Mervyn de Silva 79 Birth Anniversary—Sept. 5
'Mervyn’s was not the characteristic fling with modernity that many of his generation and social class turned their back on as they aged, retreating in retirement to the fold and the consolations and circumscribed certainties of their cultural inheritance. Mervyn’s mentality, conversation and commentaries remained modernist, rational, agnostic and internationalist till his final breath.'
by Dayan Jayatilleka
by Dayan Jayatilleka
(September 03, Geneva, Sri Lanka Guardian) Wisdom almost always comes with hindsight. The great Hegel said that the owl of Minerva takes flight only after the shades of night have fallen — meaning that philosophical reflection comes only after the event. How then do we evaluate a mind that signaled society about a problem which would overwhelm it, when that problem was still embryonic and barely discernible? What do we say of someone who placed on the record a warning to society when the political class of the day, Government and Opposition, Right, Left and Centre, had ignored the issue?
"What ethnic problem? What are the Tamils’ ethnic grievances? What’s the problem the Tamils have that the Sinhalese don’t? What’s the problem that Tamils have that is specific to them?" These questions, which are interlinked and more or less interchangeable, would be located only on the fringe of most developed democracies, but are still heard all too audibly within the Sri Lankan mainstream.
That these queries are raised after a quarter century of intense conflict—almost a Thirty Years War— sheds light on those who raise the questions, as well as the intelligentsia and the social mainstream that permits them to feature in serious conversation in the public and policy domains.
If our society has not learned the answer to these questions after three decades of lacerating collective experience, the outlook is grim indeed, even beyond and despite the positive prospect of the Sri Lankan military prevailing at long last over the Tamil Tigers.
What is our assessment of someone who posed the questions and provided the correct answer, cautioning the political and policy elite and the intelligentsia more than three and a half decades ago, well before Sri Lankan academics began to discuss and debate the ethnic problem, and before the discussion of ethnic identity emerged full blown in the quality international media and social scientific literature?
"…The emergence, however hesitant or faint, of a militant youth group in the peninsula is a phenomenon about which we have written before. If the observation is correct, it is a factor of enormous significance - especially to the government…
The frustrations of the educated young Tamil at a time when even science graduates cannot find suitable jobs do not require much explication. The fact that these frustrations are universal and that they are shared by his Sinhala counterpart does not make the Tamil youth’s psychological load lighter. And if he feels, in fact, that the educational system and system of recruitment to the public sector have been deliberately contrived to reduce his chances, he has more reason for anger. An anger that reaches the limits of tolerance makes inflammable material for a certain kind of politics.
…The slogan ‘Boycott Parliament’ is a propagandist effort by Tamil parliamentarians who want to retain the support of their constituents and their seats or of Tamil politicians who want to become parliamentarians or win back their lost seats. A movement of militant youth rooted in the soil of Jaffna and nourished by material frustration, a feeling of humiliation and bitterness could be another kettle of fish." (My emphasis-DJ)
Mervyn de Silva wrote the editorial that is reproduced here, on July 1st 1972, and as he notes, it was not his first on the subject. It was not a pronouncement in a marginal journal or while in self-exile, but while he was at the peak of his career in the national elite or Establishment, as the Editor of the Ceylon Daily News.
What was the sensibility that permitted this insight?
While Mervyn supported the Sri Lanka Freedom Party for its foreign policy stance, its dislodging of the ancient regime represented by the UNP, and its left of centre reformism, his debate on English literature with Reggie Siriwardene in the Daily News of the same year as this editorial demonstrates his affirmation of the universal and his rejection of its abandonment in the name of nationalist or progressive commitment.
While he was critical of both the UNP and the LSSP leaderships for their deracination, viewing them as twin sides of the same postcolonial coin, he never shared the dominant ideology and values, cultural prejudices and circumscribed world view of Sri Lankan society, all of which he had emancipated himself from at an early, undetermined age ("undetermined" because no one, including primary school contemporaries, recall him as otherwise). He never engaged in and was brusquely dismissive of the practice of the culture of obsequiousness into which Sri Lankans are socialized from childhood. He scorned narrow prejudices of caste, class, ethnicity, religion (and the related practice of arranged marriage), standing up to them from his adolescence whenever they appeared within his immediate social surroundings and transcending them in his personal choices. For him, respect was something to be earned, not axiomatically granted. He rejected convention, tradition and the baggage of historicism that did not stand up to the scrutiny of knowledge and reasoned argument, encouraging independent thinking, appreciating humour and satire, and insisting on high standards, always international, never purely national.
Mervyn de Silva was as much a critic of US and western foreign policy as he was an enthusiastic admirer of American and to a lesser extent British creative writing, poetry, film, theatre, music, criticism, journalism and policy discourse. While his contemporaries were still dwelling within the framework of British cultural references, Mervyn’s critical appreciation in the Royal College magazine of the late 1940s had already embraced John Ford’s Westerns. While a partisan in print of the liberation struggle of the Vietnamese and an admirer of General Giap, he also valued the writings of Henry Kissinger. When I returned to my parents’ bedroom after witnessing his death in hospital, the volume of Leonard Woolf’s Collected Letters lay on the rumpled sheets, a stubbed out Cuban cigar in the ashtray on the bedside table, and his table in the study had the well thumbed copy of Walter Lippman’s Selected Writings next to his typewriter.
Deeply, pronouncedly sympathetic to the predicament and the rebelliousness of rural and provincial youth, Sinhala and Tamil, and critical of the old Left’s insensitivity to the national and the peasant dimensions of a postcolonial society—his antipathy to Lankan Trotskyism was notorious — Mervyn was himself a totally urban, metropolitan figure whose consciousness and writings contained not a trace of the romanticisation of the rural, still less any urge for a postretirement return to roots. His visits to Wattegama were brief, marked by a mandatory pause at the Queens hotel in Kandy for a cold beer, and transient to permit his return to Colombo for the evening’s cocktails at the club. My paternal grandfather’s funeral – at which I was probably the only one to see the tear glinting in my father’s eye—was no exception.
Mervyn’s was not the characteristic fling with modernity that many of his generation and social class turned their back on as they aged, retreating in retirement to the fold and the consolations and circumscribed certainties of their cultural inheritance. Mervyn’s mentality, conversation and commentaries remained modernist, rational, agnostic and internationalist till his final breath.
At home in the great metropolises of the world, from Washington to Moscow, from London to Beijing, from New York to New Delhi (I have been to none which didn’t have someone who reminisced about him with respect), he travelled overseas twice a year, but chose to live and work, strive and struggle at home in Colombo, Sri Lanka, rather than undergo the ignominy of second class citizenship in someone else’s country, "a small fish in a large pond" as he used to derisively dismiss it.
Even in that postwar, post-independence generation of the university educated, modernist, Westernized Ceylonese intelligentsia, the most stellar the country has produced (as evidenced from writing in the college and campus journals of the first decade of independence), Mervyn stood alone, dissenting from Ludowykean orthodoxy and ideologies of Left and Right. His trajectory eschewed the opposing pathways of escape into exile and recoil to the rural and the religious. Godfrey Gunatillake was probably correct to describe his values and worldview as those of "humanism".
In his editorials he was at one and the same time enlightening society while "speaking truth to power". The relevance and urgency of the editorial reproduced on this anniversary remain, over thirty five years after its publication and almost a decade after his death. Have Sri Lanka’s society, politics and media caught up with Mervyn de Silva, writing in the third quarter of the last century, at the age of 42?
DAILY NEWS EDITORIAL
JULY 1st 1972
What’s up in the North?
Nobody seriously expected the MPs of the Tamil United Front to sacrifice their seats in the National State Assembly. We were equally sure that some ready formula will be duly found to clear the FP’s path to Parliament of all those argumentative impediments that the FP itself had scattered on the road with studied abandon.
The FP’s leaders have never been short of sophistry in the service of their own paradoxical positions and ambiguities of action. Among some of the lawyers of the Tamil United Front the passion for Tamil lasts only the few minutes required to call out the cases and quickly evaporate thereafter. Then English comes into its own and reigns supreme.
Time will prove what the TUF’s somewhat spunky ultimatum actually means. And we do not need to wait long. But far more interesting in our view is the incident reported by our Jaffna correspondent. The Action Committee could not hold its session at the headquarters of the All Ceylon Tamil Congress because of a demonstration by hundreds of Tamil youths. They invaded the building and demanded that the MPs continue their boycott of the Assembly.
The emergence, however hesitant or faint, of a militant youth group in the peninsula is a phenomenon about which we have written before. If the observation is correct, it is a factor of enormous significance - especially to the government. It is tempting these days to make a fetish of youth movements and youth politics. In Lanka, the temptation is almost irresistible after last year’s holocaust. In any case, this is not only a young nation but a country of young people, as the relevant statistics prove.
The frustrations of the educated young Tamil at a time when even science graduates cannot find suitable jobs do not require much explication. The fact that these frustrations are universal and that they are shared by his Sinhala counterpart does not make the Tamil youth’s psychological load lighter. And if he feels, in fact, that the educational system and system of recruitment to the public sector have been deliberately contrived to reduce his chances, he has more reason for anger. An anger that reaches the limits of tolerance makes inflammable material for a certain kind of politics.
Since the TUF’s leadership is largely drawn from the upper-middle classes and professional groups and since Parliament is the raison d’etre of political movements of this type, we have really no great cause for anxiety over the TUF’s threats.
The slogan ‘Boycott Parliament’ is a propagandist effort by Tamil parliamentarians who want to retain the support of their constituents and their seats or of Tamil politicians who want to become parliamentarians or win back their lost seats. A movement of militant youth rooted in the soil of Jaffna and nourished by material frustration, a feeling of humiliation and bitterness could be another kettle of fish.
- Sri Lanka Guardian
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