transcurrents

The left and the written word

December 7th, 2007

Ajith Samaranayake Memorial Lecture
by Dr. Sarath Amunugama:

All of us in this Hall today are friends and admirers of Ajith Samaranayake. Ajith was someone special in the field of media in our country, in that he could traverse many worlds. As a journalist he completed the full cycle of his profession from news reporter to lobby correspondent, columnist, Editor of a Daily, Editor of a Sunday newspaper, and finally consultant to Lake House. He was an English writer who made an indelible impression on the Sinhala arts and culture of his time as a critic of literature, theatre, cinema and of contemporary society. He was a welcome participant both at hearty celebrations organized by journalists as well as seminars of upmarket think tanks. He had a large circle of friends which included both bar keepers as well as keepers of literary salons among the glitterati of Colombo society. But most of all he was a good friend of media people and was every ready to do battle on their behalf. The brilliant obituaries he wrote of all newsmakers who were lucky enough to die before him, had that personal touch a reminiscence or two which gave evidence of a lifelong association. I cannot do better than quote Regi Siriwardena’s famous birthday apology and apologia on his Eightieth birthday.

“By time’s mere flux, I am called to play the part

Of Patriarch I am unfitted for.

But not for long, I hope. When the time comes,

Ajith, Prince of Obituarists, will write,

I know, a graceful piece measured, as always,

And free of flattery of fulsomeness.

(A pity I shan’t be there to read it, though)”

The vast outpouring of grief at Ajith’s passing a year ago here testimony to his influence on the local media both big and small. My lecture also then is a tribute to a good friend, sometime intellectual adversary and at all times a journalist who was at the to of his professional skills.

Looking back, I remember the young man who walked into my office in the Department of Information, several decades ago. We were bonded together by our common allegiance to Kandy, Trinity College, reading of books, socialist ideology and common cultural pursuits. Ajith and I spent many evenings together, particularly memorable ones with Lester James Peiris, Mervyn De Silva, and Sarath Muttetuwegama. I remember those stimulating days which now creates sadness. As Amitav Ghose wrote: “There is no greater sorrow than times of joy recalled in wretchedness.”

As luck would have it, when I took a call from the Chairman Lake House, Bandula Padmakumara, inviting me to deliver the Ajith Samaranayake commemoration lecture, I was half way through reading a brilliant essay by the French socialist and teacher Regis Debray in the July-August issue of the New Left Review. We all know that it was Regis Debray who was smuggled into the Seirre Maestre inCuba to join Fidel Castro and Che Guevara when they were battling the hated Batista regime. His dispatches from that front and his long interviews with Castro, which were published in Europe, helped in creating a support base, particularly, among radical youth and the French intelligentsia for the rebels then holed up in the hills. When the fighting got fiercer Debray was captured by Batista forces and faced execution till the French government, then under pressure from French intellectuals, negotiated his release. He is, still, as the French describe it, “a man of the Left.”

In his essay “Socialism and Print” Debray explores the ecosystem of socialism seen through the material forms in which is principles were transmitted books, newspapers, manifestos and the parties, movements, schools and men who were its bearers.

Ajith Samaranayake was also “a man of the left” from the time when as a schoolboy in Trinity College, he joined the youth league of the LSSP. To his dying day he was intellectually committed to the socialist cause. His view of society and arts and culture was underpinned by that belief. Therefore, I thought the theme of my lecture “The Left and the Written World” would be a fitting tribute to Ajith.

This lecture will be in two parts. The first part will deal with Regis Debray’s theory of the Mediasphere as comprising three epochs the logosphere, the graphosphere, and the videosphere which he claims “suggests a new periodisation for the history of ideas.”

The second part will attempt to apply the insights of Debray’s theory to the rise and eventual collapse of the Left in Sri Lanka, particularly, the LSSp and the CP. This collapse coincides with the beginning and end of Socialism which Debray characterizes as ‘the life cycle of socialism, that great fallen oak of political endeavour.’

Let us now describe Regis Debray’s theory. He says:

It is impossible to grasp the nature of conscious collective life in any epoch without an understanding of the material forms and processes through which its ideas were transmitted the communication networks that enable thought to have a social existence. Indeed, the successive stages of development of these means and relations of transmission whose ensemble we might term the mediasphere suggest a new periodization for the history of ideas. First what we may call the logosphere: that long period stretching from the invention of writing (and of clay tablets, papyrus, parchment scrolls) to the coming of the printing press. The age of the logos, but also that of the theology, in which writing is first and foremost, the inscription of the word of God, the ’sacred carving’ of the hieroglyph. God dictates, man transcribes in the Bible or the Koran and dictates in his turn. Reading is done aloud, in company; man’s task is not to invent but to transmit received truths.

A second period the graphosphere, runs from 1448 AD to around 1968; from the Gutenberg Revolution to the rise of TV. It is the age of reason and of the book, of the newspaper and political party. The poet or artist emerges as a guarantor of truth, invention flourishes amid an abundance of written references; the image is subordinate to the text. The third, still expanding today, is the era of the videosphere: the age of the image, in which the book is knocked off its pedestal and the visible triumphs over the great invisibles God, History, Progress of the previous epochs.”

Debray identifies print media as the dominant form within the second period of his mediological periodisation, which enabled socialism to flourish. The ecosystem of socialism as social practice depended on an ensemble of men (militants, leaders, theoreticians) tools of transmission (books, schools, newspapers) and institutions (factions, parties, associations). The print media helped in intellectualising the proletariat and proletarianizing the intellectual.

Based on ideas gleaned within this ecosystem of the printed word the library, newspapers, evening classes and lectures there also developed a powerful oral culture in the workers movement. Debray describes the link between socialist print and socialist speech making.

A powerful oral culture also played a large part in the workers’ movement, of course: harangues at rallies, congress speeches, conferences; Jaures at Pre-Saint-Gervais, Lenin on Red Square, Blum at Tours or the Place de la Nation in 1936 all spoke without benefit of microphones, shouting themselves hoarse, to the brink of exhaustion, before tens of thousands of listeners. But if the spokesmen of socialism relied as muchon their public pulpits as on their presses, their rhetoric was nevertheless stamped by a bookish culture and a long familiarity with the written word. Even their extemporizations have the feel of the reader or the scholar. Many were great parliamentarians, orators and tribunes in the classical republican tradition; but their addresses were formally founded upon the written word, the real basis of law both in their own eyes and in those of the rank and file.”

Debray who romanticized the revolution was happy to be a comp follower, to rub shoulders with the great socialist heroes of today. But he did not fail to see that they were in thrall to the written word. He says:

“All the revolutionary men of action I have met, from Che Guevara to Pham Van Dong by way of Castro (not the autocrat, but the onetime rebel), to say nothing of the walking encyclopedias known as Trotskyists, were compulsive readers, as devoted to books as they were unreceptive to images.”

Many followers of the Chinese Revolution will recall photos of Mao Tse Tung in his bedchamber cum study in Zongnanhai which was filled from top to bottom with books.

Andre Malrcaux who went in to this room to interview Mao describes his books, his writing table and the ever-present spittoon. Mao’s shifts in policy wre all proceeded by his writings and admonitions, which towards the end, had the flavor of aphorisms. “Let a thousand flowers bloom” he said, “let a thousand thoughts contend”, Later, more directly he ordered “Bombard the Headquarters.”

Why were words so important to socialist leaders? Because as Blanqui said in 1978 “Ideas alone have constituted the strength and salvation of the proletariat”. Debrary brilliantly explains why the idea is at the heart of socialist belief.

“Abstract concepts were the ABC of a militant’s apprenticeship. The notions of proletariat and bourgeoisie, like those of labour power, Surplus value, relations of production, etc., that underlie them, are not apprehensible by the senses. Secondly, whether project or myth, the idea of the Revolution as ‘what should be’ is the denial and transcendence of the immediate, the overcoming of the present. Both as logical discourse and as moral undertaking, the socialist utopia demanded an inner break with the of everyday life’, an act of faith that mobilized the powers of conceptual analysis to break the accepted social imagery down into elemental abstracts, like ‘exploitation’”.

Let us now apply Debrays analysis to the Sri Lankan situation, in particular the praxis of the LSSP and the CP. The founding fathers and outstanding leaders of both the LSSP and the CP were young men who were drawn to the growing communist ideology in the west. What started as an anti-imperialist militancy ended in the communist embrace, particularly, after the writings of Lenin on Imperialism and the establishment of the Third International, in which M. N. Roy was dominant Asian voice. Fortunately, we now have several publications regarding Philip Gunewardene’s early years in the United States and Europe where he was first attracted to the ideas of his teacher Scott Nearing in which he was joined by his friend and fellow student Jayaprakash Narayan. We must also remember that this was the time of the growth of the American Trostkyist Movement. This was the hay day of pro-Trotsky activities in the US with a special commission led by an American Liberal to investigate all of Stalin’s charges against the founder of the Red Army and Lenin’s colleague, now in exile in Mexico after being expelled from the island of Prinkip due to stalinist pressures. When Philip Gunawardene arrived in the UK he beganan association with Dr. S. A. Wickremesinghe, Dr. N. M. Perera, Dr. Colvin R De Silva and Leslie Gunawardena who were all engaged in post-graduate work either in London University or the LSE. Except for their Indian colleagues who later went on to join the Indian Communist Party, or the Praja Socialist Party, it would be difficult to think of a more “bookish” coterie even among radicals who, as we have seen, were the embodiment of Regis Debray’s graphosphere.

Another aspect that has escaped the scholars of the Left in Sri Lanka is the influence of the Indian Freedom movement and the Anti imperialist struggle on these young radicals. The Indian Nationalist Movement was gathering momentum in European Academia and Wickremesinghe, Philip and NM in particular, were drawn to it, Philip was for sometime the Secretary to Saklatwala; He was a colleague of Krishan Menon and was active in the Free India movement. Dr. Wickremesinghe was associated with the Theosophical Movement which had its headquarters in London and attracted Gandhi when he was studying Law in the Middle Temple. What is most significant is that with growing commitment to doctrinal Trotskyism the LSSP shed those contacts and relied more and more on directives from the 4th International which was housed in a side street in Paris. Colvin and Leslie were members of the steering Committee of this International and was the conduit through which there was the most horrendous control of the LSSP Parties policies by “Bookworms” from Paris who were far removed from reality.

When living in Paris, in the 1980s I met Michel Pablo who was the Leader of a ‘tendency’ which had the greatest influence on the LSS pint he post-war years. He was a secretive persons, fixing appointments with me in various cafes in the Republique area. He had lost everything after backing Messali Hadj in Algeria against the FLN. Ben Bella had called him a Traitor, burnt his library and expelled him from Algeria. Then living in Paris and reminiscing about the LSSP in which Leslie Goonewardene with his nom de guerre of Tilak was his favourite Michel Pablo did not strike me as a reliable “helmsman” for Sri Lanka’s LSSP.

Later Pieter Keuneman came down from Cambridge to serve in the Communist Party. He inhabited a Cambridge in the days of the hunger marches, when the children of the English elite were looking with eager eyes at developments in the Soviet Union, which he described pithily as “The Soviet Way” in a book he wrote later. This was Cambridge University of the “Cambridge Five” of Kim Philby, Burgers and McLean, whose spying for the Soviet Union from deep within the British establishment helped the USSR to defeat the Nazi Germany and win the Second World War.

Eric Hobsbawn, the outstanding Cambridge Communist Historian, gives the following pen picture of Pieter Keuneman at Cambridge in his book “Interesting Times”.

“Piter Keuneman, a dashing,, witty and remarkably handsome Ceylonese (the island was not yet Sri Lanka) who lived in Pembrokein some style, was a great figure in University society. President of the Union, among other things, not to mention the lucky partner of the ravishing Hedi Simon from Vienna (and Newnham), with whom I vainly fell in love. (After we graduated Pieter and I rented a tiny house together in the now no longer extant Round Church Street. Although both were devoted Party members, I do not think anyone would have predicted that this debonair socialite, who first introduced me to the poems of John Betjeman, would spend most of his later life as the General Secretary of the Communist Party of Sri Lanka.”

Left leaders who depended so much on the written word for their theories and their pamphleteering suffered badly from antoehr difficulty. None of them could read and write Sinhala or Tamil with ease. Not only the leaders I have mentioned earlier, but other outstanding personalities such as Bernard Soysa, Doric de Souza, hector Abeywardena, Bala Tampoe and Karala-singham, were more at home in the English language. Their thoughts had invariably to be translated into Sinhala and Tamil.

The lSSp and Cp had to depend onintermediaries like Henry Peiris and G II Ratnaweera to carry out propaganda of the written word in Sinhala. The two leaders of the party who had mass appeal Philip and NM were both closer to local culture and language and wee therefore held in some suspicion by the BI.P oriented. Samasamajlssts or the 4th International as being susceptible to the Petit-Bourgeois and nationalistic virus.

In an open society and democratic politics such isolation would not have been possible. But the inevitable consequence of a collapse of the party due to its “Bookish” ideas was postponed due to several factors. The first is the epoch of its growth, which was characterized by the anti-imperialist struggle. Unlike in India where the monolithie Indian Congress could accommodate many tendencies within it like the Jayaprakash Group, Lohia Group, the PSP and the CP., in Sri Lanka due to the 4th International, the LSSP with its theory of ‘a plague on both your houses’ was cut off from the independence struggle and ultimately paid a heavy price. Unlike the CP which agitated for a joint front, the LSSP still in thrall to a bookish ideology went either into hiding or to prison.

Even in prison the Book prevailed. Unlike the communist Antonio Gramsei who turned to political theoretical writing in prison, the LSSp prisoners because of its stifling Troskyite ideology, turned to more prosaic tasks Colvin to edit his University of London history thesis into “Ceylon under the British” and NM to write “The case for Free Education”. There were no theoretical or programmatic works which characterized a Mao, a Gandhi, a Ho Chi Minh or even a MN Roy. Only Philip in later years began to think afresh after he was freed from the dead hand of sterile Trotskyite semantics whose chief exponent Doric de Souza-had, by this time, become his “Bete Noir”.

We can now return to Debray’s thesis of “the eco-system of Socialism” based on the written words. The Soviet Union was the last such battleground of “alphabetical heroism”. Says Debray:

“the process was frozen in the post-war period in Eastern Europe’s huge conservatory of obsolete forms a museum of the word, in which the living sources of the past lay fossilized. Yet, studious and scholarly, ‘actually existing socialism’ had a typographic soul. A glance at UNESCO indicators for a number of books per head, quantity of public libraries, average household spending on books, etc., shows that during the Cold War, Communist countries where the economy was struggling and audio-visual cultural had barely arrived-held all the records for printed paper. To journey through those old world provinces, where Western Europe’s 19th century still lived on was to witness a universal cult of books and an idolization of writers Soviet stars were more likely to be novelists or poets than actors or musicians. With the atrophy of the image came a hypertrophy of the text, its aura enhanced by censorship.

Party-States had such respect for the power of words that they kept them under perpetual surveillance, yet this repression made a live grenade of every samizdat, in line with the ‘best’ Tsarist traditions. Everything was repeated, but upside-down. Under the Stalinist state, the Russian intelligentsia resumed its time honoured typographical combat, its old mole’s labours. For what else is told in the long history of the Russian underground, from herzen’s Kolokol (1855) to Lenin’s Iskra (1900) but stories of clandestine presses, illicit newssheets, books sown into great coats? In Dostoevasky’s ‘The Possessed’, Verkhovensky lures Shatov into a trap by sending him to retrieve a printing press buried in a school yard”.

What of the future? The old life cycle of socialism and its Eco system, which is based on the written word is now coming to an end. The age of graphology is closing and the age of videosphere is beginning. Everyday we see new developments in science information technology, cultural and politics based on the grammar of the video. Can socialism adjust, and survive?

Ajith Samaranayake was one of the few men of the left in Sri Lanka, who sensed this dilemma. As a media person with a youthful belief in High ideals, High culture and High politics, he was disturbed that the ground on which he had built his life was turning into a quicksand.

In the late eighties, I pioneered Sinhala writing on the concept of popular culture. The videosphere represented by the popular cinema, radio and TGV was beginning to play a significant role in our society and culture. Jothipala songs were on the working mans lips.

Ajith reacted with holy horror. We had an extended debate in the Sinhala Press. Leading cultural figures like Sarathchandra, Regi Siriwardena and A. J. Gunewardena entered the debate. Many years later Ajith told me that I had been right. Popular culture was on its way. But I appreciated his candour and his concern. What was under threat were the high political and literary values that he always espoused. Had he lived he would have brought his humane, intelligent and always engaged sensibility to an analysis of the emerging videosphere. His commitment was indispensable. That is why we mourn his death and miss him so much today.

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