Introduction

Notes Introduction 1. Marx notes famously: ‘these self-sufficing communities that constantly repro- duce themselves in the same form, and when accidentally destroyed, spring up again on the spot and with the same name. This simplicity supplies the key to the secret of the unchangeableness of Asiatic societies, an unchangeableness in such striking contrast with the constant dissolution and refound- ing of Asiatic States, and the never-ceasing changes of dynasty’ (393). 2. In a quasi-anthropological study of the village Changel in North India, Arvind N. Das asks some opening questions in Changel (1996) that resonate with this book as well: Does a village exist in reality? Or is it merely a construct of sociologists and others who are forever looking for an ideal type of a simplified social structure which provides an easy universe for investigation? Are the characteristics of the village essential to define it conceptually? And, if so, what are those characteristics? (7) Das repudiates ‘the unchanging village’ thesis and posits instead a biographi- cal study of Changel premised on its presence and its significance, aspects that are not latent or intrinsic to the village, but are essentially arguments that need to be made, based on research into rural historical, economic, and cultural processes, and re-presented in the form of a narrative of the village as a salient, sentient, organic collective. Das writes, Quite obviously, the self-contained and self-sufficient nature of the village is a mere myth. No village is an island unto itself. This is not only in the field of economics and politics but also in the context of the so-called village community. The many forward and backward linkages which tie the village to the rest of the world exist in fact though not necessarily in the scheme of analysts. These are manifest in the case of Changel. (7) 3. Sri Lanka gained independence from British rule after peaceful negotiations in 1948 and continued to be known as Ceylon until 1972, when, during Sirimavo Bandaranaike’s second term as prime minister, the country became a republic within the Commonwealth and changed its name to Sri Lanka. 4. In his article ‘Things Fall Apart from a Sri Lankan Perspective’, Chelva Kanganayakam makes the case for a fresh look at the rural from a postcolonial perspective. In my own conversations with Chelva, we have talked of the ways in which for Sri Lankan writers in particular, as he puts it in the article, ‘the notion of an idyllic village continues to haunt the imagination’ (6). 187 188 Notes Through the comparison with Achebe’s iconic and iconoclastic novel, this article reminds us of a postcolonial salience to the village across different cultural and national registers, pointing to an interesting overlap between the African novel and Sri Lankan literary history: ‘Had Things Fall Apart been written in Sri Lanka, using a Sri Lankan village as a backdrop, it would have been a logical sequel to all the political stances that used the village as an important trope’ (4). 5. Mahadev Desai, Gandhi’s personal secretary and a writer and activist in his own right, writes in his 1938 Preface to HS: The book was written in 1908, during Gandhiji’s return voyage from London in answer to the Indian school of violence and published serially in the columns of the Indian Opinion edited by Gandhiji. Then it was published in book form [only to be] proscribed by the Bombay Government. Gandhiji has translated the book for Mr. Kallenbach. In answer to the Bombay Government’s action, he published the English translation. When Gokhale saw the translation, on his visit to South Africa in 1912, he thought it so crude and hastily conceived that he prophesied that Gandhiji himself would destroy the book after spending a year in India. With deference to the memory of the great teacher, I may say that his prediction has failed to come true. (Desai) 6. See A Study of History, Vol. 9, where Toynbee places Woolf in the august com- pany of Herodotus, Tolstoy and Victor Hugo, men he rates highly for their excellent ability to weave the literary and the political (9–10). 7. See Gooneratne (5) for the discussion of the novel’s impact on T. S. Eliot’s modernist masterpiece The Waste Land and Judith Herz (81) for the connec- tions between Woolf’s and Forster’s works. 8. A felicitous coinage that I owe to Neil ten Kortenaar. 9. See Utopian Thought in the Western World by F. E. Manuel and F. P. Manuel for a fuller discussion of utopia as it has been variously defined over the centuries in Western philosophical thought since Plato’s Republic. The book sug- gests that while it is impossible to formulize utopia, it is possible to identify ‘historical constellations of utopia with reasonably well marked time-space perimeters and common elements that are striking enough to permit fram- ing generalizations’ (3). 10. This is William Grassie’s summary of Mannheim’s ideas on utopia: ‘Mannheim notes that utopia not only shares with ideology a noncongru- ence with reality, but that utopia offers a perspective critical of the given reality, thus exposing the gap between what is and an ideal of what should be. Utopia, in challenging the existing order, is always a projection into possible futures; whereas ideology, in legitimating the existing order, is directed toward perpetuating the past. Utopia tends to be the tool of social groups seeking ascendancy; while ideology tends to be the tool of dominant groups seeking to assuage their own sense of failing and justify the inadequacy of the status quo’ (emphasis in the original). 11. Thomas Vettickal writes: ‘It is probably the lack of an effective revolution- ary conception and praxis of renaissance utopia that made Marxists dismiss Notes 189 them as mere “wishful thinking” …. The term utopia is in fact hardly ever used by Marx or Engels other than as a pejorative adjective “utopian”, gener- ally in the terms of “utopian socialism” and “utopian communism”’ (70). 12. See Ainslie T. Embree’s Utopia in Conflict: Religion and Nationalism in Modern India for a thought-provoking analysis of the religious fractiousness in postcolonial India as a result of the conflict between different visions of religious utopia. In particular, Embree questions the truism that Hinduism is a ‘toler- ant’ religion, arguing that Hindu India’s utopian vision essentially works with a form of ‘encapsulation’ (rather than toleration). 13. And here the reference to ‘whistle’ and ‘bell’ become particularly significant, given Foucault’s lifelong interest in penitentiaries and rehabilitation wards. 14. Gandhi’s emphasis upon ‘Hindu-Muslim unity’ did not often find a con- vinced audience: B. R. Ambedkar, whose opposition to Gandhian politics was multi-pronged, described the 1920–40 period in particular as one of ‘civil war between Hindus and Muslims interrupted by brief periods of armed peace’ (qtd. in Rajmohan Gandhi 5). 15. See Richard Fox’s Gandhian Utopia: Experiments with Culture (112–34) for a compelling discussion of the ways in which Hindutva has ‘hijacked’ Gandhian politics of ‘affirmative Orientalism’. 16. Also known as Hill country Tamils or Up-country Tamils, the Indian Tamils are mostly descendants of workers sent from South India to Sri Lanka in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to work in coffee, tea, and rubber plantations. The Sri Lankan Tamils (or Ceylon Tamils) are descendants of the old Jaffna Kingdom and east coast chieftaincies called Vannimais. Most Sri Lankan Tamils live in the Northern and Eastern provinces of Sri Lanka and in the capital Colombo, whereas most Indian Tamils live in the central highlands or the hill country which are rich in plantations. 17. ‘Dhammadipa’ is literally ‘the island of the Buddha’s Dhamma’, or the truth as taught by the Buddha. ‘Sihadipa’ is literally ‘the island of the Sinhala people’. Hoole writes of the Mahavamsa (a quasi-historical account of the Sinhala dynasty of the kingdom of Anuradhapura dating around the sixth century B.C.E.): ‘the destiny of the island (dhammadipa) and its people (sihadipa) was first manifest in the archetypal gestures of the Buddha himself, whose visits to the island provide the blueprint for the ordering of Lanka’ (100). Thus, the island is pictured explicitly as Buddhist and the chronicler constructs the arrival of the Buddha in Lanka as ‘a paradigm, a foretaste of what must occur throughout the island’s history. That history begins to unfold with the arrival of Vijaya – the progenitor of the Sinhala race – whose advent synchronized with the Buddha’s parinibbana [the final nirvana]. An explicit connection is made between the two kingships …. [Like the Buddha] Vijaya too must conquer the yakkhas [evil spirits too inferior to accept the Buddha’s word]’ (101). It is however, the military king Duttugemunu ‘who is the clos- est realization of the Buddha. Responding to the threat of non-Buddhist Lanka, the Sinhalese hero vanquishes the Tamils – a typological equivalent of the yakkhas, and after restoring the unity of Lanka, he brings glory to the dhamma by the prolific building of thupas [shrines] and the like’ (102). 18. Roberts and Tambiah conceive of the mandala (a concentric diagram hav- ing spiritual and ritual significance in both Buddhism and Hinduism) as providing ‘geometrical, topographical, cosmological, and societal blueprints’ 190 Notes (Tambiah, Culture 253) for the ‘galactic polities’ of Southeast Asia, which Tambiah defines as ‘an arrangement of a center and its satellites and employed in multiple contexts’ (Culture 258). 19. At the time of writing this book, the Government of Sri Lanka (GoSL) under Mahinda Rajapaksa’s presidency, successfully carried out a military campaign against the LTTE, in which most of the LTTE top brass including the organization’s leader, Velupillai Prabhakaran, was killed or captured.

Load more