Musical Knowledge and the Vernacular Past in Post-War Sri Lanka
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Musical Knowledge and the Vernacular Past in Post-War Sri Lanka Jim Sykes King’s College London “South Asian kings are clearly interested in vernacular culture zones has rendered certain vernacular Sinhala places, but it is the poet who creates them.” and Tamil culture producers in a subordinate fashion to Sinhala and Tamil ‘heartlands’ deemed to reside Sheldon Pollock (1998: 60) elsewhere, making it difficult to recognise histories of musical relations between Sinhala and Tamil vernac - This article registers two types of musical past in Sri ular traditions. Lanka that constitute vital problems for the ethnog - The Sinhala Buddhist heartland is said to be the raphy and historiography of the island today. The first city and region of Kandy (located in the central ‘up is the persistence of vernacular music histories, which country’); the Tamil Hindu heartland is said to be demarcate Sri Lankan identities according to regional Jaffna (in the far north). In this schemata, the south - cultural differences. 1 The second type of musical past ern ‘low country’ Sinhala musicians are treated as is a nostalgia for a time before the island’s civil war lesser versions of their up country Sinhala cousins, (1983-2009) when several domains of musical prac - while eastern Tamil musicians are viewed as lesser ver - tice were multiethnic. Such communal-musical inter - sions of their northern Tamil cousins. Meanwhile, the actions continue to this day, but in attenuated form southeast is considered a kind of buffer zone between (I have space here only to discuss the vernacular past, Tamil and Sinhala cultures, such that Sinhalas in the but as we will see, both domains overlap). 2 south and Tamils in the east are generally not thought These two domains of the Sri Lankan musical past to have had any significant cultural relations with one are not well represented in the musicology of Sri another. 4 Sinhala borrowings from ‘Hindu’ traditions Lanka. With a few notable exceptions, Sri Lankanist are uniformly acknowledged to have come from musicology has reproduced the historical narratives ‘India’, not from the Sri Lankan Tamils, and Sri promoted by Sinhala Buddhist and Tamil ethnona - Lankan Tamil musicians seldom acknowledge musical tionalisms, which view the island as containing dis - influences from the Sinhalas. As Valentine Daniel tinct ‘ethnic groups’ with thoroughly separate cultural (1996: 13-43) puts it, in Sri Lanka music is mapped histories. 3 Following anthropological tradition, musi - onto a perceived dichotomy between Tamils and Sin - cal borrowings from one ethnic group are typically halas, where the former are viewed as caring about treated as being thoroughly resignified and reworked ‘heritage’ (myth as manifested in music and dance) according to another ethnic group’s aesthetics and so - and the latter as caring about ‘history’ (manifested in teriology. It is not my goal here to argue that such re - Buddhist chronicles, paintings, and ruins). 5 significations do not happen or to reduce, say, a Buddhist musical tradition to a Hindu one. Rather, I am concerned with how Sri Lanka’s cartography of isa.e-Forum © 2012 The Author(s) © 2012 ISA (Editorial Arrangement of isa.e-Forum) 1 Sykes Figure 1. Sri Lanka (courtesy of geology.com: http://geology.com/world/s ri-lanka-satellite- image.shtml). Sheldon Pollock (1998a: 43), in his work on the we are better equipped today to see these relation - development of vernacular literary cultures in South ships, not just because of Pollock’s contributions, but Asia in relation to Sanskrit cosmopolitanism, has re - because of broader developments in conceptions of marked on the historic absence of scholarship detail - sovereignty and cultural politics in the academy. For ing the relations between ‘developments in polity in if sovereignty is now viewed as residing not solely in relation to culture’. He notes that, ‘This is the vexa - the state but in processes of governmentality that con - tious legacy of a set of disciplinary practices that for trol populations, and if musics are now seen as con - too long rendered the humanities indifferent to the stitutive (rather than merely reflective) of social social world, and the social sciences indifferent to the relations, then vernacular conceptions of the musical world of the aesthetic and expressive’ (ibid.). The out - past emerge as having a direct relationship to sover - come of this division is a bifurcation between studies eign power, on account of their importance to eth - detailing, say, the development of kingship in South nonationalist constructions of community and Asia, on the one hand, and the development of ver - cultural citizenship. If I appear to be defining the re - nacular literary cultures, on the other, both of which lationship between the sovereign and the vernacular are not equipped with the conceptual tools to see artist as one of dominance and resistance, I hasten to what sorts of relations these developments have to one add that I see it more as a relationship that involves another. Although we have a long way to go, I think negotiation, strategy, and ambiguous shifts in power 2 Musical Knowledge and the Vernacular Past in Post-War Sri Lanka relations on both sides. Through such maneuvers, these pasts articulate with contemporary formations music history emerges as inherently plural, as consist - of sovereignty. ing of multiple narratives of musical being and be - longing that combine differently depending on the relationship to sovereign power expressed in any given Drummer 1: Herbert Dayasheela context. The bulk of my fieldwork has centered on the yak Such ambiguous and shifting relations between bera , a drum used in the major rituals in the south of culture producers and sovereign power are expressed the island that have a canonic place in Sri Lankanist (and constrained) through overlapping spaces of in - anthropology (Wirz 1954; Obeyesekere 1984; Tam - clusion and exclusion from the cultural discourses of biah 1976; Kapferer 1983, 1997; Scott 1994). This the nation. At best, this amounts to a feeling of mar - literature bifurcates Sinhala ritual into two domains: ginality (as described below for low country Sinhala deva tovils (rites for deities) and yak tovils (rites for and eastern Tamil artists); at worst, it amounts to a demons). The yak bera , the most important indige - life-threatening situation, if one’s vernacular identity nous musical instrument in southern Sri Lanka, is in - is viewed by the state apparatus to embody a direct tegral to both types of ritual. In yak tovils , drummers challenge to the sovereign’s cultural narratives. In ei - accompany dancers to facilitate processes of healing ther case, being a subordinate vernacular culture pro - for individuals, in which a demon’s ( yakkha’s ) malig - ducer equates to unequal access to resources and fear nant glance ( distiya ) is disrupted through a ritual spe - of the changes to vernacular practices promoted by the cialist’s recitation of appropriate mantras . In deva homogenising discourses of ethnonationalism. The tovils , by contrast, drummers accompany dancers in vernacular past thus obtains a contemporary relevance rituals held for the entire community, which rids itself as an enabling force for defining one’s humanity out - of bad karma and facilitates a proper harvest, typically side the terms of sovereign power, a fact that may ac - through making offerings to the goddess Pattini count for the continued vitality and revival of (Obeyesekere 1984). Related to these rituals are many vernacular practices in the wake of ethnonationalism. others of varying size, such as rites to bless a new house My goal here is not to romanticise the power of al - and a large-scale ritual to cure those suffering from ternative musical pasts in a region that has come to be planetary misalignment, called bali . All these rituals defined by ‘ethnic conflict’, but to point out the dan - use the yak bera , all are performed by a Sinhala caste ger of reifying ethnonationalist ideologies through a of ritualists called the berava (the word simply means musicological discourse that utilises ‘ethnicity’ as a ‘drummer), and all are viewed as part of the Sinhala grounding analytical framework. Since the presence Ayurvedic medicinal system, utilising a musical on - of alternative musical pasts shows us that musicians tology that understands sound as a form of protection do not always think of their music history through an (Sykes 2011). The rhythms are not metric, but consist ethnic lens, we have good ethnographic and historio - of through-composed phrases of drumming modeled graphical reasons to promote other frameworks. The on Sinhala poetic stanzas ( padas ). Thus, drum rest of this paper will tease out some relationships be - rhythms are not conceptualised according to the pan- tween music historical narratives, musical practices, South Asian rhythmic system called tala , and are best representations, and sovereign powers (Sinhala and described as repetitive phrases of ‘drum poetry’. 7 Tamil) 6 in contemporary Sri Lanka. To do so, I present Individuals who wish to learn the low country arts case studies of two drummers who embody Sri traditionally do so by apprenticing to a gurunanse , Lankan vernacular pasts – one a Sinhala from the who teaches drumming, dancing, singing, costume south, the other a Tamil from the east. Through their making, and other skills. My yak bera gurunanse is stories, I aim to develop a framework for understand - Herbert Dayasheela, a kattadirala (ritual specialist in ing Sri Lankan music history that is attuned not just the yakkha cults) who claims to trace his lineage back to the presence of vernacular pasts, but to the ways fourteen generations. His father, K.S. Fernando, a 3 Sykes Figure 2. Herbert Dayasheela changing the drumhead on a yak bera. highly regarded dancer and drummer, was one of the kingship. The most recognised relationship between first low country artists to tour abroad (in the 1950s).