Martin Wickramasinghe (1891 – 1976) was the foremost Sinhala novelist of the twentieth century, and he is still the greatest writer of fiction. His trilogy Gam Peraliya, Kaliyugaya and Yuganthaya and his later novel Viragaya, bear testimony to his powers of social analysis and fictionalization. He was also a literary critic of great perspicacity who could make interesting connections between ideas and trends that one did not think existed.
His interests were not confined to literature and literary criticism. He wrote insightfully on such subjects as anthropology, evolution, art and sculpture, Buddhist philosophy and folk lore. Wickramasinghe was a self-made intellectual who exercised a profound influence on the ways of thinking of his times. He introduced to the Sinhala reader such subjects as anthropology, evolution and Darwinism, genetics at a time when there was hardly a lexicon in which the complex ideas associated with these fields could be purposefully articulated.
Martin Wickramasinghe was an autodidact. It seems to me that four significant intellectual influences fecundated his mind. First, he read avidly western works of literature – Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Proust, Flaubert, Balzac etc. – and he reflected on them deeply. Second, he read the available critical writing on these novelists and
mapped them on to his own modes of critical evaluation and assessment. Third, he read widely the works of Darwin, Spencer, Huxley as well as the ethnographies of scholars like Malinowski and Ruth Benedict. Fourth, his growing up in a peasant Buddhist culture – the values, lifestyle, presuppositions endorsed by it – had a deep and far reaching influence on his mode of thinking.
What is perhaps most noteworthy about Martin Wickramasinghe as a creative writer and a public intellectual is his incredible breadth of reading and his ability to make connections between things and events one did not think were there. His rigor, his analytical mind and his arresting subtlety added to the depth of this writing. The eminent British scientist and sinologist, Joseph Needham, who once said of Wickramasinghe that he was “a truly original thinker and writer”, admired the “perspicacity” of his which enabled him to present, “Gogol as a sannyasi and father Zosima as a bodhisattva.”
In this essay, I wish to focus on one aspect of his approach to tradition, namely, the way he was shaped by Buddhist humanism, and the way he tried to demonstrate the importance of Buddhist humanism as a discourse that should guide our approach to life and literature. If we examine the generality of his literary criticism, one fact becomes evident – he was deeply moved by traditional Buddhist humanism and sought to turn it into a yardstick in evaluating the worth of literary works whether they are classical or modern. The privileged and most positively valorized terms in his critical vocabulary are authenticity – simplicity – unostentatious – realism – human sympathy – humanism – compassion – restraint – self discipline. All these can be directly traced to traditional Buddhist humanism. The way in which Martin Wickramasinghe sought to connect to tradition, and harness its many sided resources to vitalize Sinhala culture, was via Buddhist humanism.
It is the subtle explorations of the human mind, emotions and patterns of behaviour by the authors of the Jataka stories that fascinated Wickramasinghe the most. As he observed, “The life and society that supplied the materials for the Jataka stories are very remote in time and space to the life and society from which the two modern novelists (Proust and Dostoevsky) derived material and inspiration for their sadistic tales. But in spite of this remoteness there is an essential similarity between Jataka stories and the tales of Proust and Dostoevsky in the exploration of some hidden aspects of the human mind.”
He saw very interesting parallels and affinities of interest between the Jataka stories and Russian novels. He perceived interesting similarities between Prince Myshkin in Dostoevsky’s The Idiot and Jataka stories. “The character of Myshkin can be justifiably identified with that of the bodhisattva as depicted in the Jataka stories.
The bodhisattva represents the Buddhist conception of the character of an imperfect human being striving to attain moral and spiritual perfection. Such a person is called the budding Buddha (buddhankura). Sanskrit works on poetics, enumerating different types of heroes, mention kshanti vira or the hero of universal compassion. The character of the bodhisattva, as depicted in many Jataka stories, is of this type, and Prince Myshkin is also of the same type, though western critics refuse to call him a hero.”
The following observation of Joseph Needham captures admirably the comparative impulses of Martin Wickramasinghe and his insightfulness in enforcing connection. “In his study of the Jataka stories Wickramasinghe brings out again and again their relationship to the problems studied in analytic and introspective psychology of the Freudian era, and he links this similarity with the surprising resemblance that he finds in the novels of the Great Russian writers of the nineteenth century. The phenomena of anxiety neurosis, the evil impulses which can rise in man, and the fear of them, the co-existence in proximity in the same mind of the noblest thoughts and the basest urges, all were common property of the Jataka authors and the Russian novelists, who long before the clinical fearlessness of modern psychology, shrank from nothing in their determination to inspect everything of which human nature was capable”. This ability of Martin Wickramasinghe is unsurpassed, in my judgment, by any other Sinhala writer before or after.
Another aspect that marks a difference in Wickramasinghe’s approach to a form of humanism based on Buddhist worldview from Eurocentric humanism is the emphasis given to the idea of karma. The Jataka stories deal with this world and the previous world, between life and death and life. The idea of karma is general to the understanding of the traffic between the two worlds.
Commenting on this aspect of Wickramasinghe’s writing, Professor Joseph Needham made the following observation. “Martin Wickramasinghe points out that the evil impulses, murderous thoughts, suicidal tendencies, etc. in the characters of the Jataka corpus were all accounted for by its writers in terms of the doctrine of karma, or ‘spiritual heritage’, man’s feelings and instincts being considered the accumulated inheritance from the former bundles of ‘skandas’ connected with him or (in popular Buddhist thought)’ ‘his’ own previous lives.
Wickramasinghe suggests that the theory of karma was what led the Buddhist fabulists to their proto-psychoanalytic approach and intimates that it was not so far wrong after all since modern science has recognized the existence of atavistic tendencies arising from the animal past of mankind.
Thus the unplumbed depths of human psychological constitution contain much of the beast, much of the most primitive ape-man, and in so far as karma means this atavistic load still present from the past it was a fair anticipation of a valid scientific idea arising from our modern knowledge of organic evolution.”
The idea of karma and how it functions within the Buddhist Jataka stories make it clear that Wickramasinghe’s advocacy of Buddhist humanism cannot be contained within the standard, and falsely universalized form of Eurocentric humanism.
I have discussed Martin Wickramasinghe’s attitude to humanism at some length because in recent times certain critics have sought to apply uncritically the charges levelled against humanism to his work. There is not a single and unitary humanism, but there are many and Wickramasinghe’s approach demonstrates the need to recognize the multiplicities and pluralities within the broad domain of humanism. |
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