Book Review

Confusion and spirit of a time

Henry P Abeyasekera's cameos begin at a time that's easily identifiable as colonial. Those such as Maduwanwela Ratemahataya and Sir John Kotelawala may belong to a different time. But, they were unique at the crossroads of history and Henry P Abeyasekera himself lived at the crossroads of history.

So these cameos have a diffused but effervescent quality.

For a sampling, there is the Premier stakes, there is Sir John Kotelawala, and there is St. John's Panadura.

These immediately evoke spacious and colourful times; but they were also times in which the colonial flavour still remained very much intact in Sri Lankan life. Dudley Senanayaka, for instance, in the Premier Stakes, says he wouldn't take up the Premiership even if "God almighty asked him to ." Perhaps to people who lived during the Premier Stakes era, what would have been most important was why Dudley Senanayake who was adamant that the premiership should not be thrust upon him, changed his mind.

But, after several years, that part of history is so well known that it's not somehow the most engaging part of this account of the Premier Stakes. Instead, one is in a strange way left wondering why Dudley Senanayake had to invoke God when he was a Buddhist and whether it wasn't a bit funny for the press and everybody concerned at that time to report Dudley Senanayake invoking God as if it's not funny for a Buddhist leader to invoke God, when he is on a threshold of an important decision.

In sum, it seems to have been a good decision on the part of the author to eschew a strict method or chronological order in this book.

He flits from Maduwanwela Disawe to Victor Dhanapala to Cyril Jansz with an appropriate storyteller's abandon.

No character is more important or imbued with more historical gravitas than the other.

This is a past that's so studded with anecdotes that relative merits are really not necessary … The author does not attempt to draw any connection between the deterioration of the social fabric of the country from the time the jury was chosen by the mudaliyars on caste and ethnic lines to the time when Wijeweera's JVP almost overturned the much beloved system. But at first reading, there is a palpable feeling that the reader gets of where the fault lines in this society first began.

The British subverted the system that they bequeathed, of jury and judge and all of the paraphernalia and trappings that accompanied it .

Not that the British had any intention of keeping the system lily white.

In a way, it's by subverting the system that the British seemed to have introduced a sense of awe for the ruler among the uninitiated Ceylonese.

The colonised were cowed by how capricious the system could be.

It's interesting how class entered the Sri Lankan consciousness through the jury lists, which were doctored by the British to include, in the first class list the most loyal and the subservient. Eventually, marriages were conducted on the basis of how closely connected a family was to the first class jury list, a story of subservience probably at its most pathetic. .

In the main, the book etches the confusion and the spirit of a time which was ours and not quite ours. The country was studded with quirky characters who seem to be a creation of a time that was not meant to last anyway. These were people such as Maduw-anwela Dissawe ( who was seen at an elephant kraal in sarong and who etched a line on the sand and said " do not step beyond this '' when a foreign couple made the mistake of questioning his identity. ) Such quirks belonged to a different epoch. They may exist today, but not quite in the same way. It's as if the character of the nation has changed through the character of its inhabitants. Now, there is Kandalama and the JVP and other such manifestations of life, which draw on the complex and the intractable.

The past in contrast was heady and eccentric. This contrast may not be deliberate, but it's there in the book , and is probably also the author's unintended achievement.

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