IN CENTRAL COLOMBO there is a public place that rivals any the British built anywhere for its symbolism and for the message it conveys—its evocation of civic awareness. It expresses an idea of a polity, something shared and public, more powerfully than anything else in Sri Lanka. Only the ancient ruins of the four-gated capital at Anuradhapura evoke a pre-modern equivalent.
Galle Face Green, the long stretch of open lawn that runs along the oceanfront, conjures a kind of ideal. It must be counted among the great remnants of England’s imperial era, even if it originally stood for the civic participation of the few, not the many. It is the center of the city. As an expression of public space it is arguably the center of the nation, too, as Anuradhapura once was.
One can see the British mind at work at Galle Face Green, for architecture and spatial arrangements in the colonies were always purposefully expressive. The old colonials set it just to the side of, but emphatically separate from, the harbour and the commercial district. At one end stands the stately old home of the Legislative Council, the colonial body that preceded the Sri Lankan parliament. It is a massive, classically proportioned block of stone, fronted by a row of imposing Corinthian columns. At the other end of the green is the Galle Face Hotel, one of those colonial arks that still dot the former empire, focal points of an archaic sociability. The councils of state and the seat of social exchange, the gathering places of “public men”: These are the borders of Galle Face Green.
It would be hard to find a space anywhere that is more declaratively civic. At the upper end of it there is a bronze statue affecting the English monumental style. It commemorates S. W. R. D. Bandaranaike, Sri Lanka’s fourth prime minister. It suggests just the continuity the British and the founders of modern Sri Lanka, members of “the independence generation” as it emerged across the developing world, must have intended when sovereignty came in 1948 and an island of subjects became one of citizens. This is what we built, the British all but stated. Now it is yours to manage. And there is Bandaranaike, cast in bronze as one of the great, early managers.
Famously and fatefully, Bandaranaike and the others who first led independent Ceylon assumed sovereignty without a struggle. Galle Face Green and the institutions of a nation-state became Ceylonese without enmity or rancor. They came as they were—and so came with ironies and illusions, both of which continued to accumulate after independence.
The green, it turns out, did not begin as public space but as a burial ground for British soldiers who died in an early attempt to invade the kingdom at Kandy. Only in the early twentieth century were the soldiers disinterred and the burial ground turned into a green. So the great, public space the British gave the Ceylonese in 1948 began as a memorial to those who died trying to destroy Ceylon as they had found it.
There are similar layers of meaning attaching to Bandaranaike’s statue. Bandaranaike had been an active member of the local political elite since the 1920s, a supporter of independence. But the fourth prime minister’s most famous (or infamous) act was profoundly disruptive of any continuity with the past that may have been useful to independence Ceylon. The first thing he did after taking office in 1956 was to abolish English as the national language. Ignoring many centuries of history and all social and demographic realities then facing Ceylon, Bandaranaike’s law declared Sinhala alone the new national language. Tamil, the first language of about a fifth of the population at the time, was given no official recognition. It is difficult to imagine an act by a national leader more destructive of a genuine national consciousness, a consciousness Ceylon desperately needed to cultivate, then as now, among its citizens.
Today there is something very odd about Galle Face Green and the great, open expanse of space around it. It will stand as an expression of a public spirit for as long as it is there: This is more or less inscribed upon it. But here we come upon another irony, for one cannot be in this very public space for more than a few moments without realizing that modern Sri Lanka has vacated it. It is unoccupied. To cross it end to end is to take a solitary journey. To walk from the Galle Face Hotel toward the old Legislative Council is to pass through a no-man’s land.
This emptiness is as freighted with symbolic meaning as the green itself. Galle Face today is a kind of ruin, not unlike the great ruins at Anuradhapura, for its emptiness represents the same sort of social and institutional collapse that led to the decline and disappearance of the once-formidable civilization centered around the ancient capital. In this emptiness we find one of the peculiar features of Sri Lankan life: Its institutions appear to be intact and functioning, but in fact they are neither, for they, like the green, are also effectively vacant. It is the same with politics. At first glance the Sri Lankan political process appears to proceed as usual, replete with the customary collection of contending political parties and their ubiquitous initials—the U. N. P., the S. L. F. P., the J. V. P., and so on. The newspapers are full of what passes for political news every day. In fact, most Sri Lankans have deserted the political sphere, avoiding it as one would a dangerous bit of jungle, which, indeed, it can be. This is plain in any ordinary conversation, which is almost certain to be devoid of politics unless one purposely introduces the topic, or in any neighborhood, where outposts of political parties or other such organizations are conspicuous only by their absence.
We find in the green, then, the suggestion not merely of collapsed institutions and hollow symbolism, but also of a collapsed public consciousness. And it is amid this collapsed consciousness that the grim history of the past several decades has unfolded.
IT IS DIFFICULT TO DATE the beginning of Sri Lanka’s gradual decline toward the status of a failed state. One might say it started at independence, when the elite that took power from the colonial administration failed in the most fundamental task facing it: to bring the vast, excluded majority into the new polity and all its processes, to make citizens of the Ceylonese—to empower them, as we would say today. One could also point to Bandaranaike’s language law, which had a devastating effect on the consciousness of the Ceylonese as belonging to a modern, secular, multicultural nation at just the moment such a consciousness needed to be encouraged.
Then there are the problems of corruption and violence in public life. When did they begin?
Corruption in Sri Lanka has many roots. During the 1950s people without private wealth were elected to public office for the first time. In the 1960s came a vast expansion of the state sector; in the late-1970s came the opposite—a phase of privatization. Each of these proved an occasion for corruption to spread.
Another kind of corruption can be dated to 1972, when Sri Lanka passed its first “home-grown” constitution, and to 1978, when J. R. Jayewardene fashioned the presidential constitution (and then became the first executive president). These documents allowed for an unhealthy concentration of power in the executive and the unchecked politicization of every aspect of public life. Everything, thenceforth, proceeded according to political interests. Police officers were appointed according to whom they knew. School principals were appointed according to whom they knew. Nothing was left out. This, without any doubt, is the most corrosive form corruption has taken in Sri Lanka. It was by way of these two constitutions that the structure of government began to collapse, departments and agencies lost all autonomy, and power began to be exercised coercively and “extra-legally”—that is, violently, by way of dense, opaque alliances among government officials, politicians, and organized criminals. By the 1980s, it is frequently said, a political assassination could be ordered for about five hundred rupees—roughly twenty American dollars at the time—and there were many of them.
How did violence, the threat of violence, and the fear these produce among the citizenry, become so endemic in a society that inherited so stately a thing as the Westminster model? This question, too, can be answered variously.
In 1956, while parliament was debating Bandaranaike’s language law, Tamil leaders began a satyagraha at Galle Face Green. Satyagraha is an Indian term meaning, roughly, “support for the truth.” The term was much used during the Indian independence movement to describe resistance movements based on Gandhi’s principle of nonviolence. Those mounting their satyagraha at Galle Face Green were attacked by Sinhalese supporters of the language law, and eighteen people were injured. It is a tiny number compared with all the casualties that have followed, but perhaps we can date the appearance of violence in Sri Lanka, at least in its contemporary guise, to this small, mostly forgotten occasion.
There have been many ethnic riots since that moment. In 1971 a more purely political violence erupted when a leftist insurrection, an “armed struggle” in the parlance of the time, began in the south of the island. It lasted but a month, but the military’s killing spree afterward claimed, by most counts, about fifteen thousand lives.
Then came the war with Tamil separatists, and what is called ethnic violence became a way of life. Compounding this, the leftist rebellion erupted a second time, in the late-1980s. By this time the army had a more or less free hand in countering violence with violence—civil institutions having begun their slow collapse—and there was no restraint in the army’s response. The number of dead and “disappeared” is still debated and is unlikely ever to be established with certainty. The official figure is thirty thousand; “not fewer than fifty thousand” is a phrase commonly used, and some credible, independent organizations put it at sixty thousand. That is more than twice the number of “disappeared” commonly attributed to “the dirty war” in Argentina after the military junta took power in 1976.
The dirty war and Argentina’s disappeared are well-known around the world. But Sri Lanka’s grim descent into violence and near-chaos is little understood outside the country. Foreigners are generally aware that there is a war between the government and the Tamil separatists, but this is usually cast in the simplistic terms of ethnic problems and a war against “terrorists,” a word often used to remove the need for any further understanding. Apart from the war not much is known about the tragedy Sri Lanka has made of itself. Very few people are aware that most Sri Lankan institutions barely function, resulting in a circumstance just short of lawlessness. Very few people know of the preponderance of fear and violence, or of the near-complete corruption, without exception, of government institutions. This is the result of a rather grotesque cult of silence. It is perfectly possible for a foreign visitor—and I have met many such cases—to spend two weeks on a Sri Lankan beach and know nothing of these matters. This is at least in part by design. Mention Sri Lanka to outsiders, even those who have visited, and they are likely to mention back the war, cricket, or the beaches along the southern coast. The rest has unfolded away from the world’s gaze.
Least of all are foreigners or visitors (or, indeed, many Sri Lankans) able to recognize that the war—a remote, insignificant war in the world’s imagination—is a symptom and not a cause. Understood properly, the war is the not entirely illogical consequence of the collapse of national institutions—public, mediating institutions, and what we can call the institution within, the public consciousness of Sri Lankans.
It is this collapsed consciousness that accounts for one of the strangest characteristics of the Sri Lankan people. Amid all the wreckage, amid all the murders and disappearances and abuse, this macabre silence prevails. No atrocity seems to stir them. If anything, the greater the atrocity the deeper the silence. Only the few still know the importance of raising their voices. And among these, still fewer have devised ways of doing so. A friend in Colombo once described Sri Lanka by saying simply, “ours, an ugly country.” He meant the brutality, the bloodshed, the corruption, and so on. One must consider whether it is not the silence of the living that is most truly unattractive.
Absent its institutions, absent its voices, Sri Lanka is rendered incapable of resolving any of its conflicts and difficulties and faces, instead, the prospect of disintegration, for in reality there is no working entity called “Sri Lanka.” Raymond Aron, the French philosopher and social critic, once wrote that France during the radical polarizations of the 1930s “no longer existed except through the hatreds French people bore one another.” There must have been many fine, well-intentioned French people alive at that time, just as there are many such Sri Lankans living now. But we learn from Aron just how a nation can destroy itself nonetheless: It is first destroyed in people’s minds.
LET US REMAIN BRIEFLY at the green, for many things have changed in the vast open space around it over the years. And these changes are revealing. They offer a few more signs of the nation within.
In 1982 J. R. Jayewardene, the first non-ceremonial president, moved parliament out of the old Greek edifice facing westward across the ocean and made it into the Presidential Secretariat—in effect his office. Nothing could be more expressive of the narrowing of vision and political life in Sri Lanka and the dysfunctional accumulation of power in one man’s hands since Jayewardene, in the constitution adopted in 1978, switched Sri Lanka from a Westminster system to a presidential system. Parliament now sits on what was previously a swamp on the outskirts of the city—another revealing spatial rearrangement. It is in a place called Sri Jayewardenepura, Kotte—the name of an ancient kingdom—and it is commonly said that the president chose this location so that his family name and his personal legacy would be eternally honored by the presence, in this isolated bit of nowhere, of what should be one of the nation’s most essential public institutions.
The war between the Tamil separatists and the government began in the late-1970s and, after a lull, escalated dramatically in the early 1980s. And because of it the army headquarters, located just south of what is now the Presidential Secretariat, has become a kind of urban bunker—forbidding, a constant reminder of the coercive power of the Sri Lankan state and the force by which it holds itself together in a condition that is not much more than bare survival. A long wall around it is equipped with barbed wire and guard turrets, always manned. Here and there atop the wall, green-painted sandbags are stacked in piles—protection for more sentries.
There are checkpoints along the road beneath the wall, which rings what amounts to a large military quarter. Drive past one of these and you may be stopped and your papers checked. This procedure might take five minutes, or twenty-five. In such situations the police are free to detain you as long as they wish and to ask you anything they wish, and if you are Sri Lankan you are best advised to set constitutional legalities aside and answer them. Patrolling police and army units enact the same scene more or less constantly all over the city. Whatever the necessity of such exercises, there is a subliminal message in them: If Sri Lanka is anyone’s space, it is theirs, not the space of its citizens. Public space is now military space. It is a kind of occupation zone.
The statue of Bandaranaike between the army headquarters and the old legislature was erected in the mid-1970s. It is now one of five that populate a small lawn that seems to belong to the Presidential Secretariat. At the front of this formation is one of D. S. Senanayake, the first prime minister of independent Ceylon. To Senanayake’s right stands Bandaranaike, and on his left is Dudley Senanayake, the son of D. S. and a prime minister himself. Behind these are two statues of once-prominent cabinet ministers (and behind them the statues of two prominent Tamils). Bandranaike and the two Senanayake’s were national leaders, of course. But do their statues now stand for great men in Sri Lanka’s history or for the patriarchs of great families or political interests, men who brought honour to their private realms or political clans by making their names prominent in the public sphere? With Sri Lanka’s history in view, this is a fair question. It is hard to read the tablets on the pedestals of these statues, and it would be interesting to do so, for they might shed some light, perhaps unintentionally, on this very question. But the statues stand distantly, looking a little like bowling pins, behind a fence with no gate—there for all, accessible to none.
Built by the colonizer, then handed over to the once-colonized, Galle Face Green and all it stands for has languished. Today we cannot look at it and imagine all that it was once meant to signify without posing an essential question. Why did the transfer of power in Sri Lanka turn out to be such a signal failure in the years following independence? The neat, symmetrical idea of history as a logical continuity, a rational unfolding of events as humankind decides they should unfold, has had little to do with Sri Lanka’s progress, if that is the word, since 1948. It is the question that greeted me on my arrival: What is it that failed to happen? Galle Face today is not unlike the old British car I had seen on the way in from the airport: still there, but fallen into disuse and gathering dust. To make another comparison, it suggests a transplanted organ that did not survive. Something in the receiving patient rejected it. We must ask why. And still more urgently we must ask, What is to be done now to revive the patient?
The green was fenced off when I first saw it—beaten down, bare in many places, and scheduled for a restoration. It was not the first such effort, friends would tell me. There had been others, the most recent having been tried some years earlier. One friend told me a story about it. The municipal authorities had spread water sprinklers across the green to revive its trampled, parched grass. Then they turned them on and waited. Inside a week, there wasn’t a single sprinkler left. They had all been stolen. “And that is Sri Lanka,” my friend concluded.
NOSTAGLIA IS NOT an uncommon sentiment. Many people feel it in their private lives, for a lost love or a lost opportunity, or for a time when life seemed better than how it is. Sri Lanka is odd in this way: There is a nostalgia among Sri Lankans that is not private in any of these ways but involves the whole of society—a kind of public nostalgia. And it is odd in another way, too: It is a post-colonial country that seems to nurse a nostalgia for its colonial past. No one quite stands for a return to colonial rule, of course. But many people, sometimes rather openly and more than half a century after independence, miss the British era—“the time of the British” or “the British time,” as many Sri Lankans call it. This, surely, is a singular feature among the old imperial possessions.
This casting back to the British past, like any other form of nostalgia, is, again, a longing for what is lost. And to long in this way usually means to idealize the object of longing. This is what many Sri Lankans seem to do: They long and they idealize what they long for, and both of these habits are unconscious. Nonetheless, they are embedded in the very fiber of Sri Lankan life, which makes them so visible and total that they become invisible, except to the newcomer. One sees Sri Lankan longing in the pubs, which are as English in Colombo as anything to be found in S. W. 3 or off of Piccadilly, one sees it in the national taste for cricket, in the houses considered the ones worth owning, in the place of English in the national conversation, in government procedures and government buildings—it is, one might say, in the very air one breathes in Sri Lanka.
In the house I took in Nugegoda, the sitting room was decorated with artificial roses and two posters, both of a little blonde English girl. In the posters she is dressed in soft woolens and stands next to a large stone column holding a rose up to her nose. It seemed very odd to me. What has this to do with Sri Lanka, I began to wonder as I walked past these images day in, day out. They turned out to be popular posters, for I saw the same little girl with the same rose by the same stone column numerous times during my stay, once even pasted to the interior of a tuk-tuk I was riding from my suburb into the city. Outside the decrepit tuk-tuk, the chaos, noise, and fumes of a thousand motors racing to get ahead in sweltering heat; inside, the little girl in winter woolens smelling an English rose as she stands next to what looks like the corner of a great, eternal institution.
Pubs, sport, appealing English children, graceful houses: There is nothing wrong with a fondness for any of these, surely; cricket is popular the world over—a great, common language, a unifier. But Sri Lanka’s relationship with its lost British past is different. There is a certain denial in it, for one thing. There is a denial of the present as it is, and there is a denial of the past as it was, for pubs and cricket can hardly be said to stand for the sum of the colonial experience. There is also a more subtle denial: the denial of discontinuity, of a rupture, of things that were lost and mistakes that were made. Apart from denial, there is also a certain element of delusion, for in all this longing one looks back or reaches back for something that is not there. And one remembers what it was never one’s to remember. I have seen this habit elsewhere. In Japan during the 1980s and 1990s, the young entertained a great nostalgia for Elvis Presley, not because they remembered him authentically—they couldn’t, they were too young—but because of some totemic meaning attached to Elvis, something to do with the years during and just after the American occupation, years of great misery but also of common struggle and a certain spirit of exploration.
This is how we should consider the nostalgia so plentifully in evidence among Sri Lankans. We should ask, What is the totemic meaning attached to the tangible artifacts of the old colonial culture, the old way of doing things, the old habits, manners, and mannerisms? Then we must resolve the presence of this nostalgia with the presence of precisely the opposite habit of mind.
AMONG POST-COLONIAL NATIONS there is without exception a rejection of the legacy of the colonizer. This can be a painful, messy matter, as it is proving to be in Zimbabwe today, for example. Or it can be a slow process, a gradual coming apart. British cartographers created Nigeria a century ago by drawing red lines on a map, and it is now not altogether certain whether those called Nigerians want to live by those lines or erase them and begin again.
Rejection comes in many forms. Sometimes it is merely symbolic and sometimes it is to the accompaniment of the very nostalgia is seems to negate. Singapore, along with Sri Lanka and many other former colonies, has famously kept many of the trappings of British rule, including the wigs worn by judges on the bench. But this is affectation, intended to give an appearance of unassailable authority, such as the colonists projected, and to suggest the weight of history. Famously, too, Singapore repudiated recourse to the Privy Council in London when the council once ruled against the Singapore courts, and there is now little that is British, to say nothing of a universal standard, about Singaporean justice. Something not dissimilar occurred shortly after I arrived in Sri Lanka, when the chief justice, Sarath Silva, ruled that the findings of the U. N. Human Rights Committee—an by implication the terms of any international covenant Sri Lanka ratifies—were not binding unless there was a domestic law corresponding to them. So the former colonizers play a complex set of roles as history moves on: They are there to be rejected so that new leaders can demonstrate their legitimacy, and they are there to be imitated, at least superficially, for the very same reason.
Amid all their nostalgia, Sri Lankans have had a few important moments of rejection, too. Most famously, they rejected the language of the colonizer by way of the law passed in 1956. And the language law proved to represent a rejection of much else apart from the medium of English. At bottom it was a rejection of a certain idea of order and governance, and this rejection was later confirmed by way of the constitutions adopted in 1972 and 1978. It would be difficult to overstate the significance of these acts of rejection. Sri Lankans are still living—and more to the point, dying—as a consequence of them.
But for all of their acts of rejection of the colonial past, it remains their pervasive nostalgia that is most striking among Sri Lankans. To reject and then to long for the rejected: It seems a strange combination of impulses, but we must recognize that the paradox is only apparent. What allows them to co-exist so commonly—in a society, in a family, in an individual—is the presence of regret, regret and the code of silence. Regret is not ordinarily expressed—for either a society or an individual it is usually too difficult to articulate—but it seems to be there, along with silence, whenever one finds rejection and nostalgia side by side.
Nostalgia, as an American writer once pointed out, is a form of depression. It is an effort to escape from the present, so it is always, and by definition, freighted with regret—regret for what has been lost, what has been damaged or neglected, or for what is no longer there. It is not necessarily a very accurate sentiment in that it tends to paint the past differently from what it was. But it is perfectly accurate in expressing the longings for what is absent in the present.
And what, precisely, is it that Sri Lankans long for? This is a simple and obvious question that requires a complex and not so simple answer. The thing most clearly missed in contemporary Sri Lankan life is the one thing Sri Lankans rarely, if ever, speak of—not directly, in any case. It is part of the reason they maintain their rather extraordinary silence, for to speak of it directly and openly would require the painful admission of regret—regret of many years of mistakes. It would necessitate a going back and a beginning again—acts that, quite understandably, any of us would find difficult, for they involve the acceptance of time and effort wasted and lost. We see nostalgia in food or sports or architecture, but what is missed has nothing to do with mere trappings. As I read them these are unconscious expressions of a larger loss. What is truly missed lies at the very core of a nation’s life: It is an idea of order upon which all the constituents of a nation have agreed. In Sri Lanka’s case, it is the very order that was effectively discarded in 1956 and then buried in 1972, and buried again in 1978, and buried again and again in the years since—years of corruption, conflict, and, very much in effect of late, years of near lawlessness and judicial anarchy.
To put this more specifically, Sri Lanka is nostalgic for a civic consciousness, the vitality of that part of each Sri Lankan that makes that person aware of himself or herself as a public being, a self with an outward role, in a community known as “Sri Lanka.” This is absent in Sri Lanka—the great absence one finds from the airport onward. To put it still another way, Sri Lankans have declined over many years to occupy together that inherited public space so well signified by Galle Face Green. They have either declined to occupy it, occupied it irresponsibly, or, for the vast majority, they have been prevented from occupying it. As with the green at the center of Colombo, they wander across public space, aimlessly and individually, but they have at bottom left it empty. Who stole the sprinklers from Galle Face Green? We may well answer this way: All Sri Lankans did. They stole them, one might say paradoxically, by not insisting upon their common ownership over them. All that is manifest there now is an army. The rest is a great, almost palpable vacuum. And this vacuum is at once the consequence of Sri Lanka’s rejection and the object of Sri Lanka’s regret—Sri Lanka’s nostalgia.
SAMINDA WAS A NOSTALGIST. It was he who first took me to Galle Face Green. And as Saminda made clear even on that first morning after my arrival, he was full to overflowing with the regret that is the companion of nostalgia.
“Go into the street and you see what the country is,” Saminda said almost as soon as we met. “Everything is there. The street is like the face of a man.”
He was tall, well-spoken, and courteous. He dressed neatly. He wore glasses with heavy rectangular frames and thick lenses, which lent him an inquisitive look. When we drove in his car, which was often as the weeks went by, he would apologize for it each time. It was a road-worn Volkswagen with missing window handles, a broken radio, and an air-conditioner no longer strong enough to make a difference in the equatorial heat. Electrical tape sealed the sunroof. It was black, carefully matched to the colour of the paint.
“It’s not what I’m used to driving,” Saminda would explain. This was a point of some importance to Saminda. He was used to a large, commodious car—a B M W, I think—that had come with his job: a perquisite. Then it had gone with his job. Saminda had been a judge. And when he became entangled with the corruption of the judiciary he was forced to resign—a story I was to hear over and over in Sri Lanka.
Saminda was very conscious of his place in Sri Lankan society. This had something to do with personal status and pride, surely, but it also reflected his awareness of his public being, his civic self—his being a Sri Lankan. This latter I admired in him. His difficulties in the judiciary had given him a view of things. He had suffered, and like all sufferers, he was able to see more clearly because of it.
That first morning we drove out in the Volkswagen from the quiet of my lane toward Stanley Tillekeratne Mawatha, the commercial street I had seen during the night. As I had expected, it was in daylight a cacophonous confusion of cars, motorbikes, trucks, tractors, carts, pedestrians, hawkers, and tuk-tuks, the noisy three-wheeled taxis that skim across the city like insects on the surface of a pond. The fumes were heavy. I was immediately drawn to the vitality of the city. But I also saw for the first time how unkempt the streets and sidewalks were. There was no apparent order; driving seemed an exercise in improvised navigation, with no rules to govern it.
At the Nugegoda rail crossing the bars went down as a train approached. Then something curious happened, something I had never seen before. On both sides of the track drivers immediately filled the lane for oncoming traffic, so that when the train had passed and the bars were lifted the cars and trucks and motorcycles and tuk-tuks on either side of the track faced each other like opposing armies. There was chaos for several minutes as drivers threaded their ways through all the vehicles coming toward them. Motorbikes and tuk-tuks weaved tiny passages for themselves.
There is an immense energy on Sri Lanka’s streets. They burst with a kind of power that, I later came to believe, could someday prove the salvation of the nation. But for now it is an energy and power that lacks all direction, and so is spent in an altogether futile fashion.
All this made Saminda rather grim and pensive. It stood, in his mind, for the disorder that has gradually overtaken Sri Lanka—its institutions, its daily life, the way Sri Lankans think and act toward one another: In this it was “the face of a man,” as he had put it.
On that first day we eventually drove through Sri Jayewardenepura and past the parliament building. We were a few miles from the city limits, and already lush foliage began to envelop everything. Here and there along the side of the road there were piles of trash, as one sees in rural villages—dried leaves and palm fronds, the smoldering ashes of small fires, old coconut shells decaying in the heat. I thought nothing of them, but Saminda kept shaking his head. Finally he said, “This is our national symbol—garbage.”
This acute way of seeing, a kind of cynical detachment in a process of relentless self-examination, was something I was to encounter many times among Sri Lankans. In Saminda it seemed to have sharpened and grown more bitter since he had left the judiciary. He had been well brought up in Colombo. He had moved in sophisticated circles. And then, all at once, the insider was outside. He was isolated, a sudden exile. This happened a couple of years before I met Saminda, and he was still struggling with the shock of it.
THERE IS A DIFFERENT KIND of nostalgia among Sri Lankans. For some it is a longing for the old kingdoms of the Sinhalese monarchs, for the greatness of Anuradhapura and the magnificent “tanks” built from the first century onward—the vast reservoirs and the elaborate irrigation systems they watered, feats of engineering that survive in many places. This is very different from the nostalgia for the British past, of course. They are many centuries apart, these two longed-for eras. And this kind of nostalgia is rooted in an impossible idea: It supposes that the colonial era was an interruption that can be erased from history—as if it did not count, as if it was not part of what makes Sri Lankans Sri Lankan, and, indeed, as if it simply never happened. It shares only one thing with the nostalgia for the British era: They both express the longing for an idea of order, although these ideas are very different.
At lunch one day Saminda recalled a memory from his childhood. When he was young he had studied from textbooks supplied, as all were, by the government. In one, written in Sinhala, there was an account of Prince Gamini, who later became King Dutugemunu, a legendary hero credited with uniting the island for the first time. One day the prince’s mother came upon him as he slept with his arms and legs tightly folded—perhaps in a kind of fetal position. The boy awoke. His mother said, “Son, why are you sleeping this way?” The young prince replied, “Mother, it is because to the north of me are the Tamils, and to the south the sea. How can I stretch myself out in such circumstances?” As he told me this tale, Saminda explained that the terms in the textbook had certain connotations. “They implied ‘the dumb, inanimate sea’ and ‘the roguish Tamils.’”
This kind of nostalgia, an officially sanctioned nostalgia by the time Saminda went to school, held no interest for him. He told me the story simply to show me how wrong things had gone in Sri Lanka and the government’s responsibility for this wrong direction. Saminda’s nostalgia was decidedly of the more modern sort. In another circumstance one might consider him simply an Anglophile. But in Sri Lanka his nostalgia carried a much greater meaning than this term implies. It was, at bottom, a response to the impossible nostalgia of the pre-modern kind. So it was in reality a kind of anti-nostalgia.
As a boy Saminda had attended St. Thomas College, one of the famous old schools begun under the British. It was in Mount Lavinia, a suburb just south of the capital. St. Thomas was a kind of unspoiled preserve of the type one sees here and there around Sri Lanka—a park, a street of well-kept houses, a churchyard, an orderly place amid the disorder. It had a campus like that of a New England day school, and it bordered the sea.
After St. Thomas, Saminda went on to the law faculty at the University of Colombo, and from there, in 1992, he qualified as a solicitor in London. Back home, he began to practice. He started a family and bought a house in Mount Lavinia. And eventually he became a judge, rising soon enough to the High Court. In time he was up for a promotion to the Appeals Court.
Law is a chosen profession in Sri Lanka. To practice as an attorney was a privilege long preserved for the most elevated Ceylonese, the mudaliyars, those families (the Bandaranaike’s especially prominent among them) who once served the Kandyan kings as mediators and then went on to serve the British in the same fashion. The Law College and the Medical College, founded respectively in 1870 and 1874, were the first institutions of higher learning open to the Ceylonese. Thereafter, law and medicine became passages into the local elite. The status of physicians and attorneys, as belonging to revered professions, owes to this history and is evident even now. Lawyers and doctors figured prominently in the notion of continuity in Ceylon, as they do still.
All of this was evident in Saminda’s thinking. Like attorneys the world over, he had a particular regard for precedent, procedure, and the supremacy of the written statute. And for Saminda Sri Lanka had lost the order these things provided when it rejected the traditions the British had left behind. This, he thought, was the country’s fatal mistake after independence. The order of the old civilization was something beyond retrieval; the order of the British was something Sri Lanka had had and had lost.
Saminda said, “When I was young, in the early 1970s, people were paying no attention to procedure and law. It was just, ‘We’ve got power now, and we will do things as we want.’ The point was simply to uproot the system. This was the purpose of the 1972 constitution. It concentrated authority in the executive. The independence constitution, implemented in 1947, had certain essential features—the full separation of powers, full checks and balances—and most of these were eliminated in 1972. The courts had no authority to rule on the validity of laws enacted by the legislature, so parliament had ‘the liberty of a wild ass,’ as the expression went. That is why everything eventually became political and corruption spread so widely.”
Saminda paused briefly and continued.
“How could this happen? Because people were politically naïve. They talked politics all the time, but they were not politically literate. Feelings were what moved them—nationalist feelings, and then racist and religious feelings.”
Saminda spoke for a long time. But there seemed to be something missing from his account of things. It failed to explain what gave rise to the feelings people had within a few years of independence. It may have made rational sense to adopt the system the British left Ceylon in 1948, but the educated elite that took power used the system just as the British had: to exclude the majority of Ceylonese. This is why so many Sri Lankans old enough to remember independence remember most of all how little difference it made. And this, surely, was the appeal of the old Anuradhapura civilization: It could be called Ceylonese. This sort of nationalism, Sinhalese nationalism, was not really nationalism so much as a substitute for nationalism—the authentic nationalism the majority of Ceylonese had been denied after independence. It could be no surprise that so many Ceylonese, and now so many Sri Lankans, would seek an identity for themselves in the deep past. It was a mistake, but the original mistake was not theirs: It was the mistake of those who led them—those, it would have to be said, of Saminda’s class.
I never asked Saminda about being Sinhalese and what it might have meant to him. Like so many others I was to meet, he was left to struggle on his own with the matter of being Sri Lankan. And to Saminda—a lawyer, a judge—this meant drawing, dispassionately, on all of history, not just the part of it that was Sinhalese, however much its remnants suggested a bygone greatness. It is in this way that what I called Saminda’s nostalgia was an anti-nostalgia, a negation, a reply to a kind of Sinhalese fundamentalism that made an altar of the stones at Anuradhapura.
“What was the system we had in ancient times?” Saminda replied when I put all this to him. “No one knows. Nothing was written down—or not very much. We have a glorious history. There were kings who did great things. We have our ‘great walls’”—he meant the island’s famous rock faces full of chiseled inscriptions—“but I’m talking about a system of governance. We didn’t have one of our own—an identifiable, legal, administrative system, like Westminster. This is the reality. The Westminster model didn’t spring up in a day or two. It took a long time—it was a process. And we didn’t have anything that could develop in the same way. Kings tried to develop things here and there, but you can’t call it a system. Foreign influence was nothing new to us in 1948. At that point we had been under the influence of foreign powers for almost five hundred years. Our choice at that moment was simple—to preserve the Westminster model—to preserve it or improve upon it.”
THE JUDICIARY WAS THE LAST branch of government to give way to the corruption and politicization that have all but destroyed Sri Lankan institutions. Even as things crumbled all around it, the Sri Lankan judiciary was still considered to be among the best in the British Commonwealth. This seems to have been true until well into the 1990s, at least in the higher courts if not the lower. “First to go was customs,” Saminda once told me. “Then the police and the army. Then the civil service. And then the judiciary.”
As a high court judge Saminda had presided in Kandy, driving to Mount Lavinia on weekends down the steep mountain atop which Kandy sits. “It was in Kandy that my troubles began,” Saminda said in a rueful tone over dinner one evening. He had resisted talking about this when it had come up on previous occasions.
It was a low business, as it turned out, based on the pettiest of disputes. I had been warned about this before I arrived in Sri Lanka. Personal advancement, private alliances, individual ambition: It all takes precedence over anything that is public. Some of the largest decisions in its post-independence history have been taken to serve the narrow interests of a handful of people—and sometimes simply one. And it is the same throughout society. It is the very substance of disorder—a cause and a consequence of national failure.
Saminda’s story, though mundane and petty in its details, casts an interesting light on the inner workings of the judiciary. The local chief of police stopped him on a road outside of Kandy one evening, and the encounter became abusive, a matter of rank and privilege. Observing procedure, Saminda filed a complaint with the judicial authorities in Colombo. Then the realities began to make themselves apparent. The police chief had connections at the highest levels of the judiciary. He did favors of various kinds for senior judges and politicians. He was a fixer, a kind of “henchman”—a favorite term among Sri Lankans when discussing official corruption, for the system is highly dependent on such figures. In time, the status of the police chief, his invisible status, came to trump Saminda’s status as a judge. And after some months it was clear to him that he had transgressed, perhaps fatally for his career. But he had transgressed in a very Sri Lankan way: He had transgressed by not transgressing. He had held to the rules and procedures, and this had sealed his fate. Within a few months he was forced to resign from the bench.
So the professional and public became the personal and private, a common occurrence when there are no institutions to check political interests and accumulated power. What is public and what is private in such circumstances become hopelessly confused. What is public is submerged, and the forces that control society are not discernible. Everything, in the end, is invisible. And the only way to protect oneself from forces that are invisible is to become invisible oneself—to withdraw into one’s private life, to cultivate the idea of oneself as possessing no public identity, and finally to fall silent.
The sacrifices for Saminda came almost immediately. He lost all his government perks. Work stopped on a new home he had been building. He struggled to pay his sons’ school fees. He fell into what seemed, when I met him, a mild but chronic depression. There was little work. For a year he presided in a court in East Timor as part of an international mission. Then he began doing legal work for a human rights group, a group associated with the organization that sent me to Sri Lanka and later published this book.
As my days in Sri Lanka grew short, I asked Saminda what he would do. We had seen a lot of one another. And there seemed so much in Sri Lanka that needed to be addressed, I told him. Perhaps he could accomplish more now that he had learned to survive outside the system. But it seemed an excruciating choice. Saminda had responsibilities—school fees, a household to run, security to provide—and a certain standing to which he was evidently still attached. The importance of such considerations can hardly be overestimated: They are absolutely essential to understanding how Sri Lanka is able to continue functioning even amid its incipient failure and disorder. By the time I put my question to Saminda, I had met many people who had made all the compromises necessary to keep their places within institutions they knew to be corrupt—to remain members of a beleaguered elite at war even with itself.
What would he do?
Saminda hesitated before replying. It was evening, and we were sitting on a terrace under a tree. I struggled to see his expression.
Then he said, “I will go back. When the chance comes, I want to go back.”
