THE REFLECTED CULTURAL WAVES OF TSUNAMI
Ten days after the worst natural disaster in the recent history of the country we are still struggling to come to grips with the havoc it has caused. Various authorities have already been established to attend to the needs of the displaced people but it is clear that the government machinery is not working with the efficiency that it used to be. In the meanwhile allegations are being made against the scientists who are supposed to be responsible for keeping the people informed of such disasters in advance. Though the human beings became victims of the tsunami most of the animals somehow or other have managed to keep away from the killer waves.
The Asian culture in general and the Sinhala culture in particular came to the surface as a result of tsunami. The Sinhala language and, I am told, some other Asian languages have a tendency, when borrowing words from other languages, to use the equivalent or a close word of the language with the borrowed word. For example we have "light eliya" and "board laella". The latest among this group of double words is tsunami rella, in spite of the Japanese word tsunami has as one of the parts, wave or rella incorporated into it. We still do not know the exact number of victims of the tsunami rella but a very conservative estimate would make it close to fifty thousand.
The character of the Sinhala people could be seen through the disaster. Those who volunteered to assist the victims in at least one way exceeded the expectations. The donations have been pouring to various institutions causing a problem of distribution. The most salient factor was the way people went on their own to assist the victims without waiting for a central organisation. Though there have been ugly incidents, which some NGO personnel are very happy at repeating, overall the response has been very positive. Those who are resorting to various crimes are the result of the last hundred years or so of change in the culture of the country. Those who want to blame the Sinhala people especially the Sinhala Buddhists should first answer how it was possible for the Sinhala people to respond to the tsunami disaster the way they have done. As a foreigner from a western country had remarked in their countries it is the government with a centralised machinery that takes the initiative but in Sri Lanka the people did not wait for the government to give the leadership. As one western media has put it the people were busy helping the victims of tsunami without a central leadership. We have to understand what made it possible for the Sinhala people to rise to the occasion so magnificently.
The Sinhala people never had a unitary state according to some NGO pundits who echo the voice of their master and mistresses in the west. They go by the fact that the first unitary states, nation states for that matter, were established after Capitalism was introduced and that no such states would have been possible in a country such as Sri Lanka. It is true that we did not have unitary states as such but we had a state that was called an eksesath rajya. The eksesath rajya was a centralised state, but what the Sinhala people have shown during the past ten days was that there was much freedom for the people's organisations to act independently of the government, in an eksesath rajya. They went by a cultural instinct that they had inherited from the pre colonial period, and did not wait for the government. There were no laws to discourage them as in the case of the present laws against managing water of the "wevas", and they acted quite freely. The "welfare" organisations of the people, some of them formed specifically for the purpose, took upon themselves the responsibility of feeding, clothing and sheltering the victims of tsunami rella. Naturally the Buddhist upbringing helped the people to act the way they did. It was not only the religious attitude of the people that led to their particular response but the administration that they were used to before the colonial period also helped them. They are used to taking decisions on their own rather than waiting for a central authority.
In contrast the government machinery did not work as efficiently to say the least. The government structures we have inherited from the British are very rigid and centralised. If an NGO pundit wants to find out the difference between a unitary state and an eksesath rajya, I think we now have the answer. Both the eksesath rajya and the unitary state are centralised states where the power to legislate over the entire state is concentrated in a central body. This body was the king and his raja sabha in the case of the eksesath rajya and the king and the parliament in the case of a unitary state based on the British model. Though there was no difference between the two forms of the centralised state with respect to legislation, there was a difference when it came to governmental structures. The British model was more rigid with commands and instructions going from top to bottom while in the case of the eksesath rajya the people and their organisations were much free to act on their own. Buddhism that does not recognize a creator God who issues commands would have naturally helped the Sinhalas to evolve their administrative methods.
The British did not give us a centralised state as western political scientists and their imitators who do not have the knowledge of their masters and the mistresses, which is also the case of the other scientists in the so called natural sciences, claim. We have had a centralised state from the days of king Pandukabhaya and a centralised eksesath Sinhala Buddhist state from the times of king Dutugemunu. What the British gave us was the centralised rigid governmental machinery with a Brahamin civil service to go with it. The ARs and the FRs and all the other circulars attached to this machinery was introduced gradually after the so-called Colebrook Cameron reforms, In order to introduce the rigid structure the British did away with the laws and regulations and the "rajakari" system that were much more flexible though it was against the convention of 1815, the Sinhala British convention, which was baptised by the British as the Kandian convention, that promised to govern the country according to the laws of the Sinhale.
The British civil service and the governmental structures were resented by the people though some so-called educated among the graduates aspired to join the administrative service. Even the lower rungs were encouraged by the British to join the government administration as various officers and clerks and being employed in the public service had a high demand in the marriage market. However the people were oppressed by this machinery and they associated it with a Brahamin class of "niladhari hamuduruwos". The British could maintain this machinery but as soon as they left the country the people started complaining against the set up. While the English educated could find employment in the structure as civil servants, other officers and clerks the Sinhala educated were either confined to be peons or left entirely out of the system only to be suppressed. The UNP governments wanted to maintain the system but the people were gradually rising against it. The "Bamunu Kulaya" was not confined to the ministers and the mini capitalists in the form of directors of British founded firms in the country but it incorporated the higher rungs of the so-called public service. The "Bamunu Kulaya" mentioned here is not the same as that described by late Mr. Martin Wickremesinghe. As far as the people were concerned the public service was not a service to the public at all but an oppressive machinery.
The opposition to the "public service" by a public that had been used to flexible structures that gave them much freedom came to the forefront in the seventies. However, unfortunately the people had to look up to the politicians, ironically a group created also by the British, to fight the "public service". The result was the political authority that was established by the 1970 government and the rest is history. The British machinery has now almost collapsed. The governmental structures are now not functioning as efficiently. During the so-called second world war Mr. Oliver Goonathilake had been able to carry out his duties with the then existing machinery. Then over the years when we had various natural disasters and man made disasters the machinery worked though with decreasing efficiency. Today it is breathing its last breadth and very soon unless we address this problem from a nationalistic point of view we would face a disaster worse than any natural disaster.
We may call it the politcisation of the administration. However it has a deeper cultural reason why the machinery had to be "politicised" . In India it did not happen and the civil service still continues to function as that country is used to a centralised administration through the authority exercised by the Brahmins. The Manu Laws and the Veda scriptures are in the history of the Indian people, and though they would have opposed the British Raj, they did not have much problem with the centralised administration. The centralised administration is not same as a unitary state as even in a federal state, one can find such administration. The British administration continues to function in India without much problems where as in Sri Lanka it has almost reached a natural death.
(To be continued)
Professor Nalin de Silva
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