Part I: Book Review: A 16th Century Clash of Civilizations, the Portuguese Presence in Sri Lanka, Susantha Gunatilake
When the Portuguese began their “spiritual and temporal conquest” of Sri Lanka (1505 – 1658) it brought out the best and the worst in the Sinhalese. The best came out in the heroic and successful resistance to Portuguese military expeditions to conquer the nation. The worst came out in the characters of Don Juan Dharmapala and Prince Vijayapala, (1634 – 1654), the brother of Raja Sinha, who succumbed to the Western pressures and influences. These are the first of the two elitist children who were brought up in the Western culture and the consequences of their alienation were to introduce subversive politico-cultural entities that owed allegiances to the dominant West – a venal trait common among the elite even in contemporary times.
The fashionable trend to bring up children in the Western culture began with the Portuguese who were only too eager to exploit the rival Sinhala power-players vying for dominance by currying the favour of foreigners. Besides, loyalty to a foreign culture meant invariably loyalty to the political masters of that foreign culture. The process of programming 12-1converts to foreign cultures was outlined in a cameo of Prince Vijayapala drawn by Paul E. Peiris, a pioneering historian of the colonial era, who wrote: “It was a source of gratification to the Queen when the youthful Vijayapala was entrusted to a Franciscan, the Frey Francisco Negro.” (p.14, Prince Vijaya Pala of Ceylon, 1634 – 1654, from the original documents at Lisbon, 1927) Vijayapala foreshadowed the mindset of the Westernized generations to come when he wrote to the Portuguese Viceroy in India saying: “I state, Senhor, that I was born with a strong predilection for the Portuguese nation…In my earliest years, greatly to the satisfaction of the Queen my mother, there was assigned to as Mestre the padre Frey Francisco Negrao who taught me to read and write. Under his instructions I learnt very good customs and etiquette and some special habits which Royal person employ….Though I am a Chingala by blood I am a Portuguese in my ways and affections.” What is reflected here is just not the cultural cringe but the swearing of loyalty to a foreign power for political gain.
Rape of motherland
In our times the Vijayapalas are ensconced mostly in the NGOs and in the UNP. The alacrity with which these alienated cultural cripples are willing to act as political pimps to foreign exploiters waiting to rape and sodomize their mother-land is obscene. The proliferation of the Vijayapalas and Dharmapalas has become a common cancer eating into the Sri Lankan body politic. The impact of this “thuppahi culture” (Philip Gunawardena) over-determined the thinking of the Westernized elite whose loyalties were, by and large, to the Occidental centers of power, from Rome to London to Washington. For instance, Cardinal Malcolm Ranjith (63), though born in Polgahawela, is committed more to Rome than to his home town in Sri Lanka, mainly because of his “spiritual and temporal” ties to the Catholic Church. After all, he is the equivalent of a Cabinet Minister in the Roman Curia and to whom else can he owe allegiance except to the Pope, the President of the tiny state of Rome? So the religio-political progeny of the Dharmapalas and Vijayapalas continues to haunt the nation to this day.
They have been programmed to be obedient servants of Judaeo-Christian culture of the West. It became politically expedient for the Sri Lankan elite to acquire the characteristics of the Western culture. On the one hand, it gave them a sense of superiority over the indigenous people to display their acquired Western characteristics. On the other, handing over Sinhala and Tamil children into the hands of the Christian priests/schools was a modus operandi adopted to guarantee upward social mobility in colonial administrations. The tragedy is that the Westernized power elite did not die with the colonial administration. They continue to wield a disproportionate power even today by creeping in through the backdoor.
This Westernized ‘priviligentsia’ reached its peak of power under the British. It is this elite, drawn from Westernized constituents in all communities, that resisted the rising grass roots forces who were struggling to regain their lost heritage. This privileged elite was entrenched in the commanding heights of the politico-economic structures and never hesitated to either stage military coups or join hands with the Western agencies (example: NGOs) to undermine the aspirations of the people who were denied their rights since the time of Portuguese occupation..
In our time Ranil Wickremesinghe is a typical example of the “thuppahi culture”. He invited the Portuguese Prime Minister to celebrate the 500th anniversary of the arrival of Portuguese in Sri Lanka he was echoing the identical sentiments of Vijayapala. Wickremesinghe’s foot-in-the-mouth gaffe provoked a public outcry against inviting the Portuguese predators to celebrate any anniversary of their imperialist adventure. There was nothing to celebrate in the coming of the Portuguese who were the first to threaten the sovereignty and the territorial integrity of nation from the West. Their political machinations which led the native rulers to sell themselves wholesale to anti-national aliens corresponded with Wickremesinghe’s betrayal of the nation to the West and to Velupillai Prabhakaran.
Wickremesinghe’s political passion is to hobnob with the Western leaders and his greatest fear is losing the status in the International Democratic Union (IDU) – a gathering of leading Christian right wing Western leaders, including Norway, which finances right-wing politics globally with its oil-rich money. His struggle to retain the leadership role in the UNP now is not so much to serve the party or the nation (he never did) but to save his seat in the IDU where he is ideally positioned as a deputy president of Asia to stooge for the West.
Wickremesinghe’s penchant to be a willing agent for the West was somewhat of a puzzle to me until I read Dr. Susantha’s Gunatilake’s latest book, A 16th Century Clash of Civilizations, the Portuguese Presence in Sri Lanka. After all he comes from a family connected to the highest elite in Sri Lankan society. There isn’t a family with better Buddhist credentials than the Wijewardenes and his respected mother, Neela, has been a pillar of the Gangaramaya Temple. So is his uncle, the genial Ranjit Wijewardene who was thrown unexpectedly into the political thunderstorm hitting Lake House when he returned from Cambridge and had to wrestle with all his might to restore the prestige of the Wijewardene family after Ranil’s father, Esmond Wickremesinghe, dragged Lake House from the great nationalist heights of D. R. Wijewardene to the lowest depths of the utterly Westernized Kotelawela regime — a regime which was rejected in toto by the massive Sinhala-Buddhist wave that swept the polls in 1956.
Though Ranil’s maternal roots are in Buddhism his paternal roots are in the Anglican Church – the religio-political institution left behind by the British colonial masters. From his father’s side he comes from the top ranks of the Anglican Church. His uncle Bishop Lakshman Wickremesinghe was a shrewd political “leader of the Anglican Church in Sri Lanka” who led pro-federalist/separatist campaigns in the guise of political harmony. He introduced the “pol thel pahana” and shades of yellow to the cassocks to make the Anglican Church more appealing to the Buddhists. When he was Bishop of Kurunegala he even introduced the Buddhist practice of entering the Church without shoes or slippers. In an interview I had with him the Bishop told me that he was adopting Buddhist practices and symbols to break down the cultural resistance to Christian garbs, candles and practices. It was his way of marketing Christianity and making it more appealing for conversion. His nephew, Ranil, seems to be rather a curious cross between these two cultures: he sports a “pirith noola” on his wrist to advertise his Buddhist connections at home and he snips the threads off before he fronts up at the Christian IDU in the West.
Dropping bombshell
Dr. Gunatilake draws on this cultural background and drops his bombshell. He states that the nephew of the Anglican Bishop “according to newspaper reports …had been baptized as a Christian (Anglican)….and from a sense of history the action of Wickremesinghe (inviting the Portuguese to celebrate their 500th anniversary of their arrival) was “understandable”.”(p.290). He adds: “And in fact, on more than one occasion Wickramasinghe has been labelled by his political opponents as the contemporary Don Juan Dharmapala.” The people instinctively grasped the meaning of this reference to Dharmapala without much explanatory exhortations.
Of course, Wickremesinghe never expected the backlash that exploded in his face. But one positive result of his penchant for saying the wrong thing at the wrong time was that the Portuguese period came into sharp focus overnight more than any other period of the past. Not since Paul E. Peiris focused on this period in the 1920s has there been such a passionate interest in the role played by the Portuguese in Sri Lankan history.
On their part, the Portuguese too were making preparations to celebrate the 500th anniversary of their “spiritual and temporal conquests” of the east with the blessings of the Pope. There were attempts made in India to celebrate similar anniversaries but the strong resistance from the Indian nationalists soon put an end to it. Finally, the Portuguese had their own celebrations of self-glorification in Europe.
The reaction in Sri Lanka was predictably hostile. This prompted over a hundred scholars from all communities to revisit the Portuguese period and go through it with a fine comb. This movement was led by the Royal Asiatic Society. They launched the “Portuguese Encounter Research Project” which was convened by Dr. Susantha Goonatilake. Some pored over documents, some visited the sites devastated by the Portuguese, some documented with photographs the devastation caused by the Portuguese, some visited Lisbon and Goa to collect relevant data and some collected oral evidence with the sole purpose of reexamining the role of the Portuguese in Sri Lanka. Dr. Gunatilake’s latest book, A 16th Century Clash of Civilizations, the Portuguese Presence in Sri Lanka” came out of this project.
(Part 2 >>)