Gamini Haththotuwegama is no more. The man, known to some as GK, to others as
‘Gamini’, ‘Hatha’, ‘Haththa’ or simply as ‘Sir’, hailed as the Father of Street
Theatre in Sri Lanka,
will take his final curtain call this evening.
As befitting such a colossus, the Ministry of Cultural Affairs has come
forward to give him such honour as is his due, with deference of course to the
wishes of the family. In a meeting to
discuss funeral arrangements, a Ministry official said that the route that the
funeral procession will take from the ‘Kala Bhavana’ to the ‘Kanatte’ will be
lined with white flags. Rajith, the son,
remarked with the wit, smile and acute consciousness of things human so
reminiscent of his father, ‘eya aasa
rathu paatata (he preferred red)!’
Like the father, again, Rajith and his sister Chamindu displayed a
healthy disregard for ceremony and like their father once again showed a
deference to the will of an innocent public want (in this instance the need to
demonstrate grief). They did not
protest.
Red. Yes, that was his colour and ‘redness’ was the theme
song that meandered as an unmistakable thread tying together all the things
this remarkable man took on. He is
called the Father of Street Theatre and rightfully too, but theatre was but one
of the many mediums he used to articulate his insightful reading of the social,
political and cultural. He was
dramatist, actor, critic and human being. And he was a teacher through and
through.
He will be remembered fondly. Remembrance and grief are largely personal
things and one should leave it to the individuals whose lives were touched by
the man to remember and lament as per their personal preference. He was a deeply
sensitive man but not one given to tearing in public except on extremely rare
occasions. That’s a cue I suppose for
all of us.
Who was Gamini Haththotuwegama though? What was the ‘red’ in his life and work? As I browsed the web for a picture of the
man, I came across a lengthy comment by Ajith Samaranayake, perhaps the only
other person who was as articulate as Haththa (that’s how my contemporaries at
Peradeniya referred to him) in both English and Sinhala on the vast range of
subjects that come under ‘literature and arts’.
Ajith, alas, predeceased Haththa by a few years (and what a loss!).
Ajith was referring to a lecture delivered by Haththa titled
‘Unreasonable postulates and treasonable practices correlative to
English’. It was, as Ajith points out, a
rather portentous title and come to think of it, quite un-Haththa like. What caught my eyes was a quote. Haththa had approvingly read out something
that Ernest Macintyre had written:
"…when
one grows into another culture through the intensive root-cutting education in
English, the creative urge to truthfully turn it back on the soil you were
pulled away from, the sentient world of the indigenous culture, is a
magnificent compensation, the quality of which is not sometimes available even
to those with unmoved roots, in a world of much movement."
It was natural that Haththa saluted this observation because
Macintyre could very well have been talking about him for he, more than anyone
else, embodied the creature described; he cut back through the layers of
mis-education, sought his native soil and danced on it with all the grace and
confidence that the process ingrained in him, in terms of ideological
prerogative, nuance to cultural difference and the ability to pick and choose
his waters from the many wells he had encountered and make thereafter a heady
cocktail that could jolt his audience with audacity, tasteful humour and
creative genius.
Haththa knew his English.
He was acutely aware of its power, its coercive and violent potential
and its other ‘kaduwa’ quality of
marking distinction, leaving out and cultural political manipulation. He used it against itself, so to speak,
disrupting thereby the entire hegemonic discourse. I remember him telling me in the terrible
days following the UNP-JVP bheeshanaya
that the JVP could have told the people that English is a necessary part of the
revolution. His point was that English,
one of the many weapons at the disposal of the enemy, should be picked up and
turned against the oppressor. The beauty
of his disposition was that when he used the kaduwa he dealt with ‘kaduwaness’
with both unforgiving and subtle strokes, equally effective as per
occasion.
He was respected, yes; tolerated even, but Gamini
Haththotuwegama was never embraced by English Departments in our
universities. Why not? The answer can be
obtained in the following observation: "What's the point of
giving English at university levels, feeding the students with the highest
academic equipment available - the most radical, nay revolutionary cultural
theory, by presumably some of the best literary-linguistic brains in the
business, yes feeding students whose acquaintance with our culture begins and
ends presumably with 'Thannane naa -
thana-naa' sung by Ba and Sa (and a herd of tune-repeating umbaas) who have been successful as no
others have in setting a price to our folk rhythms, as a street drama actor put
it so succinctly?"
There
is then a marked distaste for doing ‘The Macintyre Number’ among those who study,
teach, write, do business, brag and in other ways and for a variety of reasons
think that their ‘fluency’ in the language gives them automatic membership in
that dubious club called ‘The Elite’. As
such these creatures are clearly part of the problem and are sadly compromised
in the neo-colonialist project even as they speak on behalf of and champion the
subaltern (how presumptuous!) and rile against hegemonic discourse.
The
fact of the matter is that Haththa, even as he called them out for intellectual
sloth and ideological confusion was far better at what they believed they were
good at: teaching and writing. A few
weeks ago someone told me that no one at Peradeniya writes as well as Gamini
Haththotuwegama. I don’t know because
not many at Peradeniya actually write, but it would be hard to find someone of
whose writing it could be said ‘Streets ahead of GK’.
This
is true not only of academic writing and also creative work. Haththa was not given to spending too much
time on producing academic treatise, but when he did, it was always cogent,
illuminating and wonderful to read. His
essay on Lakdasa Wikkramasinha is a case in point. And outside the lecture
theatre, as a creative artist, he was peerless.
No one at Peradeniya can claim to have done as much to the development
and understanding of theatre, except perhaps Ashley Halpe, probably the only
person in that Department who respected and
admired Haththa and moreover was able to have a mutually beneficial
conversation on a wide range of topic related to literature and arts.
Ajith puts it best when he remarks on that lecture thus: It is also a lecture which
only GK could have delivered because if there has ever been a teacher of
English who has effortlessly related himself to the wider Sinhala
socio-cultural milieu without pandering to populist whims or compromising his
intellectual integrity it has been Gamini K. Haththotuwegama.
His ‘redness’ was of course not limited to a battle with ‘kaduwaness’, he touched all aspects of
social injustice in his work, stood with and for the oppressed, and taught them
not to hate but to effectively challenge the structures that kept them down. He
gave us all a sense of dignity and thereby empowered us in the most important
element in that oft-caricatured thing called ‘agitation’.
Every man’s life is an epic.
Haththa will be remembered for that endearing line that has become a
veritable tag-line to the street theatre scene in the country: yadam bindala gejji maala thanaganin
(break your chains and make anklets and necklaces out of them). It is imperative that his students (and their
numbers are legion) understand that the chains referred to are multifaceted and
not limited to class-related politics (as per the quote in the Communist
Manifesto, ‘the
proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains; they have a world to win’). He was larger than that. And this is why Gamini Haththotuwegama will
live long and we will hear and be empowered by the drama that was his life long
after his ashes go cold. Some curtains
refuse to fall, or do so slowly and only after the drama is really, really,
done. It is not yet. Gamini Haththotuwegama plays on and we hear his voice; and
his words reverberate with wit, insight and a rare kind of love.
This was first published on November 1, 2009 in the 'Sunday Island'.
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