Reflection on literary sociology and sociological literature ~ Malinda Words

Peradeniya is for poets and poetry, many among those who’ve passed through that university would claim. The sheer beauty of the place constitutes a muse, of this there cannot be any argument. Dawn descends in silver from Hantane and from certain high points evening can be seen to set fire to Alagalla. There are colors to cut the heart. Carpets made of flowers. Greens rolling from hue to hue. Roads bending to disappear into trees. Moonlight and the softest rain. And a river running through it all.

But places are also people and communities are differently peopled through faculties, halls of residence, activities, eras and generations. The wider world arrives as whisper or shout, but either way will leave a trace, surreptitiously or boldly dissolving or doing away with frames and replacing these with other structures. And things are no longer the same.

Process. Inevitable.

It is loved. It is hated. And love and hate exchange places in the same heart that loved and hated. Time offers distance and change makes for assessment of things that are and how and why they became what they are. True for Peradeniya. True for any other university anywhere in the world. True of many places. Many things. Many people and processes.

And whether or not you are a poet or a sociologist (or a student of any other discipline for that matter), you can, if you so wish, reflect. Casually or deeply. You can keep it to yourself, you can share.

Karunatissa Athukorala is given to sharing, one way or another. This retired professor, from whom generations of sociologists have learned, loves to relate anecdotes. He doesn’t say ‘alright, this is a sociological insight,’ but pickings there are.

Stories. That’s the word. Stories related in a particular way. We could ask, ‘is it “a way” made particular by training?’ We could flip it too. Does he write or speak his sociology, so to say, in the way he does because he is essentially a good narrator, we could ask. Chicken or egg, in other words.

Professor Ariyaratne Athugala spoke to this issue. It was at the launch of a book of short stories written by Athukorala titled ‘Mojuwa,’ aptly too, considering the eclectic nature of the material it contained.

The stories, if not the names of the characters, are absolutely believable, to the point that the effort almost seems like a matter of Athukorala selecting pieces from a journal maintained over many decades unknown to anyone else. If that’s the case, then we have to consider the proposition that all lives are but stories, some bleeding from one to the other, and some distinct. We have neat plots, a mix of pathos and humor, a laying bare of some salient element of the human condition and an unwrapping of inter-personal relationships that shed light on larger social processes including the play of structure and agency.

Athugala pointed out that it is typical for ‘prabandha’ (fiction) to be seen as something distinctly different from ‘nibandhanaya’ (treatise) and suggested that perhaps the veracity of this ‘thesis’ should be reexamined.

Athukorala’s work certainly cries out for it. It is not a collection of ‘essays’ and no review for any sociological journal would even bother to consider any of them. Then there could also be a literary critic who might say ‘this is not fiction, it’s biography and way too sociological to be considered “literature.”’

Where does sociology end and literature begin? At what point does sociology from literature flow? Is the Bible a theological text or a work of literature, this too one could ask.

At some level sociology is literature and literature sociology. Well, we need to interject the word ‘good’ somewhere for this to hold true.

So what if it is biographical? Isn’t all sociology an outcome of personal engagement, reflection on things observed? Isn’t it true that one cannot even paint a complete picture of a social, cultural, political and ecological landscape where every detail is not only captured but depicted in sizes true to significance and where the complexities are not diluted at all?

When did Karunatissa Athukorala become a fiction writer and having produced a collection of short stories does he cease to be a sociologist? Is the sociologist embedded in the writer or vice versa? How and where are lines drawn and indeed are there lines to draw?

Right now, on a dismal Tuesday morning in the city of Colombo, writing this, I cannot picture ‘Right Now Peradeniya.’ It must be beautiful though. And, as I write, there are stories unfolding, amenable to capture but perhaps never to be written down. Trivial and personal perhaps but nevertheless containing the DNA of a complex social process which, if extracted, could be extrapolated to tell, yes, a story of what’s what and what’s not of Peradeniya that is as accurate or as full or error as any sociological treatise.

Right now, a student in the Department of Sociology could be administering a questionnaire or trying to make sense of qualitative data gathered through interviews and observations or writing it all down in ‘sociological format.’

I hope it is ‘good,’ for that would inform and make for more sensible engagement. Like Karunatissa Athukorala’s work. Like Karunatissa Athukorala’s life. In and out of Peradeniya.