One of the most fascinating lectures I’ve attended is the one delivered by Gananath Obeysekere at the Royal Asiatic Society of Sri Lanka on the Vädda, more than twenty years ago. It was based on research conducted in the Bibile region with H G Dayasisira in 199-2001. Further research had been conducted between 2007 and 2009. The project apparently was one that ‘envisaged a critique and a follow-up of ‘The Veddas,’ the classic study by C G and Brenda Z Seligmann who believed they were dealing with one of the world’s most ‘primitive’ hunting and gathering groups. The outcome of the exercise was Gananath’s 2002 book ‘The Creation of the Hunter.’
The title has the following rider: ‘The Vädda presence in the Kandyan Kingdom: A re-examination.’ The keyword is ‘re-examination.’ Obeysekere revisits the wild man thesis offered by the Seligmanns and of course his own research a decade or so before. Indeed, Obeysekere’s academic life is essentially filled with revisitations of one kind or another.
Liyanage Amarakeerthi, in a speech delivered in August 2023 on the occasion of an event where Obeysekere handed over his personal library, the Obeysekere Collection, to the University of Peradeniya, details instances where Obeysekere has challenged received knowledge. For example, he cites Obeysekere’s engagement with Edmund Leach in ‘Medusa’s Hair,’ with Marshall Sahlins in ‘The apotheosis of Captain Cook,’ with Western rationalism in ‘Awakened Ones: Phenomenology of Visionary Experience,’ and with what Amarakeerthi sees as ‘nationalist forces that brought the county down, [by] promoting extreme chauvinism and xenophobia,’ in ‘The many faces of the Kandyan Kingdom.’ One could add to this, ‘Buddhism Transformed: Religious Change in Sri Lanka,’ which Gananath co-authored by Richard Gombrich.
These revisitations certainly generated debate and fuelled much academic forays into the fields that Obeysekere explored. Revisitation of re-examination as Obeysekere puts it is obviously a key element in the social sciences in general and in history and anthropology (and related fields) in particular. Theses are generated by the examination of and reflection on information available or unearthed. Further discoveries compel scholars to revisit theories and make necessary adjustments or even abandon them altogether.
Obeysekere acknowledges the import of reconsideration, even of his own work. In an interview with Jayadeva Uyangoda aired on YouTube in 2016 titled ‘The foolishness of Gananath Obeysekere,’ when he was already close to 90 years of age, the anthropologist admits that he ‘made errors of fact and errors of interpretation.’ He quotes Friedrich Nietzsche: ‘One must be very humane to say I don’t know that.’ He asks (and answers), ‘How many of us are capable of pleading ignorance? I am. That’s why I praise foolishness.’
He eloquently summarises the dilemmas of the social sciences. ‘Human sciences are vulnerable. The human sciences have an adolescent character. That is, he (Nietzsche) calls it the fate of our times. With these kinds of work there’s a kind of incompleteness. We can’t produce a finished product. All of anthropology is like that.’
He adds, ‘ours, as against the kind of natural sciences, are argumentative disciplines. And as argumentative disciplines they are also vulnerable. You can’t produce some kind of inter-subjective consensus that everyone will agree to. We may claim to be objective. You have to balance yourself, produce your empirical investigations which require evidential support. We are creatures who are basically argumentative. There is truth-value, otherwise we won’t be writing, but truth, as I always say, should be in inverted commas.’
This is why Obeysekere probably revisited his work and that of others. He was relentless. Truth, as received, comes in inverted commas. Unfortunately, there are certain truths which those who champion Obeysekere choose to write without the qualifier, as Obeysekere himself has done on occasion. That’s a disservice to Obeysekere, obviously, and one likes to think that Obeysekere, if such errors of commission and omission, i.e. of both fact and interpretation, were pointed out, would have engaged with such theses in the spirit of the foolishness that he praises.
It is important to examine the truths (without inverted commas) that seem to have pervaded Obeysekere’s work, especially on two important scholarly interventions, his explorations of the Vädda and related and preceding narratives, and his essay on Dutugemunu’s conscience, the latter ‘truth’ being reiterated by like-minded scholars in the social sciences and humanities, again without inverted commas.
‘Duṭṭhagāmani and the Buddhist Conscience’ was an essay derived from a lecture by the same title delivered by Obeysekere at the 13th conference on South Asian Studies at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, USA in November 1984. It was included in a collection titled ‘Religion and political conflict in South Asia,’ edited by Douglas Allen in 2004. The text was translated into Sinhala in the early 1990s by Sunil Gunasekera and published by the Social Scientists’ Association in the magazine ‘Yathra’ and later in the website www.kathika.wordpress.com by the ‘Kathika Sanvada Mandapaya.’
The truth (or otherwise) presented by Obeysekere in his essay was comprehensively reviewed by Ishankha Malsiri in ‘Dutugemunuge Harda Saakshiyata Pilithurak (A response to Dutugemunu’s Conscience),’ in 2016. Malsiri examines Obeysekere’s sources and in some instances points out errors of omission and commission, especially with regard to the ‘true’ location of Elara’s grave and the purported mischief indulged in by archaeologists, as representative of the state, implying of course some ideological bent and outcome preferences subscribed to by some at the time. He points out the contradictions, inconsistencies, ambiguities and witting or unwitting obfuscations in the text and concludes that the thesis is untenable.
Interestingly, Malsiri includes in his book, as addendum, the Sinhala version of Obeysekere’s talk/essay. Obeysekere’s angst is evident therein, as it is in his work on the Väddas, the contemporary expression of Buddhist practices and the intrigue associated with the Kandyan Kingdom. He correctly and importantly points to the danger of a single narrative and the tendency of such positions to concretise or, as he would put it, remove the inverted commas of ‘truth,’ and thereby argues for a more nuanced, tolerant and humane reading of history, in particular the caricatured versions as touted by the politically inclined, including certain scholars. Nevertheless, Obeysekere cannot seem to divest himself of his own reading of the antecedents of the crises or turbulences he was born into and lived through, especially after political independence was obtained from the British. It is a malady that seems to have infected his ideological fellow-travellers who, interestingly and in contradistinction to Obeysekere’s conscious embracing of foolishness, appear not to have the wider-gaze, if you will, of the anthropologist.
Whereas Obeysekere uses Dutugemunu’s ‘avowed’ discovery of a conscience towards the end of his, Dutugemunu’s, life in order to champion multiple and even contradictory narratives, his, Obeysekere’s, acolytes remain uncritical and ‘un-foolish’ even as they rant and rave against the alleged foolishness (not in the vein that Obeysekere uses the word of course) and even mischievous ways of those who are ideologically and politically opposed to their point of view.
Amarakeerthi, for example, while claiming, probably correctly in the main, that ‘Obeysekere was turned into a national villain in [the] extremely one-dimensional nationalist/racist press,’ and that Peradeniya university produce[d] scholars who argue that Dutugemunu, by extension Sinhala people, has no sense of guilt in their conscience,’ inexplicably jumps to the following conclusion: ‘No wonder that Sri Lanka has descended into the political, ethical, cultural abyss that it is in right now.’ He opines that ‘nationalist forces’ are promoting extreme chauvinism and xenophobia, a claim that can be defended in the case of certain nationalists but not all, but his assertion that it was nationalist forces ‘that brought the country down,’ is a frivolous, mischievous, unsubstantiated and reductionist claim. Obeysekera, for all his problemetisation of identity and pluralisation postulates, does descend to the kind of monolithisation, if you will, that such claims are predicated upon. We shall return to this presently.
Malsiri proposes that Obeysekere’s objective is to denigrate contemporary Buddhist society which, admittedly, Obeysekere often treats as a monolithic entity and frivolously implies is lacking in conscience. In this, as Malsiri points out, Obeysekere is not alone. Malsiri offers a list of academics whose work is premised similarly, i.e. the Sinhala-Buddhist is the villain of the piece not only for what is erroneously or at least incompletely described as ‘the ethnic conflict’ but all major ills that has plagued the island nation for many, many decades. They include Bardwell Smith, Sachi Ponnambalam, S J Thambiah, George Bond, Jeyaratnam Wilson, Stephen Kemperer, David Littleton and H L Seneviratne.
The ontological error is most evident in Obeysekere’s work on the Väddas. The text reads as an illuminating narrative on who was who and when of peoples in the island, pertaining to the Väddas and the Sinhalas and the overarching factor of Buddhism, Buddhist (society) and related othernesses. He not only rubbishes the notion of the Vädda as a wild character as described by the Seligmanns and others, but problematises identity and relatedness of both the Väddas and the Sinhalas in the areas he focused his research on. Obeysekere forces the reader to consider the likelihood that the Vädda-trace, if you will, even if ever they lived in isolation, was not and, as importantly, is not absent in ‘Sinhala’ DNA. Nevertheless, and surprisingly, he is flippant when it comes to the origin of the Sinhalas and, inter alia, the Tamils, in this island.
Obeysekere, referring to legend of Vijaya as chronicled in the Mahavamsa, notes that this adventurer from across what came to be known as the Palk Straits developed a union with Kuveni, the Yakka princess who helped him vanquish her kinfolk, and then ‘abandoned her for what was considered legitimate union with a princess from Madurai in the Tamil country.’ Then he slips in the following: ‘As for the Sinhalas they are a product of the union between Vijaya and his followers and the women of the Tamil country which of course means, according to the Mahawamsa, that the Sinhalese are a genetic intermixture between a possibly north or eastern Indian (sic) group of men who landed in Sri Lanka and Tamil women from Madurai.’
An entire race, the Sinhalese, then, grew out of a union between Vijaya and this princess from Madurai, and that of Panduvasdeva, Vijaya’s nephew, whose father, Sumitta had married a Tamil princess from Madda, which Obeysekere offers is possibly ‘Madras in today’s nomenclature.’ He concludes without substantiation that ‘ordinary Sinhalas were directly descended from the marriage of Vijaya’s followers with Tamil women.’
Obeysekere proposes that the Mahavamsa is a frank recognition of Sinhala hybridity that was the empirical reality at the time the Mahavamsa was first composed, i.e. in the 5th Century of the Common Era, that is almost a millennium after the purported arrival of Prince Vijaya. By this time, note, there had been several invasions by various groups from the southern part of what came to be known as India who ruled parts of the island for a total of a little over 100 years. Hybridity of one kind or another is a plausible conclusion. Indeed, Obeysekere is probably correct about hybridity in the early centuries following Vijaya’s arrival, but what is important here are the dimensions of that hybridity and even more so the composition.
Just as the Mahavamsa chronicler, Reverand Mahanama, may have projected into the past some of the empirical realities of the day, so too may have Obeysekera, especially given his antipathies to Sinhala Buddhist nationalism and some of its advocates who floated and still float the idea of a pure race ‘unadulterated’ by Tamils, Väddas or others including non-Tamil speaking Dravidians from across the Palk Straits. Obeysekera perhaps inadvertently acknowledges that the dominant entity in all hybridisation happens to be the Sinhalas or at least it is the Sinhala identity that triumphed in the respective encounters, indicating the probability that those with other and even contending identities were either small in number or weak politically. Indeed, Raja Raja 1, the Chola Emperor who ruled from 985 to 1014 CE, when listing the lands he plundered in inscriptions at temples built with the loot refers to this island as ‘The land of the warlike Sinhalas.’ This indicates the erroneous nature of the flippant use of terms such as hybridity. It is, to use a more contemporary example, akin to descriptions of the Sri Lankan polity as being ‘multi-ethnic’ and/or ‘multi-religious’ without mentioning numbers and percentages. It also brings to mind the tendentious use of terms from 1983 (or even before) to the present such as ‘North-South’ indicating a 50-50 division of territory, and that of ‘border villages’ which is a tacit positing of some boundary established historically or legally.
There are other problems associated with Obeysekere’s thesis regarding the evolution of the Sinhalas. There’s nothing to say that the princess brought down from ‘Madda’ or Madurai was ethnically a Tamil. Neither is there any reference to Sumitta having married a Tamil princess from Madda. More seriously, those who draw heavily from Obeysekere’s truths (without inverted commas) frequently rubbish the Mahavamsa and yet do not object to Obeysekere using the very same Mahavamsa to support an arguably problematic narrative of how the Sinhalas came to be.
Obeysekere’s conjectures maybe questionable, but this does not necessarily mean that there were no Tamils involved in the genetic evolution of the Sinhalas. What, we need to ask, are the references to ‘Tamil’ either in archaeological artefact or historical tract?
First let us consider the inscriptional evidence. Senarath Paranavitana, in his ‘Inscriptions of Ceylon, Volume 1’ covering cave inscriptions from the 3rd Century BCE to the 1st Century CE, claims that the word ‘Dameda’ found in four inscriptions is the prototype of ‘Damela’ or ‘Demala.’ However, Ven Ellawala Medananda disputes this claim. His contention is that it is derived from ‘Drameda’ which is one of 25 Brahmin sects, 24 of which were found in the island. The word is used to refer to traders as well, Ven Medananda points out in an article titled ‘Girilen pidu janavargaya kavareda? (What ethnic groups gifted caves?),’ published in the ‘Divaina’ in March2002.
Let us assume that Paranavitana was correct. The question is, ‘why the qualifier, “Dameda”?’ Consider an inscription found in the southern part of present day India where there is reference to someone from this island, ‘Eela Kutumbika’ or ‘the householder from Eela (or Lanka).’ The ‘ethnic’ qualifier is required simply on account of the fact of the particular individual being from somewhere else. Similarly, if indeed, the word referred to Tamils, the insertion indicates ‘foreign’ at some level. Hence, we get references such as Dameda Samana (shramana or monk), Dameda Vanija (trader) and Dameda Grahapathi (householder). We don’t get such references in the southern part of the Indian peninsula and neither is there any equivalent to ‘Eela Kutubika’ in the island. Damila, note, has been used as a word equivalent to ‘foreign(er)’ even in the Rajavaliya, where even the Portuguese were referred to by that term, a reference to non-Sinhala or simply ‘not from here.’ as pointed out by D Obeysekera in ‘The History of Ceylon.’
How about the characters in inscriptions? There are Brahmi inscriptions which contain the random Tamil Brahmi character, but even these are rare, just one or two dating back to the 2-1 BCE. It’s a weak claim and one that is disputed. The indisputably Tamil Brahmi characters appear only inscriptions dated to the 8th Century CE. It must be mentioned that in the northern part of the island, most inscriptions are in Sinhala Prakrit and go back as far as the 2nd Century BCE.
There are references outside the inscriptions of course. Rev Mahanama, in the Mahavamsa, uses the word ‘Damilo’ in reference to Elara: ‘Elaro namo damilo’ or ‘the Damila (Tamil) named Elara.’ It must be mentioned that Rev Mahanama does not inscribe any negative traits upon this particular Tamil, Elara. According to the Mahavamsa, there had been no less than 32 fiefdoms north of the river Mahaweli, with Elara heading just one of them. Some of the rulers had Sinhala names but are referred to as Damilas, further supporting the idea that the word was used not to refer to a particular ethnic group but ‘enemy’ or ‘foreigner.’ Dutugemunu either defeated in battle or subdued in other ways 31 of them before taking on Elara. The process took 15 years. While this does not deny the existence of a Tamil community, it shows that the use of the name is more complex that implied in the Sinhala and even anti-Sinhala nationalist discourses.
In any event, what Dutugemunu did, then, is to erase regional political entities and replace them with centralised rule. This is evident in the exchange with one of the ten generals, referred to as the ‘dasa maha yodayo (literally, ‘ten great giants),’ Theraputtabaya. When offered a position, Theraputtabaya says that he has a war to fight, to which Dutugemunu replies ‘what war now that we are under a single flag (or a single king), the term used being ‘ekachchattan karento.’ Theraputtabaya then responds that his war is that of defeating the kleshas, the emotional obscurations such as ignorance, hatred and desire.
The political intricacies of the time have since been ignored or completely erased to leave us with grand Sinhala-Tamil antipathies in the nationalist discourse which Obeysekere understandably laments. Sinhala nationalism drew from this easy portrayal and, it can be argued, contributed fuel to inter-ethnic mistrust and worse. What is pertinent here, however, is the worth of the Tamil-factor or trace in the peopling of or more correctly the peoples of the island. The 50-50, so to speak, that Obeysekere proposes (inadvertently and not mischievously we should believe) by referring to the Vijaya legend and his unwarranted insertion of a Tamil strain is not supported by either transcription or historical tracts he draws from, selectively and uncritically. Evidential support is woefully lacking.
To understand the propensity for error, in fact and interpretation, such as those Obeysekere was prone to, perhaps we should revisit the monolithisation referred to above. In what was common parlance in the 1990s and the early years of this millennium, we saw the liberal use of terms such as the ‘Sinhala Buddhist State’ or simply ‘the Sinhala state,’ and ‘Buddhist Society.’ Obeysekere’s work, paradoxically, questions such sweeping categories but seems to have relaxed analytical rigour when it came to the configurations of contemporary polities, which he acknowledges preoccupied him. Amarakeerthi alludes to Obeysekera’s focus on complexity in the speech referred to above, when he touches on the knowledge-power axis.
‘Obeysekere’s work shows a much more complex picture of that “knowledge/power” axis,’ he says. Amarakeerthi is referring to the work of Edward Said’s ‘Orientalism’ where ‘representations of other people, Asian, African, American, and so on, in colonial discourses is mediated by power, and that power to represent overlaps with power to govern, power to punish, and power to murder.’ Once a discourse is constructed around a subject and a knowledge is produced within that discourse, many people contribute to sustaining it and giving it a life of its own, as “The Doomed King” amply demonstrates.’
This, clearly, is most apparent in discourses that are unarguably dominant. However, it is not a malady that contesting narratives or discourses that contest the dominant ‘truth’ are immune to. The reiteration of tendentious claims clothed as truth or fact is not the preserve of the powerful. Selective and uncritical use of sources, sweeping generalisations, surreptitious insertion of terminology that is at best problematic and at worst untenable are readily available tools that tend to come into play when certain narratives are privileged on account of, for example, outcome preferences, or if prompted by a desire to deconstruct non-existent monoliths or ‘constructed monoliths.’
For example, Sunila Abeysekera at a penal discussion during the Galle Literary Festival about 15 years ago lamented that ‘some people conflate the LTTE (Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam) with ‘Tamils.’ It was pointed out in the Question and Answer session that followed that ‘when some people say “the LTTE is the sole representatives of the Tamil people,” then we need to ask “who is doing the conflating here?’ Both conflations are not only problematic but are in fact pernicious, dangerous and anti-intellectual. That’s the natural and frequent product of monolithisation.
So, if exclusivist historiography is problematic, so too is Monolithisation of whatever kind, whether proposed by majority or minority, the hegemonic (or perceived to be hegemonic) or those contesting dominant (or perceived to be dominant) narratives. Obeysekere’s work is fuelled by a need to contest what is perceived to be an exclusivity shared by nationalists in toto, never mind that neither Sinhala Buddhist Nationalism nor Sinhala Nationalism nor Buddhist Society is monolithic. Regardless of the political and ideological need that framed his research focus, Obeysekere did succeed in challenging exclusivist historiography. What he makes of it is not without problems though. The extrapolations, for example, are tendentious. As always, it’s the value attached to factors that can skew a reading. That which has been excluded needs to be included, yes, but what is included should be inserted in proportions that make sense given existing information. Again, evidential support is key.
Amarakeerthi offers an interesting and valuable insight into Obeysekere’s approach and style. He says ‘His psychoanalytic approaches and extremely agile and fluid readings of classical historical narratives and historical characters have rendered them much richer than they had been represented in some colonial, nationalist, or postcolonial readings.’ Referring to Obeysekere’s ‘The Work of Culture,’ Amarakeerthi opines that it is a rich summary of the author’s previous work ‘and a demonstration of how a great thinker can work with already familiar materials and yet come up with new insights with surprise, delight and wisdom.’
There is certainly surprise and that can be good and bad. Delight of course on account of offering new and more compelling interpretation, at best, in a purely academic sense, but also because of affirming some dearly held version or buttressing prejudice. As for wisdom, Obeysekere might find it an odd word, especially given that for him it was honest engagement that hopefully yielded something that could inform involvement in more meaningful and productive ways with the objective of producing more wholesome outcomes.
Agility and fluidity, however, are certainly useful skills for an anthropologist or historian to have, especially if such scholars work on the premise that what is seen may not tell the whole story or indeed that it might very well obscure or twist what really happened. In such exercises, an obvious handicap is the burden, if such exist, of ideological and outcome preferences and of course treating one’s own and not necessarily true understanding of contemporary (or even previous) social formations as fact and not as, at best, hypothesis.
Obeysekere was clearly not impressed by neat, uncomplicated stories which unfolded neatly and produced neat outcomes. Life is not that clinical and neither is history, historical persona, event, metaphor or narrative. Such appreciation of complexity befuddles political activists (academics, NGO workers, journalists included). It is so much easier to have things in black and white and to wallow in untenable dichotomies. One could argue that such caricaturing not only makes for poor political decision-making but subverts sober, humane and truly transformational engagement.
In an article titled ‘Towards liberating ourselves from the complicities of stereotyping,’ published in the Daily Mirror in 2018, I offered the following ‘notes’ (more measured than the flourish implied in ‘agility and fluidity’) on the propensity of the allegedly subaltern or groups perceived to be or perceive themselves as being subjugated and their champions to indulge in caricature, might illustrate elements of this malady (note, again: caricature is not the preserve of the dominant).
‘If you talk about ‘Sinhala Only’ (as you should) and not talk about G.G. Ponnambalam’s ’50-50’ or Chelvanayakam’s ‘a little now, more later,’ or the ‘Tamil State Party’ or Ponnambalam Ramanathan’s Tamil chauvinism that detracted from his struggle with the Sinhalese and others against the British, if you talk about Anagarika Dharmapala and are silent about Arumugam Navalar, all of which preceded ‘Sinhala Only,’ then you are being mischievous at best.
‘If you talk of multi-ethnic and multi-religious (as you should) but don’t talk numbers and percentages, you are being mischievous, at best.
‘If you talk about all the failed agreements between Sinhala and Tamil politicians (as you should) but don’t talk about the implementation of important articles despite these ‘failures’ then you are being mischievous, at best.
‘If you talk about ‘Sinhala Only’ (as you should) and ignore the ‘English Only’ that preceded it for more than a century, if you talk about alleged ‘Buddhist hegemony’ and ignore the ‘Christian hegemony’ that had existed for 450 years and which included the destroying of temples and Kovils, murdering of bikkhus and the burning of manuscripts, you are being mischievous, at best.
‘If you talk about secularism (as you should) and leave out the fact that there are more holidays for Muslims than for Buddhists and that the number of Christian holidays are four times more than that for the latter and that the Hindus have just 3, then you are being mischievous, at best.
‘If you talk about a Sri Lankan identity (as you should) but balk at the idea ‘one country, one law’ you are being mischievous, at best.
‘If you talk about the contribution of all communities to the achieving of independence (as you should) and forget that in terms of percentages (since percentage-free numbers can be misleading) it was the Sinhala-Buddhists who sacrificed most by way of lives lost and properties destroyed, you are being mischievous, at best.
‘If you talk about the heroism of Muslim members of the security forces (as you should) in the defeat of the LTTE and ignore the fact that the freedoms enjoyed in a terrorism-free land were obtained at the cost of much higher percentages of the majority community giving their lives and limbs, you are being mischievous, at best.’
Amarakeerthi seems to be convinced that Obeysekere was not handicapped in this manner: ‘He has been an inspiration in speaking truth to power, in keeping a critical distance from all centres of power, and in feeling at home in the loneliness that often comes to you when you keep that distance.’
Power, however, is a problematic term here. There are of course structures of power and there’s resistance too, narrative and counter-narrative, version and contestation. Being at odds with perceived hegemonies of whatever kind, however, does not automatically confer greater truth-value to the contestant nor grant relatively higher moral high ground, whether the protagonist is a raw political animal or a scholar.
Obeysekere was certainly aloof vis-a-vis ‘power,’ more so than many who seem to be euphoric about his ‘findings’ and may indeed have been amused by and not necessarily approving of the encomiums. His agility and fluidity produced fascinating literatures, forced revisitations of many fields, events and personalities which in and of itself is not necessarily bad. He was probably right on many counts but dead wrong in others, as he himself admits. There were few bold enough to take issue with him and those who did were hampered by their own ideological and political trappings. Malsiri was an exception, but his work was published when Obeysekere was well over 80 years of age. It is incumbent, then, on the Obeysekerists to engage with him.
Obeysekere acknowledges the adolescent nature of the human sciences and is ready to say ‘I didn’t know’ and by extension, ‘I was wrong.’ It is unfair to castigate Obeysekere for being humble enough to acknowledge error and thereby admitting error and an adolescent engagement at times and to strut as adult at other times. Given the nature of his lifelong engagement with the world and indeed worlds around him, it is perhaps not unfair to presume that if he had the time and energy to engage with readings that are at odds with his own such as Malsiri’s critique, he would have, in the very least, offered elaborations to support his theses or admit error or place himself somewhere between these two extremes. He would do so with a smile that only a student deeply conscious of the complexities of the human condition and the adolescent nature of the human sciences can sport, at least according to those who worked closely with this unarguably tireless, relentless and engaging scholar who was as rigorous as he believed he could be.
Obeysekere, as Amarakeerthi contends, was agile and fluid. He delighted as much or more as he may have dismayed. He was meticulous in the gathering of information and there was flourish in his reading of the same. What he produced was not ‘neat’ in the sense referred to above, but it was certainly pretty. If indeed his narratives or interpretations seemed like finely crafted embroideries, one must not forget that embroidery rests on and is enhanced by spaces or gaps. Sometimes such gaps are deliberate and at times accidental. They are not ideology-free. They have that inescapable adolescence Obeysekere alludes to which is often inevitable when primary sources are ignored or just glossed over. Of Obeysekera it could be said that he was conscious of complicities and in his work there is a conscious effort to liberate himself from such as there may be.
Obeysekere was prolific. As prolific as he was it is unfair to expect him to have answered all unanswered questions regarding history. He shed light on the Väddas but at best only dabbled when it came to the Sinhalas and Tamils in terms of how they came about and how they transformed over time. There was truth-value but truth was always within inverted commas. He didn’t remove them and others should not either. He left gates open and those who wish to take the long and often arduous road into the matter of seeking information and interpreting the same do not have to pay a toll.
After delivering the Ludowyk Memorial Lecture of 2000 at the University of Peradeniya (“Voices from the Past: An Extended Footnote to Ludowyk’s ‘The Story of Ceylon’”), Obeysekere paused and offered, not academically but certainly with poetic license, that he felt the spectre of Ludowyk in the hallway outside the conference room.
Gananath Obeysekere passed away a few months ago. His spectre is likely to remain and inform the fields he made his tracks upon. Such fields are more fertile thanks to him, even when he erred, even when he was foolish. Had he not, we would have been that much poorer. That said, his legacy would certainly be enriched if there is greater acknowledgment of ‘foolishness.’ His humility, more than agility and fluidity, more than maintaining the critical distance from centres of power or being snug in resultant solitude, is perhaps the most endearing quality about the anthropologist. May it endure.
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