Looking back at Regi and his times

By Amal Siriwardena

(December 16, Colombo, Sri Lanka Guardian) What follows is a personal account, so naturally it is not free of my own interests, views, perspectives and biases. But regarding all facts and conversations I guarantee the accuracy of everything said here. Though a personal account it is also in some ways the account of a bystander. I have never actually been an active member of any of Reggie’s circles; not the left politics, nor the journalistic, nor the literary, nor the civil society/NGO. At the same time I have taken some degree of interest in all of them. This, I hope, has enabled me to see things with a certain detachment.

For this article I have largely confined myself to the period of my childhood and adolescence

One of my earliest memories is that of Regi discussing politics at the dinner table at our house in Pamankade with my maternal uncle. I must have been about five so I understood nothing. But a snitch of the conversation has stuck in my mind, "still I think this time the MEP will win because….". So it must have been shortly before the 1956 election. Later I learnt that he had won bets at Lake House on the result of the election.

In 1957, my mother and I accompanied Regi on a trip to Poland. A Polish journalist, Yashunsky previously visited Sri Lanka. We spent about 3 weeks in Poland and about another 3 weeks in Rome, Paris and London. I had my first lesson on racism en route. We were stuck in Dhahran for 3 days with engine trouble. The airline put the whites into a posh American hotel and shoved us blacks into a lousy one.

The day before we left Rome for Paris, he told us, ‘Tomorrow’s flight will be a very interesting one because we will fly over the Alps’ .And so it was. This was the era before the jet plane and the old propeller planes did not fly so high. We must have been only a few thousand feet over the mountain peaks. It was truly very beautiful, the second most beautiful sight I have seen in my life, I think (the first I will come to later). When we were preparing to leave Paris for London, I asked him ‘What will we see on today’s flight?’, hoping that there would be another treat. Regi was packing at the time, but he did not say, ‘don’t disturb me can’t you see I am busy’ as most parents would. Instead he stopped packing, thought for a moment, and said in the very matter-of-fact way which he was sometimes capable of, ‘we will see the English Channel and we will see parts of England and France’. While we were in London an event occurred that heralded an important part of our interests for the next few years. While we were in an underground station Regi picked up a newspaper which broke the news that the Soviet Union had launched the first Earth Satellite, Sputnik I.

Poland was a great experience. There was a fresh wind blowing through Eastern Europe at the time. The previous year, Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev had delivered his speech to the Communist party central committee, denouncing Joseph Stalin the brutal dictator who had ruled the Soviet Union with an iron fist till 1953. Also riots in Poland and the Hungarian uprising the same year had also forced the system to loosen up. Of course, like the Khrushchev reforms themselves, it was liberalization within limits. But in private with Regi some people had spoken fairly openly. Most of the people in the journalistic fraternity he met were liberal minded, but they were not right wing. Yashunsky had harshly criticized the authorities for not giving Regi access to Western newspapers. We had an interpreter-guide Joanna who accompanied us practically everywhere. A charming young lady, but of course a member of the communist party. She too had been for change, but at the same time had been always justifying the past.

Twelve years after the end of the second world war, the scars of armageddon were everywhere, both physically and psychologically. Warsaw had been razed to the ground. Rhoda Miller de Silva, who saw Warsaw in 1946 has given a haunting description; " … ruins and rubble as far as the eye can see…. .The ruins are saturated with the faintly sweet putrid odour of death –for somewhere in the fallen cellars beneath you lie at least 250,000 rotting corpses, former inhabitants of the city, still unburied". Having seen the Warsaw of 1957 this does not strain my credulity. The city was still being rebuilt, and ruins of bombed buildings stood in between newly built ones. The old city centre had been rebuilt as it was. Even as a child of six, I could sense the tremendous suffering and hardship the people had undergone. ‘When I was your age’ Joanna once told me ‘I stole four pounds of meat from the Germans’ cottage . It was the only way to live’. The rebuilding of Warsaw was presented as a great achievement and Regi seemed to accept it as such.

We were shown a propaganda film of the war and the Russian ‘liberation’.We were also taken to the ‘Palace of Culture and Science’ an ugly 36-story Soviet-style skyscraper in the heart of Warsaw, Stalin’s ‘gift to the Polish people’. Outwardly the feelings were one of gratitude to big brother. Perhaps the one occasion when real feelings surfaced, was when Poland defeated Russia in a football match. Poland was anyway a rather idiosyncratic communist country. Churches were a prominent presence, a sign of the uneasy cohabitation between the Catholic church and the communist party. Joe Stalin is supposed to have remarked that imposing communism on Poland was like saddling a cow.

When we visited Krakow in Southern Poland we had a personal experience that showed the impact of even a limited change. . As we were returning to our Hotel in Warsaw we had left our passports behind. Joanna would probably assumed we had taken them. When we got to the Hotel in Krakow there was a huge fuss about ‘people without papers’ although Joanna finally managed to sort it out. ‘We are lucky it is 1957’ Joanna had later confided to Regi. ‘a few years ago we would all have been behind bars’ .

As in the rest of the Eastern bloc the Soviets were enforcing the Stalinist model of economic development with its emphasis on heavy industry. Books were cheap but clothing frightfully expensive. A shirt cost an average man’s monthly salary and a pair of shoes two months. We were taken to the Nova Huta steel mill out side Krakow which had then recently been opened. Sometime after the collapse I saw a photograph of Nowa Huta in a Time or Newsweek magazine. It had ended, like most of socialist industry, a technologically obsolete highly polluting dinosaur. One thing that had favourably impressed Regi was that ordinary people were well informed compared with their counterparts in the west. It was perhaps not so surprising that Polish journalists were aware of the paddy lands act. But an ordinary worker whom we met on the tram to Nowa Huta had been aware of the political changes in 1956 and had asked a question about Mr. Bandaranaike.

After Mr. Bandaranaike’s assassination Regi attended the first press conference of the new Prime Minister Dr.W. Dahanayake. I can recall his saying ‘Daha was very weak’. None of Dr. Dahanayake’s subsequent behavior suggested he was at all weak however. He was prone to summarily firing his ministers by gazette notification!

Shortly before he left Lake House, in December 1959, Regi went on a journalistic assignment to Pakistan. He accompanied an international team of journalists who were covering an election. This was the original Pakistan, with its East and West wings, the country that should never have been. They traveled in the Presidential train in which President Ayub Khan was touring the country. The itinerary was extensive in West Pakistan including places like Peshawar. The train had its own post office with a special seal that was being prized by stamp collectors the world over. He had interviewed Ayub together with two English Journalists from the ‘Times’. Ayub turned out to be the typical ex-colonial officer, talking the same characteristic kind of lingo. The two Englishmen were however, highly impressed with him. Regi had been to the mountainous region of Swat, the only place in West Pakistan he liked. He spent a few days in East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) as well which he liked much better. Even then the discontent was very visible. He said, ‘I am sure East Pakistan will someday want re-union with India. They have much more in common with the Bengalis across the border than the Punjabis and the others in the West’. Well he was half-right.!

The election itself was a complete fraud. There were boxes of different colours for each candidate and voters had to put their ballot paper in the appropriate box. There had been a picture in one of the newspapers of a voter casting his ballot before the watchful eyes of the Chief of the Karachi police. Regi and another journalist had asked the newspaper for a copy of the picture (there were no photocopiers in those days). But the authorities had realized it would not reflect very well and refused to give one. The media had persistently referred to India as ‘Bharat’. There had been a comic headline in a newspaper about President Eisenhower meeting a delegation of ‘Red Bharatis’!

Controversy has since raged as to what should have happened when Dudley Senanayake’s minority government of March 1960 was defeated in the throne speech. Was the Governor-General right in accepting Dudley’s request for dissolution of parliament? Or should he have given C.P.de Silva (who was then leading the SLFP) an opportunity to form a government? Most constitutionalists seem to think that when an incumbent Prime Minister requests dissolution it is not usually refused. However Regi had found an article supporting the fact that the second alternative is also possible and sent it up for publication. However the then editor had declined to publish it. I have never asked Regi the exact circumstances of his departure from Lake House. I know it was regarding the cartoon campaign against the SLFP-left during the July 1960 campaign. I believe Regi signed a petition opposing the cartoons.

In spite of his limitations in Sinhala, Regi played a role as a critic in the post-56 Sinhala cultural revival. At the cultural award ceremony in 2004 where Regi was awarded the Sahitya Ratna award and I went to represent him, one of the other award winners told me that ‘Maname’ would never have taken off but for the review that he wrote.. Whatever judgments may be made now about ‘Maname’ there is no doubt that it caused a change in the attitudes of the urban middle class towards Sinhala culture. As Regi was to remark later, the English speaking class would complain about the bugs in the chairs at the Lumbini theatre where much Sinhala theatre was shown in the old days. But they still came. In a self-critical article written in the eighties, in the ‘Guardian’ he said that though the cultural revival was something necessary after the colonial domination ‘all those of us who were involved in it failed to realize its communal aspects’.

I can remember Lester James Peries coming practically every day while Regi was writing the script of ‘Gam Peraliya’ and heard many of the discussions about it. There was some agonizing over the choice of the lead actress before they decided on Punya Heendeniya. He also wrote the script for Karunasena Jayalath’s ‘Golu Hadawata’. Jayalath, he said in a newspaper article, bridged the gap between Martin Wickremasinghe and the writers of Sinhala pulp fiction.

There is no doubt that the formative political influence on Regi was Marxism and he continued to be influenced by it for much of the rest of his life. By the 60’s he had ceased to be a doctrinaire Trotskyite and adopted the ‘balanced’ view enunciated by Isaac Deutsche whom he had met in London in the early fifties.. While he was by no means a Stalinist, and was very conscious of Stalin’s crimes, he was then of the opinion that Stalin had made a great contribution to building the Soviet economy. I have heard him on more than one occasion refer to Stalin as the man who built the Soviet Union. I recall once his reading aloud to Ferdi Wijewickrema, who later became Secretary to the Ministry of Transport in the 1970-77 government, then a close friend and a frequent visitor to our house. It was the article Deutsche had written when Stalin was on his deathbed. I remember the sentence ‘He found Russia working with wooden ploughs and he has left her working with atomic piles’. Later though, during the Gorbachev period when I asked him about this he opined ‘Now it appears the economy was built in the wrong way’. Probably I think his increasing involvement with human rights would have led to change his attitudes.

Those were the leisurely days, when people has time to drop in unannounced and spend hours on intellectual conversation .I got many insights into world affairs through the discussions with visitors. Local politics did not interest me much then During the Indian occupation of Goa in 1961 there were newspaper cartoons lampooning Jawaharlal Nehru for his betrayal of Gandhian non-violence. Reggie commented, ‘I don’t believe in non-violence myself. My only complaint is that Nehru tolerated the Portuguese too long’. During a discussion between Regi and Ferdi I learnt of the rift between the two communist giants which had still not come into the open. Regi used to speak of the folly of the United States ostracizing China and keeping her out of the United Nations. The period of my childhood was the height of the cold war and the threat of a nuclear holocaust was ever present. I followed closely with Regi the Cuban missile crisis of October, 1962 when the U.S. blockaded the island to force the Russians to withdraw the nuclear tipped missiles they had installed in the island.. On the day the crisis was resolved he came with newspaper in hand to give me the news that Khrushchev had agreed to withdraw the missiles in exchange for an assurance that the U.S. would not invade Cuba.

Regi was not entirely the highbrow intellectual some people imagined him to be. He used to read and enjoy Tintin. His favourite character was Captain Haddock. I once remember he brought a new Tintin book home and both of us sat and read it through then and there .However he was critical of one book ‘The Calculus Affair’. This is about an (obviously communist) east European country with a Stalin-like dictator. This fictitious country, Borduria, kidnaps Professor Calculus to get their hands on a potentially destructive technology. Regi said it was very anti-communist, which reflected his attitude towards communism at the time. But he the liked the ‘ Blue Lotus’ which brought out well Japan’s pre-war aggression against China and ‘ The Broken Ear’ which gave a good picture of a Latin American banana republic of the time.

It may be asked with hindsight why such well informed intellectual people in that era did not see the reality of communism for what it was. I cannot give a complete answer to this but there could be many reasons. For one the (supposed) ideals of communism had a tremendous emotional appeal to left-oriented people. Also there was the argument that the communist countries had started backward and therefore faced with the task of building up their economies were forced make certain restrictions on personal freedoms. Maybe some of the real facts about the socialist countries, such as the famine which followed the great leap forward in China, were not widely known. Then also, with the Khrushchev liberalization, things seemed to be getting better in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe(which indeed they were but within narrow limits). Some of the seeming achievements of the Soviet Union, in space for instance, may have clouded the many shortcomings of the systems that the population had to contend with; the persistent shortages of basic necessities, the long queues, the drab apartment buildings and the endemic corruption.

Also with the propaganda war between the two systems it was sometimes difficult to distinguish the truth. One example was the sequence of photographs about Berlin in the American propaganda magazine, ‘ The Free World’. It showed a divided family, a father, mother and a small boy at a barbed wire fence in the divided city. This was at the time the wall was coming up and there were some guards standing some distance away. In the first shot the mother and son were on the Eastern side while the father was in the West; in the second we saw the mother quickly passing the boy to the father when the guards were looking away. In the third the father and son stand on the Western side while the guards were once more looking at the family. The implication was that the mother wanted the child to grow up in the west even at the price of being separated from him. ‘This is obviously a fabrication’, Regi remarked derisively. ‘If this had really happened surely the guards would have noticed that the boy was earlier on the other side’. Well, I was not entirely convinced. And after half a century, the collapse of communism and the tearing down of the Berlin wall all I have to say is that I am still not entirely convinced.

However even during this period when he was still very much under the influence of Marxism, I have to say that Regi was no narrow ideologue. He always conceded that Franklin D. Roosevelt had made significant changes in American society. In the mid-sixties, when the U.S. was getting into the Vietnam quagmire he once told me that he felt the Democratic party would nominate Bobby Kennedy and not Lyndon Johnson in 1968 and that he would be elected President. As it happened Johnson was forced to withdraw from the race, and Bobby very likely would have been elected president, if not for his tragic assassination in the 68 campaign. Despite his Marxist background he did not take the doctrinaire attitude that ‘in US elections it doesn’t matter who wins since they all represent the same class’. Had he been living I am sure he would have agreed that Barack Obama’s election was a major milestone.

There was a famous photo episode during the Vietnam war which he said brings out the moral dilemmas of reporting. There were these two pictures of the Chief of the Saigon Police executing a Vietcong prisoner. The first showed the gun pointed to the man’s head and the second showed him falling after being shot. It is doubtful whether the American photographer who took the photograph could have stopped what was happening. But assuming that he could have should he have? Was saving one man’s life more important than anything else? Or was the picture with the tremendous impact it had in turning American public opinion against the war, of more importance than one man’s life?

Regi had from his youth an interest in the natural sciences – Mathematics, Physics, Chemistry and even Biology. He had a continuing interest in mathematics, which P.de S. Kularatne had instilled in him at Ananda. But in the late 50’s he became very interested in Astronomy, an interest which consumed both of us for the next few years. He bought his first telescope when I was about eight, and a larger one, a cumbersome Newtonian reflector a couple of years later. Astronomy was a part of my childhood and those were indeed thrilling years. I still remember the exhilaration of seeing Saturn through the telescope, for the first time, shortly before dawn. I still consider it the most beautiful sight in the universe. We had hordes of visitors coming to see the heavens including distinguished people, one of whom was Philip Gunewardena. Among my souvenirs is Regi waking me up once late at night saying, ‘Amal come, there is a fine view of Omega Centauri’. Omega Centauri is the finest of what are called globular clusters surrounding the Milky Way Galaxy. They are spherical in shape with a tightly packed centre and more loosely packed stars around it like a swarm of bees.

There was another side to the astronomy period where science and politics mingled. These were the heady early years of the space race between the U.S. and the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union scored some stunning successes from the launching of the first sputnik in 1957 to about 1966. Regi was very impressed with the Soviet achievements and believed then that they showed the strengths of socialism, like many left-oriented people did at the time. Once when I asked the reason he said,’ In Russia, the state allocates to each person the job that is best for him. If a man is good for designing rockets he will be asked to do that. But in America the best brains are often lost because they will be bought up by the big companies and put to designing cars and things like that’. Such views were not uncommon at the time even among people who were not by any means Marxists or communists. The sputniks and moon shots had shaken up the west, especially the United States.

Regi wrote regularly on Astronomy and Space flight when he was at the Daily Mirror in 1961-62. In one of the articles he referred to the strengths of the Soviet education system, which was also widely admired at the time. He was lunching with my mother at a restaurant in Kollupitiya, when the news of Yuri Gagarin’s flight came over the Radio. He rushed to the office and wrote an article. . For anyone with an interest in Science indeed ‘bliss it was to be alive in that dawn’. Nothing that has happened since could match the excitement of the sputniks, the first photographs of the other side of the moon, the first man in space and the moon landing.

Regi very much agreed with C.P. Snow’s book ‘The two Cultures’. He used to quote what Snow said in the book, that if a person was considered to have something lacking in his education if he had not read Shakespeare, it was an equally great lacunae in one’s education not to be aware of the Second Law of Thermodynamics! At the same time he was also conscious of the narrowness of some scientists. One thing he admired about the Soviet education system was that students of the Sciences studied Russian literature, and those of the arts and the humanities studied Physics and Chemistry. Later, in life his interest in mathematics and the sciences declined. But I believe the influence of remained; it was probably why he so much detested post-modernism.

My early upbringing, though heavily weighted towards the sciences, was no means narrow. I was introduced early to Western classical music. Regi liked the painting of Bruegel as he did the poetry of Auden. At our house in Elibank road we had Bruegel’s painting, ‘the fall of Icarus’ in our sitting room. I can vividly remember Regi reading the following lines from Auden’s poem ‘The muse’ with the painting in front of him.

In Breugel’s Icarus how everything turns away

Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may have heard the splash, the forsaken cry…………….,

With Regi’s interest in the Sinhala theatre I got an opportunity to watch much Sinhala drama.

But, there were also plenty of insights into other things that could be got through science, science fiction and space flight itself. While we were reading the transcript of the first (telephone) conversation between Gagarin and Khrushchev (where they addressed each other as Nikita Sergeavitch and Yuri Alexeyvitch). Regi explained to me the Russian practice of addressing by name and patronymic. Later he was to write an entire book (‘addressing the other’) on the subject of second person address. I also leaned the about the follies of chauvinistic nationalism from Albert Einstein’s statement. "If my theory of relativity is proved wrong, France will say that I am a German and Germany will say that I am a Jew. If my theory is proved right Germany will say that I am a German and France will say that I am a citizen of the world".

Then there was the delightful story, a children’s story that could be read at any age, ‘The Little Prince’ by Antoine de Saint-Exupery a French airman who was killed in the Second World War. It is about a boy from an asteroid who comes to earth and meets the narrator, a pilot, in the desert. The Turkish astronomer.who discovered the asteroid, initially has his findings rejected because he was in Arab dress. . He had to wait till the dictator of Turkey had forced his countrymen into Western dress to be given recognition. Saint-Exupery’s comment to his young readers was, ‘grown-ups are like that’. A couple of years later when I read about Mustapha Kemal’s brutal westernization of Turkey, I was reminded of Saint-Exupery’s story. The story, intentionally or otherwise, has an ending with Buddhist overtones. The little prince wants to get back to his mini-planet, and since he cannot take his body with him, he finds another way out. He tells his new friend,

"I shall look as if I were dead; and that will not be true ….. I cannot carry this body with me. It is too heavy. But it will be like an old abandoned shell. There is nothing sad about old shells"

Unlike most literally people, Regi also had an abiding interest in science fiction. He considered it unfortunate that the British literary tradition looked down on it. He felt that good science fiction was also literature. Knowing that, in my childhood, my bent was towards the natural sciences he made no attempt to get me to read Shakespeare; instead he introduced me to H.G.Wells, Jules Verne, Arthur Conan Doyle, John Wyndham, Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke. Wells, he once said, was a writer very much under rated by the literary establishment, because he wrote mostly science fiction. However he did recommend some literary works to me such ‘Great Expectations’. ‘Beau Geste’ and ‘Moby Dick’.

The fifties and sixties were the high point of the faith in science and consciously or otherwise we were all influenced by it. This was probably the result of the post-second world war technological developments. Science and technology, in the eyes of many were the panacea for all ills, which could end poverty, disease, solve energy problems and ultimately provide the whole world with a western standard of living. Once in a (typically) Soviet book I came across an argument debunking the notion of overpopulation by pointing out the amount of land available for each person if the world’s land area were divided equally. It concluded by saying that ‘ of course a lot of work will have to be done to make all the snow, ice, deserts and mountains fit for growing crops but man is quite capable of doing it’. I asked Regi whether this was true and he confidently answered, ‘yes, of course’. Looking back science and technology have been the gods that failed. In 2001 we discussed an article that has appeared about Artur C. Clarke’s ‘Space oddessey:2001’. It pointed out that there has not been the expected progress in space flight and in developing intelligent computers. On the other hand there is a scene in the film where a secretary is shown using a typewriter. What Clarke had not foreseen was the extent to which the computer would impact everyday life. Regi Remarked, ‘these are of course the occupational hazards of any prophet’.

A claim that was often made at that time, and is still made sometimes today, was that Buddhism is scientific. This was no doubt influenced by the climate of the times. Regi would normally be considered an irreligious person. It is true he had no use for the ritual that passes for Buddhism among most ‘practicing Buddhists’ in our society. But I think at heart he had some respect for the Buddhist philosophy. I once overheard him, in the sixties, discussing Arthur C.Clarke’s novel ‘The Deep Range.’ This novel is mainly about whale farming, but it set in a future world where the progress of science has destroyed all religions except Buddhism. Regi’s interests varied over his long life, but if you put them all together he was indeed the Renaissance man.

There is still much to write about Regi; his creative writing, the evolution of his political views in later years and his role in the ethnic conflict. Perhaps at another anniversary…….

Regi passed away on the 15th of December 2004 after a long illness. As I watched the smoke billowing out of the Kanatte crematorium my mind flashed back to something Regi said when I was a child. Although funeral pyres were the norm among middle class people in those days, his wish was to be cremated in the crematorium. "I like the crematorium" he said, "because it is so impersonal. You just see the loved one going up as smoke." As the Little Prince said, the body is only a shell.

( Any comments or questions on this article may be addressed to the writer at amal_siri@yahoo.com )

-Sri Lanka Guardian