Filming Dutugemunu : responsibility and opportunity

" The making of this Dutugemunu film is both great responsibility and wonderful opportunity. It is a responsibility owed to the future, and an opportunity to discard, rather than perpetuate, the old and the obsolete. It is an opportunity to dispel and be free of destructive myths; to work towards an entirely different, 21st century, Sri Lanka. The word "education" comes from ‘to lead out’: this film can lead out, and away. It is a great opportunity to "educate" - in the best sense of that word. I gather the lead role is played by no less than a Cabinet Minister, and so have every reason to repose confidence and hope."

by Charles Sarvan

(May 15, Colombo, Sri Lanka Guardian) Modern conflicts, including those involving Tamils and Sinhalese, are reinterpreted in lofty historical terms, seeing in them something that is much grander than the shabbiness of contemporary politics. (Amartya Sen, ‘Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny’.) I read (May, 2011) that a film is being made of King Dutugemunu, reputed to have ruled over two thousand years ago (161-137 BCE). Produced now, in the present, I trust the treatment of the story will not be out-dated but modern, fully cognizant of contemporary awareness and attitudes to aspects such as myth and history. Film, being a visual medium, makes a strong impact on the populace, and hence its effectiveness and importance as an educational tool – "education" in the highest, noblest, sense of the word.

Myths are impervious to facts and have a remarkable (sometimes, depressing) longevity. The world is littered with them. For example, ‘The Song of Roland’ celebrates the heroic death of Roland (778 CE) at the hands of treacherous Moslems. (Roland was in charge of the rearguard as Charlemagne returned to France from Moorish-ruled Spain.) In fact, it was not a conflict between Christians and Moslems: Charlemagne had gone to Spain to aid a Moorish prince who had asked for help. Catholic Roland was ambushed and killed at Roncevaux, not by Moslems but by Catholic Basques. Yet in song and popular memory, it is remembered as a conflict between West and East; between Christians and Moslems. ‘The Black Hole of Calcutta’ (20 June 1756) is a story of extreme cruelty, still capable of horrifying the imagination. Of the 146 (including women) stuffed into that hole, 123 died of suffocation and thirst. In fact the "hole" was an ordinary military cell (incidentally, it was a British-built, and not an Indian, prison) such as is found in army barracks. Overnight, three men died, and that too of wounds sustained in battle: Jan Dalley, ‘The Black Hole: Money, Myth and Empire’, 2006, pp. 12-13. The story was fabricated and used to cancel out British brutality, presenting that violence as retaliatory. Mark Twain observed (op. cit, p. 18) that it served to justify British imperialism: the natives being vicious, had to be controlled and civilised. Still, despite research and evidence, the "Black Hole of Calcutta" continues to evoke horror – perhaps, even in the minds of some Indians? "Mau Mau" can conjure up images of midnight blood-oaths in the Kenyan forest, and the fiendish killing of English men, women and children. "The British at the time of their eliminationist campaign against the Kikuyu ... incarcerated approximately 1.5 million Kikuyu in a brutal camp system and killed tens of thousands (estimates range from 50, 000 to 300,000)... How many whites did the bestial Mau Mau kill? Thirty-two": Daniel Goldhagen, ‘Worse Than War’, 2009, p. 136. We believe what we want to believe; in what is useful - at the least in excusing and justifying our own conduct. So myths, falsifying and damaging, are made to outlive facts.

There are other examples but I hope these three suffice to remind us that, often, myth is mistaken for fact; received, believed in and reacted to, as history. The eminent historian, Eric Hobsbawm, has warned that myth, mistaken to be history, can become the raw material for xenophobia (see, Sarvan, ‘Public Writings on Sri Lanka’, pages 144). This brand of history is what a people learn from childhood, from family, priests and schoolmasters; from magazines, pamphlets, songs, television programmes - and film. The poison of myth and falsified history does not remain on the surface but seeps down, and contaminates the groundwater (Public Writings’, page 145). ‘The Mahavamsa’, written in the 6th century of the Common Era is a mythical relating of the story of the Sinhalese kingdom from its foundation in 6th century BCE to the reign of King Mahasena, 274-301 CE. In other words, it records a "history" starting about a thousand years earlier than the time it was written! "Simply" and unthinkingly believed in by many, credited as being literal truth, it has not gone without challenge. For example, Professor Carlo Fonseka (‘The Island’, 22 October 1995) ironically confessed embarrassment at being the descendant of banished, profligate, Vijaya, son of an incestuous marriage between Sihabahu and sister Sihasivali, whose mother was so lustful that only a lion could sexually satisfy her: profligacy, brutishness, bestiality, incest and patricide. It is an interesting, incredible, story.

The struggle between Dutugemunu and Elara was for power. It was not a Sinhalese – Tamil war: as W. I. Siriweera observes (‘Ethnicity and Social Change in Sri Lanka’, Social Scientists Association, Colombo, 1985), there were Sinhalese soldiers in Elara’s army. And yet (contradictory though it may initially seem) they were not Sinhalese because, as Professor R. A. L. H. Gunawardana writes (‘Sri Lanka: History and the Roots of Conflict’, edited by Jonathan Spencer), the word "Sinhala" applied only to the ruling class, and to those closely associated with it. The reference was political and social - not "racial". A Sinhala identity did not include all who spoke Sinhala. Even in the 19th century, some authors of texts in Sinhala refer to the last Nayakkar king as "Sinhala maharajatuwa", the great king of the Sinhala (Gunawardana). When the Portuguese, Dutch and British marched against Kandy, the bulk of their army – particularly in Portuguese times – was made up of (Low Country) Sinhalese. The latter did not see themselves as forming a single, ethnic, group and so joined men of a different skin-colour, religion, language and culture to attack those now seen as fellow Sinhalese. Similarly, it is reproached that Africans captured and sold fellow Africans to Europeans and Arabs, and to a life of slavery. But the concept and identity, the feeling of being "African", did not then exist. Therefore, they were not guilty of having sold their own. To think of the Dutugemunu - Elara conflict as one between Sinhalese and Tamil is to read the distant, dim and unreliable past through the consciousness of later times. It is to impose categories on the conflict that then did not exist. Like many such stories, stripped bare of "racial" and religious rhetoric, it is exposed for what it essentially was: individual and group drive for power.

In Western literature, Greek Homer, writing the story of the Greek victory over the Trojans, repeatedly mentions the courage, skill and sacrifice of the defeated. British historians of the Second World War, while fully recognising the awful inhumanity of Nazi doctrine and practice, still point out that, in military terms, the German army was among the best the world has seen. Dutugemunu is said to have shown regard for defeated and dead Elara. There was no mutilation of corpses; no desecration or vulgar triumphalism, but regret and sorrow. (The Duke of Wellington, inspecting the field of Waterloo after the battle (1815) and seeing the dead, the dying and the wounded, commented that the next saddest thing to losing a war is winning it: a remarkable humanity that transcended national division and competition, enmity and conflict.)

The making of this Dutugemunu film is both great responsibility and wonderful opportunity. It is a responsibility owed to the future, and an opportunity to discard, rather than perpetuate, the old and the obsolete. It is an opportunity to dispel and be free of destructive myths; to work towards an entirely different, 21st century, Sri Lanka. The word "education" comes from ‘to lead out’: this film can lead out, and away. It is a great opportunity to "educate" - in the best sense of that word. I gather the lead role is played by no less than a Cabinet Minister, and so have every reason to repose confidence and hope.