On February 4, 1948, Ceylon embraced Independence albeit with Dominion status. D S Senanayake, the first Prime Minister of Independent Ceylon, attired in the western suit, addressed the Parliament, the legislature that still communicated in English, the language of the colonial masters.
What came to pass on February 4 ruled a whole decade of incidents in Sri Lanka. The forties decade is marked with importance because an independent country was offered to the Ceylonese occupants.
We have evolved seven decades following Independence, apparently not without turbulences. Does that reflection of what happened over the past seven decades help us understand where we are headed? Probably not! Or probably yes! Ruwanthie de Chickera is concerned about it more than any of us.
That concern – or interest, rather – has led de Chickera to view the decade as a generation. She has approached the individuals born in the 1930s as a periscope to view the turbulences in a fresh angle.
“Those born in the 1930s are a unique generation. Even in the world, they remain unique because they witnessed crucial events of world history. In Sri Lanka, they are an interesting generation because they were born during the colonisation. Then they remember the end of colonisation. They remember how things proceeded after the British colonisation ended,” de Chickera anatomises her justification.
And that journey is given a title: Dear Children Sincerely, a theatre production that goes on board on July 5 and 7 at the Lionel Wendt.
Following the thirties, quite a few countries were born. The majority of the people born during this period feel as if they have been suddenly given a country. More importantly, they remember socialism unlike those who were born post-1980s.
“They are the children of socialism. They believed in that. This country had faith in the Left. It is the Left that was interested in gaining freedom too,” de Chickera adds.
Once capitalism entered, nothing could exist. It has destroyed everything. But the thirties generation has shards of that beautiful memory. What matters the most is that they witnessed the key episode of Sri Lanka, gaining Independence. Then they were the spectacle to what came to pass in the country for the first ten years – The Sinhala-only policy, for instance, and so on.
“They saw everything happen for the first time. The first anti-Tamil riots, for one. The Sinhala-only as well as its offshoot, the ‘71 insurrection. They have a better understanding of how these things happened,” de Chickera examines.
With that background, they entered the 80s to observe a new phenomenon. That was the period when the open economy was making waves in the country and shifting the priorities of the ordinary common life from simplistic to a materialistic one. De Chickera identifies 1983 as the phase when violence was allowed in the open.
“One ethnic group began to feel they are powerful, while another began to feel alienated. And politicians supported this for the first time. It is that culture that resulted in everything followed: selfishness, insularity, materialism, corruption and narrow education system,” she lists an inventory.
The decade was full of happenings. De Chickera looks at them as the circumstances that governed the country more than being a mere menace or conflict. We cannot judge ourselves right now, but we can always reflect on our childhood.
The Sinhala-only policy launched during the late fifties led to a youth insurgency in the seventies. It gave birth to a generation of Sinhala-educated crowd struggling to find some placement in the employment sector. Then there was conflict.
“In this project what we do is let the 30s generation reflect country’s journey. You cannot understand where things went wrong or right. I thought it’s good to capture that perspective. On the other hand, it is good to approach the younger generation. Our younger audience, especially the Sinhala (and may be the Tamils in the north as well) have no real sense of history. They have no idea about the history of other communities of this country. If they are engaged in some political party, they know some history of their party. But I know the people aged between the 20s and 30s who are clueless about what happened in 1983.”
Ruwanthie accredits that unawareness to the local education system which does not focus much on modern history. On the other hand, the average youth have more problems, especially financial, to deal with and hardly any time to explore other subjects.
“We do not try to cover the whole story from the 1940s up to date. We have interviewed 70 people and transcribed their views. Most stories are not more than five minutes. But each story is complete. We have a basket full of these stories. We can create many stories if we like. These are performed as a standalone. One segment is on the Sinhala-only.”
Finally, the team links all such stories to consummate the production.
The research has given something important to each generation. The Independence governed the 1940s. The Sinhala-only emerged in the late 50s. That was to be followed by a military coup attempt in the 1960s, which indicated the distancing of the Christian English speaking elite from the power. The 1970s and the 1980s saw insurrections and riots respectively. Although the 1990s was a bloodshed history marked with numerous assassinations caused by the LTTE, Sri Lanka marked its presence in the global context by winning the Cricket World Cup in 1996. Come 2000, and behold the Menik Farm following the end of the war.
So much to happen over a matter of seven decades!
Dear Children Sincerely will be a new experience to the local audience in its attempt to devise theatre in the form of an ensemble. The director does not command. As Akalanka, an actor, puts it, the director employs the cast to get the best out of them.
“We do not act according to a pre-written script. We write on the sets. We do music, though there is a musician. We all do everything. Director listens to us and vice versa,” Akalanka explains.
Seven Decades of Sri Lanka on stage at the Wendt
Directed by Ruwanthie de Chickera, Dear Children Sincerely highlights seven singular events that changed the course of Sri Lanka’s history and will be performed at the Lionel Wendt on July 5 and 6 at 7 pm.
The play is a highly-charged ensemble performance that takes the audience on a journey through seventy years of Sri Lanka’s recent history. The piece was created through conversations with senior citizens born in the 1930s, and through their stories, traces the dramatic socio-political journey of the Sri Lankan people, from Independence in the 1940s to the end of the war in 2009.
The play is written and directed by Ruwanthie de Chickera and was devised with an ensemble group of artists comprising well-established actors and talented newcomers. The play explores how history evolves, and how memory works; focussing on what people retain, how they retain it, what gets carried on and why things get erased.
Performances devised under the DCS project -- starting from 2015 -- have toured within and outside Sri Lanka. The first DCS show was on Sri Lankan and Rwandan histories and was staged in Kigali at the Ubumuntu Arts Festival in 2015. DCS shows have since toured in Kerala, Jammu, New Delhi and Mumbai. Performances have also taken place in Ireland and the UK and were adopted by ASHTAR – the Theatre International Youth Festival, Palestine in 2016.
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