Of language, literature and unity: Perspectives of S.G. Punchihewa

Stoic and reflecting the very epitome of health, S.G. Punchihewa, the veteran writer and thinker encompassing socialist thought, stands at the top of the road that leads to his house. He is 90 years young and the trishaw driver who drives me to his house seems shocked when his age is revealed. He almost gets down and worships him when told who he is. He has read his many writings in the Sinhala language media.

S.G. Punchihewa looks very much like the school teacher that he was. Hence let us begin with the much circulated narration of how an official from the education ministry had visited a remote village in the East which S.G. had served as principal and announced the visit of the then education minister I.M.R.A. Iriyagolla. 

S.G. was asked how he would make arrangements to treat the minister with the usual grand lunch that rural schools would somehow muster together pooling scarce resources. S.G. had said that there will not be any problem. The education ministry official had still looked unsure because the terrain was remote and the school obviously very poor. How will the families of the children attending this school provide a suitably dignified meal for the education minister? 

S.G. had insisted that it was not a problem and that he would see to it that the minister would be grandly treated. Later it was clear to the official that what S.G. was planning to do was to bestow a ‘buth packet’ (a packet of rice) from the local eatery that he vouched served up the tastiest fancy lunch that he ate on the rarest of occasions when he wanted a special treat! S.G. was treated to an immediate transfer – to Colombo! In all his shrewdness S.G. had placed the East as his hometown in official documentation so that the remote punishment transfers when it came (which was often) would be Colombo, where his home was!

So this is the man in whose library I am now seated munching biscuits with tea that his wife (equally young at 88) and also a former teacher serves up.

His home in Pannipitiya has only the very basic necessities. It is the type in which one rarely finds a leftist oriented person living in today, in times when the left and the right is often entwined in luxury and hypocrisy.

What is amply furnished is the library which is mesmerising in its riches. Works dedicated to philosophy co-exist with literature, poetry, religion, politics and a host of other topics. 

He informs that this is the English medium library and that the books in the Sinhala language is in another part of the house. We continue our conversation in this section of the library. I spot the book Tear and a Smile by Kahlil Gibran. This is one of the many English works that S.G. Punchihewa had translated into Sinhala. Gibran, Kabir and Tagore are amongst his favourite poets.

Amongst his favourite short story writers is Zhou Shuren (better known by the pen name of Lu Xun) whose short story ‘diary of a madman’ he had translated to Sinhala. 

“This story which I read in my youth made a lasting impression on me. It is about a youth who is decreed as mad by his family and taken to the asylum. He is declared mad as he sees the food the household prepares and everything that they do as an act of cannibalism. The oppression of women in the home through which meals are made, taken as the domestic norm, he sees as murder and subsequent consumption of the human. I translated this story in the 1970s and consider it to be one of the finest short stories I have come across that speaks of human exploitation that includes the gender based viewpoint,” he explains. 

His mother dying young, when he was 14 years, created a vacuum in the life of S.G. which he filled with reading and thinking, taking up studying Hegel’s dialectics from different angles. Growing up in the scenic hometown of Thotamuna in Matara, near the spot where the Nilwala Ganga falls to sea, his earliest influence was his father who was learned in English, Sanskrit, Pali and Sinhala. 

“My father was a strict and proud man. He did not hesitate to pick up fights with anyone who would cross him. I must say that some of this qualities rubbed off on me!” laughs S.G. Punchihewa, who was known to be a force to reckon with if any government official tried to interfere with regulations. 

Schooled at the Nupe Christ Church school (which was referred to as the C.C. school) S.G. Punchihewa had specialised in Sinhala, Pali and Sanskrit at the S.S.C. exam and then gone onto the Pirivena School to follow the SSC in English medium, studying for an additional three years.

He considers the solid foundation he received in both Sinhala and English to be the stepping stone for the success of his teaching as well as literary career as an author, translator and columnist writing in the Sinhala language. 

He cites the English medium education at the Pirivena School to be a valuable asset that shaped and broadened his knowledge with the ability to read directly in the English language and translate many works into Sinhala. 

“I was 22 years when the Sinhala Only policy was introduced in Sri Lanka. I was in support of this view then but I changed my mind later. I saw how the North of Sri Lanka which earlier had a serious interest in Sinhala totally avoided it after 1956. I saw the South of the country totally abandoning English. I saw the damage all this did,” he states voicing his opinion on the language based societal metamorphosis he saw emerging in the island. 

He respects the contribution made to Sinhala literature by Kumaratunga Munidasa who started a discourse on Sinhala grammar and remembers seeing him once as a child at a Sinhala language related discussion where Munidasa was delivering a lecture. 

“Kumaratunga Munidasa raised the dignity of the Sinhalese people through literature and of the entire nation. We have to speak of and focus on the work of Munidasa in relevance to raising the dignity of the people of the whole of Sri Lanka.”  “Writers such as Kumaratunga Mundidasa are national writers and should be accessible to all Sri Lankans. Their works should be taught to all. When we divide people through language nothing educative or intellectual comes through it. Only division.”

In speaking of Buddhism he states that the appeal of Buddhism to him is in its rationality. 

Wimalaratna Kumaragama, Raphiel Tennakoon and Fr. Marcelline Jayakody are some of his favourite Sinhala literary veterans that were key names during his youth. 

“Literature holds the key to leading the way towards a humanistic world. It is not separate to the economic or the spiritual but is the conduit which connects both,” he states. 

(To be continued.) 

(SV)