Esther Daimari
Dr.
Esther Daimari is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of
English, Tezpur University. Her research interests include Landscape and
Literature, Contemporary South Asian Fiction in English, Partition and
Literature, and English Literature from Northeast India.
Abstract
This paper
analyzes the representation of the city (in other words, the urban landscape)
of Colombo in the fiction of two Sri Lankan writers in English – Carl Muller’s Colombo (1995) and Shyam Selvadurai’s The Hungry Ghosts (2013). It examines
how the texts demystify the city of Colombo by focusing on the non-spectacular
landscapes of Colombo and thereby effectively break the romantic and
picturesque lens through which Sri Lanka is otherwise seen. It further explores how the topos of monuments,
slums and streets of Colombo are deployed in the novels as potent symbols of
degeneration and corruption in an aspiring postcolonial city. The argument of
the paper will be based on the theoretical concepts of the “dialectical image”
and “phantasmagoria”. The authors, as the article argues, scrutinize the
transformation of Colombo after Sri Lanka’s independence in 1948 into a
degrading cityscape and a place of fluctuating and rapid social and political
change and a place of continuous conflict.
Keywords:
postcolonial urbanscapes, city, South Asian literature, Sri Lankan English
literature, Colombo
Keywords: postcolonial urbanscapes, city,
South Asian literature, Sri Lankan English literature, Colombo
This paper analyzes
the representation of the city (in other words, the urban landscape) of Colombo
in the fiction of two Sri Lankan writers in English – Carl Muller’s Colombo (1995) and Shyam Selvadurai’s The Hungry Ghosts (2013). It examines
how the texts demystify the city of Colombo by focusing on the non-spectacular
landscapes of Colombo and thereby effectively break the romantic and
picturesque lens through which Sri Lanka is otherwise seen. It further explores how the topos of
monuments, slums and streets of Colombo are deployed in the novels as potent
symbols of degeneration and corruption in an aspiring postcolonial city. The
argument of the paper will be based on the theoretical concepts of the
“dialectical image” and “phantasmagoria”. The authors, as the article argues,
scrutinize the transformation of Colombo after Sri Lanka’s independence in 1948
into a degrading cityscape and a place of fluctuating and rapid social and
political change and a place of continuous conflict.
The notion of the city or the urban space
have become immensely important for postcolonial writers in exploring key
questions of home, exile, alienation, being, migration, culture and identity.
Diasporic writers like Shyam Selvadurai often display a tussle between two or
more places/cities; most often it is the author’s or one of the character’s
birth city and the city of exile, the place where the character moves to
voluntarily or involuntarily. As the
character subconsciously compares the two places, it allows the writer to use city
as strategic topoi to comment on the modernizing and “development” programmes
of the post-independence nation. It also brings into play notions of utopia and
dystopia as well as the binary of the rural and the urban in the post-colonial
context.
In texts such as Muller’s Colombo and Selvadurai’s The Hungry Ghost, the city is the space
for major temporal and spatial sequences and the center of the dramatic action.
The city brings together both colonial and postcolonial discourses in the
novel. Paulo Brusasco, in his analysis
of the novel Colombo, says that
Colombo itself is the main character in the novel. Other than Colombo and the
narrator, there are no recurring characters in the novel. There is also no
unifying plot in the novel. There are 27 self-contained chapters which follow
no specific pattern and the novel exhibits an elaborate use of bricolage,
intertextuality, official chronicles personal memoirs, news items, fictional
passages, social criticism, and so on. The narration constantly shifts in time
and space and as Brusasco says, in the narrative “space and time interact, the
one prompting glimpses of the other” (176). Every time the narrator chronicles
the past and present history of an area in Colombo, he supports his claims by
including a fictional episode that illustrates the darker side of Colombo. Selvadurai’s
The Hungry Ghosts take us through
various cities, mainly Vancouver, Toronto and Colombo. The novel can be read as
Selvadurai’s attempt to chart the landscape of both Canada and Sri Lanka. The bi-racial
(half-Sinhala and half-Tamil) protagonist of the novel Shivan Rassiah, moves
from Colombo to Toronto in order to escape war as well as the dominance of his
grandmother, Aacho. Throughout the novel, the protagonist travels back and
forth from Sri Lanka and Canada in an attempt to come to terms with the ghosts
of his past and in the process, Selvadurai reveals various aspects of city life
in both Canada and Sri Lanka. After Funny
Boy and Cinnamon Gardens, both of
which are set in Colombo, Selvadurai along with capturing the abundant culture
and landscape of Colombo also turns his interest into exploring the bleak
working-class Canadian suburb where his family reached after escaping from Sri
Lanka in 1983. The novels invite the reader to reexamine the past and the
present landscape of the city, thereby shedding light on some of the seen, yet
ignored aspects of the city in the narrative of an “advanced” metropolis that
highlights what Guy Debord calls the “spectacles”, the grand and decorative
images that signify progress in a modern capitalist city.
One of the primary contentions that evolve
from a close reading of texts like Colombo
and The Hungry Ghosts is that the
city is not ahistorical but a product of a long history of colonialism,
postcolonialism, capitalist commodification of landscape and the civil war.
Muller in Colombo and other texts
like his Burgher trilogy[i]
explores the Anglicization of the Sri Lanka landscape by the British as they
imported Britain’s own landscape into Ceylon. He comments on the transformative
impact of the Empire that planted colonial houses, buildings and railways among
other things during the colonial period and shows how in the post-colonial
period, landscape/landscaping in turn became a way to project difference,
nationalism and identity. In
representing these, the appearance of the city becomes the focal point. It is
“the most readable landmark of the city” (Jing Li 3) – the most decipherable
and perceptible structures that can speak volumes about the place. The narrator’s choice of landmarks is symbolic
as they help him dissect the city as an “artificial city” (Muller 413) marked
by a very strong presence of foreigners – the Arab traders, the Moors, the
Portuguese, the Dutch and the British – in the past.
Muller displays a sense of angst due to
the rapid deterioration of the city and moan the loss of a greener and more
pristine condition of Colombo of the past. Drawing the reader’s attention to
some of the prime areas in Colombo like the Galle Face Green, The Fort, Pettah,
etc. in the stories, Muller looks at Colombo as a ruin which is in large part
already destroyed as the city became a perfect canvas for the colonialists to
come and project their power and fantasies on it. However, Muller also attributes a sense of
volatility to the city as its spaces emerge as hybrid and ambivalent. After the British left the island, the city
became a site for creating a new image of the nation, a site for experimenting
with different programs of reform and development. Nihal Perera highlights the
grand reorganization of the city after independence mostly by dismantling older
structures and replacing them with new indigenous structures. Tariq Jazeel highlights that the architects
of Sri Lanka tried to “fashion an avowedly ‘post-colonial’ architecture of
sorts” (Jazeel 6) in order to bring in a new sense of national citizenship and
collective consciousness and an alternative modernity that did not rely on the
Western tradition of development. There was a generous sprouting of modernist
buildings and complexes over pre-existing ones, some were only renovated and
some other colonial structures stayed on as reminders of colonialism. The
resultant landscape was a “mixed urban landscape” that facilitated an odd and
unusual kind of urban experience, which is different, as explored in Shyam
Selvadurai’s The Hungry Ghost, from
the city experience in the West. In the post-colonial period, Colombo and its
limited space, according to Muller and Selvadurai, is constantly negotiated by
the rich and the poor, the privileged and the underprivileged, the displaced
and the marginalized. The writers look at the city from the point of view of
the marginalized (Muller’s characters are mostly poor and the underprivileged and
Selvadurai’s protagonist is a homosexual) and highlight how their aspirations
and dreams are constantly muffled in a city struggling with its own dream of
becoming a world-class city. The novels subvert the cliché of a progressive
metropolis by presenting an alternative mode of urban writing by highlighting
the ugly and the non-spectacular, the “what-has-been” and the “now” in what
Walter Benjamin calls the “‘lightning flash’ of dialectic image(s)” (Pensky 178).
As Pensky suggests, the concept of the “dialectical image” is the
“methodological heart” of Walter Benjamin’s Arcades
Project. Walter Benjamin in his Arcades
Project defined “the dialectical image” as “an image that emerges suddenly
in a flash. What has been is to be held fast – as an image flashing up in the
now of its recognizability” (7). Interpreting the idea, Pensky explains that in
Benjamin’s sense, the “ ‘past’ and ‘present’ are constantly locked in a complex
interplay in which what is past and what is present are negotiated through
material struggles” (180). Walter Benjamin believed in showing history over
telling history through graphic and concrete images and he realized that “the
images cannot be strung together into a coherent, non-contradictory picture of
the whole” (Buck-Morss 55) but that the images can be presented only in
fragments and thereby create a montage of a constellation of images. Both
Muller and Selvadurai present a montage of images of monuments, slums and
streets of Colombo that are “dialectical” in the sense that these images not
only represent the “now time” but are also relics and “hieroglyphic clues to a
forgotten past” (Buck-Morss 39). The trace of past history seem to survive in
fossilized form in the hybrid and ambivalent spaces like the built structures
and streets of the city. As examples, we may cite Muller’s depiction of the
Central Business District, the colonial Fort area, the President’s House, Old
Parliament Building/ Presidential Secretariat, The Town Hall and The Royal
College of Colombo, that in Muller’s imagination and perhaps in the collective
imagination of other Burghers like him, are remnants of the colonial period
that still “remind us (them) of the balmy days that were” (Muller 446). In deep
contrast to the past situation, both Muller and Selvadurai suggests that in the
present period, these spaces have metamorphosed into dens and hubs of crimes,
illegal activities, violence and poverty and all sorts of dirt and squalor
surround them.
Selvadurai further highlights that the
British not only left imprints of their architecture and political and
financial system in the island but also left residues of western manners for
the natives to mimic. In post-colonial Sri Lankan culture, class difference and
“western avarice” seemed to have replaced Buddhist tolerance and communalism
and ethnic clashes have seeped into the social and political fabric of the
nation. In The Hungry Ghosts,
Shivan’s grandmother (Aacho) is an embodiment of “avarice”. An owner of a
number of properties in various parts of Colombo, it was only money and profit
that motivated her. The colonialist’s
drive to conquer and amass new lands and wealth can be equated with the
post-colonial subject’s (like Aacho’s) ambition to be richer in the
post-colonial era. Anoma Pieris says that the class system is “the most
resilient social inheritance from the colonial period in South Asia” (4) that
“produced a hierarchy based on economic capital and monetization of the social
system around capitalist morality and exercised through colonial laws” (4).
This inheritance divided the population into “nobodys” and “somebodys” in the
post-colonial period. Aacho, a native dipped in western manners and “western
avarice”, ironically shows a good understanding of Buddhist philosophy,
revealing the dialectical nature of the character. The Buddhist moral tales
narrated by his grandmother shapes a good part of Shivan’s childhood. The most
memorable story Shivan heard from Aacho was that of the perethaya: a perethaya
looks like a “hungry ghost, with stork-like limbs and an enormous belly that he
must prop up with his hands. The yellowed flesh of his face is seared to the
skull, his mouth no larger than the eye of a needle, so he can never satisfy
his hunger” (Selvadurai 24). According to this myth, “a person is reborn a perethaya, because, during the human
life, he desired too much – hence the large stomach that can never be filled
through the tiny mouth” (Selvadurai 24).
The moral of the story is that one should refrain from too much greed
that ironically, Aacho herself could not overcome. Capitalists like Aacho used
criminals like Chandralal to bully and exploit people. On the other hand,
Selvadurai also introduces characters like Siriyani Karunaratne, Mili, and
Ranjini who are human activists and work for organisations like “Kantha” to
represent the interests of the poor and the marginalized. The city, thus, is
represented as a dialectical site of conflicting groups and ideologies.
Colombo: Not a Dream Space
Traditionally, as stark contrast to the
rural space that stands for simplicity, antiquity and tradition, the urban
space promises a different kind of experience; for many it is a dream space
where one can realize personal desires and project communal hopes. Colombo’s aspiration to be a successful
cosmopolitan city, Muller presents, is obvious from the city’s engagement with
modernity inherited from its previous conquerors, its rapid urbanization,
industrialization, grandiose display of skyscrapers and buildings, and use of
technology. However, both Muller and
Selvadurai draw attention to the dystopian underbelly of Colombo apparent from
the writer’s examination of what Walter Benjamin and George Simmel suggests as
“urban phantasmagoria” through engaging episodes of marginalized characters’
tryst with poverty, crime, fear, discrimination, oppression and exclusion that
take place within those spaces. The writers highlight that Colombo, in its
various capacities, stand as a metaphor for an urban disaster, as an example of
a city where “modernity has gone astray”.[ii]
The idea of the “phantasmagoria” “goes
back three centuries to the use of magic lantern for projecting
phantasmatic-hallucinatory images” (Andreotti and Lahiji 15). The term, then,
captures the city as a “spectacular incarnation” of the urban space “with all
its excesses and excrescencies” (Andreotti and Lahiji X). Phantasmagoria encapsulates the spectacular
dream houses and “prestige objects” of the city created with a sense of vanity,
narcissism and arrogance that bears the capacity to render the citizens of the
city invisible. In the neoliberal context, the fetishized commodity hijacks the
pride of place of the human and there is a growing sense of alienation,
displacement and exclusion of the person from the spaces and structures of the
city. Alternatively, in Muller’s and Selvadurai’s urban writing, the
phantasmagoria promotes the hyper visibility of the host of “outcasts”, the
forgotten, the poor and the oppressed who are otherwise not taken into account
by the government or the city planners; they make their presence felt through
their stark contrast to the spectacular surroundings. In fact, in their
writings, the uncanny presence of the multitude of outcasts themselves seems to
take on a phantasmagoric shape. This is mostly evident as Muller uses the trope
of the slum and the street in describing Colombo. He talks about beggars begging
in the streets of Colombo in the chapter “The Exhibitionist”. The surrealistic
and phantasmagoric quality of the beggars in the city of Colombo is highlighted
as Muller describes the sudden disappearance of these figures at dusk and their
magical reappearance on the streets of the city during daytime. He poses a
question,
Who brings that unshaven,
toothless epileptic to the streets? He cannot walk. He drags shaky legs on the
cobbles to retrieve a coin that has rolled out of reach. Yet, by dawn, night
workers find him, ready to wail through another day.
And by nightfall, who takes him away? And where
does he go? (Muller 47)
Muller puts slums at the
center while narrating about Colombo. Scholars of South Asian cities such as
Mike Davis look at the city as dumping grounds of “surplus humanity” – “ people
cut out of the formal world economy” (Davis 14) and “slum remains the only
fully franchised solution to the problem of warehousing the 21st
century surplus humanity” (Davis 28).
Both Muller and Selvadurai, through the use of the trope of the slum
represent Colombo as a city that thrives on stratification and segregation of
the rich from the poor, and of the powerful from the marginalized. As
population began to grow in Colombo, the city elite moved out to occupy the
more spacious residential area in the suburbs and the central part of Colombo
came to be occupied by the “other” – the poor, the minorities, the refugees,
the (im) migrants, the outcasts. Cut off from basic amenities and
opportunities, the slum dwellers become prone to crimes, illegal activities and
poverty. Muller, through his montage of the everyday lives of the people brings
forth shocking account of people living in slums. “Under the Umbrella” is an
account of two lovers, Anton and Kusum, for whom, the only private space
available for making love in the city is provided by Anton’s umbrella.
Ironically, in the secret spaces of one of the cheap hotels, a young Malay girl
is secretly murdered and another teenager raped with “her vagina ripped apart”
(Muller 8). “The Canalians” reveals the
life of city migrants who are forced to live by the banks of the Old Dutch
canal. Joronis and his family live a disgusting life in one of the shacks.
Joronis plucks coconuts during daytime and steals at night. His children are
also involved in various illegal activities - “Romiel, picks pockets in the Pettah. Agnes is a whore
and Sandu, yet small, is a squirrel of a boy who will steal anything” (Muller 65).
“The Exhibitionists” tells the story of a beggar woman in Colombo who begs to
earn a living but her drunkard husband takes away all the money that she earns,
for buying alcohol. Selvadurai also in The Hungry Ghosts highlights how
gentrification and class divide characterizes Colombo. Shivan’s grandmother
possesses various rental properties at different parts of Colombo. She lets out
for rent the big house in the wealthy area of Colombo 7 to an American couple,
whereas, her shabby and pitiable house in Pettah is occupied by a poor family. Young Shivan notices that her grandmother is courteous
to the rich tenants of her Cinnamon Garden house but harsh and sarcastic to her
tenants of the Pettah property, thereby educating her young grandson about the
urban society of Sri Lanka that is comprised of the civil society of the rich
and the poor, that occupy the dirtier and less desirable spaces of the city.
The later are a prototype of a class that Muller calls “the shabby people.”
“The shabby people” does a small job somewhere and works hard to make ends
meet. He is an embodiment of poverty as the want of money – for buying
necessary items, for paying church tithes and fees, etc. – constantly bothers
him. They are the vote banks for politicians and the bargain seekers in the
world of commodities as they lose themselves in “ a wilderness of display, a
wilderness of world’s worst rubbish” (Muller 27). They travel in buses, live in
homes with a leaking roof and buy from open pavement stalls with “this insane
urge to buy an ugly bauble, even a plastic flower which, they hope, will
brighten their shabby homes” (Muller 27).
Muller
further highlights the slums in Colombo as a site of juvenile delinquency and
youth crime. Colombo highlights the
abundance of sex crime and abuse in the slum areas. Brusasco comments that
Muller’s “treatment of sexuality takes a different color in Colombo, where it
is portrayed as dark, traumatic and often relying on a net of illicit family or
social connivance so as to stress its most despicable and poisonous aspects” (183).
Muller creates vivid images of children
turning themselves into prostitutes, thieves, drug addicts, actors in porn, and
so on. Muller’s dictum “these slum children have a sharp native intelligence …
they know on which side their bread is buttered” (Muller 148) sums up the life
and character of the slum children.
Walter Benjamin says the figure of the prostitute is an allegory of the
(human) commodity and its status as exchange-value object in the urban
phantasmagoria. Sex in the city turns into a fetish and the prostitute/poor
child, an object that offer herself/himself as a substitute for financial
return. The slum children begin to look at sex as a commodity that can be
exchanged for something valuable; as a physical activity (labour) remote from
emotion that makes them vulnerable to crimes like prostitution and rape. Andreotti
and Lahiji comments that “the dialectic in the general structure of fetishism
determines the relation between the thing itself and its substitute in such a
way that this substitute behind which the thing itself lies hidden, ultimately
disappears in favor of the thing itself” (26). In the world of tourism, where
Sri Lanka, Colombo in particular, is projected as the ideal haven for
pleasure-seeking tourists, the subjection of the body to exploitation is hardly
noticed over the commodity of sex that these (little) bodies provide. Muller
dramatizes sexual encounters between tourists and the local people, especially
children. Jody Miller in his study on homosexuality in Sri Lanka highlights
that the “Europeans were generally fascinated; in both an ethnographic and
prurient fashion by sexual practices overseas” (7). They expect that the
non-western people are born with “abnormal sexual endowments” (Miller 7) and
can provide them with “kinky refinements of sexual pleasure” (Miller 7). In Muller’s Colombo, in the chapter “Oh, Oh, Colombo”, Siya works as a pimp
whose job is to provide a good sexual experience to foreigners. He offers his
clients children who, he knows, are easy to procure. Sila offers his own
daughter, Nila, to sexually please the “suddas”/ foreigners. Nila, although she
does not like the experience with the “suddas”, it is gratifying to the little
child to be able to buy a “packet of sugar for her father” and “a small tin of
powdered milk” (Muller 305). Such sexual relationships are not difficult to
form in the city with an ever-growing appetite for excitement and thrill, with
poverty on one side, and money and power on the other. Although prostitution is
a taboo and homosexuality a crime in Sri Lanka, such activities go unabated in
the city.
These
stories lend a “phantasmagoric” element to Muller’s urban writing as they are
meant to create enough stimuli for the readers so as to “shock”[iii]
them out of their senses, in the same way as intoxication or drug addiction, as
Andreotti and Lahiji suggest, can lead to phantasmagoria. Muller promotes an
alternative way of perceiving the city that builds on a strange fascination for
the slums that seems to have erupted in post independent Colombo as the city
struggled to cope with its new found independence, postcoloniality and
modernity. The stories show Colombo’s failure to be a welfare city as
developmental policies fail to improve people’s lives and inequality and
conflict becomes the core of the economic expansion of Sri Lanka.
In The Hungry Ghosts, Selvadurai highlights
the difference between the poor in Sri Lanka and the poor in Canada. The poor
are a common category of people in both the countries. However, while Canada
encourages the poor to better their lives, Colombo pushes the economically downtrodden
communities further into anonymity.
Shivan and his family, as Tamils (Shivan’s father is Tamil), belonged to
the minority in both Sri Lanka and Canada. Shivan saw that his grandmother
treated the poor and other Tamils with utter disgust. She justified her actions
by saying that the Tamils are better off than the Sinhalese; the Tamils who
emigrate to Australia and Canada are much richer than the Sinhalese. Shivan
contests this idea by saying, “No, Aacho, that is not so. Tamils are poor in
those countries, very poor” (Selvadurai 160), thereby, highlighting the diasporic
experience of Tamils in Canada. Shivan himself goes to Canada lured by its
promise of cultural hybridity but he finds that racialization is hidden within
the folds of multiculturalism in Canada. Family Class Migrants like Shivan and
his family, upon their arrival at Canada had to “double up” with their family
and friends that triggered the problem of overcrowding and “hidden
homelessness” in the host city. It is a struggle for the migrants to find a
house for themselves due to acute shortage of houses and they end up becoming
soft targets to high rent demands. The Subramaniams extracted much money from
Shivan’s mother on the pretext of offering them shelter. The dominant white
communities in Canada look down upon the minority communities of color and
harbor certain stereotypical beliefs about them. This leads to Asian “cultural
ghettoization” in those places. Shivan notices that the Sri Lankan community in
Canada frequents certain spaces that bring to fore the idea of racialized space
and community construction in Canada. The marginalized communities feel the
need to carve out their own space in their struggle for recognition and
inclusion within the multicultural landscape of Canadian society and thus, the
racialized spaces reflect power relations within society. The inner city slums
in Canada are examples of how state structures erect spaces to “ghettoize” and
exclude marginalized racial groups from the rest of the society. Selvadurai,
however, highlights that despite everything else Canada is still more
hospitable than Colombo. Canada is home to a number of Jaffna Tamil boys, who
otherwise in Sri Lanka are either killed or forced to join extremist groups.
Colombo forces its’ own citizens to find “home” elsewhere, whereas Canada
accepts even a refugee as its own citizen and provides them with “home”.
The
Streets of Colombo
The Streets of Colombo, in Muller and Selvadurai’s
fiction, display contestations over public space, citizenship, power and urban
reconfiguration; it is a mix of imaginations – of modernity, globalization,
cosmopolitanism and tradition. The shopping malls, grand hotels, luxury
apartments, latest fashion and luxury cars stands as testimony to Colombo’s
aspirations to be a world-class city. However, Colombo also cannot do without the
street hawkers, congestion, dirt, lawlessness, beggars, porters and labourers-
those elements which the writers suggest- define the essence of Colombo. The
writers represent the dialectical character of the streets as they stand for
contradictory things: wealth and poverty, local practices and globally
circulating commodities, the sacred and the profane.
In the
novels, the narrator/protagonist, a spectator of the urban landscape, is a
prototype of Walter Benjamin and Baudelaire’s flâneur, a gentleman stroller of streets. He is an
explorer, a modern urban spectator who inspects the city while remaining a
detached spectator. Interestingly, while in Muller’s Colombo, the
narrator remains a detached spectator of the street, Selvadurai’s Shivan, to a
certain extent, does not remain detached, but a participant – someone of the
street who shares the experience of being in the street, both in Colombo and in
Canada. He finds himself comparing Colombo with Toronto and Vancouver.
Shivan takes into account the way streets
in Colombo are bifurcated into lanes and bye lanes; the way the streets in the
elite areas are clear and smooth but those in the dilapidated areas rough and
uneven, and the way streets transformed into sites of communal violence during
riots. The Hungry Ghosts throws light into post-independence urban
planning in Sri Lanka. “Town planning”, a western concept, as Edward Relph suggests,
began as a reaction against industrialization and was treated as a means of
“providing grand solutions to all urban problems, either by radical
redevelopment for city beautification or by the construction of entirely new
garden cities” (63-64). Town planning is accompanied by other western ideas
such as “zoning” and “street design”. Another 20th century western
concept, “Garden Cities” aimed at making a community surrounded by nature
“containing proportionate areas of residences, industry and agriculture”
(Waterford 81). Garden cities demand
zoning, i.e., targeting a particular area in the country/city and ordering them
as per the plan. As far as Colombo is concerned, the British in the 19th
century had a huge project of making Colombo a “Garden City of the East”. Sir
Patrick Geddes made the first plan for Colombo in 1921; others followed this such
as Sir Leslie Patrick Abercrombie’s plan in 1948 and the first Master Plan of
Colombo Metropolitan Region in 1978.
However, not all parts of the city received equal attention and even in
the post-colonial period, the condition of the roads became typical of the
areas to which they belong. The poorer streets became a metaphor for poverty,
marginalization and corruption.
The figure
of the prostitute in the streets, as suggested earlier, is a primary trope in Colombo, symbolizing social suffering
and degradation. Muller highlights streets in prime areas in Colombo such as
the Slave Island, Fort Railway Station, Pettah, Maradana and Borella that
transforms from “the regular street used to drive and hawk and beg during the
day” (Gandhi 209) into “a place where single women with bright makeup and bold
stares and stand at night” (Gandhi 209). The prostitute figure adds an element
of eroticism to the street as she makes a “living of the debris of the streets
and sells her wares in the market place” (Nord 5). She becomes a means to
satisfy the demand for pleasure in the city and epitomizes the fleeting nature
of urban relations; in her sexuality, she marks “the ephemeral, the fugitive,
the contingent” (Nord 5), those very qualities that Baudelaire associates with
modernity. In Colombo, the depiction
of the prostitute amidst the dirt and squalor of city streets is metaphorically
connected with the unhygienic and contaminated conditions of urban life, with
the wastes, poverty, vagrancy and all kinds of vices of the streets.
The overwhelming presence of the poor and
criminals on the streets makes Muller’s flâneur shape the reality of the
streets of Colombo as dialectically and paradoxically structured as the space
is a constant friction between two kinds of spectacles – the spectacle of the
poor and outcasts and the spectacle of the grand.
According to R. P. Mishra, “Colombo attracts about 1.5 million people
from neighboring areas on any working day. The resident population plus the
floating population during the daytime add up to more than 2 million. It is
estimated that 50 percent of the commuting population arrives in the city for
employment, business, and education” (427). Many of these immigrants are incorporated into the urban economy as
informal wage earners. In Colombo, Lakshmi’s family exemplifies
this. Lakshmi’s father, “a thin, wiry
man” with a hunch, works as a coolie at Pettah market and pulls “heavy trolley,
struggling and panting each time it twisted in the potholes of the nightmare
street” (Muller 149). People like them
are the street’s underclass; they are the drivers, labourers, cleaners,
beggars, street performers, etc. who physically overpower the street but are
absent from its consciousness. The phantasmagoric quality of the streets is
highlighted in its dreamlike and fluid quality to transform itself into many
things – it is a home for the underclass; during daytime, they congregate at
the street waiting for employers to hire them, and at nighttime, the street is
their bedroom. At night and during festivals and celebrations, the street
emerges as the haunt of criminals. In “The Leafy Mango Tree”, the rapist Justin
roams around at night looking for his prey.
In “Let Sleeping Gods Lie”, Oscar’s daughter Nelum is assaulted and
abused as she goes to see the spectacular Vesak festival with her family: “someone
squeezed Nelum, dug a finger into the cleft of her buttocks, brushed a hand against
her breast” (Muller 89). Thus, the
streets of Colombo represent the paradoxes inherent in the notion of modernity
itself.
In The Hungry Ghosts, Selvadurai presents a
comparison between the streets of Toronto and that of Colombo. In Toronto,
Shivan frequented the streets of Kensington Market and the Queen Street and
found them as an embodiment of Canada’s multicultural spirit. As a homosexual,
he appreciated Toronto’s “cold” and indifferent attitude towards foreigners.
Shivan does mention that he experienced some amount of racism in the bars,
however, on hindsight, Shivan favours the streets of Cananda over the streets
in Colombo that he saw, turned into sites of violence during the civil
war. Shivan highlights that in 1983,
when Colombo was in the grip of communal riots between the Sinhalese and the
Tamils, the streets became a site of large gang attacking activities. The
streets became a place for political spectacle, a space for slogan raising,
procession and rallies of violent people. The small alleys and lanes in
Colombo, that usually were points of contact between people of various
communities emerge as palimpsests of narratives of victimization, persecution
and retaliation. Shivan highlights how during the riots, some Sinhalese people
helped their Tamil neighbours escape the brunt of violence, while there were
others who turned against their own neighbours and moved into streets to burn
down Tamil houses. Aacho helps a Tamil family migrate to Canada but on the
condition that they sell their house for the lowest price possible. In another
instance, Aacho gets Mili, Shivan’s homosexual partner in Colombo, killed by
the goons. Thus, the streets are
manifestation of intolerance and resentment towards the minorities and
highlight the paradoxes inherent in the notion of modernity in the postcolonial
city.
Thus, Muller and Selvadurai ultimately represent
Colombo as a real place with real problems. Their representation defies the
audience’s expectations to see an exotic and heavenly place. Muller, in his
narrative, incorporates as he subverts the exotic descriptions of Colombo by
travellers from the West – Pablo Neruda called Ceylon “a pearl of greenness,
flower of the island, tower of beauty” (Muller 246); Anton Chekov called Ceylon
“the site of paradise” where he enjoyed “dalliance with a dark-eyed Hindu girl
… in a coconut grove on a moonlit night” (Muller 247) and Andre Malraux found
“Colombo one of the calmest places on earth” (Muller 247) – by putting disease,
death and poverty at the center of narrating Colombo. Muller’s analysis of the
everyday life of his characters brings forth the corrupt and dehumanized face
of the city; for the characters Colombo is anything but a dream space. There is
a conscious effort on the part of the writers to resist the stereotypical way
of looking at the Sri Lankan landscape as pristine and paradisiacal. The
writers overturn the inherited traditions associated with European romanticism
by refiguring and reimagining the postcolonial landscapes of Sri Lanka in new
ways. They do not uncritically replicate the modes of landscape and they
highlight the perceived otherness of the landscape as the basis for a
distinctive Sri Lankan identity. Instead of initiating a pastoral or wilderness
narrative, the writers opt to map the landscape by placing the struggles of the
island – poverty, overpopulation, collapsing eco-systems, militarization,
terrorism, industrialization, death and disease– at the center thereby offering
a counter narrative.
[i]
See Muller’s Once Upon a Tender Time, The Jam Fruit Tree and Yakada Yaka.
[ii] In
another study, Representing Calcutta: Modernity, nationalism and the
colonial uncanny (2005), by Swati Chattopadhyay, Calcutta is shown as a
place where modernity has gone astray.
[iii] Walter Benjamin, as explained by
Buck-Morss, understood modern experience as one that is neurological and based
on the experience of shock. Buck-Morss explains that Benjamin believed that
consciousness usually protected a person from the “excessive energies” of
stimuli; however, without consciousness, excessive energy or stimuli of the
modern experience may result in what he calls shock and trauma. See
Buck-Morss’s The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the
Arcades Project (1989).
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