An agonising cultural gap

“The truest expression of its people is in its dances and its music” (American Choreographer, Agness De Mille, niece of Cecille B. DeMille)

Introduction

The Honorary Consulate of Sri Lanka in Western Australia and The Sri Lankan Cultural Society of Western Australia recently celebrated the 78th year of Independence Day in Subiaco, Perth. I had the privilege of being invited as one of the guests, and I did attend. It was a two-hour enjoyable evening attended by around 200 expatriates, which as usual ended with Sri Lankan refreshments. The organisers presented a variety of Sri Lankan cultural music and dance items all of them representing the Sinhala and Tamil communities of the motherland, and I as a Sri Lankan Muslim felt ashamed of the absence of even one item to represent the Moor and Malay communities. It was not the fault of the organisers because there was none available to pick and present. The fault lies in the two communities back home. What follows is a reiteration of the reasons for this cultural poverty which this author had dealt with in previous contributions to the Daily FT.

Golden era of Muslim history

Thanks to Lorna Devarajah’s 1974 publication Muslims of Sri Lanka: One Thousand Years of Ethnic Harmony - 900-1915, there is at least a scholarly foundation to build a more detailed and constructive foundation of the unique history and experience of the Muslim minority in Buddhist Sri Lanka. It will be difficult to find another country in Asia or elsewhere where a Muslim minority had such a peaceful and prosperous existence as it did in what was then known as Serendib and Jezirat al-Yaqut or land of rubies in the Arab world. The Malay community was a late addition dating back to the Dutch era.    

Over the centuries however, including the colonial era cross-cultural interactions had influenced the way of living of every community including the Muslims; and when independence came in 1948 Sri Lanka’s demography had become a rich tapestry of cultural heterogeneity.  Within the Muslim community naattukkavi (folksong), kalikkampu (baton play), faqir bait (songs of sufi mendicants) and rabban (drum played mainly by Malay women) became sources of entertainment to celebrate happy occasions. The koodu festival procession in Meeramakkam mosque in Kandy, kodiyettam festival in Kalmunai, kanduri festivals in various mosques attracted men and women from different communities. In Kattankudy circumcision of children born in affluent families was an occasion for nightly processions of those to be circumcised but accompanied by music and drums performed by melam (drum) and nathaswaram (double reed instrument) artists who were all Tamils. This author remembers one parent bringing Kandyan dancers for his child’s circumcision procession. It was indeed culturally a healthy development which brought communities together and had no relevance to religion. That was a golden era. 

Era of religious purifiers

The 1950s brought in the missionaries of Tablighi Jamat (TJ) from India to Sri Lanka. TJ was born after the demise of the Khilafat Movement led by the two famous Moulana brothers, Muhmmmad Ali and Shaukat Ali whose anti-British campaign attracted Ghandi also. TJ was aiming to make Muslims become more observant of their obligatory religious duties, and to purify Islam from all syncretic elements.  These missionaries were the foot soldiers of Allah who dedicated their life to make nominal Muslims better Muslims rather than to convert non-Muslims to Islam. As a result, mosques became crowded with worshippers causing more and larger mosques to be built, prayer calls grew louder via loudspeakers, and the attire and appearance of at least male Muslims slowly began to change.  All forms of worldly entertainment such as watching movies, listening to songs and music, attending dance festivals and so on were discouraged. Even the spoken Tamil dialect of Muslims underwent change with greater inflection of Arabic words.  But more damagingly, Muslim community began to lose interest in its own local cultural heritage. In short, TJ perhaps quite unintentionally paved the way for the self-alienation of a community that was living integrated with others for more than a millennium.

Meanwhile, the 1960s witnessed a renaissance in the folk drama of Sinhalese and Tamils under the able guidance of Professor Sarachchandra and Dr. Vithyananthan respectively and the University of Ceylon at Peradeniya became its epicentre. Maname Sinhaba in Sinhalese and Karnan Por in Tamil were landmark productions by these dramatists. After Vithyananthan, Professor Mounaguru who performed the role of Karnanan when he was an undergraduate later continued from where Vidyanathan left and staged that drama in Switzerland and Canada. Maunaguru was also instrumental in converting Eastern University to the nucleus of Tamil folk drama revival. Vithyananthan also introduced a Muslim version of villuppattu and produced piraippattu with Islamic themes. But none of these developments touched the hearts and minds of the Muslim community, and it was left to one leader Badiuddin Mahmud, who was the Minister of Education in the 1970s to do something about this cultural lacuna, and he boldly introduced music and dance as part of the teaching curricula in Muslim schools.  As expected, it led to an uproar led by the mullahs, and one young budding Muslim politician at that time, M.H.M. Ashraf, the future founder President of Sri Lanka Muslim Congress, led a vicious campaign against the minister, and soon the minister’s reforms were declared haram (prohibited) by the mullahs, and the minister’s reform had a natural death. 

Muslim self-alienation received a fresh impetus under the Open Economy of President J.R. Jayawardena. It opened the flood gates to more waves of Islam purifying movements led by Wahhabism from Saudi Arabia. There were also other Islamist ideologies accompanying Wahhabism from the Middle East. TJ only changed the appearance and attire of Muslim males, but the new wave of purists entered the female world also.  However, to all these purifiers secular aesthetic expressions of art, music and other forms of entertainment are repugnant and were viewed as devil’s creations to lead Muslims astray from the right path. As a result, Muslim traditional arts and entertainment like kalikkampu, nattukkavi, faqir bait and rabban became part of a forgotten history.  

Need for a renaissance 

In 2023, Nadya Bhimani Perera’s documentary film “Minarets”, brought to light the traditional musical expressions of Sri Lankan Muslims to the view of a new generation. The community should be thankful to her efforts and that documentary should have been an eyeopener to Muslim leaders especially to the intelligentsia to realise the need for a cultural renaissance in the community. As pointed out earlier it was the university that played a key role in reviving the forgotten Sinhala and Tamil arts in the 1960s and ‘70s.  There is now a national university in the heart of a Muslim area in the Eastern Province, which for all intents and purposes is operating as a Muslim University. It is the task of this university’s academic community to take up the challenge of initiating a cultural renaissance. The lost musical and other aesthetic traditions of Sri Lankan Muslims should not only be revived but more importantly be modernised to make them presentable on the world stage. The current agonising cultural gap must be closed.