Instead of orthodox analytical approaches, using ‘poetics’ marks a more nuanced approach to studying, analysing, and exploring Sri Lankan socio-political scenarios. The use of ‘poetics’ as an analytical tool gives a sense of novelty and a different colour to the study. As indicated in the book’s title, the ‘poetics’ is used as an analytical tool through Gunadasa Amarasekara’s writings. The third thinker, Gunadasa Amarasekara is occasionally used as a tool of analysis for the first two thinkers. The author locates the first two thinkers in a broader socio-economic and political sphere where they continually crisscross across the nation-state’s boundaries. The book critically offers a sense of Sri Lankan political history at a glance.Īdhering to the above theoretical framework, the author explores three thinkers who appeared in colonial and post-colonial contexts: Anagarika Dharmapala S.W.R.D. Within this kind of discursive framework, the book explores the politics of Sinhala cultural and political authenticity which emerged in the colonial period and evolved into a hegemonic force during the post-colonial era.
As Rambukwella correctly proposes in his book, nationalists and post-colonial scholars hardly escape from the geopolitical duality between East and West. However, these attempts to decolonize the knowledge of nationalism barely escape from the trap of generating an ‘authentic past’. Post-colonial knowledge production forecast nationalism in a different theoretical frame with attempts of decolonization. While Gellner projects the institutional nature of nationalism, Anderson sees nationalism both as institutional and cultural. The ‘nation’ imagines itself as a homogenous entity occupied by connected individuals who share the same time-frame.
In this context, ‘time’ is defined by the clock or the calendar, which Anderson understands as ’empty homogenous time’. In this new milieu, ‘time’ escapes from the religious frame and locates itself in a more secular frame. Anderson approaches the phenomena differently, explaining how mass circulation of print media such as novels and newspapers enables a community to imagine itself as a homogenous group regardless of their differences and diversities. The nation-state is built upon and energized upon nationalism. In that case, mass education, literacy, and bureaucracy are considered as preconditions of nationalism. For Gellner, ‘nationalism’ emerges from transforming society from an agrarian economy to an industrial economy. In his journey towards grappling with nationality and nationalism, the author analyses the similarities and differences between writers like Ernest Gellner and Benedict Anderson. As per his explanation and analysis, the notion ‘ apēkama‘ is not a personal, idiosyncratic belief, but a discourse which reproduces and transmits from generation to generation. The author historicises the notion of ‘apēkama’ by guiding the reader to navigate through different times, spaces and phases. The study links the concept of ‘authenticity’ with the Sinhala word ‘ apēkama‘, which can be loosely translated as ‘ourness’. Nationalism often seeks to associate with ideas of ‘authenticity’. The study is engrossed in understanding nationalists’ conduct within ‘nationalism’ and how they produce and reproduce nationalism than to understand what nationalism is. Efforts have been made to separate ‘nationalism as a category of action’ and ‘nationalism as a category of analysis’. The author comes out from the comfort zone of what is ‘given’ or deemed inevitable. The study explores these concepts with fluidity and points out the danger of using them in a ‘given-universal’ form. Pushing the boundaries of analysis beyond the surface of prevailing scholarship, Rambukwella deconstructs the idea of nationalism, rather than understanding it as ‘given’ or ‘universal’. Rambukwella’s book finds its roots in the rupture of the existing scholarship where nationalism is seen as the endpoint in understanding Sri Lankan politics. Many scholars have made Sinhala nationalism ‘the reason’ of conflict and war, making it a dead-end socio-political analysis. The over-use of the concept, ‘Sinhala nationalism’ has made it a tedious and an outdated analytical tool in Sri Lankan scholarship. Harshana Rambukwella, The Politics and Poetics of Authenticity: A Cultural Genealogy of Sinhala Nationalism, 2018.
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