India's National Magazine
From the publishers of THE HINDU

Vol. 16 :: No. 04 :: Feb. 13 - 26, 1999

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SYMPOSIUM: SRI LANKA'S CULTURAL EXPERIENCE

Debunking ethnic labels

Michael Ondaatje's Running in the Family is valuable as a springboard to interrogate and deconstruct the hegemonic myths of a pure national identity that are prevalent today.

NELUKA SILVA

Everyone was vaguely related and had Sinhalese, Tamil, Dutch, British and Burgher blood in them going back many generations... Emil Daniels summed up the situation for most of them when he was asked by one of the British governors what his nationality was - "God alone knows, Your Excellency."

- from Running in the Family, Ondaatje, 1982.

MICHAEL ONDAATJE, the Booker Prize-winning writer of mixed Tamil and Burgher ancestry, was born in Sri Lanka and left the island at the age of 11. He now lives and works in Canada. The English Patient won him international prestige. This article seeks to examine one of his earlier books, Running in the Family (1982), as a text which explores Ondaatje's concern with identity and historiography and provides an enabling critique of nationalist discourse in contemporary Sri Lanka.1 While Running in the Family reflects Ondaatje's personal claim to a multi-cultural inheritance, it also bears testimony to the island's multi-cultural topography.

Family vignettes in Running in the Family function as a microcosm of the world of the upper-class Burgher. They enact the traumas of finding hitherto accepted realities and identity destabilised in the transitional era of decolonisation. The key events occur in the historical juncture when colonial hierarchies are in the process of being dismantled.

Through the deployment of two recurring metaphors - marriage and the theatre - Ondaatje establishes his own ancestry and inscribes the historical circumstances that have shaped the diverse character of the modern Sri Lankan nation-state.

(Ceylon was) the wife of many marriages, courted by invaders who stepped ashore and claimed everything with the power of their sword or bible or language (emphasis added).

This pendant, once its shape stood still, became a mirror. It pretended to reflect each European power till newer ships arrived and spilled their nationalities, some of whom stayed and intermarried - my own ancestor arriving in 1600, a doctor who cured the residing governor's daughter with a strange herb and was rewarded with land, a foreign wife, and a new name which was a Dutch spelling of his own. Ondaatje.

In both passages, Ondaatje signals the presence of cross-cultural alliances and his personal investment in them. Sri Lanka is located as a mystical paradise conducive to such liaisons. However, this 'exotic' ambience enshrouds the more inimical aspects behind the coloniser's 'civilising' mission. A seemingly innocent comment like 'Ceylon falls on a map and its outline is the shape of a tear' reveals the complexities of interrelations between the coloniser and the colonial subject.

The larger political insecurities that threaten the stability of Ondaatje's protagonists in Running in the Family are reflected in fraught marital relationships. The pressure to adhere to the cultural baggage of identity is exemplified in Bampa's (Ondaatje's grandfather's) obsessive emulation of the manners and habits of the English and its detrimental effect on his marriage as well as his personality. Bampa's excessive dominance lies in the familial domain where the whole family lived in terror of him. Only his death 'liberates' them, particularly his wife, from the shackles of 'English' decorum.

The overtones of disenchantment inscribed within the power-politics of marriage are invested with a symbolic value. The description of Ceylon as 'the wife of many marriages' is more than an oblique reference to the egregious effects of colonialism and, like the marital relationship, foregrounds an antagonistic element. Similarly, in the light of this relationship between marriage and colonialism, the undermining effects of adultery and duplicity within the marriages in the text symbolise moments of pre-Independence resistance. The description of Lalla's position after the death of her husband, as liberated but '(managing) to persuade all those she met into chaos', may be read as a metaphoric enactment of the tensions of the post-Independence nation, carrying also a prophetic note of the state of affairs in 1983, soon after the publication of the text in 1982.

The hierarchical nature of ethnic relations in the pre-Independence period encroaches on the workings of personal relationships. In the text, the snobbery of Ondaatje's family contests the assumption that the Burghers were eager to intermarry into other communities. The episode of Lalla's dismissal of the news of her daughter's engagement to a Tamil reinforces the disinclination towards intermarriage.

BY SPECIAL ARRANGEMENT
Michael Ondaatje

When my mother eventually announced her engagement to my father, Lalla turned to friends and said, 'What do you think, darling, she's going to marry an Ondaatje... she's going to marry a Tamil!'

She then laughs for the duration of the wedding ceremony, marking the 'beginning of a war' between mother-in-law and son-in-law. The comic incidents that ensue capture the irony that neither Mervyn nor Lalla has a claim to ethnic 'superiority', and point to the present-day futility of a war based on ethnic differences. This episode offers useful insights into a broader, more moderate envisioning of the contemporary Sri Lankan nation. Moreover, Ondaatje has already revealed the speciousness of ethnic 'purity' by giving the reader a description of the 'hybrid' ancestry of the protagonists.

The theatricalities of the socialites provide much of the entertainment in Running in the Family. Distinctions between reality and 'acting' are frequently blurred, registering the tenuousness of public and private identity. Almost all of Ondaatje's protagonists exploit the theatre for different reasons, either for entertainment or as a way of defining their identity: the theatre provides them with a means of retreating to and retrieving a halcyon world of make-believe. Theatrical activities are integral to the culture of decadence and insouciance. The Burgher set in Running in the Family is like a tropical avatar of the legendary Jazz Age society.

After the races they would return to Ambalangoda, pick up the oysters "which we swallowed with wine if we lost or champagne if we won". Couples then paired off casually or with great complexity and danced in a half-hearted manner to the portable gramophone beside the cars. Ambalangoda was the centre for devil dances and exorcism rites, but this charmed group was part of another lost world. The men leaned their chins against the serene necks of the women, danced a waltz or two, slid oysters down their partners' mouths.

The protagonists here are a set of dreamlike people who have never calculated the cost of their affluent lifestyle. Yet the menace always hovers beneath the glamour. It is present in the form of devil dances, interweaving the supernatural and the macabre with family experience, revealing how the dream can easily collapse into nightmare. In the context of decolonisation, like the theatrical excesses within marriage, the hedonistic lifestyle and the unquestioning enthusiasm with which 'Western' practices are re-enacted can be read as a masquerade for the insidious disquiet which lurks behind the overt joie de vivre.

Lalla's drowning in the flood in 1947, less than a year before Ceylon became independent, is as theatrical as the fancy dress parties and the drunken revelry. The image of the flood has strong overtones of the biblical flood; it heralds a new era. The final image of Lalla, as 'free as a fish', is interfused with Ondaatje's own version of the events. The element of uncertainty inscribed in the narrative is a manifestation of the protagonists' doubt in a new era which ushers in a different set of parameters. Like the biblical flood, this era cleanses as well as destroys the old structures of dominance. The injustice meted out to the majority Sinhalese could no longer be ignored, and the Burghers as well as the English-speaking elite were aware that the advent of Independence heralded the end of their freedom and privileges.

The theatrical behaviour of the Burgher characters in the novel is thus a protective device that on the one hand conceals the exclusionary practices of other communities and masks the consciousness of being perceived by the majority communities as ethnic anomalies. However, it also bolsters a sense of belonging by acting out the external markers of European identity in a more emphatic form.

In documenting and reclaiming his family history, Ondaatje reveals the blurring of racial distinctions that constitute Sri Lankan identity. Although Running in the Family was written in 1982, a year before ethnic violence erupted, the text is valuable as a springboard to interrogate and deconstruct the hegemonic myths of a pure national identity that are prevalent today. Foregrounding the hybridised nature of the Sri Lankan nation, Ondaatje debunks facile labels such as Sinhalese or Tamil. While attempting to rehabilitate his own past and restore the umbilical cord that was severed by his migration to Canada, Ondaatje makes a plea for the recognition of multiple identities and ethnicities which negate the nationalist or fundamentalist assertion of a homogeneous national self.

Neluka Silva is a lecturer in English at the University of Colombo.