- Prof. Sasanka Perera on art, history, and collective memory
Our history is a huge part of who we are, but no two people have the same view of history. Humanity is very complex and there are so many influences that make us who we are and shape how we see and experience the world, both collectively and individually. History and how we remember our history play a huge part in how we see ourselves today, and how we see ourselves in the future.
To be able to study this aspect of humanity, to be able to look at our history and see how it has shaped us, what has endured in our collective and individual memories and what has not, and to draw conclusions on where our remembered histories can take us in the future, is a fascinating field to be able to delve into.
Prof. Sasanka Perera is a sociologist who, through his personal research, observes how we as people remember our histories, and what influences make us remember them in the way we do. A sociologist who, by his own admission, was trained “a very long time ago at the University of California”. Prof. Perera was with the Department of Sociology at the University of Colombo, Sri Lanka for 20 years before going on to become a founding faculty member of the South Asian University’s New Delhi Department of Sociology, and its former Vice President. He was also the Founding Chairman of the Colombo Institute for the Advanced Study of Society and Culture and was the Founding Editor of Society and Culture in South Asia (the journal of the Department of Sociology, South Asian University, co-published with Sage India). His research interests have enabled him to work in Sri Lanka, the US, Cambodia, Pakistan, Nepal, Japan, and India. He has written extensively and published in Sri Lanka, India, and internationally in the English and Sinhala languages.
Last week, he was part of an eminent panel on the relationship between art and memory, held as part of the World Art and Memory Museum’s Curating Cultures of Memory webinar series. In the panel, Prof. Perera discussed the methodological usefulness of things like art in documenting memory and if art can be a useful means of understanding violence formally in disciplines like social anthropology. Essentially, can art, be it sculpture, paintings, performance, or even written art like poetry, be treated as “facts” in the same way facts can be drawn from an interview or statistics? Brunch caught up with Prof. Perera for more on the relationship between art and sociology, and how art can shape how we remember our history.
Becoming a sociologist
Prof. Perera’s path into sociology initially stemmed from a desire to study languages. At a time when studying sciences was far more the status quo than languages and humanities, this desire was not always well received, with Prof. Perera recalling that his principal tried very hard to encourage him to pursue sciences, but it was an avenue that simply did not interest him.
“Sociology was a clinical decision,” Prof. Perera explained. “By the time I had finished my Advanced Levels (A/Ls), I didn’t plan to be a scholar. I was thinking of a job, and I wanted at one point to join the foreign service. A relative of mine, who was a high-ranking official at the time, told me that wouldn’t be a good idea because I don’t listen to people in authority. I then picked up sociology because this was the time the inter-ethnic conflict in Sri Lanka was becoming a very serious problem, and though I came from a Sinhala-Buddhist nationalistic background, by the time I came to university, I knew something was wrong with the way we were dealing with ethnicity, religion, and politics more broadly. I was looking for a discipline that would give me answers and that was what put me on track to sociology and then social anthropology. In short, I was looking for a tool to unravel the kind of politics that was going on at the time, and I couldn’t unravel that with the knowledge I had at the time.”
While he does find the institutional setup of academia restricting at times, one thing that does keep things interesting for Prof. Perera is that sociology is a way of looking at society and combined with his personal interests in photography, poetry, blogging, art, music, and journalism, allows him to take an unconventional approach in an academic culture in Sri Lanka that is very undergraduate-focused and not always one that fosters great intellectualism.
Prof. Perera’s passion for languages also keeps things interesting, and he works frequently on translations of both creative and scholarly work into Sinhala. One current translation project Prof. Perera is working on with a friend from the University of Ruhuna, Indu Gamage, is the translation of selected works by the 13th-Century Iranian poet Jalaluddin Rumi. Part of Prof. Perera’s drive to translate work like this is to give Sri Lankan state university graduates the chance to expose themselves to intellectual and cultural material of this nature – exposure that has been declining since state universities switched to Sinhala and Tamil in the 1960s because works like these are not available in these languages.
Art, memory, and sociology
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A temple painting from the Subhodharama Raja Maha Viharaya, Karagampitiya[/caption]
Prof. Perera’s interest in art as a methodological tool in sociology comes from the role art can play in our collective memory. Our memory, which in this context is how we collectively remember our history, and traumas within that history, and how we remember the people we have lost because of these traumas, is indicated in whatever we do. It is part of our ritual traditions, our biases, and our fears.
In the present day, Prof. Perera shared, the pandemic will have a major impact on our memory, which will vary from person to person and community to community. The Muslim community, for example, will remember the pandemic differently because of the lack of closure it brought for the burial of their dead. The way the regime remembers the pandemic will be different from how private and other public communities will remember the pandemic. Memory and remembrance are not accurate; they tend to “edit” actively based on what we want to remember.
Prof. Perera’s take on art and its role in sociology is unconventional. Art, he explained, talks about our society in a more nuanced way than statistics (and sociology is heavily statistics-driven) ever could. “For example, if we are looking at the civil war, from the late 1970s to 2009, from the northern perspective, we would definitely be talking to survivors and the military, but I would also want to look at Tamil poetry from that era and area, and I would also want to look at art post-war, particularly what is known as the ‘Art of the 1980s’. Without looking at these, I would consider my understanding incomplete,” he said, noting that this is because art captures viewpoints and perspectives from the time it was created that don’t always make their way into collective or public memories and histories; even if he was to look at the impact of the civil war on southern Sri Lanka, because the art and poetry from that time during the war would provide a much more nuanced view than a sociologists' data alone.
Prof. Perera did stress that while art does play an important role, because of its personal subjectivity, it cannot be the sole voice to speak for a phase of violence or a period of politics, there needs to be secondary sources and statistics too where needed, located in the context of other discourse to provide a comprehensive view of any given time and its issues.
Art and its influence on memory in the present day
With art, the bottom line, Prof. Perera shared, is that art reflects the time in which it is made, shedding light on parts of our history that memory has forgotten over the years. For example, Prof. Perera shared, there are temple paintings that show demons in hell carrying guns, which is fascinating not simply because depictions of hell precede guns, but because this hints at how artists at the time equated guns with the demons, most probably trying to say something about colonialism and the destruction colonialists wreaked with their guns, he opined.
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A temple painting from the Subhodharama Raja Maha Viharaya, Karagampitiya[/caption]
Art of the time can also show us how different communities interacted, with Prof. Perera noting that murals at the Subodharama Raja Maha Viharaya Temple in Karagampitiya clearly depict Muslims participating in the perahera. Art can also depict how we as a society dealt with external influences at different times in history, with Ridi Viharaya in Kurunegala, which Prof. Perera has visited, using Dutch period tiles depicting the life of Christ within the shrine room. In Dutch period documents, you can also find references to different communities from Africans and Turks to Moors and Brahmins, all playing an active role in King Wimaladharmasuriya I’s court, showing how concepts that seem alien to us today (like having foreigners in our government) were not unusual at one point in history. “In our current intolerant context, this is a very powerful statement, and if you look at that kind of art and documentary evidence, it tells you about a very interesting part of our lives at a particular historical time.”
Preserving a more nuanced form of memory
The fickle nature of our collective memory means that there do come points in time when we have forgotten integral parts of who we were. Prof. Perera shared that there is plenty of evidence, particularly throughout the Kandyan period, that shows how tolerant we were as a people. “Some people say that you should look at the past to create the present,” Prof. Perera said. “But if that’s so, we’re looking at the wrong past. There were tolerant ways that we dealt with different religions, ethnicities, and differences that we have either simply forgotten or do not want to remember.”
Prof. Perera also shared that there needs to be bigger interest from people in rediscovering themselves, and he is not sure this is something the Sri Lankan people have yet paid serious attention to. The key to promoting this rediscovery is making information available, both through a reasonable understanding of our history being taught in schools, as well as through information that is privately available for people to discover; and here, the media too can play a role through publishing and circulating these lessons from history that have been forgotten. “We have a pretty parochial outlook of the past, and it is the job of scholars to bring out these fascinating and forgotten stories as well as the job of the State to make sure it is taught in state schools, as well as private schools. This is about citizenship.”
