The Cultural Life of Democracy: Notes on Popular Sovereignty, Culture and Arts in Sri Lanka’s Aragalaya

Abstract

This paper explores the emergence of a demotic style of politics alongside demotic forms of cultural and esthetic expression during Sri Lanka’s 2022 political struggle dubbed the aragalaya (struggle). It argues that the aragalaya opened up a discursive space to reimagine democratic politics in Sri Lanka and the role of aesthetics and culture in such popular-democratic political mobilization. However, the paper also argues that such popular political mobilization and its attendant cultural expression needs to be considered cautiously because its potential is politically and culturally ambiguous. By tracing a critical genealogy of the notion of the “people” in Sri Lankan political history and extending this genealogy to how the “people” was reimagined as an agential collective during the aragalaya and by looking at aesthetic and cultural practices that were foregrounded during the aragalaya—particularly the music of Ajith Kumarasiri—the paper argues that the demotic understanding of the people and the demotic cultural forms that gained prominence within the aragalaya offer a counterpoint to the deeply corrupt and exclusionary mainstream political culture of the country. A central concept used to frame this argument is the analytical and methodological heuristic of the “cultural life of democracy.”

Keywords:

• Sri Lanka
• political uprising
• democracy
• music
• populism
• culture

Introduction

The aragalaya (struggle in English, pōrāṭṭam in Tamil) was, arguably, postcolonial Sri Lanka’s most spectacular mass political event. The aragayala was a historic first for many reasons. It succeeded in breaking the vicious cycle of patron-client politics which often distorts electoral democracy in the country—with impoverished populations being mobilized on the promise of political largesse (Uyangoda 2022; Rambukwella 2022). It transcended—if temporarily—ethnic and religious divisions that have fueled conflict in Sri Lanka. It provided a space for youth activism rarely visible in the political mainstream and it also provided a rare space for alternative cultural expression, including a visibly active LGBTQ community. The political “form” of the aragalaya was novel and, as I argue below, this novel form was manifested in how “the people” emerged as an agential force and how a “people-centric” aesthetic discourse also became prominent within the struggle.

This paper deploys the notion of “cultural life of democracy”—defined as a heuristic to understand the constitutive role culture plays in democracy and also to argue that democracy has a “cultural style” which is not globally uniform—to critically interrogate the possibilities and limitations that the aragalaya offers for rethinking politics in contemporary Sri Lanka. The “cultural style” of the politics of the aragalaya was demotic. It pushed against the more familiar institutionalized style of democracy—deeply corrupt, but still able to project an aura of bureaucratic and established order. At the same time, the cultural life of democracy was also manifested in the cultural and aesthetic forms that were associated with the politics of the aragalaya. Mainstream Sri Lankan aesthetics—particularly within Sinhala cultural production—for many decades following independence retained a national cultural form (Rambukwella 2018a and 2018b). This national cultural form was politically and culturally conservative both in its thematic content and how it expressed itself aesthetically. But within the aragalaya the prominence of avant-garde artists—particularly singers like Ajith Kumarasiri or “Rock Ajith” whose brand of avante-garde music has been pushing against established aesthetics and cultural conventions for some time—signified a demotic aesthetic practice that resonated with the demotic politics of the struggle. This convergence between demotic politics and a demotic cultural style, I argue, marks a brief and transient, but nevertheless significant moment in the political history of Sri Lanka.

However, this paper is also written with critical hindsight. More than two years on from the historic scenes of the aragalaya, a deeply unpopular government remains in power. An executive president—with almost no popular legitimacy but legally elected by parliament—rules with an iron fist. Ranil Wickremesinghe, a man once considered a liberal icon in Sri Lankan politics, has worked systematically and insidiously to discredit the aragayala—rebranding it as an anarchic movement that brought the country to the brink of existential annihilation (Center for Policy Alternatives 2023; Uyangoda 2023). In terms of political and cultural history a year or two is perhaps insufficient time to offer any substantive analysis. Perhaps we are still inhabiting a Gramscian interregnum—where “the old is dying but the new cannot be born.” However, what this quick resurgence of conventional politics also means is that both the political and cultural implications of the aragalaya need to be read with a degree of caution. The political “style” of the aragalaya was “demotic” in the sense that it allowed significant space for what might be deemed a popular or colloquial practice of politics. However, as we are witnessing globally, populist politics (especially right wing populisms) are not inherently democratic because they can silence dissent and shrink the space for debate. Therefore, the observations made in this paper are provisional and speculative. In what follows I propose to unpack the implications of the aragalaya for democracy through two themes: the notion of “the people” and the role of the arts, as manifested in the music of Ajith Kumarasiri, in a democratic imaginary. Both themes were visible signifiers of the aragalaya. Both are also familiar categories, but as I argue below, the aragalaya defamiliarized them—allowing new possibilities to emerge.

The “Cultural Life of Democracy”

Before the thematic exploration of the aragalaya, a brief definition of what is meant by “cultural life” is necessary. Democratic theorization has been long associated with Eurocentrism (Chatterjee 2011). “Cultural life” is conceived as an alternative conceptual and methodological heuristic to such Eurocentric understandings and as a possible means of exploring the plurality of democratic practice. However, such an approach does not mean the repudiation of democratic “norms” as inherently Eurocentric. What the aralagalaya experience implies is the necessity to agonistically engage with the idea of democracy and to identify a democratic spirit and imaginary within spaces and actions that may not readily appear “democratic.”

The notion of the “cultural life of democracy” becomes important in the Sri Lankan context because Sri Lanka’s democratic trajectory does not fit neatly within terms such as ethnocracy (DeVotta 2021) or illiberal democracy (Zakaria 1997). Ethnocracy is a term that speaks to how Sri Lanka’s representative democratic system has enabled a culture of majoritarianism, and illiberalism captures the paradox of a country that regularly exercises universal franchise, but where people remain disenfranchized. But, while both these terms delineate something of Sri Lanka’s democratic dilemmas, they do not tell the whole story. Sri Lanka is often positioned as a model colony that saw a peaceful transition to independence. The rest of this narrative is one in which this democratic promise has been squandered. The predominant image of Sri Lanka today is that of a failed state (Rotberg 2003). Much of this discourse also centers on the failure of democratic institutions and processes as well as the lack of active citizenship and the dominance of patron-client relationships. Instances of patron-clientelism in the Global South are often associated with the persistence of pre-modern culture. Such critical assessments also hold that normative features of democracy are insufficiently realized in societies that are democratically deficient. These assessments are informed by what Dipesh Chakrabarty (2000, 45) calls “hyperreal Europe,” where Europe functions as a universal referent. Partha Chatterjee (2011, 1–25) characterizes this as a norm-deviation model. Chatterjee argues that an ahistorical normative democratic model is associated with “hyperreal Europe,” which in turn shapes the negative evaluation of non-European societies.

The Eurocentric nature of such “standard” democratic discourse is also underwritten by an ahistorical and mythic quality as Partha Chatterjee (2011, 8) has argued. This ahistoricity results in a decontextualized sense of democracy that appears to exist outside time and space. However, though ostensibly decontextualized, in reality such “standard” notions of democracy operate with an implicit “normative” referent—which is often based on Euro-American “first world” societies. This problem becomes acute in relation to culture. For instance, in Jurgen Habermas’s notion of a public sphere—a space where reasoned debate can occur and a hallmark of the civic life of democratic societies—is informed by a European notion of civil society. In relation to a demotic reading of democracy this kind of idealized notion of culture has little space for popular culture or aesthetic practices—which can also be extended to how liberal democratic discourse views populism with disdain (Galston, Hunter and Owen 2018). It is in this context that the convergence of demotic political activism and the popularity of avant-garde art within the aragalaya becomes significant. While the aragalaya’s political script challenged the conventional wisdom of liberal democracy, its cultural script signaled the potential of politically conscious popular artistic practice which does not fold into a national or nationalist cultural style—as in Ajith Kumarasiri’s avant-garde music, which is representative of a non-mainstream cultural style.

In the discussion that follows I trace a brief genealogy of the notion of the people in Sri Lankan political discourse and through this discussion attempt to demonstrate how the aragalaya has created space to imagine “the people” anew. At the same time I connect this discussion of “the people” to culture and aesthetics and show how the “demotic” idea of the people within the aragayala is also connected to a “demotic” notion of aesthetics visible in the carnivalesque cultural milieu that informed the people’s uprising in general and Ajith Kumarasiri’s music in particular. However, as already noted, a demotic political and cultural practice is not inherently democratic. While popular and avant-garde art has been associated with emancipatory struggles they have also been instrumentalized for darker purposes—for instance, in Nazi Germany where popular culture was a major vector for its genocidal politics. In the Sri Lankan context popular culture has been used to shore up war sentiment within the majority Sinhalese community, for instance. Nonetheless, in the convergence between the idea of “the people” and the cultural and aesthetic style of the aragalaya, I believe, it is possible to discern what Jonathan Spencer calls “actually existing politics” (Spencer 2007, 177). Spencer’s argument is that political analysis often deploys preexisting normative frameworks—such as the rule of law, elections or political parties—to understand political action. “Actually existing politics” means looking outside these normative frameworks at what people actually do when they act “politically” and the argalaya can be considered a particularly powerful instantiation of such “actually existing politics.”

Who Are “The People”? Interrogating Popular Sovereignty in the Aftermath of the Aragalaya

One dimension of how the aragalaya opened up the discussion on democracy was by rendering the settled and conventional notion of the “people” unfamiliar. Within Sri Lanka’s long tradition of liberal representative democracy, the “people” is largely taken as a given. As an election cycle approaches the people are ritualistically invoked and the “people” appear to come alive politically and vote and provide democratic sanction to their representatives to govern them. However, in between election cycles, “the people” are a largely absent-presence. Disrupting this conventional understanding, in the space of roughly three months from April to July 2022 the “people” became a tangible, powerful political spectacle—unsettling received notions about “people” as lacking agency and a body that could be easily manipulated by political parties. It also raised fundamental questions about the role of “the people” in an democracy and whether it was confined to merely electing political represenatives or whether “the people” needed a more active role within governance.

The Constitution of the Democratic Socialist Republic of Sri Lanka begins—as do most democratic constitutions around the world—by invoking the sovereignty of “the people” (The Constitution of the Democratic Socialist Republic of Sri Lanka 2023, xxi). However, though a constitutionally enshrined principle and a taken-for-granted fact in representative democracy, “the people” is a contentious and slippery political category. Who are “the people”? How do we really know the will of “the people”? Who has the right to speak and act on behalf of “the people”? These are some of the critical questions that dominated Sri Lanka’s 2022 political interregnum.

The People as a Shifting Category in Sri Lankan Politics

The notion of “the people” became politically relevant in Sri Lankan politics with the Donoughmore constitutional reforms of 1931, which introduced universal franchise. Initially the Sri Lankan political elite, like their European counterparts in the nineteenth century, resisted universal franchise (De Silva 1981, 418–21). However, when forced to adapt to the new reality, the political elite began to claim legitimacy through “communal politics” (Nissan and Stirrat 1990)—projecting themselves as “authentic” representatives of their respective ethno-religious communities. This strategy of ethno-religious particularism and how it developed alongside representative democracy has had a significant impact on Sri Lanka’s divisive post-independence ethno-nationalist politics.

However, while franchise precipitated an elite scramble to claim representative legitimacy it was within the early left movement that a more substantive sense of “the people” as a political entity emerged. The left introduced a number of terms in the 1930s that were crucial to imagining “the people” in more concrete form (Uyangoda 2014, 29–33). Some of these terms were, panthiya (social class), peeditha panthiya (oppressed class), peeditha gemi janathawa (the oppressed rural masses or people). In essence, these terms disaggregated the notion of “the people” and within left activism provided a more agentive role for the people as opposed to the instrumentalist conception of “the people” in the elite political imagination. However, while it was most likely the early left that introduced the Sinhala language term janathawa (the people) into the local political lexicon (Uyangoda, personal communication April 2023), janathawa along with terms like peeditha gemi janathawa or peeditha janathawa (oppressed masses or people), have been appropriated by bourgeoisie politics and in contemporary usage evoke little of their early radical potential within the left movement. One of the reasons that leftist understandings of “the people” were supplanted by bourgeoisie and nationalist understandings, is that the “old left” had little engagement with culture. The leaders of the old left were western educated and had almost no engagement with Sri Lankan or Sinhalese culture. This essentially left the political uses of culture open to nationalist appropriation—a process visible in post independence Sri Lanka as the state becomes ethnicized and a Sinhalese nationalist cultural form which I discuss below begins to become hegemonic (Rambukwella 2018b).

Sri Lanka’s post-independence history of ethno-nationalist division has also meant that the notion of the “people” is conflated with majoritarian imaginations of the nation. The Sinhala term jathiya which can be a cognate for janathawa—depending on the context of its use—is semantically slippery because jathiya, which technically stands for “people,” in general also implies the Sinhala jathiya meaning the Sinhalese people. Therefore, as Uyangoda (2014, 29–33) points out, when the phrase jathiya godanageema (nation building) is used in Sinhala it often means the building of the Sinhalese nation as opposed to the Sri Lankan nation—which has been a defining feature of how Sinhalese nationalism has attempted to define the task of the postcolonial state in Sri Lanka. This majoritarian dynamic is also visible in how democracy became increasingly understood as the “will of the majority” in post-independence Sri Lanka. One instantiation of this majoritarian understanding of democracy was the 1956 electoral victory of the MEP (Mahajana Eksath Peramuna), when the Sinhalese nationalist political coalition led by S.W.R.D. Bandaranaike secured a significant electoral victory. Martin Wickremasinghe, the prominent twentieth century Sinhala novelist, published a pamphlet entitled bamunu kulaye bindaweteema (The Fall of the Brahmin Class) celebrating this electoral victory as a decolonial triumph of the “ordinary” people against the political elite (Wickramasinghe 1956). While 1956 clearly marked a change in political mobilization, where an intermediate village-based middle class was able to challenge the political hegemony of the anglophone political elite (Wickramasinghe 2006, 230–7), “the people” in this conception excluded non-Sinhalese and non-Buddhist communities.

From the 1950s onwards, the Sri Lankan state became more institutionally majoritarian—a process that has been described as the emergence of an “ethnocracy” (DeVotta 2021). This majoritarian dynamic also overdetermined left politics (Anandalingam and Abraham 1986) and “the people,” while retaining a notion of class, even within leftist politics came to largely signify the Sinhalese majority.

It is within this larger socio-political context that one can see a convergence between how “the people” are constructed in political discourse and how they are imagined in artistic terms. Cultural production in Sinhalese society began to acquire a distinct “national form” from the 1950s onwards. It is during this period that many genres of Sinhala cultural expression such as song, literature, theater and film began to acquire an “aesthetic shape or form” that has remained influential for many decades. The development of this “national cultural form” is closely linked to the formation of the Sinhalese-dominated post-independence Sri Lankan nation state (Rambukwella 2018a). The artistic and cultural implications of this “Sinhalese turn” in the Sri Lankan nation state are not straightforward. Nonetheless, several observations on how art, culture and politics reproduce each other and how this impacts the imagination of the people are possible.

At one level, mainstream Sinhala cultural production begins to craft a notion of indigeneity that is increasingly Sinhalese-centric. Prior to the 1950s the popular term was deshiya which could encompass a multicultural sense of indigeneity. But increasingly this term was replaced by apekama (loosely translating as “ourness”) which had a more exclusive Sinhalese connotation (Rambukwella 2018a). Aesthetically this shift is marked in how Sinhala artistic production begins to be dominated by an idealized village-centric pastoral notion of Sinhalaness that writers like Wickramasinghe, discussed above, helped popularize. This trend also results in a form of cultural conformism creeping into multiple genres. In writing one sees once-critical writers like Gunadasa Amarasekara, who were experimental and avant-garde, beginning to subscribe to this national form. In film one sees a distinct change in the thematic thrust of filmmakers like Lester James Peiris, who begins to look for rural authenticity in his subject matter, and while in music one sees the emergence of the genre of Sinhala sarala gee or the subhawitha gee or the “well-made” art song genre, which marks a particularly striking instance of how an artistic form itself becomes imbued with a national character (Rambukwella 2018a; Field 2017). As I discuss in the final section of this paper, within the aragalaya, one can see an instance of how this national cultural form was challenged in the work of the avant-garde musician Ajith Kumarasiri—who became a significant presence within the struggle and can be seen as a contemporary manifestation of a more “people centric” artistic practice that has antecedents in avant-garde trends that began emerging in the 1960s.

In the 1960s the national cultural form described above began to be challenged—partly because many segments in society were disillusioned that the “promise” of independence in social and economic terms was not being realized. One area in which this was particularly visible was theater. In the 1960s a “people’s theater”—resonant of the leftist discourse of the people I trace above—emerged. This trend was most visible in the work of Sugathapala de Silva who formed the theater group “apey kattiya” (our people) in the 1960s. de Silva’s theater was a direct reaction to what he saw as the classical elitism and social irrelevance of the work of dramatists like Ediriweera Sarachchandra, whose work can be closely identified with the national cultural form described above (Haththotuwegama 2012, 190). The titles of some of de Silva’s early plays, such as “Boarding Karayo” (Boarding-house Guys) staged in 1962 or “Thattu Geval” (Tenements) staged in 1963 indicate an earthy, urban realism. The films of the iconic filmmaker, Dharmasena Pathiraja from the late 1970s and early 1980s was another instantiation of this avant-gardist trend with “the people” imagined as restless, educated rural youth in search of meaning amidst the ruins of a postcolonial nation. However, a significant irony was that organized leftist politics—represented at the time by the JVP which had staged an unsuccessful military insurrection in 1971 and would go on to stage a second unsuccessful bid for state power in the 1987–1989 period—had little connection with this avant-garde artistic production. Cultural and artistic expression, even when it was associated with the left, remained largely within the parameters of the national cultural form associated with mainstream artistic expression (Rambukwella 2018b). From the late 1980s onwards, particularly with the influence of groups like the X-group—an anti-institutional self-styled radical intellectual circle—and a new wave of film-makers, writers and musicians an alternative cultrual discourse developed. While this discourse was largely resistant to the national cultural form that preceeded it, it also remained confined to a select audience. It is in this context that the rise of “the people” during the aragalaya and the concomitant prominence of avant-garde artistes within the same demotic political space needs to be read.

The Aragalaya and the Rise of “The People”

The mobilization of people from a significantly broad social spectrum within the aragalaya—which cut across ethnic, religious, class and sexual divisions—needs to be read against the brief history of “the people” in Sri Lankan political discourse outlined above. The aragayala was often identified as the janatha aragalaya or the “people’s struggle.” This invocation of the janathawa or “the people,” however, within the aragalaya was consciously positioned against the kinds of instrumentalist political uses of the category outlined above. The aragalaya fashioned itself as a movement that sought to reclaim a sense of lost political agency for “the people.” This conception of “the people” appeared to derive from an informal consensus within the aragalaya that its activism needed to be kept outside the framework of organized politics and political parties. However, groups such as the Inter University Students Federation—composed of students from all state universities in the south of the country, a highly politically active organization with links to the radical leftist political party the Frontline Socialist Party (FSP); the Socialist Youth Union, affiliated to the JVP; and other smaller groups representing various social, religious and reform agendas were present and active within the aragalaya (Srinivasan 2022). The presence of such a diverse range of groups also meant that there were tensions within the aragalaya, but by and large the aragalaya was characterized by a form of solidarity shaped by the leveling effect of the extreme economic precarity the country experienced and anger toward a political class that was seen as the authors of this misery.

While Sri Lanka’s post-independence history has witnessed frequent protests such as the 1953 harthal, which was a general strike led by the leftist Lanka Sama Samaja Party (LSSP), or the more recent history of protests particularly within Tamil communities in the north and the east resulting from the trauma of conflict, the uniqueness of the aragalaya was its broad representative character and the lack of any discernible central organizing structure. It is also the first time in Sri Lanka that a popular uprising ousted an executive president, a sitting cabinet of ministers and a prime minister. The people’s uprising also came in a context in which political parties that identify themselves as “progressive,” such as the leftist JVP and FSP, viewed “the people” as lacking critical political awareness—both these political parties spoke about the need to “elect a new people” (aluth janathawak path kara geneema) drawing on Bertholt Brecht’s satirical poem about Stalinist Russia “The Solution.” However, this was not a concern confined to the left, and public commentators who identify themselves as “liberal” have also consistently expressed concern that Sri Lankan political behavior is similar to that of yatathwesiyan (subjects) rather than purawesiyan (citizens) (Gunwardene 2015). What was significant about the aragalaya was that it, at least temporarily, challenged these political fictions of “the people” as a politically naïve undifferentiated mass that could be easily manipulated.

This emergence of the “demos” as a tangible political force also provides a transition to the theme of culture and arts. A key theme of the aragalaya, and one that still has some political resonance, is the need to rethink the representative democratic system of the country and to constitute a “people’s council”—in essence, the establishment of a kind of direct democratic structure that operates parallel to the representative democratic model. It is a demand that also resonates with a different “style” of doing democracy—a “style” of politics in which the business of democracy is not shrouded in technocratic institutional rhetoric nor subsumed by a violent political register dominated by political strongmen. The “style” of politics the aragalaya embodied and envisioned was one where “ordinary” people had a stake in governance and this “ordinariness” had cultural coordinates which can be read in relation to the brief history of the “national cultural form” and the avant-garde counter-hegemonic response that I have sketched above.

Some commentators identified a Bakhtinian “carnivalesque” quality, or a situation where “normal” social and political codes in society are violated or disrupted, within the aragalaya (Weerasinghe 2022). The prominence of artists like Ajith Kumarasiri played a major role in bringing this carnivalesque quality because both the form and content of Kumarasiri’s works pastiches and ironizes hegemonic cultural tropes. This carnivalesque quality also has political implications. The organized left and other progressive groups in society have historically used artistic work—particularly music and song—for political mobilization. For instance, there is a tradition of virodhaakalpa gee (protest song) in Sinhala music (Mallikarachchi 2018). However, this sub-genre never truly broke with the national cultural form. The artists associated with work of this nature such as Nanda Malini, Sunil Ariyarathne or Kumaradasa Saputhanthri retained a close alliance with mainstream cultural production and even when the thematic content of their work was “oppositional,” the aesthetic form remained conventional. Some of these artists also held strong Sinhalese nationalist sentiments, and like Martin Wickrasmasinghe back in the 1950s, identified themselves with the demotic spirit of people’s suffering and struggles but such identification was always overdetermined by an understanding of “the people” as being primarily Sinhalese. A particularly visible example of this was the Pavana (breeze) concert in which Nanda Malini sang a number of protest songs, written by Sunil Ariyarathne, directly addressing the bloody state response to the JVP youth insurrection during the 1987–1989 period. However, tellingly neither of these artists had produced any material relating to the equally bloody state response to Tamil youth militancy from the 1980s. Instead, both artists had contributed to the production of “patriotic” music espousing strong Sinhalese nationalist sentiments and implicitly backing the state’s military response to Tamil nationalism. What was also striking was that even when the thematic content of the work of these artists was critical of the state, it continued to retain a conventional aesthetic form—suggesting the deep relationship between the national cultural form and aesthetic practice. However, within this cultural mainstream there were outliers such as Premasiri Khemadasa and Gunadasa Kapuge who did attempt to break from the nationalist cultural form and were openly critical of hegemonic Sinhalese cultural nationalism. But, this was the exception.

It is against this larger context that one can read the convergence of the rise of “the people” as an agential collective within the aragalaya and the visibility of avant-garde art and cultural production within the struggle. While Sri Lankan politics has always had a nationalist-populist element—with political rallies often resembling street parties where party faithful inebriated by plentiful alcohol behave rowdily– the subversive and carnivalesque quality of the aragalaya was culturally and politically distinct from the nationalist-popular. One can, therefore, draw some cautious but important interconnections between the emergence of “the people” as an agential political force, a different rhythm and style in democratic politics and the visibility of avant-garde artists and artistic practices within the aragalayala.

Culture, Arts and the Possibilities of Alternative Democratic Imaginaries

The cultural script of the aragalaya is a contentious one because there was no singular cultural identity that informed the struggle as a whole. A significant feature of the aragalaya was its ability to accommodate a wide social spectrum ranging from Buddhist monks, Catholic priests and nuns, Muslim religious leaders, peace activists, LGBTQ activists, and even groups representing ranawiruwo or war veterans. However, particularly in the main Gotagogama site in Colombo, and in several of the satellite Gotagogamas that were established in other parts of the country, avant-garde music, art and theater played a prominent role. For instance, the artist Sujit Rathnayake established a tent at Gotagogama and functioned as a resident artist, and his art was recently exhibited in London under the theme “Artful Struggle in Sri Lanka” (Lankanewsweb 2023). Similarly, Ajith Kumarasiri, known popularly as “Rock Ajith,” with his alt-brand of music, became a musical ambassador for the aragalaya. Street performances such as those by actor Jehan Appuhamy staging the “bearing of the cross”—demanding justice for the victims of the 2019 Easter Sunday attacks—also became iconic signifiers of the people’s struggle. Other performances included “the confession” on 30 April 2022 when representatives of civil society activists, media personnel, and trade unionists, staged a performance with their eyes and mouths bound—to imply their complicity in empowering the Rajapakse political dynasty, or Ryan Holsinger’s satirical renaming of street signboards such as paga paara (bribery path), “import city” (Colombo Port City) and “CentralBankruptcy (the Central Bank). While each of these artistic performances had varying political, ideological and aesthetic inspirations, collectively they signify a number of themes that align with the political spirit of the aragalaya.

All of these artistic performances had what might be called a “leveling effect.” Similar to how the extreme economic crisis resulted in a form of common precarity that had a social-leveling effect (for instance, people who would ordinarily not encounter each other found themselves standing in the same infernal queues), art and artistic performance appealed to people across the social spectrum. Classist distinctions of taste (following Bourdieu 1984) seemed to be temporarily on hold and the distinction between high and low forms of art did not seem to matter—the common denominator became whether the art and the artists identified with the spirit of aragalaya. At the same time the strong presence of avant-garde artists also meant that much of the cultural vibe associated with the aragalaya was non-mainstream. Therefore, while the very form of the aragalaya challenged the established political style in the country, the many avant-garde artistic practices visible within the same political space subverted the national cultural form I have discussed earlier—rendering it ironic and suggesting the possibility of more progressive alternatives to the national/nationalist-popular.

In what follows, I explore the aesthetic and political implications of the artistic practices that gained visibility during the aragalaya through the music of Ajith Kumarasiri. This is not to suggest that Kumarasiri’s work is representative of the totality of the aragalaya or to homogenize the cultural/artistic vibe of the aragalaya through the work of one artist. However, Kumarasiri, as I have argued earlier, is an apt choice because he has been a significant presence in Sri Lanka’s alt music scene for a significant period and his “emergence” during the aragalaya signifies a process whereby a cultural and artistic habitus that occupied the margins of Sri Lankan society gains prominence—paralleling the political “emergence” of “the people” within the aragalaya. If one were to put it in more trite terms—the people’s struggle also gained a people’s musician.

Kumarasiri, who draws inspiration from global musical influences such as the work of John Cage—the American composer associated with disruptive musical experimentation—innovates with both form and content. Kumarasiri’s compositions often subvert the aesthetic conventions of Sinhala music—particularly the esthetic form of the Sinhala sarala gee (light art song) or subhawitha gee (well-made song) associated with Sinhala sambhawya kalawa or Sinhala “high” culture. Despite its origins in the 1950s, as discussed earlier, it is a form that arguably still retains wide social and political significance as evidenced during the “Dhanno Budunge” controversy. In 2016, Kishani Jayasinghe, an internationally renowned Sri Lankan soprano, sang this song which was identified with Pandit W.D. Amaradeva—an iconic musician deeply associated with the legacy of the subhawitha gee tradition—in operatic style, resulting in a major cultural controversy where Kishani’s rendering of the song was perceived as damaging the authenticity of the song’s aesthetic form (Rambukwella 2018a, 1–25). In essence this controversy signaled the extent to which artistic genres—such as the sarala gee or subhawitha gee remain implicated in cultural nationalism in the country. Therefore, Kumarasiri’s music can be seen as a disruptive intervention that challenges this “national” (read Sinhalese) cultural form. Within the aragalaya the presence of his avant-garde music was also not isolated. Other groups such as skitzo associated with the bekariye kattiya (bakery collective), which has staged several rounds of an alt-music festival called “downtown pulse” were also present. Kumarasiri, however, in many ways was a pioneer in this avant-garde musical trend and perhaps the most “political” of these musicians.

As Liyanage Amarakeerthi (2013) has argued, Kumarasiri’s music offers a radical critique of contemporary Sri Lankan society. For instance, his song “Hey Geneva” uses an earthy colloquial diction paired with a musical score that is anti-aesthetic (aesthetic here meaning Sinhala mainstream music) to satirically critique Sinhalese nationalism and global human rights discourse. The main refrain of the song is, ““හේයිි ජීනීවා අපි දැන් මරන්ෙන නෑ- අපි දැන් කනවා විිතරමයි” (hey Geneva we are not killing anymore—we only eat/consume now). This is an allusion to postwar Sri Lanka, which after the 2009 conclusion of the armed conflict had become a hyper-consumerist society in which the Sinhalese majority and political establishment actively suppressed or avoided talking about the human cost of the war. At the same time, every year since the war, the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva invokes Sri Lanka’s human rights record and lack of accountability for human rights violations. This ritualistic invocation of human rights, which often leads to little tangible action, has been critiqued as part of an empty “human rights industry” (Zigon 2013) and what Kumarasiri does in the song is yoke together the nationalist amnesia regarding the conflict and the human rights industry’s instrumentalist uses of this collective trauma with dark irony.

In other songs like පාර්ලිමේන්තුව (parliament) Kumarasiri creates pastiches and channels people’s frustrations about the political class. The song as a whole has an absurdist and darkly comic effect because it satirizes mainstream politics represented by the parliament as a form of insanity—an insanity that the lyrics of the song also extend to a critique of Sinhalese nationalism.

පාර්ලිමේන්තුව ඇතුලට සද පායනවා

සද එලියට පිස්සු හැදිල බල්ලො බුරනවා

සිංහ පැටව් වාගෙ බුරනවා

බල්ලො හදට යන්න හදනවා

සිංහයගෙ අතට කඩුව දුන්නෙ කවුද

ලෙලදෙනකොට පැනල ඇවිත් අපිව කයිද… පුතා අහනවා

එයාට නින්ද යන්නෙ නෑ

කොඩියේ සිංහයට බයයි එයාගෙ කඩුවටත් බයයි

බල්ලෝ බුරනවට බයයි

The moon is shining into the parliament

The dogs have gone crazy for the moonlight and are barking

They are barking like lion cubs

Dogs are trying to reach the moon

Who handed the sword to the lion?

My son asks…will it jump out and eat us when it flaps in the wind

He can’t sleep

He is afraid of the lion and the sword in the flag

He is also afraid of dogs barking

(translation by Harshana Rambukwella)

Written in the post-2009, postwar period the lyrics of this song—rendered from the perspective of a young child’s fears—pithily captures the dystopia of a parliament that has lost creditability. The politicians are like rabid dogs, barking at the moon but also pretending to be lion cubs—an ironic reference that draws on the symbolism of the Sri Lankan flag in which a menacing lion (representing the Sinhalese majority) brandishes a sword. The lyrics of the song while critiquing the insanity of the politicians also yokes this to the insanity of the postwar moment in Sri Lanka when a particularly shrill Sinhalese-majoritarian triumphalism was on full display. Kumarasiri also writes in a colloquial diction using terminology used by “ordinary” people and the musical score to this song, as in most of his songs, has an “anti-aesthetic” aesthetic—or a musical tonality that cuts against the familiar “aesthetic” of the hegemonic sarala gee (light art song) or subhawitha gee (well-made song) genre.

In terms of the aragalaya, what is significant is that songs of this nature, which had a limited audience and were only performed in select spaces, found a more general audience. It is of course not possible to generalize from such a specific example, or the mere presence of this alt-culture in the aragalaya, to argue that this marks a substantive shift in the cultural discourse of the country. However, as with the emergence of “the people,” the avant-garde cultural script of the aragalaya suggests distinct new aesthetic and political possibilities.

Conclusion: Unresolved Contradictions and the Afterlife of the Aragalaya

The narrative of popular sovereignty that I have traced so far in relation to the aragalaya has been a largely positive one. In essence, I have positioned the aragalaya as a political and cultural counterpoint to mainstream politics and culture in Sri Lanka. However, in conclusion I would like to add a note of dissonance to this positive assessment. I do so by critically interrogating the demand for a “people’s council” that has survived as one of the more enduring legacies of the aragalaya. Embedded in this demand, I believe, are both the possibilities and limits of the aragalaya and the culture it signified. The demand for a people’s council emerges in relation to the aragalaya narrative that representative democracy has failed in Sri Lanka and that the entire parliament was illegitimate. Instead of this flawed structure aragalaya activists propose a people’s council that can bring an element of direct democracy and also serve as a mechanism to hold elected representatives accountable. This is an ostensibly progressive solution, which aligns with the demotic spirit of the aragalaya. However, it leaves a number of unresolved contradictions which also speak to the problem of navigating between democratic “norms” and a more demotic style of democracy.

The populism that emerged during the aragalaya was not a spontaneous phenomenon and the discrediting of the entire parliament within the aragalaya (Kumar 2022) had a longer political history. Just as much, as the aragalaya was a popular movement, the ousted president Gotabhaya Rajapaksa’s unprecedented electoral victory in 2019 can also be read as a triumph of populism. The campaign that brought him into power was built on projecting him as a “non-political,” technocratic, benign-authoritarian figure who would be the existential savior of Sri Lankans—particularly the Sinhalese Buddhist community—and a man who would usher in a new age of prosperity. Though a member of the Rajapaksa dynasty, whose political credibility was waning, Gotabhaya was billed as the “non-political” alternative.

Many elements of populism were present in this narrative. Some of these were: the victimized and long-suffering people (though this was understood in Sinhalese nationalist terms) premised against a corrupt and dysfunctional political elite who had placed the security of the “nation” at risk during the 2019 Easter Sunday bombings; the promise of a direct political and social contract between “the people” and the president, by-passing the elected representatives in parliament; and the promise of efficient government that would dispense with unnecessary legislation and bureaucratic bottlenecks. However, Gotabhaya, himself, was hardly populist material—a socially awkward man with little public presence, he was essentially a front for his charismatic brother Mahinda, who was constitutionally barred from re-contesting the presidency. Therefore, this cannot be read in terms of a “classic” manifestation of populism. But the way in which “the people” became an empty signifier on to which an expedient notion of “the people” as a victimized majority, oppressed by an “unpatriotic” political elite, follows Ernesto Laclau’s (2005) analysis of populism. In Laclau’s analysis of populism “the people” is either an empty or floating container on to which various political meanings can be grafted and this malleable nature of “the people” in turn relates to what Mouffe (2018) call a “chain of equivalence” of how populism succeeds in uniting people with disparate grievances under a single agenda.

Given the context described above, the aragalaya demand for a “people’s council” needs to be read against this longer history of a populist critique of the existing representative democratic system. It is here that the notion of “the people” and the “will of the people” become crucial. The “people’s council” demand was mainly highlighted by the FSP and given the FSP’s history as a radical splinter group of the JVP and their lack of significant electoral presence, some commentators interpreted this demand as a politically expedient move by the FSP to become politically relevant (Uyangoda 2022)—does the FSP or even the aragalaya itself truly represent “the people” or the “people’s will”? In addition, if a people’s council is to be formed how will it overcome problems in terms of gender, ethnic and linguistic divisions that have bedeviled Sri Lanka’s representative democracy for more than half a century? Therefore, if the demos or “the people” are to play a more significant role in Sri Lankan democracy—as they did during the aragalaya—how is this to be facilitated?

Similarly, in terms of the cultural script of the aragalaya a number of problems remain. While an alt-culture gained prominence within the argalaya it remained ultimately a Sinhalese-centric one. While the music of Ajith Kumarasiri that I highlight subverts the national cultural form, there is always the possibility that it can be co-opted by the national or even the nationalist popular. In fact, some commentators have been critical of Kumarasiri because as he gained more visibility he was also increasingly embraced by the mainstream music industry—creating the potential for his art to be shaped by mainstream market demands rather than a radical political agenda. Kumarasiri’s work is also linguistically segregated—largely confined to Sinhalese modes of expression, similar to how the aragalaya as a whole was more visible in the Sinhalese-dominated south of the country. Intermixed with these cultural and linguistic tensions was also the role of religion. For instance, Omalpe Sobitha, a Buddhist priest who has a Sinhalese nationalist pedigree, figured prominently within the aragalaya. While his presence did not create a sense of Sinhalese Buddhist exceptionalism or supremacy within the aragalaya the deference with which he was treated and the prominence he was granted also implied that the historic dominance of Sinhalese majoritarian ideology was not something that could be easily shifted. Therefore, while the aragalaya represented an exceptional moment in Sri Lanka’s modern political history, as this dissonant ending suggests, its fleeting appearance—like the Arab Spring or the pro-democracy movement in Hong Kong—suggests that any longer term political or cultural gains will not follow naturally or organically. The swiftness with which the Ranil Wickremesinghe government was able to rebrand the aragalaya as a form of anarchy and how this in turn led a significant portion of people who initially supported the aragalaya to abandon it, is also suggestive of this stark political reality. What future popular sovereignty might look like in Sri Lanka, therefore, remains an open and tenuous question.

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Harshana Rambukwella

Harshana Rambukwella, Visiting Professor at NYU Abu Dhabi, is a comparative literature and cultural studies scholar with an interest in the intersections between literature, history, aesthetics, and nationalism in South Asia. He is also a sociolinguist with interest in critical sociolinguistics and discourse analysis.