A general amiable amnesia about the inequities perpetrated on the Buddhists and Hindus during the past four hundred years will make us gentlemen of tolerance and broadness of outlook. The Patricians must not be disturbed in their afternoon siesta of complacency by a cacophony of clamouring for the restoration of Buddhists’ rights. For the sake of peace the old order must not give place to the new. For the sake of harmony no word of protest should be voiced lest a nation’s conscience, be awakened. Mettananda’s vitriolic voice should not mar the mysterious march of Christian domination in the Army, the Navy, the Police, the Civil Service and the general administration.
These unseemly outcries seem so inartistic. They jar on the refined delicate feelings of those with turned up noses sweating in tweed suits and kneeling at high altars. It is also disgustingly out of taste. It is so appallingly vulgar.
Mettananda cannot care less. A plague on all your sense of good taste. He cares tuppence for all your finer sensibilities and refinements. He is proud of his vulgarity. He is not ashamed of hurting those who choose to get hurt.
He opens cupboards and shows you skeletons. He parts Catholic curtains and shows you filing cabinets for petitions in modern offices working overtime to bring about acts of God under suspicious circumstances.
He has all the percentages worked out, the names in neat lists and all instances tabulated. Everything is nicely taped out. He has all the right quotations noted down.
His facts’ cannot be questioned. Verification makes the charges all the more virulent.
He is the lone crusader who does not sheath his sword. He is the boor who walks into the drawing room with muddy shoes. He is the fanatic who has made fanaticism fantastic.
He catches the rulers dealing in short weight to Buddhists. He rings the coins always whenever the Buddhists get change.
His voice is insistent, insolent and almost instinctive.
He cares not on whose corns he tramples. He is unconcerned whose conscience he pricks. He does not mind what you call him, what you think of him and who you think you are.
He has to be heard. That is all that matters.
But those that matter do not hear him much and those that hear him do not matter much. That is Mettananda’s tragedy.
But nobody ever doubts his sincerity, his honesty, his earnestness.
Here is a man who has no axes to grind. He is devoid of ambition. If he has nothing to lose, he has nothing to gain for himself either.
His honesty of purpose rises above our horizon like the rock of Sigiriya over the landscape it dominates. No one can question his sincerity.
Having no political ambitions himself he is eternally searching for the right man who will give unto the Buddhists that which is theirs by rights, reserving for Caesar what is his.
When Bandaranaike was in search of supporters to beat his drum Mettananda he moved in with gusto. He organized thousands of Bhikkus to walk from door to door reading choice extracts from the Buddhist Commission’s Report and denouncing the U.N.P. He carried on a whirlwind campaign throughout the country, reviving hopes in the breast of Buddhists and painting Bandaranaike as a new hero born to right wrongs suffered by Buddhists.
In 1956 when Bandaranaike won the General Election he thought Mettananda would get into the spirit of practical politics and be satisfied with the fun he had had plus an Ambassadorial job and not bother about his blessed Buddhists anymore.
But Mettananda is made of sterner stuff. He spurned efforts to placate him with cushy jobs and spoke out loud and bold once again about the unredressed grievances of the Buddhists. Bandaranaike turned round and called Mettananda a mad man. The man with a load of grievances was only amused. He lost hope and began another search.
Then who should come along but our friend Mr. Philip Gunawardane, his lips full of promises and his heart full of vengeance.
Mettananda adopted Philip as he had earlier taken over Bandaranaike and scoured the country with battle cries. But Philip by trying to make Mettananda a minor prophet in his hierarchy of the hustings could hardly make enough of an impression. Mettanandawords were sincere it was true. But the big question remained were Philip’s intentions honest ?
Mettananda was himself in for a rude shock when immediately after the March 1960 Election Philip without any reference to Mettananda issued a declaration that showed him in his true colours.
Mettananda perhaps was relieved that by the merest chance the horse he had wrongly backed had not won.
But there is no bitterness in this crusader out to build once again an El Dorado for Buddhists in this green and pleasant land. In the July 1960 General Election he once again backed Mrs. Bandaranaike in a quiet but more efficient manner.
He sits in his Nawala house a lone man surrounded by unfulfilled hopes, unsatisfied desires of the majority of this land. But there is iron in his spirit that refuses to waver, to give up the fight.
He is a hermit with a home, a big prophet with a small pension. His wants are few his tastes simple. His smile is benign and reminds me of a grey eminence of intrinsic worth. He waits patiently for the day of deliverance after a long, period of occupation of the country by those whom he considers aliens in their own land.
He does not give up the ghost.
Ever moving in mysterious diverse ways he guides a set of quiet people with determined chins and tight lips to whom he has become a god in flesh and blood.
In his person he combines the force, of more than half a dozen Buddhist Congresses and a hundred Y. M. B. As put together.
In the eyes of the country he is the one honest man we have yet left. He is a power ever to be reckoned with.
When after working as a teacher for over twenty five years at Ananda and Dharmaraja he became Principal of Ananda, one never thought that this Latin scholar would become such a crusader in the near future as we saw him organising carnivals, flattering the rich and begging for donations to build up a great school after it had almost been reduced to ashes. Then no word of criticism passed his lips.
He was the exemplary Guru who evidently had no political opinions. While he never crawled before the high and mighty he did not prod or probe either.
Once he retired from Ananda, all pent up feelings, unexpressed grievances and bottled up bitterness seem to have made him into quite another man, a kind of reincarnation in the same old body of a new personality alive with character, pulsating with vigour and unreckoning of pace and energy.
This pedagogue who became prophet is not without a peculiar sophistication. Mixed with his load of grievances there is also a burden ‘of suspicion. He walks warily, gingerly, carefully, always on the lookout for conspiracies, plots and mysteries.
If he has to walk on the carpet of a Catholic he will be careful not to trip over the woven flowers!
If a Catholic asks him the time, Mettananda is apt to think there is some catch in it!
He is disgruntled as a petition, as decided as, a magistrate and as suspicious as a wife.
Of course, Mettananda is a fanatic if revolt without reward, battle without booty and enthusiasm without fulfilment can be summed up in a cheap epithet.
Very new things are achieved by people without fanaticism. The great thing is to keep one’s humanity along with one’s fanaticism. And that Mettananda has achieved in great measure.
If Mettananda examines Buddhist grievances with his magnifying glass without relating them to forces of history his impatience would burst out into religious war to the knife. But he knows more about the background than most of us. His humanity keeps his impatience under perfect control.
He knows that four centuries of Christian chronocity cannot be cured in four years of Buddhist balm.
But the effort is the great thing as far as he is concerned.
And one honestly, cannot say that his effort has been entirely in vain.
But on the other hand if Christianity could only make this little headway for four centuries helped as it was by the conquerors with bribes and the sword, is it possible for it to make further progress in discrimination and inequities in the future when free democracy rules Ceylon ?
Is it not wiser to allow it to fade away through disuse and indifference rather than fight it tooth and nail and perhaps putting it on its guard and making it fight back from the last ditch.
Of course this is where most people disagree with Mettananda.
If he did not disagree he would not be Mettananda the fanatic who disgusts the refined, disturbs the complacent, jars the cultured - but inspires his followers.
