An Identity of One’s Own: The Use of Sri Lankan English in Ru Freeman’s A Disobedient Girl

“... to convey in a language that is not one’s own, the spirit that is one’s own.” Raja Rao, Foreword to Kanthapura The attempt at establishing a form of English with a Sri Lankan identity goes as far back as 1896, with the publication of Glossary of Native & Foreign Words occurring [sic] in Official Correspondence & Other Documents (Gunesekera, 2005: 84), yet its revival after Independence owes to academics of the calibre of Professors H. A. Passé, Doric de Souza and Thiru Kandiah, and Godfrey Gunatilleke, promoting Sri Lankan English. However, it was as late as the early part of this century that the topic became a general subject of interest, with the media and the public being drawn into the debate. Today we see the symbol of the sword (“kaduwa”) (“lvqj”)2, gradually giving way to that of the manna (“ukak”),3 as the new generation of Sri Lankan scholars and writers becomes more and more aware of the need for an English of their own. In this article, I shall discuss Ru Freeman’s A Disobedient Girl (2009) in the light of this theory.


Discussion of the Novel
Born to an English-speaking middle-class family, Freeman is at ease with the language of her choice, while at the same time, being a second-generation postcolonial Sinhala, she is bilingual, and more in tune with the nuances of the Sinhala language than most of her predecessors.
With all that, we still come across instances where the language could have improved in both Standard and Sri Lankan English, as well as the use of Sinhala words.

Grammar
(a) The Dropping of the Definite Article "the" with Reference to Places This is a characteristic Michael Meyler identifies as a typically Sri Lankan error (Meyler, 2007: xvii).

(c) A Different Preposition to that of Standard British English
This is another error common to Sri Lankans (Meyler, 2007: xvii). e.g.:-"Too young to be sent away for errands like this…" (41) "… as though this alone, to be told these stories, was the sole purpose for Latha's return" (113).
"'The name for that gentleman on the train'" (309).

(d) Discrepancy in Verbs
We come across an instance where there is a discrepancy in verbs. e.g.:-"'…The children look hungry, too, aren't you, darlings?'" (344) (e) The Dropping of the Object Another instance where Standard British grammar is neglected is in the dropping of the object (Meyler, 2007: xvii). e.g.:-"'Use a magazine to fan _'" (230).
"'A suddha [sic] had got it from Japan and I bought _ from him after he had used it for only a few years'" (317).
"'There have been plenty of stories about children from other places. We have all heard _'" (340).
(f) The Dropping of the Adverb e.g.:-"I tended them all, felling the old to give way to the new, revisiting not just the grove but, through my care of them, my parents' lands ___, where I had first learned to be mindful of the growing things that sustain us all;…" (16) (g) The Non-Use of the Possessive Form e.g.:-"Of me being more than a woman caught between my father and my husband" (125).
(h) Subject-Verb Disagreement e.g.:-"It is only when it [the car] stops and rolls down the window that we see another man in the backseat [sic]…" (240) Sabaragamuwa University Journal 2014, V. 13 NO. 2 pp 1-22 An Identity of One's Own: The Use of Sri Lankan English in Ru Freeman's A Disobedient Girl "'When [sic] family needs something, we have to come forward and do it'" (317).
(i) The Wrong Word e.g.:-"She put Madhayanthi down, and the child toddled a little ways, still holding on to Latha's fingers" (181).
"And the houseboy with his 'Madam will be waiting,' and his 'Mahaththaya will be worried,' and his 'Don't the babas have music lessons today?' had finally taken his toll, and even Latha had wondered what she had been thinking" (205).
"That was that he was thinking of, not her, Latha, not how he felt about her or their unborn baby" (350).

(k) Redundancy
Although redundancy is not strictly considered a grammatical error in Sri Lanka, it comes under this category in the U.S.A. e.g.:-"… as though this alone, to be told these stories, was the sole purpose for [sic]Latha's return" (113).
"I take her hand in mine too and compare my girls, tracing the lines on their palms as if I were like one of the Tamil fortune-tellers from Kataragama" (61).

(a) Contradictory Words
In rare instances, the choice of words gives a contradictory meaning: e.g.:-"Gehan was probably destined to be one of those who would have to rely on a matchmaker to find himself a wife. Latha felt certain of that" (6).

(b) Words Giving a Meaning in Contradiction to What is Intended
In the following instance, the two underlined words give wrong information about Buddhist history: "I can think only of the story of Kisa Gothami and her dead son, and the Buddha's request that she find mustard seeds from a house that withstood no death;…" (286). In the story referred to, 4 the Buddha tells Kisa Gothami to get mustard seeds from a house where no one has died.

Punctuation
(a) The Omission of Inverted Commas e.g.:-"'I will be in Pattipola for a week,' he says as he gathers his belongings, __ and then, I must go back to Colombo'" (143).
The Use of Sri Lankan English and Sinhala Words Debarati Sengupta praises Freeman's writing, for its "…gentle charm of a particularly Sinhalese-Sri Lankan flavor" (Sengupta, 2009: 1). Freeman does, indeed, evoke a Sri Lankanness into her writing by the commendable use of language.
Characteristics of Sri Lankan English 5

The Doubling of Words
Again, this is a characteristic of Sri Lankan English as identified by Meyler (Meyler, 2007: xvii).

Drawbacks in the Spelling of Sinhala Words
In spite of the overall success in the use of Sinhala words to give a "Sinhalese-Sri Lankan flavor" ( à la Sengupta), there are instances where we come across errors: (a) Wrong Spelling Among other instances of wrong spelling, are two words given as one, wrong hyphenation, the wrong use of the aspirated form, and the use of a word different in meaning to that intended. A lack of uniformity in the spelling of some Sinhala words also lessens the value of the "Sinhalese-Sri Lankan flavor" of this novel: (i) It is unclear why the Sinhala elongated "a" ("wd") sound is sometimes spelt with an "ā" while at others it is spelt with an "a," and, on yet other occasions , has a "double a" spelling: e.g.:-"ā" "a" "aa" (ii) Sometimes, the same sound, in the same word, ["mā" ("ud˜)] is given differently [as "mā" ("ud˜) and "ma" ("u")].
e.g.:-māmas (333) ["ududia "] (iii) In some instances, the same word is written with an "ā" in one place and an "a" in another, while in one place it is capitalized, and in another, it is not, and italicized in one instance, but not in another.

Discrepancy in Capitalization
Sometimes, the same word is given with the first letter capitalized in one place, and in the simple in another.

Discrepancy in Italicization
Although the writer states that she has done away with the convention of italicizing Sinhala words, 8  In some instances, this lack of uniformity occurs in the same sentence.
[Both "nona" ("fkda kd˜) ("lady") and "malli" ("u,a a ,s ") ("younger brother") are Sinhala words, but only the former is italicized.] Sometimes, in two Sinhala words coming together, one is italicized, and the other is not.
"Mrs. Perera must have been watching because she muttered something about Rodi whores who were just the type to lick the arses of the Suddhas…" (181).

Discrepancy in Explaining the Meaning of a Sinhala Word
In some instances, one Sinhala word is explained, but not the next.

Literal Translations
In dialogues, we sometimes get literal translations.
Yet in this instance, one can see how Freeman improves on earlier writers' translations. For example, in Punyakante Wijenaike's The Waiting Earth (1966), we get the English translation for this Sinhala sentence as, "Then I will take your leave to go and come again" (Wijenaike, 1966: 61), which is more jarring on the senses.

Compound Words which are Mixtures of Sinhala and English Words
Sometimes, we get a compound word which is a mixture of a Sinhala word and an English one.

The Change in the Structure of a Sentence
The change in the normal structure of a sentence may be given as a device for obtaining a "Sinhalese-Sri Lankan flavor" in the language.
"'Why all of a sudden have you got interested in my camera?'" (344)

Idioms and Phrases
The use of idioms and phrases etc., too, gives an authentic flavour of Sri Lankanness to the language.
e.g.:-"…as if I had been at a temple, and the temple had been blown up" (291). This refers to the story of a rakshasa ("rdCIi") (demon) who put his beloved, a human woman, in a casket and swallowed it, as a means of keeping her "safe." These show a progress in the use of Sri Lankan proverbs and other expressions, from earlier writers. If we were to compare the idioms and metaphors, etc. in this novel with those in some forerunners, we may see this.
e.g.:-Punyakante Wijenaike's The Waiting Earth (1966): "… like a man who has caught hold of a leopard's tail" (Wijenaike, 1966: 154) refers to the proverb "Koti valigaya alla gattha vage." (fldá j,s .h w,a , .;a ;d jf.ã). [A "kotiya" (-fldáhd˜) is a tiger, not a leopard. So the proverb should be "like a man who has caught hold of a tiger's tail."] "'Her talk is as high as driving in a car though her traveling is done on foot'" (Wijenaike, 1996: 211), refers to, "Katava dolaven, gamana payn." (-l;dj foda ,dfjka , .uk mhs ka .˜) ("The talk is done on the palanquin, the walk is on foot."). "As high as driving in a car," does not contain the flavour of its Sinhala origin. A "dolava" ("foda ,dj") is a lighter sort of palanquin borne by four carriers, with the passenger inside. The fact that one is "high" is conveyed by this, rather than by spelling it out "as high as driving in a car." When one is driving a car, one is not "high." This contradiction between the talk being "high" and the walk being "low," in the original, is conveyed by the position of the passenger in a dolava, and its bearers, or a pedestrian. The preposition in "driving in a car," too, is subject to question.
" … a drowning man would swim for the nearest rock and cling to it with whatever strength left him" (Wijenaike, 1996: 189). This refers to the proverb, "Gilena miniha piduru gaheth ellenava." (".sf,k ñksyd msÿre .fy;a t,af,kjd.") ("The drowning man will cling onto even a straw.") This proverb shows that when a man is desperate, he will cling onto even a flimsy support. The drowning man clinging onto a straw conveys this expression much better than one who swims to a rock, which is stable. Furthermore, the original has a pithiness the translation lacks. It is taken for granted that a drowning man is not at his strongest. Thus, "with whatever strength left him" is redundant. What has been summed up in five words in the Sinhala, has taken nine in Wijenaike's version.

Padma Edirisinghe's From a Woman's Diary (1975):
"Till the sun's rays scorched him in the mornings" (Edirisinghe, 1979: 128), refers to the saying, "Passata ira payana thek." ("Till the sun shines on the backside.") This refers to somebody sleeping till late. In the original saying, the sun shining on the "backside" better conveys (so much more for the derogatory term) the laziness of the sleeper, than the word "scorched".

Yasmine Gooneratne's The Pleasures of Conquest (1995):
"Indeed it was true, Mallika thought, that you can build a wall around an entire country, but a tongue such as Elder Sister's knows no barriers" (Gooneratne, 1995: 266), refers to the proverb "rata vata kara veta bandat kata vata kara veta bandinna bae." ("rg jg lr jeg neka o;a lg jg lr jeg n¢ka k nE.") ("One may put a boundary around the country, but one cannot do so around the tongue.") This translation lacks the rhythm and pithiness of the Sinhala original. There is a further grammatical error in the English translation, in its discrepancy in tense ("it was true…"; "you can build…").
"Did anyone ever gain anything by playing the veena sweetly in the ear of a deaf elephant?" (Gooneratne, 1995: 286) refers to "Beeri aliyata veena vādanaya kalā se." ("îß w,s hdg ùKd jdokh l<d fia ") ("Like playing the lute to the deaf elephant.") This, too, falls short of the Sinhala original, which does not elaborate on the futility of such an action, or qualify the music with an adjective. Both aspects are inherent in the simile.
Freeman's metaphors and other literary devices are more smooth-flowing than these.
Yet some words in the novel would have better conveyed a Sri Lankan flavour, had they been given in their indigenous version, considering the fact that there is a generous sprinkling of Sinhala words throughout, anyway.
e.g.:-"veralu" 11 instead of "olives" (6) This is specially so in the case of terms of endearment.
There are instances in the dialogues where, even in speech which is obviously in Sinhala, some sentences are given in both Sinhala and English: e.g.:-"Amma ohoma inna," ("wïud Tfydu bka k") he yells to me, and we both smile. "Stay there" (222).
Although in the dialogues, the word "mahaththaya" ("uy;a ;hd") occurs often, ["And the houseboy, with his 'Madam will be waiting,' and his 'Mahaththaya will be worried,' …" (204) etc.,] sometimes, when one addresses another as "Sir," it may be meant to be taken as "Mahaththaya." e.g.:-"'Do you have children, Sir?' I ask. I do not know why I added the 'mahaththaya' to my words; it slipped out of my lips as though he might deserve the title" (131). This is problematical, because even in Sinhala speech, one can use the word "Sir." Therefore, whether the speaker is actually addressing, or referring to, someone as "Mahaththaya," or "Sir," is confusing. This goes for the title "Madam," as well, which is used interchangeably with "Nona" ("fkda kd"). For instance, it is unlikely that a domestic employee would address the master of the house as "Mahaththaya," and the mistress as "Madam," as in "…the houseboy, with his 'Madam will be waiting,' and his 'Mahaththaya will be worried, '….." (204). This confusion is unfortunate, because there is a difference in nuance between the English and Sinhala terms. For instance, if Sabaragamuwa University Journal 2014, V. 13 NO. 2 pp 1-22 the houseboy does refer to Gehan as "Mahaththaya" and Thara as "Madam," it may imply that he has subconsciously imbued the class prejudice of the Vithanages, and looks upon the mistress as superior, by addressing her in the English term, and him, in the vernacular, 12 although such an attitude is not implied elsewhere in the novel.
Sometimes, a term of address is used interchangeably by the same person where the addressee is the same.
Sometimes, a Sinhala word/phrase is explained in English.
Sometimes, both the Sinhala word and its English translation are given in the same sentence: "his hansi putuwa, his armchair" (Wijenaike, 1994: 37) "She must not be susceptible to loneliness where she could fall easy victim to the black demon, Kalu-Kumaraya" (Wijenaike, 1994: 58).
"When I awoke next morning she was gone, bag and baggage, taking the household hiramane, the coconut scraper [sic] with her" (Wijenaike, 1994: 63).

Roma Tearne's Mosquito
In this instance, too, Freeman improves on the earlier writers. Notice, for instance, the omission of the comma after the explanatory word in "taking the household hiramane, the coconut scraper with her" (Wijenaike, 1994: 63); "Everything was tittha, bitter for him" (Arasanayagam, 2006: 475); the wrong hyphenation in "Kalu-Kumaraya" (Wijenaike, 1994: 58); or the redundancy in pluralization in "pujas" 13 (Tearne, 2007: 108) in the above examples, in contrast to the comparatively flawless language in Freeman's "They called her lady, nona, when it was Latha's turn" (371), though the device itself jars on the reader.
A common device of Sri Lankan English writers targeting an international public is inserting "indigenous" descriptions geared to draw the attention of overseas readers: what, for instance, Siromi Fernando and Ryhana Raheem call "description for description' sake" neither advancing the reader's "comprehension of either plot or character" (Fernando & Raheem,95), or Chandani Lokge refers to as "the author's too obvious wish to unveil the intricacies of Sri Lankan rural life…" (Lokuge,202). Freeman, on the other hand, resorts to this unobtrusively. While all descriptions in A Disobedient Girl are an integral part of the plot, they give an indication to the intimacy of the writer's experience of the country she left behind. This is how Biso plans her escape with the children from her husband: Tomorrow I will go with the dew under my feet to the plantain grove beyond the kitul trees that my father put in when my son was born. These first plantain trees have given way to the offspring who came up around their trunks; I tended them all, felling the old to give way to the new, revisiting not just the grove but, , where I had first learned to be mindful of the growing things that sustain us all; I will cut down a frond from one of the young trees and I will walk home in the morning rain with it over my head. He will not hear me rip the leaves, or smell the steam when I hold them over the wood fire to turn their waxy green to dark. In silence I will lay them out, in silence make four mounds of still hot [sic] rice, embedded with hard, dried, salted fish, the taste of my life by the sea. Two pieces each for the girls and myself, three for my son. The orange coconut sambol, ground with the last of our dried red chilies, will stain the white. Condensation will have to provide the gravy. I will add them to the woven market bag that once belonged to my mother and that I have carried for ten years. I will slash the kurumba from our front yard with my knife, drain the sweet water into my children's plastic drink bottles. (16) From the descriptions of a Sri Lankan landscape and a housewife-mother's chores, down to the favouritism of the male child, this spells a Sri Lankanness to the core,while, at the same time, advancing the plot.
Biso's reminiscences of a long-ago wedding visit to her relatives, too, brings out truly Sri Lankan customs and attitudes: "… my cousin and her husband had asked us to stay another day, but when we'd protested and said we didn't want to inconvenience them that long, they had chosen to believe our story, that we had someone else to visit in Nuwara Eliya that day, and they hadn't argued with us as they should have" (italics added, 246).
Another aspect of the language worth discussing is the humour, unfortunately not an often-accosted part of Sri Lankan writing, except in rare instances like Carl Muller, Yasmine Gooneratne or Goolbai Gunasekera. And this humour is used to highlight the pathos of the situation the characters find themselves in, and endears us to them, in spite of their shortcomings: Latha-the-servant's musings of Thara-the-mistress's favoured shoppingplaces are: "… a shop whose bags announced it as a place called Barefoot, with price tags that indicated that one had to be quite well shod in order to afford anything from it" (277).
She didn't even go the The Palace now, because everybody who was somebody went to a new place called Old Dale, 14 she had told Latha, and taken her there one day to show her a shop filled with people, a lot of them foreigners, buying clothes and sunglasses and handmade things like notepads and coffee mugs and odd-shaped caps with elephants on the front. But after a few minutes she had met a friend who wanted to go to the store café, and Thara had told Latha to go and sit in the car and wait for her, which she had done, but not before touching as many fine, unaffordable, and completely useless things as she could on her way out. (295) Sabaragamuwa University Journal 2014, V. 13 NO. 2 pp 1-22 Even a negative character like Gehan is sometimes portrayed with sympathy through this humour: "… and having come upstairs to discover the origin of the unusual sounds of mirth that were floating from his own bedroom, managed to witness the cruel beauty between the two women in his world, the wrong one and the wrong one, and the relative value of each to the fulfillment of his life" (280).
This humour finds its way even into the most bizarre situations, like that of two men getting together in instigating an abortion where the woman concerned has no say. This is the conversation between the doctor and Latha's seducer, that precedes her being taken into surgery: "I say, don't listen to those government buggers telling you to go here and there, Danny boy. You should watch your own back. Tell them you got local information that the South is dangerous!" Still holding one of Daniel's hands in his own, the doctor thumped Daniel on the back like he himself was the Local Information and repeated himself. "The South is dangerous!" "You crack me up," Daniel said, and they laughed again.
Crack. Me. Up. Crackmeup. It wasn't hard enough of a thumping to break him, surely, but maybe he was feeling breakable too, though he wasn't showing it. (231) And most often, this humour is in connection with the lack of familiarity in English on the part of Latha, a fact that subtly indicates class oppression, and delicately hints at another aspect of the pathos of her situation. The successful use of humour in creative writing shows mastery of language on the part of the writer. Here, Freeman uses her own mastery of the English language to shed light on the pathos of a character deprived of that privilege. It is in this latter instance (preceding herabortion), where Latha is at her most destitute, both as a woman (sexual oppression) and a servant (class oppression) that she is also shown at her most generous, in trying to justify another's callousness (though this can be read as a typical female weakness in excusing men's wrong-doings).

Conclusion
Although Sengupta sees a "Sinhalese-Sri Lankan flavor" in this novel, in some instances, the writer betrays her Americanization.
e.g.:-the reference to three-wheelers as "scooter taxis" (188,205,226) Furthermore, the title itself discloses a conceding to Western norms. The original title of the novel was My Woman, but, as Freeman explains, her literary agents had a problem with that, as that phrase, in the West, they had Sabaragamuwa University Journal 2014, V. 13 NO. 2 pp 1-22 pointed out, refers to a profession "that has nothing to do with making tea." 15 Yet, A Disobedient Girl misses out on the true implication of the theme of the novel, which is the attempt at the objectification of servant-class females. Sometimes, a word/phrase differs in meaning from culture to culture. What "my woman" in a Sri Lankan context conveys may be different to what it means in America. That is what cultural difference is all about. For instance, the title of Mulk Raj Anand's Untouchable (1938) will evoke for the non-Indian reader, the image of someone/something so high or sacred that ordinary people cannot touch/achieve. Yet in the context in which it is written, it is that of a low-caste too "polluted" to be touched by others. The contrast between the first impression and the realization of its meaning after a reading of the novel adds to the irony, and hence, the worth, of the text. Had Freeman kept to her original title, the "Sinhalese-Sri Lankan flavor" Sengupta observes would have been much more effective.
So, too, is the writer's name. Before leaving her motherland and marrying an American, she was Ruvani Seneviratne. The truncation and Westernization of names, which Gooneratne satirizes in A Change of Skies (Gooneratne, 1991: 122 -124), is seen at first hand, in this instance. Taking one's husband's name is one's choice. Yet changing one's indigenous first name to a Westernized one (conceding that 'Ru' does have several meanings in Sinhala), 16 is a bit of a letdown to readers who look forward to seeing their fellow-country[wo]men recognized on the international plane. Like the Salman Rushdies, Arundhati Roys, and Kiran Desais of India, how nice if a Sri Lankan name could be received on the international plane, an achievement the quality of the novel well deserves! In his famous essay on Sri Lankan creative writing in English, "A Language without Metaphor," more than half a century ago, Gunatilleke laments that he has "still to read a piece of creative writing by a Ceylonese, which gathers our landscape, vegetation, our domestic surroundings, the familiar speech unobtrusively into an effective idiom, giving the sense of here and now, the immediacy which is the moving spirit in art" (Gunatilleke, 1954: 10). Gunatilleke would take heart today, in the descriptive scenes in this novel, which have the qualities he prescribes for that "moving spirit" that, in turn, goes to form a "language with metaphor"--that ultimate requirement for effective creative writing.
In striving to find a Sri Lankan identity in English writing, or even a Sri Lankan way of writing in English, one would do well to follow the example of the Lord Buddha, who, says the Ven. Veattheave Rahula Thero, set about reforming people thus: Ron aragena se min

Yana bingu lesin kusu min
Buduguna Alankaraya (5) (-frdka wer f.k fi ñka hk ìÕ= f,is ka l= iq ñkã) nq ÿ.= K w,xldrh (5) ["Like the bee who slowly takes nectar from the flower"] The bee takes nectar from a flower without damaging the flower in any way. Likewise, when a Sri Lankan writer adapts English for his/her own writing, s/he should do no damage to the language in the quest to carve a Sri Lankan English out of it.
In the mission of creating a Sri Lankan identity in English creative writing, one should bear in mind to keep the rules of Standard English intact. The excuse for the poor language standard as a characteristic of "Sri Lankan English," for instance,--an attempt that is surreptitiously seeping into journalism in Sri Lanka, and even some parts of the local academia--should be avoided at all costs. In A Disobedient Girl, it is heartening to notice the indigenization of the English language parallelling the improvement of Standard English. Yet it falls short of the full depth of Sengupta's "Sinhalese-Sri Lankan flavor", and, by extension, Rao's earlier-mentioned dictum, due to the rare instances where there are weaknesses especially in the use of Sinhala expressions, and in the conceding to Western norms.