Sri Lanka figures prominently during a Pacific Islands-bound voyage of discovery of two Polish friends, one a pioneering anthropologist and writer and the other a photographer, novelist and painter who was to assist him in field work.
Bronislaw Malinowski, a celebrated anthropologist, often considered one of the most important 20th-century icons in the field, studied indigenous cultures of Melanesia and published landmark work ‘Argonauts of the Western Pacific’ in 1922.
His assistant was Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz (known popularly as Witkacy), a Polish writer, painter, philosopher, playwright, novelist, and photographer active in the interwar period and who was nursing a heartbreak with suicide on his mind during the voyage and his stay in Sri Lanka.
According to an article titled ‘The Nonsense of Witnessing Such Beauty’: Malinowski’s Tryst with Sri Lanka’ in The Diplomat, a short time before the voyage Witkacy experienced a personal tragedy. His fiancee, Jadwiga Janczewska, committed suicide just before their wedding. The devastated artist had been blaming himself for the tragedy and Malinowski reportedly asked Witkacy to accompany him primarily to keep Witkacy’s mind away from his heartache. His scheme, however, backfired.
The two friends met in London and boarded a ship bound for Australia. After a brief visit to Egypt, they travelled to South Asia. The only longer break in the voyage was in Sri Lanka (then called Ceylon). Two travellers stopped for a fortnight in Ceylon to acclimate to the tropical climate and for some sightseeing. The two visited Colombo and Kandy and a few places such as Anuradhapura, Dambulla, Maradankadawala and Kekirawa. The old Buddhist ruins at Anuradhapura emerged as one of the highlights of their sightseeing and deeply impressed the two tourists.
Malinowski delved deep into Sri Lankan culture with his academic zeal and Witkacy was enchanted by the island’s pristine landscape with an artist’s sensitivity but Sri Lanka’s beauty also troubled him in a way.
The colourful images of Sri Lanka left an imprint on Witkacy’s imagination as a painter, a fact which is visible in his later paintings. But this mind-boggling diversity was also greatly troubling him. In a strange way he was sad as his lover was not there with him to share the fascinating experience of being together in the beautiful island.
In a letter to his father, dated June 29, 1914, Witkacy wrote bitterly that: “All of this causes the worst suffering, a pain beyond enduring, because she is not here. All is left is the deepest grief and the nonsense of witnessing such beauty. She is not seeing this and I am not an artist”.
“That surplus of life, that wildness of forms and colours leaves a depressing feeling. There is a wild nonsense about this, an excess, a superfluity, a profligacy, a troubling strength and passion bordering on insanity,” he wrote about his impressions of Sri Lanka when describing the journey in one of the Polish journals.
On July 2, 1914 Witkacy, unable to come to terms with his beloved’s suicide, decided to kill himself in a hotel in remote Anuradhapura. Before putting a Browning pistol to his head, however, he wrote a letter to the Ceylon authorities, so that Malinowski would not face any trouble after his suicide.
“After having lost my bride who has committed suicide, I would before four months kill myself,” he wrote in the opening sentence. “Malinowski was so kind that he has lent me £50 to the sum, I have had, and has taken me in a very bad physical state with him and on account of it has had many troubles. He was so good as a best brother. And I am very sorry that I must do him than injustice and leave him” explained Witkacy in the letter.
Witkacy spent an entire night in a hotel in Anuradhapura in remote Sri Lanka with a pistol against his temple but eventually decided against taking his life, but few years later after hearing that the Soviet army attacked Poland he committed suicide
The document ended with a request to the local authorities not to delay Malinowski’s journey by way of legal formalities and inquiries and said the decision to commit suicide was his own. As he wrote to his mother, Witkacy spent the entire night with a pistol against his temple but eventually decided against taking his life.
The two friends continued their journey and left Sri Lanka for Australia but then the breaking of First World War divided them politically. Malinowski and Witkacy were both Polish, but citizens of two different countries. As Poland was not an independent state at that time, Malinowski happened to be a citizen of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy while Witkacy was a citizen of Russia.
The two Poles had to decide where their loyalties lay and the best way to fight for independence. Witkacy was of the opinion that the Polish people should support Russia against Germany and Austro-Hungary. Malinowski did not agree and, at any rate, did not want to abandon his research just before its commencement.
The two friends had disagreements before, but this quarrel about politics and patriotism proved to be the final straw. Furious, Witkacy parted ways with Malinowski in Australia and embarked on a return journey, planning to join the Russian army. Although they did exchange some letters afterwards, that event proved to be the end of their friendship.
Malinowski went to the Pacific islands for his research, while Witkacy never got to see Oceania. On his lonely way back, the artist spent a few hours in Bombay (now Mumbai). He later called it “a wonderful city” in a letter to Malinowski.
The Sri Lankan impressions echoed not only his later plays and paintings but also one novel: Pożegnanie jesieni (A Farewell to Autumn) which was adopted into a film in 1990. A part of the book is clearly modelled on travel experiences shared with Malinowski, as a section of the novel describes the journey of a Polish couple to India and Sri Lanka. In the book, however, Witkacy’s literary avatar is not accompanied in India by a Malinowski-like character, but by his lover. The journey, however, ends in an equally sorrowful and dramatic parting as the one that took place in real life. Moreover, the Indian landscapes, as portrayed in the novel, are clearly modelled on Sri Lanka. “I do not know India, save for a few hours spent in Bombay,” admitted Witkacy in the introduction to the novel. “I do not know why I have shifted certain events [of the novel] to India, basing on the things I have seen in Ceylon.”
Witkacy, reached Russia to join its army, as he had planned. On the way, however, he was briefly detained by the British in Egypt, who took him for a German professor. Moreover, his time in the Russian army shocked him not only because of the war itself but because he witnessed the beginning of the Bolshevik revolution. After the war the artist stayed in independent Poland and feared the looming Russian Communist menace.
When the Second World War began, Witkacy was in Poland and Malinowski in the US. Upon hearing that the Soviet army attacked Poland soon after the invasion of the German Nazi forces, Witkacy did what he hesitated to do in Sri Lanka’s Anuradhapura hotel – he committed suicide.
Malinowski spent most of the time between the wars in Italy and the United Kingdom, and later moved on to an academic life in the US.
Apart from fieldwork, Malinowski also challenged the claim to universality of Freud’s theory of the Oedipus complex. He initiated a cross-cultural approach in Sex and Repression in Savage Society (1927) where he demonstrated that specific psychological complexes are not universal.
Malinowski influenced the course of African history, serving as an academic mentor to Jomo Kenyatta, the father and first president of modern-day Kenya. Malinowski also wrote the introduction to Facing Mount Kenya, Kenyatta’s ethnographic study of the Gikuyu tribe.
Malinowski died of a heart attack in New Haven, Connecticut, on 16 May 1942. – newstrails.com (The Diplomat/Internet Files)
