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Language in India www.languageinindia.com ISSN 1930-2940 Vol. 20:6 June 2020

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A Comparative Portrayal of Punyakante Wijenaike’s
The Waiting Earth
Dr. Veeramankai Stalina Yogaratnam, B.A., M.A., B.Ed., Ph.D.
Senior Lecturer in English Literature
Department of Linguistics and English
University of Jaffna, Sri Lanka
yoharatnam7@gmail.com
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Punyakante Wijenaike
Courtesy: http://christnotes.weebly.com/iii-semester3/monkeys-by-punyakante-wijenaike

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Language in India www.languageinindia.com ISSN 1930-2940 20:6 June 2020
Dr. Veeramankai Stalina Yogaratnam, B.A., M.A., B.Ed., Ph.D.
A Comparative Portrayal of Punyakante Wijenaike’s The Waiting Earth 168
 Courtesy: www.goodreads.com
ABSTRACT
This paper focuses on Punyakante Wijenaike's The Waiting Earth (1966) which depicts
the Sri Lankan state which emphases on development and the social upheaval caused by
resettlement in the 1960s. Punyakante Wijenaike, one of the most prolific Sri Lankan writers
in English, and whose fictional world has been described as a woman's world, looks at these
concepts in a Sri Lankan cultural context. Wijenaike, while describing the painful mental
condition of one’s being cut off from their own native soil very effectively, through her fiction,
speaks out the pains and agonies suffered during war time and thus her works provide a very
powerful example of Sri Lankan literature. The disturbed psychological morale or the angst
can best be pictured through literature, as literature is the one of the sources to ventilate this
kind of angst. Wijenaike's ambiguity about the extent of the agricultural growth and poverty
alleviation inspects literary strategies including indirect discourse to demonstrate. This paper
argues about the text The Waiting Earth which is regarded as literary and political interventions
against government enforced resettlement.

Keywords: Punyakante Wijenaike, The Waiting Earth, Social upheaval, cultural context,
agricultural development, poverty alleviation, psychology, native soil.

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Language in India www.languageinindia.com ISSN 1930-2940 20:6 June 2020
Dr. Veeramankai Stalina Yogaratnam, B.A., M.A., B.Ed., Ph.D.
A Comparative Portrayal of Punyakante Wijenaike’s The Waiting Earth 169
INTRODUCTION
Literature has been used as a vehicle to express a country’s political, cultural and
emotional attitudes. Sri Lankan literature of creative writing is an expression of its country’s
social changes. The writers reflect their concern about the past and present history of their
nation. The social changes during pre-war, ethnic crisis in war and post war which influence
the present condition with a growing awareness of both personal and national identity and the
problems of the modern days find an expression in Sri Lankan literature. Sri Lankan writers
make an attempt at investigating the hardships of man in the process of making an ideal society.
The fictionalization of nationalist and political aspirations and the modern and recent trends of
treating social, cultural, political and existential problems form the complex and enriched
features of Sri Lankan creative writing of English. The spirit of producing literature has
flourished with such faction, where Wijenaike has carved a niche for herself in Sri Lankan
literature. She portrays the real conditions of the society with its problems and pains and at the
same time its riches and enviable heritage and culture. It is quite relevant to mention Freud at
this point mainly for his psychoanalysis.

Punyakante Wijenaike’s The Waiting Earth (1966) should be viewed in two

perspectives. First it occupies a prominent place in the history of the Sri Lankan novel in
English. There were very few original writings in English at that time and The Waiting Earth
leaves a strong impact on later writings of fiction. Secondly, the write Wiejenaike was greatly
influenced by the writer Peral. S Buck, who was popular among Sri Lankan readers. The title
The Waiting Earth itself echoes Pearl.S Buck’s The Good Earth. The Waiting Earth is the story
of a woman written to appeal to women.

Punyakante Wijenaike is a conspicuous Sri Lankan novelist who addressed the

women’s social issues of Sri Lanka throughout the previous six decades. The Psychological
oppression of the Sri Lankan traditional woman after their marriage is usually brought. This
usual Sri Lankan phenomenon is clearly presented in the novel and it has been a serious women
issue in Sri Lanka for a long time. She portrays the real conditions of the society with its
problems and pains and at the same time its riches and enviable heritage and culture.

In a book Sri Lanka's Development Since Independence: Socio-economic Perspectives

and Analyses written by W. D. Lakshman, Clement Allan Tisdell discusses about the Sri
Lankan’s tradition of seeing the world as a connected whole.as explains that,

This literature could sound such notes as “the guns are ready, grenades piled
high, bayonets gleaming,” (Lakdasa Wikkramasinha) but it is not typically
revolutionary, speaking of tragic waste and evoking compassion, as in
Punyakante Wijenaike’s stories The Sun and The Rebel. (288)

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Language in India www.languageinindia.com ISSN 1930-2940 20:6 June 2020
Dr. Veeramankai Stalina Yogaratnam, B.A., M.A., B.Ed., Ph.D.
A Comparative Portrayal of Punyakante Wijenaike’s The Waiting Earth 170
 Punyakante Wijenaike skilfully blends the historical, political and cultural implications
with a prophetic vision. These implications and emotional tensions in her and the personal pain
sharpen the perception of life which reflects through her writings. The transformation of
experiences lifts her writing from the exterior to the interior, rural to urban, restrictions to
freedom and fantasy to reality.

Wijenaike capably handles the intellectual uncertainty to present the past and future
simultaneously. Wijenaike expresses the search for bearings and a home through historical and
social structure in her works.

THE STRUGGLE TO SURVIVE

The protagonist in The Waiting Earth is Sellohamy, Wijenaike’s own favourite heroine.
The theme of the novel is endurance and patience like the earth. She is devoted to her husband
and children. She struggles for her survival when her husband alienates her and her daughter
Isabella Hamy and younger son Piyasena protest against her about the rumour spread in the
village. She tolerates her husband as well as her children even though they oppose and alienate
her. The struggle for survival is clearly depicted by Wijenaike through the character Sellohamy,
who is a woman of endurance, patience as well as strong will.

Punyakante Wijenaike’s works gained regional mainstream popularity. The

unembellished prose, emotional intensity and dramatic change of her work are the features
which contribute to her representation writings. Punyakante Wijenaike mostly delineates the
restless search for habitation of the female, alienated and disfranchised protagonists or
characters. These characters and literary representations of her subjectivity, space relations
reflect, re-evaluate and feminise territorially inscribed cultural transformation.

Punyakante Wijenaike portrays the peasant life and the flourishing rural life of Sri
Lanka in her first novel The Waiting Earth. She expresses socialist impulses and humanitarian
views which foreground the poverty and homeless condition of the landless peasant Podi
Singho. Podi Singho’s desire expresses his insecurities and his fulfilment of life depends on
owning a land of his own as his birth right. She registers the socio-cultural unhomely rural life
and a landless peasant, and his homelessness is resolved at the end by succeeding in having an
understanding within his family and finding his joy and fulfilment in it.

The Waiting Earth is the symbolic representation of land or the affection towards one’s
own space. This message becomes very clear in holding towards the earth or land with one’s
own culture and tradition in order to get an identity in the society. In The Waiting Earth, the
protagonist Sellohamy waits very patiently like the earth for the love and affection of her
husband, Podi Singho. Podi Singho explores the magnificence of owning a piece of land, which
is also the symbolic journey of his life. In The Waiting Earth, Podi Singho " ... made himself
imagine that his sweat was not all in vain, for everything he cut would be for himself and his
sons, and his grandsons-yet-to-be" (17). The characters search for an identity has been

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Language in India www.languageinindia.com ISSN 1930-2940 20:6 June 2020
Dr. Veeramankai Stalina Yogaratnam, B.A., M.A., B.Ed., Ph.D.
A Comparative Portrayal of Punyakante Wijenaike’s The Waiting Earth 171
established in each work which is equivalent to truth to untruth and life from imagination. All
the central characters make self-discoveries and develop their own idea to reach their vision of
life in spite of all their struggles and failures.

In a book Writing Sri Lanka: Literature, Resistance & the Politics of Place written by
Minoli Salgado explains about critical framework that actively reclaims marginalized voices
and draws upon recent studies in migration and the diaspora to reconfigure the Sri Lankan
critical terrain and discusses about The Waiting Earth as,

When Wijenaike write The Waiting Earth in 1966 the literary preoccupation
with rural life was still flourishing. Like her Lankan contemporary James
Goonewardene, and her Indian precursors Raja Rao and Kamala Markandaya,
she sought in rural life and traditions the models being and thinking that would
authenticate the experience of living in a newly independent nation, a concern
that might serve to ground and legitimate her writing in English and thereby
obviate possible charges of ‘cultural treason’. (60)

THE VOICES OF WOMEN IN WRITING

Punyakante Wijenaike portrays her characters, particularly women characters, both in
traditional and modern, where their values conflict with those of men and their milieu. Her
heroines are patient and meek, undergo suppression and suffer agony initially under the male
domination but later on, they break all the chains and constricting traditions of their social set
up. The gender war becomes one of the major themes in the works of Punyakante Wijenaike
which sets her apart compared to her with other writers. The writer’s mission is to awake self-
consciousness among women to claim their rights for equality with a mission to awake self-
realisation and have a duty to protect and uphold the value systems of society, which are still
sound and valid and relevant.

Punyakante Wijenaike has established a major voice among Sri Lankan women writers
in her descriptions of place, with an elegance and naturalness of story setting, ability to reveal
the subtle emotional lives of characters which have been developed from her own life
experience. She has chosen the ordinary events in the lives of ordinary women and grasps and
interprets the human relationships of ordinary people. The strength of her fiction and short
stories lies in the regional focus and deep-rooted customs and traditions. Again, her strength
lies in her ability of expressing the texture of everyday life with compassion and unyielding
moments which evoke emotions and lend grace for living. Her short stories are about everyday
life with struggles in their ordinary lives which explore the rhythm of her nation’s life.

The narration of women through their journey of life can be segregated from inner to
outer space with entailing discoveries and dangers. The journey pattern of woman is analyzed
through her different stages of life like childhood, girlhood, wife and motherhood in the
institution of family as well as in the relationship of public domain in the society. A woman is

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Language in India www.languageinindia.com ISSN 1930-2940 20:6 June 2020
Dr. Veeramankai Stalina Yogaratnam, B.A., M.A., B.Ed., Ph.D.
A Comparative Portrayal of Punyakante Wijenaike’s The Waiting Earth 172
primarily defined in her marital terms like a mother, a wife and a widow. In short, she plays
roles like that of a man’s wife or mother of children. These stages of narration of a woman have
been done very perfectly in most of her works. Punyakante Wijenaike explores the sufferings
and oppression of a woman in these segregated stages of life. Her heroines fall neatly into these
categories exploring their own dream and come to terms with their relationship with the family
as well as with the society.
He took one brief look at the child and then went out, his heart twisting in
disappointment. A daughter! Once again life had let him down and he was
afraid. The fear came together with the bitter thought that nothing could come
right for him and that he might as well kill himself and end everything. She
[Sellohamy] could not care for him the way she pretended to, he thought wildly.
A woman who truly cared for her man would bear him nothing but sons. It was
strange that she who never had many words to offer, always had something to
say and cover her failure in this thing. He remembered bitterly her words to him
on that one tender evening: "I want only sons that are as the same heart as the
father." Now she was trying to make him believe that a daughter was lucky.
This time he would not believe so easily her woman's talk and he would not
forgive so easily either. This time he would let his heart remain hard and perhaps
this would make her give him a son next time. (The Waiting Earth, 29)

Even considering the fact that Podi Singho is a village farmer uninformed about the
genetic theory that it is the male who is "responsible" for the sex of the child, his reaction to
the birth of a daughter cannot be condoned. If we compare this extract with the passage
describing his response to the earlier birth of his freak son, we can see to what extremes the
discrimination against the baby girl can go:

He tightened his hold on the child. So, she [Kathirinahamy] had made no
attempt to save his son. She had thrust it aside like a piece of useless flesh. He
wanted to put out his fist and smash the rotten teeth in her head because she had
dared to insult this thing who was, in spite of everything, his own flesh and
blood .... He clutched the child closer to his body ... (The Waiting Earth, 5)

The crucial sufferings of war have been explored through the life imprints of individuals
in the society. These individuals shape the socio-political ethos in the country. The tragic
effects of war manifest into the mindless bloody violence and migration or people turning to
be refugees overnight. Punyakante Wijenaike connects war with the life of individuals with a
humanist presentation. She presents her individual with a major significant role in the making
of the history of his times. The plot of the story has been identified through the life of
protagonists in three distinct stages. In the first phase, the protagonists undergo the identity
crisis which leads to isolation and negation in the second phase and the tremendous
reconstruction of their life in their own terms is the final phase. This realization of distinct
phases of identity has been positively emphasized in the works of Punyakante Wijenaike. These

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Language in India www.languageinindia.com ISSN 1930-2940 20:6 June 2020
Dr. Veeramankai Stalina Yogaratnam, B.A., M.A., B.Ed., Ph.D.
A Comparative Portrayal of Punyakante Wijenaike’s The Waiting Earth 173
phases of identity lead the protagonist to human existence through various cities, countries, and
cultures. The protagonists discover the compassion within themselves for others. This positive
and bold approach leads them to discover a new identity with new culture and society which
shows fellow feeling, warmth, strength, new hope, and dreams to achieve and bind worlds
together.

Podi Singho learns lessons, both at personal and social levels in which his existential
problems with regard to having a land on his own turned as his inner conflict. Each one has a
meaning of life to himself and that is the root of the conflict. No one can enter another’s inside.
There may be only one meaning in life and everybody is just groping along in their various
ways to achieve it. Man’s social circumstances could be changed and remade within his own
circumstances of boundary or his life which make him stronger in character and hope to achieve
their dreams through the realization of his own nature in society.

In a book Utopia and the Village in South Asian Literatures written by Anupama
Mohan portrays about the rural poverty and territorial dispossession and explains that, “The
Waiting Earth, where the author critiques from an emergent feminist standpoint the
essentialisms and homogenizations of mainstream nationalism, she is unable to break out of
the self-legitimizing binaries of ethnocentric models of national collectivization.” (30)

LUST FOR LAND

It was the time of tenant farming and absentee landlords living in the city. This was the
pre-1958 historic paddy-land-act era. That act gave the tenant farmer greater claim to the land
cultivated that described in the novel. One can determine the time more precisely to be early
1950s because that was the time, when state land in the dry zone, was being distributed among
landless framers in the wet zone. “The land is everything—their law, their ethics, and their
reason for existence. Without that relationship they become ghosts. Half people. They are not
separated from the land. When they lose it, they lost themselves.” (Davidson 167)

The call of nature is reflected in the language and is the mode that the writer chooses
for expression. Nature is a source of inspiration, nature with all its bounty appears in her
writings. Her writings are replete with nature descriptions which reflect the mood or action of
the character. Her writings claim a relationship with nature, and it is symbolic tie for the
characters. Nature provides not only the appeal to the writer by their beauty but also provides
strength and hope for her characters. The predominance of nature along with the individual’s
life which gives an opportunity for the author to be an observer of the landscape, leading the
characters to self-introspection and imagination to make them identity with the true pilgrim of
life’s journey. It becomes the character’s roots, belongings, family, and the relationship
between the individual and family which shows imaginative and creative observations in
shaping human destiny. It shows the inner and outer conflict of people’s journey.

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Language in India www.languageinindia.com ISSN 1930-2940 20:6 June 2020
Dr. Veeramankai Stalina Yogaratnam, B.A., M.A., B.Ed., Ph.D.
A Comparative Portrayal of Punyakante Wijenaike’s The Waiting Earth 174
 Punyakante Weijenaike situates her novel in a Sri Lankan backward village. The name
of the village is not mentioned. The village has no good roads and modern transport. There
were no hospitals and medical facilities. At the early stage of the novel, when the protagonist
Podi Singho’s wife has to give birth to a baby she does so at home aided by a few village
women. The child is still born.

In a book Utopia and the Village in South Asian Literatures written by Anupama
Mohan discusses about the The Waiting Earth as “They also provide the ideological a priori
for the dystopic imaginary of Punyakante Wijenaike’s The Waiting Earth (1966), endorsed
tacitly through the character of ‘the ideal Sinhala woman’ whose ‘invisibilization’ is both an
effect and a critique of the chauvinisms of the male-authored nationalisms. (29) It explained
about the rural trope inn twentieth century about the ideas of literary and cultural imaginaries.

Punyakante Weijeinaike situates her novel in a backward Sri Lankan village in the
decade of 195s. It is the story of the ruin of basically man and his family by a complex of
factors operating in such a village. Among these factors, the most pervasive in the novel is the
rural landlessness. Punyakante Weijenaike shows that for the Sri Lankan villager, his rice-box
is the treasure at home. The food is the most valuable thing in a Sri Lankan rural home. Food
is the source of life. Land produces food. Therefore, for the Sri Lankan villager, land is the
source of life.

Sellohamy does all her duties to Podi Singho who always dream of possessing a land
of his own. Sellohamy follows the teachings of Buddha even though she is uneducated. She
follows all the customs and traditions in her family. Podi Singho is always in his dream land.
He does not fulfil the duty as a husband. He does not love his wife. He is at first advised to
respect her wife, to be courteous to her. Podi Singho does not discharge his duties to the family.
He should earn and he should fulfil the needs of his family members, but he goes to work for
some days and some days he does not work. He only dreams of his land and he considers a
land of his own as his identity because it has roots in his soul. He does not realise that land
does not make a home or that it is only the family member’s affection, care and love that make
a home. He always does whatever he thinks. Sellohamy has to endure all the problems and
struggles in her life as well as in the family.

Sellohamy’s concern about her family life and future depends on Podi Singho. Podi
Singho’s concern is not only to get a land of his own not about his wife. He always talks about
the land. Sellohamy lives a crippled martial life as Podi Singho does not give any concern for
her. Sellohamy talks about the harvest to her husband Podi Singho saying that they would get
more grain as their share for the work that they did so that she can fill her rice box. But Podi
Singho says that the harvest is good enough, but their share would be small as usual. Seeing
the frustrated face of Sellohamy. Podi Singho begins to speak whatever comes to his mind.

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Language in India www.languageinindia.com ISSN 1930-2940 20:6 June 2020
Dr. Veeramankai Stalina Yogaratnam, B.A., M.A., B.Ed., Ph.D.
A Comparative Portrayal of Punyakante Wijenaike’s The Waiting Earth 175
 If I had one field of rice, I could call my own! What good will come of a life
spent in working for others? Here I am a man of nearly thirtyone … and I have only my two
hands to fall back on in time of trouble. What will I leave my sons when I die? What will the
will they have to remember me by? A handful of coconuts from the compound? A hut which
leaks when it rains and for which I pay a rupee or two each month as rent? Each harvest I get
this tight knot of pain in my head and it will not go till the harvest is over, If only you could
have brought me a bit of land as dowry.

The final scene in the novel is also not authentic. Then novel ends on the hopeful note
that Podi Singho may get a piece of land from the land Kacheri to be held at the head man.
Podi Singho is overjoyed at the news. This joy of the man shows how the new hope for the
possession of a piece of land in a colonisation scheme can revitalise a man even an old man.
But the way that revitalization is expressed in the last scene is not acceptable. Podi Singho tells
with a promise to his wife that no other night they have shared with all the heat he had felt
within him. And he spoke without shame before his son. This is impossible in Sri Lankan
context even if Podi Singho dares to speak about their sex life openly to his wife which is very
unlikely from a man like Podi Singho. Sri Lankan villager not even a presence of a grown-up
child of his.

CONCLUSION
Punyakante Wijenaike cares much to present the vivid picture of the social structure in
the country. Sri Lankan people accept life and its circumstances towards the journey of death.
The truth of life is carried from generations after generations. One had to secure one’s own
place in the society either through wealth or through tradition and cultural rights from their
own ancestors: “The land of living was not far removed from the domain of the ancestors. They
are coming and going between them. A man’s life from birth to death was a series of transition
rites which brought nearer and nearer to his ancestors” (Achebe 122). In search of a
materialistic world, the people destroy the moral standards of the people and lose faith in their
old values, customs, and traditions.

Punyakante Wijenaike’s women characters are highly intelligent and beautiful female
protagonist who wills her way with indomitable courage and stands her ground firmly when
confronted with vehement of social opposition and an adverse fate. The protagonists are
insightful in their presentation of woman as an embodiment of patience and fortitude and as a
source of strength to man in sorting out her own problems of adjustment and fulfilment in a
man-made world and its institutions.

Punyakante Wijenaike gives her own experience as a Sri Lankan growing up in Sri
Lanka, living in a house where war becomes a major barrier and wherein family
misunderstandings and misconceptions are common. All the factors that arise out of war and
family are not at all negative because when one learns to accept the mixture, one can witness
the drifting opinions sustain them in all aspects. Eventually, the women are able to create a new

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Language in India www.languageinindia.com ISSN 1930-2940 20:6 June 2020
Dr. Veeramankai Stalina Yogaratnam, B.A., M.A., B.Ed., Ph.D.
A Comparative Portrayal of Punyakante Wijenaike’s The Waiting Earth 176
space for themselves. The women characters depict the exploitation of women within the
family as well as in the community. They want to build up their family first and the society or
community comes secondly. Punyakante Wijenaike identifies the problems of women by
depicting the forces of denigration and self-denigration. They change themselves to get
recognition in their own family and in the society.
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WORKS CITED

Achebe, Chinua. Things Fall Apart. Heinemann. 1966.

Davidson, Robyn. Tracks. London: Picador, 1998.
Lakshman. W.D., Tisdel, Clement Allan. Sri Lanka's Development Since Independence: Socio-
economic Perspectives and Analyses. Nova Publishers, 2000.
Salgado, Minoli. Writing Sri Lanka: Literature, Resistance & the Politics of Place.
Routledge. 2007.
Wijenaike, Punyakante. The Waiting Earth. Colombo Apothecaries Co., 1966.
Mohan, Anupama. Utopia and the Village in South Asian Literatures. Palgrave Macmillan.
2012.
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Language in India www.languageinindia.com ISSN 1930-2940 20:6 June 2020
Dr. Veeramankai Stalina Yogaratnam, B.A., M.A., B.Ed., Ph.D.
A Comparative Portrayal of Punyakante Wijenaike’s The Waiting Earth 177