The bloody finale of Sri Lanka’s civil war hit the headlines worldwide in 2009. News reports often displayed the Tiger emblem of Tamil nationalism and Lion emblem of Sinhala nationalism, but never mentioned that there has been extensive intermingling between members of different communities from time immemorial, including strong bonds of love and friendship. Newspaper articles and human rights organisations reported atrocities committed by those who wielded political and military power, but there was little or no mention of the innumerable acts of compassion and kindness with which ordinary civilians – all too often ignored by professional peace-makers – have resisted the prevailing barbarism and kept alive values of love and solidarity. Yet without the contribution of these people, peace would not be possible. This novel is about them.
Sri Lanka (earlier called Ceylon, Serendib, Taprobane, Lanka) has been an important entrepot for maritime trade routes since ancient times, and this has left its mark on the culture and composition of its people. The original inhabitants, the Veddas, still survive as a small community, but most members have intermarried and been absorbed by other groups. Apart from a continuous influx of settlers from South India, whose descendants constitute the main Sinhala- and Tamil-speaking communities, Indonesians, Malays and Chinese, Arabs and Africans, Portuguese, Dutch and British colonisers and others have all left their mark on the composition of the population, making ‘ethnic purity’ a fiction. The culture too is diverse and composite; for centuries, people and cultures mixed freely, and the boundaries between them, where they existed at all, were fluid and permeable. Although Buddhism has played a major role in shaping Sri Lankan society, Hinduism, Islam, Christianity and other religions are very much in evidence. A veritable paradise for those who celebrate diversity!
So, what disrupted this idyll? The damage done by European ‘race’ theory did not end with the departure of the British, because it was already being deployed by some of the local elites. Independence in 1948 was followed immediately by the Citizenship Acts, enacted by the ruling United National Party (UNP), which robbed Hill-country Tamils – mainly the families of indentured labourers brought from India by the British to work on tea plantations – of their citizenship and franchise. In 1956, S.W.R.D. Bandaranaike broke away from the UNP to form the Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP) and came to power on the promise to make Sinhala the only official language, reneging on a pre-Independence commitment to make both Sinhala and Tamil official languages, and putting Tamils at a disadvantage in employment. The ‘standardisation scheme’ introduced in 1971 discriminated against Tamil students seeking university entrance. The first large-scale anti-Tamil pogrom broke out in 1958; like those that followed, the intention of driving out Tamils – ethnic cleansing – was very much in evidence. When the UNP, led by J.R. Jayawardene, came to power in 1977, anti-Tamil pogroms broke out again, and again in 1981, when the Jaffna Library with over 90,000 volumes and many priceless manuscripts was burned to the ground. The well-planned island-wide pogroms of 1983 converted a simmering conflict into a civil war.
The irony is that this majoritarian Sinhala nationalism had nothing to offer the overwhelming majority of the Sinhalese. An insurrection in 1971 by a Sinhalese militant group with a base mainly among rural youth, the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP), showed that discrimination against Tamils was not solving their problems of poverty and unemployment; yet the same policies were continued after the insurrection was crushed. In 1978, a new constitution made J.R. Jayawardene the all-powerful Executive President, and in 1979 the Prevention of Terrorism Act (PTA) opened the floodgates to disappearances, torture and extra-judicial killings. In 1987, when the Indo-Lanka Accord was signed between Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi and President Jayawardene, and the Indian Peace-Keeping Force occupied the North and East, the JVP launched a second insurrection, also inspired by the ideology of Sinhala nationalism. The rebels committed ghastly atrocities, but the state forces were equally ruthless and much stronger. On the pretext of defeating the insurgency, democratic rights were demolished, unarmed Sinhalese dissidents killed, and thousands of Sinhalese youths rounded up and massacred. The insurrection ended when its leader, Rohana Wijeweera, was killed in late 1989, but repression in the South continued; the total death toll has been estimated as being between 40,000 and 60,000. In 1990 the Indian army withdrew, and the civil war broke out again.
Tamil nationalism was already present at Independence, and its class character is illustrated by its response to the Citizenship Acts. One section of the Ceylon Tamil Congress voted for the legislation. Another, led by S.J.V. Chelvanayakam, opposed it, correctly foreseeing that it was a prelude to attacks on other minorities, especially Tamil-speaking ones, and broke away to form the Federal Party (FP). But the solution to the problem was seen as demanding more autonomy and rights for Tamils in the North and East, whereas the plantation workers lived in the central Hill-country. Moreover, the FP made no attempt to join forces with the Left parties, which compared the legislation to Hitler’s policies and opposed it. This was clearly linked to its base among the Tamil elite, which made it closer to the ruling UNP than to the Left parties, with their base mainly in the working class and rural poor. The disenfranchised plantation workers were excluded from the Tamil nationalist project by their class, caste and domicile.
Tamil militancy was an off-shoot of Tamil nationalism, and although initially a response to state repression, was itself equally repressive. It is fairly well known that the most powerful group, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), engaged in terrorist attacks against civilians in the South. It is less well known that it acquired its position of dominance by slaughtering members of other Tamil militant groups and systematically killing unarmed Tamil critics and dissidents, the first of whom was assassinated with the tacit approval of the FP as early as 1975. Its forcible conscription of Tamil children earned it the hatred of Tamils in the North and East. It is rarely mentioned that it engaged in massacres of Tamil-speaking Muslims in the East and ethnic cleansing of around 75,000 Muslims from the North. Just as the totalitarianism inherent in Sinhala nationalism could be turned against Sinhalese, the totalitarianism inherent in Tamil nationalism was a source of internal terror. Even within the LTTE, anyone who challenged V. Prabhakaran, the leader, was liquidated; only the Eastern Commander, Karuna Amman, managed to survive such an attempt in 2004, and went on to become Prabhakaran’s nemesis by throwing in his lot with the Sri Lankan government.
Journalistic accounts rarely mention that in 1994, Chandrika Kumaratunga and her government won a landslide victory on a platform of democracy and peace with justice for Tamils. Sinhala nationalism was in abeyance, there was a restoration of democracy in parts of the island controlled by the government, and a real possibility of a political solution to the conflict; but it was sabotaged by the LTTE, which broke the ceasefire, and by the UNP (then in opposition). The Kumaratunga government could also be criticized for not trying harder to secure a more permanent restoration of democracy by abolishing the executive presidency. Again in 2002, when the Norwegian-mediated ceasefire and peace process began, there was popular support for a compromise. But Prabhakaran’s refusal to consider anything short of a separate, exclusively Tamil state (Eelam), the LTTE’s murder of Sri Lanka’s Tamil Foreign Minister Lakshman Kadirgamar and other Tamil moderates, and eventually its provocation of the state security forces, helped to re-start the war and whip up Sinhala nationalism. Tamil dissidents warned that the LTTE’s strategy could only end in disaster for the Tamil people of Sri Lanka, and they were proved absolutely right.
This novel ends shortly before the elections that brought Kumaratunga to power. It was a time when it was possible to hope that democracy would be restored, and the war would end. Subsequently, the LTTE was indeed defeated and Prabhakaran killed under Kumaratunga’s successor, Mahinda Rajapaksa, but Sinhala nationalism remained strong, threatening the progress of post-war reconciliation. The detention of around 250,000 Tamil civilians in prison camps for months on end and denial of liberty and other fundamental rights to them indicated that while the war might be over, the conditions which led to it persisted. When Sinhala nationalist warnings that the LTTE was still a potent enemy grew increasingly implausible, gangs of right-wing extremist Buddhist monks began spewing venom and inciting violence against Muslims. Democratic reforms were reversed, partially restored after the elections of January and August 2015, and destroyed again after the presidential election of November 2019. It appears that the majority of Sinhalese Buddhists in Sri Lanka have not learned that their own rights will be under threat so long as they vote for extreme right-wing leaders from their community. The future depends critically on the ability of the people of Sri Lanka to put behind them the fictitious identities and spurious claims over territory that have caused such devastation.
Nor is this a problem faced in Sri Lanka alone. There is scarcely a country in the world where minority communities have not faced discrimination and persecution. In a significant number of cases, the fight-back has turned violent; state and anti-state terrorism, ethnic cleansing and genocide have claimed innumerable lives and inflicted unspeakable suffering. The experience of the JVP insurrection too is not an isolated one; around the world, from Peru to India, militant groups have taken up arms to solve social problems. But armed struggle is inherently undemocratic: the unarmed civilians supposedly represented by these groups have no control over them, and, on the contrary, may face summary execution if they dissent, like student leader Daya Pathirana who was murdered by the JVP in 1986. These groups thus mirror the violence and authoritarianism of the states they confront. And so the little island in the Indian Ocean, whose history has incorporated influences from around the world, also encapsulates the global struggle to reclaim our humanity from racist, communal, militarist, nationalist and statist ideologies that start by positing a fundamental difference between ‘us’ and ‘them’, and end by condoning mass murder of ‘the other’.
A few words of explanation:
In the story of the Sinhalese king Dutugemunu, his mother, Vihara Maha Devi, encourages him to go to war against the Tamil king Elara to expand his kingdom. Later, when he is conscience-stricken by the countless number of deaths he has caused, Buddhist monks console him by saying he has killed only one-and-a-half people: the ‘one’ being a fully ordained monk, and the ‘half’ a lay follower!
The story of the rabbit in the moon is taken from the Jataka Tales told by the Buddha. One full moon night, the God Indra, disguised as a starving mendicant, comes in turn to four friends – a monkey, jackal, otter and rabbit – begging for food. The monkey offers bananas, the jackal gets some eggs, the otter catches a fish, but the rabbit has nothing to offer but grass. Nonetheless he asks his guest to make a fire, and, when it is ready, jumps into it. Instead of being cooked, he finds himself deposited on cool grass, while Indra breaks off the tip of a mountain and draws the image of the rabbit on the moon to commemorate this act of kindness and generosity. If you are used to seeing the man in the moon, it may not be easy to discern the rabbit, but for those (like me) who have grown up seeing the rabbit, it is hard to see anything else!
This novel is not autobiographical, but I have woven into it fragments from the stories of my own family and friends and the stories of refugees, internally displaced people, women workers, labour activists and women’s rights activists I encountered in the course of my work; and although the characters are fictional, they embody the qualities and values of people I know. Thanks to them, there is still hope for democracy and social justice in Sri Lanka.
(This is the Preface to the Kindle e-book and paperback of Playing Lions and Tigers published in November 2021:
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Playing-Lions-Tigers-Rohini-Hensman-ebook/dp/B09LNQF9JN.)