We bought our first television set in Madurai, back in the early eighties. It was a Sony Trinitron model – a popular series from the iconic Japanese manufacturer, that came framed in an aesthetically pleasing wooden cabinet (rosewood, I am told). The screen was curved, the colors ( combination of red, blue, green – hence Trinitron) vibrant, and most importantly, the images on the screen were sharp and without the irritating shadows that normally plagued the performance of conventional television sets. At that time, Doordarshan, the Indian Government-run television channel, was the only option available, and the elaborate antenna, painstakingly erected as part of any standard TV installation, would stream in less-than-average quality signals broadcast from the national or regional stations to the screen. However, we liked what we received, and didn’t mind the quality because there was nothing else to compare the experience with; until one day, we accidentally tuned into Roopavahini – a Srilankan television channel. Madurai, geographically, is about 370 km (as the crow flies) from the island of Srilanka, and sometimes, when the weather was clear, and the angels shined on us, and with a little tweak to the direction of the Antenna, the television waves from the Island would travel unimpeded to our screens. The result was breathtaking. The quality of Roopavahini’s transmission, its content, and the exquisite rich colors it produced in our Sony Trinitron TV was extraordinary. The reception of Roopavahini was never certain, certainly not legal, I suppose, but we loved those moments when we received clear signals. Not until Star TV and other channels flooded the market did we experience the kind of quality transmission we did, during those occasional moments with Roopavahini programs. And for me, as a boy of ten or eleven at that time, it was my first brush with a country called Srilanka. It was through Roopavahini, I came to know of this Island nation. I didn’t realize that this small island that broadcasts high-quality TV programs and I assumed was a stable and prosperous country was to soon be consumed by a civil war that would last for decades.
Growing up in the eighties, especially in Southern India, It was impossible not to know about the freedom struggle in Srilanka. The newspapers were full of it. The LTTE, the militant Tamil outfit, run by the enigmatic guerrilla soldier, Vellupillai Prabhakaran, was fast becoming a household name. The date when the civil war between Sinhalese and the LTTE started in full force is generally pegged at 23rd July 1983. That was the day when the LTTE ambushed and killed thirteen Srilankan soldiers in Jaffna and triggered what is now known as the Black riots – a week of mayhem and murder that prevailed in most parts of Srilanka where LTTE had a presence. What began that week would end only in 2009.
The LTTE’s fight for a separate Tamil land in Srilanka had support in some political circles, especially in Tamil Nadu, but at the same time, the means and methods used by the organization were severely criticized and condoned, nationally and internationally. Over time, it was difficult to determine what kind of fight the LTTE was fighting. While there is unanimous consent among people that the Tamils had to take a stand and ask for their rights; perhaps, the LTTE was even right in their demand for a separate status within Sri Lanka. But what turned out wrong was the increasing violence of the means the group used to achieve it.
Throughout the eighties, the LTTE executed several assassinations within Srilanka of those who weren’t sympathetic to their cause. But the turning point was the assassination of former Indian prime minister Rajiv Gandhi in the middle of his campaign rally by arming a young girl with enough bombs in her vest to blow out a few square miles. The audacity of the act, the sheer brutality, and the arrogance of an organization that had taken upon itself the task of purging anyone who wasn’t supportive of its vision awakened the world to the kind of organization LTTE had become in its fight for freedom. Immediately after the assassination, all the major counties declared LTTE a terrorist organization, and that ban exists even today, even after the LTTE is no longer a force. Some would argue that it is the Sinhalese that pushed the LTTE to become more and more militant and animalistic in its behavior and tactics. There is truth to that as well.
Since the independence of Sri Lanka in 1948, the Sinhalese had systematically stripped the Tamil population of its status and dignity through legislative, social, and religious statutes, and had marginalized the Tamils who have been there for thousands of years. A strong sense among the Sinhalese-speaking population that they are the only true inheritors of the land, and that the Tamils were never a part of the core culture, derived its force from the “Mahavamsa”, a two-thousand-year-old Srilankan epic written in Pali script, that persistently portrays the “Damils” as evil. The epic extols the exploits of the Sinhala King Dutthagamani who eventually defeated the Tamil king Elara, and thereby established an undisputed hegemony of the Sinhalese and Buddhism in Srilanka. It is no surprise, therefore, after independence, when the Sinhalese began tightening the screws the Tamils rebelled against the state, and the rebellion had to take the form of militancy. But having drawn the gun to fight a legitimate war, the LTTE, under Prabhakaran, soon became an outfit that lost its direction, sucked in the paranoia of its leader, and consumed by the disillusionment that sets in whenever the lofty and idealistic goals of a militant movement are subsumed in the whim and fancies of one man.
When the Srilankan army cornered the LTTE in 2009, and allegedly shot Prabhakaran and killed him, the civil war in the country had already taken an irrevocable toll on the psyche and temperament of its people. For three decades, the Tamils, the Sinhalese, and the Muslims have lived on the edge, pushed now by the army, and now by the LTTE, and never allowed any of them to settle down. The war wore down their nerves, and the reasons for the war became more blurred with each passing day. The common man, always the victim in any war, found himself displaced, uprooted, and inconsolable. The LTTE, which attracted intelligent and educated men and women at one point, had lost all its gloss by the time the war ended, and many devout supporters and members of the organization had already defected to other countries to lead new lives and/or avoid retribution from their own organization. To keep the outfit alive, the LTTE had to forcibly take children and girls against the will of helpless families as their fodder. The fight for freedom had turned into a fight for survival at any cost. The mangled picture of Prabhakaran, lying sprawled in the fields of Jaffna in his guerrilla fatigues, with his head covered in blue cloth with dried blood plastering his face, is still not a conclusive picture of his death. There is a train of thought that Prabhakaran may have slipped away to a different country, and biding his time. Certain sections of the Tamil population in Srilanka still believe in the resurrection of the organization. But that is unlikely.
Over the years, I have read many articles and watched several documentaries on the state of the struggle in Srilanka. I have always wanted to read a comprehensive, well-written, and well-researched book on the origins of the civil war, its progress, its conclusion, and its aftermath. A book that can give me a rounded picture of the war. It is easy to write about any war in the abstract, but to explore and express it through the voice of those who have lived through these tumultuous times, and can provide first-hand accounts of the events, gives the historian honesty and intellectual integrity in telling the story. I found what I wished for in Samanth Subramanian’s 2015 book “This divided island – life, death, and the Sri Lankan war”. Samantha is a journalist, based in London and regularly writes wonderful long-form essays for the Guardian, Wire, New Yorker, and other prestigious publications. This is his second book, the first is about the state of fishing and the types of fish that flourish along the coasts of India. Another delightful book.
Samanth spent several months in Sri Lanka researching and writing this book. He arrived there in 2011, two years after the Sri Lankan army vanquished and literally snuffed out the LTTE resistance. It was an interesting and equally trepidatious time to be there. Journalists weren’t welcomed, especially from India, and a Tamil-speaking one at that. President Mahinda Rajapaksa and his family were ruling high and mighty and were the darling of the Sinhalese population. Huge cutouts of the well-built president in his trademark white outfit with a velvet-colored sash around his neck were prominently displayed. The Sri Lankan army and the bureaucracy were still circumspect about Tamils and were tightly regulating their movements, and congregations, watching for any signs of Tamil militancy raising its head again. Hindu temples were being systematically taken down, and the statues of Buddha were appearing everywhere. History books were rewritten to erase all traces of Tamil presence. Local historians and anthologists were busy digging out evidence or reinterpreting facts to trace the lineage of President Mahinda to the ancient hero of Ceylon – King Dutthagamani. Samanth senses a palpable undercurrent of fear and tension among the population: Understandable though- after enduring thirty years of civil war, it is impossible to regain normalcy in just a couple of years. He recounts with vivid clarity his interviews with those who were directly involved and affected by the war. His descriptions of the background, the atmosphere, the hesitancy to open up, the withdrawn body language, and finally the emotional intensity of the conversations whenever he could break through with the speaker, give the reader a clear and viscerally moving account of how each community traced the origins of the civil war, its trajectory over the years, and the painful and bloody consummation of the struggle that devoured thousands upon thousands of civilian lives, mostly Tamil, during the final stages of the war.
Samanth’s crystal clear prose sprinkled with apt metaphors and crisp turn of phrases, keeps the narrative flowing without ever deviating from the principal subject. Even when he occasionally digresses, it ends up illuminating an observation or conversation described later in the book. Samanth covers the history of the civil war from all angles, and importantly, stays away from being judgmental about anything. In an account of a war that was close to Indian shores, It would have been difficult to remain neutral; but he has managed to do just that. The Prabhakaran that emerges from the pages of the book is a man who lost his way in the legitimate struggle for Tamil freedom – an instance of the archetypical rebel who was consumed by his own hallucinations and mania about how civil liberties should be won. The book is equally unforgiving and unequivocal in its observations about the role of the Sri Lankan government in creating the atmosphere for such a bloody war to arise in the first place. From the time Sri Lanka gained independence, almost, the very first acts of the government machinery were to curb the rights and liberties of the Tamils. From changing the official religion to changing the official language to increasing the bars for Tamils to gain access to higher education, to the conversion of temples to Buddhist shrines; the Sri Lankan government was clear on its priorities. That a man like Prabhakaran should rise with a gun in his hand with no intention of talking about peace seems inevitable, from Samanth’s narrative. Revolutions and revolutionaries are born from the very soil that breeds them, and the rising of the LTTE seems no exception. One wonders if peace talks done in the right spirit would have helped. But that would be pure conjecture at this distance. By the early nineties, too much water had flown down the bridge for any kind of talks to prevail over either side of the conflict. The civil war had to end the way it did – with rivulets of blood soaking the parched earth, and the lives of innocent men, women, and children sacrificed for absolutely nothing.
I read Samanth’s book in two days. It is about 320 pages long. When I closed the book, I felt immensely sad and heavy that after all the incessant fighting, countless killings, and high-visibility assassinations, nothing concrete has emerged out of this hubris. In the last ten years, the country has gone from bad to worse, and today stands financially bankrupt – Tamil and Sinhalese, both are on the streets weathering inflation of seventy percent, the President fleeing the country, and the government is at the mercy of the surrounding nations to provide financial support to bring it back from the brink of an irrecoverable humanitarian problem.
“This divided island” was long-listed for the prestigious Samuel Johnson prize for Non-fiction writing in 2016, only the second time an Indian author has been nominated for this prize after Sekutu Mehta’s brilliant portrayal of Mumbai in the 2002 book “Maximum city”. I highly recommend Samanth Subramanian’s book for its style, the treatment of the sensitive subject, and the wonderful commitment to understanding this messy war that may have ended decisively for one side, but never reached a solution to the problem both sides fought for. The book makes us think hard about the choices we make as a society when it is multilingual and multicultural in nature. Can one justify marginalizing a whole segment of the population based on religion and language? The lessons from the civil war in Sri Lanka can apply to any democratic country where the dominant community seeks to impose restrictions and restraints that disempower those who have an equal claim on the land. Failing to do so will have consequences for the country as a whole.