Dear Sir,

I am Eshantha Ariyadasa, presently a research higher degree student at Flinders University in South Australia. This is to inform you of a very tragic incident that happened to a Sri Lankan student Dhanushka Uswatte who is presently at the Flinders University reading for his honours degree.

According to Dhanushka, last Friday (10^th May 2013), he was waiting for a bus at a bus stop with one of his Australian university friends. Suddenly an Australian (an Aboriginal) has appeared swearing at both of them, and has demanded that Dhanushka go back to his country. Dhanushka politely requested that he leave them alone, as they have done nothing wrong other than waiting to catch a bus. However unfortunately his request was ignored and Dhanushka was brutally attacked by this person. He suffered severe facial injury and had to undergo an immediate surgery at the Flinders Medical Centre in Adelaide. According to Dhanushka, two plates have been used during his operation underneath his left eye and just above his mouth to fix the fracture caused by this attack. He says, part of his face’s left side is still numb as some nerves too have been damaged. This incident has been reported to the police as well as to the officials of the university.

 Dhanushka was hospitalized for five days but now has returned to his apartment and is surviving solely with the support of his few friends from both Sri Lanka and Australia. Dhanushka is a really having difficulties being a self-financed student, and has only come up to this level of education with an enormous difficulty. It seems to me that he is in no way responsible for this terrible occurrence, however it has left him with great financial difficulty and will limit obviously delay his important studies. He may not be able to attend university lectures and his part time works for a long while.

 I strongly believe that Australia as a country that supports International students enormously and honour Human Rights greatly, should take necessary actions immediately.

 I as a Sri Lankan, as well as a student from his same university, kindly appeal you to be an intermediary to this case. I strongly feel that Dhanushka needs your support as an adviser at this time as he is away from his family and his dear ones in his motherland. Sir, if you need any assistance or more information, I would with no hesitation ready to help you voluntarily. My contact no. is 04 0664 4259. I have written below the contact details of Dhanushka for your kind perusal.

Tel. no. 04 3365 5201

Address: 8 Greenock Rd,

Sturt 5047 SA 

 Sir, could you please forward this to the ASLA president?

Kind regards!

Eshantha Ariyadasa

Research Higher Degree (PhD) Student (Australia Awards Endeavour Scholarship), School of Social & Policy Studies (SSS 123) Flinders University, South Australia

II: Memo from Roberts

I spoke to Dhanushka on the phone today. He is in his fifth year at Flinders Uni and is studying nanotechnolgy. He was waiting at a bus stand on Sturt Road with Alishya, a White Australian student, when an  Aboriginal man passed with a young child of about six years accompanying him. The man came back . Let Dhanushka relate the sequnce of events that followed: “he head bumped me asking what are you looking at. When i said we are just waiting for the bus, he said ‘go back to you f**** country.’ Alicia said just walk away we don’t need any troubles, we are waiting for a bus. I knew he is going to hit me anyway regardless of what we say, so I apologized by saying I’m sorry if we did something wrong and stood up. Then he backed off which [led me to think] he was going andIi turned to speak to Alishya to make her feel at ease … But then the Aboriginal man hit me in the face. I lost consciousness for a fleeting moment as next thing i remember i was on Alishya’s lap bleeding heavily…”

Alishya had asitedhimbak to the flat heshares with an east timorse student. Freiiends ahd then helped him to the ER at Flinders Medical Centre at 11.00pm that night. ”I waited 4hrs to see a doctor. After numerous X-ray and CT scans, doc said my nose is broken from two places and there is a fracture underneath the eye socket. surgery was on tuesday. They fixed the nose and the damage near eye socket was worse than they thought and they put 2 plates one underneath the eye and one to the left side of the nose. Half of my face is still numb due to the hit which damaged a nerve. According to the doctors, it could last for months. Its been 11 days but I’m still spitting blood. I have to go to the eye clinic next week as well. I had more than 40 tablets of painkillers since last thursday evening when i came home from the hospital and its barely helped to ease the pain.”

Dhanushka is from Rajagiriya and attended Ashoka college and then Royal College. He played cricket  and Bhanuka Rajapaksa (of Royal who played for Sri Lanka’s U 19 team and was quite a star then) is among his buddies. Dhansuhka also plays cricket fro Flinders Uni in the Turf Tournament. I have therefore informed the Sri Lankan Cricket circle in Adelaide. Dr Charitha Perera who presides over the cricketing society is already aware of Dhanushka’s misfortune and one can be certain that the medical circles will attend to his needs to the best of their ability.

Ironically Sturt Police Station was/is just a stone’s throw from where the assault occurred. Dhanushka’s complaint of aasault is now in the Police Report 13/K87354. The assailant was in his thirties in Dhanushka’s estimation and quite big.  I note here that there is a special aboriignal Park area not far from this road and a trifle to the south along Marion Road. It is likely that the man  is from the Ngarrindjeri people — the local Aboriginal tribal group who see themselves as a “nation” –an usage rooted in its archaic meaning when “nation” and “tribe” were used interchangeably in the English language and was thus carried into the terminology of White expansion and settlement in Australia (as well as America). This is not quite the same connotation it carries after the French Revolution and its impact on political thought in the course of European imperial expansion in the centuries that followed. For a review of this topic written earlier for my work on SINHALA CONSCIOUSNESS, see   “The Vocabulary of “Nation” in English in the Early Modern Period” inhttp://thuppahi.wordpress.com/2011/07/10/the-vocabulary-of-nation-in-english-in-the-early-modern-period/

 Ngarrindjeri Flag

 In wild surmise I suggest that it is possible that the Aboriginal man misinterpreted the conversation taking place between Dhanushka and Alishya as he passed and thought that they had demeaned him in some way. His bellicose command that Dhanushka should return to his country [he would not have known where precisely Dhanushka is from] can also be interpreted as one of the currents of thought among people (White, Black, Brown)  at the bottom of the social order in  Australia, some of whom believe that “boat people” are getting aid and drawing welfare benefits in ways which impact — that is reduce –the monies available to them.

The de facto LTTE state in Sri Lanka has established a number of calendrical rituals to honour and remember its fallen heroes and heroines, the māvīrar. These are the personnel who have died in battle or fallen as part of the LTTE goal of political independence, namely, Thamilīlam or Eelam as the latter is more widely labelled. The most significant of these moments is Heroes Day on 27 November when their ­talaivar, or “Leader,” Velupillai Prabhākaran (more properly Pirapakaran) also delivers a peroration for 25 minutes immediately prior to the lighting of the flame of sacrifice at 6.06 p.m. at the designated tuyilam illam (resting places) for the māvīrar.[1] As Chritiana Natali discovered (2005) the Tamil people do not see these sites as “cemeteries.” Rather they are “portrayed as temples.” Binded, like the people she talked to, a demi-official LTTE site described the locations as “holy places.”[2]

 FIGURE 1 Tuyilam Illam  at Kopay, Near Jaffna Town, November 2004 The original tuyilam illam (resting place) at this site was bulldozed by the Sri Lanka  Army when it captured the western part of the peninsula in mid-1995; this is a rebuilt temple’. Each tuyilam illam  is kept in immaculate condition. This photograph was taken at a time when Kopay was being prepared for the major ceremony on 27 November 2004. Stands with oil lamps have been placed in front of each gravestone so that kinfolk can light them simultaneously at the appointed time. Photo by Michael Roberts.

Among the nine other rituals observed annually by the LTTE perhaps the most significant is that known as Black Tiger Day on 5 July, a moment which identifies the day when one of their fighters known by the nom de guerre Captain Miller[3] drove a truck laden with explosives into a school compound at Nelliyady in 1987 and killed about 40 soldiers of the Sri Lanka Army (SLA) – for the compound was the site of a camp occupied by the advancing SLA forces during its Vadamarachchi offensive threatening the Tamil heartland known as the Jaffna Peninsula. Institutionalised around the time of this attack,[4] the Black Tigers are the LTTE men and women who have been specially selected for dangerous operations including suicidal attacks. They are the LTTE’s version of the SAS or commando.

While the Black Tigers’ dutiful commitment to self-sacrifice through suicide attacks is one dimension of their capacity, they are not alone in this measure of commitment. From very early on the LTTE leadership demanded that all their personnel should take an oath of loyalty expressing a readiness to die for their cause even by their own hand. This commitment-cum-expectation was (is) embodied in the cyanide vials (kuppi) around their necks – a ready instrument for use if captured. This practice was adopted around 1983/84.[5] It immediately garnered admiration among the Tamil population of all classes and gave an edge to the LTTE in their competition with other militant groups for recruits and supporters. As a Christian Tamil octogenarian in Adelaide informed me, the “devotion that the Tigers showed was unmatched.”[6]

Indeed, the Tigers regard the kuppi as “a good friend,” as Schalk notes in distilled summary after conversations with Kittu (third-in-command) in 1991 and other LTTE personnel.[7] Thus, sacrificial devotion to the point of suicidal self-annihilation was (is) expected of every LTTE fighting person as well as other personnel committed to the cause. There was a temporal gap, however, before the LTTE hierarchy approved of the use of human weapons of death. There was an internal debate between 1984 and 1987 before those who argued that there was no difference between swallowing pills to avoid capture and mounting suicidal attacks[8] (and thus assassinations too) won the day. It was seen as a logical step forward with the instrumental benefit of creating a precision weapon. The situation of beleaguered military asymmetry confronting the LTTE and the Tamil people, of course, conditioned such reasoning. In brief, as so many analysts have stressed, human bombs have been perfected by forces in a disempowered situation.

  Fig 2 Black Tigers marching This image was extracted for me by Varathan from a web site partial to the LTTE, namely, http://www.Puthinam.com. The location is definitely on the A9 road at Kilinochchi.The Black Tigers are elite commando troops and do not always function as units. It is from their ranks that the suicide attackers and assassins are selected.

 Fig 3: Prabhakaran pays homage to Black Tigers in front of a photograph of Miller on 5 July 2005, the first Tiger who carried out a suicide attack at Nelliyadi, (5 July 1987) … courtesy of TamilNet.

Since then, the Black Tigers (see Figure 2) have been the best fighters who are carefully selected because of their skills as well as supreme qualities of commitment. A semi-official statement notes that “[t]heir identities are closely guarded. Having completed their training, they serve in regular LTTE units, concealing their membership. When called up for a mission, they take routine leave and if they survive, return to regular service again. Membership is only revealed if they are killed in combat.”[9] The significance attached to the Black Tiger personnel within the military machine of the LTTE from the late 1980s is indicated by the fact that those sent on suicide missions have the privilege of a last meal with their tesai talaivar or “national leader”[10] – a practice that has surely been inspired by the Christians within the movement. By September 2002 there were 241 Black Tiger māvīrar among the 17,889 LTTE fighters who had died for their cause, that is, they made up 1.3 percent of the fallen.[11] In November 2004 a special commemoration shed at Kilinochchi was devoted to displaying pictures of selected Black Tiger dead.

Each of the calendrical rites designated by the LTTE is not confined to one site. They may be held at several regional sites, while Māvīrar Nāl on 27^th November is conducted at twenty-one locations,[12] besides being observed by migrant bodies of Tamils in various parts of the world — whether Toronto, Dusseldorf, London, Geneva, Melbourne et cetera.

Commemorative Rite: Black Tiger Day, 2003

My focus today is on the ethnographic details within www.TamilNet.com depicting the manner in which the LTTE supporters from Trincomalee District inaugurated a memorial for the Black Tigers at Sampur village within Muttur East on 5 July 2003. The ceremony was presided over by Colonel Pathuman[13] and included “Mr. Uthayan” (the LTTE’s military commander for the Trincomalee town) and other area commanders as well as “Mr. K. Thurairetnasingham” (the Tamil National Alliance parliamentarian) and Thilak (the LTTE’s district political head).

  Figures 4 and 5

This new memorial was dedicated to sixteen Black Tigers from Trincomalee District who had fallen up to that date, in addition to the first Black Tiger, Captain Miller, and the first woman Black Tiger, Angayarkanni. From the website description it appears that the ritual activities followed this order.

• Colonel Pathuman, Thilak and other area leaders took the salute while the Tamil national anthem was sung.
• A relative of a Black Tiger lit the flame of sacrifice.
• Mr. Uthayan hoisted the Tamil Eelam national flag.
• Colonel Pathuman then declared open the memorial by cutting the ribbon.
• Col. Pathuman, Mr.K.Thurairetnasingham, Mr.Thilak and LTTE area commanders laid floral tributes to the fallen Tigers – while thereafter “leading citizens, principals of schools, teachers, students and the public also paid their homage to the Black Tigers” (www.TamilNet.com, 6 July 2003)
• A paramilitary training exercise followed [as a means of demonstrating the LTTE’s capacities and inspiring the audience].

My principal interest is in one of the accompanying images of Black Tigers queuing up to honour their immediate ‘lineage’ of māvīrar. In one hand they carry a weapon and in the other white flowers, probably the jasmine flower (Figure 6). To me these two symbols embody the currents of “practical rationality” and “enchanted power” that inspire and guide the LTTE struggle. These are currents that they draw on for protection, mobilisation and commitment. It is towards an elaboration of this hypothesis in mostly conjectural, yet logical, ways that my essay is directed.

 Figure 6: Black Tigers Pay Homage to Their Fallen at Sampur in Muttur East, 5 July 2003

In contrasting rationality in all its complexity with “enchantment” I am clearly informed by Max Weber’s writings. The idea of “enchantment” is intimately connected with Weberian sociology and its stress on the process of disenchantment towards religious faith and “magic” that accompanied the growth of rationality, science and market capitalism. The hegemony secured by mathematico-logical and scientific skills over the seventeenth-to-nineteenth centuries included a cluster of processes, such as a stress on the Individual, secularisation and the growth of materialism.[14]

 Specialists in Weber’s oeuvre note his “casual and unsystematic” use of some of his own concepts and the relational “perspectivism” that qualifies his evaluations of the rationalization process taken in sum.[15] But it is widely agreed that Weber’s principal focus was “specific and peculiar rationalism of Western culture,” more especially its capitalist economy and “its objectified, institutionalised, supra-individual form” of bureaucracy, an emphasis that was informed by the international mastery secured by European forces.[16] This supremacy, in Weber’s view, was secured through multiple, interrelated processes. In Brubaker’s summary three motifs underline the Weberian analysis: “increasing knowledge, growing impersonality and enhanced control” (1984:  9-10).

 In Weber’s view, as Gellner notes, the process of rationalization involved the institutionalisation of the ways of “ordered regularity” associated with the bureaucrat and means:ends efficiency. Moreover, “rationality and disenchantment [were] intimately connected” and (1974: 188-89). Thus his ideal typical concept of “practical rationality’ referred to the individual pursuit of egoistic ends in calculating ways attuned to given realities – with “a concomitant inclination to oppose all orientations based on transcendence of daily routine” (Kalberg 1980: 1152). To Weber, therefore, the “modern proletariat, … [was] characterised, like the greater part of the authentic modern bourgeoisie, by indifference to, or rejection of religion.” The proletariat, moreover, had abandoned “all thought of dependence on cosmic processes, the weather or other natural processes seen as capable of being influenced by magic or providence” (Weber 1978a: 178).

Given his focus on the historical trajectory of rationality to its position of eminence, Weber’s remarks on enchantment and irrationality are, not surprisingly, unsystematic. But no less a person than Talcott Parsons has observed his “marked tendency … to move in terms of the dichotomy of rational and irrational” because of his methodology of ideal types (1947: 15). As such, deviations from rational norms were seen as irrational, leading, in Parsons’s evaluation, to “a theoretically unwarranted antithesis” (1947: 16).

In this tendency Weber was reproducing the dominant current within intellectual circles in the West in his time, a perspective which regarded magical practices and religious faith as inferior phenomenon. Ardent religious faith, even that among Christians, was deemed “zealotry;” and, eventually, in the twentieth century decreed to be “fundamentalism” – something suspect because of its dogmatism and its literal readings of a Book.[17] In this disenchanted, rationalist perspective, therefore, “enchanted practices” were seen as equivalent to magic/irrationality. My essay is partly directed towards questioning this linkage and enforcing their separation in specified contexts.

Since rationality was, often implicitly, associated with individual advancement in one’s lifetime and an individuated, transactionalist reading of the Good, seeking benefits in the afterlife assumed inferior status. In this logic, therefore, seeking death happily was more irrational than suicide in a state of depression: the latter was as regrettable as illegal, but understandable, whereas the calm pursuit of death by a healthy person was madness.[18] Suicide by immolation, involving as it did horrific Fire, was doubly crazy.[19]

 Fire is not seen in quite this horrified way in Hinduized cultural settings. The third eye of Siva, at the centre of the forehead, is the point at which his fiery power is said to flow out (Fuller 1992: 60). The “immaterial medium of a flame” is treated as a form of divine power. A camphor flame is a central item in conventional worship (pūjā) at a temple. The camphor flame and a devotee’s offerings of prasāda, “together divinize the human actor to achieve … identity between deity and worshipper” (Fuller 1992: 74). Again, Tanaka argues that when devotees walk the fire they are nor merely keeping a promise and thanking a deity for boons conferred; they are also performing “homa, a form of fire sacrifice.” That is, “firewalking is a ceremony of symbolic death and rebirth in which the medium and the votaries [whom] he leads sacrifice themselves” (1991: 181).

Against this background the immolation of self through fire in special circumstances requires but one extra step, so to speak. In relatively recent times in Indiasati matas who immolated themselves on their husbands’ cremation fires were heroines who became deified and served others as tutelary village deities (Fuller 1992: 49). The praise and celebration of suicide extended to great men who killed themselves “when some irretrievable disgrace or insult befell them” (Kailasapathy 1968: 76). Such an act was usually carried out in ways that were deemed to be a chastisement of powerful figures by those weaker – in brief a classic case of a weapon wielded by the weak.

Suicide attacks emerged as Tiger weapon in precisely this situation of military asymmetry. They were one facet of a tactical response directed by a rational marshalling of available resources.

 LTTE Success and its Hard-headed Capacities [20]

The date when the LTTE emerged is shrouded in obscurity. Its predecessor is said to be the Tamil New Tigers formed in 1974, while its formal existence as the Liberation Tigers for Tamil Eelam is attributed to the year 1976.[21] Its committed core of fighters in early 1983 may not have been even added up to 100. But, like the other underground militant forces, this ragtag guerrilla group expanded hugely after the July 1983 pogrom. In the next four years at least ten batches were trained at military camps in India, several of them LTTE-run. By early 1987, having ruthlessly eliminated the TELO forces in April/May 1986 as well as the EPRLF leadership, the LTTE had become the leading resistance force among the Sri Lankan Tamils.

     When the relationship with the Indian government soured in October 1987 and the LTTE went to war with the Indian Peace Keeping Force in Sri Lanka, they lost significant numbers of their cadre. But they replenished their ranks and withstood a massive Indian army presence. After the Indians left in February/March 1990, they established a de facto state dominating much of the Tamil-speaking territory within Sri Lanka.

     In no time they became a conventional army with guerrilla extensions in certain areas. Between 1990 and 2001 they secured massive victories against the Sri Lankan state forces, notably at Pooneryn (November 1991), Mullaitivu (July 1997), Puliyankulam & Kanakarayankulam (September 1999) and Elephant Pass (April 2000). Though outgunned and outnumbered, they used to advantage the state’s foolhardiness in fighting in fixed positions on numerous fronts by relying on mobility, the tactical concentration of limited resources and superior-intelligence about their opponent’s dispositions.

     From early days moreover, they developed a brown water navy of speedboats that used the subcontinental coastlines to advantage – perhaps the only modern liberation force to develop such a capacity. Purchasing a fleet of freighters that sailed convenient “pan-ho-lib” flags, they developed a shipping network that functioned as legitimate businesses while also bringing them arms when feasible. They also have an embryonic air force that is causing widespread anxiety at the present moment.[22]

     One word sums up the LTTE’s success and reach: “organization.” Within Sri Lanka, for instance, their key personnel have been protected since the late 1980s through extensive underground facilities, while state-of-the art, underground hospitals service(d) their rehabilitation needs. From the mid-1980s they grew into a transnational corporation with numerous subsidiary enterprises, some criminal and clandestine, as well as affiliated front organizations. As one militant told Davis, Prabhākaran “thought like a good merchant capitalist” (Davis 1996: 31). This multinational corporation has three dimensions: fundraising, arms procurement, publicity. As Peiris sums up: the “LTTE has established over the years a massive empire of business and commerce with a global spread for which the Eelam war provides the motive force” (2002: 00).

     In this sense the LTTE is an epitome of successful etatism or state capitalism – as anyone who visits Tigerland today and sees the thriving restaurants, transport services and customs collections would attest. Such productive investments call to mind, albeit in minute comparison, the developments within Nazi Germany in the 1930s. Enabling both instances of growth was the foundation provided by a people’s investment in education over many decades in ways that provided a pool of personnel with technological and organisational skills – that is, with the bureaucratic rationality-cum-precision that Weber and so many identified as the path of dominating modernization.

Managerial Abilities, Pragmatism and Scenario Planning

The wide-ranging activities and success of the LTTE, therefore, demonstrate their managerial skills. The demi-god status attached to Velupillai Pirapāharan among some Tamils must not lead one to think of the organisation as a one-man show. Pirapāharan is not only supported by thinkers, investment-bankers and logisticians (such as the mysterious Kumaran Padmanabha) abroad, but also has had the support of able men such as Shankar,* Kittu,* Mahattaya,* Ponnamma,* Kerdelz,* Tileepan,* Shangar (Soranalingam Vaithiyalingam),* Soosaipillai, Baby Subramanium, Yogi, Balasingham, Pottu Amman, and Basheer Karder during the 1980s (asterisks indicate those who have died). Since then capable individuals honed by battle and organisational experience, such as Thamil Chelvam, Karuna, Sasi Master, Karikalan, Kaushalyan,* Mano Master, Sornam, Bhanu, Puhalenthi, Ramesh, and Kuttu, have added steel to the senior ranks (till a major split in early 2004 centred on Col. Karuna and Batticaloa District generated a spanner within their works). But the critical point is that there always has been a high command that directs operations along multiple channels and relies on watchful devolution.

      As such, the Tigers are the epitome of modern entrepreneurship and what one can call “practical rationality.” This capacity is leavened by pragmatism. “The LTTE lives by the day,” said Dharmeratnam Sivaram in conversation with me at Wellawatte one day in 2000.  Sivaram himself is better known to the world as “Taraki,” the name he adopts for his newspaper columns. Widely read in philosophy, well versed in Tamil history,[23] Sivaram originates from the EasternProvince and had been active in PLOTE, one of the militant groups fighting for independence, before taking up the pen. As a staunch Eelamist, his sympathies have been increasingly towards the LTTE. But it is his perceptiveness and knowledge that I wish to mark in highlighting his evaluation of the LTTE.

      The Tiger leadership, in this estimate, adjust their goals according to tactical requirements as well as their strategies. It is a point that has also been stressed by Peter Schalk from a position sympathetic to the LTTE project. He observes that many fighters in the LTTE know a famous quotation from their talaivar by heart: “Poritta vativankal maralam. Anal ematu poratta ilatciyam marapovatillai” – “The methods of war may change. But the aim of our war will not change.” This was a statement made by Veluppillai Pirapakaran at Cutumalai Amman Kovil in the JaffnaPeninsula, on 4th August 1987 at a stage when the LTTE was confronting a dilemma, whether to accept the intervention of the Indian state in the form of the Indian Peace Keeping Force or to reject the imperialistic relationship implied in such actions. Schalk presents this principle as a form of Kautalyan wisdom suited to the LTTE situation.

     The subsequent successes of the LTTE on battlefield, in the global order and the field of diplomacy indicate that their pragmatism is paying dividends. The comparison can be taken beyond Kautalya to the figure of Bismarck because of the ruthlessness which the LTTE has displayed in eliminating key opponents, marshalling the Sri Lankan Tamil population and generally using the instruments of power, notably guns, explosives, assassinations, and propaganda, to pursue its cause. Where in the late 1980s the Tamil moderate party  (TULF) was firmly opposed to the LTTE, from 1999 this very same party and its successors have fallen into line behind the LTTE and accepted the principle that they are the “sole representative of the Tamils” in the ongoing peace negotiations. Here, then, we see a degree of similarity with the manner in which so many German liberals of the mid-nineteenth century sat at Bismarck’s feet after he united Germany by power and immorality in 1870. The conqueror is victor, so to speak, and, as so often, writes the ‘history’ after the victory. Realpolitik can reshape the past world according to it own image.

     The moulding of opinion by the LTTE among the Tamil population in Sri Lanka and the Tamils of the diaspora has involved careful and wide-ranging efforts through press, radio, television, and performative modes of presentation. From an early date the LTTE also has trained two-person video teams that go into action with their fighting units in any major battle. The footage on their victories is then suitably edited by a state-of-the-art studio to produce videos and DVDs for propaganda and mobilisational purposes both in Sri Lanka and abroad.[24]

      The day-to-day adjustments of a pragmatic and opportunistic character, however, are seconded by long term planning as well as schemes for several contingencies. One reason for LTTE success has been this foresight. A striking example of their long term vision was the manner in which they planted one of their committed loyalists, Babu, alias Kulaveerasingham Veerakumar, as a mole in the working class urban quarter where Ranasinghe Premadasa, the UNP politician who risen from the slums to the position of President, had his origins and roots. There in Kehelwatte over a period of two years Babu inveigled himself into Premadasa’s circle of fixers and low-level intermediaries. On 1 May 1991 the familiar figure of Babu (with hidden suicide vest), was able to breach Premadasa’s security cordon with relative ease and to blow himself, the President of Sri Lanka and others around to smithereens.[25] It was not only that the timing for Babu’s act of suicidal assassination that was impeccable. From the viewpoint of realpolitik, the moment chosen by his LTTE masters was geared to their objectives: they had got rid of two of the most capable leaders within the ruling United National Party within one month in 1991 in ways that encouraged all manner of conspiracy theories and maximum uncertainty.[26]

     The LTTE discovered the value of long-term contingency thinking the hard way. Again, we are indebted to Sivaram for clarifying this point. “The Tigers,” he says “were utterly unprepared for the Indian military intervention in 1987.” When they eventually took on the might of the IPKF, many of their fighters were known to the Indians and they lost a significant number of their cadre of their pool of personnel, then around 2000 persons (Taraki 2004a). Thereafter, however, the LTTE attended meticulously to “scenario planning.”[27] “The first military lessons that Tamil guerrillas learnt in the early eighties was that a plan of attack, however small, should always include as many alternative routes of withdrawal as possible to ensure the safe return of fighters and their weapons. Training with scenarios makes commanders more agile in making decisions in the battlefield” (Taraki 2004a). Such long-term thinking extends beyond battlefield situations to the overall military and political prospects. As such, Taraki tells us, they have always “plann[ed] ahead for possible future foreign military interventions on behalf of the Sri Lankan state.” This military thinking itself is “not as an end in itself but as a means to achieve the fundamental political objectives espoused by the Tamil national movement in Sri Lanka since 1948.”[28] Thus, the Tigers developed the concept of “asymmetrical deterrence” as one part of this two-pronged strategy. This idea describes a situation where an outgunned and outmanned antagonist positions its forces strategically to deny military victory to an opponent with superior resources. Such a programme is designed to secure a “stable equilibrium” that enables a political thrust.[29]

     In sum, therefore it is foresight backed by organisational skill that has enabled the LTTE to move from a position of pronounced military asymmetry in the mid-1980s to one, since 2001-02, where they have effective military deterrence and revealed a capacity to breach the heartland of the Sinhala-dominated state through commando operations.[30] This organisational capacity has been a feature of the Eelam movement in its widest range from the 1970s and applies to other Tamil-run outfits, both those that have been aligned with the LTTE and those who are quite hostile to it (e. g. the University Teachers for Human Rights). One has only to review the web sites sustained by the LTTE or its front organizations to comprehend the thoroughness of their activities.[31] They are efficient tools of LTTE propaganda. Not only are they regularly updated, but their historical data pool is also maintained meticulously – with a LTTE slant of course. The efforts of the government in Colombo and those of hardline Sinhala activists in the diaspora pale into significance when brought into comparison with the streams of internet transmission mounted by the Eelamists over the years – streams that not only cater to the true believers, but also target those on fringe and serve as instruments of legitimation for those watching the scene.

       The LTTE, therefore, is the epitome of a cohesive outfit pursuing its ends with tactical acumen and organisational efficiency. Attentiveness to this capacity is a requisite for all those surveying the scene, including those adamantly hostile to the LTTE.

Deciphering the Black Tiger Rite

We are now in a position to return to the image, Picture 5, that provides the point of departure for this essay: a body of Black Tigers with gun in each hand and jasmine flowers in other paying homage to the garlanded photographs of their fallen, local Black Tigers. Though occurring in open air the table that is the focus for the line of Black Tigers at Sampur resembles that of a pītam, the table or “sacrificial altar” placed in front of religious icons at shrines in Asia.[32]

As significantly, the photographs of the māvīrar are garlanded. Garlands are a sign of importance, but can convey different shades meaning according to context. Politicians and important persons in South Asia are garlanded as an expression of honour. Such an act cannot be deemed “religious” in any sense of the word. But within the context of death and a funeral rite, the ambience associated with a garland “deepens.” The LTTE garlands its māvīrar gravestones as well as memorials for stellar māvīrar such as Malati (Picture 6) and Miller of Nelliyady fame. One such star in their firmament is Lt Col. Bork, namely Mapanapillai Arasaratnam of Arumuhathan Puthukulam, who attempted to breach the forward defences at Mankulam as a human-bomb-in-makeshift-bulldozer in 1990. Thus, we witness an official recognition of his valour in his home locality of Vavuniya on 5 July 2003 (Picture 7).[33]

 Figure 7 Lt Col Bork’s Nadukal worshipped by an LTTE official, 5 July 2003  “LTTE’s Vavuniya Political head Mr. S. Elilan is seen garlanding Black Tiger Lt. Col. Bork’s ‘Nadukal’ at the Eachchankulam Maveerar Thuyilum Illam. Lt. Col. Bork (MapanapillaiArasaratnam of Arumuhathan Puthukulam Vavuniya) was killed on 23.11.1990 when he helped destroy the entrance to strategic Mankulam SLA camp” (www.tamilnet.com). Courtesy of TamilNet.

As significantly the LTTE call the gravestone a nadukal,[34] that is, a memorial stone or hero stone. This term refers to a practice in India of enshrining special humans, a practice that Aiyappan encompasses within the phrase, “the deification of humans and the humanising of the deities.”[35] The practice of erecting hero stones prevailed in many parts of Tamilnadu as well as the Kannada-speaking area of Mysore (Karnataka) and Kerala for many centuries.[36] The evidence goes back even to the Cankam poetry of the first-to-third centuries BCE. “These heroes often became tutelary divinities or demons and were worshipped with offerings of food and flowers.”[37] Indeed, in southern India it was believed that the spirit of the dead entered the hero stones (Rajam 2000: 8 ff).

Honouring Lt. Col. Bork in this way with a garland was not an isolated act. Witness the manner in which every gravestone at tuyilam illam (resting places) is ‘ordained’ with a garland prior to an LTTE ceremony (Figure 8). Such official practice is amplified by the kinfolk who bring flowers, incense, camphor and candles to ‘embalm’ each gravestone (Natali 2005). As Chandrakanthan has observed elsewhere, these acts of bedecking are one facet of activities that resemble action at shrines and temples (2000: 165). As strikingly in 1998 the Voice of Tigers radio said in its night broadcast … that aircraft of the Air Tigers sprinkled flowers on the LTTE’s Heroes’ memorials in the Vanni this evening during the Maaveerar day ceremonies” (TamilNet, 27 November 1998). As such the functions of 27^th November are rites rather than mere ceremonies.

   Figure 8: Garlanded gravestones at a tuyilam illam in Batticaloa District. his image was located for me by Varathan of ICES, and I have no details with regard to the time and place. The red and gold (yellow) color schemes for buntings, shades, and other décor are conventional for most LTTE rites and assemblies. They convey a warm familiarity and perhaps even a Hindu Saivite religious ambience.

Perhaps the most significant parallel between garlanded-Tiger-gravestone and Saivite rite is the blood sacrifice known as velvi that occurs at the climactic stage of the Bhadrakāli festival for Tamil Saivites and other worshippers. Officiants hang a garland round the neck of a black goat, anoint it with consecrated water and wave incense over it, while the crowd shouts “arohara!” before the head is cut off.[38] In parenthesis we might attend to the multiple sensory media that are called into play during such rituals, with sound, smell, touch, and sight in kaleidoscope fusion engaging each devotee’s basic channels of consciousness.

 It is the garlanding, however, that is my focus here. There does not seem to be a standardisation of the flowers used for the goat’s garland, though red is favoured according to some informants.[39] As an analytical extension Tanaka conjectures that the rite of velvi is akin to a marriage and symbolises the marriage between Bhadrakāli and her “devotee husband,” represented by the he-goat (1991: 119). Etymologically velvi means (i) spiritual discipline; (ii) the site of a rite; (iii) service or worship; and thus a desire or offering in search of a goal (elaboration by Sivathamby, interview November 2004). It is the idea of a gift that appears to prevail at the folk level among the Sri Lankan Tamils: for Hellmann-Rajanayagam found that in the context of māvīrar ceremonies it is often expressed as veta velvi in the sense of “donation” (2005). This vocabulary is consonant with the concept of uyirāyutam, an innovation of Tiger coinage that describes those who sacrifice their lives by swallowing cyanide or serving as human bombs and translates as “life-[gifted-as-]weapon.”[40] Thus uyirāyutam carries a legitimation of suicidal operations.

The enchanted traditional dimension is accentuated by the fact that in their act of homage at Sampur each Black Tiger carries his flowers in his right hand, while the weapon is on his left. The right hand is the ritual hand, the clean unpolluted hand. It would be unclean to bear flowers in one’s left hand. Whether this choice was intentional or not, it was a choice – the more significant if it was taken-for-granted “tradition” or convention.

The force of convention is deepened by the choice of flower. My educated speculation is that the Black Tigers are carrying white jasmine flowers. Jasmine in its species form of two petals is widely favoured by Tamil worshippers because of its fragrance and common availability in the popular colour, white. But other flowers, such as hibiscus, roses, chrysanthemum, are also deployed. Roses (rōja) are probably a colonial import, now deemed normal because of long usage. But bougainvillaea, another colonial import, is never used because it has no fragrance and is deemed unsuitable.[41]

 Some Tamil informants stressed that jasmine was used because of its widespread availability – a line of utilitarian reasoning that denied symbolic implications. The fact remains that jasmine is deeply etched within Tamil folklore and culture from Cankam times as the symbol of meaningful connectivity: whether identified in its specific forms as mullai, malikai or nitya kalyāni, the jasmine stands for the stoic fortitude of a female lover waiting for her warrior hero (Thaninayagam 1966: 80-81). Hart notes that jasmine signs the heat of desire and the smell of love making because it is associated with the expectant heroine waiting at dusk for her hero chief to return from war (1999: 164-65, 187). Elsewhere Thaninayagam refers to its evocation of pathos when a poet addresses the jasmine in his elegy at the death of a chief (1966: 33). Taken in sum, these tropes emphasise the degree to which the jasmine is associated with critical conjunctures or passages — what Turner in another context refers to as “conjunctiveness” (1982: 29). It appears to be the liminal flower par excellence in Tamil culture in the anthropological sense of the “liminal.”

As originally presented by van Gennep, the concept of liminality identified the transitional stage in a rite of passage, that which was betwixt and between and therefore shared aspects of the stages preceding and following it. Victor Turner expanded the idea to encompass enduring figures, such as the jester or the poet, or social principles such as matrilaterality in patrilineal systems of kinship. Such diverse phenomena tend to share specific features: such as paradoxical symbols as well as a “lurking sacrality” associated with “movement towards the borders of the uncharted and the unpredicted.”[42]

 This “deep culture” of speaking in flowers, with “different flowers signify[ing] different strategic movements” (Thaninayagam 1966: 34), is now implanted in LTTE practice. In November 2003 they proclaimed the karthigai or karnthal (kaantal) to be their “official national flower.”[43] The karthigai is the gloriosa superba or glory lily. This choice was justified on three grounds: (1) “in November, the month of Heroes Day celebrations, [the karthigai flower] ubiquitously spreads, sprouts new shoots and blooms throughout the North East;” (2) it was the practice for ancient Tamil kingdoms to have a favourite flower just as modern nation states opt for such emblematic signs; and (3) the karthigai was the flower of the “War God, Murugan” (www.Tamilnet, 14 April 2004). In the Cankam traditions, one might add, the karthigai or kaantal is described as a “blood red flower” and associated with “lovers in the hills” (the tinai landscape identified as kuriñci).[44] Since the glory lily has flame-like tubers and is either red, deep pink or yellow in colour (Picture 10), its symbolising love (Cankam) and sacrifice (LTTE) seems apposite. One could not ask for a better visual image of immolation in flames (also see Picture 11).

For our interests here, however, the more significant flowering, both literally and figuratively, of this tendency lies in the fact that a small circle of jasmine surrounded the LTTE’s flagpoles at various sites in Kilinochchi in November 2004 (my observations), while a profusion of wild jasmine (nitya kalyani) adorns the base of the flagpole at the tuyilam illam at Vavuniya together with crossandra, hibiscus and frangipani (Picture 12). In carrying jasmine in their right hand the Black Tigers at Sampur were re-affirming the liminal significance of the moment. They were establishing and conveying profound connections.

From an analytical distance what, then, were the connections and meanings that are being secured by the ritual action at Sampur depicted in our key Figure 1? Clearly, as explicitly argued by LTTE sympathisers,[45] this was an act of commemoration, a remembrance of deeds done and the ultimate sacrifice of life by heroes past.

Logically this act could also be deemed an act of camaraderie between the deceased Black Tigers and those Black Tigers participating in the rite, one that at the same time reaffirms comradeship, a special form of connectivity, among those fighters participating in that act of homage.

One can build logically on this reasoning in ways that are in line with instrumental reason and emphasise the strategic advantages to the LTTE from this type of ritual venture. It could be conjectured that the living fighters draw strength and courage from such acts and go away with the firm knowledge that their deaths would be remembered in similar fashion should they die in action. Thus, such rites can be deemed to be a renewal of commitment to cause. As such, the LTTE hierarchy could be said to be deploying ritual intelligently in order to strengthen their military capacity. For my part I have no doubt that such reasoning would be at play.

The question remains whether there are additional dimensions to this type of ritual act, either at the individual level of participating Black Tigers or among those who organise these moments. Here, I move into more tenuous terrain of conjecture. Let me provide one of the Black Tigers in Picture 1 with the pseudonym Kandasamy and develop my argument in question form. 

Could Kandasamy’s flower offering and act of homage expand beyond remembrance to a votive request, an act of propitiation? Could Kandasamy (silently?) ask the māvīrar at the ‘altar’ before him for some assistance in the manner of Saivites and Christians who make offerings at shrines?

If we grant this possibility, what would each fighter ask for? Protection and safety, that is, staying alive? That would seem the obvious type of request. But these are Black Tiger fighters, no ordinary persons. They have been disciplined and honed as members of a special commando force. They are fully aware that they could be at any time chosen for a suicidal attack, a special privilege in the universe of being surrounding personnel in the LTTE. In such circumstances, therefore, my conjecture is that Kandasamy would request his dead mates to provide him with a “good death.”

A Good Death: for a Black Tiger a good death would be a successful strike, mission accomplished without letting any comrades down.

Taking up all the probable and possible dimensions attached to the Black Tiger rite at Sampur on 5 July 2003, therefore, one can extract a significant analytical point. Such an event has the capacity to become a conjuncture that “draws different dimensions toward itself” (Copeman 2004: 131); or a conjuncture that develops “fusion force” in Kapferer’s vocabulary (1997: 261). Since the context for Kapferer’s elaboration is that of sorcery, I shall limit myself to Copeman’s clarification. Copeman develops this contention from an analysis of recent blood donation events in India centred upon statues of dead celebrities such as Indira Gandhi and Rajiv Gandhi. At such events the blood of the donor is usually “identified with the blood of the person being commemorated.” It therefore “holds the past within it.” But “in being propelled into the veins of others … it simultaneously holds the future within it” (Copeman 2004: 131).

Such an extrapolation of meaningfulness, I fear, will be meaningless to readers of this text unless they have some awareness of the heritages and cosmologies within which these practices secure worth. To grasp Copeman’s argument one has to comprehend the value attached to such Hindu practices and expectations as prasāda (Skt), darśanam, arul and accaryam. The concept of darśanam, — known as darśana or darśan elsewhere — can be translated variously and severally as the act of seeing and being seen by a deity, an exchange of vision, an auspicious sight or a blessing deriving from the gaze of a deity.[46] Arul refers to grace or divine presence, while accaryam describes marvels and surprises arising from divine responses to devotional fervour.[47]    

A prasāda, that is a piracātam in Tamil, is “the indispensable sequel to all acts of worship in popular Hinduism” (Fuller 1992: 74). A brief description of a piracātam in a Saivite temple in Sri Lanka serves to illustrate its meaningful relationships and potentialities.

[As the concluding act of worship] the priest passes around among the devotees the fire of the pancāratti, which remains after the last worship of the main idol. They place their hands over the fire, and move them towards their faces, touching them lightly over their bodies from the eyes down to the hest – as if they were absorbing the divine body from the fire into [each] body. Then sacred ash, sandal paste and vermilion powder are passed around the congregation. They … make a pottu mark (a sign of Saivites) on their foreheads. Finally the priest distributes rice balls. Prasāda, which includes fire, sacred ash and other non-edibles, is considered to contain divine power and religious merit accrues to those who eat it (Tanaka 1991: 70).

Contextualised in this manner, Copeman’s blood donation rituals may not be considered a prasāda in the strict sense, but the description of such devotional practices underlines the ideas of connectivity, transmutation and transmission that gird and thread the South Asian world of religious belief. The central point is this: the deity in sculpted form or within a poster calendar is treated as if he or she is alive. The deity is thus “immanent,” charged with ākarśana, that is, the “power of divine magnetism” or attracting force.[48] It is this conviction that leads so many South Asians to place food offerings before the deities on appropriate occasions. Indeed, in worshipping a deity a devotee brings that deity into life, renders that deity ākarśana and darśanam. It is a two-way connectivity. The internal energy of the devotee, organically engaging all the sensory modes available to a human being, helps invoke the deity’s powers. [49]

It would be stretching one’s imagination to suggest that the Black Tiger rite at Sampur was an act of piracātam (prasāda). But could Kandasamy have propitiated the māvīrar before him in the manner of those seeking arul or darśanam? One would be ill advised to dismiss this possibility in peremptory fashion: the background of religious practice in which Tamil Saivites and Catholics — especially those from working class, farming and fishing families — have been nourished over the years suggests the potentiality for such modes of interrelationship and expectation.

 Be that as it may, within such a context the Black Tiger rite at Sampur can be read as a nodal, liminal moment where Past, Present and Future meet in fused unity, gathering an empowering form of fusion from the Tiger point of view. At this moment the Past is embodied in the māvīrar, sacrificial heroes from the recent past, perhaps deified dead like those reposing in natukal in the Tamil-past. The Present is borne by the Black Tigers, the point men[50] in the LTTE project. The Future is the iconic goal of the LTTE and the Tamils they command, the independent state of Eelam, that nationalist utopia of the true believers.

Moving On, Moving Beyond

In my argument, therefore, the ritual at Sampur neatly encapsulates the combination of hard-headed instrumental rationality on the one hand and an “enchanted universe of being” on the other within the organisational ‘investments’ of the LTTE. That the rational, tactical, and strategic calculations demanded by their military-cum-political requirements have dominated the activities of the LTTE for over two decades cannot be denied. But my point here is to indicate that their practices are also influenced in some measure, no doubt in lesser measure, by sentiments that are “beyond reason” and rooted in the cosmos of their upbringing as Tamils of South Asia, whether Christian or Hindu. I have, in other words, attempted to ‘introduce’ the fabulous dimensions of their existential situation of uncertainty/risk and to highlight the manner in which they attempt to augment their rational military/political strategies with practices drawn from the “mythologized realities” (Kapferer’s phrase) of their everyday world.

They are not the only radical militants to draw on the phenomenological subjectivities embedded in their everyday world of upbringing. Take the 9/11 attackers who shocked the Western world with their devastating attacks on the World Trade Centre in New York and the Pentagon in Washington. These were thoroughly modern revolutionaries, using ‘simple,’ rational methods to turn a modern machine into a flying smart-bomb – with enormous and terrifying effect. As one of the arms of Al-Qaeda, moreover, they were part of an organisation that can be, like the LTTE, viewed as a multi-national corporation with multiple sites and a globalised reach. It is now commonplace for security experts to stress that Al-Qaeda is thoroughly modern and that Osama bin Laden has the adopted the managerial practices of modern economic corporations into his outfit.[51]

Yet, take their preparation for their tasks in the heightened moment of the eleventh hour. “The Last Night,” probably drafted by Mohammed Atta, the operational commander of the strike-force, sets out the requisite (thus ideal) precautionary and preparatory practices for each Al-Qaeda commando.[52] The first injunction runs thus: “Mutual swearing of the oath unto death and renewal of [one’s] intention.* Shave excess hair from the body and apply cologne. Shower.”[53] Among the subsequent commandments are these:

1. Staying the night [praying], pressing onward in prayer, divination (jafr), strengthening [ones self], [obtaining a] clear victory, and ease of heart that you might not betray us.
2. Much remembrance [of God], and know that the best way of remembrance is to read/recite the Noble Qur’an…
3. Purify your heart [54] and cleanse it from all uncleanliness. Forget and become oblivious to that thing called “this world.” The time for play is over and the appointed time for seriousness has come.

Thereafter in moving to what the author saw as the “second phase” of their operation, we find the following orders:

When the taxi is taking you to the a[irport], then recite the devotional of travel, the devotional of [entering a] town, the devotional of praise and other devotionals. When you have arrived and you see the a[irport] and have gotten out of the taxi, then say the prayer of  shelter; every place you go say the prayer of shelter in it. Smile and be tranquil for this is pleasing to the believers. Make sure that no one of whom you are unaware is following you. Then say the prayer: “God, make me strong through your entire creation, … Then you when you have said it, you will find matters straightened; and [God’s] protection will be around you; no power can penetrate that. [God] has promised His faithful servants who say this prayer that which follows: ….

1. [They will] return with grace [from God] and His bounty[55]                   

2. Evil will not touch them

3. [They will be in] accordance with the grace of God

… All of their devices, their [security] gates[56] and their technology will not save them nor harm [anyone] without God’s permission. 

The Last Night, it should be stressed, was drafted by someone “well acquainted with the Qur’an” and “a strong basis in Muslim pious literature” (Cook 2002: 000). Without a comprehension of the spirituality that permeates his Qur’anic interpretations, one can hardly comprehend the pervasive emphasis on prayer as an essential tool for each commando assassin to sustain his determination and goal orientation. In this sense the Last Night was a psychological preparation for the difficulties of battle, in short, a trainer’s manual. But this manual also contained a mantra: a profound belief in Allah as their guardian and a force that would render them invisible, powerful and successful. Here, then, enchanted cosmological being was merged with careful planning and rational action.

 The picture of the Black Tigers’ act of ritual homage and the Last Night, in this argument, share a shoring in cosmological realities, that is, what Weber would regard as a world of enchantment antithetical to the rational order ushered in by the Enlightenment, market capitalism and the terrors of modern war as well as the epistemologies of individualism and materialism. This is not to say that the Tigers and the radical Muslims of Al-Qaeda share a similar mentality. At face value their cultural backgrounds could be deemed substantially different. The similarity is at one step removed, at the level of abstraction that I have framed as the “enchanted world” in opposition to the disenchanted world of materially-grounded instrumentalities and rational calculation rooted in an emphasis on the Individual.

 In speaking of an “enchanted world” I stress that it should not be equated with the supernatural and other-worldly in the sense “out there in the skies.” My suggestion is that in many parts of Asia today people engage in daily activities that are imbricated with non-tangible forces and possibilities. The “evil eye,” for instance, is a possibility within daily life for many people in southern Asia. The idea that someone can harm another person by looking at the other’s property or person, the “eye of envy” as it is sometimes called, remains widespread in contemporary South Asia and among Greeks all over the world, though it is impossible to indicate precisely the proportion of people who adhere to this belief and take precautions, such as amulets and black pottus for babies, against these dangers.[57]

     Where such potentialities inhabit the everyday, and where acts of sorcery by jealous others remain real to so many people, protective rites are not uncommon.[58] In this sense they are “everyday.” They may not be daily acts, but they are highly significant acts; and sometimes even expensive acts calling for investments of planning, time, and money. Just as the use of ädura (specialists in exorcism) and healing rites to cure a bodily or mental affliction does not preclude a suffering family from resorting to Western or ayurvedic medicine,[59] thoroughly modern warriors are quite ready to propitiate the spirits that inhabit their world. Within their mind-set, there is no necessary contradiction. The universe of being in which the most Tigers and Tamils have been nourished would have oriented them to multiple strategies and the contingencies of the life-world. Calling on the powers of their cosmos to protect them and to regenerate their enterprise is as meaningful a rite as a puja that seeks to inspire the rains to fall at the right time for their agricultural work or to protect fishermen on their daily ventures to sea.[60] The ritual acts of the type depicted in Picture 5, and the whole LTTE enterprise of calendrical rituals and cemeteries with tombs for fallen māvīrar,[61] are reasoned actions seeking to renew their strength and to enlist the powers of the cosmos in this work of regeneration.

   Fig ?: Bodies that fight on …This “memorial tomb” is a specific act of “veneration” for the 398 Tiger fighters who “attained martyrdom” during a three–ay operation, known as “Unceasing Waves,” directedby Prabhakaran himself that “liberated the territory of Kilinochchi from the Sri Lankan military that occupied the Tamil homeland.” This cenotaph, located along the A9 road to Jaffna at Kilinochchi, administrative capital of the LTTE, was unveiled on 27 November 2004. The inscription is in English, and the words quoted above are from this representation. Note the embellishment provided by flame-like stalks of the karthigai (glory lily) cradling the fallen avirar in the manner of a lotus base. Pic courtesy of Vaitheespara Ravindiran.  

   There can be no better illustration of this deadly combination than the scene of Black Tiger commandoes at a ‘shrine’ with guns in one hand and jasmine flowers in unpolluted hand. Such a moment sits neatly with one of the LTTE’s expressive propaganda acts that depicts a tombstone with a clenched fist encoded with gun punching the air (Picture 12). Here we see an enshrined warrior attempting to inspire Tamils with his/her fighting spirit and affirmation of defiance. In the Tamil and Asian world, therefore, power and empowerment does not rest solely on disenchanted rationality. The dead, whether a Rajiv Gandhi-as-statue or a mavirar-in-tombstone, can be invested with an “ongoing agentive capacity”[62] in the manner of saints and deities of the past.

** However the footnote referencing adheres to my original version [because some citations were incorporated in the text in Social Analysis]; while the photographic numbering is somewhat different and one or two additonal images are included here.

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Soundara Rajan, K. V. 1982 “Origin and Spread of Memorial Stones in Tamil-Nadu.” Pp. 59-76.  Memorial Stones. eds. S. Settar & G. D. Sontheimer. Dharwad: Institute of Indian Art History.

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NC9NeJh1NhI

“Every day at dusk, Indian and Pakistani border guards put on a show of one-upmanship at the Wagah border crossing near Amritsar, Punjab. The two countries are not on the best terms, but instead of a boring stare down, there is plenty of humour and acrobatic extravaganza to be found as the soldiers try to outdo the other side by marching and parading in hilariously exaggerated fashion. Thousands show up to watch from the stands everyday, and we thoroughly enjoyed the crazy uniforms, impressively HIGH leg kicks, and the longest bellowing contest we have ever heard. Gotta say, the Pakistani bellower was a bit better that day.” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HPpiQTAC__s

PS: There is some parade on NOW in Sri Lanka is there not?

Just as with the response of the international community, people in Batticaloa reached into their hearts and helped out however they could. They weathered the crisis and, in doing so, learned a valuable lesson. Wherever there is turbulence there is transition, and transition – to be productive of the most positive results – must be anchored in an open and yielding heart.

The question presenting itself so dramatically at the time of the tsunami remains one that applies even more today when the psychology of terror has become a universal obsession. How can we keep our hearts open to one another when the world seems to be closing down in fear? An invisible tsunami threatens to sweep us away, one of suspicion and fear. The media feeds on it and    people feed on the media: bombs go off in Boston, Benghazi and Belfast. It seems to be an untieable knot. Who know where it begins or ends?

In the 13^th century the great Muslim poet Rumi urged us to “move outside the tangle of fear-thinking and live in silence”: not the silence of denial, but that which opens inwardly toward wisdom and outwardly with compassion toward our fellow human beings. Maybe it’s time to heed this advice, but where do we begin?

We begin with the heart. When we join one another to paint, whether at the Monkey’s Tale Centre in Batticaloa or the Step-by-Step Studio in Colombo, or anywhere else in the world, we come home to the heart. When Sinhalese, Tamil, Muslim and Burgher sisters and brothers sit silently painting together, they quietly, without effort, return home to the heart of their common humanity. The stories that emerge from their Mystery Paintings represent a common scripture recognizable to all: that which enables us to make visible the invisible love that animates our world beyond the television screen, and the smoke screen, of terror and fear.

1. Moving or Being Moved: Finding Our Place in Pandemonium: For two years we worked out of a wonderful studio space on Albert Perera Mawatha in the backstreets of a quiet community in Nugegoda, Colombo. When we got the word that the building was about to be sold and that we would have to vacate when our lease expired at the end of January 2013 our little idyll ended quite abruptly. We were busy conducting sessions in Mayachitra (Mystery Painting) for wounded veterans at Mihindu Seth Medura, a rehabilitation facility run by the Sri Lankan Army and at Sri Vajira Temple Children’s Development Centre, an institution for orphaned youth who otherwise would probably have been living in the streets. We were in the midst of preparations for an exhibition and sale of paintings done by these kids to help support the program.

The exhibition called Biththara Amma (Egg Momma)   consisted of 13 paintings scaled up for sale, one painting for each child in the class and over forty original paintings, which belonged to the artist and could not be sold. In addition to the scaling operation, we performed other tasks in the Nugegoda studio: stretching canvases, prepping canvas boards, paints and brush kits for students, doing our own Mayachitra practice, as well as taking care of studio maintenance and administration, such as book keeping and reporting.

By the time the New Year rolled around we were   totally stressed out by the rapidly converging date for both the children’s exhibition (February 15) and our eviction (January 31). We ran around looking at prospective studio spaces – all inadequate or over budget – at the same time preparing to make an emergency move of studio equipment into storage if necessary, even though we had not procured a storage space. The plain truth was we did not have enough money in our bank account for either studio or storage space, both of which usually require a year’s payment in advance. Preparing an exhibition while being under such pressure took its toll.

When Paul arrived back in Sri Lanka in January he accompanied us our classes with the soldiers and the kids. We painted together, we talked and we laughed. He said, “Maybe it’s not so much a question of moving, but of someone being moved. Let’s concentrate on the show for now and see what happens.”

Like Biththara Amma, there is always a question of what comes first – the chicken, the egg, or the  enigmatic energy of the unknowable. That is the mystery and the key to the mystery is not to bolt out of fear but to stay with the uncertainty and see where it takes you. Seeing is the subtlest of the arts we study at Step-by-Step-Studio: It is a way of knowing without remembering.

After that we got lucky. Sam, one of our board members, somehow charmed the landlord into extending our lease by two months so we could concentrate on the exhibition for the kids at Sri Vajira Temple. Up to that point the landlord had never taken the slightest interest in our work. Not once had he visited us at the studio, but for some reason he took pity on us. It was he who was moved when he heard about the exhibition at the Children’s Development Centre; so we did not have to move. He generously extended our lease by two months with no increase in rent.

uring this period Janaka, one of our mentors and friends in the UK in collaboration with the Project 360, initiated a funding campaign and we received enough money from that source to look for new studio space at a more leisurely pace and make our move after the exhibition was over.

2. Exhibitions: “The Meaning of Life is Not to Hide the Meaning of Life”

There is always something mysterious about painting and the stories that come out of painting. There is a space between the painting and the story where inside and outside – imagination and expression – merge and become one. Painting is secret sort of process. All the way along you have no idea what you’re doing. You proceed in silence from a point of rest inside yourself. Telling the story of the painting afterwards, on the other hand, is a very social thing. You share it with others. That’s how we attempt to make living inside and living outside one through the Mayachitra process.

The Biththara Amma exhibition ran from February 15 -28. We were given a dining hall room at the temple centre, which a team of older boys from the class helped us convert into a gallery. We had to create  adequate viewing space by boarding up windows for the  duration of the show and painting the floor and walls.

Hon. Duminda Dissanayake, Minister of Education Services, opened the exhibition. We sold two paintings to a professional photographer at the opening, Mr. Cha Poon, from Korea. The children were more amazed by what they had accomplished than anyone else. They had created everything themselves – the paintings, the stories, the exhibition space. For our part we coaxed and coddled and goaded them along.

They received a real boost when soldiers and fellow Mayachitra artists from the Mihindu Seth Medura class showed up to support them. These men have been wounded in combat and it is not easy for them to get about. We thank them for making the effort coming to support the kids at the temple program. It is a tribute to their courage and compassion, and to the wisdom of their doctor, Major Deshan Dissanayake, to have arranged the visit.

Now these soldier / painters are talking about having an exhibition of their own later in the year. And we have new ideas for further exhibitions at the Children’s Development Centre. Many converts were won among  students at the centre when they saw this show. We hope some of them will join the class when we start new painting sessions on May 8th.

3. Stories within Stories

We are emphasizing narration in our classes this year: how to find a story in a painting and how to present it by   telling it to others, writing it and maybe even publishing it someday. We understand the world itself is a story made up of many interwoven stories. In this storm of stories we must find our own truth. The story is a seed. It is the seed of our own becoming, so we must tell our stories ourselves and not let others tell them for us.

Sometimes our stories are too painful to tell. Through the Mystery Painting process of Cloud Seeding, Cloud Watching and Cloud Riding we find courage in the chaos of our lives and to tell our stories, indirectly at first, in a metaphorical way. As we become more comfortable with our truth we become less fearful of telling it and accepting responsibility for it.

Here are summary examples of two stories and the paintings that inspired them the first Biththara Amma (Eggs Momma) a painting by a 14-year old girl named Jezika from Sri Vajira Temple Children’s Development Centre and the second, Kapati Kurulla (Dodgy Duck) by Susantha Dharmadasa, a Captain in the Sri Lankan army now at Mihindu Seth Medura

BITHTHARA AMMA

BITHTHARA AMMA

(Eggs Momma) I am an egg. I’m inside and outside. I’m small. I have to eat something to grow. I eat the invisible sun inside me. I’m getting bigger day by day. One day I crack and break and my inside jumps out. I can’t see a thing outside but I can hear and feel things happening around me. I’m blind and very hungry. I want to eat the world I once inhabited and move into this one.  

Someone is giving me food and protecting me but I don’t know who she is. Whenever she comes around me I see rainbow light and I feel loved. Other creatures come near and try to eat me but my protector fends them off. I know after a while that she is my mother and I love her.

Later I meet my father. I am getting bigger and beginning to see the world the way it really is. One day my father goes off to the army and never comes back. In the shadow of a tree I meet another bird like me, a chicken boy. We fall in love and before you know it I lay an egg of my own.

 Dodgy Duck – or Kapati Kurulla, a painting with a story

KAPATI KURULLA

(Dodgy Duck)

I’m a one legged duck. You may think I’m a bit of a suspicious character. When I was a kid a croc made short work of my other leg. Now when I try to swim I just paddle round in circles getting more and more frustrated and depressed. And I don’t get momentum when I dive. Bit of a shame really, because the pond I live in is full of food, fish and frogs, if I could only catch them. It’s easy to snag them if you’ve got all your equipment. That’s my problem.

I had to cut a deal with the Deva of the pond. I promised her I would never kill anyone who lived there under her protection, even if I was starving but, in exchange, I begged her mercy and asked the pond to support me if I   honored this vow. That’s when Podi Ibba, the turtle, surfaced out of the depths.

Podi is a great diver. He easily catches enough frogs to keep us both going. I thank the guardian spirit of the pond every day for having sent this gentle old soul to help me. He’s a cagey fisherman so we always have enough to eat, and I don’t have to break my promise to abstain from killing. I just eat whatever Podi Ibba offers with a clear conscience.

When I tried thanking him one evening after a particularly good feed, which included shrimp and some kind of crispy seaweed salad, he scolded me roundly.

“Never mind,” he said, “You have made me a very rich turtle, the richest in this pond.” “But how is that?” I ask, having never given him anything more than a few greens I found growing by the shore. He winked and disappeared back inside his shell. I watched him sink like a stone to the bottom of the pond. When I stuck my head under the water to see where he had settled I heard his voice echo in my head like a tinny boom box. “You’ve only got what you give away, duckie dear. Thank you for helping me to make my fortune.”

4. Mayachitra (Mystery Painting) Manifest: What Painters Say About The Mystery Painting Practice

Major Deshan Dissanayake is a practitioner of Mystery Painting and the physician in charge of wounded soldiers in rehabilitation at the army’s Mihindu Seth Medura facility in Colombo.  This is what he has to say about the healing effects of this practice on his men. “Mayachitra (Mystery Painting) is a kind of yoga which, if practiced regularly calms the mind and opens the imagination to creative inspiration and healing. Our soldiers, many of them disabled for life, experience improvements both psychologically and physically through practicing this art in weekly three hour sessions under the guidance of two artist / teachers from the Step-by-Step Studio, Chaminda Pushpakumara and Nalaka Ranasinghe… In a matter of six months I have noticed a lessening in tremoring and spasticity among some seriously wounded soldiers as well as a general improvement in muscle tone, co-ordination and strength. With the diminishment in depression the men’s spirits lift and self-confidence returns. The narratives that accompany their paintings demonstrate wit, resilience and wisdom in mediating the adverse effects of severe disability. I experience more social cohesion, camaraderie and community spirit within the group.”

Captain Susantha Dharmadasa, whose story Kapati Kurulla is summarized above, has become an enthusiastic painter and exponent of the art form. In six months he has completed sixteen paintings. This is what he had to say about the Mystery Painting practice.

“I had absolutely no interest or aptitude for art before I was wounded and when I was young. But with Mayachitra I found out I could manage the bad feelings – the anger and depression – I suffered with my injury in a more contemplative spirit. I feel that other kinds of therapeutic programs offered here (at Mihindu Seth Medura) in arts and crafts did not go very far in alleviating our misery. But this painting and the stories that accompany it go deep and bring a positive change in our perceptions and attitudes.” 

Without exception, the young people at the Sri Vajira Children’s Development Centre were astonished that they could make images, that they could dream up stories, that very beautiful paintings could be scaled up based on their originals, and that two of these scaled-up paintings sold for an remarkable amount of money in their books; that is, Rs. 25,000 or about US $200 each.  But it wasn’t all a bed of roses. Here is what two of them had to say about the experience.

Udesika, without ever having heard about the Pink Panther, produced an unlikely facsimile of this world famous icon. When the children were invited to attend these classes she was fearful and convinced she could never do it. In spite of her nervousness she decided to give it a try. “It was hard for me to find anything in my breath lines and almost impossible to clear them so that some kind of recognizable image emerged. However, I learned to sit in one place and concentrate and when I did so time seemed to pass very quickly. Suddenly there he was, the big cat. After that it didn’t get any easier. I found color balancing a big challenge. Most difficult of all though was making the story because it seemed like telling a lie. I told a small fib about my cat, which I think he must have enjoyed, because after that the whole story fell in place. At the exhibition people asked me how I did it. I just told them the truth: Meditation, silence, following breath with brush and paint. It was all right there from the beginning.”  

The older boys in the group were indispensible in organizing classes and setting up the exhibition. It was a steep learning curve for them but they were loyal to group and to the painting class and made sure everything worked out for the exhibition. Srimal is an outstanding leader. Here is what he had to say. “I was hooked from the beginning by the breathline exercise. It gave me a thrill to see the shapes that come out of those lines try to communicate with me. It got harder after that with color balancing while having different shapes in the painting compete for my attention. By listening to other kids tell their stories I got the hang of it. But it was the exhibition that excited me most. Chaminda and Nalaka put a lot of trust in me and I worked hard to make the exhibition happen according to their directions. When one of my own paintings, Egg Baby, sold to a man from Korea, I could hardly believe it, nor could I believe what he paid for it. I am very proud that this money will contribute to more classes in the future. It was a great learning experience from beginning to end.”

 ABSTRACT: The collective identity of Sinhala-speakers over four centuries dating from the 1590s is analyzed with due attention to the structural form of (a) the Kingdom of Kandy and (b) the British colonial regime that took control of the whole island by 1815/18. The analysis dwells on the modes of oral, visual-iconic and written forms of cultural transmission that pre-dated print technology, while drawing attention to the relative uniformity of the Sinhala language in both geographical and temporal scale. A semantic pattern of political alliances based on the opposition of inside to outside which works contextually like a nestling Chinese-box is one dimension of this linguistic order. This supported the tendency of Sinhalese representations to adopt an associational logic which merged past enemies (the wicked Tamils) with contemporary enemies (the Portuguese, the English) during the liberation struggles of the Kandyan state and its militia in the pre-1818 period. Such tendencies and the continuation of disparaging epithets coined during the period of Portuguese imperial intrusion into the vocabulary of the twentieth century must inform any theoretical efforts to distinguish the collective consciousness of the Sinhalese after the substantial transformations initiated under the British from that which is expressed so powerfully in the war poems of the pre-British period.

The temporal focus of this article[i] will be the last four centuries, though some attention will be devoted to elements and themes that embrace the whole of the “middle period,” viz. 1232-1815/18. Within this span of time greater space will be devoted to the 1590s to 1815/18 covering the Kingdom of Kandy for the reason that the literature on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is better developed.

Relationality and Ethnicity: Endowed with speech and memory human beings classify the world around them. As such they are embedded in some measure within classification systems of their own creation. It can be presumed that these vernacular language schemes are influenced by the political economy of particular regions and peoples. It is also manifest that both the semantic patterns and the political economy mould particular notions of personhood as well as specific affiliations to a group or groups.

 Group identities and loyalties are usually relational, intersubjective and self-referential. Where they are reproduced over time in some scheme of classification, such collective identities usually involve an understanding of “Us” with a self-referential name that distinguishes the speakers from “Them,” that is, one or more named Others. These Others are usually neighbours in contiguous space, though the realm of human imagination may also create cosmic or spirit beings in ‘virtual space.’ Interactive exchanges with these Others are the warp and woof of those collective identities that are reproduced, albeit with subtle changes, over time. Needless to say, the cluster of factors that sustain the boundaries of named groups over an extended period of time can vary from place to place and, in any specific case, can alter over time.

 Groups are rarely homogeneous in character and the name that self-referentially embraces a body of people can encompass considerable diversity. There is scope for ambiguity and for elements of the population to be marked by sets of practices that render them a mix, a hybrid type within their context of interaction. Where such hybridity emerges and is sustained, it is incumbent on analysts to identify where in the social order understood in relation to class and power such hybridity is located; and in which spatial locations such a feature is found.

 As the reference to hybridity indicates, group boundaries are rarely watertight. Individuals and families, and sometimes even significant bodies of people, may change their affiliations and self-referential identity over generational time. Why, when and how such alterations occur are the analytical issues that arise from such instances of boundary-crossing. But these instances do not mean that collective sentiments are “fluid” in some formless sense.[ii] I assert that, more often than not, such examples of boundary-crossing contribute to the reproduction of collective categories. Where some individuals from A become B, it is usually an index of the power of B in the societal scheme of things in a particular region. The further question is whether others in A react in hostile fashion to such a development or whether the process grows to the point where A disappears from the historical face as a marked category. In brief, boundaries do not have to be watertight, or even policed rigorously, for us to speak of ‘groupness’, ethnicity and nationality.

 Sinhalese un the Past Eight Centuries: I begin by concentrating upon those people in Sri Lanka who spoke Sinhala as their mother tongue or principal mode of communication from the thirteenth century onwards. This interest includes the individuals and bodies of people who immigrated to the island from the Indian subcontinent and became identified as Sinhalese over time.[iii] It also embraces (a) the individual Portuguese and other Europeans who went “native;” and (b) those Kaffirs[iv] and Malays in the service of the Kandyan state who stayed on and intermarried with indigenes in ways that led to assimilation.[v]

In overview and in point-form I mark several significant characteristics in the world of Sinhala-speakers over this broad span of time, including some features that depend upon the controversial methodological tack of using early-mid twentieth century knowledge to read backwards.

1. By the time Gurulugomi wrote a text called the Dharmapradīpika in 1200, “the term Sinhala … denoted the Sinhala-speaking population who were the preponderant element among the residents in the island and did not include within its meaning other linguistic groups.”[vi]
2. Most Sinhala-speakers appear to have been Buddhist. This phenomenon assumed greater significance because Buddhism had declined considerably in southern India in the face of a militant Hindu revival from the sixth century AD onwards and was fast petering out. In effect the conditions were ripe for the divide between Saivism and Buddhism to assume sharper emphasis[vii] in a context in which there were few Tamils who were Buddhist.
3. This did not prevent the continuous ingress of people, commodities and icons from the Indian subcontinent during the middle period and a process of syncretic accretions and borrowings in the lifeways of the Sinhala-speakers and Buddhists.[viii] 
4. By the twelfth century the Sinhala script had to a large extent evolved into the forms familiar to us in the twentieth century, while the language was even closer to the usage of modern times.[ix]
5. The Sinhala-speech community appears to have been characterised by a remarkable regional uniformity. Thus, taking our cue from evidence drawn from the mid-twentieth century before the modern educational network was established, one can hardly use the term “dialect” for the variations that are found because these are confined to word bank and phonetic inflections rather than syntax.[x]
6. This is not a recent development. The absence of dialectical variation extends backwards into the thirteenth century. Thus, the Pūjāvaliya (1266), Butsarana and Saddharmaratnāvaliya, all thirteenth century texts, are in simple prose and would be comprehensible to most Sinhalese when read or recited aloud.
7. This ease of comprehension was assisted by the character of conventional Sinhala prose as a medium that can be alliterated in recitational form by a mere switch of gears so to speak, a dexterity available to the ordinary people.
8. The most powerful medium of communication, however, was that of oral poetry. Most of the poetry from the fourteenth century onwards was composed in the simple Elu (Hela) form rather than Sanskritized Sinhala.
9. Cultural transmission was deepened by the capacities of a population, whether literate or illiterate, that had had honed its mnemonic skills through repetition as well as the mnemonic codes built into speech or verse form.[xi]
10. Twentieth century evidence indicates that alliance-making at the local level within the Sinhala-speaking population can assemble, or refer to, a body of persons as api or apē kattiya (us, our crowd) in ways that permit the api (us) to be expanded into a broader group or contracted downwards into a smaller body. In short, one has a semantic pattern of the inside versus the outside tailored according to context. I discovered this pattern initially during the course of investigations into the pejorative terminology in the modern era and then used data from informants, anecdotes, a central incident in a popular, yet didactic novel published in the year 1906 and the thematic patterns in the first lot of novels by the same author to establish the argument.[xii]

The author of these novels was Piyadasa Sirisena, the most popular novelist of the early twentieth century and a political activist as well. To Sirisena “mixing blood [was] in no wise good.” The Burghers are treated as a mixed, contaminated category (often in the pejorative description tuppahiyek) and invariably enter his romantic novels as degenerates who mislead innocent Sinhala youth. Those Sinhalese who follow the Westernised pathways are also depicted as tuppahi. Indeed, in his later novels the term enters a list of ethnic categories: “marakkala, hamba, kocci, demala, tuppahi.”[xiii] Rather to my surprise I recently discovered that this usage is inscribed within verse 395, in the Rajasiha Hatana, a seventeenth century war poem:[xiv]

 gerimas kannata ek vū erata upan tuppā                       sit

pirivässan ändaka sinnarukam karanā aya pā              sit

mari mastaka Kavisit Kannadi Parangi nandē             sit

sulu mas väda kotana lesin damā tänin täna pā            sit

Those country-born Thupassis who feed on beef and ape the senhors in their trousers — Kavisi, Kannadi, Parangis and men from many a land — all are struck down as when fishermen kill their prey at night.            (Pieris 1909)

Country born Tuppahis who joined [the Portuguese] to feed on beef and Senhors with retinues around them were cut down. And all around Kaffirs, Kannadis and Parangis from various lands are cut down into small logs of flesh.             (Wakkumbura)                                                                                                                                                             

The term tuppahi itself is a foreign loan word developing from the syncretic exchanges and liaisons associated with the by-lanes and sea lanes of the Portuguese empire. Specifically, it seems to have been derived from the word Tupass or Topaz that was so widely used in the Indian Ocean world affected by the Portuguese. Thus, in Hobson Jobson it is noted that the word was employed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries “for dark-skinned or half-caste claimants of Portuguese descent, and Christian profession.” This term appears to have taken root in Dutch Ceylon as an appellation for mixed bloods (Mesticos) of supposed Portuguese descent.[xv] Antiquarian interest in the etymological origins of the word Topaz/Tupass has inspired several theories, among them the suggestion that it emanates from the Sanskrit word “dvibhāsā,” a speaker of two languages and thus an intermediary.[xvi] What matters for our purposes, however, is its rapid incorporation into Sinhala speech to describe people of mixed descent.

The use of Tuppāsi or Tuppahi as a collective noun seems to have been associated with two parallel developments that expanded the range and the multiplicity of meanings attached to this word. By the nineteenth century, if not earlier, it could be used to refer to translators and thus be adopted as a lineage name, Tuppahigē, for those who had taken up this occupation.[xvii] But what the polite nineteenth century dictionaries do not indicate is the process by which it had been adopted as a term for outcastes. The latter usage was quite consistent with its deployment as an ethnic label for the ‘creole’ peoples of the European imperial outposts. Since the word jātiya was grounded in conceptions of birth and origin, and therefore refers to “birth,” “kind,” “caste” and “race,”[xviii] it was logical enough for this new word to embrace both people of mixed blood as well as those considered outcaste. Those castes that mixed their blood in the past, one suspects, were considered beyond the pale. That is, they were like the Rodi, the lowest of the low in the Sinhala caste order. Likewise, the progeny of mixed liaisons with foreigners were of the same low (nīca) order. They were, so to speak, as mixed as outcaste. Thus, a modern Sinhala dictionary indicates that tuppahi refers (i) an interpreter; (ii) Hollanders and Portuguese; (iii) those who do not fit into Sinhala culture, namely, the sankara (samkara) or mixed; and (iv) those who are low or inferior.[xix]

Amending Anderson and Hobsbawm: This specific piece of evidence indicates that oral communication in a context of violent conflict over a period of time can sustain sharp ethnic differentiation. But beyond the temporal specifics of the sixteenth and seventeenth century warfare, my review above is directed towards revising the misdirection generated by Benedict Anderson’s emphasis on print capitalism in the rise of nationalism. One simply cannot assume that ideology was moulded largely by those who could read and write — a body of people who are regarded by Anderson as “tiny literate reefs on top of vast illiterate oceans.”[xx] Nor does the Sinhala-world of the middle period support Hobsbawm’s dictum that there could have been no linguistic uniformity in countries lacking a formal system of education.[xxi]

What we have among the Sinhalese, then, is what Adrian Hastings has called a “written vernacular” in stressing the significance of such a factor in the generation of politicised collective identities in England and Europe in the late medieval and early modern periods.[xxii] While attentive to the written texts (some of which originated in oral form anyway), I would lay greater stress on the fact that the principal means of cultural transmission among the Sinhalese were verbal, poetic, preformative and visual. Thus, it a reasonable speculation that the diffusion of the more popular stories inscribed within prose and poetic texts would have been furthered by the cross-hatching of messages in the visual imagery of temple wall paintings or artifacts of propitiation (for instance, those used in yak tovil) on the one hand, and the incidence of pilgrimages associated with the sacred geography of the island as a Buddhist and Sinhala entity on the other. I conjecture that the visual markers of ethnic and/or religious difference included tonsorial, sumptuary and eating practices that helped differentiate the Yon (Muslim Moors), Demala (Tamils), Kannadi (Kannadi) and Javun (Malays), among others, from each other. This list could be expanded to include other bodies of troops that participated in the wars of the period. Indeed, one must attach particular weight to the Sinhala fear of the Black Africans known as Kāberi, people that were presumably distinguished by ‘depth’ of skin colour and type of hair in the course of being invested with all manner of demonic capacities.[xxiii] The Kāberi were among the auxiliaries in the service of the Portuguese, Dutch and British imperial armies.

  Such differentiation does not mean that there were no cultural exchanges between these bodies of people or that the Sinhala-speakers and Tamil-speakers did not have some affinities or that individual Tamil-speakers did not become Sinhalese over generational time. However, the latter process marks the force of the Sinhala-speaking majority in the south central parts of the island and the power of the Sinhala-and-Goyigama-dominated state regimes.[xxiv]

State Formation and Sinhalaness: What we see, therefore, in south central Lanka is a relatively uniform speech community with a written vernacular organised around a dynastic state invested with the task of preserving Buddhism in its Thēravāda form. The kings of these states in the middle period were constituted as cakravarti figures and bodhisattvas. As such, each king was god-like and even addressed as deiyyo (god). In our terms the monarch was lawmaker, appellate judge, administrator, military commander and cosmological font rolled into one. He was surrounded by taboos and wielded great power, though he was also subject to the force of custom, the fear of cosmic intervention and the expectation that he would make the rains fall and the sun shine at the appropriate times. Bad omens and natural calamities therefore rendered the kings vulnerable to rebellions from disaffected elements within the population.[xxv]

 Every one of the Sinhala states in the middle period seems to have been described as tunsinhalaya or trisinhalaya or tunlaka (see Appendix A). One of the shortened speech variants of this concept was sinhal[MSOffice1] ē (hereafter rendered as Sinhalē). This terminology marked the idea that the kings were the rulers of the whole island. Informed by the fact that there were sub-kingdoms within the realm as well as the Kingdom of Yālppānam in the north beyond the depopulated, jungle-clad north central districts, historians have regarded this claim as a “fiction.”[xxvi] But their yardstick has been governed by modern conceptions of state authority based on regular forms of surplus appropriation and administrative controls. Their modernist ideology has not countenanced the possibility of different forms of allegiance and rule. What one found was “tributary overlordship,” where rule was constituted by rites of homage accompanied by gift-giving from subordinate to superior figure.[xxvii]

In consequence, during the period of triangular conflict between the Portuguese, Dutch and Sinhalese-in-Kandy (1638-58), Rājasinha II addressed the Dutch commanders with such phrases as “the Captain-Major of the nation of my Hollanders” and consistently referred to “my lowland territories” and “this my island of Ceilao.”[xxviii] Indeed, in one letter he stated unequivocally that “the black people of this my island of Ceilao, wheresoever they might be, were my vassals by right.”[xxix] In subsequent decades the Kandyan court adhered to the constitutional theory that in administering power in the Maritime Provinces the Dutch were “the guardians of the seacoasts.”[xxx]

The practices of the Dutch sustained these perceptions. One governor, Pijl, referred to himself as the “king’s most faithful governor and humble servant,” called the king “His Majesty” and spoke of ”the King’s castle at Colombo.”[xxxi] It may be partly for this reason that he was bestowed with honours by the King of Kandy and inscribed in the annals of the Kandyan court as “Governor Unnānsē, Prince of Love.”[xxxii] The Dutch letters to the King of Kandy were liberally sprinkled with high-sounding epithets that catered to the imperial claims of its rulers: for instance, groot magtisten en onverwinnelijk keijser or “invincible emperor of supreme power.”[xxxiii] These letters, whether by messenger or borne by ambassadorial parties, were placed on a silver tray and held above the bared head of an appuhāmy, a respectable native. During the long journey to Senkadagala (the city of Kandy) they were lodged at night in a separate shed with white linen and its own sentries.[xxxiv] Likewise gifts “were [generally] wrapped in white linen, a traditional mark of respect reserved for the king.”[xxxv] In effect, the indigenous theory of overlordship received confirmation from the Dutch.[xxxvi] It was possible for Kīrti Srī Rājasinha (1747-82) to be praised conventionally, and thus in a profoundly evocative manner, as “the divine lord King Kīrti Srī, the chief of the whole of Lanka.”[xxxvii]

  The Kingdom of Kandy (or rather, to be more precise, Sinhalē), then, was a centre-oriented galactic polity of the type identified by Tambiah.[xxxviii] It encompassed tributary states through acts of homage carrying powerful ideas of superordination and subordination.

War in the Moulding of Sinhalaness: The role of the king and the attachment to the concept Sinhalē among nobles and people was also nourished by the wars against the Portuguese and, subsequently, albeit in lesser measure, those involving the Dutch and the English. There was intermittently continuous warfare in the period extending from the 1590s to the 1670s. Many of the war poems seem to be a product of this particular period.

They were, evidently, a means of mobilisation and a means of sustaining esprit de corps. Dolapihilla’s reconstruction indicates the suggestive possibilities. “[In] the van of a Kandyan army marched a numerous band of davulkārayo…. Giving utterance to words of courageous defiance was an essential part of the fighting. When waiting for battle round each leader the men under him gathered into a kavikāra maduva. The davul drums and the drums used to broadcast orders were for the moment forgotten. Not so the udäkki and cymbals, which too had been brought. The ease with which these could be carried seems to have made them dear to the soldier’s heart. They sang brave songs of what they meant to do the next day. When a specially brave song was concluded there was a huzza. De Queyroz makes mention of the noise in the Sinhalese camp on the eve of de Saa’s defeat at Vellavaya.“[xxxix]

These war poems, clearly, were a form of entertainment as well. They were yet more. They were praise poems eulogizing the potency of particular kings, princes or chiefs. They were in the kāvya tradition and, following Ron Inden, should be interpreted as constitutive acts.[xl] In the understanding of speakers, recipients and listeners their glorification carried illocutionary force The words were believed to render the monarch as glorious as potent. Illustratively, I note that in some poems the King of Kandy is depicted as incandescent as a sun that could render all adversaries into minute fireflies: “the gallant Atapattu host was posted near to oppose them; and like a cloud of fireflies before the rising sun, the might of the Parangis [Portuguese] was dimmed and their only thought was flight.”[xli]         

In overview, then, one finds that the war poems present a picture of a devotional body of militia (lak sen or sīhala sen) who served “apa maha nirindu,” “our great king.”[xlii] This is a recurring phrase in the war poems. Though there may be a touch of the formulaic in such expressions, the context of war and the partisanship of the speakers make this practice meaningful. “Apa maha nirindu” is more than a statement of respect towards a powerful figure. In a maximalist reading based on consultations with literary specialists,[xliii] I contend that this expression embraces the audience in a sentimental We-feeling around the hero-king. It is yet more. In revealing this style of devotion the spokesperson was taking possession of the king on behalf of a dependant populace/audience. “Apa maha nirindu” reminded the king of the expectation that he would fulfill the protective obligations of kingship and sustain the dasarājadharma (ten royal virtues) as spelt out in the coronation and such texts as the Budugunālankāraya.

The war poems, moreover, reiterate the idea that the king was overlord of the whole island. Sometimes this was through the Buddhist metaphor of a “white canopy.”[xliv] The Rajasiha Hatana refers to Rājasinha’s overlordship over tunsinhalaya or tunlaka, that is, the “three kingdoms of Sinhala” (or Lanka) in the translation favoured by Wakkumbura or “the whole of Lanka” in that proposed by Pieris and Goonetilleke. In the Maha Hatana it is affirmed that Rājasinha “protected the Low Country (and) unified blessed Lanka” (pāta rata rägat siri laka ekkara nā).[xlv] Likewise in the Rajasiha Hatana, it is observed that after a battlefield triumph “our victorious king … devot[ed] himself to the well being of the two Ratas, for he made no difference between them.”[xlvi]

In summary, then, the war poems of the Kandyan period present us with a picture of cakravarti figures vested with superhuman character, devotional followers and fighters, Sīhala sen, all oriented towards defending a valued territory that was variously referred to as Lakdiva, Tun Sinhalaya, Siri Laka, uda pāta rata et cetera. These add up to a powerful sense of collective self-perception linked to territory. What we see here is a Sinhala consciousness with a significant measure of patriotism. Underpinning this was an explicit notion of sovereignty.[xlvii] I am reluctant, however, to refer to this form of thinking as a “nationalism” of the sort found in Europe and elsewhere from the nineteenth century.[xlviii] There was no theory of self-determination supported by the principles of jurisprudence that had developed in Europe. Nor was there an egalitarian ideal and the democratic thrust associated with the idea of popular sovereignty. But the resistances mounted by the people of Sinhalē in support of a hierarchically constituted dynastic state did amount to practices of liberation.

Nineteenth Century British Ceylon: The British occupation was consolidated in four steps, in 1795/96, 1815, 1817/18 (the pacification of a major Sinhala rebellion centred in the south east and the Kandyan Provinces) and 1832 (the formal unification of the Maritime Provinces and the Kandyan Provinces). This meant that the island was now unified under a modernising administrative regime. The building of roads, bridges and railways and the establishment of postal and telegraphic services were among the critical steps in this process of unification.[xlix]

This expansion of the transport and communication network materially assisted the growth of market exchanges and the implantation of a capitalist order in Sri Lanka. Central to this development was the institutional framework of capitalism created by legislative and administrative acts. The abolition of the state-sponsored system of corvee labour known as rājakāriya in 1832 was one step in this foundational work. The improvement of the judicial and administrative services, for instance the creation of a Survey Department, provided the basis for property rights that were amenable to conveyancing and improvement. There was a reciprocal causal interaction between these developments and the rapid growth of a plantation economy. The growth of plantations was initially devoted to coffee and coconut and subsequently concentrated on tea and rubber alongside coconut.

These trends in their turn led to the growing dominance of English as the language of administration and high commerce (except perhaps in one critical arena, the Pettah firms). Along one dimension English thereby became the lingua franca linking (some) people who spoke two different languages, namely Sinhala and Tamil. Along another dimension, as we shall see, it became an instrument of privilege, domination and oppression (e. g. through pejorative remarks).

In the result one sees the emergence of an indigenous bourgeoisie drawn from a number of different “communities,” whether Colombo Chetty, Parsee, Tamil, Sinhalese, Malay, Mohammedan Moor[l] or the descendants of Portuguese, Dutch and other European residents who had become identified as “Burghers” or lansi.[li] Overlapping partially with the bourgeoisie was a body of people who, together with many, but not all, members of the bourgeoisie, fell within the umbrella of the local term “middle class.” The adoption of this term as an analytical concept is rendered necessary by the fact that the modalities of domination/superiority were not restricted to property/wealth, but included life style and the English language.[lii]

The English language as well as the expanding print technology in an era of more rapid communication opened the floodgates for intellectual currents from Europe to enter the world of the bourgeoisie and middle class. The high literature of Europe, especially the works of Shakespeare’s and the current of nineteenth century romanticism, were among the products of the West that were accorded value in these circles. The “Young Ceylon” group that blossomed in the early 1850s seem to have been influenced by the currents associated with Young Italy and Young England.[liii] In brief, then, the ideas associated with Liberalism and nationalism were now available to the indigenous elites. One part of the Liberal philosophy and its implications was the language of rights (as opposed to that of petition and propitiation) and the emphasis on equality. Since the British educational institutions praised the virtues of the British constitution, the instruments were being set in place for the British to be eventually (in the early twentieth century) hoist on their own petard. Critically, the arguments of “representation,” “equality” and “self-government” were understood by the English-educated middle class as arguments for the interests of the people of Ceylon, that is, for the “Ceylonese” in its all-island, multi-ethnic sense.

The middle class and bourgeoisie began to concentrate around the city of Colombo, especially after the port facilities were revolutionised in the 1870s and 1880s. As the hub of administration as well as the transport network, Colombo became a hegemonic centre in the widest meaning of the term. It became the country’s principal ideological manufactory as well as the source of its valued life style.[liv]

 British rule was accompanied by aggressive proselytisation work by missionaries and lay people motivated by Evangelical ideas. This activity generated opposition among both Hindus in the north and Buddhists in the south western quadrant. Hindu and Buddhist revitalisation movements emerged from the mid-nineteenth century. They borrowed some of their organisational forms and techniques from the missionary orders. Their style of protest matched the virulence of their opponents.[lv] The anti-Christian reaction among the Sinhalese was promoted by laypersons as well as bhikkhus and involved both Sinhala-speakers and those bilingual in Sinhala and English. Individual spokesmen even referred to Buddhism as “the Sinhalese national faith” and “the religion of the land.”[lvi] Such activists were inevitably pitted against the Sinhala Christians, especially Catholics, with procession disputes occasionally acting as a catalyst for violent local clashes.[lvii]

 Anagarika Dharmapala   a temperance meeting — Pic from Kumari Jayawardena

The anti-Christian rhetoric overlapped with a powerful current of opposition to Westernisation and its allegedly degrading effects. An overwhelming anxiety developed among some activists that their ­kula sirit and gunadharma (customs and virtues) were being contaminated to the point of decline. An apocalyptic vision of cultural doom took root in some quarters.[lviii] One facet of this line of protest was an emphasis on nativism and purism. This is illustrated, for instance, in (a) the campaign mounted against meat-eating;  Pedris Silva alias Piyadasa Sirisena — the Gunadasa Amarasekera of his time

(b) the campaign advocating the wearing of the osariya (a form of Kandyan saree) by Sinhala womenfolk; and (c) the objection to miscegenation and mixed marriages. While this line of resistance to Westernisation was expressed both in Sinhala and English mediums, its support base was strongest among the intermediary elites that had emerged within the new social order.[lix] The broad objective of this movement of regeneration, therefore, was to uplift the Sinhalese qua Sinhalese.[lx]

 However, one must also note the parallel development of a movement against “denationalisation” among the English-educated elites during the 1890s and 1900s. This campaign opposed uncritical mimicry of Western ways and stressed indigenism in a broad style, that is, in the sense “Ceylonese.” Among its advocates were A K Coomaraswamy, the Ponnambalam brothers and the Ceylon Social Reform Society (1905 et seq).[lxi]

 Where the Ceylon Social Reform Society’s version of denationalisation encompassed the island’s ethnic diversity, that of the nativist Sinhala activists had a hostility to things foreign that occasionally targeted the kocci, demala and hambamarakkala (the Cochinese, Tamils and Coast Moors).[lxii] This sort of criticism and the framework of thought espoused in such texts as Piyadasa Sirisena’s earliest novels reveal a caste ideology in fusion with the racist ideas that had been recently imported into Lankā through Western writings. In other words, caste notions became, in effect, re-worked and then combined with the imported European theories of race to shore up the boundaries of the Sinhala world and Sinhala culture as an exclusive bounded entity.[lxiii] However, along another dimension, as we shall see, there was a tendency for the category “Sinhalese” (or Sinhala) to encompass the concept “Ceylonese” in a manner that was both incorporative and subsuming.

 The Twentieth Century in Broad Overview: For our purposes four strands of idoelogical activity in the twentieth century that ran paralllel with each other can be highlighted:

* Ceylonese (Sri Lankan) nationalism of a multi-ethnic kind.

* Sinhala nationalism.

* Tamil communitarianism which, following the lead provided by the Ceylon Communist Party in October 1944,[lxiv] redefined its constituency as a “nation” in 1948-49 (clearly on the pre-existing foundations provided by what I have called “communitarianism”).

* Dating from the 1930s the “Left Movement,” which has also provided one of the intellectual currents feeding the “New Left” of the 1960s-and-beyond, especially the Janatā Vimukti Peramuna (the People’s Liberation Front), which has also been inspired by nativist Sinhala nationalism (B above).

None of these streams of consciousness/activity was monolithic and the factional struggles and variations must be part of more complex pictures than I can attempt here. But, in this simplified overview, I would say that the story of the twentieth century is the manner in which the leading edge provided by Ceylonese nationalism in the front reaches of power through the first half of the twentieth century was transformed by the hegemonic upsurge of Sinhala cultural nationalism from the 1940s/50s and quickly upstaged by the sharpening conflict between Sinhala and Tamil nationalisms. At present, Sri Lankan (Ceylonese) nationalism remains a relatively weak third force in the firmament.

The Twentieth century in Sharper Focus:Confronting the British colonial state at the beginning of the twentieth century one finds a movement for constitutional reform headed by English-educated and Westernised elements among the Sri Lankan bourgeoisie and middle class. This movement was fractured by familial, caste, regional and “communal” rivalries. Its methods were nowhere near the militancy seen in British India, but its pressures were constant and the rhetoric quite heated at times. The clever, pragmatic politics of these forces, assisted by Sri Lanka’s geo-political scale, namely, its small island situation, eventually saw a transfer of power in two stages, 1931 and 1948.[lxv]

One part of the development of Ceylonese nationalism was the emergence of the Ceylon Labour Union in the 1920s and then the emergence of the Left Movement through the LSSP and the Ceylon Communist Party in the 1930s and 1940s.[lxvi] Indeed, the Left-Right struggle dominated the political scene from the late 1930s to the 1950s, while remaining central within a context of   sharpening Sinhala-Tamil differences in the late ‘fifties-to-‘sixties.

 Some of the Tamil leaders distanced themselves from the Ceylon National Congress from the early 1920s and approached the British authorities for “minority safeguards” and, subsequently, for “fifty:fifty” minority representation for the Tamil, Muslim and Burgher “communities.” Other Tamils in the Jaffna Youth League took a more radical all-island path,[lxvii] while yet others joined the Left Movement. The writings in the Tamil-medium during the first half of the twentieth century have hardly been researched, however, and our knowledge of the Tamil streams of consciousness is even less than that of the Sinhala forces, though the latter, too, is marked by yawning gaps.[lxviii]

 The Senanayakes and others in relaxed mood

What can be stressed about the current of Sinhala cultural nationalism is that it remained a powerful undercurrent in the first half of the century. Its energies were expressed in both the temperance agitations of 1904 and the early 1910s as well as the pogrom that led to an assault on the Mohammedan Moors (Muslims) in the south western quadrant of the island in mid-1915.[lxix] This undercurrent was sustained thereafter within the literary and journalistic fields, but from the 1920s also had its proponents within the Lanka Maha Jana Sabha, the All-Ceylon Village Committees Conference and then, from the mid-1930s, in the Sinhala Maha Sabha. All three associations were components within the Ceylon National Congress (CNC), so these strands had a voice within the main engine of constitutional agitation. From 1931 the key institutional force behind the pressures on the British, however, was the Board of Ministers set up under the Donoughmore constitution. Since the State Council was elected by universal suffrage and answered to an electorate that was 69 per cent Sinhalese, one must attend to the implications of this fact in the thinking of the key figures within the Board of Ministers (especially D. B. Jayatilaka and D. S. Senanayake).[lxx]

Because those Sinhalese attached to their cultural values had links or sympathies with the underprivileged and because the vernacular languages were underprivileged in relation to English, some of those sympathetic to Sinhala nativism moved with the Leftists. Others were part of the Ceylon National Congress. Signs of a significant split in the CNC emerged in early 1945 when the Executive Committee discussed a motion to the effect that “The culture, language and script of the minorities shall be protected” – a clause that was to be part of a “Declaration of Fundamental Rights.” Peter Galloluwa and Jayantha Wirasekera proposed that the words “language and script” should be deleted.[lxxi] In other words, what one sees here is a hardline Sinhala chauvinist position and a precursor of the Sinhala Only campaign of the mid-1950s.

They were defeated, but, significantly, they were leading players in a faction, centred on the Maradana branch of the CNC, that opposed a resolution moved by J. R. Jayewardene in May 1946 proposing that the CNC should become part of D. S. Senanayake’s newly-formed United National Party. They lost that vote as well, but represented a significant minority. As significantly, if one allows for some mavericks from the elite, this factional struggle was a battle between Maradana (Galloluwa et al) and Cinnamon Gardens (J. R. Jayewardene et al) in the social order of Colombo. In brief, one witnesses here a precursor of the struggle between Sinhala nativism and the Western-educated that became so central in the early 1950s and led to the electoral transformation of 1956.

 SWRD Bandaranaike in rhetorical flow — Pic from Victor Ivan

The story of the so-called “revolution of 1956” is relatively well known.[lxxii] The electoral victory of a coalition led by the SLFP under S.W. R. D. Bandaranaike was engineered on a platform that attacked the privileges of the English language and the values of Westernised “brown sahibs,” while espousing the claims of the allegedly downtrodden Buddhist religion in the context of entrenched Christian privileges and an alleged network identified as “Catholic Action.” A critical element in this campaign was embodied in the phrase “Sinhala Only,” a clarion call demanding the righting of previous wrongs by making Sinhala the official language of administration. Behind this particular demand was the feeling that the Tamils had used the English language to advantage and secured far too great a stake in the prestigious government services (a major pillar in the economy till the 1980s).

            Central to the movement that brought about this transformation in 1956 were four forces:

(a)                a body of Buddhist monks organised as the Eksat Bhikkhu Peramuna;

(b)               the intermediary social classes represented by Sinhala schoolteachers, ayurvedic physicians, lower level government functionaries and (some) small businessmen;

(c)                socialist thinking advocating the needs and rights of the underprivileged, a strand of ideology that was found in the SLFP as well as the Leftist party (VLSSP) led by Philip Gunawardena that was one pillar of the MEP coalition that won the election;

(d)               Sinhala cultural nationalism with threads of ideology that go back, at the very least, to the late nineteenth century.

   LH Mettananda addresses a crowd of Sinhala enthusiasts at Galle Face Green — Pic from Victor Ivan

One of the significant details associated with the upsurge of “1956” was that the effective and popular manner in which the term tuppahi was used to disparage the Sinhalese brown sahibs of the Western-educated and privileged classes, with Philip Gunawardena (MEP) and Prof W S Karunaratne (SLFP) being among the adepts of this verbal weaponry.[lxxiii] But it is the broader themes and outcomes that should command our attention.[lxxiv]

            In the first place the overwhelming electoral victory enabled the forces attached to it to speak of “apē ānduva” (“our government).” In effect, this meant that Sinhalaness received a majoritarian and democratic sanction. It was now invested with legitimacy. No longer could it be derided, as it was so widely in previous decades, as a form of “communalism” or a “tribal” phenomenon.[lxxv]  Relatively uncommitted observers, such as Farmer and Kearney began to speak of “Sinhalese nationalism,” thereby investing it with the legitimacy attached to the concept in an anti-colonial context.[lxxvi]

            In the second place, of course, the triumph of Sinhala Only sharpened the Sri Lankan Tamil response and rejuvenated the Federal Party (which had been defeated by the Tamil Congress in the Tamil constituencies during the elections of 1952) as the bearer of a “defensive Tamil nationalism.”[lxxvii] This thesis is often presented by scholars presenting a picture of consistent victimisation of the Tamils as part of exercises that provide legitimation for subsequent trends in Tamil politics. The contention has strong evidential and circumstantial foundations and has the support of scholars who are not subsumed within the Tamil cause.[lxxviii] However, one has to attach a few qualifications. For one thing, research on expressions of Tamil nationalism from the 1940s in the Tamil language has been relatively limited. For another, these expressions must be set within a close study of Tamilian politics in the years 1949-76 by scholars who are prepared to look beyond the “victimisation” thesis. Speculatively, I suggest that such research may uncover strands of extremism much earlier than known to us today, while unravelling the manner in which elements of intransigence in Tamil circles fed on the threatening clouds of Sinhala majoritarianism from the late 1950s to make compromise more difficult.

            Thirdly, all the major parties with roots in the south centre of the island readjusted their programmes to meet the interests of the forces behind 1956. This applied (eventually) to the Leftist parties as much as the UNP. In 1964 both the LSSP and the CCP gave up their multi-ethnic language policy and joined the SLFP in a coalition when the opportunity for a stake in the government opened up. This not only meant a moderating of their revolutionary rhetoric by an espousal of the parliamentary path to power, it also meant a partial abandonment of their Tamil supporters. The further outcome was that young Tamil radicals did not have a party in the south that they could readily turn to in the manner pursued by the older generations of the 1930s to 1950s.

            In the process the LSSP and CCP were pushed into the analytical category “Old Left” as new generations of Sinhala-speaking youth found their style of vocabulary unappealing and the Old Left’s new programme far too docile for their fighting tastes. Inspired in part by undercurrents of Sinhala chauvinism that had been nurtured within the Ceylon Communist Party[lxxix] the Janatā Vimukti Peramuna emerged in the 1960s to espouse the revolutionary path with a mix of Maoism, Stalinism, Guevarism and nativism/Sinhala chauvinism. In my view the JVP personnel within its 1971 variant, JVP Mach I as I call it, were distinctly the children of the Old Left merged with the forces of 1956.[lxxx]

            It is the strand of nativism in the thinking of the JVP of 1971 as well as its subsequent incarnations[lxxxi] that is pertinent to our interests. In it first incarnation the JVP expressed an antipathy to Western symbols such as the mini-skirt and sunglasses that combined an attack on wealth with markers of styles deemed erosive to Sinhala custom. This puritanical steak was resurrected in the third version of the JVP, its most violent moment thus far, in 1987-1990. During the underground civil war the JVP banned the sale of cigarettes and alcohol in some localities and depicted its personnel as chaste and disciplined individuals. This may have been a relatively subordinate feature of its programme, but has to be interpreted in the context of extreme antipathies to the Indian state as well as signs of xenophobia found in the propaganda of some of its spokesmen.[lxxxii] Nor is it insignificant that the JVP Mach IV, the present parliamentary party, is one of those vehemently opposed to the peace initiative and the Norwegian and NGO roles in the process.

 Selective Threads: In overview I mark some strands of Sinhalaness that have had a long history over the last two centuries. First: many Sinhalese conventionally believe that Sri Lanka is a “Sinhala country” (a) because its civilisational base is believed to have been Sinhala, (b) because most of the inhabitants were deemed to have been Sinhala-speakers from the late centuries BC and (c) because the principal states with a “continuous” history backwards into the first millennium BC were regarded as Sinhala regimes under Sinhala kings for the most part. This belief also courses through the writings of British, Burgher and other personnel in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. One of the questions at issue for us today is whether this reading of the past by those who spoke and thought in Sinhala can be linked as a current of thought to the notions of overlordship and sovereignty in the Kandyan era that I have outlined in the first part of this essay. Are there manifest continuities of the sort identified in the use of the terms tuppahi, sädi demalu and para as a disparagement of dangerous Others in the Kandyan era and modern times? Does the inside/outside pattern of understanding alignments that is inscribed within Sinhala usage kick into gear at moments of profound opposition in ways that reproduce self-referential notions of Sinhalaness?

Secondly: for some time in the modern era there has been a tendency among some Sinhala ideologues to subsume the category “Ceylonese” (or “Lankan”) within the category “Sinhalese” and to equate “Sinhala” with “Lanka.”[lxxxiii] Thus, when Dharmapala presented an essay in the early twentieth century called “A Message to the Young Men of Ceylon,” his opening paragraphs begin by referring to “we the heirs of our beloved Lanka” and declaring that “We Sinhalese should remember that our ancestors came from Lada;” while proceeding to exhort his readers to “look to the future and protect the interests of the coming generation of Sinhalese.” In the same breadth he announces that the “people of Ceylon are of Aryan race.”[lxxxiv] This tendency appears implicitly in recent newspaper interventions by a leading Sinhala novelist, Gunadasa Amarasekera.[lxxxv] I suspect that the equation of Lankan with Sinhalese has been widespread at all levels of the Sinhala-speaking population. So one of the tasks for social science inquiries today is the investigation of the degree to which this occurs and an evaluation of the implications thereof. Neither is an easy task.

Without wishing to press the analogies too far, the best way for me to underline this point is to highlight the manner in which Magyar spokesmen in the nineteenth century equated “Magyar” with “Hungary”[lxxxvi] and the manner in which the categories “England” and “English” have over the last three centuries tended to subsume “Britain” and “British.”[lxxxvii] In the latter instance the incidence of this phenomenon suggests that it is a marker of the hegemony of the English in the institutional complex known as Great Britain from the eighteenth century till recent decades.

Thirdly: one can say that the ideology encoded in the Mahāvamsa (especially its latter parts II, III and IV dating from the thirteenth century onwards, a section known also as the Cūlavamsa) was sharpened in the British period by a number of interconnected processes. The establishment of a rationalising bureaucratic order meant that its either/or epistemology and utilitarian philosophy took root. This demanded more precise boundary marking for propertied assets as well as concepts. This extended to statistical compilations such as the Blue Books and decennial census enumerations. One dimension of this new intellectual framework was the work of Indological scholars (that is, Orientalists), both scholar-officials and specialists from Germany or elsewhere. Their researches introduced to South Asia the distinction between the Aryan and Dravidian languages, thereby opening the way for these linguistic distinctions to be extended to those of “race” — at a time when the racial theories associated with Darwinism were also being diffused among the local population.

The stories related in the Mahāvamsa gained legitimacy not only because they were made available in English translation effected by a British scholar-official in the 1830s, but because the stories themselves adhered to a chronological framework and were linked to a history of kings. Moreover, the discovery of ancient ruins at Anuradhapura, Polonnaruva and other places invested the history with an aura of greatness that was attractive to a British ruling class that had been nurtured in the classics and admired ancient civilisations.[lxxxviii] Such admiration was latched unto and expanded by the emerging Ceylonese middle class, both Sinhalese and Other, as a means of boosting their self-esteem amidst the manifest racial and other subordinations they encountered during the colonial era.

In broad terms the ruins also seemed to substantiate the veracity of the Mahāvamsa stories. Indeed, the Mahāvamsa ideology was sharpened by the introduction of empiricist history writing in its British form. This empiricist view of the past had been implanted among the educated Sri Lankan population from the nineteenth century onwards through the growing English-medium school system. In the twentieth century these seeds were consolidated as the disciplines of History and Archaeology, as well as the study of Oriental languages, were established at University College (1921) and thereafter at the new University of Ceylon (1930).

These developments consolidated the historical consciousness that had been nourished among the Sinhalese by the monks, literati and the oral storytellers of yesteryear. They also injected a hard-nosed certainty about the “facts” of the past in the thinking of those who went through these new educational institutions. The historicity of the Vijaya legend, for instance, was accepted as an established fact. This sort of belief became part of the taken-for-granted understanding that Sri Lanka had always been a land of the Sinhalese.

One of the striking features of the various currents of hardline Sinhala thinking presented in the English-language during the last twenty years has been the role of individuals from the professional occupations, among them several with postgraduate qualifications. Though there are, now in 2003, several Sinhala extremists in the age-bracket 20-to-45, a significant proportion within the strident opposition to the “division of the country” is from generational cohorts who reached adulthood in the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s. In short, what we may loosely call the “1956 generations” have provided some of the most obdurate voices of Sinhala chauvinism during the last decade.[lxxxix] This is a pointer to the significance of the British transformation and the new epistemologies that came with it.

That said, we must not overestimate the force of print capitalism and the new educational institutions introduced in British times. The pirivenas (temple schools) continued to function, perhaps in atrophied form, throughout. More vitally, the lively oral traditions and the poetic practices were sustained till at least the third quarter of the twentieth century. The considerable influence of kavi kola and kälä patra (verses on leaflets and slanderous broadsides) during the general election of 1956 was built on this foundation. True, these were printed pamphlets. But I conjecture that for every printed leaflet there were countless oral ditties and slogans coined and repeated by virtuosi at bus stands, polas (markets) and other sites where bodies of people assembled.

One did not have to be literate to compose poetry. Ananda Wakkumbura recalls (personal communication) that in his village of Demalaporuva in Sabaragamuva in the mid-twentieth century there were three “plebian” kavikārayas (bards) who used to go about the locality and entertain people in the course of their journeys. They were all illiterate. I do not think this is an idiosyncratic instance. These men were one sliver within the vibrant oral, visual and dramatic modes of cultural transmission that pre-dated the British occupation and continued to function during the technological and educational “revolution” implemented in modern times. These media were available to literate and illiterate alike.

The analytical question, therefore, is whether the transformations initiated from the early nineteenth century onwards were of a character that not only accentuated pre-British conceptions of collective identity, but also transformed them into a phenomenon that we can consider totally different. Difference there certainly was. The bearers of Sinhalaness from the late nineteenth century, after all, were from a class order that was different to that of the Kandyan dispensation. They also had available the concept of a “nation” honed in Europe as a legitimate foundation for the “self-determination” of a people and becoming a widespread phenomenon in an international order of nation states. This input gave new inflections to the word “jātiya” (see above). The term now had to stand for “nation” in its modern sense as well as “race” in the sense of “kind” or ancestral blood group. It also had to compete with another use of jātiya: when it was associated with the new word lānkika as lānkika jātiya in the sense of “Ceylonese nation” in its multi-ethnic sense. The new multi-ethnic attributions to “Ceylonese,” and thus potentially to “lānkika,” had (has) the capacity to subvert the older meaning attached to the term lakväsiyo (technically residents of Sri Lanka), namely, a synonym for Sinhala (Sinhalese).[xc] But we cannot be sure that the older meaning and/or ambiguities do not prevail in everyday usage in modern times. Thus, one cannot be certain that the meaning “Sinhala” does not invidiously subsume “Sri Lankan” (or “Ceylonese”) in its embrace when individual Sinhala-speakers use (used) the words either in English or Sinhala.

 To speak of the “Sinhala jātiya” or “Sinhala aya” or some such collective label today, that is, to place the Sinhala people within a collectivising category in differentiation from a like category, is certainly not the same usage as that of “Sīhala dana”[xci] or “Sīhala senaga”[xcii] or “Sinhala ratun”[xciii] or “Sinhala ayaval”[xciv] in the Kandyan era. But neither does it seem entirely different. Our problem is to develop a theory that can ‘measure’ the difference, the form of measurement being, of course, within the limitation of the evaluations available to the social sciences. But, prior to that, one requires an in-depth case study of contemporary references to these terms in Sinhala-speak, both verbal everyday discourse and interventions in print, by a scholar with a thorough competence in both the language and one of the social science disciplines. This has not been done as yet.

** This article was written while I was finalizing my study of Sinhala Consciousness in the Kandyan Period, 1590s-1818 (Colombo: Vijitha Yapa Associates, 2004). Clearly it should be comprehended as a product set in that moment in 2002/03. Since then some new material from the work of Anoma Pieris and Alan Strathern has been used in the re-working of the motifs found in this essay in “Sinhalaness and its Reproduction, 1232-1818” which was written in response to an invitation and has appeared in print in The Republic at 40 (Colombo, CPA, 2013). This article has also been reproduced in http://thuppahi.wordpress.com/2013/03/14/sinhalaness-and-its-reproduction-1232-1818-2/. Other writings on my part which pertain to the domain of this article are listed in an Addendum. But if I may say so I see the concise contentions on ethnicity and its reproduction at the outset of this essay as perhaps the most cogent argument for the inclusion of this item in a digital circuit.

NAMES OF THE ISLAND within the Sinhala world during the middle period

Trisimhala                                                            Trisinhalē

Tisīhala                                                                Tunrajaya

Tun Rata                                                              Tun Laka

Tun Lankā                                                         Tun Sinhalaya

Sinhalaya (Simhalaya)                               Sinhalē

Sīhalē                                                                   Sīhalarata

Sīhalaya                                                            Sīhaladīpa

Sīhaladvīpa                                                    Srīlankādvīpa

Lankādvīpa                                                   Lankā

Lankāva                                                       Lakdiva

Laka (Lak)                                                    Lak Tun Rata

Siri Laka

ADDENDUM: Recent articles by Michael Roberts relevant to this domain

2001 “Sinhala-ness and Sinhala Nationalism,” in G. Gunatilleke et al (eds.): A History of Ethnic Conflict in Sri Lanka: Recollection, Reinterpretation and Reconciliation, Colombo: Marga Monograph Series, No 4.

2001 “The burden of history: obstacles to power sharing in Sri Lanka”, Contributions to Indian Sociology, n. s., May 2001, 35: 65-96.

2001 “Dakunen sädi kotiyo, uturen golu muhudai,” [The fierce/vile Tamils to the south, the turbulent/ unfathomable sea to the north] Pravāda 6: 17-18.

2002  “The collective consciousness of the Sinhalese during the Kandyan era: Manichean demonisation, associational logic,” Asian Ethnicity, vol. III: 1, March 2002, pp. 29-46.

2002 “Primordialist strands in contemporary Sinhala nationalism in Sri Lanka: urumaya as Ur,” Colombo: Marga Monograph Series on A History of Ethnic Conflict in Sri Lanka: Recollection, Reinterpretation and Reconciliation, Colombo: Marga Monograph Series, No 20.

2004 “Narrating Tamil Nationalism: subjectivities & issues,” http://books.google.com.au/books/about/Sri_Lankan_Tamil_Nationalism.html?id=W3aAB9IFVdkC&redir_esc=y, and South Asia, April 2004, 27: 87-108.

2004 “Prejudice and Hate in Plural Settings: The Kingdom of Kandy,” in AJ Canagaratne (ed.) Neelan Tiruchelvam Commemoration Conference Papers, Colombo: International Centre for Ethnic Studies, pp.  142-59.

2005 “Tamil Tiger ‘Martyrs’: Regenerating Divine Potency?” Studies in Conflict  & Terrorism 28: 493-514.

 2005 “Saivite Symbolism, Sacrifice and Tamil Tiger Rites”, Social Analysis 49: 67-93.

2006 “Pragmatic Action & Enchanted Worlds: A Black Tiger Rite Of Commemoration,”    Social Analysis  50: 73-102.

2006 “The Tamil Movement for Eelam,” E-Bulletin of the International Sociological Association No. 4, July 2006, pp. 12-24.

2006 “Understanding Zealotry and Questions for Post-Orientalism, I” Lines May-August 2006,  vol.5, 1 & 2, in http://www.lines-magazine.org.

2007 “Suicide Missions as Witnessing: Expansions, Contrasts,” Studies in Conflict and Terrorism, 30:  857-88.

2007 “Blunders in Tigerland: Pape’s Muddles on ‘Suicide Bombers’ in Sri Lanka,” Online publication within series known as Heidelberg Papers in South Asian and Comparative Politics (HPSACP), ISSN: 1617-5069.

2008 “Tamil Tigers: Sacrificial Symbolism and ‘Dead Body Politics’,” Anthropology Today, June 2008, 24/3: 22-23.

2010 “Killing Rajiv Gandhi: Dhanu’s Metamorphosis in Death?” South Asian History and Culture, Vol 1, No. 1, pp.25-41.

2010 “Hitler, Nationalism, Sacrifice: Koenigsberg and Beyond … Towards the Tamil Tigers,” 19 May 2010, http://thuppahi.wordpress.com/2010/03/19/hitler-nationalism-sacrifice-koenigsberg-and-beyond-%E2%80%A6-towards-the-tamil-tigers/http://

2012 “Velupillai Pirapāharan: Veera Maranam,” 26 August 2012, http://thuppahi.wordpress.com/2012/11/26/velupillai-pirapaharan-veera-maranam/

NOTES

When the Jaffna Development Council started functioning a Minister who made frequent official visits to Jaffna was Hon. Gamini Dissanayake. His known closeness to the President lent some significance to the discussions he had with Mr. Nadarajah the Chairman of the Council. A warm rapport developed between the two. To the Chairman it opened a two-way communication connecting the District with the Centre. The Minister perhaps was not unaware of the political fall-out for the government, if things turned out well.

Quite a few meetings with the Minister were held in Colombo. The Chairman, the Government Agent Dr. Nesiah and the writer participated in these meetings. What were emphasized from the Council’s side were substantially larger funding and more devolved powers to utilize the finances effectively. The proposition struck a sensitive chord with the Minister and he took the initiative in arranging for a meeting with President J.R. Jayawardene one evening at his residence. It was in the latter part of 1982. The five of us took part in the discussions for over an hour. Development priorities with central funding were outlined by us. The Jaffna Lagoon Scheme and bridging the Mahadeva Causeway were among them. There was responsive interaction.

In mid-1982, to mark the first anniversary of the Development Council a special sitting was organized. Policy and programme set out in a document of fifty pages was read out by the Chairman at this ceremonial sitting. It became the base for discussions in Colombo. In a subsequent document, another exercise was undertaken to define objective principles for block grants to Development Councils. The capital votes were taken together and after setting apart a certain percentage for central government works, the balance was to be given to the districts. Distribution based on the criteria of population and area of each district will compose a share and the remaining amount will be apportioned according to a district’s state of growth, development needs and other relevant criteria.

This proposition with figures extracted from the Printed Estimates and worked out with a district perspective was sent to the powers that be in Colombo. To continuous correspondence and personal contact, there was a response from the President. Three from the Development Council, Chairman, GA and the writer were invited for a discussion on a day of a Cabinet meeting. After the conclusion of the meeting, President retained a handful of Ministers including Lalith Athulathmudali and Cyril Mathew and called on the Chairman to address them. The strategy appeared to be to expose them to the suffocation suffered by a Development Council for want of finances and of authority. The Chairman a former Senator had the respect of the President for his outspokenness. He explained the proposition urging the need for meaningful financial devolution and for increased funding. Lalith showed interest and even appeared impressed with the proposition.

The above meeting was about January 1983, after the conclusion of the referendum and the general election in 1982. About two weeks subsequently, I was summoned by the President for a discussion on budgetary support. Those present included Lalith, Dr. Ranjit Attapattu from the deep South and the DST. Issues related to making the Councils effective were discussed. In passing even the creation of a District based Public Service from among serving officers was touched on. An important decision taken was to appoint a Committee of Secretaries – about six – to suggest ways for greater financial support.

Lalith was to be Chairman and Mr. Bradman Weerakoon Secretary. Mr. Felix Dias Abeysinghe though retired was in the committee for his Local Government background. I was appointed Assistant Secretary, so that as a wearer of the shoe in the Jaffna District, I could explain where it pinched and how hard. After deliberations spread over a few weeks, an Interim Report was submitted in May 1983. The highlight of it was a recommendation for an allocation to all Development Councils of a sum equivalent to the allocation for the Decentralized Budget (DCB). It meant a doubling of Rs. 420 million to 840 million for direct spending by the districts.

This was far from satisfying. The North South dialogue with the President from October 1982 to September 1983 achieved precious little. No meeting ground came about. Each side was reinforced in its own position and policy stance on the scope of devolution. Political power residing in the South prevailed over the North. There was not even a thought of sharing. The failed attempt at building bridges alienated the Tamils still further. They saw the effort and the minimal financial support through the prism of a Tamil saying – show the moon to distract the child that pesters. The simmering Tamil problem only festered. The Tamil side was neither distracted nor convinced nor satisfied. To those who pegged their vision on a federal arrangement, the Development Council with proven impotence was a far cry.

The Chairman did not wish to continue with a position that offered little prospects for meaningful engagement. He relinquished his post and informed the President accordingly, about the 12th July 1983. The next week the Ex-Chairman and I were invited for a discussion on devolution at the President’s residence. At this point of time we had come to the position that a Province and not a District should be the unit of devolution. We wanted to put forward this point of view. At the conference seated on one side were about five others including Lalith and facing them were both of us. President’s opening sentence was “Chairman, if you are thinking of any scheme outside the Development Council set up, WE PART”. So the discussion was limited to refining the existing scheme.

The next day July 22nd, we travelled back to Jaffna by car with the GA. Explosions that midnight changed the political scene. In late September I was called for a one to one discussion on the Development Council and Devolution. In a fortnight I was summoned again. At this discussion senior officials too participated. I said “Sir, if we can take up the most sensitive issue of land and make some progress, it will clear the way to success in other subjects”. Devolution of all powers relating to land was put across. After some deliberations on land Mr. G. V. P. Samarasinghe said, “You can’t override the Minister”. After some more discussions the meeting ended. It marked the end of a year’s effort. India’s involvement grew thereafter eclipsing any local initiative.

After the riots many of the MPs were in self-exile. The Development Council lingered on for a few more months making little impact on economic life. When it was born, there were no comets seen. At its demise there was not a whimper. Having lived up to the objective of the President it derived neither power nor finances. It just withered away. There was no devolution and little development. Even the meager expectations of some Tamils were completely belied. In the words of a Tamil recluse, uttered 1,000 years ago, “everything receded as a phantasm, an old tale and a dream”. The Council merged in the Kachcheri, losing its brief authority and identity. The district had to wait for the next five years for the North-East Provincial Council.

 Sri Lanka can be coverted into a regional maritime hub as an alternative to Singapore, said Rob Grool, President, Fleet Seaspan Ship Management Ltd, Canada, which owns over 60 large container ships.  In an exclusive interview with Daily News Business at the Seaspan Ship Management (Vancouver) Offers Forum concluded in Colombo last Saturday held in collaboration with their manning agents in Sri Lanka, Ceyline Shipping Ltd, Grool said that Colombo, Hambantota and Galle could play a major role towards achieving this target.
“Both these harbours lie on a global maritime route and should be promoted towards reaching this target,” he added. He said that bunkering, crew exchange, supplying of commodities, repairs and spares are the key areas that these three harbours should pay attention to,” he said.
He said that Sri Lanka which is enjoying a ‘fanatic economy,’ has rightly identified the maritime sector as a area to be nursed and investments made towards this would be very productive in the future.  He also said that the Sri Lankan seafarers were highly respected for their skills and that’s why they too employ many Sri Lankans. “We have over a 550 Sri Lanka workforce and this was also a reason for us to host this event in Colombo,” he added.  “Our company too is actively involved in training and we have five training ships in our fleet of 67.”Commenting on the global shipping industry, he said that Somalia pirates and global recession still remains an issue. “2013 looks a tough year for the industry as vessels are usually half loaded. However, Asia seems to be out of this situation. ”
“As for the Somalia pirates issue, today vessels have taken extra security precautions and though this is an additional investment, it’s proving to be productive.”
Commenting on the industry trends he said that the demand for cruise liners are picking up as more and more leisure travelers are seen taking cruises. Asked if they were planning to diversify to cater to this segment he answered in the negative.
The official theme of the forum was ‘Changing Environment: Leading through Times of Change,” and Ceyline Shipping Group Director/ Managing Director Capt. Nalin Peiris said that the event was a success. Delegates from Sri Lanka, India and Canada participated.

Source: Daily News

RSS: Bunker Ports News Worldwide

 the inland hole that is now part of the inlet that constitutes Hambantota harbour — Pic courtesy of Susiri Weerasekera

 same spot a year or so down the track

While I was reading the new publication from the International Diaspora Group on counting the dead in Sri Lanka,[i] I cast my mind back to what Gordon Weiss had to say on the subject in his book, The Cage.

  Bad Writing: Jason Burke[ii], writing in the Literary Review, describes this book as a : “comprehensive, fair and well-written work”. I beg to differ about the well-written bit. It is a good read, but not a good write. As seems to be the custom with contemporary authors in any genre[iii], Weiss provides a lengthy list of acknowledgements to those without whom etc…. Weiss is readable enough but it is a pity that some of those who “helped” did not draw his attention to several examples of inelegant English or lack of clarity.

I am not sure if it is helpful  or logically sound to describe Sri Lanka as “this endemically violent country”.[iv] I will leave it to those with more expertise than I possess in linguistic analysis and Sri Lankan history to argue that one. “Most ominously of all, there is good evidence that at least on some occasions the Tigers fired artillery into their own people”.[v] Notice the jarring disjunction between the firm “good evidence” and the slippery and logically meaningless “on at least some occasions”. The way that he expresses it make it seem like a minor peccadillo on the part of the Tigers, perhaps no more than clumsiness.

“Yet, contrary to the ICRC, the very breadth of this mandate makes for inherent contradictions, so that  the UN often finds itself   at loggerheads with itself”.[vi] It is that “contrary to” that buggers up the sentence. I think he means that the UN has a broader mandate than the ICRC.

“Hunger, however, is a great leveller, and erodes at notions of freedom, turning a resistant mood”. [vii] What?!

Navi Pillay, UN Commissioner for Human Rights,  is described as “an ethnic Indian Tamil of South African origin”. [viii]Would it not be better to say “A South African of Indian Tamil origin”?

Factual Errors: In his review on Groundviews, Sanjana Hattotuwa, pointed out some errors and even sternly scolded about “irresponsibly written and edited content”.[ix]  Sanjana points out that it was an armour-plated BMW 7 Series that saved Gotabaya’s life, not a Mercedes. When the war ended, there was a “big, riotous party” in Colombo (and indeed in Badulla) rather than ”little of the air of celebration” that Weiss claims. Sanjana points out that Weiss gets his Peirises mixed up – Prof. GL was never Attorney General.

Some of Weiss’s statements raised an eyebrow with me. “In what they called Eelam (a Tamil word implying separation) a small portion of the Tamil inhabitants of Sri Lanka began to enjoy the fruits of an independence long denied by the Sri Lankan state, including the right to use their own language”.[x] Did Tamils living under Prabakharan in Killinochchi really have a better life than those living in Wellawatte?

Am I alone in finding Weiss’s use of his Jewish forebears’ victimhood vicarious and somewhat distasteful? Weiss claims that during the Second World War his own grandfather “and dozens of other relatives were killed because of their ethnicity”. He is blasé about the LTTE’s racism. Would Weiss be in the appeasement camp had he lived in Europe in the 1930s?

On page 203 he says the Chinese built a port in Laem Chabang in Myanmar. Laem Chabang is in Thailand not far from Pattaya Beach, where I once went on holiday.

“In relative terms, and in the course of a long and bloody civil war, the number of civilians killed by terrorist acts attributed to the Tigers was somewhat modest compared with estimates on the overall death toll inflicted on the Tamils”.[xi] Discuss. What does “in relative terms” mean? The “overall death toll inflicted on the Tamils” includes, of course, Tamils killed by the tigers. Perhaps he should have clarified that.

Weiss says on page 65 that Alfred Durayappah, Prabakharan’s first victim, was appointed mayor of Jaffna by the prime minister. He was elected not appointed.

On page 237, Mano Ganesan, is described as “the TNA party leader”. I asked Mano about this. “What to say? Gordon is a known friend. It is an oversight. No issue. haha. I am comfortably the leader of Democratic People’s Front, the party of the Voiceless, the party which conducts democratic struggles for all the people of all the regions.” [xii]

In his survey of Sri Lankan history, Weiss criticises D S Senanayake for settling Sinhalese in Anuradhapura and Polonnaruwa,  “part of Tamil majority ‘dry zone’ as opposed to the Sinhalese majority ‘wet zone’”.  Sinhalese view those areas as the cradle of their  ancient civilization rather than part of a Tamil homeland.

Lack of Expertise: “In Sri Lanka, even though I could not bear witness, I was close enough to the levers of action to believe that they [children] were being wounded and killed in large numbers each day”. My emphasis.

That’s not what it says on the tin. The cover blurb says: “Gordon Weiss witnessed the conflict at first hand as a UN spokesman in Colombo”.

The bibliography is both long and deep. If he has actually read all those publications he is a better man than I am. I wonder how he found the time. The notes are also extensive and informative although open to debate in some instances.

Weiss was not a witness. Like an urban myth or an internet hoax, a story gets passed around and is treated as legal currency. The neologism “churnalism” has been credited to BBC journalist Waseem Zakir who coined the term in 2008. “You get copy coming in on the wires and reporters churn it out, processing stuff and maybe adding the odd local quote.” Stephen Colbert coined the term “truthiness” – “We’re not talking about truth, we’re talking about something that seems like truth – the truth we want to exist”.

Praise for Sri Lankan Army: Weiss has good things to say about the Sri Lankan Army. “On the whole, however, the vast majority of people who escaped seem to have been received with relative  restraint and care by the front-line SLA troops who quickly passed them up the line  for tea, rice and first aid. The faceless enemy, such a source of terror for the young peasant men and women of  southern Sri Lanka who made up  the majority of the troops, were suddenly given a human aspect, as thin, bedraggled and women clutching children to their breasts and pleading in a foreign tongue fell at their feet”.[xiii]

Note that Weiss cannot say that those who “escaped” were treated with care. It has to have the begrudging modifier “relative”. Relative to what? Relative to the care given by the  LTTE from whom they had escaped?

He repeats similar sentiments later but drops the begrudgery. “During the course of research for this book, dozens of Tamils described the Sinhalese as inherently kind and gentle people. The front-line soldiers who received the first civilians as they escaped to government lines, those who guarded them in the camps and the civilian and military doctors who provided vital treatment distinguished themselves most commonly through their mercy and care.”[xiv] We will forgive the dangling participle. Only a pedant would point out that Tamils were not doing the research.

Hang on – weren’t these internment camps? “If a civilian survived the crossing , they faced an uncertain future in government internment camps (of the existence of which they were well aware)”.[xv] I was tempted to file that under Bad Writing.

“It remains a credit to many of the front-line SLA soldiers that, despite odd cruel exceptions, they so often seem to have made the effort to draw civilians out from the morass of fighting ahead of them in an attempt to save lives. Soldiers yelled out to civilians, left gaps in their lines while they waved white flags to attract people forward and bodily plucked the wounded from foxholes and bunkers. Troops bravely waded into the lagoon under fire to rescue wounded people threading their way out of the battlefield or to help parents with their children, and gave their rations to civilians as they lay in fields, exhausted in their first moments of safety after years of living under the roar and threat of gunfire”.[xvi]

Numbers Game:  Weiss introduces a caveat. “I have not dealt in close detail  with the matter of figures of dead and wounded, how they are calculated and how reliable those sources  might be. I make the point in the text that it is for others to get closer to that particular particle of truth”. [xvii]  A strange way of putting it. Despite this disclaimer, throughout  the book , Weiss  repeats the mantra that 10,000 to 40,000 civilians were killed.

Weiss was and is a major player in the numbers game. When he was  working  for the UN in Colombo,  he went on record as saying the number of civilian casualties was 7,000. This became the official figure quoted by The UN General Secretary’s New York spokesperson,  Michelle Monas, who told Inner City Press reporter Matthew Lee, “We have no way of knowing the exact count”. When Weiss left the UN and returned to Australia and began writing this book he increased the figure to 15,000,  which he then upped to  40,000, a figure that a whole range of media outlets, including BBC and NDTV, ran with. Journalists confused the issue by failing to make clear whether information came from “an employee of the UN”  or  “a former employee of the UN”, rather than “the UN”.

“From this confusion of information, and despite the prospect that the Tamil Tigers might be forcing the Tamil doctors or the UN staff, to give inflated figures of the dead and wounded, the accumulation of events and casualties seemed consistent”.[xviii] Having raised the possibility that figures were inflated, he gives himself licence to inflate further.

“From this point on, the death toll could only grow”.[xix] Does this mean that more people would be killed or that estimates of the dead would become more inflated? Earlier on the same page, a press release by Navi Pillay is quoted saying that as many as 2,800 civilians “may have been killed”. Weiss gives this spin: “Critically, the civilian death toll Pillay quoted finally established a baseline that had some kind of official imprimatur and weakened government efforts to confine solid numbers to the realm of speculation and confusion”. Pillay’s statement did not take us out of the realms of speculation because she said “as many as 2,800 may have been killed”. That is speculation. What does establishing a “baseline” mean? Does it mean that because Pillay says “as many as 2,800 may have been killed” that gives Weiss licence to say 10,000 to 4,000 and Frances Harrison and Alan Keenan to say 147,000?

Gordon Weiss’s lower  estimate of 7,000 civilian deaths, made in 2009, was challenged by Sir John Holmes, the UN Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and UN Emergency Relief Coordinator, who stated in New York on 24 March 2009 that this figure could not be verified. In spite of this, Weiss throughout The Cage routinely talks of “between 10,000 and 40,000”,  which is meaningless.

Convoy 11: In his Groundviews review, Sanjana Hattotuwa writes that The Cage is: “A mind-numbingly harrowing account of violence that supports what the UN Panel of Experts says are credible allegations of war crimes and crimes against humanity. Weiss takes pains to emphasise that the appalling details are based on reports by two men who each had significant experience in active combat.”

Sanjana  chastises Weiss for naming names which the Darusman Report withheld: “Justifiable caution over and confidentiality of sources in the UN Panel’s report is ruined by the revelations in The Cage, attributed by Weiss to specific individuals. ..After reading The Cage, it is a matter of simple extrapolation that the sources were in fact Col. Khan and Col. Du Toit.”

Rajiva Wijesinha recalls meeting ”the shady South African Chris du Toit”[xx], whom he says was an intelligence officer for the apartheid regime. Weiss also claims that Du Toit had trained and commanded proxy guerrilla forces in the illicit wars fought by South Africa in Angola. Du Toit was most probably involved in the training of Jonas Savimbi’s UNITA guerrilla group who committed horrendous crimes against humanity in Angola.

Wijesinha questions Du Toit’s method of calculating civilian casualties. “He said that there were three elements taken into consideration, first the dead bodies … seen by UN staff, secondly reports they received, and thirdly extrapolation. Pressed on the number of those seen by the UN, he said it was something like 39, over the previous month. Given what he then said about the numbers calculated on the other methods, I believe the figure that was being floated around was excessive. The implications of the methods he employed, for speculation that is now treated as gospel by the panel, need to be reviewed in greater detail”.[xxi]

Wijesinha continues: “Under close questioning, he had to admit that, while there had been firing on areas near where he had been sleeping, he could not say with any certainty from which direction the firing had come. He had brought with him large pictures of craters caused by shells, and he took out one and said that was the only shot the direction of which they could be certain of, and that had come from the direction of the LTTE forces.”

The UN officer who was actually with the convoy was Retired Colonel Harun Khan. He is said to have managed counter-insurgency operations in Bangladesh,[xxii] most probably against the Buddhist Chakma hill tribes in the Chittagong Hill Tracts where horrific crimes against humanity were committed.[xxiii]

Weiss says Harun Khan took photographs of the carnage, but the only example he provided seems to be questionable. This is what Groundviews said: “The problem is that this photo, part of what Weiss claims is ‘many other images of the wounded and dead from these days in late January 2009’ taken by Col. Harun was actually taken 22nd August 2008 at 5.08pm, and not in late January 2009. This emphatically does not help any advocacy, domestic and international, to hold those responsible for alleged war crimes accountable for their actions and calls for independent investigations to determine the veracity of these very serious allegations. It is possible that Weiss was careless, and posted the wrong photograph. It is possible he and the UN, as we noted in our review of his tome, have the originals of these images, where similar scrutiny under any photo editing programme can very easily determine whether they are in fact from late January or earlier.”[xxiv]

I do not know the truth of what happened but there is a lot of churnalism here. Weiss’s account cannot “support” the Panel’s view because he was not there and they were not there. I gather from Weiss’s account that Du Toit was not with the convoy either but was back in Colombo.

Conclusion: Weiss quotes Timothy Garton Ash: “Liberal internationalism… means developing norms and rules by which most states will abide, preferably made explicit in international law and sustained by international organisations. It posits some basic rights that belong to every human being on this planet…It seeks to  build peace between nations on these foundations”.

I am a great admirer of Timothy Garton Ash. I have even set up a Google alert so that I can read all of his articles. Let us not forget, however, that he supported the 2003 invasion of Iraq by the “Coalition of the Willing”. Remind me what the reason for that invasion was. First of all, Iraq was somehow behind 9/11; then Saddam had WMD; when those excuses proved spurious the invasion was retrospectively justified as being about  “basic rights that belong to every human being on this planet”.

Weiss puts his own spin on this: “The choice between strategies when fighting  an insurgency is relatively straightforward”. There’s that word again; relative to what? Weiss believes that liberal democracies choose the “hearts and minds” strategy. I am reminded of General Westmoreland’s maxim: “Grab ’em by the balls and their hearts and minds will follow”. See how the liberal democracy that is the United States conducted “counterinsurgency” in Vietnam[xxv]. Weiss sermonises: “Counterinsurgencies are fought by liberal democracies in places like Afghanistan. Their leaders and decision makers understand that they are ultimately answerable to constituencies that might, like the French in the Algerian war of independence, withdraw support if they become too murderous”.

Despite praising the conduct of most SLA soldiers, Weiss in the end accuses the winning side of exceptional brutality, not fitting in with his sense of how liberal democracies would fight insurgency.  As Sanjana Hattotuwa said in his review: “Weiss offers no larger analysis of this tragic fragmentation between spontaneous compassion and calculated mass scale atrocity, and its effects on the civilians caught in direct or cross-fire. “

Has the book had an influence? It generated great interest in foreign embassies in Colombo. As Sanjana told me: “Several embassies had block booked 20 – 30 copies of the book, which resulted in higher than planned demand. This may have given rise to the perception at the time the book was hard to get, which it was, but not because of heavy handed Govt censorship.”[xxvi]

 celebrations in the south–May 2009

FOUR years ago this week, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam announced that their struggle for an independent homeland in northern Sri Lanka had “reached its bitter end.” The group had been fighting on behalf of the Tamil people for more than a quarter-century, and its defeat was absolute.  Today, great sections of Tamil country are still a scene of devastation. The houses are either destroyed or brand-new; the land is uncultivated and overgrown; there are forests of decapitated Palmyra palms, damaged by heavy shelling. And then there are the relics of war — graveyards of L.T.T.E. vehicles rotting in the open air; the remains of a ship, its superstructure blown to pieces and in whose rusting starboard a gaping hole gives on to blue sea.

When I first arrived there last March, I saw the loss in primarily military terms. But the feeling of defeat among the Tamils of Sri Lanka goes far deeper than the material defeat of the rebels. It is a moral and psychological defeat. In that forested country of red earth and lagoons, it is possible to visit the bunker of the leader of the Tigers, a torture chamber of a place that sinks three levels into the ground. There, in the fetid air, infused with the smell of urine and bat excrement, one senses the full futility and wretchedness of what the rebel movement became in the end.

 A tuyilam illam being swept clean in LTTE land–Pic by Reuters

 Kopay tuyilam illam [resting place for maaveerar] in November 2004 –Pic by Roberts

For the truth is that the Tamil defeat has less to do with the vanquishing of the L.T.T.E. by the Sri Lankan Army and much more to do with the self-wounding (“suicidal” would not be too strong a word) character of the movement itself. The Tigers were for so long the custodians of the Tamil people’s hope of self-realization. But theirs was a deeply flawed organization. Under the leadership of Velupillai Prabhakaran, the Tigers pioneered and perfected the use of the suicide bomber. This was not simply a mode of warfare, but almost a symbol, an expression of a self-annihilating spirit. And it was to self-annihilation that Mr. Prabhakaran committed the Tamils. He was a man who, like a modern-day Coriolanus, seemed to lack the imagination for peace. He took the Tamils on a journey of war without end, where no offer of compromise was ever enough, and where all forms of moderation were seen as betrayal.  A female tiger fighter being inducted at passing out ceremony with a kuppi– BBC, 1991

 Black Tigers marching at Kilinochchi — Puthinam

One evening, soon after I arrived in Jaffna, the capital of the northern province, I had dinner at the house of a woman whose sister had been part of a circle of academics who had published a book in 1990 called “The Broken Palmyra.” The book was, by no means, a simple polemic against the Tigers; it was an academic work that, in trying to be evenhanded, had taken account of both government and L.T.T.E. atrocities. But this was too treasonous for Mr. Prabhakaran, and my host’s sister was killed even before the book went to print.  Rajani Thiranagama

The room that night was filled with people whose lives the tyranny of the L.T.T.E. had left forever scarred. There was the Muslim woman who, along with all the other Muslim families of Jaffna, had, one morning in 1990, been summoned to a school compound and given two hours to leave the city of her birth. They were told to leave behind their valuables and the deeds to their houses. When they asked why they were being expelled, they were told that they were lucky not to be killed. Then they were loaded into lorries and escorted to the border of the district. (Like most, this woman returned only after the end of the war in 2009.)

A middle-aged woman, working as a maid in the house, had more recent traumas. Her son had gone to work with his uncle, a carpenter, in the northern district of Kilinochchi, which would become the scene of an infamous battle. When war came, it was Mr. Prabhakaran’s express strategy to retreat with an enormous civilian population — 300,000 people, some say — and to use them as a human shield against the advancing army. It was his intention to let so many Tamils die that the international community (read, the West) would be forced to intervene, and the Tamils would be granted their homeland.

But here he made a grave mistake: he either overestimated his own importance; or else, the West’s sense of decency. For the West, occupied with problems more pressing, let as many Tamils die as had to die for the war to be won.

This was an added layer of shame in the Tamil defeat. It was not just that they had lost the war. It was also that the grass-roots movement they originated, and for which they had paid taxes and sacrificed able-bodied men and women, had, in the end, been more vicious to them than to anyone else.

When I asked what became of the woman’s son, she replied that he had not come home. “He’s dead,” my hostess clarified, “but she doesn’t like to hear that.”

THE north of Sri Lanka today is a spectacle of Sinhalese triumphalism. A victorious army is rebuilding new roads, grabbing land for itself (6,000 acres, rumor has it), and displaying the spoils of war before tourists from the south.

Even when the government of President Mahinda Rajapaksa acts magnanimously toward the Tamil people, by building new infrastructure projects, for instance, the Tamils seem to feel that their defeat is being rubbed in their faces. And they are not wrong. It is simply one of those intractable situations where nothing will feel right. For the loss the Tamils feel is really the loss of a story. They are now a people without a story, a traumatized people, devastated by decades of war and migration, whose dream of self-determination was hijacked by the nihilistic vision of their leader and turned to nightmare.

“We lost something,” a Tamil artist in Jaffna, T. Shanaathanan, told me, “but we do not know what. The war is over, but there is a kind of psychological warfare now. Before, people looked at us with suspicion, with the feeling that you’re Tamil, you might be a terrorist. But now they look at us as if we’re nothing.”

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JANE HUTCHEON    To discuss Syria and the state of the world the Deputy Opposition Leader and Shadow Minister for Foreign Affairs Julie Bishop joins us in the studio. Julie Bishop welcome to ‘The World’, many thanks for coming in.
 JULIE BISHOP    Good evening.

          SEGMENT TWO : ……….. 
 JANE HUTCHEON    Let’s go to Sri Lanka now , and I wonder, do you support the return of Sri Lankan asylum seekers to their country of origin? 
 JULIE BISHOP    Yes, I do. Based on what I saw and have learned from a visit to Sri Lanka in January of this year, I’m convinced that the Sinhalese in particular have no reason to fear persecution in Sri Lanka. 
 JANE HUTCHEON    What about the Tamils? 
 JULIE BISHOP    Indeed the Tamils likewise are receiving much better treatment under the Sri Lankan government and if they were to fear persecution in any form, then paying a people smuggler and getting on a rickety boat and travelling thousands of kilometres across the sea is not the right thing to do. 
 If they do want to claim asylum, if they do claim a fear of persecution, which I would dispute, then they can go 30km into India, where they would be welcome and provided with health and medical support. 

JANE HUTCHEON    You dispute the many reports by human rights organisations that say people who go back, Tamils, are tortured by security agents? 
 JULIE BISHOP    There’s absolutely no evidence to support those claims. Even the Human Rights Watch report claims that they have evidence but when they’re called upon to produce it, they can’t. And indeed, I was in Sri Lanka with the Tamils, not with the government, I spent three days with Scott Morrison and Michael Keenan in the former Tamil territory in the north around Jaffna and Kilinochchi. We went where the Tamils wanted us to go, we met with the people they wanted us to meet and when I asked specifically for evidence of torture, names, details…
 JANE HUTCHEON    It was a government sponsored trip though wasn’t it? 
 JULIE BISHOP    No, it wasn’t. We went  and we paid our own way with Australian Government funding, but the government did not take any part, that is the government of Sri Lanka took absolutely no part in the organisation of our trip to the north. That was done through the TNA, the Tamil Parliamentary Party. They organised it, we didn’t have government people with us. 
 JANE HUTCHEON    So you don’t believe torture exists for anyone?
 JULIE BISHOP    I saw no evidence of it yet I called for evidence time and time again and none was forthcoming. I asked for names, dates, instances. Now it was a very brutal civil war and it finished in 2009, a very brutal civil war…..
 JANE HUTCHEON    And the government has had no investigation?
 JULIE BISHOP    But now there has been a lot of progress in terms of reconstruction, reconciliation, resettlements. Reconciliation has a way to go but what I believe we should be doing is engaging with the Sri Lankan government and seeking to influence the Sri Lankan government and I believe that progress will be made.

                                   **** SEGMENT ONE:

JANE HUTCHEON To discuss Syria and the state of the world the Deputy Opposition Leader and Shadow Minister for Foreign Affairs Julie Bishop joins us in the studio. Julie Bishop welcome to ‘The World’, many thanks for coming in.
JULIE BISHOP Good evening.
JANE HUTCHEON What are your thoughts on bringing the warring parties in the Syrian conflict together?
JULIE BISHOP This is a welcome breakthrough. There had been a stalemate, particularly between the west and Russia and China over the best way to end the bloodshed in Syria. In fact I met with Sergei Lavrov the Russian Foreign Minister just before Anzac Day, and he was determined to ensure that there was not a repeat of what went on in Libya and Russia was going to continue to use its veto to prevent there being any military intervention.
JANE HUTCHEON So you oppose military intervention?JULIE BISHOP I welcome the fact that we are looking for a political solution and I think the meeting today between President Putin, Sergei Lavrov and Secretary of State John Kerry from the United States will find a road map based on the Geneva Communique from last year, but what it will mean is that the Assad regime and the opposition will have to come together with a view to forming a transitional government for elections next year. This is a good thing. Now there will have to be a ceasefire, there will have to be a securing of the chemical weapons that we know the regime holds. There will have to be a guarantee that this doesn’t spread beyond Syria and that it ends up as some sort of regional conflict particularly between the Sunnis and the Shias. So this is a step in the right direction. I’m not claiming that it’s going to resolve everything, but it shows that Russia and the United States can work together for a better outcome. 
     ********* SEGMENT THREE

 JANE HUTCHEON    Let’s move on to the bigger picture. If the Coalition wins government in September, what would be the centre-piece of your foreign policy?
 JULIE BISHOP    Should we be honoured to win the next election, there will be differences in our approach to foreign policy than the current government. For a start, we will adopt a level of quiet diplomacy to ensure that our relations with particularly countries in our region is based on mutual respect. None of the megaphone diplomacy, the surprise announcements, we’ll quietly work behind the scenes as opposed to through the media. 
 JANE HUTCHEON    What about China?
 JULIE BISHOP    Secondly, a focus of our foreign policy will be un unambiguously focused on the Indian Ocean Asia Pacific. All our foreign policy assets whether they be military and defence capability or economic and trade capacity, diplomacy or aid, will be focused on our region. 
   Third, we will have a focus on what I call economic diplomacy. Our trade policy will be a centre of our foreign policy so that Australia’s national interests, that is, being a prosperous, stable country, will be served through our foreign policy. 
   And finally, we will be pragmatic about our approach, not driven by ideology. 
 JANE HUTCHEON    Will you go forward, will you keep pushing this relationship that was set up by Julia Gillard in terms of China, the deeper engagement, will you take that to another level?
 JULIE BISHOP    First it wasn’t set up by Julia Gillard. 
 JANE HUTCHEON    Yes, it was. She won the deeper engage minute with China, John Howard obviously built on the previous Labor Government?
 JULIE BISHOP    No, what happened is that the Howard Government had such an informal arrangement with China whereby … 
 JANE HUTCHEON    It didn’t formalise it though.
 JULIE BISHOP    I’m coming to that point. John Howard had this arrangement with the Chinese leaders where he would visit often and did, and the Chinese would visits Australia often and they did. 
 What Julia Gillard did is formalise what was already happening under the Howard Government and the reason she had to formalise it is because she was not giving the relationship the attention that it deserved. She wasn’t visiting regularly. She sent no ministers to their important economic forum the Boao Forum in 2012. Not one Labor minister attended, I was, there were no Labor ministers there. 
 JANE HUTCHEON    What do you think made her suddenly see the light with China? 
 JULIE BISHOP    I think Bob Hawke had a lot to do with it. He was very vocal at the 2012 Boao Forum over the fact there was no-one from the Labor Government present there, and I believe he had quite some influence in ensuring that Julia Gillard paid more attention to the relationship with China because it is after all our major trading partner. 
 JANE HUTCHEON    Do you think Australia needs to choose between the US and China as our key ally? 
 JULIE BISHOP    No, I do not believe we need to choose and neither would the United States expect us to choose, nor China expect us to choose. The United States and China are working very closely together. They might have all sorts of differences but they’re working very closely together on economic issues and even strategic issues. 
 And so Australia will not be asked to choose, and nor should we debate some sort of false assumption that we’ll need to. 
 JANE HUTCHEON    But do you see the language that was in last week’s White Paper, removing the provocative, I suppose, ideas about China’s ascendancy particularly military ascendancy?
 JULIE BISHOP    Four years too late. That 2009 White Paper of the Rudd Government was disgraceful in the way that it identified China as the most likely military threat that Australia would face. We didn’t believe that, Beijing was appalled by it, and Washington didn’t believe it. So it’s taken them four years to right that wrong.
 JANE HUTCHEON    The Malaysian election took place over the weekend, we’re hoping to cross there during an opposition rally shortly. There were widespread reports of rorting. Is it Australia’s business to point out to the Malaysian government when we see quote unquote flawed democracy in progress?
 JULIE BISHOP    Australia should be very careful not to interfere in another country’s elections unless we have a factual basis for it. At this stage its claim and counter claim. The long-serving BN Party has been returned and are claiming an election mandate. The Opposition Leader Anwar Ibrahim says that there’s been widespread electoral fraud and he’s calling for peaceful protests. But until such time as the Australian Government has facts to base a complaint, we should respect the process. 
 JANE HUTCHEON    I hear that you meet regularly with ambassadors from different countries. You have them speak to senior members of the Liberal Party. Do you think your role as you are, I suppose, in the wings, is to speak openly about some of the problems that you see? Or is it to just watch and wait until if and when the Coalition takes power in September?
 JULIE BISHOP    As a senior person in the opposition and as the Deputy Leader of the Opposition, of course I speak out on a whole range of issues. I do in Foreign Affairs, I do in trade and also more generally across portfolios in my capacity as Deputy Leader. 
   In relation to the preparation for government, should we be elected, of course I have confidential briefings and discussions with ambassadors and with government officials, both here in Australia and overseas because I want to ensure that we have relationships in place so that should I become the next Foreign Minister, I will be able to commence discussions, commence negotiations immediately, having met the various players as Deputy Leader of the Opposition. 
   So a lot of what we’re doing is quiet work behind the scenes, a lot of hard work. And we hope that that will bear fruit for Australia so that there’s a seamless transition to a new Foreign Minister should the Australian people so decide.
 JANE HUTCHEON    Now, I’ve looked at the list of countries that you’ve visited since becoming the shadow Foreign Affairs spokesperson. It’s pretty – a pretty good schedule for the time that you’ve been there. Is there a particular country or interest that you feel you’d like to sort of add a special touch to?
 JULIE BISHOP    Very much to the India/Indonesia/Australia relationship. I believe that the Indian Ocean is one of our most important strategic areas, and I think with India and Indonesia, Australia can play a very strong part in improving the lives of people who live on the Indian Ocean rim. 
   And also Papua New Guinea. I have a particular and special interest in ensuring that our dear friends and closest neighbour in Papua New Guinea has a mature economic relationship with Australia, that we move away from the aid-donor, aid-recipient relationship that currently exists, and I look forward to embracing a much more mature and sophisticated relationship with PNG. 
 JANE HUTCHEON    Julie Bishop thank you so much for coming in and speaking to ‘The World’.
 JULIE BISHOP    It’s been my pleasure.