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| Sunday, 17 March 2002 |
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Two tales of a city named Jaffna by Ajith Samaranayake The Norwegians are coming, the Prime Minister goes to Jaffna and hopes rise again about the end to our communal blood-letting. The peace forces are on the march, the doves take to the skies and the hawks uncertainly scan the horizon. In the corridors of the mass media the men and women come and go not talking like T.S. Eliot's women about Michael Angelo, but about Anton Balasingham who in an earlier incarnation as A.B. Stanislaus had been such a quiet young man when he was at the 'Virakesari' and the British High Commission. Veteran observers, seasoned cynics and men about town, however, can be pardoned for feeling a sense of deja vu. Haven't we seen all this before stretching from Thimpu to Jaffna via Madras and New Delhi? What is the assurance that this time round the truce will hold and things will not come apart as it has happened so many times in the past? To understand this dilemma and predicament S. Sivanayagam's 'The Pen and the Gun' offers us an invaluable key. Sivanayagam, who edited the 'Saturday Review' in Jaffna from January 1982 to July 1983 when it was banned, has since been the editor of various publications in India and Britain and has led a nomadic life in exile in India, Singapore, Honk Kong and several African countries before obtaining political asylum in France and later Britain not to mention one and a half years he spent in a jail and under Police guard in a hospital in Madras at Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi's pleasure when the latter was desperately trying to keep the Indo-Lanka agreement in place. Sub-titled 'Selected Writings 1977-2001' this anthology offers what is surely a unique insight into the evolution of the one intractable issue which has plagued Sri Lanka from Independence but which for several decades after was swept under the carpet as a dirty little secret which nobody dared to utter in polite company. This book is more than an anthology of collected writings. Although not an autobiography it offers insights into the writer who on his own admission had led a fairly tranquil life in journalism, advertising, the Ceylon Tourist Board and finally the Colombo Plan until he was propelled by a sense of mission following the mounting attacks on the Tamil community and its sense of collective helplessness to assume an interventionist role. The Saturday Review which Sivanayagam edited from Jaffna was unusual in the sense that it was a newspaper sprung from the soil of the Tamil heartland but edited with aplomb in a language which has remained the language of the ruling class in Sri Lanka and the lingua franca of the elite irrespective of the homage which is ritually paid to the official language which appears increasingly to be only for the hoi polloi. In another sense 'The Pen and the Gun' is the biography of a whole people. There is a sense of elegy in Sivanayagam's description of the Jaffna of days gone by when in the famous words of the late Maoist leader N. Sanmugathasan the North was regulated by a 'postal order economy'. The boys were studious, the people law-abiding and their ultimate trophy was a good Government job. Sivanayagam says that the used to joke in Jaffna that even if you looked after hens it should be for a Government department for there was a respectable salary and pension attached to it! Another joke had it that if you tripped and fell in Jaffna the chances were that you would fall on a school teacher or a pundit! How then did such a tranquil people take to arms, how did the haven of peace erupt in flames. How did Jaffna spawn one of the most violent movements of terror and how was it able to bring about the near prostration of a country? It is the familiar tale but Sivanayagam tells it in a way which is all his own. He has a superb command of the English language and when necessary he can slip into the vernacular as well. In that sense he is the English parallel to B.A. Siriwardena, the unbeatable editor of the 'Aththa' whose loss is widely felt. Sivanayagam recalls S. Nadesan who appeared for the 'Saturday Review' in the Supreme Court telling him that some of the politically-appointed judges of the time were squirming when he quoted from the editorials 'Because your language can sometimes be very biting'. So much for the singer but what of the song? As we have already observed it is the familiar one but one which we will be ignoring at our peril if we are to remain as one nation and one people. The Tamils implicitly trusted the Sinhala leadership at Independence to the extent that two of them, C. Suntharalingam and G.G. Ponnambalam, became Ministers of the first Cabinet. But soon the marginalisation of the Tamil community started under all Governments, both UNP and SLFP, and when the Federal Party took to the Gandhian path they were rebuffed with violence. 1958 could have been dismissed as an aberration if it was not followed regularly until the Tamil people felt estranged to the point of demanding separation. The book consists basically of the editorials Sivanayagam had written but a solid ideological underpinning is provided by a series of articles tracing Sinhala-Tamil relations, both historically and otherwise, under the title of the 'Inevitability of Tamil Eelam'. Sivanayagam has often been demonised as the supreme Eelam propagandist but that is to make him a cheap demagogue. He is a greater man and a man of wide humanistic sympathies. Yet I have one lingering doubt. Sivanayagam comes close to idolising Velupillai Prabhakaran and after the tortures the Tamil community has been subject to who can quarrel with him? But given the fact that Prabhakaran is the supreme of the LTTE will he be amenable to a solution which while being honourable by the Tamil people can still be offered to the large Sinhala constituency as an acceptable proposition? After all it was Sivanayagam himself who has described Tamil Eelam as a 'state of mind' something like Pirandello's 'Six Characters in Search of an Author'. Whether Eelam will be transformed from a state of mind to a nation state or whether Sri Lanka as we know it will hold surely depends on the historic sense and sagacity of all our leadership transcending both communal and political boundaries. |
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