The Rajpal Abeynayake Column

The Chaura Regina and her chagrined biographer

Victor Ivan’s book ‘Chaura Regina’ sold at the rate of two per minute at its Colombo international Book Fair release.
Talk about good timing.

Ivan’s bombshells pack more plastic explosives than the ones he describes. He pinch hits, and gets into the stride of his attack frenetically and in the first fifteen overs.

Take this for instance:

The Town Hall bomb, which blinded the former President Chandrika in one eye, according to Victor’s blast-conspiracy theory, was planned and executed with electoral imperatives in mind. The weeping widow’s daughter did it!

To what end?

For eliciting sympathy before a crucial Presidential election, as her mother did, when her husband was assassinated. His logic that she spoke to Swarnavahini after the blast, and not to the state television seems to clinch the point for Ivan that the bombing was staged. It doesn’t seem to him that it could be a ghoulish suggestion given that the ex President lost an eye in the process.

A woman was probably hired to wear a suicide jacket, which was then remotely detonated, he says.

Ghoulish? Ivan later finds the space to joke about it. He quotes what he says is an apocryphal joke that did the rounds that Chandrika won the first election due to Ivan and the next due to Eye-One.

There is no doubt about it. Chandrika was in Victor’s eyes — both of them —- a female Rusputin, and given that this tale is told by none other than Ivan (....no puns on that please...) all this may have the faint flavour of Gorkian era Russian fiction.
It’s not salvaging the fact from the fiction that’s difficult — but salvaging the reality from the hyperbole. Yes, Chandrika Kumaranatunge was supercilious, paranoid and vengeful —- and gave Chandraleka and Rukantha forced haircuts, which was much scarier than it sounds.

But what happened to context?? Didn’t Chandrika Kumaratunge pour anti-freeze on the extremely rigid and authoritarian political culture that prevailed before her, and can anybody say that Chandrika Kumaratunge’s dozen years were worse than the 17 that preceded it?

Ivan’s description of Chandrika as post independent Sri Lanka’s most unproductive political leader is a cutting indictment for someone who was relatively liberal, as the others before her were relatively tyrannical.

Sanath Gunatilleke is an unmitigated embarrassment, and so are all other sordid affairs in the elongated Kumaratunge interlude in Sri Lankan politics, but is there an open vendetta here that masquerades, in part, as a serious political assessment of the Chandrika era?

Ivan doubles in this treatise as biography maker and biography writer. If this is CBK’s unauthorised biography, Ivan sees it from the ringside and bedside for most part. (No he did not sleep with her.)

Among all of the names that are dropped in the book, his is the most prolific, often as the man who in his own assessment, brought Chandrika Kumaratunge into power.

Maybe the only way that Chandrika Kumaratunge could get even with this masterwork of fact gossip and innuendo, is if she writes her own unauthorised biography of Victor Ivan. The author figures in his own book to the extent where at some point, the burden is cast on him to prove that it is not his close association to the subject of the biography that is the fountainhead of this venom.

That does not mean that biographers are not supposed to be closely involved with the lives of their subjects. If that were indeed the case, the gospels would have never got written.

But, talking of the gospels, it seems at least something turns on the fact that one could be close to the subject of a bio such as this. The Gospels may not be biographical in the main, but when they are being biographical in the narrative on Jesus, the gospels quite plainly defer, depending on which apostle’s pen they were written from.

Nothing proves this point more than the fact that there is now a gospel of Judas that is said to have been unearthed. From Judas’s pen, Jesus does not come out in the same way that he does in the gospels of Mark, Luke or Matthew. Judas vindicates himself in his gospel, and contributes to the theology that he has no sin in him, as he was nothing but an instrument in seeing the life of Jesus to its preordained termination.

No gospel is invalidated though, irrespective of the writer’s closeness or otherwise to the subject. Ivan’s ‘Chaura Regina’ - less subtle here than Gospel — doesn’t necessarily disqualify itself because the writer becomes more important in the book than his subject.

Ivan’s narrative, for one, is not bland, and if he could be accused of hyperbole he never could be accused of being boring. There is never a dull moment — not when he pitches into Sanath Gunatilleke or anywhere else in this pol-pot boiler. (Yes, he says Chandrika was maniacal and murderous, though not in Cambodian proportions.)

Ivan writes that Sanath Gunatilleke has the knack of doing nothing for any political party on the campaign trail, but then getting close to its power vortex after the election is over. The rest of what he says about Sanath Gunatillke is quite simply unprintable in a mainstream national publication.

But does any of the somewhat self centred narrative or the almost yellow sensationalism make the book irrelevant as a serious offering to the aficionado of political fact?

I do not think so. The fact that Kumaratunge was better in terms of her liberality than JR Jayewardene or any of her dictatorial predecessors does not justify any of her sins either by commission or omission.

No doubt she was a brazen, if not comic liar. If she were half as economical with the country’s exchequer as she was with the truth, maybe one would have even begun to characterise her tenure as being somewhat positive. But she comes nowhere near to that sort of sanguine assessment of herself, and her longtime nemesis succeeds in driving the final nail into the coffin in terms of burying her image.

She couldn’t redeem herself, unless she comes out with something earthshaking in her unauthorised biography of Victor Ivan, yet to be written, or contemplated?