Dress Sense or Discrimination?

(Previously published in The Island on Wednesday 28th October 2009)

I remember, a few months ago, there was an exchange of correspondence in the Opinion Column of The Island between a couple of readers about what is decent or not decent in the way some Sri Lankan women dress themselves, and the controversy eventually petered out; it appeared all over and done with. However, in the recent weeks there seems to have been a revival of interest in the subject.

Probably it betrays a lingering fascination with the topic of women’s attire. The nature of this apparent enchantment has both positive and negative aspects. Personally I don’t have anything original or interesting or useful to say about the matter. Nonetheless my attention was caught by what I would suspect to be a trace of possible bias against women in the collective treatment of the subject, though it is cunningly couched as light-hearted banter (though not all those who have commented on the subject can be said to be guilty of such an attitude).

There is a popular a piece of wisdom, especially among men themselves, that some men condemn in public any deliberate or inadvertent display of nudity or supposed wantonness or erotic insouciance in women which they would indulgently connive at in private. I don’t at all want to suggest that any of those who wrote critically about the question under discussion are guilty of such hypocrisy. Yet the risk of being suspected of some degree of hypocrisy is a realistic possibility that people who venture to express their opinions about a hush-hush topic like this including me cannot avoid. Not that it matters.

Some women, like some men, exhibit a poor dress sense, and upset others for that reason. Whatever it is, there is reason to believe that our society prefers to observe a critical point beyond which women are not expected to dress down, if they are allowed to dress down at all by their family or community, which restriction does not seem to apply to men at all. Apparently, dressing up has no such limit for either gender.

What I am writing here should not be taken as an attack on someone, or a challenge of some point of view. It is just a reflection on a state of affairs that has prevailed, properly disguised of course, in human society at least for centuries, if not for millennia.

The exchange of views about women’s attire led my mind to an instance where the subject is treated in classical English literature. I decided to share with my readers two delightful short lyrics from 17^th century English poetry: Ben Jonson’s (1573-1637) ‘Still to be neat…’, and Robert Herrick’s (1591-1674) ‘Delight in Disorder’. (Texts of the poems reproduced below are from A Book of English Poetry Collected by G.B.Harrison (Penguin Books. First published 1937). But first, let me provide a little bit of background information to facilitate understanding of the poems, for the social context in England in which these poets wrote, and the existential realities they took for granted, no longer exist even for English people today. It is also useful to be aware that certain key words which may seem familiar to a modern reader could mean something different from their modern denotations.

Both these poets were junior contemporaries of the famous William Shakespeare (1564-1616), who was a dramatist and a poet. However, Shakespeare is identified with the Elizabethan period, and Jonson and Herrick with the Jacobean and the Cavalier periods (the 17^th century) when it comes to talking about the history of English literature.

Though Herrick was eighteen years junior to Jonson they were closely associated with each other in their literary pursuits. Jonson was a poet and a dramatist of repute; Herrick became his fan and pupil. This teacher pupil duo enjoyed many a “lyrick feast” in taverns. (It was normal at that time for artists and men of letters to meet in pubs to have learned discussions.) Their “lyrick feasts” were (needless to add, both literally and metaphorically) spirited conversations about art and literature. A common theme among 17^th century poets is the hedonistic view that the most important thing in life is to enjoy to the fullest the present moment without worrying too much about the future, as expressed in Herrick’s well known line “Gather ye rose-buds while ye may”.

This is called the carpe diem theme: “carpe diem quam minimum credula postero” is a line from the ancient Latin poet Horace (65-8 BCE) which in English means “Enjoy the present day, trust the least possible to the future” (Chambers Dictionary). Such ideas were probably due to the uncertainties and apprehensions about what was yet to come for most people in that time of political instability at home (mainly characterized by the tussle between the King and the Parliament), and to the inevitable undermining of the sense of security guaranteed by traditional religious faith as a result of expanding horizons of scientific knowledge and rational thought.

Nevertheless the contemporary society was a highly ordered one. And it was a men’s world. Women were treated as naturally inferior in intelligence and strength of character to men. Another related point is that the time had not yet come when ordinary men and women began to be considered as proper subjects for treatment in literature. Poets wrote about the lives of lords and ladies. Women (of high class) generally figured as objects of beauty, love and romance. They were immaculately dressed; women covered themselves in flowing robes, and much finery. But since people were, unlike today, usually unaware of the causes of diseases, and the importance of personal cleanliness for good health, they were satisfied with very little washing! Poor hygiene led to outbreaks of illness among the population. Allusions to venereal disease abound, especially in Elizabethan poetry.

Let us now look at Ben Jonson’s “Still to be neat…” whose original title was “Simplex Munditiis” (another phrase from Horace which means “elegant in simplicity”). It was first published in 1609.

Still to be neat, still to be dressed,
As you were going to a feast;
Still to be powdered, still perfum’d;
Lady, it is to be presum’d,
Though art's hid causes are not found,
All is not sweet, all is not sound.

Give me a look, give me a face,
That makes simplicity a grace;
Robes loosely flowing, hair as free:
Such sweet neglect more taketh me
Than all the adulteries of art;
They strike mine eyes, but not my heart.

The poet is apparently saying to the elaborately dressed woman here that she might be trying to hide some unpalatable truth about herself (like sexual promiscuity) by dressing up like that; as far as he is concerned, an plainly attired woman in “Robes loosely flowing, hair as free:” with a touch of “sweet neglect” would be more alluring; such simplicity will take his heart more readily than all “the adulteries of art”.

The four times repeated “still” in the first stanza means “always” in modern English. The repetition registers the poet’s censure of the woman’s apparent preoccupation with dressing up. Is it to be assumed that there is some not so sweet, not so sound secret that she is trying to conceal under an attractive exterior? She might be an immoral woman who is even carrying venereal disease. The impersonality of “…it is to be presum’d…” suggests that such a negative judgment is unavoidable in these circumstances; it is not a matter of personal preferences; the poet is taking a hard objective look at this deceptive show! He will not be taken in by such a sham. He is not impressed by “all the adulteries of art” which, though appealing to his eye, will not move his heart. The simplicity he asks for is found in “such sweet neglect” as seen in “Robes loosely flowing, hair as free”. The word “art” is used in both stanzas. In “Though art’s hid causes are not found” art may mean either creation of beauty or crafty conduct; the same ambiguity is repeated in the recurrence of the word in the second stanza; but the phrase “adulteries of art” is a direct reference to the features of her make-up which are designed to invite an adulterous response from men.

Women’s vulnerability to accusations of impropriety or even immorality in the matter of dress in a male dominant society, especially when traditional social mores are deemed threatened, is not a new thing.

Below is Robert Herrick’s “Delight in Disorder” published in 1648.

A sweet disorder in the dress
Kindles in clothes a wantonness:
A lawn about the shoulders thrown
Into a fine distraction:
An erring lace, which here and there
Enthrals the crimson stomacher:
A cuff neglectful, and thereby
Ribbands to flow confusedly:
A winning wave (deserving note)
In the tempestuous petticoat:
A careless shoe-string, in whose tie
I see a wild civility:
Do more bewitch me, than when art
Is too precise in every part.

Robert Herrick’s lines above differ somewhat from Jonson’s in tone as well as in theme. The latter’s rather dispassionate dismissal of “the adulteries of art” in favour of a woman being “elegant in simplicity” forms a fine contrast to Herrick’s presumably fatal attraction to a “sweet disorder in the dress” (of a beautiful woman). Though the tendency to represent women as a source of potential danger is common to both poets, the menacing manifestation of that potential is differently viewed. Whereas Jonson perceives possible/almost real treachery where

“Though art’s hid causes are not found

All is not sweet, and all is not sound”,

Herrick detects it in the apparent nonchalance of the way the woman is dressed: “A sweet disorder in the dress – Kindles in clothes a wantonness”; the scarf is thrown into a fine distraction (something that distracts you or makes you crazy); the erring lace …enthrals (enslaves) the crimsonstomacher (a separate piece of cloth for the centre front of a bodice); A cuff neglectful …Ribbands to flow confusedly ; a winning wave… in thetempestuous (stormy, violent) petticoat; a careless shoestring in whose tie the poet sees a wild civility… All the words that I have underscored above help conjure the image of a woman who is far from being a submissive, demure character before males, contrary to what traditional norms of propriety would demand. Instead, the “sweet disorder” that Herrick delights in seems to imply a promise of sexual abandon of the same kind (obviously not looked kindly upon in the strictly conservative, puritanical, male chauvinist 17^th century English society).

This interpretation of the two short lyrics and their appropriation in this context are entirely mine, though my reading of the poems has been naturally influenced by what other commentators have written about them. However, it represents only one of the many different ways in which they could be creatively experienced by discerning readers.

I feel that these two specimens of lyrical poetry, despite their obvious literary worth, embody a warped view of women in society and that this idea is likely to be an essential strand in the fabric of any critical text produced on them. On a more positive note, I may add that the poems also represent two delightfully elegant responses to a display of female beauty through dress in a world where “The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak”.

Rohana R.Wasala

Hey! Biased Western Media! Call It Quits!

First published, in a slightly edited version, in The Island on Tuesday 26th May 2009



(Note:- The informal expression ‘Call it quits’ is used in its normally accepted sense of ‘agree that an argument or dispute or financial exchange between two parties has been settled’, not in the (erroneous) sense of ‘quit’ (leave, give up); the newspaper version gives the impression that ‘Call it quits’ carries the latter meaning, which is wrong, a result of editorial error. The following is my unedited original essay, where the phrase ‘Call it quits’ is used correctly.)



We, Sri Lankans, have just emerged out of over three decades of terrorism that caused us untold suffering. You probably cannot understand the deep sense of relief and joy that we are experiencing at this victorious moment of our final liberation from that terror; and that may be why you seem to persist in your anti-Sri Lanka slant in your reportage of the momentous event that has just taken place in our country. Intentionally or unintentionally you, as media people, chose to connive at the LTTE’s brutal acts of violence against us while it was in existence. We feel that you have been well and truly duped by the massive anti-Sri Lanka misinformation movement executed mainly through some members of the large community of Tamil economic refugees in the West miscalled the Tamil Diaspora, and other LTTE sympathizers in influential positions there, ostensibly determined to promote their unjust and unrealistic separate state goal; it is also possible that the LTTE itself has been taken for a ride by you in pursuance of the barely concealed objective of sustaining the threatened western hegemony in a geopolitically sensitive region of the world.



Whatever the motive behind your zeal for slandering Sri Lanka, it is we who have been the innocent victims of thirty three long years of incessant terror, which cost us dearly in terms of thousands of mostly young men and women dead or injured, the economy of the country wrecked, and intolerable mental trauma inflicted on millions. And we, the ordinary people of Sri Lanka, feel justified in blaming you, among others, fair and square for helping the LTTE terrorists to survive and flourish (until a few days ago), thereby prolonging our agony for so long through your consistently adamant misrepresentation of the truth about Sri Lanka’s predicament in the face of the terrorist scourge.



I, the writer of this, who have been following your media channels, especially the electronic media, from the birth to the death of LTTE terrorism, can hardly remember any instance where you cared to represent Sri Lanka’s point of view regarding this matter with adequate impartiality or some minimum concern for truth; you have always been partisan towards the LTTE in spite of its irrefutable record of heinous crimes against humanity. (I hasten to exempt unbiased media organs such as the Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Times from this general censure.)



We, the common citizens of this country, know at first hand that there is no ethnic, religious, or linguistic discrimination or resultant disharmony that could justify separatism or any rebel movement aimed at such a goal. There has never been any genocide against any community by Sri Lanka except the genocidal violence unleashed by the LTTE against all Sri Lankans in general. The very few communal eruptions that took place after 1958 were isolated incidents deliberately incited by certain chauvinistic or merely criminal elements from among both the Sinhalese and the Tamils without any firm popular support. Their repetition in the future is unlikely when certain outstanding issues relating to the common welfare of all the communities are addressed. However, such unfortunate aberrations as racial riots in the recent political history of our country have been repeatedly exaggerated and exploited by interested parties with political or personal axes to grind. Internationally, we have already paid a heavy price because of this. The truth is that no community has been free from horrendous Tiger terror, be it Sinhalese, Tamil, or Muslim. The extermination of the LTTE terrorists has brought great relief and hope to the vast majority of Sri Lankans. Therefore the mood of celebration that is sweeping across the country on this occasion should not be interpreted as a show of triumphalism.



We have had to suffer so much for so long mainly because of the nefarious behaviour of the West, one of whose agents you seem to be. The most recent demonstration of your usual attitude became evident in the way your TV channels such as the BBC, CNN, and Al Jazeera reported the news about the crushing defeat of the LTTE at the hands of the Sri Lankan armed forces. You tried to represent the Tigers as heroes who have suffered a temporary setback; you completely blotted out the truly professional and heroic conduct of the patriotic Sri Lankan army soldiers. The chimera of LTTE invincibility that you helped conjure has now been exorcised for good; it was as false as the recent doctored tamilnet picture of an amused Prabhakaran gazing on his own corpse being shown on TV! We won’t be surprised if you too decided to flash the latter on your own channels!



Have you ever even referred to the abominable fact that the LTTE hadn’t spent a single dollar out of the billions contributed to it by the various INGOs and Tamils working abroad on any development work in the area that they illegally held for so many years? Apart from enriching themselves, and living a luxurious life in their palatial houses (albeit in the jungle), they squandered all that money on procuring massive stocks of modern weapons (apparently far in excess of what would be needed to resist the Sri Lankan army attacks), and building bunkers destroying the lush environment with its rich natural resources. They held captive their own people in abject poverty and misery. How did the government treat these innocent civilians (claimed by the LTTE to be citizens of their self-styled ‘Eelam’) while they were being thus ill used by those deadly fanatics? Through its agencies still functional in that territory the government sent them food, in fact, more food than the actual numbers needed, knowing very well that the number of residents in the area had been deliberately exaggerated by the terrorists with a view to acquiring extra supplies for maintaining buffer stocks for their own use in their intended future military campaigns against the government. Sri Lanka’s is probably the only government in the world that has been feeding a terror outfit that sought to destroy it and the country, and nearly succeeded in their attempt! Didn’t you hear George Master (a former postmaster of the Sri Lanka Postal department who later served the LTTE as its translator) telling on a TV interview that he drew his pension from his post office just before he joined the civilian trek towards the safety within the army lines, where he was identified and detained, but well treated by the soldiers?



When the LTTE exploded human bombs among the escaping Tamil civilians, using women and children for the purpose, in order to cause mayhem among the soldiers and the civilians to discourage the latter from trying to flee LTTE captivity and reach the safety of the area liberated by the Sri Lankan army, the soldiers offered their own lunch packets to the hungry escapees, though they themselves had to starve by doing so. Often the soldiers were seen supporting, even carrying, the sick and the wounded and the infirm among the escaping hostages (for the Tigers shot at , and injured or killed, these civilians for refusing to obey their orders to stay back as human shields); they provided emergency medical succour for them. Many such acts of human kindness were seen in the operational area, which earned the soldiers the respect and gratitude of those people. That is also why they were bold enough to rebuke the foreigners for criticizing the temporary welfare camp arrangements put in place by the army.



Do you know that the overwhelming majority (about 90%) of these young soldiers are from rural villages? They are heir to a rich culture steeped in the most humane Buddhist values. We feel that the very phrase ‘Sinhala Buddhist’ could be anathema to you. Yet it is principally the Sinhalese Buddhists of the South who have been sending donations for relieving the sufferings of the Tamil IDPs in the North from the day they began to escape from the Tiger clutches in their thousands when the army breached the LTTE defences. Buddhist monks in Colombo went on their ‘alms rounds’ to collect provisions and other needs to be sent to the North. I heard a government minister who represents the Hambantota district saying during a TV programme that nine lorry loads of things were collected and dispatched for the use of their displaced compatriots of the North by the poor folk of that district. Something that you will find it hard to believe is that very recently a number of massacres of innocent civilians by shooting and by bus-bombing were carried out by the LTTE in the same area, and that the threat of further such attacks was still lurking.



Have you ever talked about such things in your ‘news’ broadcasts? You have always relied on the lies that the Tiger propagandists fed to you. As ‘free, but responsible’ media, did you ever think of verifying, at least for the sake of some semblance of journalistic decency, what you heard from Tiger sources against the claims of the Sri Lankan national media (not all of them state-sponsored) reporting live from the battlefront? You can’t have missed regular video footage broadcast by the national TV channels showing Tamil civilians being corralled by the LTTE at gun point, and even shot at to prevent them breaking up the human shield that protected the terror leaders from the besieging Sri Lankan army. Didn’t you see the camouflaged heavy guns mounted in the very midst of civilian huts in the no-fire zone declared by the government from where the Tigers fired at the army, trying to provoke retaliatory fire from them in order that the LTTE could then claim that the army was massacring civilians? But the Tigers were actually putting to test their own conviction that the highly disciplined Sri Lanka army would not retaliate for fear of injuring civilians, strictly obeying the government’s explicit instructions to protect the civilians at all costs.



You failed to talk about these things, but falsely claimed that the army shelled the no-fire zone. One woman ‘journalist’ (a Canadian) was mean enough to refer to the temporary welfare camps hastily put up by the army to house the escaping thousands as ‘detention’ camps! (We strongly suspect that many of these ‘journalists’ were in the pay of the LTTE.)



All such fabrications that you tried to lend credence to were, we feel, meant to invite some sort of foreign intervention under the pretext of protecting civilians from alleged human rights violations by their own government, the real motive of this ploy being to throw a lifeline to the sinking Tigers, thereby prolonging our suffering indefinitely.



However, we still believe that the journalists, who represent those impersonal media organizations of the West with such names as the BBC, CNN, Al Jazeera, and so on, are also human beings like us with a common sense of justice and fair play. We, as civilized human beings, expect them as similarly civilized human beings to desist from disseminating biased news about our beloved Sri Lanka. We expect them to be fair minded in their reporting. We know that justice is on our side. Actually, we wouldn’t care what individuals or organizations chose to say about our country if not for the fact that it could help perpetuate the undeserved shabby treatment that our country is being subjected to at the hands of the powers that be in the current unjust exploitative global power structure, and that it could obstruct the essential and inevitable demolition of the separatist ideology that had formed the basis of the terror movement. If you can’t comply with this innocent expectation of ours, please avoid talking about our country. Online opinion polls such as the ongoing CNN International Desk poll on Sri Lanka are also meaningless because of the mismatch between the Sinhalese and the Tamils in terms of their numerical strength (about 15 and over 80 million respectively), which will leave little room for a fair result to emerge.


(Image stolen from blueroof.wordpress.com)


You have already done enough and more damage to our international standing as a sovereign nation. This is in addition to the (im)moral support you extended to the bloodthirsty terrorists by whitewashing them, terrorists who wreaked havoc in our beloved land drenching it in innocent blood for thirty three years. If you had any grudge against us before, you have paid it off with interest. Now we are quits. So, please leave us alone. Thank you!





Rohana R. Wasala

Sri Lankan Identity Will Prevail

First published in two parts in The Island on 21^st and 22^nd July 2008

What impelled me to write this essay was Mr RMB Senanayake’s article entitled ‘Sri Lankan identity is dead – a response to Anne Abeysekera’, in The Island of Saturday 5^th July, 2008 where the opening paragraph concludes thus:

“In the past in the social environment she and I grew up, the social environment was not dominated by the Sinhala Buddhist ethos. It was a more humanist tradition inherited from the West.”

I had a feeling of respect for Mr Senanayake on the basis of the quality of his numerous articles in The Island which let me believe him to be an ethical, rational, and broadminded person. So it was painful for me to read the words quoted above coming from his pen; many other readers sharing my attitude towards the subject in question may have been similarly affected by the implications of those words.

In fact, Mr Senanayake was only responding to Ms Anne Abayasekara’s contribution under the title ‘Am I a Sinhalese first, and a Sri Lankan afterwards’carried in the same paper on Monday 30th June, 2008, which in turn was a reaction to an even earlier article entitled ‘How does one BECOME Sinhalese or Tamil in Sentiments’ by Dr Michael Roberts in The Island of 30th April, 2008. Following Ms Abayasekera’s essay Dr Roberts had another short piece, which was on the subject of “Debating and quantifying the label ‘secular’” in The Island of 3^rd July, 2008.

I reread all those three articles before sitting down to write the following, which will contain my personal views apropos of the points raised, for whatever they are worth.

First of all I wish to add a caveat: I felt rather diffident at the beginning about the task I must address myself to on this occasion, because I am neither a historian nor a political scientist, not even a politician (the least intellectually demanding vocation in our country at the present time!). I am someone Dr Roberts could justifiably include in the ETDH (Every Tom Dick and Harry) category, and I hope I am not trespassing too much on his academic preserve; mine are humble views based on commonsense; I don’t want to make a fool of myself by challenging Dr Michael Roberts whose scholarship and fame I very sincerely admire. However, with the realization that history is not at issue here and that Dr Roberts’ enlightened liberal views regarding the limited value of history (whether ancient or most recent) for the resolution of the current conflict situation in our country are essentially identical with mine, I feel I have managed by this point to shed some of my initial inhibitions.

But I do not share his convictions about the existence and significance of what is usually condemned as ‘Sinhala Buddhist chauvinism’ ( or of a Tamil version of the same sort of chauvinism for that matter) among the ordinary people of this country. These charges of chauvinism relate especially to the Sinhalese Buddhists’ agitation prior to Independence aimed at regaining what they believed was their due status as the majority race of this island with a well established history along with the other communities, and to certain political and legislative measures attempted since in order to eliminate longstanding anomalies.

To my mind both Dr Roberts and Mr Senanayake take ‘Sinhala Buddhist chauvinism’ for granted, of course, with different degrees of tolerance or disapproval of the same between them. (Ms Abayasekara is apparently free from such an attitude.) In addition to this, all three stand socially and culturally more or less at the same distance from the ordinary Sinhala Buddhists whom they are implicitly passing judgement on. Dr Roberts’ purportedly cold scientific approach contrasts with Ms Abayasekara’s empathetic attitude of a certain fellow feeling, understanding and tolerance. Mr Senanayake provides a foil to both in his downright condemnation of ‘the Sinhala Buddhist ethos’ as lacking in humanism (whatever he means by the last term).

Since it was Ms Abayasekara’s attempt to answer a riddle in the form of a number of questions formulated by Dr Michael Roberts towards the end of his article and offered to the Sinhalese (and as a second thought to the Tamil) readers for their own education through reflection that has triggered this colloquy, and since in my view his barrage of questions presumes the existence of a certain morbid state of mind that impels the Sinhalese to think fanatically of themselves as a race, let me start with those questions.

What makes you FEEL that you are a Sinhalese?

How did you become Sinhalese?

What made your parents think and feel themselves Sinhalese?

And are you at the same time a Sri Lankan in sentiment?

Or is the last question redundant in that Sinhalese is equivalent to ‘Sri Lankan’?

Dr Roberts deletes the last question for the Tamils, as he maintains, because of their recent experiences (presumably their sufferings at the hands of fanatical Sinhalese Buddhist nationalists as often alleged).

Kan Butani feels in his article ‘Make money not war: A recipe for peace’ ( The Island, Tuesday 8^th July, 2008) that Dr Roberts’ question is ‘the most absurd question and every answer will be confronted by an unanswerable why.’ I would not call it absurd; I would say that , though apparently silly, it is well-meaning, its purpose being to stimulate rational analysis of a certain undesirable sentiment – fanatical emotional attachment to one’s race- which will result in the analyst being cured of that illness. The practical intellectual exercise that Dr Roberts recommends for those readers who FEEL and have BECOME Sinhalese ( the capitalizing foregrounds the notion that ethnic identity is more a subjective emotional construct than a scientifically provable fact) is meant to pave the way for some sort of communal rapprochement between the Sinhalese, Tamils and Muslims, who, in his perception, are engaged at present in ‘the competitive jostling-cum-conflicts’ that determines ‘…the present impasse in the politics of Sri Lanka’.

In fact, Dr Roberts’ article appeared on the web on April 23^rd (before it did so in The Island a week after). It has attracted a number of comments (some commending, some disparaging his views) from bloggers. Acknowledging their comments Dr Roberts says on the same website: “My intention… was to underline the complex process (really processes) through which we become Sinhalese, Tamil, Scottish, Japanese, etc”. He illustrates this by referring to the case of Greek migrants to Australia. According to him some of them identify themselves as Australian, some as Greek-Australians, and some as Greek, the last being positively anti-Aussie in sentiment! He further adds: “ Arguably some of the most rabid Sinhala and Tamil chauvinists can be found among elements living abroad”.

In his reply to an individual blogger Dr Roberts acidly comments: “Since he also asserts that HOME of Tamils is Tamil Nadu his contention in effect suggests that the Tamils of Sri Lanka can bugger off to that country. I have it on good authority that some politicians of the present regime occasionally voice the same idea which is PLAIN WRONG…It is only the paranoid attitude of the Sinhala Buddhists or Sinhala extremists that render them into a threatening force and a looming ally of the LTTE..”. (Such extremist claims as those made by the reader who said that the home f the Tamils is Tamil Nadu are often provoked by similarly PLAIN WRONG assertions by Tamil extremists. But we must realize the fact that extremists, in spite of their notoriety and loud noise, are only a handful on both sides.)

Dr Roberts’ questions were meant for the “introspective examination” of such morbid notions as those that give rise to extremism..

Later, however, he qualifies this apparently totally damning assessment, for he admits that “There are always a few, maybe even more, with whom – and WITHIN whom – collective identity sits lightly”. My own contention is, as it has always been, that despite all appearances to the contrary, with the vast majority of ordinary ‘Sinhala Buddhists’, especially ‘within’ Sinhala Buddhists, ‘collective identity sits lightly’ to an extent generally unusual among many other communities (I am risking a charge of the popularly condemned ‘We Vs Them’ syndrome here). Consider, for example, a very obvious cultural trait of the Sinhalese Buddhists: their names and their manner of dress do not reveal their racial or religious identity; the absence of painted marks on the body that distinguish them from others reinforces this anonymity. (This may be due to the influence of the Buddhist teaching that emphasizes the harmfulness of obsession with one’s self and advocates its effacement.) Only close association and familiarity with the Sinhalese Buddhists will reveal how non-racist most of them are in their social outlook despite their awareness of their identity as Sinhalese Buddhists in a world where racial, religious, cultural, social and other numerous kinds of divisions are normal. The unfortunate thing is that foreigners and the equally alien representatives of the elite who wish to sit in judgement over them are usually unable to get near enough to them to understand and assess them properly. They arrive at their damning conclusions only by looking at a handful of really rabid chauvinists doing politics among the Sinhalese who claim to represent the Sinhalese Buddhist masses (but such extremists among the Sinhalese are far outnumbered by similar elements in the opposite camps). Which community is free of such elements?

Dr Roberts summarizes his questions thus: ‘how did each of you become Sinhalese or Tamil and develop attachments to that entity?’ If I had any objections to such a poser, it would be because it begs the question in that it takes for granted the ‘rabid chauvinism’ the admission or denial of which should form part of the answer; for example, one cannot respond ‘I don’t FEEL Sinhalese, and didn’t BECOME Sinhalese either, I AM Sinhalese because I was born to Sinhalese parents, I speak Sinhalese, I follow the cultural traditions generally associated with the Sinhalese, etc, etc, just as you would say, if pressed for an answer to the question ‘What’s your race or ethnicity?’ that you ARE a Burgher or some version of it such as Ceylonese Burgher, Sinhalese-Burgher, or whatever, for similar reasons; but such an answer would amount to a rejection of the question; in other words, only those who admit to have made such a big deal of their Sinhaleseness as to be discriminatory towards other communities could take the question up as part of some sort of a psychological counseling process, and hopefully benefit from it. And if there are any Sinhalese who have really made themselves Sinhalese, and who do feel themselves Sinhalese in the judgement of these counselors, but refuse to accept the fact, they will simply scoff at the questions as nonsense.

I flatter myself that as an ordinary citizen I too share the same liberal values that I believe Dr Roberts subscribes to. We don’t set much store by our ethnic identity or other identity that serves to isolate us from the rest of humanity. And that, surprisingly for their detractors, is the attitude of most Sinhalese Buddhists. By writing what might look like a defence of the majority of ordinary Sinhalese Buddhists against charges of extremism I am not trying to defend the indefensible. What I am attempting to show is that Sinhalese Buddhist chauvinism is itself a chimerical creation of vested political interests especially over the past one hundred years or so.

An ordinary citizen like me could easily realize it if the Sinhalese Buddhists who form the majority of the population discriminated against the minorities at every turn, and behaved in ways that would amount to a deliberate violation of their rights as free and equal citizens living in a democracy. There is no evidence of such chauvinism among the Sinhalese Buddhists.

Chauvinism is the fanatical adherence to one’s race, religion, language, morals, and political and military power, based on the belief that these are superior to anyone else’s. The majority of the Sinhalese Buddhists are the ordinary people you see wherever you go in the country – peasant cultivators, pavement hawkers, mechanics, clerks, teachers, shop assistants, health workers, and the rest in all walks of life. There is no tradition of lording it over the members other communities by these people in any way.

Recently I got a ‘paint baas’ (a painter) to paint the wall in front of our house which faces a main road. I knew he was a Sinhalese and a Buddhist, a member of the much maligned majority. On seeing the logo ‘May Budungay daysayayi’ (This is the Land of the Buddha) painted on the rear windscreen of a bus that passed, he said with a wry smile, ‘Munta pissu!’ (They are crazy). Though I understood perfectly well that he was expressing his contempt for those extremist elements who thought up that slogan, I asked him,’Why?’ The answer was: ‘How can any person say that? Isn’t this country the land of Muslims, Christians, Hindus, and other religionists, as well?’

To understand and appreciate the attitude of ordinary Buddhists towards intercommunal coexistence analysts must interact closely with those people. It is not right to judge them entirely by what politicians say, or by what one speculates.

More than half a century of anti-Sinhala-Buddhist propaganda has demonized the Sinhalese majority in the eyes of the world, and this I see as a mere gratuitous development, principally due to our (Sri Lankans’) failure to emerge whole out of the stranglehold of British colonialism. This failure was the net result of the discriminatory treatment by the imperialists of the subject majority as against the minorities. When the time came for the rectification of the historical wrongs perpetrated on the majority Sinhalese Buddhists, disagreements and rivalries between the different communities gave rise to centrifugal, instead of centripetal, tendencies in the national struggle towards independence.

Apparently Mr Senanayake is not unaware of this history of ‘Sinhala Buddhist nationalism’ because he says:

‘The national cake is of fixed size and if the Tamils got a disproportionate share of it then the Sinhala Buddhists would inevitably get less…’ There is a gap in his logic here for he then implies that the Sinhala Buddhists should have taken this lying down, but that they didn’t, as a result of which the ‘manufacture of Sinhala Buddhist nationalism’ came about. Then he asserts that this Sinhala Buddhist nationalism ‘led to a similar Tamil nationalism’.

When he compares the ‘Sinhala Buddhist ethos’ unfavouably with ‘Western humanism’ Mr Senanayake’s logic snaps again. He himself gives a few examples of Western humanism such as the case of the 14-year old black boy Emmet Till who “could be hunted down and murdered by a Mississippi gang simply because he had supposedly made suggestive remarks to a white woman”. Therefore I need not say anything about his denunciation of the ‘Sinhala Buddhist ethos’.

The Right Honourable D.S.Senanayake, acting as a true patriotic Sinhalese Buddhist leader without publicly assuming that name to gain narrow political advantage, managed to achieve a degree of national unity sufficient to inaugurate a progressive march towards the establishment of a single, multiethnic, multicultural, and multilinguistic nation amidst much opposition from extremist elements from both sides. But this march was cut short with the untimely death of D.S. in 1952 just three years into his tenure of office as the first Prime Minister of independent Ceylon (Sri Lanka).

It is not right to apportion blame exclusively to the so-called Sinhala Buddhist nationalists for ‘the present impasse’. One could argue that the members of the Tamil elite pampered under the British provoked a naturally hostile reaction from their Sinhalese counterparts by opposing the accommodation by the colonial rulers of the latter’s demand for the fulfillment of their legitimate aspirations.

However, if we look back over the past century occupied successively by the final fifty or so years of colonial rule of our country, and six decades of independence we can realize that communal harmony has broadly held, and with it a sense of Sri Lankan identity in spite of some serious setbacks; but these setbacks were not due to any real Sinhala Buddhist chauvinism.

National unity was seen at two levels of society inherently hostile to each other: 1)at the level of the pampered minuscule elite, the comprador class – the native collaborators of foreign imperialism – for whom their original ethnic identity and culture were of little import in the face of the power and prestige they gained through Christianity and English, and 2)at the level of the vast majority of the oppressed masses of the native population consisting of the poor of all the Lankan communities. Naturally it took different things to unite each class within itself. Imperial patronage and privileges united the one, while the misery attendant upon imperial exploitation, being the common lot of the dispossessed, united the other. This is a theme I alluded to in passing in an artcle entitled ‘Language for Peace and Progress’ in The Island (Midweek Review) on Wednesday 3^rd November 1999:

In the past there were situations in our country in which Sinhalese,
Tamils, Muslims and Burghers lived and worked together in complete peace
and harmony in spite of their divergent ethnic backgrounds. Even now,
ordinary Sinhalese and Tamils realise such peaceful co-existence. From
history, we know that the English-educated, mostly westernised elite of our
country under the British formed a close-knit community despite their
varied racial backgrounds. In such harmonious situations, what is important
is not race or language, but the community of interests and the opportunity
to promote those interests without hindrance. Of course social elitism,
which depends on a system of exploitation of the majority by a privileged
minority, cannot be a model for us to follow. I merely alluded to it here
as an illustration of my belief that shared goals and mutually beneficial
means of reaching them are a more potent factor in generating communal
harmony, than language.

Readers who wish to view this article in full may go to (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/act/message/263)

Both Ms Abayasekara and Mr Senanayake grieve over the alleged disappearance of the Ceylonese/Sri Lankan identity or national unity enjoyed at the brown sahib level (the former perhaps with some reservations, the latter without any).

I had reached this point in my essay when Dr Mahes Ladduwahetty’s article ‘Is Sri Lankan identity dead?’ appeared in The Island of Monday 14^th July, 2008, which is a patient and fair-minded response to ‘Those who condemn Sri Lankan nationalism/patriotism while extolling a theoretical “Western humanism” and post nationalism…”, and is certainly better than what I am attempting here.

By a happy coincidence I find myself able to bring my discourse to an end by quoting, in confirmation of my thesis, the concluding sentences of an article by Dr Dayan Jayatilleke under the title “The coordinates of national consciousness” in The Island of Tuesday 15^th July, 2008. Dr Jayatilleke’s article is a reaction to a critique by a local writer in The Sunday Leader of 13^th July, 2008 of a new nationwide public “Peace poll” published last month by the Institute of Irish Studies at the University of Liverpool in the UK and commissioned by The Centre for Policy Alternatives, Colombo.

Summarizing the general implications of the statistical findings of the said survey Dr Jayatilleke winds up his essay with these sentences:

“…Taken together, the totality of the Sinhala views, on national priorities, the war, the Tigers, devolution and discrimination, present a picture not of a fanatical, chauvinist community but of middle-of-the road mass sentiment; of a majority on the Middle Path. Running against the collective wisdom of the current crop of Cassandras, the scenario turns still more optimistic when one recalls just how reasonable Tamil opinion is on many issues, revealing that there is no unbridgeable chasm between the communities.”

As for Mr Senanayake’s presumed near-realization in the West of ‘post identity’ ideals – ‘post nationalism, postmodernism and multiculturalism’ (from Mr S’s article)- which prompts him to say, “Obama’s candidacy is thrilling because it carries with it the notion that the gap between the races may be beginning to close”, he may find little confirmation of his view in the news item ‘Former President Clinton warns of polarization of electorate’ on page 7 of the same issue of The Island. According to this news dispatch Mr Clinton opines that “Underneath the apparent accommodation to our diversity, we are in fact hunkering down in communities of like-mindedness, and it affects our ability to manage difference”.

Contrary to Mr Senanayake’s totally pessimistic assessment of the chance of an Obama type of “accommodation to diversity” (Clinton’s phrase) being achieved in our country, it has been proved more than once that persons from the minorities are acceptable to the Sinhala Buddhists as their political leaders when they are perceived to champion the national interest rather than their individual communal agendas. It is also my own hunch that a young generation of Sri Lankans are emerging both in the embattled north and east and in the relatively calm south, who, by education or instinct, due most probably to the combined influence of the tolerant humanist traditions of Hindu and Buddhist cultures which predate the Western ‘humanist’ culture at least by half a millennium, seem to embrace more meaningful ideals such as shared prosperity, good jobs, and a peaceful life of personal and social happiness than self-destructive sectarian goals. No more proof of this would be necessary than the case of the former LTTE child soldier Sivanesathurai Chandrakanthan (Pillayan) who has been elected the Chief Minister of the Eastern Provincial Council. Our fervent hope should be that the present old guard labouring under various fanaticisms may not scuttle this epochal trend which is steadily gaining ground.

Rohana R Wasala

The Way Forward

First published in The Island on Wednesday 11^th February 2009

The government, for its part, must break free from the evil spell of the bankrupt racist political elements masquerading as patriots wrapping themselves in the flag. The JHU, the JVP etc., which are anachronisms in modern politics ought to be neutralised politically if ethnic polarisation is to be checked. The same goes for mono ethnic and mono religious outfits like the SLMC and the TULF. These political malformations that have resulted from the failure of the two main parties to do away with the ethno-religious glass ceiling which has prevented non-Sinhala and/or non-Buddhist leaders from reaching the topmost notches of government, inter alia, have put paid to the efforts made since Independence to bring about the much needed national integration and to create a Sri Lanka where people can live in peace and dignity, irrespective of their ethnicity and/or religion.

(from The Island editorial of February 9, 2009)

As always, the Island editor has hit the nail on the head. “Political malformations” indeed! For they have blighted the Sri Lankan body politic since even before Independence by going against our ingrained pacifist, tolerant, non-violent, accommodating common cultural heritage.

The overwhelming majority of our people – comprising the Sinhalese, Tamils, Muslims, Burghers, Malays, and the rest of well over twenty different ethnic groups that share this little island as their native land, represented in the procession that paraded before the President on the Day of Independence (February 4, 2009) when he opened the Dayata Kirula (Sovereignty to the Nation) Exhibition at the BMICH - are not racist. However, to be sure, there are potentially dangerous fault lines in the polity, mainly the legacy of nearly half a millennium of foreign colonial rule; but these could have been easily fixed by now, had the more patriotic and enlightened politicians of post-independence Sri Lanka who understood and followed the implicit commitment of the general body of citizens to the principles of hospitality, caring and sharing, and generosity that they have inherited from centuries of a common culture of harmonious coexistence and religious and ethnic tolerance.

(Mr D.S. Senanayake, the Father of the Nation, and the first Prime Minister of independent Sri Lanka, was one of these rare statesmen; the incumbent President Mr Mahinda Rajapakse appears to be ushering in a new era of national resurgence following, in some important sense, in the footsteps of the late Mr Senanayake, though, as should be expected, against infinitely more formidable obstacles.)

We have occasionally heard the desperate cry that divisive politics is the bane of this country, and that a benign dictatorship could be the remedy. Though there is no doubt that the worst form of democracy is potentially superior to the best manifestation of any dictatorship, it is also true that unscrupulous politicians do flourish by sowing division among the populace. In the matter of inter-communal relations within a society such as ours, power hungry politicos should be expected to be in their element. Hence the crop of tribalist political gatherings that plague this country today.

Of these, the JHU and the JVP, are of comparatively more recent origin than those monoethnic Tamil and Muslim political parties, and differ significantly from the latter in terms of their raison d’etre. The advent of the JHU and the recent metamorphosis of the JVP as its ally could be interpreted as reactive, rather than proactive, developments in that they were actually in response to the perceived failure of the two main national parties (the UNP and the SLFP) to successfully and democratically neutralize the racism of the more pronounced, and, within their respective communities, more popular and hence more potent, political formations of the country’s ethnic minorities.

It is to the credit of the majority Sinhalese that they will never allow any extremist racist political party to flourish. The two main parties are not racist in any significant way. The smaller parties that seem to advocate a rather narrow racist slant in favour of the majority community always find it necessary to lean on one of the main parties for their survival in politics. We can safely predict the possible fate of the JHU and the JVP if they decide to contest by themselves at the next general elections: their parliamentary representation will be drastically reduced! When the minority communities are given a chance to show that they care more for the wider national interest, rather than narrow communalism, the fate of those ethnicity-based parties will be the same.

In today’s context, the UNP and the SLFP have an epochal role to play. They must form a united front to absorb all or most of the patriotic elements from all the communities (i.e. the majority of the common people) and create a truly democratic country where racist outfits and political parasites will be wiped out of the political arena. That, I believe, is the way forward for us at this juncture.

Rohana R.Wasala

*‘Prabhakaran’ *is worth seeing

first published in The Island on Friday 23rd May 2008.


RICE PADDY



“US Airborne’s not there to escort

kids to school,” snorts Condoleeza.

“No, not to school,” I counter-snort,

“but to the mortuary freezer.”



From ‘The Krieg
Anthology’ in *Under the Clock-*

* New Poems *by Tony Harrison (2005) Penguin Books



When I saw Thushara Peiris’ *Prabhakaran,* I felt that it is a film worth
seeing, and even writing about. Though the adoption of the name Prabhakaran
seemed a mere advertising gimmick before my viewing of it, it now reveals
itself to me as a well-thought-out choice of a title that gives an ironical
twist to the usual connotations of that name, which are due to its
association with the leader of the most ruthless terror outfit in the world.
That name is quite appropriate for the film in terms of the central concern
of Peiris’ cinematic *tour de force. *Though the description *tour de force
*might seem somewhat of an exaggeration, the fact remains that Peiris , as a
young film-maker, has made a conscientious attempt to artistically
communicate, as best he could, a deeply felt experience through his chosen
medium. My point is that though *Prabhakaran * is obviously not of the
highest quality it displays signs of informed effort on the part of its
author to turn out a good film.



*Prabhakaran *is not at all about the terrorist boss of that name. He is
only a menacing presence in the background, which is occasionally invoked to
exact obedience from those serving him under coercion. The film is based on
an internal division in the terror organization between the bigoted
leadership and the free thinking young disillusioned with its terror
tactics.



Kamalani and her younger brother Prabhakaran are children of ethnically
mixed parentage (father Tamil, mother Sinhalese) . They live in a so-called
border village as members of a mixed community. Having lost their parents in
their childhood to communal violence, they are brought up in an orphanage.
Subsequently, Kamalani secretly joins the LTTE’s suicide squad known as
the Black Tiger Unit. She also gets her brother enlisted in the rebel
movement. She is forced to marry Piyasoma, a young Sinhalese. The terror
outfit tries to use both Prabhakaran and Kamalani in their campaign of
terror through subjecting them to a kind of brainwashing about the
necessity of avenging the murder of their parents. But when they see that it
is poor people like themselves on both sides who get killed in communal
violence, they lose faith in the terror outfit. Despite traumatic memories
from the past, they do not now relish their part in rebel violence from
which, however, they can’t extricate themselves under the circumstances.



Kamalani becomes pregnant. The child inside her and her husband’s love give
her new hope. Prabhakaran, who is a child combatant, rebels against the
repression of the terror group.



Isolated and stranded between their natural human passion for life and love,
freedom and fulfillment on the one hand, and on the other, the relentless
coercion of the terrorists they struggle heroically against their fate in
their own way while events move inexorably to their tragic end.



The drama is unfolded against a rural, jungle setting. The time is the
present time when Tamils, Sinhalese, and others coexist as peaceably as
ever, despite the alleged ethnic conflict raging around them in the name of
which a small section of the population is fighting a terrorist war against
the government. The incidents of violence shown in the film like the killing
of innocent civilians in rebel hold-ups , landmine attacks, night raids on
villages in which sleeping villagers get knifed, and other similar outrages
are plausible reconstructions of cases often heard about.



The people are unsophisticated rural peasants who bear the brunt of these
terrorist attacks. These people care little about race distinctions among
them. They eke out a meager living in unenviable circumstances, but still
live a life of sharing and caring. When an elderly man among a group of
villagers including the seven month pregnant Kamalani riding in the open
back of a tractor jolting along a rough road, urges the driver to drive
slowly saying, “Otherwise Piyasoma’s wife will give birth to her baby here
and now!” (The feeling of intimacy and camaraderie of his plain, perfectly
explicit, unedited, colloquial Sinhalese does not come out in this clumsy
English rendering), he expresses their collective concern for her comfort
and wellbeing.



The jungle-covered, isolated, primitive rural setting is appropriate for the
depiction of the most fundamental human instincts of fellow feeling, trust,
and sympathy that are being violated by terrorism. The jungle setting suits
the rare atavistic nature of such violation of norms of civilized conduct.
Besides, it is the very jungle terrain where the terrorist violence in
question is actually taking place.



Terrorism sows suspicion among neighbours setting them against one another.
What could be a more telling expression of this than Piyasoma’s casual
remark to Kamalani, while bathing in the tank about his apprehensions
concerning her: “Who knows if you are secretly helping the terrorists”? It
is inconceivable that Piyasoma of all people suspects Kamalani of
involvement in the terrorist movement. But his ingenuous, childish words
betray the deep, insidious mistrust of one community by another that is
inevitably generated at a time of turmoil.



It is not only the social fabric that terrorism threatens. While vitiating
the social atmosphere it turns innocents into killers. Prabhakaran kills
civilians in cold blood because he is forced to do so by the terror outfit
whose prisoner he is. Kamalani also kills, but for a different reason. Her
act of killing Abe, who has been stalking her despite her attachment and
marriage to Piyasoma (who, unaware of the man’s secret passion for his wife,
still treats him as a trusted friend), always lurking in the background, is
something she is compelled to do by Abe’s thoughtless, self-centred pursuit
of her attentions merely because of his own infatuation with her. It proves
her absolute devotion to Piyasoma. It is also an indication of the intensity
of her suffering on account of her having to conceal from her husband her
involvement with the terrorists, because it is nothing less than a betrayal
of his trust in her. Abe’s murder removes any lurking suspicion in us
that Kamalani’s chafing at the LTTE demand for her undertaking of a suicide
mission is due to her tenderness or cowardice, or that she is capable of
betrayal of a cause that she could genuinely pledge allegiance to. She kills
Abe because her loyalty to her husband is total; she can’t stand anyone who
belittles or tries to call her devotion to him into question. It
demonstrates that if she was truly committed to the terrorist cause she
would not fail to serve that cause faithfully. The same goes for
Prabhakaran. Therefore the rejection of the terrorist campaign by both of
them is because of their unwavering loyalty to the truly meaningful values
of humanity, love and respect for life.



For Kamalani and Piyasoma her pregnancy is the natural fruition of their
love. But when she pleads with her handler or commander in the rebel
organization that she be allowed to give birth to her child before the
accomplishment of her mission, he reminds her of the fact that it was their
stratagem to have her made pregnant for use as a suicide bomber in their
terrorist scheme (her pregnancy would save her being searched by security
personnel, which would facilitate her access to her target), and tells her
not to worry about the unborn child.



What is more natural than the birth of new life? What is more unnaturally
cruel than a terrorism that uses a pregnant woman as a human bomb to
massacre innocents?



The image of the expectant woman present from the beginning to the end of
the film is a central symbol in this film. Her survival at the end of the
movie strikes a positive note. Kamalani is made to turn tables (by fate or
some mysterious process of natural justice) on her tormentors by
inadvertently blowing them up with a time-bomb that they have meant for her
(delivered to her hidden in a bag supposed to be that of her dead brother);
she walks home thus miraculously saved from the deadly treachery of her
handlers. The important thing is that Kamalani has survived all the chaos so
far, and that her survival holds out some hope for the future.



Any artistic creation is a fusion of art and artifice. A film is no
exception. But film, in comparison with other forms of art, which have
existed for hundreds or even thousands of years, is of relatively recent
origin, and hence naturally utilizes elements derived from those older
modes. Film borrows from painting, plastic arts, photography, drama,
fiction, poetry, and music, etc. This makes cinema an unusually complex, an
unusually powerful artistic medium. Basically, of course, a film is a piece
of visual art that depends on images, and that usually taps the resources of
language and music.



It is the film-maker’s business to blend all these elements into an
effective vehicle for the conveyance of his or her innermost responses to
striking experiences real or imaginary that excite our aesthetic sense. A
good film like any other good work of art engages the connoisseurs’ critical
imagination for the reward of an apprehension of beauty in its
contemplation, and a deepening of insight into an aspect of human
experience.



*Prabhakaran * is an attempt in this direction. The ancient Latin poet
Horace (65-08 BCE) held that the worth of a work of art could be gauged in
terms of two criteria: an artistic work is of value if it ‘*pleases’* and ‘*
instructs*’. In my opinion Thushara Peiris’ film fulfills these criteria.
Some critics may tend to see it as mere anti-LTTE propaganda. My own view is
that the film’s real focus is not the LTTE. It is not a critique of the LTTE
cause. The LTTE campaign of terror is presented from the point of view of
its direct victims represented by Prabhakaran the child soldier, and his
sister Kamalani. The separatist cause – the oft repeated “a country for
ourselves” - is simply a threadbare, vacuous slogan for these victims, like
the soundless lip movements of the rebel commander in the film. What the
viewers of the film, through its artistic devices, are made to emotionally
experience is the tragedy of the needless dehumanization and destruction of
blooming youth in the name of a single deranged megalomaniac’s dreams of
imperial domination.



The nature of our aesthetic sense is such that though the theme is bleak our
sensitive response to its artistic presentation ‘delights’ us. At the same
time the contemplation of the common humanity of the terrorists, and their
victims (with whom we identify ourselves as vicarious sufferers) is a
sobering thought for us.



A literary text – be it a poem like Homer’s epic *Iliad, *T.S. Eliot’s *The
Waste Land, *Tony Harrison’s *Under the Clock* (from which my epigraph to
this review comes), or a prose work like Joseph Conrad’s novel *Heart of
Darkness* – uses the resources of human language, mainly in the form of
words that refer to things in the world of human experience; but a film
principally relies on the arrangement of images on a screen which
reconstructs situations in the same domain. In both cases the creative
artist’s role is the same: shaping out of his or her raw materials (words
and images) an object of beauty – i.e. a finished poem/story/drama or a film
for the contemplation and enjoyment of the aesthetes (at whatever level of
sophistication they are capable of reaching).



Thushara Peiris has been conscious of this in the making of
*Prabhakaran. *Though
I don’t think that I am competent enough to talk about the cinematographic
aspect of film-making the shooting of the various scenes of this film has
been attended to with care to highlight the really significant aspect of
each shot. For example, we may consider the various shots of Kamalani
waiting for her rendezvous with terror activists in the jungle. In one she
stands under a large tree, and soliloquizes (Soliloquy is a device borrowed
from drama that is used to reveal to the audience the innermost thoughts
that pass through the mind of a character). This image of Kamalani, among
other things, shows her smallness (vis-à-vis the huge issues she is
confronting), and her isolation in a vast world of private misery. In
another shot she is shown hiding in the hollow of a tree; she is
unpleasantly surprised by the sudden appearance of the person from the rebel
organization that she has been waiting for, and she tells him how frightened
she is. The talk of fear irks the man. Her ingratiating attempt to make it a
bit amusing is pathetic: “You frightened even the one inside me”. The night
raid on the sleeping village is another effective shot. Flickering points of
light dancing in pitch darkness orchestrated by sounds of shouting and
wailing actualize the numbing fear and terror of that experience for those
who have only heard or read about such atrocities.



There are other signs of the film-maker’s commitment to cinema as art. The
use of symbolism is one. Trees, water, the moon, light, darkness, and many
other details assume symbolic significance, which does not escape the
average discerning viewer’s notice. The film also uses such devices as the
flashback technique, contrasts, parallels, and juxtaposition in its
narration in order to highlight the relevant themes. All these invite the
creative engagement of the audience with what is projected onto the screen
by the director.



My ‘reading’ of the film is that it is mainly a criticism of the use of
children by the terror organization. Even when Kamalani’s self-immolation is
demanded, the equally pitiable but more outrageously exploited victim is
the unborn child (because, if it is merely a young woman they need for the
mission, any other young woman would do; but here Kamalani qualifies for the
mission because her pregnancy is an essential part of the camouflage, so
diabolically planned by terror agents).



To the terrorists children count for nothing except as conscripts. When they
get killed in clashes with the army, they are shown to the world as
innocent school children massacred by the army, not as heroic fighters who
have laid down their lives for a cause (even though they did so under
duress). That is, the terrorists exploit them even after their death for
propaganda purposes. So in my view, what is being held up for our
condemnation is not any identifiable political cause (right or wrong), but
the terrorists’ sacrifice of children on the altar of some political
ideology.



The young boy and the young woman playing the two central roles of
Prabhakaran and Kamalani respectively do a commendable job by bringing these
two characters alive for the film-goers in a convincing manner.



Therefore watching *Prabhakaran *should be a rewarding experience to many.



*Rohana R. Wasala *

In the Aftermath of the War on Terrorism ( an ordinary citizen’s perspective)

First published in Midweek Review, The Island, on Wednesday 18^th February 2009

The following is not a reply to any article or articles that appeared in this paper or elsewhere about the subject discussed. It is meant to represent my personal response as a Sri Lankan citizen to what I see as partisan reactions of certain members of the ‘international community’ and their local/native representatives who are alien to our way of thinking about the matter; these biased attitudes are evident in the local as well as foreign media.

A loud chorus of such spurious slogans and warnings as ‘amnesty’, ‘reconciliation’, ‘danger of triumphalism’, ‘need to address the grievances of the Tamil people’, etc., can be heard these days from certain brazen LTTE supporters, especially in the NGO fraternity.These dealers in charity of the NGO cartel are still trying to throw the few remaining terrorists a lifeline in order that they might live to resume their terrorism in the future so that there will be enough victims to justify the continuation of their business of raking in dollars among the international gullible in the name of charity. (The numerous genuine voluntary relief organizations sharing the same name are excluded from this general condemnation.)

If these elements talked about the need to treat the defeated LTTE members including their leaders in a humane way no one would object to that; but humanitarian concerns about the civilian population should have engaged their attention even before this. However, few of these spoke about them except when civilian concerns coincided with those of the terrorists. What is objectionable today is that foreign and local LTTE sympathizers try to pretend that the terrorists and the Tamil people are identical.

However, it is quite certain that no sensible authority, least of all the government under the wise and able leadership of President Mahinda Rajapakse, will fail to see through their false façade, and to treat their unsolicited advice with the cautious cynicism it deserves.

On the other hand, there is no doubt that the leaders of the present administration who are achieving a decisive military victory over terrorism amidst various constraints and restraints (the resistance offered by the local and international backers of the terrorists being not the least of these) will be equal to the task of managing the aftermath of the current successful humanitarian operations. They are sensitive to the yearning of the common people of this country for an early end to the terrorist problem followed by political and economic stability. The end of the LTTE terrorism must see the beginning of an era of economic prosperity and social well-being for the whole country.

We, the ordinary citizens of Sri Lanka, know better than any of our international mentors and their local mercenaries, what should be done now. As a democracy we are free to elect our rulers who will decide on a suitable plan of reconstruction and restoration for the North and the East. Already, vast development programmes have been launched in the East, and its civil administration as an integral part of the Sri Lankan state restored. Even though the liberation of the North from the terrorists cannot be said to have been completed yet, a reversal of the fortunes of the terrorists is not likely. Reconstruction and development work has already been initiated in the North with the instant repair of damaged roads and bridges, and the building of houses for the fugitive Tamil civilians fleeing LTTE captivity.

In Mr. Rajapakse we have a leader who has great empathy with the common people, and thinks like one of them. People of my generation, to which Mr. Rajapakse himself belongs, generally share a higher level of literacy than our parents as a result of the rapid expansion of state sponsored free education in the post- independence years under successive governments, and are sufficiently well educated and well informed to participate actively in a modern democracy by exploiting its various political institutions.

In addition to a general awareness of our democratic rights and responsibilities, we possess common cultural traditions that uphold altruistic, humane values.

The successful humanitarian campaign launched by the present administration under Mr. Rajapakse to liberate the people of the North and the East from mindless terror is about to end. The government’s resounding success at the Northwestern and Central Provincial Councils elections, that effectively became a virtual national referendum on its policy of following military victory with immediate tangible economic development of the liberated areas in dealing with the terrorist problem, is testimony to the people’s trust in the current stewardship of the President.

Though the LTTE and its Western dupes have always represented Mr. Rajapakse as a war monger, the truth is that he, like all his predecessors, gave the Tigers every possible opportunity to negotiate with the government, short of giving in to their usual stratagem of agreeing to peace talks only in order to gain a breather to recoup and rearm, and continue their terror campaign with renewed vigour. When Mr. Rajapakse seemed to initially dillydally with the military option (which probably was a part of his deliberate strategy), the Tiger leader in his imbecility put it down to his weakness.

The Tigers’ closure of the Maavil Aru sluice-gate (Mahaveli Amuna) which destroyed thousands of acres of lush paddy, thereby depriving the peasant population of the area of their age-old livelihood and, even of their drinking water was perhaps meant to provoke a military response from the government in the face of human misery; they must have thought that this would lead to a final showdown in which they hoped to defeat the armed forces, and establish their Eelam. But for them fate decided otherwise. They were well and truly beaten in the East, and then got holed up in the North.

The present ignominious lot of the erstwhile Sun God is to cower in a bunker to save his wretched life, surrounded by a human shield that he himself commandeered consisting of men, women and children, reluctantly relying on the strict policy of the country’s defence forces that they would not mount an attack on him if it could lead to indiscriminate civilian casualties.

Mr. Rajapakse left the doors open for negotiations even though the Tigers were being soundly beaten and confined to an ever shrinking piece of landlocked territory with no escape route, until he decided to ban the terrorist organization in Sri Lanka at the eleventh hour recently. The present predicament of the Tigers is of their own making; they forced the government’s hand.

All along we, the ordinary people, knew that the Tigers had to be defeated militarily if we were not ready to concede their demand for a separate state, which they consider non-negotiable, and that the LTTE never talked peace with the government in good faith. However, it was also clear to us that the government was not free to deal with the terrorists in the only way it would yield results because of outside meddling occasioned by our economic vulnerability. Misinformed by the Tamil diaspora and the NGOs largely controlled by the terrorists (who were mainly responsible for their coming into being) the Western governments, media, and other organizations discouraged the Sri Lankan government from resorting to the obvious solution. As a result, the country has had to pay a heavy price over a period of some thirty years in terms of human suffering and material loss.

The misplaced compassion and ill informed concerns shown by the international community and certain other elements , by their biased meddling in our internal affairs at this juncture, could similarly scuttle the Sri Lankan government’s genuine efforts to restore normalcy to our terrorism ravaged country.

The government has successfully called the LTTE’s bluff. This is something that the foreign and local friends of the terrorists cannot digest. The humane treatment of the terrorists themselves by the Sri Lankan government is only now being internationally acknowledged. The fact that the terrorists have been sustaining themselves on the food and medical supplies provided by the government for the civilians in the areas illegally held by the LTTE came to light only when they were forced to flee abandoning their posts in the face of the army onslaught. (The government agencies had sent more supplies than actually needed for the civilians because the government officers working in those areas were forced to furnish inflated civilian numbers at the behest of the LTTE, which wanted to create buffer stocks for their own use during their military campaign against the very government that fed them.)

The callous disregard of the Tigers even for the basic survival needs of the people they claim to protect is evident in the fact that they used rice-filled bags stolen from government stores to fortify their bunkers in the jungle while innocent Tamil civilians were left to starve. It is now being revealed that under the LTTE the Tamil civilians trapped in the areas they occupied have been living a life of abject misery. They shoot and kill Tamil civilians who try to escape to the government controlled areas. Children were forcibly removed from their parents under conscription orders by the LTTE; adults were used as forced labour in making earth bunds, trenches, moats, and bunkers. The Tigers have used the money they had collected from their supporters abroad and ostensible charities for smuggling in arms shipments, building clandestine airstrips in the thick jungle, and luxury bungalows for their leaders to live in clover. There is no sign of any new civilian housing having been built to be seen. Thousands of valuable trees have been felled to construct bunkers and training camps for the LTTE. Rails and electricity posts stripped from public utilities have been used for making military installations.

All these and other crimes of the LTTE are being exposed by our young journalists reporting from the battle front. I wish the diaspora Tamils, held to ransom by the Tamil terror activists abroad, had a chance to visit the North and see firsthand what the LTTE have done with the money they were forced to contribute for the separatist cause!

If this stark contrast between the humanity of the government of Sri Lanka and the inhumanity of the Tigers fails to convince our international mentors and ‘aid’ donors, the humane way the Sri Lankan armed forces have conducted their military operations against the LTTE over the past two and a half years may be referred to for further proof of that humanity. In spite of the fact that the terrorists launch their attacks from among the civilians, the army has always desisted from retaliatory fire. The terrorists have attacked the army from temples, churches, and hospitals No such building has been damaged by any deliberate retaliatory army fire. What the army usually does is to clean, and restore places of worship damaged and desecrated by the terrorists.

The implementation of the zero-civilian-casualty policy urged by the Sri Lankan President contrasts sharply with what is reportedly happening in Iraq and Afghanistan where the Americans are fighting their so-called anti-terror war. But since the thousands of civilian casualties caused in those places should perhaps be excused as mere collateral damage such a comparison may not be acceptable to our western advisors. Yet if the Sri Lankan armed forces did what the Israeli army did in indiscriminately targeting the Hamas militants mingled with civilians (ignoring the thousands of civilian fatalities), they could have finished off the Tigers overnight. We, as a nation, are averse to wanton killing like that.

Appointing biased individuals as special envoys (as the British wanted to do), or trying to impose their own ill conceived solutions on us (as the so-called Tokyo co-chairs did when they reportedly called upon the LTTE to accept the amnesty offered by the government and lay down arms, when in reality no such offer had been made by the Sri Lankan government) is not the best way to help the country at this critical moment. If they want to help us, let them do so by giving us substantial material help. At the same time it would be best if they allowed the Sri Lankans themselves to evolve their own solutions to their problems.

Rohana R. Wasala