This Divided Island review by Samanth

Subramanian Sri Lankas tragedy

An account of the civil war in Sri Lanka and its aftermath
is all the more devastating for withholding judgment

A Sri Lankan soldier walks among debris as the war with the Tamil Tigers came to a close. Photograph:
AFP/Getty Images

Amit Chaudhuri-Wednesday 13 May 2015

It is equal to living in a tragic land/ To live in a tragic time, said Wallace

Stevens in the poem Dry Loaf. It is about an attempt to portray a bucolic
scene That was what I painted behind the loaf,/ The rocks not even
touched by the snow while the exercise is transformed at every moment
by the incursion of history: It was the soldiers went marching over the
rocks/ And still the birds came, came in watery flocks,/ Because it was
spring and the birds had to come. In Samanth Subramanians excellent
account of the civil war and its aftermath in Sri Lanka, history encompasses
the people who lived through that tragic time, and the lands sole

function is to serve as that historys paradigm. Theres no getting away,

whether you find yourself in Canada or in a time of peace.
Subramanian is an Indian of Tamil ethnicity. Todays regrettable
recuperation of caste origins in India in the name of genealogy would
remind us that hes a Tamil Brahmin or, in the kitsch-sentimental language
of the new Indian elite, which both fetishises and constantly invents
pedigree, a Tam-Brahm. The Tam-Brahm, progeny of a priestly class, is
putatively a secular whizz-kid and achiever, although the upper-caste
inflection is never entirely renounced. And, indeed, Tamils have shone in
modern India: to take just one instance, Indias remarkable space
programme is powered by Tamil scientists.
In Sri Lanka, the Tamils did well, too through a quirk of colonial policy,
says Subramanian, which gave them unfair access to higher education and
key institutional positions. So, as is the case with ethnic minorities in other
parts of the world, they constituted that unfortunate group that once
benefited from the imperial practice of divide and rule. Still, how much of
the rise of the Tamils might be attributed to colonial history and how much
to their response to modernity isnt clear. Some of the Tamils success in Sri
Lanka must surely be the result of the innate and inherited skills that have
seen them flourish in the modern world. Might it have to do, partly (as in
India), with an upper-caste elite that possessed the ballast of an intellectual
history?
Subramanian doesnt tell us very much about the caste histories of
Sri Lankas Tamils. Whats clear from his book is how much they were
resented by the majority Sinhalese for their privileges. By the 70s, they
were being seen as outsiders by a majoritarian Sinhalese nationalism,
though Subramanian points out that a foundational Sinhalese Buddhist text,
the Mahavamsa, makes it clear that the Tamils had been in Sri Lanka for
a couple of millennia. As with German Jews four or five decades before (and
with those in Malaysia today who arentbumiputras literally, sons of the
soil), the educational and political rights of Tamils began, one by one, to be
curtailed. These developments engendered the utopian vision of the
founder-leader of the Tamil Tigers, Velupillai Prabhakaran that the north of
Sri Lanka be declared an eelam, a separate homeland for Tamils.
Prabhakaran was convinced there was no way the Tamils could achieve that
utopia without waging war.

Some of this lineage of deprivation and recrimination is confusing to the

naive outsider. For instance, the Sinhalese do not seem like a race of
underlings: they clearly have the robust and even aristocratic sense of
cultural identity that allowed Arjuna Ranatunga, the captain of the Sri
Lankan cricket team, to respond to Shane Warne with: We come from
2,000 years of history. We all know where the Australians come from.
Whos the we here? On the one hand, this might be an expression of
Sinhala arrogance. On the other, more plausibly, it could be a non-violent,
quasi-Gandhian rebuttal; one wonders, then, why rebuttal, rather than
retribution, featured so little in late 20th-century Sri Lankan politics. Was it
marginalised by the intransigence (as it appears from Subramanians book)
of both a new rightwing Buddhism and of Prabhakaran? One also wonders
about the intellectual formation of another superb Sinhalese batsman,
Kumar Sangakkara,probably the most articulate cricketer the world has
seen for a while, and his lofty, classically secularist proclamation: I am
Tamil, Sinhalese, Muslim and Burgher. Faced with two ethnic groups that
possess individuals with great leadership skills, courage and sophistication,
one can only speculate why Sri Lanka didnt have the kind of renaissance
that the southern parts of India did with globalisation. Success would have
seemed a truer destiny for it than the violent political impasse it inflicted
on itself until 2009, when the war ended with the crushing of the Tigers and
the death of Prabhakaran.
From 2011, Subramanian spent time in the locations in which the traumatic
events the Tamil word for them is prachanai, problem gathered
momentum; he effaced himself and patiently pursued the participants
with questions. He even went to Canada, and interviewed those who were
quietly resettled, including a fascinating and implausible subset of Tamils
who were officers in the Sri Lankan army. He suffered in the Sri Lankan
heat, which appeared to both slow him down and allow him to grasp,
as a narrator, the lack of fixity in the dichotomous narrative about the
Sinhalese and the Tamils he was aiming to tell us. Midway through the
book, he fell ill; recovering, he read, with that special blurry focus that
comes from being out of sorts, the Mahavamsa, in which he discovered the
mythic and minatory figure of Dutugemunu, a precursor to present-day
Sinhalese cruelty.

By now, the books reportorial tone has given way to a subterranean reality
especially characteristic of South Asian epics: that there are no firm moral
positions in a war between relatives. If the Sinhalese army was savagely
punitive, so was Prabhakaran (who believed in unquestioning fealty)
towards his own. This, suggests Subramanian, was essentially how he lost
the war, despite having, at one point, almost absolute control over
the north: because his pathological distrust of internal opposition, policy of
forced conscriptions and fundamental intolerance of democracy alienated
his constituency.
Nothing remains of Prabhakarans house now except the absence of
a house where a cat and a chicken were fighting at the back of a plot.
The crushing of the Tigers and the Tamils is captured by Subramanian with
exemplary concision; he himself seems unprepared for the impact the
survivors stories have had on him: They would lose their potency ... I had
thought at first ... But here they were ... Time had clarified memory, instead
of muddying it. These closing chapters are not so much testimonials as a
distillation of what it means to be defeated. The book leaves us with
a tantalising sense of the ambiguity of peace and victory: of the new and
incongruous conservatism of Sinhalese Buddhism. Subramanian withholds
judgment, but the precision of the final descriptions is searing.
Posted by Thavam