Jane Russell on Nationalist Extremism on Both Sides in the 1970s et seq

Jane Russell was a postgraduate student at the History Department, Peradeniya University, in the early 1970s and stayed on in Sri Lanka for two decades after completing her dissertation;[i] and left only because she was deported. I had lost touch with her till she popped up as a blogger adding some useful information about her interaction with Handy Perinpanayagam, the architect of the Jaffna Youth League in the 1930s, in response to Rajan Philips’s article on the JYL.[ii]

She also chose to add an informative comment in my masthead essay on “The Sinhala Mindset.” This comment is far too important to be buried in that arena, so it is given the spotlight here.

I also took the opportunity to ask Jane for more information on a critical piece of data she had supplied me then, circa 1973/74, an item that contributed to my conclusion THEN that Sri Lanka would probably ‘progress’ towards a severe conflict of the type seen in Cyprus, Lebanon and Northern Ireland. She responded by email so these two items are also tacked on here: namely, (A) the WHY and WHEREFORE of my query; and (B) Jane Russell’s detailed information. Michael Roberts.

JANE RUSSELL: Comment on The Sinhala Mindset

Thanks for your thoughtful and reasoned comments on the Sinhala mind-set with which I totally agree. However, it takes two to tango… the Jaffna (and to a lesser extent East coast) Tamils also have a similar mind-set. At their back they feel the power of 60 million or so south Indian Tamils who give them assurance that they too can turn a part of Sri Lanka (the north-east) into a whole — a Tamil whole. Thus we had the claims of 50-50 before independence (which many Sinhalese and Tamils understood to be 50% of Sri Lanka for Tamils and 50% for Sinhalese — it was not this at all but the slogan carried the idea that it might be). And later so many of the Eelamists produced maps showing almost half the land mass and even more of the coastline to be “Tamil homelands”. Even now so many Tamil fundamental nationalists claim that Negombo is a Tamil town. This is all just a fruitless foray into a political cul-de-sac down unresearchable paths of forgotten and probably bloody history: I personally and idiosyncratically believe that domesticated winged dinosaurs were used by Sri Lankan kings as virtual spy planes (launched from the huge cave at Ella) to fight off an army of gigantic dinosaur gorillas from south Indian invaders — which led to the whole Ravanna myth. But I’d never expect to turn such eccentric crankiness into a theory on which to build a modern nation-state… but both the Sinhala Buddhist fundamentalists and Tamil fundamental nationalists seem to dwell in the fields of fantasy best left to JR Tolkein and JK Rowling!!
(Once, while waiting for a CTB bus at Kurumbacciddy Junction in 1974, I saw a blackboard advertising a lecture by the then proto-LTTE which showed speedboats pulling the Jaffna peninsula across the Palk Straits and joining it to Tamil Nadu… ).

   Meanwhile, the real nation-building (including proper historical research) is kicked off the field by the loonies who can shout louder and sloganise more easily ….

    With best wishes and much sadness at so much blood having flowed under the bridge and still so few recognising what a waste of lives it has all been….

MICHAEL ROBERTS: Background for my Question to Jane Russell, dated 20 March 2012

The late 1960s and 1970s were a time of intellectual ferment in Sri Lanka. One site of discussion was the Ceylon Studies Seminar (CSS) at Peradeniya University. As a young lecturer in the History Department I had initiated a course on “Nationalism and Its Problems” in 1972 and was fully alive to the discontent among the Tamil middle class, especially the grievances associated with job prospects in the Sinhalacized administrative services, the gerrymandering of University-entrance requirements and the shortcomings of the 1972 Constitution. A conference on the 1972 Constitution was organised by the CSS at Peradeniya and featured both Professor A. J. Wilson and Bishop Lakshman Wickremasinghe if my memory serves me correct.

    Some of us directing the CSS felt the relations between the Tamil and Sinhalese sides of the political divide were in such serious strife that – at enormous logistical effort—we organised a whole day conference on “the Sinhala Tamil Problem” in Colombo so that we could exchange views with leading politicians and make at least a few of them aware of our concerns. Neville Jayaweera, V. Karalasingham and Bishop Wickremasinghe were among our speakers. Among those attending were Jane Russell and Janice Jiggins. So too was A. Amirthalingam. All three, incidentally, spoke from the floor within the limits imposed by a bell utilised by Mark Cooray as Chairperson.

    That session only deepened my pessimism. My feeling that we were on the path towards a severe conflict was encouraged by numerous little signs. One was provided by Jane Russell at some point in 1973-74. She spent a fair amount of time in the Jaffna Peninsula as a part of her historical researches. One day in Peradeniya she told me she had met some Jaffna youth who told her that their Tamil leaders in Colombo had let them down. As far as they were concerned, the Tamils in Colombo could die.

This was a vital clue. Some young Jaffna men had moved to the poles. There was, now, no restraint on the lengths to which they would go. I did not ask Jane for more information then. I respected the anthropological principle of privacy. What mattered was not which individual thought in this way but  WHAT the lines of thought were. This clue, amidst others, led me to craft an article in 1976 when ona fellowship at Heidelberg in Germany. It was entitled “Ethnic Conflict in Sri Lankaand Sinhalese Perspectives: Barriers to Accommodation.” As normal in the academic world, it appeared in print two years later in Modern Asian Studies, 12: 353-76. It is also availble in Roberts, Exploring Confrontation. Sri Lanka: Politics, Culture and History, Reading, Harwood Academic Publishers, 1994, chap. ten. Some of the material therein, and its reasoning, have entered my short piece “Sinhala Mindset” — so Jane Russell’s blog-comment has  brought us full circle in serendipitous fashion, even though the topic is hardly balmy.

Some 10-15 years later I asked Jane whether Velupillai Prabhakaran had been among the cluster of youth who expressed such a viewpoint. She said “No” and indicated that she did not think those who had expressed such views then in the early 1970s had gained prominence in the subsequent militancy. Now, in 2012, I was moved to ask her for more detail. So I sent her this email: “you told me then that some Jaffna youth told you: ‘as far as we are concerned the Tamils in Colombo can die.‘ Can you recall that chat and the type of youth who were voicing this opinion? Your recollections can be vital data.”

 JANE RUSSELL’s Response with Information, 21 March 2012

Dear Michael,

 What elephantine memories historians have!!

As to the points you mentioned: the Jaffna Tamils were far more caste minded than the Sinhalese when I first went there — they had what they called “first class villages,” which were villages where only the top band of the Vellala owned land e. g. Vaddukoddai; [while] the “second class villages” were adjoining villages where Vellala of the lower band could own land. An example of a first class Vellala was Sir Kanthiah Vaithianathan; whereas the second class Vellala were people like James Rutnam.

 I only know this because I was friends with Mahen Vaithianathan (Sir K’s son) and also James Rutnam. However, James did not like being called second-class Vellala so it was not something I ever wrote about as he was a good friend, a jolly person and a good historian. I forget the name of his ancestral village but it was close to Vadukkoddai and I can probably re-remember it if I look at a detailed map of Jaffna.

When I lived in Kurumbaccidy, I first stayed in the “first-class” section at one end of the village and then was offered a free house by a young mudalali at the other end of the village which had people either from a lower Vellala band or else a lower caste (I  use the term ‘lower’ only to describe the hierarchy — not as a value-judgement). The top end of the village had a Hindu temple with red stripes i. e. a Brahmin-run temple, whereas the temple at the other end did not have red stripes, was much smaller and they slaughtered goats there for certain rituals, which Brahmins would never do — so presumably there was pusari from a non-Vellala caste who conducted the rituals. 

My young and well-built landlord had married a very beautiful girl from a higher caste/band in south India (he had gone to Madras hoping to be film star and worked in the film studios as some kind of carrier of scenery etc) and she was totally shunned by her family and also very isolated within her husband’s family and therefore extremely unhappy. She used to come and unload her bucket of misery on me every evening along with a cup of coffee — it was all in Tamil and I only understood one word in ten, but I know it helped her to have someone to nod sympathetically now and then.

Mali and I once went to Jaffna with Mahen Vaithianathan (late 1976). We went to see land (about 3 acres) owned by his family in Manipay: they were growing vegetables there — onions I think and the caretaker who was a poor relation of some sort asked him for a gun: when Mahen asked why he needed it, he was told that it was shoot the “low caste buggers” who dared to come into the land, foraging for vegetables.

Their family also owned a large Dutch style bungalow on the beach at Velvedditurrai: it had been their holiday residence when the Vaithianathan’s were living in Vadukkodai in the 1900/19010’s and went by bullock cart for the Xmas and summer holidays. It was falling down and we slept on the verandah. Already the Karaiyar caste had come to totally dominate VVT and they had very expensive speedboats tied up at the back which they used to smuggle goods and people from south India. (Mahen was quite scared of them and we avoided any contact with them). The Karaiyar of VVT had a tradition of marrying girls from the Karaiyar caste in south India so they were able to go up and down to south India without visa/ customs etc problems and were in league with police on both sides of the Palk Straits.

It was from this community that Prabakharan came and his first recruits were all from VVT. They literally did have one foot in Jaffna and the other in Tamil Nadu … they were members of the Communist (China) Youth Wing which had been set up, motivated and propagandised by Shanmugunathan in the 50-70’s. The posters that appeared in VVT and adjoining areas within 24 hours of Mao-Tse Tung’s death showed excellent organisation — but hardly reflected the real political opinions of Jaffna which were deeply conservative.

The young guys who spoke to me and said that they were quite happy to see the Colombo Tamils all die if necessary were living in a chummery in Jaffna town. They were members of the proto-LTTE (this was in 1974) that is, Shamugunathan’s pro-China /pro-North Korea branch of Communism (I think Shan got funds from North Korea and possibly China to help with his recruitment and ‘education’ programmes). They were studying at one of the Jaffna boys’ schools or a tech college where you could do a foundation degree from a south Indian university/institution. They were most aggrieved that the points system instituted by the Muslim Minister of Education (Baduideen Mohammed) had effectively prevented Jaffnese students from getting into the university at Peradeniya or Colombo. If I remember aright, it was Pieter Keuneman (presumably more aware of Shanmugunathan’s doings than anyone else) who ensured that Jaffna got its own university before the United Front government collapsed in the late 70’s. However, it was too little, too late: 17 yr old Prabakharan murdered Mayor Duriappah in the Vellala Brahmin temple while he was worshipping in 1978(?) and put the LTTE on the map.[iii] It was such an outrageous thing to do — to violate the temple precincts in that way— that it changed Jaffna and Sri Lankan Tamil politics forever.  

 Another thing I found out much later was that the LTTE’s ideologue, Anton Balasingham, worked for the British High Commission as a Tamil translator long before the LTTE was thought of. He fell in love with a Sinhalese secretary there (a Karava girl from Moratuwa) called Rose. They married, but she died shortly afterwards and he blamed her demise on the Sinhalese nation (presumably there was prejudice from her family and friends about the marriage) and that fuelled a lot of his political views ever after. (There was a letter to the Sunday press about the affair by someone who had been a colleague of both at the BHC).

One last point while I remember: when I was studying at Jaffna College in Vadukkoddai, (1974 spring) there was a madman/seer who used to walk up and down the main street of the village: he wore only a verti – no banian or shirt but he spoke good English so he muist have been educated and presumably he was Vellala caste as he seemed to live somewhere around there. He was maybe 40 or 50 — difficult to tell with the mad — anyway, he used to shout at me as I went past on bike or walked to catch the bus and one day I stopped and talked to him — he was one of those nutters who walk at an incredible pace so I had to run to stay with him but he yelled at me that I was a spy come from Colombo to spy on the Jaffna Tamils and report back to Colombo about their doings which he warned me would very soon lead to them dropping bombs on Colombo……

I asked some local people about him but they laughed and dismissed him as a nutter whom no one took notice of  — but I think there was already something going on among the Jaffna youth and he knew something about it and others either ignored it as they didn’t want to think about it or else wanted to hide it from any outsiders like me ….. it reminded of a conversation I had over a bottle of arrack when I was with Janice Jiggins at Jaffna Resthouse with a couple of Jaffnese businessmen (August 1973) who were congratulating themselves on not having a Tamil youth rebellion like the Sinhalese had had with the JVP…. the LTTE drew I am sure far more inspiration from the JVP than anyone realised…. 

Addendum: A Comment by Jane Russell, dated 5 April 2012, to the masthead essay as response to a Note by “Chandre”

Hi Chandre,

Thanks for your comment and the chance to further explain.

What I was trying to say in my overall comment, of which you have extracted a small portion, is that there are absurdly unrealisable and positively dangerous options posited by extremists within the Sinhala Buddhist warrior camp as well as by the Tamil warriors of the LTTE et al which each camp then takes seriously and thereby can justify their equally crazy antithetical position. It is “50-50″ in terms of who can out-trump the other in going more and more into the realms of political fantasy. However, the victims of this assault on the rational instinct are the political moderates who understand that mediation and compromise is the only the way forward and also the civilians who are sacrificed to this warrior mentality.

The example you use is typical of the kind of impossible scenario sketched out by the LTTE to their less worldly followers as something that could be achieved. Equally, the Sinhalese who talked (and still do) of “sending back to south India” Tamils who refuse to “Sinhalise” — an attitude which played nicely into the hands of the warrior Tamil nationalists who were able to introduce the label of “ethnic cleansing” into the global debate and thereby gain useful support among the human rights lobby and media in the west – are either shooting themselves in the foot or deliberately provoking the Tamils to adopt an even more extreme position. Whether cock-up or conspiracy, it is bad for peace and reconciliation and that is what is required now.

Two generations of Sri Lankans have endured thirty plus years of civil war plus a nasty backhander from nature with the tsunami: at least the man-inspired misery can be ameliorated … but not if the Sinhala and Tamil warriors continue to dominate intellectual debate.

Michael Roberts: The Sinhala Mind-Set, December 2009

One of the fundamental problems facing Sri Lanka today has been an underlying current for some time. Let me present this argument first in abstract terms. I refer to a way of seeing the world that enables a PART to equate itself with the WHOLE and thus to subsume the whole.

In this insidious and yet powerful fashion the Sinhala part subsumes the Sri Lankan whole and provides one of the foundations for Sinhala domination. This attitude can be discerned in Anagarika Dharmapala’s writings. It underpinned the surge of political forces that effected the political transformation of 1956, challenged the primacy of English, made Sinhalese the language of administration and in the process placed the Tamil vernacular in a secondary position.

The 1956 ideology underpinned the triumph of the SLFP-led forces that brought Mahinda Rajapakse to power in late 2005. So, the recent defeat of the LTTE raises the possibility that the merger of whole within the dominant part of the population could poison the prospects of reconciliation.

I do not have the expertise to assess the degree to which such a mind-set prevails among the Sinhala-speaking people, both Buddhist and Christian. There are many persons of goodwill within the Sinhala community who are attentive to the needs of the present hour: a healing touch that is built on a genuine confederative ideology that sees the minorities as an integral part of the concept “Sri Lankan.” However, I do not know what political clout they carry or what proportion of the Sinhala-speaking problem are even aware of the part/whole relationship that I have set up as a PROBLEM.

If you do not consider something to be a problem, then you will not attempt to redress it. So, this little note is a consciousness-raising act. In parenthesis let me note that people who cannot read a text that runs to more than 250 words will not even get to the starting point of internal reform.

For an elaboration of this theme, also see Michael Roberts, “Some Pillars for Lanka’s Future,” in FRONTLINE, Volume 26 – Issue 12 :: Jun. 06-19, 2009 Volume 26 – Issue 12 :: Jun. 06-19, 2009. SEE http://www.frontlineonnet.com/fl2612/fl261200.htm