The Eelam War or the Sri Lankan Civil War was fought from 1983 to 2009, by the government of Sri Lanka and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (the LTTE), which aimed to create an independent Tamil state in the north and the east of the country. After a 26-year military campaign, the Sri Lankan military defeated the LTTE through heavy military measures in 2009. Hence, chronologically speaking, one may label Sri Lanka as a ‘post-war’ society. But the term ‘post’, while convenient, can also be problematic in its assumption of the complete closure of both war and ‘conflict’ and positive progress thereafter (Meegaswatta, 2017). The issue here is that although the ‘war’ had concluded, the underlying ethnic ‘conflict’ has remained in subtler forms largely due to the inability of political powers to address the grievances that led to the war in the first place and the absence of a mechanism for the traumatized communities to come to terms with the past violences. Hence, decades of violent warfare and continued ethnic tension have become a key thread in the fabric of the national consciousness. This, in turn, has rendered our experience of time palimpsestuous (Meegaswatta, 2020): any given point in time becomes a complex cross-section of the memories and narrative of the past, lived realities of the present, and anxieties and aspirations for the future. In a sense, the war and ethnic conflict had irrevocably shaped Sri Lanka’s past, is now shaping the present and, by extension, the future.
Contemporary Sri Lankan society evidences how both the past and future may bear on the lived reality of ‘now’ and attempts to re/imagine a nation in contexts of conflict. ‘Contemporary’ as it applies to Sri Lankan society is in many ways shaped by violent conflicts that has plagued the post-colonial Sri Lanka from its inception as a sovereign nation in 1948.1 Post-2009 Sri Lanka, especially, is possibly what Gellner (1983) would term as a “nation in transition” with communities confronted with painful choices of identity, territory and political allegiance in order to invent, reinvent or strengthen a national consciousness following decades of ethnic warfare (Meegaswatta, 2017). The legacy of the war has left a lasting imprint on the collective psyche of the population, shaping their consciousness and political choices in significant ways.
To elaborate, the bloody end of the Eelam war in 2009— a veritable threshold— has always been a ‘tool,’ with different factions trying to appropriate the narrative of war to the best political advantage. Since the conclusion of the war, the dominant political discourses in Sri Lanka have drawn heavily on the war ‘victory,’ especially in times of key elections. The former president Mahinda Rajapaksa won his first term in office (2005-2010) largely due to his promise to eradicate the LTTE. Then, in the first presidential election in post-war Sri Lanka, Rajapaksa effectively capitalized on the war victory, fashioned himself as a protective father figure to the nation who would guard against future threats (Schubert, 2016), rallied the majority around a vision of a sovereign nation on the path towards unhindered ‘development’,2 and won his second term in office from 2010 to 2015. His campaign also involved a re-claiming of precolonial ‘King’ status: in Sinhala Buddhist nationalist imagination, he was the reincarnation of King Dutugamunu, a potent symbol of Sinhalese power, renowned for defeating and grievances that led to the war in the first place and the absence of a mechanism for the trauma- tized communities to come to terms with the past violences. Hence, decades of violent warfare and continued ethnic tension have become a key thread in the fabric of the national conscious- ness. This, in turn, has rendered our experience of time palimpsestuous (Meegaswatta, 2020): any given point in time becomes a complex cross section of the memories and narrative of the past, lived realities of the present, and anxieties and aspirations for the future. In a sense, the war and ethnic conflict had irrevocably shaped Sri Lanka’s past, is now shaping the present and, by extension, the future.
Contemporary Sri Lankan society evidences how both the past and future may bear on the lived reality of ‘now’ and attempts to re/imagine a nation in contexts of conflict. ‘Con- temporary’ as it applies to Sri Lankan society is in many ways shaped by violent conflicts that has plagued the post-colonial Sri Lanka from its inception as a sovereign nation in 1948.1 Post-2009 Sri Lanka, especially, is possibly what Gellner (1983) would term as a “nation in transition” with communities confronted with painful choices of identity, territory and polit- ical allegiance in order to invent, reinvent or strengthen a national consciousness following decades of ethnic warfare (Meegaswatta, 2017). The legacy of the war has left a lasting im- print on the collective psyche of the population, shaping their consciousness and political choices in significant ways.
To elaborate, the bloody end of the Eelam war in 2009— a veritable threshold— has al- ways been a ‘tool,’ with different factions trying to appropriate the narrative of war to the best political advantage. Since the conclusion of the war, the dominant political discourses in Sri Lanka have drawn heavily on the war ‘victory,’ especially in times of key elections. The for- mer president Mahinda Rajapaksa won his first term in office (2005 -2010) largely due to his promise to eradicate the LTTE. Then, in the first presidential election in post-war Sri Lanka, Rajapaksa effectively capitalized on the war victory, fashioned himself as a protective father figure to the nation who would guard against future threats (Schubert, 2016), rallied the major- ity around a vision of a sovereign nation on the path towards unhindered ‘development’,2 and won his second term in office from 2010 to 2015. His campaign also involved a re-claiming of precolonial ‘King’ status: in Sinhala Buddhist nationalist imagination, he was the reincar- nation of King Dutugamunu, a potent symbol of Sinhalese power, renowned for defeating and grievances that led to the war in the first place and the absence of a mechanism for the traumatized communities to come to terms with the past violences. Hence, decades of violent warfare and continued ethnic tension have become a key thread in the fabric of the national consciousness. This, in turn, has rendered our experience of time palimpsestuous (Meegaswatta, 2020): any given point in time becomes a complex cross section of the memories and narrative of the past, lived realities of the present, and anxieties and aspirations for the future. In a sense, the war and ethnic conflict had irrevocably shaped Sri Lanka’s past, is now shaping the present and, by extension, the future.
Contemporary Sri Lankan society evidences how both the past and future may bear on the lived reality of ‘now’ and attempts to re/imagine a nation in contexts of conflict. ‘Con- temporary’ as it applies to Sri Lankan society is in many ways shaped by violent conflicts that has plagued the post-colonial Sri Lanka from its inception as a sovereign nation in 1948.1 Post-2009 Sri Lanka, especially, is possibly what Gellner (1983) would term as a “nation in transition” with communities confronted with painful choices of identity, territory and polit- ical allegiance in order to invent, reinvent or strengthen a national consciousness following decades of ethnic warfare (Meegaswatta, 2017). The legacy of the war has left a lasting im- print on the collective psyche of the population, shaping their consciousness and political choices in significant ways.
To elaborate, the bloody end of the Eelam war in 2009— a veritable threshold— has al- ways been a ‘tool,’ with different factions trying to appropriate the narrative of war to the best political advantage. Since the conclusion of the war, the dominant political discourses in Sri Lanka have drawn heavily on the war ‘victory,’ especially in times of key elections. The for- mer president Mahinda Rajapaksa won his first term in office (2005 -2010) largely due to his promise to eradicate the LTTE. Then, in the first presidential election in post-war Sri Lanka, Rajapaksa effectively capitalized on the war victory, fashioned himself as a protective father figure to the nation who would guard against future threats (Schubert, 2016), rallied the major- ity around a vision of a sovereign nation on the path towards unhindered ‘development’,2 and won his second term in office from 2010 to 2015. His campaign also involved a re-claiming of precolonial ‘King’ status: in Sinhala Buddhist nationalist imagination, he was the reincar- nation of King Dutugamunu, a potent symbol of Sinhalese power, renowned for defeating and overthrowing Elara, the usurping Tamil king South India in 205 BC. In this case, the people’s experience of the ‘national’ present3 is partially reinscripted by pre-colonial histories. Present is porous and clearly, the past too is in constant flux and is characterized by a certain recursivity that ensures histories remain present (Stoler, 2016). This fluidity and complexity perhaps stems from the nation’s vexed relations with the past which “…takes on strikingly different aspects depending on whether the referent is the pre-colonial or ancestral past, on one hand, or the traumatic pasts of the colonialism and conflict, on the other” (Samuelson, 2007), marks the nation’s temporal experience.
In further evidence, the current president Gotabaya Rajapaksa, who was the Secretary of Defence for his brother’s government, framed himself as the mastermind behind the victory against Tamil separatism spearheaded by the LTTE and then also presented himself as the warrior—wiruwa in Sinhala— that could save the country and its people from the clutches of Islamist extremism in the wake of the Easter attacks in April, 2019 that brought the simmering anti-Muslim sentiments in post-war Sri Lanka to a head and effectively redefined the enemy ‘Other’ for the Sinhalese majority in forceful terms.
He secured a landslide victory in the 2019 presidential elections buoyed by the votes of those anxious about the ‘future’ security of the Sinhala Buddhist nation in the face of Islamist extremism. After assuming office, he also touted the ‘tried and tested’ recipe for war victory to garner support for reforms that are repressive and undemocratic in nature.
This conveys how, time and again, fear and memories of separatism, terrorism, and violence have led the people to relinquish power to ‘strong man’ political leaders and parties4. It also demonstrates how much our present hangs on what the dominant narratives establish to be our past (in this case, how and why the Easter attacks happened, and how a similar terrorist threat was overcome in the past with Rajapaksa leadership). Clearly, the intelligibility of the ‘new’ nation imagined in the shadow of an aggressive hetero-patriarchal masculine ‘warrior’ figure is tethered to the countrys war-torn past and draws heavily on the future anxieties of a battered polity.
Thapar (2014) argues that if the past is called upon to legitimize the present, the veracity of such a past has to be continuously vetted. However, this ‘vetting’ or ‘judging’ would happen in a temporal context defined by mew realities. In a sense, it is not only the past that haunts the present—it is the other way around too. Upsetting the temporal timeline that we tend to take for granted, the present reaches back to alter the past so that the past actions, events, and narratives may cohere with the dominant narratives and ideological standpoints of the present time. Past then becomes fragile, alterable, and therefore a construct that may be tethered to the physical facticity of past events and action only tenuously (Meegaswatta, 2020; Scott, 2014). Consider how the actions that were once heroic, patriotic, and worthy could be reframed in line with changing political and legal frames of comprehension.
In the case of Sri Lanka, the increasing international pressure to investigate war crimes and human rights violations during and after the war and thereby ensure ‘transitional justice’ framed the past and the present in different terms. As “the full range of processes and mechanisms associated with a society’s attempt to come to terms with a legacy of large- scale past abuses” (UN, 2010, p.3), transitional justice provided a new, markedly less complimentary discourse to articulate the past (Meegaswatta, 2020; Scott, 2014). This, coupled with the fall of the neo-liberalist ‘soft dictatorship’ of President Mahinda Rajapaksa and the subsequent establishment of a west-oriented government in 2015,5 drastically changed the terms within which the past was articulated. The statist reading of the war victory that excluded all sorts of violations and violence and regarded the bloody and controversial conclusion of the war as a euphoric second birth subsided. In its place, alternative narratives that questioned the legitimacy of purpose and means of the victors surfaced in a way that would have been discursively impossible in the immediate aftermath of the war. The new narrative has involved a re-articulation or a remembering of the past within a political world shaped by a new discourse (provided by the processes and concepts of transitional justice and renewed focus on reparation and reconciliation) that “no longer admitted the legibility, much less recognized the legitimacy, of [ ] former political ambitions, [ ] former political languages, [ ] former political lives” (Scott,3
It needs to be acknowledged that this experience of the ‘national’ present inscribed with ‘heroic’ pre-colonial histories of Sinhalese kings would likely be ethnically demarcated. I would suggest here, cautiously (so as not to essentialize ethnicity and ethnic experience), that the temporal experiences of ethnic communities diverge, especially in the context of a protracted war an ethnic nature that concluded with a decisive ‘victory’ for one party. 4 Such political behavior has been observed to be a troubling trend in South Asia (Campbell, Ferdous, Mookherjee, & Widger, 2020). narratives may cohere with the dominant narratives and ideological standpoints of the present time. Past then becomes fragile, alterable, and therefore a construct that may be tethered to the physical facticity of past events and action only tenuously (Meegaswatta, 2020; Scott, 2014). Consider how the actions that were once heroic, patriotic, and worthy could be reframed in line with changing political and legal frames of comprehension.
In the case of Sri Lanka, the increasing international pressure to investigate war crimes and human rights violations during and after the war and thereby ensure ‘transitional justice’ framed the past and the present in different terms. As “the full range of processes and mech- anisms associated with a society’s attempt to come to terms with a legacy of large- scale past abuses” (UN, 2010, p.3), transitional justice provided a new, markedly less complimentary discourse to articulate the past (Meegaswatta, 2020; Scott, 2014). This, coupled with the fall of the neo-liberalist ‘soft dictatorship’ of President Mahinda Rajapaksa and the subsequent establishment of a west-oriented government in 2015,5 drastically changed the terms within which the past was articulated. The statist reading of the war victory that excluded all sorts of violations and violence and regarded the bloody and controversial conclusion of the war as a euphoric second birth subsided. In its place, alternative narratives that questioned the legitimacy of purpose and means of the victors surfaced in a way that would have been dis- cursively impossible in the immediate aftermath of the war. The new narrative has involved a re-articulation or a remembering of the past within a political world shaped by a new dis- course (provided by the processes and concepts of transitional justice and renewed focus on reparation and reconciliation) that “no longer admitted the legibility, much less recognized the legitimacy, of [ ] former political ambitions, [ ] former political languages, [ ] former political lives” (Scott, 2014, p. 5). However, the nationalist narrative of the war victory subsided only to resurface with fresh tenacity with the establishment of yet another Rajapaksa government in 2019. Hence, in the case of post- war Sri Lanka, Scott’s (2014) argument that “a distinctive temporality is always embodied in—while not being the simple mirror of—each imaginary of history” (p.7) holds true.
Such discursive shifts indicate that the temporal grounds of judgment concerning past con- flicts and political action constantly change. Clearly, the myriad of ways in which the past is remembered, recorded, referred to, and actively talked about is shaped by the contemporane- ous discursive boundaries—political or otherwise. Often, this is also in line with the demands of the nation; the imagined community or the construct of which the legitimacy and
existence5 The coalition government of United National Party (UNP) and a breakaway faction of the Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP) was established following the closely contested 2015 presidential election. Dubbed ‘Yahapalana’ (good governance) government, this coalition was largely seen as catering to the demands of the west under the leadership of Prime Minister Ranil Wickramasinghe, the leader of the UNP. requires constant cultural reinforcement (Anderson, 2001; Bhabha, 1994) especially during transitional periods following conflict. Consider how with conducive political changes, a dif- ferent imaginary of the nation became a possibility: the Report on Public Representations on Constitutional Reforms (2016) showed that a considerable representation of people through- out Sri Lanka viewed national reconciliation as an urgent requirement of the time, supported the democratisation of the state and the polity, and encouraged respect for diversity and plu- rality. This points to the imagining of a different collective identity and a consciousness that may have been largely dormant or supressed within the post-war traitor- patriot binary and majoritarian nationalist discourse.
What are the implications of such complex temporal intersections, especially for societies grappling with violent legacies? A population purposefully kept in the debilitating grip of en- mity and trauma has a disastrous impact on a society’s collective experience of ‘time’, its per- ception and configuration of past, present and future, and by extension, political choices and behaviours. Without political resolution, meaningful reconciliation, and cross-ethnic sharing of memory, narrative, and experience, the majority in a multi-ethnic, multi-religious society can easily be distracted and nose-led by political propaganda that targets shot-term power at the expense of long-term peace and well-being of the people. What is needed, then, is a past that is not rendered a pathological wound by vested interests, a present lived conscious of the fact that the past is a flexible narrative, and a future imagined in line with humane values.
REFERENCES
Anderson, B. (2001 [1983]). Imagined communities (1983). In V. P. Pecora (Ed.), Nations and identities: Classic readings (pp. 309-324). NJ: Wiley-Blackwell.
Bhabha, H.K. (1994). The location of culture. London, New York: Routledge.
Bryant, L. R. (2009). [Review of the book The Time of Our Lives: A Critical History of Temporality, by D. C. Hoy]. Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews. Retrieved from https://ndpr.nd.edu/news/the-time-of-our-lives-a-critical-history-of-temporality/
Campbell, B., Ferdous, R., Mookherjee, N. & Widger, T. (2020). Introduction to the BASAs 2019 special section, Contemporary South Asia, 28(3), 359-361, DOI: 10.1080/09584935.2020.1803214
Gellner, E. (2001 [1983]). Nations and nationalism (1983). In V. P. Pecora (Ed.), Nations and identities: Classic readings (pp. 292- 308). NJ: Wiley-Blackwell.
Jeganathan, P. (2000). A space for violence: Anthropology, politics and the location of a Sinhala practice of masculinity. In P. Chatterjee & P. Jeganathan (Eds.), Subaltern studies XI: Community, gender and violence (pp. 37–65). NY: Columbia University Press.
Meegaswatta, T. N. K. (2017). Unframing truths: the representation of gender in Sri Lanka’s post-war literature in English [Unpublished master’s thesis]. University of Colombo, Colombo, Sri Lanka.
Meegaswatta T.N.K. (2020). Temporality of History: A Reading of the Contemporaneity of the Past in Post-war Sri Lanka. Open University Research Sessions 2020. Colombo: The Open University of Sri Lanka.
Public Representations Committee on Constitutional Reform (2016). The Report on Public Representations on Constitutional Reforms. Colombo: PRCCR. Retrieved from ………………………. …………………………. …… constitutionnet.org/sites/default/files/sri_lanka_prc_rep-english-final.pdf
Samuelson, M. (2007). Remembering the nation, dismembering women? Stories of the South African transition. Scottsville, South Africa: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press.
Schubert, A. (2016). Warriors and fathers: war, visual culture and the complexities of con- structing masculinities after the end of Sri Lanka’s civil war, NORMA: International Journal for Masculinity Studies, 11 (3), 139-157. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/18902138.2016.1217691
Scott, D. (2014). Omens of adversity: Tragedy, time, memory, justice. Durham & London: Duke University Press.
Thapar, R. (2014). The Past as Present: Forging Contemporary Identities through History. New Delhi: Aleph Book Company.
United Nations (2010). Guidance Note of the Secretary-General: United Nations approach to transitional justice. Retrieved ihttps://www.un.org/ruleoflaw/files/TJ_Guidance_ Note_March_2010FINAL.pdf
*****
END NOTES
[1] Post-independence Sri Lanka experienced numerous political and ethnic conflicts; the most notable being the Leftist insurrections let by Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP) in 1971 and 1987, and Ethnic riots in 1958, 1977, and the Black July in the 1983— the event that produced a ‘profound rupture in the narration of Sri Lanka’s modernity” (Jaganathan, 2000, p.41)— and the subsequent civil war in the north and the east of the country and post-war ethnic clashes in 2014, 2018, and 2019 involving the country’s Muslim population.
[2] The rhetoric of post-war development subsumed more serious grievances of the Northern Tamils in the first five years after the war and almost constituted a post-war militarizing strategy.
[ 3] It needs to be acknowledged that this experience of the ‘national’ present inscribed with ‘heroic’ pre-colonial histories of Sinhalese kings would likely be ethnically demarcated. I would suggest here, cautiously (so as not to essentialize ethnicity and ethnic experience), that the temporal experiences of ethnic communities diverge, especially in the context of a protracted war an ethnic nature that concluded with a decisive ‘victory’ for one party.
[4] Such political behavior has been observed to be a troubling trend in South Asia (Campbell, Ferdous, Mookherjee, & Widger, 2020.
[5] The coalition government of United National Party (UNP) and a breakaway faction of the Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP) was established following the closely contested 2015 presidential election. Dubbed ‘Yahapalana’ (good governance) government, this coalition was largely seen as catering to the demands of the west under the leadership of Prime Minister Ranil Wickaramasinghe, the leader of the UNP.