Remembering Rajani Thiranagama and Her Message

Jihan Hameed in FACEBOOK, June 2025 …. with highlighting added by The editor, Thuppahi

We Must Never Forget Women Like Rajani Thiranagama.

The cost of national betrayal is written in the blood of the brave.

In a nation drowning under political terrorism and foreign subversion, few stood with the moral courage to resist from within. Dr. Rajani Thiranagama was one of them. Her life, and brutal death reveal the ruthless nature of the very forces that have kept Sri Lanka divided for decades.

Born on 23 February 1954 in Jaffna, she was raised in a Christian Tamil family, the second of four daughters to Deputy Principal A. Rajasingham of Jaffna College. Rajani excelled academically, first studying at Jaffna College, then briefly at Chundikuli Girls’ College, before advancing to Colombo Medical Faculty in 1973. It was there that she crossed paths with Dayapala Thiranagama, a Sinhala Buddhist student leader from Kelaniya University. Defying every divisive boundary, they married in August 1977, demonstrating the possibility of unity beyond race, religion, and politics.

Rajani qualified as a doctor in 1978 and served in multiple hospitals, including Jaffna and Haldummulla. In 1980, she joined the newly established Faculty of Medicine at the University of Jaffna as a lecturer in Anatomy. For a period, her sister Nirmala, a member of the LTTE, drew her indirectly into proximity with the organization. She initially offered medical care to LTTE fighters, as many physicians did under local pressure during those years.

But exposure soon brought clarity. Rajani came to see not only the brutal nature of the state’s military actions but equally the authoritarian, sectarian extremism emerging within the LTTE’s own structure. The promise of liberation had mutated into a culture of assassination and control.

In 1983, she travelled to the UK for her postgraduate studies at Liverpool Medical School. From there, she simultaneously engaged in human rights advocacy, while also attempting to secure the release of her sister who was arrested under Sri Lanka’s Prevention of Terrorism Act. But she did not stop at criticizing only the state or external forces. Unlike many who selectively attack one side, she documented the full scope of violations, whether committed by the LTTE, the Indian Peace Keeping Force (IPKF), or state agencies.

Upon returning to Sri Lanka, she resumed her academic duties and co-founded the University Teachers for Human Rights (UTHR). Together with colleagues, she exposed both state and non-state atrocities, leading to the publication of her now famous co-authored work, The Broken Palmyra, a text that remains one of the few honest accounts of the North’s political descent into terror.

Her fate was sealed. On 21 September 1989, at just 35 years old, while returning home on her bicycle near her residence in Thirunelveli, she was assassinated by LTTE operatives. Her young daughters, Narmada and Sharika, were in the house when the shots rang out. Her husband, Dayapala, was in Colombo at the time. The final news of her murder reached him not through state channels but from a complete stranger who delivered the message personally — a moment he would later describe as the most devastating of his life.

Her funeral was held in Nallur on 25 September 1989, her daughters by her side. Her elder daughter Narmada now resides in the United Kingdom, while her younger daughter Sharika lives in the United States, married to Stanford anthropologist Thomas Hansen. In 2005, Sharika portrayed her mother’s life in the Canadian documentary No More Tears Sister.

In her final words, Rajani left behind not simply a personal reflection, but a prophecy of civilizational tragedy:

“One day some gun will silence me,

and it will not be held by an outsider,

but by the son born in the womb of this society,

from a woman with whom my history is shared.”

Her words echo far beyond her death. They describe the very sickness that continues to be weaponized by external actors: internal betrayal, cultivated to fragment the nation from within.

Rajani Thiranagama was not killed by foreign armies. She was eliminated by a proxy force, trained, funded, and strategically manipulated to destroy any Tamil voice that rejected extremism. Her story is not simply a personal loss. It is a case study of how ideological terror consumes its own, and how the international silence towards LTTE assassinations contributed to the long-term destabilization of Sri Lanka.

We do not mourn her as a victim. We record her as evidence. And in recording, we prevent her sacrifice from being erased.

THE NATIONALIST

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A NOTE by Michael Roberts, mid-June 2025

This essay is an exemplary composition: incisive in its messages and redolent with meaning. I do not know the author; I hail his messages. Sri Lanka is blessed to have such personnel as Jihan Hameed, Rajani, Dayapala, Rajan Hoole, Hilali Noordeen ….. and others.

ALSO NOTE

Palmyrah Fallen. Reflections on Rajani Thiranagama’s Legacy

Composing THE BROKEN PALMYRAH: Rajani Thiranagama’s Rigorous Oversight … and Her Insights