Michael Roberts, 29 October 2011
Pic by Chandragupta Amarasinghe
The anti-Tamil pogrom of July 1983 in the southern reaches of Sri Lanka stirred me to the bone: generating anger and depression in alternate moods as I ruminated from a distance in Australia in the mid-1980s. Much later, when on study leave in Lanka in 1991, I picked up testimonies and tales about specific incidents of killing and threat during those dark days in Colombo, including one relating to the killing of Arumanaiyagam, a former young colleague.
When I flew from Katunayake to Charlottesville inVirginia for the second stage of my leave on a semester fellowship, it was in a particular mood that I sat in the planes and reflected upon that horrible occasion. The relative isolation of my quarters in Charlottesville suited that mood. It was there that I penned “The agony and the ecstasy of a pogrom: southern Lanka, July 1983” – a literary essay rather than a social science document, one that amounted to a personal statement of protest and anguish.
This essay eventually appeared in an anthology of my essays, namely, “The agony and the ecstasy of a pogrom: southern Lanka, July 1983,” in Roberts, Exploring Confrontation. Sri Lanka. Politics, Culture and History, Reading: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1994, pp. 317-27. An invaluable facet of this presentation was the inclusion of two photographs from the Tamil Times of November 1983 depicting mob scenes at Borella Junction on the night of 24/25th July 1983. Extracted from the poor reproductions in the Tamil Times, these photographs would have made a fastidious cameraperson squirm because they lacked sharp definition. But the definition was good enough to reveal striking content – content of the sort that would make viewers squirm because of the inhumanity of man-upon-man they revealed to all and sundry. Better versions of these pictures that are now reproduced within this post would already have bought this point home to readers. Continue reading →
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