Sivamohan Sumathy, courtesy of The Island, Monday, 18 Jult 2016 where the title is “On Silan Kadirgamar, Marxist, Humanist, Activist and Academic”
Silan Kadirgamar , lecturer, Marxist, non-Marxist, humanist, activist, and one of the founder members of MIRJE and its strongest voice in Jaffna, passed away last year on July 25th in the 81st year of his life. Recalling my memories of him, on the first anniversary commemoration, to be held in Jaffna on the 16th of July this year, and the subsequent conference on Social Justice and Post War North, which focussed on gender, caste and class, I am once again overwhelmed, as I was a year ago, about the loss of a generation of fearless women and men, who had been uncompromisingly on the side of a basic sense of humanity and stood up for what they thought right. My memories of him are deeply personal, going back a long way into childhood while my political alliance with him, in years to come, on many fronts, is shaped by that very same sense of belonging to an age and a space that was both personal and political: Jaffna College, Left politics, Tamil nationalism, militancy, the insular world of the JTCs ( Jaffna Tamil Christians) and the gossip that attended it, friends, family, murders, arrests, loss, human rights, love, light, laughter and loss.
