Sri Lanka’s Civil War and the Limits of Literature (New Lines Magazine)

https://newlinesmag.com/review/sri-lankas-civil-war-and-the-limits-of-literature/?fbclid=IwY2xjawQp1JBleHRuA2FlbQIxMQBzcnRjBmFwcF9pZBAyMjIwMzkxNzg4MjAwODkyAAEeDZqyVIN0AHCijMr-iQteSwT3V5fraLBCy746268jDg63wcQb6ei38_QCBFY_aem__JkkfbwbxNDPVZLAcGZUiQ

Sri Lanka’s Civil War and the Limits of Literature

As new mass graves are exhumed in the country, a veteran journalist who spent years with the Tamil Tigers asks what it means for a narrative to be complete

Shyam Tekwani

Shyam TekwaniShyam Tekwani is a faculty member at the Daniel K. Inouye Asia-Pacific Center for Security Studies and a former photojournalist

January 19, 2026

Sri Lanka’s Civil War and the Limits of Literature
A solitary figure stands beneath a tree in northern Sri Lanka after a firefight between Tamil Tigers and the Sri Lankan Army in the 1990s. (Shyam Tekwani)

The refugees came quietly, careful not to disturb the world they were leaving or the ghosts already waiting on the other shore. They clutched bundles; bread or babies, it was hard to tell. The men carried only fatigue. The children’s eyes were large, hollowed by sights they would never describe. They had abandoned their homes, and soon even the names of those places would vanish. There were no declarations, no banners, only boats: small, splintering craft rowed through the narrow waters between Jaffna and the forgotten villages of Tamil Nadu. The Palk Strait is not wide, yet on those nights it seemed endless.

For 26 years, from 1983 to 2009, Sri Lanka had been the stage for a long annihilation, between a Sinhalese-majority state and the Tamil rebels of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). What began as grievance hardened into ideology, then into siege. The civil war was not the longest of our age, nor the largest, yet few conflicts have left such a dense and divided silence in their wake.

And that is how it began for me. Not with the noise of artillery, but with the silence of oars dipping into black water. The Tamil refugees crouched on the planks, pressed shoulder to shoulder, whispering prayers, exhaling fear. No one wept; there was no point. I sat where they sat, smelled the same fear, and when the wind shifted, the same blood. The sea carried more than the living.

From the boats I drifted into the camps, and from the camps into the forests. At first I moved with a ragged constellation of groups: ideologues with unread manifestos, boys with slogans but no weapons, exiles rehearsing a return already lost. I watched their dreams rot in the heat until they vanished, absorbed or destroyed, leaving only the Tigers. And so, in time, I moved with the Tigers, exclusively. They, at least, had mastered survival. Years later, when the guns finally fell silent at Nandikadal Lagoon in May 2009 and the state proclaimed victory, nearly 100,000 had been killed. Many more disappeared into euphemisms: “operations,” “counterinsurgency,” “rehabilitation,” “relocation,” “missing in action.” Villages vanished, cities were shelled and generations grew knowing only suspicion. The world looked away, mistaking exhaustion for peace.

Beneath the architecture of reconciliation, the war persisted, in memory, in language and in the policing of grief. The victors built monuments; the bereaved were smothered in silence. The question of truth, always deferred, has since returned from the ground itself.

A family holds up photographs of a relative who never returned. (Shyam Tekwani)

In Chemmani, a small town near Jaffna, the cultural heart of the Tamil Tigers, the earth stirs. The soil, long compacted by denial, yields its dead, with bones rising where silence once held dominion: a woman’s anklet, a child’s button, the curved glass of a bottle meant for a hand that never grew. The accidental discovery last summer of a new mass grave with 19 bodies, including three infants, only confirms what was always known, what survivors whispered through the years. Each exhumation reopens what peace concealed.

This is not closure, but history refusing burial. The graves are not archives, but indictments, an argument against forgetting. What was buried did not decay. It waited, stubborn as guilt, for its unearthing. The war never ended; it merely changed depth. Beneath asphalt and rhetoric lies a dark seam the living agree not to see. What tribunals could not name, the soil now mutters — breaking through the language of reconciliation, reminding us that amnesty without truth is merely postponement.

Like many who arrived with notebooks or cameras, I told myself I was bearing witness. I stayed too long to remain untouched, and not long enough to claim anything other than fragments. And fragments rarely tell you what they mean. They stay with you, not as images, but as questions. The war scattered stories as wind scatters ash; what remains cannot be retold, only inhaled. What endures is no ledger of events but a fogged window, smudged by distance, politics, betrayal and shame. The writing that followed, from generals, diplomats and journalists, was too tidy. It either justified or avoided. Some thundered. Some whispered. Each attempt to narrate faltered. Most evaded the truth. But what refuses to be written is often where the war still lives.

Chemmani is not a revelation. It was here in 1996 that the body of Krishanthi Kumaraswamy, the schoolgirl who had been gang-raped by members of the Sri Lankan Army, was recovered along with those of her mother, brother and a family friend. Lance Cpl. Somaratne Rajapakse, who was found guilty of the rape and murder, alleged at his trial that up to 400 people had been buried in mass graves in Chemmani. A 2017 Amnesty International report estimated that up to 100,000 people disappeared in Sri Lanka during the war.

The same earth that once swallowed the disappeared now exhales them. From that disturbed earth, I ask what happens when the instruments of truth — journalism, history, photography — reach their limits. When what can be verified falters at the threshold of what must be imagined, literature becomes not escape, but evidence. The work of writing is not to conclude the war, but to chronicle its persistence, quietly, beneath our feet.

There are things I witnessed that I have not written. Others I could not. And still others that remain untold because they cannot yet be risked. Some I wrote before I understood what I had seen. That uncertainty remains. Wars like this one do not end when the shooting stops. They continue in stories, in silences, in the faint, terrible suspicion that no one ever saw the whole of them. Sri Lanka’s war, like photographs, still develops in the dark.

On 18 May 2009, the Sri Lankan government declared an end to the war, which in its final phase killed up to 40,000. Thousands of civilians were killed and many more displaced. The war ended not in triumph but in something closer to abandonment. No treaty was signed, no surrender declared. At Nandikadal Lagoon, where the last bodies fell, the final image was not a flag raised in victory but a corpse in the mud. He died barefoot, bloated not just by water but by history. Velupillai Prabhakaran, architect of both fear and fidelity, his mustache, once iconic, reduced now to hair on a corpse. Around him, the last circle of bodies. And yet he remained, not as martyr, not as monster, but as something more complicated: the liberator who caged his people, the strategist who misread the endgame, the revolutionary who outlasted the revolution. The cause that bore his name burned beside him. Truth, too, was exiled: driven from the dispatch and buried in metaphor. Eelam — the independent Tamil state to which he aspired — was a dream he dared, and drowned. In the cracked mirror of memory, he is not the man who created the Tamil homeland, but the one who destroyed it. History belongs to the victors, but memory belongs to those who remember what victory destroyed.

What followed was not peace but choreography: victory day parades, presidential decrees, the language of healing but none of its labor. The silence that emerged was not the hush of rest but a silence legislated, patrolled and praised, a quiet that hummed with the electric tension of unspoken threats, the faint scent of stale cigarette smoke from the watchtowers. Mourning became sedition; inquiry, a threat. The war, having ended, could no longer be mentioned. And in that erasure, a different violence took root.

Every nation writes its wars backward, into something righteous, into heroism. But Sri Lanka buried the writing itself.

Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) leader Velupillai Prabhakaran. (Shyam Tekwani)

From the beginning, the media — Sinhalese and Tamil, Indian and international — was complicit in prolonging the war through absence, partisanship and a hunger for the byline that advertised proximity. Indian journalists wrapped themselves in flags: national, regional, linguistic, posing as neutral while carrying bias in their back pockets. Others shadowed the military, hopscotching from front lines to hotel bars, harvesting headlines under escort. Editorials mirrored Delhi’s mood. Western correspondents arrived like weather fronts: sudden, loud and gone, departing with a quote, not context. What emerged was not a record of truth but a collection of myths, set adrift from the facts they claimed to represent.

As battle lines hardened, so too did the narratives. Like their Saigon forebears, most correspondents worked the war from the 5 o’clock press briefings by Indian envoys in Colombo, imperious in bearing, colonial in posture, and nicknamed “viceroys” by Sri Lankans and foreign press alike. Assigned to write the first draft of history, they moved like looters through the ruins of testimony, their fingerprints smudging every shard of truth they collected. Beneath it all lay a deeper betrayal, not only of accuracy or detachment, but of intimacy: the failure to stay. Conflict became a credential, a line in the bio, a story rehearsed over drinks, an anecdote polished until the war itself seemed a backdrop for performance.

From their hotel balconies, they surveyed the war like a landscape: visible, containable, almost picturesque. They saw everything except the humidity of fear, the weight of breath before a door is knocked at midnight. One wrote with the assurance of having found the war’s pulse, speaking of “columns of soldiers, bayonets like needles of light.” I remember only columns of smoke, needles of bone. His prose marches; mine limps behind it, uncertain of its direction, unwilling to keep pace.

There were a few who slipped through the checkpoints and went north, sleeping on church verandas, writing by the glow of a half-broken lamp. Their notebooks smelled of mildew and sea salt. They wrote not of geopolitics but of the hush that follows shellfire, the moment when even the crickets fall silent. Those rare pages remind me still what witness sounds like when it no longer seeks to report, only to remain.

LTTE fighters guard the Jaffna Fort, overlooking the lagoon, a strategic approach contested during the severe fighting for control of Jaffna city. (Shyam Tekwani)

If the journalists failed to capture the war’s intimacy, the generals refused to even acknowledge it. The most curiously detached accounts came from Indian generals themselves, those who arrived under the flag of intervention and departed with the language of command. “Assignment Jaffna” by Lt. Gen. S. C. Sardeshpande (1992), “IPKF in Sri Lanka” by Lt. Gen. Depinder Singh (1992), and “Intervention in Sri Lanka” by Maj. Gen. Harkirat Singh (2007) render the war in a clipped operational grammar: missions, maneuvers, misunderstandings, glimpses of turf battles between diplomats and commanders. In state-licensed Sinhalese history, certainty prevails. Maj. Gen. Kamal Gunaratne’s “The Road to Nandikadal” (2016) narrates a precision campaign, a clean war in which there are heroes and villains and history ends at the lagoon. His map is tight, his memory exact; the Tamil dead register not as grief but as collateral. The account is too proud of its coherence, too indifferent to what had to be erased to achieve it. This is the architecture of all state-sanctioned memory: It is founded on erasure. Even in postwar Sinhalese journalism, distance lingers. The war appears as tragedy, yes, but as shared abstraction, not culpability; sadness without stain.

One exception is “A Long Watch” (2016) by Commodore Ajith Boyagoda, a naval officer captured and held for eight years by the LTTE. His memoir does not thunder with vindication. He writes not from command but from captivity. His reflections dwell in stillness: on friendship, patience, the blurred line between enemy and fellow prisoner. He does not defend; he does not deny. In this, his watch becomes a form of witnessing: unresolved, strangely generous.

Sri Lankan military units at an Independence Day rehearsal along the Galle Face Green shoreline in Colombo, February 2024. (Shyam Tekwani)

Yet there came others who chronicled: those who watched from safer distances yet felt the moral weight of what they recorded. Frances Harrison’s “Still Counting the Dead” (2012) gathers testimonies of Tamil survivors — doctors, students, mothers — whose voices arrive like aftershocks. Timelines blur. Symmetry breaks. There is only pain. In “The Seasons of Trouble” (2014), Rohini Mohan follows those trying, often vainly, to live again, tracking surveillance, fear and disappearances rewritten as data. Her journalism does not trust normalcy. It listens to the background hum of dread.

Nirupama Subramanian’s “Sri Lanka: Voices From a War Zone” (2005), Gordon Weiss’ “The Cage” (2012), and Samanth Subramanian’s “This Divided Island” (2015) stand as careful, necessary works, bearing witness to the conflict’s devastating erasures and the nation’s struggle with memory. Nirupama offers a mosaic of lives across communities. Weiss delivers a concentrated account of the war’s harrowing final phase. Samanth travels a postwar landscape to capture the scattered voices left behind. Yet their witnessing, however meticulous, remains bounded by departure. They could leave; those they wrote about could not.

And yet, where words falter or are forbidden, another kind of witness emerges, one that speaks not in syntax, but in light and shadow.

A photograph promises witness, but in war, witness is never clean. The camera arrives too late to prevent, too early to grieve, and always just in time to claim. In Sri Lanka, the lens was many things: evidence, weapon, trophy, threat. Some images became icons, others vanished; most were never seen. The Tigers knew how to stage. Cadres with rifles against jungle backdrops, smiling girls with cyanide capsules, funeral salutes frozen in militant grace — these were not records but declarations. They instructed memory. The state curated its own theater: aerial shots of bombed bunkers, white flags ignored, bodies blurred just enough to escape the charge of atrocity.

There were images taken from behind rebel lines: cadres barefoot in the undergrowth, rifles held without tremor, eyes trained just past the frame. Boys and girls, still children, faces set in expressions they had not yet grown into. The jungle was a backdrop, deliberate but not false. The cyanide capsules gleamed like pendants. One frame caught a woman crouched beside a small bundle, cloth-wrapped, impossibly small. Her face was turned away. Behind her, streaks of blood ran across the floor, a trail of what had been dragged and could not be named.

Another has a dog pulling at the body of a man whose face no longer held shape, viscera spilling from a ruptured belly. It revealed everything but explained nothing; too sharp, too clear. Perhaps that is what made it unshowable. Its clarity left nothing to interpret. Still another came from above: In the shrinking geometry of the No Fire Zone, aerial shots mapped tents and shelters like debris folded into the coastline. Bunkers erupted like fossils. Each frame insisted, withholding as much as it revealed. What it captured was not so much truth as trust, granted briefly and strategically, and always with a predetermined narrative.

I, too, raised a camera — sometimes out of instinct. The urge came when I realized the world believed nothing — nothing that didn’t fit inside a frame. Yet there were moments when I lowered the lens, ashamed not of what I might capture, but of what it meant to capture at all. The problem with war photography is not that it fails to tell the truth; it tells too many truths at once. Each image carries the gaze of the photographer, the pain of the subject, the distance of the viewer, the appetite of the archive. The image asks to be seen — and punishes the seeing. What is remembered is not the moment, but the framing: the boy running, the mother screaming, the fire caught midflame; iconic, consumable, unbearable in the abstract. But never in full. You never hear the silence after the click.

The image outlives the witness and the wound, until what remains is no longer pain but choreography, endlessly rehearsed in the archive. The same photograph is reused in report, rally, denial: cropped, captioned, stripped of doubt. Some images never leave the darkroom, not because they are flawed but because we are. To print them would be to admit what we saw, and what we did not stop. For the light they hold is not merely illumination, but exposure — of the moment, yes, but also of the one who chose to keep it. And that, perhaps, is the cruelest thing an image can do: make the unthinkable tolerable by making it still.

There is no innocent frame. Even the most honest photograph has edges; it excludes, arranges, decides what light will touch and what it will leave in shadow. And sometimes, in war, the shadow is where the truth resides. In the years since, the archive has multiplied: official, informal, algorithmic. Diasporas trade montages of martyrdom; governments release victory slideshows, social media feeds recycle suffering into pixelated loops: crying children, charred vehicles, armed men in slow motion. The photograph becomes both evidence and echo, repeated until it loses its urgency, kept until it loses its name.

And what of those who took the pictures and never shared them — who buried the roll, deleted the card, pressed the shutter and then folded the image into silence? Their restraint is not forgetfulness but another kind of testimony: one that refuses clarity, that understands the difference between revealing and releasing. Not every photograph must be shown. Some must remain in the dark, not because they are hidden, but because they are still grieving.

Garlanded portraits of fallen LTTE fighters at a remembrance event in Batticaloa in 2005, part of the July 5 Black Tigers Day commemoration for the LTTE’s elite suicide commando unit. (Shyam Tekwani)

While some observed from afar, others could not look away and wrote from within the fracture itself. Tamil authors such as Rajani Thiranagama, Rajan Hoole and Daya Somasundaram write with unflinching intimacy. Their works, “The Broken Palmyrah” (1990) and “The Arrogance of Power” (2001), refuse resolution. Memory, they warn, does not fade when suppressed; it festers. Thiranagama, co-author of “Palmyrah,” was gunned down by the Tigers — not for betrayal but for refusing their script. The same unease pulses in N. Malathy’s “A Fleeting Moment in My Country” (2012), a quiet, searing account from within LTTE-administered zones. It is not a memoir of loyalty but of ambivalence. She lingers in the bureaucratic horror; briefings, burials, disappearances folded into the day’s routine. Her war is not exceptional; it is procedural.

Sharika Thiranagama’s “In My Mother’s House” (2013) listens not for heroism but for rupture, for violence across families, generations and villages. She writes as an anthropologist and daughter of the war. The LTTE, once a symbol of resistance, becomes in her telling a machinery of silence, a sculptor of fear. Her work is not about battles but about households emptied of sons, neighborhoods where memory itself becomes a risk. Her question is not how one survives war, but how one survives the future it destroys.

Some voices spoke not after but during. Adele Balasingham’s “The Will to Freedom” (2001), “Women Fighters of the Liberation Tigers” (1993) and “Liberation Tigers and Tamil Eelam Freedom Struggle” (1983) were written from within the machine they glorified. In her pages, the LTTE is not merely justified; it is generative. Women fighters become symbols; deaths are folded into doctrine. What haunts is not what she writes but what she withholds: doubt, regret, fracture. “Malaravan’s War Journey: Diary of a Tamil Tiger” (2013) is different. A young cadre, barely out of adolescence, he writes in a minor key, observing the weight of a gun, the ache of a wound, a glimpse of forest between ambushes. He died before the book could be published. His voice remains unpolished, unclaimed, unretouched, not a testimony of conviction but of consequence: how a boy becomes a fighter not from zeal but from absence of choice.

So nonfiction, for all its documents, falters. Tamil voices remain cautious, broken, because speech still courts danger. Sinhalese voices remain outward, tidy, because speaking plainly might rupture peace. Between them stands the global journalist, translating wreckage into story. Nonfiction offers a frame, a chronology, but this war does not move in time; it lingers like grief.

Adele Balasingham, Australian-born leader of the LTTE’s women’s wing, photographed in the 1990s. (Shyam Tekwani)

When the record falters, imagination takes over, seeking the truths that exist not in events, but in their lingering stains on the objects and gestures of ordinary life. Fiction understands what nonfiction cannot: that war marks the furniture, dulls the language, alters the way a mother cups her son’s face, as if bracing for his absence. It sees that grief is not something to describe, but something to survive. Fiction does not explain. It asks how war hollows the ordinary: sleep, love, memory, language.

Michael Ondaatje’s “Anil’s Ghost” (2001) remains foundational. It does not dwell on the machinery of war but on what the war erases: bones without names, truths that resist closure. A forensic anthropologist gathers evidence, but the more she exhumes, the less she understands. The novel sinks into the fog of aftermath, where knowledge unravels and certainty disintegrates under heat and time. Facts accumulate, yet understanding recedes, as if knowledge itself were being buried anew.

That lesson returns in Chemmani, where the soil again releases its dead. The graves are not literature; they are fact. Yet they read like fiction because they resist closure, echoing precisely what Ondaatje foresaw: that evidence may mount while meaning dissolves.

Shehan Karunatilaka’s “The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida” (2022) emerges from this landscape of unresolved truths as a dazzling, disquieting reply. It proposes a fantastical answer to the question of what happens to those who vanish, or to facts that refuse record. Its protagonist, Maali Almeida, a spectral war photographer navigating an otherworldly bureaucracy, has only a few “moons,” a Buddhist-inspired purgatorial time, to ensure his hidden photographs are revealed. The novel’s progression — fragmented, nonlinear, laced with acerbic humor — mirrors grief itself: recursive, uneven, disloyal to order. Through Maali’s journey, Karunatilaka shows how truth, once buried, finds unconventional routes to the surface. The surreal afterlife he imagines, populated by victims of violence, becomes a searing indictment of corruption, division and the complicity of silence. Some truths in Sri Lanka cannot be told conventionally. They require the audacity of fiction, even the supernatural, to inhabit the horror and demand acknowledgement.

Shobasakthi’s “Gorilla” (2001) and “Traitor” (2003) speak in the broken voice of one who once believed. A former child soldier turned novelist, he spares no one; not the Tigers, not the diaspora, not himself. His fiction is rough, obscene, wounded, yet thrumming with reality. “Gorilla” is brutal: war enters the protagonist’s life not as cause but as hunger, beatings, uniforms. Shobasakthi’s war does not elevate the Tamil struggle; it exposes its inner rot. Memory here is not inheritance; it is scar tissue.

In “Brotherless Night” (2024), V.V. Ganeshananthan brings the fracture inward. Her narrator, a young Tamil woman drawn into the Tigers’ orbit, recounts not a war of glory but one of collapse. The novel unfolds like memory: halting, circling, burdened by grief and impossible choices. Ganeshananthan does not paint the LTTE as villain or victim; she refuses clarity. To remember one’s people is not to absolve them. This is a distinction fiction is uniquely equipped to make.

Language itself bears the scars. Sinhala imposed by decree. Tamil encrypted to survive. English, hovering between, is neither refuge nor weapon, but a mask that lets many speak without being heard. Tamil fiction clings to the body: the missing brother, the slippers by the door. Sinhalese fiction, when it appears, often mourns the nation. One reaches for myth; the other endures through memory. One seeks meaning, the other survives what meaning cannot hold.

Nayomi Munaweera’s “Island of a Thousand Mirrors” (2016) braids myth and memory — a Sinhalese girl, a Tamil militant — refusing single allegiance, staining both sides with pain. Violence lands not as abstraction but as bruises on schoolgirls, as blood on kitchen tiles. Munaweera offers no reconciliation, only damage: shared, inherited, unfinished. In her pages, even belonging is barbed.

In “The Story of a Brief Marriage” (2016), Anuk Arudpragasam collapses time into sensation. His war has no battles, only breath; the feel of washing another’s body, the texture of touch amid annihilation. In “A Passage North,” the war has ended, but grief metastasizes. His narrator wanders not through ruins but through numbness. Stillness becomes a kind of reckoning. Arudpragasam does not write with outrage; he writes with silence.

Even the diaspora murmurs. Characters in Minoli Salgado’s “Twelve Cries From Home” (2022) carry the war in syntax, in absence, in silence. Her fiction does not document; it mourns. It does not clarify but clouds; it does not resolve but reverberates, like names the tongue begins yet cannot finish. Its narrators contradict themselves, not in error but as method. They falter, stammer, leave the sentence open; not for lack of language but because closure would betray the war’s unfinished breath. And in doing so, they come closest to its lingering truth: not what happened, but what remains in the marrow of those who survived it.

Shell-damaged buildings in Jaffna, which had been battered at different times by the Sri Lankan Armed Forces and the Indian Peace Keeping Force. (Shyam Tekwani)

Fiction, having spoken where fact could not, now drifts into the dust of remembrance. What remains is not story but residue. And then, there is July: not a date, but a negative held too long to the light, overexposed, unfinished, recurring at the edges of thought. A scar across the map, a terrain of recurrence, a wound that loops rather than heals.

July 1983: Black July, when the veil first tore. July 1987: Martyrs’ Day, commemorating the Tamil militant known as Miller, the first suicide bomber, and the day of the signing of the Indo-Sri Lanka Accord, an agreement that promised peace and delivered occupation. July 2001: the attack on Bandaranaike Airport, fire lighting the runways.

A litany of violence, anniversaries without peace, a tremor beneath the ground. Each July means something different, depending on the ash, the anthem, the absence, on which barricade you stood behind, or which door was kicked open in the night. For some, it is the month of martyrdom. For others, betrayal. Commemoration becomes geography. The ground itself changes meaning, and mourning becomes a minefield. To walk through it is to risk detonation.

To read Sri Lanka’s war is to read across shards: to read diagonally, across genres, across denials. We must listen diagonally, too: the general’s precision beside the deserter’s doubt, the satire of Karunatilaka beside the forensic ache of Ondaatje, the fury of Shobasakthi beside the steady anthropology of Thiranagama, the stillness of Harrison beside the fracture of Hoole. Even now, the war continues: pixelated, portable, repackaged. Even captions carry allegiance. In diaspora blog wars, WhatsApp forwards, YouTube montages where subtitles do the work of revision, TikTok tributes cut to mournful music and militant pride, memory circulates in pixels, its half-truths traveling at the speed of light: distortions untethered from fact, but no less capable of injury.

Future texts may come from daughters of the disappeared, from sons of soldiers grown old in silence, from poets who no longer translate their sorrow into English. They may come from the hands of archivists collecting rain-stained documents, half-burnt letters, schoolbooks with blood at the corners; the silence behind bulldozers. Among the stories withheld are those we withhold from ourselves. Some stories will arrive as photographs, uncaptioned, misfiled, stained with someone else’s fingerprints.

Perhaps this is the final honesty the war demands: to admit that narration will never be whole, that justice may never be named in time, that literature, too, has limits. It cannot bring back the dead. It only teaches us how to sit in their absence, quietly, like one sits in a room where grief has just left, but the dust has not yet settled. And memory, refusing to close its eyes, continues to look back. It does not ask to be named, only to remain, like the faint outline of a photograph never brought to light.

And somewhere in Chemmani, the dust does not settle; it shifts, bone by bone, as if the earth itself were breathing, holding within its breath the hush that the undeveloped photograph still holds in light, like water remembering the weight of the bodies it once carried.

Podcast: Bitter Leaves: Women Workers in Sri Lanka’s Tea Plantations (Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung, South Asia)

Ahead of International Women’s Day, we speak with Menaha Kandasamy of the Ceylon Workers Red Flag Union in Sri Lanka.

Tea from Sri Lanka reaches cups around the world. But the workers behind it—most of them women—continue to face low wages, unsafe conditions, and the long shadow of a colonial plantation system.

In this episode, Menaha discusses the workers’ tribunal on plantation labour, the challenges of organizing in the estates, and why international solidarity still matters.

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/bitter-leaves-women-workers-in-sri-lankas-tea-plantations/id1800994126?i=1000753517934

Press article – “Tamil Elites May Call the NPP ‘Old Sinhala Nationalism in Disguise,’ but Ordinary Tamils See a Progressive Force” — Jayadeva Uyangoda (The Morning)

Interview of Professor Jayadeva Uyangoda in Jaffna Monitor

https://www.jaffnamonitor.com/featured/tamil-elites-may-call-the-npp-old-sinhala-nationalism-in-disguise-but-ordinary-tamils-see-a-progressive-force-jayadeva-uyangoda

Jayadeva Uyangoda, Professor Emeritus of Political Science at the University of Colombo, is one of Sri Lanka’s leading scholars on ethnic conflict, peace processes, nationalism, democracy, and leftist politics. Before becoming one of the country’s most influential political scientists, Uyangoda had been briefly involved with the early Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP) movement founded by Rohana Wijeweera and was imprisoned after the 1971 uprising.

A former activist with a Ph.D. from Colombo, he has spent decades dissecting Sri Lanka’s post-independence political struggles—majoritarian ethnocracy, civil war legacies, militarization, and the rise of populist forces—while advocating pluralist, class-sensitive paths toward reconciliation and genuine democratization.

His landmark recent work is the two-volume Democracy and Democratisation in Sri Lanka: Paths, Trends and Imaginations (2023). Through incisive academic analysis and public commentary, Uyangoda has emerged as a principled left-liberal critic of both Sinhala and Tamil elite nationalisms, arguing that ethnic justice must be intertwined with broader social emancipation in South Asia’s most fractious democracy.

This is his exclusive interview with Jaffna Monitor.

The JVP led two violent insurrections in 1971 and 1987–89 that resulted in the deaths of tens of thousands of mainly Sinhala youth, many of them killed by the state’s security forces. Today, the NPP governs the very police and military institutions that once hunted and destroyed the JVP. How do you explain this transformation—from insurgent movement to custodian of the state? Is it comparable to other revolutionary movements’ transitions into democratic politics, or is it fundamentally different because the JVP never underwent a genuine political or moral reckoning with its violent past?

Revolutionary movements are almost always guided by visions and projects aimed at capturing and exercising state power. Some have succeeded through revolution itself. Many of them have been nationalist in character, others socialist, and still others religious-nationalist.

The JVP’s path to political power has been long, protracted, and tortuous. There were two attempts to capture state power through armed uprisings, both of which proved extremely costly. After the failure of the revolutionary path, the JVP gradually explored the peaceful and electoral route to power. That transformation itself took a considerable amount of time.

There are several historical examples of revolutionary movements that have successfully transformed themselves into parliamentary parties and become part of the political mainstream. One well-known case is Sinn Féin, closely associated with the Irish Republican Army in Northern Ireland. The armed struggle against British rule there had a long history spanning more than 150 years. The conflict formally came to an end in 1998 with the Good Friday Agreement between the British government and the republican leadership. In the years that followed, Sinn Féin contested elections, won seats in the Northern Ireland Assembly, and became one of the principal governing parties. Today it is widely regarded as a legitimate and respected political force.

A second example comes from South Asia, specifically Nepal. The Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) led a guerrilla war against the monarchy. Following the UN-mediated peace accord in 2006, the Maoists entered parliamentary politics, won national elections, and formed a coalition government with other left-wing parties. Led by Pushpa Kamal Dahal, the Maoists governed Nepal twice. However, after embracing parliamentary politics and moving into the political mainstream, the Maoist movement gradually lost much of its radical socialist fervour and came to resemble a conventional political party. This transformation involved politically and ethically costly compromises, as former rebels became part of a parliamentary system long troubled by corruption and transactional politics. For some observers, Nepal’s Maoists provide a sobering example of how the institutional pressures of parliamentary politics can reshape revolutionary movements.

There are several additional examples from Africa and Latin America. The African National Congress in South Africa, the Sandinista National Liberation Front in Nicaragua, and the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front in El Salvador all followed comparable trajectories. In South Africa, for instance, critics argue that after the death of Nelson Mandela, sections of the ANC leadership lost much of their liberationist vision and became associated with corruption and the pursuit of power. Many senior figures and mid-level cadres were seen to have undergone what critics described as “bourgeoisification.” In Nicaragua, too, elements of the Sandinista leadership were widely perceived as succumbing to the temptations of power and wealth, while democratic ideals became increasingly marginalized. Most of these examples suggest that ex-rebel movements that have taken the risk of joining the political mainstream should be cautious of the trap of de-radicalization.

Sri Lanka’s own experience also offers examples. Several Tamil militant groups that entered mainstream politics after the Indo-Lanka Accord followed a similar trajectory of political degeneration. Some of them became aligned with rival factions of the Sinhala ruling class—particularly the Sri Lanka Freedom Party and the United National Party—in exchange for cabinet positions and other material benefits. In the end, their pursuit of power and patronage undermined their political credibility and largely ended their relevance.

The JVP therefore carries a historically significant responsibility: to prove itself an exception to this pattern—to demonstrate that a former revolutionary movement can enter parliamentary politics without abandoning its founding ideals. The JVP leaders appear to be aware of the crucial need to avoid the political and moral costs of de-radicalization.

The JVP’s transformation also has a distinctive history. In many countries, revolutionary movements enter parliamentary politics through negotiated peace agreements mediated by external actors. Such agreements usually involve the surrender of weapons, the dismantling of armed units, the reintegration of fighters into civilian life, incentives to join mainstream politics, and security guarantees.

By contrast, the JVP’s decision to enter parliamentary politics in the early 1990s was taken unilaterally by its new leadership. There were no formal conditions imposed by the Sri Lankan state or by any external mediator to shape its post-insurgency trajectory.

In that sense, the JVP’s case is unique. Its shift toward democratic politics was a voluntary and autonomous decision. There was no negotiated peace settlement, no security guarantees, and no institutional process such as a Truth and Reconciliation Commission to facilitate public acknowledgement of past violence by all parties involved.

Yet these absences should not diminish the significance of the JVP’s decision to enter democratic politics without external pressure. It is also worth recalling that its leaders have, on several occasions, expressed regret about the violence of the past. One example is the speech delivered in Parliament by Bimal Rathnayake during the debate on the Batalanda Commission Report. His remarks, which appeared to draw inspiration from figures such as Nelson Mandela and Barack Obama, were widely seen as morally persuasive.

A contrasting experience can be seen in Tamil insurgent organizations such as the Eelam People’s Revolutionary Liberation Front, People’s Liberation Organisation of Tamil Eelam, and the Eelam People’s Democratic Party, which entered mainstream politics after the Indo-Lanka Accord under political and security guarantees provided by both the Indian and Sri Lankan states.

The key question now concerns the kind of democratic politics the JVP intends to pursue. The party has pledged to cleanse democratic institutions and political processes of corruption and authoritarian control, and to free Sri Lanka’s democracy from its illiberal and authoritarian constraints. No other political party in Sri Lanka has undertaken—or even claimed to undertake—such an ambitious and difficult task.

 

 

 

You have argued that Sri Lankan democracy operates through what you call “authoritarian constitutionalism.” The NPP came to power promising systemic change, yet now governs within the same executive-presidential framework and relies on coercive laws such as the PTA and proposed PSTA. Can a government realistically reform a structure from which it derives power, or will it reproduce the same authoritarian patterns as its predecessors?

If a government believes that the constitutional source of its power is morally flawed, even if it remains legally valid, it has the authority to alter that source of power and derive both legality and legitimacy by establishing a new constitutional order. The question you appear to raise is whether the NPP government will choose to do so. It certainly possesses both legal and moral authority, derived directly from the people through the most recent presidential and parliamentary elections. But does it have the political will? That, perhaps, is the real question.

Personally, I am also puzzled by the government’s apparent reluctance to abrogate the existing Constitution and substantially revise the Prevention of Terrorism Act (PTA) within the framework of the rule of law and a more advanced system of procedural democracy. At this stage, I can only offer speculation, speaking as a political commentator.

My speculative thesis is as follows: The NPP government has a transformative agenda. It is not a revolutionary agenda. Nor is it merely reformist, as has been the case with most of the governments we have had in the past. Transformation represents a stage of change that lies between reform and revolution. Policy reforms are adjustments that introduce relatively minor changes and usually generate only mild resistance in society. By contrast, transformative efforts by a government to remake the familiar order through drastic systemic changes can provoke sustained resistance, particularly from those who have benefited from the old system. Even corrupt and inefficient systems of governance produce their own beneficiaries, who will resist any attempt to alter the rules of the game. The resistance of the guardians of the ancien régime can be unpredictable and may even turn violent in one form or another. When the contradictions between the old and the new order sharpen, what will ultimately be at stake is state power. Instinctively, the NPP leadership must be aware that it may have to prepare for an open confrontation between the old and the new political classes.

You have argued that resolving Sri Lanka’s ethnic conflict requires Sinhala society to recognize Tamil political agency, not merely offer administrative decentralization. The NPP promises Provincial Council elections but avoids discussing enhancement of the 13th Amendment, while its Sinhala-Buddhist support base includes strong currents historically opposed to devolution. Taken together, does this indicate that the NPP is not truly prepared to offer meaningful power-sharing to Tamil areas? In your view, is the party fundamentally willing to devolve political power to Tamils, or does it still interpret the Tamil question primarily as a class or economic problem rather than an ethnic and political one?

In my view, a new phase of dialogue toward a constitutional settlement must begin, given that a new government—one that claims to represent a break from the policies of previous administrations—is now in power. Tamil political leaders, however, appear to expect the NPP government to continue the same negotiation framework they had established with earlier Sri Lankan governments, the old ruling class, and the Indian state, leaving little independent political agency to the NPP leadership. Labelling the NPP as merely “another Sinhala government” reflects a sense of political impatience and despair, and it risks sending counterproductive signals both to the government and to the Tamil people.

What is urgently needed is direct engagement between the NPP government and Tamil political leaders to explore a genuinely new beginning—to develop a new political vocabulary capable of enabling meaningful and productive dialogue, and to inaugurate a new discourse within which a constitutional settlement can be imagined beyond the limitations of the traditional devolution framework, toward the deepening of democracy.

Let me offer one example of the limitations of the much-venerated devolution framework as a starting point for fresh thinking about a democratic solution to what has long been understood as Sri Lanka’s ethnic problem. It is time to recognize, even if belatedly, that ethnic problems do not necessarily have purely ethnic solutions, as Tamil nationalist politics has often assumed for decades. This is a fundamental lesson drawn from the experiences of many other societies. What is required instead are democratic solutions capable of reconciling nationalist aspirations for regional autonomy with the demands for political, social, and class emancipation of ethnic minority communities.

In Sri Lanka, a democratic solution to minority ethnic grievances has often been imagined as one that enables regional minority elites to emerge as regional ruling classes. This approach overlooks the aspirations for political recognition, representation, and self-rule among smaller regional and local minorities. Almost all provinces—including the Northern, Eastern, Central, and Western provinces—contain not only regional majorities but also regional and local minorities, whose identities are shaped by both ethnic and social differences.

Viewed from this perspective, conventional models of devolution appear increasingly inadequate, as they fail to address the sovereign rights to political equality and representation of smaller and dispersed minority communities within provinces and districts. In other words, a genuinely democratic solution to Sri Lanka’s ethnic question requires deep democratic alternatives. This calls for revising our political vocabulary itself: moving from federalism to deep federalization, from devolution to deep power-sharing, and from decentralization to genuine local democracy. Empowering local communities of ordinary citizens is as important as elevating regional elites to positions of authority.

You have shown how the old left (LSSP and CP) abandoned its internationalist principles by accommodating Sinhala nationalism in the 1950s–70s, and how it failed to develop a serious theoretical engagement with Tamil nationalism—often dismissing it as false consciousness or elite manipulation. Colvin R. de Silva’s shift from “two languages, one nation” to endorsing the 1972 Constitution symbolized this collapse of anti-chauvinist politics. The NPP/JVP is now the first left government since that era. In your view, is it repeating the old left’s historic pattern of subordinating minority justice to majoritarian politics, or has it genuinely broken from that legacy? And on what grounds should Tamils believe that this time will be different?

There is continuity as well as a break. The nationalist turn of the JVP in the 1980s has a parallel with the shift of the Left toward Sinhala nationalism during the 1960s and early 1970s. From the very beginning, the JVP’s ideology also contained an element of mild nationalism, which at the time was described as ‘patriotism.’ Many Left movements in colonial and post-colonial societies contained this element of mild nationalism, based on the argument that nationalist movements could play a progressive role in struggles against imperialism and colonial capitalism.

While the Old Left deserves to be critiqued for its capitulation to the Sinhala nationalism of the SLFP, we must not ignore the Left’s seminal contribution to advancing a powerful discourse on ethnic minority rights since the 1940s and again after the late 1970s. In the past, the Left was an influential political and ideological force in the North, shaping several generations of Tamil political activists and intellectuals who were committed to the ideal of socialist equality beyond narrow ethnic identity politics.

My answer to your question is that, under the present leadership, the JVP and the NPP have made a break from their Sinhala nationalist past. You may have observed that this shift began to become evident after Wimal Weerawansa—who was the JVP’s Sinhala nationalist voice at the time—left the party and joined Mahinda Rajapaksa’s camp. That split was obviously the result of a major internal debate between two tendencies regarding the JVP’s ideology and political path.

You might also recall some of the excellent speeches Anura Kumara Dissanayake made in Parliament defending the rights of Tamil people living in Colombo, when Gotabaya Rajapaksa, as Defence Secretary, initiated a campaign of forcible relocation targeting Tamils who were living in or visiting the city. That period marked a moment when the JVP, perhaps under new leadership, began to shed its Sinhala nationalist politics and move toward embracing the politics of pluralism.

It was also during this period that JVP and TNA parliamentarians began to initiate dialogue and even develop personal friendships. In my view, the JVP is now a changed political entity—changed in terms of its leadership, ideology, political orientation, and overall political project.

My suspicion is that Tamil nationalist political actors among the elite, along with sections of the Tamil diaspora, will continue to label the NPP as merely a continuation of its old Sinhala nationalism under a new disguise. However, non-elite and ordinary Tamils appear to have begun to see the NPP differently—as a progressive Sinhala political force that brings together the politics of ethnicity and social class.

The time has come for all of us to recognize that ethnic and class politics—or identity politics and social justice politics—can no longer be approached as two separate paths to political emancipation. In my view, this is also the message the NPP seeks to convey to the Tamil and Muslim communities, particularly in the North and East.

You have argued that class politics in Sri Lanka cannot be separated from ethnic identity. Yet the NPP’s economic platform emphasizes anti-corruption and efficiency rather than addressing how economic marginalization overlaps with ethnic geography. Does this suggest that left politics in Sri Lanka must subordinate class analysis to ethnic accommodation?

 

There was a time when the Left politics subordinated ethnic politics to class politics, particularly after the Federal Party was formed to advance its federalist demand. It was a Tamil Marxist theoretician of the LSSP, V. Karalasingham, who wrote the famous pamphlet The Way Out for the Tamil Speaking People of Sri Lanka in 1962. In that essay, comrade Karalisingham argued that the federalist demand came from the ‘Tamil bourgeoisie’. He characterised federalism as a reactionary demand that would divide the Sinhalese and Tamil working masses and drive them away from class politics which alone could bring true emancipation. On that basis, he also defended the unitary state model.

However, after 1972, there was a shift in the position of some radical sections of the Left to argue that the Left should support the evolving struggle of the Tamil people for resolving the national question by accommodating their demand for self-determination. The Nava Sama Samaja Party, LSSP( R), Revolutionary Communist League and a number of other Trotskyite groups, openly defended the right of the Tamil-speaking people for self-determination. This was the key demand of the TULF after it was formed. I also began to share this position around 1975-76 when I was still in jail as a JVP political prisoner.

Meanwhile, I had the opportunity to have brief political conversations when I was in jail with some young Tamil political activists about their politics. I think Kasi Anandan from Batticaloa was one among them. That was also the time when I began to develop the idea that class and ethnicity are co-present and intertwined in Sri Lanka’s anti-systemic and progressive politics for change. Later on, after 1977, my conversations with Kethesh Loganathan and some of the founders of the EPRLF and EROS enabled me to see how the Left had a role to play in bringing class politics to Tamil nationalist politics.

After I was released from jail, I openly supported the TULF and the radical Tamil demand for the right of Self – determination. I wrote newspaper articles supporting the demand for self-determination rights of the ethnic minorities. I was also influenced by Lenin’s position on this issue. Mr. Amirthalingam even quoted me when he gave evidence before the Sansoni Commission to make the point that even the Sinhalese intellectuals support the just demands for national rights by the Tamil political parties. ‘Ethnic politics has no ethnic solutions; it can only highlight ethnic grievances. It needs democratic and social justice solutions.’ This is the formula I apply to the present stage of Sri Lanka’s debate on the ethnic problem as well.

Amidst these developments, and reflecting on the rise of the LTTE-brand of ethno-nationalist politics and its parallels in other societies, I began to re-think and revise my position on nationalist politics as a whole.

I share the revised Left position, which can be stated as follows: class politics without ethnic accommodation runs the risk of becoming majoritarian in multi-ethnic, plural societies. Similarly, ethnic accommodation without class analysis abandons the oppressed masses to the mercy of capitalist and professional elites who have a narrow and patronising world view on issues of justice, rights and equality.

The NPP has embraced IMF restructuring despite its historical anti-imperialist rhetoric. Is this pragmatic adaptation to global capitalism, or does it reveal that the JVP’s socialism was always more nationalist than Marxist?

I have a very different reading of the issue you raise. The NPP did not come to power through a socialist or nationalist revolution promising a complete, radical and immediate break from the past. Nor is it a radical socialist party. Rather, it is a progressive reformist party that has assumed power through peaceful parliamentary means.

The NPP leadership appears to have chosen a path that avoids open and hostile confrontation with domestic capitalist classes, global capitalism, or its institutional structures. The government’s economic and foreign policy directions seem to be shaped by pragmatism, rather than by ideological adventurism in the name of radicalism.

My assessment is that the NPP leadership envisions remaining in power beyond a single term, operating within a democratic framework while gradually implementing its transformative agenda. This approach appears to emphasize patience, caution, and strategic prudence, particularly in managing resistance and emerging threats from the ancien régime.

You describe Sri Lanka as having undergone “violent state-making,” producing a powerful military-security apparatus. The NPP inherits a highly militarized state. Can a civilian government realistically subordinate the military and intelligence services, or have these institutions become autonomous political actors?

Transforming a national-security-oriented and ethnocratic state into a democratic state in the aftermath of civil war is an extraordinarily difficult, complex, and high-risk undertaking. It is far easier to articulate such a transformation in theory than to achieve it in practice.

With regard to your second point, the management of civil–military relations in post-war Sri Lanka is considerably less complicated than it was during the years of armed conflict. Sri Lanka’s traditional political establishment, which has since lost power, nevertheless maintained a system in which the military remained firmly under civilian political control. The National People’s Power (NPP) government must preserve this tradition of civilian oversight while gradually demilitarizing the state through the strengthening of democratic institutions and processes. Ultimately, a resilient democratic system remains the most effective safeguard for the protection of democracy itself.

Regarding your final question, the Sri Lankan military has not historically emerged as an autonomous center of political power, even during the war years. However, the conflict did significantly enhance the military’s bargaining power in its dealings with successive governments. The political rift between the Rajapaksa leadership and former Army Commander Sarath Fonseka can be interpreted as a moment that revealed tensions associated with a possible shift toward greater military influence in the political sphere.

It is therefore fair to say that the military has evolved into an important stakeholder in Sri Lanka’s national security decision-making structure, possessing its own ideological perspectives and strategic doctrines regarding national security. Unfortunately, there has been little meaningful public dialogue between the military and civilian experts in security studies on these critical issues. In my view, the military’s national security doctrine should be subject to open scrutiny, examination, and critique by civilian security specialists, the media, and political actors. Such engagement is essential for strengthening democratic accountability and informed policy-making in the sphere of national security.

 

The military continues to control land, businesses, and infrastructure in the North and East, yet the NPP government has made no visible moves to reverse this. Does this reflect a fear of military backlash, or an acceptance of militarization as a permanent feature of governance in Tamil areas?

My knowledge of the current ground situation in Jaffna on this specific issue is somewhat limited. However, it is clear that demilitarization in Jaffna remains an enormously challenging task for any Sri Lankan government—unless the military itself becomes a coalition partner within the governing political framework.

During Mahinda Rajapaksa’s presidency, for example, there existed something close to a civil–military partnership even after the war had ended. Yet that partnership effectively reinforced a process of continued militarization rather than reversing it.

In my view, meaningful demilitarization in Jaffna—and more broadly within the Sri Lankan state—will require the emergence of a new generation of military leadership as well as new generations of both Sinhala and Tamil political leadership. For now, it appears that society will have to wait patiently for such changes to take shape.

Paradoxically, it is also possible that a radical socialist transformation could produce even greater militarization in places like Jaffna. What may be required instead is a left-liberal government in Colombo working alongside a left-liberal Tamil political leadership in Jaffna.

I realize that this assessment may disappoint many of my Tamil nationalist-liberal friends, but the political realities surrounding demilitarization are far more complex than they are often presented.

 

You have written that Sinhala society has not fully confronted the violence committed in its name during the war. Why has this reckoning not taken place? What social or institutional barriers prevent moral and historical accountability?

To my knowledge, the only society that has confronted large-scale violence from its past in a systematic and meaningful way is South Africa. That experience was made possible by a unique historical moment. South Africa had the African National Congress led by a remarkable humanist, Nelson Mandela, and the Methodist Church guided by another extraordinary moral figure, Bishop Desmond Tutu.

Together, they created the moral and political conditions that made the Truth and Reconciliation process possible. But such moments are exceedingly rare in human history. They depend on a convergence of leadership, institutions, and social readiness that does not occur often.

In that sense, South Africa remains an exception rather than a rule. It was, in many ways, a historical wonder. And wonders, as we know, do not repeat themselves very often.

Large numbers of people disappeared during both the 1987–89 JVP insurrection (mostly Sinhala youth) and the northern war (mostly Tamils). Yet the NPP appears far more vocal about JVP-era victims than about Tamil disappearances. Does this reflect an unequal moral recognition of suffering across ethnic lines?

President Anura Kumara Dissanayake, Minister Bimal Rathnayake, and several other leaders of the National People’s Power have, on a number of occasions, expressed solidarity with Tamil victims of the civil war and with their families. I recall hearing President Dissanayake, in a speech delivered in the North, speak passionately about how the NPP identifies both with militant Tamil youth and with the victims of the war as fellow victims of state violence.

However, it appears that such expressions of solidarity may not have been made frequently enough to leave a lasting impression in the collective memory of Tamil victims of state violence. Another possibility is that these messages and events have not been communicated effectively to the Tamil public.

What continues to intrigue me is the apparent weakness of the NPP government in political communication with minority communities. At times, the leadership also seems to underestimate the crucial importance of ideological engagement while in power. Even a counter-systemic political movement that has come to govern cannot afford to neglect the ideological arena. The struggle over ideas and narratives remains central, even — and perhaps especially — when a movement transitions from opposition to government.

 

How can a Tamil with a moral conscience come to terms with the fact that the JVP—which actively supported the war that led to the deaths of thousands of Tamils—has now emerged as a major political force in Tamil-majority areas?

I think this is, to some extent, an elite-driven question. It implicitly assumes that ordinary Tamil citizens who have voted for the NPP lack a moral conscience. In reality, the moral economy of ordinary citizens often contains a strong element of pragmatism and practical wisdom, enabling them to make political judgments shaped by their lived experience and by what one might call the political unconscious of their own class.

In that sense, your question reminds me of Their Morals and Ours by Leon Trotsky, which reflected on how moral reasoning operates differently in political struggles.

At the same time, there is another dimension to the issue you raise—one that concerns political conscience. It is a difficult and uncomfortable problem that many political actors in Sri Lanka, both in the North and the South and across elite and non-elite groups, will have to confront when they face their own histories.

Sri Lanka is a society in which both state and non-state actors have, at different times, competed with one another in demonstrating their capacity for brutality, often directed even against civilian populations. Yet there has been very little tradition of open acknowledgement or moral reckoning. I sometimes feel that societies shaped by non-Christian cultural traditions, particularly in South Asia, are less accustomed to the practice of public confession or admission of guilt—except, perhaps, under the coercive conditions of police interrogation.

 

You have met families of the disappeared from both communities. What differences have you observed in how Sinhala and Tamil families articulate justice, and does the state respond differently based on ethnicity?

Many families of the disappeared, both in the North and in the South, continue to wait for redress and compensation from the state. Disappointment and despair are experiences they share, regardless of their ethnic background. Many of them had expected the NPP government to expedite this process as part of a broader effort toward reconciliation and peace-building.

Another common experience among these families—both in the North and the South—has been the political exploitation of their grievances. Their suffering has often been invoked in political discourse without meaningful progress toward justice.

Personally, I feel deeply saddened whenever I see reports and images of these families still standing in protests, holding photographs of their missing loved ones and demanding answers. The fact that such demonstrations continue, even under the present NPP government, is a painful reminder that their quest for justice remains unresolved.

 

The NPP proposes a Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) while rejecting international mechanisms. Given the failure of past domestic accountability bodies, is this genuine commitment or performative politics to deflect external pressure? What failures within Tamil politics enabled the NPP to win three parliamentary seats in Jaffna, the traditional heartland of Tamil nationalist politics?

 

Any government will need a great deal of political will, courage, and moral strength to establish a TRC in Sri Lanka in line with international standards and practices. This is an issue that will continue to test the leadership of the NPP.

I am not very optimistic that these promises will now be fulfilled. It may already be too late for the NPP government to move beyond what it has done so far. Any government that fails to initiate the TRC process within its first year in office may find it extremely difficult to do so later. Such a process usually needs to begin when there is a strong sense of collective political optimism in the country, soon after a major political change supported by the public.

Launching a TRC process in a country that has endured a protracted civil war—with immense human cost, violence, and deeply bitter political memories and enmities—is no less a challenge than initiating a moral revolution among the people.

In Sri Lanka, the continuing paradox surrounding the TRC option is that both its necessity and its difficulty are closely intertwined. I can only wish the government good luck if it is genuinely committed to pursuing a meaningful TRC process in Sri Lanka.

 

You have described Tamil politics as “victimhood without strategic vision.” What would a more mature Tamil political ideology look like—beyond reactive nationalism toward constructive state-building?

I may have made that comment some time ago, in the context of the 2005 presidential election, when Tamil voters were persuaded by both the LTTE and sections of the moderate Tamil leadership to boycott the poll. That boycott enabled Mahinda Rajapaksa to win the presidency. The situation has since changed. Even in the post-civil war and post-secession context, Tamil political elites appear to be struggling to make sense of the futility of the old political path, which has now clearly reached a dead end.

If Tamil politics is to emerge from its present impasse, it is crucial that the more advanced sections of liberal Tamil political leadership recognize that Sri Lankan politics—including politics within Tamil society—has entered a new historical phase. In this new context, outdated forms of identity politics are unlikely to suit the post-Aragalaya realities.

I hope what I say will not be interpreted as the perspective of a Sinhala majoritarian academic. I approach the national question from a left-liberal standpoint. From that perspective, I can recognize both the strengths and the democratic limits of nationalist politics. While I politically defend ethnic “minority” politics, I remain aware of the critical limitations of such movements when they ignore substantive democracy, social justice, and social equality—values that go beyond the narrow procedural democracy of liberal constitutionalism.

At times, I remind myself that Tamil nationalist politics, as well as Sri Lanka’s constitutional thinking more broadly, has remained confined for too long within the narrow framework of liberal procedural democracy. The time has come for those of us with a left intellectual background to highlight the limitations of older forms of ethnic nationalism—whether Sinhala or Tamil, often articulated by brilliant lawyers and academics.

I hope that comrade Ayathurai Santhan’s new novel, Twice Upon a Time, may stimulate a healthy debate in the North on these questions.

From my limited understanding of the evolving political dynamics in the Northern Province, traditional elite politics—long dominated by bourgeois political parties and leaderships—appears to be gradually declining. A similar trend can also be observed within Muslim politics. In other words, the sociology of representative politics in both Tamil and Muslim societies is undergoing rapid change.

It is this social and political transformation in the way democracy operates among people in Jaffna that has enabled the NPP to emerge as a new force within Tamil and Muslim politics across the Northern, Eastern, Central, and Western provinces.

At present, progressive nationalists in the North have a significant opportunity and political space to initiate a movement that can free minority politics from conservative elite control. Such a project could inaugurate a new form of nationalist-class politics that combines national emancipation with social emancipation. Ultimately, that would amount to building a new political bridge linking the North-East, the Centre, and the South.

Given that Sinhala nationalist discourse treats even the 13th Amendment as excessive, is meaningful federalism politically impossible in Sri Lanka, or could the NPP realistically reshape Sinhala opinion?

The term ‘federalism’ comes from what I would call our outdated political vocabulary. My view is that the historical role of the concept of federalism, and the political imaginations it once inspired, has effectively come to an end. I say this both as a political theorist and as someone who has, in a way, been a small actor in Sri Lankan politics.

Federalist expectations and aspirations brought the Tamil community together. They gave the community a deep sense of political solidarity and even a bond that enabled it to imagine nationhood and self-determination. These are positive and undeniable contributions made by that concept.

However, it has also had negative consequences. It has emerged as a wall of separation between the Sinhala and Tamil communities within the same nation-state.

My view is that in Sri Lanka we now need a new political vocabulary—one that can bring together Sinhala, North-East Tamil, Malayaha Tamil, and Muslim communities as a multiplicity of regional, local, and dispersed minorities under a banner of deep devolution, or deep power-sharing. It should be a banner inscribed with the slogan: “Unity in Diversity and Diversity in Unity.”

In fact, political theory has advanced considerably on many of these issues, but the thinking of our ethnic entrepreneurs has not.

You’ve been attacked by Sinhala nationalists as pro-Tamil and by some Tamil activists as pro-state. How do you maintain intellectual integrity in such a polarized landscape?

Being attacked by my political or ideological adversaries, or by those who simply disagree with me, does not bother me at all. I have learned not to be moved by such attacks. In that sense, over the years I have cultivated a Buddhist and liberal ethic of tolerance and forbearance.

Sri Lankan academia—both Sinhala and Tamil—largely failed to critically challenge ethnic nationalism during the war years. And in the post-war period, has scholarship done any better in questioning dominant nationalist narratives and producing genuinely critical, independent analysis?

The assumption underlying this question is not correct. There is a substantial body of literature produced by progressive Tamil and Sinhalese scholars. Institutions such as the Social Scientists’ Association, the International Centre for Ethnic Studies, and the Centre for Policy Alternatives have played a key non-state role in Colombo through research, policy advocacy, publications, and public education.

In all three languages, a new strand of political and social thought has emerged—remarkably rich in both quality and depth—on issues such as peacebuilding, democracy, democratization, constitutionalism, multiculturalism, pluralism, power-sharing, and nation-building.

 

This interview will be read mainly by Tamils in Jaffna and the diaspora who have lived through state violence and broken promises. What would you say to them about why they should place hope—if at all—in yet another Colombo government promising change?

In my approach to politics, no community can be considered homogeneous, whether Sinhala or Tamil, in terms of class, social status, gender, or political identity.

My view is that the NPP’s appeal is particularly attractive to the non-elite social classes within Jaffna Tamil society, as well as to progressive sections among Tamil citizens who hold Left or Left-liberal political leanings.

For the Tamil political elite, who largely come from upper-class and upper-caste social backgrounds, my message is that the time has come for them to broaden their ethnic-identity politics by opening the doors to the oppressed Tamil masses and to women. They should also cease to think of non-elite Tamil citizens merely as voters to be mobilized during elections.

The social democratization of Tamil nationalist politics has become a historical necessity.

This transformation has already taken place in Sinhala society, and the NPP represents the concretization of that shift toward what may be called “civic nationalism.”

The time has come in Sri Lanka to move toward a civic-nationalist vision for nation-building. Civic nationalist imaginations can creatively combine three types of democratic solutions to Sri Lanka’s ethnic conflict—namely, liberal, republican, and communitarian approaches.

Such a future would have the capacity and flexibility to facilitate coexistence between Sinhala, Tamil, and Muslim ethnic nationalisms within a broader framework of a civic-nationalist Sri Lankan nation-state.

After all, Sri Lanka is supposed to be a “Democratic Socialist Republic,” isn’t it? Strangely, the solutions are already enshrined in the very name of our modern nation-state, long unnoticed by all of us.



 

 

Poetry by Ahilan “A Smile Drying on a Vine”

A Smile Drying on a Vine

Translated from Tamil into English by Geetha Sukumaran.

Featuring the original poems in Tamil alongside translations by Geetha Sukumaran, A Smile Drying on a Vine illuminates how history, mythology, visuality and the intimate experience of war shape language to give voice to the impact of conflict and trauma. Deeply visceral yet reflective, Ahilan’s masterful language moves from the clinical to the performative, seeking remembrance as resistance, amid the din of a war that has not ceased in its erasures (redriverpress.in)


The book was launched at Jaffna University in October 2025. Below is a link to the speech delivered by Professor M Thiruvarangan, Head of the Department of Linguistics and English at the occasion:

 

Research Collaboration Radhika Hettiarachchi (ICES, Colombo) – PHARE, Université Paris 1, Panthéon-Sorbonne

Guest seminar was conducted on the 10th of December 2025 by Radhika Hettiarachchi at PHARE, Université Paris 1, Panthéon-Sorbonne on

Good Work: The Moral Dilemma of Commercial Sex

Abstract: Based on the women’s histories of sex work project, this discussion will reflect on how women are balancing respectability, income, care responsibilities, and the demands of labour, while re-defining what ‘good work’ means to them. We hope this conversation will invite us to rethink the value placed on women’s labour and to question the systems that determine whose work is seen, supported, or made invisible. Using the method of life-history documentation, this project involves women from across Sri Lanka who worked as sex workers throughout and after the Sri Lankan civil war, whose narratives were collaboratively documented between 2021-2023.

This is the first in a series of events organised as part of an ongoing research collaboration between Radhika Hettiarachchi (research fellow at ICES – International Centre for Ethnic Studies, Colombo Sri Lanka, independent consultant specialising in history, “peace-building” and justice) and Nadeera Rajapakse (PHARE, Université Paris 1, Panthéon-Sorbonne, specialising in the history of economic thought on women’s work, value, the informal sector and development)

Related publication:


When the Devil Drums, we Dance: Sex Work and Sexual Violence in Wartime Sri Lanka

Sexual violence on sex workers in wartime hashtagSriLanka reinforces the structural and systemic violence that enables the abuse of women’s bodies, beyond sex worker communities and beyond the war. Radhika Hettiarachchi draws from the Women’s Histories of Sex Work archive to spotlight the experiences of sex workers in wartime Sri Lanka and underscore the need to listen to their stories, build allyships, and decriminalise sex work in Sri Lanka.

https://polity.lk/radhika-hettiarachchi-sex-work-and-sexual-violence-in-wartime-sri-lanka/

 

 

 

Publication – The Good Ambassadors of the Diaspora by Nadeera Rajapakse (Economic and Political Weekly)

The Good Ambassadors of the Diaspora

Sri Lankan Tamil Diaspora and the State

In March 2025, the Prime Minister of Sri Lanka, Harini Amarasuriya, met with students at Sciences Po, Paris and answered many questions, among which were inquiries about the new government’s engagement with the diaspora. She referred to the diaspora as “good ambassadors of the country,” a description which, in a context of high expectations regarding national reconciliation and justice, incites reflection about identities and identity politics. 

Economic and Political Weekly, Vol. 60, Issue No. 28, 12 Jul, 2025
Nadeera Rajapakse

https://www.epw.in/journal/2025/28/commentary/good-ambassadors-diaspora.html

Two books on contemporary writing from Sri Lanka

Out of Sri Lanka: Tamil, Sinhala, & English Poetry from Sri Lanka & Its Diasporas, published by Bloodaxe Books in June 2023, is described by its editors, Vidyan Ravinthiran, Seni Seneviratne, and Shash Trevett, as the “first true anthology of Sri Lankan and diasporic poetry”. The volume brings together 138 poets and over 300 poems written in, or translated from, the island’s three main languages: Tamil, Sinhala, and English.
The anthology is structured to resist the linguistic and geographical segregation that has historically defined Sri Lankan literature since independence in 1948.The editors chose an alphabetical ordering of poets, creating “serendipitous connections,” allowing disparate voices to “find a way of living alongside each other” and erasing potential biases in selection.
The collection includes work from poets who remained in Sri Lanka during the 1983–2009 civil war and those forced into exile. It features a wide range of voices, from internationally renowned figures to previously obscure or out-of-print poets, including several whose work appears in translation for the first time.The editors made the deliberate choice to exclude poetry that “cheerleads violently” for either the Sinhalese-dominated government or the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), focusing instead on a “poetry of witness”.
The poems explore the legacy of colonialism, the horrors of the civil war, the 1970s/80s insurrections, the 2004 tsunami, and the complex, shifting meaning of “home” for the diaspora.
 

 

 

 

Time will Write a Song for You: Contemporary Tamil Writing from Sri Lanka, published in 2014 by Penguin Books India in association with the French Institute of Pondicherry, is an anthology edited by Kannan M. and others.
The anthology documents a significant paradigm shift in Sri Lankan Tamil poetry, moving from traditional verse and religious themes to “free verse” that grapples with modern trauma.

 

Article about the book

 

Out of Sri Lanka is a multilingual and multi-ethnic collection, bringing together Tamil, Sinhala, and English voices to resist the “linguistic segregation” that has historically divided the country.

Time will Write a Song for You focuses exclusively on contemporary Tamil writing, documenting the “cultural awakening” and paradigm shift specifically within the Tamil poetic tradition.

The overlapping contributors represent both the foundational figures of modern Sri Lankan Tamil poetry and the contemporary voices of the diaspora. Both books feature the “poets of the sixties”, Mahakavi, Murugaiyan, and Neelavanan. These writers are credited with breaking away from traditional religious themes to adopt a conversational diction that shaped the “modernist slant” of the island’s Tamil literature.

Key figures from the 1970s and 80s who shifted focus to social crises and ethnic conflict appear in both, including M.A. Nuhman, V.I.S. Jayapalan, and Shanmugam Sivalingam. Both anthologies highlight Cheran as a central figure, along with other shared expatriate poets include A.M. Rashmy, Packiyanathan Ahilan, Ki. Pi. Aravindan, and S. Vinothini.

Female poets who recorded the trauma of war, S. Sivaramani, are included in both.

 

An Archive of Forced Exile – ICES, Sri Lanka

https://www.ices.lk/publications-1/prof.-hasbulla’s-ledgers?utm_campaign=An%20Archive%20of%20Forced%20Exile&utm_medium=email&utm_source=newsletter

 

This archive documents one of the most traumatic episodes of Sri Lanka’s contemporary history: the forcible expulsion of almost the entire Muslim population from the Northern Province by the LTTE in October 1990. Given only hours or days to leave, families were driven out without the right to carry valuables or essential documents, dispersing along land routes to Anuradhapura and Kurunegala or by sea from Mannar to the northwestern coast of Puttalam, where many remain displaced to this day. The collection captures the immediate aftermath of this mass displacement, preserving the lived realities of communities uprooted from Jaffna, Mannar, and other northern areas and forced into prolonged exile far from their homes.

At the heart of the archive are more than 7,000 household surveys conducted in February 1991, just three months after the eviction, under the leadership of Dr. S.H. Hasbullah of the University of Peradeniya, with the assistance of displaced undergraduates, academics, and community volunteers. Compiled across Puttalam, Anuradhapura, and Kurunegala, the Tamil-language surveys record detailed family information, former villages, livelihoods, economic losses, educational backgrounds, political aspirations, and experiences of expulsion. Originally assembled for reasons of documentation and advocacy, the collection is now fully digitized, publicly accessible, and jointly safeguarded by the International Centre for Ethnic Studies in Colombo and the International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam, where the original materials have been preserved since 2024.

 

Magic Maids at Université Paris 1, Pantheon-Sorbonne

https://polity.lk/nadeera-rajapakse-magic-maids-sweeping-up-a-storm-at-the-sorbonne

Magic Maids: Sweeping Up a Storm at the Sorbonne

Nadeera Rajapakse

 

Aug 14, 2025 | Labour

 
 
 

After performing in several theatres across Paris, Eisa Jocson and Venuri Perera bewitched the spectators, students, and startled passers-by at the Pantheon Centre of the University Paris 1, Pantheon-Sorbonne in March 2025. They swept through the halls of the 18th century building, housing the second oldest university in Europe, to embody women migrant domestic workers.


Venuri Perera and Eisa Jocson at the University Paris 1, Pantheon-Sorbonne
Photo credit: Jean-Remy Mallek

Their representation was hailed by an eager audience of economists, historians, philosophers, political scientists, anthropologists, geographers, working on and interested in various related subjects. A roundtable session among scholars and artists, bound by common themes of female labour, exploitation, and agency, was followed by a general discussion between the two dancers and guests.

Among the many compelling insights shared, one particularly resonant idea was that the deepest intellectual understanding often arises through embodied experience. In the novel Expectation, the author describes how this can happen: “suddenly the knowledge arrives, hitting her body before her mind. It spikes her blood, makes her heart race, her palms damp” (Hope 2019: 251). Accordingly, in Magic Maids, resistance is articulated through movement, the dancers physically and symbolically reclaim the figure of the domestic worker. In the following commentary, I will discuss the idea of resistance, its significance in this context, and the narrative power of the performance in reclaiming the idealised image of women.


Roundtable discussion with Emmanuel Charrier (moderator), Jules Ramage (visual artist), Muriel Gilardone (economic historian specialising in gender and economics), Mickaëlle Provost (philosopher), Elodie Bertrand (economic historian, editor of
Routledge Handbook of Commodification).
Photo credit: Jean-Remy Mallek

Firstly, resistance comes in the shape of exposing the disturbing aspects of migration for domestic work. For one, the fundamental contradiction structuring Sri Lanka’s migration economy: the systematic social devaluation of women’s domestic labour against its staggering economic contributions. The state’s reliance on 8.4 billion USD in annual remittances, of which 54% are from domestic workers (CBSL 2023), exists in violent tension with cultural imaginaries that render these workers as ‘demure’, ‘docile’, and ‘disposable’, while being remittance-sending ‘heroines’.

The aesthetic framing of domestic workers as ‘smiling, docile’ figures emerges from deep cultural constructs. The ideal female figure in religious, nationalist, and cultural tropes lacks agency, existing in submission to men or gods (Sreenivasan 1975, de Mel 2001, de Silva 2004). Added to that is a narrow version of “purity” as well as “pedagogies of respectability” (de Alwis 2022). This has translated into general media representations where most Sri Lankan newspaper articles frame migrant workers mostly as either “victims” or “heroines” (Rata Viruwo in Sinhala), denying complex subjectivity. This is just like the female ideal in certain religious representations: they are either pure, chaste, and submissive, or they are all-powerful, destructive goddesses. The Vessantara Jātaka’s ideal of female self-sacrifice finds an echo in the state rhetoric celebrating “heroines” sending remittances, making resilience and silent endurance the most acclaimed qualities in “good” maids (de Silva 2004).

In keeping with economic market logic, the supply of migrant labour is endless, coming from many South Asian nations competing with one another, whereas demand from employers (mostly in the Middle East) powerfully dictates all terms of employment. Hence, women migrant workers are disposable, easily replaceable. The dancers, Jocson and Perera, recount discovering “24 nails driven into her body, like a living voodoo doll”, referring to a real experience of a migrant worker. Again, the contradiction is made obvious: the horrific exploitation of bodies that literally constitute the nation’s economic lifeline. Sri Lanka’s 1.2 million migrant domestic workers generate about 30% of total remittances, 6.7% of GDP (World Bank 2023). And yet, the institutional recognition of the value of their labour remains an uphill struggle: only in 2020 was the promise made to upgrade domestic work to the skilled labour category (Mudugamuwa 2020), while standard employment contracts under the Foreign Employment Act, and ILO Convention 189 ratification still do not take full account of domestic work.

Venuri Perera and Eisa Jocson shedding docility, resisting purity.
Photo credit: Jean-Remy Mallek

These institutional failures mirror the “social reproduction paradox”, i.e., the simultaneous economic reliance on and symbolic annihilation of care work under financialised capitalism (Elson 2012). In the course of their performance, Jocson and Perera narrate: “even if you hit her, she may say ‘hit me baby, one more time’”, laying bare the paradox where ‘docile’ workers must be simultaneously productive enough to remit and disposable enough to replace.

Another revelation from the duo is about racialised market hierarchies. The performance’s mocking comparison between “a Filipina” and “a cheaper Sri Lankan” exposes what Bridget Anderson (2000) terms “hierarchies of servitude” in global care chains. Recruitment agencies actively cultivate this in terms of salary differentials: a Filipina worker is paid double the wage received monthly by a Sri Lankan domestic worker in many Middle Eastern countries (Esim and Smith 2004); skills framing: Most Sri Lankan agencies advertise workers as “more submissive and easier to mould” vs. Filipinas as commanding “more respect” (Jureidni and Moukarbel 2004: 6). Above all, “Sri Lankan” or “Sri Lanki” is synonymous with domestic worker, so much so that if the domestic worker is from the Philippines, the question would be “Is your Sri Lankan a Filipina?” (Jureidni and Moukarbel 2004: 5). Jocson and Perera rephrase the question for the French audience (and French employers), asking where their “Sri Lankan” is from: Algeria? Romania? The Republic of Guinea? 

Discussing embodied resistance: dancers and participants at University Paris 1, Pantheon-Sorbonne.
Photo credit: Leonie Seince, Maya Abou Imad, Iris Chaput, Lucie Liu

The devaluation of migrant workers is seen in other disturbing institutional shortcomings and exclusions. While Sri Lanka’s economic crisis has intensified reliance on migrant earnings—remittances cover 128% of the trade deficit according to the Central Bank (CBSL 2023)—the 2023 national Budget allocated only a paltry amount to migrant welfare; only a handful of returnee workers access reintegration programs (IOM 2023) and the majority of migrant households do not use bank accounts, especially for remittances. Most have no pension contributions despite working close to a decade abroad (ILO 2021).

On the other hand, restrictive regulation is palmed more on migrants than on markets. In the SLBFE curriculum, mandatory household training encourages submission (Handapangoda 2023, Jureidni and Moukarbel 2004). There are bans on pregnancy, marriage (Ireland 2018), and unionisation (Amnesty International 2025), while non-payment of wages, non-compliance with labour laws, and non-respect of basic worker rights go unpunished.

By framing domestic work as ‘natural’ feminine traits rather than skilled labour, global labour markets exclude them from formal economic accounting. Then the idealised yet paradoxical requirements are piled on: maids need to perform docility and as a result, suppress emotions for job security. They need to channel productivity to super-human levels: An average workday in Gulf Cooperation Council countries is 17 hours (ILO 2021), which they endure stoically, leading to chronic health conditions.

Lynch documents how Sri Lankan migrant workers face “moral censure for transgressing spatial boundaries” (2007: 92), stigmatised as “fallen” women for monetising domesticity while remaining culturally obligated to perform it, unpaid, at home. These contradictions add up, with the state praising women’s economic contributions while denying them labour rights, which Jayawardena describes as “patriarchal ventriloquism” (2016: 24).

Venuri Perera, wielding the brooms wildly
(Still from video footage)
Credit: Leonie Sence, Iris Chaput, Maya Abou Imad, Lucie Liu and Theo Milon

But then, the Magic Maids strike. Jocson and Perera viscerally demonstrate that the same bodies disciplined into docility can erupt into wild, powerful dancing, symbolising the latent agency within apparent submission. This agency becomes discernible, palpable, when we shed the gendered, capitalist lenses above. Despite moral, physical, and institutional risks, which are well-documented, Sri Lankan women continue migrating at unprecedented rates.

This constitutes not merely economic pragmatism, but a strike against the gendered, spatial order. Migrant women transmit subversive “gender remittances” (Levitt and Lamba-Nieves 2011) that slowly corrode patriarchal ideology in sending communities. These narratives weaponise the very mobility that moralists decry. Their efforts have led to movements, like the ILO C189 campaign, which have forced recognition of domestic work as skilled labour providing potent examples of “capability metrics” (Piper 2017). In Sri Lanka, returnee workers now demand pension contributions, not as supplicants, but as creditors of a national economy that they sustain.

By migrating to take up work that challenges traditional ideals of domestic femininity, and through subtle defiance of religious or moral ideals that confine them to obedience and purity, women migrant domestic workers show resistance.

The performance epitomises the central contradiction: these women are economically indispensable, yet socially expendable. Their labour props up GDP while their contribution is undervalued, a paradox sustained by gendered architectures. Yet as the performance’s climactic shift from slow, robotic sweeping to wails, vigour, and piercing eye contact reminds us, even the most disciplined bodies harbour the capacity to disrupt the scripts written upon them. The true measure of feminist praxis lies not in lamenting oppression, but in tracing, as this commentary has attempted, the fault lines where agency erupts through the cracks of constraint. 

Venuri Perera, defying norms of docility
(Still from video footage)
Credit: Leonie Sence, Iris Chaput, Maya Abou Imad, Lucie Liu and Theo Milon


Nadeera Rajapakse
is an assistant professor at the University of Paris 1, Pantheon-Sorbonne in the History of Economic Thought and in English for Economics. She is a member of the PHARE (Philosophy, History and the Analysis of Economic Representation) research department and her current areas of research include development and identity, women migrant domestic workers, and migration and identity.

 

References
Amnesty International. (2025). Locked In. Left out. The Hidden Lives of Kenyan Domestic Workers in Saudi Arabia. London: Amnesty International. Available at https://www.amnesty.nl/content/uploads/2025/05/Amnesty-Kenya-Saudi-workers.pdf?x69908

Amnesty International. (2014). “My Sleep is My Break”: Exploitation of Migrant Domestic Workers in Qatar. Available at https://www.amnesty.org/en/documents/mde22/004/2014/en/

Anderson, Bridget. (2000). Doing the Dirty Work? The global politics of domestic labour. London: Zed Books.

Central Bank of Sri Lanka (CBSL). (2023). Annual Economic Review. Available at https://www.cbsl.gov.lk/en/publications/economic-and-financial-reports/annual-economic-review/annual-economic-review-2023

De Alwis, Malathi. (2022). “The Production and Embodiment of Respectability: Gendered Demeanours in Colonial Ceylon”. In Kanchana Ruwanpura, Caryll Tozer, Chulani Kodikara, Sonali Deraniyagala, Vraie Cally Balthazar (Eds.). Her Smile Lingers. Malathi de Alwis Selected Essays. Colombo: International Centre for Ethnic Studies.

De Mel, Neloufer. (2001). Women & the Nation’s Narrative: Gender and Nationalism in Twentieth-Century Sri Lanka. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield.

De Silva, Neluka. (2004). The Gendered Nation: Contemporary Writings from South Asia, London: Sage.

Department of Technical Education and Training. (2023). National Competency Standards (NCS) Catalogue. Colombo: DTET. Available at http://www.dtet.gov.lk/nvq_standards

Elson, Diane. (2012). “Social Reproduction in the Global Crisis: Rapid Recovery or Long-Lasting Depletion?” In Peter Utting, Shahra Razavi, and Rebecca Varghese Buchholz (Eds.). The Global Crisis and Transformative Social Change (63-80). Palgrave Macmillan

Esim, Simel, and Monica Smith (Eds). (2004). Gender and Migration in Arab States. The case of domestic workers. Beirut: International Labour Organization. Available at https://www.ilo.org/publications/gender-and-migration-arab-states-case-domestic-workers

Handapangoda, Wasana. (2023). “Migrant domestic workers in the Arabian Gulf”. Ingenere (2 February): https://www.ingenere.it/en/articles/migrant-domestic-workers-arabian-gulf

Hope, Anna. (2020). Expectation. Black Swan.

International Organization for Migration (IOM). (2023). “Chapter 5 – Migrant-facing Information Initiatives”. In IRIS Handbook for Governments on Ethical Recruitment and Migrant Worker Protection. IOM, Geneva. Available at https://publications.iom.int/system/files/pdf/pub2023-034-l-iris-handbook-for-govt-ch5.pdf

International Labour Organization (ILO). (2021). Making Decent Work a Reality for Domestic Workers: Progress and Prospects Ten Years after the Adoption of the Domestic Workers Convention, 2011 (No. 189), Geneva: International Labour Organization. Available at https://www.ilo.org/publications/major-publications/making-decent-work-reality-domestic-workers-progress-and-prospects-ten

Ireland, Patrick. (2018). “The limits of sending-state power”. International Political Science Review 39 (3): 322-337.

Jayawardena, Kumari. (2016). Feminism and Nationalism in the Third World. New York: Verso Books.

Jayawardena, Kumari and Rachel Kurian. (2015). Class, Patriarchy and Ethnicity on Sri Lankan Plantations: Two Centuries of Power and Protest. New Delhi: Orient Blackswan.

Jureidni, Ray, and Nayla Moukarbel. (2004). “Female Sri Lankan domestic workers in Lebanon: A case of ‘contract slavery’?” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 30 (4): 581-607.

Levitt, Peggy, and Deepak Lamba-Nieves. (2011). “Social Remittances Revisited.” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 37 (1):1-22.

Lynch, Caitrin. (2007). Juki Girls, Good Girls: Gender and Cultural Politics in Sri Lanka’s Global Garment Industry. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Piper, Nicola. (2017). “Migration and the SDGs.” Global Social Policy, 17 (2): 231-238.

Sreenivasan, M.A. (1975). “Panchakanya – An Age-old Benediction”. In Devaki Jain (Ed.). Indian Women (51-58). New Delhi: Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, India.

Mudugamuwa, Maheesha. (2020). “Skills development for domestic workers. From Housemaid to Housekeeping assistant”. The Morning (23 September): https://www.themorning.lk/articles/98732

World Bank. (2023). “Personal remittances, received (% of GDP) – Sri Lanka”. World Bank Open Data – Sri Lanka. Available at https://data.worldbank.org/country/sri-lanka

Sri Lanka’s NPP Government: From system change to structural compliance

Article by IFRI: Institut Français des Relations Internationales

https://www.ifri.org/en/studies/sri-lankas-npp-government-system-change-structural-compliance

In September 2024, a relative outsider to Sri Lanka’s two-party-dominated political system, Anura Kumara Dissanayake, won the presidential elections. The anti-establishment, populist movement he represented, the National People’s Power (NPP), went on to receive an overwhelming mandate in the November 2024 general elections, winning 159 seats in a 225-member parliament.

Prix Émile Guimet 2025 – littérature asiatique

https://actualitte.com/article/124235/prix-litteraires/tokyo-colombo-seoul-les-laureats-du-prix-emile-guimet-2025

Le Sri-Lankais Shehan Karunatilaka remporte le prix dans la catégorie roman pour Les Sept Lunes de Maali Almeida (Calmann Lévy), tandis que le duo sud-coréen Lee Dong-Eun et Jeong Yi-Yong est primé en bande dessinée pour Hana (Éditions Ça et Là). Le prix étudiant Inalco pour le manga a été attribué à Taiyô Matsumoto pour Tokyo, ces jours-ci, Tome 1 (Kana). La remise des prix s’est tenue au musée Guimet à Paris, sous la présidence de Laure Adler.

Le roman lauréat, Les Sept Lunes de Maali Almeida, met en scène un photographe de guerre sri-lankais assassiné, revenu d’entre les morts pour élucider son propre meurtre et livrer des clichés susceptibles d’infléchir le cours de la guerre civile qui ravage Colombo en 1990. Un récit entre polar métaphysique et satire politique, salué pour sa modernité narrative et sa force littéraire, déjà reconnu par le Booker Prize 2022.

https://www.livreshebdo.fr/article/les-laureats-des-prix-emile-guimet-de-litterature-asiatique-et-etudiant-inalco-pour-le

New publication

Beyond the Binary: The Experiences of Genderqueer People in Colombo

https://www.ices.lk/publications-1/beyond-the-binary%3A-the-experiences-of-genderqueer-people-in-colombo

This paper explores the vibrant and complex landscape of genderqueer
identities in Sri Lanka, shedding light on the experiences, artistic expressions,
and cultural challenges faced by non-binary people navigating both local and
global frameworks. Through the lens of artists, activists, and community
members, the study interrogates how gender fluidity is both marginalized
and reimagined within a predominantly cisnormative Sri Lankan society.
Central to the discussion is the tension between local cultural traditions and
the increasingly visible discourse around queer identities, particularly in the
wake of contemporary legal and social changes.
Drawing primarily on interviews with local genderqueer people in
Colombo, the paper examines how many defy binary gender norms and
construct alternative personal spaces where non-binary people can belong.
Furthermore, this work illuminates the ongoing struggles within the Sri
Lankan LGBTQ+ community to recognize and embrace gender fluidity, with
younger activists advocating for more inclusive approaches to identity and
visibility. It proposes a more localized and inclusive approach to gender,
urging a shift in public awareness and attitudes. Challenging both the state’s
erasure of gender diversity and the limitations of identity politics, this
research calls for a deeper understanding of how genderqueer lives have
always existed but remain hidden in the island’s margins.

Sri Lanka – 6 months on

https://www.lse.ac.uk/south-asia-centre/events/archive/Spring-Term-2025

London School of Economics Event – Sri Lanka 6 months on

As the ‘AKD’ government of President Anura Kumara Dissanayake marks 6 months, how is Sri Lanka now? This panel will discuss the country’s current economic and political situation as it recovers from a period of severe crisis and, looking ahead, what needs to be done in different sectors domestically, regionally and globally for Sri Lanka to emerge as a confident and stable power.

SPEAKERS: Harsha Amarasekera PC is a leading commerical lawyer, and Chairman, Colombo Port City Economic Commission, alongside several other leading positions in the private sector; Farzana Haniffa (@FaraFarout) is Professor of Sociology, University of Colombo, and Member, Human Rights Commission, Sri Lanka; Dr Paikiasothy Saravanamuttu (@PSaravanamuttu), an LSE alumnus, is Founder and Executive Director, Centre for Policy Alternatives, Colombo.

DISCUSSANT: Dr Alan Keenan (@akeenan23) is Senior Consultant for Sri Lanka, International Crisis Group, London, where he coordinates and contributes to research, advocacy and publications on Sri Lanka.    

CO-CHAIRS: Naufel Vilcassim is Director, LSE South Asia Centre (@SAsiaLSE) and Professor of Marketing at LSE; Dr Nilanjan Sarkar is Deputy Director, LSE South Asia Centre (@SAsiaLSE).