“We’re proud to share our latest animated short film “As the sun rises”.
As temperatures in Colombo continue to rise, conversations around climate change focus more on numbers and projections. This film takes a different approach by centering the real stories of women outdoor workers, whose job means spending every day outdoors in extreme heat.
Throughout this project, we were committed to an ethical storytelling approach. We allowed their stories to guide the creative process. This film follows the flow of an ordinary workday, exploring how rising temperatures shapes working conditions, daily routines, health and caregiving. Rather than focusing on only the moments of crisis, we also wanted to capture the smaller moments like the search for shade or the need to stay hydrated.
We hope this film encourages viewers to think about climate change through the everyday experiences of the people living and working through it, and to reflect on how rising urban heat is not experienced equally.
A heartfelt thank you to the women who trusted us with their stories, and to the incredible team of creatives who brought this project to life with such care.
‘COLOMBO: Layered Histories in a Global South City’ is a UKRI-funded project which was successful in the ERC Advanced Grant Pathway and is covered by UKRI’s underwrite agreement. It will run from 2024-2029. It is hosted at the University of Cambridge and is directed by Professor Sujit Sivasundaram as Principal Investigator. It involves a team of researchers, including postdoctoral fellows, doctoral students, researchers in Sri Lanka, artists and digital humanists, working on a variety of topics within the broad compass of the long-term history of the city of Colombo.
Project Abstract
A Chinese-financed $15 billion dollar port city project is dramatically restructuring today’s Colombo. Yet, Colombo has a deeply layered imperial past: it was at one point partly a Muslim settlement, before it came under a succession of European empires, Portuguese (first trading post in 1518), Dutch (1656-1796) and British (1796-1948). This project interrogates how these outsiders made a city in an unstable environment at the centre of the Indian Ocean, in which arose a diverse society, generating an abundance of cultural production and a sequence of violent politics.
The origin of Colombo is mired in many myths, and it would be unwise to try to parse these. Regardless of what stood here prior to Muslim settlement, among Europeans it was the Portuguese who first built a trading post in 1518. The city then became a bastion of Dutch (1656-1796) and British (1796-1948) colonisation. In the last census of 2012, Colombo District had 2.3 million residents of multiple religions and ethnicities.
Two Sri Lankan writers: Antonythasan Jesuthasan in 2026 and Shehan Karunatilaka in 2025, have been awarded in consecutive years the Prix Émile Guimet, the French prize for Asian literature in translation. About the same time in 2025 during a visit to Sciences Po in Paris, Sri Lanka’s Prime Minister Harini Amarasuriya said that “the members of the diaspora are good ambassadors of our country” (Rajapakse 2025). If her remark imagines the diaspora as legible representatives of a nation; these writers render that vision more complex. Their work reveals identities that are neither singular nor coherent, but layered and contradictory.
Before the prize was announced this year, Jesuthasan, along with two other authors in exile, were interviewed at the Festival du Livre in Paris in May. One of the other writers, Pedro Kadivar, observed that in the eyes of the authorities who grant citizenship, one must be either French or a foreigner. This binary requirement stems from an ideological stance which is institutionally implemented. The French asylum process requires applicants to narrate persecution in individualised terms, transforming complex histories into personal stories of victimhood (Mantovan 2018). In doing so, identity becomes fixed in the moment of displacement, privileging what one is over who one might become. In both cases, the self is required to stabilise into a form that institutions can recognise. Sri Lanka, too, in many instances of its history, has expected and constrained its citizens to conform to a national identity, to respect a national culture, with similar narrowing impulses (DeVotta 2017). At their core, whether in Sri Lanka, or in France, lies the demand that a person be nationally and institutionally recognisable.
In reality, as Kadivar—who is of Iranian origin—suggests, a person may carry many overlapping identities simultaneously. Literature, fortunately, opens a different space, one that is wide and plural enough to hold what the narrow official narrative rejects: the lived, contradictory, plural experiences that do not fit nationalist categories. It allows identities to take forms that refuse to settle.
It is within this tension between institutional fixing and lived plurality that I discuss the recognition given to the two writers of Sri Lankan origin. In 2025, Shehan Karunatilaka was awarded the fiction prize for Les Sept Lunes de Maali Almeida, translated from English (The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida) by Xavier Gros and published by Calmann-Lévy. This year, the jury selected Salamalecs,[1] written in Tamil (ஸலாம் அலைக்) by Antonythasan Jesuthasan (under the nom de guerre Shobasakthi) and translated into French by Leticia Ibanez, published by Zulma. The two writers occupy different loci in relation to Sri Lanka: one is an exile in France, the other holds dual citizenship with New Zealand, and has lived in many countries.
I frame my literary analysis along three axes: plural identity; the critique of violence; and the experience of migration and exile. While the first two axes stay within the two novels, the third follows a path suggested by them: if Maali in Seven Moons cannot be narrowly claimed by any side and Nandan in Salamalecs holds two countries but one history, then the plurality each text bestows to its protagonist can also be studied from its source, the authors. The third axis thus, changes both method and scale, from the plural character to the plural author. The terrain of discussion becomes more uneven, since Karunatilaka and Jesuthasan occupy that plurality differently.
Plural identity Starting with symmetry, both The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida and Salamalecs place the question of plural, unfixed identity at their centre, though each approaches it through a different formal and political logic. In Karunatilaka’s novel, Maali is a protagonist who transcends partisan boundaries. Morally compromised, entangled in secret alliances, moving between factions, he embodies the impossibility of a stable position in wartime. His politically dangerous photographs make him simultaneously heroic and treacherous, a truth-teller to some, a traitor to others. The novel suggests that in a civil-war context, where loyalties are unstable and the stakes of naming are lethal, the same person can occupy entirely different moral registers depending on who is looking. This is what Thiranagama captures in her book In My Mother’s House, when she writes of the ambivalence marking the lives of ex-militants: “The contingency of ex-militants’ lives now as they look back on their past, one that has been removed from the history of freedom fighting and placed in a history of treachery instead” (2011: 184).
Jesuthasan’s novel works the same questions of identity through form as much as content. Salamalecs is structured as a roman recto-verso, a narrative literally readable from two directions, with no fixed point of entry or conclusion. Such a choice of structure is stylistic while also functional. It mirrors a protagonist who is simultaneously in exile and a returnee, present father and absent one, political subject and administrative outsider. By way of this double entrée the novel insists that Nandan has two countries, France and Sri Lanka, but one history, a phrasing that refuses to treat plural identity as a simple accumulation of affiliations. The same life is read differently depending on where Nandan stands, who is speaking about him, and which institutional power is in the act of naming him. In the novel, identity is like refracted light: the same material reflects differently depending on the angle of reception.
Critiques of violence To uphold plural, unfixed identities is also to refuse the ease of taking sides and instead, to insist on criticising violence regardless of who perpetrates it: the state, separatists, insurrectionists, or corrupt leaders. Both novels bring out this refusal. In Salamalecs, the chapter Corps Mystique (Mystical Body) presents a devastating passage: the LTTE’s violence rendered not through statistics or ideology but through the intimacy of a family unable to identify which of their twin sons was killed, forced to conduct funeral rites in ignorance, while the other twin was disappeared. This particular cruelty, the denial of even the rituals of grief, is one that other actors in Sri Lanka’s conflict have also perpetrated, and Jesuthasan does not exempt them. Elsewhere in the novel, the confusion of victim and perpetrator, mourner and celebrant, is made evident: militants in Paris celebrating a suicide bombing are confronted with the words, “21 de nos jeunes finissent carbonisés et pour vous, ça se fête?” (21 of our young people end up burnt to death and for you, that’s something to celebrate?) (2025: 31), a question that indicts the political culture that could transform mass death into an occasion for festivity.
In Jesuthasan’s story, violence does not stay in the past:
Savitri ne savait rien sur ma femme et mon fils. Les ténèbres étaient descendues sur moi ou, pour mieux le dire, mon esprit n’était plus qu’un désert où mon fils, ma femme et mon ancien hôte évoluaient à l’état d’ombres spectrales
(Savitri knew nothing about my wife and son. Darkness had descended upon me, or, to put it more accurately, my mind had become nothing more than a desert where my son, my wife, and my former host moved about as ghostly shadows). (2025: 112)
Darkness, desert, spectral shadows, belong to the language of trauma that refuses to heal.
It is also the language of TheSeven Moons of Maali Almeida. Spectres and shadows dance around Karunatilaka’s novel. The entire narrative is structured around the ghostly and the unquiet dead, figures who cannot rest because the violence that produced them has never been fully reckoned with. The two novels, written in different languages and from different positions of belonging, share this haunted register, as though the experience of Sri Lanka’s war generates, across its survivors and witnesses, the same vocabulary of darkness and spectrality.
Karunatilaka’s critique of nationalist violence appears evocatively in a passage on the two flags: both bear a beast (a tiger and a lion), both are the colour of blood, one the tomato red of a fresh wound, the other the plum maroon of a scar unhealed. Neither beast, he notes, ever actually roamed these lands, yet there they sit, waving weapons, swimming in blood, “as if to acknowledge that Lanka was founded on bestiality and bloodshed” (2020: 138). The symmetry makes its point obvious: neither flag is innocent, neither founding myth untainted.
Both novels point towards an ethical position that separates grief from political allegiance. In a recent article, Maharoof (2026) advocates for the “recognition that multiple communities can carry legitimate histories of pain without those histories negating one another”. Such an insight is particularly important in Sri Lanka, where mourning itself often becomes politically contested. Rather than asking readers to choose between competing memories, the novels create space for several histories to coexist without collapsing them into a single narrative.
Migration and inherited histories Turning now to the more uneven terrain of analysis, from fiction to the figure of the author, the experience of migration is far from incidental to Sri Lanka’s history, but it is not evenly distributed between the two authors. As a dual citizen, Karunatilaka probably occupies a form of belonging that meets institutional criteria; one that can be processed legibly and documented. Jesuthasan’s exile is less linear (Jesuthasan and Baron 2017). If the prime minister’s image of the diaspora as “ambassadors” presumes a singular, transferable connection to the nation, these two writers already demonstrate that such a relationship is elusive, even between two Sri Lankan-born novelists sharing the same prize in consecutive years.
Migration is not a departure from the question of plural identity. It is one of the historical processes through which such identities are produced. While institutions may seek stable categories of belonging, migration reveals belonging to be unstable, contradictory even. Thiranagama (2011) reminds us that movement was the most common experience of war reported by Tamils: from labour migration in the 19th century to internal displacement and then external refugee flight, it also became a way of understanding one’s relationship to history as inherited rather than chosen.
Jesuthasan’s story brings this out. In the chapter La Fosse (The Pit), he writes that every family watched a son leave: “chaque famille voyait partir un garçon parce qu’il rejoignait une organisation indépendantiste ou parce qu’il émigrait” (Every family saw one of their sons leave, either because he was joining a separatist organisation or because he was emigrating) (2025: 62). The two departures, into militancy or into exile, are placed side by side as if they were the only the two available futures, which was often the case.
What makes exile so difficult to convey to those who have not lived it is that leaving is not only a physical act. Thiranagama’s concept of ur (home, village, place of birth…) helps explain this condition. More than a place of origin, ur denotes the locality through which personhood is formed. Exile disrupts this reciprocal relationship between place and self, creating a persistent uncertainty about belonging. The challenge could be more pronounced for subsequent generations, who may inherit memories of a homeland without having themselves been constituted by it. Thus, across generations, the emotional labour needed to maintain a former home (somewhere in Sri Lanka as ur, for example), against the practical and present claims of Puttalam, Paris, or wherever one has actually settled, is considerable and unending.
This is what host countries and receiving institutions struggle to understand when they demand that identity be fixed, named, assigned to a category. The question is not simply “Where are you from?”, but what it means to be from somewhere when that somewhere has been violently taken from you, and when your children may have no somewhere to be from at all. If members of the diaspora are imagined as “ambassadors”, the question arises: which ur do they represent? The village left behind, the camp named on a birth document, or the fragmented, evolving landscapes of exile?
Naming home This, in turn, shifts the question: not only what exile does to identity, but what forms of identity exile makes possible. Cheran Rudhramoorthy’s (2001) concept of the sixth thinai offers a useful lens here. Building on the classical Tamil literary tradition of landscape-based emotional worlds, he identifies a sixth landscape: the snowy terrain of the diaspora, a space marked by exile, estrangement, and longing. Jesuthasan could be writing from within this sixth thinai. His work insists on what we might call the condition of precarious refuge, the recognition that crossing a border does not put an end to vulnerability but prolongs and transforms it. The dangers of the country of origin give way to the surveillance and marginalisation of the country of arrival.
And haunting all of this is the difficulty of naming home at all. For many in the Tamil diaspora,[2] even the word is contested: Sri Lanka, Ilangai, Eelam, three names for a place that is, for each speaker, a different political and emotional reality. Exile, as opposed to migration, does not simply mean leaving a place; it means leaving a name they can no longer pronounce—and arriving somewhere that has no name for them yet.
Once again, the metaphor of the diaspora as ambassador, which implies a stable relationship between a representative and the nation represented, becomes shaky because the notion of ur complicates this assumption. If belonging is constituted through multiple and shifting locations, then diaspora subjects who inhabit several places simultaneously could hardly represent a singular homeland.
Although Karunatilaka’s experience as a voluntary migrant belongs to a different register compared to Jesuthasan’s experience of exile, both writers depict identities formed within, without and across borders. The difference lies not in the existence of multiplicity but in the conditions through which it emerges. Karunatilaka’s dual citizenship grants him institutional acceptance: two passports, two legal homes, neither contested by the state that issues it. But The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida is haunted by the instability of belonging: Maali’s ghost wanders a Colombo he can act upon but no longer inhabit, suspended between the recognised and the unrecognisable.
This brings the analysis back into the pages, where the two novels meet, not at a shared condition, but at the suggestion that institutional legibility, whether granted or withheld, does not suffice to resolve the deeper unsettlement that exile and war produce. Their point of convergence is not a shared migration experience, but a shared insight demonstrating that bureaucratic arrangements (exile, citizenship) cannot fully settle what displacement has unmoored. The question, then, is not only how identities are named, recognised, or misrecognised within the novels, but also how the novels themselves are recognised within literary culture.
The value of literature There is sometimes a tendency to read literature from the Global South not as art but as testimony; to approach it as sociological data, as evidence of conditions rather than as inherent experimentation with form, voice, and meaning. The Prix Émile Guimet, in recognising both Karunatilaka and Jesuthasan, validates these novels as literary achievements, each in their own right. It represents a form of plural recognition: endorsing distinct linguistic, political, and experiential positions within a shared historical field. While I have used the focus of exile to discuss its impact on transforming and rendering identities even more complex, the prize overlooks this difference to reward the books of both authors for their own worth.
These writers, and others, are telling stories, while also acting as archivists, preserving experiences, voices, and forms of knowing that would otherwise remain outside the dominant literary stream. Fortunately, that archive has always existed, and is growing. Anthologies and collections such as Many Roads through Paradise (2014), Time Will Write a Song for You (2014), and Out of Sri Lanka (2023) are expanding the body of work available to readers who wish to move beyond the familiar names. Further, works like Voices of Peace (2018) and Herstories (2013) must also be brought to the fore, as texts that insist on the multiplicity of experience even within a single conflict, a single island, a single generation.[3] Because the underlying argument of this body of literature is one of plural identities, plural histories, and the refusal of national frameworks; of endorsing translingual, intercultural, and transnational ways of being.
Why does this matter beyond the literary? Because the stakes of remembering are also about the future. In Thiranagama’s study, the people she spoke with, displaced, bereaved, carrying the weight of the previous two decades, were not asking to dwell in the past. They were asking for a guarantee that it would not happen again. To imagine a future in which they would not have to flee once more. To say “move on” to those who have survived such violence is only meaningful if it is accompanied by a commitment to the future, not a dismissal of the past.
Literature is one of the spaces in which that reckoning becomes possible, where fractured, fracturing identities can be held without being resolved, where the complexity of what happened can be approached without being reduced. These are writers who refuse to cave to the politics of nationalism, who write instead from subject-positions of displacement and plurality. Jesuthasan writing from his position as an exile, Karunatilake writing as a migrant/expatriate; both criticise violence by its various perpetrators, implicitly and explicitly endorsing plural identities. They converge by allowing disparate histories to coexist on the page, not collapsed into a single narrative but held in necessary tension.
Emerging from this juxtaposition is a contrast between two modes of recognition. On the one hand, the state gestures toward inclusion through the language of representation, “good ambassadors”. On the other, literature insists on irreducible plurality, sometimes allowing different histories to jostle against one another, at other times allowing the same history to be lit up in different hues.
Maharoof (2026) raises these questions: “[…] how does a post-conflict society remember its past without perpetuating its divisions? And more importantly, is it possible to construct an inclusive national identity when the very act of remembering remains politically polarised?”.
The answer may lie in ceasing to look for a singular identity. If meaningful reconciliation is to take place, what is required is not representation in singular terms, but recognition through what might be called multiple acts of identification: an acknowledgement that identities are not fixed, but negotiated across time, space, and experience. And taking a cue from literature, one might begin to imagine a future for Sri Lanka as a nation that has never been one, to ask what it might become if allowed to be many.
Nadeera Rajapakse is an Assistant Professor in the History of Economic Thought at the University of Paris 1, Pantheon-Sorbonne, with research interests in identities, migrants, and global mobilities.
Cheran, Rudhramoorthy. (2001). The Sixth Genre: Memory, History and the Tamil Diaspora Imagination. Colombo: Marga Institute. Monograph Series on Ethnic Reconciliation, VII.
DeVotta, Neil. (2017). Majoritarian Politics in Sri Lanka: The Roots of Pluralism Breakdown. Ottawa: Global Centre for Pluralism.
Hettiarachchi, Radhika (Ed.). (2022). We are Present: Women’s Histories of Conflict, Courage and Survival. New York: International Coalition of Sites of Conscience
Jesuthasan, Antonythasan, and Celementine V. Baron. (2017). Shoba, itinéraire d’un réfugié [Itinerary of a refugee]. LGF. Livre de poche.
Jesuthasan, Antonythasan, and Leticia Ibanez (Trans.). (2025). Salamalecs. Paris: Zulma.
Kabir, Sarah. (2018). Voices of peace: ‘they were just like us’ (First edition). Colombo: author publication.
Kannan, M, Rebecca Whittington, D Senthil Babu, David Buck, and Institut Français de Pondichéry (Eds). (2014). Time will write a song for you: Contemporary Tamil writing from Sri Lanka. Institut Français de Pondichéry Penguin Books.
Karunatilaka, Shehan. (2020). The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida. Penguin Random House India.
Karunatilaka, Shehan, and Xavier Gros (2024). Les sept lunes de Maali Almeida. Paris: Calmann-Levy.
Madavan, Delon. (2014): “Populations d’origine sud-asiatique à Paris et en Ile-de-France”, Hommes & migrations, 1308 (October): 33-43. https://doi.org/10.4000/hommesmigrations.2991
Mantovan, Giacomo. (2018): “A ‘tactical’ use of collective history: the construction and certification of truth in life accounts for Sri Lankan Tamil asylum application in France”, Contemporary South Asia, 26 (2): 221-237. https://doi.org/10.1080/09584935.2017.1346585
Rajapakse, Nadeera. (2025). “The Good Ambassadors of the Diaspora. Sri Lankan Tamil Diaspora and the State”. Economic and Political Weekly, 60 (28). https://doi.org/10.71279/epw.v60i28.44059
Ravinthiran, Vidyan, Seni Seneviratne, and Shash Trevett (Eds.). (2023). Out of Sri Lanka: Tamil, Sinhala, and English Poetry from Sri Lanka and its Diasporas. Northumberland: Bloodaxe Books Ltd.
Shyam, Selvadurai. (Ed.). (2014). Many roads through paradise, an anthology of Sri Lankan literature. New Delhi: Penguin Books India.
Thiranagama, Sharika. (2011). In my mother’s house: Civil war in Sri Lanka (1st ed). University of Pennsylvania Press.
Notes
[1] The French title Salamalecs carries its own story. Jesuthasan says that when he was learning French, his teacher, exasperated by his ineptitude, used this term to refer to his faltering attempts. The term Salamalecs draws on the French word for exaggerated or affected politeness, while also echoing the Arabic greeting salam alaykum.
[2] The Sri Lankan Tamil diaspora in France is itself far from homogeneous. It encompasses multiple political orientations, pro-LTTE, pro-Eelam, pro-Sri Lankan, pro-Ilangai, as well as divisions of class, caste, generation, and migration trajectory (Madavan 2014).
[3] I saw the play “Dear Children, Sincerely” directed by Ruwanthie de Chickera and performed by Stages Theatre Group, in Germany in June 2026, which further confirmed my belief that the arts are essential for giving voice to what history often leaves unsaid.
Using a literature review, tourist arrival data, interviews with tourists and tour guides, this article examines the role of hill stations established under the British colonial regime, and the subsequent development of the Ramayana Trail promoting Indian tourism to Sri Lanka and domestic tourism within Sri Lanka. Nuwara Eliya developed as a colonial hill station with the gradual installation of required infrastructure facilities, scenic mountainous landscape and desirable weather conditions conducive to holiday making among the colonial elites. While colonial rule formally ended in 1948, the plantation economy and the hill station continued shaping postcolonial developments in Sri Lanka. Building on the Ramayana mythology framed in ancient India and the urban infrastructure established in the colonial hill station, the Ramayana Trail developed in the postcolonial era, constituting a new form of pilgrimage plus tourism targeting designated Ramayana sites in Sri Lanka. This article examines the resulting expansion of tourism and related infrastructural development encompassing mountain landscape, new challenges encountered by the postcolonial state and the tourist industry in catering to the demands from the Ramayana pilgrims, the service providers and the local communities and possible ways of addressing these challenges evolved from the colonial era.
Every morning for the past four years, come rain or shine, a group of dedicated activists and relatives of the forcibly disappeared have been making the long walk in Batticaloa town from St Sebastian Church to Gandhi Park, a route that has become a daily form of resistance. In a world of fleeting digital trends and mass mobilisations, the Justice Walk offers a different way of thinking about change: one that is slow, mindful and ingrained in the unwavering commitment of everyday practice.
The roots of this movement trace back to Sri Lanka’s emergency periods. When gathering in groups was prohibited and protests required elusive state permissions, a unique form of dissent emerged: the single file march. By walking alone but together – separated by just enough distance to avoid the legal definition of an unlawful assembly – activists found a way to say what needed to be said without uttering a word.
This history of foot pilgrimages evolved in the early 2000s, often led by the mothers of the disappeared. These women would walk from temple to temple or church to church, turning their personal grief into a public call for accountability. The current iteration of the Justice Walk found its immediate spark during the aragalaya in 2022.
When the central protest sites in Colombo were dismantled and curfews were imposed on May 12 four years ago, a small group met in a private home. They were nervous but they decided to reclaim the public space. They began with a plan for five days, which then extended to 10. “It kind of just happened that we wanted to continue,” walker Amara says. From its initial conception, the Justice Walk has spanned nearly 1,500 days of continuous presence.
At the heart of Gandhi Park stands a tree that the walkers have named the Justice Tree. In the absence of a permanent physical office, at different points in time this tree has been their meeting place, their archive and their mailing address. They have even used Justice Tree, Gandhi Park as a formal address to send recommendations to the president regarding new terror laws.
Today the tree remains adorned with artwork, poetry and placards; it functions as a living library of history. Every month the banners change to reflect the names of those who disappeared in that specific month in Batticaloa’s history. One of the walkers, Sharadha Devi, describes the tree as a silent witness: “This tree does not know how to talk. If it could, it would tell many stories… it is the one that bears our pain and suffering.” For the participants of the Justice Walk, system change is not merely about replacing a political leader or a specific government. In the East, where Tamil communities have long faced unique struggles regarding land, disappearances and wartime violence, the call for justice is much older than the recent economic crisis.
While the fuel and food shortages of 2022 initially brought thousands into the streets, the walkers realised that true transformation required something deeper than mass mobilisation; it required an internal transformation. “Change has to come from us,” Sarala Emmanuel explains. “We need to talk about history. We need to question things in our everyday practice, whether it’s about the environment, the economy or what we see as entitlements.”
This philosophy explains why they continue to walk long after the height of the aragalaya. When passersby ask, “Why are you still walking? Didn’t you get what you wanted?” the walkers respond with their own questions: “Can you afford food? Have things changed in our neighborhoods?” The walk is a space kept open specifically to ask these questions when the rest of the world has moved on.
The Justice Walk is a space to remember all victims of violence, refusing to take sides in a way that prioritises one grief over another. It commemorates massacres where the military was responsible but it also honours Buddhist monks and the hundreds of police officers killed in 1990. The walkers’ solidarity extends beyond the borders of Sri Lanka. On the seventh of every month, they walk for Palestine and the victims of conflicts in Sudan and other global crises. On the 25th, they carry placards for women living with disabilities who may not be physically able to participate in the walk themselves. In doing so, they connect the local soil of Batticaloa to a global history of resistance, drawing inspiration from the mothers of the Plaza de Mayo in Argentina, who have walked for the disappeared for over three decades.
The Justice Walk encourages a focus on mindfulness. It is not a performance for an audience; it is a discipline. The walkers describe the difficulties of being present – fighting the distractions of the mind and the urge to worry about the next task. Their pace is different now than it was four years ago; it is slower, more deliberate.
As they enter their fifth year, the group admits it does not have a grand plan. “How long are we going to do this? We don’t know,” says one. “But we will walk. That is the only thing we know.”
The Justice Walk reminds us that history is something that we can reflect on every day to have a greater understanding of the present. By walking this route day after day, the walkers ensure that the names of the disappeared are not forgotten, that the struggles of municipal workers are heard and that the future is filled with a persistent, quiet demand for a more just world.
To find out more about the Justice Walk in Batticaloa you can visit its Facebook Page.
Everystory Sri Lanka published the narrative reading list on Women and the City, discussing how the city of Colombo, is seen, experienced, lived in and navigated by women.
Introduction
“Any settlement is an inscription in space of the social relations in the society that built it…. Our cities are patriarchy written in stone, brick, glass and concrete.” Jane Darke, Geographer
Cities have historically been planned for and by men. From the 1970s, architects, geographers and feminists have questioned the impact of such a built environment on women, exploring what it means to be a woman in anurban space and what struggles and opportunities women encounter in these environments. As urbanisation increased in the 19th century, so did concerns about women’s place in these unfamiliar crowded environments, as cities offered a degree of freedom and agency to women, from economic opportunities to romantic encounters.
Colonial cities were often missing women and Colombo was no different, as early migrants were often single men migrating to the city in search of fortune. In fact it was only in the 1960s, centuries after its founding, that Colombo’s gender ratio caught up with the rest of the country. Nihal Perera charts the transformation of colonial Colombo from a white male city to one with both European and indigenous Lankan women through processes of interracial marriage and missionary schools. In Sri Lanka, the city has been seen as a Westernised and modern space contrasted with the village as a site of national authenticity. Cultural narratives have often positioned women in Colombo as corrupted and Westernised: Harshana Rambukwella discusses common trope of a young man from a village losing himself through contact with the city and the sexually promiscuous (often Eurasian) women who inhabit it.
Colombo in the 1970s
Home Work?
Architect Dolores Hayden observed that a century of urban planning was informed by the principle that ‘a woman’s place is in the home,’ noting that these “dwellings, neighbourhoods and cities designed for homebound women constrain women physically, socially, and economically.” These cities were designed for the model of a male breadwinner commuting from the suburbs to an office in the city, returning to an oasis of domestic bliss governed by his wife. The city was a masculine space of economic activity, work and production, while the home was the worker’s refuge. Home is a site of shelter and nurture, the site of essential domestic labour that enables life and work to continue. Whether referred to as social reproduction or care work, the mundane tasks of cooking, cleaning, laundry, taking care of children and elderly are performed mostly by women at home.
1950s advertisements promoted and reflected the gendered divide of space and roles.
Making and running a home is no easy task, especially in the cities of the global South where infrastructure and service delivery may be insufficient, fragmented or non-existent. Where the grid is overburdened or absent, women often do the work of making sure their households have access to water, electricity and sanitation. This was particularly so during COVID-19 and Sri Lanka’s economic crisis. Washing clothes by hand, foregoing nutritious food, cooking on hazardous wood-stoves to save gas, were all strategies that women adopted to navigate the crisis which had a disproportionate impact on low-income urban households who relied on daily wages and often had higher costs of living than their rural counterparts. Meghal Perera reflects on the electricity consumption of the working class poor in Colombo, examining the impact of tariff increases in 2022 – 2023 and its impact on women and their time poverty.
Writing about how care is intrinsically linked to housing, David Madden notes that “every time a public housing development is demolished or a household is evicted, some piece of care infrastructure is shattered and needs to be rebuilt at cost. The contemporary city is battered by a relentless churn, which forces households to repeatedly build and rebuild structures and networks of social support.” In Sri Lanka, displacement has had a disproportionate impact on women in urban settlements. Even the possibility of eviction can send ripples through communities, with women again bearing the brunt. Asha Abeysekera describes how women in a low-income settlement in Slave Island face hostility and violence from their brothers, husbands and in-laws as inheritance disputes come to a head due to looming evictions and anticipated compensation. Relocation itself is a jolting experience; networks of communal care and surveillance that made it safe for children to play outside no longer exist, narrow corridors and unlit stairs limit the mobility of teenage girls. Iromi Perera writes about how even simple tasks like laundry become fraught and contested in high-rise tower blocks in Colombo that communities are relocated to in the name of development.
Iromi Perera looks at how relocation to a high-rise building makes the gendered work of laundry more complicated and time-consuming for women.
One approach is to think of urban infrastructures of care, which are aspects of the built environment that impede or support caregiving labour. Hayden warns us that the solutions to “overcome an environment without child care, public transportation, or food service have been “private,” commercially profitable solutions: maids and baby-sitters by the hour; franchise day care or extended television viewing; fast food service; easier credit for purchasing an automobile, a washer, or a microwave oven.” The cost of these private fixes is often borne by poorer women who take on the poorly paid jobs generated by these conditions. Yet care infrastructures can be thought of in more transformative ways. For instance, the first female Mayor of Bogota, Colombia established ‘Care Blocks’which provided integrated public services around the needs of caregivers and their dependents. Located within a 15-20 minute walk, they offer not only childcare, eldercare and job training, but legal assistance, adult education, recreation and leisure facilities. In Colombo, care remains very much within the mother’s domain, and impedes working class women from taking on full time work or formal work and their income generation activities are very much still determined by the timings and availability of day cares or school timings.
Women traditional flowing dresses for their performance at a “care block” center in Bogotá, Colombia. The class is one of the free services offered to anyone in the neighborhood who is an unpaid caregiver for their family.
While urban planners may not count on women working, the reality is very different. In the cities of the global South, a majority of women work in the informal sector, in jobs that are poorly paid and precarious. Women constitute a majority of market vendors worldwide, and often suffer as a result of spaces that have not been designed with them in mind. Female vendors often do not have access to toilets and sanitation facilities, and even when they do these are often not gender-separated which poses safety issues. The precarity of informal vending also exacerbates working conditions with women vendors facing violence and harassment from the police, male vendors and even customers, alongside the constant threat of eviction. Female-gig workers don’t have it any better, experiencing sexual violence, pollution and a lack of labour protections.
Such work is also complicated in the context of climate change and the increasing intensity and frequency of extreme heat. In Colombo, outdoor female workers are affected by heat stress in different ways: goods spoiling in the heat causes income loss, reduced water intake when they don’t have access to a bathroom and may cause infections and other health impacts. The absence of public infrastructure such as public bathrooms only exacerbates these vulnerabilities. Even in their own communities, women in low-income settlements across South Asia lack access to bathrooms which puts their health and safety at risk. Bathrooms can also be another flashpoint of sexism that is designed into the city: open-air urinals installed in Paris in 2018 were widely condemned for reinforcing the idea that only men exist in public spaces.
Mobility, Security and Reclaiming the City
Women’s mobility in the city is influenced by a variety of factors. Women have different transport patterns from men, often taking additional trips to take care of domestic responsibilities and caregiving, rather than a straightforward commute to office. They are also more likely to take more walking trips than their male counterparts. Given that women are often confined to the domestic sphere in places where gender roles are rigid, efficient and affordable public transport can have a huge impact in increasing women’s mobility. Karnataka’s Shakthi Scheme, which provides free rides to all women and trans people on state buses, resulted in women having more financial independence, joining the workplace and taking trips for leisure for the first time.
The threat of gender based violence also looms over women’s transport choices. A UNFPA study found that 90% of Sri Lankan women had experienced some form of sexual harassment on public transport. Such experiences can have ripple effects into all aspects of women’s life. Long commutes may dissuade women from joining the labour force, while time-poverty of caregivers may increase as they have to accompany female children to places on public transport. Ride hailing apps may facilitate women’s mobility, particularly at night, but also come with their own risks.
In light of the threat of gender based violence on public transport, many cities have adopted female-only carriages and buses as a means of ensuring women a safe journey, including those in India, Japan and Iran. While such measures may ease anxieties around public transport, critics note that sex-segregated transport does not address behavioural change and reinforces the idea that men and women cannot exist in the same space without gender based violence.
Many scholars have argued for a new approach to how we think about women’s safety in public places. They note that safety for women is a goal that can be co-opted by patriarchal forces to reinforce gender stereotypes and limit freedoms of women. What would happen if we abandoned viewing women and the city solely through the lens of potential violence? Shilpa Phadke and Sameera Khan argue that a right to risk is a more liberatory goal which grants women unconditional access to public space. Under this logic, women, like men, can access the city even at night, because they have the right to public space and its pleasures. Reorienting the city as a place of pleasure, joy and fun can be a means of attacking the original logic that would see women’s place in the kitchen. In their seminal work, Why Loiter? Sameera Khan, Shilpa Phadke and Shilpa Ranade make the case for women’s right to loiter in the city, as men do all the time. Only through loitering, or existing in space without a legitimate or respectable reason, can women reclaim urban space and the full citizenship that comes with it.
Why Loiter has inspired initiatives like #GirlsatDhabas and #GirlsPlayingStreetCricket through which women and girls across South Asia reclaim urban spaces.
This book explores how Devadasi dance traditions were transformed through caste reform, colonial morality, and nationalist revival into Bharatanatyam, creating a purified symbol of Indian culture.
Drawing on a multidisciplinary framework, the work explores the “ethics-aesthetics nexus” to illustrate how technical ideals of purity intersected with questions of citizenship and belonging.
Historically, Devadasis occupied fluid roles as temple ritualists and courtly artists within matrifocal structures that enabled economic autonomy and ritual authority. Colonial regulation and nationalist reform later recast these “non-wife” identities as immoral, facilitating a transfer of artistic capital from female-hereditary practitioners to male authority, and imposing upper-caste domesticity.
Dancing Against Purity looks beyond the single story, highlighting the plural, layered histories, and invites readers to imagine forms of belonging that are as porous and transgressive as the women who once blurred the boundaries between the sacred and the sensual.
About the author
Nadeera Rajapakse is a senior lecturer in the history of economic thought at Panthéon-Sorbonne University. She is affiliated with the PHARE research group (Philosophy, History and Analysis of Economic Representations). Her research focuses on migration (particularly female migrants working in domestic service), identities and development.
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 TekwaniShyam Tekwani is a faculty member at the Daniel K. Inouye Asia-Pacific Center for Security Studies and a former photojournalist
January 19, 2026
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.
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.
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.
Aruliniyan Mahalingam is a Sri Lankan journalist and author from Jaffna, known for incisive reporting on conflict, culture, and geopolitics across South and Southeast Asia.
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:
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 hashtag#SriLanka 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.
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
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.
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.
