Dr. Jerzy Malinowski and Dr. Piotr Balcerowicz invite articles of experts of South Asia, art historians, Indologists, scholars of religion and culture as well as representatives from associated fields of study that engage with the Art of South Asia – from Antiquity to modern times – in interconnected areas of broadly understood art, such as fine arts, iconography, architecture, literature on art and artistic treatises, visual arts, traditional dance and theatre, connections of art with religion and with intellectual culture, influences of South Asian art on, and its relationship to other regions, e.g. Central Asia, South-East Asia etc.
The articles will be published in a special issue of The Artistic Traditions of Non-European Cultures (ISSN: 2450-5692, http://artistic-tradition-of- non-european-culture.world- art.pl/). It is published by the Polish Institute of World Art Studies (http://www.world-art.pl/), which in 2025 celebrated the 25th anniversary of its foundation. The Institute has published 15 monographs devoted to the art of India as well as South and South-East Asia which include eight monographs and collective volumes, together with materials from conferences organised by the Institute in its periodicals and publication series (beside approx. 400 volumes on World Art in English, Polish, Italian, Spanish, or Chinese, https://world-art.pl/ repozytorium-i-publikacje/).
Manuscripts may contain colour or black-and-white plates.
– Article submission deadline (extended): 31 October 2026
– Peer review notification: within two months after submission
This conference explores the interrelationships among political literary, and religious culture in early second-millennium South India and Sri Lanka. Scholars of premodern South Asia and Indian Ocean political culture now recognize that transregional processes fundamentally shaped political environments in this region. The substantial migration of scholars, military operators, ritual specialists, and pilgrim-patrons led to substantial transfers of knowledge. During this period, textual forms, material culture, languages, and technical sciences were on the move. Speakers will highlight the potential of working across languages and between key political-cultural centers to identify core characteristics of premodern political culture in peninsular India and Sri Lanka from approximately 900-1500. The culture of politics in this region underwent substantial changes during this period, bookended by the Indian Ocean imperial vision of the Cōḷas to the advent of the Portuguese Indian Ocean colonial empire.
Young activists lead Sri Lanka’s 2022 uprising, toppling an authoritarian president but can fragile hope survive in a country built on forgetting?
Directed by Kannan Arunasalam, Republic of Amnesia follows the rise and fall of Sri Lanka’s Aragalaya (“The Struggle”) the youth-led protest movement that forced authoritarian president Gotabaya Rajapaksa to flee the country in 2022. At its heart are young activists like Melani, Buwanaka and Jeana, who organize marches, face arrest, and confront a political system built to endure. As they challenge a powerful dynasty, their struggle raises a deeper question: can fragile hope survive in a country built on forgetting?
As the spirit of the Aragalaya ripples across Asia, inspiring youth movements from Bangladesh to Indonesia, the film looks beyond the moment itself. It asks what remains and what is lost when a movement fades, and suggests that the struggle for democracy lies not only in institutions or leaders, but in the stories a society chooses to preserve.
Filmmaker Kannan Arunasalam will join for a conversation after the film with Daniel Bass, Senior Program Manager of the South Asia Program.
Free admission! Sponsored by the South Asia Program at the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies.
About the filmmaker Kannan Arunasalam is a British-Sri Lankan filmmaker working across documentary film and moving-image installation. His work explores memory, political resistance, and the legacies of conflict and colonialism. His installation The Tent (2019) was presented in a solo exhibition at Yorkshire Contemporary. His documentary Sri Lanka’s Rebel Wife (2021) was shortlisted for Best Documentary at the DIG Investigative Film Awards. He recently completed two feature documentaries: Republic of Amnesia (2025, UK/Sri Lanka), examining Sri Lanka’s 2022 Aragalaya protest movement, and Possible Landscapes (2025, US/Trinidad & Tobago), which premiered at the BlackStar Film Festival and explores intergenerational environmental experience.
We share an interview given by Reverant Father Aloysius Pieris S.J. about his life and the Discovery of an Asian Theology of Liberation. The interview was given to Tulana Media.
Biography
Aloysius Pieris S.J. (9 April 1934 – 22 March 2026) was a Sri Lankan Jesuit priest, theologian, intellect, Buddhist scholar and the founding director of the Tulana Research Centre for Encounter and Dialogue. He was born in Ampitiya, British Ceylon. He studied at St. Aloysius’ College, Galle. He took his Jesuit vows in 1953. Pieris had three theological degrees, an LPh from Sacred Heart College in Shembaganur, India (1959), an STL from the Pontifical Theological Faculty in Naples (1966), and a Th.D. from Tilburg University (1987). Pieris also had a BA in Pali and Sanskrit from the University of London (1961) graduating with first-class honours and reportedly becoming the first student in the world to do so and a Ph.D. in Buddhist philosophy from the University of Sri Lanka (1971). He also obtained a diploma in Pre-Polyphonic Music from Fondazione Cini, Venice, in 1964. He held academic posts as the Franciscan Chair in Mission Studies at the Washington Theological Union, the Henry Luce Chair of World Christianity at Union Theological Seminary, New York, and the A. P. Wilson Distinguished Visiting Chair of Theology at Vanderbilt Divinity School.
He was fluent in more than twenty languages, including Pali, Sanskrit, several forms of Prakrit, Sinhala, English, Greek, German, Spanish, Italian, French, Latin, Aramaic and Hebrew.
In June 1974, Pieris established the Tulana Research Centre for Encounter and Dialogue in Kelaniya, Sri Lanka, and was its director ever afterwards. Tulana was created as a Jesuit retreat site, but also as a space for Buddhist-Christian interfaith dialogue.
One of Pieris’s most well-known writings, An Asian Theology of Liberation (1988), attempts to move beyond the limitations of Latin American liberation theology and engage with an Asia that is wreaked by severe poverty and shaped by deep religiosity.
Pieris died on 22 March 2026, at the age of 91.
We would like also to share a review by Peter C. Phan of An Asian Theology of Liberation by Aloysius Pieris, SJ (Orbis Books, 1988).
We share a statement by Iranian Ambassador to Sri Lanka, Dr Alireza Delkhosh, who recall the current situation of war and in Strait of Hormuz. He emphases that Sri lanka is friendly country for Iran and that his country is ready to provide fuel or essential goods for the island nation.
Entre mémoires d’exil et rythmes solaires, et pour fêter la haute saison qui revient à Metaxu, le samedi 28 mars s’annonce suspendu !
Au programme :
EXPO & PERFORMANCE : Nous aurons le plaisir d’accueillir l’artiste VP. Vasuhan (@vasuhan_paris) pour une exposition et une performance unique à 20h. Ses masques organiques, puisés dans les traditions populaires, explorent nos liens profonds entre culture et nature.
SOUND LOVERS : Côté platines, le @novi_collectif, créateur de concerts et DJ sets à l’ambiance festive et conviviale autour de musiques comme le soukous, l’afrobeat et le zouk, transformera la péniche en salon tropical. Fidèles à l’esprit des fêtes familiales togolaises, il invitera Etni (@etnispirit) et son « Afromazonia House » pour un voyage entre musique homemade et percussions chamaniques.
On se retrouve Place de la Pointe pour un samedi de foliiiiie !
Récap de votre soirée : 20h : Performance de VP. Vasuhan 19h – 2h : Exposition & DJ Set ETNI
Infos pratiques : 📍Metaxu, place de la Pointe, Pantin 📆 samedi 28 mars 🚇 Métro ligne 5 – arrêt Eglise de Pantin 🎟️ Lien en bio – GRATUIT
Abstract Islamic art is often misrepresented as an iconophobic tradition. As a result of this assumption, the polyvalence of figural artworks made for Hindustan’s Muslim audiences has remained hidden in plain view. By combining an art historical survey with an analysis of primary Indo-Persian literature, this talk shows how figurative painting was intimately linked to a unique Indo-Muslim religious expression that had a wide circulation across South Asia.
Biography Murad Khan Mumtaz is an associate professor in the Art Department at Williams College. He examines historical intersections of art, literature and religious expression in South Asia, with a primary focus on Indo-Muslim patronage. By combining art history with textual analysis, his recent book, Faces of God: Images of Devotion in Indo-Muslim Painting (Brill, 2023), examines the cultural contexts within which these Islamicate images of devotion were made and viewed. Murad is also an artist trained in traditional Hindustani painting techniques which he teaches at Williams. His work has been shown in solo and group exhibitions internationally.
We are happy to share Jonathan Spencer’s presentation on “James Brow, Anuradhapura 1984, and the Question of Agrarian Change”. This presentation was given during given during Critical Agrarian Studies Seminar Series, organized by Social Scientists’ Association (SSA).
Summary
James Brow (d. 2022) made a major contribution to the analysis of rural society and structure in Sri Lanka, in his two monographs on Anuradhapura district, but also in co-organising an international conference on ‘Symbolic and Material Dimensions of Agrarian Change’ in July 1984. My talk combines a personal reassessment of the work of a friend and exemplary mentor, with reflections on a meeting of brilliant young researchers who had carried out field studies in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Yet when Agrarian Change in Sri Lanka (Sage, New Delhi) belatedly appeared in 1992, the age of the classic village study seemed over. How did this happen? What can we still learn from that encounter of 40 years ago?
In January 2025, Colombo Urban Lab hosted a webinar on Sri Lanka’s development projects and debt, with a focus on the lived realities of communities affected by the Colombo Urban Regeneration Project, on the 16th of January, at 6pm via Zoom. The team at Colombo Urban Lab shared some highlights from the November 2024 report on the URP, followed by a discussion with Professor Jonathan Spencer from the University of Edinburgh and Dr. Avanka Fernando from the University of Colombo.
The first video in the series introduces the island of Sri Lanka, the people that live there and where they come from, with a particular focus on the Sinhalese and the Tamils. It also explores part of Colombo.
Sources:
-A History of Sri Lanka, K. M. de Silva -Elephant Complex; Travels in Sri Lanka, John Gimlette
-The Cage: The Fight for Sri Lanka and the Last Days of the Tamil Tigers, Gordon Weiss
-The Ocean of Churn: How the Indian Ocean Shaped Human History, Sanjeev Sanyal
-This Divided Island: Stories from the Sri Lankan War, Samanth Subramanian
The origins of the Sri Lankan Civil War lie in the continuous political rancor between the majority Sinhalese and the minority Sri Lankan Tamils. Before and during the early part of colonial rule by Europeans, Sri Lanka was under the rule of three separate kingdoms. During the colonial rule by Portuguese and then the Dutch, the three sovereign states were ruled as separate entities. The final British colonial rule amalgamated the entire island into a single administrative entity after independence, and the minorities were handed over to the mercy of the majority. According to Jonathan Spencer, a social anthropologist from the School of Social and Political Studies of the University of Edinburgh,[1] the war is an outcome of how modern ethnic identities have been made and re-made since the colonial period, with the political struggle between minority Tamils and the Sinhalese-dominant government accompanied by rhetorical wars over archeological sites and place name etymologies, and the political use of the national past.
Nous partageons un lien pour lier ou télécharger le mémoire de Laurence Blin sur “Les familles tamoules sri lankaises et l’école en France: des projets différenciés d’ascension sociale“. Ce mémoire a été réalisé dans le cadre du diplôme universitaire (DU) de INSHEA – Institut national supérieur de formation et de recherche pour l’éducation des jeunes handicapés et les enseignements adaptés, lors de l’année 2020/20
Résumé:
L’auteure cherche à identifier les éléments constitutifs de la diversité des parcours scolaires des enfants de familles tamoules du Sri Lanka. Elle s’appuie à la fois sur des éléments théoriques et sur l’analyse des entretiens réalisés auprès de neuf personnes. Dans une première partie, elle s’intéresse à la diversité des positions sociales des parents dans le cadre historique commun d’un mouvement de minorisation des Tamouls sri lankais. Dans une deuxième partie, elle étudie comment ces positions et expériences prémigratoires mêlées aux positions et expériences sociales de la société d’immigration transforment des différences sociales en inégalités scolaires.
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.
09h00-09h15 : Introduction Professeur Jean-Paul Amat (Université Paris IV et Directeur de l’ENeC) & Professeur Eric Meyer (Vice Président de l’INALCO)
09h15-09h40 : Véronique Halperin : un exemple de formation et de représentation des identités à travers des photographies du XIX et XX ème siècle, Université Paris-IV Sorbonne, UFR d’Histoire de l’Art, CREOPS
09h40-10h05 : Delon Madavan : Tamil minorities in Colombo, Kuala Lumpur and Singapore, Université Paris-IV Sorbonne, UFR de Geographie, UMR 8185 ENeC
10h05-10h30 : Kathrin Thurnheer : Life Beyond Survivial. Social forms of coping in post- tsunami, war-affected Batticaloa / Eastern Sri Lanka, University of Bern (Switzerland), Institute for Social Anthropology and Interdisciplinary Centre for Gender Studies
10h30-10h55 : Nadeera Rajapakse : Elements of informations on Sri Lankan Female Labor Migrants in Middle East, Université Paris 1 – Panthéon Sorbonne, UFR d’Economie, GRESE-PHARE
10h55-11h10 : Pause
11h10-11h35 : Gaelle Dequirez : Tamils’ Discourses and political mobilizations in France Université Lille 2, Pôle Droit Science Politique, laboratoire CERAPS
11h35-12h00 : Anthony Goreau : La diaspora tamoule: trajectoires spatio-temporelles et inscriptions territoriales en Île-de-France, Université Bordeaux III, UFR Géographie, l’UMR 5185 ADES
12h00-12h25 : Giacomo Mantovan: Souffrance et trajectoires thérapeutiques des Tamouls en Ile-de-France, EHESS, mention Santé, Population, Politiques Sociales
12h25-12h50 : Mark Bradley : The importance of religion in a forced migration context with regard to the identity transmission process: comparative study of religious practices of Hindu Sri Lankan Tamils in Montréal and Paris, Université du Québec à Montréal, Département de sciences des religions
L’atelier de travail Sri Lanka et diaspora sri lankaise qui s’est tenu le samedi 16 décembre 2008 à l’université Paris 8 Saint Denis, sous l’égide du laboratoire ENeC, a réuni quinze personnes. Outre les huit intervenants, des enseignants chercheurs, des membres d’organisations non gouvernementales travaillant à Sri Lanka et quelques étudiants se sont rassemblés afin de discuter de leurs projets de recherche portant sur Sri Lanka ou la diaspora.
Cet atelier pluridisciplinaire a permis aux doctorants de présenter leur projet de thèse pendant quinze minutes en français ou en anglais. Chaque communication a été suivie par des questions posées par les auditeurs.
Cette manifestation a été l’occasion pour les doctorants de partager leur recherche, leur méthodologie de travail et les problèmes qu’ils ont pu rencontrer. Le caractère pluridisciplinaire et international de cette réunion de travail a permis à des personnes issues de six nationalités différentes d’élargir leur réflexion sur des thèmes très divers mais complémentaires.
Le bilan de cet atelier est très positif car il a permis à un groupe d’étude informel de jeunes chercheurs français, encadré par Monsieur Meyer (voir la liste des participants jointe infra), d’acquérir une plus large visibilité. Cette rencontre a été l’occasion d’élargir ce groupe de réflexion à d’autres jeunes chercheurs français (A. Goreau) et surtout étrangers (M. Bradley, K. Thurnheer, etc.) et à des personnes travaillant dans différentes organisations non gouvernementales. Cela a notamment favorisé la constitution d’un véritable réseau international permettant les échanges d’idées et de contacts.
Par ailleurs, cet atelier a constitué une étape indispensable pour le rapprochement entre l’ENeC et l’INALCO en vue de la tenue d’un colloque international pluridisciplinaire sur les communautés tamoules et le conflit sri lankais qui sera co-organisée en février 2010 à l’université Paris-Sorbonne. Ce colloque sera l’occasion pour nos deux institutions de collaborer afin de renforcer la place de la recherche française sur la scène internationale. En effet, ce colloque doit permettre à la France de jouer un rôle moteur en relançant la conférence internationale européenne de chercheurs sur Sri Lanka et les Tamouls qui se tenait tous les deux ans dans une université européenne jusqu’à la fin des années 80.
Liste des participants à l’atelier de travail
Enseignants-chercheurs :
Eric Meyer, Vice Président de l’INALCO et spécialiste de Sri Lanka
Olivier Sevin, Université Paris-Sorbonne, Directeur du Master Mondialisation et Dynamiques spatiales dans les pays du Sud, ENEC
Elisabeth Sethupathy, maître de conférences de tamoul à INALCO
Communiquants :
Mark Bradley, Canadien, Université du Québec à Montréal, Département de sciences des religions
Gaelle Dequirez, Française, Université Lille 2, Pôle Droit Science Politique, laboratoire CERAPS
Anthony Goreau, Française, Université Bordeaux III, UFR Géographie, l’UMR 5185 ADES
Veronique Halperin, Française, Université Paris-IV Sorbonne, UFR d’Histoire de l’Art, CREOPS
Delon Madavan, Français, Université Paris-IV Sorbonne, UFR de Geographie, UMR 8185 ENEC