SAMINDA ONCE MADE a point about the meaning of fires in Sri Lanka.
We were driving, and we had come upon a large lot where there had once been a house and a walled garden. Bits of charred wreckage and the crumbled wall near the street were all that remained.
“Fires are common,” Saminda said. “During periods of violence people used to set them all the time. In this case it’s impossible to tell what happened. But there is something very typical about setting fire to things as an act of revenge or retaliation. Everything is destroyed. After a fire there’s nothing left.”
THE MOST FATEFUL FIRE in Sri Lankan history occurred in the city of Jaffna, in the far north, in 1981. It was set on the first of three nights of anti-Tamil violence and destruction that resembled a pogrom, a running Kristallnacht in the center of the Tamil community. Apart from the death toll, which was six, the greatest casualty was the Jaffna Library.
There are many photographs of the library after the fire. The one I have shows the front elevation. It is a hollow shell. You can still make out many of the elements the architect, a noted Indian, combined into an Indo-Gothic style: the three domes inspired by Hindu temples, the Greek-influenced columns favored by the English of the Victorian era. But the window frames are empty–revealing only the daylight coming in from the other side of the building. In the foreground of the photograph a Tamil boy struggles with a bicycle that is a little too big for him.
The library was a unique institution in Sri Lanka. It began as a modest private collection in 1933. Then it grew, a contribution at a time, to include more than ninety thousand volumes, many of them rare. It also had an extraordinary collection of precious documents: palm-leaf manuscripts, scrolls, newspaper files, archival materials, hand-written memoirs and local histories. The original building opened in 1959; by the time of the fire two wings had been added.
So the library was a cumulative project, the way Saminda had described the Westminster system as a cumulative process: It grew to what it was over a long period, by accretion, and the process of accretion made it what it was. It was also a public project, a community project, in that generations of local residents contributed to it–time, money, books, artifacts, collections. This lent Jaffna Library a great symbolic meaning: It stood as a monument to Tamil culture, tradition, dedication to learning, and achievement. It also represented a shared effort; it was public space of a special kind.
The fire started on May 31st. That day a Tamil political organization, the Tamil United Liberation Front, held a rally in anticipation of local elections scheduled for mid-June. In an atmosphere already charged with ethnic animosity, four Sinhalese policemen were attacked and two were killed.
Those were the sparks that set off the three nights of violence. Apart from the library, newspaper offices were burned, statues defaced, and businesses destroyed. Four people were pulled from their homes and murdered.
There has never been much dispute about the role of government officials in these events, including the library fire. By all accounts the violence was led by police and paramilitary units, some in uniform and some in plain clothes, and “henchmen,” those ever-lurking fixers employed by government officials. Two cabinet ministers from Colombo witnessed the scene from the verandah of their hotel. One said afterward that it was all “an unfortunate incident where a few policemen got drunk and went on a looting spree all on their own.” It took the government a decade to acknowledge its responsibility; it was a dozen years more before Jaffna finished reconstructing its library.
The loss of the library became a rallying cry for Tamil separatists. Two years later came “Black July,” when the deaths of thirteen soldiers serving in Jaffna set off a week of frenetic violence in Colombo, in which up to two thousand people, by some estimates, were killed. This, like the hartal and the events in Jaffna, was a transforming moment in Sri Lanka. Armed conflict was soon a fact of life. Four years after Black July, the Sri Lankan government was bombing Jaffna, a city it was supposed to be governing.
A long, crooked line stretches from the Bracegirdle photograph to that of the charred library in Jaffna. But the line between the language law of 1956 and Sri Lanka’s most notorious fire is perfectly straight. It is natural that those of Tamil extraction would mourn the loss of their library for many years, as many Tamils did. But the true loss was larger still than it was commonly understood to be. Jaffna Library was not only, or even primarily, a Tamil institution. Understood properly, it was Sri Lankan. It stood for the multicultural mosaic of the nation. As a national treasure, Sinhalese ought to have celebrated it just as much as Tamils did. In the burning of the Jaffna Library we must recognize not only an attack on an ethnic population, but the annihilation of public space.
ON THE VERANDAH of a new friend’s home there were two paintings, hung facing one another on opposite walls. They were superbly executed, oils done on board: two more pictures from the past.
The themes in these pictures were simple and straightforward, but whoever had painted them had plainly been exposed to modernist technique. There were modernist innovations in the use of perspective, scale, and color; there were abstract elements and borrowings from Cubism. And the paintings used these techniques to good effect, evoking a kind of individuality that is found within multiplicity. They showed not merely figures, but the world in which the figures lived. I was struck by them as soon as I saw them.
One pictured two workers in front of an industrial site, a Sinhalese and a darker man, a Tamil. Their stylized arms framed the composition, leading down to oversized hands opened, palms up, at the bottom of the picture. Together, they held a betel leaf. Betel leaf, otherwise known as paan: that palliative, heart-shaped frond mentioned in Sri Lanka’s most ancient book, the Mahavamsa, and signifying some combination of welcome, courtesy, sympathy, respect, a shared bounty whenever one offers it to another.
The other painting was in the same style. It showed a crowd of men–again, workers–listening to one of their own who holds a book. The faces capture perfectly what one would see in any Sri Lankan gathering–curious faces, thoughtful faces, hopeful and beseeching faces, all in different shades of brown, all belonging to men in different sorts of dress.
My friend’s name was Vijaya. When I asked him about the paintings on the verandah he took me inside, to a room off the dining room where there were stacks of books and a daybed. There he showed me two more pieces by the same artist–watercolors, even more expertly rendered than the oils.
“I know him well,” Vijaya said. “Stanley Kirinde. You can meet him if you like.”
BETWEEN VIJAYA AND ME, I was the nostalgist. I was a bit like the Japanese teenagers nostalgic for Elvis when I came to a place such as Sri Lanka. I was too young to recall anything about the independence era. In New England, where I had been raised, most people never gave such an idea even a thought. But as I grew older and began to understand the history of my own lifetime (I was born at exactly mid-century), I came to have a great fascination with the independence era and an admiration for the men and women who made it what it had been. There were, as I thought of them, “the four ‘Ns'”–Nehru, Nkrumah, Nyerere, and the gigantic Nasser. There were Sukarno, Mossadegh, and Arbenz. One could name others. They were all imperfect, all full of flaws, but they all seemed larger than life. And behind them there were millions of committed, conscious men and women. Ceylon produced no such Herculean figures, but it had produced many fine, intelligent individuals. It had been prominent in the movement, if we can call it such, of newly independent nations.
I have long regretted living through this period and not being old enough, or in the right place, or born into the right circumstances and with the right set of interests, to have been part of it. It was a singular passage in twentieth-century history–or simply in human history altogether. And to be in Sri Lanka (or India, or Iran, or Guatemala, and so on) was to be where the history had taken place. What force and attraction the ideals of that time must have had for those who held them. What could it have been like, the sensation of being elevated by such ideas and ideals, such belief in what we humans are capable of? The thought is especially poignant when one entertains it in our age, a low age by comparison, with few such compelling ideals and few to articulate them. Some years ago an Indonesian general attended the funeral of an aged colleague with whom he had fought the Dutch, then collaborated with the Japanese against the Allies, and then fought the Dutch again, and with whom he had later served under Sukarno. “We soared like eagles,” he said at the funeral. “And then we scratched the earth like chickens.” This was Indonesia’s story, but it was not Indonesia’s alone.
I had a long tuk-tuk drive out to Stanley Kirinde’s home, and I got briefly lost in such thoughts amid the thick, black fumes of buses and trucks and the dozens of sounds that announced I was on a busy road in a busy country full of busy, struggling people. We passed the parliament building in Sri Jayewardenepura and then turned at a junction called Pelawatte. Then another turn down a narrow lane. Then a half kilometer along and I would find Stanley Kirinde’s house.
I was early. I asked the driver to drop me at the top of the lane and started to walk the half kilometer. It was suddenly rather peaceful. The commotion and congestion of the capital had not reached this neighborhood yet. There were long, flat fields, and the smell of the soil was strong. Near the lane a farmer in a sarong worked a patch of vegetables with a hoe.
Stanley’s home was modern, a recent addition to the lane. There was a stone terrace at the entrance and then a simple, airy sitting room. Stanley welcomed me warmly, and his wife, who was also very welcoming, served tea. Stanley was not tall, as Vijaya was, but his features were very fine. He and his wife were in their seventies. He had retired from government service–a career in the department of lands.
The walls were filled with Stanley’s pictures, and I was eager to learn about them. But there were none that resembled those I had seen at Vijaya’s. Almost everything was perfectly representational, with none of the technique I had seen on Vijaya’s verandah. Stanley’s subjects were different, too. There was a series of watercolors based on an old epic poem—illustrations, with lines from the text written in Sinhala script. There were portraits—strong, simple heads, like stone sculptures—and paintings of animals. There was a wedding portrait Stanley had done for one of his children.
I told Stanley how much I admired the pictures I had seen at Vijaya’s.
“They were from the 1970s,” he replied.
This surprised me: I had thought they had depicted an earlier time, an earlier spirit.
“The kind of thinking and excitement that was there then no longer is,” Stanley said by way of explanation. “I wasn’t a socialist. It was more a matter of private thinking for me—what was right, what to do. A lot of government servants were like this. They had personal preferences and opinions but were not involved in things like demonstrations.”
“So you left off that kind of painting.” I wanted to make sure there were no others I might be able to see.
“You change,” Stanley said. “You begin to think of your heritage, the country’s heritage.”
We had finished our tour of the walls, and we sat beneath the watercolors of the ancient epic. I began to understand the paintings at Vijaya’s in their proper context. Stanley was like a mirror, it seemed to me, and that is what made him interesting. I was disappointed to find that he wasn’t a sort of heroic survivor of a great, bygone era, full of the old idealism, but he had reflected his time. In the end, it was because he did this so faithfully—so transparently, so to say—that the paintings I admired were so compelling. He had captured a moment as the moment passed through him.
Stanley handed me a book—a large, heavy art book with an elegant, glossy jacket. It was a book of his paintings. A decade or so earlier, in the mid-1990s, a man named Lakshman Kadirgamar had approached him with the idea of gathering all the work and publishing reproductions of it. Kadirgamar had been a friend since their school days and had later served for many years as foreign minister.
“We studied together at Trinity,” Stanley said, referring to one of the old, respected colleges, like St. Thomas. “He somehow kept in touch.”
Trinity is located in Kandy. And so the pre-colonial capital, last seat of the Sinhalese kings, had brought Stanley and Kadirgamar together. Stanley had a Kandyan chieftain among his ancestors, and Kadirgamar, as Stanley mentioned, was Tamil, suggesting that his family had probably come from the area around Kandy.
Stanley spoke of his old school friend with hierarchical respect. He was polished, he was erudite, he had studied at Oxford, he was foreign minister. “It wouldn’t have been proper,” Stanley said, “for me to barge into his affairs.” Perhaps this reflected Stanley’s gratitude. The book, published in 1997, was an impressive publication. One way or another, it was important to Stanley that Kadirgamar had come to him.
One painting served as a sort of centerpiece in the book. It was in three panels and measured, altogether, ten feet by nine feet; it hung in the foreign ministry, and one could see why from the subject. It was called Embassy to Rome, and it depicted ambassadors from Anuradhapura in the court of Augustus Caesar. This event had occurred sometime between 22 B. C. and 7 A. D.
I studied the painting carefully, for it was a curious incident, surely—revealing a complexity in the ancient world most of us barely suspect. It erased the great boundary by which we live and understand ourselves, the supposedly eternal boundary between East and West. And it said something about the prominence the old kingdom had once enjoyed beyond the island’s shores.
Stanley began to talk as I stared at the open pages, as if he were providing a narration, a sort of museum tour. He spoke at length, for I had gone silent. And as he started to speak I was immediately confused. The man I had shortly before met, the man who so well reflected his time, was not at all the man I had anticipated meeting.
“THEY WERE BIG MEN THEN,” Stanley began. “I think of them as big men doing big things—big men on a tiny island. You should see the streets in Anuradhapura. They’re huge. And they’re still there. The reservoirs—today they’d need aid from the World Bank to build them. They’re like seas.
“So, big men who thought big and did big things. But gradually there’s a diminution in thinking and in attitudes. The mind itself has got withdrawn, as it were. We feel we’re not capable of doing what our ancestors were capable of doing. We think small now. Today the mentality is such…”
Stanley trailed off briefly before beginning again.
“We delight in killing people. We’re a small country. We depend on others. We need aid and assistance. Others have to think for us.”
Another pause, and then:
“I don’t like this notion of ‘third world.’ We’re big people like everyone else.”
Stanley pointed to the painting of the diplomats in Rome. “It’s the difference between what we were and what we are now. Go and look at what we’ve done.”
I turned to another painting, The Battle of Danture. It depicted the Kandyan king as he defeated the Portuguese army in a famous encounter on the slopes leading up to Kandy in 1594. The military training college had commissioned it, and it hung in the hallway there.
I couldn’t pick up the thread of Stanley’s thinking. I couldn’t trace the path that had led from the celebrations of workers in the 1960s and 1970s to embassies of robed diplomats in Rome and storied battle scenes on the slopes below the old capital—slopes that always, until the British, had defeated foreign armies.
So I asked Stanley about this turn in his interests.
“They had a character then, a strong sense of self-respect,” he replied. “Everything now is based on earning dollars and having contacts abroad. We’re part of a global system, but people’s character and dignity have to be maintained even within a global system.”
I had grown less animated than I had been when I arrived. Perhaps it was to fill the void in our conversation that Stanley had become so voluble. I couldn’t tell. I thought of Saminda, who sometimes seemed a little ashamed of the country he was showing me. Perhaps Stanley, feeling somewhat the same in the presence of a visiting foreigner, wanted to show me what greatness there had once been, and that Sri Lanka had a point of identity, an anchor in history and something to be proud of, just as others did.
He continued, taking a new and surprising direction.
“You think of Sinhalese heritage. I’m Sinhalese, but I’m thinking of the heritage of this country. It so happens that ninety percent of our heritage was built by Sinhalese. The Sinhalese—they left a large amount of evidence to show that they were here for good, as it were. The others never left anything that signified their attachment to this place. What have they left? Nothing. They weren’t concerned about living here. They were just traders who went back.”
The others: The Tamil population.
Back: Back to Tamil Nadu, to southern India.
Going back is a recurring theme among some Sinhalese. In 1981, just after the burning of the Jaffna Library, a legislator from the U. N. P. said of the Tamils in a parliamentary debate, “If there is discrimination in this land, which is not their homeland, then why try to stay here? Why not go back home, where there would be no discrimination? There you have your culture, your education, universities, et cetera. There you are masters of your own fate…. It would be advisable for the Tamils not to disturb the sleeping Sinhalese brother…. Everyone knows that lions, when disturbed, are not peaceful.”
And so on.
What is striking about such versions of events, including Stanley’s, is how neatly the past is organized. In the past there had been “we Sinhalese” and “the others.” This is entirely at variance with history—every square inch of which has been explored to the minutest detail, of course. To state the case simply, Tamil influence in what is now Sri Lanka is commonly dated to the pre-Christian era. Trade ties were dense from an early period; it is likely that Tamils made possible Ceylon’s contacts with the Mediterranean world. In time, the great kings at Anuradhapura grew dependent on Tamils. There were Tamils in their armies and in influential positions at court. Some kings relied on Tamils to stay in power. This interaction between Sinhalese and Tamils suggests a complex past. But there were no such complexities in Stanley’s past, just as there were none in the legislator’s and none in Stanley’s new style of painting.
And it is the past alone that matters for those who have created Sinhalese nationalism and those who adhere to it. It is by way of the past that the present is intelligible and justified. This past must be properly rendered, rather in the way of a painting, and then accepted by everybody as having been a certain way—an accurate rendering. Then the old dominion can be justly re-established, and once that had been accomplished, life in Sri Lanka, in 2006 or 2007 or 2008, can proceed peacefully.
There is something quite striking to note in all this. For many people such as Stanley there is nothing wrong with Tamils. One of Stanley’s lifelong friends, for whom he displayed the utmost regard, is a Tamil. One of his best paintings depicts a Sinhalese and a Tamil sharing a betel leaf. In this way the present—a present as blurry and indistinct as Stanley’s past, necessarily devoid of detail—was not a concern. The concern is simply that Tamils understand the past as they should, and so in whose country they live.
PUBLIC SPACE: IT HAD ONCE and briefly been celebrated as belonging, by definition, to everyone. Then this ideal had been abandoned, and public space corrupted. Then it had been obliterated, cleared of everyone, burned to the ground. And now it could be calm again, reoccupied—but as Sinhalese public space, not everyone’s.
Stanley said, “I don’t think there’s an ethnic crisis, even though they call it one. It’s just a terrorist group trying to create disorder. The Sinhalese and Tamils are very friendly people. It’s just not their homeland. They’ve left no achievements.”
We had strayed far from Stanley’s pictures, and it seemed unlikely we would find our way back to them. So I decided to ask him what he thought about language.
“That’s a difficult one,” Stanley said, leaning back in his chair. “Before the British came, Sinhala was the predominant language. Then they imposed English. Tamil was also there, but it was a minority language. The majority language has to be looked after before the minority language can be looked into. I don’t know why they want to make a big thing of it. It’s common sense if you take your mind away from the political issues.”
Stanley Kahinde was kind to me. He had opened his door to a stranger. He had taught me little and told me nothing, but he had shown me quite a lot. The painter, the mirror, the glass reflection of his world, had once depicted the present for the simple reason that he was able to live in it. Then he had retreated and had found a path into the past—a mythical past, but one that had given him a way to continue living. It was a source of dignity in a place that had lost its dignity.
At the gate giving onto the little lane, Stanley stopped and said, “I hope you didn’t misunderstand me. I am Sri Lankan just as much as you are American. I love my country as you love yours. I spoke about these things only because you asked me.”
“Yes,” I said, “I know you are Sri Lankan.”
