THE UNBROKEN PALMYRA:

REMEMBERING RAJANI THIRANAGAMA

PART 01

PHOTO BUDDHIKA BANDARA

14, 2014 by sethuka-

Prabha Manuratne

The palmyra trees have grown. The sad broken tips of these majestic trees
that had haunted visitors in 2004, when I last visited Jaffna, have given way
to a fresh growth. The bullet-riddled buildings, which never for a minute
allowed the war tourists of the Peace Accord to forget the gruesome
realities of the violence, have disappeared. Only the white-washed, painted
new looks of old houses were visible. The others that were resistant to this
new kitsch touristy image, presumably, have been flattened out. The new
look was a reminder to be grateful that now, only bird-drops fall from the
sky. And gratitude is a dangerous thing, especially when our rulers demand

it from us.
The skepticism towards this fragile calm notwithstanding, we were on our
way for a commemoration of Dr. Rajani Thiranagama, which was organized
for the first time in Jaffna after 25 years. The invitations asked that we show
solidarity with the people of Jaffna. How could we not, after everything that
Jaffna has given us?
Many who remember Dr. Rajani Thiranagama tend to emphasize her work
as a human rights activist, feminist, and a fierce dissenter in Tamil society.
But the journey to Jaffna, an almost 10-hour bus ride from Colombo, was an
occasion to reflect on her place in the national political imagination. Would
this be a form of appropriation that she herself would have rejected? Or is
this even the right gesture when the ethnically divisive politics of postindependence Sri Lanka has made it difficult to even discuss our history as
one about a common struggle? Even if this be so, it would do no harm to
pose the question, perhaps to reject the claim later.

PHOTO BUDDHIKA
BANDARA

Year 1990. Forced into witnessing the 1987-89 insurrection and the carnage
that followed in the South, the Sinhalese youth in the southern part of the
country were largely oblivious to the suffering of the Tamil people in the
North a suffering carried out, supposedly, in our name. Moreover, the then
dominant popular politics of all the major political parties did much to
propagate the idea that the Tamil people were our enemies, hell-bent on
destroying the Sinhalese. We had heard the bombs go off in Colombo; some
Sinhalese people felt deeply hurt because a few of us had ventured to save
some Tamil lives in 1983, and thought, for that, we were incapable of being
racist. As during the 2009 military confrontations between the government

and the L.T.T.E., even the Sinhalese who were not viciously racist, were
blinded by their narcissistic ideal of a false self-magnanimity. And so, we did
not see. Or, we did not dare to look.
And then came The Broken Palmyra. In the early 1990s.
The Yukthiya newspaper, then one of the few dissenting newspapers
published in Sinhalese, carried pieces about the struggles of the people in
the North. It published parts of The Broken Palmyra in translation along with
other articles that showed what life had become to young people in the
North. It presented an alternative to the platitudes of the Three-Sinhala Lion
Cubs rhetoric of the 1980s and stretched the political imagination of its
readers across the tears of the Kilali crossing. Rajani Thiranagama was
already dead by that time. But for young people like me, hungry for some
meaning amid the violence we had witnessed, her work had just begun.
In 1993, a march was organized from Koralawella, Moratuwa to the
Viharamahadevi Park to commemorate Richard de Zoysa and Rajani
Thiranagama. As it was with the march in 2014, that march too was
banned. Young men and women wore T-shirts with the smiling face of Rajani
and the serious contemplative face of Richard. Freedom from Fear, the
motto read. Rajani had had the courage to be unafraid of the brutal power
of the government of the time; she criticized the I.P.K.F. and the L.T.T.E. That
was a lot of powerful enemies to make. Her death, like that of Richard de
Zoysa, signified something that stood for something other than unremitting
violence; the possibility of courage. At that event, a nascent counter-power
was claiming Rajani as a point of solidarity between the Tamils and the
Sinhalese to recognize that we were all victims of a brutal regime. As such,
her memory became something dangerous, something worth suppressing.

PHOTO UNKNOWN

In hindsight, I feel that this was an important point in the history of leftist
politics in Sri Lanka for those of my generation. We were commemorating
the memory of a Tamil woman as a political ideal. It was doubly daring,
because she was a woman and she was a Tamil. And for me, she stood for
something other than herself: that possibility. That we could remember her
past as our past when we read her writing and heard about her life. That
she could take us to the parts in our country that we had never been to,
and help us remember that other pastthe one we hadnt known, but that
nevertheless was ours. That through her life and death, we would be
introduced to anonymous people who would help us remember their
memory of being hemmed-in between competing military powers that were
equally ruthless; that her writing would occasionally let us share the little
pleasures rendered by such staggering violence, such as seeing women
become involved in revolution, maybe even carrying guns.
She helped us remember the disappointment we had never known, when
people began to say that the boys determination was weakened by the
presence of women in the war. She helped us taste the bitterest of fears
that of knowing that you will be killed by a son of the people you love. More
than ever, she stood to remind us that justice is above all political
calculations, and that the Sinhalese dominated governments (in various
hues) had committed a grave injustice against the ethnic and religious
minorities in the country. That was her gift: stretching our political
imagination so that we would remember a past that those born into the
Sinhalese ethnic group rarely experienced; so that we would have the

imagination to know what happened to herourpeople.

PHOTO BUDDHIKA
BANDARA

That is of course, not to deny the presence of groups comprising of

Sinhalese, Tamil, Muslim, and other ethnically diverse people, who
recognized, even then, the importance of a shared struggle; not at all.
Moreover, The Broken Palmyra itself recounts the presence of Sinhalese
people in the North during the Peace Accord, and the Tamil peoples
hospitality towards them, even as it recounts atrocities committed against
these civilians. But those who recognized the importance of the Tamil
struggle for self-determination, as it was defined at the time, were rare.
That they were a precious few reflects the importance of the work of many
like Rajani who were determined to bear witness to that struggle and that
possibility of solidarity, with their life, if need be.
Since that first commemoration that I had seen in the South, that spirit of
solidarity was largely overcome by an identification of a different kind. For
marginal fringe groups voicing solidarity with the Tamil people, the L.T.T.E.s
politics became the rhetorical point of identification. Many of us chose to
ignore its violence. Peace became a presidents slogan; war an excusable
means to an unclear end. After all, the reasoning went, who else but the
L.T.T.E could represent the Tamil people? On the other hand, there were war
professionals; there were peace professionals; there were those who fell
through the cracks. Many we had held as our ideals slowly gave in to the
pressures of this new reality of professionalizing political struggles.

Object 1

In 2005, the documentary No More Tears, Sister was released and it

premiered on PBS in 2006. The name Rajani Thiranagama emerged once
again, this time, in the world documentary scene. The Canadian director
Helene Klodawsky had found a poetic language in which Rajanis short and
meaningful life became couched within a family drama, drawing attention,
not only to her work, but also to her family: her sisters, husband, and
daughters. It was a harrowingly tragic depiction of her life.
But the true significance of this film, to me, was in its timing. In 2004, the
JHU had won eleven seats in the parliament. The Buddhist right wing was
emerging strong, whipping up an unprecedented war rhetoric. The L.T.T.E.,
allegedly, became complicit with voting the Rajapakse regime to power. The
winds were shifting again to full-blown war. The palmyras must have
shuddered.
In 2005, a few activists in Colombo organized, for the first time in the South
as far as I know, a commemoration of those who died in the 1983 Black July
attacks. Some of us wanted to show excerpts of No More Tears, Sister at
this event. But even as late as 2005, some of the organizers objected,
apparently because she had been a tad over-critical of the L.T.T.E.; and
anyway, as it was said those days, she was killed by the I.P.K.F. Even at that
point, Rajani remained a point of non-assimilation into easy politics. We
missed an opportunity to stretch our imagination a little more and learn to
never compromise, for the sake of practical necessity, the political integrity
of ones work. This too was a lesson that Rajani would teach us. That
politics is an ethical commitment.
Rajani showed us that betrayal has an ethic of its own. When one finds the
courage to question ones political past, take responsibility for it, and stand
up to the unbecoming powers that sometimes, we ourselves help raise, and
when we do so with no guarantee of a place in historys balance sheet, we
are remembering the unbroken spirit of the palmyra. At those moments, we

are remembering Rajani.

Prabha Manuratne
Posted by Thavam