For a transcript see
https://www.buzzsprout.com/1970784
For photos, see greatmirror.com
For a transcript see
https://www.buzzsprout.com/1970784
For photos, see greatmirror.com
Postcard from Jaffna
On November 11, 2019, a twin-engine turboprop landed near the northern tip of Sri Lanka. It was the first civilian flight to land in 41 years at an airport restricted all that time to military aircraft.
Known as Palaly since it was built for the RAF in World War II, the airport had a new name, Jaffna International. It had a new terminal, too, a small, Spartan but clean metal shed. By the following February, JAF was handling two flights daily. One was a domestic flight to and from Colombo, and the other was the turboprop, an ATR from Chennai. Neither Travelocity nor Orbitz had heard of JAF, but Air India was selling tickets on its website.
Arriving or departing, Chennai passengers had their bags searched by dismayingly thorough military personnel and also by men and women who appeared to be (but might not have been) civilians. The inspectors were polite and after a minute or two even conversational, but they radiated doubt about anyone without business or family ties.
The airport had no car-rental agencies. This shouldn’t have been a surprise, because foreigners can’t drive in Sri Lanka without a special license obtainable only in Colombo. There were no buses, either, but a few impromptu taxis were waiting. I stayed with one driver throughout my visit.
Like ninety-nine percent of the residents of Jaffna, he was a Tamil, which means probably a Hindu, possibly a Christian, almost certainly not a Buddhist. He had endured the crushing onslaught of the Sri Lankan security forces in 2009—been caught in the charnel house of the “no-fire zone.” Every time we passed a ruined building, he would say “more ruins.” He said it in a wildly inappropriate tone, gaily, as if we were passing a lovely patch of wildflowers or a blizzard of butterflies. After a while I found it irritating, but I had the sense not to tell him to stop it. I can’t write his name here, because he lived in fear of the Sri Lankan government. Was it paranoia that led him to believe that his life would be forfeit if he ever discussed in public the things he had seen?
Arriving after a long flight to a new part of the world, I’m sensitive but stupid. The drive into Jaffna—about a dozen miles to the south—began with several miles of one-lane road with almost no traffic. An air of abandonment or unnatural quiet pervaded the place, but I didn’t think to ask why. Fortunately, and without my asking, the driver explained that during the civil war, which ran from 1983 until 2009, the Sri Lankan military had evicted everyone near the airport. Ten more years passed before the military decided to allow them back into this so-called high-security zone. Many returned to find their homes ruined. Others found that their home was still occupied by the military, which held it without compensation or redress.
Owners lucky enough to re-occupy their homes usually erect a crude but cheap perimeter fence of painted sheets nailed to posts. The base of the sheets is often a foot or two off the ground. My driver came to the rescue again, explaining that this was done to calm the soldiers and police who were still on frequent patrol and who worried that attackers might hide behind a fence. Feet couldn’t hide behind these fences.
The fences made sense particularly because the security forces, entirely Sinhalese, were all ignorant of the Tamil language. True, most Tamils know some Sinhalese—for them, it is a basic survival skill—but they use it only when they must. More than 100,000 of them died, after all, in a war that was fought, initially at least, over the Tamil desire for language parity. They had lost that struggle but not the desire for parity. The Sinhalese outnumber the Tamils seven to one—about fifteen million to two million across Sri Lanka—and see no reason to cede their dominance.
After a few miles the landscape became less sinister. The road graduated to two lanes, newly paved and paid for by whatever foreign assistance hadn’t been creamed off by officials in Colombo. The island’s railroad, completed to this corner of the island in 1902, had been destroyed in the war but had now been rebuilt to a high standard. I never saw a freight train on the line. Passenger trains did run daily to Colombo with equipment that would have been scrapped decades earlier in wealthier countries, but buses would have been cheaper. Many were already on the road.
The electricity supply was stable, no small thing, but buildings both along the road and in Jaffna proper seemed to stand in a 1:1 ratio between new or damaged buildings. Older commercial buildings, usually of one or two stories, hid some of their scars behind huge painted-wood signs: “Vene Stores,” “Style Park,” “Food City,” and so on, perhaps half in Tamil and half in English.
New commercial buildings were owned mostly by Diaspora Tamils. They were the only people willing and able to invest. Viewed strictly as economic ventures, there probably were more profitable opportunities in other countries, but, like Diaspora Palestinians, Diaspora Tamils are determined to demonstrate their attachment to the place they consider home, even if they make only occasional visits.
A few undamaged homes from the colonial past survived. Typically, these were L-shaped bungalows, with heavy tile roofs over plastered brick walls painted shades of tan. Many were trimmed with ornamental columns and pilasters. Some had wooden bargeboards running around the eaves like the edges of doilies, and a few had upper stories with long balconies overlooking the street. The most ostentatious were set back from the street and had massive masonry gateways under a pediment connected to a short but elaborately decorated covered walkway to the house. Nearly all these once impressive houses were in ruins. Attracting attention is a bad idea in wartime.
A major cement plant had opened in 1950 at Kankesanturai, on the coast a few miles north of the airport, but it had closed during the war, and its machinery had been surreptitiously sold off. Leyden Industries, an old underwear factory close to the center of Jaffna, was an empty, burned hulk. I saw none of the cut-and-sew factories common farther south on the island.
A few tourists wandered around, mostly young, mostly foreign, mostly on foot. Most had arrived by bus or train, but, as the behavior of the airport officials implies, the tourist presence was puzzling. Jaffna has never been on Sri Lanka’s tourist circuit—or on old Ceylon’s, for that matter. That is unlikely to change. There are beaches and diving opportunities, but if that’s what you want you don’t have to make the six- or seven-hour drive from Colombo—and that’s according to speed-demon Google Maps.
Jaffna and its neighborhood do contain many Hindu temples—at least eighty percent of the population is Hindu—but the temples were methodically destroyed by the Portuguese in the 17th and 18th centuries. Rebuilt during the comparatively tolerant British Raj, the temples were once again damaged or destroyed during the civil war.
The senior Maviddapuram Temple, unlucky enough to be only two miles from Palaly, had now, in 2020, been almost completely rebuilt, but replicas don’t draw many tourists, especially when the circus-bright figures decorating the walls look as though they were sourced from a Chinese sculpture factory dealing only in bulk orders. Similarly, Christian missionaries have been very active in Jaffna for two centuries, but few tourists seek out the churches, schools, and hospitals that, along with tombstones, are the visible legacy of the missionaries.
What does that leave? The prime attraction is Jaffna Fort, built by the Portuguese in 1618 and taken over by the Dutch in 1658. Dissatisfied with the simple Portuguese rectangle, the Dutch completely rebuilt the fort on a grand scale—a star with five mighty bastions, a moat, and outworks, much like the fort that the Dutch built in Cape Town.
A few years later, in 1795, Holland agreed in the Treaty of Amiens to cede Ceylon to the British. This was a sideshow in the politics of Napoleonic Europe, but it must have seemed like idiocy to the Dutch in Jaffna, obliged to abandon the splendid new fort without a fight.
The fort remained almost perfectly intact in British hands. Then, during its bicentennial, the Tamil Tigers and the Sri Lankan military reduced everything except the wall to rubble, including the Dutch church that was the fort’s chief attraction. You don’t need a ticket to see the walls, and you might as well save your money if you’re looking for the church.
Tourists with Leonard Woolf’s autobiography can track down the bastion-top house into which he moved in 1905, fresh from Cambridge. It was the beginning of his life-changing decade in the Ceylon Civil Service, but the bungalow is gone except for some waist-high walls and a young banyan, perhaps the descendant of the huge banyan that, Woolf wrote, was home to a devil that terrified his servants.
There is a good view from the bastion over the moat toward the city’s nondescript skyline. Looking inward, there’s a view over the rubble of the Dutch church and a building once called the King’s (or Queen’s) House, where visiting governors were accommodated. My 1984 Lonely Planet guide calls the building “an excellent example of Dutch architecture of the period.” C’est la vie: there’s nothing left of the King’s House except some fragmentary walls. A greater loss may be the floor of the church, once paved with loquacious Dutch tombstones. One of them survives outside Jaffna’s small and makeshift museum. The town had a pre-war museum, “itself a fine old Dutch building” according to my old Lonely Planet. It’s gone, too.
Outside the fort, Jaffna has many restored churches, another beneficiary of Diaspora Tamils. The Anglican church of St. John the Baptist has been very handsomely restored with slim, wood-framed Gothic windows that pivot on a central, vertical axis. Inside, beams project over the nave and support a steeply pitched roof. A plaques on a wall recalled a young man who came from England and worked as a customs officer before dying seven years later at 29. Another plaque recalled a missionary’s wife who died at 33. Her husband married again—twice—before eventually returning to England, where he was still alive at 94. Luck of the draw.
The St. John’s churchyard was locked tight on a busy Sunday morning, but the church warden provided a couple of guides who unlocked the gate. With their help, I hunted for Percival Ackland Dyke. I headed for the biggest monument I saw, a cube about six feet on a side. It seemed a plausible monument to the “the Rajah of Jaffna,” but most of the cube’s marble sheathing was gone, and bullet holes were sprayed across the remaining bits. I found no inscription, looked around the graveyard, and was on the verge of giving up when I went back to the cube and peeped behind a cast-iron bathtub that had been propped up against it along with some trash. Sure enough, there was an inscription: “Percival Ackland Dyke, more than 40 years Govt. Agent of the Northern Province, born in 1805, who died in his tent at Koppay.” Koppay, or Kopay, is a village on the edge of Jaffna.
Dyke is not exactly a household name even in Jaffna these days, but for 38 years until his death in 1868 Percival Dyke was a virtual satrap. It is said that he returned to England only once and that, in dudgeon at the tone of a cab driver, turned around on arrival and went straight back to Jaffna. It’s probably too good to be true, but it does suggest a certain manner. Nowadays, and depending on the situation, we either detest or laugh at imperial arrogance, but Woolf was startled to find that the British kept no troops and hardly any police in Jaffna. The Pax Britannica rested instead on celestial confidence. Compared to governments that rely on guns, bluff doesn’t seem so bad.
While not on tour and living (and dying) in a tent, Percival Ackland Dyke—I don’t suppose anyone ever called him Percy—lived in a mansion apparently built with his own money. He in any case thought of it as his personal property, because he bequeathed this so-called Residency to his successors in perpetuity. The ruins stand today at the edge of a well-tended patch of green called the Old Park. It’s about a mile from the fort and only a couple of blocks from St. John’s. Woolf writes of cycling every day from his house on the bastion to the kutchery or government office adjacent to the Residency. He regularly had tea with John Penrys Lewis, the Government Agent of the day, and with Lewis’s formidable wife.
The Residency looks like a ruin from antiquity, but it was occupied as late as the mid-1960s by another of Dyke’s successors, Vernon Abeysekera. In a memoir, Abeysekera describes the Residency as having “pillared verandahs, lofty archways, and timbered ceilings. The showpiece was the drawing room upstairs, so immense that it could only be furnished with two sets of furniture, one in each half of the room.” The columns survive, along with bare walls and a few roof beams now naked under the sky. There was once a plaque remembering Dyke, but I could not find it. Abeysekera himself retired to Melbourne, where he died in 2005.
I found another surprising connection between Jaffna and Melboune. Just offshore, and plainly visible from the walls of the fort, there’s a good-sized island that can be reached by a two-mile-long causeway. The north end of the island has a village called Kayts. (The name is Dutch and is pronounced “kites.”) Just outside the village there are ruins of a Portuguese fort, with a rectangle of damaged walls enclosing an area about the size of a basketball court. It’s underwhelming until you notice that the walls are made of cobble-sized blocks of many species of coral, each patterned in its own elegant and delicate way. A bit less than a mile offshore, there’s a much grander fort filling up a tiny island still used by the Sri Lankan Navy and now including a tourist resort.
Kayts also has a superabundance of Catholic churches. The oldest, St. James, from 1715, is painted in shades of gold. A few hundred feet away, in an intense blue, there’s St. Mary’s, from 1895. In a different direction but still within a few minutes’ walk, there’s St. Anthony’s, from 1920 and in a gently competitive pale magenta. Two miles down the road there’s St. Peter’s, from 1909. It’s pink, not a bad color for a church whose high façade is stepped and trimmed like a wedding cake.
It’s easy to assume that there were simply too many Catholics here for the pews at St. James, but the truth is that the different castes needed different churches. After all, the famous temple at Maviddapuram traditionally excluded low castes. So, too, these churches. The priest at St. Peter’s explained that his church had been built for high-castes but that with their emigration it was used now by low castes.
It turns out that neither the Portuguese nor the Dutch nor the British were able to shake that infinitely adaptable engine of hierarchy called caste. Some scholars, M.M.M. Mahroof among them, have argued that the British actually strengthened it by codifying its groups in colonial law.
The priest surprised me again by saying that he had just returned from a decade as a parish priest in Melbourne. I think it came up in the context of my American accent. It was easy to understand, he said, unlike the Ozzie accent. He smiled and without missing a beat said, “G’die, Fatha.”
I asked why he had returned from an obviously more comfortable posting, and he replied matter-of-factly that his work in Melbourne had been a failure. I must have looked puzzled, because he went on to say that he had been unable to convert a single person. Worse, he could not even get young Tamils from Catholic families to come to Mass; only their grandparents attended.
I was tactful enough not to ask if he was doing any better here at St. Peter’s, but it became clear that he wasn’t. Back in Melbourne, he must have known what he would find here—a Church that appealed only to the old—which brings us back to why he had returned. The answer, I assume, is that home is home. He wasn’t a young man.
If I had thought of it, I might have steered the conversation to Jaffna College, whose history coincides with the priest’s experience.
Jaffna College, I should explain, is about five miles north of Jaffna or, by helicopter, about ten east from Kayts. It’s one of two neighboring schools established in the 1820s by American missionaries. One was a boys’ school called the Batticotta Seminary. Since 1872 it’s been Jaffna College. The other, about four miles farther east, is the Uduvil Girls’ College. Both are very much alive and still functioning as private institutions under the control of the Church of South India, but both have had troubles since the Sri Lankan government in 1975 expropriated a large part of the Jaffna College campus.
The last principal of the Batticotta Seminary was E.P. Hastings, a New Yorker by birth. (In one of those funny reminders of Six Degrees of Separation, Hastings was married to Anna Cleveland, one of Grover’s sisters.) In 1855 Hastings closed the seminary permanently, or so he thought. This had nothing to do with academic standards: Emerson Tennant, Ceylon’s colonial secretaries in the 1840s, praised the school’s eight-year course of study as bearing fair comparison to European universities. Hastings instead acted because in three decades the school had been able to make no or almost no converts.
It wasn’t his fault: only high-caste families could afford the school fees, and high-caste Hindus, as everywhere in South Asia, are the least likely converts. The school might have given scholarships to a few low-caste students, but then the high-caste students would have left. Enrolling only low-caste students was impossible, because the mission could not afford to provide scholarships for every student.
Fifteen years later, recognizing the value of the Western education they had received at the now-defunct seminary, a group of Batticotta graduates got together and sponsored the reopening of the school as Jaffna College. Ironically, they hired as principal none other than E.P. Hastings. He apparently had had second thoughts; in any case, he ran the school for another 17 years, until 1889.
Since then, Jaffna College has had a long line of well-credentialed headmasters, including John Bicknell, a graduate of the Yale divinity school. Bicknell was headmaster from 1916 to 1936, and his name is recalled on a handsome plaque on one fine old building and in large words painted on the concrete bleachers overlooking the cricket pitch: Bicknell Memorial Pavilion. No matter. I suspect Hastings would still deplore heathen recalcitrance. Generations of students have passed under—and mostly ignored—the words over a main staircase at the school: “Jesus Christ. The Light of Life.”
It is the same story at Uduvil. The school’s church has a plaque for Eliza Agnew, another New Yorker by birth and principal at Uduvil from 1839 to 1878. Known as “the mother of a thousand,” she never returned to the United States, even in the five years of life remaining after her retirement. Her bungalow on the school grounds is still just about perfect: a long building one room deep and with plastered masonry painted white under a tile roof. A long arcaded porch overlooked a driveway lined with a brigade of potted plants.
The school has several new buildings but none with the appeal of that bungalow. Still, I wonder what Eliza Agnew would say if asked if her work had been a success. The school’s motto has always been “The Truth shall make you free,” but, despite their provenance in the gospels, those words can as easily be read in support of not just Christianity but any religion, or none.
A plaque on one classroom building recalls Ariam Hudson Paramasamy, the school’s “first national principal.” The daughter of a Jaffna College professor and the holder of an M.A. from Oberlin, Paramasamy was principal from 1941 to 1970. The plaque does not mention that she was the only Christian in her own family. I like to think that on the matter of conversion she would have called for infinite patience.
Frustrating as the missionary experience has been in Sri Lanka, it’s nothing compared to the failure of Tamils and Sinhalese to get along with each other.
About a mile north of the Uduvil school, there’s a whisper of the antagonism. It’s in a Buddhist cemetery, a collection of twenty hemispherical stupas crudely rebuilt by the British while Sri Lanka was still Ceylon. None is taller than a man and there’s nothing noteworthy until you notice the original bases, which consist of delicately varying concentric rings reminiscent of the wonderful moonstones of Anuradhapura. Archaeological evidence dates these stupas to about 1,000 A.D, but popular belief has it that sixty monks were poisoned here about 600 years ago. Or perhaps, less malevolently, that they merely starved to death. Either way, there’s no great love around here for Buddhists.
I asked my driver to take me about six miles north to the coast. We were too early for paddy, but we passed rectangular blocks of bare and dry earth, freshly plowed and red as iron ore. Earth bunds or low dikes rimmed the fields, which awaited the monsoon. The skyline was meanwhile green with coconut and palmyra palms, and there were hundreds of acres of resplendently green tobacco and of fruit and vegetables, including exotics like bitter melon. They were all irrigated by tiny ditches. Irrigation water that a century ago would have been lifted manually with well sweeps—the shadufs of the Middle East—was pumped by small engines parked next to open wells dangerous to anyone drunk or careless.
Every now and then, my driver would gaily point and say, “More ruins!” but otherwise the landscape seemed almost apolitical. Traditional agrarian or peasant landscapes always do, like the scene at the end of Seven Samurai, when the war is over, the bandits are dead, the samurai are no longer needed, and the villagers are once again singing in the fields.
The coast here is dotted with many small fishing ports. The boats are about the size of a dory, so the industry is absolutely artisanal—a polite way of saying primitive—but they imply a strong seafaring tradition. This is significant because it’s about thirty-five miles from here to India, and during the civil war the Tamil Tigers were resupplied across these waters by men who spent their lives on them.
Along the coast road running eastward we passed a resort built and run by the military. Perhaps it’s busy on weekends, but when I saw it the Thalsevana Holiday Resort was spookily empty. It had a nice beach and I suppose the usual amenities. I didn’t go inside. We also passed collections of huts built, as people here say, for displaced people.
It’s unclear how many are victims of the civil war and how many are casualties of the 2005 Boxing Day tsunami. In this part of Sri Lanka there are no hills and no tall buildings for refuge. I met one man who told me that he was alive only because he got so drunk on Christmas Day, 2005, that he remained unconscious when the wave picked him up from his bed at dawn and left him wedged against some attic beams. He had been injured, he said, but he had survived, unlike friends who were awake enough to fight the water.
After tracing the coast for about ten miles, we came to Velvettihurai, a town of about 20,000. On my own, I would have driven right through it, at most noticing a large tree growing in the main road. Affixed to the tree was a very colorful poster of M.G. Ramachandran, known as MGR to all lovers of Tamil cinema. The image—Ramachandran is wearing his trademark wraparound shades under a karakul cap—is the magnified image of a 15-rupee Indian stamp. The poster was especially puzzling because close by there was a golden statue of MGR adorned with garlands.
“Curious,” I might have said, but my driver knew the place well, and suggested we turn right onto a narrow lane.
After passing a dozen or more homes we came to an empty and heavily overgrown lot. There was nothing to indicate anything significant about it, but my driver explained that this was the site of the family home of Velupillai Prabhakaran, the leader of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, the LTTE or Tamil Tigers.
The government of Sri Lanka would never permit a monument to the Tiger’s leader, but it tolerated monuments to a Tamil film star who later in life entered politics and as Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu provided the Tigers with arms and safe refuge.
The people of Velvettiihurai saw MGR and thought of their dead hero, Prabakharan. At least some of them did. Townsfolk aren’t going to share their innermost thoughts with an unknown foreigner in town for an hour, but one man told me that he wasn’t sure that Prabakharan was dead. He also assured me that Prabakharan was a very gentle, modest man.
I mentioned suicide bombings, which the Tigers had pioneered. I mentioned Rajini Thiranagama, a graduate of Jaffna College and a medical doctor trained in the UK. While teaching anatomy in Jaffna, she was also a Tiger sympathizer helping injured Tigers. Her fatal mistake was to dare in print to criticize Tiger atrocities. In 1989, she was gunned down outside her home. Her children heard the shots, and she became another name on the list of Tiger atrocities. The man I was speaking to replied only that it is in the nature of violence to escalate. Even during the war, he said, when Prabakharan was a wanted man, he would come to town unannounced and would walk the streets, modest and gentle as ever.
Along the coast road we had passed propaganda signs posted by the government. They urged everyone to forget the past; it was the only way forward, the signs said. Yet over on Kayts my driver and I had passed the spot where General Denzil Kobbekaduwa, once the most popular general in the Sri Lankan army, had been blown up with his retinue in 1992. The road was closed to through traffic, but it was open as far as a concrete monument with large color photographs of the dozen or so officers who died in the blast. Next to it was the preserved wreckage of two military vehicles obliterated so totally that I couldn’t even recognize them as vehicles.
So the winner’s history was to be hallowed and the loser’s buried. That’s usually the winner’s plan and perhaps it’s usually the eventual outcome. Still, quiescent volcanoes are not always extinct, and the security forces in Jaffna, far from cooling Tamil aspirations, were only repressing them.
One man told me that peace would be so easy, if only the Sinhalese were not so hard. It wasn’t clear if he was asking for equal rights, an autonomous Tamil region, or outright independence, but were those things so terrible that they had to be prevented at any cost? Staying up north, I missed the Sinhalese reply.
I did take a bicycle down to Jaffna’s main fish market. It’s only a few blocks from some ruins that are all that’s left, I suspect, of the house occupied by Sir William Twynam. Succeeding Percival Ackland Dyke, Twynam had been “Rajah of Jaffna” from 1869 to 1897 and apparently had to be shoehorned out of his post. Even then he did not leave Jaffna, instead moving to a house on Beach Road.
Twynam lived until 1922. I suspect that his house became the Grand Hotel, which had fallen on hard times when Lonely Planet came by in the early 1980s. By the time I saw it, only one gable-end wall was intact.
The nearby fish market was just a roofed space across a narrow road from a seawall. Dories came abreast of the wall with their floorboards piled with fish, and men used plastic buckets to unload the catch and dump it on the concrete floor of the market. A scrum of men—all men—negotiated the sale of tuna and barracuda, crabs, shrimp, and fish so small you could swallow two at a time. The near-shore water was blanketed with floating trash that piled up wherever there was a bit of beach. A spiffy new billboard urged Jaffnans to keep their city clean.