Sunday 22 July 2012
A closer look into what happened in the history of Jaffna will reveal that dark, demonic and destructive forces presided over its hidden past. Tragically, these dark forces have not evaporated. They still cloud the skies of Jaffna casting long shadows ominously across its future. The ill-fated future of Jaffna was first identified by Mylvaganam Pulavar who wrote the first official history of Jaffna, Yalpana Vaipava Malai, at the request of the Dutch governor in 1736. The forecast of Jaffna’s doomed future is pronounced by Suppathidda muni who told King Pararajasegaram that “sovereignty will never again come back to your descendants.” However, this prediction in Mylvaganam’s history is less important — perhaps, even irrelevant in rational historiography — than his focus on the cruelty (he calls it the “insane fury”) that bloodied the pre-Dutch period, from Sangkili to the Portuguese. One strand of the dark forces that haunted Jaffna throughout its history is the unrestrained “insane fury” of the pre-colonial period (starting from Sangkili) that flowed right down, going through the phase of the Vellahlas, to Prabhakaran. The average Jaffna man, living under the oppressive regimes of each phase, was a victim of the “insane fury” that dehumanized him, making Jaffna a brutal enclave with no parallel in any other part of Sri Lanka.
Besides, an overview of the history of Jaffna that has unfolded so far signposts an intransigent movement led by extremist leaders unwinding its way to an end without hope. No other community in Sri Lanka has suffered as much as the people of Jaffna under their self-centred and myopic leaders. At no time in their history were the Jaffnaites free from oppression. In addition to this, the Tamil leaders who were in command of peninsular politics never failed to lead their people into recurring disasters in the 20th Century. The known events of the past records that the Tamil leadership went down the wrong path each time they arrived at the critical fork of the road. They seem to have the unerring knack of picking the wrong turn each time they decided to go their own way dismissing the other communities that have compromised seeking the path of non-violence for the common good. Their intransigence leading to “insane fury,” which, of course, leads to death and destruction, is a curse they have brought upon themselves. This makes them look as if they had walked out of Albert Camus’ ill-fated landscape. The fatalism that runs through his short story The Guest fits Jaffna like a glove. In it he wrote: “This is the way the region was, cruel to live in, even without men — who didn’t help matters either. But Drau (the school teacher living way up in a plateau, cut off from the rest) had been born here. Everywhere else he felt exiled.” (There is more to this story which will be related in due course.)
Locked inside a socio-political framework Full Story>>>
