Sunday 22 July 2012 -Part-1
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.
Part-2
Historians agree that there was no bitter
division or explosive violence between the Tamils of the north and the Sinhalese
of the south until the constitutional changes introduced by the British in the
early twenties and thirties led to the rise of communalism in the north,
particularly with Sir. Ponnambalam Arunachalam leaving the broad multi-ethnic
Ceylon National Congress to form the narrow communal organisation, the Tamil
Mahajana Sabhai in 1921. Prof. K. Indrapala, who had to run away from the Jaffna
University for writing history that was not palatable to the Tamil separatists,
wrote: “There have been political and social conflicts among them (Sinhalese and
Tamils) but the kind of ethnic consciousness and destructive prejudices that
have surfaced in the twentieth century and continue to plague the island were
not part of Sri Lanka’s pre-colonial history.” (pix — The Evolution of an Ethnic
Identity, The Tamils in Sri Lanka C. 300 BCE to C. 1200 CE, South Asian Studies
Centre, Sydney, 2005)Dr. G. C. Mendis, the doyen of the early modern historians, was the first to point this out in his essays on Ceylon, as it was known at the time he wrote them. He said that none of the chroniclers of the colonial times — from Portuguese Queroz to British Robert Knox who meticulously documented the social conditions — had recorded any communal tensions or violence. Looking back at the events that cascaded from the break up of the Ceylon National Congress (CNC) with Sir Ponnambalam Arunachalam leaving it to launch the first communal organisation in Sri Lankan politics, Prof. K. M. de Silva, the foremost historian of Sri Lanka, traced in two brilliant essays (The Ceylon Journal of Historical and Social Studies, July-December 1972 and January- June 1973) the north-south divisions and tensions emerging from the post-Arunachalam period with some covert and overt encouragement by Governor William (“divide and rule”) Manning. Dr. Mendis, however, focused on the first communal tensions and outbreak of violence in the thirties, referring, of course, to the virulent communalism of G.G. Ponnambalam (Snr) who unleashed a provocative barrage on the Sinhalese targeting in particular the Mahavamsa.
Mono-ethnic history Full Story»>
