The Rajasingam Legacy: A Quest For Quality
By Rajan Hoole –September 23, 2016
Dr. Rajan Hoole
After nightfall on 21st September 1989, Rajasingam Master called on his bicycle at my mother’s home quite unexpectedly and delivered his pithy message, “Rajini has been shot.” His voice showed no evident emotion. After a brief exchange of words, he turned back. That was the man; stoic, incorruptible, who lived by his strong sense of duty. Master, his wife Mahila Acca, and their daughters, Nirmala, Rajini, Sumathy and Vasuki were familiar to us from childhood days in the St. James’ Church choir. Had Master been more ambitious during his university days, he would have left his mark as an outstanding mathematician in our university. What he did as a school master at Hartley and Jaffna College was no less important. His zeal for catching hold of students who seemed to be in need of inspiration and getting them to work Mathematics problems remained a passion with him to the end of his life.
As a man called upon to manage church and school finances, he remained sharp and knew well the foibles of those he worked with. Having stuck on in Jaffna through times that saw the worst of moral and physical turpitude, he saw through people and their hypocrisy and opportunism, but kept things to himself. At best a wry smile might have escaped him. Whenever he undertook a commitment, he carried it through to the end and brooked no interference. As a trade union man, not only did he take up the cases of three teachers dismissed from St. John’s College in the late 1960s, against strong pressure from the Church, but did the impossible in ferreting out the money to meet the legal fees, using his knowledge of miscellaneous accounts.
Alvapillai Rajasingam – Retired Vice Principal, Jaffna College, Vaddukoddai (8th May 1926 – 14th August 2016)
Rajasingam Master’s personality would have been impoverished, but for Mahila, a superb classical pianist, singer and violinist in both the Western and Carnatic traditions. She trained choirs and during the war years, taught English Literature to Advanced Level students at Chundikuli Girls’ College. Despite these graces and accomplishments, she was not the withdrawn housewife. Her combative no-nonsense approach could be seen in her daughters. The word that one most readily associates with the Rajasingams, is Quality. Ben Bavink of Vaddukkottai and Amsterdam, a close friend of the Rajasingams, about a year after Rajini’s death presented to me his copy of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s ‘Letters and Papers from Prison’, which has the words, “Nobility springs from and thrives on self-sacrifice and courage…it demands a recovery of a lost sense of quality and of a social order based upon quality. Quality is the bitterest enemy of conceit in all its forms.”
Bonhoeffer, a prisoner of the Nazi regime, was thinking of recovery of quality in a post fascist society, the kind of society we are in now. A dominant feature of loss of quality is puruda – a word close to chicanery and farce, whose meaning in Tamil has been enriched through association with Tamil life and society during especially the fascist period (1986 – 2010), particularly when reverence was demanded under threat for the horrific and ridiculous. The Rajasingams were sticklers for quality and the ability of a society to lift itself back to quality depends on the presence of families strongly rooted in it. Rajini was killed because she would not compromise with puruda in politics that claimed the divine right to purify the ‘nation’ through murder.
