Learning Politics From Sivaram: The Life and Death of a Revolutionary Tamil Journalist in Sri Lanka (Anthropology, Culture and Society)

265 Pages·2006·0.89 MB·English

by  Mark Whitaker

LEARNING POLITICS
FROM SIVARAM
The Life and Death of a Revolutionary
Tamil Journalist in Sri Lanka
MARK P. WHITAKER
P
Pluto Press
LONDON (cid:127) ANN ARBOR, MI
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First published 2007 by Pluto Press
345 Archway Road, London N6 5AA
and 839 Greene Street, Ann Arbor, MI 48106
www.plutobooks.com
Copyright © Mark P. Whitaker 2007
The right of Mark P. Whitaker to be identified as the author of this work has
been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents
Act 1988.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Hardback
ISBN-10 0 7453 2354 5
ISBN-13 978 0 7453 2354 1
Paperback
ISBN-10 0 7453 2353 7
ISBN-13 978 0 7453 2353 4
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CONTENTS
Acknowledgements vi
Note on Transliteration, Translation, Names, and Neutrality ix
Three Prologues xi
1. Introduction: Why an Intellectual Biography of Sivaram
Dharmeratnam? 1
2. Learning Politics from Sivaram 18
3. The Family Elephant 32
4. Ananthan and the Readers’ Circle 52
5. From SR to Taraki – A ‘Serious Unserious’ Journey 79
6. From Taraki to TamilNet: Sivaram as Journalist, Military Analyst,
and Internet Pioneer 113
7. States, Nations, and Nationalism 157
8. Return to Batticaloa 180
Notes 218
Bibliography 233
Index 242
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Sivaram often used to say ‘My riches are my people. I collect people.’ The truth
of this became more generally apparent to me as I was trying to remember
all of the people – most, like me, members of Sivaram’s ‘collection’ – who
helped create this book.
Research for this project was funded by three research grants from the
University of South Carolina and by an American Institute of Sri Lankan
Studies Fellowship. Jeanne Merecek, John Rogers and other AISLS members
helped make my time as a fellow in 2003–04 rewarding. The University of
South Carolina, Aiken, graciously granted me leave for the 2003–04 school
year so that I could complete my research. I want to express my gratitude to
the Anthropology Department at Sussex University for making me a visiting
research fellow for the fall of 2003. In Sri Lanka, the International Centre
for Ethnic Studies, Kandy, kindly allowed me access to their well-stocked
and thankfully cool library, as well as some much needed cups of tea. For
this I want to thank S.W.R de A. Samurasinghe, the Institute’s director, and
Kanthi Gamage, the centre’s supremely helpful Librarian and Documentation
Officer, who often pointed me toward resources that later proved invaluable.
I also want to thank K.M. DeSilva for setting set me straight about several
events at Peradeniya University during the 1983 riots. My thanks to Neelan
Thiruchelvam of the International Centre for Ethnic Studies, Colombo, for
answering many questions when he was so busy in 1997 must be, sadly,
posthumous. S. Nadarajah, Chief Editor of Viirakeesari, was extremely
generous in making available to me copies of all of Sivaram Dharmeratnam’s
2003–04 columns. I want to thank the editors of TamilNet.com for answering
so many questions about their operation.
At Pluto Press I want to thank Anne Beech, the Managing Director, for
her early and continuing interest in this project. David Castle, Robert Webb
and Sophie Richmond edited my manuscript with admirable dispatch and
tolerance for my various foibles. Ray Addicott and Chase Publishing Services
have also been most helpful with the production. Back on my side of the
Atlantic, Diane Cochrane deserves special thanks for helping me wrestle
American spellings and usages into compliance with Pluto Press’s British
style sheet. I am also in debt to two anonymous reviewers of my original book
proposal. Their comments were brilliant, and helped me reshape the book to
address audiences I might otherwise have neglected.
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Acknowledgements vii
My larger intellectual and social debts are too many to completely
enumerate. First of all, of course, is what I owe Sivaram Dharmeratnam.
For 24 years he was my friend and intellectual jousting partner; I do not
– I never shall – quite believe it is over. Years ago Gananath Obeyesekere, as
my academic mentor, provided a wonderful introduction to Sri Lanka. This
project was also inspired, in various ways, by the works of Kevin Dwyer,
Kumari Jayawardene, Newton Gunasinghe, S.J. Tambiah, Susan Harding,
David Anthony, and E. Valentine Daniel. Conversations, in turn, with both K.
Sivathamby and the late K. Kailasapathy, though separated by sixteen years,
helped convince me of the importance of studying the intellectual history
of Tamil Sri Lanka. Michael Roberts encouragingly edited my first essay on
Sivaram. A brief outline of this project was read to a South Asian work group
at the University of California, Santa Cruz. I want to thank Triloki Pandey,
Annapurna Pandey, Kristy Bright, and Dina Siddiqi for their encouragement
and helpful comments. Anne Blackburn and Laura Ahearn, members of
my South Asia study group at the University of South Carolina, read and
helpfully commented upon other parts of this project. I also presented bits of
this book at colloquia for the Anthropology Department at the University of
South Carolina, and am grateful for the many useful comments I found there.
R.L Stirrat, Elizabeth Nissen, Dennis McGilvray, Patricia Lawrence and Jude
Fernando have all granted me not only the benefit of their superior expertise
but also their congenial hospitality. Jonathan Spencer, in addition to being
a kind and humorous host, also shared keen critical insight into some of
the trickier issues involved in doing a biography such as this. I also want to
thank Michele Ruth Gamburd, Margaret Trawick, Yuvaraj Thangaraj, Ram
Alegan, Seela Aleduwaka, Ramani Hettiarachchi, and Laxman Kumara
Keerthi for sharing, at various times, their professional insights about Sri
Lanka. R. Cheran and D.B.S. Jeyaraj amiably answered some last minute
questions. Rajes Kandiah, Bhamini Jayaraman, David Buck, Balasundaram
Elayathamby, and S. Punchchalingam all helped me cope with my weak Tamil.
Many journalists were generous with their advice and ideas, often in difficult
circumstances. J.S. Tissainayagam, Gamini Weerakon, Marwaan Macan-
markar, V.S.Sambadan, Chandana Keerthi Bandara and Rajpal Abeynayake
must all be thanked.
My friends and family, thankfully, have sustained me through this long and
sometimes difficult project. To have parents like Burt and Hilda Whitaker, a
brother like Jeff Whitaker, and a sister like Gail Wright is to be rich indeed.
Ann Kingsolver, my wife, not only loyally supported my many years of
work on this biography but also, as a fellow anthropologist and researcher,
shaped it for the better. David, my son, put up with all our travel and loved
his uncle Sivaram.
It almost goes without saying that I could not have completed this book
without the kind forbearance of all the Sri Lankan people I interviewed. I
thank you all from the bottom of my heart. But it is to Sivaram’s far-flung
family, I think, that I owe my deepest thanks. They not only put up with my
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viii Learning Politics from Sivaram
presence and my probing questions, but also added their own insights and
ideas – so much so that this book clearly became a collective enterprise.
Meena Dharmeratnam and S. Dharmavasan both took time to read and
correct the manuscript; and I must thank S. Dharmavasan and his father,
Somasundaram, further, for allowing my family to stay in their lovely
house in Batticaloa, and for other kindnesses while we were in Sri Lanka. In
Suriyakumaran Dharmeratnam and K.O.Pillai I found gracious hospitality,
intellectual companionship, and new-found kin. Lee Karu made my visit to
London in 2001 truly memorable. Surendaran and Seevaratnam Vellupillai
were also most kind. I must thank all the other family members in Colombo,
Batticaloa, London and Toronto who have received me with such kindness.
Daniel and David Poopalipillai, Bavani’s brothers, have been yet more brothers
to me. Bavani, Vaishnavi, Vaitheki, and Seralaathan have become a part of
our family now, and we a part of theirs.
Finally, I would like to dedicate this book to the Sri Lankan journalists of
all ethnicities who, like Sivaram, risk their lives every day, or have already
lost them, to keep the stories coming.
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NOTE ON TRANSLITERATION, TRANSLATION,
NAMES, AND NEUTRALITY
The Sri Lankan Tamil words and phrases in this book are transliterated
according to the scheme used in David McAlpin’s A Core Vocabulary for Tamil
(1976: xix–xxc). Tamil’s long vowels are signaled by doubling letters, and
retroflex consonants by capitalization. Readers of English can get a feel for
long-vowel Tamil sounds if they hold doubled vowels (aa, ee, ii, oo, uu) for
an extra beat. Retroflex consonants, transliterated here as ‘L,’ ‘N,’ and ‘T,’
can be approximated by rolling back one’s tongue and touching the roof
of one’s mouth (which sounds more difficult than it is) while pronouncing
the English sounds ‘l,’ ‘n,’ or ‘t.’ The letter transliterated here as ‘t’ sounds
a bit like the ‘th’ sound in ‘thespian.’ The Tamil letter transliterated here as
‘R’ represents a lightly trilled ‘tr’ sound. The letter transliterated as ‘c’ can
sometimes sound like an English ‘s’ and sometimes, especially when doubled
in the middle of words, like the ‘ch’ sound in ‘church’ or ‘chug.’ The letter
transliterated as ‘k’ can sound like either the English ‘k’ at the beginning of
words, and a ‘g’ or ‘h’ elsewhere. There is also a letter in Tamil, here rendered
as ‘ng,’ which sounds like the ‘ng’ sound in the English word ‘sing.’ I have
generally refrained from transliterating place names and people’s personal
names, preferring to allow them to appear as they generally do in English
maps and newspapers.
I have had, and certainly required, a lot of help understanding written
Tamil. Sivaram Dharmeratnam translated most of the Tamil words and
texts discussed in the earlier chapters of this book. V.B. Jeyaraman of Kandy
helped me read twelve of Sivaram’s later Viirakeesari articles, and translated
many more. David Buck, a translator and Tamil scholar, gave me the benefit
of his insights into Sivaram’s Tamil prose style. And Dennis McGilvray of the
University of Colorado frequently supplied me with the meanings of words
and phrases. I thank them all. Any mistakes, however, are all mine.
This is a hybrid book: an intellectual biography written by an ethnographer.
Because this is an intellectual biography, and thus a form of history, I have
used people’s names whenever people gave me permission to use them, or
whenever the person in question was a public figure. Because some of the
background of this book is ethnographic, however, I have mostly avoided
using names altogether when discussing things in general or, of course,
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x Learning Politics from Sivaram
whenever people wished to remain anonymous. Ex-Tamil militants who
appear in this book are generally identified only by their ‘party names’ or
aliases. This, generally, was how Sivaram told me about them, and I have made
no effort to go beyond what he told me to find out or use their real names, nor
did he want me to. I have made an exception, however, for those militants or
ex-militants who became public figures. I should add that Batticaloa Tamil
names do not work the same way British or American ones do. Generally, the
father’s name is placed first, followed by the child’s name. Hence, Sivaram P.
Dharmeratnam in Tamil was Dharmeratnam P. Sivaram. In this book, so as
not to be confusing, I have followed the English convention.
Finally, although this book is concerned with Sri Lanka’s ethnic struggle,
it does not pretend to be a neutral account. If I were writing this as an
ethnography of Sri Lanka’s crisis as a whole I would have been careful to
include a balance of views. But as this is an intellectual biography of Sivaram
Dharmeratnam, Sri Lankan events are presented largely as they appeared
to him, and Sivaram was anything but neutral. At the same time, Sivaram
was a subtle man. Partisans looking either for a straw man or an easy ally
likely will be disappointed. Also, I should note that Sivaram was checking
for errors as I wrote, but he was killed before I had completed Chapter 5 or
had written Chapters 6 and 8. I am responsible, ultimately, for all the errors
in this book, but I especially want to apologize in advance for any errors in
those chapters.
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THREE PROLOGUES
First, it was 1982. Aside from its spectacular heat, I found Sri Lanka’s
easternmost Batticaloa district before the war a wonderful place in which
to live and do anthropological fieldwork. A splash of tawny, alluvial sand
between hazy western mountains and the eastern sea of Bengal, the district
near harvest time always glistened like burnished gold beneath an exaggerated
sun – beckoning, I thought. So, on days when I was bored with fieldwork and
in need of some senseless motion, I would allow myself to be called by it. I
would climb onto my tiny blue Honda 90, drive out of the Hindu temple
village of Mandur, where I was working, and head either south toward the
largely Muslim town of Kalmunai, with its busy roadside bazaars and prayer-
singing, green- striped mosques, or north to the district capital, Batticaloa,
with its sleepier colonial residues, following either way the bumpy road that
ran beside the district’s long and sluggish, warm, and semi-saline lagoon.
Sometimes, if going south, I would stop on the concrete causeway between
the two Karaiyar caste villages that people called the Kallars, and watch
ungainly young palm trees wave luxuriantly on the sea dike, near where
the Portuguese once tried to build a fort in the early seventeenth century;
and near, also, where British Methodist missionaries built a school and had
rather more success implanting Christianity. Or, on other days, with the
excuse of some message for its temple elites, I would dip down toward the
rice or ‘paddy’ fields of Turaineelavanai, an ancient, ciirpaatar caste, Hindu
town of sandy paths and cajan (mud and straw) walls, established sometime
in the distant sixteenth or perhaps seventeenth century by royal fiat of the
Buddhist Kandyan kingdom. There, if it was planting time, the new paddy
would glow like backlit jade, a color so unrestrainedly iridescent I could never
quite take it seriously, and I would have to pause a moment on my bike to
stifle my wonder, and a vague hysteria, as hallucinogenic blue and green
kingfisher birds wound down low over my head to feast on the new-sown
fields. Or, going north, I would run to this bend in the road I liked, closer to
Batticaloa town, where the cactuses always seemed to be in bloom. The air
would be thick with a syrupy perfume, and the monkeys would come out to
play and throw rocks at passing trucks, though never, oddly enough, at me.
From there, of course, I would have to drive on into Batticaloa town to carry
out whatever task I had invented to give me leave to go. Often this ‘task’ would
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