Book Review: People versus the state

The closing of Samanth Subramanian’s intense investigation into the aftermath of Sri Lanka’s victory over the separatist LTTE is perhaps the best of recent times.

Spotting a triumphalist bronze sculpture, he says: “From the bank of the lake, the soldier had appeared to be cheering in jubilation and triumph. Closer up, though, his face was a contorted rictus, his eyes wide and joyless, and nothing seemed to be coming out of his mouth except an empty scream.” It is prose worthy of Pyrrhus, the king of Epirus who famously said, “One more such victory and we are lost”.

The LTTE waged war on the Sri Lankan state for almost three decades, ending in May 2009 with the decisive defeat in the sandbars of Nandikadal Lagoon in particular the village of Mullivaikal and the death of chief Tiger V. Prabhakaran. That, of course, was not the end of the story; and Subramanian spent several months of 2011 living and travelling and digging in the island nation to see what nobody was two years earlier allowed to witness: a state ruthlessness that makes what’s happening in Gaza today look rather mild in comparison.

The book is not just a journal of reportage but is also a meditation on memory: the individual and the community’s tug-of-war with a state that continues to try and erase dissenting memory, through legislation, through disappearances, through the construction of viharayas, and even through Sinhalese-only roadsigns.

At one point, in one of the book’s finest lines, Subramanian says: “I felt like a man who had picked at a loose floor tile and found a stash of corpses buried beneath.” In this manner, This Divided Island evokes 20th century European writing on the Holocaust; its mind-blowing quality reminds me of A Rumour of War, Phil Caputo’s Vietnam memoir.

Subramanian writes that it wasn’t just the Sri Lankan Army, the LTTE was also culpable its tyrannical leadership and its paranoiac violence driving away first the ideologues, like Nirmala and Raghavan, with whom Subramanian spends time in both Colombo and in London, and later the ordinary Tamil population, even while Tamil nationalism remained sturdy in people’s hearts.

Two detailed accounts leave no doubt on this score: the massacre of Tamil Muslims at two mosques in Kattankudy (near Batticaloa) in August 1990, told through the eyes of survivor Ismail, who witnesses his six-year-old nephew Akram get shot in the mouth, the left side of his head blown away; and the forced conscription, during the war’s final years, of teenaged children by the Tigers for a war that they all knew was now lost.

“In these ways, the Tigers had utterly disrupted the constitution of a single family: recruiting one person, killing another out of sheer pique, earning the hatred of a third, and snaring a fourth by marriage. The web of these relationships, these various loyalties and loathings, was densely knotted, the strands looping back and across and under each other until they were impossible to unravel and understand.”

Then how bad was the Sri Lankan Army? The most harrowing part of the book quotes civilians who suffered the shelling by the Army in the war’s final weeks shelling that was done even on the UN hospital, after the UN gave the Army its position that describes, among other horrors, people being wounded and then being treated, only to be blown up seconds after being bandaged. A man tells of seeing a baby decapitated by a shell. Even the UN charged Sri Lanka with the killing of thousands of civilians, the estimates ranging from 40,000 upwards. The result? “It took me a full minute to realise that these people, their lives so thoroughly demolished by conflict, were starting to yearn already for a new war.”

Possibly the Sri Lankan state realises this, which is why, as Subramanian notes, President Mahinda Rajapaksa is not just changing the Tamil names of places, like Nainativu, an island off Jaffna renamed in Sinhalese as Nagadeepa and he is not only building gleaming new Buddhist viharayas that crowd out older temples, but he is fashioning himself as the incarnation of the 2nd Century BCE king Dutugemunu from the epic Mahavamsa.

Dutugemunu killed thousands of Tamils but did not accrue any bad karma because Tamils were like animals, according to his priests. Rajapaksa’s project isn’t new; it actually began with the 1956 legislation to make Sinhala the sole official language, and currently takes the form of official archeologists burying evidence that Tamils have been on the island just as long as the Sinhalese. It has also involved increasingly Right-wing monks jumping into politics; and the continuing disappearance of journalists, even Sinhalese ones, who speak out against the excesses of the state and its first family.

You’d expect that all this might have a numbing effect on Subramanian, and while it does take an emotional toll on him (he even ends up with a 10-day flu), he still retains the presence of mind to investigate a variety of curious matters, like the Tamils who served in the Sri Lankan Army (he travels to Toronto to meet a former Major). To his credit, he occasionally manages dry wit despite the subject matter’s crushing weight. He even takes a five-hour autorickshaw ride down the coast from Colombo to Baddegama.

The result is a fine piece of non-fiction, full of anecdotes and stories-within-stories: one of the best to emerge from India in a while, especially since most Indian non-fiction is lazy and sloppy. I can only hope that others adopt this immersive approach. In the meantime, pick up This Divided Island; it’ll be one of the best books you’ll pick up this year.