“The Tamil Tigers killed her for questioning them. Jaffna, by the way, is the main Tamil town – on the northern most peninsula of Sri Lanka. They were the founding members of the University Teachers for Human Rights, based in Jaffna.
It was written by four professors: Rajan Hoole, Daya Somasundaram, K. So The Broken Palmyrah was written in the late 1980s, and by then the conflict had already escalated quite a bit.
It was then that lots of young Tamils start to join militant groups – including the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam or LTTE.
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This is when we had the horrendous anti-Tamil pogroms in Colombo, with over 2000 civilians killed, and it really marks the beginning of the full scale armed conflict. So the civil war really started in July 1983. Yes, The Broken Palmyrah-the palmyrah being a palm tree and a symbol of Jaffna. So your next book is written when the conflict is already well under way. The nationalists used history to polarize everything, but in fact the two sides were very interlinked, even by marriage.īy by Rajan Hoole, Daya Somasundaram & K. And what Ludowyk points out is that in reality society was very mixed, very hybrid. And on the other side the Tamils claim that certain areas always belonged to them, that they have had a clear homeland since time immemorial. That’s a large part of the basis for Sinhala nationalism. This idea that the country was blessed by the Buddha. On one side there is the myth of Sri Lanka’s origins. Nationalism was used to polarize the two sides, and that nationalism was partly based on history. History is at the center of the conflict? In what way? Also because it takes a very sobering look at the history, which is at the centre of many of the claims made by both sides in the conflict. I read this book a number of years ago and it made an enormous impression on me. And looking back, it makes me wonder what went wrong: Why couldn’t we resolve our problems politically? Why did Sri Lanka’s history become so tragic? That for people of that generation, and my parents’ generation, it would have been almost impossible to imagine the militarized conflict that would subsequently erupt. But what is so refreshing for me is that it is also clear from the book that it didn’t have to go in this direction. Ludowyk tells the story of Ceylon, and he is conscious where it all might be heading, and you have glimpses of where 50 years later it could all end. But before doing so, he wrote this book.Īnd for me, it is like reading something written by someone from an unimaginable era. He taught my parents’ generation, the generation that saw Ceylon gain independence from Britain in 1948 and after he retired he returned to England and died there.
Ludowyk grew up in Sri Lanka, he was a Shakespearian scholar, half Sri-Lankan, half British, I believe, who taught at the University of Ceylon. It was written in the late 1950s, just at the time of the escalation of Sinhala Buddhist nationalism. This is my favorite history of Sri Lanka, or Ceylon, as it was then called. So the first book you chose was written back in colonial times: The Story of Ceylon by Evelyn Frederick Charles Ludowyk.
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