FIRE IN JAFFNA

The public library in Jaffna, Sri Lanka was once known for its wide-ranging and multilingual collection of books, and for the rare ancient manuscripts that were preserved here. But during the ’80s, it became an unlikely symbol for the worst ravages of the

On June 3, 1981, the well-known Tamil scholar and etymologist Rev. Fr. H.S. David died in his sleep. A day earlier, he had watched from his room at St. Patrick’s College, Jaffna, his beloved Jaffna Public Library, with its 95,000 books, rare palm-leaf manuscripts and a vast collection of journals, magazines and newspapers, burn to the ground. The shock had evidently proved to be too much for the 74-yearold scholar.

This act of biblioclasm ( book- burning) was a loss of staggering proportions. Some works such as YalpanaVaipava Malai (a history of the kingdom of Jaffna), written by the Tamil poet Mayilvagana Pulavar in 1736, were virtually irreplaceable since the library had just one copy! Over 10,000 manuscripts were consumed by the fire, many of them rare palm leaf ones, stored in special sandalwood boxes. There were also hard-to-replace books on herbal medicine, miniature editions of the Ramayana, copies of old Tamil newspapers and much else besides.

The parallel that people immediately drew was to the Nazi book-burnings of 1933 when on May 10, rightwing student groups across Germany tossed into the flames some 20,000 books by Brecht, Einstein, Freud, Mann and Remarque among others. Many of the targets were Jewish intellectual and cultural figures. It was cultural carnage on a scale that the modern world had not witnessed.

Jaffna being the centre of Sri Lankan Tamil culture and the library in particular recognised as a valuable repository of Tamil literature, its burning down too inevitably came to be interpreted as an act of cultural genocide and as a signal that the Tamil and Sinhala communities of Sri Lanka could never live together.

The background to the burning of the Jaffna Library can be traced back to the fractious relationship that the majority Sinhala and the minority Tamil communities of Sri Lanka shared. The British had managed to keep the lid on ethnic tensions, but their exit had set off a chain of events, the last act of which is bookended by the burning of the Jaffna library in 1981, and the final decimation of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) in 2009.

Sri Lankan independence in 1948 had kicked off a concerted effort by the majority Sinhalese to dominate the politics of the island and marginalise the Tamils. The 1956 Language Act which stipulated that Sinhala was the sole official language of the island was but the first action in what eventually led to a violent civil war that raged for close to 30 years. An estimated 80,000 to 100,000 people died in the civil war. Among its more prominent victims were former Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, and Sri Lankan President Ranasinghe Premadasa.

The island of Sri Lanka has a colonial history dating back to the early 16th century when the Portuguese first captured sections of the island. The Portuguese were displaced by the Dutch in the mid-17th century. In 1815, the British captured the entire island and from 1833, they began administering the island from Colombo. The Tamils, who were largely predominant in the northern part of the island had throughout remained a separate community. During British rule, they had begun migrating to the Sinhalese-dominated areas of the south, but retained their culturally distinct characteristics. Owing to their better education, they were soon better represented in government services, a fact that the Sinhalese resented.

Under the Buddhist revivalist, AnagarikaDharmapala (1864-1933), a Sinhalese nationalism took birth that claimed the entire island for the Sinhalese and sought to oust the Tamils even though archaeological evidence indicated that the Tamils have been on the island for close to two thousand years, almost as long if not more than the Sinhalese themselves. Dharmapala unlike some of his more catholic counterparts in other British South Asian colonies like India or Burma was not a unifier. He often referred to the Tamils as hadi Demalu, the dirty Tamils. This strain of Sinhalese nationalism ensured that the anti-colonial struggle in Sri Lanka was a fractured one with both communities jostling for concessions from the British and often backstabbing each other.