War as a process. Not an event. For over three decades, the island of Sri Lanka has been ripped apart by a government-led military campaign that sought to eliminate the LTTE (Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam). This government vs insurgents conflict was also one of regional and linguistic identity. Dominating the government are the Sinhalese who form the majority of the population and speak Sinhala. The LTTE consisted of Tamils, a minority that was consistently sidelined, oppressed and speak Tamil. The Sinhalese claim that they are the original occupants of the land and follow Buddhism. The Tamils on the other hand, contest this claim and largely follow Hinduism. The ‘Sinhala Only’ Act in 1956, which replaced English with Sinhala as the state’s official language further accelerated resentment against the Sinhalese and led to the rise of Velupila Prabhakaran. Prabhakaran formed the LTTE, a militant separatistic outfit that the government then tried to eliminate unsuccessfully for the coming three decades, finally succeeding in 2009 when it killed him. We Indians, of course know Prabhakaran best as the person responsible Rajiv Gandhi’s assassination.
I remember vividly seeing the image of a dead Prabhakaran splashed across papers and guiltily feeling a sense of victory. Guilty because it reminded me of our primeval nature. No matter how evolved the discourse around war or terrorism gets, we ultimately need a photo of a dead Prabhakar, Saddam or Kasab to feel ‘The End’ as a society. ‘This Divided Island’ reminds us that there is no such end.
How does a three-decade war erode the fabric of civil society? In ‘This Divided Island’ Samanth Subramanian weaves across a country gingerly recovering from the onslaught. Many civil liberties like freedom of the press, that we take for granted are not adhered to in Sri Lanka so it’s doubly admirable that Subramanian managed to slip through the cracks of a tight-fisted government that is working hard to obfuscate all allegations of war crimes. Cutting a swathe through a wide cross-section of the populace, Subramanian talks to former LTTE members who have now settled abroad, journalists, the next of kin of those who have ‘disappeared’ in the war, Sinhalese monks, and the general public who’ve been bombed, maimed and brutalized repeatedly.
‘This Divided Island’ is part memoir, part travelogue and part investigative reportage. It’s a format that allows us, the reader to trace the large arc of Sri Lanka’s violent history through the first-hand experiences of Subramanian and the people he talks to. His prose has a matter-of-fact quality to it that draws you in even when there is mountain of information and suffering to be absorbed. But when confronted with the mundane, like being on a bumpy bus ride, a vivid image jumps off the page and you cannot but encounter Subramanian’s skill with words. Here is an example: The bus transmitted each scar and lesion of the road as precisely as if somebody were pummeling in Morse code. I curled my body into a tense coil and waited for daybreak.
‘This Divided Island’ is a 360-degree look at a ravaged country next door that seldom opens itself up to outsiders. Read it.
Lady Middlebrow 