This Divided Island: Life, Death, and the Sri Lankan War

by Samanth Subramanian

The date traditionally fitted to the start of the civil war is 23 July 1983, when the Tigers killed 13 soldiers in an army patrol in Jaffna.

In 1956, Parliament passed an act declaring Sinhalese to be the sole official language of Sri Lanka.

In 1971, universities started to demand higher admission marks of Tamil students than of Sinhalese—a ‘standardization’ policy

One of Duraiappah’s companions later remembered a short youth shivering as he aimed his pistol at the mayor. This was Velupillai Prabhakaran in his Gavrilo Princip moment, his assassination of a representative of a state he did not wish to belong to, his inauguration of a war.

Just as it became important to disentangle my identity from my work, it became important also to separate, like yolk from white, the Tigers from the grievances of the Tamils.

‘All of us had faith in the armed struggle, even though we had no idea about how to conduct it.’

Prabhakaran, he said, had developed the rudiments of a messiah complex.

Murder was an acceptable weapon, as long as it was pointed in the right direction.

M. liked to say, without any irony, and his harshest criticism of Prabhakaran was, in fact, that he was unsound on political theory.

‘We would have all agreed that the Tigers should have led the Tamil cause, because somebody had to fight the Sinhalese chauvinism,’ M. said. ‘But the heart weakens without democracy, and there was no democracy within the Tigers.

anybody who asked you to trust them despite minor infractions was not to be trusted at all.

This was the war the Tigers lost first, the war for the unconditional affections of the island’s Tamils and for the uncontested right to fight on their behalf. Once this war was lost, once this earth was scorched, it could have been only a question of time before the Tigers lost the other war too.

More than with any other religion, the non-Buddhist world has a rigid idea of Buddhism, fixed along dimensions of pacific thought and lofty deeds and high detachment. I was learning, in Sri Lanka, how Buddhism was just as fluid as any other faith, just as easily poured into new and unexpected moulds.

In its approach towards the remnants of the Tigers, the state behaved less as victors towards the vanquished than as doctors towards a tumour, seeking to expunge every last malignant cell. But the chemotherapy was surrounded by dense obfuscation.