Midweek Review

Alborada: Dawn Song or Dawn Rape?

Published

4 years ago

2022/03/9

By Carmen Wickramagamage

Ashoka Handagama’s latest film, Alborada, introduces itself as “the poem that Neruda never wrote.” What is this poem? Released on February 14 to coincide with Valentine’s Day, the irony of the timing is hard to miss for Alborada culminates in the horrific rape by Neruda, the great love poet, of a female latrine cleaner during his brief stay in Ceylon as the Chilean Consul. Hardly a subject that lends itself to poetry though the recitations in the film, in the original Spanish, of poems that Neruda did write are mesmerizing. Perhaps this explains why Garcia Marquez chose to characterize Neruda as “the greatest poet of the twentieth century in any language”. What is Handagama’s intention in the film?

In interviews, Handagama has spoken of his film as a challenge to Western hegemony that he claims operated to push this ignominious act under the carpet. But he has made it clear that unearthing a little-known fact about a poet hailed today as a critic of capitalism and champion of the oppressed is not his only intention. He sees his film as making an intervention into the contemporary discourse on women’s right to bodily autonomy in the age of #MeToo. Handagama is clearly well-intentioned. It is therefore necessary to examine how Alborada intervenes, through its representation of the scene of rape, in the rape culture that naturalizes masculine privilege and feminine vulnerability.

Source of the story

The source of what we know about the incident is Neruda himself. While he may not have composed a poem about the rape, he did “confess” to it in his memoirs translated into English by Hadley St. Martin as I confess I have lived: memoirs (1977). Written some forty years later, one page of the eleven pages (out of three-hundred fifty) that he devotes to his Ceylonese sojourn concerns itself with this incident. Though it created hardly a ripple in Sri Lanka, in Chile, Neruda’s admission stirred up a storm when the Chilean Parliament voted in 2018 to rename the airport in Santiago after him, with women and human rights activists vociferously protesting against the plan citing this incident. Not that the incident was completely unknown in Sri Lanka but the rumour that was doing the rounds was more along the lines of “something” between Neruda and his “domestic”. Handagama has said that he first read about it in a book by Tissa Abeysekera which, according to Sarath Chandrajeewa, went this way: “the great poet, the Nobel prize winner who loved a scavenger woman in Wellawatte”. No mention of rape there. Transferring a brief reference in Neruda’s memoirs into film and making it the pièce de résistance of a visually powerful medium is a radical gesture but how radical is it in its contribution to the ongoing conversation on rape?

Handagama has tried to distance himself from Neruda, calling the film his “creation” just as Neruda’s memoirs were his but the film is in large measure faithful to Neruda’s recollections of his stay in Ceylon, highlighting the theme of solitude that runs like a refrain through the young poet’s account and offering a sympathetic portrait of a man ill at ease in the “narrow colonialism” of the British but intrigued by the sights, sounds and people of Ceylon. Just as Neruda is the subject of his memoirs, so is he in the film. In only one respect is there a significant deviation: the representation of rape.

The Incident

In Neruda’s account, his interest in the woman begins with his curiosity about the mysterious workings of his latrine. When he finally sees the woman who cleans it, he is not repulsed, calling her instead the “the most beautiful woman I had yet seen in Ceylon” (p. 99) and elevating her above the rest through appellations such as “queen” and goddess”. But, when she disdains his tokens of love in the form of silks and fruits, he exercises his white male prerogative over native women’s bodies by raping her: “One morning , I decided to go all the way. I got a strong grip on her wrist and stared into her eyes. There was no language I could talk with her. Unsmiling, she let herself be led away and was soon naked in my bed. Her waist, so very slim, her full hips, the brimming cups of her breasts made her like one of the thousand-year-old sculptures from the south of India. It was the coming together of a man and a statue” (p. 100).

Neruda plays down the violence of the encounter in his penitential recounting, resorting instead to euphemisms. The woman does not struggle. She “let herself be led” (Is she deterred by the “strong grip on her wrist”?). She does not scream for help (Is she aware of its futility given the isolated location of the bungalow?). She was “soon naked”, how she came to be naked elided, its place taken by an aestheticized description of the female form reminiscent of classical Sanskrit poetry that deflects attention from the violence. Some trace of the woman’s resistance is acknowledged in her unresponsiveness. At the climactic moment, when he forces himself on her, she turns into a sculpture in his eyes, turning Neruda in turn into a Pygmalion in reverse. Where Pygmalion (in Ovid’s Metamorphosis) manages to obtain his heart’s desire by turning a statue (thanks to Venus’ intervention) into the woman of his dreams, Neruda’s touch turns a living, breathing woman into a sculpture. The description ends with lines that have self-loathing write large over it: “She was right to despise me . The experience was never repeated” (p. 100).

Its Representation

How does Handagama render this incident in film? Unlike in the memoirs, here, the audience is prepped from the start for the impending climax through the sighting of the Parvati statue by Neruda on arrival, his frolics with members of the Sakkili community that has Ratné Aiya incensed, and the rhythmic chiming of the latrine-cleaner’s anklets that wakes him up at dawn from a night of love-making. When the rape finally occurs, it is portrayed on screen in all its brutality. The woman screams, she struggles valiantly to escape, she has to be forcibly detained and stripped naked before the final humiliation of rape. There is nothing subtle or indirect about it. Why this directorial decision to deviate? Is it that Handagama wanted to dispel any illusions that his audience may entertain about the great poet Neruda? Or did he want to force his audience to confront head on the brutality of rape against the backdrop of a rape culture that thrives on misconceptions regarding women’s consent?

I find Handagama’s directorial decisions problematic on many fronts. For one thing, in the eyes of the law, ‘rape’ is sexual intercourse without consent, what constitutes “absence of consent” carefully delineated to accommodate the different scenarios that qualify as “rape” in the eyes of the law. Here, the woman violently struggles, thus confirming a misunderstanding “if there is rape, there must be evidence of struggle.” In a culture where the tendency is to hold the victim responsible for triggering the rape situation, this is dangerous. In anchoring rape in “consent”, the law recognizes the extenuating circumstances where a victim may not be able to physically resist or even say ‘no’. In Neruda’s account, the circumstances that prevent the woman from resisting or saying ‘no’ vocally are very clear. In hindsight, he too acknowledges her ‘no’: “She kept her eyes wide open all the while, completely unresponsive” (p. 100).

Beyond the issue of consent, his portrayal of the scene of rape also raises questions on how to represent violence on screen. Much has been written on the intrinsic violence of representation in attempts to represent violence. The risk is doubled when it comes to sexual violence as Laura Mulvey and others have pointed out as it turns spectators into voyeurs who wittingly or unwittingly participate in the violence enacted on screen. In Alborada, we all join Ratné Aiya at the “keyhole” or aperture to gaze at the scene unfolding within, whether we derive a vicarious pleasure from that or not. Handagama tries to draw the attention of the audience to the very real pain of the woman by having a tear course down her cheek as she stares directly at the camera and at us while averting her gaze from the perpetrator. By doing so, he restores the flesh-and-blood woman to the scene of the rape where Neruda had seen a statue. Unfortunately, the protracted violence of the rape scene is in danger of slipping from pathos to bathos. Sarath Chandrajeewa has already said that he found the scene where the predator and his prey circle round the massive four-poster bed comical. I agree. The scene was too reminiscent of “ottu sellang”, a children’s game of “catch me if you can”, for me!

Life after rape

Feminist critics such as Sharon Marcus and Rajeswari Sunder Rajan have emphasized the importance of rewriting the normative rape script which sees the woman as victim and her defilement as marking her for life. In Sri Lanka, women are enjoined to protect their character (a euphemism for sexual purity) as if it were their life, its loss a fate worse than death. Marcus and Sunder Rajan, therefore, argue that it is essential to speak of rape survivors, not rape victims, who thereby refuse the powerlessness assigned to them in a “gendered grammar of violence”(Marcus).

In Neruda’s memoirs, at the end of the account, attention is redirected to Neruda himself albeit on a note of self-recrimination: “She was right to despise me” (p. 100). The woman’s subsequent fate is of little concern to him. In the film, the lines translate into an image of Neruda trading places with the latrine cleaner, first taking up the brush and cleaning the latrine and then walking towards the sea carrying the latrine bucket on his head in a show of abject humility. As for the woman, the camera follows her out of the bedroom and into the sea where she tries frenziedly to rid herself of the defiling touch, her facial expressions indicating her disgust. She is then seen swimming deeper into the ocean, with the ocean waters gradually submerging her completely. Only the red cloth survives to create patterns in the water as it did at the start of the film. Clearly, there is no life after rape.

The film, however, adds another scene in an attempt to locate the phenomenon of rape in the present. In this scene the woman resurfaces from the sea framed against a skyline featuring a jet-ski. How to read it? Is it to remind the audience that, some one hundred years later, nothing much has changed? Or is to hold out hope that in the age of #MeToo, something is about to change?

But, according to Sarath Chandrajeewa (in “Beyond the Fiction of Alborada“)who claims to have traced the identity of the woman raped by Neruda, the “real” woman did not drown herself. She returned to her community but was married off by her family to an older man because she had “lost her virginity” and, when her husband died shortly after, the now pregnant woman jumped into the funeral pyre of her husband and committed suicide, which some in the community described as “Sathi Pooja”. Chandrajeewa even speculates that the husband’s death from alcohol poisoning was “either because he was delighted with his beautiful young bride or perhaps due to grief” (!). This information that Chandrajeewa says he gathered as part of his research among the Sakkili community who lived in Wellawatte and Bambalapitiya in the 1970s raises many questions for me. Did the community that the woman belonged to (the lowly scavenger caste) uphold norms of feminine sexual purity that have their basis in the genteel classes? Did they practice “Sathi Pooja” of which there are no documented cases in Ceylon and which, even in India is very much tied to region, class and caste as scholars like Lata Mani and Gayatri Spivak have pointed out? Pregnant women in any case do not commit Sathi Pooja. They wait until they give birth. How much does Chandrajeewa “know” of their ways?

This is not the only attempt at endowing the woman with an afterlife. Another account of the nameless woman’s subsequent fate has been doing the rounds of late due to an article by Kumar Gunawardena in The Island in 2020 where he, drawing on a story titled “Brumpy’s Daughter” in Tissa Devendra’s On Horseshoe Street, claims that the raped woman’s story had a happy ending. According to Gunawardena, Neruda “did the right thing” by the woman, who now has a name, Thangamma, by marrying her off to his retainer Brumpy. And when a daughter (Neruda’s) was born in due course, she was named Imelda after Neruda’s mother at his behest and supported financially by Neruda through George Keyt. Devendra meets Imelda Ratnayake (last name from the foster father Brumpy) much later when he is heading a Kachcheri where she too works and attracts his attention because of her striking appearance. She ends up marrying a Chilean, a Neruda devotee, who had worked for a while in Ceylon. After her marriage, Imelda settles in Chile with her husband and meets Devendra again at a conference in Mexico. It was a feel-good story. But the feeling was short-lived. When Michael Roberts reprinted Kumar Gunawardena’s account in his blog Thuppahi, someone by the name of Manel Fonseka intervened to spoil it by declaring “If I’m not mistaken, Devendra’s whole story was exactly that! A STORY! No basis in truth”. If Manel Fonseka is right, Gunawardena, a medical doctor by training, had failed to recognize the difference between fact and fiction!

In all this, there is no room for the subjectivity of the woman who was raped. She does not speak. For Neruda, the reason is the language barrier though he turns that into something more by comparing her to a “shy jungle animal” belonging in “another kind of existence, in another world” (p. 100). Handagama restores some humanity to her by adding that artistically placed single tear but that’s where he stops. She never speaks. The gaze in the film is predominantly Neruda’s, the camera angles adopting Neruda’s perspective on the receding figure of the latrine cleaner reminiscent of a classical South Indian sculpture although, unfortunately, her walk could well be that of a model on the runway. Similarly, her face takes on a bronze sheen when Neruda intercepts her to remind us that, in his mind, she resembles a statue. Given the race, caste, class and gender of the latrine cleaner, it is unlikely we will ever know what happened to her. Chandrajeewa, who claims he found the “real” woman, assigns her an exceptional fate as a “mad” woman (suffering from “Idiopathic Psychological Disorder”) who commits Sathi Pooja. Even Tissa Devendra’s story ultimately fails to imagine for her a life that is not defined by the rape. I like to think that there was life after rape for her, that she, though no doubt traumatized, survived the rape without having to play the prescribed role in the normative script for the rape victim–forced marriage and unwanted pregnancy–although, gender norms at the time being such, she could not cry out loud #HeToo!

(Carmen Wickramagamage is Professor in English at the University of Peradeniya)

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Midweek Review

Year ends with the NPP govt. on the back foot

Published

2 days ago

2025/12/24

Sahan Weerasooriya

President Dissanayake addresses Parliament as PM Dr. Harini Amarasuriya looks on. Dissanayake is the leader of both the JVP and NPP

The failure on the part of the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP)-led National People’s Power (NPP) government to fulfil a plethora of promises given in the run up to the last presidential election, in September, 2024, and a series of incidents, including cases of corruption, and embarrassing failure to act on a specific weather alert, ahead of Cyclone Ditwah, had undermined the administration beyond measure.

Ditwah dealt a knockout blow to the arrogant and cocky NPP. If the ruling party consented to the Opposition proposal for a Parliamentary Select Committee (PSC) to probe the events leading to the November 27 cyclone, the disclosure would be catastrophic, even for the all-powerful Executive President Anura Kumara Dissanayake, as responsible government bodies, like the Disaster Management Centre that horribly failed in its duty, and the Met Department that alerted about the developing storm, but the government did not heed its timely warnings, directly come under his purview.

The NPP is on the back foot and struggling to cope up with the rapidly developing situation. In spite of having both executive presidency and an overwhelming 2/3 majority in Parliament, the government seems to be weak and in total disarray.

The regular appearance of President Dissanayake in Parliament, who usually respond deftly to criticism, thereby defending his parliamentary group, obviously failed to make an impression. Overall, the top NPP leadership appeared to have caused irreparable damage to the NPP and taken the shine out of two glorious electoral victories at the last presidential and parliamentary polls held in September and November 2024 respectively.

The NPP has deteriorated, both in and out of Parliament. The performance of the 159-member NPP parliamentary group, led by Prime Minister Dr. Harini Amarasuriya, doesn’t reflect the actual situation on the ground or the developing political environment.

Having repeatedly boasted of its commitment to bring about good governance and accountability, the current dispensation proved in style that it is definitely not different from the previous lots or even worse. (The recent arrest of a policeman who claimed of being assaulted by a gang, led by an NPP MP, emphasised that so-called system change is nothing but a farce) In the run-up to the November, 2024, parliamentary polls, President Dissanayake, who is the leader of both the JVP and NPP, declared that the House should be filled with only NPPers as other political parties were corrupt. Dissanayake cited the Parliament defeating the no-confidence motions filed against Ravi Karunanayake (2016/over Treasury Bond scams) and Keheliya Rambukwella (2023/against health sector corruption) to promote his argument. However, recently the ongoing controversy over patient deaths, allegedly blamed on the administration of Ondansetron injections, exposed the government.

Mounting concerns over drug safety and regulatory oversight triggered strong calls from medical professionals, and trade unions, for the resignation of senior officials at the National Medicines Regulatory Authority (NMRA) and the State Pharmaceutical Corporation (SPC).

Medical and civil rights groups declared that the incident exposed deep systemic failures in Sri Lanka’s drug regulatory framework, with critics warning that the collapse of quality assurance mechanisms is placing patients’ lives at grave risk.

The Medical and Civil Rights Professional Association of Doctors (MCRPA), and allied trade unions, accused health authorities of gross negligence and demanded the immediate resignation of senior NMRA and SPC officials.

MCRPA President Dr. Chamal Sanjeewa is on record as having said that the Health Ministry, NMRA and SPC had collectively failed to ensure patient safety, citing, what he described as, a failed drug regulatory system.

The controversy has taken an unexpected turn with some alleging that the NPP government, on behalf of Sri Lanka and India, in April this year, entered into an agreement whereby the former agreed to lower quality/standards of medicine imports.

Trouble begins with Ranwala’s resignation

The NPP suffered a humiliating setback when its National List MP Asoka Ranwala had to resign from the post of Speaker on 13 December, 2024, following intense controversy over his educational qualification. The petroleum sector trade union leader served as the Speaker for a period of three weeks and his resignation shook the party. Ranwala, first time entrant to Parliament was one of the 18 NPP National List appointees out of a total of 29. The Parliament consists of 196 elected and 29 appointed members. Since the introduction of the National List, in 1989, there had never been an occasion where one party secured 18 slots.

The JVP/NPP made an initial bid to defend Ranwala but quickly gave it up and got him to resign amidst media furor. Ranwala dominated the social media as political rivals exploited the controversy over his claimed doctorate from the Waseda University of Japan, which he has failed to prove to this day. But, the JVP/NPP had to suffer a second time as a result of Ranwala’s antics when he caused injuries to three persons, including a child, on 11 December, in the Sapugaskanda police area.

The NPP made a pathetic, UNP and SLFP style effort to save the parliamentarian by blaming the Sapugaskanda police for not promptly subjecting him for a drunk driving test. The declaration made by the Government Analyst Department that the parliamentarian hadn’t been drunk at the time of the accident, several days after the accident, does not make any difference. Having experienced the wrongdoing of successive previous governments, the public, regardless of what various interested parties propagated on social media, realise that the government is making a disgraceful bid to cover-up.

No less a person than President Dissanayake is on record as having said that their members do not consume liquor. Let us wait for the outcome of the internal investigation into the lapses on the part of the Sapugaskanda police with regard to the accident that happened near Denimulla Junction, in Sapugaskanda.

JVP/NPP bigwigs obviously hadn’t learnt from the Weligama W 15 hotel attack in December, 2023, that ruined President Ranil Wickremeinghe’s administration. That incident exposed the direct nexus between the government and the police in carrying out Mafia-style operations. Although the two incidents cannot be compared as the circumstances differ, there is a similarity. Initially, police headquarters represented the interests of the wrongdoers, while President Wickremesinghe bent over backwards to retain the man who dispatched the CCD (Colombo Crime Division) team to Weligama, as the IGP. The UNP leader went to the extent of speaking to Chief Justice Jayantha Jayasuriya, PC, and Speaker Mahinda Yapa Abeywardena to push his agenda. There is no dispute the then Public Security Minister Tiran Alles wanted Deshabandu Tennakoon as IGP, regardless of a spate of accusations against him, in addition to him being faulted by the Supreme Court in a high-profile fundamental rights application.

The JVP/NPP must have realised that though the Opposition remained disorganised and ineffective, thanks to the media, particularly social media, a case of transgression, if not addressed swiftly and properly, can develop into a crisis. Action taken by the government to protect Ranwala is a case in point. Government leaders must have heaved a sigh of relief as Ranwala is no longer the Speaker when he drove a jeep recklessly and collided with a motorcycle and a car.

Major cases, key developments

Instead of addressing public concerns, the government sought to suppress the truth by manipulating and exploiting developments

* The release of 323 containers from the Colombo Port, in January 2025, is a case in point. The issue at hand is whether the powers that be took advantage of the port congestion to clear ‘red-flagged’ containers.

Although the Customs repeatedly declared that they did nothing wrong and such releases were resorted even during Ranil Wickremesinghe’s presidency (July 2022 to September 2024), the public won’t buy that. Container issue remains a mystery. That controversy eroded public confidence in the NPP that vowed 100 percent transparency in all its dealings. But the way the current dispensation handled the Port congestion proved that transparency must be the last thing in the minds of the JVPers/NPPers holding office.

* The JVP/NPP’s much touted all-out anti-corruption stand suffered a debilitating blow over their failure to finalise the appointment of a new Auditor General. In spite of the Opposition, the civil society, and the media, vigorously taking up this issue, the government continued to hold up the appointment by irresponsibly pushing for an appointment acceptable to President Dissanayake. The JVP/NPP is certainly pursuing a strategy contrary to what it preached while in the Opposition and found fault with successive governments for trying to manipulate the AG. It would be pertinent to mention that President Dissanayake should accept the responsibility for the inordinate delay in proposing a suitable person to that position. The government failed to get the approval of the Constitutional Council more than once to install a favourite of theirs in it, thanks to the forthright position taken by its civil society representatives.

The government should be ashamed of its disgraceful effort to bring the Office of the Auditor General under its thumb:

* The JVP/NPP government’s hotly disputed decision to procure 1,775 brand-new double cab pickup trucks, at a staggering cost exceeding Rs. 12,500 mn, under controversial circumstances, exposed the duplicity of that party that painted all other political parties black. Would the government rethink the double cab deal, especially in the wake of economic ruination caused by Cyclone Ditwah? The top leadership seems to be determined to proceed with their original plans, regardless of immeasurable losses caused by Cyclone Ditwah. Post-cyclone efforts still remain at a nascent stage with the government putting on a brave face. The top leadership has turned a blind eye to the overwhelming challenge in getting the country back on track especially against the backdrop of its agreement with the IMF.

Post-Cyclone Ditwah recovery process is going to be slow and extremely painful. Unfortunately, both the government and the Opposition are hell-bent on exploiting the miserable conditions experienced by its hapless victims. The government is yet to acknowledge that it could have faced the crisis much better if it acted on the warning issued by Met Department Chief Athula Karunanayake on 12 November, two weeks before the cyclone struck.

Foreign policy dilemma

Sri Lanka moved further closer to India and the US this year as President Dissanayake entered into several new agreements with them. In spite of criticism, seven Memorandums of Understanding (MoUs), including one on defence, remains confidential. What are they hiding?

Within weeks after signing of the seven MoUs, India bought the controlling interests in the Colombo Dockyard Limited for USD 52 mn.

Although some Opposition members, representing the SJB, raised the issue, their leader Sajith Premadasa, during a subsequent visit to New Delhi, indicated he wouldn’t, under any circumstances, raise such a contentious issue.

Premadasa went a step further. The SJB leader assured his unwavering commitment to the full implementation of the 13th Amendment to the Constitution that was forced on Sri Lanka during President JRJ’s administration, under the highly questionable Indo-Lanka Accord of July, 1987, after the infamous parippu drop by Indian military aircraft over Jaffna, their version of the old gunboat diplomacy practiced by the West.

Both India and the US consolidated their position here further in the post-Aragalaya period. Those who felt that the JVP would be in a collision course with them must have been quite surprised by the turn of events and the way post-Aragalaya Sri Lanka leaned towards the US-India combine with not a hum from our carboard revolutionaries now installed in power. They certainly know which side of the bread is buttered. Sri Lanka’s economic deterioration, and the 2023 agreement with the IMF, had tied up the country with the US-led bloc.

In spite of India still procuring large quantities of Russian crude oil and its refusal to condemn Russia over the conflict in Ukraine, New Delhi has obviously reached consensus with the US on a long-term partnership to meet the formidable Chinese challenge. Both countries feel each other’s support is incalculably vital and indispensable.

Sri Lanka, India, and Japan, in May 2019, signed a Memorandum of Cooperation (MoC) to jointly develop the East Container Terminal (ECT) at the Colombo Port. That was during the tail end of the Yahapalana administration. The Gotabaya Rajapaksa administration wanted to take that project forward. But trade unions, spearheaded by the JVP/NPP combine, thwarted a tripartite agreement on the basis that they opposed privatisation of the Colombo Port at any level.

But, the Colombo West International Terminal (CWIT) project, that was launched in November, 2022, during Ranil Wickremesinghe’s presidency, became fully operational in April this year. The JVP revolutionary tiger has completely changed its stripes regarding foreign investments and privatisation. If the JVP remained committed to its previous strategies, India taking over CDL or CWIT would have been unrealistic.

The failure on the part of the government to reveal its stand on visits by foreign research vessels to ports here underscored the intensity of US and Indian pressure. Hope our readers remember how US and India compelled the then President Wickremesinghe to announce a one-year moratorium on such visits. In line with that decision Sri Lanka declared research vessels wouldn’t be allowed here during 2024. The NPP that succeeded Wickremesinghe’s administration in September, 2024, is yet to take a decision on foreign research vessels. What a pity?

The NPP ends the year on the back foot, struggling to cope up with daunting challenges, both domestic and external. The recent revelation of direct Indian intervention in the 2022 regime change project here along with the US underscored the gravity of the situation and developing challenges. Post-cyclone period will facilitate further Indian and US interventions for obvious reasons.

****

Perhaps one of the most debated events in 2025 was the opening of ‘City of Dreams Sri Lanka’ that included, what the investors called, a world-class casino. In spite of mega Bollywood star Shah Rukh Khan’s unexpected decision to pull out of the grand opening on 02 August, the investors went ahead with the restricted event. The Chief Guest was President Anura Kumara Dissanayake, who is also the Finance Minister, in addition to being the Defence Minister. Among the other notable invitees were Dissanayake’s predecessor Ranil Wickremesinghe, whose administration gave critical support to the high-profile project, worth over USD 1.2 bn. John Keells Holdings PLC (JKH) and Melco Resorts & Entertainment (Melco) invested in the project that also consist of the luxurious Nüwa hotel and a premium shopping mall. Who would have thought President Dissanayake’s participation, even remotely, possible, against the backdrop of his strong past public opposition to gambling of any kind?

Don’t forget ‘City of Dreams’ received a license to operate for a period of 20 years. Definitely an unprecedented situation. Although that license had been issued by the Wickremesinghe administration, the NPP, or any other political party represented in Parliament, didn’t speak publicly about that matter. Interesting, isn’t it, coming from people, still referred by influential sections of the Western media, as avowed Marxists?

By Shamindra Ferdinando

Midweek Review

The Aesthetics and the Visual Politics of an Artisanal Community

Published

2 days ago

2025/12/24

Sahan Weerasooriya

Through the Eyes of the Patua:

Organised by the Colombo Institute for Human Sciences in collaboration with Millennium Art Contemporary, an interesting and unique exhibition got underway in the latter’s gallery in Millennium City, Oruwala on 21 December 2025. The exhibition is titled, ‘Through the Eyes of the Patua: Ramayana Paintings of an Artisanal Community’ and was organized in parallel with the conference that was held on 20 December 2025 under the theme, ‘Move Your Shadow: Rediscovering Ravana, Forms of Resistance and Alternative Universes in the Tellings of the Ramayana.’ The scrolls on display at the gallery are part of the over 100 scrolls in the collection of Colombo Institute’s ‘Roma Chatterji Patua Scroll Collection.’ Prof Chatterji, who taught Sociology at University of Delhi and at present teaches at Shiv Nadar University donated the scrolls to the Colombo Institute in 2024.

The paintings on display are what might be called narrative scrolls that are often over ten feet long. Each scroll narrates a story, with separate panels pictorially depicting one component of a story. The Patuas or the Chitrakars, as they are also known, are traditionally bards. A bard will sing the story that is depicted by each scroll which is simultaneously unfurled. For Sri Lankan viewers for whom the paintings and their contexts of production and use would be unusual and unfamiliar, the best way to understand them is to consider them as a comic strip. In the case of the ongoing exhibition, since the bards or the live songs are not a part of it, the word and voice elements are missing. However, the curators have endeavoured to address this gap by displaying a series of video presentations of the songs, how they are performed and the history of the Patuas as part of the exhibition itself.

The unfamiliarity of the art on display and their histories, necessitates broader explanation. The Patua hail from Medinipur District of West Bengal in India. Essentially, this community of artisans are traditional painters and singers who compose stories based on sacred texts such as the Ramayana or Mahabharata as well as secular events that can vary from the bombing of the Twin Towers in New York in 2001 to the Indian Ocean Tsunami of 2004. Even though painted storytelling is done by a number of traditional artisan groups in India, the Patua is the only community where performers and artists belong to the same group. Hence, Professor Chatterji, in her curatorial note for the exhibition calls them “the original multi-media performers in Bengal.”

‘The story of the Patuas’ also is an account of what happens to such artisanal communities in contemporary times in South Asia more broadly even though this specific story is from India. There was a time before the 21st century when such communities were living and working across a large part of eastern India – each group with a claim to their recognizably unique style of painting. However, at the present time, this community and their vocation is limited to areas such as Medinipur, Birbhum, Purulia in West Bengal and Dumka in Jharkhand.

A pertinent question is how the scroll painters from Medinipur have survived the vagaries of time when others have not. Professor Chatterji provides an important clue when she notes that these painters, “unlike their counterparts elsewhere, are also extremely responsive to political events.” As such, “apart from a rich repertoire of stories based on myth and folklore, including the Ramayana and other epics, they have, over many years, also composed on themes that range from events of local or national significance such as boat accidents and communal violence to global events such as the tsunami and the attack on the World Trade Centre.”

There is another interesting aspect that becomes evident when one looks into the socio-cultural background of this community. As Professor Chatterji writes, “one significant feature that gives a distinct flavour to their stories is the fact that a majority of Chitrakars consider themselves to be Muslims but perform stories based largely on Hindu myths.” In this sense, their story complicates the tension-ridden dichotomies between ethno-cultural and religious groups typical of relations between groups in India as well as more broadly in South Asia, including in Sri Lanka. Prof Chatterji suggests this positionality allows the Patua to have “a truly secular voice so vital in the world that we live in today.”

As a result, she notes, contemporary Patuas “have propagated the message of communal harmony in their compositions in the context of the recent riots in India and the Gulf War. Their commentaries couched in the language of myth are profoundly symbolic and draw on a rich oral tradition of storytelling.” What is even more important is their “engagement with contemporary issues also inflects their aesthetics” because many of these painters also “experiment with novel painterly values inspired by recent interaction with new media such as comic books and with folk art forms from other parts of the country.”

From this varied repertoire of the Patuas’ painterly tradition, this exhibition focusses on scrolls portraying different aspects of the Ramayana. In North Indian and the more dominant renditions of the Ramayana, the focus is on Rama while in many alternate renditions this shifts to Ravana as typified by versions popular among the Sinhalas and Tamils in Sri Lanka as well as in some areas in several Indian states. Compared to this, the Patua renditions in the exhibition mostly illustrate the abduction of Sita with a pronounced focus on Sita and not on Ravana, the conventional antagonist or on Rama, the conventional protagonist. As a result, these two traditional male colossuses are distant. Moreover, with the focus on Sita, these folk renditions also bring to the fore other figures directly associated with her such as her sons Luv and Kush in the act of capturing Rama’s victory horse as well as Lakshmana.

Interestingly, almost as a counter narrative, which also serves as a comparison to these Ramayana scrolls, the exhibition also presents three scrolls known as ‘bin-Laden Patas’ depicting different renditions on the attack on New York’s Twin Towers.

While the painted scrolls in this collection have been exhibited thrice in India, this is the first time they are being exhibited in Sri Lanka, and it is quite likely such paintings from any community beyond Sri Lanka’s shores were not available for viewing in the country before this. Organised with no diplomatic or political affiliation and purely as a Sri Lankan cultural effort with broader South Asian interest, it is definitely worth a visit. The exhibition will run until 10 January 2026.