Midweek Review

An epic history of reason

Published

4 years ago

2022/09/7

Sahan Weerasooriya

Steven Skybell and F. Murray Abraham in Classic Stage’s ‘Galileo.’ Photo courtesy Joan Marcus

Brecht’s Life of Galileo:

By Laleen Jayamanne

Andrea: Unhappy the land
hat breeds no hero.
Galileo: No! Unhappy the land
that needs a hero.

Brecht in Sri Lanka

It is interesting that while three of Brecht’s plays were translated into Sinhala and successfully performed, The Life of Galileo (as far as I know), has not been translated. It was directed by Percy Colin-Thomé in English, with the Aquinas University College theatre workshop, in 1969. A Professor of Physics, Arthur Weerakoon, played Galileo with unabiding interest. The unusual back projections of text and the lively Italian Carnevale scene are still vivid in my memory. I remember revellers in masks and a figure dressed as the sun around which a child dressed as green earth, danced to the cheers of the crowd who well understood what the skit meant. The telescope, an invention Galileo modified and trained on the stars, was sold cheaply as an optical toy in the city streets. The Carnevale scene showed that the astronomer Galileo Galilei’s momentous discovery that the earth moved around the sun had reached the marketplace. Popular pamphlets about it were distributed, songs sung. A new age, they thought, had arrived.

I am now wondering why this play about the struggle between scientific reason, ethics, religious myth and superstition promoted by the all-powerful Catholic Church, failed to interest progressive Sinhala theatre folk of the 1960s. Might it interest Lankan theatre folk and students now, as they struggle to grapple with the current political, economic and ethical turmoil in the country and the role an ethnoreligious state ideology plays in it?

The Second World War – 1939

Brecht wrote his four major Epic plays in exile in Denmark and the US, after he fled Germany when Hitler came to power in 1933. The first of these was The Life of Galileo written in three weeks in late 1938 in Denmark where Niels Bohr was working on the problem of splitting the atom. Unlike his other plays, which were based on parables, Galileo was based on a famous historical figure. Bohr’s assistants advised Brecht on Ptolemaic cosmology which presented the universe as a ‘crystal sphere.’ A model of it became an important prop in the play. It is this ancient static model of the universe (accepted by the church of Rome), which Galileo challenged with his dynamic theory of a heliocentric universe. The history of writing, translating and revising the play is linked to major world historical events. In 1940 when Hitler invaded Denmark, Brecht and family escaped, via Finland, Moscow and Vladivostok to California.

Hiroshima – 6 August 1945

Later, while Brecht worked on the play with the brilliant English actor Charles Laughton in LA in 1945, the US dropped the atom bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In his diary Brecht writes of the horror and mourning expressed by ordinary Americans on the streets, though it meant the end of the war and return of their husbands and sons, victorious. Brecht’s play, which shows the birth of the ‘New Scientific Age’, carried a dark premonition. It also demonstrated the way Galileo betrayed his own rational discovery, by recanting his ideas so as to escape torture and death as a heretic.

Death of Stalin – 1953

After the war Brecht went to live in East Berlin under Soviet rule, where he created his famous Berliner Ensemble with his wife, the great Brechtian actress, Helena Weigel. Brecht reworked Galileo while living in East Berlin when Stalin died in 1953. He would have had a keen understanding of the Stalinist Soviet bureaucracy that ‘purged’ artistes, some of them close friends, including Tretyakov the playwright, who he considered his teacher. Born in 1898, Brecht died in 1956 relatively young, without being able to direct Galileo with his ensemble as he had planned.

The Holy Inquisition of Rome

The 17th Century papal court in Rome was a vast bureaucracy, which controlled knowledge, wealth and the people in a hierarchical pre-ordained structure, just as they imagined the universe to be. In fact Brecht referred to that Church, not entirely ironically, as a ‘secular institution’ in its comprehensive pursuit of power and policing of thought. Pope Urban VIII (who summoned Galileo to the Inquisition), was himself a mathematician. They agreed that Galileo’s math was correct but not the radical conclusions he drew from it, which contradicted church dogma of the earth’s centrality in the universe. Still, for the Church, Galileo alive (as the preeminent and famous astronomer and physicist of Europe) was more useful than burnt-alive as a heretic. This way Italian merchants could use his star charts to navigate the seas. If he was burnt as a heretic all of his knowledge would be proscribed, unable to be put to practical commercial use. The church was a political organisation that kept the peasantry in their impoverished place, as it was preordained in the Bible. Galileo, according to the play, did not join the new mercantile bourgeois class even when he had an opportunity to help form a resisting power block, but instead bowed to Church power and Princely feudal social relations through fear of physical torture.

Brecht in America

California is where a large number of German Jewish refugees went to flee Fascism, hoping to find work in the Hollywood film industry. Many of the highly trained technicians from the sophisticated German Weimar film industry did get employed, enriching Hollywood cinema, as did a few directors. But ironically, some of the Jewish actors had to play bit-roles as German Nazis in Hollywood anti-war films, because of their German accents and poor English! Charlie Chaplin befriended some of these artistes and was deeply concerned about what was happening in Europe, which is what prompted him to make The Great Dictator (1940).

In 1947 Brecht himself was called to appear at the Senate hearings of the House Un-American Activities Committee held against people suspected of being Communists. He left the States soon after. Chaplin, suspected of being a communist, was also called before this committee after he made Monsieur Verdoux (1947), when American audiences turned against him for playing the role of a benevolent murderer. When he requested a visa to leave and return to the US after a promotional tour to Europe, the State Dept. refused it. Then, quite astutely had his considerable wealth transferred to a Swiss bank and left the US for good. The most popular and loved star-director had become box-office and political ‘poison’ in an America driven by the anti-Communist witch-hunt. Many Hollywood directors, script-writers and actors lost their jobs either because they were or were suspected of being communists. Many progressive American artistes had joined the Communist Party during the 1930s Depression.

An Epic History of Reason

“June twenty-second sixteen thirty-three,

A momentous days for you and me,

Of all the days that was the one

An age of reason could have begun

“

The play explores how a ‘new age of reason’ became a ‘new dark age’ when the church suppressed the truth. The creation of scientific reason and ethics, and their accessibility to ordinary people, are major themes of the play. Brecht demonstrates how and why the authoritarian institution of the church controlled both the people and new knowledge. He does so through his newly formulated idea of epic theatre. He wanted theatre not only to be a place where emotions such as empathy and catharsis are experienced (as in the Greek tragedy), but also a forum for thought. He thought that epic devices such as a narrator or interruptions with song or projection of text and images would stimulate sensory thought.

Brecht’s Galileo was first performed in a small theatre in Los Angeles in 1947 with Charles Laughton in the lead and directed by Joseph Losey who had socialist sympathies and had also visited the Soviet Union in the 1930s. There is a very intricate account of their collaboration, in Brecht’s diary, gold for those interested in Brechtian acting and staging, and his thinking on the new Epic mode.

The play is about several aspects of the life of the great scientist. He is presented as a man who has a robust enjoyment of eating, drinking, teaching, observing, thinking and writing. The play opens with him enjoying his bath and talking about astronomy with his maid’s son, Andrea, who is only nine. He is teaching him the new astronomy that ‘the earth moves’ around the sun through a playful demonstration. The play concludes with Andrea (now a physicist himself), confronting his teacher.

Reason in Buddhist Philosophy

Within the history of Indian philosophy Buddhism offered an interrogation and understanding of the human mind, its processes of thinking and of reason. The Buddha rejected traditional Hindu ideas of animal sacrifice, elaborate priestly ritual and faith in revealed sacred texts. He promoted debate and introspective, yet detached examination of mental processes. He spoke to the people in the vernacular Pali, rather than in the language of learning and power, Sanskrit. But when the Buddha’s teaching became a popular religion over many centuries and received political patronage as in Sri Lanka, it became also a source of superstition and myths, used by rulers to propagate their authoritarian power.

Former President Mahinda Rajapaksa’s government created an ideology of the ‘war hero’ (ranawiru), in order to win the war against the LTTE. It was promoted as a war to save Lanka as an exclusive Sinhala-Buddhist nation, headed by a leader who was likened to the celebrated ancient King Dutugemunu who defeated the Tamil king Elara. Through this legend, reinforced by a genre of historical epic films, the heavy militarisation of an authoritarian ethno-religious state was normalised, consolidated and enthusiastically embraced by a large majority of Sinhala folk.

Tisaranee Gunasekara issues a timely warning in her article, Prelude to the Elections (GroundViews, 8/21/22). At first she gives a global historical perspective on religious violence.

“When Pope Francis visited Greece, a Greek Orthodox priest called him a heretic. That charge would have led to a gruesome death by fire in most of Europe just a few hundred years ago. If that past seems not just another time but another universe, it was thanks to the work of Christians who struggled for religious reforms and the secularisation of politics, often at the risk of their lives. It is the inadequacy of such struggles or their failure that creates spaces for fatwas against authors and their brutal implementation”.

Then she focuses on Sri Lanka’s recent ethno-religious politics and offers a reasonable suggestion for the next elections in the context of the ongoing Aragalaya.

“Religion and race played a decisive role in the 2019 and 2020 elections and here we are. Minimising these deadly influences is necessary to ensure that the next election produces a parliament that is more moderate and more rational […] the more moderate parties should form an understanding about not giving nominations to clergy of any religion and keeping religious symbols out of politics in general and electoral politics in particular.”

Galileo Betrays Science

Shown the instruments of torture, fearing death by fire, Galileo recants. He denies the scientific knowledge he arrived at by empirically studying the sky through a telescope for the very first time in history and through his mathematical calculations. Saved from death, he lives in relative comfort, under house arrest in Florence and writes his Discorsi in Italian rather than in Latin, the language of scholarship. While he dictated his book to his daughter, a monk would take away each page of the manuscript daily. But each night he would secretly make a copy and hide it inside a large globe!

Guru and Shishya

In the penultimate scene Galileo’s former student Andrea arrives (on route to Amsterdam to take up work as a physicist), to say farewell. The exchange between the great master and student who felt bitterly betrayed, is emotionally wrenching and crystal clear in conception. It is all of the following; a discourse, a debate, a lament, a lesson, on the betrayal of reason and of its consequences for humanity in the field of science. It is in every sense a brilliant ‘Epic Pedagogic Demonstration’ of what happens when reason is betrayed by unreason, and the irrational rules. Here, Brecht presents science (with its immense destructive modern technology and the atom bomb), as a matter of interest to all of humanity, not just to a clique of rulers and scientists. An epic articulation of this historical event is what is important here.

The full force of Galileo’s clear-eyed response to Andrea’s rebuke, ‘unhappy the land that breeds no hero,’ is felt here. When Andrea is ready to hail him as hero because Galileo has secretly completed the Discorsi, ‘the first important work of modern physics’, the master categorically refuses the exalted status even as he entrusts his manuscript to Andrea for safe delivery to an enlightened Europe. Galileo warns Andrea to be extra careful when he crosses Germany – as though it were now Europa 1940!

Then, Brecht’s Galileo delivers his infamous speech of self-disgust and trenchant critique in response to Andrea’s high praise:

Andrea: Science has only one commandment; contribution. And you have contributed more than any man for a hundred years.

Galileo: Have I? Then welcome to my gutter, dear colleague in science and brother in treason: I sold out, you are a buyer. The first sight of the book! His mouth watered and scoldings were drowned. Blessed be our bargaining, white-washing, death fearing community!”

Note the brilliant shift of pronouns, modes of address and use of idiomatic cliché as epic devices.

In recanting Galileo says he betrayed the people who believed that a new age had begun. He knew, he said, that for a short while he was as strong as the church and could have, as a single individual, challenged its immense power but didn’t. He was famous across Europe and scientists were awaiting his latest research. But he adds that no single man can do science, that it is a collective enterprise and should concern everyone. It’s this collective social mission of scientific reason and its capacity to alleviate suffering that he thought he had betrayed. The great secrecy of the process of creating the hydrogen bomb in the Manhattan Project and its links to the US military machine were events with great immediacy for Brecht when writing Galileo. Brecht’s Galileo telescopes 17th Century Enlightenment Reason and 20th Century Instrumental Reason; State Violence and Mass-Destruction.

Christian Witch Burning

The final scene focuses on Andrea who leaves an old and blind Galileo behind settling down to eat a roast goose for dinner. He has refused to give his sullied hand to Andrea who he sees as the future of science. At a border crossing while an Italian customs officer checks Andreas’ box of books for contraband, he openly and avidly reads the Discorsi when shouts from a gang of boys distracts him. They point to a little hut nearby saying there is a witch living there. Andrea lifts a boy up to the window and asks him what he sees. He replies, ‘an old girl cooking porridge at a stove’. But as Andrea clears customs and is about to leave he sees the boys pointing to a shadow cast on the house and yelling, ‘Marina’s a witch, she rides a broom at night!’ A new age indeed! Brecht ends Galileo on this disquieting irrational cry, reminding us of a time when women healers, midwives and just any old woman living alone were burnt as witches by Christian Europe, for not fitting into a patriarchal order, not that long ago.

Neither Hero nor Villain

In Brecht’s modern epic presentation of Galileo, he is neither a hero nor a villain. Heroes pitted against pitiless Destiny defined Greek Tragedy. Instead of heroes and villains or more recently goodies and baddies who we can cheer or boo, Brecht offers something quite rare and mighty strange. He offers scene after scene where the relations between the following dyadic terms are so finely calibrated that we really have to learn the irresistible joy of thinking for ourselves in the theatre.

Here are the dyadic terms:
senses and intellect,
gestures and speech,
subjects and objects,
costumes and movements
time and space,
body and mind,
feeling and thought

The terms on the left are rather more sensory and immediate, while those on the right tend to be more abstract, mediated. They are dyads not opposites, so the relays among them are intricate and complex, keeping us engaged. The mise-en-scène of the play is expansive, both terrestrial and cosmic. There is no longer an unmoving centre to the universe nor within the human brain, according to Galileo. Brecht’s Galileo presents both the cosmos and the human brain as dynamic systems. And Brecht’s modern epic theatrical idiom is the necessarily de-centred formal means adequate to demonstrating this new reality.

New Translations?

On October 31st 1992 (after 359 years) Pope John Paul II formally apologised for the ‘Galileo Case.’ It was the first of many apologies during his papacy. Is such a gesture by a ruler even thinkable in the Lankan context? I feel that Brecht’s Life of Galileo may resonate now with some Lankans engaged in the Aragalaya in the long term, as a process critically evaluating many spheres of Lankan life. I hope some folk reading this piece might think the time is ripe for a Sinhala and Tamil translation of Galileo some time soon.

All News Advertisement

Related Topics:Brecht’s Life of Galileo:F. Murray Abraham Joan Marcus Steven Skybell

Up Next

The Kandy-floss Tea-Dance, or Walk like an Elephant

Don't Miss

Challenge of Sadness

Click to comment

Midweek Review

Legacy of enforced disappearances: Vital facts conveniently forgotten to whitewash LTTE and India

Published

4 days ago

2026/09/9

Sahan Weerasooriya

One-time child soldier Jesuthasan Antonythasan poses with actresses Claudine Vinasithamby and Kalieaswari Srinivasan during a photocall for the film "Dheepan" at the 68th Cannes Film Festival in Cannes. The movie won the Palme d'Or in 2015. Antonythasan fought for the LTTE terrorist group before fleeing Sri Lanka and reached France in 1993. Of those categorised as missing, perhaps he is the most famous.

Those demanding accountability from Sri Lanka for war crimes allegations are strangely silent on atrocities committed by the LTTE. On the orders of its leader Velupillai Prabhakaran, the LTTE killed hundreds of members belonging to rival terrorist groups. It assassinated President Ranasinghe Premadsasa, almost succeeded in assassinating President Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunga and made attempts on President Mahinda Rajapaksa. But, the indiscriminate use of children as cannon fodder went unnoticed. How many children, forcibly recruited into their ranks, perished in fighting? And, lastly, shouldn’t the Tamil community hold the Illankai Thamil Arasu Kadchi (ITAK)-led now defunct Tamil National Alliance, that recognised the LTTE in 2001 as the sole representative of the Tamil speaking people, responsible for death and destruction caused since 2001?

By Shamindra Ferdinando

Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances (WGEID) representative Ana Lorena Delgadillo Pérez, and head of the Association of Relatives of Enforced Disappearances (ARED) Yogarasa Kanagaranjini, on 30 August, opened an exhibition at the Thanthai Selva Auditorium in Jaffna. The exhibition, appropriately named ‘Long Road for Justice,’ coincided with the International Day for Victims of Enforced Disappearances.

Pérez later addressed a conference held therein where the responsibility on the part of Sri Lanka was stressed.

Civil society activist Sunanda Deshapriya, in an article titled ‘Sri Lanka’s Disappeared: Where Do We Go from Here?’ carried in Jaffna Monitor, dealt with missing persons issue. Deshapriya focused on the North-East war (https://www.jaffnamonitor.com/sri-lankas-disappeared-where-do-we-go-from-here/)

The ICRC, Colombo, issued a statement regarding the International Day of the Disappeared. When the writer sought the number of missing persons in the country, Ruwanthi Jayasundare, Head of Communications, said that they had a caseload of 15,000 registered tracing requests (1983-2009) but she asserted that the actual number of missing was far bigger (https://island.lk/icrs-sustained-and-collective-efforts-critical-to-address-issue-of-missing-persons/)

Perhaps, many people wouldn’t know that the ICRC arrived here in 1989 during the second Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP) terror campaign in the wake of Indian military intervention here. The much discussed issue of disappearances must be appropriately dealt with, taking into consideration the relevant factors. At the time of their deployment here, President Ranasinghe Premadasa had been engaged in direct talks with the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) and the Geneva-headquartered body never expected a gruesome outbreak of violence. It would be pertinent to mention that within weeks after the ICRC’s arrival here, the JVP was crushed with brute force as it, too, resorted to senseless violence. The counter violence unleashed by the state apparatus was such that the then Marxist group’s top leadership was killed, except for Somawansa Amarasinghe, who escaped, with Indian help, in February 1990, and remained in exile till late 2001.

The ICRC deployment took place in mid October, 1989, and JVP leader Rohana Wijeweera was captured in the second week of November, at Ulapone, and shot in custody, and was allegedly cremated alive at the Borella cemetery.

In fact, at the time the ICRC arrived here, the JVP was on its last legs. The UNP government never bothered to hand over the bodies of slain JVP cadres to their families. Those who had been listed missing at that time were no longer in the land of the living, by the time the ICRC brought its operation in the South to an end.

What the country never expected was a fresh flare-up in the northern and eastern regions. The LTTE resumed large-scale hostilities, in June, after the Indian Army pulled out from Sri Lanka in late March 1990. Interestingly, some of those demanding justice for the missing/disappeared are conveniently silent about the disappearances during the Indian Army deployment here (July 1987 to March 1990).

Soon after hostilities erupted in the northern and eastern regions, following a 14-month truce between President Ranasinghe Premadasa and LTTE leader Velupillai Prabhakaran (May 1989 to June 1990), the ICRC was invited to open offices in that region. There had been excesses on the part of the military and law enforcement authorities as the government battled the LTTE, the world’s most ruthless terrorist organisation as assessed by none other than the US Federal Bureau of Investigation.

Yet Sri Lanka must earnestly address accountability issues and take meaningful measures to compensate the families of the innocents.

However, the Tamil community must come to terms with the reality that the vast majority of dead were members of the LTTE. The LTTE enjoyed considerable firepower as it literally wielded a conventional fighting capability, which even included a fledgling air force and directly challenged the government, and the armed forces had no option but to fight back. Obviously, the LTTE, that achieved significant battlefield successes over the years, never expected the almost non-stop three-year-long offensive that brought the war to an end in May 2009. Disappearances became exceptionally an important issue in the overall agenda pursued by the Tamil Diaspora and Tamil speaking political parties here only after the LTTE’s eradication.

Multiple reasons

In September 1990, several months after the Indian Army was literally forced to pull out from Sri Lanka as Tigers fought back the mighty IPKF to a standstill, while President Premadasa, too, made it clear that they were no longer welcome here, Amnesty International (AI) documented 43 cases of disappearances. According to the London headquartered AI, the majority of these disappearances happened in the Jaffna peninsula, following the outbreak of fighting in October 1989. The Indian Army launched ‘Operation Pawan’ meant to disarm the LTTE in line with the Indo-Lanka Accord, signed on 29 July, 1987.

During the Indian Army deployment here (1987 July to 1990 March), the Sri Lankan armed forces were confined to their barracks in the North and East. The AI accused the Indian Army of torture, extrajudicial executions and disappearances. The deaths of nearly 1,500 Indian officers and men, and injuries to approximately 3,000 others during the Indian deployment here, underscored the ferocity of the situation.

The Indian Army carried out reprisals, following LTTE attacks in both provinces. The Indian Army was also accused of sexual violence. Perhaps, the August 1989 Valvettithurai orgy of violence, during which Indian soldiers killed civilians, tortured detainees, committed sexual violence, and systematically destroyed homes and businesses, while the town was under curfew, was the worst case.

In October, 2025, the International Truth and Justice Project (ITJP) presented a detailed reparations claim, in association with the Valvettithurai Citizens’ Committee, to the Sri Lankan Office for Reparations, requesting USD $15 million (LKR 4.5 billion) for victims of a 1989 orgy of violence committed by the IPKF where at least 66 civilians were killed and 34 injured.

There hadn’t been a previous instance of a comprehensive compensation claim for such a wartime crime. Thousands of LTTE cadres, some of them trained in India, and civilians, perished in Indian Army action. The Indian Peace Keeping Force (IPKF) earned such a bad reputation it came to be dubbed the Indian People Killing Force.

The war in Sri Lanka, or whatever one chooses to call it, should be examined in the context of a high profile Indian destabilisation project ordered by Premier Indira Gandhi. Over a year after the Indian Army pullout, the LTTE assassinated Rajiv Gandhi, by then out of power, but he was the person Velupillai Prabhakaran held responsible for the Indian Army deployment in Sri Lanka. Following Gandhi’s assassination, India hunted down the LTTE team, involved in the operation, carried out by a female suicide cadre.

The LTTE forgot the Indian role in the transformation of the Tamil separatist terrorist movement to a deadly conventional threat. If not for the despicable Indian action, Sri Lanka wouldn’t have been hauled up before the Geneva-based United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC). That is the unpalatable truth.

How many Sri Lankan Tamils disappeared during weapons training in India? Did India investigate such disappearances as well as deaths caused by fighting among rival Tamil terrorist groups operating in India at that time? Among the groups that had been armed by India were PLOTE (People’s Liberation Organisation of Tamil Eelam), EPRLF (Eelam People’s Revolutionary Liberation Front) and TELO (Tamil Eelam Liberation Organisation) responsible for quite a significant number of killings and human rights violations.

India never accepted responsibility for the PLOTE raid on the Maldives on a contract to topple the then Maldivian PM Gayoom’s government given by a domestic rival in early November, 1988. Shouldn’t New Delhi at least apologise for the sea borne raid on the Maldives that resulted in deaths of Maldivians, as well as raiders? The Indian Navy sank a ship commandeered by the attackers fleeing the Maldives after air borne Indian troops brought the situation under control.

The Indian and global media praised swift Indian intervention but ignored two key factors, namely (i) the operation targeting Maldivian President Maumoon Abdul Gayoom was mounted by one of the groups trained, armed and deployed by India and (ii) two trawlers carrying the raiding party left the northern part of Sri Lanka, at that time held by the Indian Army.

The writer had the opportunity, in November, 2011, to interview the Maldivian businessman, Abdullah Luthufee, who convinced the PLOTE leader Uma Maheswaran to carry out the operation. (Male plot leader speaks out 3 November, 2011, Rajiv saved us from Gayoom-Male coup leader 4 November 2011 and How Luthufee moved SAARC venue from Male to Addu 11 Nov 2011) dealt with the operation that should have drawn international attention to the Indian destabilisation project. Let me stress that some PLOTE cadres perished when the Indian Navy sank the vessel commandeered by the fleeing PLOTE cadres. They were among those who had been listed missing during the conflict.

Australian and US interventions

One-time top JVPer Kumar Gunaratnam secret arrival in Sri Lanka as an Australian Citizen Noel Mudalige, in early September, 2011, emphasised the issuance of foreign passports in assumed names to Sri Lankans under controversial circumstances. The writer exclusively reported how the head of the breakaway JVP faction, known as the Frontline Socialist Party (FSP), arrived here. The Australian High Commission in Sri Lanka acted swiftly and decisively when Gunaratnam disappeared after entering the country, using Australian passport bearing number N 1016123 on September 4, 2011 (https://dbsjeyaraj.com/dbsj/?p=43914). The writer dealt with the same issue again in August 2016 (https://dbsjeyaraj.com/dbsj/?p=47936).

Among thousands of Sri Lankans, now having foreign citizenship, there can be many people listed here as “missing/forcibly” disappeared. Western governments never helped Sri Lanka to establish the real identities of Sri Lankans living abroad, under assumed names. If Gunaratnam never acted in a manner inimical to the JVP, he could have easily lived a comfortable life in Australia as Sinhala Buddhist Noel Mudalige.

There had been many interesting stories of those categorised as missing/dead turning up in the West, under new identities. One of the most intriguing ones, is about an ex-LTTE terrorist turned Frenchman Antonythasan Jesuthasan, the lead actor in Dheepen that won the prestigious Palme d’Or at the 2015 Cannes Film Festival.

Internationally acclaimed Jacques Audiard directed the movie about three Sri Lankans who formed a fake family to escape the war and to secure asylum in France. Antonythasan Jesuthasan’s performance in Dheepan earned him a Best Actor nomination at the 2016 César Awards (the French equivalent of the Oscars). Jesuthasan is the only ex-LTTE terrorist to receive international acclaim as an actor.

In an interview with Tom Seymour (Dheepan’s Antonythasan Jesuthasan: from Tamil Tiger to star of a Palme d’Or winner in The Guardian) posted online on March 31, 2016, transformed Frenchman Jesuthasan, unwittingly revealed how he deceived the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) to secure political asylum. Seymour reported that Jesuthasan, after having shown him a dense lattice of scars on his forearm, declared: “I did those to myself. I was 22, and I had spent years trying to come to the west. I wanted to get a fake French passport, but I had to be accepted as a refugee. I went to the UNHCR [the UN High Commissioner for Refugees], but they wouldn’t believe my story. So I cut myself, and held up my arm, and said to them: ‘Look at my blood. This is my word.”

Jesuthasan is just one among thousands who obtained political asylum on false claims. Jesuthasan ended up as the star of Dheepan, directed by Jacques Audiard, possibly France’s most celebrated modern director. There cannot be a better example than Jesuthasan to highlight the web of deceit pertaining to the vast majority of those who successfully secured political asylum. But, the Sri Lanka Foreign Ministry never bothered to set the record straight. Born in Allaipiddy, on the Velanaitivu islet, Jesuthasan claimed he fought the Sri Lanka Army in August 1990 and subsequently fled the country and managed to reach France.

But, the case of Kathiravel Thayapararajah is one of the most controversial cases. Thayapararajah had been involved in a Tamil Diaspora funded project in Kilinochchi during Eelam war IV. He couldn’t have secured the Diaspora assignment without the approval of the LTTE and remained in the Vanni during the war. He disappeared in September 2009.

His disappearance prompted a section of the media, as well as some international NGOs, to accuse the Directorate of Military Intelligence (DMI) of executing him. No less a person than the then US Assistant Secretary of State for South Asian Affairs and one-time US Ambassador in Colombo, Robert O. Blake, inquired about the missing person.

The University Teachers for Human Rights (Jaffna), the Australian Government Refugee Review Tribunal, Tamilnet and the European Centre for Constitutional and Human Rights among others blamed the Sri Lankan intelligence for the disappearance. However, the Indian media, in May, 2014, revealed Thayapararajah’s arrest though they didn’t know at the time that he was the person who was supposed to have been killed by the Sri Lankan Intelligence. At the time Indian police apprehended Thayapararajah, at Arichamunai off Dhanuskodi, after arriving there in a boat from Sri Lanka, he had been with notorious female human smuggler Uthayakala. She claimed Thayapararajah was her second husband.

That chance detection exposed a blatant lie propagated over the years. The then Head of Missing Persons Commission, retired High Court Judge Maxwell Paranagama, is also on record as having called for international cooperation to trace persons living overseas under new identities. Paranagama told the writer that at that time both the international community, including the ICRC, had declined to help Sri Lanka identify those taking cover behind new identities.

Chemmani mass graves

Sri Lanka needs to investigate war crimes allegations, particularly the high profile Chemmani mass grave. The country cannot ignore the continuing accusations with the international media taking advantage of the situation to tarnish the country, especially the Rajapaksa rule. It must be a way of the West taking revenge from the Rajapaksas for going against their wish to save the bold thirsty Tigers. It is like their logic that Israel can do no wrong!

The CNN dealt with the Chemmani issue while the International Commission of Jurists (ICJ), in July last year, called for what it claimed as victim-centred investigation into the alleged mass graves in compliance with international law and standards.

Tamil political parties, too, repeatedly demanded tangible action against the perpetrators. The Chemmani mass grave site drew national and international attention in 1998 following the confession of a soldier implicated in the rape and murder of schoolgirl Krishanthy Kumaraswamy. Chemmani has become a powerful and painful symbol of the country’s war-torn past.

Krishanthy Kumaraswamy was raped and killed by soldiers on the 7th of September, 1996. The same group of soldiers later killed her mother, her younger brother and a family friend who went out searching for the teenager.

An excavation, in 1999, led to the recovery of 15 sets of remains, and then the matter was allowed to rest for about a quarter of a century. On the orders of the Jaffna Magistrate’s court, a fresh excavation was ordered last year, following the chance recovery of some skeletal remains and so far nearly 600 sets of human remains have been found, among them children and infants. Tamil media have declared Chemmani as the largest mass grave found in Sri Lanka.

It would be pertinent to mention that some time back the Army was accused of the Mannar mass graves but investigations undertaken by the Office of Missing Persons (OMP), with international expertise, proved the claims false. Bone fragment samples were submitted to Beta Analytic, a specialised US radiocarbon-dating laboratory. This happened during the Yahapalana administration (2015-2019) Later, the lab indicated that the tested bone samples dated back to the period between 1499 and 1719 AD (the 15th to 18th century). That brought an end to the Mannar mass graves hoax.

Whatever the circumstances, the government cannot remain silent regarding the Chemmani mass graves. The area that had been under Security Forces Headquarters, Jaffna continues to receive public attention, both here and abroad. The Army will have to address the issue without further delay. Let me stress the importance of investigating the atrocities perpetrated by others, namely the Indian Army for which the responsibility lies with the government of India as well as the LTTE, and over half a dozen other terrorist groups that subsequently entered the political mainstream.

The formation of Tamil National Army (TNA) by India before the Indian Army pullout by March 1990, too, must receive the attention of Sri Lanka as well the concerned international community. Having totally destabilised the smaller neighbouring county by arming scores of terrorist groups, New Delhi went a step further by the formation of the TNA meant to protect Varatharaja Perumal’s North-East provincial administration.

In spite of President Ranasinghe Premadasa drawing strong criticism for arming the LTTE against the Indian Army, in hindsight, if not for his controversial decision, India’s proxy, TNA may have taken root. Whatever various parties say today, the TNA had been formed to ensure the continuation of the deeply unpopular Perumal’s administration that went to the extent of forcible conscription. India can never absolve itself of responsibility for what it did in Sri Lanka. The destabilisation project, largely influenced by the then Premier Indira Gandhi’s concerns over the developing situation in Tamil Nadu, caused massive death and destruction. No less a person than J.N. Dixit, who served as their High Commissioner in Colombo (1985 to 1989), and later appointed National Security Advisor (2004 to 2005) disclosed in his memoirs ‘Makers of India’s Foreign Policy: Raja Ram Mohun to Yashwant Sinha’, Indira’s Gandhi’s intervention. The late Dixit in no uncertain terms blamed her for Indian intervention in Sri Lanka.

Midweek Review

A street where Sri Lankan stories found their readers

Published

4 days ago

2026/09/9

Sahan Weerasooriya

Margaret Richardson and Asanka de Mel / Ashok Ferrey

By Ifham Nizam

Pictures by Nishan S Priyantha and Kamal Bogoda

Ashok Ferrey took readers into an older Colombo through Colpetty People. Vivimarie Vanderpoorten opened the door to the personal stories behind her poetry. Andrew Fidel Fernando brought cricket, culture and the distinctive world of Sri Lankan school cricket into the conversation, while Ramya Jirasinghe spoke candidly about the long and often difficult road from writing a manuscript to seeing it published.

Then came Margaret Richardson and Asanka de Mel, whose conversation moved from literature to the question of where Sri Lanka should be by 2048.

These were among the voices that gave life to Fairway Street of Stories, a new initiative that sought to bring Sri Lankan English-language writers closer to their readers.

But behind the gathering of authors, readers, books, children, book clubs and aspiring writers was a bigger idea—the brainchild of Amendra Haputhanthri, Director of Sarasavi Bookshop (Pvt) Ltd.

For Haputhanthri, Fairway Street of Stories is not merely another literary event. It is part of a much larger attempt to create a marketplace for Sri Lankan talent and to persuade readers to discover stories that are unmistakably their own.

“Usually, when we have exhibitions, such as the Colombo Book Fair, we always think about what sells the most. Here, we wanted to create a niche market for people who want to read Sri Lankan writing,” she said.

And the first event demonstrated just how wide that literary world can be.

Stories from a Sri Lanka we know

Haputhanthri believes one of the greatest strengths of Sri Lankan English writing is its sense of place.

A thriller set in an unfamiliar foreign city may be entertaining. But a thriller unfolding at the Galle Face Hotel or Mount Lavinia Hotel carries another kind of intimacy for a Sri Lankan reader.

“You have familiar words and actual real-world places that we have been to. There will be a connection with the book,” she said.

That connection can be even more powerful when the story takes readers into places and experiences that are disappearing.

This is one reason she admires Ferrey’s work.

During his Fairway session, Ferrey, together with Tanya de Mel, offered readers an engaging glimpse into the world behind Colpetty People and the Colombo it captures.

Amendra Haputhanthri (extreme left) with winners

For Haputhanthri, Ferrey’s writing is also a record of a rapidly changing city.

“Even Sri Lanka is changing very rapidly. Within Colombo also, the environment is rapidly changing, and that is being addressed nicely in the books of Ashok Ferrey,” she said.

Literature, in that sense, becomes more than entertainment.

It becomes memory.

The stories behind the poems

Vivimarie Vanderpoorten offered a very different literary experience.

Haputhanthri describes her as one of the country’s outstanding contemporary talents, particularly because of the personal histories embedded in her poetry.

A poem on a page may be only a few lines long. But behind those lines can lie an entire life.

Vanderpoorten spoke about those experiences at Fairway, including deeply disturbing events she had witnessed during her university years.

For Haputhanthri, hearing those stories transformed the poems.

“All her stories, there is a back story. All her poems, there is a back story,” she said.

She believes such conversations are precisely what literary events should create—a space where readers can move beyond the printed page and understand the human experience that produced it.

She also encouraged people to read poetry, even if only one poetry collection a year.

Poetry, she believes, forces readers to think beyond what is immediately presented.

“It gives you the ability to think out of the box,” she said.

Cricket is more than a score

Andrew Fidel Fernando brought yet another dimension to the event.

For someone who writes and comments on international cricket, his work naturally takes readers into the world of the game. But Haputhanthri noted that Fernando’s writing also captures the culture surrounding cricket in different countries.

And Sri Lanka has a particularly richstory to tell.

Andrew Fidel Fernando / Dr. Vivimarie Vanderpoorten

For Haputhanthri, the island’s school-cricket culture is something the world should know more about.

“We are the best in the world when it comes to having a culture for school cricket. It is something very unique to our country,” she said.

She even suggested that writers interested in Sri Lankan cricket should explore this largely distinctive phenomenon in greater depth.

Because literature can sometimes reveal what statistics cannot.

A schoolboy walking onto a cricket ground carries with him a school, a city, friendships, rivalries, family expectations and an entire culture.

From manuscript to book

Ramya Jirasinghe’s contribution was particularly relevant to aspiring writers.

She spoke about her own journey and the realities of getting a book published.

Her experience demonstrated that literary success rarely happens overnight.

Winning recognition is one thing. Turning a manuscript into an internationally published book is another.

For emerging writers listening to her, the message was clear: writing requires patience, revision and persistence.

Haputhanthri knows that process well.

Writers, she said, can be rejected repeatedly—even at international level.

And translations create another layer of difficulty.

Sometimes an author reads a translation of his or her work and says: “This doesn’t have my voice.”

That, Haputhanthri acknowledged, illustrates how complex the journey from an original manuscript to another language can be.

A speech from the future

Carmel Miranda

Asanka de Mel and Margaret Richardson brought another perspective to Fairway.

De Mel’s 2048: A Speech from 2048 looks towards the centenary of Sri Lanka’s independence and asks why the country has not yet become a developed nation.

But his message, as Haputhanthri interpreted it, was not one of resignation.

Sri Lanka should not allow its small geographical size to become a psychological limitation.

De Mel’s own journey—from two decades in Silicon Valley to returning to Sri Lanka and embarking on entrepreneurial ventures—was offered as an example of what persistence and confidence can achieve.

For Haputhanthri, it reinforced one of the central lessons of both writing and life.

“There is no shortcut in life,” she said.

Stories that preserve a country

Fairway Street of Stories also reflected Haputhanthri’s belief that literature can preserve aspects of Sri Lankan identity that are increasingly vulnerable.

She spoke about Angampora, Beeralu weaving, traditional culture and historical stories.

Even the country’s royal heritage can become a gateway for a new generation to understand the island’s past.

She recalled seeing foreign visitors browsing books about Sri Lankan kings.

Those books were doing more than recounting history. They were presenting the story of a country with a long and complicated heritage.

Haputhanthri believes Sri Lankan literature can perform a similar role internationally.

“Our stories should also reach people in the same way our food and cultural experiences have reached the world,” she said.

She recalled meeting two foreigners who had visited Sri Lanka around 156 times.

Their extraordinary attachment to the country reminded her that Sri Lanka’s culture has an ability to attract people repeatedly.

The stories of the country, she believes, deserve the same reach.

The problem is not the e-book

Ramya Jirasinghe (third from left)

Yet while Haputhanthri is passionate about books, she is equally concerned about the future of reading.

She does not believe e-books are necessarily the enemy.

“If people are reading an e-version, as long as they are reading something valuable, that will add something to you,” she said.

The bigger threat, in her view, is the endless scrolling culture of the smartphone.

“Scrolling on the phone reduces your attention span and you can’t do any sort of deep work,” she said.

She has observed this challenge among young people entering the workplace and believes sustained concentration is increasingly difficult.

But her answer is not to blame young people.

It is to begin much earlier—with parents and teachers.

“Whatever the parents read, the children also will read,” she said.

‘Readers Are Not Born, They Are Created’

That belief is now developing into another initiative.

Haputhanthri is working on a programme titled ‘Readers Are Not Born, They Are Created’, which she hopes to take from school to school and community to community.

The target will be parents as much as children.

The message is that reading habits are cultivated. They are demonstrated, encouraged and nurtured.

She also hopes to involve children who have themselves developed through reading, allowing them to share their experiences with others.

For Haputhanthri, the issue is deeply personal.

“I would credit everything that I have today, and everything I am today, because of reading,” she said.

She believes avid readers develop empathy, creativity and critical thinking—qualities that are increasingly valuable in a world dominated by information but often short on attention.

Beyond one literary weekend

Fairway Street of Stories, therefore, is not intended to remain a once-a-year literary celebration.

Haputhanthri wants to see activities connected with reading and books continue throughout the year.

A bargain book sale is among the ideas being considered, making use of books from Sarasavi’s extensive network of branches that may have suffered minor damage or discolouration while remaining on shelves.

The next major event will be the book fair, followed by further initiatives.

But the larger ambition goes beyond sales.

It is about discovery.

A reader discovering a Sri Lankan writer.

A child discovering poetry.

An aspiring author discovering that rejection is not the end.

A foreign visitor discovering that Sri Lanka’s stories are as rich as its food, landscapes and traditions.

And a country discovering itself in its own books.

That is perhaps the most significant contribution of Fairway Street of Stories.

Because the authors who gathered there did more than talk about their books.

They demonstrated the many ways in which Sri Lanka can be written, remembered and imagined.

And behind that gathering was Amendra Haputhanthri’s conviction that these stories deserve not only a place on a bookshelf, but a place in the minds of readers—and eventually, a place in the wider world.