Midweek Review

‘An Insider’s Guide to Pandemics and Biosecurity’

Published

3 years ago

2022/10/19

Author: Raina MacIntyre (Sydney: NSW Press, 2022)

“June Twenty Second Sixteen Thirty-three
A momentous day for you and me
Of all the days that was the one
An age of Reason could have begun”
The Life of Galileo, Bertolt Brecht, 1939

Book Review
by Dr. Laleen Jayamanne

Senior Lecturer in Cinema Studies (retired) University of Sydney

Personal Connections

There is a wonderful long-ago-and-far-away connection between Bertolt Brecht’s play The Life of Galileo (1939), and Raina MacIntyre, the distinguished, internationally respected Lankan-Australian Epidemiologist and University Professor of Global Biosecurity. She is the daughter of Nalini and Ernest MacIntyre, the former a Vice-Principal of Ladies’ College, and the latter a leading member of The Stage and Set theatre group. Mac, as he is known, introduced Brecht’s theatre to Lanka by directing the Chalk Circle.

In 1969, as a little girl growing up in Colombo, Raina MacIntyre played the role of Planet Earth, dressed as a small green sphere, twirling around a larger child, dressed as our sun in the robust Carnival scene on the streets of Venice in Brecht’s play. The telescope, a new invention, was sold as an optical toy in the marketplace; Galileo had repurposed it as a scientific instrument and trained on the firmament, leading to his scientific proof of a heliocentric universe, which Copernicus was only able to posit. The people understood and celebrated the importance of this momentous discovery and created that little skit and songs and pamphlets celebrating the birth of scientific reason. For Brecht’s Galileo science was for the people, for their well-being, not an exclusive possession of a ruling clique who controlled knowledge, wealth and power. He knew that he had betrayed the highest calling of scientific reason by acquiescing to the demands of the all-powerful Holy Inquisition, recanting under threat of torture and death by fire.

In having completed his Discorsi secretly and having it smuggled out of Italy, Galileo did contribute to science but he judged himself harshly for not having stood up to the Church of Rome, in the interests of science. His infamous self-critique on his own lack of an ethical will was addressed to his former student. By that he perhaps hoped that his student, now a physicist himself, willing to risk smuggling his forbidden text out of Italy, might be true to scientific reason.

“Welcome to my gutter, colleague in science and brother in treason…” Galileo

Reading Raina MacIntyre’s timely book Dark Winter: An Insider’s Guide to Pandemics and Biosecurity, one gets a clear impression that the ‘gutter’ has considerably widened with some scientists quite comfortably settled in there and thriving by creating counter-narratives to whatever research topic they happened not to agree with disregarding sound scientific practice. Ethics in the conduct of science is a central concern of this book.

MacIntyre says her aim in writing Dark Winter is to focus ‘a historical lens’ on scientific practices related to pandemics and biosecurity. Staying with MacIntyre’s rhetorically productive technical image of the ‘lens,’ as an instrument which overcomes the limits of natural human perception, she provides us with both a telescopic and a microscopic perception of a certain history of science related to pandemics, outbreak detection and mitigation of biological warfare and bioterrorism – which are her remit.

This is a crisply written book for the lay reader. The normal scholarly steel armature of citations within the text is dispensed with and instead, the references for each chapter are alphabetically provided at the end of the book. It is a bit difficult if one wants to work out which piece of research went with which argument. But the strategy of creating a smooth narrative surface is important for a popular book on science (for which there is an avid readership), without compromising its scholarly rigour. The table of contents makes the book intriguing and inviting. Chapter One, ‘Believe the Unbelievable’, examines an instance of the US military releasing a pathogen into the San Francisco harbour secretly, causing serious urine infections and one death, in the 1950s. Chapter Three, ‘Error not Terror’ deals with the problem of formulating questions so as to guide research. In this instance, the question of whether a pathogen was natural or accidentally or deliberately released from a lab becomes a major professional battle between opposed camps. We are told that many scientists generally resist the lab error explanation and assume that it’s a natural event through animal transmission. The stakes are huge in terms of lab freedom and research funding. This debate has been headline fodder with the absurd politicization of Covid as though it were a virus with ‘Chinese characteristics!’ Chapter Five, ‘Jurassic Park for Viruses’, shows us how what was sci-fi a few decades ago is now available for scientific replication and cloning. Chapter Twelve, ‘Brain-Eating Viruses’, poses the question of how to deal with the emerging long-Covid syndrome, which is unknown territory. She focuses on the problem of protecting children by vaccination and improvement of air quality in classrooms. She poses the question of whether a famous sports star’s sudden death might have been related to his Covid infection. The book concludes with the sombre final chapter, ‘A Biological Winter.’ We can tell that MacIntyre enjoys writing and is a film buff with documentary, sci-fi and zombie horror cult movie interests as well, which she uses to convey scientific ideas pithily.

In the chapter called ‘The Fuss about Face Masks,’ MacIntyre presents her pioneering research on this piece of modest preventive technology, which she began around 2006. During Covid, the mask she promoted for health workers, as the best for an airborne virus, was N95. The major opposition came from infection control specialists who promoted surgical masks instead. Her point is that for such a non-invasive technology to become so politicized, even among specialists, meant that something was not working in society. She says three major factors help in dealing effectively with pandemics, namely good leadership, a culture with a sense of public good and free public health. MacIntyre’s account of major public health institutions, governments and the science publishing industry, both local and global, gives us a historical understanding of how the politics of science worked within the post WW2 international order which included the Cold War. She focuses on epidemics, which didn’t happen naturally but ‘unnaturally’, through lab leaks or deliberate acts of sabotage. In these cases the world does not neatly divide into democracies as honest players and the autocracy of the Soviet Union as bad. The historical examples MacIntyre describes are taken from the US, the USSR and Great Britain and make for chilling reading.

One also learns about the ways in which, in our digital era, Biology has become a limitless field of invention enhancing life but also frequently destroying that very life through what’s called ‘dual-use research’. This kind of research linked to genetic engineering and gene editing, while benefiting humanity may also create pathogens like smallpox synthesized in labs. This process becomes a key to bio-warfare and bio-terrorism. The availability of materials and cheap technology that has led to the creation of DYI private labs which make the creation of biological material easier, poses dangers as they are not fully regulatable.

Interdisciplinarity

This book departs from a familiar pop-science genre, say of describing strangely fascinating case histories which Oliver Sacks, for example, does well up to a point, before we lose interest because it becomes just a pile up of empirical case studies, terribly sad though they are. No generalizable ideas or concepts are formulated: about the brain, say, and how it is thought about in the various branches that study it in relation to his case studies. Then there is the philosophically attuned, ever-humorous physician and neuroscientist V.S. Ramachandran and his Phantoms in the Brain written with Sandra Blakesley. While he provides basic maps of the brain, which are useful for a layperson, he describes several pathologies including the phenomenon of Synesthesia, which is an inherited trait, or pathology or gift, depending how you look at it. While Ramachandran can describe the pathologies well and has also been able as a clinician to relieve pain in phantom limbs of patients whose limbs have been severed, he doesn’t stay on that plane of descriptive analysis alone. He is bold in his speculative interests, in art and evolution and their links to synesthesia for instance. So his book has a conceptual architecture that does not shy away from formulating ideas and concepts despite its hands-on low-tech clinical base.

MacIntyre’s book works with historical cases studies taken from a global context but it has a strong conceptual architecture able to identify serious institutional problems that make it difficult to promote sound scientifically tested methods to prevent the spread of a pandemic for example. She strongly argues for the absolute necessity of interdisciplinary work in health and biosecurity. She argues eloquently for taking seriously the work done by Law Enforcement and Intelligence as well as work with engineers in developing complex preventive strategies. She actually practises what she preaches by inviting a Law Enforcement official Tom Engells, chief of police at the University of Texas, Ebola research lab, to a high powered conference she organised, because she found his article, ‘The Insider threat – a new aspect of biosecurity’ important. She also arranged for him to give lectures on the topic to her postgraduate class. Her collaboration with him is exemplary of a true interdisciplinary scholar. She does not make the hierarchical professional distinction whereby the scientists are placed on a pedestal while law enforcement folk are treated differently.

This book was written in the midst of the Covid global pandemic when MacIntyre’s several outstanding skills as a public speaker and expertise are in high demand to also (i) address public health issues on TV and (ii) write to the newspapers. In the midst of all this how she found the time and quiet focus needed to write this well-crafted book remains a mystery.

I also want to talk about MacIntyre’s work as a teacher and its links to her book. This is an issue that has been of importance to me since I taught cinema studies at the University of Sydney. In the new century, management made it very clear to us that teaching was not as important as research, and many academics, internalizing this injunction, longed to escape teaching which was handed over to tutors. I note that MacIntyre devised courses directly linked to her pioneering research and co-taught courses at postgraduate level which drew students internationally, especially from Asia. I know from personal conversations how much she enjoys teaching and she mentions two invaluable mentors, Dr Mike Lane and Professor Aileen Plant, who have guided her research just as she must now direct her students whose work she cites. It is worth noting the interlinked connections among her high-stakes research, administrative skills and teaching, the three components of an academic’s work. Especially in an Australian Neo-Liberal University ethos where teaching has been downgraded by managers it is heartening to note how seriously MacIntyre takes her teaching as well. Her sense of the intergenerational transmission of knowledge from guru to student was evident when she decided to do a podcast on her retired mentor Mike Lane, just a few years before he died and discovers with gratitude his past hands-on practice which she knew nothing about. This cherishing of the intergenerational transmission of knowledge and values is a South Asian trait, which I have found rarely in my thirty odd years in the Australian academy.

So, as a guidebook Dark Winter takes us through several circles of hell where scientific reason, and the values that are embodied in such an idea and its practices, have been violated by some scientists and scientific institutions themselves. Most professions have their share of malpractice, as in teaching or in the law but with science the scale of destruction is now planetary. And as an epidemic and biosecurity specialist MacIntyre says that we may be in a pandemic without knowing it for some time. The signs of a smallpox virus camouflaged by a monkey-pox virus are hard to read in a timely manner, we are told. When critical time was lost we all know what happened to the whole world with Covid. The next time might be even less perceptible, especially if those voices from the gutter are the loudest and the most powerful, in the virulent information-wars between scientists. There are indications of the professional difficulties MacIntyre has had as a ‘person of colour’ in an Australian University milieu dominated by white males unused to South Asian female intellectuals saying exactly what they think out loud and clear. Now in my retirement, it’s amusing to see some of these white men, of my long unpleasant acquaintance, scrambling to prove their diversity credentials. What I love about the tone of this book is the sense of deep enjoyment MacIntyre derives from all aspects of her multifaceted work, especially in the training of the next generation of ‘diverse’ researchers. The occasional sardonic whiplash wit is part of it for sure.

But MacIntyre’s book shows us many scientists, teachers and their interdisciplinary colleagues and students working quietly with enormous dedication and ethical awareness of the importance of defending scientific reason against great odds. The book advocates for the importance of an educated citizenry who appreciates science and it is the duty of scientists to make their specialist knowledge accessible also to those of us who have no formal scientific knowledge.

Brecht’s Galileo telescoped 17th Century scientific Reason and 20th Century Instrumental Reason, which saw the rise of Nazi medical experiments and the dropping of the atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Brecht was rehearsing his play in LA with Charles Laughton as Galileo, when the bombs were dropped in August 1945. He said he didn’t have to change much after the event. That struggle between reason and unreason will not go away any time soon, as pandemics and war are big business, says MacIntyre, and as we see so clearly right now. But in this book, she offers ways in which we as a democratic citizenry can take a more active interest in the scientific debates without leaving it to scientists, governments and corporations to make decisions about life-and-death matters. So, we do need more scientists like MacIntyre, who has a wonderful scientific imagination which enables her to seriously draw on film with flair, as an ally in her task as a populariser of science. I like to imagine that playing Planet Earth as a little girl, and seeing telescopes as toys, might have nourished her imagination, without which scientific reason itself cannot and does not advance.

All News Advertisement

Related Topics:Dark Winter Raina MacIntyre

Up Next

leaves out Gash dispatches, Swiss embassy abduction drama and India’s accountability

Don't Miss

Flowers in Bloom

Sahan Weerasooriya

Click to comment

Midweek Review

A look back at now mostly forgotten Eelam war in the aftermath of Kashmir massacre

Published

6 days ago

2025/04/30

Sahan Weerasooriya

LTTE directed two claymore mines at an overcrowded SLTB bus, at Kebithigollewa, on June 15, 2006. The blasts claimed the lives of 68 civilians. Seventeen years after the war, some interested parties sought to muddy the waters by falsely claiming the Karuna faction triggered the Kebithigollewa blasts at the behest of President Mahinda Rajapaksa.

In the aftermath of the Pahalgam massacre, Pakistan offered to cooperate in what it called a neutral investigation. But India never regretted the
catastrophic results of its intervention in Sri Lanka that led to the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi in May 1991, over a year after India pulled out its Army
from NE, Sri Lanka

In a telephone call to Indian Premier Narendra Modi, President Anura Kumara Dissanayake condemned the massacre of 26 civilians – 25 Indians and one Nepali – at Pahalgam, in the Indian controlled Kashmir, on April 22.

President Dissanayake expressed his condolences and reaffirmed, what the President’s Media Division (PMD) called, Sri Lanka’s unwavering solidarity and brotherhood with the people of India.

Having described the massacre as a terrorist attack, New Delhi found fault with Pakistan for the incident. Pakistan was accused of backing a previously unknown group, identified as Kashmir Resistance.

The Indian media have quoted Indian security agencies as having said that Kashmir Resistance is a front for Pakistan-based terrorist groups, Lashkar-e-Taiba and Hizbul Mujahideen fighting Indian rule in Kashmir. Pakistan says it only provides moral and diplomatic support.

Pakistan has denied its involvement in the Pahalgam attack. A section of the Indian media, and some experts, have compared the Pahalgam attack with the coordinated raids carried out by Hamas on southern Israel, in early October 2023.

President Dissanayake called Premier Modi on the afternoon of April 25, three days after the Pahalgam attack. The PMD quoted Dissanayake as having reiterated Sri Lanka’s firm stance against terrorism in all its forms, regardless of where it occurred in the world, in a 15-minute call.

Modi cut short his visit to Saudi Arabia as India took a series of measures against Pakistan. Indian actions included suspension of the Indus Waters Treaty (IWT) governing water sharing of six rivers in the Indus basin between the two countries. The agreement that had been finalised way back in 1960 survived three major wars in 1965, 1971 and 1999.

One-time Pentagon official Michael Rubin, having likened the Pahalgam attack to a targeted strike on civilians, has urged India to adopt an Israel-style retaliation, targeting Pakistan, but not realising that both are nuclear armed.

Soon after the Hamas raid some interested parties compared Sri Lanka’s war against the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), and the ongoing Israel war on Gaza.

The latest incident in Indian-controlled Kashmir, and Gaza genocide, cannot be compared under any circumstances. Therefore, suggestions that India adopt Israel-style retaliation against Pakistan do not hold water. Also, Sri Lanka’s war against the LTTE that was brought to a successful conclusion in May 2009 cannot be compared with the conflict Israel is involved in.

Sri Lanka can easily relate to the victims of the Pahalgam attack as a victim of separatist terrorism that bled the country for nearly 30 years. India, however, never bothered to express regret over causing terrorism here.

Indian-sponsored terror projects brought Sri Lanka to its knees before President JRJ made an attempt to eradicate the LTTE in May-June 1987. JRJ resorted to ‘Operation Liberation’ after Indian mediated talks failed to end the conflict. Having forced Sri Lanka to call off the largest-ever ground offensive undertaken at that time with the hope of routing the LTTE in Vadamarachchi, the home turf of Velupillai Prabhakaran, followed by India deploying its Mi 17s on July 24, 1987, to rescue the Tiger Supremo, his wife, two children and several of his close associates – just five days before the signing of the so-called Indo-Lanka peace accord, virtually at Indian gun point.

First phase of Eelam war

During the onset of the conflict here, the LTTE routinely carried out raids on predominantly Sinhala villages where civilians were butchered. That had been part of its strategy approved by ‘controllers’ based across the Palk Straits. That had been a volatile period in the run-up to the July 29, 1987, accord. Although India established half a dozen terrorist groups here, the LTTE had been unquestionably the most violent and the dominant group. To New Delhi’s humiliation all such groups supported by it were wiped out by the marauding Tigers.

Those who compared the LTTE with Hamas, or any other group, conveniently forget that the Sri Lankan group caused significant losses to its creator. India lost over 1,300 officers and men, while nearly 3,000 others suffered injuries during the Indian deployment here (July 1987-March 1990).

The world turned a blind eye to what was going on in Sri Lanka in the ’80s. The war launched by India in the early ’80s against Sri Lanka lasted till the signing of the peace accord. That can be broadly identified as phase one of the conflict (1983 July – 1987 July). That first phase can be safely described as an Indian proxy war aimed at creating an environment conducive for the deployment of the Indian Army.

Having compelled President JRJ to accept deployment of the Indian Army in the northern and eastern regions in terms of the “peace accord”, New Delhi sought to consolidate its hold here by disarming all groups, except the one it had handpicked to run the North-East Provincial Council. The Indian Army oversaw the first Provincial Council election held on Nov. 19, 1988, to elect members to the NE council. The whole exercise was meant to ensure the installation of the Varatharaja Perumal led-EPRLF (Eelam People’s Revolutionary Liberation Forint) administration therein.

The second phase (1987 July – 1990 March) saw a war between the Indian Army and the LTTE. During this period, the Indian Army supervised two national elections – presidential on Dec. 19, 1988, and parliamentary on Feb. 15, 1989, that were won by Ranasinghe Premadasa and the UNP.

During that period, the UNP battled the JVP terror campaign and the South bled. The JVP that resorted to unbridled violence against the Indo-Lanka accord, at that time, has ended-up signing several agreements, including one on defence cooperation, recently, and the country is yet to get details of these secret agreements.

Raid on the Maldives

The second phase of the Eelam conflict ended when India pulled out its Army from NE Sri Lanka in March 1990. The sea-borne raid that had been carried out by Indian-trained PLOTE (People’s Liberation Organisation of Tamil Eelam) targeting Maldivian President Maumoon Abdul Gayoom, in Nov. 1988, is perhaps a significant development during the second phase of the conflict, though it was never examined in the right context.

No one – not even the Maldives – found fault with India for exporting terrorism to the island nation. India received accolades for swift air borne intervention to neutralise the PLOTE group. The Indian Navy sank a vessel commandeered by a section of the PLOTE raiders in a bid to escape back to Sri Lanka. The truth is that PLOTE, that had been trained by India to destabilise Sri Lanka, ended-up taking up a lucrative private assignment to overthrow President Gayoom’s administration.

India never regretted the Maldivian incident. It would be pertinent to mention that two boat loads of PLOTE cadres had quietly left Sri Lanka at a time the Indian Navy was responsible for monitoring in and out sea movements.

In the aftermath of the Pahalgam massacre, Pakistan offered to cooperate in what it called a neutral investigation. But India never regretted the catastrophic results of its intervention in Sri Lanka that led to the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi in May 1991, over a year after India pulled out its Army from NE, Sri Lanka.

Resumption of hostilities by the LTTE in June 1990 can be considered as the beginning of the third phase of the conflict. Having battled the Indian Army and gained valuable battle experience, the LTTE, following a 14-month honeymoon with President Ranasinghe Premadasa, resumed hostilities. Within weeks the LTTE gained the upper hand in the northern theatre of operations.

In spite of India banning the LTTE, after the May 1991 assassination of Gandhi, the group continued to grow with the funds pouring in from the West over the years. Regardless of losing Jaffna in 1995, the LTTE consolidated its position, both in the Vanni and the East, to such an extent their victory seemed inevitable.

But resolute political leadership given by Mahinda Rajapaksa ensured that Sri Lanka turned the tables on the LTTE within weeks after the LTTE appeared to be making significant progress at the beginning. Within two years and 10 months (2006 August – 2009 May) the armed forces brought the LTTE to its knees, and the rest is history. As we have said in our earlier columns that victory was soon soured. Spearheaded by Sarath Fonseka, the type of General that a country gets in about once in a thousand years, ended in enmity within, for the simple reason this super hero wanted to collect all the trophies won by many braves.

Post-war developments

Sri Lanka’s war has been mentioned on many occasions in relation to various conflicts/situations. We have observed many distorted/inaccurate attempts to compare Sri Lanka’s war against LTTE with other conflicts/situations.

Unparalleled Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel, triggered a spate of comments on Sri Lanka’s war against the LTTE. Respected expert on terrorism experienced in Sri Lanka, M.R. Narayan Swamy, discussed the similarities of Sri Lanka’s conflict and the ongoing Israel-Gaza war. New Delhi-based Swamy, who had served UNI and AFP during his decades’ long career, discussed the issues at hand while acknowledging no two situations were absolutely comparable. Swamy currently serves as the Executive Director of IANS (Indo-Asian News Service).

‘How’s Hamas’ attack similar to that of LTTE?’ and ‘Hamas’ offensive on Israel may bring it closer to LTTE’s fate,’ dealt with the issues involved. Let me reproduce Swamy’s comment: “Oct. 7 could be a turning point for Hamas similar to what happened to the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam in Sri Lanka in 2006. Let me explain. Similar to Hamas, the LTTE grew significantly over time eventually gaining control of a significant portion of Sri Lanka’s land and coast. The LTTE was even more formidable than Hamas. It had a strong army, growing air force and a deadly naval presence. Unlike Hamas, the LTTE successfully assassinated high ranking political figures in Sri Lanka and India. Notably, the LTTE achieved this without direct support from any country while Hamas received military and financial backing from Iran and some other states. The LTTE became too sure of their victories overtime. They thought they could never be beaten and that starting a war would always make them stronger. But in 2006 when they began Eelam War 1V their leader Velupillai Prabhakaran couldn’t have foreseen that within three years he and his prominent group would be defeated. Prabhakaran believed gathering tens of thousands of Tamils during the last stages of war would protect them and Sri Lanka wouldn’t unleash missiles and rockets. Colombo proved him wrong. They were hit. By asking the people not to flee Gaza, despite Israeli warnings, Hamas is taking a similar line. Punishing all Palestinians for Hamas’ actions is unjust, just like punishing all Tamils for LTTE’s actions was wrong. The LTTE claimed to fight for Tamils without consulting them and Hamas claimed to represent Palestinians without seeking the approval for the Oct.7 strike. Well, two situations are not absolutely comparable. We can be clear that Hamas is facing a situation similar to what the LTTE faced, shortly before its end. Will Hamas meet a similar fate as the LTTE? Only time will answer that question.” The above was said soon after the Oct. 2023 Hamas attack.

Swamy quite conveniently refrained from mentioning India’s direct role in setting up one of the deadliest terror projects in the world here in the ’80s.

Former Editor of The Hindu, Malini Parthasarathy, who also had served as Chairperson of The Hindu Group, released a list of politicians assassinated by the LTTE, as she hit back hard at those who raged against the comparison of the Hamas to the LTTE. The list included two Jaffna District MPs, Arumugam Murugesu Alalasundaram and Visvanathan Dharmalingam, assassinated in early Sept. 1985. Slain Visvanathan Dharmalingam’s son, Dharmalingam Siddharthan, who represents the Vanni electoral district on the Illankai Thamil Arasu Kadchi (ITAK), is on record as having said that the two MPs were abducted and killed by TELO (Tamil Eelam Liberation Organisation.) gunmen. The list posted by Parthasarathy included PLOTE leader Uma Maheswaran, assassinated in Colombo in July 1989. The LTTE hadn’t been involved in that killing either. Maheswaran is believed to have been killed by his onetime associates, perhaps over the abortive PLOTE raid on the Maldives in Nov, 1988. India never bothered at least to acknowledge that the Maldives raid was carried out by men trained by India to destabilise Sri Lanka. There is no doubt that Maheswasran’s killers, too, were known to the Indian intelligence at that time.

Before rushing into conclusions regarding Hamas and the LTTE, perhaps a proper examination of the circumstances they emerged is necessary. The two situations – fourth phase of the Eelam conflict and the latest Hamas strike on Israel and the devastating counter attack – cannot be compared under any circumstances. Efforts to compare the two issues is more like comparing apples and oranges, though mutually Tamils and Sinhalese have so many commonalities having intermingled throughout history like the Arabs and Jews.

It is no doubt Jews are a people that suffered persecution throughout known history under Assyrians, Babylonians to Romans and so forth. Such persecution includes expulsion of Jews from England in 1290 and from Spain 1492. So what Hitler and the Germans did was to take the historic process to another extreme.

Yet to blame the Palestinians and treat them like animals and to simply butcher them for the latest uprising by Hamas for all the humiliations and suffering they have been going through non-stop since Naqba in1948, from the time of the creation of Israel is to allow the creators of the problem, including the UK, the USA and United Nations to wash all their sins on the true other victims of this conflict, the Palestinians.

It would be pertinent to mention that Israel, in spite of having one of the world’s best fighting armed forces with 100 percent backing from the West, cannot totally eradicate Hamas the way Sri Lanka dealt with the LTTE. Mind you we did not drop 2000 pound bombs supplied by the US on hapless Tamil civilians to commit genocide as is happening in Palestine in the hands of the Israelis.

The circumstances under which the LTTE launched a large-scale offensive in Aug. 2006 and its objectives had been very much different from that of Hamas. The LTTE really believed that it could have defeated the Sri Lankan military in the North by cutting off the sea supply route from Trincomalee to Kankesanthurai and simultaneously overrunning the Kilali-Muhamalai-Nagarkovil forward defence line (FDL). The total collapse of the FDL could have allowed the LTTE to eradicate isolated fighting formations trapped north of the FDL. But, in the case of the Gaza war, the Hamas strike was meant to provoke Israel to unleash a massive unbridled counter attack that caused maximum losses on the civilians. As Hamas expected the Israeli counter attack has triggered massive protests in the West against their leaders. They have been accused of encouraging violence against Palestine. Saudi Arabia, Jordan and other US allies are under heavy pressure from Muslims and other horrified communities’ world over to take a stand against the US.

But in spite of growing protests, Israel has sustained the offensive action not only against Gaza but Lebanon, Yemen and Iran.

Instead of being grateful to those who risked their lives to bring the LTTE terror to an end, various interested parties are still on an agenda to harm the armed forces reputation.

The treacherous Yahapalana government went to the extent of sponsoring an accountability resolution against its own armed forces at the Geneva-based UNHRC in Oct. 2015. That was the level of their treachery.

By Shamindra Ferdinando

Midweek Review

The Broken Promise of the Lankan Cinema:

Published

6 days ago

2025/04/30

Sahan Weerasooriya

Asoka & Swarna’s Thrilling-Melodrama – Part III

“‘Dr. Ranee Sridharan,’ you say. ‘Nice to see you again.’

The woman in the white sari places a thumb in her ledger book, adjusts her spectacles and smiles up at you. ‘You may call me Ranee. Helping you is what I am assigned to do,’ she says. ‘You have seven moons. And you have already waisted one.’”

The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida

by Shehan Karunatilaka (London: Sort of Books, 2022. p84)

(Continued from yesterday)

Rukmani’s Stardom & Acting Opportunity

Rukmani Devi is still remembered for her incomparable singing voice and her studio photograph by Ralex Ranasinghe with its hint of Film Noir mystery and seduction, and for the role of Blanch Dubois she played in Dhamma Jagoda’s Vesmuhunu, an adaptation of Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire. This is a role she shared on alternate nights with Irangani Serasinghe in the late 60s or early 70s. (See my Island Essays, 2024, p114) She was immensely happy to be able to act in a modern western classic directed by a visionary theatre director like Dhamma Jagoda and it was to his credit that he chose to give her that role when all acting roles had dried up for her. I observed those rehearsals held at Harrold Peiris’ open garage.

I, too, am happy that Swarna has had a chance to perform again in her 70s. The question is, how exactly has she used that very rare opportunity to act in a film that has doubled its production cost within two months, and now showing in private screenings in multiplexes in Australia with English subtitles, with ambitions to be shown on Netflix and Amazon Prime. These outlets also now fund films and make challenging mini-series. Rani has clearly been produced and marketed with this global distribution in mind. How does this important fact affect Swarna’s style of acting and the aesthetics of Asoka’s script, are the questions I wish to explore in the final section of this piece.

A Sensational-Thrilling Political & Family Melodrama

‘Melodrama’ is a popular genre with a history that goes back to 19th century theatre in the west and with the advent of film, Hollywood took it up as it offered a key set of thrilling devices known as ‘Attractions’, for structuring and developing a popular genre cinema. The word ‘Melodrama’ is a compound of the Greek word for music ‘melos’ and drama as an action, with the connotation of a highly orchestrated set of actions. The orchestration (not only with sound but also the speed and rhythm of editing, dramatic expressive lighting, ‘histrionic’ acting, etc.,) always reaches toward thrilling climaxes and at times exaggerated display of emotions. The plots are sensational, propelled by coincidences and written to reach climaxes and dramatic reversals of fortune, and sudden revelations. Hollywood was famous for its happy endings with resolution of the dramatised conflicts, while Hindi melodramas and Lankan copies often ended sadly.

In the history of cinema there are highly sophisticated melodramas within Hollywood, classical Hindi cinema and also in European art cinema. Rainer Werner Fassbinder was one of the German directors who developed a modern ‘Brechtian-Melodrama’ of extraordinary political and aesthetic power in the 70s. And of course, there are very poorly conceived melodramas too like many of the Sinhala films which were copies of Indian prototypes. Melodramatic devices inflect the different genres of Hollywood, for example the Gangster Film, the Western and created durable genre types in character, e.g. the Gangster, the Lonesome Cowboy and Indians; all national stereotypes, one embodying the underbelly of American capitalism, an anti-hero and the other the American hero actualising The American Dream. ‘The Indian,’ merely the collateral damage of this phantasy!

When the stories were centred on women the genre classification was ‘Women’s Melodrama’ as it dealt with interpersonal relations, conflicts, and sadness centred on the home primarily. Feminist film theory has developed a vast archive of scholarship on the melodramatic genre, cross-culturally, with a special focus on Hollywood and Hindi cinema decades prior to the formation we now call Bollywood, made with transnational capital and global reach. It was assumed that the audience for the family melodramas was female and that as women, we enjoy crying at the cinema, hence the condescending name ‘The Weepies’. I cut my scholarly/critical teeth studying these much-maligned melodramatic films for my doctorate, which I had enjoyed while growing up in a long-ago Ceylon.

Asoka’s Melodramatic Turn

Asoka in Alborada, but more so in Rani has made melodramatic films with his own ‘self-expressive’ variations on the structure, with an ‘Art Cinema’ gloss. He has said that Rani is more like Alborada and unlike his previous films made during the civil war. This is quite obvious. Though the advertising tag line for Alborada claimed it as a ‘Poetic film that Neruda never made’ it was a straightforward narrative film. I have argued in a long essay (‘Psycho-Sexual Violence in the Sinhala Cinema: Parasathumal & Alborada’, in Lamentation of the Dawn, ed. S. Chandrajeewa, 2022, also tr. into Sinhala, 2023), that the staging of the rape of the nameless, silent, Dalit woman is conceived in a melodramatic manner playing it for both critique and exciting thrills. This is a case of both having his cake and eating it.

Swarna’s Melodramatic Turn

The film appears to be constructed, plotted melodramatically, to demonstrate Swarna’s ability to perform dramatic scenes of high excitement in areas of taboo, the opportunity for which is unavailable to a Sinhala actress, in a Sinhala film, playing the role of a Sinhala Buddhist mother, who has lost her son to an act of terror unleashed by the Sinhala-Buddhist State terror and Sinhala-Buddhist JVP.

In short, Swarna has been given the opportunity to demonstrate how well she can perform a range of Melodramatic emotions that go from say A to, say D. She has been given the chance to move smoothly from English to Sinhala as the middle classes do; use the two most common American expletives which are part of the American vernacular; drink for pleasure but also to the point of getting drunk; offer alcohol to her baffled domestic worker; coax her son and friends to drink; dance with them in an inebriated state; pour alcohol, whisky, not arrack, like one would pour water from a bottle; chain smoke furiously; dash a full mug of tea on the floor in a rage; crumple on the floor sobbing uncontrollably; shout at her loyal aid Karu; speak with sarcasm to a police officer insisting that she is ‘Dr Manorani …’ not ‘Miss or Mrs’, like feminists did back in the day; chat intimately with a minister of the government; look angrily and scowl at President Premadasa when he comes to the funeral house to condole with her; stage Richard’s funeral in a Catholic church with a stain glass window of the Pieta; to quote a well-known Psalm of David from the Bible, ‘Oh Absalom my son, Oh my son!’; etc.

Rani is Swarna’s chance to show that she can perform in ways that no Sinhala script has allowed a Sinhala actor to do up to now, that is, behave like the Sinhala cinema’s fantasy of how the upper-class Anglophone Lankan women behave. In short not unlike, but much worse, than the ‘bad girls’ in the Sinhala melodramatic genre cinema who always ended up in a Night Club, the locus of licentiousness that tempt them. I am thinking of Pitisara Kella from the 50s and a host of other films. Sinhala cinema simply cannot convincingly present the upper-class English-speaking milieu, with any nuance and conviction, it just feels very stilted, poorly acted therefore. Saying this is not class snobbery on my part. Even Lester James Peries from this very upper class and a Roman Catholic, in Delowak Atara couldn’t do it with Irangani Serasinghe and others. The dialogue meant to be serious or just plain normal sounded stilted and even funny. But when Lester did the Walauwa as in Nidhahanaya, it was brilliant, one of our classics. Brecht it was who said (on the eve of WW2, creating a Modern Epic mode of theatre in exile, that it’s not easy to make drama about current events. It’s much easier to look back with nostalgia at a genteel aristocratic Sinhala past for sure.

In taking the opportunity to explore kinetic and emotional behaviour considered to be taboo for a Sinhala woman, a fantasy Tamil woman has been fabricated. The plot of Rani is constructed by Asoka to provide Swarna the opportunity to indulge in these very taboos. In short, the fictional Tamil Rani offers Swarna an acting opportunity to improve her career prospects in the future. In so doing she has weakened her ability, I fear, to evolve as an actress.

A Domestic Melodrama: The House Suspended in a Void

If Swarna so desired, if the script ‘allowed her’ to, she could have tried to develop a quieter, more restrained and therefore a more powerful Rani. A friend of the family, when asked, said that, “The most striking feature of Manorani was her quiet, confident dignity, before and after Richard.” To testify to such a person, Asoka and Swarna could have asked the obvious question, did she have any close friendships formed as undergraduates, who supported her during this tragedy, as there certainly were cherished friends who shared her grief. After all, she was among the elite first generations of Ceylonese women to enter University in the 1940, to medical school at that!

Asoka and Swarna have entrapped their Rani in a vacuum of a house, friendless, with a little cross on Richard’s wall to signify religion. A lot of effort has gone into the set decoration and art direction of the house, as in Alborada, to stage a fantasy/phantasy melodramatic scenario. There is no real sensory, empathetic feel and understanding of the ethos (character), of this urbane Anglophone Ceylonese-Lankan mother and son, hence the fictionalised scenarios feel synthetic, cosmetic in the best traditions of the Sinhala genre cinema’s representation of the ‘excessive and even grotesque upper-class’. Except, here the Realism of the mise-en-scene (the old-world airy house and furniture and composition of the visual components) makes claims to a realist authenticity. A little modest research would have shown that Manorani and Richard moved from one rented apartment to another in the last few years of his life and when he was abducted, lived on the upper-floor of a house, in a housing estate in Rajagiriya. Asoka said in an interview that it wasn’t possible to find in Colombo the kind of old house they required for Rani. So, they went out of town to find the ideal house suited to stage their phantasy.

I suspect that it was Swarna who called shots this time, not Asoka who was recovering from a serious illness. He said that she brought the project to him and the producer and that he had no idea of making a film on Manorani, but added that he wrote the script within 3 months. I suspect that this Rani, (this out of control, angry, scowling, bad tempered, lamenting, hysterical Rani, reaching for the alcohol and cigarettes to assuage her grief, performing one sensational, thrilling melodramatic turn after another), was Swarna’s conception, her version of Manorani that she has nursed for 28 long years. Had she resisted this temptation to display her high-intensity acting-out skills yet again, she might just have been able to tap unsuspected resources within herself which she may still have as a serious actress. Its these latent affective depths that Rukmani Devi undoubtedly tapped when she was invited to play the drunken and lost Blanche Dubois, in A Streetcar Named Desire in Sinhala, as a desperate, drunken, aristocratic lady, in Dhamma Jagoda’s Vesmuhunu (1971?).

Jagoda / Irangani

It is reported that before going on stage, Rukmani Devi went on her hands and knees to pay her respects to Dhamma, not as feudal act of deference but to acknowledge his Shilpiya Nuwana, craft knowledge/intelligence’, as one very perceptive Sinhala critic put it. That gesture of Vandeema was foreign to the Tamil Christian Rukmani Devi, but nevertheless it shows her sense of immense gratitude to Dhamma for having taken her into a zone of expression (a dangerous territory emotionally for dedicated vulnerable actors), that she had never experienced before, so late in her life. But ‘late’ is relative to gender, then she was only in her 50s!

Challenge is what serious actors yearn for, strange beings who may suggest to us intensities that sustain and amplify life, all life. Swarna might usefully think about Rukmani Devi, her life and her star persona as a Tamil star in countless sarala Sinhala films, in whose shadow and echo every single Sinhala actress has entered the limelight, Swarna more so now than any other!

As for Asoka, he needs to rest and take care of himself before he commits himself to this recent track of films which are yielding less and less with each of the two films done back to back. His body of work is too important to trash it with this kind of half thought out ‘Tales of Sound and Fury’, which is a precise definition of Melodrama at its best. This film, alas, is not one of those.

That young Tamil women, often silent and traumatised, appeared following Sinhala soldiers in Lankan ‘civil-war cinema’ of the modernists, all male, is a troubling phenomenon. A ‘Sinhala Orientalism’, an exoticising of Tamil and Dalith young women as Other, is at work in some of the civil war films, as in Alborada and Rani. And then this very elevation always leads to unleashing psycho/sexual and/or other forms of violence, because the elevation (Mother Goddess in Alborada) only feeds violent male psychosexual phantasies, which in the Sinhala cinema often leads to the violence of rape and other forms of violence towards women, both Tamil and Sinhala. (To be continued)

by Laleen Jayamanne