The passing of Sarjana Karunakaran

‘Chirp ye squirrels and mourn ye birds, for a spirit ye loved hath bidden good bye’

Passing is something that we all have to reckon with, come early or late. We feel sadder when a person full of smiles and life is taken from us by chance. The beginning of 1990 was a time, with the drum beats of the second round of war, that heralded three births in my family, besides Sarjana they were all three girls, with Thayamani and Thabitha. Times were such that the first time I saw Sarjana and came to know her was during a visit to Jaffna in July 1996. The first impression we had of her can be described as a bubbly presence, full of sunshine and laughter.

When we came to know her intimately was in 2010, as a neighbour, our house, a benefaction of my maternal uncle Gnanar, Sarjana’s grandfather. It is in him that I trace the spirit that moved Sarjana. He was on holiday with us when I was a boy in the same house he later occupied. On a tour of the back garden, he told us of the day he found a baby squirrel fallen down out of its nest and how he climbed the tree and restored the squirrel where it belonged. Sarjana’s window faced us, a symbol of joy and cheer.

In this short presentation, I will draw attention to her chiefly as a scholar. Even in a war-torn society such as ours, ability and scholarship still abound and find their mark. I was more fortunate in my boyhood before the war; the point I make is that scholarship faces several handicaps in a vacuum. Einstein built on his great predecessors, particularly Isaac Newton. When I did my doctorate in Oxford, I was personally fortunate to find inspiration from the work of Ted Slaman from Harvard, who gave me ideas in Mathematical Logic that I followed up.

Likewise, Sarjana who was tipped to do her doctorate in agricultural-biotechnology, related to pest management, during the time the world was under the spell of Covid, which took many promising lives. As was her good nature, she by correspondence helped her cousin Elilini, doing her research at Cambridge, besides others who appealed to her. Elilini has acknowledged Sarjana’s contribution to her doctoral research, which on Sarjana’s sound advice and counsel went fruitfully into allied areas.

Sarjana has left us without revealing the magnificent potential of her life, but gave other youngsters inspiration in fun and scholarship.

Rajan Hoole

Response from Elilini Hoole

Without Chinna (Sarjana) I would not have been able to do my data collection! We also wrote and presented a paper together for a Development Studies Conference in London last year, based on the data we collected. Everyone here (supervisor, colleagues, etc.) commented on how she was able to conduct so many interviews in one month, patiently waiting for a gap in the stringent COVID travel restrictions to interview 50 women. She also managed to do so with such diligence and empathy for the women that, despite the restrictions, she was able to give us rich, detailed insights into a hugely neglected area of understanding. I was really hoping she would come and do a PhD here in Cambridge. She would have loved the programme here, which encourages free curiosity about the world around us.

But she’d no doubt now at her happiest surrounded by God and God’s glorious creatures in heaven. I am looking forward to seeing her again!