Features

Caste and Education in the North

Published

4 years ago

2022/01/4

By Mahendran Thiruvarangan

The last Kuppi Talk article by Erandika de Silva discussed the disjuncture between the emphasis on standardisation and the absence of serious efforts to address the challenges facing students and teachers in the peripheries due to socio-economic inequalities. She drew insights from her own teaching experiences in the North to elaborate on this disjuncture. If uneven resource allocation and development, the civil war, the North’s isolation during the war years, protracted militarization and the ethno-nationalism of the state produce the North and its academic institutions as peripheral, caste and class-based inequalities within the North create peripheries within this periphery. Today’s article focuses on how caste-based inequalities make free education an uneven terrain in the North, and sheds light on the forms of caste-based discrimination observed in educational institutions in Jaffna in the past and present.

Casteism in Education

Recently, a Panchamar caste community—a collection of five caste-based communities subjected to systemic oppression and exploitation historically and forming a significant share of Jaffna’s population today—faced severe casteist violence at Vaddukoddai in Jaffna. One person from the community lost a finger as a result; houses and properties of the Panchamar were damaged; the community was psychologically traumatized. According to the community, this violence unfolded in a context of protracted, systematic caste-based oppression in various arenas including education. The members spoke of the discrimination their children face in examinations, sports and competitions in both the private and public schools in the village; the way teachers and administrators from the dominant Vellalar caste communities ignore the needs of their children; the economic deprivation amidst which they learn; and the stereotyping of their children as drug-peddlers, alcohol-addicts and sexual perverts by the school community and larger society.

Even as some academics, commentators and the Tamil media claim that caste is a thing of the past and that educational opportunities for Panchamar communities under the free education system have levelled social inequalities, Panchamar children, teachers and educational administrators in the North experience casteism in education on a daily basis.

A Casteist Past

Historically, the dominant Vellala community has had near total to significant control over education in the North. Though one is not sure where this story begins, the Tinnai Pallikkutams or Veranda Schools where education was imparted in the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were not open to Panchamar children. Mark Balmforth’s research demonstrates that in the nineteenth century, even the American Ceylon Mission, which established many educational institutions in Jaffna “systematically allowed the operation of caste privileges demanded by the few Veḷḷāḷar members of its churches and schools…” In Ilankaiyil Sathiyamum Athatkethirana Porattangalum (Casteism and Anti-Caste Struggles in Sri Lanka), Vehujanan and Ravana observe that many Saivite-Tamil schools established by the revivalist movements in the latter decades of the nineteenth-century refused to educate children from the Panchamar communities. In the twentieth-century, sections of these movements felt that accommodation of Panchamar in their schools was necessary but merely as a strategy to resist missionary schools. The authors note that a few Vellalar elite supported the establishment of Saivite schools for Panchamar children in places like Thevarayali in order to segregate them from Vellalar children.

Even as Jaffna was hailed as a high seat of learning in colonial Ceylon, the Panchamar suffered discrimination in education. Those who benefitted from colonial education were disproportionately Vellalar. This social group and their descendants later formed the (English) educated middle class in Jaffna that held administrative positions in the colonial state. The educational boom of this period did not lead to significant improvement in the lives of the Panchamar.

In the post-independence period, some Panchamar Christians were able to find free admission in some of the schools established by the missionaries. However, Panchamar among Hindus were unable to afford these schools. Even within Christian schools, children and teachers from the Panchamar communities faced marginalization. Administrative positions in these schools were generally held by Vellalar with a few exceptions.

Critical inquiries into this past are important because this long history of casteism has had multi-generational consequences in delaying and crippling the progress of the Panchamar. The caste power acquired by the Vellalar over the centuries first via accumulation of land and later via education have enabled them to preserve their dominance over others even today. Such exclusions in education are a key reason for the poverty prevalent among Panchamar at present.

Free Education and Its Limits

Free education and the nationalization of schools between the 1940s and 1960s increased the educational opportunities available for the Panchamar. However, Vellalar were relentless in preventing the Panchamar from benefitting from these policies. For instance, it took nearly fifteen years after its nationalization for a school in Puttur to open its portals to Panchamar children. Casteist forces attacked nationalized schools that tried to ensure equality in seating. Even today, alumni associations and school development societies of some state schools are dominated by the Vellalar, excluding the Panchamar from engaging with these institutions and shaping their activities.

Caste hierarchies continue to interfere in appointments, transfers and promotions that take place in the education sector. A few years ago, a candidate who satisfied all the requirements for Grade I principalship was not even called for interviews because she was a Panchamar. Dominant caste actors, while blaming the state as majoritarian, use the apparatuses of the state to keep the Panchamar under their control and impede their further mobility within the education sector.

Free education and the mobilities enabled by anti-caste resistance have led to the emergence of a small middle class within the Panchamar communities. However, a large number of Panchamar still face landlessness, lack of housing, unemployment and poverty today. Many of them work in the construction industry, as agricultural labourers or domestic workers. Their children tend to drop out of school to support their parents. The pandemic and the worsening economic crisis have had a disproportionate impact on their children’s education. Panchamar families find online education expensive and inaccessible. These worrying trends result chiefly from the absence of support systems within our free education system that cater to the specific needs of Panchamar children and other marginalized groups. They underline need to re-imagine free education from a homogenous system blind to the hierarchies of caste and class into a variegated terrain with additional mechanisms to address the challenges faced by deprived communities like the Panchamar.

Caste at the University

At the University of Jaffna, issues related to caste take a back seat in academic conversations. Although the academic community at the University gives prominence to Tamil nationalist aspirations and condemns the ongoing militarization of the North, open discussions about caste are hardly encouraged, barring a few occasions. A section of the academic community is warped in its view that discussing caste in public will cause disunity among Tamils.

The academia’s silence, its attempts to reduce caste to a sociological reality within flawed frameworks of multiculturalism and its refusal to recognize caste as one of the central ways in which power operates within and outside the classroom need to be challenged. As a center of higher education in the North, the University should give, within its social focus and research culture, a prominent place to caste and its workings and questions of social justice.

Quest for Justice

Despite longstanding discrimination on various fronts including education, the Panchamar continue to demand better access to education for their children. In 2019, landless Panchamar families from a camp for the war-displaced, told a land commission that they did not want to return to where they had lived previously and requested the state to allocate them lands in areas where they lived at the time so that their children could attend good schools. At Vaddukoddai, parents from the community affected in the recent caste violence are expressing their protest against the way their children are traumatized in school. The judicial victories achieved by professionals from the Panchamar castes, like the Principal applicant who faced discrimination, give the community hope and confidence to advance their struggles for justice. Their present-day struggles find inspiration and guidance from the anti-caste struggles of the past too.

It is high time the dominant caste communities introspected into the ways in which they have (ab)used the education system to preserve and multiply their privileges, and joined Panchamar and other caste groups in their quest for justice. It is also high time the state, instead of taking advantage of the caste-based fissures among the Tamils or framing caste as an internal problem of the Tamils, acknowledged its own failure in eliminating casteism in the education sector and introduced practices that can democratize free education in ways beneficial to the Panchamar and other historically disadvantaged communities in the North and elsewhere.

Mahendran Thiruvarangan is a Senior Lecturer attached to the Department of Linguistics & English at the University of Jaffna.

Kuppi is a politics and pedagogy happening on the margins of the lecture hall that parodies, subverts, and simultaneously reaffirms social hierarchies.

All News Advertisement

Features

Cricket and the National Interest

Published

15 hours ago

2026/05/5

Sahan Weerasooriya

The appointment of former minister Eran Wickremaratne to chair the Sri Lanka Cricket Transformation Committee is significant for more than the future of cricket. It signals a possible shift in the culture of governance even as it offers Sri Lankan cricket a fighting possibility to get out of the doldrums of failure. There have been glorious patches for the national cricket team since the epochal 1996 World Cup triumph. But these patches of brightness have been few and far between and virtually non-existent over the past decade. At the centre of this disaster has been the failures of governance within Sri Lanka Cricket which are not unlike the larger failures of governance within the country itself. The appointment of a new reform oriented committee therefore carries significance beyond cricket. It reflects the wider challenge facing the country which is to restore trust in public institutions for better management.

The appointment of Eran Wickremaratne brings a professional administrator with a proven track record into the cricket arena. He has several strengths that many of his immediate predecessors lacked. Before the ascent of the present government leadership to positions of power, Eran Wickremaratne was among the handful of government ministers who did not have allegations of corruption attached to their names. His reputation for financial professionalism and integrity has remained intact over many years in public life. With him in the Cricket Transformation Committee are also respected former cricketers Kumar Sangakkara, Roshan Mahanama and Sidath Wettimuny together with professionals from legal and business backgrounds. They have been tasked with introducing structural reforms and improving transparency and accountability within cricket administration.

A second reason for this appointment to be significant is that this is possibly the first occasion on which the NPP government has reached out to someone associated with the opposition to obtain assistance in an area of national importance. The commitment to bipartisanship has been a constant demand from politically non-partisan civic groups and political analysts. They have voiced the opinion that the government needs to be more inclusive in its choice of appointments to decision making authorities. The NPP government’s practice so far has largely been to limit appointments to those within the ruling party or those considered loyalists even at the cost of proven expertise. The government’s decision in this case therefore marks a potentially important departure.

National Interest

There are areas of public life where national interest should transcend party divisions and cricket, beloved of the people, is one of them. Sri Lanka cannot afford to continue treating every institution as an arena for political competition when institutions themselves are in crisis and public confidence has become fragile. It is therefore unfortunate that when the government has moved positively in the direction of drawing on expertise from outside its own ranks there should be a negative response from sections of the opposition. This is indicative of the absence of a culture of bipartisanship even on issues that concern the national interest. The SJB, of which the newly appointed cricket committee chairman was a member objected on the grounds that politicians should not hold positions in sports administration and asked him to resign from the party. There is a need to recognise the distinction between partisan political control and the temporary use of experienced administrators to carry out reform and institutional restructuring. In other countries those in politics often join academia and civil society on a temporary basis and vice versa.

More disturbing has been the insidious campaign carried out against the new cricket committee and its chairman on the grounds of religious affiliation. This is an unacceptable denial of the reality that Sri Lanka is a plural, multi ethnic and multi religious society. The interim committee reflects this diversity to a reasonable extent. The country’s long history of ethnic conflict should have taught all political actors the dangers of mobilising communal prejudice for short term political gain. Sri Lanka paid a very heavy price for decades of mistrust and division. It would be tragic if even cricket administration became another arena for communal suspicion and hostility. The present government represents an important departure from the sectarian rhetoric that was employed by previous governments. They have repeatedly pledged to protect the equal rights of all citizens and not permit discrimination or extremism in any form.

The recent international peace march in Sri Lanka led by the Venerable Bhikkhu Thich Paññākāra from Vietnam with its message of loving kindness and mindfulness to all resonated strongly with the masses of people as seen by the crowds who thronged the roadsides to obtain blessings and show respect. This message stands in contrast to the sectarian resentment manifested by those who seek to use the cricket appointments as a weapon to attack the government at the present time. The challenges before the Sri Lanka Cricket Transformation Committee parallel the larger challenges before the government in developing the national economy and respecting ethnic and religious diversity. Plugging the leaks and restoring systems will take time and effort. It cannot be done overnight and it cannot succeed without public patience and support.

New Recognition

There is also a need for realism. The appointment of Eran Wickremaratne and the new committee does not guarantee success. Reforming deeply flawed institutions is always difficult. Besides, Sri Lanka is a small country with a relatively small population compared to many other cricket playing nations. It is also a country still recovering from the economic breakdown of 2022 which pushed the majority of people into hardship and severely weakened public institutions. The country continues to face unprecedented challenges including the damage caused by Cyclone Ditwah and the wider global economic uncertainties linked to conflict in the Middle East. Under these difficult circumstances Sri Lanka has fewer resources than many larger countries to devote to both cricket and economic development.

When resources are scarce they cannot be wasted through corruption or incompetence. Drawing upon the strengths of all those who are competent for the tasks at hand regardless of party affiliation or ethnic or religious identity is necessary if improvement is to come sooner rather than later. The burden of rebuilding the country cannot rest only on the government. The crisis facing the country is too deep for any single party or government to solve alone. National recovery requires capable individuals from across society and from different sectors such as business and civil society to work together in areas where the national interest transcends party politics. There is also a responsibility on opposition political parties to support initiatives that are politically neutral and genuinely in the national interest. Not every issue needs to become a partisan battle.

Sri Lanka cricket occupies a special place in the national consciousness. At its best it once united the country and gave Sri Lankans a sense of pride and international recognition. Restoring integrity and professionalism to cricket administration can therefore become part of the larger task of national renewal. The appointment of Eran Wickremaratne and the new committee, while it does not guarantee success, is a sign that the political leadership and people of the country may be beginning to mature in their approach to governance. In recognising the need for competence, integrity and bipartisan cooperation and extending it beyond cricket into other areas of national life, Sri Lanka may find the way towards more stable and successful governance..

by Jehan Perera

Features

From Dhaka to Sri Lanka, three wheels that drive our economies

Published

15 hours ago

2026/05/5

Sahan Weerasooriya

Court vacation this year came with an unexpected lesson, not from a courtroom but from the streets of Dhaka — a city that moves, quite literally, on three wheels.

Above the traffic, a modern metro line glides past concrete pillars and crowded rooftops. It is efficient, clean and frequently cited as a symbol of progress in Bangladesh. For a visitor from Sri Lanka, it inevitably brings to mind our own abandoned light rail plans — a project debated, politicised and ultimately set aside.

But Dhaka’s real story is not in the air. It is on the ground.

Beneath the elevated tracks, the streets belong to three-wheelers. Known locally as CNGs, they cluster at junctions, line the edges of markets and pour into narrow roads that larger vehicles avoid. Even with a functioning rail system, these three-wheelers remain the city’s most dependable form of everyday transport.

Within hours of arriving, their importance becomes obvious. The train may take you across the city, but the journey does not end there. The last mile — often the most complicated part — belongs entirely to the three-wheeler. It is the vehicle that gets you home, to a meeting or simply through streets that no bus route properly serves.

There is a rhythm to using them. A destination is mentioned, a price is suggested and a brief negotiation follows. Then the ride begins, edging into traffic that feels permanently compressed. Drivers move with instinct, adjusting routes and squeezing through gaps with a confidence built over years.

It is not polished. But it works.

And that is where the comparison with Sri Lanka becomes less about what we lack and more about what we already have.

Back home, the three-wheeler has long been part of daily life — so familiar that it is often discussed only in terms of its problems. There are frequent complaints about fares, refusals or the absence of meters. More recently, the industry itself has become entangled in politics — from fuel subsidies to regulatory debates, from election-time promises to periodic crackdowns.

In that process, the conversation has shifted. The three-wheeler is often treated as a problem to be managed, rather than a service to be strengthened.

Yet, seen through the experience of Dhaka, Sri Lanka’s system begins to look far more settled — and, in many ways, ahead.

There is a growing structure in place. Meters, while not perfect, are widely recognised. Ride-hailing apps have added transparency and reduced uncertainty for passengers. There are clearer expectations on both sides — driver and commuter alike. Even small details, such as designated parking areas in parts of Colombo or the increasing standard of vehicles, point to an industry slowly moving towards professionalism.

Just as importantly, there is a human element that remains intact.

In Sri Lanka, a three-wheeler ride is rarely just a transaction. Drivers talk. They offer directions, comment on the day’s news, or share local knowledge. The ride becomes part of the social fabric, not just a means of getting from one point to another.

In Dhaka, the scale of the city leaves less room for that. The interaction is quicker, more direct, shaped by urgency. The service is essential, but it is under constant pressure.

What stands out, across both countries, is that the three-wheeler is not a temporary or outdated mode of transport. It is a necessity in dense, fast-growing Asian cities — one that fills gaps no rail or bus system can fully address.

Large infrastructure projects, like light rail, are important. They bring efficiency and long-term capacity. But they cannot replace the flexibility of a three-wheeler. They cannot reach into narrow streets, respond instantly to demand or provide that crucial last-mile connection.

That is why, even in a city that has invested heavily in modern rail, Dhaka still runs on three wheels.

For Sri Lanka, the lesson is not simply about what could have been built, but about what should be better managed and valued.

The three-wheeler industry does not need to be politicised at every turn. It needs steady regulation — clear fare systems, proper licensing, safety standards — alongside encouragement and recognition. It needs to be seen as part of the solution to urban transport, not as a side issue.

Because for thousands of drivers, it is a livelihood. And for millions of passengers, it is the most immediate and reliable form of mobility.

The tuk-tuk may not feature in grand policy speeches or infrastructure blueprints. It does not run on elevated tracks or attract international attention. But on the ground, where daily life unfolds, it continues to do what larger systems often struggle to do — show up, adapt and keep moving.

And after watching Dhaka’s streets — crowded, relentless, yet functioning — that small, three-wheeled vehicle feels less like something to argue over and more like something to get right.

(The writer is an Attorney-at-Law with over a decade of experience specialising in civil law, a former Board Member of the Office of Missing Persons and a former Legal Director of the Central Cultural Fund. He holds an LLM in International Business Law)

by Sampath Perera recently in Dhaka, Bangladesh

Features

Dubai scene … opening up

Published

16 hours ago

2026/05/5

Sahan Weerasooriya

Seven Notes: Operating in Dubai

According to reports coming my way, the entertainment scene, in Dubai, is very much opening up, and buzzing again!

After a quieter few months, May is packed with entertainment and the whole scene, they say, is shifting back into full swing.

The Seven Notes band, made up of Sri Lankans, based in Dubai, are back in the spotlight, after a short hiatus, due to the ongoing Middle East problems.

On 18th April they did Legends Night at Mercure Hotel Dubai Barsha Heights; on Thursday, 9th May, they will be at the Sports Bar of the Mercure Hotel for 70s/80s Retro Night; on 6th June, they will be at Al Jadaf Dubai to provide the music for Sandun Perera live in concert … and with more dates to follow.

These events are expected to showcase the band’s evolving sound, tighter stage coordination, and stronger audience engagement.

With each performance, the band aims to refine its identity and build a loyal following within Dubai’s vibrant nightlife and event scene.

Pasindu Umayanga: The group’s new vocalist

What makes Seven Notes standout is their versatility which has made the band a dynamic and promising act.

With a growing performance calendar, new talent integration, and international ambitions, the band is definitely entering a defining phase of its journey.

Dubai’s music industry, I’m told, thrives on diversity, energy, and audience connection, with live bands playing a crucial role in elevating events—from corporate shows to private concerts. Against this backdrop, Seven Notes is positioning itself not just as another band, but as a performance-driven musical unit focused on consistency and growth.

Adding fresh momentum to the group is Pasindu Umayanga who joins Seven Notes as their new vocalist. This move signals a strategic upgrade—not just filling a role, but strengthening the band’s front-line presence.

Looking beyond local stages, Seven Notes is preparing for an international tour, to Korea, in July.

Bassist Niluk Uswaththa: Spokesperson for Seven Notes

According to bassist Niluk Uswaththa, taking a band abroad means: Your sound must hold up against unfamiliar audiences, your performance must translate beyond language, and your discipline must be at a professional level.

“If executed well, this tour could redefine Seven Notes from a local band into an emerging international act,” added Niluk.

He went on to say that Dubai is not an easy market. It’s saturated with highly experienced, multi-genre bands that can adapt instantly to any crowd.

“To stand out consistently you need to have tight rehearsal discipline, unique sound identity (not just covers), strong stage chemistry, audience retention – not just applause.”

No doubt, Seven Notes is entering a critical growth phase—new member, multiple shows, and an international tour on the horizon. The opportunity is real, but so is the pressure.

However, there is talk that Seven Notes will soon be a recognised name in the regional music scene.