Features

Coming home from India, back to where our hearts belonged

Published

3 years ago

2023/05/7

Excerpted from Chosen Ground: the saga of Clara Motwani
by Goolbai Gunasekera

Another famous name connected with Ooty is that of the dancer, Ram Gopal. His sister had married an English canon and their daughter, (the earlier mentioned Joy Mellor), was my classmate at the convent. Ram Gopal came up to visit his sister on one memorable occasion, and Mother was able to have the intricacies of Indian dance made somewhat intelligible to her.

Each holiday season, Father took his family down to Madras to hear the annual Krishnamurti talks. We would stay at the Theosophical Society in Adyar at Leadbeater Chambers – a sort of subsidized hotel for foreign visitors. The menus there were mainly western, and could not have been duller. They were totally inadequate for the Motwani girls’ robust appetites. So Father would take us to Bhojanshalla, the Society’s Indian restaurant, where we sat on the floor and ate off banana leaves. The taste was fantastic and the food (thankfully) plentiful. Totally vegetarian, of course. Both Father and Mother were strict vegetarians and Su and I only tasted meat when we left home to be married.

“Where do they put all that food?” Father would marvel, watching us slurp our curries in the accepted Madrasi way. “They’re bottomless pits – that’s what they are.”

Rukmani Arundale, the lady who made oriental dancing a respectable occupation for women in India, was the wife of a former President of the society and they had remained good friends. Dinners in her home were occasions that I recall with nostalgia. We would sit on her broad veranda, watching the Adyar river flow by. The conversation was always philosophical, and without being aware of it, Su and I absorbed, as if by osmosis, the thoughts and teachings of the world’s great teachers. Theosophists regard all religions as important, and there were always visiting foreigners ready to debate and discuss – with Father around to dispute. Father was at his best in argument. For once in our talkative little lives, we remained silent.

Mother claimed she could not understand half of what was being said. “You get so TECHNICAL,” she would complain to Father as we walked back to Leadbeater Chambers in the moonlight, enjoying the breathtaking view while keeping a wary lookout for snakes. The Adyar Theosophical Society was a beautiful place then, its lovely buildings standing in two hundred acres of parkland. The largest banyan tree in the world was located in its garden, and members of the Society would have tea beneath its spreading roots. Su and I watched and wondered.

Beautiful Rukmani, later India’s Minister of Culture, was a goddess to worship. Years later, after my daughter Khulsum was born, she had dinner with us in Colombo and I treasure a picture of an ageing but still lovely lady, taken with a sleepy, nightie-clad Khulsum.

Those two years in India were happy years but we all wanted to come back to Colombo. Sri Lanka (still known then as Ceylon) was our home. Mother pined for Ceylon and had moments of deep depression. At such times Father felt the weight of her sadness fall on him and knew he had been its unwitting cause. He made up his mind that he would never take Mother from Ceylon again. He would make his headquarters in Colombo whenever he was in between assignments. And so we came home.

The end of World War II wrought drastic changes in our own family life. As a sociologist, Father realized that the Partition of India was inevitable. Vainly he wrote frantic letters to his brothers and sisters in Karachi, advising them to transfer whatever assets they could convert into cash and get the hell out of, what was soon going to be, Pakistan. They could not believe that it would happen.

“How can anyone take this land from me?” Uncle Ladikdas wrote angrily. “You are saying this because you have no land, and you want to deprive me of it too.”

Father was hurt beyond measure. He brooded over his brother’s letter for days. He decided the time had come for one last trip to Arazi, before Partition was officially declared. He took me with him.

In Arazi was my favourite relative — my cousin Ahalyabai who was my age and, thanks to some genetic quirk, my double. We could have been identical twins. If relationships were to be accurately defined, Ahalya was in reality my aunt, the granddaughter of my uncle Muniram. Despite my American blood, Ahalya’s skin was a shade fairer than mine. This was a source of great satisfaction to her. She rarely went out in the sun, while my own activities kept me outdoors a great deal.

This visit to Father’s birthplace was to be our last. I have never returned to Karachi after the Partition of India. Father tried his best to get his Arazi family to recognize the gravity of the looming conflict between Hindus and Muslims. He transferred his books and other movable assets to Madras, but the go-downs he owned in Karachi were eventually compensated for by the Government of India, with a tract of barren land in Jubbulpore. Father never saw the land, and promptly mislaid the deeds.

Go-down rentals and other sources of private income dried up after Partition, and my parents realized that life must change. Both could command high salaries, and Mother constantly told us that the value of a good education was above the price of rubies. “See how useful it is now,” she would tell us. She had been offered the post of Principal of a large school in Gwalior, India, but opted instead to take up an offer from Hindu Ladies’ College in Jaffna. Father was resigned.

“If Karma ordains that your Mother must live in Ceylon, who am I, a mere husband, to thwart the fates!”

Actually Father would have thwarted God himself if anything interfered with his own agenda, but Indian Independence was around the corner and American universities were sending out feelers on the lecture circuit of which Father was a shining light. What with his Indian background and Yale education he was quite a draw. He was now booked on an 18-month tour of United States universities, and it mattered little, therefore, whether the rest of the family was based in Ooty or in Jaffna.

The decision was made, and till the Principal’s house in Jaffna was ready for us we spent a fortnight with Dr. and Mrs. E.M. Wijerama, Mother’s best friends. As I have already said, to Su and me it was coming home. To Mother it was bliss. Except for Father we all felt Sri Lankan, for here was familiarity, here was friendship and here was love. For us, the friends Mother made were closer than family. The Visakhians who knew me as a baby remained my ‘sisters’ all my life.

To this day Beryl de Silva, Bona de Lanerolle, Lakshmi Edirisinghe, Manel Ratnatunga, Agnes Abeysekera and dozens of others have shared my life as though we were blood relatives. Never have I felt alone on this ‘Chosen Ground’. And now that fate had seen fit to scatter the Motwanis of Arazi, Sri Lanka was the home of our hearts.

There is a tragic tale to be .told here. Ahalya, my twin in both personality and appearance, lost her life in one of the last trains to leave Pakistan. It was rumoured that she was dragged out, raped and killed in front of her parents. Father never saw his brothers again. His family was scattered, and he did not even know where to begin looking for them.

“At least they know where to find me,” he would say prosaically, hiding the deep hurt he felt that he had parted so angrily from Uncle Ladikdas who would not heed the counsel of the younger brother he had earlier been so anxious to educate.

Years later, a Motwani family from a bank in Dubai contacted us. Father was by then no longer alive, but I was able to get some news of at least this one family from far away Arazi. There were so few left of the formerly large and united Motwani joint families of Karachi. It was a bitter-sweet meeting.

Each year, for three years after this the young banker would send my mother an expensive white chiffon sari (which I promptly annexed). It was only after the second one arrived that we realized why these lovely white saris were arriving with such regularity.

When Kishin Motwani met us in Colombo, Mother was wearing a white sari. Kishin approvingly commented on this several times saying to me, “Auntie looks lovely in white.” I thought nothing of it at the time. As the saris began coming, it eventually dawned on us that Kishin must have thought Mother was following the time honoured custom of Sindhi widows wearing nothing but white after their husbands had passed away and we realized that he must have been terribly impressed that Mother, an American, would be so traditional minded that she would actually forsake wearing colours. I think Mother wrote each year and thanked him but a long distance relationship is not easy to maintain and we eventually lost touch again.

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Features

Misinterpreting President Dissanayake on National Reconciliation

Published

5 hours ago

2026/02/10

Sahan Weerasooriya

President Dissanayake

President Anura Kumara Dissanayake has been investing his political capital in going to the public to explain some of the most politically sensitive and controversial issues. At a time when easier political choices are available, the president is choosing the harder path of confronting ethnic suspicion and communal fears. There are three issues in particular on which the president’s words have generated strong reactions. These are first with regard to Buddhist pilgrims going to the north of the country with nationalist motivations. Second is the controversy relating to the expansion of the Tissa Raja Maha Viharaya, a recently constructed Buddhist temple in Kankesanturai which has become a flashpoint between local Tamil residents and Sinhala nationalist groups. Third is the decision not to give the war victory a central place in the Independence Day celebrations.

Even in the opposition, when his party held only three seats in parliament, Anura Kumara Dissanayake took his role as a public educator seriously. He used to deliver lengthy, well researched and easily digestible speeches in parliament. He continues this practice as president. It can be seen that his statements are primarily meant to elevate the thinking of the people and not to win votes the easy way. The easy way to win votes whether in Sri Lanka or elsewhere in the world is to rouse nationalist and racist sentiments and ride that wave. Sri Lanka’s post independence political history shows that narrow ethnic mobilisation has often produced short term electoral gains but long term national damage.

Sections of the opposition and segments of the general public have been critical of the president for taking these positions. They have claimed that the president is taking these positions in order to obtain more Tamil votes or to appease minority communities. The same may be said in reverse of those others who take contrary positions that they seek the Sinhala votes. These political actors who thrive on nationalist mobilisation have attempted to portray the president’s statements as an abandonment of the majority community. The president’s actions need to be understood within the larger framework of national reconciliation and long term national stability.

Reconciler’s Duty

When the president referred to Buddhist pilgrims from the south going to the north, he was not speaking about pilgrims visiting long established Buddhist heritage sites such as Nagadeepa or Kandarodai. His remarks were directed at a specific and highly contentious development, the recently built Buddhist temple in Kankesanturai and those built elsewhere in the recent past in the north and east. The temple in Kankesanturai did not emerge from the religious needs of a local Buddhist community as there is none in that area. It has been constructed on land that was formerly owned and used by Tamil civilians and which came under military occupation as a high security zone. What has made the issue of the temple particularly controversial is that it was established with the support of the security forces.

The controversy has deepened because the temple authorities have sought to expand the site from approximately one acre to nearly fourteen acres on the basis that there was a historic Buddhist temple in that area up to the colonial period. However, the Tamil residents of the area fear that expansion would further displace surrounding residents and consolidate a permanent Buddhist religious presence in the present period in an area where the local population is overwhelmingly Hindu. For many Tamils in Kankesanturai, the issue is not Buddhism as a religion but the use of religion as a vehicle for territorial assertion and demographic changes in a region that bore the brunt of the war. Likewise, there are other parts of the north and east where other temples or places of worship have been established by the military personnel in their camps during their war-time occupation and questions arise regarding the future when these camps are finally closed.

There are those who have actively organised large scale pilgrimages from the south to make the Tissa temple another important religious site. These pilgrimages are framed publicly as acts of devotion but are widely perceived locally as demonstrations of dominance. Each such visit heightens tension, provokes protest by Tamil residents, and risks confrontation. For communities that experienced mass displacement, military occupation and land loss, the symbolism of a state backed religious structure on contested land with the backing of the security forces is impossible to separate from memories of war and destruction. A president committed to reconciliation cannot remain silent in the face of such provocations, however uncomfortable it may be to challenge sections of the majority community.

High-minded leadership

The controversy regarding the president’s Independence Day speech has also generated strong debate. In that speech the president did not refer to the military victory over the LTTE and also did not use the term “war heroes” to describe soldiers. For many Sinhala nationalist groups, the absence of these references was seen as an attempt to diminish the sacrifices of the armed forces. The reality is that Independence Day means very different things to different communities. In the north and east the same day is marked by protest events and mourning and as a “Black Day”, symbolising the consolidation of a state they continue to experience as excluding them and not empathizing with the full extent of their losses.

By way of contrast, the president’s objective was to ensure that Independence Day could be observed as a day that belonged to all communities in the country. It is not correct to assume that the president takes these positions in order to appease minorities or secure electoral advantage. The president is only one year into his term and does not need to take politically risky positions for short term electoral gains. Indeed, the positions he has taken involve confronting powerful nationalist political forces that can mobilise significant opposition. He risks losing majority support for his statements. This itself indicates that the motivation is not electoral calculation.

President Dissanayake has recognized that Sri Lanka’s long term political stability and economic recovery depend on building trust among communities that once peacefully coexisted and then lived through decades of war. Political leadership is ultimately tested by the willingness to say what is necessary rather than what is politically expedient. The president’s recent interventions demonstrate rare national leadership and constitute an attempt to shift public discourse away from ethnic triumphalism and toward a more inclusive conception of nationhood. Reconciliation cannot take root if national ceremonies reinforce the perception of victory for one community and defeat for another especially in an internal conflict.

BY Jehan Perera

Features

Recovery of LTTE weapons

Published

5 hours ago

2026/02/10

Sahan Weerasooriya

Sri Lanka Navy in action

I have read a newspaper report that the Special Task Force of Sri Lanka Police, with help of Military Intelligence, recovered three buried yet well-preserved 84mm Carl Gustaf recoilless rocket launchers used by the LTTE, in the Kudumbimalai area, Batticaloa.

These deadly weapons were used by the LTTE SEA TIGER WING to attack the Sri Lanka Navy ships and craft in 1990s. The first incident was in February 1997, off Iranativu island, in the Gulf of Mannar.

Admiral Cecil Tissera took over as Commander of the Navy on 27 January, 1997, from Admiral Mohan Samarasekara.

The fight against the LTTE was intensified from 1996 and the SLN was using her Vanguard of the Navy, Fast Attack Craft Squadron, to destroy the LTTE’s littoral fighting capabilities. Frequent confrontations against the LTTE Sea Tiger boats were reported off Mullaitivu, Point Pedro and Velvetiturai areas, where SLN units became victorious in most of these sea battles, except in a few incidents where the SLN lost Fast Attack Craft.

Carl Gustaf recoilless rocket launchers

The intelligence reports confirmed that the LTTE Sea Tigers was using new recoilless rocket launchers against aluminium-hull FACs, and they were deadly at close quarter sea battles, but the exact type of this weapon was not disclosed.

The following incident, which occurred in February 1997, helped confirm the weapon was Carl Gustaf 84 mm Recoilless gun!

DATE: 09TH FEBRUARY, 1997, morning 0600 hrs.

LOCATION: OFF IRANATHIVE.

FACs: P 460 ISRAEL BUILT, COMMANDED BY CDR MANOJ JAYESOORIYA

P 452 CDL BUILT, COMMANDED BY LCDR PM WICKRAMASINGHE (ON TEMPORARY COMMAND. PROPER OIC LCDR N HEENATIGALA)

OPERATED FROM KKS.

CONFRONTED WITH LTTE ATTACK CRAFT POWERED WITH FOUR 250 HP OUT BOARD MOTORS.

TARGET WAS DESTROYED AND ONE LTTE MEMBER WAS CAPTURED.

LEADING MARINE ENGINEERING MECHANIC OF THE FAC CAME UP TO THE BRIDGE CARRYING A PROJECTILE WHICH WAS FIRED BY THE LTTE BOAT, DURING CONFRONTATION, WHICH PENETRATED THROUGH THE FAC’s HULL, AND ENTERED THE OICs CABIN (BETWEEN THE TWO BUNKS) AND HIT THE AUXILIARY ENGINE ROOM DOOR AND HAD FALLEN DOWN WITHOUT EXPLODING. THE ENGINE ROOM DOOR WAS HEAVILY DAMAGED LOOSING THE WATER TIGHT INTEGRITY OF THE FAC.

THE PROJECTILE WAS LATER HANDED OVER TO THE NAVAL WEAPONS EXPERTS WHEN THE FACs RETURNED TO KKS. INVESTIGATIONS REVEALED THE WEAPON USED BY THE ENEMY WAS 84 mm CARL GUSTAF SHOULDER-FIRED RECOILLESS GUN AND THIS PROJECTILE WAS AN ILLUMINATER BOMB OF ONE MILLION CANDLE POWER. BUT THE ATTACKERS HAS FAILED TO REMOVE THE SAFETY PIN, THEREFORE THE BOMB WAS NOT ACTIVATED.

Sea Tigers

Carl Gustaf 84 mm recoilless gun was named after Carl Gustaf Stads Gevärsfaktori, which, initially, produced it. Sweden later developed the 84mm shoulder-fired recoilless gun by the Royal Swedish Army Materiel Administration during the second half of 1940s as a crew served man- portable infantry support gun for close range multi-role anti-armour, anti-personnel, battle field illumination, smoke screening and marking fire.

It is confirmed in Wikipedia that Carl Gustaf Recoilless shoulder-fired guns were used by the only non-state actor in the world – the LTTE – during the final Eelam War.

It is extremely important to check the batch numbers of the recently recovered three launchers to find out where they were produced and other details like how they ended up in Batticaloa, Sri Lanka?

By Admiral Ravindra C. Wijegunaratne
WV, RWP and Bar, RSP, VSV, USP, NI (M) (Pakistan), ndc, psn, Bsc (Hons) (War Studies) (Karachi) MPhil (Madras)
Former Navy Commander and Former Chief of Defence Staff
Former Chairman, Trincomalee Petroleum Terminals Ltd
Former Managing Director Ceylon Petroleum Corporation
Former High Commissioner to Pakistan

Features

Yellow Beatz … a style similar to K-pop!

Published

5 hours ago

2026/02/10

Sahan Weerasooriya

Yes, get ready to vibe with Yellow Beatz, Sri Lanka’s awesome girl group, keen to take Sri Lankan music to the world with a style similar to K-pop!

With high-energy beats and infectious hooks, these talented ladies are here to shake up the music scene.

Think bold moves, catchy hooks, and, of course, spicy versions of old Sinhala hits, and Yellow Beatz is the package you won’t want to miss!

According to a spokesman for the group, Yellow Beatz became a reality during the Covid period … when everyone was stuck at home, in lockdown.

“First we interviewed girls, online, and selected a team that blended well, as four voices, and then started rehearsals. One of the cover songs we recorded, during those early rehearsals, unexpectedly went viral on Facebook. From that moment onward, we continued doing cover songs, and we received a huge response. Through that, we were able to bring back some beautiful Sri Lankan musical creations that were being forgotten, and introduce them to the new generation.”

The team members, I am told, have strong musical skills and with proper training their goal is to become a vocal group recognised around the world.

Believe me, their goal, they say, is not only to take Sri Lanka’s name forward, in the music scene, but to bring home a Grammy Award, as well.

“We truly believe we can achieve this with the love and support of everyone in Sri Lanka.”

The year 2026 is very special for Yellow Beatz as they have received an exceptional opportunity to represent Sri Lanka at the World Championships of Performing Arts in the USA.

Under the guidance of Chris Raththara, the Director for Sri Lanka, and with the blessings of all Sri Lankans, the girls have a great hope that they can win this milestone.

“We believe this will be a moment of great value for us as Yellow Beatz, and also for all Sri Lankans, and it will be an important inspiration for the future of our country.”

Along with all the preparation for the event in the USA, they went on to say they also need to manage their performances, original song recordings, and everything related.

The year 2026 is very special for Yellow Beatz

“We have strong confidence in ourselves and in our sincere intentions, because we are a team that studies music deeply, researches within the field, and works to take the uniqueness of Sri Lankan identity to the world.”

At present, they gather at the Voices Lab Academy, twice a week, for new creations and concert rehearsals.

This project was created by Buddhika Dayarathne who is currently working as a Pop Vocal lecturer at SLTC Campus. Voice Lab Academy is also his own private music academy and Yellow Beatz was formed through that platform.

Buddhika is keen to take Sri Lankan music to the world with a style similar to K-Pop and Yellow Beatz began as a result of that vision. With that same aim, we all work together as one team.

“Although it was a little challenging for the four of us girls to work together at first, we have united for our goal and continue to work very flexibly and with dedication. Our parents and families also give their continuous blessings and support for this project,” Rameesha, Dinushi, Newansa and Risuri said.

Last year, Yellow Beatz released their first original song, ‘Ihirila’ , and with everything happening this year, they are also preparing for their first album.