Opinion
Full implementation of 13A – Final solution to ‘national problem’ or end of unitary state? – Part II

By Kalyananda Tiranagama
Executive Director
Lawyers for Human Rights and Development
(First part of this article appeared yesterday)
Ten-point Accord for Regime Change arrived at Singapore in 2013
As disclosed by a report published on the Tamilnet website on 23 Jan., 2015, the TNA and the Tamil diaspora with the objective of achieving their goal of creating a federal state in the North-East played a key role in bringing about a regime change at the 2015 presidential election.
As revealed in this report, an LTTE front organisation in South Africa ‘In Transformation Initiative’ organised a conference in Singapore in 2013, and it was funded by two European countries. Former Minister of Foreign Affairs Mangala Samaraweera, TNA national list Member of Parliament M. A. Sumanthiran, Dr. Jayampathy Wickramaratne, who was an Adviser on Constitutional Affairs to two Presidents, representatives of the Global Tamil Forum (GTF) representing the Diaspora Tamils, Colombo University Law Professor Thamilmaran and a lawyer from the Sri Lanka Muslim Congress were among the participants at that Conference, according to the Tamilnet report.
Samaraweera, who represented Ranil Wickramasinghe, urged Tamils for support for regime change and abolition of executive presidency, promising in return to grant all demands of the TNA such as the release of all LTTE prisoners, changing the Governor of the Northern Province, removing Army from Jaffna, and the full implementation of 13th Amendment.
The report claims that the understanding reached in Singapore in 2013 formulated a conceptual framework on abolishing the executive presidency which is a fundamental obstacle for the Tamils to create a federal state in Sri Lanka based on ten basic principles described as the ‘‘Singapore Principles’’.
When Tamil aspirations were taken up for discussion, Sumanthiran wanted to avoid use of terms such as Nation and Right to Self-determination in the document. Thamilmaran remained silent on this matter.
Only the voice of a human rights defender, a Sinhalese representing the civil society, was in favour of a formula based on the recognition of nationhood of Tamil people with their traditional homeland in the North-East.
Thus, the Tamil aspirations went missing in the proposal. Instead, the document was drafted with the intention of being nondescript.
Sumanthiran, who represented the TNA took care not to include anything in the document that would result in arousing fear in the minds the Sinhala population in the South.
The Ten Point Singapore Principles agreed in the Accord:
In describing the nature of the State what is important is the substance; the labels are secondary.
(While maintaining ‘unitary state’ label, they can have a full federal rule in the North-East)
The Constitution shall be based on basic constitutional principles and values including sovereignty of the people, participatory democracy and supremacy of the Constitution which shall form an unalterable basic structure.
Power sharing shall be on the basis of self-rule and shared-rule within an undivided Sri Lanka.
(This is Sampanthan’s united, undivided, indivisible Sri Lanka; They have taken care not to use the terms ‘self-autonomy’, or ‘self-determination’; they mean the same thing when they use the term ‘self-rule’ and ‘shared-rule’.)
The executive presidency shall be abolished and the form of government shall be Parliamentary.
(Executive presidency was the main obstacle for the full implementation of federalism at that time; Now with Ranil Wickramasinghe as President, executive presidency has paved the way for full implementation of federalism.)
The pluralist character of Sri Lankan society as well as identities and aspirations of the constituent peoples of Sri Lanka shall be constitutionally recognized. (This will have the effect of diluting the identity of the majority Sinhala population in the country.)
There shall be a strong and enforceable Bill of Rights consistent with universally accepted norms and standards.
There shall be a separation of powers and an independent judiciary which includes a Constitutional Court.
Important institutions shall be independent and accountable. Appointments to these and High Posts shall be through a transparent mechanism that provides for a national consensus, example Constitutional Council.
Institutions of the State shall reflect the pluralist character of Sri Lankan society. (This will have the effect not only of diluting the identity of the majority Sinhala population in the country, but also of making appointments to important state institutions not on the basis of merit and qualifications, but on the basis of ethnicity and religion.)
The Republic of Sri Lanka shall be a secular state. The foremost place to Buddhism and equal status to other religions shall be assured.
Giving Effect to the Understanding reached in Singapore
The Yahapalana government, which came to power following the presidential election of 2015, took several steps to give effect to the understanding reached with the TNA and Tamil diaspora in Singapore in 2013:
Within 100 days of coming to power, on 28 April, the 19th Amendment to the Constitution was passed in Parliament, curtailing the executive power of the President to a great extent and enabling the Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe to take the effective control of the government into his hands.
In the new Parliament elected at the August 2015 general elections, R. Sampanthan, the leader of the Tamil National Alliance with 16 MPs, was appointed the Leader of the Opposition in Parliament, ignoring the claim of the United Opposition with 51 elected MPs.
In January 2016, the government took steps to draft a new Constitution with Parliament sitting as a ‘Constitutional Assembly’ and with several Steering Committees well represented by Tamil groups appointed to draft different chapters.
TNA Proposal submitted to the Steering Committee contained the following points:
SL a federal state within the framework of a united/undivided and indivisible country. Centre and Provinces to exercise exclusive power in the areas of their competence.
North-East to constitute one state> N-E historically inhabited by Tamil speaking people;
The powers and functions to be assigned to the provinces shall be in conformity with the Recommendations of (a) Mangala Munasinghe Select Committee; (b) with shared sovereignty, 2000 Constitution Bill, etc.
Province to have power to muster financial resources required;
Governor not to have powers to interfere with the exercise of the executive power of the Province;
Sampanthan’s Speech at Matara in September 2016
When one goes through the Speech made by Sampanthan, as the Leader of the Opposition, at the Samurdhi Development Community Foundation Meeting held at Matara on 02 Sept., 2016, one can clearly see how the Tamil National Alliance is pursuing the same goal of setting up a full federal state in the North-East of Sri Lanka adopting new strategies so as to allay the fears of the people in the South about the division of the country. He attended the meeting at the invitation of Mr. Buddhika Pathirana, UNP MP. This is what Mr. Sampanthan said:
“We are not trying to divide the country. We are only trying to share power, the country will be one united, undivided, indivisible country which cannot ever be divided.
“All the powers required to ensure the unity and indivisibility of the country would remain with the central government. The powers that would remain with the central government in a power sharing arrangement that was being envisaged – defence, foreign affairs, finance and currency and immigration and emigration would be vested with the Centre. All the powers required to ensure the unity and indivisibility of the country would remain with the Central Government.
“Other powers would be devolved to the provincial councils which would have enhanced powers, and devolution would allow people of a particular region to exercise more control over the issues relevant to them through elected representatives of those areas. – Daily Financial Times of 05 Sept., 2016.
13 demands of TNA forwarded to Candidates of 2019 Presidential Election
Tamil National Alliance (TNA) led by Ilankai Thamil Arasu Katchi (ITAK) of Mr. Sampanthan forwarded 13 Point Demands to Candidates of major political parties that contested the 2019 Presidential Election, extending their support to the Candidate who accepts these demands.
“Having realised that the final solution to the long standing Tamil Ethnic issue, which has remained in the Island of Sri Lanka as an unresolved National Question for several decades and been the cause for the war which extended for over three decades, would be the – (1) Acceptance of the political aspirations of the Tamil Nation; (2) Recognition of the Northern and Eastern Provinces as the historical habitat and the traditional homelands of the Tamil Nation: (3) Acknowledgement of the Sovereignty of the Tamil Nation and (4) Realization of the fact that the Tamil People under the provisions of International Law are entitled to the right of self-determination, accordingly the creation of federal rule in the merged Northern and Eastern Provinces would be our considered stand-point.
‘‘ With the hope of finding a final solution to problems of Tamil People the following demands are presented to Presidential candidates of major political parties:
A solution to the Sri Lankan Tamil issue must be found by setting up a new federal constitution rejecting the heretofore unitary constitution, accepting the nationhood of the Sri Lankan Tamils and recognising its sovereignty and accepting that Tamils under the provisions of the International Law are entitled to the right of self determination.
Full-fledged independent impartial International Mechanisms through the International Criminal Court / International Arbitration Tribunal must be set up to inquire into the War Crimes and Crimes against Humanity and Genocide committed during the final stages of the war:
The Prevention of Terrorism Act must be withdrawn:
(Consequently) All Tamil Political Prisoners must be freed unconditionally:
Justice must be found for those affected by the enforced disappearance of persons through appropriate international mechanisms.
The Governmental Forces occupying private and state lands / buildings in the Northern and Eastern Provinces which were occupied by Tamils before the war must be withdrawn, the lands released and resettlement process must be immediately set in motion.
Sinhalisation, Buddhistization and Sinhala Colonisation in the Northern and Eastern Provinces presently with state assistance must be stopped immediately.
Since the Mahaweli Development Authority is engaged in planned Sinhala Colonization in the Northern Province under the pretext of redirecting of the Mahaweli River to the North, the jurisdiction of the said Authority must be forthwith terminated. Also the planned Sinhala Colonisation taking place in the Eastern Province under the Mahaweli Development Scheme must also be terminated.
The Moragaskanda Irrigation Scheme recently introduced is indulging in planned Sinhala Colonisation in the Vanni Region. All such Sinhala Colonisation must forthwith be terminated.
The expropriation of lands and areas of religious worship by Government Departments including Archaeology Department, Wildlife Department, Forest’s Department must forthwith be stopped. Those lands and places of worship already expropriated through these Departments must be freed from the effect of the Gazette Notifications which so expropriated them.
Those affected in the Northern and Eastern Provinces by the war, wanting to economically improve themselves or youth wanting to enhance their job opportunities receiving direct investments from our Diaspora and elsewhere must have all legal obstacles faced removed so that handling lands and finances here would be easy and quick.
Priority must be given to those belonging to the Northern and Eastern Provinces in Governmental and Private sector job opportunities in the said two provinces.
An independent mechanism must be set up under the supervision of elected Representatives of the People of the Northern and Eastern Provinces to handle all finances for Development in the said two Provinces after proclaiming the Northern and Eastern Provinces as areas affected by war.
(To be continued)
Opinion
Economic value of Mahinda Rajapaksa

by Dr Sirimewan Dharmaratne,
former Senior Analyst, HMRC, UK.
Although this may not be doable at all times, it is possible to retrospectively assess the economic impact of crucial decisions. While putting a value on a person may seem unethical or unconscionable, everyone has an economic value. Our lives are valued for myriad of commercial purposes, such as for insurance policies, compensation for work place injuries and death and for various illnesses due to environmental pollution and other such instances. In all these cases, what is valued is the economic life, and not the intrinsic value of the person itself.
The method is ‘what if’ concept; how much could he/she have earned if the person has not died or been incapacitated? The same concept could be extended to assess the value of critical events, such as natural disasters. The method simply is to compare the state before and after the even and put some economic value to the event or the decisionmaker.
Benefits of Mahinda Rajapaksa (MR)
The most seminal event that happened in Sri Lanka during MR regime was ending the war on terrorism in 2009. Friends and foes alike attribute this historic event to MR. Although there are different schools of thoughts on this, winning or to losing a war is ultimately attributed the leadership and not to anyone else. This is because it is the leader that takes decisions and accept all risks. Winston Churchill as the war-winning UK prime minister, Chinese revolution has been attributed to Mao Tse-Tung, and the ending the civil war in the USA has been attributed to Abraham Lincoln. The ensuing discussion and analysis are based on this premise.
Benefits of Ending the War
There is no doubt that there was significant economic revival after the end of the war. The underlying justification is that if he had not taken the decision to end the war, it would not have ended in 2009. As such, whatever the costs and benefits of ending the war can be attributed to MR. While a complicated economic evaluation is not possible within the context of this article, it is possible to see whether we have enough evidence to do a ‘back of the envelop’ economic assessment of ending the war.
Revival of Tourism
One of the unequivocal benefits of ending the war is the massive revival in tourism as seen in tourism statistics. The average tourism spending during the 5-year period before 2009 was about US$ 0.76 billion a year and during the 5-year period after the war was over US$ 2 billion a year. Therefore, the increase of revenue of around US$1.25 bn a year can be safely be attributed to the event of ending the war as this was the only pivotal event that happened in 2009. Assuming that 30% of these spending is net profit, then nearly US$ 2bn was accrued to Sri Lankan businesses during this 5-year period immediately after the war compared to the previous 5 years.
Economic Growth
There was nearly a 5% jump in the GDP growth in the year after the war. That momentum was maintained for the next two years. During the first three years over $16 bn was added to the economy compared to the $8 bn during the three preceding years. Unemployment that was well over 5% in 2009 (and in preceding years) dropped below 5% in 2010, for the first time since early 1990s. On the average unemployment fell by 0.34% year during the 5 years after 2009. No doubt other economic indicators showed similar positive trends.
Other Benefits
It is commonly believed that egregious corruption and irregularities were rife under the guise of war for many years, under all regimes during the 30-year period. These essentially ended after 2009. Then there are other benefits such as improved international relationships, more investments, building of several roads and highways and the general wellbeing of the citizen, which are all hard to quantify in this context. Although, this momentum in growth could not be maintained for a longer period due to regime changes, cronyism, complacency, capricious decision-making, and many other factors, they cannot unfortunately be quantified. While these unconscionable acts may or may not be directly attributed to MR, his cavalier attitude in some instances may have contributed to gratuitous corruption under his watch. Due to these reasons, a vast stream of benefits that could have resulted from the end of war never materialised.
Costs of Mahinda Rajapaksa
There are economic costs and financial costs. Financial costs are those borne by the taxpayer for his upkeep and benefit. These are the costs that are the focus of the ongoing controversy. Economic costs are the costs to the taxpayer arising from decisions that he may have taken. It is important to note that such decisions must have been approved by the parliament and therefore, any responsibility should be held collectively. Nevertheless, for this article we will assume that they are taken unilaterally and exclusively attributed to MR.
Two of the main projects that are constantly being flaunted are the Hambanthota port and the Mattala airport. Both these are portrayed as colossal waste of money. There is ample evidence that these main projects and others were undertaken without much thought. However, as far as this article is concerned, only the losses to the taxpayer resulting from these decisions are considered.
Large infrastructure projects yield benefits far in to the future as they have a very long lifespan. Further, their investments cost is not a loss, but only the losses incurred in their operation. Although, initially made significant losses due to lack of business, with the deal agreed with a Chinese investor in 2016, it appears that the port is no longer costing the taxpayer. In fact, there is already evidence that it could be profitable with the proposed oil refinery. Also, with the opening of the economy for imports, this could be a major trade hub. Therefore, for the purpose of this article, it is reasonable to use the widely quoted loss of US$216 million during the period of 2011-2016.
The Mattala airport on the other hand has incurred about US$140 million loss during the 5-year period of 2017-2022. There is still no evidence that it could be turned into a profit-making venture. There may be other smaller projects that could have made lesser losses. To account for all those, a rather ballpark figure of US$500 million sounds reasonable at least for the purpose of this exercise.
Financial Costs
The main contentious issue at the moment is whether the facilities (particularly the accommodation) at the disposal of MR is justified. Let’s say this current facility is available to MR for a 20-year period from 2015 and the monthly average imputed rent is Rs 20 million a month. Then the total cost to the taxpayer would be about US$16 million. Adding all other benefits that he is entitled to, a figure of US$ 50 million seems to be a reasonable assessment of the as the total cost of maintaining MR for a 20-year period from 2015.
Stolen Money
The main accusation of MR is not the few bad policy decisions that he may have taken or the cost of his retirement, but the colossal amount of money that he claimed to have stolen and stashed overseas. Despite years of accusations, the existence or the amount of this money is yet to be unambiguously ascertained. Unfortunately, there is no paper trail or digital footprint to show that taxpayer money has been siphoned out of the country. There is a further twist to these claims of stolen money. They are only relevant for this analysis, if taxpayer money (from the Treasury, for example) was taken out of the country. On the other hand, gratuitous payments directly deposited in foreign banks (commonly known as commissions) for awarding contracts are irrelevant as far as the taxpayer is concerned. This would only be an issue if the taxpayer was short-changed as a result of awarding contracts. Either way as far as stolen money is concerned, until definitive proof is surfaced, imaginary amounts cannot be taken into account.
Is he worth it?
The total loss to the taxpayer during the MR regime plus is subsequent maintenance costs for a 20-year period from 2015 comes to about US$ 0.5bn. It is important to note that the maintenance cost is only a fraction of the total economic loss due to the two main projects. Based on a very conservative estimate, net benefits from the revival of tourism alone could be nearing US$ 2bn for the 5-year period after ending the war. Then there are all other benefits resulting from accelerated economic growth in the immediate few years after 2009. Therefore, for MR to be a liability to the taxpayer someone will have to find at least US$2 billion of taxpayer money stashed somewhere. While this search is going on, it seems that MR has every right to stay put where he is now, purely from an economic view point.
This perfunctory analysis portrays how even in an extreme situation some objectivity can be imparted to the decision-making process. With some rudimentary information, decisions can be made more objective. Also, a nascent idea could be vastly improved by seeking and including actual data rather than hearsay. For example, the ‘analysis’ presented here could be immensely improved by adding factual information. This is a process that any government should introduce as a matter of principal in all decision making.
Opinion
China’s meteoric rise through strict policy implementation!

The obscure Hangzhou hedge fund that coded a ChatGPT competitor as a side project it claims cost just $6m emerges from a concerted effort to invest in future generations of technology.
This is not an accident. This is policy.
The raw materials of artificial intelligence (AI) are microchips, science PhDs and data. On the latter two, China might be ahead already.
Really speaking, Western World had been caught napping through its lethargy while enjoying much higher standards of living!
Here in U.K., the Welfare State including the NHS and Social Services made some people opting not to work, claiming all manner of benefits! It is a common sight to see able bodied men and women selling The Big Issue magazine in street corners!
There are on average more than 6,000 PhDs in STEM subjects (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) coming out of Chinese universities every month. In the US it is more like 2,000-3,000, in the UK it is 1,500.
In terms of patents generally, more are being filed in China than in the rest of the world put together. In 2023 China filed 1.7 million patents, against 600,000 in the US. Two decades earlier China had a third of the patents filed by the US, a quarter of Japan’s and was well behind South Korea and Europe!
While there are some questions about the quality, on some measures China now exceeds the US on what is known as “citation-weighted” patents too, which adjusts for how often new scientific papers are referred to.
Chinese lithium-ion electric batteries now cost per kWh about a seventh of what they cost a decade ago. DeepSeek is doing in AI exactly what China has done elsewhere.
While the impact of this was most visible in electric vehicles (EVs), where China is now the world’s biggest exporter, having cornered the supply chains and the science for battery technology, it stretches well beyond. BYD Auto Co., Ltd. and brand of BYD (Beyond Your Dreams, publicly listed Chinese multinational Manufacturing Company. It manufactures passenger Battery Energy Electric Vehicles (BEEVs) and Plug-in Electric Vehicle (PHEVs), in China. It also produces electric buses and trucks. The company sells its vehicles under the main BYD brand and high-end vehicles under its Denza, Yangwang and Fangchengbao brands.
Even in auto the Chinese manufacturers are now pushing the concept of “electric intelligent vehicles”, in which conventional carmakers cannot compete, especially on software development.
China’s consumer electronics companies are shifting into car manufacturing, with “dark factories” operated 24/7 by armies of AI-powered robots, now also increasingly made in China.
This innovation is partly of necessity. China does not have indigenous fossil fuels, and is electrifying at an astonishing rate, and is referred to by some researchers as an “electro state”. It now files three-quarters of all clean tech patents, versus a twentieth at the start of the century.
Last year the US National Science Board asserted China’s objective of being the world’s leading science and engineering nation was on the verge of being achieved. “We already see this in artificial intelligence, where China out publishes us, has more patents, and produces more students than the United States,” they wrote.
Delegates who accompanied the UK Chancellor Rachel Reeves to China earlier this month marvelled at how the Beijing air had been cleaned up, and indigenous electric cars were everywhere. Another UK CEO told the media of a visit to Huawei’s Oxbridge-style campus complete with spires and bridges, and its own Tube line, purely for its scientists.
Clearly, however, there are concerns about censorship, democracy and security. One of the drivers of the Chinese AI industry has been access to extraordinary amounts of data, which is more difficult to get hold of in the West.
If the US Congress was sufficiently concerned about TikTok to ban it, then surely a table-topping AI program could be highly problematic. President Trump’s argument recently was that DeepSeek’s innovation was “positive” and “a wake-up call”. China has not been prominent as the first target of Trump tariffs.
There is still an obvious balancing act for the UK government here. But this sort of innovation and its impact on the world was exactly why the chancellor visited Beijing a fortnight ago.
She said at the time she wanted a long-term relationship with China that is “squarely in our national interest” with the visit part of a “commitment to explore deeper economic co-operation” between Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer and President Xi.
Other European nations such as Spain have encouraged China not just to set up factories but to transfer its advanced battery technology, for example, into Europe.
The West wants China to make its T-shirts, its tables, its TVs and EVs. But could that really now stretch into DeepSeek data-hungry AI models too? It is a deep tremor, not just for tech, but for economics and geopolitics as well. Do not be fooled into thinking that China is a benevolent country when it offers “help” with massive projects in third world countries as they all come with strings attached and possibly expansionist agendas!
Sunil Dharmabandhu
Wales, UK
Opinion
A singular modern Lankan mentor – Part III

by Laleen Jayamanne and Namika Raby
Gananath Obeysekere: In search of Buddhist conscience
(Baudha Hurdasakshiya Soya)
(Part II of this article appeared in The Island on Monday – 03)
Tissa Ranasinghe’s and Gananath’s Kannagi
Gananath’s Pattini book has a mysterious blue-black cover with an icon of Kannagi in Bronze sculpted by Lanka’s foremost Modernist sculptor Tissa Ranasinghe, commissioned by Gananath. What Appadurai termed Lanka’s links with ‘Indic culture’ is encapsulated in this image of the heroic figure Kannagi from the Tamil epic, striking a gesture of mourning for her husband Kovalan, unjustly killed by the king of Madurai. She kneels with her arms held raised around her head in the familiar triangular formation suggestive of the aniconic representation of the Yoni (an emblematic civilisational gesture of great iconic strength and power, in the Bronze lineage of India, which stretches back to the little bronze figurine of The Dancing Girl of Monhenjodaro itself), even as she laments the injustice. And those of us who know the legend also see that her left breast is missing. Kannagi, it is told, tore her breast and hurled it at the city of Madurai, setting it on fire with her righteous anger! Together, Gananath and Tissa have presented Kannagi in a most generative posture and gesture for the cover of the book on the Sinhala Pattini cult, the only Mother goddess of the Sinhala folk, borrowed from the Tamil Epic, to assuage and heal Sinhala male sexual anxieties and group trauma. This marvelous collaboration between Lanka’s celebrated Modernist Sculptor and Anthropologist was a multivalent, therapeutic intervention into Lanka’s cyclical interethnic violence. The book was published in 1984, one year after the state sponsored pogram against Tamils in July ‘83. Tissa’s modernist Kannagi demonstrates how an archaic ‘Maternal Archetype’ can be creatively mobilised by an artist, to express contemporary predicaments without diluting her orginal power and affective vitality magnified by the use of bronze, a resonant civilisational material.
Pattini is the Sinhala Buddhist incarnation of the Tamil heroic Kannagi and as far as I can tell she appears not to have the iconographic attributes of heroic rage and righteous anger which Kannagi embodies in the Tamil Epic. Kannagi is the step mother of Manimekalai who became a Buddhist nun, according to legend. Is it the case that Pattini is without progeny and so, as a Mother Goddess, rather like the West Asian mother Goddesses who were also virgins? As a girl, my mother and I were devoted to rituals of Mother Mary (mother of Jesus), also known as the Virgin-Mary from, let’s not forget, West Asia (in historic Palestine).
Professor Sunil Ariyaratne’s 2016 film Pattini, warrants a passing comment or two in this context as an example of the institutional consolidation of Neo-Liberal capitalist extraction and commodification of the residual vitality and power of the perennial syncretic Folk traditions of Lanka. It is a neo-traditionalist extravaganza in the genre of nostalgic revival of ‘the Sinhala-Buddhist Folk Heritage of Lanka’ which flourished recently with much fanfare and state patronage as a ‘Rajapaksha genre’. The film deals with the Kannagi legend just so as to reduce it to reinforcing the Sinhala-Buddhist ideology of purity and virginity for women through the exemplary tale of ‘the pure wife’ Kannagi and her step-daughter Manimekala, who becomes a Tamil Buddhist. Her dearest wish is to be reborn as a male so that she can indeed aspire to become a Buddha. The emphasis is on the preservation of virginity (Pathiwatha), and the enthroning of male sexuality as the route to attaining Buddhahood. The mythic epic figure of Kannagi who in her rage enacts heroic justice in the Tamil epic is converted into a parabolic emblem of virginal purity.
A Humanist Education
Gananath’s education is a strand very comprehensively covered in the film, a source of his immense openness to the world of ideas and refusal to accept them on authority without critical evaluation. The film opens at Gananath’s home in Kandy which he shares with Professor Ranjini Obeysekere who appears with her vibrant intellect and grace and ends there too. The couple are shown warmly welcoming the film crew to their house as they have done over their long engagement with numerous students, as they did with me both in Kandy and the US when I was tangled up and blue. It is worth remembering here that Ranjini is the Editor in Chief of the magnificent multi-volume translation project of the Jataka Tales into English, published just last year. It is only now that I can see how deeply Ranjini and Gananath’s scholarship is in conversation with each other.
The account of Ranjini and Gananath’s meeting at Peradeniya University while studying English Literature with Professor E.F.C. Ludowyk is one of the highlights of the film for me. Ranjini acted in the plays directed by Ludowyck and they studied English Literature at honours level together. Interestingly, though Gananath followed the Dram Soc activities on campus, he didn’t participate in any of them, his interest being elsewhere. He says, whenever he could he got onto a bus or train and travelled to distant villages to talk to villagers and monks and tape their songs (kavi). Gananath says that Ludowyck was the best teacher he has ever met and that he was responsible for directing him at every key juncture of his undergraduate life and soon after when making the unusual choice of going to a US graduate school, refusing a scholarship to Cambridge because of colonial history. Gananath’s brilliant textual analysis and exegesis of texts in Sinhala of myths and legends, especially the complex corpus of the Gajabahu legend, owes a great deal to the textual training he received from Ludowyck in ‘Practical Criticism’. We are all beneficiaries of this tradition of Literary Criticism which was part of the training we received in English Lit in old Ceylon and now continued by scholars such as Professor of English, Sumathy Sivamohan and others. Ranjini tells us that it was Ludowyck who collected Rs 10,000 from ten of his friends and handed it to Gananath to go travel the country and do what he wished soon after he graduated with English Honours. All he was asked to do was to write and thank his benefactors. So, it’s this tradition of mentorship and duty of care that Gananath and Ranjini have practiced with their own students during their long working life at American Universities.
A Counter Archive of a People’s Literature, Painting and Ritual
Though I was familiar with some of Gananath’s writing and studied a couple for the film I made, there is a major topic of his research which I didn’t know anything about and as such this film has provided an important learning experience for me. In drawing from the local non-canonical texts preserved in Temples, libraries and archives, which are written, in Sinhala by the folk and as such are anonymous, not by scholar monks in Pali, the language of high learning, Gananath has been able to piece together stories, legends of migrations from India, Kerala and Tamil Nadu and the ways in which some of these waves of migrants have been incorporated into the folk Buddhist body politic and culture. The gist of which is the seemingly heretical idea (an affront to Sinhala exceptionalism and their sense of manifest destiny as ‘pure Ariya’ Sinhala-Buddhists claiming to be the only real Lankans), that at one time, all people who call themselves Sinhala in Lanka did come from India and were indigenised through various practices and this happened in waves of migration over long periods of time. This section draws from the folk archive of poetry, ritual and Temple murals and legends such as the complex Gajabahu Myth, that bear witness to these processes of migration and acculturation, to make the case for the existence of robust muti-ethnic, diverse communities dotting the island. The legendary folk tales and rituals were, he says, imaginative, fictionalised, poetic expressions of folk memory of these migratory events, not ‘false’ accounts.
Here I want to cite a longish relevant passage from Professor Patrick Olivelle’s highly acclaimed book, Ashoka: Portrait of a Philosopher King. Ramchandra Guha, the editor of the series called ‘Indian Lives‘ of which this is the first, says of the Lankan Olivelle that, ‘he is one of the greatest living scholars of Ancient India’. Here’s Olivelle’s argument, on the familiar opposition between History and Legend, which supports Gananath’s theoretical move with practical consequences for how we understand ourselves as Lankans.
“In a seminal remark, the historian Robert Lingat notes: ‘There are two Ashokas—the historical Ashoka whom we know through his inscriptions, and the legendary Ashoka, who is known to us through texts of diverse origin, Pali, Sanskrit, Chinese and Tibetan. Although essentially correct, there are two problems with Lingat’s assessment.
First it is simplistic to contrast the ‘historical with the legendary’. The portrait of Ashoka I have constructed in this book is based on Ashokan inscriptions and artefacts, yet it contains a heavy dose of interpretation, translation, imagination, narrative, perhaps bias… The ‘legendery’ is not simply false and to be dismissed; it is the reimagination of the past to serve present needs, something inherently human. These narratives were meaningful and important to the persons and communities that constructed them. Their purpose was not to do history in the modern sense of the term, but to do something much more significant to them in their own time.
….There are actually not two but several Ashokas, including modern ones”.
Following this argument, we Lankans who try to practice ‘Loving-Kindness’ must be thankful that Gananath has highlighted for us at least two Dutthagaminies, in his timely essay, Dutthagamini and the Buddhist Conscience, written in the wake of the carnage of the ‘July ‘83’ state sponsored pogrom against the Tamil people of Lanka. There is the familiar Dutthagamini, taught to us in school, as a Sinhala-Buddhist, Tamil-hating ethno-nationalist, constructed from the Mahavamsa narrative taken as incontrovertible historical fact. On the other hand, Gananath presents evidence, from the Dambulla temple paintings, for a humanist Dutthagamini, who like Ashoka himself, was contrite about the mass slaughter he conducted and his killing of Elara the Tamil king.
The film shows us how Gananath makes a radical scholarly move in the late stages of his life by researching the indigenous folk of Lanka, the Veddhas. He argues against the deep-seated idea, promulgated by the ethno-nationalist Sinhala-Buddhist ideologues, that there is an ancient historical enmity between the Sinhala and Tamil folk of Lanka going back to the days of the kings, prior to colonialism. Gananath analyses the myth of origin of the Sinhala folk as represented in temple murals that show Vijaya’s arrival in Lanka from India and his marriage with the indigenous woman Kuveni. The Veddhas are the descendants, he says, of Kuveni and her children by Vijaya and are the ‘other’ or outsider, so to speak, to the Sinhala.
Through his ethnographic work on the powerful Vadi procession (perahera) in Mahiyanganaya, Gananath is able to show the ritual means through which they are incorporated into the Sinhala community. The ethnographic film, demonstrating this robust festive ritual event of staging cultural difference and incorporation, supports Gananath’s argument that the Veddas have been the true ‘outsiders’ of the Buddhist polity (in dress, culinary habits, religion), and despite that, the Buddhist culture had ritual mechanisms of incorporation of the outsider, without resorting to slaughter, while also acknowledging and respecting the awesome power of the Veddas. This section should be shown to school kids, I think, because of its liveliness and pedagogic value. Gananath acknowledges the fine scholarship of Paul E. Peiris on the Veddas and shows the colonial hostility and violence towards these indigenous folk of Lanka. Gananath’s ‘Cook Book’, also relevant to Australia’s colonial history, would have provided a global perspective on colonisation of indigenous peoples and the violent means used in casting them as ‘uncivilised primitives’, which in turn would have prepared him well to write the book on, the Veddas, Creation of the Hunter, in 2022.
What to Do, Napuru Kaleta? (In Wicked Times)
It seems to me that young scholars and artists might be able to generate a new thought or two by reading Gananath’s essays and books in relation to Ananda Coomaraswamy’s Mediaeval Sinhalaese Art (Campden: Gloucestershire, 1908) and Olivelle’s book on Ashoka. In this way, the monodisciplinary compartmentalisation of knowledge, ideas, can be disturbed so as to gain aesthetic nourishment to create, with what’s left, after the ravages of Neoliberal cultural nationalism’s cognitive extraction of our brains. All three distinguished, visionary Lankan scholars were writing about times when material culture and the ‘Intangible Heritage’ (A UNESCO Platform for their preservation) of Lanka and India were/are being destroyed from within, extinguished.
Some ‘transversal’ or lateral ways of understanding and connecting material practices/stuff and immaterial ideas are called for now, I believe, and these three Lankan scholars have shown us many ways in which this can be done. Let me clinch my argument by citing the full title of Coomaraswamy’s indispensable book which took 60 years to be translated into Sinhala. Professor Sarath Chandrajeewa (who also taught ‘mati-weda’) gave me this information for which I am most thankful. I read it in English as an undergraduate, quite by chance. Here’s the extended title:
“Being a Monograph on Mediaeval Sinhalese Arts and Crafts, Mainly as Surviving in the 18th Century with an Account of the Structure of Society and the Status of the Craftsman.”
Gananath might well have known through Ludowyk that the first edition of this book was hand printed in England by Coomaraswamy himself over a period of 15 months on the same printing press (which he purchased), as the one in which the first edition of the complete works of the Mediaeval English poet Chaucer was printed by William Morris, one of leaders of the ‘Arts and Craft Movement’. There is a wonderful story I heard from a native informant of California, of Gananath’s freshman lecture at the University of California in San Diego, on Pilgrimages. On hearing Gananath recite an entire section from Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales ‘by heart,’ the students gave him a standing ovation!
Felix Guattari’s Three Ecologies, (namely Social Ecology, Mental Ecology, Environmental Ecology), is another a book worth reading (now freely downloadable), alongside the others as he was a radical psychotherapist trained in psychoanalysis by Lacan, and a Left Activist in France who also collaborated with the philosopher Gilles Deleuze on Anti–Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1968), which was a best seller. He also worked at a humane, innovative mental health institution which was part of the radical anti-psychiatry movement of the 60s and was a wild thinker who reminds me of Gananath and also had the requisite discipline, like him, to write books that crossed generations. He died all too soon, but Gananath will turn 95 on the second of February 2025.
Finally, my gratitude to the producers of this film, the Kathika Collective whose independent spirit, deep research, dedication, and not least, the love of cinema has led to the production of this film over a long period of time, which included the hiatus of the COVID pandemic. While Dimuthu is credited as researcher, script writer and director and Chathura Madhusanka with editing and camera, a great many well wishes (acknowledged in the credits), contributed freely to this film which has not received any external funding. The spirit of education that drove this film is a truly beautiful tribute to Gananath and Ranjini Obeysekere, our indispensable mentors, both.
Yahonis Pattini Kapumahattya’s haunting voice emanating from a deep folk history (which Gananath much admired and we are privileged to hear), accompanies the long credit list.
The film is dedicated:
“To all rural folk who in their diverse ways enriched the peasant Buddhist tradition and found Buddha in that”. (Concluded)
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