Somewhere, halfway through Yasmin Khan’s wonderful new book, I go looking for a picture of Aruna Asaf Ali, née Ganguli. I have only the vaguest recollection of her, but the woman Khan describes is entirely fascinating. When we first meet her, Aruna, the wife of Congress party member Asaf Ali, is “more noted for her saris than her political views”. But then her husband, along with much of the national leadership of Congress, is imprisoned in 1942. Though she is not among those arrested, she will shortly make the British government wish she had been.

Aruna, now a friend to revolutionaries, goes underground to evade arrest, popping up all over the country to ferment rebellion against the Raj. Eventually her fame and popularity eclipses her husband’s. Behind bars, he frets for her safety and agonises over his own, much less militant politics; he notes in his diary that his wife, 21 years younger, is “now an overzealous stranger,” bobbing her hair short and using unknown pseudonyms. Their marriage survives India’s eventual independence in name only. The crucible of the war years and the long struggle for independence has exposed and exacerbated every disagreement, every divergence in ideology between this man and wife. On a much grander scale, it will do the same for the Raj and its colony.

On the eve of World War II, the literacy rate in India was 12.5 per cent and life expectancy was 26. In the years that followed, Khan notes that “The war flattened out pretensions of empire… It mobilised women, workers and the urban middle classes in radical new ways. It heightened nationalism, both in India and in Britain…” The war, she concludes, left the Raj “in debt, morally redundant and staffed by exhausted administrators”. Certainly, World War II made the British Raj untenable in India. Jinnah himself would note: “The war which nobody welcomed proved to be a blessing in disguise.”

Khan is an associate Professor of History at the University of Oxford and no stranger to this period in South Asia — her first publication, The Great Partition: The Making of India and Pakistan, won the Gladstone Prize in 2007. In The Raj at War, Khan makes the assertion that “Britain did not fight the Second World War, the British Empire did”. There is an aspect to this that is well known — after all the Indian Army accounted for a significant portion of Britain’s forces, and men from this country fought and died in the Middle East, North Africa, and Europe. By 1940, about 2 lakh soldiers were enlisting a month and by 1945, the force would number well over 2 million — the largest volunteer army the world had ever seen.

But Khan’s book expands its remit to embrace those who tend to disappear into the background in most military histories: she writes of the mothers who sent their sons to war, the merchants who made their fortunes off supplying armies, and the peasants who saw their fields of paddy razed to make runways. In fact there are so many narrative threads in this ambitious, dense book that the author never seems to rest. Instead, she casts a dancing spotlight, its intimate circle illuminating lives through fragments of letters, memoirs, official reports and even popular folk songs.

As a result, this book contains within it multitude of other books, each compressed to a chapter or just a few paragraphs. For a reader, the absence of a central, strong narrative arc can be disorienting, but it is in the end a rewarding experience. Khan is an intelligent, compassionate guide to this moment in time, bringing depth and nuance not just to the events that we study in our history books but seeking beyond to those that are neglected such as the Bengal famine.

There is a telling moment at the end of this book where the Congress Minister in Madras, Raghavan Menon is approached by British writer Compton Mackenzie about a volume the latter is writing on the Indian experience of the war. Menon’s response leaves Mackenzie surprised: “He said at once that he was not interested in the book because he and his party had not considered it their war.”

It is an argument that seems to have lingered in India’s consciousness, for to acknowledge it in all its complexity would be to threaten the supremacy of chauvinistic, patriarchal national narratives. In Britain, Khan writes, remembering would be equally inconvenient for a country intent on celebrating a “story of plucky small-island British heroism”. The latter explains why it took till 2002 for the Commonwealth to install a memorial in London to honour India’s war dead.

In this context, The Raj at War is a very welcome addition to the historical canon. Khan produces stories that fascinate, that startle and that bring us to a point of confrontation with what she dubs the “terrible decisions, strange juxtapositions and unforeseen consequences,” of a long and devastating conflict — but at least now we have the option of acknowledging them all.

Published in the Hindu BusinessLine on September 11, 2015. Words by Smriti Daniel. 

[Colombo] In the run-up to critical parliamentary elections on 17 August, Manthri.lk, a parliamentary performance monitoring website, is providing unprecedented insight into the workings of Sri Lanka’s government.

Asoka Obeyesekere, leader of the Manthri.lk team, says the site was created to bridge the information gap “between the parliament and the public.” The site is run by Verité, a non-partisan Colombo-based think tank in partnership with Saberion, a transnational web and mobile technology provider. It is accessible in Sinhala, Tamil and English and aims to promote transparency and good governance.

Billed as an ‘MP monitoring scorecard,’ the site ranks Sri Lanka’s 225 MPs on productive time spent. The impartial classification coding system is based on data collected from a comprehensive analysis of the Hansard, a verbatim record of parliamentary proceedings. MPs who are active and contribute to Parliamentary proceedings in a procedurally correct manner are rewarded, while those who disrupt Parliament and impede its functions are penalised. The system is entirely non-partisan.

Obeyesekere explains that each minister is assigned a number within the system, allowing for a record of every contribution he or she makes in Parliament. Statements are qualified by methods of contribution, topic, type of debate and the language that the contribution is submitted in.

The site’s new ‘Election Hub’ allows visitors to see how MPs voted on key pieces of legislation, and offers additional rankings based on the minutes of the influential consultative committees. There is also a comprehensive list of candidate names and numbers which are otherwise hard to find in one place.

Obeyesekere stresses that Manthri.lk’s rankings are not definitive, as an MP’s value to his or her constituents might be determined by grassroots work undertaken outside Parliament. Information is also lacking, with MPs educational qualifications, Parliament attendance, and assets records not available in the public domain. “We have to rethink these arcane secrecy provisions that stop people from disseminating this vital information,” says Obeyesekere.

Policy Analyst Rohan Samarajiva says the site’s most important contribution is that it has given mainstream media information to work with but that the format may still be “a little too techy” for the average user.

Sanjana Hattotuwa, editor of the citizen journalism website Groundviews, agrees that the site is yet to see wide usage, which he says is unfortunate: “The value of such a site is that it allows that citizens to keeps tabs on who they have elected into public office and parliament and to see if their representatives have lived up to their promises.”

Published on SciDev.Net on August 15, 2015. Words by Smriti Daniel. Pix by Sven Torfinn / Panos.

[COLOMBO] High spatial resolution images captured by drones are bettering those generated by satellites, and enabling researchers in Sri Lanka to study crop health and irrigation in greater detail.

A team of the International Water Management Institute (IWMI) has been testing the Swiss-manufactured eBee, or Electronic Bee in the skies above the Anuradhapura district, this month (September). “Usually, the clear sky window doesn’t coincide with a satellite pass,” says Salman Siddiqui, head of the organisation’s geographic information systems.

“With a near infrared sensor on board, the eBee can help us or farmers identify stress in a crop 10 days before it actually shows up physically,” says Siddiqui. Multiple images taken by a drone can be stitched together to produce a digital surface or elevation model in virtual 3D. These can, for example, help identify areas vulnerable to flooding.

The 16 megapixel camera on-board the eBee boasts a spatial resolution of up to three centimetres which is significantly more detailed than images generated, for instance, by Google Earth which clocks in at five metres.

The drone also allows scientists to determine the frequency with which images are updated. In contrast, satellites data is usually refreshed only every 15 days or so. “Of course another major factor is the cost of satellite images, particularly when the area has to be covered several times,” says Siddiqui.

The eBee can spend up to 45 minutes in the air on a single charge of its batteries. Its sensors keep it stable through shifting winds and allow it to avoid other objects that might be sharing its airspace. On completion of mission, the eBee lands automatically, guided by its artificial intelligence module and the global positioning system.

P.M.P. Udayakantha, Sri Lanka’s surveyor general, expects that the eBee will come in useful in developing a national cadastre and doing strip surveys along road traces, canals and highways. “We are planning to do a survey of Badulla town with the UAV — this can expedite most of the work,” he tells SciDev.Net.

32 years after the riots of Black July engulfed Colombo, there is perhaps only one place in the city where you can still see traces of the fires that were set that day. But that is not the reason why tuk-tuk drivers will throw you an assessing look if you ask to be dropped off at the Rio in Slave Island. For most part, the once luxurious, 60-room hotel is forgotten, as is the adjoining Navah Cinema. It is the third member of that complex – an adult film cinema, also called the Rio – that has earned the venue its notoriety. But today, walk past the box office (unless you would like a ticket to watch Pussy Cat), take a right, brave a dark corridor and you will find yourself at the threshold of the city’s most unusual art exhibition.

From August 21, a festival called Cinnamon Colomboscope has brought visitors pouring into the once abandoned hotel for the exhibition Shadow Scenes. About 40 local and international artists have created 51 pieces for the show, which occupies all seven of the hotel’s floors and is on view till August 30.

Natasha Ginwala, who curated the show with Menika Van Der Poorten, said that the building itself was one of the reasons she was drawn to the project. Born and raised in Ahmedabad, Ginwala moved to Europe five years ago. For this project, she found her memories of the Gujarat riots of 2002 influencing her response to the space. “It became quite personal. I had to think about this as a living ruin and an archive that had endured this kind of history.”

The history she’s referring to is the anti-Tamil pogrom in Sri Lanka that was launched in July 1983 after an ambush by the terrorist group Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam claimed the lives of 13 soldiers in the Sri Lankan army. Mainly Sinhalese mobs led a week of rioting that left some 150,000 people homeless and anywhere between 400 and 3,000 people dead. The numbers remain disputed.

Today, the area around the Rio is also contested, but for a different reason. The neighbourhood of Slave Island, known in Sinhala as Kompannaveediya and in Tamil as Kompani Theru, both meaning Company Street, was marked for a beautification drive under former President Mahinda Rajapaksa’s government. In a controversial move, some 582 families were evicted two years ago to make way for a $429.5 million development project in the area by Tata Housing.

Now, work there has been suspended while Tata Housing negotiates with President Maithripala Sirisena’s new government. Meanwhile, the affected families wait in an uneasy limbo.

The first floor of the Rio and the opening of the exhibition attempts to introduce viewers to this context with a series of photographs of the communities affected by the beautification drive. In subsequent levels, artists have been assigned rooms in which to create individual scenes.

The approach has paid off, with diverse responses across a range of media, including film, photography, sculpture, audio and paintings. Room has also been made for foreign perspectives, from the quiet sophistication of Indian artist Rathin Barman’s brick dust and ink in Documentation of Architectural Reconciliation to the Karachi-II series, Pakistani artist Bani Abidi’s meditation on the cinemas of Lahore.

Bani Abidi: Funland, Karachi Series II, 2013-14, film and photographic prints. 

At the very top, in what once housed the nightclub Eagles’ Nest, an audio installation by Colombian artist Pedro Gómez-Egaña, and a panoramic view of the numerous development projects dotting the city greets visitors. “From up there you can hypothesise what future can be composed from the present of the city,” said Ginwala, “while in the interior you move through the past, shuttering across time and temporalities.”

Pedro Gómez-Egaña: The Vimana Kiranaavarta Observatory, 2015;  sound installation. 

Preparing the decrepit building for this exhibition has presented its own set of challenges. Jan Ramesh De Saram, cultural affairs coordinator at the Goethe-Institut in Colombo, says the entire structure first had to have electricity put in. Sections with broken roofs, which were open to the elements and frequently flooded, had to be repaired, he added. Undaunted, artists Mahen Perera and Janananda Laksiri actually took advantage of the stagnant water in their rooms to create a reflective surface for suspended, site responsive installations.

Mahen Perera: Things, 2015; site-responsive sculptures.

Taken together, the 51 exhibits have in common an approach that emphasises participatory, research-based, highly personal and socially responsive works, said Van Der Poorten. She took particular care to include pieces by artists such as Pakkiyarajah Pushpakanthan, Thavarasa Thajendran, Mariya Thevathas Vijitharan and Thujiba Vijayalayan, who live and work in Jaffna. The region felt the full brunt of the war, and as a consequence has been traditionally underrepresented in the country’s art scene.

Among the participating artists are those who have been internally displaced or imprisoned both during the war and in violent insurrections such as those staged by Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna in 1971 and again in 1987. The artwork that arises from this lived experience is powerful and emotive.

In T Shanaathanan’s Nation for instance, a barricade of traditional sand bags is interspersed with sacks made from lavish wedding sarees – the last resort of people who had run out of other materials from which to build their defences. The barricade is circular, and the space around it, representing civil society, is narrow and cramped.

T Shanaathanan: Nation, 2015; installation.

Prominent artist Chandraguptha Thenuwara is one of those whose works are on display. Since 1997, Thenuwara has staged a brave annual one-man exhibition in memory of Black July. Until 2009, when the conflict was brought to a brutal conclusion, his works were determinedly anti-war but in the post-war years he took to grappling with contemporary issues related to ethnic divisions in the country.

Since a change in government in January, there is a sense that there is now more room for national introspection. Thenuwara is pleased to see something on the scale of Shadow Scenes take place. “This might be the only space remaining that is related to the 1983 riots; beautification and development have erased a lot of memories,” he said of the Rio.

Chandragupta Thenuwara: Lotus Zone, 2015; drawings and installation. 

Some of the young artists engaging with these issues weren’t even born in 1983, but Ginwala said the curators made a determined effort to ensure the exhibition wasn’t mired in the history it was grappling with. “For us it was not about looking back and being immobilised,” she said, “but saying, this happened and now what can we do from here.”

A few other works from the exhibition.

Kavan Balasurya: Capital Complex, 2015; acrylic, graphite and pastel on paper.

Pradeep Chandrasiri: Inside the Charcoal Mountain, 2015;
installation with charcoal wall drawing. 

Agnieszka Polska: The leisure time of a firearm, 2015; mixed media. Photo courtesy of artist and Żak | Branicka Galerie, Berlin.

(Above and below) Pala Pothupitiye: Borakakul & Borakakul, 2004; installation.

Published on Scroll.in on August 27, 2015. Words by Smriti Daniel. Pix by Ruvin de Silva. 

[COLOMBO] Sri Lanka has made significant progress on maternal and child health but falls short on critical health services for vulnerable women, sexual minorities, the country’s at-risk population and those who live in former conflict areas, say the authors of a country profile on sexual and reproductive health.

This two-part report on Universal Access to Sexual and Reproductive healthproduced by Colombo-based Women and Media Collective (WMC) focuses on access to health services and rights issues around sexual and reproductive health. It says that the favourable national maternal mortality statistics hide regional and sectoral differences.

For instance, in the Northern district of Mullaitivu, in the former conflictzone, the maternal mortality rate is 110 per 1000 live births, while in the more prosperous district of the capital Colombo the rate stands at 8.7 per 1000 live births.

“Women from former conflict areas find it difficult to access health services which may not be easily available in their district,” notes Kumudini Samuel, a senior programme and research associate at WMC. “Women in these districts could be supported if community centres hosted regular clinics.”

Across the island, single women are often overlooked in government health schemes which adhere to conventional notions of reproductive services offered to traditional, heterosexual families. “Marriage may not be something they want for themselves, but they still want access to sexual and reproductive services,” adds Samuel

The country profile says that a lack of data on sexual minorities, in particular on Sri Lanka’s transgender population, has left the medical establishment ignorant of the health challenges faced by the group. “The members of LGBTQ community are hidden because they are criminalised, so data gathering is difficult,” Thiloma Munasinghe, a consultant community physician tellsSciDev.Net. Samuel notes that sexual minorities feel unsafe about coming out because they fear losing access to health and legal services.

Evangeline de Silva, gender and sexuality programme officer at WMC, stresses the need to develop formal data gathering systems to support evidence-basedpolicy and programming. She says such systems need to target areas where there are data gaps related to gender-based violence, sexual health rights of men, sexual dysfunctions, and sexual health rights of those beyond reproductive age.

Experts say Sri Lanka owes its impressive maternal and child care figures to policies adopted in the 1940s — healthcare in the island nation is financed primarily by the government, and a nationwide network is in place. However, Munasinghe notes that 30 years of war have impacted the delivery of essential health services and that “poverty pockets”, where access is poor, remain.

Gaps also exist in accurate data on HIV and AIDS. Sri Lanka is currently classified as a country with low prevalence with some 2,074 cases identified as of December 2014. “We can’t say those are the only ones because we still haven’t reached the most at-risk population,” cautions Madhusha Dissanayake, director of HIV/AIDS and advocacy at the Family Planning Association. According to the report, men who work as migrant workers, men who have sex with men, sex workers and members of the armed and police force fall into the at-risk population.

The country’s healthcare infrastructure will be put to the test as Sri Lanka sets out to eradicate syphilis and prevent new transmissions of HIV from mother to child by 2017. Munasinghe explains that a key part of the government’s strategy would be to package HIV testing with the standard health screening for pregnant women.

“Although we have a robust health service, we need to be aware of gaps,” says Samuel, adding that lack of access to and availability of public health services in under-serviced areas should be cause for concern.

Published in SciDev.Net on December 16, 2015. Words by Smriti Daniel. Pix Copyright: Chris Stowers / Panos

[COLOMBO] An integrated resource recovery centre (IRRC) model, which uses composting, recycling and bio-digestion, offers an inexpensive solution to the escalating problem of waste management in Sri Lanka, say the authors of a new Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (ESCAP) publication.

The island nation’s cities face multiple waste management challenges arising from economic development, a growing population and inadequate awareness on recycling.  The IRRC model offers a low-cost, low-technology, community-based and decentralized solution.

The IRRC model, successfully deployed in Bangladesh, was adopted in Sri Lanka’s Pilisaru Waste Management Programme in 2014, led by the Central Environmental Authority. Biogas, biodiesel, compost, plastic, paper, glass and even electricity can be among the end products of an IRRC model and it is due to be replicated nationally.

“One of the advantages of the IRRC model is that it is adaptable,” Donovan Storey, chief of the sustainable urban development, environment and development division at ESCAP tells SciDev.Net. “Each facility can be customised to cope with the waste composition and the needs and limitations of the communities it serves.”

Currently, several cities are only partially served by waste collection services. In Matale, for example, the municipality collects only 60 per cent of the waste, leaving the informal sector to play a key role in collection, separation and recycling, particularly of inorganic materials.

Sudarshana Fernando, a resource recovery and reuse expert at the International Water Management Institute (IWMI) in Colombo says the IRRC model, which includes an emphasis on both physical facilities and social systems, is a viable alternative option to a centralised composting system.

“Long-term financial sustainability seems to be the major challenge of the industry at present,” Fernando tells SciDev.Net.  “The current average cost-recovery potential of central compost plants in Sri Lanka is as low as one-third of the operation and maintenance (O&M) cost of the compost plants.

However, Fernando says IRRC can be an alternative to centralised composting.  “By reducing O&M costs and seeking additional value propositions [inorganic recyclables, residual derived fuels, etc.] to reduce the gap in cash flow, the outcome may be a positive impact on long-term sustainability of the plants.”

According to ESCAP a waste crisis is emerging in the Asia and Pacific region as a result of rising quantities of waste, on the one hand, and poor regulation and management, on the other. ‘This crisis threatens to overwhelm the resources and capacity of local governments and communities alike,’ the publication says.

Published in SciDev.Net on December 6, 2015. Words by Smriti Daniel. Pix Copyright: Robin Hammond / Panos

[COLOMBO] South Asia’s medium-sized and secondary cities, rather than its megacities, will determine whether urban development succeeds or fails in the region says a UN report.

The State of Asian and Pacific Cities 2015, released in October 2015 by the UN Human Settlements Programme (UN-Habitat) and the UN Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (ESCAP), says that the waycities develop while still home to a small population can determine how sustainable they are decades later. This includes how they approachenergy and resource management and the development of effective and accountable governance.

“They are the window to the future urban world,” Donovan Storey, chief of the sustainable urban development, environment and development division at ESCAP tells SciDev.Net. “In avoiding the mistakes made by the region’s larger megacities we must re-shape our urban future through rapidly growing secondary cities.”

Several South Asian countries lack national urban policies or development frameworks, resulting in government ministries and local bodies being out of step with each other, says the report. It proposes integrated planning, in which national urban strategies guide local authorities to plan for and meet the needs of their cities.

A key challenge highlighted by the report is the need to eliminate drivers of inequality that can result in significant differences in the experiences of various communities inhabiting the same spaces. “Urbanisation has no doubt contributed greatly to the region’s success in reducing poverty,” says Storey. “However urban inequality remains a significant problem.”

There is a need for an ‘urban data revolution’ to combat this inequality among city populations, say the authors of the report. However, there is a dearth of data, particularly around the workings of the informal sector. “We are planning for cities in an absence of information in many key areas, and in ignorance of majority populations in some cases.”

“If the new urbanisation does not acknowledge the diversity of urban settings being composed of different interest groups and classes of people…if urbanisation primarily favours and benefits the rich in terms of opportunities and access to resources in the spaces of city, the commutate effect will be aggravation of inequality,” warns Udan Fernando, executive director, Centre for Poverty Analysis (CEPA), Colombo.

Asian cities should prioritise equitability, inclusivity and allow diverse groups of city inhabitants to participate in how their cities are designed and maintained, Fernando says.

Published in SciDev.Net on January 5, 2016. Words by Smriti Daniel. 

With white sarongs draped around their waists and white turbans on their heads, two bare-chested traditional Sabaragamuwa dancers perform on stage. In the background is a contemporary jazz trio improvising music that echoes and weaves through the ritual chant.

This is a juxtaposition not often seen in Sri Lanka, making the Baliphonics group compelling enough for Jan Ramesh de Saram, cultural coordinator at the Goethe-Institut, to invite them to perform at the Colombo centre. The band traces its roots to Musicmatters, a school in the city that is widely acknowledged to be producing some of the most creative music on the island.

Each quarter, Musicmatters also presents Big Ears, with performances that are original, exciting and constantly evolving. Responding to and inspired by its Sri Lankan context, the music is unique to this little corner of the earth.

According to De Saram, the small school and its constellation of local and foreign collaborators have laid the foundations for the Colombo music scene of the future. “Their portfolio has expanded constantly in the form of countless ensembles, acts and musical ideas being formed and tried out,” he said. “Apart from the Baliphonics, the Serendib Sorcerers bring back reinterpreted folk melodies while Kinesthetics 0800 creates an electronica live band experience. There are other ensembles, with intriguing names such as Doe Eye, Transcoastal Collective, Tomcat, Magnum etc.”

Among those driving the movement at Musicmatters is Sumudi Suraweera, the school’s co-director, who has a PhD in ethnomusicology. Suraweera and classical pianist Eshantha Joseph Peiris started Musicmatters in 2010 to introduce an alternative model for Western music education in Sri Lanka.

“Musicmatters fills a void in Colombo’s western music education and performing platforms,” said Lakshman Joseph de Saram, a composer and artistic director at The Chamber Music Society of Colombo. “When it comes to presenting live music, they have been constantly innovating and blending a wide range of styles and ideas, culminating in a quite intoxicating genre-bending annual festival of music.”

Currently, Musicmatters has 13 bands associated with it including Baliphonics. In its most current form, Baliphonics consists of a duo on double bass and drums and two ritual artistes. The Bali ritual that gives Baliphonics its name draws from a tradition that has been passed down through families in Sri Lanka’s Raigama region. Suraweera, who’s part of the ensemble, wants to see the music survive even as the ritual fades into memory. It may seem like an uneasy marriage, but the performance feels vibrant, deceptively chaotic and  and entirely true to its roots.

One of the most established bands of the lot is the progressive rock outfit Thriloka. The quintet focuses on improvising music inspired by traditional Sri Lankan sounds. Their most recent project was a loud, melodic 20-minute track inspired by the Kuweni Asne lament of the Sri Lankan upcountry Kohombo Kankariya ritual.

Another unique collaboration involves a nine-hour drive from Batticaloa in the Eastern Province to Colombo as Lavanya Mahadeva, Kisnaveni Palasingam, Selvaraj Rajiv, Baskaramurthi Satheeswaran and Meiyanathan Ketheeswaran meet up with their collaborators to form The Musicmatters Transcoastal Collective.

The bands all have dedicated genres. The Serendib Sorcerers embrace an improvisational, traditional jazz based on melodies from Sri Lankan-Sinhala folk music. Sakvala Chakraya produces post-colonial trance-punk while the Amila Sandaruwan Band plays experimental pop-rock in Sinhala. As for the Brahminy Kites, the folk music of North India is among their diverse influences.

Musicmatters co-founder Peiris feels the school’s output is the result of some deliberate choices. “Musicmatters has strived to provide a space – both intellectual and physical – in which our teaching staff can experiment, absorb influences and rehearse free from the usual commercial constraints,” he said. “The sheer variety of musical collaborations that have resulted from Musicmatters-facilitated encounters are a testament to the viability of this concept.”

Peiris said the school has had some success raising funds on Kickstarter to support recordings, but the focus is on the live performance experience, for both listeners and collaborating musicians.

Experimental musician and sound artist Isuru Kumarasinghe is part of the project. He has had no formal training and is passionate about the music he makes. “There are a few artists here in Sri Lanka who are interested in doing something different,” he said.

Musicmatters has provided a platform for Kumarasinghe to meet likeminded people. “When I met these people and we started to interact musically, that was a new thing for me. And I wasn’t alone. I know everybody has learned so many things from each other. It’s about gathering and sharing. I think this experiment is really beautiful and very interesting.”
Published in Scroll.in on November 13, 2015. Words by Smriti Daniel.

C-H-A-M-M-I.

Chandima Rajapatirana’s first word, painstakingly spelled out, letter by letter, was a revelation. He had had no means of communicating in the 17 years that led up to this moment. Few suspected he had anything worth saying.

Raised by his Sri Lankan parents in the US, he was first diagnosed with autism at the age of four. Later, doctors added apraxia — a motor disorder that hindered his ability to control body movements — to the diagnosis. Chandima was mute. He would be forced to listen, unable to voice protest, as experts told his mother that her son was ‘retarded’ and should be institutionalised. He would bite, scratch and bang his head against the wall. All the while, he watched the world pass him by, and saw his ‘normal’ siblings discover it in ways he could not. Then, on the cusp of his adulthood, his mother, Anoja, finally found a communication technique that worked for him. Chandima began to type using Facilitated Communication (commonly called FC).

His first word was notable not only for breaking his silence, but by altering the way his family spelled his nickname — using an ‘i’ instead of a ‘y’ — he was demonstrating autonomy and will.

Today, Chandima can type independently, without support from his facilitator, if need be. He is a poet, author and an advocate for the rights of disabled people. In 2007, his mother Anoja and he returned to Colombo to open EASE (Educate, Advocate, Support, Empower), a small centre where they offer free support and education to people who have disabilities.

Parents visiting them are often astonished by Chandima. He is effectively bilingual, and can ‘speak’ in Sinhala by switching his English alphabet board for a Sinhala one. His collection of essays and poems, Traveller’s Tales (published this year) with brutal honesty addresses how he experiences anxiety and sensory overload; why he might have trouble in a crowd, or making eye contact, or even simply sitting still.

For instance, this is what it can feel like to try and have a conversation: “When I want to speak, my impulse goes to my body. Gyrating cursed limbs take over. My arms fling up, my hands join and wring… Speakers open their mouths and words pour out. I open my mouth and scream. Your sounds emerge modulated, shaped into words. Mine emerge unmodulated, unshaped, un-understandable squeals. The reality is that I sound like an animal. It is an awful thought. The awareness of how bizarre I sound kills the desire to speak.”

Though Chandima relies on FC, he tells me that he and Anoja are aware that there is no single technique to suit everyone. “Best you just say that I am not the last word, nor the first word, just one of many,” he types out.

**

Autism is a complex developmental disorder that appears in the first three years of life, impacting the brain’s development, its interpretation of sensory input, as well as social and communication skills. The condition manifests across a wide range of symptoms, which is why the diagnostic label is Autism Spectrum Disorder.

“Children with autism have varying communication challenges, and it is very case-specific, so it is difficult to generalise,” says Soharni Tennekoon, a Colombo-based speech therapist. Autistic children may be entirely non-verbal or may have a rich vocabulary on specific subject matters, she explains, adding that many have difficulty interpreting or employing the non-speech elements — eye contact, facial expressions and body language — that inform so much of our communication with each other.

Chandima’s friend Jennifer Seybert knows that an autistic person is as likely to misunderstand as to be misunderstood. Only diagnosed as an 11-year-old, she remembers: “I was tuned into the world around me but not being able to communicate was hell. I was locked inside a glass bubble, figuratively, pounding on the glass to let me out; however, all that was being noticed was my behaviour.” When her parents introduced her to FC she was already in her twenties. A new way to communicate brought with it a different kind of emotional turmoil. “Being locked inside of myself for 24 years, I had much to work through and process. Trusting a world outside of my autistic world was scary but I was determined to make this work,” she says.

‘Making it work’ for Jennifer, as for Chandima, has been about embracing an engaged and purposeful life. She earned a BA in Psychology in 2006 and a Master’s in Disability Studies in 2012. She is an active autism advocate as well.

It is only in recent years that we have begun to hear from people like Chandima and Jennifer. The few first-hand accounts of autism that existed were produced overwhelmingly by those described as high-functioning autistics, namely, able to converse using speech. In Autism and the Myth of the Person Alone, American educator and FC champion Douglas Biklen points out that the use of the term ‘high-functioning’ is problematic as it implies that someone who cannot speak has less intelligence than someone who can.

Douglas’s book includes a chapter on Tito Rajarshi Mukhopadhyay and his mother Soma. Tito grew up mostly in Bangalore, and was home-schooled. Acknowledging that most people would consider Tito’s case severe, Douglas says, ‘the dominant view is that three-fourths of people with autism are mentally retarded. It’s not true, but that’s the view.’

Tito has done more to prove that view wrong than many. He is the author of books including How Can I Talk if my Lips Don’t Move?, The Gold of the Sunbeams and The Mind Tree, which he wrote before he turned 11. He was anointed a miracle, and his mother the miracle worker. Together they appeared on 60 Minutes II, featured in the BBC documentary Tito’s Story (2000) and were in the pages of The New York Times, National Geographic and People.

A mother’s dogged determination made all of this possible. When Tito couldn’t hold a pencil, she attached one to his hand with a rubber band; when he panicked because a power cut stopped the anchoring whir of the fan above him, she stood beneath it, moving the blades manually with a long rod until the power came back on. She talked to him incessantly, read him Shakespeare, Hardy, Dickens and insisted he attempt his own poetry and prose. During the 60 Minute segment, the interviewer asks Tito what his life would have been like without his mother. The camera follows his pencil as he responds: “I would have been a vegetable.”

Soma has since collated the techniques that worked with Tito into her Rapid Prompting Method (RPM). Today, over 600 clients between the ages of two and 50 have come to study with Soma, who ‘begins by identifying in individuals how and which of the senses dominate.’ Her approach is in many ways unique and parents have attested that the results are quick and dramatic. But like FC, it is not for everyone.

Whether it’s FC, RPM or any other augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) strategies that offer options for communication, what isn’t on offer is a cure for autism. In an email, Texas-based Soma says, “I wouldn’t advise ‘hard work’ to folks who are already doing hard work. I wouldn’t advise ‘patience’. It is easy to advise. Many times impatience works wonders too. I would suggest — keep going because the way is the way through. There isn’t a way around.”

**

In the Chennai office of Avaz, an AAC app has been evolving steadily. In 2011, it got its inventor, Ajit Narayanan, on to MIT’s prestigious TR35 list of the most exciting young innovators in the world. The Avaz app is meant to be a part of a child’s daily life, and relies on a clever augmentative picture communication software to help parents and teachers work with children. (The price — $99.99 — and the need for a device such as a tablet computer to run it may be one reason why the app is downloaded by more people outside India.)

As the company works to build an Indian market, the head of its product development team, Narayanan R, argues not just for basic communication but also language that is richly expressive and nuanced. “Imagine if Stephen Hawking was always given a vocabulary of eight pictures to communicate with everyone around him. How much research would he have contributed?” Narayanan asks.

One must believe, regardless of appearances, that a child is capable of communication. “The first rule for any speech therapist/special educator is to presume competence,” says Narayanan. “A lot of times, it’s the disability of the medium that we use to make them ‘understand’. Hence it’s not their inability, it’s the medium’s inability to get through to them.”

In Narayanan’s experience though, it is worth making the effort: “It gives them tremendous self-belief and enables them to achieve more. They can participate in classrooms, socialise with peers, write stories, and express pain, anger and love.” Certainly, to be heard for the first time can be a profoundly empowering experience. In a testimonial on the Avaz site, a young man named Mukund writes that on being able to communicate for the first time he knew: “we could live like other human beings. We knew we could belong to the world of human beings.”

**

The one thread that runs through these diverse narratives and emerging techniques is the commitment to return agency to autistic people themselves. Cynthia Blasko, an autism advocate and communication trainer in the US, thinks it is high time we did so. “We have done a horrible job historically, when it comes to including people with disabilities in the discussion about their development, because there has been a belief that they cannot participate,” she says.

Blasko, who is also the parent of an autistic child, believes individuals with autism could benefit greatly from being told about their diagnosis and how it may affect their sensory experience. “We need to teach how current neuroscience explains some of the differences in how the autistic mind works… how psychology and sociology and modern linguistics all contribute to our self-perception, as well as others’ perceptions.”

Back in Sri Lanka, MM Nirmala Priyangani, a seamstress and single mother, travels hours by bus to bring her daughter Ashini to the educational programme run by EASE. Bus rides used to be a nightmare — Ashini would often pinch and bite strangers around her. The mother-daughter duo would be accosted by hostile stares and comments. Unsurprisingly, they often chose to stay secluded at home. But there too, in outbursts of rage, Ashini would physically attack her brother, and throw his books on the floor.

Nirmala suspected — and her friends and neighbours could never resist confirming — that Ashini’s autism was the result of vengeful karma. But things have changed since they became regulars at EASE. Being recognised as an intelligent being by her family has gentled Ashini. Nirmala knows they have much to learn about autism and each other, but just to have been given the chance seems like a miracle. “I used to think that her autism was a punishment for my sins,” Nirmala says, tears in her eyes, “but now I am glad I have this child, because I can love her. She is not a punishment, she is a gift.”

Today, Ashini is generally calmer than she has ever been before and happily spends time with her brother. Her family thought that the 13-year-old girl was severely ‘retarded’ and never expected her to speak. But recently when her grandfather dropped a cup of tea, she gasped, “Aiyo!” A single word proved just how far Ashini had travelled.

First published in The Hindu Blink (Cover Story) on October 30, 2015. Words by Smriti Daniel. Pix courtesy Anoja Rajapatirana. 

British novelist Sebastian Faulks is the latest member of the Fairways Galle Literary Festival team. His job description, as he puts it is to act as “a sort of go-between” for authors being invited to the festival and the organizers themselves. Formerly the first literary editor of The Independent and now the author of over a dozen books, Faulks is that rare beast, a writer who is both critically acclaimed and immensely popular.

Having appeared at more than his fair share of festivals, the author has chosen to make his debut behind the scenes with FGLF. It helps that he knows this island well, having come here for the first time in 1981 for what he now describes as perhaps the most enjoyable three weeks of his life. Eager to “escape the grey English winter for as long as possible,” Faulks is looking forward to discovering the festival itself. Of Sri Lanka, he says: “The civil war was obviously a trauma and a disaster, but I found a cautious optimism in January which I hope has flourished since. I am longing to be back.”

Below are excerpts from his email interview with the Sunday Times.

Sunday Times: You have said you set your heart on being a novelist at a young age – what did you imagine the life of a novelist would be like at 14? How does it compare with reality?

Sebastian Faulks: It is much more of a day job than I had imagined. It is very hard work. It also involves much more publicity and marketing than I ever dreamed of. Luckily I enjoy meeting readers and going to festivals. But it is not quite the austere or monkish calling I had envisaged.

ST: How does the experience of having worked as a reporter and editor shape the way you function as a writer today?

SF: Being a newspaper reporter helped me understand how easy it is to find things out, if you are determined. One week I had to be an ‘expert’ on church architecture, the next on some aspect of wildlife. I learned that if you telephone people they will usually help – even if it sometimes not in their own interests. I learned not to be afraid of tackling subjects about which I was initially ignorant. I also learned not to be frightened of the blank page. You can’t be all fey and artsy about it if the news editor is shouting at you.

ST: From A Trick of Light to Where My Heart Used to Beat, your career spans decades. How has your writing and your approach to writing evolved over that time? 

SF: I only ever tried to write the best book that was in me. And usually the subjects came calling. They found me. Only in retrospect can I see that there is some sort of shape and development over 30 years. It has to do with the themes that emerged. But I was not aware at the time that I was ‘getting towards the end of Phase 1’ or ‘starting on Phase 3’ or whatever. However, I am aware that I am about to begin a new phase now. Heaven knows what will be in it…

ST: How did it feel to see Birdsong adapted by the BBC? How do you think the story fared in the transition?

SF: I thought Eddie Redmayne was terrific.  I was lucky to have him in that part. And Cate Blanchett as Charlotte Gray. You could not ask for better actors than those two.

ST: In Where My Heart Used to Beat, and of course Birdsong and the novels before that, you recreate the past in an incredibly vivid, detailed way. What for you is the appeal and the challenge of writing historical fiction? Is it inevitable that you would write about these times from the certainty of the present looking back or do you try to write from the uncertainty of the past, the moment as it was unfolding?

SF: You have to write in that moment, the turbulent present with no perspective. The key for me was understanding that people in 1910 or 1940 felt fully ‘modern’, just as you or I do. And humanity has changed very little, I suppose.

One thing I wanted to do was to understand who I was, where I had come from. That led me to try to understand the past and to honour the glorious dead. The dead are no more dead than we are alive, if you see what I mean…”

ST: What do you think historical fiction, your France Trilogy for instance, tells us about the present moment?

SF: “I hope the French trilogy opened up a fairly long perspective on France, Britain and Europe in the 20^th century, but it began domestically and focused tightly on individual experience. It suggests that even the private love affair of a young maid in a run-down hotel is shaped by the movement of public events long ago. It was this connection that intrigued me. I wanted to take ‘history’ out of the class room and show that the effects of the past are felt in every beat of your heart, today.

ST: 13 books in, are you sure there will be a 14th and a 15th? Do you still feel anxious about where the next book will come from or how it will be received?

SF: I have reached a crossroads with Where My Heart Used to Beat, because it sums up and gives shape in quite a short book to a number of quite complex themes I have been dealing with a long time.

I have more books in me, though at the moment I don’t know what they are. I am not sure I could bear to write another novel as sad as Where My Heart, though. It is not good for one’s health or sanity!”

ST: Spectre will be out soon, and so the Bond franchise hums on. What was it like to follow in Ian Fleming’s footsteps in writing a new Bond novel?

SF: I read all the books through before attempting my own. And I enjoyed them, especially the early ones, before Fleming, I think, became bored with it. The later ones are a bit silly. The good ones work for a simple reason. He creates jeopardy round his hero. You feel frightened for him. You ache for him to escape and survive. That jeopardy thing is harder to do than you might think.

ST: In what ways did you want to pay tribute to Fleming and in what ways did you want to differentiate your work? When did you find yourself having the most fun with that project?  

SF: I copied the stuff I liked – girls, Feix Leiter, drink, action – and dropped the stuff I didn’t like so much. The best bit was discovering an exotic real-life machine called the Ekranoplan that might have been invented by Fleming himself. I had fun with Scarlett, the girl, and her twin sister. I enjoyed making her cleverer than Bond in a 21^st century way – but I tried to make her fun and sexy in an old-fashioned way too. I think she is probably the best thing in the book. And the parachute jump. That was fun.

ST: You’ve advised aspiring writers to write about what they don’t know. How has doing that made you the writer you are today?

SF: All the words come from your head and through your fingers. Quite enough of you gets into the book anyway. Writing about people of a different sex, different age and in a different country was a liberation to me. It set free my energy and imagination, such as they are.

Published in the Sunday Times on October 25, 2015. Words by Smriti Daniel. Pix courtesy Sebastian Faulks.

Though she was born in Kuala Lampur, and has since lived in England, Malaysia, Thailand and Indonesia, Minoli Salgado will tell you her earliest memories are of her grandparent’s home in Sri Lanka. Revealingly, this is a country she feels compelled to return to again and again in her writing. A poet and the author of several short stories, Salgoda is perhaps best known for her debut novel A Little Dust on the Eyes, which was recently shortlisted for the DSC Prize. (The winner of the Prize is to be announced at the Fairway Galle Literary Festival in January.)

The novel follows the twined lives of two cousins – Renu works with the families of the disappeared in Sri Lanka and is only reunited with Savi, who was pursuing a PhD in the UK, when the latter returns for a family wedding. Together the two confront an increasingly complicated and painful past and when the tsunami strikes, are thrown into even greater turmoil.

An academic with a PhD in Indo-Anglian fiction, Salgado currently teaches at the University of Sussex where she is a Reader in English Literature. She is also the author of  Writing Sri Lanka: Literature, Resistance and the Politics of Place. For this influential study of Sri Lankan literature in English, Salgado analysed in detail the works of eight Sri Lankan writers – Michael Ondaatje, Romesh Gunasekera, Shyam Selvadurai, A. Sivanandan, Jean Arasanayagam, Carl Muller, James Goonewardene and Punyakante Wijenaike.

Below is an email interview the author gave the Sunday Times:

ST: Congratulations on making the DSC longlist! You won the SL Leeds Literary Prize for A Little Dust on the Eyes and I’m curious about what role you think literary prizes play in the industry as well as if you sometimes feel wary of them?

MS: Prizes play a crucial role in drawing attention to a book in a crowded literary market and I am very grateful to SI Leeds for giving the novel its first break. Prizes also raise issues of inclusivity and exclusivity, of whose experiences get prioritised, whose voices get valued and heard. There was an interesting study by Nicola Griffith recently that showed there was a serious gender imbalance in large literary prizes, and we also all know how difficult it is to cut it as a South Asian writer. Smaller prizes like SI Leeds and large ones like DSC mark important cultural interventions. I am thrilled that my novel, which focuses on the experiences of Sri Lankan women and the exclusions of history, has made the long-list.

ST: You’ve lived in many different countries, but what is it about Sri Lanka that draws your attention as a writer? In your work, you grapple with disappearances, silence and unreliable histories, in what way do those themes reflect your encounters with this island? 

MS: Yes, I have lived outside Sri Lanka for a long time and I have always been coming back. Sri Lanka has been a constant in the middle of all the change. Whenever we were here, my father would take me around the country, re-introducing me to my large extended family. The experience gave me a strong sense of connectedness that has developed beyond family links. Sri Lanka is a vibrant land, teeming with stories that you move into every day. I come awake here. As for my engagement with silence and enforced disappearances, these are shaped by the time I spent here in the late 1980s and early 1990s when I became interested in the Mothers’ Front and the example set by Dr Manorani Saravanamuttu. She is someone who spoke out when others did not, someone who spoke truth to power.

ST: How did Renu and Savi emerge as characters while you were writing A Little Dust on the Eyes? Tell us about their relationship, and how each of their concerns drives the plot forward. 

MS: Renu was going to be the main character. I was trying to find a way into her story when I thought, why not write a double narrative, from two different perspectives, one that would broaden the reach of the book and take it outside Sri Lanka. Savi came to me then. Her specific difficulties, which are tied to her personal losses and wilful blindness to political events, immediately enriched and balanced Renu’s story. Renu doesn’t have Savi’s personal hang-ups but her search for political answers ends up taking her into a closer knowledge of her family. Each has something to learn. The personal and the political are intertwined and the close connection between the cousins, as they discover themselves through one another, drives the narrative forward.

ST: You landed in Sri Lanka a few hours before the tsunami struck. What do you remember of days in the immediate aftermath? In fiction, how does integrating a real tragedy on this scale both challenge and allow for new realities for you as a writer? 

MS: This was a terrible time – we all knew people affected. It defies description. As a writer you are looking for a language to make sense of it while also having to acknowledge its resistance to being written about. I wrote a piece, ‘The Waves’, just days after the tsunami, having visited some refugee camps; it is quite raw, I think, and communicates this difficulty. I took a different approach in the novel, juxtaposing different voices to show both the struggle for expression and the impossibility of containing the event in language. The tsunami is narrated through a host of different discourses – journalistic, mythic and scientific, among them – and exceeds them all. Ultimately it is the characters’ experience of the tsunami, each one different and individual, that readers will remember.

ST: Why do you think the civil war is a preoccupation shared by Sri Lankan writers both resident in the country and in the diaspora?

MS: One of the things that connects us is this shared past. Fiction and poetry are hugely important – vital, I would say – in giving us access to new ways of seeing, writing and bearing witness to this past, in opening it up to scrutiny, challenging official versions, creating channels for communication, forging links in ways that might allow for greater understanding of the differences between, and commonalities of, experience. Literature has the power to transform our relationship to the world.

ST: Why do you, personally, choose to write about the civil war? As a writer how do you approach topics that may be very contested and emotionally fraught? 

I belong to the generation that grew into adulthood with the war. I was an undergraduate when it began so it has shaped my thinking.  I am acutely conscious of the need for an ethical writing of trauma and have tried to address this in A Little Dust by layering the narrative, so that not only the characters bear witness to events but the readers are made witnesses too. I would like readers to become conscious of their role as witnesses to history, to take responsibility for this.

ST: You’ve written poetry and short stories and now a novel. How do you decide which format you will work in when you have a story to tell? Does one ever become the other – say a poem feeding into a short story?   

MS: I don’t choose the form; ideas come and crystallise around an event, a character, a voice. It makes me think of Tartuffe – you know the bit where he says something like ‘What! I have been talking in prose all this time? I didn’t know!’  You discover the form for a piece as you keep writing. A novel needs planning and historical grounding, while stories and poems can be more ephemeral and intimate. ‘The Waves’ was first published as a prose piece but I later rewrote it as a poem to emphasise the voices that make it up.

ST: When do you think you will be in Sri Lanka next? Is there another book in the offing? If yes, do you imagine you will set parts of it in Sri Lanka again?

MS: Quite soon, I hope. I have accepted an invitation to participate in the Galle Literary Festival. And yes, I am working on another book. Whatever the primary setting, Sri Lanka is likely to remain a part of my imaginative landscape.

Published in the Sunday Times on November 8, 2015. Interview by Smriti Daniel. Pix courtesy Minoli Salgado. 

When Jeet Thayil was 13 years old, he bought a copy of Catch-22.  His father, the noted journalist and editor TJS George, did not approve. When he found Heller’s book, he confiscated it. Thayil went out and bought another. Enraged, believing the book to be inappropriate for a young man, and certainly for one who was already pushing the boundaries of authority in uncomfortable ways, his father actually tore the second copy. Thayil remembers that his parent felt awful afterward – books were revered in their house. But it was still a lesson to him that reading could be a subversive act. When Thayil brought home a third copy of Catch-22, he hid it very well.

That early recognition of the possibilities for rebellion in between the pages of a book shaped the kind of reader Thayil grew up to be, but lest you judge his father too harshly he is also frank about the challenges he posed his parents – “I was a wild child,” he says. Casually, the author mentions “being in trouble with the police” at age 15, and by age 19, he had found his way to the opium dens of Bombay.

At 56, Thayil has yet to let life beat the wildness out of him. He is the author of Narcopolis published in 2012 which put him on the shortlist for the Man Booker Prize and won him the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature. He is far more prolific as a poet having produced four collections of which he considers These Errors Are Correct (2008), his best.

Thayil’s success with Narcopolis wasn’t unambiguous. Readers complained that it was disjointed and rambling. Some reviewers never seemed to get much further than the first line which stretched over six pages with not a full stop in sight. Evoking the headiness of that first pull on an opium pipe, that sentence is a masterpiece, straddling the line between poetry and prose.

The rest of the book, however, can feel uneven; there are moments of luminescence, but it requires patience to find them. In one of the wittier meditations on the book, Asian Age’s reviewer Raja Sen’s response to the novel took the form of a single sentence, this one only 679 words long, but still enough to convey his opinion that the ‘confounding volume’ was a ‘surreptitiously sucked-in hit that thrills only in bits…but nevertheless a quick ride with true merit and some steam.’

But mixed reviews aside, Narcopolis also ensured that Thayil has spent the last few years talking to journalists about how drugs shaped both him and the city he called home. Opium exported to China in the 1800s made the British East India Company and a group of Bombay Parsi merchants unimaginably rich, yet by and large the populace remain ignorant of the context of the Opium Wars.

“I think of the opium story as a kind of secret history,” says Thayil. “For me as a novelist, that is a history I never reference in terms of figures and numbers though I knew them. You can Google that. That’s not what a novel should bring you. I think literature can tell you far more of the truth than the stats ever could.”

Though the novel isn’t an autobiography, Thayil drew on what he had seen and experienced in his time as an addict. He first arrived in Bombay in 1979. “At the time, I was a reckless 19-year old, and it felt like I was in the wrong place at the wrong time because there was no way to be in a college hostel in Bombay in 1979 and feel in any way that you were not living outside history.” I am curious what he means by that, and Thayil pauses for a moment, before responding.

“I was a poet. I knew nobody, nobody knew me. I discovered the world of opium on Shuklaji street, my friends were vagabonds and criminals, most of them are dead today. I certainly felt like I didn’t matter in the world, and that I never would. I felt absolutely obscure, which poets do in any case, which is what being a poet means.”

Thayil makes no bones that writing Narcopolis was for him the opposite of cathartic. Instead he found himself reliving that time in all its despair and wonder. Though Thayil, along with Bombay would graduate from the oneiric, almost old-world romance of opium to the much harder and edgier one of cocaine and heroin, he remained a high functioning addict, holding down a job as a journalist and successfully concealing his addiction for years. He attempted to get clean many times, and when he finally managed it, the process was so harrowing, that it may have kept him from relapsing.

Today, Thayil says he is simply bored of talking about drugs. “A lot of the friends I had who were on drugs are now on NA – Narcotics Anonymous. They do rehab with the same fervour that they used to do heroin. I really think the healthiest thing to do is to stop fixating and simply move on.”

Thayil has moved on not only to prose but to poetry and music. In fact the last time he was in Sri Lanka, he came not as an author but one half of the relentlessly innovative band Sridhar/Thayil – they had only 15 minutes of music then, far too little to please the crowd, but eventually together the two produced an album titled STD. When Rolling Stone published a glowing review of it, they did so under the blurb: ‘eclectic pop twosome make a sexy mess.’  It is one of a handful of projects that showcases Thayil’s artistry as a performance poet.

An anthology of his poetry was received warmly upon its release in 2015. It evoked a “posthumous feeling” in him, he says. Having tried and failed to better These Errors Are Correct, he is unlikely to ever publish another collection. Thayil, who lost his young wife, the writer and editor Shakti Bhatt of a sudden illness, in 2007 was still raw with grief when he published that collection a year later, and its significance in his life remains outsized, not least because the book was dedicated to her.

“We started the Shakthi Bhatt First Book Prize after she died, it was a very small thing, the family wanted to create a way of remembering her,” says Thayil. Shakthi was working on two books when she died. Thayil co-curated the shortlist, though he was not on the jury that chose Rohini Mohan’s book about Sri Lanka, The Seasons of Trouble, as the winner in 2015. He says that the initial selection of non-fiction books all had one thing in common and it was that they “read like literature, and were books that would last well beyond their topic.” (A previous winner, Samanth Subramian who won in 2010 for Following Fish: Travels around the Indian Coast was also, by happy coincidence, at FGLF.)

Sometime in 2013, Thayil thought he was ready to publish his second book. He even told journalists it would be called The Sex Lives of Saints but a second read convinced him it wasn’t ready yet.

Did he feel terrible as realisation dawned that he would have to rework the book?

“That wasn’t the terrible feeling. The terrible feeling is now, two years later, when I still don’t know how close I am to finishing it.” He is willing to wait it out, to live with the “frustration, no, the self-loathing” rather than send something unfinished to the editor.

If Narcopolis was any indication, when this book is released, Thayil will be put through the wringer again, both the bad reviews and the adulation. Is he prepared?

He feels he has no choice: “It’s what you do. It’s your job. Without it you are nothing. Without it you are worse off. Without it you need psychotherapy. Sustained psychotherapy.”

It is clear that writing, whether poetry or prose, is for Thayil an emotionally turbulent, utterly unpredictable process. He wrestles with it, never certain of the outcome. It is in a memory though that I see most clearly the pleasure he finds in his work. We end where we began – with him in a room with his father and a book.

TJS George had a wonderful library. Thayil remembers reading the collected works of Dylan Thomas and the hardcover first edition of Ulysses that was his father’s pride. “He was the first adult who spoke to me intelligently about James Joyce,” Thayil says now. He remembers them dissecting the famously protracted sentence that Joyce concluded Ulysses with. “He said it with such admiration in his eyes. ‘You know this book carries with it a 40 page sentence.’ Thinking of what Joyce had accomplished, and the respect his father had for the writer, the boy thought simply: “Wow, wow. I want to be that guy.”

When I point out to him that, thanks to his six page long first line in Narcopolis, he did kind of grow up to be that guy, Thayil looks startled for a moment. Then he laughs with pleasure at the discovery.

Published in the Sunday Times, Sri Lanka on January 17, 2016. Text by Smriti Daniel. Pix by Pushpa Kumara. 

What would Kesari do?

As Amitav Ghosh stood arguing with a taxi driver, a character from his book popped into his head.  For Ghosh, who in 2015 brought his enormously ambitious Ibis Trilogy to completion with the release of Flood of Fire, this is what it means to live with the people he writes into being. It’s difficult to imagine how Havildar Kesari Singh of the Bengal Native Infantry’s 25th regiment would handle a truculent New York cabbie, but Ghosh has fun trying anyway. “When you imagine a character it is not only an abstract thing. They become real because you imagine them in real situations. You imagine their responses and you think of what it’s like to be with them,” he says.

The last time Ghosh was in Sri Lanka, it was in 2005, and he was just about to begin writing Sea of Poppies, the first in a trilogy that would take 10 years of his life, sprawl over 1,600 pages and involve more than a million words. From the workers slaving away in the Ghazipur opium factory, to the homes of Parsi merchants in Calcutta and all the way to China and the shores of Hong Kong, his fictional recreation of the events leading up to the first opium war of 1839-42 would challenge Ghosh as none of his previous books ever had.

Connecting all the dots was the ship Ibis, on which many of the main characters meet for the first time before circumstance scatters them, and through which they remain bound in often surprising ways.

Though Ghosh has long frustrated curious journalists by describing his approach as being “nothing more than to blunder along,” he still admits that he has grown tremendously as a writer. Ghosh simultaneously researched and wrote each book. Though character-driven, writing historical fiction required Ghosh to understand how opium traders operated, how a Parsi widow would welcome a guest, or exactly what kind of ships were deployed by the British as they hammered the Chinese into submission.

In particular, no historian had analysed the military engagements, and so Ghosh was in fact conducting primary research in some cases. “I could never have done the Ibis trilogy, earlier in my life – the sort of technical skills that were called for, the organisational and descriptional skills, the structural knowledge, all these things I had never possessed before. It really called on everything I had ever done.”

As he rose to meet the challenge, the world around him too was altered in unimaginable ways. “I could not even begin to chronicle all the shifts – just think of how much Sri Lanka itself has changed,” he says.

That Ghosh was in Sri Lanka both at the beginning and end of his trilogy is not as much of a coincidence as you may think. His ties to this country are deep, reaching back into his childhood. The son of an Indian diplomat once posted in Colombo, Amitav lived here as a boy and was enrolled in Royal College. He still has surprisingly vivid memories of his classmates, his teachers and even the cane used to discourage them from talking in the classroom.

Every weekend, the family would leave the city behind to travel across the island and Ghosh credits those earliest experiences with embedding in him a lifelong love of travel. “There were so many places to see,” he says, “It’s no surprise it became an addiction.” In his novels, Ghosh often uses travel as a device to drive the transformation of his characters – women discover their freedom, men their limitations, and both are thrown together in to a maelstrom of history.

It has certainly transformed the author’s own life. “My family has been on the move since the mid-19th century,” says Ghosh. “We were originally from Bangladesh, but then the entire family scattered all over the place – to Burma and Germany. I feel very grateful to my family, because they have given me so much to write about.” According to family lore, they first left their home in Bangladesh, because the river changed course and drowned the village. Ghosh has said that in some sense his travels began with his family becoming ecological refugees.

Ghosh has journeyed extensively for study, work and pleasure. He completed an MA in social anthropology in Delhi before moving to Oxford to complete a PhD in the same subject. He would return to Egypt many times, where as a student anthropologist he immersed himself in village life (maintaining a journal all the while which he says taught him a great deal about how to write character and dialogue).

He has taught in American colleges including Colombia and Harvard and now he and his wife, the writer Deborah Baker divide their time between Calcutta, Goa and Brooklyn. Today, pointing eastward from a veranda in Galle to where the Mergui Archipelago lies, he tells me he just finished a sailing trip through those turquoise waters aboard a 110-year-old schooner.

Sailing was one of the things that Ghosh learned to do while writing the Ibis trilogy. “These for me are the fun parts of writing fiction – visiting interesting and out-of-the-way places, of having strange and marvellous experiences,” he says. He also began to watch a lot of wrestling (an art his character Havildar Kesari Singh is proficient in), which coincided serendipitously with his son developing a keen interest in the sport. Ghosh laughs as he assures me: “He was a very good wrestler. It gave me a very visceral sense of what wrestling is about. There is nothing scarier than to watch your little boy being set upon by another little boy.”

In writing the book, Ghosh also developed a working knowledge of Cantonese, which he practised on the owner of their neighbourhood laundromat. The author already speaks Bengali, Hindi, French, Arabic and English – a linguistic diversity which is reflected in the characters populating the Ibis trilogy.

The groundwork for Ghosh’s linguistic agility as a writer was actually laid in Sri Lanka. “Sri Lankan English was very distinctive, and that was the language we learned. The English we spoke, say even on the playing fields of Royal College, has a completely different tonality.” His research revealed that the island’s speech drew unabashedly on the various trading languages of the Indian Ocean. “It was a kind of nautical language that emerged from the world of the Ibis trilogy, and so it was interesting for me to use this language, these various registers of English in various ways.”

In fact, Ghosh is a fan of Carl Muller, who he feels uses English in a particularly innovative way. He so admired the Sri Lankan author of the Jam Fruit Tree that he actually landed up – with his wife and children in town – on Muller’s doorstep in Kandy in 2005. Muller, recently remarried, had on a singlet and a pair of shorts and had apparently been fixing a vehicle, possibly a motorbike, but he gave Ghosh and his family a warm welcome.

In fact, Ghosh seems hard pressed to relate an encounter with Sri Lanka that has not been memorable. When he landed here in 2001, to deliver the annual Neelan Tiruchelvam lecture, it was to see the runway bordered with wrecked planes – the result of the LTTE attack on Bandaranaike Airport.

In the same visit, he spent time with Arthur C. Clarke who he was pleased to discover was a fan. He had tour of Clarke’s remarkable library, and the two even played table tennis according to the legendary science fiction writer’s own rules.

We find ourselves returning to science fiction when we talk of Ghosh’s upcoming publication – a collection of lectures and essays on climate change and why art and literature has struggled to reckon with climate change in any significant way.

Sci-Fi writers were among the earliest to engage with environmental catastrophe in a really immersive sense, but Ghosh is surprised by how the unfolding events in Asia have not stirred the literary community to a greater degree. In Bangladesh alone some 100 million people are estimated to live within the danger zone – vulnerable to the smallest rise in sea-level. Ghosh speculates over what damage a really strong storm surge could do in Galle. In the mangrove forests of the Sundarbans, where he set his novel The Hungry Tide, several islands have been submerged in the last few years, displacing thousands.

“That is one of the things I am trying to understand – why is it that in contemporary fiction and arts, it’s very easy to engage with questions of identity, but it is so hard to engage with the non-human?”

Meanwhile, Ghosh will be signing copies of the Ibis trilogy for some time to come. His readers share with him both the fulfillment and the sense of loss that comes with the end of this wonderful series. Ghosh is almost wistful as he speaks of moving on to other projects and commitments: “The writing gave texture to my days. Every day would be different.”

Despite having enjoyed so much the process of researching the book, of learning how to sail, of engaging with readers or understanding the intricacies of a new language, he says it is the act of writing itself that he loves best. “It is just every day you are doing something you love. At the end of every day, every single day, I just think to myself how lucky I am to do this.”

Published in the Sunday Times, Sri Lanka on January 17, 2016. Text by Smriti Daniel. Pix by Indika Handunwala. 

Muhamalai, Sri Lanka – Not so long ago Shanmukam Thankamuththu had 25 goats; now she has only five.

The other 20 have been sold, each animal bringing in 9,000 rupees, or around $60, depending on its size. “I sold one and used the money to build this wall. I sold another to dig the well,” she says, explaining how her goats paid for her house.

This sturdy but cramped single-room structure is occupied by the 56-year-old, her husband and the two youngest of their seven children, along with two dogs and a ginger kitten. Thankamuththu is one of hundreds of thousands of people internally displaced – many more than once – over the course of Sri Lanka’s 26-year civil war.

Humble though their new residence might be, this time she is hoping that she will never have to leave.

Repeated losses have made a pragmatic woman out of her, but the thought of her first home of 17 years, close by but currently inaccessible, still fills Thankamuththu with emotion. “If I talk about it I will cry,” she says.

Her eyes fill as she remembers that first displacement back in 2000 – after three days of shelling had rendered their bunker ineffective, they finally fled on foot. They locked everything they could not carry in a room, but had to leave a water pump that had cost them $500 unprotected, and a fine chilli garden, whose remembered largesse is still a source of pride.

When Thankamuththu returned a week later, it was to find that the area was an active war zone. When she returned six years later, it was Sri Lanka’s largest minefield.

Minefields

Sprawling over 12 square kilometres, the minefield at Muhamalai in the northern district of Kilinochchi is unique, even in an area on intimate terms with mines.

The prosperous village, once associated primarily with coconut plantations, was ravaged by violent confrontations between the insurgent group, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) and the Sri Lankan Army (SLA). The Tamil Tigers, as the LTTE were also known, wanted to establish a homeland for the minority Hindu Tamil population, in a country where the majority are Sinhalese Buddhists.

In the years that followed the Tamil Tigers would be designated a terrorist organisation – notorious for pioneering suicide bombings, assassinating dozens of prominent leaders, both Tamil and Sinhalese, recruiting child soldiers and – crucial to Muhamalai’s eventual fate – producing their own range of mines.

“From what I have seen here, the LTTE were among the most resourceful and disciplined rebel army that the modern world has seen. They had their own aircraft, they were building submarines. They had munitions factories and they waged a civil war for decades,” says Damian O’Brien, a programme manager for the international demining agency, the HALO Trust.

Particularly between 2000 and 2009, when the SLA finally defeated the LTTE, Nagar Kovil and Muhamalai would witness some of the most intense fighting of a long war.

The two sides laid out heavily fortified forward defence lines here. The minefields took the shape of a broad swath in Muhamalai, which narrowed as it crossed the neck of the Jaffna isthmus and then continued into the sandy soils of the former fishing village of Nagar Kovil.

The mine lines finally stopped at the Indian Ocean on the island’s east coast.

In Muhamalai and Nagar Kovil mines are present in great density across diverse terrain: hidden in scrub jungle, wedged amid rocky boulders, wallowing in sandy beaches and submerged in shallow waters.

An LTTE Rangan mine with detonator unscrewed. An intact Rangan can be safely removed from the ground if it is not linked to other devices [Devaka Seneviratne/Halo Trust Archives/Al Jazeera]

Other explosives

There are also plenty of other forms of explosives, ammunition and unexploded ordinance (UXOs) littering this earth.

Rajudurai Sritharan, a senior survey officer with HALO, says that he still gets as many as 10 calls a day asking for help with such finds.

“They tell me when there is a suspect item,” he says. In fact, he already had one this morning from a school close to the border of Muhamalai.

The DASH de-mining agency’s estimates, based on data from the National Mine Action Centre, place the total number of mines in the country somewhere between 1.3 million and 1.5 million, of which more than 600,000 mines have reportedly been recovered.

According to the Landmine and Cluster Munitions monitor, described as the “bible for de-mining efforts”, the number of landmine casualties by the end of 2013 was some22,150, which included civilians, SLA soldiers and ex-LTTE combatants.

According to the latest figures from UNICEF, another 22 lives were claimed by mines in 2013, with 45 percent of all casualties that year occurring in Kilinochchi. In 2014, 16 people were killed, but by 2015 that number had dropped to six.

Years after the end of the war, this plethora of abandoned weaponry still renders lethal long stretches of land where people once lived and worked.

Take the case of the A9, a critical road that connects Kandy in the Central Province with Jaffna in the north, and cuts through Muhamalai. The road and an adjoining train line were reopened in late 2013 after the HALO Trust cleared a 300-metre-wide strip on either side of the road. In this stretch that represented only five percent of the field, they found 8,000 mines.

Each pin on the map marks the location of a minefield [Devaka Seneviratne/Halo Trust Archives/Al Jazeera]

Delvon Assistance for Social Harmony

Retired Brigadier Ananda Chandrasiri was closing in on 60 when he co-founded and began running Sri Lanka’s only national humanitarian de-mining organisation, the Delvon Assistance for Social Harmony, better known by the rather jaunty acronym of DASH.

A little less than a decade later, the end of Chandrasiri’s mission feels like it is in sight. He has seen his fair share of fighting over 36 years, including as a colonel attached to infantry brigades in Kilinochchi and Mannar and at the head of an army engineering brigade. Even in those intense, last years of the war, however, Chandrasiri was more interested in taking mines out of the ground than putting them in.

He carries around in his head a virtual encyclopaedia of the mines deployed during the war. The army mines were imported from places such as Pakistan and China, but the LTTE’s explosives, in retrospect often surprisingly superior products, were made locally.

The first anti-personnel mine deployed by the LTTE was the Jony in the 1980s, Chandrasiri explains. The simple wooden box was packed with 90g of TNT.

Then in the 1990s, the Rangan 99 debuted with an explosive punch of 120g of TNT. “As far as quality was concerned, they could stay live for longer than conventional [imported] mines could,” says Chandrasiri, “maybe even 20 years or more.”

“At various stages during the war, the LTTE used a lot of improvised devices,” O’Brien says. “The major munitions factories that we have come across were churning out thousands and thousands of landmines and mortars. There are also attempts at more complex weapons like the LTTE aircraft bomb.”

Exactly how many mines were laid down, no one is quite certain. “We say they [the LTTE] didn’t give us any records,” says Chandrasiri, “but to be fair, I don’t think they had any to give.”

To unravel the orderly pattern of an SLA minefield, one had only to discover the first mine.

The LTTE on the other hand were unpredictable – planting a circle of explosives around a well where soldiers might stop for water or in the gardens of homes they abandoned to the advancing Sri Lankan army. Mines have been found in pots of curd and plastic cricket bats.

DASH’s records, drawn from the government’s National Mine Action Centre, reveal that the current estimate of contaminated land stands at just over 156 million square metres, some 88 million of which have been cleared with just over another 64 million due for clearance.

Sasi’s husband was killed in the war. She lost a leg to a landmine and when she returned  after years of displacement she found her land was mined. Now it has been cleared by HALO.[Devaka Seneviratne/Halo Trust Archives/Al Jazeera]

Protective de-mining equipment

One never knows what might be found in a former war zone. In 2015, de-miners with the HALO Trust found 403 grenades in one day, another team uncovered a store of 580 mines, five improvised explosive devices and three Bangalore torpedoes, while yet another team brought in 942 detonators and 9,340 bullets in a single haul. They have found bodies and bunkers.

However, the work, more often than not, is without surprises, and entails painstakingly unearthing one mine at a time.

Typically, manual de-mining is the slow but reliable option.

Today, Vimalasweran Gunamala is loosening the soil around a buried mine. Lean but strong, she plies her spade in a square of excavated earth .

The boundary line beginning close to her elbow is marked by a painted red stick and a sudden sprout of shrubs. Another mine sits literally right by that edge – this one, in the open. It may have been shifted by rains, but it looks simply like someone bent down, casually deposited his lethal burden and walked away.

When a break is called, Gunamala lifts off her heavy visor. In northern Sri Lanka, where temperatures have been known to reach 28 degrees Celsius, the thick pants, long-sleeved shirts, gloves, tall boots and padded vest of the mandatory uniform must leave her and the others cooking in their own sweat, but the de-miner does not complain.

“We know it is all the protection we have,” she says. The boots are also a nod to the presence of other dangers – at least two de-miners are taken to the clinic each month with a snakebite or scorpion sting.

Fifty percent of HALO’s de-miners in Sri Lanka are women. Many are the sole earner in their household [Devaka Seneviratne/Halo Trust Archives/Al Jazeera]

Female de-miners

Gunamala is a female head of household, one of an estimated 1.2 million in Sri Lanka, according to data from 2013 from the Department of Census and Statistics. Her husband, who has suffered from chronic liver disease for 13 years, is bedridden. They have three children, named with pleasing symmetry – Kajendran, Kanjaruban and Kajendini. Again and again, Gunamala says, “I just want to take care of them.”

O’Brien has championed female de-miners in this posting, and notes that unlike, say, in Afghanistan, it is actually possible to ensure that in Sri Lanka 50 percent of his de-miners are female.

At HALO, women are finding their way into higher management, and they now have three section commanders who oversee multiple teams. Speaking of these promotions, O’Brien says that he wanted “women to have opportunities for progression – because that’s what we offer the men”.

For her part, Gunamala appreciates the reliable pay cheque that comes with this job, but money is still tight and life hard.

She is woken every day at 2am to cook and clean, and returns in the afternoon to do more of the same. Things were not like this for her mother’s generation, she says. Then one could focus on housework and raising children, “but these days women are expected to do everything”.

In her office, P Jeyarani, the divisional secretary for the Pachchilaipalli area in Kilinochchi, acknowledges the issues female heads of households face. For many, each day is a constant struggle for economic stability and personal security.

The LTTE famously recruited women cadres, and today ex-combatants, both men and women, are a part of the de-mining teams of all agencies. Employees must clear security screenings by the army and the national Criminal Investigation Department before they can be considered.

Returnees

In the meantime, other returnees with claims to large estates are planning to regrow their ancestral coconut plantations.

In an area experiencing unpredictable weather and labour shortages, even such homecomings are not without their problems.

Suresh Kumar drives some 60km to meet and explain how the $374,000 he has invested in his coconut plantation will take several years to turn a profit. In the meantime, he has plans for a poultry farm and hopes the government will assist him.

But the authorities are juggling many other priorities.

Jeyarani’s records list 257 families who have already registered their claims to mined lands in her district. That number is likely to increase with people returning from abroad.

Most families have deeds, she says. “Their problem is actually locating the land sometimes, because some have been displaced for 20 years.”

Determined to ensure a smooth transition, the divisional secretary sees her real challenge as the recovery of a traumatised populace. “We can easily give the housing and infrastructure, but mentally … that recovery will take time.”

De-mining technology

As a requirement of his own training, Damian O’Brien worked as a de-miner, doing his stint in Somaliland. The Englishman is now based in the HALO Trust’s Kilinochchi office, where he is a programme manager.

Working in a former warzone presents him with its own unique challenges.

“There are lots of workplace issues that clearly come from the fact that these people have been traumatised during the war: they have spent time in half-way camps, they’ve got difficult home lives and live in deprived areas,” he says.

It is partly why he plans to pause this week to celebrate the organisation’s achievement of pulling 200,000 mines out of the ground. “I don’t think the de-miners get enough recognition for the work they do.”

HALO’s Sri Lanka programme is pioneering in more ways than one, however, particularly in terms of the technology being deployed.

HALO is already using Handheld Standoff Mine Detection Systems, which help to clearly differentiate between mines and metal debris and have improved clearance rates in Sri Lanka by up to 40 percent.

Other innovations include using armoured flail machines and BeachTech sand filtering machines which come in handy on the right terrain and allow for rapid clearance.

They have also begun using Skybox, a satellite imagery service provided free of charge by Google to NGOs. “It’s been particularly useful when looking at post-clearance land use to show donors the impact their support has had,” says O’Brien.

Approaches that work here will probably be imported to other countries.

Obstacles to de-mining

However, HALO, traditionally one of the biggest operators in the country, has seen the number of its teams shrink – one indication that work in these areas has not always progressed smoothly.

Under former President Mahinda Rajapakse’s government, in a political context of suspicion and hostility directed at NGOs, all international operators were told that they would have to leave the country. Traditionally, de-mining in Sri Lanka has been supported by funds from the European Union, Japan, Australia, the US and Britain.

Donors balked, forcing HALO to lay off some 700 people, while other agencies closed down shop.

However, a new government elected into power in 2015 and headed by President Maithripala Sirisena lifted the directive and suggested an alternate deadline – that Sri Lanka be declared mine-impact free by 2020. In December, MM Nayeemudeen, the additional secretary of the ministry of resettlement, announced at a Meeting of States Parties to the International Mine Ban Treaty that Sri Lanka was seriously considering becoming a signatory – a move that could unlock more funding and speed up the process of de-mining considerably.

The task of de-mining this island nation is not as daunting as it appears.

For a start, the actual remaining area requiring clearance will be less than the figures listed, as identifying mine lines will help agencies to zero in on narrower stretches of contaminated lands. Yet, DASH’s Chandrasiri still pauses when asked if the government’s ambitions are realistic.

Speaking of the inevitability of some explosives remaining undetected in remote forests or deeply buried in the soil, he says: “We might not be able to take every single mine out of the ground, but the important thing is that people will be able to go on with their lives. They will no longer need to be afraid.”

Published in Al Jazeera on January 12, 2016. Text by Smriti Daniel. Pix by Devaka Seneviratne.

Shahidul Alam has long been gripped by the life of a woman he has never met.

It’s been two decades since Kalpana Chakma was abducted, but Shahidul refuses to forget her. Standing at the threshold of his latest exhibition,Kalpana’s Warriors, the Bangladeshi photographer pauses for a moment.

In the room beyond is the third in a series of photo exhibitions that began with Searching for Kalpana Chakma in 2013, and was followed by 18 in 2014. The woman around whom these pictures revolve is notably absent from them. She was abducted at gunpoint in the early hours of 12 June 1996 from her home in Rangamati in Bangladesh. Her captors were a group of plain-clothed men who were recognised as being from a nearby army camp. Kalpana never returned home and her fate remains unknown.

When the exhibition first opened at the Drik Gallery in Dhaka, many of those who had been photographed could not risk coming out of hiding, yet the room was full of people who knew Kalpana’s story intimately. Some simply stood for a while before the portraits, others wept.

“I have never met Kalpana Chakma, I only knew her in terms of her activism but I feel I know her in other ways,” Shahidul says. “I have sat on her bed, have read her diaries, have spent time with her family, I have looked at archival footage of her talks. But more importantly I have felt her presence among the people who survive.”

Kalpana, only twenty-three years old when she was taken, had made it her life’s mission to campaign for the rights of the indigenous people living in Bangladesh’s Chittagong Hill Tracts (CHT). She herself belonged to the Chakma or Pahari community, and was a leader of the Hill Women’s Federation. There have been multiple reports of human riots violations, massacres and the razing of entire villages by Bangladeshi forces in the CHT from the 1980s onwards. Inevitably, such events brought Kalpana – and by extension all her supporters – into conflict with the State.

His exhibitions have been Shahidul’s determined contribution to finding justice for a brave Pahari woman and her people: “As an artist, certainly as an activist, what one hopes to achieve is that you make people respond to the work at a guttural level. In some way you provoke them, you anger them, or move them from their complacency.”

He seeks to speak truth to power by giving a voice to those who do not usually have one. Kalpana’s brothers, who were also abducted that night but managed to escape, say they identified the men who took them, but that the police never even questioned the principal accused. “The words of the Pahari were never taken into account, it was only the military and the Bengali version that was recorded,” says Shahidul. “I wanted to explore the culpability of the state.”

Shahidul acknowledges that they are navigating a national landscape that seems to offer less and less space for free speech – for dissidence. Beginning in 2013, several secular writers, bloggers and publishers in Bangladesh have been brutally murdered by Islamist extremists. Yet, even as the room to manoeuvre may seem to narrow, he refuses to give way.

In many respects, Shahidul deliberately set out to transcend the limitations of photography withKalpana’s Warriors.

While doing his research, his interviewees repeatedly spoke to him of the bareness of Kalpana’s home, of how she slept on the floor on a simple straw mat. Shahidul then chose to use this material as a canvas because it was such a large part of the daily lives of the Pahari people. Their villages had been torched, and so a laser beam was used to burn the straw on stage. The images had to be converted and then converted again to maintain gradient, contrast and all the elements that ensured it retained the feel of a fine print, despite the rough surface on which the images were etched.

The device they used to create the portraits was also one commonly found in Bangladesh’s garment factories, notorious for their poor working conditions after tragedies such as Rana Plaza. “Because of the situation of the workers, a laser device which is used in the garment industry being appropriated for something like this was for me very apt, because I think as artists we need to appropriate the spaces, we need to turn things around. Its guerrilla warfare and in guerrilla warfare you have to use the enemies strength against them, which is what we are trying to do,” Shahidul explained. “I wanted the process itself to deal with the politics.”

Shahidul’s decision to abandon the traditional photography exhibition format in this case was a pragmatic one. “I don’t really see myself a photographer,” he says. “I see myself as a craftsman and as a storyteller.” As the latter, he turns to whichever tools best suit his purpose. As an artist he feels the need to go further, to push himself every time. “It is only when one is creating that one becomes an artist. The rest of the time, one is a technician.”

Shahidul knows very well what he risks when he steps out onto the streets of Dhaka, where he and his wife, the anthropologist and activist Rahnuma Ahmed live. So what possessed him to pick up Kalpana’s fight? Part of the answer is that he sees himself as less of a photographer and more of an activist.

As the former, Shahidul has often been in the thick of it – on the streets during the people’s campaign to topple the military dictator General Ershad and among an elite few granted exclusive access to Nelson Mandela. He is the recipient of numerous honours, including the Mother Jones and the Andrea Frank Awards, and has seen his work displayed at MoMA in New York, the Royal Albert Hall in London and the National Art Gallery in Kuala Lumpur.

But Shahidul is one of the most influential photographers of his generation not just because of where he points his lens. He, together with others, founded the award-winning Drik Picture Library and the Bangladesh Photographic Institute. With Pathshala they created an internationally acclaimed school of photography, and with the Majority World photo agency, they championed the work of talented photographers from Asia, Africa, Latin America and the Middle East, who were otherwise often overlooked.  Shahidul sees all these initiatives as a way of building a community that can challenge entrenched power structures, both political and social, national and global. He sees this as a way of equipping the resistance with vital skills, networks … and cameras.

There are days when Shahidul evaluates his success by who and how many his detractors are. Drik – the host of many a controversial exhibition – has been targeted more than once.  Its phone lines have been cut, its exhibitions forcibly cancelled and death threats delivered to their doorstep. During anti-government demonstrations in 1996, Shahidul himself was pulled out of a rickshaw, robbed and then stabbed eight times by unknown assailants.

“You think you are invincible. You are not,” he says now. In the years that followed the attack Shahidul would become wary at odd moments, tensing up for instance if a vehicle slowed as it overtook him on the street. “Fear is a powerful weapon and that is one of the weapons they use against you. It’s very effective. You try and get over it – sometimes you don’t.”

Shahidul and Rahnuma’s home can be an open house, with visitors streaming in and out at all hours. Never more so than when Rahnuma returned to Bangladesh after completing her PhD studies. She found that in her absence her husband had been adopted by – at his count – some forty-seven adolescents. They were all part of ‘Out of Focus,’ a unique Drik project that trained children from poor, working-class families in Dhaka as photojournalists.  Soon, the two would not know how many to expect at the table for every meal. There were long conversations and multiple emotional crisis. “Without having sired any children, we have as parent’s nevertheless experienced teenage pregnancy, syphilis, drugs … the entire spectrum,” Shahidul says, laughing.

As we speak, it is evident to me that Shahidul resists cynicism – despite the many setbacks and challenges he has experienced in his time as an activist-photographer; there is a sense that he is also genuinely hopeful and curious about the world.  He is clear-eyed too, about the challenges of working in Bangladesh, and in this case favours being both forewarned and forearmed.

Under his watch, Drik has proved itself unafraid to stand up to anyone, not least its own government. In Crossfire (2010), one of their most successful exhibitions to date, Shahidul set out to confront the extrajudicial executions carried out by Bangladesh’s notorious Rapid Action Battalion (RAB). Formed in 2004, these death squads are believed to have murdered over a 1,000 people. Working with researchers, Shahidul framed images of the last things victims saw before their deaths, went where their bodies were dumped and used objects to highlight discrepancies in official narratives. He took his pictures at night, by torchlight, to replicate the conditions in which the attacks took place.

Shahidul named this exhibition for the way in which the authorities claimed the victims had died – “crossfired” during an exchange of bullets – and prepared meticulously for the inevitable. When, on cue, the government attempted to ban the exhibition, a combination of an immediate appeal to the courts and the mobilising of citizens out on the street forced the State to back down. In the months that followed, he even heard reports that the RAB had scaled back its activities in the face of public outrage.

Shahidul says such successes have taught him the value of being subtle and strategic. He likens himself as a young man to a battering ram, but now he finds new ways of getting things done. He embodies an uneasy contradiction; in his visual practice he often throws down the gauntlet, but as an activist he sometimes chooses to sit down with the very people he detests. To him, laying down his placard and stepping off the street and into the meeting room means refusing to abdicate his rights, or letting those who have no legal authority go unchecked: “I have very clinically ensured that I am present at the tables where some of those vital decisions are made.”

In response to a question on why he persists despite threats to his life, he says: “I recognise the fact that there is a very thin boundary between getting burnt and being ineffective and there is that space in the middle that is our only space. It requires feeling the heat, it does mean occasionally getting singed, but if you take one step back you cease to be effective and then what is the point in you being what you are?”

Kalpana’s Warriors opens at Art and Aesthetic in New Delhi on 30 January 2016 and will continue till 2 March 2016.

Colombo, Sri Lanka – Ariyaseeli Gunaweera, known as Ari to all, is a supervising public health midwife in Sri Lanka. She is, as a result, a person of some importance.

Ajith Kumarasiri certainly thinks so – when Ari sends him on an errand, he hurries to get it done, returning with a large 10cc syringe in just a few minutes.

“Here, cut it from here,” says public health midwife Kumudini Kumari as she shows the young father where to shear through the syringe so that the end with the needle falls away.

Having plied his blue hacksaw blade enthusiastically, Ajith is taught how to manipulate the plunger so that finally he has in his hands a crude yet effective breast pump. The midwives’ affordable, DIY solution is perfect for this corner of Colombo – a set of apartment blocks occupied by working-class families on low incomes.

In one of the apartment’s two small bedrooms, just the sight of Ari is enough to bring a smile to Shanthini Kumarasiri’s face. At only three-days-old, her little boy doesn’t have a name yet.

Shanthini has been worried. Her son is so thin that the bones in his chest protrude. Ajith’s mother Kumari Manel shares her daughter-in-law’s relief at Ari’s arrival. She is sure all will be well now, and remembers that reassuring feeling from when she was pregnant with her own son and the midwives came to visit. This is an intimate relationship with the state that spans generations.

With kind eyes and gentle hands, Ari and Kumudini work with the young mother to check the flow of milk from her breasts and quickly determine that one is blocked. Chatting all the while, they find a way to ease her discomfort, feed the child, and teach the first-time parents how to prevent the problem from recurring.

The baby calms and stretches in his grandmother’s lap as he hungrily empties the cup of milk that the midwife spoons into his mouth.

According to their official schedule Ari and Kumudini are on track – midwives are expected to pay four postpartum visits; two in the first 10 days, and another two within the first two months. In 2013, according to data collected by Sri Lanka’s Family Health Bureau, 92.2 percent of new mothers who were identified and registered were visited at least once by a midwife in that critical postpartum period.

Each visit involves a thorough check-up of mother and child. As the boy grows, he and his parents will also visit the nearby clinic. The midwives will watch him closely until he is five years old, checking his growth and development and ensuring that he is up to date on critical vaccine shots. The attention and support provided by the midwives feels deeply personal, and it is free.

As the midwives finish up and prepare to leave, Kumari Manel serves them a glass of cold, sweet, neon orange soda. She is full of gratitude. “No one else will come to help us, only the midwives come,” she says.

A mother cradles her child at a clinic dedicated to babies just over a month old. Her baby is registered at this centre and will be carefully monitored until he turns five [Suda Shanmugaraja/Al Jazeera]

‘Womb to tomb’ healthcare

Sri Lanka’s commitment to maternal and child health goes back more than a century.

In 1879, the doors of the De Soysa Lying-in-Home, possibly the very first maternity hospital in Asia, were thrown open to expectant mothers. It was here that the first training school for Sri Lankan midwives began operating in 1881. Between 1941 and 2009, the number of trained midwives in the country multiplied from 347 to 8,741.

Like most modern midwives, Ari received her diploma from the National Institute of Health Sciences – that was more than two decades ago.

Today, the country has at least 7,000 midwives, and along with a cadre of public health inspectors, they are the “ultimate grassroots workers,” says Dr Ruwan Wijayamuni, the chief medical officer of health at the Public Health Department.

They offer what he describes as “womb to tomb” coverage, with each public health midwife responsible on average for some 3,000 people. According to officialestimates, nearly 15 million people come under the purview of the Family Health Programme.

‘An inspiring success’: Sri Lanka’s maternal mortality ratio

The system is so successful that Sri Lanka has a maternal and child health record that is the envy of South Asia. Nowhere is this better reflected than in the maternal mortality ratio or MMR.

These two girls know Ari well. Sri Lanka’s School Health Programme includes assessments of nutritional status, detection of health problems and provides immunisation [Suda Shanmugaraja/Al Jazeera]

This critical figure is drawn from the number of maternal deaths per 100,000 live births, in a given time.

In 1955, less than a decade after Sri Lanka celebrated its independence, some 405 women died for every 100,000 live births. In 2013, Sri Lanka’s MMR was 32. Compare this with the island’s closest neighbours: in India, 189 women died for every 100,000 live births in 2013, in Nepal, it was 291 that same year, while in Bangladesh it was 201.

“Sri Lanka represents a unique and inspiring success story in terms of the country’s achievements in maternal health,” says Ana Langer, the director of the Women and Health Initiative and the Maternal Health Task Force at the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health.

She attributes the steady decline of maternal mortality over the past 60 years to factors such as consistent political will, universal health coverage, skilled birth attendance at 97 percent of deliveries and “the quality of care offered by the trained midwives, who are distributed across the country ensuring women’s access to it”.

Registers for life

Painstaking, accurate data-gathering has proved critical to Sri Lanka’s healthcare successes, and Ari and the other midwives devote much of their time to record keeping.

Ari maintains three registers. Young couples are entered into the Eligible Family Register. In theory at least, cohabiting couples, and women between the ages of 15 and 49 are also included in this list. Ari offers anyone who needs it advice on family planning, distributes contraception for free and even sits down with couples for informal counselling. Women who want to conceive are advised on how to space out pregnancies, prescribed certain supplements and vaccinated against rubella and tetanus.

Ari, right, is a supervisor with more than 25 years of experience as a midwife. Fewer younger women are signing up to be midwives in Sri Lanka [Suda Shanmugaraja/Al Jazeera]

When a woman becomes pregnant she is entered into a second register where her progress is tracked carefully. Registered women are offered an exhaustive package of services and are carefully monitored.

Those identified as having high-risk pregnancies are given specialist care. Once the child is born, he or she is given his own column in a new register – the Birth and Immunisation Register.

The attention of the midwife continues into the child’s adolescence when they will make contact again to impart sex education.

According to Ari, common problems faced by mothers include poverty, domestic violence and cantankerous mother-in-laws. She relies on her personal relationship with her charges to allow her to speak frankly to husband and wife, and takes an interest in everyone in the household, and even in the neighbours. They all have a role to play in the mother’s health, she believes.

It helps that she has known some of these people since they were children. “I am part of the family now,” says the 54-year-old, “so they listen to me.”

When things go wrong: ‘Every time a pregnant woman dies, two people die’

When things go wrong, midwives are the first to be held accountable.

Each maternal death is expected to be reported within 24 hours to the regional director of Health Services and the Family Health Bureau by the Ministry of Health, explains Dr KD Liyanaarachchi, the deputy chief medical officer and Ari’s immediate supervisor.

“We do a thorough investigation of each case. A doctor, a nursing sister and a midwife will all go into the field to talk to the families and to see if the mother was given proper service,” she says.

Fathima Rizana says it’s thanks to the midwives that her sons Mohammed Rafi, Mohammed Rashi and Mohammed Raheem (pictured with his mother) are all doing well [Suda Shanmugaraja/Al Jazeera]

The data collected from the visit is compiled into a “maternal death case scenario”, a document that includes a post-mortem report, bedhead tickets and clinical, pregnancy, family planning and other field records.

Each scenario is reviewed at the field, institutional, district and national levels by the Family Health Bureau, in consultation with independent experts – allowing the authorities to systematically identify problems with the healthcare delivery.

“When we look at how other countries are doing in this region, we can boast that up to 99.4 percent of women in this country are cared for in hospitals,” says Dr Kapila Jayaratne, a national programme manager for the Family Health Bureau overseeing maternal and child morbidity and mortality surveillance. “In India, for instance, it is around 40 percent. For the other 60 percent you don’t know where they deliver, how they die, nothing.”

In the past year and a half alone, some 14 countries, including Bangladesh and Afghanistan have sent delegations to study Sri Lanka’s approach, says Jayaratne. The team is also often invited to conferences abroad to share their programme’s successes. “Always we get the applause for nearly five minutes when we make our presentation.”

For Ari, there are real women behind the statistics. She speaks of the last time she lost a mother, many years ago. Though Ari had her rushed to the hospital, the woman and her child died of blood pressure related complications.

“I felt worse than if I had driven a car and run over someone on the road,” she says. “We are responsible for these women, some we have taken care of for years.” Behind her glasses, her eyes shine with tears. She adds in a quiet voice: “Every time a pregnant mother dies, two people die.”

Shanthini Kumarasiri cradles her newborn son. In 1955, some 405 women died for every 100,000 live births. By 2013, that figure dropped to 32 [Suda Shanmugaraja/Al Jazeera]

Can Sri Lanka keep it up?

Ari’s job is not getting any easier. One of the most commonly cited problems is the perennial shortage of midwives. Dr Wijayamuni says thanks to such staffing issues in the Colombo area, a midwife may be responsible for as many as 6,000 to 12,000 people, considerably more than the ideal of 3,000 per midwife.

The challenges of providing care for pregnant mothers and vaccinations for children are even greater than they first appear when you take into consideration the city’s large migrant population.

“I think it is remarkable, even though we have a large floating population which does not remain static like those in the villages, our immunisation coverage has been excellent,” he says of the Colombo area. “This is why we have no neonatal tetanus or diphtheria. We have eradicated polio and whooping cough.”

But will the public health services be able to maintain their stellar record without enough midwives to go into communities?

Ari believes the situation might improve if women are allowed to serve in the areas they are from instead of being assigned to distant locations.

Ari came to work in Colombo, though she was originally from the island’s southern province. She faced the practical challenges – the shocking cost of living in the city, the dearth of good accommodation – but also the social and emotional trials of adapting to her new profession.

Ari and her brother were orphaned in their 20s and went through some tough times. She found her husband on the job, as it were, when a more senior midwife took a shine to her and proposed that Ari marry her son, Don Nihal Wickramarachchi.

She has been a widow for several years now and lives close to her place of work, but says her colleagues at the Wanathamulla Mother and Child Welfare Centre all hail from outside Colombo. Some even commute 161km a day.

Jayaratne says that when the Family Health Bureau advertised for 5,000 new midwife positions, they received only 2,700 applications. In response they have begun relaxing the requirement that midwives have studied science in school, and are instead recruiting people from an arts and commerce background as well.

Although government jobs are usually sought after for their stability, it’s also easy to see why the basic salary for a new midwife, approximately 15,000 Sri Lankan rupees or just over a $100 a month, would have potential employees opting for careers in the private sector.

Ari says midwives are having to learn new skills to cope with the steep rise in non-communicable diseases. She now routinely encounters gestational diabetes and hypertensive disorders. In 2013, heart disease and respiratory diseases were the leading causes of maternal death in Sri Lanka.

When women develop such complications far away from good healthcare centres, or in areas with poor coverage, their lives are at risk.

“A large majority of the women who died due to a pregnancy-related cause in 2014 were either from rural (65 percent) or estate (10 percent) sectors,” Jayaratne noted in a report. He went on to flag that “it is also noticeable that a significant number of single females (10 percent) contributes to maternal deaths”.

In the face of social stigma, many unmarried pregnant women hesitate to utilise public services and others risk illegal abortions.

“The healthcare system is still lagging behind in encouraging single women to come forward to address their sexual health needs,” says Dr Sepali Kottegoda, the director of the Women and Media Collective in Sri Lanka. “There has to be a clear institutional response in terms of making it known that irrespective of your marital status, as a citizen you have the right to healthcare and as a person who is in need of it, you should seek it out.”

To improve maternal and child healthcare, Sri Lanka must now focus on quality.

“We have to prioritise quality over quantity, to take care of individual women now,” says Wijayamuni .”Each and every mother counts, each and every pregnancy counts.”

He would like to see midwives and public health inspectors given more training and allowed to pursue bachelor and master’s degrees in their field.

“They are the very first contact people at the grassroot level for the Ministry of Health, and their education is critical.”

A little girl attends a clinic with her mother. In Sri Lanka, growth monitoring is done through serial measurement of infants, young children and preschoolers [Suda Shanmugaraja/Al Jazeera]

‘I’m going to stay at home and rest’ 

Back on her rounds, Ari’s meets more families. Her unhurried pace is deceptive – typically she will make some 30 house calls in a day.

Following her white clad figure through a neighbourhood, it becomes evident that she is a magnet for both men and women. Mothers walking their children home from school stop on the street to have a quick word; others accost her on the stairs, waving test results and asking her to interpret the numbers.

In a largely patriarchal society, Ari says midwives like herself are the ones who tell the men what do when their partners experience morning sickness or how they can “talk” to the baby while he or she is still in the womb during the last trimester.

Even disapproving mother-in-laws will take her advice.

A devoted Buddhist, Ari sees her job as “not actually just caring for a person and combating disease. It is about bringing life to earth”.

This has been her calling, but when she retires in less than a decade, Ari says she is keeping her plans simple. “I am going to stay at home and rest.”

Public health midwives have proved themselves integral to the success of the primary healthcare system in Sri Lanka since early in the 20th century [Suda Shanmugaraja/Al Jazeera]

Published in Al Jazeera on March 14, 2016. By Smriti Daniel with pictures by Suda Shanmugaraja. 

Seran Sivananthamoorthy is only 25 years old which is why his knowledge of the Jaffna Public Library is limited to memory and anecdote. The library with some 95,000 volumes including the only original copy of the Yalpana Vaipavamalai or the History of the Kingdom of Jaffna was set alight by a mob in 1981 as tensions rose between the island’s Sinhalese and Tamil communities in the prelude to Sri Lanka’s civil war. Miniature editions of the Ramayana, accounts of early explorers in Ceylon and a trove of ancient palm-leaf manuscripts important to Sri Lanka’s Tamil-speaking communities were also lost in the fire.

“There are chances it could happen again,” said Seran. This is not a reference to the possibility of renewed conflict or arson, but to the fact that the integrity of such collections are threatened by a host of factors – from pests and mould to censorship imposed by casteism and patriarchy.

This was also on Kopinath Thillainathan’s mind when he, along with a friend Mauran Muralitharan, established the Noolaham Foundation that set up the Noolaham Digital Library in 2005 whose 16,000 documents now make it one of the largest Tamil digital archives available online.

A rare repository

Sri Lanka’s colonisation and subsequent political movements have been particularly effective in marginalising voices that belong to the nation’s minority Tamil-speaking communities. Outsiders perhaps see Sri Lankan Tamils as a homogeneous group but the community comprises not just the Tamils of the north and east of Sri Lanka, but Indian Tamils whose ancestors were brought over by the British from India to work on plantations, Coast Veddas from the island’s indigenous population, and Tamil-speaking Muslim communities.

The archive is funded by the community and driven overwhelmingly by volunteers. Its contents include photographs of 5,000 timeworn pages that make up 24 palm-leaf manuscripts, and books such asYalpana Samaya Nilai or Religion in Jaffna that date to 1893. The longest documents it has stored on its servers are four volumes ofTolkappiyam, one of the oldest Tamil grammar books.

At present, the archive also collects thirty magazines and eight newspapers. This includes the regional newspaper Valampuri, which continued to report through some of the most violent years of the island nation’s civil war, as well as Paathukavalan, the oldest Catholic weekly to be published from Jaffna, which was first printed in 1876.

Extensive archives

The library gives scholars access to documents they will not find elsewhere including pamphlets produced by Sri Lanka’s Muslim political parties and traditional documents Tamil families produce as a kind of a comprehensive obituary for their deceased loved ones.

The foundation has also started building what its members call a “biographical dictionary.” “So far we have collected details of about 2,500 personalities,” said Kopinath.

He added, “This is the first ever reference resource of this magnitude on Tamil people. We expect to document 5,000 personalities by the end of 2016 and are planning to publish print volumes as well.”

Noolaham hopes to create audio, video and photo archives too.

A passion project

Its core members make time for the foundation from their busy schedules. For instance, Kopinath, who lives in Australia, is a production manager at a factory, while young Seran has just begun to work as an engineer. Seran confesses that in many ways his heart lies with Noolaham: “I don’t want to say this archive is my part-time work. This is my spiritual work. This is what I want to do with my life.”

With three offices in Sri Lanka and working groups in the UK, Canada, Norway, Australia and USA, and more than 200 volunteers and 350 individual donors across the world, the Noolaham Digital Library seems like an extended community project. Nevertheless funding is a constant challenge as is handling copyright permissions.

An engaged community

Kopinath credits the group’s commitment to their passion project with having pulled them through a challenging decade. He judges their success by the importance the archive is seen to have among the people. A majority of visitors to the site come from Sri Lanka itself.

“Our communities are using Noolaham as a repository where they can store, preserve and retrieve their documents and knowledge,” said Kopinath, citing increasing requests for the foundation to archive personal and institutional records.

Kopinath said he feels a deep joy when he looks at the books and manuscripts the digital library has now. Born on a small island off Sri Lanka’s northern coast, he reminisced how keenly he, as a child, felt the loss of his family’s large collection of books because of their multiple displacements. After being displaced for the third time, Kopinath recalled “I had nothing in my hands.” To him and the others involved with this project, Noolaham offers a promise that such losses are not permanent. That somewhere all that lost knowledge is waiting for them to find and preserve it.

Published on Scroll.in on February 18, 2016. By Smriti Daniel, pic courtesy Noolaham.

The sastra karaya could see a ghost standing behind Shehan Karunatilaka’s shoulder.

He said the spirit was a woman, someone Karunatilaka had known and who was now his guardian. Now, in his airy living room in Colombo, Karunatilaka admits he didn’t sense anything himself, and that he was a little bit disappointed with the experience. “There is the sceptic in me that thinks he [the astrologer] was just doing some cold reading,” he admits, but when advised to do a Bodhi pooja, Karunatilaka lit some lamps and made offerings of flowers under the sacred fig tree anyway.

Karunatilaka never attempted to become better acquainted with his ghost. One of Sri Lanka’s most celebrated contemporary writers, you wouldn’t imagine his wry intellect lends itself to a belief in the paranormal. But while he’s not a man of (any) faith, his thinking on the matter is simple – “I am not a believer in this stuff, but I fear it. If it is out there, you don’t want to be messing with it.”

Yet an astrologer’s office is far from the strangest place he has been in pursuit of material. In the last few years, the author has taken an interest in subjects as diverse as Sri Lankan death squads, Colombo’s haunted houses, the pilgrimage to the sacred city of Kataragama and Buddhist notions of the afterlife and rebirth.

In fact, the last time I met Karunatilaka, he was lurking among the graves in Borella cemetery, scouting for ghosts. Then his sunglasses, pierced nose and sharp beard, threaded with white streaks, gave him the air of an insouciant rock star. It is an air he retains, perhaps because even though his band Powercut Circus no longer exists, Karunatilaka still plays the bass guitar every other morning, treating it as a form of meditation.

While the music remains a constant, Karunatilaka’s other interests shift with each new novel. With Chinaman: The Legend of Pradeep Mathew, it was cricket games and old, alcoholic uncles. Certainly, his friendly ghost brought him good fortune back then – the book he had self-published in Sri Lanka first won the Gratiaen Prize, then gathered up the Commonwealth Book Prize and the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature even as it found publishers in India, the US and the UK.

And now, a new novel

That was in 2012, but Karunatilaka is finally ready to unveil his follow-up. In his home office, he has walls covered in post it notes and newspaper cuttings, wireless neon lighting he controls from his smartphone and several writing projects in various stages of progress. His present focus is the unpublished manuscript Devil Dance, which is currently in the running for the Gratiaen Prize. Founded by Michael Ondaatje with his Booker Prize winnings in 1992 and named for Ondaatje’s mother, the Gratiaen is one of Sri Lanka’s best known literary awards. Karunatilaka has won twice before, and will only find out if he has won again on May 12. In any case, Devil Dance should be in bookstores by the end of this year.

Karunatilaka writes for a Sri Lankan audience and is canny enough to know that it’s that very specificity that makes him interesting to the wider world. When we first meet Devil Dance’s protagonist, the intrepid investigative journalist Riyal Ratnam Almeida, he is already dead; tethered to his own corpse, even as it is being inefficiently disposed off in Beira Lake. Born in 1955, dead by 1990, Riyal’s obituaries will describe him as “a brilliant, erratic, homosexual leftist,” and “Sri Lanka’s premiere war photographer.” He has lived through some of the most tumultuous years in Sri Lankan history, and is about to be a spectral spectator to a few more.

But first, some background

Post-independence Sri Lanka has been wracked by violence. The war between the state and the separatist terrorist outfit Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) stretched out over nearly three decades, and was brought to a bloody end under former President Mahinda Rajapaksa only in 2009. Meanwhile, the Indian Peace Keeping Force, which was deployed following the Indo-Sri Lankan Accord of 1987, is remembered with little fondness by Sri Lankans.

But lesser known outside these shores are the insurgencies in the south of the island. The party Janathā Vimukthi Peramuṇa led armed uprisings against the ruling governments in 1971 and then again in 1987. Young, poorly armed and barely trained though they may have been, the JVP earned a reputation for pure brutality, one that would only be outdone by the state’s response. Thousands upon thousands died.

“It was the perfect storm,” says Karunatilaka now. “And all this stuff happened between the third A-ha album and the fifth A-ha album.” However, while the novel relies on this context, he did not delve deep into the historical record, but he has his premise: “If a ghost is someone who died unfairly, Sri Lanka is obviously swarming with them.”

In Riyal, Karunatilaka created an angry ghost, hungry for justice. The dead journalist suspects he was put on a hit list thanks to his determined attempts to ferret out the killers of a certain Elsa Loganathan. The young woman’s corpse was found floating in a tank on the roof of the Hotel Rio. Unfortunately, even surviving his own death has left Riyal no wiser about who murdered Elsa.

Was it the LTTE or the India’s intelligence agency RAW or a Sri Lankan state-sanctioned death squad? What role does the suspicious US Fund for Peace play? As Riyal sets out to unravel the mystery, he is also simultaneously working up an ethereal sweat, struggling to master the skills that will allow him to visit pain and havoc on the men responsible.

Yesterday, today, and maybe tomorrow

The story plays out in a world that is completely contemporary in its concerns yet populated by creatures out of folktales, Buddhist philosophy and Sri Lankan legend. Grease Yakas go diving in the wrecks with mermaids and “tsunami drowners”, the Crowman in his office serves up justice on cheating husbands with a little help from the other side, and hordes of the disappeared dead ride the winds as they await their killers in the afterlife.

While this shadow world exerts a powerful influence on our own, the horrors who inhabit it pale in comparison to those which living men make – the torture rooms hidden in the middle of a bustling city, the mass graves packed with the bones of entire villages.

This is undoubtedly grim raw material, but Karunatilaka finds a very Sri Lankan way of approaching it. In his writing, irreverence and humour leaven despair. (The general attitude seems to be, there may be bombs in the street and mass graves in the forest, but life goes on, so why not face it with a glass of arrack in hand?) And if this plot sounds like he has many balls in the air, it’s because Karunatilaka has never juggled so hard before.

Like his famously hard drinking predecessor, the perpetually inebriated 64-year-old WG Karunasena who was the star of Chinaman, Riyal is also a determined journalist with a strong appetite for self-destruction. But where Chinaman appealed in part because of the intimacy of its plot, and the deep familiarity and affection its lead evoked in readers, Karunatilaka is at work on a much larger canvas with Devil’s Dance. He was taken by surprise to have Chinaman hailed as the ‘great Sri Lankan novel,’ and in that success lie the seeds of his present doubt – “perhaps, it is when you try to write the ‘great Sri Lankan novel’ that you are most likely to fail,” he says.

That this career in writing fiction brings with it no surety of success is not a surprise to him. Consequently, he is yet to take fully to it as a profession, still committing some of his time to advertising work. The latter has paid his bills for a long time – arrived at after trialling life working at food courts, in data entry, and perhaps most memorably, digging graves – it is a job that he is decidedly good at and he has the awards to prove it.

But once he has earned his keep, he settles back into Sri Lanka and the house he grew up in. He has made a routine out of discipline – rising at 4am to write a bit every day, and spending his afternoons in charge of his young daughter. He says becoming a father has somehow made him a more prolific: “You become more aware of the scarcity of time and the need to fill pages.”

It helps that being in the land of his birth is also the best antidote to this writer’s doubt. It inspires a kind of certainty – it is the only place he could have produced Devil Dance. His voice, his stories, even his sense of humour, are somehow inextricably of this place. He admits sometimes to struggling with writing in the gloom of London, or in relentless Singapore.

“When I am here, in Sri Lanka, it’s just not an issue. I can’t imagine writing anywhere else,” he says. It is an approach that has served him well. By just staying home, Shehan Karunatilaka has found, again and again, stories the world wants to read.

Published on Scroll.in on May 8, 2016. By Smriti Daniel with picture courtesy Shehan Karunatilaka. 

In A Long Watch Commodore Ajith Boyagoda of the Sri Lankan Navy reflects on how the story of the Sagarawardene, the ship of which he was captain, was one he had read long before it was one he told. Commodore Boyagoda was the highest ranking prisoner detained by the Tamil Tigers during the civil war. He spent eight years in captivity before his release in 2002.

When Commodore Boyagoda finally decided to speak about his experience in detail, it was to Sunila Galappatti. The memoir they have produced together has been described by Michael Ondaatje as “the best book yet on the war in Sri Lanka.”

One of the things that makes it so is the writer. A Long Watch marks Galappatti’s debut. A former Director of the Galle Literary Festival Galappatti has also had stints at the Royal Shakespeare Company and Live Theatre.

Written from Commodore Boyagoda’s perspective, A Long Watch is narrated with an honesty that does not fear the complexity of human relationships. It finds a quiet space amid the noise of a country at war with itself. It makes room for the sometimes impossible contradictions Sri Lankans have long lived with. Beautifully observed, elegant without embellishment and deeply felt, this feels like a story that makes many other stories possible. Excerpts from an interview with Galapatti in the run-up to the launch of the book.

I’d like to begin at the end, with a line from your acknowledgements. You write that “it was a book written first for those who knew this war and then for those who did not.” How did this determination shape A Long Watch?
What mattered most to me, and to the Commodore, was how this book would feel to a reader in Sri Lanka, wherever else it might be read. Sometimes I read books about Sri Lanka – good books – and feel alienated. When too much is explained for example, or there is bold summarising of our lives, then I know the book wasn’t written for us. Have you had that experience? I’m sure insiders always feel this way but I think it can be especially painful to those who have lived through conflict (in many very different ways); whose experiences feel not only personal but complicated, contested, unprotected.

When you were approached to write this book, your first, what drew you to Commodore Boyagoda’s story?
The way he told it. This book has all the ingredients of a sensational prisoner of war story – an attack on a ship at night, chains, rumours of collaboration, a hunger strike – but in a way I took it on for the opposite reason. At my first meeting with Commodore Boyagoda, I was struck by the understated way he spoke.

He described his captivity in very normal language – it had of course been his normality for eight years of his life. I felt there was something we might learn from hearing that quiet voice. It reminded me of the way I’ve heard others speak of experiences of loss and disappearance through our many conflicts – experiences that are now intrinsic to their lives and which they have to live with every day.

Throughout the years in which I worked with Commodore Boyagoda on this story, he continued to speak in this voice. Often it would be a throwaway comment that reminded me how extreme the experience was he was describing. He told me how in one camp he used to go to the door of his cell and try and pick out an object far away to focus his eyes on – a tree or the sky. The muscles of his eyes would never otherwise get to relax, he said, as in a 10 x 3 foot cell you’re only ever focusing on objects close at hand.

The Commodore is not a man to go in for elaborate description – it was often the smaller details that I found most moving. He had the fortune to be a declared prisoner, and was sent books to read by the ICRC. He told me that one of these books was A Long Walk to Freedom, Nelson Mandela’s account of his own life and imprisonment.

Commodore Boyagoda said the book served to remind him of greater strength and tenacity – if Mandela had survived a longer, harsher prison sentence, surely he could manage his own. Sometimes, he said, he would read to the end of the book, then turn back to the beginning and start again.

Walk us through how this book took shape. Did the book settle into its present structure early on? When did you begin to feel like you could narrate this story in his tone, his voice?
You know, I realise that I have now almost forgotten the work and deliberation that went into this book. When I was going through my papers for a photograph to give you, I found old notes, plans, timelines, lists of questions, newspaper cuttings and of course bundles of the ICRC forms on which the Commodore and his family wrote to each other.

I’d packed everything away carefully, terrified that a leaking roof might damage the Commodore’s letters before I could return them to him, and opening that cupboard reminded me that I’d spent five years working on this book.

But the way I wrote the book really followed instinct I’d had at the start – that I had to tell the story in the Commodore’s voice: as a first person narration and with a discipline to tell his story, not to colour it in myself. It wasn’t automatically easy to write in his voice – he being a military man of his generation and experience, my being a civilian woman of my own time and place. I finally felt able to do it after a lot of close listening.

For about three and a half years Commodore Boyagoda and I met, twice a week, for two hours at a time. He would tell his story and I would listen. Then for another year, perhaps, I listened to recordings of those conversations. Eventually, I felt I could catch his tone and meaning with enough nuance to put it in writing.

My training comes from working in classical, contemporary and documentary theatre – I found that the precision and discipline I was taught in that trade was the most useful to me in completing this project.

Commodore Boyagoda draws on his own experience in personal recollections of high ranking LTTE officials and reflections on ways that both the LTTE and the Forces conducted themselves through the war. In doing so he challenges binary narratives of the conflict. What do you hope will come of sharing these stories with a wider audience?
We should be very clear this is not a whistle-blower book; not an exercise in naming or shaming. The Commodore always said, “We’re not here to light more fires.” We set out only to tell one among the hundreds of thousands of stories that exist about this war, knowing too that it is not a typical story.

If I hope for anything, it is that when people read this book they will be moved to speak of their own histories. I think books sometimes work this way – the story in the book sometimes gives shelter and protection to other stories that we tell each other, around it.

As someone pointed out to me last week, it helps that the Commodore tells his story so gently – we don’t feel shocked or distanced from it; rather, it reminds us of gentler ways to talk of what we have experienced and to reflect on our history. I don’t mean that it will be painless, or that it will right the wrongs of the past; only that it is another way to talk.

Dearest Appachchi,

One aunty at school told me that you would come home with Ammi. I was waiting for Ammi to come home.

After Ammi came home, she cried and cried. If I had come with her to see you, we would have found a way to bring you back, no? Don’t the LTTE uncles know that we’re here in Colombo?

Appachchi, I came third in the swimming meet but later they said I was fourth. I have left the band. We went on a trip with the band. Ammi also came. I’m in the choir for Poson bakthi-gee, and I play badminton in school. Wednesdays and Fridays, Ammi comes. Tuesdays and Saturdays are Elocution. Ammi and Appachchi are like the Titanic story, no? My Aiyas said so.

From Chuti Putha

— (Translated from Sinhala)

For me this book, despite its specificity and its loyalty to a single perspective, is about more than the man himself. It is about how Sri Lanka has changed as well. Some of the most moving sections come early on, when Commodore Boyagoda remembers for instance the relationship the forces had with civilians before the conflict broke out. What was your response to these glimpses of Sri Lanka’s past?One day the Commodore said in passing that in the old days the crows in Kandy were different from the crows in Colombo. And suddenly I remembered that from my own childhood. We would drive to Colombo from Peradeniya, where we lived at the time, and the air would change and the birds were quicker and more ashen in the city.

But I, born at the very end of the 1970s, don’t really remember the country before the war got going. So it was by talking to the Commodore that I think I began really to appreciate the scale of the change that took place in the fabric of everyday life.

He says himself, had he remained in the world at large throughout that time, he may not have registered it either. But coming back after eight years in captivity the impression was stark. I sometimes think of this book as a sideways look at a history we need not have had – had we anticipated it better – but which is now inside us.

You chose to write Commodore Boyagoda’s story in this book. His is one view and there will be countless others. How did you address that tension in your writing and in your conversations with him?
I admit thought about this a lot at the start. We are schooled to question every story that is told. I asked the Commodore questions, I wondered how I could get the facts all straight. But over time I grew to understand that even after all the material I gathered what was most revealing were in fact the personal reflections of a man making sense of his life and his history.

Neither he nor I would ever suggest this is the only authoritative account. The Commodore has often pointed out that his cellmates would have their own stories to tell and that many others who could add to the story are dead.

One day I went to talk with Mrs Boyagoda. I was meeting her for the first time; a woman whose courage had been very clear to me in the account I’d heard from her husband. The stories she told remain with me still, from the moment she heard the voices of friends at her window one night and realised something must have happened. She told me how she decided to break the news to her sons in stages: their father had been captured and she could give them no satisfactory answers about what would happen next.

The boys were at the time nine, seven, and less than two years old. There is at least another book to be written, even within this one family, about the experiences of this woman and her sons over the subsequent eight years.

This interview was published here in The Sunday Times, Sri Lanka  on May 22, 2016 and republished on Scroll.in on May 29, 2016. Interview by Smriti Daniel. Pictures courtesy Sunila Galappatti and Commodore Ajith Boyagoda.  

Johann saw people die on this mountain, watched as they plummeted to their deaths. He also saw other climbers in distress and could do nothing to help them. “It shatters you,” he says quietly. Walking past the corpse of a man who had died, he says he tried to look away, but could not. More than once, he and Jayanthi feared for their own lives. Their goggles clouded, their bodies deprived of oxygen and their limbs swaddled in bulbous, thick clothing, it was all they could do to set one foot in front of the other. Both say they could not have done it without the constant support of Ang Karma Sherpa and Ang Passang Sherpa.

But for Jayanthi the view from the summit was all the reward she could ask for. She remembers that after deciding she would no longer let the strain get to her, she began talking to the mountain, calling it by its other name – Chomolungma. “I wanted to stop cursing the cold and the bad weather, and instead I asked the mountain for permission to climb it. For me it wasn’t about conquering it, but having the patience to wait for the right time.” She was overwhelmed by the beauty of the peaks around her, and Everest towering above them all. “It is so huge and there you are, an ant in a sea of ice.”

In early rotations, Jayanthi was slow on one of her climbs and her guides cautioned that unless her timing was up to standard she wouldn’t be allowed to attempt the summit. Anxious to avoid a repeat on summit day she went hard, going for the peak like her life depended on it. She took almost no breaks and pushed on, reaching the top at 5:03 a.m. on May 21,surprising everyone including herself with her great timing.

The Hilary Step has beckoned Jayanthi from her screensaver this whole year, and now she had crossed it to the small, windy space that all these months of hard work had led to. For 15 minutes she took in the view. “There was the moon on one side and on the other hand, I saw the sun rising. The clouds were below me, and I could see the tops of other mountains pushing through them. The summit is small, one step on the other side and I would be in another country. It was unbelievable to just stand there. It’s not everyone who gets to live their dream.”

From where he stood, stuck behind a line of slow climbers, and running short on oxygen, Johann could see the lights at the summit. Turning back was one of the hardest things he has ever had to do. “But I’ve stood on one of the highest places in the world,” he says, and that is some consolation. So many people have written to him, and he says he’s grateful they know what it was really all about.

When asked if they would ever return to the mountain, the two look at each other. Then Johann tells Jayanthi, “Listen, hit me over the head if I ever suggest it, OK?” Laughing, she immediately agrees.

Published in The Sunday Times, Sri Lanka on June 5, 2016. Words by Smriti Daniel. Pix courtesy Jayanthi.