The ethnic riots of 1983 were not the first in Sri Lanka. Nor were they the last. But Black July was indisputably a seismic event in this country’s history. Its echoes are everywhere, but some of my most meaningful encounters with it have been through the island’s literature. From the warmth and innocence of Funny Boy to the passionate and inescapably political poetry of Jean Arasanayagam, the riots are embedded in Sri Lanka’s literary consciousness.

In fiction like July by Karen Roberts, On Sal Mal Lane by Ru Freeman, Reefby Romesh Gunasekera, Love, Marriage by VV Ganeshanantha, and Road from Elephant Pass by Nihal de Silva, 1983, even if only referred to in a few lines, is a profound influence. Its arrival on the page transmutes individuals and communities physically, emotionally and spiritually. The borders that mark the before and after are sharp, and when you cross over, it is into another country. So much of this writing does what you would expect of the best fiction. It produces stories that are intimate, deeply felt, unabashedly subjective, that go beyond dry statistics and sanitised official reports.

For context, the riots began on July 23 with reports of an ambush of 13 Sri Lankan army soldiers by the separatist militant group Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). By the next day, controversy around the soldiers’ funerals had already spurred the gathering of angry, predominantly Sinhalese mobs in Colombo. It marked the start of a week of deadly rioting across the county, with Tamil homes, businesses and factories targeted. Hundreds of Tamil civilians were killed (the actual number remains disputed) and some 150,000 people were displaced. Many reports include mention of mobs armed with voter registration lists that allowed them to zero in on their targets.

In the wake of the riots, Tamils fled to the North and East of the country, while those who could leave left the country altogether. The 26 years of war between the LTTE and the state that followed would become one of the most brutal, and longest-running civil conflicts in Asia.

Going away

“It just boggles reality,” says author Shyam Selvadurai. Selvadurai’s first and greatly beloved book Funny Boy was a semi-autobiographical novel that introduced us to a young boy named Arjie. Arjie is gay and in a world where gender, class and ethnic categories are rigidly adhered to, he is an anomaly, a “funny boy.” In the final section of the book, titled “Riot Journal”, Arjie reports on the unravelling of his world. In a particularly difficult moment, he hears that he has lost his grandparents – their car was set alight, with them still in it – and we see the event through a child’s confused eyes as he struggles to make sense of his father’s wild grief and his mother’s fear.

The family is forced to flee their home, which is later torched, the flames illuminating the night sky as they take refuge with a Sinhalese neighbour. Selvadurai, who drew on both his personal recollections and reports published after the event to write the scene, says of 1983: “It was a watershed. After that the war began. After that we lost our innocence. I was never the same person after that and neither was the country ever the same.”

He says that in essence 1983 helped define the diaspora. People who had migrated in the years before watched in horror as events unfolded back home. “For the diaspora, it’s their reason for existing. It’s like a rite of passage for them, a sort of second birth,” says Selvadurai. “Sure people came in waves after 1983, but it’s the moment that created the first push out to a place like Toronto. In the north is also galvanised the Tiger movement when people saw the refugees arriving there.”

A fresh view

“In the diaspora, the memories of ‘83 are alive in a different way,” says the poet Ramya Chamalie Jirasinghe. Jirasinghe, who also teaches creative writing through a Fulbright programme in Colombo, says she believes younger writers in the diaspora have engaged with ‘83 in an attempt to understand what drove their families into exile. She suspects new local writers will feel less compelled to wrestle with it, but from a purely technical perspective, there is a need even here to seek new approaches and to find fresh ways of representing a much written about event.

Nayomi Munaweera is one among a handful of contemporary Sri Lankan writers to achieve such a fresh approach. She published Island of a Thousand Mirrors in 2014 to critical acclaim. Her debut, it was long-listed for the Man Asia Prize and won the Commonwealth Regional Prize for Asia. Munaweera’s book is dense, lyrical and madly ambitious in its determination to have characters speak not from this side or that but to explore the many faces of the conflict.

A central scene in the book places her characters on the streets of Colombo as murderous mobs go on a rampage. While Munaweera did not experience the riots first hand, they still hold a central place in her imagination and memory. “My paternal aunt, much like the character of Mala in Island of a Thousand Mirrors was pregnant and went into labour during the riots,” she says.

The family’s mad dash to hospital ended well, and Munaweera’s cousin is now expecting his own child. “However the description of that terrible drive, its psychic weight on my family, the threat of what could have happened to them and their witnessing of what happened to Tamil people on the streets was one of the first moments I understood absolute terror,” says the writer.

Later on, Munaweera would hear other accounts of the riots from people she loved. A boyfriend described hiding from the mobs with his siblings under a bed and then fleeing to the airport, “leaving their homes and everything they treasured to chaos.” As a Sinhala woman Munaweera says she was aware that she had been allowed into that story, and was a witness to the terror they had felt.

She would draw on these narratives in her writing and sees such truth-telling as a driving force of her work. “It’s always the work of the artist to stand up against the official narrative and say – that’s not what happened, let’s look at the painful truth.” She does this through “the telling of fictions,” an act which at its most effective she says “demands that people’s experiences are honoured.”

The unofficial version

For authors like Selvadurai, fiction has been a powerful tool with which to help people engage with those experiences and to challenge the obfuscation of official narratives. “I think it makes the horror of it personal,” he says. “It forces us to think of these people as people and not just numbers. It also contradicts the official narrative by narrating how the government and armed forces stood by and let it happen and even participated. For me 1983 so far, along with the JVP insurrection, are the only events in the war in which I feel there is some real truth being spoken and acknowledged.”

From her home in Kandy, Jean Arasanayagam shares a memory from 33 years ago, when she stepped out of house to go and face down the mob. She knew her husband, who was Tamil, and their two children were in danger. Despite their Dutch Burgher ancestry, she and her brother were threatened at their front gate, but they managed to hold the crowd at bay. Later that day, they fled to a refugee camp.

The experience shattered her life as she knew it. “I understood that my sense of safety was forever imperilled, forever destroyed. You are never yourself again,” says Arasanayagam. “Since then I find myself constantly peering into the interstices of the past, trying to unpick all the threads.”

In her writing, Arasanayagam returns again and again to that time in works such as Apocalypse 83, The Journey and The Captain Has Come. She remembers the camp they took shelter in was a universe unto itself. People were overcome by fear, strain and a sense of absolute alienation. Arasanayagam herself felt fenced in, incarcerated mentally and physically within that space. When they were able to leave, she still carried within her something of that terrible uncertainty. “You can pick up the fragments and leave the camp, but those fragments will remain embedded within you like shrapnel,” she says.

In the months and years to come, Arasanayagam would have many conversations about that time, others adding their own recollections to hers. “Everything I have described to you has found its way into my work, I have had to excise it out of my system,” she says, adding with a rueful laugh, “through out my life, this has been grist to my mill. It is alchemy – the conversion of base metal through literature into something precious.”

Today, Arasanayagam says that while other concerns have superseded the events of 1983 in her mind, the experience remains one of the most defining of her life. It has helped form the writer she is today, someone intent on questioning, unpacking history and identity, and confronting even the most painful emotions so as to reveal deeper truths. Through this work she has found her purpose. “I am so happy that I am still here to report,” Arasanayagam tells me. “I am not young any more but I am still reporting.”

Published on Scroll.in on July 23, 2016. By Smriti Daniel. 

Asha de Vos knew what to expect before the big announcement. “The hardest part was keeping it secret,” she tells The Sunday Times. The only Sri Lankan so far to have a Ph.D. in marine-mammal-related research, de Vos was named an Emerging Explorer by the National Geographic Society in May this year. Subsequently featured in the NatGeo magazine in July, the young marine biologist joins a group of ‘uniquely gifted and inspiring scientists, conservationists, storytellers, and innovators’ who each receive $10,000 to support their research and exploration.

Explaining that the nomination itself came as a total shock, de Vos explains that National Geographic Explorers are picked through a secret system, with potential honourees kept in the dark until everything is confirmed. “When they originally told me, I felt like my sides were going to burst. It was a huge moment in my life.”

She grew up reading NatGeo magazines and recalls being inspired by Arthur C. Clarke. She told NatGeo: “He would come to my swimming club and I would sit with him. He’d tell me these stories about his dives. There was a lot of intrigue around that.” Reared on this diet of adventure and exploration, she would grow into an unusually determined young woman. When she was low on cash after her graduation, de Vos worked in potato fields to save the money she needed to travel to New Zealand. Once there, she lived in a tent for six months while working on conservation projects.

She got one of her biggest breaks when she managed to convince scientists on a whale research vessel that she deserved to be part of the team – she wrote to them every day for three months until they agreed to let her on board. Working as a deckhand on the ship headed to Sri Lanka, de Vos was soon promoted to the team’s science intern.

Today, de Vos has made her name as a marine biologist with her research on Sri Lanka’s ‘unorthodox’ blue whales. A Pew fellow, she is building Sri Lanka’s first marine conservation research and education organization. Now, being named an Emerging Explorer has thrown open doors she never expected to walk through.

“When you come from a small developing nation in the middle of the most understudied ocean basin where being a marine biologist is a rare thing, being part of a global network can help with idea exchange and brain-storming, access to resources and infrastructure, eliminating the feeling of working in isolation and access to a global audience,” says de Vos. “The international community has always been hugely supportive of my work but being a National Geographic Explorer and being featured in the July issue of NatGeo will just help me to take the work to yet another group of incredible people.”

She is yet to decide where she will invest her prize money, but she says the honour has already given her access to exciting and influential new networks. Walking into the National Geographic Headquarters for a symposium last month, she felt she had come home. “The other explorers welcomed me like I had always been a part of them. It was a huge honour and incredibly humbling. It was even more amazing to see how many of those explorers had been following my work over the years – there was a lot of mutual awe for sure.”

It’s a hard won accolade, and one that de Vos intends to use to throw light on some of the challenges facing her beloved blue whales. But de Vos is as unorthodox as the animals she studies, and in that sense this is also a win for women struggling to make themselves heard in what is a traditionally male dominated profession in Sri Lanka.

She admits readily to having dealt with misogyny in many guises – “Everything from being ignored at meetings to getting ridiculously, heart-wrenchingly trolled in the comments sections of my videos when they make their way on to YouTube. Constant questions of my marital status – including if my husband wouldn’t mind me getting black in the sun. I have had hate mail written and circulated about me and I have had people give me threatening calls in the middle of the night.”

But de Vos has used these experiences to fuel her growth and makes no apologies for her ambition – “I hope at least some of those people read this interview because I want to thank them for making me who I am today,” she says, adding, “I love being unconventional and unorthodox. It puzzles people and people constantly ask me if it isn’t time to settle down and get a real job. I guess my job looks like way too much fun to be real!”

In the meantime, her fascination with blue whales continues unabated. “The blue whales that I work with around Sri Lanka were virtually untalked about before I started my work. How is it even possible that we can overlook something so giant and not be drawn in to find out more?” she asks. For her this is a red flag, a warning that there may be many smaller, wonderful things in the ocean that we remain in complete ignorance of.

Even when it comes to studying the whales themselves, there is so much we do not know. She points out that while there were people doing monitoring work on whales in Sri Lankan waters, no one was doing any science-based research on whales before the launch of The Sri Lankan Blue Whale Project.

For her part, she knows this will be the work of decades, a lifelong obsession. But she hopes it will not be a lonely pursuit, and that she will be able to recruit many more champions for marine conservation efforts. Fortunately, she knows where to make a start: “The ocean needs to become a part of our everyday conversation and that can only happen if we start to tell stories about things people are magically drawn to.”

Published in the Sunday Times, Sri Lanka on July 31, 2016. Words by Smriti Daniel, pix courtesy Asha de Vos.

It was 33 years ago, but Chandraguptha Thenuwara still remembers the group of men stopping the bus and clambering on. They had a seemingly bizarre demand, going from passenger to passenger, insisting that he or she say the Sinhalese words for pen and bucket – pǣna, bāldiya. Tamil tongues twisted different around these syllables, making it easy for the assailants to sort members of one of Sri Lanka’s ethnic communities from the other. Thenuwara, who is Sinhalese, was passed over. Others who struggled with the pronunciation were dragged off the bus to meet uncertain ends. The vehicle was waved on.

An ambush by Tamil insurgents had blown up a truck carrying 13 Sri Lankan army soldiers a few days back. There were immediate retaliations on civilians in the North. The unrest had spread, and now smoke was rising over Colombo as rampaging mobs set homes and business alight. Thenuwara decided he wanted to see what was happening for himself, and he set out to walk from Colpetty to the predominantly Tamil neighbourhood of Wellawatte, a distance of some 5km along Galle Road. “It happened in front of me. I can’t forget what I saw,” he says now. “Wellawatte was burning.” All seemed to be anarchy, but the police stood by as the mobs wrecked their vengeance, and the leaders were seen to be directing their attacks with the aid of electoral registers.

In the weeks and months that followed, the riots of Black July would loom in Sri Lanka’s national consciousness as an event that sparked an exodus of Tamil people from these shores and made open conflict between the state and Tamil militant groups like the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam LTTE seem inevitable. Hundreds were killed, many thousands displaced, and millions of rupees lost as a result of arson and looting.

Thenuwara himself would leave the country to pursue a Masters in Fine Art in Russia. He watched helplessly from a distance as Sri Lanka drowned in a bloodbath. As the violence escalated in the North and East of the island, insurrections by the Janathā Vimukthi Peramuṇa (JVP), a Marxist and Sinhalese nationalist political party, brought chaos and death to the South. When Thenuwara returned home in the 1990s, he found a country at war with itself, being transformed by encroaching militarisation. Thenuwara’s response was to mount a challenge. In 1997, he held his first exhibition to commemorate Black July.

Today, the exhibition is a long-running tradition. This July will mark the 18^th time he has held it, only having missed one year in the middle. It is a singular event in many ways, not least because of Thenuwara himself.

Among Sri Lanka’s foremost contemporary artists, Thenuwara is unique among his peers. He is an inherently political animal, as comfortable in front of a canvas as he is out at a street protest. He has often been invited to speak at rallies and on talk shows on national television.

“Thenuwara is widely recognized as both an artist and a political activist,” says Paikiasothy Saravanamuttu, the Executive Director of the Centre for Policy Alternatives (CPA) in Colombo. “His exhibition every year commemorating July 83 attests to his uncompromising belief that uncomfortable truths have to be confronted if reconciliation is to have any meaning, unity any value.” Saravanamuttu is frank about the risks Thenuwara has taken in being a vocal critic of the state, even in times when such outspokenness has led to people being threatened, disappeared or assassinated.

Having seen him in action many times, Saravanamuttu says also that Thenuwara is a particularly compelling speaker. “He does not make political speeches like a politician, instead he is charming and articulate. He has a biting sense of humour. He is in every way a political artist.”

Thenuwara has always drawn strength from time spent outside the studio, in the thick of the crowd. The last time he received a death threat before a rally, he went anyway, hiding his face under an umbrella as a friend smuggled him past the men waiting with rods and batons. His sculpture ‘Monotony’ could be inspired by the experience – it features a hulking, faceless soldier crouching behind a shield. From his back cascade arms like tentacles, each clutching a long rod. The figure polices a series of others; the incarcerated are trapped in solid brick, only their heads are left vulnerable and bare; their mouths are sealed shut. The black metal figure is oppression and violence given physical form.

When he is not hiding under umbrellas, Thenuwara’s face, framed by those bristling white sideburns, is familiar to many.

At a time when the Federation of University Teachers Association (FUTA) was leading a huge protest demanding the state allocate more resources to education, Thenuwara was in the limelight throughout the year he served as its President. His was a prominent voice in the Platform for Freedom and he remains active in the organisation Purawesi Balaya or citizens’ power that served to mobilise opposition and dissent against the Mahinda Rajapakse Government, which culminated with a dramatic electoral defeat for the incumbent president in January 2015.

Thenuwara is the founder of the Vibhavi Academy of Fine Arts (VAFA), and a senior lecturer at the University of the Visual and Performing Arts in Colombo. In 2015 he was appointed President of the Arts Council of Sri Lanka.

Seemingly fearless, this artist’s outspoken critique of war, human rights abuses, militarisation, censorship and authoritarianism has seen him cast by his critics as unpatriotic and anti-national. Yet every year, he produces a new collection of work that engages critically with contemporary politics. He has consistently kept his finger on the pulse of the national conversation, one year marking our grief over the masses of disappeared civilians and the next confronting militarization through a series inspired by camouflage.

For ‘Chandraguptha Thenuwara: A Retrospective’ (Saskia Fernando Gallery, 2009) Qadri Ismail would write that ‘the force of Thenuwara’s work isn’t only political and aesthetic, but intellectual and ethical…It insists that art cannot be concerned only with the formal, the beautiful, but must also say something, be responsible (to the other).’

Anchored in this approach, Thenuwara has produced a new artistic vocabulary, rich in symbol and motif. He is perhaps best known for ‘barrelism,’ a series of paintings and installations, inspired by the streets of Colombo when they were thick with military checkpoints. The tar barrels of his childhood had been repainted in camouflage colours of green and black, with yellow highlights, and used to delineate the boundaries of army checkpoints. To Thenuwara, the colours were speaking – “those colours were both intended to camouflage and be visible at the same time,” he says, explaining the checkpoints would be situated only in neighbourhoods of some strategic importance. “I wanted to know who they were protecting. It was not the normal people. They were stopped and questioned, and lived life outside the protection of the barrels.”

In the post-war context, Thenu would incorporate barbed wire into his work, a reference to the way internally displaced civilians fleeing the warzone were fenced in in places like Menik Farm. For his exhibition on Urban Regeneration Program which had seen thousands from Colombo’s low income settlements evicted, Thenuwara created a mosaic you had to walk over. Embedded in the floor, it mimicked the new walking paths springing up all over the city. Inscribed on his tiles were the dates of riots and massacres, and in a particularly visceral piece, bone fragments were mixed in among the jumble of building materials.

“Thenu, as an artist working in a community, manages to confront us with images, motifs from our everyday, sometimes before we have identified them ourselves,” says Jake Oorloff, founder and artistic director of the Floating Space Theatre Company. Explaining that Thenuwara’s art has often provided inspiration to his company, Oorloff adds, “His work challenges the status quo, the narrative; he subverts the power of the motifs and complicates the narrative, sometimes to the point of mockery. In this way he has contributed to an artistic vocabulary, something that is not limited to one artist or one practice but influences the way other artists and artistic communities start communicating.”

Thenuwara and his wife, the activist Kumudini Samuel, live with their son Charu in a lovely, airy home. Their living room looks out over a narrow canal studded with lotus flowers which forms the border of an adjacent bird sanctuary. Sitting at her dining table, Samuel tells me: “Each year Thenuwara’s exhibition is a critique of what is happening at that time. I can see the way his politics have evolved, and that evolution is the story of our lives.”

She recalls there was a time in the years immediately after the war when dissent was a particularly dangerous thing. With journalists and activists targeted, Samuel found strangers who recognized them in supermarkets and doctors’ waiting rooms coming up to Thenuwara just to say, “Thank you for your courage, but please be careful.” Samuel, who had herself been questioned by the CID because of her human rights activism, says she began to worry that Thenuwara’s life was at risk. But he would not agree to be more cautious – “Now is the time I need to speak,” he told her.

Both this courage, and the ideology that underpins it, are strongly rooted in his childhood.  Thenuwara grew up primarily in Ampara, the son of two teachers. His father Gunatilaka’s strong socialist politics led him to lose his job, along with 123 other teachers in a controversial incident in 1956. But that was not the last blow. Thenuwara and his elder brother Rohana both came down with diphtheria. Rohana did not survive. Soon after, Thenu who was still very young, lost his mother Yasawathie to complications resulting from childbirth.

That tragedy, deeply felt, continues to haunt his work. Mothers are treated with a particular reverence, and the Madonna is a recurring icon. “It is because of my childhood that I learned to take risks,” says Thenuwara now. “Life is risk. That is why I am not afraid. Knowing that, I don’t want to be passive. I want to be active, looking forward, trying to change things instead of accepting the status quo.”

Over the years, his work has drifted far from the colourful, beautifully detailed portraiture that he originally made his name with, moving instead to installations and sculpture and featuring more sketches and paintings in black and white. His friend and fellow artist T. Shanaathanan points out that this commitment to producing an exhibition every July has had a mixed impact on Thenuwara’s body of work: “Sticking to an exhibition calendar and its focus on that previous year, has become a kind of possibility, and also a kind of limitation. It confines him to a certain kind of palette and a certain kind of imagery. The colour palette is not in his hand, it is in the country, it is in the calendar.”

For his part, Thenuwara embraces this. With this year’s series titled ‘Glitch’ he meditates both on the realisation of this country’s hope when it voted for Maithripala Sirisena in that historic 2015 election, and the ways in which the new government has disappointed the electorate since it came to power. The paintings are bursting with colour but distorted by noise, static proliferating through what was once a perfect image. The exhibition which opens on July 23 will run for a month at the Saskia Fernando Gallery.

Though he is so celebrated in some circles, Thenuwara also knows that this comes at a price. Yet it is one he has willing paid for decades. “You are doing work that usually cannot sell. People do not want to carry these tragedies back to their homes,” he says. But then, with a glint in his eye, he points out that even an unhappy viewer is an engaged viewer, and that is what he wants above all. He is content if he can make people question, even if what they are questioning is him. “People would love to forget everything easily, but I love to remind them,” he says.

Published in Open on 22 July, 2016. By Smriti Daniel. 

Though she had been to many book clubs since the publication of her novel What Lies Between Us, Nayomi Munaweera found her heart sinking when faced with the newest group. Sitting around in a circle, waiting to discuss her novel were nearly 50 women, all mothers with children who attended the local elementary school. She braced herself for a barrage of criticism.

Before the book even appeared on shelves, Munaweera and her publisher had had a frank conversation about what to expect in terms of fallout. They thought it quite likely that people would find the crime at the heart of the novel – “the very worst thing a woman could do,” as Nayomi describes it – thoroughly objectionable. “My publisher told me, ‘You are going to get a lot of hate mail. People are going to be upset,’” Munaweera remembers.

Hearing this didn’t come as a complete surprise to the Sri Lankan-American writer. She knew the protagonist of her novel, who remains unnamed till the very end, wasn’t going to take home any prizes. We can guess, almost from the first page, the crime this woman has committed. You read on simply to know why and how, a pursuit that takes up most of the 300 pages of What Lies Between Us. The author had deliberately set out to wring sympathy from her readers for an unsympathetic character and now, in a book club, surrounded by readers who were also mothers, she was about to find out if she had succeeded.

The women loved the novel.

“You’ve got this completely right,” one reader told her; she remembers another saying, “You are talking about stuff that most people don’t want to talk about.” The conversation that followed was for Munaweera a kind of validation. The things she was writing about were grim and emotionally weighted but her readers were drawn to the book despite, no, because of her willingness to wade into murky waters.

By now, Munaweera is used to surprising everyone, herself included. Her debut, Island of a Thousand Mirrors, made the rounds of several US publishers and was rejected multiple times before a chance encounter with an old friend led to Perera-Hussein Publishing House launching the book in Sri Lanka in 2012. Island was subsequently a nominee for the Man Asian Literary Prize and the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature. It took home the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Asia in 2013.

By then, good reviews had earned Munaweera a two-book deal with St. Martin’s Press. The author, by now at work on her second and third books, could rest easy that her next novel already had a publisher.

Munaweera’s confidence, on page and in person, has grown visibly since her debut. Her style, though eliciting comparisons with the lyricism of Michael Ondaatje, is very recognizably her own. The pages are thick with metaphor and simile; every other paragraph seems to launch a kind of sensory assault – taste, touch, sight, sound – on the reader. Her attention to visual detail reminds you she once considered a career in painting. Her plots, which lean toward the dramatic, are fuelled by deep emotion. Certainly, her work is not to everyone’s taste, but that doesn’t seem to bother Munaweera in the least – she lives by the dictum that she writes the kind of book she would want to read.

Since she frequently ventures far beyond the experiences of her own relatively privileged life, writing remains for her a kind of leap into the unknown, an inseparable blend of “imagination and research, dreams and overheard conversations.” Munaweera does not subscribe to the notion that writing is meant to be easy. She describes an approach that sounds almost painful in its emphasis on writing and rewriting a piece until all those re-workings produce the illusion of ease and effortless flow. Experience has taught her not to show her manuscript to anyone early on, and so she is largely a solitary writer.

Despite the emphasis on technique, she is far from detached. The novel’s interest in motherhood had Munaweera wondering whether her own decision not to have a child would come under scrutiny (it hasn’t, so far). But she is honestly sceptical about whether she would have attempted this book if she and her husband Whit had had a family, or even if her niece, who she adores, had been born then. “I don’t think I could have written those hard scenes if I had natural child in my life,” she confesses. Even though the character of the girl Bodhi had no real counterpart, Munaweera says the life of her protagonist sometimes felt too painful to inhabit for long stretches of time.

The author is currently listening to an audio book of Moby Dick, and in Herman Melville’s iconic work she sees an odd concurrence of philosophies. For her Moby Dick is all about the ocean, and Melville, she says with frank admiration, has “considered every piece of it.” She strives toward something very similar, building novels that revolve around a single theme. “The way that I think about a book is that there is a central idea or a question. For the first book, the central idea was about the civil war [in Sri Lanka], and in this book it was about maternity. I end up looking at that idea from every angle that I can.”

Munaweera admits to a kind of necessary obsession with the subject she chooses, because it is one she will live with for the many years it takes to write, publish and publicize a book. “I just attune my life to answering that one question, to attacking it from every single angle I can.”

Her use of the word “attacking” is reflective of Munaweera’s surprising tenacity, a trait that might initially seem at odds with her cheerful, easy-going personality. The 43-year old has a predilection for difficult, dark subjects – the question at the heart of her unpublished third book is the nature of evil – but running through all her writing so far is a concern with women’s bodies, how they are circumscribed by the patriarchy, and policed by society. “Women live in a world in which we don’t even fully realize the ways in which we are oppressed,” she says. Referring to the dominance of male voices in literature, Munaweera declares her interest in being a writer who writes about women, their relationships to themselves, to each other and to the world.

This ambition demands that as a writer she switch constantly between the private and the public. In What Lies Between Us, a young girl grows up to become a mother herself. We see her life filtered through the lenses of family, society and tradition. Trauma is a seed whose roots run ever deeper over time. It does not seem to matter that our protagonist has long since left everything behind; fleeing her attacker, her homeland and every expectation of who she should be. She is still haunted.

This plot, which flows in a relentless circle, will undoubtedly leave some readers feeling leaden. Munaweera, not being immune herself, says she has always tried to find room for humour and beauty. “I wanted to have moments of respite,” she says. One of the most charming segments comes early in the book, when she describes a typical Sri Lankan party, complete with a feast (silver-skinned fish, fried beetroot, red chicken curry, fried potatoes, coconut sambol, crackling papadams and rice), music (a heady mix of Abba, Boney M and baila) and a full complement of aunties and arrack-soaked uncles whiling the night away.

“That one was straight from my memory. That was absolutely what childhood parties were like,” she says of the chapter, adding “Boney M – ah, no matter where Sri Lankans go in the world, they take Boney M with them.” I think it revealing that Munaweera – who is by now used to people coming up to her to talk about how her handling of ethnicity, violence or trauma had a personal resonance for them – takes particular pride in a very different kind of compliment. “It’s amazing when people say to me, ‘I really want to try Sri Lankan food now.’ I really love that.”

Published in Scroll.in on 27 August, 2016. By Smriti Daniel. Pix courtesy Nayomi Munaweera. 

My mother-in-law has never told me she loves me; unlike her son, I wouldn’t take it for granted. But I am always reassured by what I taste in her food.

I go grocery shopping with her sometimes, trailing in her wake as she cuts a swathe through the crowded isles of Sri Lanka’s Wellawatte market, disregarding the calls of jostling vendors and making her way straight to those she knows best, and who know her. They have their routine, and there is always a friendly argument as money and bags of produce are exchanged.

Often, she will return from these jaunts bearing bunches of greens, some of which she will turn into a kola kanda—or herbal porridge—for our breakfast. Her main ingredient is most often gotu kola (Centella asiatica). A member of the parsley family, the plant grows well in and around water. Its small, fan-shaped leaves taste ever so slightly bitter. When blended with coconut milk and garlic they morph into a bright green, nourishing soup into which fat grains of red rice are added.

Local wisdom has it that the gotu kola has medicinal properties, combating everything from colds to skin conditions. The rice, high in fiber, is slow to digest but rich in energy.

Though homemade is best, early birds may still find this treat for breakfast in some local eateries or at a kanda van, where a man dishes out steaming cups to morning commuters. Each helping (Rs.30, the last time I checked, which is less than an American cent) is accompanied by a small square of crumbly, sweet jaggery for additional flavor. There are other kandas, and many households have a preferred version. One made with red rice and another with rice flakes are both thickened with coconut milk and flavored simply with the garlic, onion, and curry leaves.

I confess that gotu kola was an acquired but ultimately addictive taste for me. Now I might eat it twice in one day, especially when it makes an appearance at lunchtime in a mallung. Sri Lanka’s Sinhalese population make their version of the mallung bright and tart with chilli, lime, and onions, dicing the leaves finely and serving it raw. Tamils cook it in a quick, dry roast, seasoning the roughly chopped greens with slivers of white coconut and subtle spices.

I have watched my mother-in-law make mallungs in both styles in her impeccably clean kitchen, but the kanda remains a favorite, and tastes of comfort. She will deliver it to me through Lionel, our neighborhood trishaw man, along with a dozen vegetables and curries in containers with her initials—A.S.—inscribed on them. Sometimes, I open the refrigerator and marvel at how well my husband and I—busy and uninspired to cook—eat everyday thanks to her thoughtfulness. Hers is, in every way, a labor of love.

First published in Roads&Kingdoms on Nov 30, 2015. By Smriti Daniel. Pix by Suda Shanmugaraja.

The heavy, metal apparatus standing in R. Lorrence’s garage seems out of place. Its design is simple enough – a pneumatic pump helps pack a mix of explosive chemicals into a slender plastic tube, exerting pressure that a human hand couldn’t hope to match. But it is the only machine in this little cottage firework factory – everything else here is made by hand. “My son designed this,” Lorrence says, explaining with pride that the boy studied science in school. When the rocket is lit, it explodes upward, whistling its way into the sky. Having made its debut just last year, it is the most sophisticated technology Kimbulapitiya manufacturers have access to.

This little village in the south of the island, is known all over Sri Lanka as rathinna gammanaya, literally fireworks village. However, when Kimbulapitiya makes headlines, it is rarely good news. Every year on average four or five people die in this rural community, says Lorrence, the founding chairman of the Fireworks Manufacturers Association of Sri Lanka, and its current vice chairman. This year alone three young men succumbed to severe burns after an explosion flattened their workshop.

According to Lorrence only some 175 people have licenses to produce fireworks in Kimbulapitiya. But he says the actual number of people involved is considerably more – this industry is the lifeblood of the area, and almost no household is exempt. When demand soars, say during The Sinhala and Tamil New Year, or in election season, they will churn out hundreds of thousands of fireworks. Disregarding government regulations, people take the work into their bedrooms and kitchens. Labour laws are more strictly enforced than they used to be, but even children will help out with the simpler tasks.

“Gunpowder for us is like a relative, it is a friend. We have lived closely with it for a long time,” says Lorrence. “It there is an accident, we remember it only for a week and then we go back to work. It is in our blood.”

The majority of the ‘factories’ here are small operations, typically hiring 6 people or less in the off season and expanding to a dozen or more at peak times. Most are family businesses, the premises passed down from parent to child, along with the basic knowledge needed to make the fireworks. This is true of Surin Fernando, whose family has been in this business for fifty years. He owns the Mua (Deer) brand of fireworks, while his sister Chamila produces her own range under the name Speeder. Both operate their businesses out of home. Fernando is brutally frank in his assessment of their technical capacity: “We belong in the stone age.”

When Sri Lanka’s nearly thirty year long civil conflict ended in 2009, the villagers spontaneously emptied their stores of fireworks as they took to the streets in celebration. It heralded a boom in their previously flagging industry, and the demand for their products has only increased since then. But today they are struggling under the burdens of labour shortages, poor technology and expensive raw materials. Chinese manufacturers who visited the village were astonished, says Lorrence, to discover that where they played around with some 125 chemicals, their Sri Lankan counterparts had only 7. And what they do have can prove extraordinarily volatile.

Surin admits that they do not always know the properties of the chemicals they work with. “It completely contradicts common sense,” he says. When they are experimenting with something new, it’s a hazardous process of trial and error. In the workshops, people are in constant proximity to substances like potassium nitrate, barium nitrate, aluminium powder, potassium chlorate and sulphuric powder. Factories produce around 24 different kinds of fireworks by hand. Most often the workers gather all the raw materials within easy reach, piling up the finished goods on the other side. It’s a process Fernando describes as akin to “working with a bomb strapped to your stomach.”

It is why the mixers tend to be the most experienced workers in the community. Suresh Prasanna Fernando is trusted by his employers at Jayahanda Fireworks to mix the chemical powders that others will use to fill the crackers. Suresh is 24 now, but has been working in this industry since he was 14. With no formal training, he is all instinct, relying on the sight, smell and the texture of the powder as it is to sieved to know if he has got the mix right. “You have to be very careful,” he says, in something of an understatement.

Today, however, he has been set to work churning out three pointed, triangular crackers. He sits there with pile of explosive powder between his legs. He wears no mask or gloves and will sometimes find himself coughing because of all the powder he inhales. Lung problems are common among the workers, he reveals. The powder settles all over his body, turning his skin silver. Each cracker takes him just under 30 seconds to fold, fill and knot up. Suresh’s efficiency is not unusual, next to him a man he calls Sarath uncle produces some 10,000 to 15,000 of the smaller crackers in a single day. Sarath has been making fireworks since he was 11.  “This is hard work,” he says, “but this is what I know to do, so I do it.”

Workers like Suresh and Sarath earn anywhere between Rs.1000 – Rs.3,000 (approx. $6 – $20) a day and work from 7am to 5pm. Another man named Sona Ramesh, who does this part time says he will usually be paid for every 1000 sky rockets he produces. “The main problem is that we have no life insurance,” he says, “but even people who have lost family members in accidents keep coming back because there is no other way to earn.” He explains that it’s not only the locals who are employed in the industry. Itinerant workers who appear at season time are given a day or two of training and then set to work. Many don’t understand that even a small ember from a beedi is enough to level an entire workshop, says Ramesh. Locals know better which is ironically why accidents are more common in licensed, large workshops than in homes.

KPN Jayatilaka and his wife Lashika Fernando own Jayahanda firecrackers. As stipulated by government regulations, their workshop is on a five acre property and their home is some 150m away from where the crackers are made. They say this industry’s history goes back to the 1940s and to a man named K.E Perera who is believed to have taught the first firework makers here everything he knew. But little has changed since then. “It’s hard to meet the demand because the cost of the chemicals keeps going up but we have to sell the fireworks at the same price,” says Lashika.

Their business feels precarious because of the issue of unreliable labour. Even if they were to attempt to take out a mortgage on their home in order to buy chemicals, they may lose everything if their workforce proves unreliable. When accidents happen, it is the owners who compensate workers and their families, bearing the full cost. They are desperately in need of mechanization, training and support from the government, who they hope will facilitate the imports of safer chemicals.

“There is no lab for us to test the quality of the chemical, and so we have to just mix it and see. Sometimes it is a waste and we have to throw big batches away. But we have to be very careful because things like exposure to sunlight or even morning dew can trigger a fire or explosion,” says Jayatilaka.

The manufacturers here were at the forefront of a drive to block fireworks imports into Sri Lanka but Jayatilaka had a chance to look at the stuff that slipped through into local markets. There were skyrockets that exploded in many colours, and smaller crackers that went off like popcorn. “The packaging looked like beautiful chocolates, you couldn’t even tell it was a firework,” he says, with something like longing in his voice. “We can’t compete with that but we are always trying take things apart and learn how they work.”

Everyone we speak with says they test their products frequently, but that the fireworks are so commonplace that they take little joy in them. The only exception seems to be the Feast of Our Lady of Lourdes, an annual celebration held at the local Catholic church in February. In the weeks before, local producers step up production but do not sell to their distributors. Instead they bring everything they have to the procession where they vie to outdo each other with ever larger displays. New designs are debuted. The religious make offerings of fireworks to fulfil vows or seek favours from the Lady. It does not seem to matter that some are Buddhists, others Hindus.

There can be no clearer demonstration that whatever challenges their work throws at them, the villagers of Kimbulupitiya cannot imagine life without fireworks. Despite the deadly toll it takes, this industry has become inextricably tied to their notion of home, family, faith, tradition and identity.

Back at Thushara Fireworks, Lorrence remains optimistic about their future. His children are internet savvy, and he is keen to see what other innovations they can help him roll out. Will his sons take up the family business? Lorrence says he thinks they will – “Just hopefully in a better way than we have been able to do.”

Published in Al Jazeera on July 4, 2016. By Smriti Daniel. Pix by M.A Pushpakumara.

If you know where to look, you can find the numbers all over Ena de Silva’s house.

Faded yet still legible, the white scribbles mark each tile in the parquet floor, each pebble and boulder in the sunny interior courtyard. Under their layer of paint, the bricks are numbered, and so are the columns and the latticed windows.

The numbers are sequential, grouped according to their location in the structure. The whole system relies on thousands upon thousands of components falling into place. Standing there, one might suspect to be surrounded by an enormous jigsaw puzzle – which isn’t all that far from the truth.

This same house once stood in a small plot nearly 90km and an hour-and-half away, in the Colombo suburb of Cinnamon Gardens.

It had been created for the artist and designer Ena de Silva and her husband Osmund in 1960 by Geoffrey Bawa , a man now widely acknowledged as the foremost architect of his generation in Sri Lanka, if not in all of South Asia.

One enormous jigsaw – thousands of individual pieces of Ena de Silva’s house await reassembly [Courtesy of Bawa Trust]

‘The most important house’

Ena’s house was utterly unconventional for its time. Anchored in the rich multicultural traditions of the island, yet responding ever to the present, Bawa would become known as the Father of Tropical Modernism. And in this house, one of his earliest designs, one could find many of the elements that would soon become synonymous with his work.

First, there was the interior urban courtyard, for which Bawa made room in a relatively cramped city plot. With it, he revived a forgotten tradition which had until then been largely confined to old colonial homes.

He then connected this interior space to a constellation of five subsidiary courtyards, all bounded by a high wall. Now, light and air poured into every room, with notions of inside and outside blurred nearly beyond distinction.

In relocating Ena de Silva’s house, the team of architects paid particular attention to replicating Bawa’s original palette of light and shadow [Courtesy of Sebastian Posingis]

His raw materials – plastered bricks for the walls, deep red terracotta tiles for the roof, columns of gleaming satin wood, and floors made of solid, rough granite – were all familiar to Sri Lankans, though they had seldom seen them assembled quite like this.

At Ena’s request and in defiance of modernist trends, he used no glass.

“It is probably the most important house in the history of contemporary South Asian architecture because it changed the way we looked at ourselves and our past,” says Channa Daswatte, an architect and trustee for the Bawa Trust.

Bawa’s aesthetic shaped an entire generation of south Asian architects and today in Sri Lanka particularly, his influence is ubiquitous.

“His spirit has become a part of the way Sri Lankans think of themselves,” Daswatte tells Al Jazeera.

It is also worth preserving as the home of a remarkable woman. As the daughter of Sir Richard Aluwihare, the first Ceylonese Inspector General of Police and Lucille Moonemalle, Ena was part of the Sri Lankan aristocracy.

Unabashedly flamboyant and boasting impeccable taste, she is remembered for her work in reinvigorating traditional crafts such as Kandyan embroidery and batik prints – perhaps most famously decorating Sri Lanka’s parliament building with fabric banners patterned in batik.

Though she would grow to love her home, when Bevis Bawa first proposed she hire his younger brother to be her architect, Ena was reportedly skeptical.

“To Ena, Geoffrey was this frivolous playboy who ran around in a Rolls-Royce convertible, with his silk scarf and long blonde hair trailing in the wind,” recalls Daswatte. But they bonded over this house, and Ena would later tell journalists that they built it together.

Ena de Silva [Courtesy of Dominic Sansoni/Three Blind Men]

“If there was such a thing as a soul mate for Geoffrey, she was it,” Daswatte adds.

Ena was likely responsible for the interiors of the new house, which she filled with a mix of antiques, and furniture of her own design.

She joined two bedheads together to make a long seat, and then added several of her densely patterned Kandyan embroidery cushions for comfort; she bought blue and white pottery bowls and embedded them in a decorative pattern in the wall above the bathtub; she eschewed a traditional dressing table for one made with cement, and stored her saris in horizontal cupboards built into her bed.

She even had a secret door that opened into a storage room installed behind a display case.

In essence, Ena was avant-garde, as were the people she surrounded herself with. There was the handloom designer and painter Barbara Sansoni, and the gardener and sculptor Laki Senanayake who, along with performers such as the dancer Chitrasena and the painters who made up the 43 Group, were together driving a kind of renaissance in Sri Lankan art and culture.

Everything that could be salvaged from Ena de Silva’s home, including the doors and windows, was carefully dismantled and moved to Lunuganga [Courtesy of Bawa Trust]

‘Sometimes the conventional methods aren’t enough’

In her new home, Ena earned a reputation as an eccentric yet impeccable hostess, throwing parties where formal tables were abandoned for dining under the night sky in her open courtyard.

Ena was finally forced to sell the house owing to health concerns, mounting bills and the need for a multi-million-rupee roof repair job that was beyond both her wallet and her stamina.

Her land in central Colombo was immensely valuable and was quickly snapped up by an adjoining hospital. But the public outcry that followed news of the proposed demolition saw the Urban Development Authority insist that the house itself be preserved.

This is when the Bawa Trust proposed their unusual solution, says architect Amila de Mel. De Mel helped coordinate the project, liaising between the teams of architects, archaeologists, engineers and contractors recruited to move Ena’s house.

Working closely with her was conservation specialist Nilan Cooray, who brought to the task his twin interests in archaeology and architecture.

It was Cooray who produced hundreds of glass paper drawings and devised the system that would allow them to shift the house.

Unlike examples from Japan and Norway, where timber structures had been relocated successfully, Cooray knew he would have to work with masonry, some of which was falling apart. They kept everything they could and where they could not, they commissioned research plaster analysis to replicate the mix Bawa used in the 1960s.

Daswatte, who watched Cooray work, says he was meticulous – every pebble in the courtyard was numbered before he was done. Working from the roof down, they then began dismantling the house, which was boxed up and loaded on to lorries to be carted off to a plot next door to Lunuganga, Bawa’s world-famous garden home.

De Mel says she learned a lot from seeing one of the master’s homes stripped down to the skeleton.

They paid particular attention to replicating the structure’s orientation to the Sun, because that was essential to Bawa’s original palette of light and shadow. She loved the way the scale changed throughout.

“Another thing I hadn’t realised was how well it engages the garden all the time,” she says. “It’s just fantastic.”

Working with a team member, Nilan Cooray, left, laboriously traces the placement of each boulder in the front courtyard  [Courtesy of Bawa Trust]

Though the move was a smooth one, building stalled when funds became an issue. In the end, it took six years from start to finish.

“I was unsure till the very end that we would pull it off,” de Mel confesses.

Unfortunately, Ena who passed away in 2015, did not live to see it completed. But Cooray thinks she would have approved. “We captured the spirit and feeling of the house,” he says.

Cooray thinks the project could set a new template for how Sri Lanka approaches the conservation of its heritage buildings.

“Sometimes the conventional methods and practices aren’t enough. If you really want to conserve architecture you have to think out of the box,” he says.

Relying on black and white photos and surviving furniture, the Bawa Trust intends to return Ena’s house to a spitting image of how she had kept it, even replanting the garden with her choice of plants. There are plans for an exhibition in October and eventually guests will be allowed to occupy the rooms.

All this will mean that Ena’s house “won’t be an art installation or a museum, but rather a kind of archive”, proposes Sean Anderson, an associate curator in the Department of Architecture and Design at the Museum of Modern Arts in New York.

As the space evolves, he believes it will allow visitors to truly inhabit Bawa’s legacy, in a way that seems most fitting.

“For me, what I have learned from Bawa’s buildings is that beyond context and formal design you experience his architecture in a very different way. It almost feels to me that he is carrying you through a story that he wants to share with you, and that story is very particular to Sri Lanka,” Anderson tells Al Jazeera.

“He is setting up a framework for experiencing the world, and he has done it in a way that no one has ever successfully copied, which is lovely.”

Geoffrey Bawa is famous for his innovative use of traditional Sri Lankan materials such as terracotta tiles, rough granite slabs and Satin wood columns [Sebastian Posingis/Al Jazeera] [Daylife]

Published in Al Jazeera on 20 September 2016. By Smriti Daniel. Pix courtesy Sebastian Posingis, Dominic Sansoni and the Bawa Trust. 

The Jayakody House, Colombo. Pictures courtesy Sebastian Posingis

It might seem to the world that Geoffrey Bawa’s legacy is assured, but a new book by his most well-known biographer asks whether enough is being done to protect it. In Search of Bawa with text by David Robson and with photographs by Sebastian Posingis, sees Robson return to a subject he knows intimately, but even as he spends several pages on Bawa’s remarkable life, he also highlights how over a decade after the architect’s death, Sri Lanka is in danger of neglecting the rich, architectural inheritance Bawa left the land of his birth.

The idea for the book came from Posingis, who says it was while driving with Robson around Colombo and looking at Bawa’s architecture, that it struck him that many buildings existed that were by the architect but never associated with him, as well as others that claimed to be by Bawa but were not. “My first thought was that a “Bawa app” for the phone would be great, with GPS, tons of information, audio and suggestions of nearby properties,” says the photographer, admitting wryly that,“I still think it is a worthwhile project but as I am not much of a tech guy and more interested in books, I thought a small publication would be the next best thing.”

Priced at Rs.3,400, In Search of Bawa is meant to be affordable and portable, making it suitable for the libraries of students and the suitcases of travellers, but its real interest may be in its systematic survey of what remains of Bawa’s work. Posingis and Robson travelled across Sri Lanka, and found that many of Bawa’s buildings were in a state of disrepair, had been reconstructed beyond recognition or were even in danger of being demolished.

When he began taking the pictures, Posingis knew he was most interested in images that were honest, rather than beautiful – though from his results it is clear that the former didn’t rule out the latter. But to his disappointment, the photographer sometimes found there was not much left for his camera to record. “Some of the pictures I have admired for years just did not exist anymore, either due to alterations or simple obstructions such as trees or other buildings. Some of the black and white pictures of the nuns at the Chapel in Bandarawela, The Strathspey’s Estate Bungalow or the classic image of the State Mortgage Bank cannot be taken anymore.”

The book’s appendices dedicate several pages to Bawa buildings at risk, those that have been transformed and those that are lost to us forever. “To a degree Geoffrey Bawa has become a cliché,” Robson tells the Sunday Times over a Skype call, referring to the near ubiquitous popularity of the architect’s work. Robson notes however that there is a contradiction here, despite Bawa’s growing legend, “his buildings are being treated very badly, and they are disappearing very quickly.Unfortunately quite a number of his buildings have now been altered or been destroyed.”

But it isn’t all bad news. A photograph of the library at the Ruhuna University Campus is one of the highlights of working on this book for Robson. He says Posingis has taken what may be one of the first pictures of the interior of the library ever to be published. In Posingis’ picture, the library’s double-height reading rooms are framed by bookshelves and rows of windows that bring the light flooding in. The pleasing geometry of the reading halls is reflected in the paneled ceiling. It is very much an inhabited, well-loved space, as its architect intended it to be.

Robson notes that subsequent renovations and extensions to the university have been done with great care so as to add to rather than detract from Bawa’s original design.

There are lessons to be learnt here about how a conservation effort is successful. Robson believes that buildings do not stand still. “If you are going to conserve a building you have to have a use for it,” he says, pointing to the work of the National Trust in Britain as a working model for this approach. “Inevitably in preserving a building, there will be changes.”

He points to the Ratna Sivaratnam House off Buller’s Road, where the son of the late owner had painstakingly renovated the house, as a great example of what he means. “When I saw it in 2000 it was in very bad condition, but they have done a marvellous job of bringing it back up,” says Robson. A similar effort returned The Raffel House to its original glory.

One of the biggest success stories for Robson has been the conversion of Bawa’s office into the Gallery Café. “It is an example of a completely new use for a building but somehow it preserves the spirit of the place. It is still essentially the building Geoffrey designed in 1962,” says Robson, pointing out that as a result, so many thousands have enjoyed it. He minces no words when describing another effort by the same owners though – “If you take the hotel called The Villa at Bentota, I think they have added buildings to the extent that it has completely ruined the character of the original.”

For the author, all this points to the need for a more considered and comprehensive approach to preserving Bawa’s buildings. For Sri Lanka, this would also mean investing in a source of tourism revenue as interest in Bawa’s work brings his fans flocking to these shores. Says Posingis: “I hope this book opens up a wider conversation about the preservation of buildings in Sri Lanka. It’s frightening to see the speed at which buildings disappear here, especially in Colombo.”

Published in The Sunday Times, Sri Lanka on September 11, 2016. By Smriti Daniel. Pix courtesy Sebastian Posingis.

Since 2014, Hasanah Cegu Isadeen has met with and interviewed some 700 Sri Lankan Muslim women. A lawyer, independent researcher and activist, Cegu is haunted by the stories she has heard.

She has met women who were married as young as 12 and forced into sex by their adult partners before they had even attained puberty. One woman described to Cegu how she was married off against her will. Plucked off the playground, she was dressed and carried to the marriage hall by her guardians. “I screamed and protested, and no one listened,” she told Cegu. “The ceremony went on. At night, I cried, I screamed, and that man was on me. No one came.”

Another woman recalled fighting her husband’s decision to take another wife. In retaliation, the man put out a burning beedi on the stomach of his three-year-old daughter. A quazi court – a religious court, based on the Muslim law Shariah, of which the quazi is judge – later refused to make him pay maintenance.

Cegu, who keeps records and notes of all these meetings, said it took time to win the women’s trust. But every encounter convinced her of the urgent need for change. And right now she sees a unique window of opportunity.

Muslim discrimination

Sri Lanka is deep in the process of Constitutional reform. Coming after the end of a nearly three-decade-long civil war, the new Constitution is primarily seen as an attempt to address the deep schisms between the country’s ethnic communities and to find a way forward. But for some activists, the reform process also needs to address other long-standing grievances.

Muslim women’s groups have been advocating for reform of the Muslim Marriage and Divorce Act for many decades, and at least four official committees have been set up since the 1970s to look into this matter. Last week, the Muslim Personal Law Reforms Action Group released a statement noting that a 16-member Muslim Personal Law Reforms Committee headed by retired Supreme Court judge Saleem Marsoof was yet to submit its report seven years after it was set up in 2009.

“When men talk about Muslim issues, they don’t talk about reforming Muslim Personal Law,” said Cegu. “They talk about land rights and reconciliation, they talk about how Muslims should unite and pray for Palestine and Syria, but no one wants to talk about the women suffering in our community.”

Muslim groups and women have approached the Public Representations Committee on Constitutional Reforms, and activists seem to largely agree on what the issues are: The divorce process unfairly favours men, polygamy is allowed without condition (or even the wife’s knowledge) and the amount of maintenance paid to a wife is arbitrary and seems to hinge on the subjective judgements of various quazi courts. Under the Muslim Marriage and Divorce Act, women are not allowed to become marriage registrars, quazis or jurors, or serve on the board of quazis. Because these are state-salaried and tax-funded positions, it is worrying to see legal discrimination being allowed on the basis of sex.

Child marriage

The issue of child marriage, in particular, remains a difficult one. According to the Sri Lankan Penal Code, sexual intercourse with a girl below 16 years of age, with or without her consent, amounts to statutory rape. However, the provision does not apply to married Muslim girls under the age of 16 and above the age of 12.

Data of registered Muslim marriages from just four DS [divisional secretariat] divisions in two eastern districts collected by Cegu and her colleague, researcher Hyshyama Hamim, reveals over 143 cases of underage marriage in 2014 and over 118 cases for the first few months of 2015 alone. In addition to case data, information from marriage registrations, maternal units in hospitals and research on child marriage shows both child marriage and child pregnancies are prevalent.

“Girls who marry young are at a higher risk of reproductive and maternal health problems given their lack of bodily maturity and decision-making over sexual, reproductive choices and family planning,” Hamim toldScroll.in, adding that these women are also at greater risk of gender-based violence such as domestic violence and marital rape.

“It is the state’s responsibility to establish one minimum age of marriage for all citizens, and not compromise on this in the name of culture and religion,” she said.

To address these issues, activists said Article 16(1) of Sri Lanka’s Constitution of 1978 had to be repealed. In essence, 16(1) holds that all ‘written and unwritten laws’ that existed prior to that Constitution are valid and operative, regardless of whether these are inconsistent with the fundamental rights granted to all citizens. These written and unwritten laws include the likes of the Kandyan Marriage Ordinance of 1954, Thesavalamai Pre-Emption of 1948, and the Vagrants Ordinance of 1842. However, it is the Muslim Marriage and Divorce Act enacted in 1951 that is the focus of much ire. Experts say it has made second-class citizens of the country’s Muslim women, and that it has made possible an ongoing violation of fundamental rights.

Against change

However, some conservative elements within the community are fighting the reform process. “There is a division in the Muslim lobby,” said Sudarshana Gunawardana, executive director of Rights Now Collective for Democracy.

“Some in the community have an under-siege mentality, they are concerned that their traditional values are being challenged or undermined.”

He said women were losing out because they were not represented by a political party in the way ethnic minorities are.

Sri Lankan Muslims have also had to contend with racist rhetoric from fundamentalist Buddhist groups, and there is concern that these revelations will only be used to attack the community. But activists are unwilling to keep sacrificing women on the altar of the greater good.

“They are expecting 100% consensus, which they are not going to get,” said Faizun Zackariya, co-founder of Muslim Women’s Research and Action Forum. “For me, the community is not a homogenous entity, but I believe the ground-level support for this change is there.”

Zackariya noted that staunch conservatives hold that the Muslim Marriage and Divorce Act is based on Shariah law and cannot be reformed, which is untrue since the Act embraces local customs. For instance, it recognises kaikuli (dowry), which is forbidden in Islam and is considered anti-Shariah.

“I feel this is no longer a religious issue, but that this is a political issue,” she said.

Attorney-at-law Ermiza Tegal pointed out that the process of Constitutional reform and the public consultation process have created room for Muslim women to come forward. “If Article 16 is not repeated in the new Constitution, it will only create a space for reform to be asked for and pursued,” she said, pointing out that the community will itself still have to confront and grapple with these issues.

“As the law stands, it does not allow women who are most affected to fight back – under this law, we are not even treated as equals,” she said. “There is a lot of work that has to be done. This is only the first step.”

Published by Scroll.in on 22 September, 2016. By Smriti Daniel. Pix courtesy Groundviews / Vikalapa 

Puhudiwula, Sri Lanka –  In the district of Anuradhapura in Sri Lanka, Puhudiwula is a village of abandoned wells.

Though new and well-built, these wells can be found in every garden, costing around 100,000 rupees ($700) to build. The villagers, however, will not drink or even cook with the water, which they believe is driving an epidemic of the deadly Chronic Kidney Disease of Unknown Etiology (CKDu) in this area. While the illness is not the end of the community’s troubles, many of their woes are tied to water.

These are the hottest months of the year in Puhudiwula, deep in the island’s dry zone. The local water tank is nearly dry – its bed is ribbed with cracks as the clay changes colour, hardening under the sun. This year, to save their crop of paddy, the farmers ordered bowsers to deliver water to their fields. Climate change in these parts means more dry days and higher temperatures; it also means that people have to dig deeper wells to meet their needs, inadvertently increasing the risk of the contamination of their drinking water.

As a former border village on the frontlines of a nearly three-decade long civil war, the villagers lived with sporadic violence and terrible uncertainty. Now, seven years after the conflict ended, times are still tough, but the village of Puhudiwula is about to be thrown a lifeline.

In 2016, Sri Lanka became one of the first 15 countries in the world to receive a grant from the Green Climate Fund. The Ministry of Mahaweli Development and Environment, with the assistance of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), procured $38.1m to help communities adapt to the impacts of climate change. Over the next few years, an estimated 770,500 people in the dry zone, including those in Puhudiwula, will experience direct benefits from this programme.

Somewhat remarkably, the whole proposal turns on Sri Lanka realising that the best answer to their modern woes is an ancient innovation.

Scrabbling for answers

A sign in Sinhalese by 40-year-old Bandula Silva’s door in Puhudiwula reads “May Buddha Bless this House”. Inside, however, its owner has been dealt a death sentence. Eleven months ago, the 40-year-old from Puhudiwula was diagnosed with CKDu. He began treatment but the disease had already ravaged his body. The father of three is barely able to walk and cannot keep his food down, except just after a session of dialysis, when the treatment brings some relief. It is difficult to predict how much time his weekly visits to the hospital will buy him.

Just down the road from Silva, G Premawathie has the same disease – the elderly widow’s kidneys have begun to fail her and fluid retention has left her feet and ankles swollen. She has another neighbour, a 29-year-old farmer who was recently diagnosed. Though the intensity of the condition can vary, villagers know the outlook is grim: Two days ago, they attended the funeral of a man who had succumbed to CKDu. The diseased was a close relative of Piyasiri Soyza, president of the local farmers’ association. Soyza estimates that there are currently more than 100 people battling CKDu in this area. He lost his own father to the disease.

Since he was diagnosed, Silva and his family have stopped drinking water from their well. Premawathie and her family also buy their water, paying by the litre.

“The water from our well tastes of rust,” she tells Al Jazeera. Soyza, who is hale and fit at 57 years old, says for years now he has travelled several kilometres each week to bring his family water from another village where there is a spring and no occurrence of CKDu.

Children in a village near Horowpathana can only drink from this tank, which must be refilled frequently. The water from their well is unusable [Tharuka Dissanaike/ UNDP/ Al Jazeera]

CKDu has been reported in many countries, yet the disease remains poorly understood. In Sri Lanka, studies have explored multiple causes, most notably the possibility that the heavy use of agrochemicals is to blame. The fact that men are most at risk of developing the condition has led researchers to consider what role dehydration and outdoor farm work might play, though it is likely to be a combination of many factors.

An ancient innovation

Though climate change threatens to exacerbate the situation to a dangerous degree, Ranjith Punyawardena, chief climatologist at the Department of Agriculture tells Al Jazeera that people in Sri Lanka’s dry zone have always struggled to find enough water. Some of the small village tanks in this area have been in operation for more than 2,000 years.  The best estimates place the total number of both functioning and abandoned tanks in Sri Lanka at 18,387 [PDF].

Over generations, these tanks evolved into cascade systems connecting these earthen water reservoirs – resembling ponds and lakes – with each other using a system of canals.

“The cascades were a counter for this natural climate variability,” says Punyawardena, adding that without these innovative water management systems, cultivation in the dry zone would have been impossible.

According to Herath Manthrithilake, head of the research programme at the International Water Management Institute in Sri Lanka, the tanks “eventually evolved into a new kind of hydrological civilisation.”

Manthrithilake explains that some tanks would be water holes, serving as upstream sediment traps. Forest tanks in the upper catchment area were for local wildlife and kept animals from competing with humans for water. Others were especially designed to replenish ground water or support seasonal irrigation.

The ancients even developed their own sluice gate design, allowing water to be collected from the surface of the tank, rather than its murky depths.

The restored bund is so broad it is now a main point of access for this Galgamuwa village. It is used to transport crops and bring materials to the fields. [Tharuka Dissanaike/ UNDP/ Al Jazeera]

A father and daughter go to collect water. These are the thirstiest months in the dry zone, and the family travels several kilometres twice a week to a shop. [Tharuka Dissanaike/ UNDP/ Al Jazeera]

Adapting to climate change

Some cascade systems are currently being restored, with heartening results. Sampath Bandara Abeyrathne, the project manager of the Climate Change Adaptation Project at the UNDP, has been directing a team of researchers and engineers, overseeing the restoration of the 28 tanks that are part of the Maha Nanneriya tank cascade system in Galgamuwa in the Kurunegala district.

Abeyrathne grew up in these parts and explains that the de-silting of these tanks must be done very carefully, ensuring that the natural clay seal remains intact to prevent seepage and that the holding capacity of the tank is not affected. The ratio of depth versus spread of the water in the tank is critical to managing issues like salinity, water evaporation and flow within the cascade.

Abeyrathne points out that a catchment area is only as good as the forest it relies on. But a drone he sent up recently came back with images that revealed huge patches of deforestation and chena, or shifting cultivations, in this stretch.

Despite these issues, one fully restored tank in the Maha Nanneriya cascade has held its water during the driest months. Standing on the tank bund, AMA Adikari, a retired school principal and member of the local farm organisation, says that for the first time, farmers are contemplating cultivating through three seasons instead of staggering through just one – a move that will have a profound impact on their food security and incomes.

WATCH: Sri Lankans struggle to find clean water

It is essential that the community take an active hand if the cascade systems that have been repaired are to survive, emphasises Buddhika Hapuarchchi, a technical adviser at Sri Lanka’s Comprehensive Disaster Management Programme, the UNDP’s national partner on the Maha Nanneriya cascade project.

“Galgamuwa is one of the most drought-prone divisions in Kurunegala, and in fact, the whole country,” adding that restoring this cascade system is “essentially the pilot project for Sri Lanka on climate change adaptation. We have to see how to incorporate climate change adaption into our development planning process.”

The project will also help fuel a quiet revolution in Sri Lanka’s approach to water management.

In years ahead, local farmers say they hope to borrow from ancient systems of labour and land sharing, which emphasised a community approach in all things.

“We had a very good democratic system to manage scarce resources as a collective, without creating unnecessary competition,” says Adikari. This generation, he believes, still has a lot to learn from their ancestors.

This restored tank in the Maha Nanneriya cascade will allow villagers to cultivate three times a year, and offers separate spots for bathing, fishing and cattle [Tharuka Dissanaike/ UNDP/ Al Jazeera]

Published in Al Jazeera on 24 September, 2016. By Smriti Daniel. Pix courtesy Tharuka Dissanaike/ UNDP.

I could not remember the last time I sat in darkness so absolute. With every door and window barricaded in the room at the University of Visual and Performing Arts in Colombo, I would not have been able to see my hand if I held it in front of my nose. It was so utterly disorienting that I had to work to suppress a little bubble of panic in my chest, latching on to the comforting sound of someone giggling behind me and the creaking of shifting boards under our feet, as my neighbour adjusted her stance.

Somewhere in the darkness, Sara Mikolai began her performance. It was day two of the Colombo Dance Platform’s festival Shakti: A Space for a Single Body and this German-Sri Lankan experimental dancer had made some interesting choices. For a start, if she was dancing, we could not see it. There was only an unidentifiable sound, and at one point I heard the soft tinkle of ghungroos. A laugh rising out of the darkness and the brief murmur of speech marked the end of the performance.

Soon after, Mikolai sat down before a crowd to talk about her piece and her multiple rejections: of dance traditions that refuse questioning, of boxes such as contemporary and modern, the exoticising of her heritage, and even the demand that she share more of her personal history.

“If I wanted the audience to know my story, I would tell them,” she said. “I refuse to remain in these categories where I just cannot find myself. It is a new beginning. It is a ground of not knowing.”

I admired what Mikolai had set out to do, but found myself underwhelmed by what was actually done. I knew others felt differently, and these divergent conversations were what Shakti’s curator Venuri Perera had hoped to enable.

Over the course of three days in September and October, Perera presented a collection of remarkably diverse solo pieces by female artists: performances such as that of researcher-dancer Lakni Prasanjali pairing lipstick and fire to create a visual spectacle, pressed up against Indian performer Mirra’s meditation on materialism and society, and artist Tara Transitory’s improvised, wild, feel-the-bass-in-your-chest sound. The only exception to the gender rule was the Sri Lankan dancer Pradeep Gunarathna, who managed to fit in anyway as his performance was dedicated to embodying one woman’s oscillation between a goddess and a female demon.

As curator, Perera said she wanted to create a platform that offered space and opportunities to solo performers.

A performer herself, Perera explained: “It is a very different way of making work, and I wanted people to have a sense of what a wonderful form this is because it exposes the vulnerability of the performers, their power and their individuality. There are so many different things that can be done with solo practice, and we wanted to have a space that celebrated that.”

The diversity of approach and aesthetic among her performers was intentional. Perera wanted Sri Lankan students and artists to look and decide for themselves whether this is a way they would like to work, learning more about themselves by exposure to very different kinds of practice.

Chankethya Chey – who comes from a background of classical Cambodian dance – was in many ways the most easily accessible. The rules forbids performers to speak during traditional performances, but Chey used the spoken word to create an intensely personal piece that allowed her to interrogate identity, and the nature of love and loyalty in her relationships with her mother and guru. The Sri Lankan audience, who have also lived through prolonged conflict, responded to what felt like Chey’s invitation to talk about the wider context of violence and reconciliation in politically oppressive societies.

“It is by questioning the tradition, that I keep it alive,” Chey said.

Later, she explained that she began her solo practice when she moved to the US. “In America, no one practiced my form, and I had to be responsible for my own art.” She realised she needed to take a step back to really unpack her history and her relationships with her mother and guru, two of the most powerful influences in her life. “I needed to isolate myself,” she said.

The Indian artist Mirra experiences her own version of this isolation – she is often challenged for not being “Indian enough” – and, as a result, is constantly seeking new audiences. She feels so strongly about her message of questioning consumerism that she has performed in apartment buildings and called up colleges to ask if they will allow her into their auditoriums. She said she does this to avoid the usual audiences of performers and critics – “I don’t want to preach to the converted, to be sitting there constantly shining each other’s apples”. The crux of her practice, built in solitude, is her faith in herself.

It is something that every performer at the Shakti festival, from the curator down, grapples with. In the case of Mallika Taneja, her solo performances have earned her the spotlight and yet leave her questioning the very ground she stands on.

Taneja began her performance at the Goethe Institut in Colombo completely nude, and ended it wrapped in dozens upon dozens of garments, three pairs of socks, mittens, sunglasses, and a helmet.

In the monologue that sped up to accompany her increasingly frantic actions as she pulled on more and more clothes, Taneja used wit and humour to eviscerate the notion that women could protect themselves against assault simply by taking a little more care. Her opening, which confronts deeply held discomforts about naked bodies, had people looking away, unable to meet the performer’s eyes. But she said she was utterly comfortable in the nude. And neither did she take on “the responsibility of the responsibility” of playing to society’s expectations of what makes a woman good and pure.

Her performances have changed her own outlook, she told Scroll.in: “It has taken a lot time, but I really do wear whatever I want to wear. I do still think of questions of safety of course, but the idea of what is appropriate or not, doesn’t come up for me.”

Though personally liberating, Taneja’s brave performance has often left her standing outside more conservative spaces and traditional communities. “At one point, there were more articles than shows,” Taneja said, talking about how organisers have requested that she appear in underwear rather than nude, and that she has been tucked away into more basements and private rooms than she can count. Though she has performed in places like Zurich, Paris and London, her appearance in Colombo is her first outside India in the Subcontinent.

But if she does not find herself always fitting in among her contemporaries, the artist said her audience has never been the problem. She said they have so far been entirely honest both in their criticism and praise of her work, and it seems like her place is, in a sense, with them. In that context, the workshops in which Taneja and all the others participated were critical in allowing the artists to unpack and interrogate their work with students from as far away as Jaffna in the north of Sri Lanka. Taneja said the workshops were one of her favourite parts of the festival.

Perera, who is a member of the dance panel of the Arts Council of Sri Lanka, said she hopes that they will be to carve out a space with regular events, performances, conversations and room to devise performances in the months ahead. Shakti itself allowed audiences and performers to gather for a mini-festival in the long gap between Colombo Dance Platform events. “Perhaps I am being selfish,” she said, “because I have been working independently for so long, I crave community.” Always travelling, Perera said her network in many ways is actually more outside her homeland than in it. “I would like to change that.”

Published in Scroll on 19 October, 2016. By Smriti Daniel. Pix courtesy Malaka Mp/Shakti.

Sitting among the members of a displaced community in Puttalam a few years ago, Dr. Chesmal Siriwardhana found himself thinking about the ethical problems around health research.

To get to this point – where he was able to meet people who had been driven out of their homes by the LTTE, had been displaced for many years, and were now considering a return to their lands in the north of the island – Siriwardhana’s researchers had run the compulsory gamut of not just one but two ethics review committees. With their focus on mental health issues, the team first had to conceive, analyse and list potential ethical issues that the study could throw up, and then convince the committees that they would do no harm to the people they were speaking to. And yet out in the field, new ethical dilemmas would often arise.

With this particular study for instance, researchers had a plan for what to do if they discovered a participant in the study presented an active suicide risk or had a serious mental illness, but there was always a surprise. For instance, confidentiality of the interviews was considered sacrosanct, and researchers were supposed to speak to people strictly on a one-on-one basis. But they hadn’t counted on a pattern intrinsic to social interactions in Sri Lanka. Though they would sit down with one interviewee, others would invariably butt in, and often there would even be cross-talk between various participants. Researchers couldn’t ask the third (and frequently fourth) parties to leave at the risk of offering insult, placing the team in a quandary.

Siriwardhana, currently a senior lecturer in the Public Health Faculty of Medical Science at Anglia Ruskin University but soon to take up a new post at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, says the working with the communities themselves has always offered it’s own lessons: “What we noticed was that when collecting data, the challenges that actually came up were often very different from what we had envisaged. Being out in the field always challenged our assumptions.”

It is with this in mind that a team of researchers was awarded £417,000 from Elrha’s Research for Health in Humanitarian Crises (R2HC) programme to analyse the ethical challenges involved in health research in humanitarian crises in Afghanistan, Nepal, Lebanon, Sierra Leone, Sri Lanka and Ethiopia. The Sri Lankan-born Siriwardhana is the lead investigator and will work with his colleagues at Médecines Sans Frontières, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, Dublin City University, HealthNet TPO and other partners in relevant countries.

Siriwardhana knows this discrepancy between anticipated challenges and what researchers actually encounter during data collection is an extremely common occurrence and yet, he says, many like him have no means of sharing what they have learned. There are no real systems in place for a comprehensive review at an institutional level and no dedicated networks for researchers to catalogue the ethical challenges that present themselves during field work. This means whatever learning there may have been is wasted, as researchers often go in to a new context only to inadvertently repeat the same errors made by teams before them.

“We want to establish a mechanism that allows researchers to share information about what happens in the field,” says Siriwardhana. He sees this as particularly important for studies done in the aftermath of humanitarian crisis, when aid agencies are conducting routine data collection. Though this is not typically considered research, Siriwardhana says these rapid assessments include all sorts of evaluations, some of which could inadvertently cause harm to communities already made deeply vulnerable by the catastrophe they just suffered.

The team has chosen countries in various stages of crisis, some acute, some chronic, and some considered post-crisis and undergoing the long process of recovery. Some like Nepal and Sri Lanka are dealing with the fallout from both natural disasters and long conflicts. Siriwardhana has highlighted how critical such research is in the wake of serious natural disasters, wars that are fuelling an ongoing refugee crisis on an unprecedented scale and even in coping with global epidemics like the Ebola. “We have seen so many of these crises in recent years and there is a corresponding increase of research attention, however a focus on ethics is important to prevent exploitation of vulnerable populations affected by these crisis situations,” he said.

The R2HC programme is funded equally by the Wellcome Trust and DFID, with Elrha overseeing the programme’s execution and management.  For Siriwardhana’s team, who first applied in 2014, getting this funding has been a challenge but they are now ready to get to work. They will potentially be speaking to people involved in every stage of the research, from the lead investigators of various teams, to the participants and fieldworkers as well as members of various ethics review committees. They are going in aware of the power imbalances that do exist in many of these projects, not just between participants, researchers and regulatory bodies, but in the very fabric of north-south collaborations.

However, the researchers are taking care to emphasise this is “not an exercise in pointing fingers.” Says Siriwardhana: “This is not about looking for mistakes, this is about learning lessons and sharing for future improvements.” The goal is to use established clinical audit principles and practices to improve current ethics practices. Post-study, the data and analysis will be used to create a post-research ethics analysis (PREA) tool, allowing researchers to share their experiences from the field and learn from those of others.

Once developed and tested, the English language version of the PREA tool will be made freely available for translation and adaptation for other non-humanitarian settings. It will be supported by an online site that will bring together existing and evolving ethical guidance on health research in humanitarian crises. Constantly evolving, the site will enable active information sharing on a range of ethical challenges linked to specific cultures, geographical regions, humanitarian crises types, research designs and collaborations.

Ultimately, Siriwardhana says their goal is to make a mobile application complete with videos and educational material that is available freely in different language versions. The goal is for this process to be incorporated into the ethics review process itself, implying a fundamental change in approach to health research.

“It is crazily ambitious,” admits Siriwardhana. The team are anticipating country specific challenges, but they hope that the research community will see how essential this work is. After all, their success will be determined in part by whether people at every step along the research chain are willing to ask themselves some tough questions and truly evolve in their practice. “We want to create as much discussion as possible,” says Siriwardhana.

Published in Sunday Times, Sri Lanka on 30 October, 2016. By Smriti Daniel. 

Ruvan Ranatunga and Shihan Anthony John did not know quite what to make of the Japanese team.

It was early October and they were in the middle of one of the most demanding of the 4 Desert Races – a 6 day-long, 242 km crossing of the Atacama on foot.The plateau in Chile stretches 960 km south from the border of Peru, and its centre is recognized as the driest place on earth.The air was leached of moisture and temperatures swung wildly, from freezing in the morning, to baking under the afternoon Sun. The terrain was unpredictable: there were the steep hills and rocky valleys but one also had to slither and slide up sand dunes 150m high, and wade through shallow stretches of water.

Injuries were common as runners navigated fields of rocks sharp enough to slice through skin, and broccoli-like clusters of soil and stone that were an invitation to twist your ankle. Often you ran in complete isolation, participants so far ahead or behind that you could not see them. Little pink flags marked the long path, and you strayed at your own peril.

In the middle of this, Team AHO from Japan were like a dehydrated runner’s hallucination. They competed wearing multi-coloured wigs, with little fairy lights embedded in them. When everyone else was discarding all extraneous weight from their bulky back packs, this group carried colourful banners. At night, music blasted out of their portable stereo, shattering the silence of the desert night and keeping Ranatunga and John wide awake.

The two teams were only properly introduced when they met in the medical tent. Ranatunga and John noticed that the AHO group presented feet covered in enormous and painful blisters. When they saw the Sri Lankan duo had none, they made a long sound of awe, their mouths wide in a perfect O. “Basically, they had crawled that last stretch and they couldn’t believe our feet were fine,” says Ranatunga. John grins as he reports that the Japanese asked them, “Are you superhuman?”

Ranatunga and John say they only discovered what the AHO team was about at the awards banquet. Apparently, they were all there because of one man. He had begun to lose his eyesight and had previously tried to run this race alone and failed. His closest friends had decided they would help him complete it this year and they had, in the most joyous way possible.

“Looking back, it was the people we met that made it really amazing,” says John. He and Ranatunga have shed a few pounds but still manage to radiate good health – clearly a week running across a desert was exactly what the doctor ordered for these two. The first Sri Lankans to compete in a 4 Desert Race they say that starting out, their goal was simply to cross the finish line together. They finished 66 and 67 of 131 competitors.

Along the way, the team had their fair share of hiccups. John says Stage 1, where they began running at an altitude of 3,100m, was a huge challenge. “We had never really trained at that high an altitude. It was a very difficult first day, and I really struggled,” says John. “It was something new for us,” agrees Ranatunga. The two were plagued with throbbing heads and exhaustion, and John in particular became quite badly dehydrated. But they were feeling so good about being there that they simply learned what they needed to and moved on. Plus, there was the reminder that they were representing Sri Lanka. “Seeing our flag up at the starting line, in this unknown country, it gave us this sense of purpose,” says Ranatunga.

They also knew that back home in Jaffna, the group from Trail would be starting their walk to raise funds for cancer treatment, and that they were doing their part to help.

Unfortunately, they were at a disadvantage before they had even begun. Despite a 13-hour layover in Paris, someone had failed to transfer their luggage for the final leg of the flight. Though they were carrying most of what they needed, and their competitors were kind enough to share things like salt tablets, the Sri Lankan duo would have to do without their sleeping pads and trekking poles. John says he was thinking of the airline when they were forced to scrabble up the sheer face of a sand dune. “The sand was burning, it was like putting your hands on a hot plate, but we didn’t have any other choice but to dig in and claw ourselves up. We were really pleased with the French for that.”

Though they were happy enough to leave some sections behind, its clear Ranatunga and John fell a little in love with the Atacama. “You might think that all there is in a desert is just sand, but there is so much more,” says Ranatunga, conjuring images of crossing salt flats that looked like snow but radiated the heat of the desert and stumbling upon little green oasis with streams winding through. “It’s hard to imagine that there is a sky so blue anywhere. In the night you can look and see all the stars and the Milky Way. Even though it was so cold, I would go out and just look up sometimes. It was so clear, and so beautiful, it is hard to describe.”

Though it was strenuous, John says they never over-extended themselves or felt like they were at the end of their tether. Any exhaustion would usually hit at night, when they finally arrived at camp. They couldn’t shower and so it was a session with the wet wipes before they went to bed. Toward the end of the trip, they weren’t eating very much either having found their food – like strawberry custard and protein bars – so unappetizing that they preferred to do without.

Despite some of these challenges, the team was in remarkably good form. They never needed the help of the camp doctors, says John, and they completed the run quite comfortably and without any injuries. Not everyone was so lucky – as many as 18 people started out but faltered along the way. On their third day, in keeping with the spirit of the race, John remembers how they supported another team who were struggling, only to be disappointed when the team failed to appear the next morning.

“They were forced to quit, and when we didn’t see them the next day it hurt,” says Ranatunga, “we didn’t know them, but it’s as if you do, because you know what it has taken to reach this point, and you know what it would mean to have to turn back. It was a feeling I had never had before.”

At 44 years old, Ranatunga has a good decade on John, who actually celebrated turning 34 with the much loathed strawberry custard while on the trail. For the former, continuing to test himself in these kinds of events proves that age needn’t hold you back. “We aren’t professional athletes, we are just ordinary guys who decided to do this together,” says Ranatunga. It is clear they make a great team, even though they “don’t mirror each other in any way.” What they do have in common is a love of the sport and a background in the armed forces. Military service has tested them in different ways, but they both still have the discipline they learned there.

Part of it is knowing exactly how far you can push yourself. Ranatunga says that every time he leaves his family – and in particular his son who is 12 years old now – behind, he does so in the certainty that he will not take unnecessary risks. “You manage it to the greatest level possible so you can come back to your family and friends. You don’t do mad things, you don’t do stupid things, you understand your body, you understand your limitations.”

Of course, many would argue that walking across the Atacama itself is unnecessary, but for Ranatunga it is a beautiful and unique experience. “If you want to see the world, to walk is the best way. You can ride through, you can drive through, you can fly through, but nothing puts you in touch with your surroundings as much as walking,” he says. “The sights, the sounds, the faces of people…you don’t leave them in a hurry. When you are walking through there is no adrenaline rush but you have all that time to absorb what is happening around you. You absorb the desert: the dryness of it, the texture of the earth, the slight breeze that suddenly goes by; you get to experience that.For someone who is willing to take that journey, that is the discovery.”

Published in The Sunday Times, Sri Lanka on October 23, 2016. By Smriti Daniel. Pix courtesy Ruvan Ranatunga. 

When Ahilan Arulanantham heard that the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation had named him a recipient of the $625,000 “Genius Grant,” one of the first things he thought about was how much he would like to spend some of it on supporting human rights work in Sri Lanka.

Since the announcement was made in late September, the 43-year-old lawyer’s phone has been ringing off the hook. None of the 23 recipients applied for the grant, and like the others Arulanantham  did not even know he was being considered. But now congratulatory messages are still pouring in, finding him in Los Angeles, where he lives and works. “It’s a wonderful thing to get contacted by people you have known your whole life and from all around the world, often at all hours of day and night. It’s a very enjoyable, dizzying sort of experience,” he tells the Sunday Times, over a call.

Arulanantham is director of advocacy and legal director at the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Southern California.  The grant was announced just a day after he and his team experienced a disappointing setback when the U.S. Appeals Court rejected their class action lawsuit arguing for the right of unaccompanied immigrant children to have access to lawyers during deportation proceedings.

This week, Arulanantham has been preparing to see another big case, Jennings vs. Rodrigues, which they won, go up before the Supreme Court for review. He explains that in the balance now is the issue of the government’s power to detain immigrants and refugees and what limits there should be on that power.

“It’s very uncertain and a huge amount is at stake,” says Arulanantham, pointing out that tonight alone some 38,000 people will sleep in an immigration detention centre in the US.Over the course of a year, as many as 400,000 people will find themselves in a similar position. This “parallel prison system” is one in which many of the basic procedural protections afforded in criminal cases do not apply. With the Rodriquez case, Arulanantham and his team are asking that immigrants held in detention – up to half of whom might be refugees – be given the right to a bond hearing in front of a judge.

Without this measure, detainees live in uncertainty, not knowing when their cases will be heard or when they will be released. “Rodriguez was detained for 3 ½ years, but that’s not unusual,” says Arulanantham, adding that “in fact the first case I took on in this area was that of a Sri Lankan Tamil refugee, who was detained for 4 ½ years.”

Run by county jails and private prison companies, conditions within the centres mimic prison. Inmates wear prison jumpsuits and are only allowed ‘no contact’ visits, where they are forced to talk to their families through a glass barrier. “Although under the law their cases are treated as civil rather than criminal, in practice that distinction is just a fiction,” says Arulanantham. With no right to a court appointed lawyer, most must navigate the complex system on their own, even though on the other side of the case, a prosecutor is appointed.

For child refugees, the system is kinder in one aspect –the vast majority of children are placed very quickly with their nearest relatives in the States. In cases where a child arrives with a parent, however, they are likely to be put in detention together, an occurrence which in Arulanantham’s view is an abomination and perhaps the most “egregious aspect of the Obama administration’s immigration policy in the last two years.” Even children transferred to the custody of a relative are charged with being deportable. Most children will struggle to make it to court and, like the adults, seldom have access to lawyers. “They are knowingly perpetuating an injustice,” says Arulanantham, of the American authorities.

Arulanantham has been grappling with these issues for years, and has successfully litigated several landmark cases, including one which helped to establish limits on the government’s power to detain immigrants as national security threats and another that ensured the federal government now provides legal representation to mentally ill immigrants.

With degrees from Georgetown University, Oxford and Yale Law School, Arulanantham was named one of California Lawyer Magazine’s ‘Lawyers of the Year’ for his work at the intersection of immigrants’ rights and national security. In 2007, 2008, 2009, 2012 and 2013, he was named one of the Daily Journal’s ‘Top 100 Lawyers in California.’ In 2010, he received the Arthur C. Helton Human Rights Award from the American Immigration Lawyers’ Association.

But Arulanantham isn’t quite sure he qualifies for this latest honour. The MacArthur Foundation say their Fellows Programme among things ‘awards unrestricted fellowships to talented individuals who have shown extraordinary originality and dedication in their creative pursuits.’ Says Arulanantham: “I did not apply for it, and I am not sure I would have given it to myself – I don’t see the work I do as particularly innovative.”

Instead, for him it is simply about “applying very basic constitutional principles in an area where our values are not particularly in harmony with our practice.” (After the announcement he Tweeted: ‘It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that if you want a child to get a fair hearing in immigration court, they need a lawyer.’)

His deep interest in this issue is very much shaped by his experiences as a child. His parents, both doctors, left Sri Lanka in the 1960s following  the introduction of the Sinhala Only Policy and the multiple outbreaks of violence in the 1950s, convinced they  needed to raise their children in a more stable environment. Most of their family members, however, chose to stay.

Arulanantham was only ten years old in the Black July of 1983. He remembers clearly how his father explained that the cousins they had met a few times before would be coming to live with them. “He said, ‘It could be a few days, it could be a few months.’” But in the end, the family ended up having guests for years, with sometimes as many as 16 people at a time in their home. His family was not exceptional among the diaspora for throwing open their home to the community, Arulanantham emphasises, however, seeing first-hand the kind of trauma his relatives, and in particular his cousins, the same age as him, had been through, was a defining experience.

Today, particularly in the context of Donald Trump’s run for President, Arulanantham sees a chronic shortage of empathy for immigrants and refugees in America. He believes more people in the US would be kinder if they could only step, just for a moment, in to the shoes of someone fleeing violence or even someone simply trying to build a better life for their children.

He knows this doesn’t mean the policies would necessarily change, but perhaps there would be a little less judgement of those knocking on the door – and even that, says the lawyer, would be an improvement.

Arulanantham who has visited Sri Lanka five times since 2000 has many friends and family here. Though he does not know the local human rights environment as intimately as that in the States, he says he cares deeply about this island and would like to support work here. Having worked on the odd human rights case relating to the country, it remains “something of the road not taken. It’s something that has been on my mind for many years.” Now for him, one of the perks of this Genius Grant will be a chance to address that history in an entirely unexpected way.

For a change, Kevin Sanders has decided to let someone, or more accurately, something else count the apples in his orchard. This isn’t the first time his idyllic farm down in Australia’s Yarra Valley has played host to robots and their handlers, so Sanders knows what to expect.

Moving soundlessly down the corridors between trees, an electric robot will scan each plant, identifying individual fruit and flowers. An algorithm is then used to classify and count the apples in each image and provide a yield estimation, a critical figure for farmers that will inform Sanders’ plans to manage his orchards and the harvest.

A fourth generation farmer, Sanders and his brothers have an interest in innovation that has created an unconventional operation.

The winner of a Hugh McKay Future Farming Award in 2010, the Sanders’ farm is a particularly good fit for robotic field trials because of their unusual orchard design.

The trees here grow flat on a V-shaped trellis making them 2D rather than 3D, -in that their branches are not allowed to grow in all directions. They are short and typically only a metre wide. “These aren’t the dimensions people grew up with,” says Sanders, adding however that it can still take hours and hours to count blossoms and fruit and carry out essential activities such as thinning out the branches.

V-shaped trees at Sanders’ farm [Photos courtesy of ACFR]

WATCH: The farmers growing vegetables with LED lights (23:54)

Cost savings

All this time adds up.

“It’s not uncommon to end up paying anything between A$1,000 to A$7,000 (US$737-$5,168) a hectare in labour bills,” Sanders tells Al Jazeera, explaining that in Australia hired labour typically accounts for the largest percentage of cash costs, making robotic solutions appealing, particularly as local farmers’ scramble to remain competitive in international markets.

And there are other concerns. According to data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics,  Australia’s farmers tend to work well beyond their retirement age. In 2011, almost a quarter were over 65 years old, compared with only 3 percent in other occupations.

The figures also reveal that the growth of large-scale farming operations and increasing urbanisation, with more young people moving to cities to live and work, has had a detrimental impact on farmer numbers.

An analysis of the 30 years leading up to 2011 revealed that the number of farmers declined by 106,200 (40 percent) – that’s an average of 294 fewer farmers each month.

Salah Sukkarieh, director of research and innovation at the Australian Centre for Field Robotics (ACFR) at the University of Sidney, thinks that the answer might lie in increasingly sophisticated agricultural robots.

The past decade has seen widespread adoption of digital technologies such as sensors on Australian farms. But the real game-changer has been the leaps forward in computing power that have enabled farmers to receive and act upon this data in real time.

“It’s an easy extension from there for robotics to kick in, because if you can sense in real time, then you can  make decisions in real time and you can act in real time,” says Sukkarieh.

OPINION: Pasture cropping – A regenerative solution from Down Under

Shrimp on a mango orchard near Bundaberg  [Photos courtesy of ACFR ]

Sustainability

ACFR’s first forays in agricultural robotics began with the tree crop industries, where farmers wanted to switch from making decisions on a macro scale to a micro scale.

“They were interested in knowing how individual trees were performing, which they had never been able to do before,” he says.

The robotic system Sukkarieh and his team built for its Shrimp robot could collect LiDAR – light detecting and ranging – visual, thermal and hyperspectral data as well as track soil conductivity and natural gamma, “demonstrating that there are many ways to view the humble tree”.

In 2016, the ACFR’s SwagBot had its first field trial. Whirring madly, the robot was able to pull itself out of ditches, roll over branches and traverse stretches of water.

Set to work herding cattle, SwagBot got them all moving in the right direction. Sukkarieh imagines that SwagBot, which can also be used to autonomously tow heavy loads such as feed into the field, could help people manage sprawling cattle farms even in very remote locations.

Sukkarieh says the most natural next step will be to teach the robots to identify sick or injured animals based on variables such as their body temperature. Because pasture quality is key for high-quality milk, farmers would welcome soil samples and other measurements from grazing areas.

The SwagBot is used to herd cattle  [Photos courtesy of ACFR]

WATCH: Pesticide Free Farming  (9:02)

ACFR also has drones, and it is possible to coordinate between ground and airborne robots. Currently, ACFR has been deploying its aerial technology to detect weed infestations on both large and small farms.

Sustainability has been an important focus for the ACFR team. Their RIPPA robot has been put to work on several commercial vegetable farms across Australia, where it trundles along rows of vegetables, conducting autonomous, real-time soil sampling, weed identification and de-weeding, as well as dispensing water, pesticides and fertilisers according to the needs of individual plants.

With RIPPA able to use satellite-based corrections to operate within 4cm precision, this has radical implications for irrigation management and agro-chemical use on the farm.

Earlier in the year, the robot had its first endurance trial during which it completed nearly 22 hours of continuous operation, roving autonomously up and down spinach crop rows, using only battery and solar power. Its batteries finally died in the early of the morning, but when the sun rose, the machine recharged and was back in operation.

Robotic helicopter spraying aquatic weeds in Pitt Town [Photos courtesy of ACFR ]

Wider use in agriculture

Anthony Kachenko, the R&D lead at Horticulture Innovation Australia, saw what RIPPA could do first hand. He believes Australian farmers who are forewarned can be forearmed.

“Being able to detect disease at the onset – or even predict conditions where there is more risk of disease – will help with disease management and potential savings in chemical use,” says Kachenko.

He adds that data from agricultural robots have already helped farmers identify hot spots where further attention is needed. “This is just the beginning, as the next step is providing the remedial action to help the farmer farm smarter.”

However, there is still some way to go before such robots become common on farms.

“We haven’t reached the dexterity of what a human hand can achieve,” Sukkarieh tells Al Jazeera, explaining that one of the big concerns remains cost. “In agriculture a farmer typically doesn’t have a lot of money, the margins are very, very small.”

WATCH: Japan’s Future Farms

‘We haven’t reached the dexterity of what a human hand can achieve,’ says Salah Sukkarieh, Director of Research and Innovation at the Australian Centre for Field Robotics [Photos courtesy of ACFR]

The robot had its first endurance trial where it completed nearly 22 hours of continuous operation, roving autonomously up and down spinach crop rows, using only battery and solar power  [Photos courtesy of ACFR ]

Running robots from smartphones

Rohan Rainbow, managing director at Crop Protection Australia, says the new technologies might actually inspire a new generation of young farmers, who are enthusiastic about technological innovation, to return to the field. But the effect on labour and how the technology is implemented is still to be seen.

“As you become more automated, the way people interact in the field and with equipment changes,” he says, “and there seems to be a need to develop social license, if you will, for commercialisation of those technologies.”

In fact, the industry’s big challenge might not be the technology itself but satisfying regulatory requirements of government safety and giving confidence to the insurance industry that the machines can be operated safely, says Rainbow.

There is also the matter of enabling real-time communication and exchange of huge data packets through communication channels between farmers and the robots and between the machines themselves – many farms are so isolated that access to bandwidth is an everyday challenge.

Sukkarieh has also started to think about what 2050 will look like from a robotics perspective. The requirement for sustainable operations, labour shortages, 24/7 precision agriculture, minimising costs and minimising chemical use and energy will all shape this burgeoning field. Not too far in the future, Sukkarieh imagines the possibility of semi-automated or even fully autonomous farms.

Grains, vegetables and fruits could arrive in supermarkets without a single human ever having touched them. “The question is how do you feel about that?” asks Sukkarieh.

First autonomous on-farm field trial of robot on a beetroot crop in Cowra [Photos courtesy of ACFR]

Published in Al Jazeera on 16 December 2016. By Smriti Daniel. Pix courtesy ACFR.

Under the controversial Urban Regeneration Project (URP), over 5,000 families from underserved communities have already been resettled in high-rises in and around Colombo. And more will follow – the Urban Development Authority (UDA) has committed to building another 15,000 – 20,000 apartments.

At this crucial point in the URP, two recent studies –one published by the Centre for Policy Alternatives (CPA) and the other by International Centre for Ethnic Studies (ICES) – offer critical insights into its successes and failures.

Their narratives and numbers reveal the tensions pervading the new high-rises and the emerging problems, around maintenance and security in particular. They examine the roots of specific dissatisfactions among the communities and highlight how trust in the government has been eroded over time. Notably, the studies agree on how these families are struggling to adapt to a new kind of life in the high-rises, so distinct from their familiar networks in the old settlements.

CPA’s report ‘Living it Down’ is the first and most comprehensive quantitative survey to date of those affected by the URP. Drawing on answers from 1222 respondents living in three complexes – Mihindusenpura, Sirisara Uyana and Methsara Uyana – all located in Dematagoda, it seeks to assess the experiences of those who have lived in these high-rises for over a year.

“The government has decided that the high-rises are the answer to housing issues in Colombo,” says Iromi Perera, a senior researcher at CPA and the lead author of ‘Living it Down.’ “In fact, historically, this is an approach that has failed all over the world. We are making the same kind of the mistakes that the US and other countries made in the 70s,” she adds, highlighting the very real danger that these high-rises might become vertical slums. Perera thinks it’s unlikely that the government will change track so far into this programme, but she hopes that sharing the experiences of communities will inform policy going forward.

The ICES research paper ‘Experiences of a relocated community in Colombo’ is a case study of the Sinhapura high-rise inWanathamulla and began with a survey of over 800 relocated households in Colombo, which was followed by a community profiling exercise. “I think the relocation of these shanty communities is an important phenomenon, and one worth studying because it has all kinds of politics attached to it,” says Iresha Lakshman, a sociologist and one of the authors of the ICES study.

Both studies highlight that how people feel about their new homes has a great deal to do with the circumstances under which they left their old ones. Sinhapura, for instance, comprises two phases: Phase 1 was constructed in 2007 and Phase 2 in 2011. Residents of Phase 1 come mainly from 54 watta. While the majority of the residents of Phase 2, were from 187 watta, in Torrington, Colombo 7.

The evictions for Phase 1 were loaded with violence as people were forced out of their homes by the military. One resident told ICES researchers: “We didn’t come here willingly. They demolished a section of our house and I dragged my children like animals and came here…”

Those in Phase 2 were deceived by promises that they would be housed in a complex in the same area as their old homes. Many in this group feel deeply nostalgic for their old homes, and those who relied on being in the Colombo 7 area for work have found their livelihoods adversely impacted.

Class distinctions – between those who had lived in “good houses” and those who lived in “small houses” – were also felt between those from Phase 1 and Phase 2. Those who already had indoor toilets for instance, were less keen on the apartments than those in small houses who may not have even had electricity.

The CPA study breaks down these histories by the numbers, and one result of this approach is that it challenges the notion that many of those resettled lived in squalor in shanty towns, squatting on government property. Instead the survey reveals that 70.3% previously lived in a permanent house; 23.8% had houses that were 100-500 square feet, 41% had houses that were 501-1000 square feet and 10% had houses that were 1000 – 2500 square feet.

A full 48.8% had indoor bathrooms, while 78% of houses had piped-water and 90.4% had electricity. 20.9% had a deed and owned their land and regardless of ownership, many had lived in this one space for years: 24.4%for 1-10 years, 26.8% for 11-20 years, 20.9% for 21-30 years and 25.8% for more than 30 years.

Perera says this offers a crucial lesson for policy makers: “We need to stop looking at people through the narrow lens of title holder and non-title holder.” People have often invested their savings in improving their homes, and may have lived in this one area for generations. “The state has also recognized these people on paper – they pay taxes, they are on the electoral register, they pay utility bills,” she points out, adding, “We should not be relocating people involuntarily.”

While the eviction process may have a difficult one for many of these families, there are those whose old homes were difficult places to live. According to the CPA study 21.6% said they experienced floods several times a year and 9.8% said twice a year.In focus groups with young children, ICES researchers were told by one student: “It used to always flood during heavy rain because those locations were low lands. We become helpless when floods come. Our books get wet. But here that is not a problem because these are flats.” Researchers noted that these families were also pleased at that they would one day own these new houses.

But it is clear, if this is to become a home for multiple generations that more thought needs to go into the design of the complexes and of the relocation process itself. There are practical issues: electricity meters that are inaccessible or water tanks on the roof whose lids are blown off by the wind, leaving residents sometimes drinking water polluted by the corpses of dead animals. There are cultural issues – no mosque in the vicinity of the Methsara Uyana has left its Muslim families bereft. There are economic issues – families are unable to pay the government money that is due for their homes, many have gone into debt, others have eaten into their savings.

Meanwhile, cleanliness in public spaces has begun to noticeably deteriorate. “The way that people treat the building reveals how they feel about it,” says Perera, adding that for her one of the most important findings of the CPA study is the disconnect people feel from their environment. Just keeping the lifts running and the public spaces and playgrounds clean is something of a challenge. “It is very unsustainable for the UDA to take on this role of the landlord,” says Perera.

Lakshman says a lack of community feeling is also contributing to a widespread sense of insecurity.“In their previous location for instance, there were still issues around drugs, but they told me that they and their neighbours would ensure that those people never came close to their homes or to their children. In the high-rises, they are scared to confront strangers because they are not sure the people around them will support them. That kind of social networking just hasn’t happened yet.”

This lack of a community identity is also what Lakshman believes is hindering the high-rise dwellers from taking charge of their own spaces. “For some things you need the intervention of the government,” says the sociologist, citing a problem such as a leak in a pipeline that runs 13 floors. However, the community playground has become filthy, and she believes the community themselves should be invested enough to keep it clean.

“You have all these environmental, economic, and political issues, but sociologically the biggest problem is how people have not connected with each other. There is simply no mechanism to help them do this.” With all the problems – both inherited and newly generated facing the URP – this is one of the most pressing. “They are missing a sense of belonging, and unless people feel they belong to this community, all these other problems will continue to worsen over the years.”

In her foreword to ‘Living it Down,’Perera sums up what needs to change in the government’s attitude: ‘Policy makers and the UDA must move away from an approach,’ she writes, ‘that views people, especially the working class poor, as impediments to adding social and economic value to the city, to one that acknowledges them not only as partners but, in keeping with the letter and spirit of the Constitution, as sovereign.’

Published in the Sunday Times, Sri Lanka on 25 December, 2016. By Smriti Daniel. Pictures courtesy Abdul Halik Azeez and Iromi Perera for Right To The City initiative/ CPA. 

Wilpattu, Sri Lanka’s oldest and largest national park, was once a warzone. The fighting between the Sri Lankan state and the militant separatist group Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) that began in the 1980s had spilled over into these wild lands.

Wildlife researchers Anjali Watson and Andrew Kittle remember hearing stories from soldiers stationed in these forests. The men recalled nights when they would be jolted awake by the sound of landmines exploding in the pitch darkness, somewhere beyond the border of their camps. Nervously, they wondered whether guerillas had triggered the bombs, and if their enemies would soon close in on them.

But the dawn would bring evidence of a different kind of victim. The remains of peacocks were found lying in heaps of shredded feathers; elephants lay with limbs blown off. “A few leopards and bears were also shot because men who encountered them were afraid,” Watson told me, explaining that the thick, thorny forests often swallowed any evidence.

The park itself was off limits to the researchers during the conflict. But even after a ceasefire signed in 2002, it remained unsafe—a mine claimed the lives of a jeep full of wildlife enthusiasts in 2006 and a year later, Wilpattu’s park warden Wasantha Pushpananda was ambushed and killed by the LTTE while on an inspection tour with his team.

Kittle and Watson look at a map of the national park and leopard sightings. Image: Devaka Seneviratne

It wasn’t until the nearly 30-year-long war came to an end in 2009, and many landmines laboriously cleared, that Watson and Kittle were able to readily move about Wilpattu again. They are now publishing data from one of the most comprehensive studies of the leopard population in Wilpattu—the first since the Smithsonian Institution did a more general survey in the late 1960s.

A husband and wife team, Kittle and Watson head The Leopard Project at the Wilderness and Wildlife Conservation Trust (WWCT) in Sri Lanka. They have been studying leopards for over a decade and were responsible for gathering the data that put the native big cat on the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s Red List of endangered species in 2008.

“Being on the Red List influences both conservation and funding attention,” Watson said, explaining that IUCN tracks the global status of various species. In Sri Lanka, the state’s conservation programs had previously been focused overwhelmingly on the elephant, but the IUCN listing has driven a surge of interest in the leopard and its significance as an apex predator—residing comfortably at the very top of the food chain on this island.

Kittle, Watson and I meet in their small office, perched above a garage in central Colombo, the commercial capital of Sri Lanka. The two sit across from each other and share a desk, seeming to be seldom out of each other’s company. Their rhythm has roots—the two met in university and have since travelled widely, always working closely together as a team. When their children were born, they simply took the kids along to the field, something they continue to do. Little drawings by Ayla and Amara decorate an entire wall in their office.

A leopard in Wilpattu. Image: Namal Kamalgoda

Watson said she and Kittle first knew they could make such a close partnership work when they were assigned to help reestablish a wild population of native primate species on an uninhabited island on the Panama Canal in the late 90s.

“There was just the two of us, and a guard who spoke Spanish,” Watson tells me, laughing. “I spoke no Spanish, Andrew spoke some Spanish, and the only other contact we had was a boat coming in every Saturday to bring us provisions. We spent nearly two years there, and I thought if we could do this…”

Today, though their work still might take them far afield, Sri Lanka is home—Watson said her heart is with this island because she grew up here. The duo are working toward establishing a comprehensive habitat use plan for the Sri Lankan leopard by 2020, including a population distribution map, and assessments of its habitats across the island. But tracking this predator has always presented a challenge.

When Watson and Kittle first told me this, I was surprised. I have seen leopards in Yala National Park in southeast Sri Lanka, where the big cats draped themselves decoratively over high branches and rolled around on dusty trails as tourists watched. But Kittle explains that in Wilpattu, and pretty much everywhere else in the island nation,the Panthera pardus kotiya is notoriously shy.

“Usually cryptic carnivores like this are really difficult to spot,” he said, adding that leopards manage to remain elusive despite existing in relatively high numbers in little pockets across the island.

Kittle and Watson have helped nearby villagers learn to live with leopards. Image: Namal Kamalgoda

Now, in the Peak Wilderness Sanctuary in central Sri Lanka, where tea plantations abut dense forest, encounters between leopards and people are on the rise. As more and more wilderness is cleared, Kittle and Watson say leopards and other animals are increasingly moving around and even breeding in ‘habitat mosaics’, or heavily fragmented forested areas surrounded by a patchwork of farms, plantations and homesteads. As a result, villagers are reporting more leopards sightings.

With one legendary exception—in the 1920s, the ‘maneater of Punanai’ was a voracious killer—Sri Lankan leopards are not maneaters.

In Dickoya, people have escaped encounters with the animal with just some deep scratches. Watson and Kittle, increasingly called on to reassure nervous communities, use these incidents to help convince villagers that the leopards are likely as frightened of the people as the people are of them. Working closely with the management of sprawling tea estates, they are now trying to find ways to prevent humans from barging in on the leopards. But to do this, they first have to know where they will be.

In the years that Watson and Kittle have been out in the field, they’ve seen the tracking technology available evolve. In their earliest forays into the field, they would rely on sighting the animals directly and recording each encounter. Some of Yala’s leopards, such as one who boasted bold spots in the shape of a ‘W’ on his forehead, were immediately recognizable, others could only be identified by closely examining photographs of the unique pattern of rosettes on their bodies.

The couple would also rely on tracing Paw Impression Pads: sweeping leaf litter away from a likely spot, they would create a sandy clearing, then return to record pugmarks. This technique allowed them to set up TrailMasters, camera traps that ran on film, to monitor spots where there was a lot of leopard traffic.

Kittle and Watson use tracking technology to help their research. Image: Devaka Seneviratne

Watson and Kittle stuck with the technology up until 2012, before they switched to digital cameras. Film cameras could be cumbersome in the field, demanding hooking up wires and multiple components, but digital ones offered better battery life, were usually more weather resistant, and enabled them to get results faster and cover larger areas.

Ironically, conservationists must often rely on technology developed for hunters, Kittle said, but at least there are hundreds of cameras to choose from. Currently, they use Scoutguard SG565F cameras which have an incandescent flash (old style, bright white). “This is not de rigueur these days in remote camera work as infra-red or low-light flash is the thing,” Kittle said.“But we need to identify individuals in order to estimate population densities etc. and only incandescent flash is capable of that for a moving animal.”

However, the technology still comes with its own share of glitches. “The camera trap is triggered by data from a highly sensitive Passive Infra-Red motion sensor,” said Watson, adding that deploying this technology in Sri Lankan parks has been a steep learning curve. “In Wilpattu we found that the sun rays in the morning could interfere with the beam, and we would have 3000 shots of sunlight,” she said.

“In the Horton Plains dew and mist would trigger the trap, in Ritigala ants were building nests inside the lens, and in the Peak Wilderness Sanctuary we have all these pictures of leopards with a spider web across one corner of the image. Thank god, they were still usable.”

A leopard is captured with its prey. Image: Anjali Watson and Andrew Kittle

Watson says that there are between 700 and 1000 of this apex predator across the 65,000 sq km island. “They are a keystone species, in ecological parlance,” Watson told me,“They are more important to the system than their numbers would suggest.” She explained that leopards are an “umbrella species” – because they are wide ranging animals, protecting them would mean protecting many others in the same territories.

The team uses scat—i.e. leopard feces—analysis to understand the leopards’ diet and hunting patterns. “Felids have very short guts and pass out hair, bones, nails, quills etc. undigested,” said Kittle. Efforts are underway to fine tune mathematical equations that can then transform scat analysis output into an estimate of biomass consumed, providing a clearer, more reliable picture of leopards’ dietary choices.

Kittle and Watson have watched the post-war transition with interest, and have been curious about the conflict’s impact on local wildlife. Watson points out that war can lead to decimation of habitats and rampant poaching, but that in other cases “mines can also keep people out”, somewhat protecting wildlife from human intervention or development.

Kittle and Watson look at where leopards have been spotted. Image: Devaka Seneviratne

Now, as people return to the formerly war torn areas in the north and east, they have begun reclaiming lands or clearing new acres in previously untouched areas like the sprawling forests of the Wanni. They’re building homes and preparing the once wild land for farming. But this trend is not confined to one part of the island, and everywhere protected areas are coming under threat.

“I think the big concern is the pace of this whole post-war development drive,” warns Watson. “There is so much we don’t know, so many areas we haven’t explored. We could be losing species we never even knew about.”

But Kittle said studying the leopard has left him “tentatively optimistic.”

“For us, there’s always this thrill, no matter how often you see the animal. You have this respect for its ability to exist in very compromised locations, often alongside people, with minimum conflict. You have to admire that.”

Published on Vice on 3 January, 2017. By Smriti Daniel. Pictures as credited. 

Sri Lankan activists will tell you that the island has a commission culture. In the last 15 years alone, people have stood up and testified before dozens of committees – some, such as the Udalagama Commission, investigating human rights abuses, and others, such as the Mahanama Tilakaratne and Paranagama Commissions, looking into abductions and disappearances. There have been commissions dedicated to lessons

In the last 15 years alone, people have stood up and testified before dozens of committees – some, such as the Udalagama Commission, investigating human rights abuses, and others, such as the Mahanama Tilakaratne and Paranagama Commissions, looking into abductions and disappearances. There have been commissions dedicated to lessons learnt (Lessons Learnt and Reconciliation Commission) and on constitutional reform (Public Representations Committee).

Thousands of Sri Lankans have testified, and thousands have been disappointed by how little has changed despite their courage. This is why when the Consultation Task Force – a government-appointed body with members from civil society – released its Final Report on Reconciliation Mechanisms on January 4, its authors admitted they were concerned that their witnesses suffered from “commission fatigue”.

But despite this, 7,306 Sri Lankans came forward to have their say on a transitional justice system and a new Constitution that would help the country address deep schisms left behind by a nearly 30-year-long war between the government and the militant separatist group Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam. The report collates the results of a series of district and provisional-level consultations carried out across the country, and represents a diversity of voices. In these pages are members of the military, mothers of the disappeared, CEOs, bureaucrats, Malaiyaha Tamils (originally from the plantations) and the indigenous Veddas. There are Sinhalese displaced from border villages, former Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam combatants, and Muslim IDPs (internally displaced persons) who have yet to return home. There are extremist, ultra-nationalist Buddhists.

In these pages are members of the military, mothers of the disappeared, CEOs, bureaucrats, Malaiyaha Tamils (originally from the plantations) and the indigenous Veddas. There are Sinhalese displaced from border villages, former Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam combatants, and Muslim IDPs (internally displaced persons) who have yet to return home. There are extremist, ultra-nationalist Buddhists.

The number of participants at individual public meetings varied in the zones with the highest participation being 1,190 in Batticaloa and the lowest, six in Jaffna. Overall, the poor turnout has been attributed to a variety of issues, including apathetic outreach by the government, a lack of interest from the mainstream media, and harassment and intimidation of witnesses, particularly in the north and east.

What was successful were the Zonal Task Forces that ran the consultations. These were deliberately diverse, representing every religion, ethnicity and regional language and comprising over 50% women. “This is a historic moment for Sri Lanka,” Mirak Raheem, an activist and member of the Consultation Task Force, told Scroll.in. The 11-member committee found that the public was pleased at being consulted, for the first time, by the state instead of being presented with a fait accompli, many for the first time.

Public opinion

The consultations came about when Maithripala Sirisena’s new government, elected in January 2015, chose to make a radical departure from the policies of the Mahinda Rajapaksa regime and co-sponsor a resolution at the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva that year.

The resolution proposed four mechanisms relating to transitional justice – an Office on Missing Persons, an Office of Reparations, Truth, Justice, Reconciliation and Non-Recurrence Commissions, and a judicial mechanism comprising a special court and an Office of a Special Counsel.

In presenting these to the public, the task force chose to encourage people to offer their opinions not just on the four mechanisms but also to freely suggest other reconciliation methods and priorities. People overwhelmingly wanted these to break out of the usual Colombo-centric set-up and instead be available to them in their areas, accessible in their language of choice. The submissions raised a wide array of issues, ranging from accountability for crimes committed during multiple conflicts in Sri Lanka, demands for truth, compensation for victims and other forms of reparations, to a political solution

The submissions raised a wide array of issues, ranging from accountability for crimes committed during multiple conflicts in Sri Lanka, demands for truth, compensation for victims and other forms of reparations, to a political solution for the ethnic conflict and land grabs by the armed forces and other state groups, noted Raheem.

The families of the disappeared formed a large proportion of the people who became a part of these consultations. “I don’t want compensation,” a woman whose husband was abducted in 1990 told the commission in Trincomalee. “Who did this? Why? Only then will I talk about compensation.”

Many had not given up hope that their loved ones were still alive. One family in the south said they wanted a certain detention centre investigated to see if their children still lived. “Doesn’t matter if they’re disabled or without limbs,” they said. “If they’re alive, that’s enough.”

Many of the most dedicated campaigners were women. “The complexity of transitional justice has come out thanks to the engagement of women,” said Shreen Abdul Saroor, one of the founders of the Mannar Women’s Development Federation.

Government commitment

Saroor sees the real danger ahead as being in the state making showy, token efforts that do nothing to ensure justice for families. “The government just wants to ensure that Sri Lanka disappears off the agenda of the next UN Human Rights Council,” she said.

A major proposal of the Consultation Task Force – which is, the creation of a hybrid court comprising both Sri Lankan and foreign judges, prosecutors and investigators to try cases typically left uncovered by traditional penal systems such as war crimes or crimes against humanity – is also unlikely to find state support. A day before the report was released, the government reiterated its determination that foreign judges or prosecutors would not be allowed to participate in such an exercise.

The people themselves are divided on issues such as how crimes committed by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam should be prosecuted. “The people were certainly not in favour of amnesty for very serious crimes,” said Dr Paikiasothy Saravanamuttu, secretary of the Consultation Task Force. “They wanted a robust witness and victim protection unit. They wanted to make sure there was the independence of these various commissions.”

The Consultation Task Force reports that the people of Sri Lanka are united in their desire to see movement on all these issues. The call for justice was not restricted to the Tamils of the north and east, but was also made by Sinhalese and Muslims with regard to the war (1983-2009), the youth insurrection and political violence between the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna, a communist party, and the government (1971 and 1987-’89), the anti-Tamil pogrom (1983), and violence and discrimination against minority religions in post-war Sri Lanka.

Communities who have been historically marginalised and discriminated against, such as the Malaiyaha Tamils and the indigenous Veddhas, were determined to be heard as well. “We have a 37,000-year-old history,” an Adivasi leader told the commission. “From the day King Vijaya came here until today, we have only been subjected to harassment.”

To the disappointment of many, neither Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe nor President Maithripala Sirisena were on hand to receive the final report of the task force on January 3. “Critics of this process got ammunition from that,” Bhavani Fonseka, a senior researcher at the Centre for Policy Alternatives, said. When the government rushed a bill on the Office on Missing Persons through Parliament in August even as consultations were ongoing, people were left questioning whether it ever intended to heed the findings of the task force, particularly since no progress has subsequently been made on setting up the office. “It is my sense that the government has not understood the complexities and nuances involved in the transitional justice process,” Fonseka added. “For them, it’s just checking boxes.”

In 2017, it is hoped that Sri Lanka will begin drafting a new Constitution, and that progress will be made simultaneously on designing and establishing the four transitional justice mechanisms. But schedules are impossible to pin down and government commitment is lacking. “The report should serve as a warning against taking a technocratic and legalese-laden approach to transitional justice,” said Raheem, pointing to victim-centric solutions outlined in the report.

Saroor added, “We do understand that this government will face a tug of war to get these changes through Parliament. It is possible we might never see the colour of a new Constitution… But we have to take ownership of this report. It is ours.”

Published in Scroll.in on 9 January, 2016. By Smriti Daniel. Image credit AFP.