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Cultural castration of the Jaffna man
Part I
By H. L.D.MahindapalaIn his impassioned eulogy for ‘The Light that Shineth in the Darkness’ (Sunday Island, October 25, 1998) Mr. Neville Jayaweera, the former Government Agent of Jaffna, refers to the ‘perplexing phenomenon’ of the Jaffna culture which remained stagnant while the rest of the nation changed under the impact of modernity. His article is permeated with a romantic view of the Jaffna culture and sees St. John’s College as the repository of all his cherished values. In his own subtle way (and credit must be given to him for his missionary endeavours to proselytise) he identifies St.John’s College, the Christian missionaries and the culture of Jaffna as three parts which add up to one glorious whole. In this, he sounds more like one of his predecessors, Sir. William Twyneham, who, in his own words, was ‘more a missionary than a stereotype civil servant and was always available to the missionaries and to the principal of St. John’s for little favours’. His smooth verbal flow is designed to give, among other things, the impression that St. John’s College is the nearest thing to the Garden of Eden, ‘where the zeal of the missionaries (helped) to roll back the frontiers of ‘darkness’’.
Within this romanticised overview, Mr. Jayaweera raises the fundamental question that is vital for any valid appreciation, or interpretation of the culture of Jaffna which led to the current crisis. He expresses unreserved admiration for the unique culture of Jaffna which confined only to the peninsula. Scoffing at the spiritual castration of those Jaffnaites who had lost their ‘cultural genitalia’ (his words) in the wasteland outside Jaffna he asks : ‘Why did this (cultural castration) not happen among the Tamils of Jaffna?’ Of course, his question appears to be an inquiry that seeks confirmation of his own belief that there is a mystical element in the culture of Jaffna symbolised in the grandeur of St. John’s College that produced all that is ‘good and noble in the human condition’. As opposed to this, more realistic inquirers, deeply rooted in the Jaffna soil (e.g. Mrs. Rangini Thirangama and Prof. Rajan Hoole) who were shocked and repelled by the brutal violence, where the Tamils were more prone to kill Tamils, let alone outsiders, posed a different question. They asked : ‘How did an evil monster come out from the womb of Jaffna?’ Mr. Jayaweera sidesteps the grim political realities of his Garden of Eden and shifts deftly to the cultural dimensions which he romaticises as a sacrosanct ideal. He endorses it as ‘the strong value system’ which is devoid of ‘the pseudo-culture (of the) straw men, hollow men, belonging neither here nor there’.
‘Erosion’
He goes further and states that ‘the Sinhala culture has been susceptible to erosion’ and the ‘Tamil culture has been resilient’. His inquiry is directed at finding the factor that has made the unique Jaffna Tamil culture more ‘resilient’? But has Jaffna society been ‘resilient’, as Mr. Jayaweera claims, or stubbornly resistant to change? Was not that clammy clinging to their ‘identity’ a direct result of their resistance to change? He speculates as to whether Hinduism, which has a tradition of integrating diverse foreign elements without changing its essential identity, is the hidden factor that preserved the Jaffna culture intact. If so how does one explain the slow and steady — and of late the rapid— cultural changes in the original homeland of Hinduism, India, which is now producing on a mass scale its own Bollywoodian brand of pop culture, saturated with McDonald’s and Coca Cola? More closer to home, how is it that the Batticaloa Hindus, drawn from the same stock as the Jaffna Tamils, were more susceptible to cultural ‘erosion’ than the Jaffna Tamils?Mr. Jayaweera’s argument that the Jaffna Tamil culture was ‘resilient’ is contradicted by his own assertion that not all the intrusions of modernity could change the Tamil way of thinking, acting and behaving. Is that resilience or intransigent rigidity stuck in a decaying past? It appears that in his attempt to elevate the Jaffna culture and identity to a level that accord with his romantic view he has got it all mixed up. He hails the Tamil resistance to any substantial changes to their way life as ‘resilience’ and the Sinhala south, with its open society, adapting itself to modernity as a weakness that has led to the ‘erosion’ of its fundamental values. Whether the ready adaptability of the Sinhala south to changes — he calls it an ‘erosion’ — is a weakness or strength can be debated till the cows come home. As against this contentious assertion of Mr. Jayaweera, it is necessary to emphasise that in all societies it takes only twenty four hours to change a political culture (e.g. a coup de etat) and an extended period, perhaps five to ten years, to radically change the economic structure (e.g. USSR) but a culture cannot be changed even after centuries of foreign domination. The essence of the cultural base remains the same under varying vicissitudes of economic and political upheavals. It may lie dormant under the violent pressures but it will always spring back into life under the right conditions. The difference in a viable and evolving culture is that it remains the same while it changes.But stagnant societies remain the same without changes.
Each culture is renewed by adapting itself to new circumstances. Some do view such adaptations as an ‘erosion’ of pristine values. But societies that do not change end up in a warped culture. No individual or group can reside in their past forever and ever. The ability of the old framework to absorb the new without disintegrating is, in any society, a remarkable sign of its inner strength. Resilience is in opening doors to to the winds that blow in from the four comers. Closed societies that shut the doors to outsiders are condemned to remain stagnant, and sometimes smelly and skewered. The Sinhala south which opened its doors to all comers (despite its tragic diversions that disturbed this trend temporarily) contributed to the dynamic multicultural way of life to which it was accustomed down the ages. But Mr. Jayaweera claims that the closed society of Jaffna which shut it doors to all outsiders was ‘resilient’. It was a society that was paranoid about change. The cadjan curtain was in reality the iron curtain. Consider just one example. The open multicultural society of the Sinhala south, with all its manifest defects, elected from its so-called racist electorates Europeans, Burghers, Muslims and Tamils, just not once or twice but repeatedly. But the ‘resilient’ Jaffna society of Mr. Jayaweera has consistently elected none but those who pushed Tamil racism to the extreme. Mr. Jayaweera will agree that every successful political platform in Jaffna — from Ponnambalam to Prabhakaran — was based on pushing Tamil racism deeper into its current violent phase. Those who showed the slightest sign of cooperation with the Sinhala south were liquidated either by the ballot or the bullet.
Is this the grim reality of the ‘strength of the Tamil sense of cultural identity’ which Mr. Jayaweera lauds so effusively? By implication, he considers the racist politics of Jaffna as a manifestation of the ‘strength of the Tamil sense of cultural identity’. He is also proud and pleased that ‘the missionary enterprise in Jaffna’ has strengthened this Tamil cultural identity. Everyone has a right to retain the cultural identity of his/her group and foster it too. But what is objectionable is the double standards adopted on this issue. When the Tamil leaders and the Christian missionaries push what Mr. Jayaweera calls the ‘Tamil identity’ to the extremes to keep the Tamil fires burning it is praised to high heaven as a magnificent achievement. But when the Sinhala south goes down the identical track, their leaders and Buddhist monks are condemned as racists obstructing the progress towards a multicultural society, and to reconciliation and peace!
This is not the only limitation in Mr. Jayaweera’s emotional exposition of the noble virtues of Jaffna which, I must add, are valid in parts. His analysis, analogies and inquiries are too limited. His inquiries need to be widened into a larger spectrum to ascertain the central characteristics of Jaffna. Hence, it is necessary to ask: Are there any bigger factors than Hinduism that determined the Tamil identity? Who was it who shaped that identity and in whose interest? What was the nature of that Tamil identity? Did it carry a virulence directed against non-Tamils? What was the impact of that Tamil identity? Why is it that Jaffna failed to enter the twentieth century while the rest of the nation moved into it rapidly? Or what is the force that held back Jaffna and kept it insulated from the rest of the world? Why was the fragile cadjan curtain so impenetrable for the external forces? What are the internal dynamics of Jaffna that made it so rigid and resistant to modernity? Was it its geography? Did it produce in them a ‘peninsularity of the mind’, as stated by Jane Russell, in her excellent study of Communalism? Or was it their laws and customs enshrined in the Tesawalamai which gathered a legal force of its own in isolation to define the essential characteristics of Jaffna? Or was it their hierarchical social structure which dominated the Jaffna culture and permeated every single aspect of their way of life, including its exclusivist politics? To sum it all : what is the single and the most dominant characteristic of Jaffna society that distinctly separated it from the rest of Sri Lankan communities who were slowly but surely discarding their feudal remnants inherited from their traditional past?
Mr. Jayaweera will agree that these are issues relevant to clarify his ‘perplexity’. Of course, he says that he ‘must leave to the more knowledgeable to answer’ his queries. Mr. Jayaweera himself is no mean authority on Jaffna. I think it was somewhere in the sixties when he was the Government of Jaffna (and those were, indeed, idyllic days for anyone living in Jaffna at that level) he wrote a series of articles on the Jaffna culture for the Daily News. Without claiming any such knowledgeable status, I propose to tentatively advance a line of thinking which may (or may not) satisfy Mr. Jayaweera.
No middle ground
First point to note is that stratified societies are highly resistant to changes and Jaffna was stratified into one of the most rigid and ruthless caste system in the hydraulic societies of S. Asia. Only those who step out of that iron-cast circle, both mentally and physically, can be resilient and open to changes. The stratified Jaffna society where casteism reigned supreme gave little or no space for changes. It was a society where the individuals place was fixed permanently from the womb to the tomb. In that society the individual was either ‘in’or ‘out’. There was no middle ground. The individuals’ place was determined by his/her identity. To be ‘in’ the individual had to retain his/her identity. If the individual lost his/her identity then he/she had no place behind the caste curtain. If anyone dared to step out of the rigid boundaries demarcated by the Jaffna society he/she would be discarded as outcastes from the spheres of religion, politics and even family.Unlike the open south Jaffna was a closed society whose perimeters were defined by the ruling ideology of caste. Endogamy, heredity and ranking within it preserved an identity that gave an elitist status to the dominant vellalas. The vellalas imposed their ruling ideology so vigorously and ruthlessly that those who remained in Jaffna, or returned to their base in Jaffna, had no anchorage outside its confines. It was basically a conformist society. It was different in the south. The south was non-conformist and liberal. There was no rigid caste structure in the south to impose its ideology or its dominance over the rest. The caste categories in the south were free to compete with each other freely and work their way out of the old confines. In the north the caste ideology prevented any free movements. Everyone inside it became a prisoner not only of the system but also of the vellala ideology ruling the system. The ruling vellala caste was not only numerically superior but economically, politically and administratively endowed with a traditional power to whip any deviantionist into line. Inevitably, as in all prison systems, the vellala jailers also became prisoners of their own vicious system.
In other words, the vellala cast had all the power to impose its ideology even among those whom they oppressed. Hinduism, casteism and Tamilness were blended into an ideology that defined their identity and held everyone together. Chelvanayakam is a good example. Though a Christian he did not abandon his Hindu culture. He eschewed everything that was alien to his ‘Tamil identity’. According to his faithful biographer, Prof. A. J. Wilson, he even refused to buy a house in Colombo fearing that his children will take to the cosmopolitan culture. Chelvanayakam emerges from his son-in-law’s biography as a man who ate Tamil, drank Tamil, breathed Tamil and even worshipped Tamil. He maintained only minimal contacts with the outsiders — and that too to promote his Tamil politics. He knew that he could maintain his grip on Jaffna only by fencing in the people of Jaffna. He too was dependent on the vellala caste for his political survival and despite being a Christian endorsed and embraced the Hindu system in its entirety — i.e. caste and all.
The lower-castes too, who were rejected by the upper-caste, were glued to the overwhelming culture as there was no counter force to provide an alternative. Besides, their economic dependence on the vellalas made them subservient physically and mentally to their masters. Though there was a symbiotic relationship between the lower and the upper castes, each being dependent on the other, it is the vellalas who determined the Tamil identity which changed, almost imperceptibly, from Hinduism to communalism in the dying days of the British raj which sustained them in all their casteist glory when the imperial was at its zenith. Eventually, the identities of the upper and the lower castes coalesced when the vellals raised the bogey of Sinhala ogre waiting to gobble them up. Imported ideologies like Christianity, Buddhism or Marxism failed to gain a strong foothold because they could not breakdown the caste barriers of the dominant vellalas. Every foreign import was seen as a threat to the dominance of vellalas entrenched in their hierarchical privileges and status. Any attempt to break through had to break through the combined forces of all three factors – Hinduism, casteism and Tamilness. In its last days, the vellalas disguised their need for dominance and security (both internally and externally) as the struggle of the Tamils.
The vellalas had the unreserved backing of the ideological gurus who came mainly from that community. The Tamil intellectuals and academics— from Prof. S. J. Tambiah to A. J. Wilson who relentlessly probed the Sinhala-Buddhist society — never ventured to explore the Jaffna Tamil society with the same vigour or in depth. Besides, it would have been very embarrassing to them to dig deep into the dark and decayed layers of their feudal society that was doggedly refusing to shed its perverse caste system. That would not have helped them to advance the Tamil struggle as a just cause. (More of this later). All the other intellectuals who followed them also concentrated on the south and not the north. The local Marxists, misled by their distorted view of the cross-cultural forces collaborating or clashing on the political plane, considered Jaffna society as a ‘bourgeois perversion’. They did not grasp the fact that Jaffna was the last enclave of feudalism, replete with its hierarchical caste system. Nestling as a haven of retirement for the Jaffna Tamils who made it good in the south, Jaffna was indeed an idyllic retreat from modernity. If there is one thing that the Jaffnaite resisted —- and resisted it with all their power — it was changes to their hierarchical value system based on the Hindu ideology.
It was a society divided into two distinct groups : the dominant and the dominated. The numerically dominant vellalas ruled the dominated minority of Jaffna society with an iron fist. In fact, the semantics of the vellalas labelled the issue of the low-castes as ‘the minority problem’, reinforcing linguistically that the vellalas were the dominant force. The irony of a 12% minority having a ‘minority problem’ of their own creation seems not have entered their political calculations at all, or disturbed their conscience. It was a deliberate attempt to wipe under the carpet the seamy side of their culture and politics and the Tamils intellectuals who came mainly from the vellala caste collaborated with the vellala elite by diverting attention to the south. Clear proof of this is in Prof. Wilson’s penetrating biography of his father-in-law, S. J.V. Chelvanayakam. In it he deals with most of the forces that went into the making of separatist politics except the caste factor. He relegates the caste issue to an appendix attached to the very end — and only a half page one at that as if caste has been an irrelevant factor. Prof. Tambiah has not only ignored it but, from conversation I had with some Tamil intellectuals, I gathered that he has scoffed at Prof. Bryan Pfaffenberger’s caste analysis.
Convoluted tentacles
Getting back to the question as to what held back Jaffna from moving forward into the modernity Mr. Jayaweera, enumerates the Western agencies — education, missionary enterprise, heavy injection of funds, English —that should have acted as catalysts for change. But they didn’t. Why? Inspite of all these active agencies why was Jaffna entrenched deeply in the past. There is only one solid answer : none of these forces could combat the over-determining caste factor. Jaffna culture and its identity was basically a product of the dominant caste system. Nothing escaped its long, far-reaching and convoluted tentacles. The (1) ruling ideology of Hinduism, (2) the elitist vellalas who ganged up as one united forced to block any interventions from outside forces, (3) the economy with land ownership concentrated in the hands of the vellalas, (4) the religious rituals particularly on temple entry designed to exclude the dominated low-castes, (5) the commanding heights of the administrative power structure occupied by the vellalas from British times, (6) the ruthless use of customary law encoded in the Tesawalamai, and (7) the use of brutal force to enforce provisions of Tesawalamai when the legal instrumentalities failed as seen in the numerous court cases, confirm the inescapable power of the caste elite who determined its culture and identity. With these overwhelming forces behind them, the vellalas imposed a tyranny of their caste which neither the internal forces nor the external forces could break down. The entrenched tyranny of that caste system could be blown apart, as in the Soviet Union, only by an implosion from within.The power of the elitist vellalas was laid down in explicit terms in the Tesawalamai (Tesa = land and walamai = law). It has its roots in the customs, traditions and the usages of the inhabitants of Jaffna. These were codified and preserved as the law of the land from Dutch times. Next to Hindu ideology, it has been the ultimate expression of the power of the vellala caste. Land which was the sole basis of the power of the dominant vellala caste could not be transferred to anyone outside the vellala owners without the prior consent of the next of vellala kin. The first offer had to be made to the heirs, co-owners, or adjacent land owners who would be vellalas as the dispossessed low-castes were excluded from the territories of the upper-caste in case they should pollute their sacred purity. This pre-emptive law was codified not to enhance kinship but to strengthen the iron grip of the vellala caste on land. Power was in the land and if it went out of their hands to ‘strangers’ (read: low-castes) it would erode their power, prestige and status. The law of the land secured power in the hands of those who held the land — and they were the vellalas. Tesawalamai was the law that built a legal fence round the land owned by the vellalas and prevented it from falling into the hands of the outsiders.
Tesawalamai
The laws of pre-emption inherent in Tesawalamai states that the ‘blood relation of the seller has a right to claim the property from the purchaser’This right is similar to fide commisum containing a prohibition against alienation of land’ which, in the case of Jaffna, would mean land passing over from the upper-caste to the lower-castes. This pre-emptive clause attached to sale of property was the traditional instrument that preserved the dominance of the vellala caste on the ownership of the land —-the only means of production in the feudal system. If there is an infringement caused by a sale to a stranger (particularly non-vellalas) then his heirs, or co-owners or neighbours—- all of whom would invariably be from the vellala caste – could challenge the sale. Mr. T. Sri Ramanathan who is now attached to the Law Faculty of the Sydney University wrote in his book Tesawalamai: ‘The Tesawalami Code enacts that when any person had sold a piece of land, garden, etc to a stranger without having given previous notice thereof to his heirs or partners and to such of his neighbours whose grounds are adjacent to his land and who might have the same in mortage, such heirs, partners and neighbours were at liberty to claim or demand the preference of such lands’. (P.72.)Tesawalamai was the most effective legal instrument of retaining the power of vellala caste. As the definitive expression of Jaffna society and culture, Tesawalamai conferred to the vellalas the legal power over life, liberty and property in Jaffna. It is the power over life that turned Tesawalamai into an instrument of oppression of the vellala caste. It legitimised the inhuman system of slavery which became an inalienable right of the vellalas even under the British. Though the British abolished slavery by a statue of Westminster they did not interfere with the right to own and exploit slaves in Jaffna by the vellalas. In fact, they kept a register of slaves in Jaffna and by the turn of the century there were 15,000 registered slaves in Jaffna who served every whim and fancy of the vellalas as abject menials with no liberty nor property. It was a tacit agreement made for the political convenience of the two ruling elites of British raj and the vellalas who traded political favours. Underlying it was the principle that if you don’t touch my caste system I will not threaten your imperial system. This was a lesson that the successors to the British failed to learn.
This convenient trade-off between the two ruling elites lasted until independence when S. W. R. D. Bandaranaike introduced the first legal instrument to dismantle the caste system in Jaffna. The Prevention of the Social Disabilities Act of 1957 is considered a classic piece of legislation, according to Prof. Bryan Pfaffenberger, who adds that it is worthy of the best analytical talent in anthropology. Prof. Pfanffenberger, an authority on the Jaffna caste and its impact on national politics, has illustrated how Bandarnaiake’s attempt to dismantle the oppressive caste system got under the skin of the vellala elite and how they rejected it as an intrusion into their sacred domain, leading, of course, to separatist politics as a defensive mechanism to preserve the dying ancien regime of the vellalas. It is a profound thesis which explains the inner compulsions of Jaffna politics that led to the national blood-bath.
(Part II continued tomorrow)
