Some Absences in National History

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In a recent panel discussion I attended on writing the memory of conflict, Sarah Kabir, a fellow panelist, drew on the glaring absences of modern history in government-issued high school text books. Kabir noted how communal riots, youth uprisings, political emergencies, and ethnic conflict, which impacted Sri Lanka’s post-independence destiny are left out. Why cannot these devastating events be acknowledged in textbooks? What happens to the memory of thousands of men, women, and children who were killed, maimed, or traumatised by these conflict moments: whose individual and collective destinies should find a place and a voice somewhere in some form? As an instrument of a national political programme, history is the balance sheet of “what counts”. History has no time or patience for memory.  

Considering the curriculum taught in high school, it is clear that the Sri Lankan state is rooted in the idea of a continuous, linear Sinhalese-Buddhist legacy which – over seven decades of nation-building – governments have placed at the root of the people’s imagination. This imagination, in turn, is anchored as an episodic story that unfolds in a teleological way. For instance, consider how school textbooks teach us the transfer of kingdoms from Anuradhapura (taught to be the oldest “Sinhalese kingdom”) to Kotte and Kandy; and shares summarised selective lists of various feats by some kings (and not others), dates of foreign invasions and so on. The purpose of this exercise is to narrow the citizen’s vision to view a past that does not get distracted by exceptions, anomalies, or alternatives to the past on which the state curates for its people a national character.  

However, the bid for total control over the past simultaneously brings on incongruities that hint at the limitation and inadequacy of readings within a tight frame of a national history. Return to the example of the linear narrative of an uninterrupted Sinhalese-Buddhist genealogy. Here, the history textbook maps a southward movement in the “Sinhalese seats of power” from the 11^th century onwards, from Polonnaruwa to Dambadeniya, and then to Yapahuwa and so on. This movement culminates in Kandy in the 17^th century. In this linear framing, the history-builder caters only to the dulled imagination, while a rich and fertile network of narratives get pushed outside the stencil block of a “2500-year-old continuous Sri Lankan tradition” (note that the everyday use of the word Sri Lanka, being adopted in 1972, is a relatively modern idea).

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For instance, while a group of settlers colonised the north western part of the island, what living conditions existed in the eastern coastline? What were the origin myths of the people who established themselves in the southern regions of the country (for, after a long chapter on the glory of the Anuradhapura kingdom, when a prince from the Ruhunu Raajya – a kingdom that otherwise receives no mention – steps up to defeat the “Tamil king” and “unify the land” the reader is taken by a bigger surprise than Elara/Ellalan)? What was the island’s role in the conflicts among Dravidian kingdoms in the southern and south-western part of modern India? Since it was located right at its centre, what place did the island occupy as two great empires – the Chola, in modern India and the Sri Vijaya, in modern Sumatra – clashed for the control of Indian Ocean trade? National history works best with fewer questions asked.

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The mental impression we carry of Sri Lanka in the vast Indian Ocean bed is based on the sketch of the country we traced off the bulk-print Atlas map used in high school History and Social Studies: the island’s memorable fruit-shape hanging under the southern tip of the Indian mainland. Even later, as adults, the proximity to India almost naturally came to mind when one thought of Sri Lanka’s geographical location. Alternatively, however, if one was given an exercise to mentally zoom out and seek a different vantage point, one saw the Indonesian islands and Malaysia to the near south-east and the Maldives to the south-west gradually come into the reference frame.

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Between those locations and Sri Lanka lay an uninterrupted sea. In an alternative historical imagination, it is perhaps not prudent to altogether disregard the migrations, settlements, invasions of and other types of arrivals on and departures from the coastline from the east to the west by Indonesian and Malaysian ancestors. In this regard, Senarath Paranavithana’s Ceylon and Malaysia, published in 1966, provides valuable insights to the dulled imagination. One of his less celebrated works, the book comes at a time when Paranavithana was losing favour with the national history project to which – at a different juncture – some of his findings added value.  

The conflict between history and memory

Struggle and violence associated with memorialisation in Sri Lanka is widely documented by scholars, researchers, journalists, and activists. A spotlight among Sri Lanka’s ongoing struggles, the continuing ordeals in the former war territories to mourn the dead has been periodically obstructed by the state. The rationale against such memorialisation has often been tied up with concerns of “national security”. Critics who support a community’s right to mourn and commemorate its shared losses often characterise the state’s prohibition as a part of its ideological agenda.  

A national imagination that is sharply divided as us-them, good-evil, valour-treachery, Sinhalese-Tamil and so on, triumph can only be realised in the eradication or suppression of the other: in the demolition of memorials, silencing of narratives, and the blocking of pain and suffering from being represented. In the same way larger-than-life monuments of triumph are erected to claim the victorious land, memories of the victim are replaced by the pre-destined and almighty narrative of national history. When wars were waged and won in the old world, they cut the hands of poets and, by cutting the tongues of singers, silenced narratives. These were not merely symbolic gestures.    

The friction between history and memory has drawn many conclusions over time. In his famous essay “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire”, Pierre Nora concedes that “history is perpetually suspicious of memory” and that “it’s true mission is to suppress and destroy it” (Nora, 1989); that history’s goal and ambition is “not to exalt but to annihilate what has in reality taken place” and bring on a “reconstitution of a past without lacunae or faults” (Nora, 1989). The idea of a continuous past within the imagined frame of the modern nation state and efforts in the present to suppress (people and) people’s memories that do not fit in with that narrative play out as a daily post-independence reality.  

One of the frequently quoted speculative works on the totalitarian state, George Orwell’s 1984 summarises the relationship between memory and national history as one where “who controls the past controls the future” and “who controls the present controls the past”. At one level, Orwell enforces the co-dependence of the nation and its preconceived destiny on total history: for its triumph to be established upon the control of memory.

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The school classroom is a crucial outlet through which this construction of history/nation is normalised, circulated, and injected into the bloodstream of the people: for them to stand at attention and respond to the stimulation of “One Country-One Nation” (a favourite post-war slogan among southern Sri Lankans) when necessary. Czech novelist Milan Kundera, famously equated “the struggle of man against power” to “the struggle of memory against forgetting”. In Sri Lanka this struggle is a daily reality – one that is so transparent that the educated see right through it.      

The challenge then, is to explode the tight compartments into which history has been packed by the state’s national history-building programme and to encourage alternative ways of imagining collective pasts and presents: to clarify further, to open gateways that enable a collapse of the narrow majoritarian framework promoted in Sri Lanka over the past 50 years by reaching over the use of history to suppress memory. For memory to survive, a thinking that anchors outside national history is both fundamental and desirable.  

New frames for history and memory

As the concluding movement of this article, I wish to introduce a possible alternative framework through which memories of conflict can be mapped and circulated: a way of framing inspired by Michael Rothberg’s theory of ‘multidirectional memory’. In a word, multidirectional memory is a way of mapping the conference between different memories encouraging imaginations beyond the notion of total history (Rothberg, 2006). Its concern is with what Rothberg calls “the interplay between different pasts and a heterogeneous present” while taking note of “overlap and interference” between and among memories (Rothberg, 2006). Adopted as a model, multidirectional memory has the potential to encourage a society to look at conflict memory by transcending the event-specific configuration we are trained in, and to appreciate parallels, overlaps, resonances and so on among conflicts that surround.    

Kandy based photographer Stephen Champion’s work in his anthology Sri Lanka: War Stories, published in 2008, illustrates the conceptual frame I have in mind. Champion has taken photographs around the 1987-90 political emergency and the north-east conflict and inter-fused them in a convergent, cross-fertilising memory spiral. Among the photographs there does not appear to be any perceivable classification, order, or hierarchy. They weave into a complex and non-linear, memory interface. The concern of the photographer ranges from the specific to the mundane. A random street scene during a curfew hour, a gathering of men and women, rebel cadres enjoying one another’s company, and a publicly disposed body being mourned by loved ones, follow one another.  

Champion’s work also encapsulates a wide range of emotions, tensions, and anxieties within and across event-frames. This ranges from community and personal grief, shock of violent discovery, muffled emotions, uncertainty, to instances of sheer expressionlessness. In one widely circulated photograph – a capture that is often mass-circulated in websites and blogs without Champion’s being acknowledged as author – a young boy weeps beside two bodies that lie on a country path. The boy seems to be still a child and, with his hand clutching a nearby stick fence, he stands crestfallen. It could be surmised that the bodies had been freshly discovered. They are victims of either rebel gunmen or agents of state terror.

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In a second photograph from the late-1980s, a whitewashed house wall is seen splattered with hate-graffiti from the rival camps of the JVP and the state paramilitary. In a third photograph, dated as 2006, a young female LTTE cadre stands with her heavy mortar weapon during a hero’s Day celebration. The girl’s face is inscrutably expressionless, while her left foot is slightly turned inwards, unlike in the disciplined military-posture. A fourth photograph, dated as 1988, shows a father who holds the framed portrait of his slain son in Batticaloa. In a fifth portrait, a mother stands on the Kebitigollewa roadside (in the east) in 2008. In her arms is her young son who is dressed up in an imitation fancy dress military uniform.  

Champion’s framework challenges the direction given by dominant groups that monopolise memory in Sri Lanka and – in search of memory-solidarity and shared re-imagination – encourages us to work-through narrow definitions. In War Stories the story is on the war. In the permeated state of photographed memories there is a solidarity and a sense of shared anxiety which can spark new thinking, previously untested approaches, and unforeseen compromises in settling past disputes in the present. In 2005, Sri Lanka’s majoritarian-nationalist framework was rescued from midlife crisis and given a new lease of life to end the war. However, in the present, it has gone its distance. Its triumphant failure was reflected in the polarised and sharply divided election outcome of 2019 and events that have since followed. Our postcolonial future calls on new imaginations to unpack that history, and to challenge the framework of mainstream history.  

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Vihanga Perera is a literary studies scholar focusing on postcolonial and South Asian literatures. He teaches at the universities of Peradeniya and Sri Jayewardenepura, and at the Postgraduate Institute of English as a visiting academic. Perera is also a nationally-recognized writer of fiction and poetry and the winners of several awards including the Gratiaen Prize in 2014 and the State Literary Award (for poetry) in 2015. His work includes Bodies in Art (2020), a fictionalized biography of artists in Colombo and Kandy, and The Pen of Granite (2015) which he co-authored with Dhanuka Bandara and Manikya Kodithuwakku as a memorial for Richard De Zoysa, a creative practitioner and human rights worker killed in 1990.

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References

Champion, S. (2008). Sri Lanka: War Stories. Hotshoe.

Kundera, M. (1999). The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. Harper Perennial.  

Orwell, G (1949). 1984. Penguin

Nora, P. (1989). “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire.” Representations. Vol. 26, pp. 7-24

Paranavithana, S. (1966). Ceylon and Malaysia. Lake House Investments.

Rothberg, M. (2006). “Between Auschwitz and Algeria: Multidirectional Memory and the Counterpublic Witness.” Critical Inquiry. Vol. 33, pp. 158-184.

Rothberg, M. (2009). Multidirectional memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the age of decolonisation. Stanford University Press.