Public Writings On Sri Lanka: Review

By Christopher Rezel -April 22, 2015

Christopher Rezel

It is usual for mainstream Sri Lanka media and politicians to dub Tamil commentators on racial inequality as biased. Given violence against dissenting voices, most such comment originates abroad. Consequently, they are labelled diaspora proxies for a resurgent Tamil Tiger movement and dismissed offhand.

Such would be remiss in the case of Charles Sarvan’s, Public Writings on Sri Lanka, Vol 11. It brings together a collection of seemingly disparate and wide-ranging essays that implicitly, if not directly, have bearing on the historical prejudice and rivalry between the Sinhalese and the Tamils. Sarvan, doctor of Philosophy, London, and professor of Commonwealth Literature, who now lives in Germany with his German-born wife after a career of teaching at universities in different parts of the world, says he is “merely presenting his personal understanding, in the hope that the ensuing discussion, even disagreement, would make a small, but positive, contribution.” An eclectic reader, he meshes his own analysis and observations with those of Sri Lankan academics and intellectuals, besides international notables.

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To ignore this book would be to remain unaware that at the height of the war with the Tamil Tigers, a Buddhist monk was a teacher at Kilinochchi; or that a Sinhalese Special Task Force officer taught music at a local school in Thirukkkovil.

The above snippets, which elevate our faith in human nature, show up in an essay that reviews the book, Of Tamils and Tigers: a journey through Sri Lanka’s war years, by Dutch missionary-teacher, Ben Bavinck, who spent 30 years on the island. Similarly, other essays, written between 2005 and 2011, may dwell on Tolstoy, on outstanding Sri Lankan individuals such as H.A.J. Hulugalle and Paul Caspersz, or on a wide range of social and ethical issues. But they all come back to throw light on the island’s ethnic problems, broadening our understanding, obliging us into a more adaptable stance. Sarvan quotes the writer Elmo Jayawardana: “We hate some people because we do not know them, and we will not know them because we hate them.”                                                           Read More