A Brief Colonial History Of Ceylon(SriLanka)
Sri Lanka: One Island Two Nations
A Brief Colonial History Of Ceylon(SriLanka)
Sri Lanka: One Island Two Nations
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Thiranjala Weerasinghe sj.- One Island Two Nations
?????????????????????????????????????????????????Friday, July 14, 2017
Caste In Jaffna: Mirage By K. Daniel
Caste in Jaffna: Mirage by
K. Daniel. Translated by Subramaniam Jebanesan; edited, introduced and
annotated by Richard Fox Young. Kumaran Book House, Colombo, 2016.
This novel depicts and indicts caste among
the Tamils of Sri Lanka as Daniel (1927-1986), an apostate or a
“convert” from (religious) Catholicism to (secular) Marxism, observed
and experienced it. “This particular novel takes place in the village
where I was born and grew up… All the characters who pass through it
were people I saw with my own eyes. Some are still living. Each incident
that occurs in the novel actually happened” (p. xiv): it’s an instance of the novelist as witness and testifier.
If racism means
the subordination and oppression by one group of another group or
groups, then casteism can be seen as another manifestation of racism. I
would suggest that Tamils who don’t protest Tamil casteism in Sri Lanka lose the moral right to protest Sinhalese racism. One
cannot claim from others what one denies to one’s own. Some Tamils,
both Hindu and Christian, may be upset by what I write but I hope, very
much, that displeasure will lead to honest, detached, thought rather
than to emotional, “knee-jerk”, denial and rejection.
Caste
is not simply an upper-class lower-class dichotomy for there are
gradations, sub-divisions, particularly enforced on the latter. If one
speaks of the Dalits, the so-called ‘untouchables’, then Daniel belonged
to what I would ironically call the caste of the “unseeables”: upper-caste
people considered it a bad omen even to see a member of this caste, and
would sometimes strike them for daring to appear in their sight (p.
304). Even their shadow was deemed polluting. They were the lowest of
the low, the washer folk, the “dhobis” of the washer folk. Teased and
bullied at his Catholic school by upper-caste pupils, Daniel dropped
out. (The UK Observer of
2 July 2017, reporting on the suicide of a Dalit student at a
university in India, comments that for Dalit students university is a
place of constant insult and abuse.)
The
translator, Dr S. Jebanesan, was Bishop of Jaffna until his retirement.
Richard Fox Young, a Professor at Princeton Theological Seminary,
provides a wealth of anthropological and historical information, drawing
attention to detail that an uninitiated reader may miss. “I doubt that
Thampappillaiyan will keep quiet” (p. 48) is glossed as: Until now
Nanniyan had always referred to him as Thampappillaiyar. The minor
change of the “ar” ending to “an” signals in the original Tamil the
casting aside of an undeserved respect (p. 249). On page 51, a woman
refers to her husband as “that man” and Young clarifies that in
traditional Tamil society (and in Sinhalese society, I’d add) a wife
didn’t mention the name of her husband. So too, it was customary and
polite not to say, “I’ll go now” but, “I’ll go now and come (return)”.
Shortened and contradictorily, on leaving one would simply say, “I’m
coming”. A
boat shaped like a toddy cup would be understood by Jaffna readers
because toddy was “served in cups made out of green Palmyra leaves
shaped to resemble this very kind of boat. What that actually looks
like, Daniel does not need to say” to his original Tamil readers (p.
255). The characters in the novel refer to incidents and figures drawn from the Tamil Makaparatam,
and Professor Young relates and clarifies significance. His
contribution heightens understanding and interest, and enhances the
value of the book.