Clash At Jaffna University: Conversations On Culture & History – Part I

By Mahendran Thiruvarangan –July 27, 2016

Mahendran Thiruvarangan

The recent clash at the University of Jaffna has triggered discussions on the university as a multicultural space and the role it ought to play in building bridges between the communities in Sri Lanka. At one level, this clash mirrors the warring nationalisms in the country. Nationalisms in general hinge on an exclusivist logic where a particular territory despite its social, cultural and economic heterogeneities is identified exclusively with a particular community/nation, which in turn is associated exclusively with a particular state, one that exists or one that is yet to come. When humans and cultures move beyond the boundaries they are asked to stay within, a rupture occurs in the land-nation-state paradigm essential for the survival of nationalism. In order to overcome this rupture, nationalisms initiate a violent process of exclusion; they ferociously push some identities and cultural practices to the margins of the territory and sometimes even eject and annihilate them. A similar rupture and alienation culminated in violence at the University of Jaffna on the 16th of July 2016. In the larger political context of national contradictions and state-aided discrimination against minorities, partly as a result of being a mono-ethnic center of higher education for nearly 20 years and partly because of its location in the cultural heartland of Tamil nationalism, Jaffna University, for many of us, not just for the Tamils but also for a fragment of the Sinhala community, is and should be a Tamil university. It is in light of this deeply naturalized assumption prevalent among many that we need to understand the clash over the performance of Kandyan Dance during the welcome procession in the Science Faculty.

Conspiracy theories play a dominant role in shaping our response to the social and political happenings around us. When someone expresses her opinion, we first try to find out who she is spying for or what ulterior motive she has. We rarely evaluate people’s ideas at their face value. Even as we engage with the Sinhala students’ request to have Kandyan Dance at the welcome event, we tend to divert the focus of our discussion on proving for instance whether these students were manipulated by the military establishment in Jaffna or the ‘Joint Opposition’ in the South. Thus we have failed to evaluate the request on its own terms.

University and its Relationship to Culture and Communities

Because of the protracted ethnic conflict in the country, we should treat the articulations of culture taking place in shared spaces as highly sensitive subjects. The incident at the University of Jaffna reminds us of the importance of thinking carefully about what kinds of cultural practices and rituals are permissible in state-run universities where students of different ethnic, cultural and religious backgrounds pursue their higher education together. The cultural environment inside a university should make all of its members feel that it is their university regardless of where they come from or what language they speak; it should create the conditions necessary for the students to participate in academic activities without fear or feelings of being a minority or alien.

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