The Story Of The Occasional Cinemagoer: Part II

By Mahesan Niranjan –MAY 14, 2022

Prof. Mahesan Niranjan

The situation in Sri Lanka is chaotic. With foreign exchange reserves low and debt repayments suspended, economy is in crisis. Politically, there is no consensus in decision-making to find a way forward. Just before quitting, the former Prime Minister tried the age-old trick of inciting violence. Mercifully, that did not work. But Gods are not kind to Sri Lankans. A serial loser representing a one-man party in Parliament is suddenly thought of as the unique solution to Sri Lanka’s problems. He who represents nobody has been tasked with representing everybody. “You can’t be serious”, the tennis player might scream. 

But is it just the economy and political deal-making that should concern us, or is there a wider picture of the nature of the Sri Lankan State and society? The country has seen much violence since independence. Sinhala youth rebelled in 1971 and 1989. Tamil youth rebelled over a 30-year period. They were all crushed with extreme brutality. Arbitrary arrests, torture and murder were widespread, going to show that violence is structural in the State apparatus of Sri Lanka. An arrest by police is usually followed by beating, the probability and intensity may differ based on the ethnicity of the suspect. The war with Tamil youth had serious disenfranchising overtones, both in cause and its energetic execution. 

State violence was never questioned by the citizens. They accepted in silence and went onto enjoy the peace of the aftermath, gullibly swallowing the fibs of its necessity, ignoring altogether the irresponsibility in governance that laid the foundations for these uprisings. That we were generating educated youth without employment opportunity, or we were unwilling to devolve a small amount of power to allow local decision-making in return for global loyalty and citizenship, were never subjects of critical appraisal. 

The inability and unwillingness for introspection is what held back Sri Lanka from moving forward, despite the tremendous advances in education and health achieved in the years immediately following independence.

Those were the thoughts of my friend, the Sri Lankan Tamil fellow Sivapuranam Thevaram, my regular drinking partner, when he travelled to London yesterday to see a film. We also have another drinker, Polgahawela Aarachchige Don Soloman Rathmana Thanthiriya Bandarawela, Pol for short. He is Sinhalese, but this not why we have reduced drinking sessions with him. Pol’s admiration for the Sri Lankan President Nandasena Gotabaya Rajapaksa, portraying him as an “action man” annoys us. We return the favour by asking our version of that famous question, which, spoken with the right Sri Lankan intonation is not a question, but a dismissive statement: 

“Who is Nandasena?”

Today, it was just the two of us with our rounds of Peroni. 

The film Thevaram went to see, Single Tumbler, is by Sivamohan Sumathy, Professor of English at the University of Peradeniya. It was screened as part of a South India film festival running in London. Thevaram’s previous Tamil film was Shobasakti’s Dheepan in 2015 (read that experience here). 

Being the first to arrive, Thevaram took his seat numbered X42. Despite the theatre being empty, a young lady, the second to arrive, took X44. British adherence to rules. You might have observed, a single Brit waiting for his bus would stand in an orderly queue of one! Thevaram and the lady started a conversation and the mood very rapidly changed to a Sri Lankan setting. With a few introductory phrases exchanged with a touch of characteristically Sri Lankan inquisitiveness, they figured out they lived within a few hundred yards in Bridgetown and were alumni of the university there. The event organizers also reinforced that Sri Lankan atmosphere by starting 20 minutes late. The host placed two chairs on the stage promising a discussion afterwards, but that did not happen.

This afternoon, sitting in the lawn of the Bridgetown pub next to the river, Thevaram took me through Single Tumbler.

“The storyline is uncomplicated. A Tamil woman who emigrated to Canada around the time of the war visits family, learns about the death of her brother, sees the impact of the death on the mother and other two siblings, asks the family home to be given to her, miserably fails to connect and leaves. Woven into this simple setting was a beautifully crafted and powerful narrative demanding from the Tamil side, what we saw a few paragraphs earlier as what was missing in the social and political trajectory of Sri Lanka: 

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