by
Neville Jayaweera
Chapter 10
The non-Vellalas unbound
For the reasons I have identified earlier in this publication the Vellala class has been decisively evicted from a dominant role in national politics, and for the first time in a thousand years has been reduced to a subaltern status. They now survive as an appendage to the very class, the non-Vellalas, whom they once despised and marginalised.
That should not blind us to certain facts concerning them. Regardless that the Vellalas’ perspective on national politics has been highly introverted and class based, throughout the past hundred years, their ideological commitment to the democratic process has been consistent and unequivocal, even though, since the Vaddukkottai Declaration that commitment has been tarnished somewhat. That notwithstanding, they understood liberal democratic values, they have always respected the parliamentary process and their primary commitment has been to dialogue and negotiation. Their eviction from the national political landscape has not only dented the country’s democratic fabric but it has also taken Tamil politics out of the democratic discourse and placed it in an altogether different domain.
At a personal level I can confirm that during my years in Jaffna and over the past 40 years I have interacted with the most iconic of the Vellala leaders as well as with simple Vellala middle class folk, and many of my friends hail from amongst them. I can also confess that they are some of the finest human beings I have met anywhere, cultured and dignified, never vulgar or offensive and never abusive or crude. The eviction of the Vellalas from a dominant role in Tamil and national politics saddens me, but history unfolds impersonally and relentlessly.
The eviction of the Vellalas from national politics has three major political consequences.
- The first is the unbinding of the non-Vellalas and their elevation to the dominant place in Tamil politics.
- The second is the impact of this ascendency on the national political process as well as on international relations and
- The third is the rise of the Tamil diaspora.
I shall deal with each of these separately.
The upsurge of the non-Vellalas
The vacuum created by the eviction of the Vellalas from the dominant role in Tamil politics has been filled by the non-Vellalas, who are now the major driving force of Tamil politics, whether in Sri Lanka or abroad. . After unnumbered centuries the no-Vellalas have been unbound.
Several characteristics differentiate the non-Vellalas from the Vellalas as a political force. Whereas the Vellalas enjoyed a heritage of stability and power, the non-Vellalas inherit a legacy of instability and oppression. Whereas the Vellalas have been sophisticated and bourgeois the non-Vellalas are simplistic and crude. Whereas the Vellalas have been adept at dialogue and negotiation, the non-Vellalas are bereft of negotiating skills, which has been evidenced abundantly in recent years. Whereas the Vellala consciousness emanates a quiet confidence and a sense of dignity, the non-Vellalas are driven by paranoia and are highly volatile and prone to violence.
To understand the non-Vellalas as a potential political power house, we must grasp how their psyche has been shaped in the crucible of oppression, humiliation and suffering, for untold hundreds, or even thousands of years. Throughout their long sojourn in the wilderness, in India, and for the past 1000 years in Sri Lanka, they have known only authoritarian rule and oppression, and have never experienced democracy. If I am asked to identify one quality that characterises their collective consciousness, more than any other, I would unhesitatingly say that it is paranoia, that is, the disposition not to trust anyone but to see enemies and conspiracies lurking everywhere. Without any malicious intention I would say that their world-view is that of troglodytes i.e. creatures who live in underground caves.
Especially noteworthy is that, through the Vellakkaras and Maravars, warrior castes who were a part of the Pandya/Chola armies that invaded Sri Lanka in the 10-11th centuries, and were later employed by the Sinhala kings as mercenaries, the non-Vellalas also inherit a tradition of militarism which is reputed for brutality and barbarism. The Portuguese and the British suppressed this militaristic tradition among the non-Vellala Tamils, but the rebel armies have readily co-opted it. The Sinhala words maravara balaya (which means, the power of intimidation) have their origin in the depredations of the Maravars in Sri Lanka during the Chola invasions.
Once the Vellala top cover had been removed exposing the non-Vellala base, this is what the government and the international community can expect to find. They will be confronted by a political entity, united by a common experience of being suppressed for aeons by the Vellalas, and of being defeated and humiliated by the state. The government must not forget that even after the killing fields have been vacated, whenever that will be, the non-Vellala Tamils in the North alone will still number over 500,000, and they will be a powerful force to reckon with.
In my view, unless Sri Lanka can produce a leader, who, while keeping his nose to the grindstone, can also keep his eyes on the stars ( Peter Drucker’s model), the next phase of Sri Lanka’s history will be more troubled than the past few decades have been. The critical question is, whether Sri Lanka can produce a leader, who is capable of that paradoxical role, of being both a Commissar and a Yogi.
Implications for international relations
The isolation of the Vellala class from international links proved their undoing. They had no leverage abroad. That explains why the Vellala led Federal Party and Tamil Congress were never able to stir the interest either of Tamil Nadu or of New Delhi, on behalf of their cause, and why their cries rarely received a serious hearing in India.
By contrast, though they are currently proscribed by New Delhi, the non-Vellalas have historic structural links with Tamil Nadu, where over 80% of the population constitute the parent stock of the Jaffna non-Vellalas. That is why when the latter are threatened there is unrest and agitation in Tamil Nadu. Caste affinities tie the non-Vellalas of Jaffna to the majority of Tamil Nadu in a historic relationship and a lack of understanding of this axis of political power can prove critical for Sri Lanka.
How the future unfolds depends primarily on how the government in Colombo responds to this reality. If it proceeds rapidly to resolve the historic grievances of the non-Vellala people i.e. the problem of landlessness, the lack of access to jobs, their perception of being oppressed, both by the SL government as well as by the Vellalas, their resentment at having their lands treated as occupied territory, and above all, their exclusion from political power, and initiates effective measures rapidly to ameliorate them, it will be possible to cocoon them and isolate them from the Tamil Nadu giant.
On the other hand, if the government in Colombo opts for myopia and succumbs to those who ask ”what grievances?”, one can expect Tamil Nadu not only seriously to destabilise Sri Lanka, but equally to start rocking the Indian Union boat itself, which can then capsize Sri Lanka as well!
The rise of the diaspora
Another consequence of the fall of the Vellalas has been the emergence of a formidable Tamil diaspora, which is now composed equally of Vellalas as well of the non-Vellalas. Wounded and humiliated by decades of Sinhala hegemonism, in a dramatic metamorphosis, the overarching consciousness of Tamilness has prevailed, and the two historic Tamil enemies, the Vellalas and non-Vellalas, have closed ranks.
Although within a matter of fifty years their world had been turned upside down, their capacity to bounce back and regain lost ground has been phenomenal, a feat matched only by the Jewish diaspora. Today, in the UK for instance, the Tamils of both caste groups have a common business directory, titled the Tamil Pages, patterned on the regular Yellow Pages, advertising enterprises owned exclusively by them, and in 2004 the directory numbered over 700 pages, and over 26,000 registered Tamil business enterprises paying taxes in the UK, and that is not counting the thousands in the professions and over 50,000 corner shops and convenience stores which do not enter the registry. I am told that in the USA and Canada their business directories are 3-4 times as large and include many shipping lines among the registered enterprises.
All this represents an enormous entrepreneurial resource which might well have been utilised within Sri Lanka itself for generating wealth, but is now not only a net loss to the country, but is being mobilised against it, with the LTTE acting as proxy. A few years back the gross annual income generated by the Tamil diaspora in the Western countries alone, was estimated to exceed Sri Lanka’s GDP. Like all other diaspora that owe their origin to a deep trauma, the united Tamil diaspora have not forgotten the past, and they are now being driven by a terrible revengist resolve.
A belated clarification of terms
Even belatedly, I think I should clarify two words I have been using in this chapter, namely Vellala and non-Vellala. It is erroneous to assume that by Vellala I mean just the Federal Party and that by non-Vellala I mean simply the LTTE. I consider these entities to be only ephemeral manifestations of a deeper structural reality, which will persist long after the manifestations have passed from view.
Also, I have endeavoured in this chapter to avoid, as much as possible, using the words LTTE and Pirabhikaran, because they seem to evoke, even among the intelligent and the educated, highly emotional responses, which obscure their capacity to perceive the structural realities underlying them. When we confuse the manifestation for the underlying reality we are merely addressing the symptoms, leaving room for the hidden reality to flare up as another malignant manifestation, when the one confronting us currently has been obliterated.
That deeper underlying reality is caste, and the central theme of this chapter has been that unless one understands how caste has fuelled and shaped the conflict, our ability to resolve it will be proportionally impaired. I am not saying that caste is the principal factor driving the Tamil response to Sinhala hegemonism, but that it is a very important factor, and if I have appeared to over-emphasise it, it is only in order to remedy its neglect by policy makers, commentators and the intellectual community.
Caste was a mechanism evolved in India, over a two thousand year period, for allocating specific specific social functions to specific categories of people deemed best equipped to carry them out. The allocation of social functions to specific groups of people based on aptitude was not in and of itself evil, although social systems that practised it tended to end up as slave societies and dictatorships, as the political philosopher Karl Popper argues in his book, “The Open Society”.
The functional allocation of social tasks was first conceived of in the Rig Veda around 1000 BC and was spelled out as the Varnasrama Dharma, which was later codified minutely around 600 AD through the Manu Smriti. It was first practised concretely in Sparta, which was the archetypal slave society, around 400 years BC and it was also embodied in Plato’s “Republic” as well as in Hegel’s concept of the perfect state.
However, in none of these cases was the allocation of social functions to specified groups of people based on heredity. What made the Tamil caste system pernicious and absolutely evil was the hereditary principle -once a road sweeper, always a road sweeper – and that was the mechanism that subjected the non-Vellalas to degradation and anonymity for over two thousand years, first in India and later in Jaffna.
Summing up
Based on my experiences in Jaffna in the 1960s, in this chapter I have tried tnd for the first time in a thousstanding of the conflict that has engulfed Sri Lanka for over three decades. Although it draws on my direct experiences, and face to face interactions, with both the Sinhala and the Tamil for many decades, both in SL and abroad, my contribution is a modest one. It is only just another paradigm through which to look at the conflict.
Commentators have generally identified the Sinhala Only policy, Sinhala chauvinism, the clash of Sinhala and Tamil nationalisms, the over centralisation of power in Colombo, India’s intervention, and the pathological malevolence of Pirabhikaran, as being among the principal causes of the conflict. I do not deny the enormous impact that all of these factors have had on determining the intensity and character of the conflict. However I do not think that the Sri Lankan conflict, or for that matter, any major socio-political conflict, can be understood through just a few variables. We need a more inclusive and holistic model.
Sinhala Only policy and Sinhala chauvinism were certainly the immediate triggers for the conflict, but when seen within a wider perspective the conflict is far more complex, and its roots network over a much wider field.
If I am pushed to select a model for understanding the Sri Lankan conflict, my preferred option is the one advanced by Antonio Gramsci, an Italian Marxist of the last century. There are two aspects of Gramscian thought that I find relevant. First, he eschews the tendency to explain major socio-political conflicts in terms of just a few variables, and suggests instead an “ensemble of relations”, i.e. an interlocking system of multiple causes, within which a change in one variable sets off changes in all variables. The other Gramscian concept I find useful is “hegemonism”. As applied to the Sri Lankan conflict, hegemonism is the dominance of Sinhala over the Tamil and of Vellala over the non-Vellala. In both instances, the dominant class seeks to impose its own view of reality on the consciousness of the subaltern class, so that the latter may see it as the natural order of things. The subaltern class reacts to this dominance sometimes through insurrection and seeks to replace the operative hegemony with their own alternative hegemony. We have seen that happen in Sri Lanka. While Sinhala hegemony has been challenged by the Tamils, it can never be overturned, much less replaced, by them. However, the Vellala hegemony has been effectively challenged and overturned by the non-Vellalas, and replaced by their own hegemony.
A Bob Dylan song
I want to end this chapter with two verses from a song that Bob Dylan, the famous American singer of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s used to sing, which still moves me profoundly. Bob Dylan’s powerful metaphors sum up much of what I have been trying to convey in this chapter.
How many years must a mountain exist,
before it is washed to the sea?
How many years must some people exist,
before they're allowed to be free?
An' how many times can a man turn his head,
An' pretend that he just doesn't see?
The answer, my friend, is blowing in the wind,
The answer is blowing in the wind.
An' how many times must a man look up
before he can see the sky?
An' how many ears must one man have
before he can hear people cry?
An' how many deaths will it take till he knows,
that too many people have died?
The answer, my friend, is blowing in the wind,
The answer is blowing in the wind.
A foot note by the author
I must state that all the chapters of this publication were written and serialised in the Sunday Island before November 2008, six months before the final eviction of the LTTE from the North.
The editor of the Sunday Island has invited me to release for publication the entirety of the chapter on Jaffna, but I am refraining from accepting his generosity. I do so because, firstly, I do not want to hog the columns of his esteemed paper, and also because much of the rest of the chapter on Jaffna, which runs into another 3-4 instalments, includes highly esoteric subjects like - Sankritization, acculturation, diversification of agriculture, fertiliser usage and the salinisation of the peninsula - which hardly make interesting reading of a Sunday morning - but they will appear in my memoirs when they are published.
Neville Jayaweera
Concluded
