(chapters extracted from the author’s unpublished memoirs)
by
Neville Jayaweera
Chapter 2
A Sinhala conquistador
I must confess, that being chosen as the pivot of N. Q. Dias’s master plan to enforce the Official Language Act throughout Jaffna, to encircle the North with military camps and bring the Tamils to heel, released in me a surge of gung-ho energy, and it was in a spirit of a Sinhala Conquistador, resolved to plant the Lion Flag and Sinhala supremacy among a troublesome Tamil people, that I sallied forth. Except that, for a coat of shining armour I had only a thick coat of juvenile hubris and for my steed a clapped out motor car. Forty years on, I cringe in shame and disbelief when I recall that a Sinhala Sunday paper of that time, referring to my posting to Jaffna, called me the new Sapumal Kumaraya. I have no plea to offer in mitigation except the vacuous ego’s eternal vulnerability to delusions of grandeur.
So it was that one evening in late Aug. 1963, Trixie and I (our daughter Mano was not born yet) were driving into Jaffna, having relinquished duties as the GA of Badulla the previous day. As we drove past Paranthan I remarked to my wife that we seemed to be coming into a wholly different country. The lush thick vegetation of the South had given way to low, parched and scattered scrub. The undulating green hills and valleys carpeted with tea bushes and terraced paddy fields that had been our universe in Uva, had yielded to rolling sand dunes, sprouting spindly Palmyra palms, looking like giant tooth picks stuck in the sand. It was like a lunar landscape, barren and sparse, and from both sides of the Elephant Pass causeway, salt crystals reflected the setting sun like myriads of glass beads.
Dusk was falling as we pulled up under the porch of the Jaffna Residency and our immediate reaction was one of extreme depression. The 100 years old mansion, built as the private residence of Jaffna’s first GA, Sir Percival Acland Dyke in the 1860s, and left unoccupied for some time now, my immediate predecessor V.P Vittachi having left a few months earlier, looked vast, gaunt and ghostly. Its ancient walls, scarred by peeling plaster and held together by green ivy and lichen, were oozing with rising damp. Giant louvered doors, that had not seen a coat of paint in over 50 years, creaked on rusty hinges. Cobwebs trailed from the ceiling like lace curtains, and the wind blowing like a torrent outside, served to emphasise the gloom. When my wife turned on the tap to fill the kettle so that we may have a cup of tea, some foul brown liquid gushed out. Every prospect seemed utterly forbidding.!
A wall of hostility
Uncharacteristically for an incoming GA, barring Ivan Samarawickrema the AGA, a Sinhala officer, not a single local official was on hand to greet us. I did not fail to notice the absence of the Head Quarters DRO ( Divisional Revenue Officer ) and of the Office Assistant, both Tamils officers, whose presence to welcome an incoming GA was a long established tradition in Provincial Administration and almost mandatory. Their absence that evening, even though the Home Ministry had kept them informed of my imminent arrival, was a clear signal to me that an organised boycott was on the agenda.
Things deteriorated sharply the very first morning I went to my office. Our Alsatian dog Shaami had been used to trailing me wherever I went. My office being only a few yards away from the Residency, Shaami walked beside me to my new place of work that first morning and curled up by my chair . It was a very friendly dog, seeking only to be petted and patted by strangers, but on this occasion, totally to my consternation , sprang at the very first local who came to see me, and shredded his 22 style="line-height: norBIt was all so dreadfully embarrassing, and the incident was not lost on the local journalists. The following morning, the Eelanadu, which was a vitriolic Tamil journal, blazoned out the news on its front page, "New Sinhala GA sets his dog on Tamils". I sensed a wall of hostility rising before me.
As the days passed, everything around us, even the very soil, seemed to shout out the unfriendliness of the Tamil people and my wife and I were oppressed by the thought that we were total aliens here. Wherever we went, at the fish market, or at the grocers, or even at the cinema, we were greeted by a wall of silence and the whole ambience reeked of suspicion and mistrust. It was quite eerie and chilling. It used to be the convention in my time, for senior officials of the district to call on a new GA and his wife when they first moved in, but in this instance not a single local official, bar Ivan Samarawickrema the AGA, and two burgher officials, the Suptd of Police Jack van Sanden and the Asst. Com. of Excise, John Martin, called on us. The wall of hostility was palpable and impregnable. On the other hand, my predecessor V.P. Vittachi did not have to run this gauntlet. The reason was plain to see. The word had got around that I had been handpicked for Jaffna by the Prime Minister and her Perm. Sec. Mr N.Q.Dias, to do a hatchet job on the Tamils, which of course was pretty close to the truth!
The Yogi or the Commissar
Already, within the first few days, even before I had gone into any real confrontation with the Tamil people, I had begun seriously to rethink my role as a GA consenting to work within the vision unfolded to me by N.Q.Dias. As the days passed, my failure to question the morality of that assignment initially, filled me with a deepening disquiet, and in no time the disquiet turned to anguish. I began to understand then, exactly what Leonard Woolf meant when he said that, as the AGA of Hambantota, way back in 1907, he felt as if he was a ruler and an imperialist, roles he said he loathed.
The religious beliefs I held at that time also sharpened my perplexity. At that time I was a totally committed Buddhist, and since my youth had been an ardent student of Abhihdhamma. I understood the Thathagatha’s central doctrines, especially the concept of anatta, to mean that all identities, whether personal, or familial, or ethnic, or national, i.e. basically the “i” –“my” concept, are derived from avijja, or ignorance of things as they are, the yatharthaya, and are illusions, or maya. Logically, it followed that all ethnic and national distinctions were false and illusory and that conflict, whether between individuals, or between races, or between nations, arose because of this fundamental cognitive or spiritual error. Therefore, it seemed to me that within the Buddha’s epistemology, insofar as they all postulated attachment to error and illusions, there was no room for ethnic distinctions, for nationalism or even for patriotism. It seemed to me therefore that the thinking that drove the Sinhala Only policy was spiritually flawed and untenable within the framework of the belief system that Dias and I shared at that time.
The problems that I was facing were therefore not merely administrative in character but were deeply rooted in consciousness.
I was caught at the intersection of two contradictory loyalties that kept tightening like a vice, by the day. On one hand, as a public servant, I had to be loyal to the government and its policies which I was bound to implement regardless of my perception of their moral validity. On the other hand, as a human being endowed with an innate sense of justice and fair play, I felt that I should obey the demands of a loyalty that transcended the mundane obligation to conform to government policies. I suppose that at some point, whoever is invested with power, and is also endowed with a conscience, is called upon to resolve the dilemma between horizontal and vertical loyalties, between the expedient and the moral. To yield unquestioningly to the horizontal or the expedient is the populist way, the way to win the approval of the world and to be applauded by it and to partake of the gravy train. On the other hand, yielding to the vertical or the moral, is the unpopular way, guaranteed to incur the world’s wrath and ridicule, and to be condemned by those in authority.
Worse, I have found in experience, that some, having blatantly chosen the path of expediency and opportunism over principle and integrity, try to salve their conscience by adducing superficial theological and philosophical jargon in support of their palpably dishonest choices. .
At the risk of being overly personal, I want to digress here, and confess that throughout my career, and indeed throughout my life, this contradiction has haunted me. While the great “Other”, or the spiritual reality, kept stalking my mundane preoccupations,
I fled Him, down the nights and down the days;
I fled Him, down the arches of the years;
I fled Him, down the labyrinthine ways of my own mind; and in the mist of tears I hid from Him
Francis Thompson ( the Hound of Heaven)
That is not to say that I refused to meet the world’s demands upon my career, but that while fulfilling them with utmost intensity, I felt constantly overshadowed by a sense of the unreality of what I was doing. The world saw only the mask, the disciplined and ruthless administrator who produced results regardless, but it had no sense of the inner torment that that mask concealed. The conflict that began stirring within me as I started to address my responsibilities as the GA of Jaffna was just one instance of that perennial predicament.
In a classic essay written in 1945, Arthur Koestler the great novelist of the Cold War era, had conceptualised that predicament as the struggle between two irreconcilable paradigms, between the Yogi and the Commissar. The Commissar, representing the outer or the mundane, sought to change the world by force, through political manipulation and through blood and iron, whereas the Yogi, the inner or the spiritual presence, insisted that the Commissar’s way will never work and that the only way forward was through inner spirituality.
The Commissar is ego or atta, the fallen man, the earthly embodiment of evil, and the product of avijja or ignorance, whereas the Yogi is non-ego or anatta, the resurrected man, the new creation, the earthly embodiment of the divine and the product of vijja or illumination.
In his poem “Paracelsus”, Robert Browning, summed up the Yogi’s paradigm, in the following words,
TRUTH is within ourselves; it takes no rise
From outward things, whatever you may believe.
There is an inmost centre in us all,
Where truth abides in fullness; but around,
Wall upon wall, the gross flesh hems it in.
Throughout my career the Commissar was seemingly in total command, while unseen by the world, but insistently from within, the Yogi was pleading to be heard. It was only much later in my career that I finally took the great leap into the void and allowed the Yogi his voice.
To get back to the Jaffna narrative, amidst great inner pain, I resolved the dilemma at least temporarily, by gradually dropping the Commissar mask and resuming my role as a true public servant. However, resuming the role as a public servant demanded from me conduct that was unambiguously honest, just, and fair, by the people whose interests I was supposed to serve. It was not at all an easy task, as the unfolding events proved.
First confrontation with the MPs
It seemed as if nothing could dispel the image the Tamil leaders had of me that I was N.Q.Dias’s Rottweiler! With rumours about my supposedly tyrannical style bubbling up all around me, things could only get worse, and they did.
Two weeks into my new job, I called a conference of the District Coordinating Committee (DCC), a committee of all local Heads of Departments, numbering about 35, along with all the eleven local Members of Parliament (MPs), just to get acquainted with them.
Even as the clock ticked away towards 9.30 a.m. which was the time fixed for the conference, the GA’s large conference room began to fill up. However, I sensed something in the air that morning, something eerie, as if everybody had an inkling of something about to happen. Almost on cue, at 09.30, led by the redoubtable S.J.V Chelvanayagam, all eleven MPs of the district, all of them from the Federal Party, trooped in silently, in single file, and took their seats. There was no banter, no idle talk, as there normally is when such a conference opens. Everyone seemed to sit on the edge of their seats and it was if I could slice through the tension with a knife!
Speaking in English I opened the conference by introducing myself. I could not proceed any further before Dr. E. M. V. Naganathan, in lay life a fine gentleman, but as an MP notoriously volatile, stood up and addressing me in Tamil said,
"Mr GA, you are here as a ruler and as an oppressor. We don't want you here and you can go back to wherever you came from. If you proceed with this conference any further I shall brain you with this paper weight"
and so saying actually picked up a glass paper weight from the conference table and raised his hand as if to throw the missile at me. Pandemonium ensued. While I remained calm in my chair, officials around me sprang at Naganathan and retrieving the paperweight from him, pinned him down to his chair. Ivan Samarawickrema, my AGA, , quietened things down and proffering sound advice to the MPS helped to restore normalcy. However, it was clear that I could not proceed with the meeting and had no alternative to adjourning it. The Superintendent of Police, Jack van Sanden, who was a participant at the conference, wanted to prosecute the MP for attempted assault but I insisted that there should be no prosecution.
Three daunting options
It was becoming increasingly clear to me that the MPs, and the people of Jaffna, had made up their minds that I was an agent of an alien power. It also became quite obvious to me that if I was to do my job, meeting the demands of justice and fairplay, I had first to dissipate those feelings of hostility. The task was a daunting one, requiring diplomatic skills, understanding, patience and wisdom, such as in my short career of eight years, I had not been called upon to deploy. It was like riding a bicycle on the high wire, while twirling a parasol over my head!
I had three options before me. I could resign from the Service, but that I could not do because I had a young family and needed the job. Or, I could try to suppress the upsurge of my inner discontent and somehow carry on, pretending that it was not there. That alternative was too distasteful and impractical and I could not have lived through it. Or, I could resort to the daunting option of explaining to the Prime Minister the impossibility of the task she had given me and try to persuade her to rethink her government’s policy in Jaffna. I chose the last option, however unpromising the prospect.
I mused that since Mrs B had come all the way to Badulla to recruit me for this job, bypassing the Sec. to the Treasury and the Home Ministry, thereby violating protocol, I might bypass protocol myself and access her directly, as indeed she had asked me to, should I ever be in trouble. Here indeed was trouble aplenty!!
Accordingly, one night I telephoned the Prime Minister directly to Temple Trees and explaining my predicament very briefly, asked to see her, not at an official meeting as such, but unofficially, personally and confidentially if possible, because what I had to share with her I preferred to keep off the record. Mrs Bandaranaike seemed quite understanding and sympathetic and even deeply maternal, and agreed to see me the following day itself, but late in the evening.
Late the following evening, on arrival at Temple Trees, I found to my absolute dismay and horror that the PM had also invited to the discussion her Perm.Sec, N.Q. Dias, my sinister sponsor and handler!! The imminent encounter with the mighty N.Q. in the presence of the Prime Minister was bound to be a horribly unequal contest. To borrow some naval jargon it was like a sloop taking on the Flagship of the Fleet ( NQ) head on, with the First Lord of the Admiralty ( Mrs B ) watching!! I feared he would simply blow me out of the water. Oh dear!! I thought to myself! How would i emerge from this encounter, if I ever would!! Here I was, confronting the two most powerful individuals in Sri Lanka at that time, with nothing to commend my audacity but a deep conviction that what was unfolding in Jaffna was unjust. NQ had 30 years service under his belt, was the most powerful public servant around at that time, and feared, whereas I had only 8 years of service to stand on, and in his eyes, a mere junior, a upstart, and above all, his protégé. This was hardly a level playing field!
Quite literally, I hoped that, in response to my pathetic situation, some lightning bolt from heaven would strike us all down and finish us off , the Big Bad Wolf and all! But it was not t be. Such stuff are only of fairy tales.
What was about to unravel would prove catalytic, not only for my administration as GA of Jaffna, but for the future of the Official Language Act in Jaffna as well, and not least, for my own career!
Let me relate how the evening's discussion unravelled
( to be continued )
