Communalism,socialism and liberation in When Memory Dies

I would like to thank Pranav Jani, William Keach, Deepa Kumar and Helen Scott for their invaluable criticisms of earlier drafts of this paper

Sivanandan A. , ‘Sri Lanka: racism and the politics of underdevelopment’, Race & Class (Vol. 26, no. 1, 1984), p. 1

Tambiah S. J. , ‘Ethnic fratricide in Sri Lanka: an update’, in Guidieri Remo , eds., Ethnicities and Nations (Houston, 1988), p. 297

Bose Sumantra , States, Nations, Sovereignty (New Delhi, 1994), p. 86

These are the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, People's Liberation Organisation of Tamil Eelam, Eelam Revolutionary Organisation of Students, Tamil Eelam Liberation Organisation, Eelam People's Revolutionary Liberation Front and Eelam National Democratic Liberation Front, respectively

Bose Sumantra , op. cit., p. 88 n. 8

Tambiah S. J. , op. cit., p. 296

See Nissan Elizabeth , and Stirrat R. L. , ‘The generation of communal identities’ in Jonathan Spencer, ed., Sri Lanka: history and the roots of conflict (London and New York, 1990), p. 26

Tim Brennan makes the same comparison in his review of the novel in The Nation (1 June 1998)

Perera S. W. , ‘Attempting the Sri Lankan novel of resistance and reconciliation: A. Sivanandan's When Memory Dies‘, Sri Lanka Journal of the Humanities (Vol. 23, nos. 1–2, 1997)

‘Communalism’ itself is a much debated term. Sivanandan points out, for instance, that the term does not allow for an adequately historical understanding of the kinds of anti-Tamil pogroms that are carried out by the Sri Lankan state (op. cit., p. 26). It would be desirable to provide a critique of the usage of this term, but this is beyond my scope here. I therefore use the term ‘communalism’ throughout this paper with imaginary quotation marks

Respectively, Sri Lanka Freedom Party, Lanka Sama Samaj Party and People's Liberation Front, i.e., Janatha Vimukti Peramuna or JVP

To avoid excessive endnotes, all page references to When Memory Dies are given in parentheses within the main text. References are to the Arcadia Books edition (London, 1997)

Sivanandan A. , op. cit., p. 2

See Elizabeth Nissan and R. L. Stirrat, op. cit., pp. 26–30.

Sivanandan A. , op. cit., p. 2

Sivanandan A. , op. cit., p. 2

The ‘Trotskyist’ Lanka Sama Samaj Party, which in 1956 shamelessly joined with Bandaranaike's Sinhala nationalist Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP) on the grounds that, as Sivanandan puts it, ‘if the SLFP was not quite socialist, the UNP was certainly capitalist'! (op. cit., p. 12) This misidentification of the SLFP's right-wing populism as some sort of left-of-centre anti-capitalism seems quite common in the literature on Sri Lankan politics to this day. See, for instance, R. Hoole, et al., The Broken Palmyra (California, 1990), p. 27, where the authors list the SLFP as one of the ‘parties of the Left’ that the TULF (Tamil United Liberation Front) had discussions with

The Janatha Vimukti Peramuna (JVP)

Perhaps this has to do with the complicated politics of the JVP. An account of the insurrection can be found in Fred Halliday, The Ceylonese Insurrection’, New Left Review (No. 69, September-October 1971). Sivanandan rightly calls this account ‘acute, but in hindsight optimistic’. Sumantra Bose argues, for instance, that the JVP's ‘“ideology” consisted primarily of an exceptionally virulent and xenophobic Sinhalese chauvinism, which its leaders combined with a totally garbled and incoherent “Marxism” into a particularly sour cocktail’ (op. cit. p. 67, n. 14). And yet, it is clear that the 1971 insurrection did in fact tap into the anger of tens of thousands of unemployed and disillusioned youth, both Sinhala and Tamil. In When Memory Dies, we see the newly politicised Tamil guerrillas trying to learn from Vijay's experiences in the JVP insurrection

Sivanandan A. , op. cit., p. 36

Perera S. W. , op. cit., p. 19

Marx Karl , Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (New York, 1966), p. 15