Disappearances,dissident memory and magic: Sandya Ekneligoda’s struggle for justice

Abstract

In January 2010, Prageeth Ekneligoda, a journalist based in Colombo, Sri Lanka was forcibly disappeared. Since then, his wife Sandya has been searching for truth and justice while organising periodic protests to keep his memory alive in the public sphere. In some of these protests, she invokes Kali, the Hindu mother goddess of death and destruction, beseeching her to punish the perpetrators. Foregrounding public cursing as a form of memory activism, with its own aesthetics, this article makes three interrelated arguments. First, I argue that protest performances that foreground impunity can be analysed as powerful enactments of ‘dissident memory’ that challenge ‘official political memory’ and its manifestations in the ‘memoryscape’ of a nation. Second, I locate Sandya’s protest performance within a broader local and global vein of gendered activism in contexts of mass disappearances that shifts the aesthetics and affective mood/register of the disappearance protest from grief and mourning to rage and vengeance, taps into memory differently, and intervenes in the postwar memoryscape from a different agentive location. Third, I argue that Sandya’s increasing reliance on cursing must be apprehended as a response to continued impunity, which decentres the victims and survivors in favour of insistently centring and remembering the perpetrators.

24 January 2019. Late afternoon. When I arrived at Galle Face Green, the iconic public space at the heart of Sri Lanka’s capital city, Colombo, Sandya Ekneligoda, who had invited me, was already there. Several activists and allies, who had by then gathered around Sandya, were helping her to arrange the various ritual objects that were necessary for the Kali yādinna that she was planning to conduct to remember her husband Prageeth and demand truth and justice for his disappearance. Prageeth Ekneligoda, journalist, cartoonist and political activist, was disappeared without trace on 24 January 2010, exactly 9 years earlier (Figure 1).

Figure 1.

Sandya Ekneligoda holding a flame and trident at Kali yādinna in front of the Presidential Secretariat, Colombo, Sri Lanka, 24 January 2019 (Photo: Nilshan Fonseka).

A yādinna is a ritual appeal or supplication, which can take the form of a prayer or a curse. On that day, it took the form of a curse. The spot Sandya had chosen for the yādinna was a narrow strip of pavement, fenced off from land being reclaimed from the sea for the construction of the 660-acre port city, right opposite the Presidential Secretariat. ¹ She had arrived there earlier in the day together with Sithy Ameena and Vijaya Lakshmi, two other family members of the disappeared who have often accompanied her in her protests. I joined the group and lent a hand with the arrangements. Sandya hung an image, around 6 feet by 4 feet, on the fence separating the pavement from the construction site. It depicted Kali, the ferocious mother goddess/demoness in Hinduism and Buddhism – a harbinger of death and destruction and an arbiter of justice who can punish evildoers and redress wrongs (Bastin, 1996; Obeyesekere, 1984: 443). A banner next to the image announced that she was appealing to Kali for justice to mark the ninth anniversary of Prageeth’s disappearance by the ‘Rajapaksa twosome’. While the Sri Lankan state is currently prosecuting several military intelligence officers concerning this disappearance, the twosome that Sandya was referring to was none other than former President Mahinda Rajapaksa, who was the Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces, and his brother, Gotabaya Rajapaksa, who was Secretary of Defence at the time that Prageeth disappeared. The latter would go on to occupy the seat of the President in November 2019, only to be unceremoniously ousted from that office less than 3 years later.

I begin with Sandya Ekneligoda’s invocation of Kali to remember her husband and demand justice as a way to illuminate public cursing as a form of activism in a context of state atrocity and impunity that can throw new light on the memory-activism-art nexus that is the central theme of this special issue. Drawing from and building on the work of a range of scholars, including Louis Bickford (2005, 2018), Malathi de Alwis (1998, 2016, 2021, 2022), Andreas Huyssen (2011), Mihaela Mihai (2019), Vasuki Nesiah (2013) and Diana Taylor (2001, 2003), I proceed on the understanding that struggles for justice and protest performances, such as the one staged by Sandya, are also struggles over memory. ‘Memory is important because it is the basis on which claims for justice and truth are made’ (Burchianti, 2004: 133 citing Mabel, mother of a disappeared son in Argentina).

Based on such an understanding, this article makes three related arguments. First, I argue that protest performances that foreground impunity can be analysed as powerful enactments of ‘dissident memory’ (Nesiah, 2013) that challenge ‘official political memory’ (Mihai, 2019) and its manifestations in the ‘memoryscape’ of a nation (Bickford, 2005, 2018). Second, I seek to locate Sandya’s performance within a broader local and global vein of gendered activism in contexts of mass disappearances. However, I show that when Sandya deploys cursing, she follows in the footsteps of the Southern Mothers’ Front in Sri Lanka, which also deployed cursing as part of its repertoire of protests. Yet, cursing represents a departure from the dominant gendered model of disappearance protests worldwide, which foregrounds the grief of family members while remembering the disappeared. This departure shifts the aesthetics and affective mood/register of the disappearance protest from grief and mourning to rage and vengeance, taps into memory differently and intervenes in the postwar memoryscape from a different agentive location. Put differently, I analyse the cursing ritual enacted by Sandya Ekneligoda as form of memory-truth-justice-activism which invokes local religious icons and vocabularies that is very distinctive to Sri Lanka. Third, I argue that Sandya’s increasing reliance on cursing must be apprehended as a response to continued impunity. This approach decentres the victims and survivors in favour of insistently centring and remembering the perpetrators.

However, before proceeding further, it is necessary to note that the disappearance of Prageeth Ekneligoda was not an isolated event. The postcolonial Sri Lankan state has a long history of using enforced disappearances, along with extrajudicial killings, arbitrary arrests, detention, and torture, as a counter-insurgency strategy linked to a number of different theatres of conflict (Human Rights Watch, 2008). In particular, hundreds and thousands of people were disappeared during the second southern insurrection, when Sinhala youth belonging to the Marxist–Leninist communist party called Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna or Peoples Liberation Front tried to overthrow the incumbent government during the late 1980s (CoI-CWSS, 1997). The state also deployed forced disappearances in the war waged against the Liberation of Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), which started in 1983 and ended in 2009 with the military defeat of the LTTE. The LTTE, a militant group from the minority Tamil community, sought to establish a separate state in the north and east of Sri Lanka due to a history of discrimination, violence and marginalisation by the Sri Lankan state dominated by the Sinhala Buddhist majority.

This history of disappearances in Sri Lanka is one marked by struggle and activism for truth and justice, involving different communities separated by time and space. In 1984, hundreds of Tamil women came together to form the first Mothers’ Front in Sri Lanka to protest the mass arrest of Tamil youth by the Sri Lankan state and prevent disappearances (Thiranagama, 1992: 303). In the wake of the second southern insurrection, thousands of Sinhala mothers formed the Southern Mothers’ Front in 1990 to demand truth and justice for disappearances during the insurrection (de Alwis, 1998). Parallel to Sandya’s struggle, which is more or less an individual struggle, hundreds of Tamil women are waging an ongoing collective struggle for truth and justice for those disappeared during Sri Lanka’s civil war (1983-2009), in particular the last phase of the war (2006–2009) (See Adayaalam Centre for Policy Research, 2022; Buthpitiya 2022; de Mel and Kodikara, 2018; Jegatheeswaran, 2021; Kodikara 2023a).

I have been studying Sandya’s struggle for justice since 2017, parallel to my research on the struggle for justice waged by Tamil next of kin of those who disappeared during the last phase of Sri Lanka’s civil war. I met Sandya in 2018. Since then, I have observed several protests organised by her, attended court cases, accompanied her to press conferences, and read countless letters and petitions written by her. As I flesh this article out, I will primarily foreground the January 2019 Kali yādinna, while also drawing on other protests organised by her and conversations with her. I write not just as an observer but as an ally.

Official public memory/dissident memory

Struggles for truth, justice, and reparations for state atrocity, including mass disappearances, are struggles over memory. Memory is central to acknowledging and accounting because there can be no justice without widespread acceptance and remembrance of such atrocity (Booth, 2001; Huyssen, 2011). Booth (2001) sees the intimacy of memory’s bond with justice as a ‘face of justice itself’ (p. 777). Andreas Huyssen (2011) has argued that ‘the active prosecution of human rights violations depends on the strength of memory discourses in the public sphere – in journalism, films, media, literature, the arts, education, and even urban graffiti’ (p. 612). When the state denies atrocity, in turn, victim survivors are denied justice. Indeed, there is an unspoken ‘exhortation to forget’ (de Alwis, 2016: 149) and to move on. Discourses of denial seek to produce those who demand justice as forgetful citizen subjects. Such narratives are built not on ‘historical fact’ but on omission, fabrication, exaggeration, embellishment and myths that seek to erase sovereign violence from history and memory without accountability. They work at the level of how we make meaning of events and form part of what Mihaela Mihai (2019) has referred to as ‘official political memory’. Mihai (2019) states that such memory is a ‘crucial part of the national common sense or doxa’. Official political memory shapes the memoryscape, that is, the built sites, marked representations and physical activities in space that shape the ‘collective’ memory of events such as past conflict and mass violence (Bickford, 2018). What is remembered and what is forgotten, what is excised, purged and what is included in official memory are not accidental or random. Deliberate, intentional, politically self-serving work of powerful mnemonic forces and memory entrepreneurs shape what is remembered and forgotten in the public sphere (Mihai, 2019: 53–54). The work of obscuring and distorting ‘what happened’ in the past is achieved through a wide range of forms, including history textbooks, memorialisation institutions and rituals, museums and popular culture (Mihai, 2019: 52). Such mnemonic processes, which serve to foster amnesia about specific historical events ultimately result in collective self-deception (Baumeister and Hastings, 1997).

Postwar Sri Lanka is an exemplar of such mnemonic processes. There is now ample evidence that the government of Mahinda Rajapaksa, which came to power in 2005, deployed forced disappearances as part of its military strategy against the LTTE during the final phase of the war and continued to disappear people even after the end of the war (Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), 2015). Sandya, a Sinhala Buddhist, believes that her husband, a Sinhala Christian, was disappeared because he was critical of the regime and had alleged that the government used chemical weapons during the war’s final phase. Despite mounting evidence, the Rajapaksas have insistently and categorically denied all disappearances that occurred during their tenure, whether during or after the war. In the wake of Prageeth’s disappearance, public officials and members of parliament from Rajapaksa’s political party accused Sandya of lying and claimed that Prageeth was living in France (Kodikara, 2023b).

Even though Prageeth was disappeared after the war, the denial of his disappearance cannot be read separately from the denial of war-related atrocities (including disappearances) by the Rajapaksa regime and Sinhala Buddhist nationalist idealogues that persists to this day. Moreover, this denial is part and parcel of the mythic and triumphalist nationalist narrative that the final phase of Sri Lanka’s civil war was a humanitarian operation conducted to save Tamil civilians from the LTTE, constructed as the most brutal terrorists the world has seen (Satkunanathan, 2013). The war was framed as such by President Rajapaksa in his ceremonial address to parliament the day after the end of the war. According to him, in conducting this ‘humanitarian operation’, ‘the troops carried a gun in one hand, the Human Rights Charter in the other, hostages on their shoulders, and the love of their children in their hearts’. ² Thus, in this postwar nationalist narrative soldiers are heroic figures. Those who challenge this narrative are considered unpatriotic; worse, they are traitors. So, too, are those who demand truth and justice for atrocities committed by the armed forces (Fernando, 2012).

This nationalist narrative indelibly shapes postwar Sri Lanka’s memoryscape. Every year, on 19th May, the state remembers the heroism and sacrifice of soldiers. The postwar landscape is stamped with monuments to heroic soldiers that have now become sites of pilgrimage for the Sinhala Buddhist community and have given rise to a phenomenon called war zone tourism (de Alwis, 2016; Hyndman and Amarasingam, 2014; McCargo and Senaratne, 2020; Perera, 2016). Moreover, it is not just the state that memorialises the figure of the heroic soldier. Singers, songwriters, artists, and filmmakers have contributed their labour to the mythologising of this figure (Kahandagama, 2015; Karunanayake and Waradas, 2013). In contradistinction to these commemorative activities, victims of state atrocity are considered unmournable and ungrievable lives.

Nevertheless, such mnemonic manipulations have not gone unchallenged. Indeed, even in the most repressive of circumstances, Tamil survivors of state atrocity and human rights activists have found ways to challenge nationalist memory-making practices, including through creative and embodied forms of protest and resistance (Buthpitiya, 2022; de Alwis, 2016; McCargo and Senaratne, 2020; Satkunanathan, 2021).

When Prageeth Ekneligoda was disappeared in 2010, Sandya went to her local police station. Even though the police grudgingly recorded her complaint, they did nothing to open an investigation. Sandya then, together with her two sons, Sanjaya and Harith, filed a habeas corpus application. The investigation linked to this application has progressed in fits and starts depending on the government in power. It is still ongoing, and there is no certainty about its outcome. However, Sandya never confined her struggle for justice to the courthouse (Fernando, 2023). Even as she waged a legal battle about the disappearance of her husband, she also deployed embodied protests as part of her repertoire of struggle to keep his memory alive and to demand justice. At times, these performances deploy lamentation, and at other times, imprecation, and incantation. At times, she foregrounds pain, sorrow and trauma, and at other times, rage and resistance. Her feminine icons of lament and protest, such as Mary, mother of Jesus, or Kali and Pattini, Amman (mother) goddesses from the Hindu and Buddhist traditions, are drawn from a religio-cultural archive familiar to the multi-ethnic, multi-religious polity in Sri Lanka.

Diana Taylor makes a helpful distinction between the archive and the repertoire in understanding resistance to dominant and hegemonic discourses, such as the one relating to the figure of the soldier outlined in a preceding paragraph. Taylor (2003: 19) suggests that if we are to grasp the full extent of the resistance and resistance strategies of those who are victimised and marginalised, it is essential to look beyond the archive, that is, the texts, documents, buildings, bones and so on generally recognised as holding the memories that matter to society, to what she calls the ‘repertoire’, even as she cautions against making binary divisions between the archive and the repertoire. The repertoire refers to ephemeral, embodied practices such as dance, sport, ritual and spoken words as critical systems of knowing and transmitting knowledge (Taylor, 2003: 19, 26).

Sandya’s protest performances, including the practice of ritual cursing, can be analysed as part of a ‘repertoire’ of resistance to the postwar Sinhala Buddhist nationalist narrative of the war and the denial of forced disappearances in Sri Lanka. Even though ephemeral, her periodic petitioning of the Amman goddesses keeps her husband’s memory alive in the public sphere, designed to forget victims such as him, transmit knowledge of disappearances, and contest hegemonic narratives of heroism and triumphalism that serve to entrench denial and erase histories and memories of state atrocity without truth or justice. Moreover, whenever she protests, she reclaims the public space dominated by memories of heroism and transforms such space into sites for enacting traumatic yet dissident memories (Nesiah, 2013; Taylor, 2003). In doing so, Sandya challenges official public memory and the dominant memoryscape of the nation.

When Sandya conducts these protest performances her choice of site is symbolically significant; the site is often connected to political power. Hence her decision to hold the Kali ritual in front of the Presidential Secretariat in January 2019. That day, while she began the ritual on the pavement opposite the Secretariat, halfway through the ritual, she decided to cross the road to sit on the pavement directly in front of the Secretariat. Those who were there followed her, taking the image, banner, and other ritual paraphernalia. The police guarding the Secretariat who had until then ignored Sandya and the group, became immediately alert and more police officers also appeared inside the premises of the Secretariat, seemingly out of nowhere. They tried to persuade Sandya to return to the original location while trying to remove the banner and image now adorning the railings of the Secretariat. Sandya refused. However, after some exchange of words between the police, Sandya and a few other people in the group, they allowed the protest to continue. Sandya ended the ritual only after the sun had set and the evening had deepened and darkened. In a final offering to Kali, Sandya lit nine cotton torches doused with kerosene and smashed nine coconuts, repeatedly chanting, ‘Sāpa vēvā, sāpa vēvā, sāpa vēvā!’ (be damned, be damned, be damned!).

There is a long tradition of women family members of the disappeared utilising prominent public spaces to make visible their disappeared loved ones, whether it is the Plaza de Mayo in Argentina (Bouvard, 1994), Pratap Park in Kashmir (Zia, 2018) or Galatasaray Square in Turkey (Can, 2022). Sandya’s protest in front of the Presidential Secretariat in 2019 reminded me of Hernan Vidal’s photograph of two Chilean women who chained themselves to the railings of the Chilean Congress on 18th April 1979, reproduced in Michael Taussig’s (1990) ‘Violence and Resistance in the Americas’. In the article, Taussig draws attention to two protesters who were part of a group of family members of the disappeared who were protesting that day and the significance of the site of the protest – the boundary of the Chilean congress. He asserts that the ‘constellation of women, memory, and the eternalization of the present in the past (was) radically broken apart and reconstellated through a courageous and inventive ritualisation of monumentalized public space’ – in this case, a space heavily charged with Chilean constitutional history (Taussig, 1990: 222). Sandya’s protests follow this tradition of women family members of the disappeared who take their struggles for memory-truth-justice into the polis and who, in doing so, transform their bodies into living counter memorials that challenge the colonisation of memory by individuals and groups who propagate mythic memories.

Mourning and motherhood/rage and magic

When Prageeth disappeared, Sandya was 46 years old. Their two sons were 16 and 13 years old. At the time, Sandya worked for an insurance company to supplement the family income. She was not an ‘activist’. However, before marriage, she had worked for a time with a women’s organisation dedicated to protecting the rights of women workers in the Free Trade Zones. Working primarily with their street theatre and music troupe, she was responsible for consciousness-raising about the everyday challenges and problems women workers face. In Sandya’s own words, she instilled ‘strength and liveliness’ into the workers’ struggle through art and aesthetics. This early experience with the women’s organisation has shaped the modes and sites of Sandya’s struggle for justice. However, the modes and sites of her struggle must also be understood in relation to the long history of gendered struggles waged in contexts of mass disappearances where ordinary wives and mothers have entered the public sphere to contest official political memory and claim justice.

Irrespective of the very diverse contexts in which forced disappearances are used as a tactic of terror, victims of this tactic are overwhelmingly men; the next of kin of the disappeared who take to the streets in search of truth and justice tend to be overwhelmingly women – mothers, and wives, but also daughters. This reality inevitably shapes the modes, forms and visual aesthetics of protests and activism around disappearances, which tend to be remarkably similar. Almost without exception, public protests in contexts of mass disappearances are dominated by silent or weeping and wailing women carrying images of their disappeared children or husbands (Bouvard, 1994; Can, 2022; Zia, 2018). Thus, motherhood, mourning and victimhood are the dominant tropes and idioms that are time and again mobilised in these struggles for memory-truth-justice. In these protests, family photographs, studio photos and official identity card images removed from their intimate family settings or bureaucratic functionality become active instruments of public protest (Buthpitiya 2022; Longoni, 2010; Taylor, 2003: 170). The photographs, whether in their original form, enlarged or laminated, pasted on placards, or made into posters, imbue disappearance protests with a distinctive, transnationally identifiable visual aesthetic, insistently drawing attention to maternal/feminine grief and mourning while foregrounding the disappeared – their names, faces and identities – while memorialising both.

Members of the Madres de la Plaza de Mayo in Argentina who first turned their bodies into walking placards with photographs of the faces of their missing children and husbands (Taylor, 2001: 97) remain the most visually recognisable of such expressions of grief and memory. Taylor (2003) states that the Abuelas and Madres (the Grandmothers and the Mothers) turned their ‘interrupted mourning process’ into ‘one of the most visible political discourses of resistance to terror’ (p. 170). Indeed, it has become the dominant model of protest and activism in many other contexts and countries, not just in the Latin American region, such as Chile, Guatemala and Peru, but further afield in Kashmir, Pakistan, Turkey and Sri Lanka.

Malathi de Alwis (1998), who was among the pioneering feminist scholars to begin theorising mourning and motherhood as a significant space of political protest, made the argument that maternalised suffering ‘exemplified by tears shed collectively and in public’ (pp. 272–277) not only exposed the contradictions between the repressive practices of the state and its rhetoric about protecting families but mobilised patriarchal stereotypes of femininity, idealisation of women as wife and mother, and the valourisation of their familial/domestic and caring/nurturing subject positions. Thus, she suggests that the power and purchase of these protests derive from the fact that it is difficult to challenge or deny the authenticity of the figure of the mourning and suffering mother; because mothers’ tears are ‘always already . . . sentimentalised’ (de Alwis, 1998: 277) within patriarchal culture. In a very similar vein, Pnina Werbner (1999) has argued that ‘women’s active citizenship often starts from pre-established cultural domains of female power’ and that ‘culturally defined domains, or the attacks upon them, create the conditions of possibility for women’s civic activism’ (p. 221).

This ‘doubly bodied’ (de Alwis, 1998: 261) figure of the mother/wife has tragically been a recurring visual icon, whether in the north, east or south of Sri Lanka, since the late 1980s. In the north and east of Sri Lanka, where Tamil women are even now waging a struggle for justice, their protests most often take the form of the grieving, mourning mother/wife carrying an image of her disappeared loved one (Buthpitiya, 2022). It is a form of protest, which Sandya herself has ritually embraced.

However, there is another tradition of disappearance protests in Sri Lanka, which deploys not tears but curses, transforming a private secretive ritual into a public spectacle. ³ I should note here that in anthropological scholarship cursing rituals are assimilated within the broader category of sorcery. Obeyesekere defines sorcery as ‘techniques of killing or harming someone deliberately and intentionally, generally with homeopathic or contagious magic, accompanied by spells, charms or incantations’. In his view it is a ‘canalization of violence’ (Obeyesekere, 1975: 1), meaning a redirection of violence. Sinhala Buddhists such as Sandya and even Sinhala Christians of all classes widely believe and practice it in secret or in shrines away from the public gaze (de Alwis, 2022: 133–134). While the principles of ahimsa (non-violence) and compassion are central to Buddhism, sorcery is fully incorporated into Buddhist practice as a form of righteous violence in retaliation for wrongdoing, where institutions of justice have failed (Bastin, 1996; Obeyesekere, 1975, 1984: 154, 168).

As opposed to the figure of the mourning mother, cursing channels a vengeful figure; it channels anger and rage, and the potential to unleash violence, thereby providing a different kind of frame to make visible and remember sovereign violence. Cursing rituals as protest does not appear to be globally widespread yet they provide particularly efficacious and memorable ways to remember and draw attention to sovereign violence because they come with readymade scripts, rhetorical devices, metaphors and performative procedures charged with symbolic and superstitious meaning. When deployed as ritualised performative acts of protest, they can be made sense of within existing aesthetic and cultural frameworks, even as they encode dissident social values and oppositional political aspirations.

Unlike the mourning mother, the figure that presides over cursing rituals is a more ambivalent and enigmatic figure. In the West, she is the ‘witch’, historically considered a mother ‘gone bad’ (Willis, 2018 [1995]: xi). For second-wave feminists, this figure is ‘fraught with genocidal implications as well as holding potential for rebellion premised in the subjugated knowledges and alternative creative potentials of women’s ways of knowing’ (Skott-Myhre, 2018: 26). Yet, there are some examples of rights activists and feminists embracing the subversive potential of the identity of the witch and the theatrical/performative potential of ritualised magic to challenge gendered hierarchies of power, the normative silencing of women as well as oppressive and discriminatory discourses and practices (Magliocco, 2020).

Magic and witchcraft have a long history in feminist activism in the United Kingdom and the United States. Take the case of the Women’s International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell (WITCH), a radical group of feminists who sought to place a hex on Wall Street in 1968 by pitting their ‘ancient magic against the evil powers of the financial district’ (Rountree, 1997: 215–216). Or consider the African American prayer-curse documented by Zora Neale Hurston in Mules and Men uttered by Alice Walker in a speech she delivered at an event organised by the Women’s Party for Survival in 1982. Here are a few lines:

. . . 0 Man God, I beg that this that I ask for my enemies shall come to pass: That the South wind shall scorch their bodies and make them wither and shall not be tempered to them . . . . (Walker citing Hurston, 1984: 338)

After reading this curse, Walker states, ‘I am sure it was a woman who first prayed this curse’. Then, adding her own curse to this old one, she ends by proclaiming, ‘Only justice can stop a curse’ (Walker, 1984 [1983]: 342). Following the election of Donald Trump in 2016, there has been resurgence in magic and witchcraft as a form of political resistance in the United States (Magliocco, 2020).

Naked protests deployed by women in several different countries across Africa since the 1990s to critique a range of injustices, from land dispossession to unfair electoral practices, have been read as a form public cursing by a number of scholars. In traditional African socio-cultural contexts where women embody both powerful beneficent and maleficent forces, women’s public disrobing is believed to cause not just misfortune to but the death of the target. As Diabate (2020: 191–194) notes, in disempowering political, juridical, social and economic contexts in postcolonial African nation states, these disrobing practices appear to be spreading beyond their original social and cultural contexts.

In Sri Lanka, cursing is not the preserve of women but is practised by both men and women, whether in shrines or the public square. ⁴ Neither the figure of the witch in the West nor the African idea of the woman as embodying both maleficent and beneficent forces describes the women practicing cursing in Sri Lanka. In Sinhala Buddhism, such women are simply mǣṇiyō (literally mothers) who have received a varam (warrant) from the goddess to practice sorcery. Nevertheless, motherhood does not fully encompass their gender and sexuality, and their demeanour is more assertive than ordinary Sinhala women (Bastin, 1996: 71, 84).

Long before Sandya invoked the divine powers of Kali in the public sphere, women members of the Southern Mothers’ Front did so as part of their repertoire of protests. In one ritual documented by de Alwis (2022) the women

dashed coconuts on the ground, lit lamps, tore their hair, struck their heads on the ground, and wept and wailed as they beseeched the goddess to find their ‘disappeared’ and punish those who had brought such suffering upon their families. (p. 131)

Uyangoda, in a critique of the Southern Mothers Front’s deployment of cursing, has characterised it as ‘voodoo in politics’, which valorised women as the ‘carriers and bearers of culture’ and those who have a primary role in religious and magic rituals. In his view, these protests depoliticised and personalised the violence while leaving its structures unidentified and uncritiqued (Uyangoda, 1992a, 1992b cited in De Alwis, 2022: 137). De Alwis, however, argues that maternal suffering and religiosity combined to mark out a crucial space (both materially and conceptually) to raise the issue of disappearances.

When Sandya enters the public sphere to curse in protest, she is of course mobilising culture and religion in her favour. Following de Alwis (2022), these protests cannot be removed from the religio-cultural context and belief in Kali in Sri Lanka. If such protests ‘always assume an audience’ (Patton and Hawley, 2005: 10), Sandya is here addressing an audience of believers, including those within the political class. Indeed, the power of such performances derives from the belief held by those who utter them as much as those addressed by the utterances. In the repressive political context in Sri Lanka, such protests are enabled by the fact that they happen in a shared space of belief that connects the curser to the cursed. On 24th January 2019, the Police Officer who tried to convince Sandya to move back to the pavement opposite the Presidential Secretariat kept referring to her as mǣṇiyō! Nevertheless, in the context of postwar Sri Lanka, challenging nationalist narratives in the public sphere is a profoundly political move that subverts the trope of the patriotic mother/wife of the nation. In nationalist narratives, she is a traitor but the yādinna opens a space for her to be addressed as a mǣṇiyō in that moment.

Centering victims/centering perpetrators

A closer look at contexts of mass disappearances reveals that the aesthetic forms of struggles for truth, justice and reparations do not remain static but are shaped by responses to such struggles – whether continuing denial and impunity or acknowledgement and accountability. Huyssen (2011: 612) cites how a new wave of trials of perpetrators in Argentina related to the years of state terror arose from a public politics of memory operating through various groups of memory activists deploying all available media of representation. One example of such activism is the escrache created by HIJOS (an organisation formed by sons and daughters of the disappeared), which is very different from the protests undertaken by the Madre. Taylor describes escraches as ‘guerrilla performances’ that set out to shame the criminals associated with the Dirty War. In contrast to the mood at the protests of the Madres and the Abuelas, escraches are loud, rowdy, festive and carnivalesque, even as they also enact and transmit traumatic memories. Escraches also invert the use of photographs associated with disappearances in a context of continuing impunity. Instead of displaying photographs of disappeared persons, HIJOS foregrounds photographs of perpetrators whom the state is yet to hold to account (Taylor, 2003: 164).

Analogous to escraches, I contend that Sandya’s increasing deployment of cursing as a form of protest is a way to remind her fellow citizens that impunity continues to prevail in Sri Lanka and that people did not just disappear; they were disappeared. Against the view of cursing as a canalisation of violence, I understand cursing in the context of such protests as a way of making visible the violence of forced disappearances; it is a way of insistently remembering, naming and implicating the perpetrators.

On 24th January 2019, Sandya invoked Sohonkali. Kali has many forms (Bastin, 1996: 62). In Sri Lanka, she is mostly known in her two incarnations as Badrakali and Sohonkali (Kali of the graveyard). In Obeyesekere’s analysis, Badrakali will act on one’s behalf if the cause is just. Sohonkali may abdicate her moral judgement if one has sufficient faith in her, although for most people, the conviction that unless one’s cause is just, the deities will not help still holds. He goes on to state that ‘what is therefore impressive is that the old conception of justice . . . that righteousness must prevail in the world, is alive and well in the minds of many ordinary people’ (Obeyesekere, 2018: 225–226). Sohonkali is the most terrifying incarnation of Kali, the form she takes when she dances on the corpse of her dead consort Siva (Bastin, 1996: 62). This is why Sandya chose Sohonkali for the yādinna in January 2019.

In the image she chose for the ritual, Sohonkali has 10 arms and 10 legs, is wearing a skirt of human hands and a necklace of skulls. Her eyes are glowing, and her ruby-red tongue protrudes from her mouth. She is carrying in her many hands a trident, a sword, a bow and arrow, and a bowl, among other symbols of her power. Before this image, Sandya laid down oil lamps, an assortment of red flowers, neem leaves, incense, camphor, coconuts, eggs, turmeric water and other ritual items. Sandya then tied to the image and scattered on the floor banana leaves and white paper inscribed with the verses from the curse that she intended to chant so that the wind would carry not just her voice but these inscriptions to the perpetrators. Once the lamps, the incense sticks and nine pots containing camphor and coal were lit, Sandya was ready to begin. Joined by Sithy Ameena and Vijaya Lakshmi, she sat on the pavement and began repetitively chanting in Sinhala the bespoke imprecatory verses composed for that day’s ritual. It is impossible to reproduce it in full here, as it was several pages long, but this is a brief excerpt:

yana yana tæna bhaya dæniyan Feel fear wherever you may go

hæma hæma viṭa gæhi palayan, be beaten wherever you go

papuva pælī maga væṭiyan . . . fall dead heart split asunder on the way side . . .

. . . væhi næti hena æda væṭiyan, . . . struck by lightning without rain

nirantarē bhaya dæniyan,  always feel fear

ahasa palā akuṇu vædī  struck by lightning that splits the sky . . .

mīnimaruvā mæri væṭiyan . . . murderers fall dead.

   (My translation)

These are violent, even shocking imprecations, otherwise unspeakable and unutterable in the public sphere. Sandya can utter these words only because of the ritual space created within the protest. Unlike in the courthouse, where she is reduced to a victim wronged by the state and a mute witness of representations made on her behalf by her lawyer and the prosecution, here she is the master of ceremonies able to assert her agency. Whether in front of the Presidential Secretariat or another venue of her choosing, besides the singularly powerful visual backdrop of Kali, she can directly appeal for divine intervention to account for injustice and invoke the elemental powers of the universe to right wrongs.

The Kali yādinna that Sandya conducted in January 2019 is one of many rituals she has conducted over the years. In January 2022, on the 12th anniversary of Prageeth’s disappearance, Sandya again appealed to Kali for justice, this time through the intercession of Pattini. Worshipped and supplicated in shrines across the country as a goddess of fertility and health, Pattini (known in Tamil as Kannaki) is also considered an arbiter of justice by Buddhists and Hindus in Sri Lanka because of the way she avenged the unjust killing of her husband (de Alwis, 2021; Obeyesekere, 1984). ⁵ On 24 January 2022, Sandya offered the Goddess fruits, flowers, incense and an epistle written by her called the nāgha sandēśaya (snake epistle). In this epistle, Pattini sends a message to Kali through a cobra, entreating Kali to punish the criminals, that is, the Rajapaksas and the accused army officers. She appeals for the Rajapaksa family to be ridiculed and forced out of power by those who once supported them. She asks Kali to keep them in constant fear, destroy their homes and end the rule of President Gotabaya Rajapaksa. The next day, on the 25th, Sandya shaved her head on the beach near the Kali temple in Modera, a suburb of Colombo, offered her hair to the ocean, and vowed that she would henceforth only dress in black until justice is done. She then recited Pattini’s epistle to Kali. Thus, in 2022, Sandya made an embodied personal sacrifice in the form of her hair and a vow to never grow her hair back to convey to the public the strength of her commitment to justice,

Just as Sandya repeatedly addresses the Rajapaksas in these rituals, the Southern Mothers’ Front, in their beseechings repeatedly named President Premadasa as the perpetrator responsible for the disappearance of their loved ones. In one ritual that de Alwis observed, one mother repetitively chants the following words: ‘Premadasa, see this coconut all smashed into bits. May your head too be splintered into a hundred bits, so heinous are the crimes you have perpetrated on my child’. Another wails, ‘Premadasa, I bore this child in my womb for ten months. May you and your family be cursed not for ten days or ten weeks or ten months or ten years or ten decades but for ten eons’ (de Alwis, 2022: 131). De Alwis (2022: 131–132) states that President Premadasa, known to be highly superstitious, was so unnerved that he took refuge in archaic and elaborate counter rituals such as feeding hundreds of milking (breastfeeding) mothers.

Sandya tells a similar story about President Rajapaksa. ⁶ In 2015, on the eve of the Presidential election, she performed a yādinna in front of his residence. In a letter narrating this event, she states that around 5.45 that evening, the President, accompanied by 460 supporters, visited the Pattini Kovil in Navagamuwa and smashed coconuts himself in an effort to neutralise the curse. The next day, he was supposed to have also visited a Kali kovil. Addressing him directly, she goes on to write,

How much gold you present to goddess Pattini, how many lives you give to Kali Amman, you cannot escape from my curse. I without guilt, who have been searching for my husband, who have silently endured the insults hurled at me by your acolytes. As the cart must follow the cow, my curse will follow you until truth and justice is done. It is my belief that neither goddess Pattini nor Kali will forgive you. That is universal law. ⁷

I am not here concerned with the efficacy of these rituals. It is nevertheless important to note that when President Gotabaya (the brother of Mahinda Rajapaksa) was ousted from power in July 2022 by a popular uprising that arose in response to the unprecedented financial crisis that hit Sri Lanka, many people remembered Sandya’s cursing ritual performed in 2022. Amid the uprising, some of the properties belonging to the Rajapaksas were burned to the ground. One media report at the time in its title asked, ‘Did one woman’s curse vanquish the Rajapaksa dynasty?’ In the same report, commenting on these events, Sandya stated,

It was startling to see Gotabaya Rajapaksa and others being driven out by the people, and how he had to go from place to place in search of a safe haven. I watched in shock as their ancestral home in Medamulana went up in flames. All this was specifically mentioned in the epistle. . . . This might defy logic, but I am now forced to believe my actions have had some effect. (Roar Media, 2022)

De Alwis (2022) recounts how a few days after President Premadasa’s death at the hands of an LTTE suicide bomber, one of the women members of the Front came to see her with a comb of bananas (considered to be an auspicious gift) and told her triumphantly: ‘He died just like the way I cursed him’ (p. 133).

Sandya explains the Kali ritual as a call to restore the natural order of things based on higher universal laws governing earth, fire and water. When Gotabaya Rajapaksa was ousted from power, she saw it as the working of this higher law. However, Sandya is waging a parallel struggle through the courts because she recognises the significance of judicial accountability even as she recognises how difficult this is in Sri Lanka. Thus, her struggle for truth and justice continues. If, as Obeyesekere (2018) claims, there is among ordinary people a sense of ‘an ontology of justice’, which draws on myth models provided by parables like Kali, through these cursing rituals, Sandya continues to remind them that ‘righteousness must prevail in the world’ (pp. 225–226) and that it is in our power to act on such belief.

Conclusion

Huyssen (2011) suggests that struggles for justice and struggles over memory can be ‘supported by works of art that train our imagination not only to recognise the . . . pain of others, but to construct legal, political and moral remedies against the unchecked proliferation of such pain’ (p. 617). Broadening the definition of ‘works of art’, this article sought to foreground the aesthetics of embodied protest in the context of enforced disappearances and the ways in which they seek to remember and make visible such violence. I show that the aesthetic form of embodied protests in the case of disappearances tend to be remarkably similar irrespective of geographical differences. They tend to be dominated by the figure of the weeping, wailing or silent mother/wife carrying an image of her disappeared loved one. However, in contexts of continued impunity and denial of the truth, I argue that the forms of such activism can evolve to foreground impunity more explicitly. I cited los escraches in Argentina as an example of how children of the disappeared changed the form of the protest to remember the perpetrators and insistently bring attention to impunity.

Analogously, Sandya Ekneligoda’s practice of cursing has to be recognised as a form of memory activism that is shaped by the failure of the law to deliver justice. In transforming a private, secretive ritual, which is not only culturally widespread but politically deployed to maintain and consolidate political power, to a public call for justice, Sandya is seeking to make her struggle more intelligible, more comprehensible in a social and political context where people are schooled to forget. Ernesto de Martino has argued that magical practices arise in the modern world at a ‘numinous’ moment when the subject suffers a ‘crisis of presence’, a set-back in their sense of agency (Magliocco, 2020: 46 citing de Martino, 2005). It is ‘a weapon of the weak’ (Magliocco, 2020: 64 citing Scott, 1985). The same can be said of the use of magic in political protests. They signal to moments of helplessness, fear, repression and silencing. Yet, the protests themselves have to be seen as expressions of creativity, agency, community and solidarity that give hope to continue struggling. Moreover, when Sandya performs her cursing rituals in the public sphere, she reanimates suppressed memories that a crime has been committed, who is responsible for this crime, that those responsible are walking free, and the need for accountability. She transmits her memories of the disappearance of her husband yet again to those who ‘did not live the violence firsthand’ (Taylor, 2003: 165). She helps to bring this all but ‘occluded history (of Prageeth’s disappearance) out of the archive into (our) working memory’ (Rigney, 2020: 709 citing Assmann, 1999). Thus, in contexts of state atrocity marked by impunity, memory activism may not remain static but evolve according to the responses they elicit and broader political and cultural dynamics. I contend that pushed to the nation’s margins, the ritual protests organised by Sandya provide her moments of power and hope, even if ephemeral, to continue her struggle for justice into an uncertain future.