நான்கு கதவுகள்The Four Hinges
There were four pogroms within twenty-five years. The last of them, in July 1983, is the one most remembered. The chronicle remembers all four, and the library in between.
The anti-Tamil pogrom of 1958 began within forty-eight hours of the Sinhala Only Act's first major implementation tour. The pogrom of 1977 followed the election that returned J. R. Jayewardene to power and the constitutional change that would follow. The pogrom of 1981 was contained inside a single act: the burning of the Jaffna Public Library, ninety-seven thousand volumes of Tamil scholarship reduced to ash by uniformed officers of the state in two nights. The pogrom of July 1983, known to the world as Black July, killed between four hundred and three thousand Tamils — the count itself a forensic dispute — and displaced more than a hundred thousand. After 1983 the Tamil refugee diaspora became, for the first time, a global political fact.[1958-pogrom][1977-pogrom][jaffna-library-burning-1981][black-july-1983]
The pogroms are not interchangeable. 1958 was a state that lost control of a crowd it had encouraged. 1977 was a state in transition that allowed a crowd to act. 1981 was a state, in uniform, acting on a library. 1983 was, in the finding of multiple independent investigations, a pogrom in which mobs moved with electoral rolls, knew which houses to attack, and were assisted by state vehicles. Each is its own fact. Each was followed by no successful prosecution at scale of the principals.[icg-srilanka]
The Jaffna Library is the hinge inside the hinges. Libraries are usually targeted in war. This library was targeted in peace, by men in state uniform, in a city that was not under attack. The ninety-seven thousand volumes included palm-leaf manuscripts that had no other copy. To burn them was to perform, with fire, what the architecture had been doing slowly with law: the removal of a people's institutional memory from the record of the state.
It is from the years between 1977 and 1983 that the Tamil militant groups — including the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, founded as a small cadre in 1976 — grew from a marginal current into a mass political phenomenon. The chronicle will not glorify them. It will, in due course, record what they did, including what they did to their own people. What is true here, at the threshold, is narrower: after 1983 the political claim that the Tamils of the north and east had become a nation entitled to self-determination ceased to be a parliamentary debate. The architecture had moved it out of parliament.
"The library at Jaffna was not collateral damage in a war. It was a peacetime act, performed by men in uniform, against a building that contained the memory of a people."