KAMALIKA PIERIS

Shankari Chandran’s book  Chai time at Cinnamon Gardens,” (2022) won the Miles Franklin award for 2023.This award was established in 1954 by the estate of Miles Franklin to be given to the  novel of the highest literary merit which presents Australian Life in any phase.

However, there are no rave reviews of this book. That is due to the structure of the novel. It has two stories. One story which got the novel its prize, is on contemporary politics and racism in the western suburbs of Sydney, Australia, written by the author with great confidence, because it is based on lived experience. Shankari is a   human rights lawyer. This story suddenly gathers momentum, without warning, reaches a sensational climax at great speed, and abruptly brings the novel to an end, leaving the reader feeling breathless.

The other story, interspersed with the main one, has absolutely nothing to do with the events in Sydney. It is actually a series of ponderous flashbacks to key events in the Tamil Separatism saga of Sri Lanka, written in a different style, by the author who has no personal experience of any of it. In this way, Tamil Separatism is neatly included in a story about racism in Australia. 

Reviewers saw this imbalance. The Guardian (UK) said,  set in both modern-day western Sydney and the Sri Lankan civil war, Shankari Chandran’s latest novel Chai time at Cinnamon Gardens,”  is sprawling but unbalanced. The balance doesn’t always sit right. The entire present-day timeline takes place over a short period, in contrast with decades in the flashbacks. Chai Time is an enticing, if not entirely realized, opportunity for a wider conversation about Australia, the diversity of its people and the gaps in our collective cultural knowledge concluded the review.

 The story is set in a retirement home in western Sydney, which is owned by an expatriate Ceylon Tamil, filled with Ceylon Tamil senior citizens and staffed by Ceylon Tamil immigrants who somehow manage to live harmoniously without fighting. This sound fictitious, but it was real. Shankari’s grandmother was resident in such a home and Shankari visited her regularly and listened to her reminisces of her life in Jaffna. She took her children also to listen. Many of the residents who lived there and the staff were also Sri Lanka Tamil.

Every fortnight I would take my children, we would visit my grandmother and she would talk to us about the past and tell us stories of her childhood and her life and her migration. And in doing so would tell us the stories of Sri Lanka and our culture and our heritage and our religion and our cooking and our community. The grandmother’s reminiscences would have been on childhood, girlhood, family, but the book does not contain any of that. The book only speaks of the ethnic conflict in Sri Lanka.

That is because this  novel is  part of  a new strategy of using  English  fiction, to  tell  unsuspecting readers about the sufferings  of  the innocent Tamils in the hands of the cruel Sinhalese,  back  in Sri Lanka .  The intention is to catch a reader unawares. So that when the reader next sees a Tamil Separatist demonstration on the street or on TV, hopefully he will say, I know about this. I read it in a novel. This could be described as propaganda via fiction.

Shankari Chandran was born in London and grew up in Australia, but Sri Lanka was always a presence in our lives, she said. Her parents had a strong connection with north and east of Sri Lanka. We were constantly aware of what was happening with the war, she said. My family, particularly my father and his brothers really felt so much grief, anger, and guilt about having left and having survived and having gone on to create good lives for themselves.  And so there was always this pull, and though we weren’t coming back to Sri Lanka, it was still a daily part of our lives. For us it is received memories of the older generation. But I do feel a very strong connection with Sri Lanka, she said.

This means that Shankari’s   interest in Tamil Separatism can be accepted though she has only heard one side of the story. A lot of my work looks at the narratives in Sri Lanka that created  one particular national identity,  Sinhala-Buddhist, which excluded the  Tamils in their own country, she said in her Authors Note to Chai time at Cinnamon Gardens .

Shankari   has more to say on the ethnic conflict.  She says in the Authors Note that Sri Lanka’s nation hood and the historical narrative of its formation has always been Contested.The Island was once three kingdoms forcibly united under British rule. The north and east were historically a Tamil kingdom. Jaffna was its capital. However, Sinhalese people are taught a completely different history, in which Tamil people are later arrivals, usurpers and  a threat to Buddhism,  she concluded in her Authors Note.

Three items are used for propaganda in this book. The first, predictably, is on cruelty in the Eelam war.  In ‘Alaveddy, Northern Sri Lanka 1995’ the character Reuben is whipped by a policeman who had nails fastened to the end of his whip.  ‘the nails had gouged deep cuts into his body sometimes the nails caught  and the whip would be dragged through the skin to free it, leaving  dangling flaps of skin”. One of Reuben’s brothers had a finger snapped out of its socket. The police took the sister into the bedroom.

Vanni jungle May 2009” was on the last phase of the Eelam war.  Sri Lanka army swept through  killing faster, sparing fewer lives.   Bodies littered the streets. Blood was running into the drain.   Young boys and girls were singled out, to be taken away. Parents tried to pull them back and were hit by rifles. Children were prised from the arms of their mothers. 

The next propaganda item is the Jaffna Public Library. ‘Jaffna 1977’   is on library collections. According to the book the Jaffna Public Library was a marvelous repository of ancient Tamil culture and archaeology. The Jaffna Public library had parchment maps of Tamil empires, the scrolls of a second century Tamil census, the text books on Ayurveda medicine and pre-Pythagorean Tamil geometry. ‘Readers came to the library for its famed collection of ancient manuscripts that detailed the longevity and richness of the Tamil culture.’

 ‘Jaffna 1981’ is on the burning of the public library. The fire burned the sacred texts of the ancient Jaffna Kingdom held in the library, also Vedic scrolls etched into ola leaves, British period newspapers,   and the diaries of the first Portuguese traders and songs that venerated the Tamil kings.  

 This is utter nonsense. The Jaffna Public library was not even heard of, until it got burned down, then overnight it became a wonderful library with valuable items, now burnt to cinders. This is yet another example of the whopping lies uttered by Tamil Separatist Movement.

Jaffna Public Library was a negligible library. Ishwari Corea, librarian of the Colombo Public library had a very low opinion of the Jaffna Public Library. She said she had visited it.  It had a lending, reference and children’s section and that was all. When she   published a three volume work, to celebrate the Colombo Public Library centenary, in the 1980s, she did not include any reference to Jaffna Public Library, let alone a separate essay on its so-called wonderful collection.

HAI Goonetileke does not mention Jaffna Public library in his monumental work Bibliography of Ceylon.” Among the 7 major research sources he used in Ceylon, he mentions Jaffna College Library, but nothing about Jaffna Public library.

The third item is the most interesting. It is pure fiction   but so was the Da Vinci Code. The fictional characters in the book   say that the Tamils were here before the Sinhalese, they were here long before Vijaya.  There were Hindu temples before the Buddhist ones were built. The Sinhala-Buddhists destroyed all this and then said that they came first. Sites that showed early Tamil settlements were deliberately destroyed by the government at the insistence of the Buddhist clergy.  There are remains of Pandya kings in the rest of the island too, but the Buddhist monks do not like to talk about it, said this fictional account.

In the book, there is a prominent fictional character,   Dr K.N. Sri Skandarajah, an archaeologist attached to the University of Jaffna who was the first to say that the Tamils were here before the Sinhalese. He had explored the length and breadth of Sri Lanka to find and preserve the ancient Tamil sites that indicated this.  

This fictional Sri Skandarajah was also the ‘curator of one of the largest collections of Tamil archaeological archives in the world.   This collection was held in the Jaffna Public Library because the University did not have room for it. The library offered him space for the books and hundreds of maps that meticulously recorded the geographical scope of the ancient Tamil civilization, a scope vastly different to the diminishing territory of the Tamil people of Sri Lanka, continued this fictitious account.’

Dr.Zakhir Ali, a Borah, (fictional)   who turns up sometime after, was also thinking on the same lines. He had come   looking for Tamil architecture in Pre Buddhist Sri Lanka. He was researching into the competing histories of Sri Lanka, their discovery and suppression. 

These two fictional characters meet and engage in fruitful discussion on the theory of pre Buddhist Proto Dravidian migration into Sri Lanka. They had found Tamil Brahmi script carved beneath Buddhist stupas   and said that the early Hindu Tamils of India migrated south to Sri Lanka before Vijaya and before Buddhism. This   discussion   is fictitious.

The fictitious story continues. Sri Skandarajah   and Zakhir Ali   were prevented from perusing their research by the government of Sri Lanka and the Buddhist Sangha. Sri Skandarajah’s   work was suppressed and silenced. All copies of Sri Skandarajah’s   book were withdrawn from universities. But Jaffna Public Library bravely    refused to destroy its copy and    maintained a full set of Sri Skandarajah    works. Zakhir was arrested and tortured by the CID in Colombo.  He was made to retract his book.

The author Shankari Chandran then takes the fiction a little further. She   creates a lengthy fictitious report on the matter, based on the work of fictitious Zakhir Ali   , which is presented to a fictitious tribunal in Sydney which is dealing with the fictitious toppling of a statute of Captain Cook at Cinnamon Gardens.

 In that fictitious report,   the character Anji, says, ‘this report charts the archaeological discoveries made by Dr KN Sri Skandarajah in the Jaffna province of Sri Lanka between 1943 and 1956.  He discovered a temple which he named Mayanilayam, and surrounding town complex which indicate that a civilization existed in the north of the island as early as 7 BC. Mayanilayam was built by people who had come from South India and were of Dravidian origin. The discovery of Mayanilayam indicates that an early Hindu civilization existed in Sri Lanka before the arrival of Vijaya and Buddhism.

   Dr. Sriskandarajah continued to excavate Mayanilayam for 13 years more. At his request the Jaffna Public Library brought in teams of archaeologists and historians from University of Madras to verify his finding. In 1956, shortly before Sinhala Only Act and Buddha Jayanti, Mayanilayam was closed by the government and the site turned into a military base. This report openly and defiantly states that a Tamil Hindu civilization existed in Sri Lanka before the arrival of Sinhala civilization and Buddhism continued this fictitious account.

 This work directly contradicts the prevailing mythology of Sri Lanka’s formation, said Anji. In the later 19 and early 20 century, Sinhalese politicians supported by the Buddhist clergy, created a powerful narrative that Sri Lanka was a Buddhist country. This narrative claims   Sri Lanka for the Sinhalese and frames the Tamils as usurpers from India who arrived later to steal the country from them.  

Their history is wrong, said Anji. This is land has been held by Tamils for thousands of years. Mayanilayam makes that clear. The attempt to stop this research strengthens the validity of the thesis.  The foundation of modern day Sri Lanka is built on myths. Historical fiction can only be fought with historical fact such as those buried in Mayanilayam. Anji ends her fictional speech at this point and the tribunal returns to the topic of what to do about the Captain Cook statue.

However, readers seem to have wanted   further clarification. Shankari says in her Authors Note that Mayanilayam and Sri Skandarajah were invented by her. They are both fictitious. Mayanilayam never existed. However, the character of Sri Skandarajah is a composite of all the historians and archaeologists she knew, who have been silenced.

 Shankari believes there is some truth in what her fictional characters said. Because in the Authors Note, she says that as Tamils we have learned of about the existence of Dravidian or proto Tamil civilization on the island. We have been taught that the evidence of our existence in the north and east was destroyed and Sinhala-Buddhist temples were built over Tamil Hindu ones. Tamil historians and archaeologists have faced extraordinary pressure from the government and bhikkhus to hide certain findings and emphasis or even contrive others, she concluded.

The question then arises, why was the actual research of these silenced archaeologists not used in the novel.  Where is this research anyway and who are these silenced archaeologists? Two concluding observations, Sinhala civilization was not introduced to Sri Lanka from outside. It ‘evolved’ within Sri Lanka. Hinduism was in its   Vedic period in the 7 century BC. Modern Hinduism came much later.