Remembering the Targeted 1981 Burning of Jaffna Public Library

by Sachi Sri Kantha, June 1, 2009

Jaffna Public Library after the May 31/June 1, 1981 fire that destroyed it.

If May 10, 1933 is recognized in history for the Aryan Nazi book burning campaign in Germany, its equivalent happened on May 31-June 1, 1981 in Jaffna. The white-skinned Aryan Nazis burnt over 25,000 books in 1933, which they deemed ‘un-German.’ The brown-skinned Aryan Nazi sympathizers of Sri Lanka burnt a library full of 97,000 books and manuscripts in 1981, to destroy what they perceived as the records of the Tamil culture on the island.

To collectively remember the vandalism perpetrated by the unruly, anti-cultural mobs in Sri Lanka in the targeted (1) June 1981 burning of the Jaffna Public Library, (2) July1983 burning of books and documents of prominent Tamil elites in Colombo, and (3) 1984 burning of libraries of Hartley College, Point Pedro and a civil community center in Valvettiturai, as a bibliophile, I post below a 1,030 word essay by Lance Morrow, that appeared in Time magazine in May 2, 1988.

When I read Morrow's essay for the first time, I liked it for some of the tidbits of information Morrow had sprinkled. Here are two.

(1) “Czar Nicholas I conducted a sort of terrorism against certain books and writers. He functioned as personal censor for Pushkin and banished Dostoyevsky to Siberia.” Lance Morrow may be unaware that in the blessed Sri Lanka, there were guys like Cyril Mathew (1912-1989) who were incarnations of not only Czar Nicholas I but also the Aryan Nazis.

(2) “In America one rarely encounters the mystical book worship. Everything in the West today seems infinitely replicable, by computer, microfilm, somehow, so that if a book chances to burn up, there must be thousands more where that came from.” But, in Jaffna’s bibliocaust of 1981, this certainly was not true. Almost all the books and manuscripts lost on that day were irreplaceable. I hardly doubt that (with few exceptions) the information available in those lost books had not been transferred to computer, microfilm and other gadgets.

Kindly note that what Lance Morrow describes in his essay was an accidental burning of Leningrad library – a natural disaster. Accidental burning and targeted burning are not equal, though the ultimate outcome are the same. In his essay, Morrow makes passing mention to the targeted burning of books by Nazi Aryan mobs in 1933.

Will an accurate count be taken on the loss of books and other culturally relevant materials (unpublished manuscripts, letters, unpublished documents that were protected by LTTE cadres, and old palm-leaf manuscripts that were passed along from generation to generation, etc.) that were lost in the recently concluded war?

To those who incredulously ask what Pirabhakaran did for the Tamils, I have asserted in my book, Pirabhakaran Phenomenon (2005), that the LTTE leader had been the prime antagonist of brown-skinned Buddhist Aryanism. That’s one reason why he faced the wrath of Aryan Buddhist forces in Sri Lanka. Here is a paragraph from the book, relating to the book burning of Aryan Buddhist sympathizers:

“It needs to be reiterated that the June 1, 1981 book burning of Jaffna Municipal Library was not an isolated event, as opined by the biographers of J.R. Jayewardene. The books located in Pirabhakaran’s birth zone were specially targeted and suffered a similar fate in 1984. The library of Hartley College-Point Pedro, containing 6,690 books was burnt by the armed force personnel who occupied the buildings close to the school. Furthermore, in August of that year, the local library of Valvettithurai was set ablaze by the armed troops, as informed by S.P. Raju, a former school teacher and a secretary of the Valvettithurai Citizen’s Council, to Sanjoy Hazarika of the New York Times [Aug. 22, 1984].”

Only those who have lost their book collections from wanton vandalism can describe their agony with feelings. Unfortunately, I don’t have many reminiscences of this kind in my hand now, other than two recorded examples. One is from a ranking journalist, Thambyaiah Sabaratnam. About what happened on July 24, 1983 in Colombo, he recorded as follows in his biography of A. Amirthalingam. To quote,

“That whole morning rioters poured into Colombo in buses, lorries, trains and government vehicles. They carried electoral registers to help them locate Tamil homes. One such group went to Dehiwala. They asked neighbours to direct them to my house. When the neighbours told them that there were no Tamil houses in the area, they were accused of attempting to protect Tamils, and were shown the electoral register. My name was underlined in red. The rioters marched to my house, broke open the front door, pulled out books from my study and set them alight. The study had contained a good collection of Sri Lankan and Indian history books and, I was told, it burnt for three long days.

I telephoned my neighbours from Castle Lane around noon. They said the house was on fire. Around the same time houses of R. Sivagurunathan, P. Balasingham, K. Nadarajah, K. Sivapiragasam, Mrs. Ponmani Kulasingham and others who held influential positions in the field of journalism were torched. The belief among the Tamils at that time was the Jathika Seva Sangamaya, the trade union wing of the ruling UNP, headed by [Cyril] Mathew, had provided their names and addresses to the gangs.” [Book; The Murder of a Moderate:Political Biography of Appapillai Amirthalingam, 1996, p. 302.]

About what happened in Trincomalee in June 1990, there exists a published record of a Tamil bibliophile that I’ve included in my Pirabhakaran Phenomenon book. To quote,

“ ‘My 30 year library’, sobbed Villavarajah Thiagalingam, his shaking finger pointing at the ashes of what once was his study at 261 Dyke St. in Trincomalee late last week. ‘All my books and 30 years of research.’ ” [Asiaweek, Hongkong, June 29, 1990, p.24.]

I also have been pained to hear (via the inquiries I received from family members and friends) that, since 1981, the papers of some of the Tamil members of the legislature of earlier generations have been destroyed and/or burned. To this list belong the papers of S. Kathiravelpillai, A. Amirthalingam, V. Navaratnam and Joseph Pararajasingham. Sons of the first three did contact me. A mutual friend of Joseph Pararajasingham let me know this fact. Two reasons were mentioned; (1) forcibly taken by one or other Tamil militant group, (2) destroyed for fear of being harassed by the members of Sri Lankan armed forces. For the record, I also note that the houses of a few other Tamil legislators, such as V. Yogeswaran (in Jaffna, 1981), M. Sivasithamparam (in Colombo, 1983) and T. Sivasithamparam (in Vavuniya, 1983), have been also destroyed by the unruly Sinhalese elements. Thus, their personal papers are also unavailable for future studies.

TamilNational report on Jaffna Public Library May 31, 2009

Pictoral history of origins of Tamil struggle.

A Holocaust of Words

by Lance Morrow

[courtesy: Time magazine, May 2, 1988, p. 52]

The library in Leningrad burned for a night and a day. By the time the fire was out at the National Academy of Sciences, 400,000 books had been incinerated. An additional 3.6 million had been damaged by water. In the weeks since the fire, workmen have been shoveling blackened remains of books into trash bins and hanging the sodden survivors on lines to dry in front of enormous electric fans.

The mind cracks a little in contemplating a holocaust of words. No one died in the fire. And yet whenever books burn, one is haunted by a sense of mourning. For books are not inanimate objects, not really, and the death of books, especially by fire, especially in such numbers, has the power of a kind of tragedy. Books are life-forms, children of the mind. Words (in the beginning was the Word) have about them some of the mystery of creation.

Russians have always loved their books profoundly. Literature has sometimes sustained the Russians when almost everything else was gone. During the siege of Leningrad, the city's population, frozen and starving down to the verge of cannibalism, drew strength by listening to a team of poets as they read on the radio from the works of Pushkin and other writers. "Never before nor ever in the future," said a survivor, "will people listen to poetry as did Leningrad in that winter -- hungry, swollen and hardly living." Today Russians will fill a stadium to hear a poetry reading.

There is of course some irony in the Russian passion for books. Knowing the power of written words, Russian authority has for centuries accorded books the brutal compliment of suppression. It has slain books by other means than fire. Book publishing first flourished in Russia under Catherine the Great, and yet it was she who used local police, corrupt and ignorant, to enforce the country's first censorship regulations. Czar Nicholas I conducted a sort of terrorism against certain books and writers. He functioned as personal censor for Pushkin and banished Dostoyevsky to Siberia. Revolution only encouraged the Russian candle-snuffers. Lenin said, "Ideas are much more fatal things than guns," a founder's nihil obstat that culminated in the years of poet destruction (Osip Mandelstam, Marina Tsvetaeva) and book murder under Stalin.

For generations of Russians, books have been surrounded by exaltation and tragedy. In a prison camp in the Gulag during the 1960s, the poet and essayist Andrei Sinyavsky hid hand-copied pages of the Book of Revelations in the calf of his boot. He wrote, "What is the most precious, the most exciting smell waiting for you in the house when you return to it after half a dozen years or so? The smell of roses, you think? No, mouldering books."

Vladimir Nabokov carried his love of Russian into exile: "Beyond the seas where I have lost a sceptre,/ I hear the neighing of my dappled nouns,/ Soft participles coming down the steps,/ Treading on leaves, trailing their rustling gowns . . ."

Americans don't take books that seriously anymore. Perhaps Russians don't either: their popular culture has begun to succumb to television. In America one rarely encounters the mystical book worship. Everything in the West today seems infinitely replicable, by computer, microfilm, somehow, so that if a book chances to burn up, there must be thousands more where that came from. If anything, there seem to be entirely too many words and numbers in circulation, too many sinister records of everything crammed into the microchips of FBI, IRS, police departments. Too many books altogether, perhaps. The glut of books subverts a reverence for them. Bookstore tables groan under the piles of remaindered volumes. In the U.S. more than 50,000 new titles are published every year. Forests cry out in despair that they are being scythed so that the works of Jackie Collins might live.

It was the Dominican zealot Girolamo Savonarola who presided over the Bonfire of the Vanities during Carnival in Florence in 1497. Thousands of the Florentine children who were Savonarola's followers went through the city collecting what they deemed to be lewd books, as well as pictures, lutes, playing cards, mirrors and other vanities, and piled them in the great Piazza della Signoria of Florence. The pyramid of offending objects rose 60 feet high, and went up in flames. One year later Savonarola had a political quarrel with Pope Alexander VI, was excommunicated, tried and hanged. His body was burned at the stake. Savonarola went up in smoke.

The Leningrad library fire was a natural disaster. Deliberate book burning seems not only criminal but evil. Why? Is it worse to destroy a book by burning it than to throw it into the trash compactor? Or to shred it? Not in effect. But somehow the irrevocable reduction of words to smoke and, poof!, into nonentity haunts the imagination. In Hitler's bonfires in 1933, the works of Kafka, Freud, Einstein, Zola and Proust were incinerated -- their smoke a prefigurement of the terrible clouds that came from the Nazi chimneys later.

Anyone who loves books knows how hard it is to throw even one of them away, even one that is silly or stupid or vicious and full of lies. How much more criminal, how much more a sin against consciousness, to burn a book. A question then: What if one were to gather from the corners of the earth all the existing copies of Mein Kampf and make a bonfire of them? Would that be an act of virtue? Or of evil?

Sometimes it seems that the right books never get burnt. But the world has its quota of idiotic and vicious people just as it has its supplies of books that are vicious, trashy and witless. Books can eventually be as mortal as people -- the acids in the paper eat them, the bindings decay and at last they crumble in one's hands. But their ambition anyway is to outlast the flesh. Books have a kind of enshrining counterlife. One can live with the thought of one's own death. It is the thought of the death of words and books that is terrifying. For that is the deeper extinction.

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