SRI LANKA IS A SMALL ISLAND. But the distances people live from one another—the psychological distances, the distances between understanding and misunderstanding—are vast.
Jayakumar Thangavelu, the senior police official, once took the time to explain an important point about the past—the past as defined by before and after the spread of institutional violence, his past, the past of the 1970s and 1980s. We were discussing “the mentality.”
Thangavelu said, “Yes, there were cases of torture in the past, but mainly because people were not aware of their rights. So they thought torture was something accepted by law. Now, people are more aware, so more cases are being reported. But before, unless someone was badly injured people thought it a way of life—a minor injury, they thought, ‘O. K., it’s nothing serious to be reported.’ People thought it was somehow legal to be tortured.”
Somehow legal—somehow. This word is so often a signal, a warning that things have not been properly thought through, that there is a soft spot in the logic, and that there is some distance to cross.
WHEN I FIRST MET Chitral Perera, it was a hot, bright morning in Panadura. Shanthi had brought me on an early bus crowded with passengers and suitcases and boxes of produce. Chitral ran the human rights group where Shanthi worked several days a week. It was called Janasansadaya, which translates as People’s Forum. I liked the name.
Forum: a public space, a civic space.
My notes from that first encounter indicate that within a couple of minutes of our meeting, Chitral (as he is known by all) was telling me a story—an old folk tale he thought would show me something. He told it this way:
“There was a king named Kekille who was very stupid. He rendered stupid judgments, and in one he ended up punishing an innocent man.
“There was a mason building a wall, a parapet wall. The wall collapsed and injured a passer-by. The injured man complained to the king, who then formed a court and sat in judgment.
The mason said, ‘Don’t blame me. A pretty woman came by, and I took my eye off the wall. That’s why it collapsed.’
“So the king said, ‘Bring the pretty woman.’ And the woman said, ‘Don’t blame me. I had to pass the wall on the way to buy some jewelry.’
“‘Bring the jeweler,’ the king said.
“‘It’s not my fault,’ the jeweler argued before the court. ‘I have to earn a living.’
“The jeweler was very thin, and when the king proposed to kill him by letting an elephant trample him, he said, ‘O. K., I don’t mind. But remember I’m only skin and bones, and the elephant might hurt himself.’
“‘Who shall I punish, then?’ the king asked. The jeweler said, ‘A fat man, a chef.’
“The king found such a man and killed him. And the roly-poly man who was punished had no idea even what had happened to the wall.”
Chitral smiled when he finished—the quiet, half-to-himself smile that was to become familiar to me. He had shared the story so that I would understand what he was about to tell me: “In a lot of villages I’ve visited people used to say, ‘When judgments come, our justice is like King Kekille’s justice.’ There are many tales to this effect—Buddhist stories, folk stories, legends like that of the king.”
Chitral paused a moment to let this sink in. I was still a stranger. He did not yet know where the conversation might go. Then he said, “People start from the assumption that ordinary Sri Lankans don’t know their rights. I wouldn’t accept this notion. You find always that people have a strong sense of their rights and of justice. Maybe they don’t know where it comes from—what law, the constitution, the U. N.—but the awareness of basic rights is there.”
In a village once, Chitral organized an “awareness program,” as he called it, and brought several lawyers with him to teach villagers about the penal code, laws covering bail, and other such subjects. The occasion proved a turning point in his thinking and seems to have helped define his work at Janasansadaya.
“A man got up, slightly drunk, and said, ‘What’s the point? This isn’t how the law actually works. What does the penal code mean to us?’ The lawyer was annoyed, but I noticed that the rest of the audience agreed with the man. I changed the discussion. I said, ‘Tell us what you mean.’ And it was then I discovered: People know all about injustice, right and wrong, courts and lawyers. The awareness is there. The question was power. There was an attitude inculcated in people: You cannot challenge the system. After this, the first thing I would say in the villages was, ‘No, there is something you can do. You are powerful.’”
CHITRAL WAS SIXTY-THREE when I met him—a youngish, vigorous sixty-three with bushy hair, an animated face, and a quick, almost urgent manner, beneath which I could see a certain abiding calm.
There was nothing in his background to suggest that he would spend these years of his life going from village to village in a van, sometimes with a lawyer, to hear the stories of victims, and begin the process that would put them before a judge, properly represented and prepared to challenge the system they had learned to fear. But this was Chitral’s work. And it made him something unusual for a Sri Lankan: It made him something other than a victim, just as he was showing those whose cases he took how to be something other than what they had been taught they were.
He was born into an affluent family and raised in Panadura, in a house not far from where he would one day return and open the office where we sat and talked. At eighteen he became a teacher’s assistant and shipped out for six months to a town twenty kilometers from the old capital—“upcountry Kandy,” as Chitral put it. The experience changed him—or began the process of change that would one day lead him back to Panadura.
Chitral said, “The life up there was the best experience. I lived in a rented house with other government officials, slept on a crude folding bed—a booru, we call it, which means ‘donkey bed.’ In the evenings we gathered with a bottle of arrack”—this is the strong drink many Sri Lankans favor, distilled from coconuts—“and talked about local history and culture. Weekends I didn’t come home. There were always events—paddy-harvesting rituals, an exorcism ceremony called a thovil.
“It was then I began to hear stories like the one I told you, and it’s these I remember most, not what I read in books. I learned to master things. And I learned that the hierarchy can be challenged and, in fact, must be challenged. I learned that people have challenged it in all sorts of ways throughout history.”
The eighteen-year-old trainee then attended teacher’s college in Maharagama, just outside Colombo, and his first appointments followed: a year in Dondra, on the southern tip of the island, five in Benthara, in the Galle District. In Benthara things began to change again: It was there Chitral began working for the teachers’ union. By 1971 a New Left party had formed, the J. V. P., and that year launched its first insurrection. Chitral was also “a kind of” member, as he put it—but “not too pleased with it.”
The insurrection brought a wave of arrests, and union work became dangerous, but Chitral continued with it as teaching colleagues faded quietly away. By 1975 he was working full-time for the union. In time he was agitating for the release of detained unionists on the ground that they were political prisoners, not terrorists or insurrectionists. In time, also, Chitral rose to become the union’s general secretary. He began meeting prominent civil society leaders, journalists, and church activists, and within two years the movement he helped form had most political prisoners out of jail, even if they were still “interdicted”—that is, banned from their workplaces.
Chitral was growing the union—by 1980 it would have forty-five thousand members, a tenfold increase in a little more than a decade. In July of that year there was a general strike, as a result of which fifty thousand to sixty thousand government employees were locked out and a few were dismissed. Life had changed again: Chitral was among the few.
“No job,” he said, laughing at what must then have been no laughing matter. “So I tried various things. I tried to start an underground movement. That failed—people weren’t really committed. I raised ornamental fish. I managed several hotels. I became a sous-chef. Then journalism—for seven years. I wrote for Attha, which means “truth,” same as Pravda.”
Chitral laughed again. I sensed that he hadn’t wanted to embark on this tale, but he had gradually entered into it.
“But you find not only ‘the truth.’ It’s ‘the truth but not only the truth.’
That should’ve been our slogan.”
There were travels: Bosnia, the Ukraine, Lithuania, the Soviet Union in its final throes. When the last collapsed, it was the beginning of the end for Attha, and so for Chitral’s years as a journalist.
He said, “At the time there was an N. G. O. called M. D. D. R., Movement for the Defense of Democratic Rights. I was put in charge of training. It was then I began going to villages to teach people about legal rights and a variety of other basic things—land disputes, family disputes, how to make a complaint. I had a training program called ‘law to the village.’ And that was my entry into human rights.”
There was a little more teaching to be done. In 1990, under pressure from civil society groups and the International Labor Organisation, the U. N. agency based in Geneva, Chitral was reinstated in his profession. He went back—not altogether eagerly so far as I could make out, but primarily to protect his pension. And in the decade he had been away, Sri Lanka’s school system had gone the way of most other institutions. There wasn’t much to go back to.
“Everything had deteriorated—discipline, standards of teaching. What struck me most was the lack of respect. Teachers and students, teachers and principals, students and principals—all of these relationships had changed. Principals and teachers started accusing one another: ‘This one has personal connections. This one shouldn’t be here.’ And so on. Students, parents, teachers—all knew about these arguments. And I think it was the reason for the lack of respect. Some teachers didn’t have even basic qualifications. Some couldn’t teach or control even a fifth-grade class. Most education officers and principals were appointed totally according to political connections.”
Chitral lasted two years. In 1992 he left the system for good and founded Janasansadaya, the N. G. O. that operated from a couple of small rooms down a dirt pathway in Panadura.
THE BUS FROM COLOMBO to Panadura runs along a single thoroughfare, the first part of which is Galle Face Road as it leads south from the green. As you leave the city the houses and shops thin out, until finally you are looking out at wooden shacks—some of which are illegal structures—and roadside hawkers selling vegetables and fish in the open air. For part of the journey the ocean comes into view.
Then the shops grow dense again, shops selling cars and furniture and office equipment, and the houses are again substantial. This is Panadura—a large, populous town, not so far from Colombo but an hour’s commute on the bus because of the traffic.
We get off, Shanthi and I, in the center of town, opposite a large police station. There is a tree-lined lane next to it, and this we follow past a primary school and then a sports club. The school sounds as if it is about to burst its walls with the vitality of the students shouting a thousand different shouts within. The club, by contrast, is silent and perhaps not much used: The grounds are unswept, and in all my trips to see Chitral, I never saw anyone on them.
At the end of the lane an old stone church, Anglican, stands in the sun on a well-kept patch of land. Beyond it I can glimpse the sea. We pass the churchyard, full of old headstones, and then turn down the pathway leading to Janasansadaya’s offices. The path runs along the back side of the primary school we just passed. The cacophony of children’s voices turns out to be a constant in Chitral’s small, concrete-floored rooms.
That first morning Chitral spoke several times of titles. He still remembered how he was greeted on his first day as a teacher’s assistant forty-five years earlier: “Hello, Mr. Perera. Come this way, please.” He had never before been a “mister.” During the days that followed in “upcountry Kandy” he was late to school often. His habit was to climb over the school fence and sneak into his classroom, until the principal spotted him one morning and said, “Good morning, Mr. Perera.”
The moment taught him something about what it meant to treat others with respect, to acknowledge their dignity. There was something of the public self realized in that moment, it seemed to me afterward as I read my notes. “I was never late again after that,” Chitral said, “and I learned to teach by way of personal example.”
Later in that first morning’s conversation Chitral came back to the matter of “mister.” It seemed to be a preoccupation—containing some thought he was eager to convey to me.
He said, “People used to be accustomed to addressing others, seniors and juniors, as ‘Mister.’ Then it changed to ‘Sir’ for those senior. They demanded it. In Sinhala it had been ‘Mahatthaya,’ the equivalent of ‘Mister,’ and then for those senior it became ‘Sir,’ just as in English.
Now if you use ‘Mahatthaya’ they get angry.”
“What explains this?” I was curious. The point seemed to go straight to the question of “the edifice within.”
“I don’t know. I’ve always made sure no one calls me ‘Sir,’ but it’s very difficult to break these habits in others. Guards at the gate, the peons”—he meant the office assistants—“clerks, they all use ‘Sir.’”
Chitral paused, and I let the silence remain, hoping he would continue without prodding in the direction he chose.
He said finally, “ ‘Sir.’ It is a device for maintaining the idea of hierarchy. Earlier, no one needed to demand respect because they were certain they had earned it. Once the system of political appointments came in, people at the top knew they didn’t deserve to be there.”
It was an eighteen-year-old who had first seen, in the hills outside of Kandy, that hierarchy has to be challenged. And now this was the essential intent at Janasansadaya, beneath all the training and the projects and cases taken up. It was to build a new kind of public space—a public space within.
Chitral started with what he had learned at the M. D. D. R., the human rights organization he joined after his newspapering years ended: Janasansadaya would empower people. But this became something to build other things upon.
He said, “The second point, after empowerment, is, we must give people solutions. You need to provide practical answers. The third point, at least for human rights activists, we’ll teach them parts of the law. We raise awareness, connecting common notions of justice—the stories and legends and so forth—with modern concepts. This is not for everyone. The majority are told, ‘What you say is right. We’ll join you in your fight for rights.’ It’s not necessary to educate everybody in all the complexities of the law.”
We talked for a long time, and there would be other such conversations, and then, when we grew to know one another and I understood the work he was doing, I could pose questions out of thin air, à propos of nothing.
“Chitral,” I once asked, “the other day you used the word ‘revolution’ to describe what you are working toward. What did you mean?”
Chitral’s reply was long. He said, “What changed first was the idea of third-party intervention—the belief that someone else had to be there. ‘You have to accept what we tell you. You cannot do anything on your own.’ This was the old notion. This is hierarchy. If you want to go to the police station you must go with a politician, or at least a ‘henchman.’
“For example, if an ordinary person walks into a police station he will be insulted—rubbished or ignored. It’s the same at a government office. If you go alone the likelihood is that you won’t get done what you went for. If you go with a ‘henchman’ you might. So people get used to believing it is the only way. When people first began to come here they sometimes brought a ‘henchman.’”
As he spoke, Chitral started drawing pyramids on a piece of paper, then tracing and retracing them until they became nearly shapeless scribble.
He continued his explanation, “For a long time this has disempowered people. It was a purposeful effort to distance people, done in an entirely organized way. The British needed middlemen—they had a language problem. But even during the kingdom, there was an enormous distance between subjects and kings. Even then, headmen were middlemen.
“Post-independence, the government took advantage of this and prolonged it. And now it is intensified. Now it’s forcing the issue of powerlessness. Awareness is forcing the issue.”
At this, Chitral turned the pyramids he had drawn toward me.
“Here’s the judicial system: judges up here at the top, ordinary people down here, the police, the lawyers, the doctors, the attorney-general’s department all in the middle. Our revolution is telling people they don’t need anyone in the middle to intervene for them. Access to justice is an inherent right. The revolution is to break the mentality you see in the pyramid.”
AS OUR CONVERSATIONS continued, Chitral forced me to think—as he must have thought once—about the nature of change: of what it is made, how it is made, and where it comes from. It is almost a necessity to consider this subject in Sri Lanka today. Meeting Chitral reminded me of this. There could be small change or large, but in some cases the two could not be separated: The latter in these cases, large change, consisted of innumerable instances of the former, small changes, and could be made of nothing else.
Chitral said, “Let me tell you about something we are doing. There is something called a ‘police message,’ requiring someone to report for an inquiry. They date back to the British. They are forms: They say, ‘To,’ ‘From,’ ‘Date,’ ‘Message.’ They’re usually full of abbreviations. They’re often illegible. What happens normally is that people are frightened. They run to the police and plead. ‘Please, sir, please explain this to me.’
“We tell people, ‘Don’t go to ask.’ We help them write to the inspector-general of police and request an explanation. ‘Please advise me as to what this says.’ At least for people living close by us, there is a clear change. Now messages are either written clearly or they are typed and sent by registered post.
“Another example. Again, a letter arrives from the police. ‘Attend this inquiry,’ it says. But it comes after the date of the inquiry. We say, ‘Write, provide dates and times, explain, inform.’ This year we’ve had seventy-five people in these kinds of situations—counting families, a hundred and fifty altogether. If we can start with this small group and change attitudes, they are empowered and they can go back to their villages and tell others. And they do. We always ask when someone comes, ‘How do you know of us?’ We’ve now got cases from two hundred kilometers away.”
Small changes—impossibly, grindingly small changes. But Chitral was talking about very large changes, too—a change in consciousness, a change in the nature of public space in Sri Lanka and who is able to occupy it. And another change: the extension of order to ordinary people. Are these changes insignificant? More to the point, will Sri Lanka change in any other fashion?
The nature of change varies in human history. Sometimes it is very sudden, as when a war is won or lost, or a key election tips one way and not the other. Change of this kind is dramatic but not always especially deep. Another kind of change involves no signal event. It is slow, it is extended. Sometimes it requires a generation or more. There is not much glory in it. There is no sudden declaration of victory. But this kind of change involves a change in direction, a break with the past, a new way of thinking. It runs very deep. Sometimes it is the way history is made. Fernand Braudel, the great French historian of the Mediterranean world, counted time in terms of various cycles—that of an individual life, that of generations, that of a civilization—and I suspect the thought was in part related to the nature of change and history as I have described it.
Chitral had made a choice in these matters.
WHAT IS IT THAT NEEDS to change most in Sri Lanka?”
I once put this question to K. M. de Silva, one of Sri Lanka’s most noted historians. His reply was immediate.
He said, “They should inscribe on every wall in the country the Bismarckian proposition that politics is the art of the possible, not the yearning for the impossible.”
To stop dreaming, de Silva seemed to say—to leave behind the old nostalgia, the yearning for Sinhalese greatness, the dream of oneness, the dream of undisturbed separateness in a green garden away from the world. This was what de Silva, after all his years of thinking and writing about Sri Lanka’s past, thought had to change.
Much later, as I studied the notes from all my conversations, I considered this point in connection with Chitral. What was it that distinguished this man? It seemed partly to rest upon de Silva’s point. Chitral did not dream—not, at least, in the way the old scholar of his own country meant it. Chitral had had his own dreams once—back in his J. V. P. days, and later when he had tried to start a “movement.” But he no longer dreamed these dreams, either. There was no nostalgia left in him, if he had ever had any, no sentiment, and no regret. Nor had he gone silent.
No nostalgia, no regret, no silence. Instead there was a certain hardness in Chitral’s character—hardness being not at all the same as insensitivity but, rather, sentimentality’s opposite, intolerant of nostalgia, dreams, and yearning. Hardness of this kind is, in the end, evidence of great sensitivity. Over time it has come to seem essential equipment for Sri Lankans—at least for those determined to be something other than victims.
There is something else Chitral prompted me to consider as he took his place in my notebooks among all the other voices I had recorded. This is the question of distance. In his own life Chitral had made it his business to bridge some of the distances that had grown over a long time among Sri Lankans. One could say it was his work, which may be why he sometimes seemed most at home while driving in a van to some far-off village. But here I mean distance of another kind, distance with a certain moral dimension.
At what distance should one stand in a society as near to failure as Sri Lanka? Where should one place oneself? Should one work outside of all the institutional frameworks, achieving some hard-won self-sufficiency and a measure of freedom from the entrenched dependencies of Sri Lankan life? In other words, escape the trap? Should one work for change from within, alternatively?
These are not questions for Sri Lankans alone. Many people in many different places ask them, or ought to ask them, or contrive in one way or another to avoid asking them. For Sri Lankans they are simply more urgent, these questions, for the self-evident reason that Sri Lanka is in a more urgent condition: The hour is late. People know this. So it is part of being an educated, aware Sri Lankan to pose the question of one’s distance, one’s chosen position in relation to the whole, and it is for this reason I address the matter here.
Many people prompted me to consider the question of distance in this way. Saminda did. So did some of the other judges I met—Wijetunge, for example. Shanthi did. In his way Thangavelu, the police official, did, too.
There were numerous others, well-meaning people, people in possession of the facts, we might say, people quite aware of Sri Lanka’s urgent needs. Often these turned out to be people who refused to discuss their views with someone who would record them for fear of losing something or other: a job, a standing, a political connection, a social recognition, a place in that network of relationships by which we suspend ourselves in our societies. These last were, we can say, people who stood as negative examples because they got the distance question wrong, especially if they happened to be journalists, or lawyers, or both—professions in which articulating the truth is among one’s basic obligations.
It was Chitral, most of all, who prompted me to try to understand Sri Lankans by way of the question of distance. And as I got to know him he showed me something unexpected. In his own life he had chosen, after all his years of teaching, to stand outside the institution he had first worked within. But he showed me as we got to know one another that the question of proximity—“outside” or “inside”—was not the important one: indeed, it hardly mattered whether one asked it.
The questions Chitral had asked were far simpler. What needs to be done that I can do? Am I willing to do it? If I am, how best is it done? Again, it is not just Sri Lankans who might do well to ask these questions. It would be unfair to single them out in such a way. We all face occasions when we ought to ask them. Perhaps what distinguished Chitral most is that he did.
