| "Usually when people ask casual questions about my parents, I have to make a judgement about what I say - it's sometimes too shocking to tell them the truth especially when they think they're asking a very simple question…if I felt safe I would say that my mother was Rajani Thiranagama and the only people I felt safe saying it to were people who already knew who she was." |
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Most Sri Lankans indeed do know the name of Rajani Thiranagama. They know that she was a doctor, a successful scientist, a committed teacher at Jaffna University and a Tamil activist so dedicated to exposing the human rights abuses being perpetrated on her people that she paid for it with her life. In 1989, aged only 35 years old, she was shot dead as she cycled home from work.
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Dr Rajani Thiranagam, murdered by the Tamil Tigers in 1989 |
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"In some ways," she says struggling to steady her voice, "I think I'm still waiting for her to come home from work." The family heard shots outside and Narmada remembers someone saying, "I wonder who they're shooting now."
During the course of that long dreadful day no one in the family actually told the children that their mother had been killed - but they knew from the people flocking to their grandparents' home, from the way their aunt held on to the door jamb for support, emitting animal-like moans, from the very fact that no one was telling them anything.
The north and eastern part of Sri Lanka had been the scene of a brutal conflict for years. Rebel Tamil groups had been fighting against the racist policies of the Sinhalese majority Sri Lankan government.
By the late 80s, after a series of putsches, the ruthless Liberation Tamil Tigers of Eelam or the LTTTE had emerged as the supreme Tamil organisation. In 1987, the Indian Peacekeeping Forces (IPKF), invited in by the Sri Lankan government, added a new dimension to a conflict where rapes, summary executions and terrible civilian casualties had become an everyday fact of life.
The LTTE was using the strategy of luring the soldiers into schools and hospitals and then abandoning the civilians caught in the crossfire to retreat into the jungles. At the time, Rajani Thiranagama was a doctor at the hospital and was teaching anatomy at the university. And she was recording the human rights abuses being committed by all warring sides - the government forces, the IPKF and the LTTE. Together with some courageous colleagues she published that material in a book called "The Broken Palmyra".
Just days before her murder, she wrote a prescient letter to a friend:
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"One day some gun will silence me. And it will not be held by an outsider, but by a son born in the womb of this very society, from a woman with whom my history is shared." |
Her family believes it was indeed a gun held by a Tamil Tiger that killed her. Once she had been one of them.
Together with her older sister Nirmala, Rajani had become politically active at a young age. Nirmala Rajasingam had been attracted to the nascent Tamil Tigers movement that was purportedly fighting for the rights of the Tamil minority. Rajani became involved peripherally with the organisation when Nirmala brought her wounded Tamil Tiger guerrillas to treat.
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Sharika, Rajani's younger daughter, plays her in the documentary film No More Tears Sister : Anatomy of Hope and Betrayal, directed by Helene Klodawsky. |
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In 1982, the government jailed Nirmala for aiding terrorists and Rajani started a campaign for her sister's release. When she got a chance to go to England on a fellowship, she stepped up the campaign to bring her sister's cause to world attention, in the process becoming ever more drawn into the LTTE organisation.
No room for politics
22 months after her incarceration, Nirmala was broken out of prison by Tamil Tiger comrades and smuggled to Madras to join the leadership base in hiding there. She spent six months with them and soon became disillusioned with their way of operating. "This was a very centralized military outfit only. There was no room for politics, no room for internal democracy, no room for any questioning of the leadership. We started hearing about murders of cadres inside, cadres who had decided to challenge the leadership."
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The family before Dayapala went underground |
Leaving the Tigers
When the Tigers killed the leaders and members of another rebel group, Nirmala was so repelled by the organisation that had earlier claimed her loyalty, that she finally cut her links with them and fled India. To this day, she keeps a low-key profile in the west, unable to go back to Jaffna because the Tigers have made it clear to hear that no one can safely leave their organisation.
Meanwhile back in the 70s Rajani had met a young Singhalese student leader, Dayapala Thiranagama, who had recently emerged from a five-year stint in jail. The couple came from different ethnic groups and on top of that, Rajani's family were middle class and educated, whereas Dayapala came from a poor rural background, so their families were not happy with the relationship; nevertheless they married and soon had two daughters.
Commitment
"We both felt responsible for our children," says Dayapala, "but we also thought our struggle was much more important than looking after our children at times because we knew a lot of our comrades had to die, leaving their children behind and they were looked after by others, friends and family, and so we thought the same thing would happen to our children, that someone would look after them."
While the girls were still very young, Dayapala had to go underground leaving Rajani alone in Jaffna juggling her considerable work commitments, the care of two young children as well as all her extra human rights activities. She was traveling around the region recording testimonies and she had also helped set up Poorani, a refuge for women who'd suffered the most in the ravages of war.
Dedication
"She was phenomenally organized," says Nirmala, recounting how her sister would wake up at 4 am every day and write a new lecture for her class that day, refusing to re-cycle previous lectures.
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Dr Rajani Thiranagama in her anatomy lab |
Despite her mother's dedication to her professional life, however, Narmada recalls a very hands-on mum micro-managing her children's lives: "the last thing I used to see at night before I went to bed was her hand washing our uniforms so they'd be dry for the next day." Rajani talked to her children constantly, encouraging them to read, to question and to think for themselves. "She would never say 'this is the way', she would say, 'Well, why do you think it's this way, what about this? Have you thought about that?'"
Separation
Eventually, because of the pressures of their lives as well as their growing political differences, Rajani and Dayapala decided on an amicable separation. They agreed on a joint responsibility for their children and Rajani occasionally brought them down to the south to meet their father at secret safe houses.
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A band of Tamil fighters |
When he heard of Rajani's death, Dayapala took the risky trip to the north. Narmada remembers that he had the most emotional reaction to her mother's death of anyone in the family. She remembers him running up the steps to where her mother's body was laid out. "He was holding on to her feet and crying and that made me so scared to see my father displaying emotion so openly."
Dayapala, who had dedicated his life for the revolution, realised his political career was over. The children wanted to leave the place that was now enveloped by the darkness of their mother's death. He took his children to England, where he found himself in the position of a refugee cut off from his family, his roots, of being a single dad responsible for the raising of two small daughters he hardly knew.
Devotion
Narmada remembers though only the devotion of a sad but tender father, packing their school lunches, cooking rice and curry for his daughters every night and telling them, "You should concentrate on your homework, that's your most important job, and leave everything else to me."
"I'm very proud of them," says Dayapala, the soft-spoken erstwhile revolutionary "and though it was difficult, more difficult than armed struggle, bringing them up was one of the major achievements of my life".
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Narmada with her cousin Kausikan |
Rajani's absence is to this day a physical thing in the lives of the family she left behind - the sister, husband and daughter all display a naked grief when they talk about her. "It's a loss that reverberates down the years and somehow grows stronger," whispers her daughter. But Narmada has also come to realise that her mother's influence reaches out to her children beyond her death. "She left me with everything I would ever need to look to her for, which is her life, the way she lived her life."
A former Tamil Tiger supporter talking of the LTTE organisation:
Tags: Colombo, Helene Klodawsky, India, IPKF, Jaffna University, LTTE, No More Tears Sister, Pierre Lapointe, Rajani Thiranagama, Sri Lanka, Tamil Eelam