The title is taken from a query articulated by a young participant at a workshop last year for displaced youths, both Tamil and Muslim, from the north and the east of Sri Lanka. The workshop was part of an ongoing research project, during which participants had to interview a partner on the other person's place of birth or dwelling. For this young man from Jaffna, the northernmost city in Sri Lanka, the question encompassed all that he could ask of life. In Tamil, ur means land, one's own place. Is there war in your place? But is that all that Jaffna is? What do I recall of Jaffna, which is my ur as well? What could I recall that could have meaning for those who see themselves as Southasian? Is there war in your ur, too? In other Southasian countries? In other countries in the world? Will they recognise Jaffna in their own cities?
My recollection of Jaffna city is multi-tongued; it records a historical narrative, culled from memory, both dominant and marginal. Jaffna to this day is known as a Dutch city by the historian, while for me it is just home. It is historically a colonial city. Architecturally, it resembles other Dutch cities of the island – Galle at the southernmost tip and Puttalam, on the northwestern coast. "This is doubtless owing to the architecture of its most prominent building – the fort and the bungalows," wrote H W Cave, a prominent Britisher in Sri Lanka, in 1908. "Other remains of the Dutch architecture in Jaffna are the buildings in Main Street where the gables and the verandas will especially claim notice." Colonial history actually goes back another century or more.
The Kingdom of Jaffna itself is said to have been in establishment from the 11th century or so. The seat of the kingdom skirted today's city's limits. As schoolchildren out on vapid educational trips, everyone is taken to see the palace ruins. Actually, the only thing remaining is an ornamental arch, called the Sangili Thoppu, bearing the name of Sangili, the last king of Jaffna. While doing some desultory historical research, I stumbled upon an account suggesting that the arch probably belonged to the headquarters of one Poothathamby Mudaliyar, an administrator during the Dutch times – thus quickly demystifying one's dreams of a magnificent past, a glorious heritage of royalty and ruins, castles and forts. But the disillusionment is not totally of recent origin. To this day, my hazy recollection of the Thoppu is mixed with the image of a noisy, dirty and cluttered garage that served motorists and cyclists as a repair shop, just behind the Thoppu. For me, a determined cyclist as a schoolgirl, the garage was vastly more useful than the ruins of a distant Tamil king.
The ashes of the past
Of course, the story of Sangili – and there had been historically more than one king with this name – has caught the imagination of writers and activists in the area. During the 1950s, K Kanapathipillai, a longtime professor with the Department of Tamil at the University of Peradeniya, wrote a thoroughly anti-colonial play about the conquest of Jaffna by the Portuguese in 1621. In line with the anti-colonial sentiments of the time, his play was self-consciously written in a Jaffna dialect, replete with all the signs of conventional patriotism, the heroic, the treacherous and the sexual.