The night of May 31, 1981 Jaffna library burned

Remembering the sad saga of Tamils in Sri Lanka, a cultural genocide of Tamils, the burning down of the Jaffna library, one of the biggest and finest in Asia, on the night of May 31, 1981? On that fateful night Sri Lankan paramilitary forces set ablaze this grand library as part of the pogrom against Tamils of Jaffna. Some 97,000 volumes of books, excluding rare and important Ola manuscripts, went up in flames.

These included works of Ananda Coomaraswamy, the famous Lanka-born Tamil Indophil and eminent intellectual Professor Issac Thambiah. In the massacre that followed over next two days statues of Tamil cultural and religious icons were destroyed or disfigured.

The library was built in many stages starting from 1933, from a modest beginnings as a private collection. Soon with the help of primarily local citizens, it became a full fledged library. The Library also became a repository of archival material written in Palm leaf manuscripts, original copies of regionally important historic documents in the contested Contest, political history of Sri Lanka and newspapers that were published hundred of years ago in the Jaffna peninsula. It thus became a place of historic and symbolic importance to the local minority Sri Lankan Tamil people.

Eventually the first major wing of the library was opened in 1959 by then Jaffna mayor Alfred Duraiappah. The architect of the Indo-Saracenic style building was one Narasimhan from Madras, India. Prominent Indian librarian S.R. Ranganathan served as an advisor to ensure that the library was built to international standards. The library became the pride of the local people as even researchers from India and other countries began to use it for their research purposes.

Braving its first destruction in 1981, the Tamil community pooled thousands of books, to rebuild the library when the civil war caught up in 1983. In 1985 again, the semi-built library bore assault of Sri Lankan Army.

Of all the destruction in Jaffna city it was the destruction of the Jaffna Public Library was the incident which appeared to cause the most distress to the people of Jaffna.

After, Jaffna was wrested from the LTTE in 1996 the then President Chandrika Kumaratunga got it rebuilt the library. But the lost inflicted was irreparable. One side of the people argue it should have been kept as a memorial and it was rebuild to whitewash the Sinhala pogram against Tamils.

The library was reopened in 2003, twenty two years later, Mayor of Jaffna Nadarajah Raviraj still grieved at the recollection of the flames he saw as a University student. He was later killed by unknown gunmen in the capital Colombo in 2006.

For Tamils the devastated library became a symbol of “physical and imaginative violence” of majoritan extremists. The attack was seen as an assault on their aspirations, value of learning and traditions of academic achievement.

Thanks to Priyadarsi Dutta who recalled the event in her article in the Pioneer on May 30, 2009. She wrote:

The knight of the burning castle, Velupillai Prabhakaran, lately went down with his crumbling homeland Eelam in Sri Lanka. He neither excelled in rhetoric, nor had scholarship enough, to clash his tongue with ‘Mylapore Brahmins’ who berated Eelam as a ‘Christian conspiracy’. They bemoaned the defeat of ‘Hindu nationalist’ BJP, virtually non-existent in Tamil Nadu, in the Lok Sabha poll more than the genocidal aggression against their Tamil kin across the Palk Strait. Prabhakaran showed, without waiting upon culturists, that acts of indelible Tamil bravery outside Rajanikanth mega-hits are possible.

Curtains are down for the civil war in Sri Lanka this May. But given the historical incompatibility of Tamil and Sinhalese, peaceful co-existence is a pipe dream. One can’t help recall an incident from another May, on the eve of the civil war that sent shock waves across the cultural world. Does anybody recall the burning down of the Jaffna library, one of the biggest and finest in Asia, on the night of May 31, 1981? On that fateful night Sri Lankan paramilitary forces set ablaze this grand library as part of the pogrom against Tamils of Jaffna. Some 97,000 volumes of books, excluding rare and important manuscripts, went up in flames. These included works of Ananda Coomaraswamy, the famous Lanka-born Tamil Indophil and eminent intellectual Professor Issac Thambiah. In the massacre that followed over next two days statues of Tamil cultural and religious icons were destroyed or disfigured.

Jaffna, where Swami Vivekananda delivered speech on Vedantism in 1897, prided upon being the chief centre of Hinduism in Sri Lanka. Its leading school is curiously named Jaffna Hindu College.

The library, which had began as a private collection in 1934, came of age in 1959 when inaugurated by Jaffna Mayor Alfred Duraippah. In May 2008, a 49-minute documentary film Burning Memories in English, French and Tamil was produced by S Someetharan. Braving its first destruction in 1981, the Tamil community pooled thousands of books, to rebuild the library when the civil war caught up in 1983. In 1985 again, the semi-built library bore assault of Sri Lankan Army. However, in hindsight the Sinhalese authorities profoundly repented their act. After, Jaffna was wrested from the LTTE in 1996 the then President Chandrika Kumaratunga got it rebuilt. But the lost inflicted was irreparable. Reopened in 2003, it is marked by a statue of goddess Saraswati in the portico.