Journeys with Yal Devi: War, Peace, and Contemporary Art in Sri Lanka

Abstract

Journeys with Yal Devi: War, Peace, and Contemporary Art in Sri Lanka Sonal Khullar (bio) i was excited to be taking the express train Yal Devi, named after the goddess of Jaffna, to attend ”but political by persuasion,” a workshop on contemporary art in Sri Lanka organized by Mariah Lookman in Colombo in 2018 (Figure 1).1 It was my first time on the train. My companion on that journey, the artist Jasmine Nilani Joseph, was also keen on going south by train from Yalpannam, as Jaffna is known in Tamil. She spoke of Yal Devi, the train and goddess, as a friend and protector. I had come to know Joseph, a graduate of the fine arts program at the University of Jaffna, on trips to Sri Lanka between 2013 and 2018 while researching a book on contemporary art from South Asia.2 The rail journey between Jaffna and Colombo, cities in the North and South of the country and associated with its Tamil-minority and Sinhalese-majority communities respectively, had been impossible for much of the twenty-six-year-long civil war that began in 1983 and concluded in 2009, which is to say, for most of Joseph’s life. [End Page 502] Joseph was born in 1990, the same year Sri Lanka Railways suspended train service to Jaffna City and Kankesanthurai in the Northern Province. Service to Jaffna City and Kankesanthurai resumed in October 2014 and January 2015, respectively. As Sharika Thiranagama has argued, the Yal Devi, or ”Queen of the North,” train was legendary for transporting goods and passengers in twentieth-century Sri Lanka and symbolized better relations between Tamil and Sinhalese communities.3 For many Tamils, the train signified ”normality,” ”magical days” of a prewar period, and ”the dream of ordinary movement, as opposed to wartime forced displacements” and travel ”to a destination that you yourself had chosen.”4 north and south On that day in 2018, the six-hour ride between Jaffna City and Colombo Fort stations was bumpy, even bruising, as train tracks had been bombed in 1985 and set ablaze in 1990 by the ltte (Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam) during the war and were still not fully repaired. Our journey yielded sights and stops laden with meaning. We passed Kilinochchi, erstwhile administrative base of the ltte, and Anuradhapura, capital of an ancient Sinhalese kingdom. Joseph pointed out Vavuniya, where her family had lived in a refugee camp between 1995 and 1998 (Figure 2). Peacocks danced in the arid bush, with their blue and green plumes shining against golden earth. In response to state-sponsored discrimination against Sri Lanka’s Tamil population, the ltte led a political and military campaign against the Sri Lankan government demanding Tamil Eelam, an independent Tamil homeland.5 The Jaffna Peninsula in the Northern Province was [End Page 503] the imaginative locus for Eelam, although Sri Lanka’s Tamil population, which includes Hindus, Muslims, and Christians, is scattered across the country with significant communities in the east, north, and southwest. The civil war officially ended in May 2009 with the ltte’s defeat by Sri Lankan military forces, a large-scale refugee crisis, and human rights violations by the Sri Lankan government and ltte.6 More than a decade later, the process of resettlement, reconstruction, and reconciliation is incomplete. The postwar period has witnessed a continuation of war by other means and generated new conflicts, encapsulated by the rise of Bodu Bala Sena, a Buddhist nationalist group, and the Easter bombings in April 2019.7 Effects of war are perceptible in the North, South, and journeys between them. During the war, the 250-mile journey by road between Colombo and Jaffna could take as long as three days because of checkpoints and curfews, the artist T. Shanaathanan recalled at a conference in Colombo in 2013. (My bus journey on the A9 highway took about six hours in 2018 with stops. Thiranagama recalls a thirteen-hour journey [End Page 504] on that road in 2010.8) On those journeys, Shanaathanan was stopped and questioned about his drawings by security forces who believed them to be maps that could be used as weapons against the state.9 Maps were coveted...