This divided island: stories from the Sri Lankan war

by Samanth Subramanian

SHORTLISTED FOR THE SAMUEL JOHNSON PRIZE 2015 In the summer of 2009, the leader of the dreaded Tamil Tiger guerrillas was killed, bringing to a bloody end the stubborn and complicated civil war in Sri Lanka. For nearly thirty years, the war's fingers had reached into the bustle of Colombo, the Buddhist monasteries scattered across the island, the soft hills of central Sri Lanka, the curves of the eastern coast near Batticaloa and Trincomalee, and the stark, hot north. With its genius for brutality, the war left few places, and fewer people, untouched. What happens to the texture of life in a country that endures such bitter conflict? What happens to the country's soul? Samanth Subramanian gives us an extraordinary account of the Sri Lankan war and the lives it changed. Taking us to the ghosts of summers past, and to other battles from other times, he draws out the story of Sri Lanka today - an exhausted, disturbed society, still hot from the embers of the war. Through travels and conversations, he examines how people reconcile themselves to violence, how religion and state conspire, how the powerful become cruel, and how victory can be put to the task of reshaping memory and burying histories. This Divided Island is a harrowing and humane investigation of a country still inflamed.

Genres: Nonfiction, History, War, Asia, Politics, India, Travel

320 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2013

About the author

Samanth Subramanian is the India correspondent for The National and the author of two books of reportage, "Following Fish: Travels Around the Indian Coast" and "This Divided Island: Stories from the Sri Lankan War." His writing has appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times, Granta, the Guardian, the Wall Street Journal, Newsweek, Intelligent Life, Aeon, Mint, Travel + Leisure, and Caravan, among other publications. His longer reported articles occupy the confluence of politics, culture and history, examining the impact of these forces upon life and society; his shorter pieces include op-eds, cultural criticism, and book reviews.

He also co-hosts The Intersection, a fortnightly science and culture podcast from Audiomatic.

"This Divided Island" won the 2015 Crossword Prize for Non Fiction and was shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Non Fiction Prize the same year. "Following Fish" won the Shakti Bhatt First Book Prize in 2010 and was shortlisted for the Andre Simon Award in 2013.

Samanth Subramanian grew up in Madras, and he lives and works in New Delhi.

Reviews

[Sairam Krishnan · Rating 5 out of 5]

In one of last year’s issues of the Indian political-literary magazine The Caravan, there was an Anjum Hasan essay on contemporary Sri Lankan fiction. It singled out, among others, Nayomi Munaweera’s Island of a Thousand Mirrors and Snehan Karunatilaka’s Chinaman; these two novels that could tell you a thing or two about Sri Lanka, she wrote, a land that seemed to still hold on to mystery & forgotten stories. I read Munaweera’s powerful, disturbing book on a flight to Delhi, and bought a bright yellow hardcover of Karunatilaka’s cricket novel at a Landmark sale in Madras.

But I still hadn’t read the Sri Lanka book I wanted to read. Growing up in Pondicherry, I always knew the facts about the war; discussions about the Sri Lankan civil war were always present in my small literary town. But being a Tamil in his native land had its own biases - all the stories we heard were full to the brim with stereotypes and defined contrasts. The Tamil was the brave freedom fighter, the Sinhala Army and the government were the oppressors. They were killing our people for speaking our language, why was the Government of India not doing anything?

I seethed in that anger. The LTTE’s pouncing tiger became the symbol of the Tamil struggle. Looking back, all this seems understandable. In the town of Mahakavi Subramaniya Bharathi, in which my earliest memories are tagging along with my father to the Kamban Vizha to listen to raucous scholars debating technicalities of the centuries old text in chaste Tamil, there could be only one sentiment.

It took years for me to be even able to appreciate superficially the complex history and present of the conflict. And by this time, the war was over; the LTTE had been routed and I was grown up, better equipped to acknowledge and understand the scale of tragedy a movement had unleashed. I read everything I could about the war and its aftermath; I tried to put all of it in perspective. I never could. It was that kind of war. Not that I wasn’t interested in the Sinhalese psyche after their victory, but I really wanted to know how it felt to be a vanquished people in their own land: They were my people, after all. I waited for stories from this fractured landscape to emerge.

This Divided Island will be the first book which tells this story, honestly and without sentiment. Samanth Subramanian is Tamil, but he refuses to take sides in narrating an oral history of the torn country, the war, and the lost people it left in its wake. In his hands, Lanka melts like ice cream in the subcontinental heat - a slow unfolding that means that the stories, laden with meaning and nostalgia, take their time to come to you. Samanth writes of a Colombo whose landmarks are memories of terrorist attacks, a Jaffna which resembles a bygone Madras and a paranoid Sri Lankan government terrified at mere rumours of a Tiger resurgence.

It is a sad book. The Tigers maintained their hegemony by force, and This Divided Island juxtaposes that with the human rights crimes of the Sri Lankan Army, making sure that we know that there was no good vs evil simplicity in this fight; there was no side that the thinking person could take. This was the true tragedy of the war, that both sides had let go of the ideals they started to fight for in the first place. Whoever won, there could be no victory in this war. Both sides had lost years ago.

For me, the most poignant passage in the book is when an exiled Tiger learns of his estranged leader’s death on TV, and in the strange night of a foreign land, howls the darkness away, drunk on the pain of his fallen cause.
This isn’t the only powerful passage in the book though, there are several others, and it is a tribute to the writer’s art that not one of them feels contrived or drawn out.

Samanth Subramaniam has written the Sri Lanka book I wanted to read, and when I travel to the island myself or think again about the land to the south, I shall reach for it again. You should too.

[Vipassana · Rating 5 out of 5]

Nobody knew at that time whether it was the army or the Tigers who did it. There was utter panic

The quote refers to a gruesome Kattankudy mosque massacre, where over a hundred boys and men were rounded and killed by the LTTE in two mosques. It might as well refer to the entire situation in Sri Lanka. The Sri Lankans felt the onslaught civil war from all directions. None of the involved parties truly cared about the people, though they deluded themselves into believing that they did.

Samanth Subramanian wades through a dizzying amount of violence, chaos and bloodshed not as an objective chronicler of events, but a man trying to wrap his head around the causes of the years of suffering that the Sri Lankan people had to endure.

The book is divided into four chapters - The Terror, The North, The Faith and Endgames in order to clump together the different perspectives of the war.

The Terror focuses on the oppression and violence meted out by both the Sri Lankan government and the LTTE. Fear is a strange thing, it usually arises out of something rotten and gives birth to something even more putrid. Nothing good ever came out of fear. Through interviews with ex-LTTE members, Samanth establishes that the horrors the Tamil people faced created this fear and the LTTE arose as fear's sickly child.

Jaffna, the Tamil dominated region in the North of Sri Lanka, was heavily contested during the civil war. The land ravaged for over two decades. Jaffna is apprehensive about living in the present. War and instability infected the DNA of the city so severely that it doesn’t seem prudent for the people to imagine justice or peace.

Despite these horrors, there are people who long for the LTTE controlled Jaffna, simply because they felt safe then. One could leave thee doors and windows of their homes open and sleep in peace. Though this was probably true only for the Jaffna Tamils, the other communities there suffered from the tyranny of the LTTE. After a few rosy years, the Tamils suffered too. How could any Tamil sympathise with the LTTE? The suffered from the despotic ways of Prabhakaran. In The Faith I found my answer.

As I read through the chapter, I remembered some lines from the Dhammapada :

Those who recite many scriptures but fail to practice their teachings are like a cowherd counting another's cows.

I couldn’t find a better way to describe the political monks of Sri Lanka. With nothing much to say for themselves, they are forever analysing the Mahavamsa, a chronicle of Sri Lankan Buddhism, to justify their own malicious deeds. They are ever quoting the Buddha and twisting his words, one monk going as far as to claim the Buddha did not condemn killing. Condemning something was too extreme for the Buddha.

To this day, these problems persist. The effects of three decades of barbarity don't get annihilated by the end of a war. Especially not the way this war ended, with the LTTE using the refugees as human shields, and the army killing civilians in the no fire zone. The LTTE chief, Prabhakaran’s childhood home was razed to the ground in case it's presence inspired any future uprisings. Descriptions at sites of historical importance read in Sinhalese and maybe English, but not Tamil. The Bodu Bala Sena continues to threaten Sri Lankan muslims, with demands as absurd as abolishing the halal certifying system. All the end of the war has achieved so far is the publication of a few accounts such as this one.

In a struggle without a true hero, a decent person, to lead the people, peace will always a far away dream.

--
February 13, 2015

[Trudie · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5

This is going to be a hard book to get out of my mind. But if you read nothing more of this review, know this - this book is an excellent piece of investigative journalism and I would happily press it into your hands regardless of your level of interest in the Sri Lankan civil war. It is about humanity and the things we are capable of doing to each other and how we justify some of those things to ourselves.

Samanth Subramanian spent a year in Sri Lanka gathering together an oral history of the decades of civil war. The story unfurls not in a chronological way but more organically as Samanth systematically chases down these stories, taking him and the reader all over Sri Lanka and to the Sri Lankan diaspora living in Canada, India and the UK. I was impressed by his patience in earning the trust of his interviewees which including right-wing monks, politicians, ex-Tamil tigers and their wives, survivors of the most appalling atrocities inflicted by both sides and those still trying to put their lives back together years after the conflict officially ended.

This was how Sri Lanka sucked me in deeper and deeper : by discussing itself incessantly.... the bigger, clearer picture dangled just out of reach, around the corner of another conversation or two. ... The war loomed too close to hand and too enormous for my senses to grasp it properly, like a wall that spread away to infinity in every direction. But in conversations I heard stories of individuals - fantastic or melancholic or even happy stories, stories that had human proportions, and that could be multiplied in my head to gain a larger truth.

In parts this book reads almost like a travel narrative as the author writes so convincingly of the feel of Sri Lanka, the heat and humidity, the Palmyra trees, auto rickshaws and grand picturesque stretches of golden beach, but also of the complex ethnic tensions that constantly threaten to break through the surface in ugly and violent ways.

I would think you might be hard pressed to find a better book about the human experiences of the Sri Lankan Civil War. Even though this book deals with a conflict officially ended in 2009, it still feels like it has something to say in general about the moral justifications, and steady erosion of principles on both sides of a conflict.

I decided to withhold my 5 star rating only for the simple reason that it all became a little too much to handle in some places, a kind of piling on monstrous goings-on with a sense of hopelessness lingering in my mind afterwards.

However, I still recommend you find this book and check it out ;)

[P. · Rating 4 out of 5]

Kannathil Muthamittaal was on TV last week, a rare Tamil movie that has aged graciously. It prompted me to pick up Ummath, a Sri Lankan Tamil novel by Sharmila Seyyid that is about Tamil women in post-war Sri Lanka. Most Tamil coverage of the Eelam war from India has centered around men; it also emerged from a place of unquestioned loyalty to the Tigers and no alternate views were aired.

Ummath vapourized the aura of holiness surrounding the image of the Tigers and revealed their flaws and crimes. The massacre of Muslims, forced recruitment of children and teenagers, murder of ex-members, using vulnerable people as a shield against the military - I wasn't aware of any of these facts about the Tigers before reading Ummath. By recording the stories of women from a wide array of backgrounds - from Muslim women to ex-Tigers to war widows and women handicapped by war, it highlighted the bleak nature of the world these women were pushed to, where even the basic needs of food, shelter and clothing weren't guaranteed. On top of nursing the wounds inflicted by war, rural Muslim women had to face religious extremists and sheer misogyny while trying to scrape a livelihood. It is one of the most devastating novels I've read so far, and it is exceptionally haunting because the situations portrayed in the novel are not changing anytime soon.

My interest in this subject remained unabated even after completing Ummath, so I picked up This Divided Island because I wanted a nonfictional account of the war and its aftermath. Samanth, in his brilliant prose, lays out the cause, course and consequences of the war. The enormous tragedy and the human cost of war is conveyed with empathy through haunting anecdotes and insightful analysis with a clear head, without succumbing to sentimentality or bias.

This Divided Island gives a complete history (political and people's) of the racial tensions in Sri Lanka and the civil war and ethnic cleansings it led to. It also provides a crucial account of the aftermath of war - material, political and cultural oppression that Tamils are being subject to. The war claimed thousands of Tamil lives, civilian and Tigers, and caused severe physical injuries to thousands more. Surviving Tamils in Sri Lanka, in addition to coping with the physical and emotional trauma left behind by decades of war, have to deal with missing friends and family who may never be accounted for, blatant discrimination by the government that is engaged in the destruction of Tamil monuments all over the country, crippling poverty and no external aid whatsoever.

In his introduction, Samanth writes:

"I went to Sri Lanka to discover what became of life before, during, and after the decades of war, and to find out what the conflict had done to the country's soul."

That sums up the book pretty well. It does not provide a linear narrative of war. There is no detailed statistics, no tabulated toll where we learn X no. of Tamils died, Y no. of Sinhalese civilians died or Z no. of soldiers died. It's a more unstructured history and it evolves with his journies. He travels to different parts of Sri Lanka to visit places of wartime significance or to meet people affected by the war, and the history is non-linearly pieced together.

The book begins with Samanth landing in Sri Lanka 2 years after the war. He finds a nation in the grip of perpetual wariness and petty celebrations by the majoritarian forces. The right-wing government has won the war and they are eager to assert their victory by erasing Tamil from signboards and official announcements, demolishing Hindu monuments and by "disappearing" anyone who dares to raise their voice against its criminal acts. Democracy has become a mere concept and individual freedom is granted according to the whims of the state.

"All Sri Lanka was wary; this was a country perpetually steeling itself for bad news. The war had made it this way: the agonizing longevity of the fighting; the Tigers' sneaky guerilla tactics; the manner in which the army had finished the war, rampaging through Tigers and Tamil civilians without distinction; the government's excesses in the two years since its victory. In such an inflamed atmosphere, rumor prompted quick violence and tragic consequences."

"Sri Lanka was a country pretending that it had been suddenly scrubbed clean of violence. But it wasn't, of course. By some fundamental law governing the conservation of violence, it was now erupting outside the battlefield, in strange and unpredictable ways."

The notion of sustained war in a Buddhist nation is frankly ridiculous to me, and the Sri Lankan war just goes to prove that no religion, no matter how peaceful, is capable of containing the human tendency for violence and majoritarianism.

"The Sinhalese like to think of their Buddhism as muscular. Their faith had seeded and nourished itself in Sri Lanka, and it had proved hardly enough to thrive here, even as it crumbled under the weight of Hinduism in India, the land of its birth… Sinhalese Buddhism is a coiled and wary creature, its reflex always to be aggressive in defence. Since 2006, when the Sri Lankan government had started winning the war, and after its victory in 2009, this ready Buddhist aggression had fused with military triumphalism."

The civil unrest between Tamils and Sinhalese originated in the 50s when the government passed the Sinhala Only Act making it the sole official language. Tamils were historically viewed as outsiders by the Sinhalese majority and open discrimination by the government added fuel to the fire. The succeeding events are quickly summarised in the timeline at the beginning of the book. Samanth traces the origins of this unrest as far back as the late 19th century. He even points out the anti-Tamil sentiment in Sri Lanka's equivalent of Mahabharata, an ancient Buddhist work.

"The schisms between the country's various ethnicities started to dilate - coaxed in no modest measure by the British, who had already divided and ruled India with such efficiency. Novel ways were discovered to emphasize differences and even to define identity, to dice finer and finer the peoples contained within this small island."

After the independence of Sri Lanka in 1948, the Sinhalese resentment of Tamils arose due to the fact that a large number of Tamils occupied positions at the universities and civil services due to their English education, and this intolerance gradually escalated through riots and open discrimination by the government into a full blown civil war in the 80s. There were many different Tamil fractions intent on leading the war, but LTTE remained as the ultimate proponent of war, partly due to its ferocity in the cause and partly because it decimated all the other rival Tamil groups.

The Tigers, usually glorified in the Tamil mainstream media, come out as very ruthless, unethical and unprincipled in Samanth's neutral account. Their personal agendas and thirst for violence seem to frequently eclipse their pure ideological motivation, and based on some of their actions, they come across as every bit as power-hungry and intolerant as their Sinhalese oppressors themselves. They also seem eager to preserve the hierarchies of caste and this does not sit in ideological harmony with their dream of an ideal Tamil state where everyone is treated as an equal. LTTE is also criticized for forced parting of families, kidnapping of children and teenagers to populate its army and using civilians as a shield against the military.

"He (Prabhakaran) killed Tigers who disagreed with him, and he ordered killed Tamils who resisted him, Sinhalese civilians and politicians. No one was off limits: not pacifists, not women or children, not the weak."

The military atrocities, public lynchings and race riots leading to the war are chronicled in great detail. The crimes committed against the Tamil public, both by the Sri Lankan military and the LTTE are given equal coverage. The narrative is peppered with several quirky anecdotes about the course of war.

Minor gripes: The military using chemical warfare against civilians in the late stage of the war wasn't given enough attention. I sometimes wished it were more linear and had some pictures. The map present at the beginning could have been more detailed.

A very well-written, affecting account of the Sri Lankan war, approached from all sides with nuance. A must-read if you are interested in the aftermath of war. This book is not to be taken as the definitive history on the subject as it doesn't seem complete, but it is very credible in whatever it offers.

[Bindu Manoj · Rating 4 out of 5]

The abbreviation IPKF, loud speakers blaring some mumbo jumbo and the name Rajiv Gandhi resonating in our ears in the early morning hours from a hostel room, the disbelief, shock and painful pictures that followed and years later, the portly figure of Velupillai Prabhakaran with the marks of a gun shot on his forehead, the war in Sri Lanka could very well have been summarized in these fleeting pictures. Strangely, it was the names of the places that had stuck on – Jaffna, Killinochi, Vavunia, Mannar, Mullativu, Batticaloa – were as familiar as a Fort Kochi, Ambalappuzha or Changanacherry. The newspaper statistics were something to be read like the daily weather report. Until I read this book.

For most of the world around, the war in Sri Lanka ceased to exist when Prabhakaran was shot dead. The silence that followed was eerie when you think of it in retrospect. Samanth Subramanian has tried to break through this darkness. Travelling cautiously and talking in hushed tones to people, who many a time sounds like ghosts stuck in a time warp, he has tried to bring out stories of a race who was betrayed by a country they thought was theirs as well as by those who was supposed to protect them.

Reading mostly one sided stories from a Tamil perspective, the LTTE and Prabhakaran were almost heroic figures of my youth. And with a name that is so obviously Tamil, I am guilty of expecting a somewhat biased story from a Subramanian, told from a parochial perspective. And as happens with unfounded prejudices, I was proved wrong, and for once am glad about it. Setting a context to the origins of the war, going back as far as 2500 years or more, the question at the root is what was the war all about? If it was about ethnicity, history proves the very foundation of the war to be absurd.

“Nobody knows with certainty whether the Sinhalese were here before the Tamils. Both communities have lived on the island for over twenty centuries, and they have spent that time not only feuding but also intermarrying. Legend informs us that, 2500 years ago, even the progenitor of the Sinhalese race imported a Tamil princess to be his wife.”

As you read on, you understand the origins of LTTE. A majority race trying to suppress the minority, forcing a ‘national’ langauge, reservations for ‘natives’, a systematic and focussed propaganda network, side lining a community that seem to have thrived and as always, the hunger for ultimate power. Simultaneously reading Ramachandra Guha’s ‘India after Gandhi’ and following the chronology, the uncanny similarities were scary in some places. But then, when war is told from the angle of those who are affected the most, it is the same wherever in the world the war might be.

Subramanian’s success is the impartial way in which he writes , irrespective of whether it is about Prabhakaran or Rajapakse. Both of them are intoxicated by the power they wield. Where the reader is hooked is in the human elements. The author narrates stories instead of reporting. Whether it is the wife of an abducted journalist, a reformed terrorist in London or the innumerable ordinary men and women whom he meets, it is they that show us the travails of a war that did no one any good. The gradual loss of faith of the Tamil population is poignantly brought out in these words,

“It was a scene where Tamils were beating up Tamils and sending them to their certain deaths. It shouldn’t have been like that. If this was really our cause, we should have wanted to go voluntarily. But we didn’t.” This was the war the Tigers lost first, the war for the unconditional affections of the island’s Tamils and for the uncontested right to fight on their behalf.

Predominantly a country of Buddhists, one would think that the monks could have played an active role in bringing peace to this ravaged land. That notion is dispelled as you read of monks who turn politicians and who are equally bad or even worse than the others. Yes, they have their own theories too, on the why. As the author says,

“Shrink the humanity of your enemy, and the fighting must see easier, more just, less complicated. Warfare consists of several psychological tricks, not least the ones you play upon yourself.”

The psyche of paranoia is unbelievable and it shows the extent to which a forest brigand could terrorize a nation. The erstwhile home of Prabhakaran is razed to the ground, even the sand was dredged and dumped in some unknown location lest people start deifying the land blessed by his feet. The systematic destruction of anything that is even remotely Tamilian can only be described as a genocide. It is more about destroying something you hate than establishing what you believe in.

What leaves you with more than a heavy heart are the families of those that were abducted in front of their loved ones and about whom there are only rumours. A group of people who live in eternal hope, refusing to let go. For, many of the camps were in undisclosed locations with no access for even organizations like the Red Cross and very few people have come out from there to tell any stories. There is a feeling of sheer despondency as he leaves you with these words,

“In the wretchedness stakes of post-war Sri Lanka, there was always somebody worse off. Even hitting rock bottom was difficult because it was so thickly carpeted by the dead.”

Verdict – A must read, for anyone even remotely interested in human stories.

More reviews at http://wanderlustathome.wordpress.com/

[Tamizhmarai · Rating 5 out of 5]

Growing up in Tamil Nadu, headlines about the LTTE and the civil war in Sri Lanka were a constant in the newspapers. I understood very little of the politics behind it, but I remember being utterly fascinated by the occasionally regal but often Sangam-era sounding names of the people involved in the war. One that I recall even today is "Anton Balasingham Stanislaus", the chief negotiator for the Tigers - sounding like a cross between an Austrian prince and a Pandya king. Sadly, this level of superficiality was the extent of my engagement with the topic.

This book was my first attempt at more seriously trying to understand what went on in Sri Lanka. It answers all the fundamental questions one might have -- how did the war start? when did it start? how did it end? -- but the book's chief strength is not its re-telling of facts, but the profoundly humane and deeply empathetic way in which Samanth covers the gruesome history of modern Sri Lanka.

He achieves this by placing the people affected by the war at the forefront, relegating events and dates to the background. Yes, there was a war. But, as is often easy to forget, war happens to people, to real individuals leading full, complex lives, with friends, families, children and parents. And it is the stories of these individuals that Samanth has managed to record and bring out emphatically in this moving book. There is the man who joined the Tigers in his youth, inspired by their radical ideology only to be disillusioned with the cause decades later; there are the Tamils who served in the Sri Lankan army, hopelessly conflicted between serving their country and serving their people; the civilians, caught in the crossfire between a violent army and an oppressive rebel force that despite being on their side was equally heartless that it was becoming increasingly hard for them to tell what difference it made to their lives who won; the women today doggedly pursuing the Sri Lankan government for the whereabouts of their missing husbands who surrendered in the war; the Buddhists, somehow squaring their xenophobia and militant conservativism with the pacific tenets of their religion. And many, many others. Perhaps this is the only way in which the enormity of events such as wars can be understood: not in the abstract clash of ideologies or notions of injustice, but in the concrete lived suffering of individuals.

George Orwell once observed that good writing is like a windowpane. Samanth's writing is such. His simple, transparent prose forces the reader to engage with the truth, or at least the version of truth as told here, bracing as it might be, making it impossible to look away from the tragedy. A passage in the book that echoed Schindlerian helplessness was particularly moving. The people Samanth speaks to and their stories come alive, while he himself largely disappears from the book. There are many places where another writer would have been tempted to butt in and offer their analysis of what occurred, but Samanth mostly keeps his political opinions to himself. This makes the few instances where he makes an observation all the more striking and memorable. At one point, he notes: “It provided a useful life lesson: anybody who asked you to trust them despite minor infractions was not to be trusted at all.” Something Sri Lanka's neighbour would have done well to heed. He also uncovers little details which enliven the narrative, such as the Tamils' habit of referring to the civil war in daily conversation as "prachanai", unmistakably echoing The Troubles in Ireland. Is this studied understatement a universal coping mechanism?

[Santhosh · Rating 5 out of 5]

"In the wretchedness stakes of post-war Sri Lanka, there was always somebody worse off. Even hitting rock bottom was difficult because it was so thickly carpeted by the dead."



1986: I've just started walking, and as I stumble-crawl my way around, I hear my aunt listening to Tamil songs on Ceylon radio - the only one to play Tamil film music back then. 1990: I understand that some of my kindergarten classmates are originally from Sri Lanka, when their parents emigrated after the July 1983 eruption of violence; ours is the batch of 1983-84 borns and parents have come here in search of safety and belonging for their children. 1991: I hear about Rajiv Gandhi's assassination on the radio - might have even been Ceylon radio. 1994: I understand Ramayana and the land of Ravanan. 2000: In all those fantasy cricket teams, Murali is added by default; like he was on loan or something and given a choice he'd play for India. 2002: I watch, with all my senses mesmerized, the hauntingly beautiful Kannathil Muthamittal. 2002: Vaiko is arrested on POTA and this hits closer home. 2005: there's a Lankan girl in class who's the stuff of our college fantasies. 2009: I meet a lot of Sri Lankans as I backpack across Europe. 2011: Newsflashes of Tamil fishermen being shot by the Sri Lankan army. 2013: I idly wonder why there can't be a land bridge connecting Dhanushkodi and Sri Lanka, which would be fantastic for tourism and industry. 2014: I start to understand a little about Sri Lanka, especially the way India's foreign policy has tampered and meddled with Sri Lanka, almost like a desi version of what USA and their CIA do in all those movies.

I come from Tamil Nadu and for most of our generation there has always been an unexplainable connection with Ceylon, something but not quite like separated brethren living in an almost-extension of India. They look like us, they speak like us, they are among us.

The Sri Lankan civil war is a story of the intertwining of politics and religion; of the majority fearing the minorities and deciding that discrimination was the way to redress imagined fears; of the understandable causes that drove the various militant groups to form to protect a millennia-old ethnicity; of a leader and a people who started a rightful fight but lost sight of what they actually wanted; of the Sinhalese starting with fears that their culture and language might be lost, but ending with wanting to wipe out everything that is not them; of escalating violence and the breakdown of communication as each side reacted to the latest show of strength from the other rather than taking that one backward step; of a government sponsored pogrom that went unchecked in the 21st century; and of being left with just the hauntingly beautiful names: Kilinochchi, the Vanni, Vavuniya, Jaffna...

Some of the impact hits you on some of the perspectives, such as the fears of a Tamil dominion across South East Asia, from South India via Sri Lanka to Malaysia. Or the suffering trauma of the sound of airplanes. Or the mosque that refuses to erase the bullet holes from a Tiger attack. Or how the war was fanned with "Sinhala is Buddhism, Buddhism is Sinhalas"! Or how, towards the end of the war, the LTTE used Tamil refugees as human shields and the army killed civilians in no-fire zones. Or how Buddhist monks perversely condone, even encourage, a call to arms in order to 'protect' Buddhism; almost a right-wing political system, but with Buddhism as the base, which is a discord I just can't seem to shake. Or how the current government is building a new country by destroying everything that stands for a part of the country's history; of making statements by erecting monstrous monasteries right next to centuries-old temples. Or the systematic reprogramming of a country's ethos, culture and history.

Beyond the raw statistics of war, it's a poignant story of all those lives unlived, violently altered, displaced. Samanth is brilliant in presenting us a complete, unbiased picture as he painstakingly sifts through human emotions and memories. The writing is so vivid and evocative that I could almost reach out and wrap myself in the world that Samanth is rendering. He treads carefully, giving us the voices without the faces. He travels the country, and sometimes the world, in search of those heart-wrenching voices that cling onto hope, seethe in anguish, cry in anger, and always, always trail off in despairing wistfulness at what was and what could have been.

This is the distinctive spoor of war traced through hundreds of personal stories.

[Murtaza · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a travelogue of postwar Sri Lanka that could perhaps serve as a political introduction to the country as well. Subramanian traveled the country in the years after the war ended and discovered that there is no such thing as clean division between war and postwar, something that I've witnessed in the Balkans as well. This book is laden with accounts of horrible crimes committed by the Tigers and the central government. This is not a defense of the Tigers or their tactics but I found that his depiction was so negative one couldn't even understand why anyone would join or support them. I suspect there must be a bit more to this story. The book is well-written and has some lines that I had to pause and read again and again. But there is no central tension driving it forward. This is an important absence. It's one thing after another and then it just ends. It's good nonetheless, and probably worth reading for those interested in the region.

[Sindhu · Rating 5 out of 5]

It is a great book for starters, like me who want to educate ourselves on this issue. It did not pick any sides. It talks about why an organization like LTTE was inevitable but did not romanticize their actions. It shows how the democratic government discriminates against a community for speaking a different language and following another religion and shares Jaffna, Tamil Eelam's, poor economic state, which was under the control of Tigers. This book might leave you with more questions and a heavy heart, but if you think it's essential to know the Tamil Eelam people to support or question their plea, this will not disappoint you.

[Stephen Yoder · Rating 5 out of 5]

An absolutely devastating book. It is well-written, impartial, and delivers sizable criticisms of the Tamil Tigers as well as the Sinhalese government & military. Reading this book has made me realize that I am not only insulated from so much evil, but that I also avoid, at times, recognizing the depth of evil that is possible in the human experience. I also feel quite stupid for several reasons (none of which are the result of this book talking over my head, mind you). In the past 20 years whenever I'd meet someone from Sri Lanka, or someone who identified as Tamil, I made references to the Tamil Tigers. Oh my science, these were probably people lucky to emigrate away from the twin murderous regimes of the LTTE as well as the Sinhalese government, military, and security forces. Beyond that, this book lays waste to the Western idealized view of Buddhism as the best religion, or as some kind of peaceful respite from the Abrahamic faiths. Any religion can turn into a nasty tool of oppression, it seems. And how have we in the West been so ignorant of this incredible loss of civilian life? I am unsettled, and that is what good writing is meant to do. Mr Subramanian has written something powerful here. I hope Sri Lanka can find a path to lasting peace. I received an ARC in exchange for this review. I would recommend buying this book if you are in any way a minority in your nation-state, or if you care about the value of human life.

[Hannah Clifton · Rating 2 out of 5]

Fascinating subject and personal stories but often too wordy and hard going.

[Gayathri · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have read other books (admittedly fewer in number) that speak about the subjugation and persecution of minorities throughout history and they are, without a doubt, heartwrenching. This one is no less excruciating either. However, as much as I try to reason with myself that persecution is persecution, this one affects me a little more than usual because I too am a Tamil person, but from India. A part of me goes, "We're all human beings ultimately," but I guess one could never completely dissociate themselves from that feeling of community/camaraderie you share with people relatively closer to you in whatever form. This is probably not a very politically-correct opinion, but I too am scrambling with these contradictory viewpoints.

Coming back to the book itself, this is an incredibly well-written collection of stories from the Sri Lankan war. The author tries to provide an overview of the history of this communal tension through stories of the people affected by the war. He stays as neutral as possible, highlighting the ruthlessness of both the Sri Lankan government and the LTTE. I was 14-15 years old when the war finally ended and whatever I knew about the war was through local news channels and media in India. The Tamil movie industry/media portrayed a romanticized version of the LTTE and their struggles and I bought into it naively back then. I did not know the extent of their ruthlessness until this book. I was genuinely shocked to read some of the accounts narrated in this book.

From learning about the beginning of the discriminatory attitude of the Sri Lankan government toward the Tamil people fresh off their independence (the Divide-and-Rule policy of the British colonizers definitely played a substantial role in the communal tensions that would persist decades after), the lead up to the formation of rebel factions and their ideologies, oppression of the common folk stuck between a rock and a hard place, the barbaric killings by both the government and the LTTE, the eventual end of the war, to post-war Sri Lanka, this book has been extremely revelatory to me. This is a very sad book, but a necessary one nonetheless.

[Manish · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Lankan civil war is a fairly well-documented one. Numerous novels and works of non-fiction have dealt with it and brought out multiple nuances. In India too, with the war having claimed one of our Prime Ministers too, the growth of the LTTE has also been a story that was always too important to be side-lined. Due to these reasons, I was curious to see what Samanth had to offer in this work and also a bit reluctant to again be subjected to the oft-repeated aspects of the war. This was specially so since I read Anuk Arudpragasam's “The Story of a Brief Marriage” just a few months back and found it too depressing.

However, “This Divided Island” is an important contribution to the vast literature documenting the impact of the numbing war on the Island. The book focussed on some aspects that were hitherto unknown to me – the Buddhist-Sinhalese Right wingers, the historical roots of the friction, the brutality of the Tigers towards the Muslims (ethnic cleansing is what was carried out) and of course the stories of the Tamil diaspora spread across Europe and Canada.

I’ve always wanted to visit Lanka - not as a tourist but to re-live my fragmented memories of growing up with the war that raged through my childhood and early adulthood. This book has given me further perspective to enjoy that trip whenever it’s going to happen!

Postscript: In 2007, when I spent two month in a coastal village in Tamil Nadu’s Nagapattinam, the most imaginative stories of the villagers were about the ‘smuggling’ of arms and gold that took place from the beach into Lanka which was just a few hours away by boat. For me, those two months were the closest I came to being ‘associated’ with that war.

[Emilie Greenhalgh · Rating 2 out of 5]

While parts of this book were compelling, it felt mostly like a travel book that took place fairly recently after the end of the war. Almost an entire chapter dedicated to old cars in Jaffna, hiring a motorcycle to slowly drive past the empty lot where the Tigers’ leader grew up.... These elements of the author’s research process and personal time hanging out in Sri Lanka distracted away from the complicated history and interesting actors he found to interview.

[Jo · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is just the type of non-fiction that appeals to me, written in a narrative style with multiple interviews representing people from all sides of the Sri Lankan civil war and a balance maintained so that it is clear people suffered regardless of who won or who committed the worst atrocities. Samanth Subramanian manages to create a network of people around the island who introduce him to more so that there is a sense of a continual journey as he attempts to find out as much information – ‘truth’ is a difficult term - about the conflict and the experiences of those who were in the middle of it.

We hear from ex Tamil Tiger soldiers, Muslims whose temples are being razed to the ground even after the war has ended, parents who had children taken by the Tigers, people who have missing family members and about whom there is still no information, a Buddhist who describes a politicized and militarized Buddhism and many more. At the same time Samanth gives us background to the conflict, what triggered the war, how it progressed over the years and how the country stood when he wrote the book.

He questions what it was that allowed people to square their conscience with Tamil murder and the kidnap of civilians and writes about their leader Prabhakaran and how he became a believer of his own hype. President Rajapaksa and his government aren’t portrayed in a better light and it added an extra layer to this reading experience to read of the current turmoil in Sri Lanka and his resignation.

There are multiple heartbreaking scenes such as an uncle describing the death of his nephews in a Mosque massacre and the crowd of people that emerges when they hear that Samanth and his friend are attempting to trace lost relatives. This would never have been a book with levity but in describing the geography and landscape of the country, the long bus journeys he took and giving a face and voice to the people who lived through these horrible events, he creates a picture of a place and people who are still dealing with the consequences of a war that took up thirty years of the country’s life and whose repercussions are still very much a part of it.

[Elisabeth Hoole · Rating 5 out of 5]

depressing as fuck but the stories are so important and so well written

[Tanuj Solanki · Rating 5 out of 5]

An anecdotal feel is mainatained throughout. Subramanian takes a lot of space describing how he reached (like, physically reached) the people who told him their stories. There is a travel book enmeshed in this humane, journalistic account, and we are all the happier discovering it.

While *receiving* stories, Subramanian is just that, the receptacle. Usually, his own emotions remain hidden, and only rarely does he make a statement that is not already buttressed by a fact or an anecdote. This, I claim, is not an attempt at objectivity, but merely an issue of style. Constructs like "I couldn't fully believe that, but I said nothing" abound.

[Ranjeev Dubey · Rating 3 out of 5]

Anyone who can write a book like "Following Fish" deserves to be read no matter what he writes. As it turns out, Subramanian has drawn a sensitive and insightful portrait of the ethnic fault lines that ripped this island paradise apart. There is more understanding of the insurgency in Sri Lanka in these 300 pages than there is in a thousand articles and news reports. As usual Subramanian's writing style is simple, engaging, evocative yet very insightful.

Highly recommended.

[Hari B · Rating 5 out of 5]

An extremely powerful and well written account of an outsider's journey through post war Sri Lanka - excels in both form and substance.

This line from the very end will stay with me for sometime - 'In the wretchedness stakes of post-war Sri Lanka, there was always somebody worse off. Even hitting rock bottom was difficult because it was so thickly carpeted by the dead.'

[Mickey · Rating 2 out of 5]

Stuck on page 229. I couldn’t with this book. It feels disrespectful to give this review given the horrors people experienced during the war. But reading this felt like a chore. I didn’t expect it to feel enjoyable, it’s not that... I just couldn’t find a flow or get into any sort of rhythm while reading it. I’ve bookmarked the page, and hope to come back someday.

[Philippe · Rating 1 out of 5]

Not a history of the Sri Lankan civil war (no index or reference notes), more a traveller's tale of the affected area and people the author (a Tamil Indian) meets. I thought he tries too hard to be erudite (clanging metaphors and adjectives) in a way that VS Naipaul so successfully avoided

[Sindhu Anna Jose · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read! No better day than today to start, the day India voted the fascist party to power for a second time, refusing to read the signs.

[Zack · Rating 2 out of 5]

A meandering slog.

[Archita · Rating 5 out of 5]

“..in December 2009 a victory monument had been installed upon an artificial islet, ..the head and torso of a helmeted soldier, cast in bronze. In his left hand, he clutched a flagpole bearing the Sri Lankan flag. In his right, he held an AK-47 with a dove perched upon it; peace was won with the gun, and Sri Lanka would never let anybody forget it. The dove looked as if it might take flight at any second, its wings unfurled, but the soldier’s grip upon his AK-47 was firm and unyielding.”

Samanth Subramanian provides first hand insights into post-war Sri Lanka, coupled with riveting oral testimonials, almost transposing the angst, fear and emptiness of survivors and victims to the reader through his beautiful and powerful expression. While the book is not a linear history of events of the Sri Lankan civil war, it does surely help in getting the nuances of the conflict, written with utmost ease and unease at the same time.

Highly recommend this one.

[Anamika · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read Reef this year, it had some mild mentions about the War. And I read Blue before that, it had nothing about the War. That's all I knew about Srilanka till a week ago. I blindly supported The Cause, outraged over Rajapakshe's visits, made the obligatory noises over that John Abraham movie and such things because I felt that it was the thing to do. But now I know.

The Terror travels from Colombo to Canada to London with Tigers, ex Tigers, disillusioned Tigers, resigned-to-fate Tigers and non-Tigers telling their tales. Scattered across the world, they still yearn for the life they dreamed of, the life they left behind. And then the book moves to The North, the defeated country. Jaffna, a town stuck in an automobile timewarp, haunted by the ghosts from the Terror. Nameboards scrubbed clean of Tamil. Kandarodai is now Kandurugoda, Hindu temples are overshadowed by Buddhist viharayas and Mahinda Rajapakshe's creepy smile overshadows The Buddha. A mosque that refuses to erase the bullet holes from a Tiger attack, a mosque inscribed with the names of 103 victims of a Tiger attack. A tale of an eight year old boy shot in the mouth by a Tiger.

The Faith broke my faith in Buddhism. I thought Buddhism was a religion of peace. But turns out that it is much like the other Religion of Peace: violent and fanatic. It also takes on the shades of that ideology from Germany when the Sinhalese talk about Aryan supremacy. The Sinhalese are apparently the Aryans who came with Buddhism from North India and the Tamils are the ugly dirty Dravidians who deserve to be wiped out. And it also reveals shades of the current trend of hatred that is taking over India these days with monks dressed in various hues of saffron invoking kings and events from two millenia ago to justify the ethnic cleansing today.

The book ends with the Endgames, where the futility of it all hits you. Villages full of families clinging on to the hope that their loved ones snatched away by the Tigers are still alive somewhere. Wives refusing to let go of their missing husbands, either running from NGO pillar to post for answers or challenging the gods by flaunting the symbols of their marriage with the hope that their dead husbands will return. On one hand, you seethe with anger at the Tigers for grabbing unwilling men and women, boys and girls to fight the War, but on the other hand you also wonder at the selfishness of families refusing to participate in the war , a war that is theirs as much as it was Prabhakaran's.

I was a Tiger sympathiser until I read this book. But I still don't hate them as much as I feel sorry for them. Like all Causes, this one also started off on the right track, for the right reasons. And went horribly, horribly wrong somewhere. A war is not lost when the last bullet hits your leader, it is lost when disillusionment sets in. And that, it seems, happened long before 19th May 2009. In every line of the book there was the undercurrent of the frustration and the helplessness of the cornered Tigers, the frustration that made them lose their minds long before they lost the war.

Samanth Subramaniam writes so beautifully. Like tiny flowers blooming on a battlefield, his metaphors brighten up the depressing storyline. He has traveled the length and breadth of The Divided Island on rickety buses, autorickshaws, motorcycles and on foot to speak to the people whose voices need to be heard; voices of anger, frustration, sadness. Voices of hope and hopelessness. He treads carefully throughout the book, telling the tale without revealing his sources, most of them initials and pseudonyms. Because, though it is 2014, They might still get to them. He doesn't take sides in this book, but at the end, the reader will. And that side will be the side of the civilians. The ones who didn't have a choice.

[Swaroop · Rating 5 out of 5]

I can't imagine it was very easy for someone who grew up in a Tamil family in the 80s and 90s to write a book that for the most part does not express opinions about the Sri Lankan War.

I must confess that I had no idea about Sri Lankan culture or history before reading this book -
I had for the most part assumed that it was very similar to South Indian culture. (Hint: I was very wrong in some ways)

I don't think there was a part of the book that I could honestly say I didn't like. Everything was so beautifully written. There were so many tidbits that you would never get from a book written about the conflict by an outsider. I do feel like a lot of the people mentioned in the book opened up to Samanth because he is a Tamil.

I do wish that he had stuck to the actual names of dishes etc. instead of saying 'rice-lentil cake' etc. But I guess that might put off the western audience.

My only regret is that I didn't read this earlier.

[Radhika Ayalur · Rating 4 out of 5]

A well-crafted amalgam of first-hand accounts and stories from a decades-long conflict, "This Divided Island" traces the origins of the Sri Lankan problem, through epics of the past, colonial shenanigans, religious and ethnic bigotry and the deviousness of contemporary politics. This book stands out as a keenly observant commentary on all things, big or small, about the conflict years as well as post-war Sri Lanka, steering clear of taking sides, even while traversing heart-wrenching stories from both sides of the war.
The narrative is tight, shunning the tedium of chronology, managing to keep in sharp focus the inevitability as well as the hopelessness of it all: that even the final 'victory' has brought no semblance of clarity or closure.
More on: http://mywordwhirlwind.blogspot.in/20...

[Sudarshan Varadhan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read this a while ago. If you want to understand the history of the civil war in Sri Lanka, this is an appropriate day to start. Today's the tenth anniversary of the genocide of Tamils sanctioned by the Sinhala extremist government.

[Nidharshana · Rating 2 out of 5]

*3.5 Stars

[Suhail Khan · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a brilliant piece of journalistic storytelling. I wish more such books depicting atrocities around the world get published. Honest, humble, amazingly well written and touches almost all the tenets of the brutal Sri Lankan civil war that went on for decades. It's a shame that one of the biggest wars in recent history was being fought so close to home yet I didn't know much about it. An essential read.