"Silent Mass Graves and Broken Palmyras: The Untold Stories of Manalaru Vijayan and Rajini Thiranagama"

© 2025 Balananthini Balasubramaniam (Small Drops 21/10/25)

Abstract

This study undertakes a comparative historiographical analysis of two contrasting interventions in Tamil wartime memory: Manalaru Vijayan’s Maunam Pudhaikuzhigal (Mouna Puthakalikalkal, Batticaloa: self-published, 2005) and Rajini Thiranagama’s The Broken Palmyra (Colombo: Sri Lankan Studies Institute, 1987). Whereas Vijayan’s work constitutes sustained, field-based eyewitness documentation that foregrounds the material evidence of violence — including explicit testimony regarding mass graves in the Eastern Province — Thiranagama’s text exemplifies an academically mediated account whose analytic frame attenuates direct survivor voice in favour of theoretical and institutional interpretation. Utilising comparative textual analysis, memory studies literature and a socio-political lens attentive to state power, diasporic dynamics and media ecology, the paper interrogates how modes of production, circulation and reception determine narrative authority. The central argument posits that Maunam Pudhaikuzhigal functions as a grassroots archive of embodied atrocity that has been marginalised by political repression, ideological contestation and structural neglect, while The Broken Palmyra demonstrates how institutional legitimacy can secure international visibility even as it distances itself from the immediacies of lived testimony. The comparative appraisal illuminates the epistemic consequences of mediation for truth-telling in post-conflict contexts and calls for methodological strategies to recover and integrate suppressed eyewitness archives into scholarly and public memory.

1. Introduction

The Sri Lankan civil war bequeathed a plural, often conflicting, archive of narratives — legal, journalistic, academic and vernacular — that contest competing claims about causation, culpability and redress. Within that contested field, two texts stand as emblematic of different epistemic orientations. Manalaru Vijayan’s Maunam Pudhaikuzhigal (2005) is an intrinsically local, field-anchored testament that documents massacres and the presence of mass graves across twelve Eastern Province settlements. Rajini Thiranagama’s The Broken Palmyra (1987), by contrast, is situated within institutional scholarship and shaped by disciplinary conventions that privilege analytic synthesis over unmediated testimony.

This study situates these works in relation to each other to illuminate how genre, institutional affiliation and geopolitical position shape the production and reception of wartime histories. The comparative frame exposes tensions between subaltern testimony and elite mediation, illustrating how certain kinds of knowledge are rendered audible while others are effectively buried.

*2. Methodology, Political Context and Academic Framing*

2.1 Comparative approach and theoretical orientation

The paper deploys comparative textual analysis, informed by the literatures on testimony, memory politics and subaltern studies. It reads both texts purposively: attentive to form, rhetorical strategy and evidentiary claims, and to their documented afterlives in diaspora and policy debates. The analysis is also informed by political sociology: it situates narrative production within state censorship regimes, media economies and diasporic communicative infrastructures.

2.2 The politics of mediation: The Broken Palmyra in context

Thiranagama’s The Broken Palmyra emerged from a milieu of academic activism and human rights concern but also from constraints typical of institutional publication — editorial conventions, concerns for international reception and, at times, strategic ambiguity to avoid reprisals. Its methodology privileges structured interviews, social analysis and normative critique, and as such offers interpretive purchase on broad processes of mobilisation, violence and moral injury. However, this institutional framing also predisposes the work to certain exclusions: graphic local detail that might implicate named actors is often subordinated to explanatory generalisation, and first-person survivor voices are mediated through academic synthesis.

3. Eyewitness Documentation and Eastern Province Mass Graves in Maunam Pudhaikuzhigal

3.1 Nature and scope of the fieldwork

Vijayan’s Maunam Pudhaikuzhigal is the product of sustained field research and eyewitness testimony collected across twelve villages of the Eastern Province: Kokkatticholai, Magiladithivu, Thonithattamadu, Pullumalai, Sithandi, Vandarumulai, Punanai, Pendukalseinai Aatrankarai, Udumpan Kulam, Sathurukkondan Tippo, Attapalam and Veeramunai. The work documents not only acts of killing but also the physical remnants of atrocity — sites suggested to contain mass interments — and records survivors’ embodied recollections of loss.

3.2 Testimony as archival practice

Vijayan frames testimony as an archival act: the very recording of testimonial utterance is treated as a countermeasure to enforced oblivion. His method—self-described in the work as the “silence of sound”—transforms communal silence into durable textual evidence. Unlike mediated, institutionally framed narratives, Vijayan’s text insists on the granularity of local experience: names of victims and locales, temporal sequencing of incidents, material descriptions of sites allegedly used for mass disposal. Such empirical specificity functions as a direct challenge to official narratives and to historical erasure.

4. Dissemination, Suppression and Reception across Local and Diasporic Milieus

Vijayan’s text experienced restricted circulation; multiple mechanisms (state censorship, fear among witnesses, ideological contestation, diasporic fragmentation, and technological marginality) limited its diffusion and constrained its incorporation into mainstream scholarship or policy debates. In contrast, Thiranagama’s institutional status enabled broader circulation, especially within Anglophone academic and human rights networks, even as it may have attenuated testimonial immediacy.

5. Socio-political Analysis: Structures, Actors and Narrative Power

This section identifies the principal socio-political mechanisms that shape the production and public life of the two texts.

1. State authority and censorship: The capacity of the state to regulate publication, to intimidate witnesses and to control archival access directly affects what can be recorded and disseminated.

2. Religious and ideological intermediaries: Religious organs and political movements in both Sri Lanka and Tamil Nadu mediated the reception of wartime narratives, sometimes reframing atrocities in ways that diluted specific claims about targeted ethnic violence.

3. Land politics and administrative expropriation: Violence was frequently accompanied by dispossession; documenting land seizure is crucial to understanding the structural objectives of ethnic targeting.

4. Diasporic communicative economies: The fragmentation of the diaspora—by class, language, political alignment and generational distance—affected which texts were read, preserved and translated.

5. Academic gatekeeping: Institutional mechanisms (peer review, editorial selection, funding priorities) shape the contours of what becomes globally visible, often privileging secular, generalisable analysis over raw testimony.

6. Comparative Interpretation

The juxtaposition of the two texts reveals the epistemic costs and benefits of different historiographical orientations.

Maunam Pudhaikuzhigal provides what one might term micro-forensic testimony: detailed, place-specific evidence that anchors atrocity in lived, material locales. Its strengths lie in evidentiary texture and moral immediacy; its limitations, within the contemporary scholarly economy, derive from lack of institutional support and limited circulation.

The Broken Palmyra offers macro-analytic synthesis: interpretive frameworks that contextualise violence within social, ideological and organisational dynamics. Its strength is explanatory purchase and academic accessibility; its limitation is reduced testimonial plenitude and a tendency to translate suffering into categories more legible to disciplinary interlocutors.

Understanding post-conflict historiography demands both modalities; yet this comparative reading demonstrates how institutional privilege can render mediated accounts more visible while marginalising grassroots archives that are nonetheless essential for accountability and truth-telling.

7. Authorial Profiles and Positionalities

Rajini Thiranagama (scholar-clinician and activist) wrote within a critical human rights and leftist intellectual tradition. Her analytical commitments to gender, social justice and moral critique informed her interpretive choices and her willingness to interrogate multiple actors and currents within Sri Lankan society.

Manalaru Vijayan (civil servant, local intellectual and field-researcher) wrote from a positionality of proximity: his dual role as eyewitness and recorder lent his text an immediacy and empirical specificity that institutions often lack. His work functions both as testimony and as an act of resistance against state silence.

8. Factors Limiting the Dissemination of Maunam Pudhaikuzhigal

Although Maunam Pudhaikuzhigal is indispensable for understanding Eastern Province atrocities, eight interlinked factors curtailed its dissemination and subsequent uptake:

8.1 State censorship and institutional repression

The Sri Lankan state’s regulatory apparatus routinely suppressed publications perceived to challenge official narratives. Works documenting mass graves or naming perpetrators were vulnerable to confiscation, legal challenge and delegitimisation as “propaganda,” thereby hampering archiving and scholarly citation.

8.2 Fear among survivors and local witnesses

Contributors to Vijayan’s fieldwork inhabited precarious environments. The threat of surveillance, intimidation or enforced disappearance discouraged public association with the material and inhibited oral transmission, thereby impeding communal circulation.

8.3 Ideological resistance in Tamil Nadu

Key intellectual actors in Tamil Nadu—operating within Dravidian, Communist and pan-regional frameworks—often treated separatist narratives with suspicion. This ideological hesitancy translated into limited institutional support and few publication conduits within South India.

8.4 Religious and media counter-narratives

Ecclesiastical and mosque-centred media outlets frequently universalised the conflict as a humanitarian crisis rather than acknowledging specific patterns of targeted ethnic violence. Such reframing attenuated the distinctiveness and political urgency of Vijayan’s claims.

8.5 Diasporic fragmentation and generational disconnection

Spatial dispersion, political schisms and linguistic acculturation within diaspora communities meant that high-Tamil texts circulated unevenly; younger cohorts, often English-dominant, were less likely to engage with untranslated vernacular testimony.

8.6 Post-2009 defeat and psychological trauma

The military defeat of the Tamil movement in 2009 precipitated communal demobilisation, grief and a collective reluctance to revisit traumatic archives. This psychic economy of avoidance further reduced public appetite for confronting evidence of mass graves.

8.7 Lack of institutional and academic support

Absent funding, translation initiatives or archival partnerships, Vijayan’s self-published book could not benefit from the validation mechanisms that typically amplify texts within academic and policy networks. It remained outside curricula, citation networks and institutional repositories.

8.8 Language, accessibility and technological marginality

Composed in high Tamil and disseminated in limited print runs without ISBN registration or digitisation, Maunam Pudhaikuzhigal failed to gain entry into library catalogues and online repositories. In the digital era, such technological marginality equates to historical invisibility.

Analytic synthesis: These factors are interdependent: structural repression facilitates silence; silence compounds technological neglect; and neglect reinforces institutional amnesia. Recovering the epistemic value of Vijayan’s testimony therefore requires multi-pronged interventions—archival rescue, translation, forensic corroboration and inclusion within scholarly curricula.

9. Conclusion

This comparative study underscores two central propositions. First, the epistemic form of a wartime text — whether grassroots testimony or academic synthesis — decisively shapes its evidentiary value, audience and political effects. Second, institutional visibility is not synonymous with epistemic completeness: academically celebrated texts may omit or sanitise the granular, forensic detail necessary for accountability, even as grassroots works that supply such detail are suppressed.

Maunam Pudhaikuzhigal should be understood as both a testimonial archive and a site of ethical claim: it preserves names, places and material indications of atrocity that are indispensable to historical justice. The Broken Palmyra, for its part, provides conceptual tools necessary for systemic analysis. Reparation, redress and robust historiography require the integration of both registers.

Finally, the recovery and elevation of suppressed eyewitness archives like Vijayan’s must be a scholarly priority. Methodologically, this entails translation and digitisation, cross-validation with independent forensic and documentary evidence, and reflexive engagement with the politics of publication. Ethically, it demands that scholars recognise the asymmetries of voice and power that determine which histories are preserved and which are buried; only by confronting those asymmetries can historiography become an instrument of accountability rather than of selective forgetting.

References

DeVotta, N. (2004). Blowback: Linguistic Nationalism, Institutional Decay, and Ethnic Conflict in Sri Lanka. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Thiranagama, R. (1987). The Broken Palmyra. Colombo: Sri Lankan Studies Institute.

Vijayan, M. (2005). Maunam Pudhaikuzhigal (Mouna Puthakalikalkal). Batticaloa: Self-published.

Wilson, A. J. (2000). Sri Lankan Tamil Politics: Ethnic Conflict and Diaspora. London: Routledge.

Chelliah, R. (1997). ‘Tamil Diaspora Memory and War Narratives’, Journal of South Asian Studies, 20(2), pp. 145–170.

Gunawardena, C. A. (2003). Ethnic Violence and Historical Documentation in Sri Lanka. Colombo: Social Science Review.