What is so civil in a civil war?

In the second version of this blog that began in June 2008 after I deleted all the previous entries, I worried about a few global hotspots as I observed them from my corner of the world.  I listed in that August 2008 post the following countries/regions in addition to Iraq and Iran:

• Pakistan
• Afghanistan
• Georgia
• Zimbabwe
• Sudan/Darfur
• Israel/Palestine
• Lebanon
• Sri Lanka
• Burma
• Tibet

Only Georgia has really gotten off that list, right?

About Sri Lanka, this is what I wrote in that post in 2008:

This AFP report says it all: Strife-torn Sri Lanka is bracing for intense and bloody battles as security forces close in on the political capital of the Tamil Tiger rebels, according to military analysts.

That was in the summer of 2008.  The 25-year old civil war that began on "Black July" in 1983 was entering yet another bloody--yes, literally bloody--stretch. 

Here in the US, it was the summer of the presidential election season, with a young and untested but charismatic Barack Obama even going to Berlin and addressing the crowds that were all eager for a change from the Bush-Cheney era.  

The US couldn't care about the violence in Sri Lanka.

Later that December, I was in India, and observed people and the press expressing worries over the increased military assaults on Tamil areas in order to wipe out the Tamil Tigers.  So, I did what I could.  I wrote a newspaper commentary after returning home.

The Sri Lankan government didn't ease up.  It was a scorched earth approach to wiping out the Tamil terrorists, and civilian deaths and displacement didn't matter one bit to the government.  The leadership of the Tamil Tigers were killed.  An uneasy peace settled on the island.

All these in an island with which Arab merchants fell in love on first sight, which is why they called it serendip, which morphed into the English word "serendipity" to mean something absolutely awesome that just appeared or happened when least expected.

I was reminded of all that, of the roommates in my first year of graduate school, and more, when we watched Funny Boy.

The best #Tamil movie that I have watched in decades ... is a Canadian movie about #SriLanka ...#FunnyBoy involves two complex issues at once: #CivilWar and #Homosexuality https://t.co/Vfpi6unq65

— Am Dr Khe (@congoboy) February 2, 2021

If you read until here, well, you might be interested in a French/Sri Lankan movie we watched a couple of years ago.  Dheepan is a movie that is about three Sri Lankan Tamils who are in France after fleeing the civil war.

All I can do is read about peoples and countries, watch movies, and wish for peace.  That itself is a start, right?

Blogging about reading Wendy Doniger's "The Hindus": #5

So, back to Wendy Doniger after that brief diversion to appreciate the world ;)

All we know is that the Indus Valley Civilization people vanished into thin air, and there were the people of the Vedas.

What was the relationship between the people who composed the Vedas (the ancient Sanskrit texts beginning with the Rig Veda, in around 1500 BCE) and the people who lived in the Indus River Valley?  Where were the people of the Indus Valley Civilization after the end of the IVC?

I would assume that one awesome, awesome prize awaits the person who successfully and convincingly answers those questions.

I wonder if it is also built into the old tradition not to get preoccupied with the origins. There is a Tamil saying that I often heard expressed back in the old country: "ரிஷி மூலம் நதி மூலம் ஆராயக்கூடாது" (do not try to trace the origins of sages and rivers.)  Thus, there was no systematic effort to dig up the past?  And now we are stuck with the best guesses that we can possibly come up with in order to sort out what happened to the IVC people, and where the Vedic people came from?

Doniger walks us through the guesses:

The Aryans invaded India from Indo-Europe
The Caucasians strolled in from the Caucasus
The Vedic people originated in India
The Vedic people lived in the Indus Valley

I am tempted to write "no dice" but cannot because Doniger writes that the six-sided dice that we use now traces its origin back to, yep, you are thinking correctly:

Archaeological evidence suggests that the use of the cubical dice began in South Asia and indeed in the IVC.

Some gamblers they were, it seems. It is high time India and Pakistan collected royalties from the trillions and trillions that have been gambled since that invention ;)

Grabbing the evidence from the horse's mouth--yes, horses are evidence here--Doniger writes:

Knowing how important horses are in the Vedas, we may deduce that there was little or no Vedic input into the civilization of the Indus Valley or, correspondingly, that there was little input from the IVC into the civilization of the Rig Veda.  

So, what's the answer?  Forget trying to solve the IVC/Vedic people puzzle.  Where and how did Hinduism originate?  There are at least five cultures that have made Hinduism "a bricoleur, a rag-and-bones man, building new things out of the scraps of other things."

(1) Stone age cultures in India long before the Indus are the foundation on which all later cultures are built.
(2) At some point, impossible to fit into the chronology or even an archaeology, come the Adivasis, the "Original Inhabitants" of India, who spoke a variety of languages and contributed words and practices to various strands of Hinduism. ...
Next come (3) the Indus civilization and (4) the village traditions that preceded, accompanied, and followed it, and after that (5) the culture of the Vedic people. Along the way, other language groups too, such as (6) the Tamils and other Dravidian speakers, who may or may not have been a part of the IVC, added pieces to the puzzle.

So, there, you have it.

Or, if you prefer a shorter answer: we have no freaking clue!

Remembering "Black July": When Serendip meant hell!

I have always had a soft spot in my heart for Sri Lanka.  Not merely because it was a place that my grandfather almost got to, but did not. There were other family stories, too, of people from immediate and extended families having worked and lived in Ceylon.  A wonderful cousin, who is my brother's age, was even born in in that country and earned the nickname of "Ravanan."

BBC's newsfeed reminds me that it was exactly thirty years ago that the paradise became hell.  The island, which was referred to as "Serendip" by the Arab merchants for the enchanting beauty that it was, and which then gave the word "serendipity" to the English language, transformed into a hell on earth.

Thirty years ago, Tamil separatists stepping up militant attacks in northern Sri Lanka killed 13 soldiers who reported for duty only a day earlier. Over the next few days, mobs of the Sinhalese majority took revenge, killing between 400 and 3,000 Tamils around the country and triggering a civil war that lasted 26 years and sent hundreds of thousands of Tamils into exile. 

I was an undergraduate student in Coimbatore when newspapers carried reports and photos on the front pages.  Those were some chaotic undergraduate years, in my mind and in the world outside.  A year later, Indira Gandhi was shot dead, which then unleashed a killing frenzy in India too.  Conversations at tea-stalls near the college were all about Lanka.  India being a country of argumentative males with strong opinions, there were discussions in plenty over watery and sugary tea.

Within a matter of days, our college and most colleges throughout the state were closed down because of student protests.  The youth in Tamil Nadu wanted the Indian government to step in and help the Tamils in Sri Lanka.

Black July was a recruiting agent for Tamil militants and catapulted the country into full-blown war, which would last 26 years and kill 100,000 or more people.
It had a drastic demographic effect as hundreds of thousands of Tamils fled abroad, said CV Wigneswaran, a retired Supreme Court judge who has just become a politician for the largest Tamil party.
"With that started the brain drain. A lot of intellectuals, lawyers, doctors, architects, engineers all went away from Sri Lanka. They thought there was no way out," he said.
"The diaspora today still cannot forget the death, damage, destruction that took place in 1983 because of which they had to leave Sri Lanka and go abroad."

I became familiar with this war-displaced Sri Lankan diaspora.  In 1987, when I came to Los Angeles for graduate schooling, my apartment-mates included two Sri Lankan Tamils.  Kugan was an emotional wreck, and even one criticism of the terror tactics that the LTTE employed would send him over the cliff and he would remind us of the horrors of that fateful July.  His sweetheart lived in Sri Lanka, and he could barely wait for her to join him in the US.  I think it was in 1989 that she finally was able to join him and their wedding was soon after at the temple in the canyons off Malibu.

Meanwhile, one of Kugan's close friends also came over for graduate school.  Ravi had more firsthand horror stories to narrate. One was absolutely cinematic.  It is one thing to watch a horror scene unfold on the screen.  But, when one realizes that this was no movie, it is bone-chilling and depressing, to say the least.  I remember his story of being chased by a Sinhalese mob, jumping over compound walls, hiding wherever he could, in order to save his life.  And, he exited the country when the opportunity came.

It was a tragic irony to study about Sri Lanka in the economic development literature in the graduate courses.  Sri Lanka and Costa Rica were some of the favorite textbook examples of how a society can have social indicators comparable to developed economies even without material prosperity.  Social indicators such as high literacy rates, long life expectancy, low infant mortality, relatively equal income distribution.  All these in an island with which Arab merchants fell in love on first sight.  Yet, it was a living hell. A hell from which a few escaped. A hell where sometimes men and women were burnt alive, or raped, or ...

An unfortunate reminder it is that not all that glitters is gold.  That an enchanting paradise is not always a paradise.  It is not the fault of the paradise though--it is all because we humans are no angels.