Taking their pain, writing his book
Subramanian in Galle: Touched by the generosity of people who took the time to recount their hardships to him. Pic by Amila Gamage
A few years ago, when Samanth Subramanian was in Kattankudy speaking to a survivor of the 1990 Kattankudy mosques attack, there was a disquieting moment where the tables were turned between the interviewer and the interviewee.
They were seated in a chocolate-brown linoleum lined living room and the man was recounting a grim tale of survival from the LTTE attack, of watching helplessly as his family’s lives disintegrated before his eyes.
Before they began their conversation however, his interviewee turned to Subramanian with a polite but pragmatic question: “What good will this conversation do to me?”
The scene is located in the heart of Subramanian’s book ‘This Divided Island’, which deals with stories from the three decade-long war in Sri Lanka. The author mulls over this question in the book. “I had no answer to give him.
I had asked this question of myself in Sri Lanka, uncapping deep wells of self-doubt” he writes. “Even in ordinary circumstances, the work of a journalist can feel like that of a parasite, fattening itself on the time and memories of others but giving back nothing tangible at all.
In Sri Lanka, the process felt especially voyeuristic, as I asked people to rehearse the pain of their lives so I could write a book they would never read.”
It’s a discomfiting question which throbs at the back of the mind of anyone engaged in the act of reporting or writing nonfiction. Even now, as we discuss the research and beginnings of the book it prompts a self-reflexive train of thought in Subramanian, to tweeze out the role of a writer in this transaction.
“It’s something I grapple with constantly and I still haven’t found an answer to it, to be honest,” he muses. “The only thing you can say as a journalist is that it’s important for people to hear these stories and you’re bearing moral witness to suffering; that in the larger body of knowledge that exists about the Sri Lankan war, you’ve contributed to a certain extent.
But what does it do for the person? I have no idea. And I still have no answers for this. It’s an amazing act of generosity for these people, who have such difficult lives and suffered all these awful stuff, to sit down and recount it for you. They get nothing out of it and we get everything and it’s the most unequal transaction.”
‘This Divided Island’ takes readers through Sri Lanka’s 30-year-civil war through conversations and anecdotes from both sides of the conflict through the years and is dotted with the writer’s own dispatches from travels in post-war Sri Lanka. The book brims with anecdotes and crosses continents in its effort to bring multiple narratives embedded within the conflict.
Recently in Galle for the Fairway Galle Literary Festival, Subramanian is a journalist currently based in New Delhi and writes on varied topics, preferring long-form narrative journalism, and often spending months wrestling with a story.
This flexibility in topics often results in curious experiences – when we meet he explains that during the previous week he was backstage at a female body builders’ contest in Mumbai and before that, found himself sailing with an Olympic level sailor off the coast of Singapore, to catch a glimpse of the land reclamation projects that are happening.
His first book, ‘Following Fish’, was a travelogue detailing journeys around India’s coastline. Published in 2014, ‘This Divided Island’ is Subramanian’s second book.
Growing up in Chennai, Sri Lankan politics were inescapable for Subramanian, seeping into news and media and impinging into life in Tamil Nadu. In his book, Subramanian writes that “the ties of politics and language bind Sri Lanka close to Tamil Nadu, like a tugboat to an ocean liner”.
He notes that the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi, in particular “exploded on our consciousness in a way that nothing before had”, shifting the political contours.
It was not the political and military aspects of the war but the stories of the people which drew him (although he admits he’s hesitant to tell people this because it sounds banal) and ‘This Divided Island’ is layered with multiple narratives.
On the day the Sri Lankan war officially ended in 2009, Subramanian was in a newsroom in Delhi watching the images which flashed in succession on the screens.
He remembers going to one of his friends in office, a Sri Lankan, and remarking offhandedly that with the war now over, someone should write about the conflict.It was the same friend who provided the initial impetus and help and Subramanian soon began research for the book, conducting 100 interviews and travelling across the country over the course of 10 months.
One of the challenging aspects of researching was to persuade people to share their stories. “I was Tamil. I was Indian. I was a journalist – it was like three types of sin,” he notes.
Given that it was still very sensitive times and the wounds of the war were recent, how did he protect the identity and privacy of those he interviewed?
Subramanian explains that it was a multi-stage process to gauge how much of their identities, names and information the people he spoke to wanted to divulge.
“They should have the agency to determine how they appear in the book,” he says, adding that he made sure to go back and confirm their decision once more, after the book was written and in the process of being edited.
The voices in the book are situated in shifting landscapes and rub against each other, traipsing through the past and often reliving sobering histories.
The characters we meet span war widows, taxi drivers, ex-terrorists, Tamils who fought for the Sri Lankan army, survivors who have been scarred by the war, Buddhist monks and intellectuals.
While the voices form the crux of the book, Subramanian takes pains to convey a sense of place through the landscapes which changed before and after the war.
In a review of the book, Shehan Karunatilaka writes that “This Divided Island is an intelligent, nuanced work that celebrates the beauty of the island next door and warns of the horrors that lie before it.
It is a book likely to spark debate in the land it laments. And this can only be a good thing. Because if we spill enough ink and share enough stories, perhaps we can avoid the spilling of more blood.”
The book contains many vivid images and there’s one particularly startling image which lingers from the book – straying from the hackneyed image of the pearl, diamond or teardrop, Subramanian instead compares Sri Lanka’s shape to a hand grenade, with the tapering Jaffna peninsula as its safety clip.
In another, Subramanian is travelling in one of the vintage cars that Jaffna is known for, and jarringly realizes that the white Morris Minor he is travelling in, once doubled up as a hearse and ambulance during the conflict.
There is a capsuled history of the country which briefly sketches out some of the events which led to the conflict and the reader is also taken through the expanding cultural schism, initially stoked by colonialism.
Subramanian shows how over the years, a small island began to magnify the slimmest of distinctions, discovering new ways to emphasise differences and define identities.