Remembering the Jaffna Public Library
“A city’s public library is the eye of the city by which the citizens are able to behold the realness of their heritage, and behold the still greater greatness of their future.”
- K. Nesiah (Education and Human Rights in Sri Lanka)
On the 2nd of June every year, Tamils all over the world wake-up with sorrow and grief - over an event that took place twenty-one years ago. It started with the citizens of Jaffna waking up, that many years ago on this fateful morning, to an absolute horror.
On the night of 1st June 1981, the splendid Jaffna public library, housing 97,000 rare books and manuscripts, was burned to the ground. The shock experienced by the men, women and children of Jaffna that morning is indescribable. That day all Tamils lost a piece of themselves. It was the most magnificent piece of architecture (leave aside the treasure it contained) ever created in Thamileelam.
This act of arson was carried out, not by a bunch of nameless hooligans, but by a posse of two hundred officers of the Sri Lankan police force, taken to Jaffna by two senior Sri Lankan Cabinet Ministers (Cyril Mathew and Gamini Dissanayake, both self-professed Sinhala supremacists), ostensibly to oversee an election.
These two Sinhala Cabinet Ministers, who watched the library burn from the verandah of the nearby Jaffna Rest House, subsequently claimed that it was an ‘unfortunate incident’, where a ‘few’ policemen ‘got drunk’ and went on a ‘looting spree’, all on their own. This ‘justification’ has been echoed, and re-echoed, by many Sinhala leaders and the Sinhala media.
Let us look back.
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