Leena Manimekalai’s Cinema and Sumathy Sivamohan
Aparna Easwaran
Documentary is seen as a genre of film that portrays real events, implying a degree of objectivity and facticity to it. This is tied to a realism of the camera — as if the truth bearing/baring part of the camera has been turned into an art form. The framing of documentary film as an art form which is authentically real and a ‘window into the world’ has immense purchase in treating it as a form of evidence.
In a war torn Sri Lanka, coming fresh out of three decades of violence, with its prevailing atmosphere of silencing through power, documentary emerged as one of the alternative ways of speaking out. This was most evident in the Channel 4 documentary, Sri Lanka’s Killing Fields. It came out in 2011, two years after the war, when the major dominating rhetoric in the public sphere was of the victorious government of Mahinda Rajapaksha, who emphasised on a script of leaving the past behind and concentrating on development at the cost of proper reconciliation measures. The documentary was instrumental in changing the discourse at an international level — screened in the UN for the various national diplomatic staff, it played a role in the eventual report of the UN Panel of Experts report that put the onus on the Sri Lankan government to address the allegations of violations of international human rights and humanitarian law.
Sri Lanka’s Killing Fields falls in the subgenre of investigative documentary, and was noted for it’s usage of the mobile phone footage shot by Sri Lankan Sinhala soldiers — mostly ‘trophy videos’ of sexual violence and torture — along with those by LTTE cameramen which were earlier intended to capture the ‘heroic exploits of Tamil Tigers’, but instead, served to show the plight of the Tamils in the endgame. For example, the footage of the sexual assault on well-known reporter and member of LTTE’s Press and Communication wing, Isaipriya’s mutilated body shocked the world and mounted international pressure on the Sri Lankan government to take accountability for the war crimes. Here, documentary turned from just an art form into a powerful source of evidence.
In this essay, I would like to examine two cinematic works that contain features of documentary art: Leena Manimekalai’s White Van Stories and Sumathy Sivamohan’s Ingirunthu. Apart from being created by two women, these two assume importance in tackling the grave issues that continue to haunt post-war realities in Sri Lanka. They present two creative and thought provoking ways of dealing with the commonsensical notion of the evidentiary imports of documentary film.
White Van Stories: Visiblising the Disappeared
After the end of the war in 2009, the families of thousands of victims of the enforced disappearances in Sri Lanka came forward to demand accountability from the Rajapaksha government, which initially denied the allegations or made light of it insensitively. For instance, in 2008, when confronted with the issue of the disappearances, he had infamously said, “Some who have gone on their honeymoon without the knowledge of their household are considered missing. Parents have lodged complaints that their children have disappeared but in fact, we have found, they have gone abroad.… These disappearance lists are all figures.” In indignation, around 200 persons, mostly mothers and wives of the disappeared, took to the streets in Jaffna in 2011, demanding clear information of their disappeared kin. Due to sustained pressure, Rajapaksha’s government grudgingly acknowledged the ‘allegations’.
Leena Manimekalai, in her documentary White Van Stories, captures the women who were part of the protest by the families of the forcefully disappeared — who demanded ‘justice, truth and compensation’ and declared that there shall be “no peace” until. White Van Stories presents to us first person accounts of 7 women across different provinces of Sri Lanka, sharing stories of the disappearances of their kin. It’s worth remembering that this was made at a time when the media was heavily censored and journalists critical of the government were among the missing. Shot in secret with hidden cameras, these contain glimpses of the military occupation of Tamil areas and the press censorship in the country. The ‘white van’ is a symbol and proof of the horrors of the enforced disappearances — in the middle of the night and in broad daylight, time stood still and justice suspended as people were abducted in white vans as a part of the war; this included Tamils, Sinhalese, Muslims, women, men, teenagers and children. The documentary sheds light on the life experiences of those waiting for their loved ones and the courage they have embraced as part of the ongoing struggle. There is ample ‘evidence’ in these testimonies where the disappearances are made visible — we see a Sinhala daughter paying homage to her disappeared father who was part of the JVP uprisings of the 1980s by visiting a public monument built for the disappeared in Hambantota, containing an inscription from the poem By the Wayside by Basil Fernando that says “Forgive me/ Forgive me, for placing a memorial for you/by the roadside.’
The documentary shows how those left behind resist forgetting — mothers refuse to cook again the food loved by their children, they write unposted letters to their missing children, they go to soothsayers asking for news of their children, all the while also appealing to the authorities and taking to streets in protest and pain. The traces of evidence that the documentary puts forth are many, both ephemeral and tangible – ranging from the graffiti on the streets painted by teenagers for the missing Sinhala cartoonist Prageeth Eknaligoda to cassettes of speeches listened to over and over again by a Muslim woman in her husband’s voice to remember him by.
Despite being made in 2013, this documentary is still relevant today, as the families of those who went missing at the time of writing are still protesting for more than 1,000 days. The situation has been exacerbated by the coming to power of Gotabhaya Rajapaksa in 2015, who has consistently opposed the demands of justice, including commitments made to the UN Human Rights Council. With Mahinda Rajapaksha assuming the post of the Prime Minister, the power is firmly and disturbingly consolidated between the brothers. With the increase in government surveillance, the Mothers of the Disappeared group has reportedly been unable to hold a public protest. When the new administration asks these mothers for information about who were part of their meetings, these women remind us of their right to information about missing persons.
Manimekalai’s documentary, as an evidence of vulnerability and resistance, thus gains prominence in this political age as well. A wonderful poet herself, Manimekalai as an Indian Tamil has consolidated the testimonies of such vast differences to drive the point of intersectionality and showing us how the brutal hands of power have shattered lives. However, the director’s voiceover in poetic utterances bridging the different narratives does sometimes slip into a conflation of the voice of the Indian and the Ilankai Tamil identities, in her usage of ‘we/they’. The question of how ethically an outsider can depict the intricacies of violence not borne by one’s own self, and yet stand in political solidarity, is mined in a more nuanced way by Sumathy Sivamohan and her ‘cinema of conversation’.
Ingirunthu (Here and Now): A Cinema of Conversation
Sri Lankan poet and academician Sumathy Sivamohan is known for her erudite and passionate critique of nationalism – both Sinhala and Tamil. Sister of activist Rajani Thiranagama, who was assassinated by the LTTE for authoring the path-breaking The Broken Palmyra, Sivamohan is someone who mines nuances and hates platitudes.
Ingirunthu is also created from her urge to understand and to open ourselves to envision a ‘politics of living’, that can cause discomfort to our ways; it is a conscious attempt to understand. Sivamohan also realises that her work is about listening and getting other voices amplified, rather than being the voice itself — why she considers Ingirunthu a ‘cinema of conversation’. Ingiruthu is on the Malayaha Tamils: a community whose minority status was dwarfed and sidelined by the dominant ethnic war focused on the North and East. Importantly, the Malayaha Tamil/ Upcountry Tamil is not only a sidelined citizen, but a working class subject as well.
The history of Sri Lanka’s Malayaha Tamil community is closely linked to colonial exploits in South Asia. In the early 19th century, the British began exploring the capitalist possibilities that lay in the forests of the hill country in Central Sri Lanka, which was then under the Kandyan kingdom. In 1840, with the passing of the Crown Lands Encroachment Ordinance, the British made way for their venture into the hill country. The first planters imported Tamil labour force from South India to clear the land and establish the first coffee plantation. Unlike in the sugar plantations of the Caribbean, Fiji, Mauritius and South Africa, to where Indians travelled as indentured labourers, the migration of Indians to work on the coffee, tea and rubber plantations in Sri Lanka and Malaysia transpired through a system of sub-contractors called ‘kankanis’ (Tamil for ‘supervisors’). Mostly ‘lower’ caste Tamils from the villages of Tirunelveli, Tanjore, and Madurai, they undertook arduous journeys to help the British in their plantations. Many perished on the way due to wild animals, diseases and sometimes sheer physical exhaustion. Those who survived created the coffee plantations, which were later transformed into tea plantations.
Despite their contribution to the economy of Ceylon, these Tamils were not considered citizens of the newly formed Sri Lanka. Erased geographically as well from the concept of ‘Eelam’, the Malayaha Tamils however were identified as ‘Tamils’ alone, and therefore, a ‘threat’ throughout the war waged by the Sinhala parochial nationalism. Sumathi Sivamohan in Ingirunthu, sets forth on screen a saga of their struggles for citizenship and decent work, using the features of the epic narrative.
Sivamohan remembers being struck by the high levels of political consciousness of the working class, especially from her conversations with the women. She has written, “I searched within the community and within myself an idiom that will combine many things, history, documentary, romance, melodrama. I sought to integrate myself with the community, picking upon conversations”. The form that Ingiruthu takes comes from a politics of commitment for social change, which Sumathy believes that Sri Lankan left-wing filmmakers have to adopt. It shuns the prescriptive vein, but nurtures innovation and experimentation in form and content with a political commitment to question the status quo and the establishment.
While producing the film, Sivamohan worked closely with the community, training several of them in key features of acting and production technology. She was conscious that she was narrating the history of a marginalised community through three female figures — especially Esther Valli, an abandoned orphan who couldn’t speak but becomes a metaphor for the ‘silence’ around the community treated no better than “vassals of an export economy”. Renowned cultural critic Professor Neloufer De Mel writes, “Esther Valli embodies the disfigurement of her community living under harsh conditions of labour, poverty and a legacy of political betrayal. She haunts us — like Toni Morrison’s Beloved — and stands as a voice of conscience in the film”.
In an attempt to talk about Malayaha Tamils, one can see that Sivamohan was consciously thinking about the form of cinema itself. She deliberately uses cinematic features to attain the documentary effect, but Ingirunthu also questions the idea of documentary as a tool to depict ‘reality’. She uses the technique of ‘free camera’, which she says “may capture things as ‘they are’, but in reality, each scene may have been more carefully planned than we imagined”. She also uses the technology of ‘re-enactment’, once popular in documentaries. Rather than evidence, the documentary becomes a narrative of the defense of a struggling community which nevertheless resists and has actively moulded their own notion of citizenship within a neoliberal and parochially nationalist state. The mode of ‘cinema of conversation’ too is an example of cinematic sensitivity. This becomes extremely important in an age of cultural appropriation, as seen latest in Deepa Mehta’s adaptation of Shyam Selvadurai’s Funny Boy, rightly criticised by Ilankai Tamils, especially by the artists and researchers in the diaspora, as an ‘Indian appropriation’ of the Ilankai Tamil voice.
As Malayaha Tamils are made to continue their fight decent wages even during today’s pandemic, Ingirunthu’s re-enactment of Meenakshi Amma, the old labor leader, reciting her poems emerges as the most important evidence:
“We came riding on rickety boats / in the midst of which our loved ones perished / creating our Lanka motherland / yet our minds pained with the atrocities we face”, “We cleared your forests, don’t be ungrateful!”
Dr. Aparna Eswaran is currently an ICSSR Post-Doctoral fellow in the Centre for Women’s Studies, JNU. Her doctoral work is titled ‘Women and Witnessing War: Poetry of Tamil Women in Sri Lanka’.
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