Counting and Cracking

‘Democracy means the counting of heads, within certain limits, and the cracking of heads beyond those limits’. It’s the signature line of Counting and Cracking, a hit play that recently finished a sell-out run in Melbourne.

The play depicts how democracy is abused by opportunistic, unscrupulous politicians in Sri Lanka to marginalise the large Tamil minority, whose Sri Lankan ancestry is as old as that of the majority Sinhalese. Even older in some quarters. The main players in the heart-rending drama are the family of a prominent Tamil politician, a minister in the government until the nationalistic rot sets in and ignites racial hatred that results in unimaginable brutality and carnage. After the family is forced to hide from a rampaging mob during a horror week in July 1983, and the politician dies from a broken heart as much as from illness, his granddaughter Radha, pregnant with Siddharta her first child, flees with her grandmother to safety in Australia, leaving behind her husband Thiru who, she’s told, has been taken away and murdered by police.

The horror of that time and the politics that led to it remain a nightmarish burden, which even Siddharta cannot escape. The play also touches on what migrants to Australia bring with them. Their past is a vital, inseparable part of them, a part without which they are incomplete. I might add that the first twenty-three years of my life, with all their joy and despair and every conceivable emotion in between, are contained in my engagement with my country of adoption, even now after close to fifty years in this marvellous country. My Sri Lankan heritage is rusted on.

Counting and Cracking was immensely enjoyable, though also a confronting experience. Stabs of anger and despair reminded me of how much affection I still have for the land of my birth. Without honest, courageous, fair and visionary leadership, democracy in Sri Lanka with its large ethnic majority was always open to exploitation, resulting in the oppression of minorities. When one factors in widespread poverty, you had a bomb set to go off, the fuse held by politicians and unscrupulous others of influence, like religious leaders.

And yet, there is the other Sri Lanka, the Sri Lanka of my personal experience, the Sri Lanka of joyful co-existence, where ethnicity meant nothing, where close, enduring friendships crossed ethnic and religious divides. That Sri Lanka still exists today, vibrant and alive. Unfortunately, no different to my childhood years, it is very much a minority, a microcosm of what Sri Lanka could be.

Historically, have the Sinhalese and Tamils really been at each others throats? The last king of Sri Lanka was a Telugu-speaking Tamil. He was the king of a Sinhalese kingdom, not a Tamil one. Sinhalese and Tamil nobility mixed freely in the king’s court, their languages enjoying equal billing. Some say animosity developed towards the Tamils when the British favoured them for jobs in the Civil service. But the British also favoured Burghers for jobs in the railways. It is difficult to blame the British for the sort of hatred that exploded in the unimaginable brutality perpetrated on innocent people purely on the grounds of their ethnicity.

It is said that the Sinhalese regard themselves as the original owners of Sri Lanka in the same way they regard themselves as the custodians of Buddhism, entrusted to them by the Buddha himself. But while Sinhalese outnumber all other races in Sri Lanka, in the region they are a minority, greatly outnumbered by South India’s Tamils with whom many Sri Lankan Tamils, especially those living in the north and east culturally and ethnically identify. With India on Sri Lanka’s doorstep, co-existence with India was always the key to Sinhalese survival, or they’d have been overrun and completely assimilated into one or more of India’s kingdoms.

Life is tough for most Sri Lankans, their basic needs never guaranteed. By all accounts, corruption and incompetence seem to be entrenched in the political class. The status quo is despairing, to say the least. The mobs are quiet now but still around. They must be. They were there in 1958 and again in 1983, hatred and bloodlust intact, probably fuelled by the hardship and deprivation that characterised their daily lives. The JVP uprising and the civil war have affected many people across the ethnic spectrum. Families lost loved ones, often in brutal fashion. People were forced to witness the murder of parents, children, siblings. It is left to be seen how this will be expressed the next time the mobs are unleashed. I hope and pray it never happens.