Reminiscence: A peep into life in a northern village

(March 21, Toronto, Sri Lanka Guardian) Victor Karunairajan who has written extensively on life in Sri Lanka especially in the north in the years gone by has shared with Sri Lanka Watch a feature that expresses his views and concerns as a schoolboy walking willingly and unwillingly to school. He was particularly concerned about the educational system that failed to spark a genuine development in the country. His diploma submission “Education for Development” was serialized in the Daily Mirror in the late 1970s. An alumnus of Jaffna College which he also served as a director in the 1980s, he believes that his alma mater should enlarge her vistas and become a Community College serving the entire District of Jaffna and even further. His community, he is convinced, needs a wide variety of people academically and otherwise educated, qualified, skilled and trained to foster and promote a development process that is compatible not only with the needs of his people but also taking into consideration the resources and the potentials of the regions. The system that prevailed too long blindfolded the community to these realities in order that it may concentrate on jobs in Colombo and other humdrum stuff that also ensured that the elite Tamil professionals held the whip that controlled the community as submissive to its clout and power.

Willingly and unwillingly to school:

Plodding daily from Sithankerny to Vaddukoddai

by Victor Karunairajan

A childhood mystery beyond comprehension to me at that time was why children from Vaddukoddai walked to Sithankerny to attend Hindu College and we from Sithankerny walked to Jaffna College at Vaddukoddai. This question plagued me into my adolescent years. Educational institutions should serve neighbourhood communities, offer adequate opportunities to all children irrespective of their roots and backgrounds and help in the creation of an egalitarian society.

Ideally it would be a network of primary and junior secondary schools feeding a senior secondary school and finally a higher academic college and a development oriented technical institution. Such a network would have identified the needs of the community, recognized the resources available to it, chalked out an appropriate curriculum and trained the personnel necessary to achieve desired results.

As I began to understand certain forces that prevailed among us, I noted that my sharply splintered community’s educational pursuit was considered not merely ideal but sacrosanct. It certainly was not. Lacking visions, it was like a pair of bulls trying to pull a cart at the Sithankerny junction, one towards Pandatheruppu (north), the other towards Vaddukoddai (south) while the carter whipped them towards Chankanai (east) and the passengers screamed for Moolai (west). Consequently, no one got anywhere.

This situation was not unique to us in the Valigamam West Divisional Revenue Office area. It was the order everywhere and the good schools were considered as those that provided training in English that helped to get jobs in the British Civil Service whether in Sri Lanka or Malaysia; even in Burma. Some of the larger bungalow type houses in Sithankerny and neighbouring Vaddukoddai, Chulipuram, Chankanai, Moolai, Araly, Thunavi were named after Malaysian towns or states like Rawang House, Seremban Cottage, Ipoh Vasa and Klang Villa.

In the search for white-collar jobs in large numbers, we ignored our own resources and the need to develop our neighbourhoods. Sithankerny has ample agricultural grounds and is adequately blessed with spring water from wells. The soil is good for homestead gardens, fruit trees and home barns and the fields around for seasonal crops essential to meet our food needs from rice to dry season legumes, a wide variety of vegetables and yams. Traditional medicine that flourished, appropriate technology and artisan trades were also neglected.

Some rainwater retaining tanks used for decades in the past to irrigate the fields were run-down and villages like Thunavi became abandoned when families moved to Malaysia from early 1900. The region also had facilities for lagoon fisheries and provided livelihood to many socially discriminated families.

The educational institutions, hooked as they were to the national grid of formal education, ignored the development of neighbourhood resources. It was a grid that milled out a large number of formally trained young people with hardly any skills for the type of development activities the country needed. Not every one can be, or should be, doctors or engineers, even civil servants and accountants.

Every society needs trained people in many fields to make development a dynamic activity. While this was not met, our planners and those charged with the responsibility of education developed and consolidated a system counterproductive to social and economic progress. They functioned as agent provocateurs of chaos, a factor that has now wrought utter havoc to our community in Sri Lanka.

Politicians of the types we were familiar with since Sri Lanka’s independence amassed their fame and fortunes on the chaos that was building up and diverted the minds of our people from the real issues that affected us in the first place.

Sithankerny had not developed from what it was and the potential it had into an ideal parish as evidenced from its temples, a cultured and stable environment and a social system that appears to have worked well. It is a large village with a community that functioned within traditional norms and various social groups interacted with each other in an ordered way. There were, no doubt, shortcomings, but the larger ideal of peaceful coexistence appears to have held the community together for decades.

As to why young people had to walk in opposite directions during my time, some two miles each way betrayed the sad fact of social and religious differences. Unfortunately, when I stepped out of my home into the world, and walked to Jaffna College with my childhood friends, I felt privileged and looked down at children who were walking in the opposite direction; a sad inheritance indeed.

We did not have the pride to respect an educational institution that was set up by our own people, the Vaddukoddai Hindu College. In due course, it also joined the bandwagon to produce grist for the voracious appetite of the British colonial service. Ideally, Sithankerny, Vaddukoddai and the neighbouring villages should have had a community college, an academically oriented school, feeder schools beginning with early childhood education and a number of junior schools. Our resources should have been available to everyone in the community.

Courtesy: Sri Lanka Watch
- Sri Lanka Guardian