The game is afoot

The game is afoot!

Feeling extraordinarily alive at the moment. We are on a search for old, forgotten Tamil literature to publish again, to rejuvenate real literacy and cultural connectedness among the children of today! It's truly surprising how Tamil children in Sri Lanka have no idea of their cultural or historical heritage. Some say that it is because of the Burning of the Jaffna Library (akin to the destruction of the Alexandria Library) and that it erased a nation's consciousness, never to be revived since the new Tamil Marxist-Fascist ideology turns away from religion and culture on the basis that it is divisive . The old library had ancient scripts that were written on ola leaves amongst other rarities and was burnt in the Siege of Jaffna (Eelam War 2 I think). It reminds me of a quote from Ondaatje in the English patient that "libraries burn" and Heinrich Heine's "Wherever they burn books, they will also, in the end, burn human beings".

Anyhow, since then, (and also due to what some say is the lesser emphasis placed by the government curriculum on Tamil medium literature) the poems, folklore etc have been dying out. And a Sinhalese colleague and I are on a mission, as part of our NGO's programs to discover these lost treasures and publish them! Now this is the sort of work I love and which I shall dedicate myself to in my remaining 5o days. And maybe it is a labour of love by us to a nation too, an act of piety by him as he said.

First came calls to my father's generation and conversations on the poems of their day. I was lectured on the Tolkaapiyam, the Cilampathirakam, how Kannagi burnt the city of Madurai in her rage at her lost lover, how Rama was an incarnation of Vishnu who also turned up on the battlefield of the Kurukshetra to deliver the Bhagavad Gita to a lost Arjun. Then came the homilies and the proverbs and the poetry of the Indian Tamil freedo-fighters for independence against the British like Bharathiyar. Then after that, came the Ceylonese pulavars (poets) one, who was the first to translate the Bible into Tamil and the others who more recently have expressed the collective desire for a free nation.

We started off the physical search by prowling Wellawatte Tamil bookshops, holes-in-the-wall with 70 year old proprietors turning crisp under the sun. They in turn led us to old translators (where I made the astonishing discovery that Marquez's works like Love in the Time of Cholera and One Hundred Years of Solitude are translated into Tamil and Sinhala and enjoy a wide readership here! How surprising!).

Who led us to one in particular, who had studied under some famous Tamil professors and knew of a man called "Google Krishnaswamy" who had apparently the second largest collection of Tamil literature in the Island after the Jaffna Library. Once, as the story goes, Queen Elizabeth herself requested an old biography of an Englishman from Ceylon and the government scoured the island and only Google Krishnaswamy had it and he was able to "fish it out of his recollection" (verbatim from the translator) where the book was in his massive, uncatalogued collection and send it to her and she replied with a note of thanks!. (Hence the nickname 'Google' Isn't it funny how the old and the new meld and even amongst non-Anglophones google thrives).

He died six months ago and his collection passed to his daughter who is rumoured to live in Wellawatte and now we will lie in wait for the Postman of Wellawatte who makes his rounds before 8am in the morning as he is the only one who knows in the neighbourhood where this Daughter of Google Krishnaswamy might live. We have also sent moles, old translators invigorated by such a cause, to loiter the streets of Wellawatte and accost random individuals to see whether they know where she lives. And this is how the lost memories of a nation, are found, rediscovered.