CRASSH

The 1971 insurrection marks the first significant crisis of the postcolonial state in Sri Lanka when thousands of Sinhala youth insurgents of the JVP (People’s Liberation Front) attempted an overnight revolution on the island. My paper focuses on my engagement with the event of the insurrection through the ethnographic ‘negotiation’ of two distinct archives, and inquires into the political and ethical stakes of seeking admission to archives in contexts in which access is limited or determined by the satisfaction of certain conditions of secrecy. My first archive, located in the National Archives, Colombo, comprises sources for the authoritative history of the insurgency that remain classified by the State or subject to various kinds of restricted access. My paper explores how protocols for the viewing of classified documents are elaborated in the absence of precedent or any clearly defined formal conditions. It seeks to understand how these protocols comprise a network of informal and formal routes of access to the archive, and index a necessary fiction of secrecy that underwrites the undisclosed, material authority of the state’s account of the insurgency. My second archival focus is the “Five Lessons”, a set of orally disseminated lectures that have historically comprised the primary means for the revolutionary political education of new JVP cadres. The lessons, though circulated in document form, exist primarily as an oral tradition, and access to them is regulated by the organization. I inquire into the possibility of conceptualizing the Five Lessons as an archive and try to ascertain its limits by exploring the tension between this archive’s identity as on the one hand, an embodied, instructional and institutional memory for contemporary JVP members and on the other, a source for a public, historical counter-narrative of the 1971 insurrection. My paper investigates how in each of these archives, the relationship between secrecy, authority and disclosure is differently constituted and embodied, complicating the politics of scholarly engagement in each case. I conclude by asking if there are instances in which information perhaps should not be available for disciplinary use.

Thushara Hewage is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Anthropology Department at Columbia University. His dissertation investigates the linkages between the legal and governmental regimes of emergency and welfare in modern Sri Lanka and their centrality to the sovereign order of the postcolonial state. His work approaches this reframing of the question of the political in Sri Lanka through the locus of the event of the 1971 insurrection on the island and its aftermaths. He also has a broad disciplinary interest in the location of the authority that underwrites anthropology’s knowledge and its adequacy to the task of identifying pressing political questions of the postcolonial present.