AN EVENT AND ITS AFTERMATH

The 1971 insurrection constituted the first major crisis of the postcolonial Sri Lankan state. On 5 April 1971, thousands of predominantly Sinhala-educated and rural-based youth, ostensibly belonging to the JVP (Janata Vimukti Peramuna, or People's Liberation Front), attempted to overthrow the recently elected United Front government by capturing police stations throughout the island.Footnote ² Within months, the uprising was crushed by police and armed forces operating under a state of emergency defined by disappearances, torture, summary executions, and the detention of some eighteen thousand JVP suspects in prison camps. The United Front had assumed power in May 1970 on a pledge to declare Ceylon a sovereign republic under a new constitution, inaugurating an era of popular sovereignty and socialist democracy.Footnote ³ This self-declared decolonizing project would now emerge under the shadow of an emergency that endured for the virtual entirety of the government's six-year duration. The Criminal Justice Commission (CJC), a quasi-judicial tribunal of five Supreme Court judges, was established by the state in the wake of the insurrection to investigate its causes and try and punish suspected insurgents.Footnote ⁴ From June 1972 to December 1974, the CJC presided over what is known as the “main trial” of the JVP Politbureau, and sentenced most of the movement's leaders to rigorous imprisonment for periods of between three years and life.Footnote ⁵ This was followed by 134 smaller-scale trials, which concluded in June 1976.

This article asks what it means to return to this event in the present. Its concern is less with producing a new history of the insurrection than with reading it as a diagnostic of Sri Lankan, and more generally, postcolonial political modernity. As an intervention in the field of archival ethnography, it conceptualizes relatively undertheorized forms of discursive, disciplinary, and ethical mediation that organize archival inquiry. Finally, it probes the political limits of archival fieldwork by locating and relativizing its ethic of inquiry and disciplinary stakes. What follows, then, is a re-reading of an event in tandem with a methodological meditation on the critical stakes of this activity.

The specific stakes under discussion center on interpretation of the major feature of Sri Lanka's postcolonial history, namely the hostility of the island's Sinhalese majority to minorities’ struggles for some measure of self-government and political rights. This is a history punctuated by discriminatory policies, stalled constitutional reform, and anti-minority violence. It is also the context for the protracted war between the Sri Lankan state and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). Analysis of this political modernity primarily fastens on the cultural-ideological question of the “ethnicization” of the state and of Sinhalese society. I will question the conceptual adequacy of this problematic and argue that the insurrection suggests a different critical focus: the secular-democratic identity of the concepts “majority” and “minority” and their articulation within postcolonial sovereign imaginaries.

The 1971 insurrection itself is marginal to the conventional narratives that organize contemporary scholarly work on Sri Lanka. The event generally forms a prelude to accounts of the second JVP insurgency of the late 1980s, and the contemporary party.Footnote ⁶ It has figured in studies of the sociology of youth unrest, political violence, and the emergence of a new left, as well as accounts of the movement itself.Footnote ⁷ In terms of the popular imaginary of insurgencies on the island, hätta eka, or “’71,” as the event is commonly glossed in Sinhala, is now read apart from both the second JVP insurgency, termed bhīṣaṇaya (the terror) and the state's war with the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam. By comparison with these subsequent events, popularly perceived as more brutal and unresolved, the violence of 1971 is understood as a temporary eruption within a more benign political order, redolent of a time prior to the maladies that have characterized postcolonial Sri Lanka.

One symptom of a certain nostalgia for 1971 is how the event figures within a genre of adventure, in serialized newspaper features on the JVP and the memoirs of former civil servants and armed forces personnel.Footnote ⁸ It is now defined by a series of dramatic episodes in which brave servants of the state battle to keep equally committed insurgent forces at bay. The ur text for this contemporary literature of epic adventure is Insurgency-1971, former Supreme Court Justice Anthony Alles's authoritative account of the event.Footnote ⁹ First published in November 1976, Insurgency-1971 was the inaugural work of Alles's post-retirement writing career. It ran to three editions between 1976 and 1979, with a final reprint appearing within a 1990 volume that incorporated material on the second JVP insurgency.Footnote ¹⁰ His account of 1971 is premised on an ability to narrate “the factual situation that actually transpired,” an authority that derives from his membership on the CJC.Footnote ¹¹ The status of the CJC's appropriation and interpretation of the insurgency as judicial truth is fundamental, in turn, to the book's avowedly unmediated character. The monograph was published in advance of the Commission's judgment, replicates much of its content, and may be understood as its popularized form.Footnote ¹² Alles's own three-part evaluation of 1971 in the censored national press preceded both publications.Footnote ¹³ He bequeathed his manuscripts for Insurgency-1971, along with notes and materials relating to its production and the Commission, to the Sri Lanka National Archives in Colombo.

IMMERSEMENT AND EXTRACTION IN THE ARCHIVE

This paper's argument is organized into three broad sections conceptually centered on different forms of mediation that attend archival investigation. The first begins by inquiring into the nature and purpose of the unprecedented judicial undertaking of the CJC. It proceeds to detail the figuration of the insurgency that emerges from Alles's monograph and archive. I explore his text's mediating problematization of the event and its participation in the formation of an historically resonant “rehabilitative script” of 1971. I argue that this script, an effect of the state, normalizes both the event and the revolutionary insurgent subject, making both available for national recuperation. The second and third sections foreground forms of discursive and non-discursive mediation, which animate the conceptualization and experience of archival ethnography. The second section pursues the methodological implications of recognizing that archival inquiry apprehends its raw material through a body of extant disciplinary preoccupations, questions, and objects. Specifically, I disclose the stakes of challenging or affirming Alles's archive by outlining the supervening context of my own interest in 1971. Here, I describe an archive of the disciplinary conceptualization of Sri Lankan political modernity, its characteristic preoccupations and objects, and their discursive effects. I examine the centrality of the concept of ethnicity to this archive and suggest that it yields and forecloses from scrutiny a normative, secular narrative of Sri Lankan political modernity. I suggest how the event of 1971 offers a locus from which to examine the substantive question of minoritization that this narrative occludes. The third and final section asks how different forms of archive implicate distinctive practices, experiences, and subjects of reading. I explore this question through a contrast between the researcher's experience of the liberal archive and the reading of 1971 within the JVP's own “archive” and its oral tradition of the panti paha (“Five Classes” or “Five Lessons”). Discussing my attempts to access the CJC's classified records, I consider the integral relationship between a disciplinary ethic premised on the archive's availability and the liberal archive's sovereign ability to furnish an experience of the thinkable. Noting the contrasting disciplinary unavailability of the JVP's lessons, I foreground how formative class experience and pedagogical practice mediate access to this archive of restricted circulation.

My focus on archives and mediation is enabled by that diverse, interdisciplinary body of literature contingent on “the archival turn.”Footnote ¹⁴ This work has deconstructed the fantasy of the space of the physical archive as a neutral domicile of self-evident and transparent facticity. It has explored processes of document selection and destruction, foundational to establishing archives; how archival forms mediate knowledge; and the embodied, interactive character of archival research.Footnote ¹⁵ After Michel-Rolph Trouillot, the early Subaltern Studies school of scholars, and studies of the colonial state, we now approach the archive as a powerful historical agent in its own right, central to the formation of governmental categories and capable of enabling and foreclosing narratives. More recent anthropological literature closely observes the dense materiality and circulation of archival objects.Footnote ¹⁶ This work seems to exhibit a methodological orientation, which Ann Stoler (after Marilyn Strathern) terms “immersement,” in opposition to earlier, predominantly “extractive” approaches.Footnote ¹⁷ Immersement connotes an ethnographic inclination to listen to and dwell within the archive rather than view it as a resource to be mined for answers to preformed questions. For instance, Stoler's own pathbreaking work reads “along the grain” of the Dutch colonial archive to disclose anxieties and doubts that belie the epistemic certainties of governing precepts. Other studies illuminate how archival artefacts’ material attributes and itineraries generate and mediate the realities they claim transparently to represent.Footnote ¹⁸

Immersive, ethnographic engagements with the dense complexity of the archive therefore reveal the instability of governing rationalities. By exposing the ideological character of modernist discourses of “immediated” representation, they promise more empirically accurate accounts of how representation actually functions.Footnote ¹⁹ If close ethnographic scrutiny of the archive's grain and materiality is a major methodological virtue of this approach, forms of mediation that organize the conceptualization and experience of archival ethnography itself now perhaps receive less close consideration. Hence, this paper steps back from the immediacy of archival immersion and the archive's apparent self-evidence as a disciplinary resource. It asks how discursive practices and disciplinary ethics prefigure, mediate, and sometimes delimit the questions we ask of an archive.

THE CRIMINAL JUSTICE COMMISSION: RECUPERATING THE RULE OF LAW

Insurgency-1971 can be understood as a popular and condensed form of the Criminal Justice Commission's judgment. The Commission's production of the insurrection's judicially sanctioned truth was, in turn, authorized by the tribunal's claim to nominally embody an historically sanctioned Commission of Inquiry form. A body of scholarship on commissions of inquiry has disclosed their distinctive identity as oftentimes novel, hybrid, legal entities, established in the wake of crisis by the state, yet possessing a certain appearance of autonomy from it, and therefore credited with the capacity to produce critique and reveal truth.Footnote ²⁰ This work has also focused on the character of the truths that commissions typically produce. From the outset, terms of reference, rulings on procedure, and admissible evidence define a circumscribed regime of problematization and legibility. It is now well-established that commissions often render political questions technical and amenable to forms of intervention intended to optimize the work of government. As Adam Sitze shows, this depoliticizing effect owes much to the biopolitical identification of crises as disturbances of equilibrium within an ideally homeostatic governmental organism. Sedition, insurrection, and rebellion may in turn be read in organicist terms, as afflictions susceptible to a range of possible remedies.Footnote ²¹ When the sovereign violence of the state is at stake and cannot be disavowed, this emphasis on balance may produce a tendentious “poetics of tragedy” in which violence is regrettable but unavoidable.Footnote ²²

All of these motifs pertain to the CJC. Established under a bill rushed through Parliament in April 1972, it embodied many extraordinary provisions. Its founding Act recognized that the “practice and procedure of the ordinary courts are inadequate” for securing the trial and conviction of suspects.Footnote ²³ This was primarily because the bulk of the state's evidence was comprised of confessions made to police officers, which were ordinarily inadmissible under Ceylon's colonial era Evidence Ordinance. As was well known, and as the Commission's proceedings subsequently revealed, many of these confessions had been extracted through torture. The Act therefore effectively suspended the Ordinance by permitting “any evidence which might be [ordinarily] inadmissible.”Footnote ²⁴ It permitted as evidence confessions made “to whomsoever and in whatsoever circumstances,” shifting the onus of proof onto suspects and allowing retracted confessions to be used as evidence against co-accused.Footnote ²⁵ Its proceedings were “free from the formalities and technicalities” of ordinary rules of procedure and evidence.Footnote ²⁶ The only requirement was that they conform to the “principles of natural justice” and, in the opinion of the Commissioners, be “best adapted to elicit proof concerning the matters that are being investigated.”Footnote ²⁷ Moreover, the Act established the insurrection as a fact prior to the Commission's undertakings, so that its task consisted of determining suspects’ complicity in the assumed conspiracy.

We see, then, that the CJC embodied that admixture of the inquisitional and inquisitorial generic to commissions. It was also intended to definitively establish a distinction between the unprecedented interregnum of counterinsurgency and the more settled judicious temporality associated with ordinary law. For instance, defending the CJC Bill in Parliament, the minister of justice presented the Commission's extraordinary provisions as an expedient solution to the logistical impossibility of prosecuting the multi-sited uprising by bringing “thousands of cases” against suspects in custody in different courts under existing law.Footnote ²⁸ But he also observed that the bill created no new offences, was drafted in conformity with existing law, and would provide accused with the right to prove their innocence and retain counsel.Footnote ²⁹

Indeed, the reasoning its proponents tendered for its peculiar form distinguish the CJC and the specific recuperative hopes invested in it. The retrospective assessment of the former permanent secretary to the Ministry of Justice, a key legal personality associated with the United Front government, conveys a sense of what was at stake for its architects. Writing in 1977, he acknowledged the “unprecedented challenge” of the insurgency that stretched to the limit a colonially conferred judicial framework of trial by jury, presumption of innocence, and so on.Footnote ³⁰ He rhetorically noted how the government could have followed legal practice from other Third World locations, including detention without trial and summary trial and execution. Instead it chose to “devise a more flexible machinery which could determine the guilt or otherwise of the persons in custody in accordance with the known and acceptable principles of natural justice.”Footnote ³¹ Hence, “without succumbing to the speed of Africa nor the lethargy of South Asia,” the Commission and the Act preserved Sri Lanka's traditions of the rule of law.Footnote ³²

Here, the CJC enables nothing less than the endurance of Sri Lanka's identity as an exemplary postcolony through a reassertion of colonially instituted legal tradition and the perspicacity of the experienced judicial mind. It functions, in Nasser Hussain's terms, as “an external signature of legality” that enfolds emergency and counterinsurgency within an ideology of the rule of law, which legitimates state sovereignty.Footnote ³³ Yet, the Commission's own extraordinary condition of possibility belies its recuperation of law, signifying what Hussain calls emergency's “indicative function,” its disclosure of law's “fungibility” in legitimating modern state sovereignty.Footnote ³⁴

INSURGENCY-1971: A REHABILITATIVE SCRIPT

The Commission recuperated law as a means of unequivocally establishing one privative truth: that the April insurrection was the culmination of a JVP conspiracy to overthrow the state. The CJC judgement exhaustively details the history, key personalities, and ideology of the JVP movement through this optic. There is little discussion of its findings in scholarship on Sri Lanka.Footnote ³⁵ When such work requires factual reference for the 1971 Insurrection, or the origins of the JVP movement, it is invariably an edition of Alles's monograph that is cited as a primary source. This documentary effect is redoubled by his presentation of the conspiracy narrative under three headings: “The Preparation,” “The Insurrection,” and “The Aftermath,” the latter containing chapters on the investigation, the CJC, and the author's own ruminations on the insurrection's causes. This organization of the text serves to isolate the narrative of the JVP as conspiracy, occluding its production as fact through the Commission's apparatus.

Insurgency-1971 commences with the birth of the JVP's leader Rohana Wijeweera in 1943 and foregrounds paradigmatic instances of his burgeoning political ambition. These include his early involvement with the Communist Party in Matara and departure for medical studies in the Soviet Union on a scholarship, his turn to Chinese Communism and involvement with the Peking wing of the Ceylon Communist Party, and his disaffection with Ceylon's established left and its neglect of the Sinhala rural social formation. Alles charts the emergence of the JVP in the late 1960s from a gathering core of acolytes and discussions in remote southern areas of the island; the recruitment and education of cadres through the indigenized revolutionary theory of the five lessons, disseminated at a series of camps in the south of the island; the organizational rationalization of the movement though village and district levels; bank robberies to stockpile cash; attempts to infiltrate the armed forces and procure arms from abroad; and finally, the plans for revolution on 5 April.

Alles reconstructs the course of the insurrection and its suppression from the Commission proceedings, using a series of dramatic episodes of insurgent attack and police resilience. These moments have subsequently functioned as anecdotal nodes of popular historical and journalistic memorialization. Significant among them are the rape and execution of the suspected female insurgent Premawathie Manamperi in Kataragama, the plan to capture the prime minister, the prolonged insurgent occupations of the Elpitiya and Deniyaya areas, and the failed attempt to liberate Wijeweera from Jaffna prison. Here, we see that, although Alles replicates much of the Commission's judgment on the character of the JVP and the insurgency, he also stages a recuperation of a decidedly more nationalist character. For the emotional charge of many of these episodes resides in the pathos of young, self-sacrificing insurgents, devoted to the cause of improving the country, but naïve in their use of violence and misled by opportunistic leaders.

This depoliticizing account emerged during the Commission, not least from the evidence of insurgents who testified on behalf of the state against their former comrades. But Alles amplifies it with his own sentimental idiom and concomitant valorization of the insurgents. In a series of passages from one of his final chapters, he presents an encomium to these insurgents. He begins by stating, “The sincerity of their cause has been amply demonstrated by the violence of their reaction,” and goes on to commend them for their self-training in the arts of bomb-making, their courage and self-discipline, and their abstinence from alcohol, smoking, and sex.Footnote ³⁶ He continues: “Without outside help the JVP revolutionaries did a magnificent job to give a severe jolt to the security services of the state and it needed all the skill, bravery and foresight of the police and state services to meet the challenge and quell the insurrection.”Footnote ³⁷

Alles's evaluation of the insurgents as sporting opponents of the state commends them from the security of their failure, but also in the process of their textualization. His private papers reveal something of the imaginative work that this nationalist narrative of the event demanded. Among them is a folder containing a corrected typescript detailing the insurgency around the southern town of Deniyaya, as well as copies of the Deniyaya CJC area trial judgment, in which he participated.Footnote ³⁸ The text seems to be an early version of a chapter from Insurgency-1971, which distills the judgment's sober account of the brief insurgent takeover of Deniyaya and the murder of a local dignitary turned counterinsurgent, Rex de Costa. The typescript, perhaps intended for publication as a discrete newspaper article, takes a more imaginative form. In it, Alles refutes the description of the insurgents as “restless unemployed youths ready to blame the ‘system’ for their rootless unused lives who went on a Maoist inspired rampage.”Footnote ³⁹ He briefly outlines the fate of one female insurgent, Rohini Handegama, seriously injured by army gunfire during the JVP's retreat from Deniyaya to the Sinharaja forest. Perhaps Alles based this character, along with one Ranil, described as her fiancé, on a suspect named during the area trial, but he proceeds to endow them both with an imaginative form and life.Footnote ⁴⁰ Hence, he writes about how Ranil and Rohini had known each other from childhood, attended school and university together, and then joined the revolutionary movement “in which they placed their hopes and aspirations” intending “to get married and settle in due course the new world of their dreams.”Footnote ⁴¹ He proceeds to relate Rohini's death from her injuries in Ranil's arms and her burial in a forest clearing, and highlights the abstemious but untutored character of the insurgents, approvingly citing the observation of one “local news correspondent” that these were “‘youths who had their roots deep in the country.’”Footnote ⁴² Alles concludes:

The terms of Alles's recuperation of the insurrection's radicalism for the nation further emerge in another item from his personal papers. It concerns the case of Viraj Fernando and Susil Siriwardena, two friends accused in the main trial of attempting to procure arms for the JVP from abroad. Both hailed from a very different social milieu from that of the majority of the insurgents. Siriwardena was the son of the first cousin of the Prime Minister, Sirimavo Bandaranaike, who following undergraduate studies at Oxford, returned to Ceylon to live among the rural poor. Fernando was a British trained engineer with a sophisticated grasp of Marxist theory and experience of revolutionary work in Europe. Wijeweera approached both men to procure arms for the insurrection, and Fernando was accused of undertaking a mission abroad with this intention. Although the Commission recognized that both terminated their links with the JVP before April 1971, they were found guilty of engaging in a conspiracy with the JVP.Footnote ⁴⁴ Their case comprises a chapter in Alles's book that replicates the Commission's characterization of their guilt. It echoes the thinking behind their sentencing by distinguishing between Siriwardena, who “became interested in Marxism only in his endeavors to find a solution to the problems of the rural youth,” and Fernando's professional, revolutionary engagement with the JVP.Footnote ⁴⁵

A note from Alles's archive entitled “The Case against Susil and Viraj,” seemingly addressed to his fellow Commissioners, foregrounds his nationalist evaluation of the men.Footnote ⁴⁶ Here, he distinguishes between two different types of revolutionaries: “frustrated youths, dedicated to the case of establishing a change in the structure of society by violent means and seizing the state machine from within” and

These sentiments did not appear in Insurgency-1971, although they must have influenced Alles's role in sentencing the two men. They afford some insight into the affective background of the Commissioners’ judicial appropriation of the insurgency. They are significant, too, for how they disclose a problematization of the event along the axes of what I call a “rehabilitative script.” The bourgeois nationalist celebration of youthful self-sacrifice in the service of a cause identifies the rural milieu as an indigenous, shallowly ideological space. Such was also the opinion of Douglas Hyde, a professional anti-communist and counter-insurgency expert, invited by the government in 1972 to tour its hastily constructed prison camps and endorse its rudimentary rehabilitation program. In his report, Hyde pointed to the ideological innocence of the incarcerated youth, concluding that they required less de-programming than their counterparts elsewhere in Asia.Footnote ⁴⁸ A depoliticized reading of the rural as a manipulatable reservoir of ressentiment additionally featured in the “old left's” embittered account of 1971.Footnote ⁴⁹

The characterization of the insurgent as a rural subject of thwarted expectation acquired added authority with the report of development economist Dudley Seer's International Labour Organisation mission, which had been visiting the country during April 1971. The mission concluded that the magnitude of unemployment, particularly among youth, was caused by a mismatch between employment sought and opportunities available.Footnote ⁵⁰ Ceylon's exemplary systems of welfare had produced a demand for white collar employment commensurate with expectations cultivated by the recent expansion of free secondary and university education.Footnote ⁵¹ Rapid postwar population growth, a stagnant colonial export economy, and a decline in the terms of trade during the 1960s meant the state could no longer provide for the status aspirations of Sinhalese vernacular educated youth. This newly visible object of educated youth unemployment coalesced with a longstanding nationalist project of modernization, which figured the rural as at once the nation's moral core and undeveloped margin.Footnote ⁵² A key task for the shaken, socialist United Front government now hinged on redressing this frustration.

A language-based “standardized” marking scheme for university entrance examinations was introduced in late 1971 to address the perceived grievances of educated, rural Sinhalese youth at the expense of Tamil medium science students. This discriminatory scheme was followed in 1973 by a more consequential district quota scheme. Both measures contributed to the radicalization of a generation of middle-class Jaffna Tamil youth.Footnote ⁵³ The regime also deployed a variety of agrarian technologies geared towards rehabilitating and harnessing youthful energies within their rural milieu. A governmental field focused on simultaneously tackling the problems of youth unemployment, monoculture, and the relative unproductivity of extant land colonization schemes had already emerged in the mid-1960s with the expedient of the youth settlement scheme, an experiment in co-operative farming and moral development.Footnote ⁵⁴ Following the insurrection, the exploration of such measures became more urgent. Land reform legislation in 1972 and 1975 created a state commission to alienate private land in excess of certain ceilings, and nationalized all public company held agricultural land. A small but significant amount of the appropriated land was given over to a range of youth cooperative settlement schemes.Footnote ⁵⁵ These collectivist measures did not survive a change of government and governing ideology in 1977. However, the legacy of the rehabilitative script of 1971 resonates in a subsequent political sociology of youth unrest, as well as in the work of state institutions and NGO's, which have sought to forestall the problem of “politicization” by reworking youthful desire.

Alles's archive, then, is significant for how it affords some affective purchase on an influential problematization of the insurrection and the bourgeois, nationalist imagination of the virtuous, rural insurgent subject, which comprises a permanent resource for critiques of the JVP's opportunism. The idiom of this nationalist vision resonated throughout my interviews with retired members of the Ceylon Civil Service, in particular former government agents, the foremost public servants at district level, who directly confronted the insurgency and its aftermath.

A poem by Leel Gunasekara, a distinguished Sinhala literary figure and permanent secretary to the Ministry of Rehabilitation in 1971, provides a sense of how the nationalist imaginary figures the event's trauma and the moral work of rehabilitation.Footnote ⁵⁶ Titled “Ämatitum ā Samaha C ārik āwaka” (A Tour with the Minister), the poem draws on Gunasekara's visit to Vidyalankara prison camp with Minister for Rehabilitation Maithripala Senanayake in June 1971.Footnote ⁵⁷ The poem pitches us into the midst of the Minister's address to the detainees:

The Minister explains that they were dispatched by helicopter to the camp on the “compassionate prime minister's orders.” He continues:

A youth moved by the minister's words then requests permission to respond and enunciates that refrain of state discourse on 1971 that I describe earlier. If “something like this” had happened in another country, he and his fellows would have been “lined up against a wall” and summarily dealt with. That this did not happen is due to “that message sown/with compassion for humanity in the land where there were courageous people.” The reference here is to the historical establishment of Buddhism in Anuradhapura, and the youth lauds the minister, who hails from this background, for fighting for him and his comrades, declaring that people like him are the “taproot of national culture.” The poem ends with a series of benedictory verses delivered by the youth:

Throughout the poem, the event that brought the detainees to the camp and its causes are obscure. But it is clear that the insurrection, as Gunasekara reminded me, issued from, among other things, an absence of the moral virtue of gu ṇa, which had deranged the traditional relationship of respect of the young for their elders.Footnote ⁵⁸ Its nationalist solution is a form of cultural reclamation, a reassertion of traditional sources of Sinhala moral authority, represented in the dialogue between the minister and the young detainees. It transforms the camp into the space of an outdoor village school and aligns the minister's discourse with that of a village teacher or monk addressing his young charges. Here, the poet enacts a return to the moral unity of the traditional Sinhala village as a microcosm of the nation and the political relationship between the state and its subjects.Footnote ⁵⁹ Within this particular Sinhala nationalist vision, the insurrection is quite impossible to account for other than as a form of national trauma issuing from the disturbance of this moral order. Rehabilitation describes the restoration of that order but cannot travel beyond 1971 as euphemism for its absence.

A SECOND ARCHIVE

Alles's text and his archive enable a vista on the authority and constitution of a rehabilitative narrative and problematization of 1971, which are vital to disciplinary and judicial practices and discourses that sought to ensure Ceylon's continuing viability as an exemplary Asian nation-state. The archive provides some insight into the kind of moral, imaginative work required to allay nationalist uncertainties about the event. Reading his papers for this dimension might well demand, in Stoler's terms, an immersive practice of archival ethnography, rather than a more extractive methodology which fastens on the merely emblematic character of the archive's evidence. In a certain sense though, ethnography's immersion is always already extractive. That is because the fieldworker's gaze and the ethnographic visibility of archival artefacts as anthropological objects are constitutively mediated by another, prior discursive field of problematics and concepts. Surprisingly little methodological consideration has been given to how anthropologists actively negotiate this field, and how doing so informs the critical value of their ethnography. In what follows, I address this question by reconstructing that discursive field that mediated my own engagement with Alles's archive.

In considering the always-present historicity of this context of inquiry, we can usefully approach it, after Foucault's much-cited conceptualization, as an archive;Footnote ⁶⁰ that is, as a systemic context organizing the production of fields of distinct yet implicitly related statements. If one always writes from within an archive, its immanence is less intelligible as a structure of abstract rules than as a system of relations, a temporal context of shifting disciplinary objects, problematics, the political narratives they embed, and the “real world” phenomena they evaluate. Locating such archives and their effects is therefore an interpretive act, implying some critical position within the archive.

Although less self-evident than the physical archive, this archive wields a similar constituting power in its ability to authorize and foreclose fields of inquiry.Footnote ⁶¹ Postcolonial theory provides useful methodological tools to reckon its contours. One now-neglected achievement of anthropology's postcolonial moment was how it complicated conventional understandings of the discipline's archive.Footnote ⁶² Theorists foregrounded the ideological implication of contemporary anthropological objects and problematics in colonial histories and concerns, revealing the importance of reconceiving the discipline's space of intervention beyond the confines of its own tradition.Footnote ⁶³ One theorization of disciplinary space to emerge in the wake of this reflexivity is David Scott's concept of “problem spaces.”Footnote ⁶⁴ A problem space delimits the present state of play of any tradition of discursive argument. It comprises disciplinary objects and concepts animated by implicit questions, indexing participants’ common political stakes. The diachronic and contingent character of the broader discursive tradition can be grasped as a series of such problem spaces. Scott's point is that the critical value of any investigation inheres in how its questions address the strategic, conjunctural demands of a problem space.Footnote ⁶⁵ Have the political stakes involved in asking older questions changed in a particular present? I suggest that the issue becomes more pointed if we understand how older ensembles of questions and answers function as an archive, exerting systemic effects on subsequent thought. We might then proceed to ask how objects generated within older problem spaces embed the moral-political concerns and assumptions specific to the past presents of those spaces. How are older forms of problematization sometimes inherited with the normalization of those objects as disciplinary paradigms? The discursive archive's description is therefore always a located and strategic matter.

Here, I want to outline how this concern with the politics of archival negotiation informs my reading of the stakes of an investigation of the 1971 insurrection. In short, I conceptualize the discursive archive that mediated my immersion in Alles's own archive. Any disciplinary work that engages with Sri Lanka's political present necessarily apprehends that present through the framing agency of prevailing concepts and concerns that have organized Sri Lankanist scholarship over the past few decades.Footnote ⁶⁶ It must reckon with two specific features. First as Pradeep Jeganathan illuminates, various explorations of Sri Lankan political modernity have been grounded in an authoritative narrative of political development, governed by the understanding of Sri Lanka as a once model colony and exemplary developing nation-state.Footnote ⁶⁷ The second feature is the effects of “ethnicity” in this work. I understand ethnicity here as a concept that both describes and evaluates difference, rather than an unmediated representation of identity itself. I suggest the concept's evaluative dimension emerges through an analysis of its uses.Footnote ⁶⁸

A genealogy of this archive would identify three key moments in the formation of its authority, falling on either side of 1983, the occasion of a large anti-Tamil pogrom marking the intensification of war between the Sri Lankan government and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam. The first moment centers on an earlier generation of political scientists working on Ceylon. For them, Ceylon's outstanding social indicators, its independent judiciary and public service, and its early experience of parliamentary democracy all made it an exemplary case study for the development of modern conditions of democracy in the newly independent Third World.Footnote ⁶⁹ This story of Ceylon as an instance of modernizing democratic institutions successfully coping with the effects of social mobilization relied on the island's identification as a model colony. This concept encoded the successful tutelage of Ceylonese elites in a colonially authored script of the art of democracy. Its motifs include an understanding of the development of democracy on the island as a matter of measured constitutional advance, with British concessions calibrated to an evolving elite ethos of responsibility for mass welfare.

For many of these writers, the increasing political prominence of Sinhala Buddhist nationalism during the 1950s did not fundamentally alter their optimism for Ceylon's “political socialization” in democracy. They saw these events as indicating a depth of traditional communal passions to be transcended through the continuing development of enlightened elites and the political maturation of the masses as secular citizens. For others, though, the growing political salience of Sinhalese Buddhist nationalism and the impediment it posed to the island's political evolution required explanation. It was in this context that ethnicity emerged as a concept specifying premodern, traditional forms of identification that distinguished Sri Lankan nationalism from secular, European prototypes.Footnote ⁷⁰ In the late 1970s, a body of leftist, secularist scholarship began to explore ethnicity's modernity and its role in the consolidation of an otherwise fissured Sinhalese polity.Footnote ⁷¹ The concept became more prominent after the July 1983 anti-Tamil pogrom undercut scholarly optimism about Sri Lanka's progressive political development.

A second key moment in the discursive archive of Sri Lanka issues from the scholarly response to this pogrom. Here, as Jeganathan notes, anthropology supplanted political science in the disciplinary division of labor.Footnote ⁷² Anthropologists mobilized a social constructionist analytic of ethnicity and a hermeneutic of culture to divine the wellspring of anti-Tamil violence by accounting for the “tenacious hold of Sinhala Buddhist nationalism” over their research subjects.Footnote ⁷³ This work yielded timely insights about the modernity of ethnic identity, and the constructedness of nationalist myths, projects, and ideologies. Yet, I suggest that in theorizing nationalist ideology's cultural embeddedness, the analytic of ethnicity tended to collapse identity with ideology, framing an isomorphism between identities themselves and Sinhalese nationalist projects of identity-making. Hence, the uptake of nationalist language has become, in a sense, guaranteed by ethnicity's conceptual properties. Nationalist symbology and language itself become “no more than a facilitating instrument of a domination that is already in place.”Footnote ⁷⁴

Such explanations for nationalist violence have circumscribed discussion of the political within the Sinhalese ethnic formation, a legacy discernible in a third and final archival moment. This is located in the work of civil society NGOs and policy think tanks, which since the mid-1980s have dominated knowledge production about Sri Lanka through the discourses of liberal constitutionalism, conflict resolution, and transitional justice. Existing in an often-vexed relationship to the Sri Lankan state, civil society's critique of it has operated within a temporal framework of crisis, targeting majoritarian constitutional dispensations, authoritarian regimes, and government corruption. It has diagnosed these as symptoms of state failure and indicative of the firm hold ethnic ideology has over the state and Sinhala society.Footnote ⁷⁵ Formulated from within the same secular imaginary that frames the model colony-new nation narrative, civil society envisions an idealized political horizon of a Western-style, bourgeois political modernity. An “ethnicized” Sinhala polity is understood to pose such an intractable impediment to realizing this ideal that advocacy of forms of international intervention and pedagogy remains endemic to liberal thought whenever crises arise.

This discursive archive hinges on an account of Sri Lanka as a once exemplary polity destabilized by the pathology of extreme nationalist identity. Its conceptual grammar frames the question of postcolonial Sri Lanka's manifold crises as deviations from the normative standards of an idealized secular, liberal, political modernity. It therefore assumes and forecloses from scrutiny the very norms that postcolonial political theory of recent decades has searchingly questioned elsewhere.Footnote ⁷⁶ A history of Sri Lanka made knowable through a gathering narrative of ethnicization precludes the consideration of events that resist this enframing and exercises an overdetermining effect on the interpretation of others. It was my interest in 1971 as one such “recalcitrant event” that brought me to Alles's archive.Footnote ⁷⁷

1971: AN INDICATIVE EVENT

This event's marginality today is much at odds with appraisals of its significance at the time. As I have said, the insurrection overshadowed the recently elected United Front government's pledged program of constitutional revolution and socialist transformation. A generation of ageing leftist leaders featured prominently in the new government. For them, this moment was the culmination of a lifetime of anti-imperialist struggle for revolution through parliamentary democracy, initiated in the legislative institutions of the late colonial period. It is unsurprising, then, that they were the most vocal in dismissing the JVP leadership as petty bourgeois malcontents and calling for aggressive suppression of the insurrection.

The brutality and reprisals unleashed by the counterinsurgency also prompted more critical reflection. This was especially the case among those intellectuals and public figures who hastily formed the Civil Rights Movement of Sri Lanka (CRM) in November 1971. Initially focused on advocating for the rights of the detained and the ending of emergency rule, the CRM's lawyers would later represent defendants before the CJC and attempt to locate those incarcerated and disappeared during the counterinsurgency. For such a constituency, 1971 crystallized a number of misgivings about the island's seemingly exemplary practice of democracy.Footnote ⁷⁸ It was an occasion for anguished reflection on elites’ complacent management of the masses through welfare, the psychic and political isolation of Colombo from the rest of the country, and the old left's “dilettante politics” of revolution.Footnote ⁷⁹ For some of these commentators, the event revealed the moribund character of an entire mode of politics. It also heralded the emergence of a new political idiom of the left, disconcertingly out of earshot of an older generation, as intimated by Ediriweera Sarachchandra's elegant novel of that time, Curfew and a Full Moon.Footnote ⁸⁰

It is this dimension of 1971, the collision of the apogee of state socialism with insurrection and counterinsurgency, which interests me. As an early fissure in the unravelling democratic relationship between the Sri Lankan state and its core Sinhala constituencies, the event has the potential to complicate a normalized narrative of Sri Lanka's political development. Relevant here is a tradition of political economy that emerged from the political crisis of the 1980s. This work analyzed the dependence of successive postcolonial ruling elites on Sinhalese rural and semi-urban “intermediate classes,” and the state's fetishized ability to reproduce its social bases through subsidy and welfare.Footnote ⁸¹ The socialism of the United Front government, and its unprecedented project of societal reorganization, mark a high point of this “statist” project. In subsequent work, these scholars observed how both southern insurrections instanced the limits of welfarist paternalism as a mechanism of social transformation, as well as the political-psychic effects of a failure to experience social mobility.Footnote ⁸² Therefore, 1971 provides a vantage on this project of sovereign nationhood, which defined the experience of postcolonial citizenship.

My main purpose in revisiting this event from this perspective is not to revise its immediate history or re-explore its density by producing a different, subaltern narrative of it using alternative archives.Footnote ⁸³ Rather, to borrow Hussain's concept, I am interested in the event's “indicative function.” Within Hussain's own work, emergency's value accrues more from the genealogical investigations it enables as a hermeneutic of modern power than from its location within “civil liberties during wartime discussions.”Footnote ⁸⁴ Analogously, I suggest 1971's analytic significance resides more in its being a locus from which to historicize the emancipatory practices and languages that underwrote a project of postcolonial sovereignty.

One example of this approach would be pursuing Nira Wickramasinghe's argument that ethnically discriminatory university-entrance quotas introduced during the 1970s are better contextualized within welfarist understandings of social justice that “transcended ethnicity” and complicate simple narratives of Sri Lanka as an “ethno-democracy.”Footnote ⁸⁵ On her account, they index an understanding of a redistributive state with a colonial genealogy. The colonial state categorized subjects, and initially distributed benefits, on the basis of ethnicity. She notes, though, how, following democratic reforms in 1931, occupation ostensibly replaced ethnicity in the designation of recipient groups, which introduced territorial representation and universal franchise. Ethnicity and ethnic ideological claims worked through categories such as “the peasantry,” which essentially designated Sinhalese cultivators.Footnote ⁸⁶ The critical point, though, is how these secularizing colonial reforms, predicated on the self-evident political neutrality of number, naturalized the concepts “majority” and “minority.”Footnote ⁸⁷ This secular political reason made the ideological mobilization of colonially constituted ethnicity electorally salient. Vitally, it also underwrote the democratic morality of reparative action and claims in the name of a majority.

The United Front comprised a governing coalition of communist, socialist, and Sinhala nationalist partners. Its leftist elements were the most enthusiastic advocates of measures such as the removal of constitutional safeguards for minorities and the use of a new constitution and state bureaucracy as political instruments of a popular will. How did such avowedly secular, anticolonial, democratic projects of universal economic emancipation rationalize the ethnic differentiation and inequalities they produced?Footnote ⁸⁸ This is a question which I suggest has bearing on recent reconsiderations of the relationship between postcolonial sovereignty's pasts and futures.Footnote ⁸⁹ To answer it we must historicize the secular rationality that inaugurated democratic reforms in Ceylon and elsewhere. This may also help us locate the contemporary JVP's democratic claim on the state.

THE EXPERIENCE OF THE LIBERAL ARCHIVE

The methodology of reading a discursive archive is an underspecified dimension of anthropological investigation. Recognizing its effect on the business of research itself entails an awareness of how conceptual schemes that bring us to the ethnographic field supply many of the criteria for what becomes visible when we immerse ourselves within it. In this sense, that prior archive anticipates and haunts ethnography, mediating its expectations and experiences of discovery.Footnote ⁹⁰ Here, I want to consider one effect of this mediation, contingent on my own experience of immersion in the Sri Lanka National Archive in Colombo.

Alles's archive helps us to understand the investments and categories that informed a disciplinary and nationalist problematization of 1971. Yet, Insurgency-1971’s instructive power, its ability to stand as an authorizing account of the insurgency, issues from the prior authority of the CJC's legal recuperation of the event. As I worked through Alles's papers in the National Archives, the penumbral presence of the state's own file on the CJC, marked as “Closed” in the catalogue, increasingly impinged on my awareness. Stoler has described how state secrets, in addition to limiting access, extend the promise of intimate participation in limited circulation by signposting what might count as more potentially revealing forms of knowledge.Footnote ⁹¹ The fetishistic character of the secret Stoler identifies is parasitic on the archive's historical identity as a political technology and a space of nominally free circulation, configured to produce self-governing, liberal subjects.Footnote ⁹² In more disciplinary terms, secrets incite that urge to subvert established truth so essential to contemporary practices of critical historical inquiry. In my particular case, access to the closed CJC files promised the possibility of new evidence that might destabilize the event as source of nationalist self-regard.

Moreover, there was a disarming openness to Alles's personal archive, which included several manuscripts, his reading materials, many notes, correspondence with his fellow Commission members, army and police reports on the insurgency, and copies of suspect confessions, not to mention copies of the CJC proceedings themselves. All told, it ran to several volumes and thousands of pages. This seeming transparency, the presentation and availability of the “raw material” of his text, seemed to avow that there was no secret to be disclosed; it was simply a set of tools on display. The secret, then, also suggests itself as a way of escaping from the mundane character of the archive. The classification of the Commission files puzzled me since the thirty-year rule on the public closure of state records housed in the National Archives had expired years earlier. My confusion was shared by other scholars in Colombo and elsewhere. Some suggested that the closed classification was an oversight, while others were unsurprised since, after all, the files concerned the attempted overthrow of the state. The director of archives did not entertain the possibility of error, and restated the law that to seek permission to view the files I must apply in writing to the Secretariat of the President of Sri Lanka. It was made clear to me that this would be an uncertain and lengthy process unless I had some way to expedite the passage of my request through the bureaucracy.

A commonly accepted convention for dealing with bureaucracy in Sri Lanka, as elsewhere, is to employ personal contacts well placed in relationship to the state who can expedite a request. Hence, the prohibitory provocation of access generated by the archive's intimation of secrecy engenders forms of complicity with distinct, wider social worlds and illiberal practices within which the liberal archive is embedded.Footnote ⁹³ My contact succeeded in securing me an interview at the Presidential Secretariat, after which I was quickly granted access to the files. I was required to peruse them sequentially in a room adjacent to the director's office, which aroused my hopes about the confidential nature of the information they might contain. To my dismay, it soon became clear that they comprised only the Commission proceedings, copies of which were already available among Alles's papers. My immediate speculation was that some files had been withheld from me, a conjecture fueled by the fact that the Commission files were uncatalogued.Footnote ⁹⁴

One might argue that this question of access is something of a red herring. Of course there are more files—there always are. The archive's premise of free circulation and the indeterminacy of its category of “Closed” play on the researcher's ethic of critical inquiry, ensuring a lack of definitive closure to this kind of speculation.Footnote ⁹⁵ The same authority that decided my access to the file could presumably decide which files I should be allowed to see. This is an authority of law that, as Talal Asad argued, occupies the space between rule and application.Footnote ⁹⁶ The liberal archive's promise resides in this fiction of access, behind which lurks an inscrutable sovereign decision, moving according to the dictates of a necessity that one cannot normatively anticipate.Footnote ⁹⁷ Recent anthropological work has registered the presence of this sovereign limitation in now-ubiquitous state performances of transparency and freedom of information.Footnote ⁹⁸ Historians, on the whole, have less readily acknowledged its implications for archival research. However, the selective character of the British government's belated release of its “migrated archives” of colonial administration has renewed awareness of the power of archives to shape research problematics.Footnote ⁹⁹ Less considered is how a more reflexive approach to the anticipatory effects of the disciplinary expectations I have outlined might attune us to the ethnographic impasses we encounter with differently mediated archives. I will turn below to my experience of the JVP's own resolutely non-liberal archive of the five lessons. My focus is how a subjective, ethical experience of class and the postcolonial state authorize access and reading in this archive. First however, I must briefly outline the party's trajectory since 1971.

THE FIVE LESSONS: A THIRD ARCHIVE

The JVP's history from its inception has been punctuated by significant fissures generated by personal, strategic, and ideological differences. I cannot detail this tumultuous history here.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Briefly, however, following the release of most incarcerated members by a new rightwing government in 1977, the party entered electoral politics before being proscribed in 1983 and going underground.Footnote ¹⁰¹ It re-emerged as an armed movement following popular opposition in the Sinhalese south of the island to the signing of the Indo-Lanka Accord and the immediate arrival of Indian troops in Sri Lanka in 1987. The JVP and its military affiliate waged a “patriotic war” against “traitors” to the motherland, which included its political opponents on the left and civilians who disobeyed its commands. Between mid-1988 and early 1989, its campaign of assassination and exemplary punishment appeared to have incapacitated the state apparatus. The government's ensuing brutal counter insurgency destroyed virtually the entire movement's leadership and decimated its grassroots organization.

Since rebuilding during the early 1990s, the JVP has become a fixture in Sri Lankan parliamentary politics, even participating in a coalition government between 2004 and 2005. Although its electoral fortunes have dwindled in recent years and it has been riven by splits, the party maintains high visibility and influence in parliamentary debate and in the public sphere.Footnote ¹⁰² This is grounded chiefly in its moral claim to be uncontaminated by the corruption popularly associated with Sri Lanka's other political parties. The movement has consistently opposed the neoliberal reform of the public sector and the scaling back of subsidies.

The JVP's position on the “national question” of the political rights of Sri Lanka's minorities and its relationship to Sinhala nationalism has fluctuated according to political strategy and leadership. Its refrain about minorities that I most frequently encountered was that their grievances are best solved within a unitary, socialist Sri Lankan state. On this account, manufactured differences of culture and religion are secondary to a common culture produced by the capitalist system. This position is not explicitly Sinhala nationalist. But its failure to seriously consider the ethnically differentiated character of citizenship leaves the party open to charges of Sinhalese nationalism. This is to say nothing of its longstanding hostility to meaningful devolution of power to minorities, its nationalist turn during the 1980s, and its complicity with former President Rajapakse's war regime.Footnote ¹⁰³

Again, the JVP's primary method of political education during the period of the 1971 insurgency was, as it remains today, its “five classes” or “five lessons.”Footnote ¹⁰⁴ The account of the lessons in Alles's archive emerges as contradictory. On one hand, it insists on the ideologically impermeable rural insurgent subject, who revolts because of a love of nation and frustration engendered by the conditions of the rural milieu. Yet, this archive also invests the lessons with an inflammatory capacity to incite violence and possess its initiates.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ The present-day JVP still maintains the institution of the lessons as the primary means for its cadres’ political education. Although the lessons have been updated over the past forty years or so to reflect the party's changing ideological positions, their endurance is one of the party's claims to continuing identity with Wijeweera's original movement, its fidelity to the event of the insurrection, and the class it claims to represent.

The lessons’ role in the JVP's assertion of its continuity is significant precisely because that identity is contested by disaffected members. A theme emerging from several of my interviews with participants in the insurrection, all of them former JVP members, was how the event marked a form of political awakening. My interlocutors remained subject to the event over the course of their lives, throughout their subsequent differences with the party. One former JVP leader in 1971, now a prominent critic of the party, described the political career of his fellow travelers as “a continuation of the same road by other means.”Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Since the 1980s, this road has traversed advocacy of the right of Tamil self-determination, liberal constitutionalism, and a negotiated settlement with the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, all positions at odds with the JVP. Other cadres from 1971, and contemporary JVP opponents, also distinguished the event of the insurrection from the party's subsequent history.

Despite these claims, the primarily oral tradition of the five lessons comprises a means for the JVP's institutional reproduction and evidence for the professed, essential stability of its political identity since 1971. They are an implicit, although often obscure and variable, condition of referentiality to which party positions and statements must be assumed to be consonant. We can therefore conceptualize the curated institution of the lessons, in its gatekeeping and epistemic functions, as a form of the generative archive that Foucault describes; that is, as a temporal, “system of discursivity,”Footnote ¹⁰⁷ which in its “positivity”Footnote ¹⁰⁸ makes possible arguments that different statements, ruptures, and ideological shifts express and attest to the movement's internal “unity throughout time.”Footnote ¹⁰⁹

Despite the aura of secrecy that attends their conduct, it is possible to discuss the lessons with former party members and to access transcribed copies. Their content seems fairly unremarkable, consisting of an indigenized, rigidly Leninist revolutionary pedagogy, but its communal context is just as important. It was with a mind to understanding this dimension of the lessons that I approached the JVP through certain contacts, asking if I could discuss 1971 with them. Following interactions with party members of different levels, I was connected with the chief incumbent of a Buddhist temple in inner Colombo, with whom I read some of Rohana Wijeweera's writings. For the JVP, my research would only be worthwhile if I could present a correct version of the 1971 event. The party, however, remained unreceptive to my requests to learn the lessons, and I sensed that I was being kept at a certain distance from them.

This was finally brought home to me after a few weeks when two JVP contacts, Vasantha and a younger cadre, Nalaka, paid an impromptu visit to my rented flat in central Colombo. In response to my questions about the lessons, Vasantha started to tell me about the poverty of his family background and the circumstances of his upbringing in a one-room flat in the Kirulapone neighborhood. He had attended a large Buddhist public school nearby, where many of his classmates were better off and were driven to school by car. “Once we were inside school, we were all equal, we were all friends” he said. “But I would notice how the other children used to waste their lunches, when we ourselves did not have any food. I learned that myself; no left thinking, no Marx, no Lenin, nothing. It was about 1986. Then afterwards I found out about the JVP.” Nalaka contributed his experience at this point. The son of sharecroppers settled on state land in Kurunegala, he had tried to join the army: “When I went for the officer cadet exams, I did well, but then at the interview I was asked what my father did and I said ‘My father is a laborer.’ Then it was finished. We blame ourselves, we think it's our fault but it's not.” Nalaka joined the JVP thereafter. He continued, “It starts from birth, when poor parents aren't able to give their children proper food and drink. Then they develop in a certain way. Think about the difference between a Colombo 7 [elite] youth, their skin, their body and someone who lives around here. Our youths smoke and drink but they don't eat properly. Colombo 7 boys abuse their bodies but eat well, so there's no damage.”

I understood Vasantha and Nalaka's accounts of their respective backgrounds to constitute a response to my questions about the JVP's political education. Their answer was that one's quotidian experience of hardship is itself a kind of learning, marking the body and orienting the subject towards grasping ideological truth.Footnote ¹¹⁰ Since that experience and the identity it authorizes were unavailable to me on account of my class background, I would be impermeable to the teleology of the lessons. I perceived this as a paradoxical situation—I could only grasp the ideological location of 1971 from within the moral-political locus of the JVP. But my own class background precluded potential membership in its moral community. My inexperience left me ignorant of those reflexive habits and practices held to denote membership.

ACCESS AND ITS POLITICAL STAKES

My interlocutors’ perception of my essential inexperience and class identity was continually pointed out to me in a mocking kind of questioning. The size, cost, and comfort of my living conditions in central Colombo, my preference for travel by three-wheeler rather than less expensive bus, and my consumption habits were all matters for discussion. A positive counterpoint to this questioning consisted in cadres educating me with various and mundane examples of those comradely practices that distinguished the party. Recurrent concepts here were the qualities of self-sacrifice and dedication manifested by JVP MPs and municipal councilors who decline the salaries that come with these positions, and by party “full timers” who renounce the comforts of family life and career for party work.

The archive of the five lessons, then, would be inaccessible to me unless I undertook to become a JVP member. The essential teleology I encountered though, that formative experiences of deprivation dispose an individual towards grasping the lecture's truth, would appear to have precluded me from the outset. Although these dispositions, as I was reminded, can be honed, they are essentially the attributes of a specific cultural and class milieu, articulated by Rohana Wijeweera's innovatory concept of the nirdhana pantiya. Jayadeva Uyangoda notes how this formulation redefined the category of the proletariat as “the class of the property-less” and allied it to broader formulations such as the p īḍita janat āwa or “oppressed masses.”Footnote ¹¹¹ The term was initiated as a critique of the established left's exclusive orientation toward the working class and its neglect and misrecognition of the rural masses as petty bourgeois. Yet it also denoted an affective field of class experience and culture beyond the ken of bourgeois, Western-educated old left leaders.Footnote ¹¹²

A copy of the five lessons from the 1970s, in its lesson on the Ceylonese left, characterizes its leaders as a class of honorary white men. Their subjective student experiences of racism in England inclined them toward social democratic thinking, which they took back to Ceylon to gull the working class.Footnote ¹¹³ The lesson claims the old left's circumscribed understanding of Marxism parallels its lack of national feeling, apparent in its hostility to Buddhism and the movement to install Sinhala as the national language of Ceylon. Most striking is the lesson's concern with the relationship between revolutionary politics and the physical travails of the body. One passage describes how leftist leaders would meet party workers on their way home for lunch without descending from their cars. It asks: “Is it the same if they go to meet the farmers? No they cannot walk on foot for ten to fifteen miles in the hot sun. They cannot cross over muddy fields. They cannot use their Benz cars. How can the leaders who cannot walk a short distance walk for ten fifteen miles to organise the peasants. So naturally the peasants were cut off from revolution.”Footnote ¹¹⁴ In the same vein, another passage concerns the day of a party rally.Footnote ¹¹⁵ The workers take leave to travel to the venue, prepare the podium and wait for their leaders. The leaders, meanwhile, after a profitable day lawyering, return home and change from black suit, tie, and shoes into worn out trousers, red shirt, and slippers. At the rally they deliver thundering speeches after which they drive home as the workers stay behind late into the night cleaning up. The lesson continues:

The lesson concludes: “We need not have Benz cars to do politics nor do we take shelter in Rest houses. We do not go to night clubs…. We go in buses or we walk. We spend nights in the huts of the depressed and enjoy what they give us as meals.”Footnote ¹¹⁷

The building of the movement through early revolutionary organizing among the nirdhana pantiya remains an emotive and exemplary historical site for the party, a story of the mutual recognition between Wijeweera's penniless band of followers and the poverty-stricken peasants in the island's deep south. The party posits a correspondence between its own agency and the nirdhana pantiya. It is therefore unsurprising that JVP members corrected my conventional description of 1971 as a karalla (insurrection), suggesting I instead use nägi ṭima (uprising), connoting an awakening. For them, 1971 and the emergence of the JVP as a revolutionary force is consanguineous with the birth of the political consciousness and agency of the nirdhana pantiya. A “correct” reading of the five lessons is essentially mediated and enabled by membership of the nirdhana pantiya.Footnote ¹¹⁸ But that identity itself is as much an effect of the pedagogy of the lessons and the membership of the movement itself. The relationship between class and party is therefore not transparent. What must be noted is its pedagogical character and its demand of discipline, both of the cadre and the civilian. For the JVP, remaining true to its foundational event means maintaining its identity with this class, which in turn requires its endurance as a party. Given this circularity, leaving the JVP or diverging from an authorized account of events may be considered a form of class betrayal.

The institution of the five lessons clearly does not invite the access a conventional archive offers. The liberal archive's conditional openness incites a disciplinary ethic of critical inquiry. This archive interpellates the researcher through its sovereign capacity to define thought as an experience of empirical discovery. The JVP archive also renders 1971 thinkable by authorizing experience. However, its very different ethics of reading raise broader questions about how distinctive archival practices of interested reading mediate artefacts and summon specific political constituencies.Footnote ¹¹⁹ To me, this case indicates the limits of an ethnographic mode of inquiry. For it is unclear how the authority of anthropology's own archive could underwrite the political stakes of reading in the JVP archive. Baldly put, the stakes of the anthropologist, “native” or otherwise, cannot be those of the cadre.