Youth as a Conveyer of Discomforting Memories

At the time of conducting this research, the reality on the ground was one of increasing state authoritarianism and repression of political criticism. This served to intensify people’s fear of discussing any issue deemed politically sensitive (let alone the Bheeshanaya).

During this research, an innocuous question that was frequently put to insurgents at the beginning of interviews in a bid to put people at ease was “What do you remember of the Bheeshanaya^rT This allowed for respondents to answer in whatever way they felt comfortable. Former insurgents would most commonly respond with a reference to their youth, followed on by stories of their involvement in the insurrec­tion, which they would hook onto this notion of “youth.” For instance, Rahula, an ex-insurgent who had joined the JVP insurrection as a schoolboy, responded with:

You know, it was those youthful years [smiles]...At school I was well-known for my art-work.

In prefacing his story with “You know it was those youthful years” accompanied by what appeared to be an indulgent smile, Rahula conveyed the concept of “youth” to be pregnant with meaning, which in turn suggests that it had narrative functions other than the mere facilitation of easing people into their stories. Rahula implies this temporal category of “youth” to carry special meaning and to have played a significant role in his involvement in the insurrection.

This is not to say that the legitimate socioeconomic and political grievances underlying the motivations of the insurrection were entirely dismissed by former insurgents. These issues were to a large extent tacitly or explicitly affirmed in people’s narratives. Nevertheless, it was “youthfulness” (tarunakama) that the vast majority of former insurgents consistently emphasized when reflecting on their participation in the insurrection some 20 years after the Bheeshanaya.

Through their narrative work, former insurgents infused representations of tarunakama with a mix of negative and positive meanings, which they described as having colored their own experiences of violence. According to them, being a youth entailed characteristics such as courage, dynamism, energy, and enthusiasm, which propelled young people to actively pursue change. The thirst for new expe­riences in one’s youth was emphasized by Kirihami, a former insurgent, who stated, “when you are a youth, you like to grasp new things [makes a grasping motion with his hands]. I got involved in the JVP for my tarunakama and its need to get involved in new experiences.”

By referring to his “youthful need” for new experiences, Kirihami implies some of these characteristics to be instinctive, diminishing a young person’s agency.

Being youthful apparently brought with it a burden of negative qualities, along with the positive. People explained these as being naivety, irresponsibility, impul­siveness, obsession with social image, the inability to foresee the consequences of one’s actions, an attraction to weapons, bravado, emotionality/quickness to anger (avegashι li), and being “up for scraps” (valiyata bara). The conceptualizations of youth that former insurgents drew on were masculine and referred to male youth. This reflects the fact that the research was conducted solely with male participants, and that the vast majority of JVP insurgents were male. Many former insurgents who had left the JVP claimed that being a youthful party itself, the JVP (leadership) was aware of these qualities and often targeted their mobilization efforts around them.

4.1 Tarunakama as a Driver of Violence

Kavindu drew on tarunakama to frame his motivations for participating in the JVP insurrection:

I was doing my A’ levels [Advanced Level school leaving qualification age 18+] at the time.

So, I was a prime target for that kind of thing (insurgent activity)...The JVP was a party for the youth. The youth were attracted to it because of the language they used, the way they spoke, and the kinds of things they wanted people to do, like go and smash things up. I had so much energy in those days.

An assortment of negative and positive characteristics ascribed to youthfulness crop up throughout Kavindu’s narrative, ranging from courage, energy, and a concern for social justice to obsession with image, bravado, “being up for scraps,” and irresponsibility. He infers that tarunakama and its contradictory experiences contributed to his decision to engage in the insurrection. At certain points in his narrative Kavindu divests his youthful years of agency (e.g., by claiming JVP manipulation), while at other points he speaks of being deeply affected by social injustice and his desire to effect change. Kavindu shows his “youthfulness” as involving emotional intensity: anger and frustration at social injustice, which in turn fueled his desire to participate in insurrectionary violence. Social discrimination engendered by the privileged position allocated to the English language, which is widely acknowledged as a factor that motivated Sinhala youth to take up arms, is also mentioned.

Through his story, Kavindu further paints a picture of the kind of young insurgent he was, by drawing on attributes of “youthfulness.” He represents himself as having been sensitive and keenly aware of social injustice, educated (he makes it a point to state that he had completed his A’ levels while his peer in the police had merely studied up to his O’ levels), full of bravado, somewhat naive and easily led, and carrying many of the usual traits of “youthfulness.” Kavindu relates his story with an air of nostalgia, indulgently laughing at his youthful escapades of acting the “hard­man” in his housing estate. He shows his own life as an insurgent to involve ambiguous youthful experiences and emotions (e.g., showing off to friends and beating people up on the one hand and being sensitive and deeply affected by social injustice on the other hand). Kavindu seemed to suggest that he could not be held morally responsible for the actions he took in his youth, under the influence of tarunakama. In drawing a clear distinction between his life now as a responsible adult and his life then as an irresponsible and emotional youthful insurgent, Kavindu was putting distance between the person he is now and his past as a “youthful” insurgent.

This form of narrative rationalization raises questions about the continuity of the self and the moral responsibility for violence committed in the past. Kavindu, like many other insurgents, appears to be saying that as an adult he is not the same person that he was during his youth, and so implies that he cannot be held responsible for the actions he committed at that time. This echoes arguments put forward by philoso­phers such as Hume and the Buddha, who reject the notion of a continuing identity and a permanent conception of the self. Buddhism emphasizes the transient nature of the self and its lack of ego. As one local Buddhist monk put it, “We are all in a constant state of flux and everything is impermanent.” For Hume, the self is a series of experiences and the feigned conception of a continuing self is based on the memory and imagination that connects a person to her/his past (Sirswal n.d). Scholars of memory have argued that the evocation of memory signals association and continuity. Memory presupposes a continuity of identity, carrying the assump­tion that the person who committed a crime in the past is the same person who should be held accountable today (Antze and Lambek 1996). What former insurgents like Kavindu seemed to be suggesting was a redundancy of moral culpability of the self by reworking their memory. They remembered their involvement in the insurrection to have taken place during their youth when they were particularly susceptible to violence, and when they were different people.

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