The Pirabhakaran Phenomenon Part 41 http://www.sangam.org/PIRABAKARAN/Part41.

htm

The Pirabhakaran Phenomenon

Part 41

Sachi Sri Kantha

[23 August 2002]

BIOGRAPHER’S INTERLUDE
‘If [a person’s] achievements amount to 70 percent of the
whole and his shortcomings to only 30 percent then his work
should in the main be approved.’
- Mao Ze Dong, on Leadership;
cited in Edgar Snow:
The Other Side of the River – Red China Today (1962), p.114.

What made me to write this biography?

Despite all the accusations peddled against him by the pompous
and non-Tamil commentators like Dayan Jayatilleka, C.A.
Chandraprema, H.L.D. Mahindapala and Gamini Weerakoon (the
editor of Colombo Island newspaper), majority among the Tamils
would say that Pirabhakaran passes the Mao’s scale of leadership
approval. Like Mao, he has an incomparable 25 year-long track
record as a guerrilla leader of repute. Nevertheless, Jayatillekas,
Mahindapalas and Weerakoons continue to squeal the ‘sour grape’
tune loudly in the Colombo’s Island newspaper like the paranoid
Aesopian foxes.

In relative terms, none among the more than one billion people
living in South Asia now can parallel Pirabhakaran’s achievement
in competence to be tagged as a second successor of Mao in
military affairs, after the Vietnamese General Giap. This is not an
exaggeration. Tamils have produced in the 20th century –
hundreds of eminent lawyers, scientists, businessmen, musicians,
sportsmen, actors and writers of international acclaim; but a
military hero – none, until Pirabhakaran appeared on the scene. It
is preposterously funny that those Sri Lankan army men who
pitted against him and lost fair and square (Gen. Denzil
Kobbekaduwa and Brigadier Wijaya Wimalaratne killed in August

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1992) or those who retired for safer pastures without completing

the assignment in hand (Gen. Janaka Perera) are being propped as
‘military greats’ by the Sinhala press of Colombo. This
phenomenon is illustrated by the well known Tamil proverb, Aalai
illa oorukku illuppai poo sarkarai. In English translation, it reads
as ‘In a village without a sugar mill, the flower of Indian bitter tree
is the sugar.’ Illuppai plant’s botanical name is Bassia longifolia
and is used in the traditional medicine of Tamil culture.

Now that I have completed 40 chapters of this biography on

Pirabhakaran, I wish to present my thoughts on why I write this
biography and how some factors pulled me into this task. The first
sentence in chapter 1, dated May 2, 2001, stated: “It’s time that
the Pirabhakaran phenomenon be studied somewhat in depth”.
When I wrote that sentence, I was under the impression that I
would write a two-part or three-part sketch on the unforgotten
facts of Pirabhakaran’s past, and move on to another weekly topic
which capture my interest for a commentary. I had titled the
column, ‘Pirabhakaran Phenomenon’ and emailed it to Nadesan
Satyendra for posting in the Tamil Nation website he then
maintained.

I was pushed to reconsider my decision of concluding my

three-part feature on Pirabhakaran, by one particular offending
piece which appeared in the Island (Colombo) newspaper on May
16, 2001 under the caption ‘Palavering with Prabhakaran’ and
signed with a pseudonym, Leo Panthera. This critic had taken it
upon himself (or herself?) to deliver a ten-point hostile tirade on
what he (or she) considered as “a few ‘psychoactive’
characteristics that profile the man and his method”. There is
something in stuffy Colombo’s hot air which breeds spineless,
anonymous critics like malarial mosquitoes proliferating from bad
air. This particular analyst with the pseudonym Leo Panthera,
knowingly or unknowingly had scribed as his (or her) fifth point,
the very two words I had chosen to caption my commentary for the
TamilNation website. To repeat the words,
“The cult of the ‘cyanide capsule’ is an astonishing
by-product of the Pirapaharan Phenomenon. If the man is a
blood-thirsty crank how can he have this willing army of
human robots prepared to die for the cause?”

This particular commentary by Leo Panthera made me to convert

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my three-part commentary on Pirabhakaran into a full-length

biography of the leader of LTTE. And I have figuratively lived with
Pirabhakaran for the past fifteen months. But instinctively for the
past 12 years, I had felt that Pirabhakaran and Eelam Tamils
deserved an extensive biography of the leader who had
commanded the interests of the Asian region and beyond for the
past 25 years.

Initially I checked my own merits and disadvantages of authoring

such a laborious endeavor. Merits, I had a few. Disadvantages were
equally bothersome, especially the lack of proximity to the subject
of my focus. Three motives which propelled me to write this
biography are as follows:
(A) A Thanksgiving
As disadvantaged as I am to the lack of proximity to the subject, I
mourn the loss of two opportunities in the past which would have
placed me at the University of Jaffna. But both opportunities were
compounded with ‘once in a life-time’ chances so that I couldn’t
reject the alternate choice of not being in Jaffna. First came in
April 1981, when I was chosen for the permanent assistant lecturer
position at the Department of Biochemistry, Faculty of Medicine,
University of Jaffna. Simultaneously, I had an offer for
postgraduate studies at the University of Illinois, with a graduate
research assistantship stipend. It was an ‘Either This or That’
option. My attempt to negotiate a solution to the dilemma I faced
with Prof. S. Vithiananthan, the then Vice Chancellor for the
University of Jaffna, was not fruitful. As I had labored as a
temporary assistant lecturer at the Dept. of Biochemistry, Faculty
of Medicine, University of Peradeniya for more than two years, I
was eager to grasp the University of Illinois stipend and did so.

Five years later, in November 1986, when I visited Jaffna, after

completing my Ph.D., my mentor at the University of Colombo,
Prof. K. Balasubramaniam (who was then the Head of the Dept. of
Biochemistry, at the Faculty of Medicine, University of Jaffna)
invited me to join the department as a lecturer. Again, I was placed
in an ‘either this or that’ situation and for selfish reasons was keen
on continuing the postdoctoral research at the University of
Tokyo, to climb the professional ladder. Thus, with heavy heart I
had to choose against joining the University of Jaffna. If I would
have returned to Jaffna then, that would have coincided with
Pirabhakaran’s return to Eelam from Tamil Nadu.

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Thus, I consider that writing this biography on Pirabhakaran is my

thanksgiving to the sacrifices of more than 17,000 youths who had
believed in his leadership. These young men and women were no
‘human robots prepared to die for the cause’ as the mean-spirited
Leo Panthera had tagged them. They were intelligent and
courageous human beings who stayed in the island to fight against
state oppression and eco-vandalism of pristine Tamil homeland.
Among them would have been talented tacticians, technicians,
teachers, musicians, engineers and artists. Though their voices
have been stilled, I felt that I had to write on their behalf.
(B) Inspiration from a Bargain Book
For me, the inspiration to write a biography on Pirabhakaran was
first kindled as a small flame when he was in the middle of
Indo-LTTE war, and his premature obituary had appeared in the
Hindu newspaper [see, Part 1 of this series.] In the fall of 1989,
when I was living in Philadelphia, I visited New York for a
weekend. At the bargain pit of the Koch’s & Brentano’s
Bookstore, I picked up an unusual book, War Zones: Voices from
the World’s Killing Grounds (1988) by Jon Lee Anderson and
Scott Anderson for $2.98, originally priced at $21.95. It contained
a chapter on Sri Lanka.

The sibling authors, of whom Jon Lee Anderson had turned out to
be a recognized war correspondent lately, had traveled for an year
in 1986 to gather material for this book in the then five war zones
of the globe: Northern Ireland, El Salvador, Uganda, Sri Lanka and
Israel. The Sri Lankan chapter carried 42 snippets of interviews
(undoubtedly mangled versions). The 42 individuals whose
interviews had appeared in this book covered a wide spectrum;
some well known and some unknown; some aged as high as 79
and one not even a teen and all others in between; some Sinhalese,
some Tamils, one Muslim and even one British mercenary; some
Buddhist priests and one Christian priest; some who met untimely
deaths before the end of the 1980s and some who are still living.

I provide below the list of 42 individuals (in the order of

appearance, and with the introductory words about them) whose
comments appear in the War Zones book. Some were active
participants in the war. Some, willingly and unwillingly,
contributed to the war by their words and deeds. Some were mere
by-standers and victims. To preserve the originality of the authors

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of the book, I have not altered their idiosyncratic spelling of some

names of the interviewees.
1. [unnamed and then] Senior Sri Lankan government official,
in his fifties.
2. Gunewardene; a Sinhalese civil engineer from Colombo.
3. Balachandra; 43, a Jaffna fisherman in Madras.
4. Kala; a large, smiling Tamil woman in Batticaloa.
5. Appapillai Amirthalingam; 59, chief of TULF, in Madras.
6. Ven.Madihe Pannasiha Thero; 73 and frail, chief prelate of
Amarapura or Burmese sect of Buddhism, in Colombo.
7. Ven.Piyadassi Thero; 72 and youthful and energetic.
8. Ratika Kumarasame; in her thirties, Jaffna Tamil in
Colombo.
9. ‘Naranja’; 26, thin, quiet man, recruiter and ‘fund raiser’ of
LTTE.
10. G.G.Tilak; 21, tall, slender Sinhalese in Anuradhapura.
11. G.G.Piyaratna; 39, member of Anuradhapura’s paramilitary
Home Guard.
12. K.Alvis; 34, heavily tattooed man, operating a small kiosk in
Anuradhapura.
13. E.A.Somalata; 28, wife of K.Alvis, short, smiling woman.
14. Ven.Nanaratana Thero; 75, custodian of sacred Bodhi (or
Bo) Tree of Anuradhapura.
15. Karu; a former military policeman, in Anuradhapura.
16. ‘George’: a devoutly Catholic Tamil lawyer.
17. R.N.Kamarawathi; 39, sister of Karu (#15), whose husband
was one of the people gunned down in Anuradhapura [killing
by LTTE].
18. Madame Sirimavo Bandaranaike; world’s first elected
woman head of state.
19. Subramaniam Sivanayagam; chain-smoking, dapper Tamil
running the Tamil Information Center in Madras.
20. Bernadine Silva; left wing Sinhalese Catholic and
middle-aged social activist.
21. Anton Balasingham; 48, enigmatic ‘theoretician’ of the
LTTE in Madras.
22. Longanathan Ketheeswaran; a skinny, pockmarked man in
his thirties and spokesman for the EPRLF in Madras.
23. ‘Kumar’; a middle-aged Tamil businessman in Batticaloa.
24. Balraj; member of the Central Committee of EROS, in
Batticaloa.

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43. Gamini Gunewardene; tall and hale, deputy Inspector General

of Police, in Kandy.
44. Tim; a deeply tanned Briton, a mercenary pilot fighting with
the Sri Lankan Army in the southern reaches of Jaffna
peninsula.
45. Nassim; a tiny, cheerful Muslim in his fifties, near Kandy.
46. Rasih; 34, the Tamil school principal, in Norwood tea
plantation.
47. ‘Talava’; a Tamil labor foreman of a tea estate in Norwood.
48. S.M.Tennakoon; government agent in Kandy, 51-year old
political appointee.
49. ‘Tony’ [Marianpillai Anthonimuthu]; government agent in
Batticaloa.
50. Christopher Romesh; 30, a thin, frail Tamil from Batticaloa,
living in Madras.
51. Bobby Wickremasinghe; a westernized Sinhalese and Deputy
Commissioner of Prisons.
52. Chandra Kumash; 26, from Trincomalee and an inmate of
Pelwatta rehabilitation transit camp.
53. Marimuthu Shanmugam; 27, laborer from Trincomalee and
an inmate of Pelwatta rehabilitation transit camp.
54. Sam Thambimuttu; Tamil lawyer and secretary of the ad-hoc
Batticaloa Citizen’s Committee.
55. Fr.Chandra; 44, Tamil Catholic priest in Batticaloa.
56. [Mrs] Sellathamby Kamalanathan; mother of a 17-year old
student slained by the Special Task Force [STF].
57. Kumarappa; 27, Tiger commander of Eastern Province.
58. Shankar; 12-year old Tiger, youngest cadre in Kumarappa’s
band.
59. Sumith Silva; STF’s Coordinating Officer of Batticaloa
district.
60. S.M.Lena; 79, retired high school teacher and member of
Batticaloa Citizen’s Committee.

Among these 42 interviewees, I was most interested in the

interview of Kumarappa, one of Pirabhakaran’s trusted lieutenants.
His photo also appears in the book, with one woman tagged as a
woman ‘spy’ Kangaratnam Athuma Kirikith. By 1988, when the
War Zones appeared in print, he had committed suicide (in
October 1987), which was widely reported in the news media. But
Andersons had written the following comment:
“It can be assumed that Athuma was executed within a few

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days of the interview. Attempts to intercede on her behalf

with Tiger supporters in Batticaloa were futile.
Eleven days later, the STF launched a massive raid on
Kumarappa’s base. In the battle, at least twenty one of the
Tigers were reported killed, including Kumarappa. The
Batticaloa Citizen’s Committee, however, charged the STF
with executing twenty seven people at the nearby shrimp
hatchery and estimated the attack’s overall death toll at nearly
two hundred, mostly civilians.”

This information in the War Zones book stated that Kumarappa

had been killed in action in 1986. This type of misinformation
especially on the deaths - some deliberately intentional like
Pirabhakaran’s in 1989, some due to carelessness - is replete in the
published literature on Tamil Tigers.

For me, the material presented by Anderson brothers was

appealing and important, but ‘just raw meat’. Can anyone feast and
feel contented on raw meat and uncooked rice, however appealing
it is to the eyes? Jon Lee Anderson may be a ranking war
correspondent, but fact-checking appeared not his forte, from the
manner he reported the death of Kumarappa. Nevertheless, the
work of Anderson brothers inspired me to collect as much as
information on Pirabhakaran and his army. Twelve years I kept on
collecting materials from newspapers, magazines and books.
(C) Rejections and Wanton Omissions by the Print Media
Editors
In the early 1990s, I was also an ardent letter writer to journals like
Lanka Guardian, Tamil Times and Asiaweek on topics related to
LTTE and Eelam. While quite a number of what I sent were
published in these journals, an equal number went unpublished, or
were mangled in print, though I kept the letters brief to the point
of not exceeding 250-300 words. To prick the partisanship and
pomposity of the print editors, sometimes I used sarcasm (and
infrequently ‘shock phrases’ also) in these letters, relating to
Pirabhakaran and his environs. Two letters I provide as examples.

The first was a completely rejected letter, sent to the Lanka

Guardian on March 22, 1991; it dealt with the Valvettithurai
bombing of the Sri Lankan army in January 1991, at the height of
Persian Gulf War. By then, I have moved from Philadelphia to
Osaka.

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Valvettiturai Bombing
“While I perused the 72 cumulative pages of the three
issues of the LG (Feb.1, Feb.15 and Mar.1, 1991) I received
lately, I could not find any reference to the Valvettiturai
bombing carried out by the Government’s Air Force between
Jan.20 and 23 of this year. None of the regular columns
mentioned about this bombing which occurred in the
Northern region. However the 72 pages I read were replete
with what I label as ‘intellectual masturbation’ on Trotsky
(by Regie Siriwardene and S.Pathiravitana) and on the Gulf
War (by Robert O’Neill, Bertram Bastiampillai and Izeth
Hussain).
The LG also published a four page account on the
destruction and damage to Iraq between Feb.2 and 8, as seen
through the eyes of Ramsey Clark, a former Attorney General
of the USA. I wonder why none of this type of reporting has
been published on Valvettiturai bombing. Is damage to
Valvettiturai, of less topical interest to the LG and its readers
than Iraq and Trotsky?”

The second letter was a response to a particularly slimy editorial

on terrorism and truth by the Asiaweek magazine in late 1994, in
which Pirabhakaran was particularly named as a ‘terrorist’ along
with Yasser Arafat and Gerry Adams. Here is the mangled letter of
mine, which appeared in print in the Asiaweek magazine.
‘Truth’
[Asiaweek, Hong Kong, Jan.6, 1995]
“In my opinion your sermon ‘In the War against
Terrorists, Truth is the Best Weapon’ belongs to the world of
fairies and angels [‘Keeping the Lid On’, Editorial, Nov.30]. I
live in a real world where the truth is always hidden or
restrained from revealing its naked beauty.
Truth is massaged and masked by the media in many
countries. Truth is also decorated by almost every practising
politician on this globe according to his or her fancy. It is an
open secret that the intelligence services of many countries
manufacture or clone truths according to their whims. So you
have the alphabet soup of CIA, (formerly the ) KGB, MI6,
Mossad, RAW and ISI working overtime to manipulate the
political, ethnic and religious frictions prevailing in many
countries. I find it perplexing that in your sermon, you have

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not bothered to mention these creators of ‘cloned truths’.”

What was deleted from print were the following passages:

“Truth is massaged and masked by the media in many
countries, of which Singapore is an extreme example. To sell
a thousand copies in Singapore, many competing
international journals would compromise real truth for
‘massaged truth’. Have you forgotten that recently your sister
magazine, Time, received a reprimand and apologized for
shading the truth in its depiction of football great
O.J.Simpson in its cover. Even Asiaweek sometimes twists
the truth to suit its stand. For example, in a foot-note to my
[previously] published letter (Letters, Nov.23, 1994), you
have stated that you did not include the name of JVP leader
Rohana Wijeweera in the list of Sri Lanka’s prominent
assassination victims, because that list was ‘confined to
political, civic and military leaders’. The massaged truth in
your explanation is easily recognizable to all Sri Lankans,
since Rohana Wijeweera was a politician and he even
contested the 1982 Presidential election.
Show me a politician who trumpets the truth in its naked
beauty and I will show you a saint. Even the reputation of a
living saint like Mother Teresa has come under attack
recently due to her past cozying with politicians who have
had a penchant for truths of dubious variety.
You have identified Yasser Arafat, Gerry Adams and
Velupillai Prabhakaran as representatives of ‘terrorists’. But
why have you not written a word about the types of truths the
CIA and Mossad had spread in the past about Mr.Arafat, or
how the truth-manufacturing department of MI 6 works round
the clock to slander the IRA or how the RAW released a truth
about the violent death of Prabhakaran in the jungles of
Vanni five years ago. If you have a sincere campaign to
abolish all the Intelligence agencies in the world to save the
real truths from their ‘cloned creations of truths’, you can
count on me to raise my hand.”

These type of rejections and wanton omissions instilled in me a

conviction that my views should reach the audience via a medium
which can by-pass the peevish print editors. There is a bit of
surliness in my part in that I’m playing the ‘gotcha game’ at

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Mervyn de Silva (the editor of Lanka Guardian, who had died) or

at the editors of the Asiaweek magazine, which has folded now.
But I feel that this is within the boundaries of peer review as
practiced in science and what has been rejected discourteously
need to be presented to a wider audience for proper evaluation;
and internet is a godsend for writers like me.

‘The Difficult Art of Biography’

Thus, to transform the three-part feature on Pirabhakaran which I
had in mind in May 2001 into a lengthy biography, I pumped up
myself after reading a wonderful essay by Wilmarth Lewis on ‘The
Difficult Art of Biography’ which appeared two months before
Pirabhakaran was born [Yale Review, Sept.1954, vol.44(1):
pp.33-40]. Some segments of this essay captivated me. To
reproduce the first two paragraphs of what Lewis had stated:
“Just about everyone likes biography. The reason for this is
not hard to find. It is the pleasure we get in identifying
ourselves with real people who have attained eminence of
some sort. By the magic of biography we are transported out
of ourselves into kings and queens, generals, poets, lovers
and bankers; we become Eleanor of Aquitaine or George
Washington or Babe Ruth. Such being the power of
biography, it is remarkable that of all the forms of the literary
art it has had the fewest successes: there has been composed
in our language only one life that everybody agrees is a
masterpiece.
Writing on biography recently Sir Harold Nicolson gave the
Oxford English Dictionary’s definition of it: ‘the history of
the lives of individual men, as a branch of literature’. ‘This
excellent definition’, he goes on, ‘contains within itself three
principles that any serious biographer should observe. A
biography must be ‘history’, in the sense that it must be
accurate and depict a person in relation to his times. It must
describe an ‘individual’, with all the gradations of human
character, and not merely present a type of virtue or of vice.
And it must be composed as ‘a branch of literature’, in that it
must be written in grammatical English and with an adequate
feeling for style.”

As Lewis noted in the first paragraph of his essay, “It is the

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pleasure we get in identifying ourselves with real people who have

attained eminence of some sort”. Tamils can identify with
Pirabhakaran. He is a real man, who have attained eminence of
some sort (or notoriety in the minds of his adversaries). Again, by
his deeds he has transformed himself into the George Washington
of Eelam and also equally the Babe Ruth of South Asian military
games.

Lewis also wrote, “In collecting his materials the author who is
writing the life of a contemporary has certain obvious advantages:
he can interview his man and his family, friends and enemies. He
can get answers that a biographer writing in the future will perhaps
have to search many books to find, and which he may not find in
the end. The contemporary has the additional advantage of
knowing how his subject dressed and walked and ate; above all,
how he spoke… The contemporary biographer has a still further
advantage which is so obvious that it might be overlooked: the
advantage of living in the same time as his subject.”

These lines of Lewis inspired me to invest my time on writing this

biography now. By providence, Pirabhakaran and I share the same
Tamil heritage, same native locality in Vadamarachchy region of
Jaffna and same generational match up. I’m only 18 months older
than him. Also, my younger sibling was born two days before him.
Of course, due to lack of proximity, as of now, I haven’t
interviewed him or his family or friends; but I have gathered
assiduously documentary materials (for the past 20 years)
generated by those who have interviewed him in person. I also
have gathered arduously materials scribed by his ‘enemies’. The
internet revolution since mid 1990s had enabled me to collect
useful information on Pirabhakaran, which would have been
impossible when Lewis’s essay appeared in print two months
before Pirabhakaran’s birth.

Lewis concluded his essay with a cautionary paragraph as follows:

“Biography demands much of its practitioners: study,
accuracy, insight and artistry. Its power and responsibility are
immense. The subject’s life, his many thousand hours, may
be set aside by posterity if his biographer is careless or
frivolous, idolatrous, or unjust. Immortality on earth is the
gift the biographer has to confer. If in the verdict of the best
judges in his own and succeeding ages he has made the gift,

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he will have won, as his reward, immortality for himself.”

How competent am I as a biographer of Pirabhakaran?

As I scan the slate of Eelam Tamil writers, I can list at least nine
who are competent to write a good biography on Pirabhakaran in
English. These are, in alphabetical order,

1. Balasinghams (Anton and Adele): the best to provide an insider

view of Pirabhakaran’s mind. Adele Balasingham has authored an
autobiography, The Will to Freedom (2001).

2. M.K.Eelaventhan: Eelam activist, with long-term residency in

Chennai, currently living in Colombo. As one with personal links
with the old Federal Party leaders and the Eelam militants, I
consider him as the under-rated talent who can describe best the
generational switch in Tamil militancy.

3. D.B.S.Jeyaraj: leading journalist of current generation with

contacts in Colombo, Chennai and elsewhere. He possesses
investigative talent, but has gained a limy image of servicing few
masters who are hostile to Tamil interests.

4. K.T.Rajasingham: journalist with decades of experience in

covering the politics of Ceylon. He is currently serializing the
un-told political history of the island, in a wider canvas.

5. T.Sabaratnam: elder ‘Lake House’ journalist with contacts in

Colombo, and author of staid biographies on A. Amirthalingam
and S. Thondaman.

6. Nadesan Satyendra: respected attorney with decades of insider

knowledge in Sri Lankan politics, law and Tamil activism.

7. S.Sivanayagam: elder journalist with an intimate knowledge of

events in Ceylon, India and mastery of English language.

8. D.P.Sivaram (Taraki): journalist with good analytical skill and

insider knowledge of recent past.

Each one of the above-mentioned individuals possesses merits

which are distinctly lacking in me to write a biography on
Pirabhakaran in English. However, they also – as I view – have
some burdens: advancing age, lack of motivation (if that is the
appropriate word!), ‘unsettled’ life and ravage of indifferent

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health, ‘uncertainty’ of surrounding mileau and inaccessibility of

reference materials are some of these. Not to be condescending, I
have one merit over these individuals, in that I have had a tough
apprenticeship in biography writing in 1990s.

In the inter-Olympic period between Barcelona and Atlanta, I

figuratively lived with Einstein to write my Einstein Dictionary
(1996), the first of its kind in science reference books. It has
received critical acclaim among my peers for its unusual treatment
of the scientist, who was chosen by the Time magazine as the
person of the [20th] century. Since there are dozens of biographies
on Einstein, I felt that I have to stand out from the crowd by
authoring a dictionary-style biography. While laboring to make my
work a success, by reading more than 100 books on the physics,
philosophy and political activism of Einstein, I learnt the skill of
(a) excavating concealed, covered-up or overlooked facts and
weaving it into interesting story; and also (b) sifting gems from the
piles of published muck.

But on Pirabhakaran, with the exception of Narayan Swamy’s

Tigers of Lanka – From Boys to Guerrillas, biographies are
lacking. Some published works provide significant mention about
his (and LTTE) activities. Thus, as of now, I couldn’t adopt the
dictionary-style biography on him. Rather, I had to focus on a full
length conventional biography.

Types of Biographies
Biographies, depending on the focus of the biographer, can be of
many types. These include,
1. Acquaintance biography (Memography)
2. Analytical biography (Psychobiography)
3. Devotional biography (Hagiography)
4. Dismantling biography (Pathobiography)
5. Recording biography (Chronobiography)
6. Autobiography

Rajan Hoole et al’s Broken Palmyra (1990) and Rohan

Gunaratna’s Indian Intervention in Sri Lanka (1993) were
recording biographies on the origin and development of LTTE in
general. Adele Balasingham’s The Will to Freedom (2001) was an
autobiography with noticeable snippets on Pirabhakaran’s mind.

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Dixit’s Assignment Colombo (1998) was a crude type of

acquaintance biography on Pirabhakaran.

In contrast to these works, I have chosen to write an analytical

biography on Pirabhakaran, which is a cross between Erik
Erikson’s Gandhi’s Truth (1969) and any of James Michener’s
non-fiction work. The three ingredients enumerated by Sir Harold
Nicolson for a biography, namely ‘history’, ‘description of an
individual’ and ‘a branch of literature with an adequate feeling for
style’, also merited my earnest attention. Either The Broken
Palmyra or Indian Intervention in Sri Lanka cannot qualify as a
biography on Pirabhakaran since in both the last two ingredients
were missing.

Though it is customary to provide a list of consulted sources at the

end of the work, for pragmatic reasons on information, I have
opted to provide a list of sources which have been consulted in the
writing of the past 40 chapters. Only the books and book chapters
are mentioned. Journal and periodical articles are too numerous to
be mentioned now.

Consulted Sources

[Note: Rather than the conventional alphabetical listing by the

authors, I have preferred the chronological listing by the
publication date.]

The sources have been categorized into three types: (A) Works
with details on Pirabhakaran (B) Works on Ceylon/Sri Lanka (C)
Works on Military history.
(A) Works with details on Pirabhakaran
1. George Rosie: The Directory of International Terrorism,
Mainstream Publishing, Edinburgh, 1986, pp. 176-177.
2. Chelvadurai Manogaran: Ethnic Conflict and Reconciliation
in Sri Lanka, University of Hawaii Press, Honolulu, 1987,
232 pp.
3. A.Jayararatnam Wilson: The Break-Up of Sri Lanka – The
Sinhalese-Tamil Conflict, C.Hurst & Co., London, 1988,
240 pp.
4. Jon Lee Anderson and Scott Anderson: War Zones-Voices

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from the World’s Killing Grounds, Dodd, Mead & Co, New
York, 1988, chapter 4: pp.173-233.
22. Attar Chand: M.G.Ramachandran – My Blood Brother, Gian
Publishing House, Delhi, 1988, 229 pp.
23. Ravi Kant Dubey: Indo-Sri Lankan Relations, with Special
Reference to the Tamil Problem, Deep & Deep Publications,
New Delhi, 1989, 216 pp.
24. Rajesh Kadian: India’s Sri Lanka Fiasco – Peace Keepers at
War, Vision Books, New Delhi, 1990, 184 pp.
25. Rajan Hoole, Daya Somasundaram, K.Sritharan and Rajani
Thiranagama: The Broken Palmyra, The Sri Lanka Studies
Institute, Claremont, CA, 1990 revised version, 464 pp.
26. K.Mohandas: MGR – The Man and the Myth, Panther
Publishers, Bangalore, 1992, 181 pp.
27. Rohan Gunaratna: Indian Intervention in Sri Lanka – The
Role of India’s Intelligence Agencies, South Asian Network
on Conflict Research, Colombo, 1993, 500 pp.
28. Kofi Buenor Hadjor: Dictionary of Third World Terms,
Penguin Books, London, 1993, pp.282-283.
29. K.M.de Silva and Howard Wriggins: J.R.Jayewardene of Sri
Lanka – A Political Biography. Vol.II: From 1956 to His
Retirement 1989, Leo Cooper/ Pen & Sword Books Ltd.,
London, 1994, 754 pp.
30. Human Rights Watch: Slaughter among Neighbors – The
Political Origins of Communal Violence, Yale University
Press, New Haven, CT, 1995, chapter 6: Sri Lanka, pp.
85-100.
31. M.R.Narayan Swamy: Tigers of Lanka – From Boys to
nd
Guerrillas, Vijitha Yapa Bookshop, Colombo, 2 edition
with Epilogue, 1996, 358 pp.
32. T.Sabaratnam: The Murder of a Moderate – Political
Biography of Appapillai Amirthalingam, Nivetha Publishers,
Dehiwela, 1996, 426 pp.
33. J.N.Dixit: Assignment Colombo, Vijitha Yapa Bookshop,
Colombo, 1998, 393 pp.
34. S.W.R.de A.Samarasinghe and Vidyamali Samarasinghe:
Historical Dictionary of Sri Lanka, Scarecrow Press,

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Lanham, MD, 1998, pp. 96-97 & 109-110.

39. Rajeev Sharma: Beyond the Tigers – Tracking Rajiv Gandhi
Assassination, Kaveri Books, New Delhi, 1998, 278 pp.
40. Subramanian Swamy: The Assassination of Rajiv Gandhi –
Unanswered Questions and Unasked Queries, Konark
Publishers, Delhi, 2000, 316 pp.
41. Adele Balasingham: The Will to Freedom – An Inside View
of Tamil Resistance, Fairmax Publishing Ltd., Mitcham,
2001, 380 pp.
42. S.Sivanayagam: The Pen and the Gun – Selected Writings
1977-2001, Tamil Information Centre, London, 2001, 292
pp.
(B) Works on Tamils/Ceylon/Sri Lanka
1. James Emerson Tennent: Ceylon – An Account of the Island
Physical, Historical and Topographical with Notices of its
Natural History, Antiquities and Production, 2 vols., 1859
(1999 reprint), Longman, Green, Longman & Roberts,
London, 619 pp & 690 pp.
2. Richard Nyrop et al.: Area Handbook for Ceylon, Foreign
Area Studies (FAS), U.S. Government Printing Office,
Washington DC, 1971, 525 pp.
3. W.Robert Holmes: Jaffna (Sri Lanka) 1980, The Christian
Institute for the Study of Religion and Society, Jaffna
College, Jaffna, 1980, 542 pp.
4. K.M.de Silva: A History of Sri Lanka, C.Hurst & Co,
London, 1981, 603 pp.
5. Margaret Trawick: Notes on Love in a Tamil Family,
University of California Press, Berkeley, 1992, 299 pp.
(C) Works on Military History
1. Nathan Leites and Charles Wolf Jr.: Rebellion and Authority
– An Analytic Essay on Insurgent Conflicts, Markham
Publishing, Chicago, 1971, 174 pp.
2. Robert Thompson and John Keegan (eds.): Conventional and
Guerrilla Warfare since 1945, Crown Publishers, New York,
1985, 336 pp.
3. John S.Bowman (ed). The Vietnam War – Day by Day,
Mallard Press, New York, 1989, 224 pp.

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4. John Keegan and Andrew Wheatcroft: Who’s Who in

Military History from 1453 to the Present Day, Routledge,
London, 1996, 3rd edition, 340 pp.
5. Jeremy Black: War and the World – Military Power and the
Fate of Continents 1450-2000, Yale University Press, New
Haven, 1998, 334 pp.

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