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By Rajan Philips

A. J. Canakaratne, who passed away on 10 October 2006, has been endearingly described as Jaffna’s Regi Siriwardene. AJ was a great admirer of Regi, would have even considered Regi to be his mentor and did go on to edit and publish Regi’s writings, but in the circumstances of Jaffna the role that AJ played is beyond comparison.

For almost all his life, save for his university years at Peradeniya and his short stay at the Lake House in Colombo, AJ lived in Jaffna – in fair weather and foul, in sunshine and in rain, in the good times of yesteryears and through the traumas of the last twenty years. Jaffna is nothing without its premium on schools and students and AJ belonged to a generation when Jaffna students were encouraged to take to arts and humanities unlike the later generations who were stampeded into a narrow cramming of the sciences. It was this grounding that enabled AJ to be a unique resource as a literary and social critic in Jaffna.

After his early education at St. Patrick’s College, a bastion of Catholic conservatism, AJ studied English (Honours) at Peradeniya under the likes of E.F.C. Ludowyk and Doric de Souza both effervescent and progressive intellectuals of their time and every time. From Peradeniya English, AJ took the by then well-trekked path to the Features page in the Ceylon Daily News. What might have turned out to be a lifelong career at the Lake House was cut short by AJ’s inadvertent act of non-compliance with a directive from Esmond Wickremasinghe, then the Managing Editor of the Daily News.

This was the 1960s and the Minister of Education in the first Sirimavo Bandaranike government, Badudin Mahmud, decided to open the admission to Royal Primary to all island competition rather than limit it to the children of Old Boys and other notables in Colombo. For reasons that are not difficult to surmise, Esmond Wickremasinghe wanted Mahmud’s move criticized and asked the Features Editor to assign the task to one of the feature writers. The task fell on AJ, who did his research, spoke to sources at Royal College and concluded that the Minister’s decision was a popular one and was welcomed by those who ran the school. AJ reported back to his editor that there was nothing to criticize and the two decided not to write anything on the matter.

When AJ’s finding came up at the editors’ meeting, Esmond Wickremasinghe’s face reportedly turned “crimson” although he kept his quiet. The fall out came not long after with the shoving of AJ from the Features section to the news room. AJ got the message and took the Mail Train to Jaffna, a rare return journey of the permanent kind. For over hundred years Jaffna has been an out-migration community – more people leaving the peninsula than coming in to earn a livelihood - with hardly any middle-class economic space except for teachers, who have been aplenty, and much fewer lawyers and doctors.

AJ’s father was the well known Proctor Canakaratne of Jaffna. Of his two younger brothers – Selvam Canakaratne settled down in Colombo becoming the Managing Director of Ceylon Printers besides continuing his panache for free lance writing, and Dr. S. G. Canakaratne joined the academia first serving the Chemistry Department at Peradeniya and now a Professor in Ohio, USA.

Although not a place for careers, Jaffna offers, rather it used to offer, its unique charms, customs, challenges and complexities to anyone with patience, curiosity and commitment. The source of Jaffna’s cultural and intellectual pride is its unique traditions of commentary on Tamil literature and in the practice of Hinduism both of which set Jaffna apart from the mass of Tamil speakers in South India. To its credit, the practice of Hinduism in Jaffna did not prevent the Christian and Muslim Tamils making their own contribution to Tamil literature and society, and to the creation of a truly secular political culture. Arumuga Navalar’s precept – “English for the body and Saivam for the soul” - exemplifies the source and success of this ethos.

It is no exaggeration to say that AJ created his own niche within this ethos and this tradition, and his role was well recognized during his lifetime even as he was respected and loved by everyone who came to know him. It will also be remembered and celebrated by future generations of Tamil literati. AJ’s uniqueness stems from his academic and intellectual background that was almost entirely English and not at all in Tamil classics. This enabled him to develop his own personality in Tamil prose that was closer to common usage yet rigourous and substantive in content, rather than the alliterative embellishments that provide easy titillations but leave no lasting impact on the reader.

He began and continued to be Jaffna’s main, if not the only, gateway between the outside intellectual world and its native players. His first book in Tamil, Mattu (churn-staff), a translation of well chosen English essays on literature, culture and politics, heralded his arrival on the Tamil literary scene. His later commentaries on contemporary Tamil literature created a following not only in Jaffna and Sri Lanka but also in Chennai and South India.

What made AJ lovable to his many friends and followers were his simplicity, humility and affability. He was a pedant to many and in more ways than one. In a society where those with ‘little English’ tend to think no end of themselves, AJ was the affable resource who needed help in English. AJ’s resourcefulness was institutionalized when Jaffna was finally given a university of its own and AJ was given a teaching position in the University. His wit and humour became an integral part of Common Room conversations and university life itself.

He did not give up on journalism; rather journalism in Jaffna came to him for help. For years, he edited and published The Co-operator, the journal of Jaffna’s once vibrant co-operative movement. When the Saturday Review was started, AJ was once again an automatic resource for the new weekly. The now defunct weekly epitomized the limitations and defiance of Tamil politics and nationalism. Saturday Review was the face of Jaffna’s defiance to its oppression and occupation by government forces that began in 1979 and has not been let up since.

AJ stuck with Jaffna through its years of trial and tribulation. He walked the fine line between the occupying army and the infighting militants, but without sacrificing his intellectual independence. He did not become a ghost writer or an apologist for any of the Tamil groups, as many others did. AJ was not brought up to be a supine fellow traveler of any group, although he had views – critically reflective views – on all of them. They were very well known in the grape vine of Jaffna. He dubbed the men of the cloth who slavishly support the LTTE – “white tigers.” He equally poured scorn on the so called Tamil Democrats who religiously hold that the troubles of the Tamils only began with the LTTE and can only end with it. AJ called them “stark raving nuts.”

I have known AJ for forty years, from my school days when AJ was editing the Co-operator, later trying to start a political periodical in Jaffna, and finally when I was on the Board of Governors of the Saturday Review. I last saw him in Jaffna in 2004, and previously in 2002, soon after the ceasefire, in the company of Rev. Paul Caspersz, Dr. Kumar David, Marshal Fernando, Dr. Vijaya Kumar, and Jayaratne Malliyagoda – some of us returning to Jaffna to commemorate our visit twenty three years earlier as part of the first fact finding the delegation of the Movement for Inter-Racial Justice and Equality (MIRJE) during the Emergency Rule of 1979. AJ had translated into Tamil the MIRJE publication: Emergency ’79.

In 2002, he gave us the most penetrating analysis of the situation in Jaffna and the prospects for a permanent peace. As he put it, it called for a leap of faith for a Tamil to believe that the UNP that burnt the Jaffna Library in 1981 and burnt the PA’s Constitutional Draft in Parliament in 2000 would deliver a lasting solution to the Tamil question. In the musical chairs that is Colombo politics, it really does not matter who is in power, and the echo from Colombo is anything but music in Jaffna.

AJ left Jaffna earlier this year for medical treatment in Colombo. That became his last journey out of the peninsula. He died and was buried in Colombo, but he will live in the collective memory of Jaffna’s literati wherever they are.