Jaffna Library in Sri Lanka burned in 1981

First step in civil war.

Jaffna Library burned

The Library of Jaffna, Sri Lanka which had over 97,000 manuscripts in 1981 was the start of the Sri Lankan war.¹ Among the destroyed were scrolls of historical value and the works and manuscripts of the universally acclaimed, philosopher, artist and author Ananda Kumaraswamy and prominent intellectual Prof. Issac Thambaiya. The destroyed articles included memoirs and works of writers and dramatists who made a significant contribution toward the sustenance of the Tamil culture.² 

In Sri Lanka, the destruction (by the Sinhalese) of the Jaffna Public Library, the Tamil minority’s primary cultural institution, led to full-scale civil war. The shattered library served and still serves as a symbol of violation and ethnic violence.³

The people who burned the library were a larger group of  a hundred officers of the Sri Lankan police force, who were taken to Jaffna to observe and disrupt a rally organized by the Tamil United Liberation Front (TULF). ⁴

In the aftermath, the Jaffna Public Library was set ablaze and the burning continued unchecked for two nights.

“Destroying a library is a satisfactory way to lash out at a despised group and express contempt for its purpose and goals. The violence contributes to a repressive environment in which the perpetrator’s exclusivist goals can be profitably pursued. A government does not have to be directly involved in the destruction of culture to be complicit: politicians merely have to stand by and let it go unpunished. If the government and central belief system accommodates pluralism, then books and libraries are fairly secure. If, however, the state is captured by an exclusionist group, then books and libraries enter the danger zone. Inflamed by ideology and possessing far too much power, an extreme regime may conclude that ethnic cleansing is justifiable. A case can be made that ethnic cleansing, including the destruction of libraries, is the logical end of ethnic conflicts that have been intensified exponentially by grievance, greed, and power. When rivalry fuels hatred and clashes over beliefs spawn extremism, violence visited upon the bodies of the enemy is also visited on their texts.”⁵

1. Wilson, A. Jeyaratnam (2000). Sri Lankan Tamil Nationalism: Its Origins and Development in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries. London: Hurst

2. Dr. Jayantha Seneviratne (2002). The reconstruction of the Jaffna library. The Daily News.

3. Knuth, Rebecca. 2006. “Destroying a Symbol: Checkered History of Sri Lanka’s Jaffna Public Library.” IFLA Conference Proceedings, November, 1–8. 

4. Thamil Venthan Ananthavinayagan (2020). The Burning of Jaffna Public Library: Sri Lanka’s First Step Toward Civil War. The Diplomat.

5. Ibid., Knuth.