Talk show with Jay Dino:

Living in Mullativu

Talking of Mullaitivu AB who was a provincial officer there long time ago had this to say about his stay there, beginning with his home.

AB: It was a wattle and daub house with cadjan roof but a spacious one, with a nice long veranda fronting the sea. A kind of long ago revival of what British GAs would have first inhabited in the Eastern Province in Batticaloa or Trinco.

Jay Dino (JD): The East coast shore is the whitest sand and the bluest water and the brightest sun isn’t it? Till the 1960s the official houses fronting the sea occupied by the GA and his subordinates and provincial heads were superb places to live in. In the afternoon they slept the sleep of the just after their office or field routines in the morning.

Mullativu town Picture by Rukmal Gamage

AB: And some of them did quite amusing things too. There was one Burghur GA who described how the development process went on and one of his best routines was about how the mobile insemination unit, for upgrading the local cattle with semen from better stock, like the Ayershires, had to chase after the cows in their vehicles.

JD: One of the pleasures of conquest!

AB: Living in Mullativu was like visiting Kumana, the bird sanctuary in the East coast further South, on the mouth of the Kumbukkan Oya.

It was so rural that we have lost the language which can evoke it. Our words are so urban and we see the place from a city dweller’s angle. But most people in Mullativu had not even gone to Colombo once.

It was an idyllic existence, fishing, paddy under the irrigation tank, and immigrant fisherman from Negombo and other places having their Wadiyas and possibly their families too. I learned Tamil there like Leonard Woolf learning Sinhala.

JD: Leonard Woolf says in his Autobiography ‘Growing’ about how he came to love the people of Hambantota, when he was AGA there in the first decade of 1900s. Did you develop such feelings too.

AB: I did too. We are villagers at heart - at least we were at the time and a certain nostalgia for the rural life lay somewhere in the unconscious.

You know as time passed and the interaction with the rest of the country continued, Mullativu from being an isolated village in the jungle, as Leonard Woolf would have described it, had he lived there instead of in the South, became a growing community with radios, nylon shirts and brick houses.

A school was built and a cooperative store to sell the essentials, in the time of the T. B. Illangaratne, era received commodities like milk food and Parippu from the imports distributed by the Colombo importers. In fact tractors came into the area and disturbed the peace of the rural scene, the sweet especial rural scene of the forgotten East coast village.

JD: So development brought its counter blessings too. I was told by a friend that in the 1980s a special program was set up by the University Grants Commission to teach English to students from all over the country who had gained admission to the University.

AB: That’s right. One of the many centers distributed throughout the country was located in Mullativu and we had three teachers from Mullativu school teaching English in the afternoons after regular classes were over. So while being isolated and also being caught up in political turmoil, there were moments when Mullativu remained part of the larger community that was Sri Lanka.

I do sincerely hope that the integration of various communities in the country will also bring about the end of Mullativu’s isolation and make it a good place to live in, once again.