In an interview on Sri Lanka

So your next book is written when the conflict is already well under way.

Yes, The Broken Palmyrah - the palmyrah being a palm tree and a symbol of Jaffna. So the civil war really started in July 1983. This is when we had the horrendous anti-Tamil pogroms in Colombo, with over 2000 civilians killed, and it really marks the beginning of the full scale armed conflict. It was then that lots of young Tamils start to join militant groups - including the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam or LTTE.

So The Broken Palmyrah was written in the late 1980s, and by then the conflict had already escalated quite a bit. It was written by four professors: Rajan Hoole, Daya Somasundaram, K. Sritharan and Rajani Thiranagama. They were the founding members of the University Teachers for Human Rights, based in Jaffna. Jaffna, by the way, is the main Tamil town - on the northern most peninsula of Sri Lanka.

By this time the LTTE campaign to marginalize other militant Tamil groups was already well under way. So these four individuals--two of them were mathematicians, one was a psychiatrist and Rajani, the last one, taught medicine—felt that at least within the university, they should be able to talk openly about things, and keep space for dialogue. And in their book, they take on all the armed actors and stand up for the rights of the civilians. So they document abuses by the Sri Lankan military, the Indian Peace Keeping Forces, by LTTE, and by other Tamil militant groups. Rajani, in her chapters, also raised questions about the role of women in the conflict – she argues that they were just being used cynically as armed cadres; that contrary to their claims, the LTTE really weren’t interested in women’s liberation at all, that women were just being used as fighters.

And I talk about Rajani in particular, because she was my neighbor when I grew up in Jaffna. She was only 35, and she had two small daughters. And, in 1989, she was assassinated by the LTTE for writing this book.

She was killed for writing The Broken Palmyrah? Why?

The Tamil Tigers killed her for questioning them. She was a doctor, she had set up a refuge for women called Poorani and she had a very dynamic personality. And I think that’s partly why they felt threatened. And this year marks the 20th anniversary of Rajani’s assassination by the Tamil Tigers. And she really is a beacon for the younger generation. She was only 35 but she had already done so much by then. Her life and work is the subject of a recent documentary by the National Film Board of Canada called 'No More Tears, Sister'.

And her death was really a watershed, because afterwards, dissent became much harder within the Tamil community. Her funeral is remembered as the last time there was a major protest in Jaffna. After that everything went quiet. There was no more open protest against LTTE within the Tamil community.