A Work of Mourning

The Copper Tumbler & Donkeys in Mannar:

‘it is not narrative that we should abandon but chronology’’ – Kumar Shahani

by Laleen Jayamanne

Sumathy Sivamohan’s The Single Tumbler (2020) recalls, in memory-images, a central traumatic historical and personal event during the civil war (not often discussed), in the early 90s. It recollects the expulsion of thousands of Muslims from their homes in Sri Lanka’s north by the separatist militant group, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Elam (LTTE), and the simultaneous disappearance of a Tamil man who questioned the expulsion. The film is largely set long after the war has ended, within this disappeared man’s comfortable, old and airy, Tamil middle-class home in Mannar, during a family reunion. The elder sister, Lalitha (who had migrated to Canada with her family, joining the Tamil diaspora after July ’83 pogrom), returns home for a holiday to see her ailing, mentally disturbed mother (Daisy Teacher), who still mourns her son, when a traumatic memory from the past irrupts into the present, quite by chance.

The gathering consists of a younger brother, Anthony and his wife Festina, a younger sister, Jesse and her daughter Anu and Lalitha chatting, eating, drinking tea and reminiscing with each other, it feels like a ‘Chamber-Film’. “What’s that?”, I ask myself. I made up the term to try and figure out what Sumathy was doing in this film by staging most of it within the privacy of the home of a scattered and shattered family, which has survived the 26-year civil war between the LTTE and the State.

European Chamber Plays

Lankans are familiar with the early 20th Century Modernist chamber plays of Strindberg (Miss Julie), early Ibsen (A Doll’s House) and others, set in domestic spaces with a handful of intimately related people, often claustrophobic and tense with unspoken conflicts. Historically it’s definitely a European bourgeois genre in its focus on the private realm of the family and the interior marital and existential dramas of women and men. Set within the privacy of a home (hence chamber), exploring their individual subjectivity.

Chamber Music

In European music, a chamber orchestra is an intimate form with just four or five musical instruments. I am told that it came to be regarded as a pure form of musical expression, after the 18th Century, when orchestras began to get bigger and louder. Chamber music comes to mind not least because of the contemporary musical and sound score of The Single Tumbler. There is also a striking characteristic of Sumathy’s films where, when asked, people simply get up and sing with ease. Hymns and religious chants imbue Mannar’s multi-ethnic social history with sonic resonance and life.

Chamber Film?

So how then is The Single Tumbler a ‘chamber film’? Its story unfolds largely within the walls of a house with the remaining family members of three generations and a totally silent, sullen and efficient maid, Pushpa. While there are private secrets, with the disappearance of the elder son Jude during the civil war, the private realm has been blasted open by political violence. The architecture of the appealing but rather shabby house, with its verandas, open doors and windows and courtyard all surrounded with trees, with family photos on the wall, so reminiscent of another era of living (not unlike the house we lived in as children, in Shady Grove Avenue, Borella), offers no protection.

Thinking of it as a ‘chamber film’ captures its delicate tone and mood (shared with chamber music), two intangible aspects of Sumathy’s cinema, not easy to put into words because of the subtle ways in which they are composed and evoked with light, colour, silence, sounds of nature, smoke, music, gesture and posture. Certainly, a remarkable long sequence has an elegiac, mournful quality and other more banal everyday moments also create intangible sensations which I will return to later. The film feels like a belated (necessarily so), prolonged act of mourning in the absence of the traditional gestures of mourning the dead (disallowed by the state in many cases), which involved full-blooded keening in the past and other expressive collective rituals, to assuage unsupportable loss. Fresh news (received on the cell phone), of the discovery of a mass grave leads to an anxious discussion about the ethnicity of the bodies. And as a lapsed Roman Catholic, I recall stories of Baptism at gunpoint, by the Portuguese in 16th Century Ceylon and of the massacre of Catholics of Mannar by the Tamil king of Jaffna, Sankili 1, making martyrs of them.

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Sumathy approaches history from ‘below’ so to speak, from the point of view of a minority (or even a minority within a minority), but her films are not historical films but rather informed by history and its forgotten stories. They are enamoured of the intimate quotidian life of women especially, reminiscent somewhat of Chantal Akerman’s films. As for me, they have created the desire to begin to reread Lankan history, this time, laterally. Each of her films creates its own method of expression, sensitive to the historical, social and personal realities on the ground and it’s this aspect of her ethico-aesthetic project that makes her oeuvre fundamentally experimental. Each time she has to, of necessity, work out how to approach a new set of coordinates, in unfamiliar, ethnically circumscribed milieux. Working as a scholar, her films are extensively researched. She doesn’t cultivate a recognisable style, what one might call an authorial signature. Though I can now recognise some camera movements that she loves, I think she resists her own stylistic habits, which is one of the things I find admirable and challenging about her cinema.

Sumathy’s films are not tightly plotted. She thinks cinematically in the sense that music (rhythmic intervals) permeates her sense of structure. This is why her powers of fabulation are maturing slowly with each film. As the Indian modernist filmmaker Kumar Shahani once said, it is not narrative that we should abandon but chronology, which enchains time in a strict casual progression. One can sense that Sumathy is moving quietly towards an oblique poetic mode of address, as her skills mature over several fearless post-war feature films (Ingirunthu, 2013), (Sons & Fathers, 2017), including The Single Tumbler (2020), and the short films, Child Soldier, Piralayam (Upheaval, 2005), Oranges (2006), Sing Mother Sing (2015), exploring the multi-ethnic polity and culture of Lanka under duress. Sumathy most recent film is a feature-length documentary, Amid the Villus; Pallaikuli (2021), about the return of some of the expelled Muslim people back to Mannar and the ongoing difficulties they have encountered in the process.

In her analysis of how South Asian women’s films have been represented in the West the British scholar of Hindi cinema, Valentina Vitali, says that there are the star directors like Deepa Mehta and Mira Nair and a few others living in the West. In a lower tier are a number of Indian women directors with family ties within the Hindi film industry, whose work may be found on various streaming services. And then there are the rest working on modest budgets and making a wide range of films whose distribution is uncertain and public profile uneven. I find this analysis helpful in thinking about Lankan cinema history in general and the films made there by women and Sumathy’s work in particular, which, however, doesn’t quite fit within this schema. This is in part because Sumathy is Lanka’s sole woman filmmaker who has made its fraught, bloodied, multiracial history, her primary area of film research. And importantly she has regularly worked with a dedicated group of well-known professional technicians of the film industry, who are sympathetic to her project.

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Sumathy indicated that Dharmasena Pathiraja was a mentor to her in an unofficial apprenticeship as a filmmaker, and The Single Tumbler is dedicated to his memory. She also collaborated with him on several film projects, notably writing the script for In Search of a Road (2007), a dramatised documentary, made during the civil war, set largely on the iconic Jaffna Colombo railway line, Yal Devi, destroyed by the LTTE. I note here the absence of a skills training program in the country, despite being recommended by the 1965 Commission of Inquiry into the Film Industry in Ceylon, chaired by Regi Siriwardena. Pathiraja encouraged Sumathy to develop her confidence and thereby her skills by observing how others worked. He demystified the process, which has not been traditionally accessible to women. They educated themselves on film history, both Indian and other. They ‘argued like hell’, she says.

The Picturesque Image

Sumathy has crossed into cultural and ethnolinguistic territories that are outside her own familiar social experience and mother tongues. Her Sons and Fathers is in Sinhala. There is not a single shot in her films that can be termed ‘picturesque’. The idea of the picturesque was developed in 18th century Britain to describe a ‘picture perfect’ image of landscape for painting and was part of the Romantic aesthetic. It was a middle path or term between the much more complex aesthetics of the ‘Beautiful’ on the one hand, and on the other, the aesthetics of the ‘Sublime’, proposed by Edmund Burke. The picturesque petrifies actual space into a pleasing image. There is an easy slide from landscape prettified in this way to how women are presented as ‘picture perfect’, like the Kodak moment of the 20th-century celluloid past.

I bring up this critical point here because I have begun to register a pattern in Lankan films and visual culture, of representing images of Jaffna landscapes and also Tamil women, in a picturesque manner. In some post-war Sinhala films there are traumatised, silent young Tamil women doggedly following former Sinhala soldiers, even marrying one. In Asoka Handagama’s film Alborada (2021), the famous love poet Pablo Neruda, while working as the Chilean Consul in Ceylon, rapes a Dalit young woman who doesn’t utter one word.

Donkeys in Mannar

To understand an entirely different approach to an unfamiliar phenomenon or culture, consider how Sumathy films the donkeys foraging in the garbage on busy roadsides in The Single Tumbler. She has said how amazed she was (on her first trip to Mannar to scout for location), to see donkeys everywhere on busy streets and realised why it was called ‘Donkey Town.’ These donkeys were first brought to Lanka about one thousand years ago by Arab traders and grew feral when the Muslim people, who used them as domesticated work-animals, were expelled from Mannar in 1990. Subsequently, they became a problem causing traffic hazards, foraging for food in garbage and getting seriously injured. So, a donkey hospital has been created to tend to them, which has in turn become an eco-tourist attraction for animal lovers.

Now famous among eco-friendly tourists, the donkeys in Sumathy’s film function in a special way. They appear suddenly halfway through the film when we leave the house for one of the few trips outside. Two donkeys suddenly appear out of nowhere on a busy road and only just avoid getting hit by vehicles. When the old, mentally disturbed mother goes shuffling out on the street looking for her long-lost friend Fatima Teacher (to return her copper tumbler), two donkeys appear at a cross-road, one coming on to the middle of the road catching the attention of the camera. Finally, they appear in a group, foraging at night in a mangrove by the sea, where the old Fatima Teacher, now dead, appears along with Lalitha and Jude. I will return to this strange elegiac scene below.

The donkeys are presented by Sumathy, not as simple local colour, as exotic animals, but rather, as an embedded neorealist ‘fact-image’ as theorised by Andre Bazin, the influential French film critic and theorist of Italian Neo-Realist Cinema, of the Post WWII era. The donkeys of Mannar carry a historical load, and are not used picturesquely to evoke pathos, which is so easy to do with a donkey, especially in cinema. Think of Robert Bresson’s moving film about a donkey named Balthazar. Or Jenny in Martin McDonagh’s The Banshees of Inisherin

Donkeys are evocative small animals who enable us to imagine the long history of Mannar, with its ancient Mantai port, as a regional hub, at the crossroads of the Indian Ocean silk road, hospitable to traders and new arrivals from many faraway places. Ancient coins, beads, copper and iron artefacts and ceramics unearthed by the famous Carswell and Deraniyagala archaeological dig in Mantai, in 1984, attest to robust cosmopolitan trade links in the ancient past. The most unusual multi-ethnic dig itself was suddenly terminated that year when the civil war broke out, and the report was only published nearly three decades later. There is much more down there, no doubt, that would reveal Lanka’s complex multi-ethnic history and trade, which might help dispel the dominant insular narrative of the island’s history. (To be continued)