There are some names history celebrates, and there are some names history deliberately buries. In Sri Lanka’s political memory, Alfred Duraiyappa is constantly presented as a “victim of Tiger violence,” a Sinhala State friendly Tamil politician whose assassination in 1975 is repeatedly weaponised by Colombo as a murder of a Tamil moderate. But the story that the Sri Lankan state, its media, and its textbooks refuse to tell is that Duraiyappa’s hands were stained with Tamil blood long before anyone fired a gun at him. One of those stains belongs to a child. His name was Kesavarajan. He was a 15 year old boy from Sulipuram, a Victoria College student. A teenager with books, not weapons. A boy who loved his mother tongue, who like thousands of Tamils, was swept up in the excitement surrounding the International Tamil Research Conference of 1974. This conference was not merely an academic gathering; it was a celebration of identity. Jaffna was decorated street to street. Tamil scholars fro...
Caste is the oldest and most enduring form of human oppression in South Asia, an evil stitched deep into the social fabric of the subcontinent. The Arya Sanatana Varnasrama Dharma engineered a rigid hierarchy to preserve Brahminical dominance, enforcing untouchability, slavery, exclusion, and social stratification through religious, economic, and cultural structures. For the Tamil Nation, dismantling this system has been a central political and moral mission. From the Sangam era to the modern day, Tamils have resisted casteism in all its forms, tying the struggle for social equality to the broader fight for self-respect, dignity, and national liberation. This blog series traces that history how caste abolition, social reform, and Tamil liberation became inseparable, especially in Eelam. It will examine the thinkers, movements, and political forces that challenged caste oppression and reshaped Tamil society. In this part we look at a decisive but often overlooked moment in the social ju...