“Life is nothing but a competition to be the criminal rather than the victim”
Bertrand Russell, Letter to Ottoline Morrell, 17th December, 1920
Hell disguised as heaven, she whispered to herself, alighting from the airplane at Colombo airport, an all too familiar feeling of dread rising rapidly from the pit of her stomach and prying open the gates of her mind to a torrent of discordant sentiments she had never quite been able to reconcile …
… ’Serendipity’, they once called her, the petite island nation of Sri Lanka, with her picture perfect features that have lured many an inveterate traveler into believing they had finally chanced upon a destination offering a sense of ‘separateness which ministered to their self-respect’: a phrase coined by British polymath Bertrand Russell in his essay on ‘architecture and social questions’ of the early 20th century, with respect to the plight of unemployed married women who had inadvertently become prisoners of independent housing, whilst finding relief from being under the kind of constant scrutiny that was an ineluctable part of their former communal way of life.
And she couldn’t help but feel as if Sri Lanka extended that same double-edged promise of providing sanctuary to those in search of a refuge from the dog-eat dog-world outside, its dark underbelly heaving with the weighty sediment of a blood thirsty civil war, at first glance concealed by the vast array of imposing aesthetic qualities, furnishing a sense of heaven heavily reinforced with the opportunities conferred by the ripple effects of hell; that hell which 19th century English poet William Blake described “not as a place of punishment, but as a source of unrepressed, somewhat Dionysian energy, opposed to the authoritarian and regulated perception of Heaven.”
It was a place in which many had been able to establish an even nastier pecking order than the ones they pretended to have escaped, but where in reality they had failed, for to quote Bertrand Russell once again, “people seem good while they are oppressed, but they only wish to become oppressors in their turn: life is nothing but a competition to be the criminal rather than the victim.”
Somehow, she had been able to detect the deception immediately, upon her first visit to the country in 2008, if for no other reason, at the time, than the fact that nowhere else in the world had she felt so uncomfortably aware of being both Indian and a woman, the former far more easily rationalized than the latter, which was wholly unexpected in a Muslim minority country.
India’s intervention in the Sri Lankan Civil war, by way of the deployment of a peace keeping force on the island between 1987 and 1990, eventually came to be known as India’s Vietnam, an outcome of selfish interest and intrinsic arrogance, leading to a lasting and palpable resentment against the Indian people by the local population; needless to say, there will always be two sides of the story, varying significantly as each one tells their own version of the tale, but far more complex to decipher was the sense of vulnerability she felt as a woman amidst Sri Lankan men, their demeanor marked by a specific distaste for the forthrightness of women rather than a generalized disrespect for the female gender itself.
Interestingly, according to a women’s wellbeing survey carried out in Sri Lanka in 2019, 47.5 percent of Sri Lankan women believe in the superiority of men, evidenced by an unusually conventional dynamic between the sexes, which as polemical as it may sound, is almost refreshing in an era seeing a transition towards the somewhat unnatural phenomenon of gender neutral societies, driven perhaps by those who are far less seduced by the notion of equality than they are by the possibility of turning themselves into the oppressors, in reaction to having once been part of the oppressed.
And suddenly, she realized that her discomfort was borne both of a compelling need and struggle to tutor her reflexes, those that had been conditioned by the tenets of an increasingly oppressive feminist ideology – not without prejudice at its inception and therefore hardly a beacon of fair play – to which she had never deliberately subscribed, yet involuntarily yielded …
… Like far too many women of her generation, she had carelessly forsaken the privilege of being feminine in favor of being formidable, losing sight of that wonderful ‘sense of separateness which ministered to her self-respect.’
And so, she asked herself the somewhat contentious question, if women were not in fact far less vulnerable, and even somewhat more powerful, when they remained in the shadows where no-one could see their hand? After all, it has always been acknowledged that ‘behind every successful man there stands a woman.’