brand logo

How Prabhakaran’s story was stitched 

26 Jun 2021

By M.R. Narayan Swamy   “How can you write someone’s biography without interviewing him?” This was one question I confronted time and again as I decided to weave the life story of Velupillai Prabhakaran, who led a formidable military machine called the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), determined to carve a Tamil Eelam out of Sri Lanka. There was one chapter devoted to the man in my first book: Tigers of Lanka, which dealt with the origin and growth of Tamil militancy. Since its publication, friends have been pressing me to write Prabhakaran’s biography. I knew that neither the LTTE nor Prabhakaran would co-operate with the project. But I was surprised by those who felt that a biography cannot be written without the explicit co-operation of the subject matter. Does it mean that no one can now write biographies of Mahatma Gandhi or Martin Luther King Jr. because they are not alive any more to lend a helping hand? Here was a man who for decades had been holding Sri Lanka to ransom, had ordered the assassination of a Sri Lankan president and a former Prime Minister of India, besides scores of others, whose outfit at one time controlled a third of the land area in Sri Lanka and two-thirds of its winding coast, and who refused to compromise, come what may. His was a compelling story. It needed to be told, however difficult the challenge. Since Prabhakaran was unlikely to help, one will have to approach everyone who knows or has known him – in India, Sri Lanka, and in the West. It was easy to be confident but difficult to go knocking on various doors. Several people in Tamil Nadu had known him from close quarters. While some of his high-profile political supporters spoke freely, the aftermath of the Rajiv Gandhi assassination forced many to clam up. The same people who had boasted about their links with the LTTE, when I researched for my first book in 1990, now either did a disappearing act or claimed they had forgotten much of the past. Some of the finest accounts of Prabhakaran’s temperament, habits, traits, and personality came from leaders of other Tamil groups who worked closely with him in earlier years before internecine wars destroyed their unity. The next best lot of information came from those who had quit the LTTE. A former LTTE member who had been with Prabhakaran in the 1970s and 1980s spoke to me in London for eight long hours, making me fill up three notebooks. LTTE literature was helpful. The Tigers were masters in propaganda. They produced a mountain of literature, mostly in Tamil but also in English, before the advent of the internet. These provided many useful tips and helped trace some missing pieces in a jigsaw puzzle called the LTTE. I must underline that my knowledge of spoken and written Tamil helped me connect with those who were not comfortable with or did not know English. Kittu, a Prabhakaran chum and a former LTTE military commander in Jaffna, had serialised the growth of the Tigers in a Chennai magazine. A Prabhakaran relative had written a long piece on the man for another Tamil journal in Chennai, but this was apparently halted after five chapters on Prabhakaran’s instructions. The LTTE leader was secretive about his past. One man who had known him intimately and who was apparently writing about him was shot dead in his Paris apartment. It is not that Prabhakaran did not want anything written about him; he would be okay with writings that built up his personality as he saw it. An adulatory biography of him did exist in Tamil. However, the LTTE Chief clearly did not like dissenting viewpoints. His ageing father, who I met in Chennai, threw some light on the early years of his youngest child. My bid to get hold of some rare photographs of Prabhakaran failed in London after a LTTE functionary told a Tamil contact not to entertain me. It helped that I had been following the Sri Lanka story for a long time. Notes I had accumulated over the years helped. After study trips to Chennai, Madurai, Colombo, Vavuniya, Jaffna, London, and Toronto (where many Sri Lankans and Indians opened up) came the arduous task of putting together a readable and credible life story of Prabhakaran. Thus was born Inside an Elusive Mind, the first biography, albeit unauthorised, of the man leading a brutal war in Sri Lanka. Since most people had spoken to me off the record, I decided not to go for footnotes. As much as pro-LTTE circles liked my first book, they did not hail the biography – for understandable reasons. As more than one person pointed out, the early part of the book makes one sympathise with Prabhakaran but the latter half portrays him as a megalomaniac. The book proved an instant hit and opened many windows which I never thought would open for me. Some of these windows were shut tight while researching for the book. One of the greatest compliments for the book came from a senior officer of Sri Lanka’s National Intelligence Bureau who met me in Colombo. He said he had not met any journalist in his quarter-century career but was making an exception for me “because my wife, I, and our daughter have become your fans after reading the book”. Before I could thank him, he went on: “I have been after the LTTE for so long. Even then, I was stunned that there is so much in the book we did not know.” A couple of years later, a Sri Lankan journalist told me that then President Mahinda Rajapaksa had told members of his delegation proceeding to Geneva to talk to the LTTE, to first read Inside an Elusive Mind.   (The writer is a historian and journalist who reported from Sri Lanka for many years)


More News..