BBC-Sharika-re-edited-24-6-2008

FROM COMMONWEALTH TO ETHNOSCAPES:

THE BBC TAMIL AND SINHALA SERVICES AMID THE CIVIL WAR IN SRI LANKA.

Sharika Thiranagama

The BBC as a Sri Lankan Institution and its Stake in Sri Lanka

Two BBCs for One Island: Ethnic Aspirations on the Air Waves

Postcolonial Ethnic Alienations and Aspirations

‘Publicizing Suffering’: The BBC as War-Time Radio

Polarization and Language: The BBC’s Two ‘Knowable Communities’

From ‘Within the Field’: Observing Journalists at Bush House

‘Public Forum’ v. ‘Truth Producer’:

The Different Spheres of BBC Tamil and Sinhala Services

At times when we fear we are doomed, forgotten and uncared for, there is a distant voice that assures us it is aware of our misery and that it will stand by us and sting the conscience of the world. That voice is the BBC.

From a Listener’s Letter to Tamil Service, Sri Lanka, (Tamil Service ACR 1986) i

The BBC World Service is ‘Sri Lankan’ for most Sri Lankans. For many, Tamils and

Sinhalese, the BBC provides the most recognized and listened to radio stations and has

done throughout its on/off 60 year history of broadcasting to the island. For many Sri

Lankans, BBC Sinhala service alone captures around 10% of the Sinhalese listening

public and while figures for Tamils are harder to obtain, the BBC itself estimates that in

1998 around 20% of Sri Lankan Tamils listened to the BBC Tamil service. If at times in

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this history the BBC audiences declined, in Sri Lanka’s bloody and brutal civil war,

which has now lasted for over twenty-five years and claimed over 70,000 lives, the BBC

has once again become a familiar and household name. The listener I begin this article

with claims that the BBC is imagined to be a global voice that will ‘stand by us’. While

we are used to discussing the BBCWS as ‘opening up global worlds’, ‘bringing the world

to locals’, here the BBC is lauded for bringing Tamils to the world and to ‘ourselves’.

The BBC provides a window onto a world, a window which in fact is a mirror by which

we can see ourselves writ large. The BBC is Sri Lankan for most Sri Lankans.

The many regional language services of the BBC World service (BBC WS) are situated

in vastly differing contexts- which thus situate the BBC differently. Moreover, they

broadcast in languages which come with their own complex histories and invisible fields

of power. This is immediately obvious in Sri Lanka, the languages spoken by the BBC in

Sri Lanka - Tamil, Sinhala, and English- are intimately entangled with Sri Lanka’s

colonial and postcolonial histories linking ethnicity to language. Regional language

media in Sri Lanka are always already situated within fields of power and one cannot

understand the ways in which the BBC Tamil and Sinhala services developed and

reproduce themselves within Sri Lanka without reference to these contested histories and

current realities. Moreover, the means by which the BBC has gained a privileged

position as a broadcaster in Sri Lanka must itself be placed within its link to an imperial

past in which Sri Lanka was once a ‘model British colony’. Part of the story I tell in this

article is thus the transformation of Sri Lanka from ‘model colony’ and highly literate and

socially responsible post-colonial country into what could now be called a ‘life-line

country’ with heavy censorship and an information poor populationii, and the

concomitant transformation of the BBC’s Tamil and Sinhala services into war-time

services and imagined guardians of information. The larger point made is that all

BBCWS regional language services must be situated within such complex linguistic and

social fields.

The first half of this paper examines through archival research two different kinds of

phases in the BBC Tamil and BBC Sinhala services in Sri Lanka. These two different

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phases, the first by which the BBC assumed the role of a media service for aspirational

listeners, the second in which it came to be a guardian of objectivity and impartial

reporter of war and suffering, are produced by an interaction between Sri Lanka’s shifting

political climate and the BBC’s own imagination of Sri Lanka. These contradictions and

ambiguities can only be understood through looking at both the BBC’s services in Sri

Lanka, otherwise one fails to understand the complexities of ethnicisation of the media in

Sri Lanka.The second half of the paper shows how Sri Lanka’s history of ethnic

polarisation and growing conflict has critically shaped the BBC in it current incarnations

in Sri Lanka. Rather than being a dispassionate global observer, transcending ethnic

difference, I argue that the BBC’s two language services do not stand outside but are

themselves part of the ethnically fractured landscape of Sri Lanka and ongoing civil war.

Broadcasting to two discrete linguistically and thus ethnically constituted audiences, the

two language services have themselves also become ethnicised. This story of the

ethnicisation of the BBC’s languages services is unfolded through and complicated by

ethnographic research with BBC journalists and their own understanding and imagination

of their role in Sri Lanka alongside the expectations of their audiences. BBC Tamil and

BBC Sinhala journalists even as they are shaped by ethnically discrete audiences, attempt

to transcend nationalist and ethnic positions, but in different ways. The article shows thus

how two distinctively attenuated spheres of objectivity are produced, complicating our

understanding of the BBC’s motives of impartiality and objectivity and forcing us to

think of these concepts as embedded and animated by specific social universes. The

relationship between the two services is also fundamental to how they maintain

themselves as universes; one can think of them as conjoined Siamese twins, sharing

organs but separate at their extremities. Just as the journalists themselves do, throughout

the article I attempt to thus understand Sri Lanka through the BBC and the BBC through

Sri Lanka.

1. THE BBC STAKE IN SRI LANKA

Sri Lanka’s literate population provides for high and consistent media consumption.

Radio listening is exceedingly high with BBC surveys showing that radio was as widely

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used a medium as television, over half of adults listened to the radio every day (MS

Jan/Feb 1998).iii There are numerous public and private radio stations in both Sri Lanka’s

major languages, though the majority are Sinhalese.iv BBC surveys also showed a highly

media savvy and sophisticated audience, inclined towards ‘cross checking’ with large

proportions of radio audiences listening to more than one Sinhala language station

regularly (MS Feb/March 1995).v

The BBC is a major presence in this radio landscape. The BBC was without question the

leading foreign radio station compared to other foreign owned broadcasting in various

languages (i.e. radio Veritas broadcasting from the Philippines or All India Radio).

Around 12.8% of adults surveyed in Southern Sri Lanka listened weekly to the BBC in

any language, coming to about 1.3 million listeners (MS Jan/Feb 1998). viHowever, it is

the BBC’s two regional language services which command the greatest media presence.

In 1998, listenership for BBC Tamil and Sinhala rose in comparison to listenership in

English (ibid). The English language BBC attracts the smallest stake in Sri Lanka,

accounting for only 1.8% of the population (around 180,000 adults) as opposed to BBC

Sinhala which had a weekly audience of around 9.1% of the Sri Lankan population

(around 950,000 listeners). This research focuses on the BBC’s regional language

services because it is as regional language broadcaster that the BBC has been able to

capture the market as Sri Lanka’s most popular foreign owned radio broadcaster. It is the

regional language services thus that re-present the BBC in Sri Lanka.

The BBC Tamil service, Tamizhosai (hereafter BBC Tamil) was one of first South Asian

languages to be broadcast in 1941. Like the older Indian services (i.e. Urdu and Bengali)

the Tamil service broadcasts over national boundaries to Tamils in both South India and

Sri Lanka. It began first as a weekly newsletter, moved to a bi-weekly broadcast in the

1980s and finally to its present form as a daily half-an hour broadcast accounting for 3.5

hours of radio time. BBC Sinhala service BBC Sandeshaya (hereafter BBC Sinhala) has

had a more interrupted existence. The Sinhala service was begun in 1942, discontinued in

1976, but reinstated in 1990, moving quickly to offer the same provision as the Tamil

service into a daily-half an hour broadcast. Both stations have latterly offered websites.

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Most importantly, since 1997 both services have been re-broadcast on an FM wavelength

by the SLBC (Sri Lanka Broadcasting Corporation). The FM wave is a major reason for

the services’ rising listener figures in Sri Lanka. In India, BBC Tamil can only be

broadcast on shortwave, thus has been struggling to maintain an Indian audience in the

face of increased media competition. Both services identify themselves as primarily

focused towards Sri Lanka and Sri Lankan audiences. The new sets of listeners, attracted

by rebroadcasting, further emphasize a demographic divide between the BBC’s regional

language listeners and its English language listeners. The new listeners (around 1 in 3)

were on average younger and more rural than previous listeners. The 1998 survey showed

that levels of listening to BBC Sinhala were twice as high amongst men as women and

ranged across age levels. However, the surveyed Tamil audience revealed that the level

of listening to the BBC in Tamil was as high for women as for men (unusual within

South Asian regional language services), and there was a more general spread of

educational levels in the audience. In contrast, the small English listening audience, a

BBC survey concluded, tended to be older and highly- educated (MS Feb/March 1995).vii

However, these statistics are limited in what they reveal about the BBC in Sri Lanka.

The languages spoken by the BBC in Sri Lanka, Tamil, Sinhala, and English, carry

complex legacies. Any analysis of regional language media in Sri Lanka ineluctably calls

these forward whether we choose to acknowledge them or not. In this piece I do draw

these stories to the foreground, positioning the services’ potentialities and structuring

factors in relation to the specificities of Sri Lanka’s post colonial history.

2. TWO BBC’S FOR ONE ISLAND; ETHNIC ASPIRATION ON THE AIR

WAVES

Once Britain ruled the waves (ocean); now the BBC rules the waves (air)” Listener’s letter from South India to Tamil Service (1986 ACR) viii

Languages or linguistic exchanges perform powerful work, they carry the legacies and

longings of collective identities along with the possibility of self-expression; they situate

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as well as request recognition. Nineteenth century philology itself has to be read

alongside the rise of particular concepts of the ‘nation-form’ (Balibar 1991). Any study of

the BBC’s regional language services has to situate regional media services and their

languages in relation to specific histories and relations of power between languages.

Moreover, the BBC World Service by attempting to broadcast in consistently standard

idioms have taken a formative role in crystallizing and conceptualizing the form that new

national languages can take, and for whom. The BBC’s Sinhala and Tamil services can

(and must) be understood through colonial and postcolonial relationships between

English, Tamil and Sinhala, a set of issues which the BBC as imperial turned post-

imperial broadcaster is in a privileged position to straddle. This is shaped by the way in

which language itself has provided the grammar of ethnic difference in the colonial and

postcolonial ethnicisation of Sri Lanka, formerly Ceylon.

Language and ethnicity in Sri Lanka

BBC Tamil and Sinhala are mapped onto a basic bi-partite of language in Sri Lanka,

between Sinhala speakers and Tamil speakers. The majority community (74%) are

Sinhalese. Tamil speakers are subdivided into different ethnic groups. Malaiyaha Tamils

(hill-country Tamils), formerly known as Indian Tamils, form 5.5% of the population and

are the descendents of nineteenth century plantation labour brought by the British.ix Many

Malaiyaha Tamils living as they do within Sinhalese majority areas also speak Sinhala.

The largest Tamil-speaking minority, central to the current ethnic conflict, are the Sri

Lankan Tamils, whose pre-war numbers comprised around 12.7 % of the population (

though this has declined considerably due to war and migration). The other most

significant Tamil-speaking minority are the Muslims (7-8%), classed as a separate ethno-

religious community. There are many other minorities who speak Sinhalese, Tamil or

English (i.e. the Portuguese and Dutch Burgers and the Veddas) but who are not

specifically involved in the current ethnic conflict. These differentiations are significant

because Sri Lanka’s post-colonial history has been marked by simmering ethnic conflict.

Since the 1980s this has transmuted into a civil war waged between the Sri Lankan state

and the separatist LTTE, popularly known as the Tigers. This war has assumed its own

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dynamic, given aggressive militarization by both the Sri Lankan government and the

LTTE with little concern for civilians – especially minority ones- caught in the war. The

primary battlefields and areas of LTTE control in Sri Lanka are in the Tamil-speaking,

Sri Lankan Tamil and Sri Lankan Muslim majority northern and eastern provinces.

While many commentators on the Sri Lankan civil war have attributed it to a primordial

antagonism between two ethnic groups, the growth of ethnic nationalist identification is

of recent provenance. The British, the third and final of Sri Lanka’s European colonial

rulers, were the first to unite the whole island in one administrative and state structure.

The British governed Sri Lanka’s immensely socially and religiously heterogeneous

population through understanding diversity as the result of empirical differences in race.

Newly popular Victorian ideas of race were linked to concrete possibilities of rule. Ethnic

classifications were increasingly entrenched into emerging legal and governmental

structures in the nineteenth century. Regions of Sri Lanka were spatially ordered into

different provinces and ruled in either Tamil or Sinhalese with differing customary laws.

Limited representation of native populations in the 1833 Legislative Council was of

representatives of different racial groups, a system of communal representation that lasted

for nearly a 100 years before universal suffrage and territorial electorates fully replaced it

in 1931.x Thus Tamil and Sinhalese, the rather ‘porous sieves through which diverse

groups and categories of Indian peoples, intermixed with non-Indians…..have passed

through’ (Tambiah 1986: 6) came to assume great significance and substance within the

political and administrative structures of the island. The nineteenth nationalist

movements within Sri Lanka from the first took ethnic nationalist forms; though it was

not until the departure of the British and independence in 1948 that internal Ceylonese

minority majority relations would become the primary focus.

Ideas about language played central roles in nineteenth racial theories (Rogers 1990).

Philologists (particularly Max Muller) had argued that there was a common origin for

Indo-European language as Aryan races (Gunawardena 1990). Alongside the

identification of Aryan languages, Robert Caldwell developed his categorization of the

Dravidian languages, the South Indian languages, arguing in the meantime that there was

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no affinity between Sinhalese and Tamil. These theorizations gained increasing

acceptance by the colonial authorities, indigenous elite, and nationalist historians. It

became considered commonsense that the Sinhalese were an Aryan race speaking an

Indo-European language, and that Tamils spoke a Dravidian languages and were clearly

and distinctly of a different racial stock descended from South Indian invaders. Language

possession became a key feature of race (Gunawardena 1990: 74). It is in this context

that the BBC Tamil service and Sinhala could broadcast in the 1940s to linguistically thus

racially differentiated audiences.

This mingling of ideas about language and culture was by no means unique to Sri Lanka,

though the governmental and spatial form these took were. In particular the context of

Tamil linguistic nationalism, after its classification as a Dravidian language and the

discovery of its immense classical canon and heritage, is crucial to understanding the

early years of the BBC Tamil service. Tamil played the central ideological and aesthetic

pole around which nineteenth and twentieth century modern Tamil nationalism in South

India emerged. xi As Ramaswamy writes in her seminal work on Tamil linguistic

nationalism, the South Indian Tamils were “a community that has exhibited a profound

enchantment with its language through much of this century” (1993: 686).xii BBC Tamil

has always targeted an audience enmeshed within strong linguistic nationalist ideologies,

ones in which Tamil-speakers, technically of all religions (though with heavily Hindu

overtones)xiii and castes, were projected to share kinship and ethnicity through their

possession and devotion to the Tamil language. The constant invocation of the necessity

of broadcasting ‘beautiful Tamil’ throughout the history of the Tamil service comes out

of this history of a Tamil cultural nationalism in which language is the supreme aesthetic

means by which any cultural media can be evaluated and situated. Furthermore, common

possession of Tamil as analogous to ethnic kinship made possible the ‘special place’ that

Sri Lankan Tamils were accorded in Tamil Nadu politics and public life. BBC Tamil

beckoned to an invisible but continually performed community of Tamil-speakers who

are kin by virtue of being Tamil-speakers. Increasingly, Sri Lankan Tamils tuned in and

wrote ever more letters to BBC Tamil as it came to represent part of the cultural and

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linguistic world that linked them to India and a world wider than Sri Lanka from which

they felt profoundly alienated.

The beginning of this alienation came from the complexities of ethnic and linguistic

identifications in post-colonial Sri Lanka. Tamil was fast becoming the language of

increasingly disempowered minorities, while Sinhala became the dominant symbolic and

governmental language of the country. However, Sinhala itself was continually struggling

under the shadow of English the language of Sri Lanka’s political elite. Sri Lanka’s three

major languages drew around them particular social fields and particular relations of

power, feelings of discrimination, and sentiments of love in the face of presumed

besiegement and wronging. From the beginning alienation and aspiration have inflected

ideas about regional media.

Postcolonial ethnic alienation and aspiration

Independence in Sri Lanka was a polite handover to ‘brown sahibs’ (Spencer 1990).

There was no significant anti-colonial movement like that in India; Sri Lanka was always

seen by colonial authorities as a model British colony. The legitimacy and authority of

the BBC within Sri Lanka in the early years of its production was buttressed by this

imperial history and elite culture to which the British and the BBC was central. Though

formally repudiated after independence, Anglophone elite culture still lingered on

socially in Sri Lanka. Under colonial rule, as Kearney remarks, English had “become the

language of government, the professions, modern commerce, higher education, and, until

well into the 1930s, even of politics…in 1953, an astounding 9.4% of the population five

years of age and over (12.5% of males and 6.1% of females) were literate in English”

(1978: 526). In proportion to the general public, Sri Lanka had undoubtedly the largest

Anglophone elite in South Asia at this time. English represented for many young

Sinhalese not only the colonial past but the continuing dominance of an English speaking

political and social elite and it is no accident that in Sinhalese English is often called by

the slang term ‘kadatha’ meaning the sword that cuts.

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The importance of ‘regional languages’ and the necessity of a symbolic and literal

vocabulary that could be shared between the brown sahib political class and the new post-

colonial Sri Lankan became ever more significant. Increasingly Sri Lanka’s political class

sought to bridge the gulf between them and their voting population with a new

‘vocabulary’ of Sinhala Buddhist nationalism, that moved criticism onto the perceived

colonial privileging of ethnic minorities such as Tamils in comparison to discrimination

against the Sinhalese ‘sons of the soil’ (Spencer 1990).

Tamil and English came to play significantly different roles in relation to Sinhala. The

1956 regional language act sought to rectify English dominance in education and

government by instituting regional languages as the new media on instruction and

government. However, the form the policy took was a campaign for ‘Sinhala Only’ and

was directed against Tamil minorities. Despite opposition to various pacts and after two

anti-Tamil riots in 1956 and 1958, eventually Tamil was introduced as a medium of

instruction in schools and public service (1958), and used for official matters in the north

and east (1969) but these were little palliatives for the larger forces of discrimination set

at work. State discrimination against Tamil minorities ranged from the progressive

sinhalicisation of the economy, the institution of Buddhism as the state religion in the

new 1972 constitution, and successive anti-Tamil riots in 1956, 1958, 1971, 1977, and

1983. Discrimination and subsequent militarization of Tamil youth has led to further

empathic and political differences which have encased separate linguistic worlds.

Furthermore, a new generation came of age in the 1970s. Education in regional languages

and universal free primary and secondary education saw the first generation of youth

whose primary education was only in Tamil and Sinhala. However, they emerged into an

unresponsive postcolonial world that continued to be dominated by the patronage and

control of the same colonial political and social elite (Obeysekere 1974). These were the

listeners that turned to regional language media rather than the English newspapers and

radio that had previously constituted educated society.

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The early years of the BBC broadcasting in Sri Lanka largely chose to ignore these

turbulent new developments concentrating instead on language and media consumption

as means to provide aspiration and social competence. This is evident through listener’s

letters for this period. Monthly reports on listener’s correspondence, both critical and

appreciative, that the BBC regional services produce for internal BBC checks are the key

archival resources we have for BBC regional services’ history. Selected by journalists,

these say as much about how broadcasters viewed their services as what people wrote to

the BBC. Rather than straightforward reports on listener correspondence these should be

seen as co-productions and collusions between listeners and broadcasters, providing

occasions where the two come together in fashioning a representation of the BBC to

itself; prime representational resources. The monthly reports that the BBC was producing

for the Tamil and Sinhala services throughout most of the twentieth century were

remarkably consonant with a particular vision of Sri Lanka and of the BBC.

Aspiration and improvement

In its early years BBC Sinhala was pitched to be primarily informative and provide

polish, refinement, culture, and give Sinhalese speakers a sense of Britain. Its

programming concentrated on vignettes of British life in carefully constructed Sinhalese.

You listened as a schoolchild to improve your pronunciation and grammar as one of the

broadcasters told me. In its survey of (241) listeners’ habits and opinions in 1954, the

BBC report notes with some satisfaction that “198 listeners were very satisfied with the

language used in the transmission. Among them were a professor of Sinhalese, a lecturer

in Sanskrit and 20 out of the 22 Buddhist priests and all except one of the 44 school

masters. Only five out of the 38 who were dissatisfied gave a reason. Three felt that it

was too literary and two that it was not sufficiently refined” (AR, Eastern Service 1952-

1955). xiv The BBC itself then was constantly attending to the need to produce a Sinhalese

that was fluent but ‘high’. BBC Sinhala’s profile was overwhelmingly young and

composed of students, Buddhist priests, clerks, and teachers- a listenership that they

continued to appeal to even as the class composition of these would dramatically alter by

the 1960s (ibid). It is precisely these kinds of youth who were instrumental in the major

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anti-state insurrection in 1971 by unemployed rural youth and university students under

the rubric of the JVP, the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (People’s Freedom Party).

However, BBC Sinhala’s response to changes within Sri Lanka was not attuned to the

new radicalism that was sweeping young Sinhalese but instead to stress to the

aspirational element of the new Sri Lanka. It provided a means to access previously elite

worlds of ‘Britishness’ and English life-styles, but in Sinhala; access to an elite life which

was still imperial in its references, which a new national language was as yet unable to

provide.

This attention to Britishness and its attempt to reinterpret postcolonial life through

imperial connection can be seen if one examines BBC Sinhala’s broadcast material. In

1969 the BBC ordered a review of programming offered in January and February 1969

by BBC Sinhala, BBC Urdu and BBC Burmese. Comparison of the schedules (refer to

Appendix 1) makes it immediately clear that BBC Urdu and BBC Burmese, both in areas

influenced by strong anti-colonial movements and broadcasting to more (Cold War)

strategically important areas in South Asia were much more in tune with topical world

news and offered a greater sense of the global and the postcolony than BBC Sinhala

which was focused on British news. It reveals the extent to which BBC Sinhala was also

broadcasting to a Sri Lanka it still thought of as a South Asian backwater.

Both BBC Urdu and BBC Burmese combined cultural programming and topical news.

Cultural programming focused on regional language heritage and literature such as BBC

Urdu’s celebration of the poet Ghalib in January and February 1969. Further, in January

and February, BBC Urdu covered among other things the Vietnam peace talks, the state

of emergency in Spain, Nixon’s press conference, alongside regular reports on the Middle

East. BBC Burmese covered some of the same material and in addition also covered the

situation in Iraq, Vietnam communist peace aims, ‘A week in the Far East’, ‘Outside

view of China’, and coming elections in four Indian states. Both services thus translated

and covered a wide range of news topics from the BBC’s central news offerings. The

overlap between news items used by the services was also high. In contrast the only item

that the Sinhalese service used in Jan and Feb 1969 which overlapped with BBC Urdu

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and Burmese was “Another non-aligned Conference?.xv Given that Sri Lanka was at the

time a leading member of the non-aligned movement, this was a rare acknowledgement

of the complexity of political life in Sri Lanka. Items that Sinhala service used from the

central agency instead included “Talking about Science: just bloody silly? – US moon

flight” (28/1/1969). Most of its international items were instead items about British life,

politics and economy. In January & February 1969 the Sinhala broadcasts covered

instead the following categories of items:

(1) News directly relating to Ceylon such as Independence Day celebrations and a

message from the Ceylonese high Commissioner. There were also British and

Ceylon news such as the training of Ceylonese Police by the British police (14.2)

(2) British socio-political issues from programming relating to British fundraising for

Biafra (4.2) to women’s prison reform

(3) Explaining British life i.e. Britain’s car industry and newly issued stamps. The

feather in the cap was the four part feature broadcast on 11.2 ‘Our views of

marriage in Britain” where four artists look into different aspects of marriage in

Britain and explain that ‘marriage in Britain is similar in some ways to the

marriage customs of Ceylon”.

Global was still an imperial imagination in BBC Sinhala and its listeners, very different

from BBC Urdu and BBC Burmese where a much wider sense of the global was in fact

being pursued. The anachronistic nature of BBC SS was probably why it was closed

down in 1976 as one of the BBC’s most non-essential language service.

Between the 1950s to 1980s BBC Tamil shared a similar emphasis on language and

aspiration. For BBC Tamil, broadcasters and listeners ‘beautiful Tamil’ was of prime

importance. As it broadcast simultaneously to India and Sri Lanka, BBC Tamil did not

have the same imperial vision of Sri Lanka as BBC Sinhala. In keeping with the other

Indian services its content included an increased quotient of other forms of programming

such as international news, Indian news and debates, and a special emphasis on science

and information programming. However, content also heavily focused on cultural

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features and self-improvement shaped by Tamil linguistic nationalism and postcolonial

aspiration. The following letter and its espousal of the language of the broadcast and its

creation of a seeming intimacy between listener and broadcaster is representative of

thousands of letters received by BBC Tamil over the twenty year reign of their most

famous broadcaster Shankarmoorthy.

“Do you know why your listeners are so attracted to you? It is because you are different from other broadcasting stations whose broadcasters stand aloof and alienated, reading a paper for others to listen to. But when Shankar deals with a subject he creates an atmosphere in which we feel there is someone sitting in front of us, explaining matters in a simple, fluent, appealing language, not to our ears but to our hearts…. Thus, the barrier of a medium is non-existent in the case of Tamilosai” Extract from listener’s letter from South India (ACR 1986)xvi

Letters praised Shankar’s translations and broadcasts of major western classics including

Shakespeare, Bernard Shaw etc into Tamil. Some reports on correspondence even began

to refer to the ‘Shankar factor’ in relation to the monthly letters about the ‘beautiful

Tamil’ spoken by Shankar. Letters most often referred to Shankar as ‘Shankar Anna’

(elder brother) according him the respect of an elder and knowledgeable brother

educating his listeners in high culture and news, thus ‘improving their minds’. The

current head of BBC Tamil explained to me and one of the BBC sound engineers to me

that BBC Tamil’s emphasis on good classical Tamil was the legacy of the Shankar era.

He told us of the ‘celebrity’ like status that Shankar had commanded. On two occasions,

he told us that, upon the visit of one of the senior producers to interview the elusive head

of the LTTE Prabhakaran, Prabhakaran had requested that his regards be sent to Shankar

Anna and on the second occasion had suggested that the next time the producer came, she

brought Shankar Anna with her. Shankar was, for two generations of Tamils listeners in

Sri Lanka and India, the official Tamil voice of culture and refinement. His accent,

pronunciation and his erudition were admired and were made the focus of generations of

listeners who were interested in ‘improving their minds’.

BBC Tamil’s broadcasting only shifted from this prioritization of improvement and

aesthetic language use in the 1980s, when the worsening ethnic conflict in Sri Lanka

began to seep into its news production. Since the 1980s BBC Tamil began to switch its

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focus from pan-Indian news into making Sri Lankan news its raison d’etre and BBC

Sinhala was re-commissioned appearing again in 1990 as decidedly post-imperial news

focused radio service. Sri Lanka’s political crisis has transformed the audience for the

BBC to news-hungry crisis listeners, a shift which has seen both BBC Tamil and Sinhala

increasingly become broadcasters who ‘publicize suffering’, a legitimacy that their own

previous history within Sri Lanka provides. The changes in the two services reflect both

changes within the services’ own ideas about Sri Lanka and their role as well as changes

in the Sri Lankan political situation.

This idea of a mutual gaze is critical in understanding the BBC’s regional services in Sri

Lanka. While the BBC broadcast about British life and mores Sri Lanka was undergoing

immense changes and ethnic and political conflict was already evident. Yet this did not

fit into the BBC’s imagination of Sri Lanka nor was what Sri Lankan audiences at that

time necessarily demanded of the BBC. The BBC in Sri Lanka was produced at the

intersection of a figure of eight, where on one side the BBC pursued a particular

imagination of Sri Lanka and on the other Sri Lankan audiences too imagined the BBC in

highly specific ways. This was for a large part of the twentieth century still through

imperial lenses. The BBC’s increasingly responsiveness to the civil war news is not just a

chronological shift, it is also an imaginative shift on the part of audiences and

broadcasters.

3. ‘PUBLICISING SUFFERING’: THE BBC AS WAR TIME RADIO

“I am a Tamil of Indian origin living in the central region of Sri Lanka on a tea estate. When we were attacked by the Sinhalese mobs, two weeks ago, there was either a blackout or a distorted version in the BBC quoted in our Government news….We are stateless, now suddenly rendered homeless, and perhaps by your lackadaisical attitude, helpless too. It is the BBC that the Sri Lankan Government fears most. If you could take a firm stand on fair play then we would receive protection” Listener’s letter, Sri Lanka (Tamil service, ACR 1986)

From the 1970s onwards a host of radical Tamil militant groups sprang up in response to

state discrimination. As combat between these groups and the state escalated, one group,

the LTTE (‘the Tigers’), emerged supreme eliminating other Tamil militant groups and

assuming control over large sections of the island’s north and east in 1990. Subsequently,

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Sri Lanka has seen the breakdown of three peace processes and the war looks likely to

continue for an indefinite period. Around 70,000 have been killed in the conflict and

nearly 1 in 2 Sri Lankan Tamils have experienced displacement both internal and external

(Sriskandarajah 2002) with thousands of Tamils leaving the island to form a large

asylum-seeking diaspora concentrated in Europe, North America, India and Australasia.

As the war has proceeded distinct Tamil and Sinhala areas have become more apparent

with geographic polarisation produced by anti- Tamil riots and military action. The north

and east became even further detached from the imagination of the rest of the island;

geographic distance was translated by civil war into social and empathic distance.

Quite apart from the growing ethnic crisis in northern and eastern ‘Tamil areas’, Sri

Lanka also went through immense political crisis in the 1980s in its southern ‘Sinhala

heartland’. The first massive deployment of the Sri Lankan security apparatus came first

in 1971 against the Maoist JVP. In 1987 in protest against the entrance of Indian Peace

Keeping Forces, the JVP rose up again much transformed from its 1971 days into an ultra

nationalist Sinhala organization. Combat between the JVP and Government security

forces resulted in 60,000 missing feared dead in the south between 1987-1989. The

human costs of political and ethnic crisis have just further extended in subsequent war

years from 1990 to present. While the situation in rebel areas has been continuously

repressive with the LTTE continually extending its power, in southern Sri Lanka the

return of democracy in 1994 and regular parliamentary elections had seen the southern

political situation dramatically improve from the late 1980s and early 1990s. However, in

2006 and 2007 with the re-escalation of the war, the government has become increasingly

repressive once again. This is the climate and crises which have been highly influential

for the media, especially for broadcasters such as the BBC in Sri Lanka.

Research with BBC staff and also remarks by BBC surveyors show that one of the major

reasons for the rise in BBC listenership in the last decade in Sri Lanka has been what is

called ‘crisis listening’. As the war has worsened news hungriness was exhibited by all

surveyed. One survey commissioned by the BBC in 1996 from the Lanka Market

Research Bureau and carried out with respondents in selected areas in southern Sri Lanka

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showed the overwhelming feeling that being in touch with news was indispensable to life

with one young woman from Kalutara telling the interviewer “If you live in this country,

you better listen to the news, you don’t know when something will happen” (LMRB,

1996: 18).xvii As the research suggested “in times of upheaval or instability in the

country, such as a bomb blast or a terrorist attack the frequency of listening was

greater….the BBC was considered to be a reliable and accurate communicator of current

affairs and news” (ibid: xi). As censorship by both the LTTE and the Sri Lankan

government has increased, listeners are increasingly turning towards radios stations seen

to be independent of both the LTTE and Sri Lankan state (LMRB, 1996). The importance

laid on ‘independence’ was shown by the unease revealed across all demographics and

ethnicities in the 1998 BBC survey about the rebroadcast of BBC radio on SLBC and the

fear that this compromised the BBC’s ‘trustworthiness’ and its ability to be impartial (MS

Jan/Feb 1998).xviii

This emphasis on news and trustworthiness reflects general distrust of the polarized

nature of Sri Lankan media and the high stakes for journalists in Sri Lanka. Sam Miller,

sent in 2003 to Sri Lanka as part of a BBC team in order to train local journalists noted

that:

The ethnic divisions that have enveloped Sri Lanka since the 1980s have been mirrored in the journalist community. Politicians on all sides of the conflict have demanded, and often been given willingly, the loyalty of their community’s journalists. As one Tamil journalist in the northern city of Jaffna told me, ‘Our job is to bark for our community’. Several journalists have been deliberately targeted and killed. There was almost no interaction (except on small scale in the capital Colombo) between Sinhala and Tamil journalists during the war years—and many of them have no common language in which they can interact. (2006: 173)

Both the LTTE and the Sri Lankan state by the dint of harassment and threats to

journalists have managed to inculcate a mixture of repression and self-censorship into the

Sri Lankan news and print media. The Sri Lankan journalist Waruna Karunathilaka in

the (British) Observer in 2001 highlighted the increasing control of Sri Lanka’s formerly

‘vibrant’ print and electronic media (29.04.2001). Since 1983 and the beginnings of the

war, Karunathilaka reports, severe restrictions have been imposed on journalists reporting

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from the north and east, with frequent bans of travel to troubled areas by national and

foreign press. Actions ranging from defamation cases, to temporary closures, attacks

from the state media and police harassment have been used against critical journalists or

editors. Journalists are enjoined to consider patriotism and national interest as the

preeminent values of a ‘good media’. In particular Tamil journalists have been subject to

intense police harassment, detention and some murdered as the International Federation

of Journalists reported in August 2007 ( www.ifj-asia.org). Critical reports on the status

and security of journalists have been issued by both the International Federation of

Journalist and Reporters sans Frontieres (www.rsf.org) with the Geneva based Press

Emblem Campaign naming Sri Lanka in 2007 as the world’s third most dangerous place

for journalists.

Control of the media has also been important for the LTTE. It has consistently cracked

down on dissident opinion, through arrest, assassination and harassment, since its climb

to supremacy in 1990. Cleverly, the LTTE soon appreciated the importance of media

control given the large Tamil diaspora outside Sri Lanka and it has since the mid 1990s

taken over or controlled much of the Tamil media broadcasting and printing in Sri Lanka

and in the diaspora (Nallainathan 2007). Dissident magazines and newspapers in Canada

have often been closed down. The Toronto based journalist DBS Jeyaraj was beaten up

and hospitalized in 1993 and the Tamil daily Muncharie he began after the attack was

shut down by 1996 after arson attacks and threats to shops distributing the journal ( Sri

Lanka Sunday Times 9.4.1996). Within Sri Lanka, the silence surrounding LTTE control

of the national Tamil newspapers has rarely been lifted. In a rare show of resistance in

northern Sri Lanka in April 2004, 4000 Tamil fishermen from Gurunagar protested

outside LTTE offices after they were shot at and some arrested when they fished within

LTTE cordoned areas. Most Tamil media did not print these anti-LTTE protests. On

September the 1st 2004, the fishermen picketed the offices of the Tamil newspaper

Uthayan demanding an apology from the newspaper after Uthayan had printed the LTTE

version of events, highlighting in their protests the LTTE control of the national Tamil

newspapers (World Socialist Website 27.9.2004). As I found in my ethnographic research

in Sri Lanka on the effects of the civil war in 2003-2004, while Tamil media and print are

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read widely, people are openly aware of their partisan and censored nature. Tamil

journalists, as with the general populace, walk a dangerous tightrope between LTTE and

government intimidation both sides ensuring that either choice makes one a target. These

issues surrounding security, the polarization of the media and self-censorship were

evident and pressing concerns. This has undoubtedly influenced the way in which BBC

Tamil and Sinhala have sought to make a new mandate for themselves.

New(s) visions

“On the 13th of September 1990, I received a message from the local police to go to the police station….they kept me for two months. On the 11th of March 1991, I was transferred to Boosa detention camp. I am still here. I supported my mother, wife and two children by working as an unskilled casual laborer working in plantations….I am 53 years old and my eye sight is failing. I can not hear very well. I still do not know why I am here. I do not understand politics. Please read this letter in your programme and ask them at least to prosecute me. Then I will know my sentence and a date of release” Listener’s letter to Sinhala Service, Boosa detention camp, (IAC & ACR January 1993) xix

Sri Lankan news has become BBC Tamil’s raison d’etre for Tamil (and Indian) listeners,

though this invites regular complaints from some Indian listeners. There have also been

shifts within the South India audience in relation to Sri Lankan Tamil news. While

initially, support and sympathy for Sri Lankan Tamils and Tamil militant groups was

strong and the LTTE was projected as a defender of general Tamilian rights, many South

Indians abandoned support for the LTTE after the LTTE’s assassination of the Indian

Prime-minister Rajiv Gandhi in Chennai the Tamil Nadu capital in 1991. The fabric of

the imagined Tamil community across national boundaries has come under increasing

pressure. The shift towards Sri Lankan news was openly acknowledged by the

broadcasting team, not only was there more regular ‘news’ in war-torn Sri Lanka, but

also as I was told on numerous occasions Sri Lanka ‘needed’ the BBC more than South

India did. South India, broadcasters argued, was part of a functioning democracy with a

competitive and free press. South India had multiple radio and TV stations and thus were

declining as ‘loyal’ audiences to the BBC. In contrast, Sri Lankan Tamils had little access

to objective press and thus the need for a broadcaster such as the BBC gave added

purpose to the work of the broadcast team. This was in consonance with a larger self-

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representation of the BBC as filling a ‘political need’ for countries in crisis, the BBC WS

as "the best estimate of truth is being offered you, often in regimes where that is in very

short supply"(my itals) as Nigel Chapman the current head of the BBC WS remarked in

the Independent (UK- Independent 09/07/07). All the papers in this collection explore

this aspect of BBC self-representation.

However, BBC Tamil’s pitch to be ‘impartial’ is also more recent than BBC Sinhala

which had the luck to emerge in 1990 with a clean slate. Until very recently BBC Tamil

was dominated by a broadcaster well known within the Sri Lankan Tamil community for

their strong support for the LTTE. This coloured BBC Tamil’s approach to Sri Lankan

news and the credibility of their analysis if not documentation of events was considerably

impaired. Significantly, since the appointment of a new head BBC Tamil has steadily

gained credibility again, beginning to distance itself from its former soft approach to the

LTTE, and focusing on more an evenhanded approach to the Sri Lankan state and the

LTTE.

The war makes it impossible to collate full figures for BBC Tamil’s audience in Sri

Lanka. BBC surveys in Sri Lanka in 1995 and 1998 (the first since 1967) were able to

survey Tamil speaking listeners in Southern Sri Lanka, mainly concentrated in Colombo

with its large minority population of Sri Lankan, Muslims and Malaiyaha (‘Indian’)

Tamils, and central Sri Lankan hill country with its large Malaiyaha Tamil populations.

Surveys estimated the audience for Tamil speakers in Southern Sri Lanka at 3.3% of the

population surveyed, around 350,000 adults (smaller numbers than for the Sinhalese

service). However, the report stated that listening levels among the Tamil minorities were

considerably higher than among Sinhalese with 27% of Tamil speakers listening weekly

to the BBC in Tamil (as opposed to 10% of Sinhala speakers) (MS Jan/Feb1998

). xx

However, these surveys did not cover the largest proportion of Tamil-speakers in the

country: Tamils and Muslims living in the northern and eastern provinces. In both 1995

and 1998, the BBC survey reported that it could not survey 8 districts in the northern and

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eastern provinces representing around 14% of the total national population and all Tamil-

speaking provinces with majority Muslim and Tamil populations ( MS Feb/March 1995

& MS Jan/Feb 1998).xxi If these are taken into account then one can estimate an

exceedingly high audience for BBC Tamil in Sri Lanka. Informally it is acknowledged

that the BBC Tamil functions as the only real radio service (alongside LTTE radio)

operating into LTTE controlled areas in the north and east. One broadcaster told me that

he understood, through some limited focus group research, that the listenership among

Tamils in rebel areas could be as high as around 7 out of 10. BBC Tamil has been able to

gain interviews with Tamil politicians, LTTE leaders and now Tamil dissidents because it

is intuitively understood that, within Sri Lanka, it has the widest listenership in rebel

areas, and, as a foreign broadcaster is not subject to open censorship by either the LTTE

or the Sri Lankan government. It functions as some kind of public sphere. Thus, BBC

Tamil has, while keeping its mandate for a Tamil kinship across countries imagined by

Tamil linguistic nationalism, progressively shifted towards a war-zone population in Sri

Lanka.

The changes in the Sinhala have been equally dramatic. In 1990 the Sinhala service was

re-introduced. The contrast between the earlier phase of the BBC Sinhala and the

returned 1990 service is palpable. In 1969, broadcasters wrote of the appreciative

response to items on marriage in Britain, highly revealing both of the audience and their

own ideas about the appropriate role of the BBC in Sri Lanka. Listener correspondence

reports in the 1990s are equally revealing of the new kind of audience that the BBC was

pitching itself towards. In their own summary of correspondence for 1992, BBC Sinhala

drew the frames of its new visions of Sri Lanka when it argued that “correspondents

wanted more news about Sri Lanka [T]hey complained that they only get to hear the

official version [O]ur correspondents wanted the BBC to find out the ‘other side’ of the

story, as the official version was always available in the local media” (Sinhala Service

IAC & ACR 1992).xxii Journalists in the BBC Sinhala deliberately began to promote news

within the service which was both different from official government news and widened

the national agenda, also thus broadcasting about minority life in Sinhalese to Sinhalese.

In 1993, when the service had been up and running for three years and had cumulated a

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more steady audience, most letters were about news and political and social turmoil.

Letters used the BBC to primarily “publicize suffering”. In January 1993, BBC Sinhala

reported that ‘most of the correspondents continue to write to us about the injustices they

had to experience’ among them ‘relatives of the disappeared’ (those who went missing in

the late 1980s and early 1990s) and ‘captive audiences’, political detainees in detention

camps detailing their torture, continuing imprisonment and fears for families left behind

(IAC 1993). xxiii In addition they highlighted their many letters from workers in the Free

Trade Zones set up after economic liberalization in Sri Lanka describing their bad

working conditions and pay : “ the workers wrote to us because they did not have many

ways of publicizing their suffering” (ibid). Thus, as I argued earlier, the changes in both

stations’ broadcast content and framing of themselves not only come out of changes

within Sri Lanka’s political landscape but also their own visions of themselves in Sri

Lanka.

The only new factors that both services have chosen to regard ambiguously surround the

growth of large war induced diasporic movements. There have been two large scale

movements out of Sri Lanka since the 1980s. The Sri Lankan Tamil diaspora has become

one of the largest asylum seeking populations in the world (McDowell 1996) and has

become highly significant in the Sri Lankan war, providing the majority of the financial

and ideological support for the LTTE. The numbers of Sinhalese seeking political asylum

are negligible; the large majority of Sinhalese who migrate do so for economic or

professional reasons. The Tamil and Sinhalese diaspora located in Europe and North

America are negligible radio audiences for the BBC. With the exception of re-

broadcasting in Australia, fiddly shortwave radio was the only way to access BBC Tamil

and Sinhala and thus there are no significant Euro-American diasporic radio listenerships.

They have only become significant with the advent of the internet websites for the two

services. Diasporic internet surfers are often very vociferous in registering their

disapproval of the BBC’s broadcasts in Sri Lanka, but they are not the target audience.

Both BBC Tamil and Sinhala heads told me explicitly that they continue to regard

listeners in Sri Lanka as their target audience not the diaspora.

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The second large migration has been the rise in short-term economic migrants to the Gulf

States from all ethnic communities in Sri Lanka who continue to listen to their shortwave

radios and return to Sri Lanka. While much work on the BBC has stressed the creation of

new migrant universes that the BBC and other services can provide to diasporas, keeping

them in touch with ‘home’ and yet attenuating these to rich new migrant worlds, the truth

is that for the BBC’s Sri Lanka services, it is the economic middle eastern migrants who

form a more significant audience than the former. Sri Lankan Tamil, Muslim and Sinhala

workers (South Indian workers also wrote to BBC Tamil) wrote to the Sinhala and Tamil

service throughout the 1990s about their lives as housemaid and migrant workers. The

Sinhala service in particular loyally responded to letters by regularly covering issues

about the Middle East workers and their conditions. On occasion this has served to

translate regional news into global news. In the 2006 Israel Lebanon war, contact made

by a Sri Lankan worker to the Sinhala service, highlighted the plight of stranded

thousands of migrant workers in Lebanon displaced and affected by the Israeli campaign.

It became evident that Sri Lankans were the largest group of foreigners in Lebanon

(80,000 nationals), the majority of them domestic workers earning less than $1000 a

month. Many of the panicked housemaids were trapped by their employers refusing to

give them back their passports and pay their wages. As they attempted to find their way

to Beirut and hopefully out of the country, the Sinhala service covered their stories and

passed the news onto the larger BBC, which began to report on the migrant workers who

had been ignored previously as part of their general coverage of the Lebanon war

(21.07.2006). The BBC programme “Have your say” focused on Sri Lankans trapped in

Lebanon and arranged for Sinhala service staff to translate emails arriving from Lebanon

(8.08.2006).

In short, our romantic assumptions about exiled listeners drawing sounds of home from

their shortwave radios are frankly out of date. Throughout this piece I concentrate on the

BBC regional language services and the BBC in Sri Lanka, because often ideas of the

BBC as a global radio community rest upon assumptions about English language service

listeners and diasporic cosmopolites. This picture dissolves when one looks at the

histories and focus of BBC Tamil and Sinhala. Moreover, as we now go onto discuss in

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greater detail, the BBC in Sri Lanka did not transcend Sri Lanka’s ethnic polarisation. In

fact the BBC’s regional services are an integral part of its fractured ethnic landscape and

provide a perfect prism by which one can see the separation of linguistic and thus ethnic

and empathic worlds in Sri Lanka.

4. POLARISATION AND LANGUAGE: THE BBC’S TWO ‘KNOWABLE COMMUNITIES’ In Raymond Williams’ groundbreaking ‘The Country and the City’ he suggests that

different novels often represent different knowable communities. While in Jane Austen’s

novels dramatic action is about face to face interaction, looks, gestures, conversations,

this face to face community is in fact pre-selected by class. Neighbours in Austen’s

novels are not those who actually live next to each other, ‘they are the people living a

little less nearby who, in social recognition, can be visited….a network of propertied

houses and families, and through the holes of this tightly drawn mesh most actual people

are simply not seen’ (166). In contrast Williams points to George Eliot’s novels which

are populated very differently; ‘a recognition of other kinds of people, other kinds of

country, other kinds of actions….the difference between Jane Austen and George

Eliot….[is] a change in literary bearings which brings into focus a persistent rural

disturbance that had previously been excluded or blurred’ (ibid). What Williams

highlights is that ‘ what is knowable is not only a function of objects- of what there is to

be known [I]t is also a function of subjects, of observers- of what is desired and what

needs to be known’ (1985 [1973]165). In keeping with this I suggest that we move to

look at the news worlds projected by and producing the Tamil and Sinhala services as

different knowable communities. While they are focused indeed on the same place and

often the same events, the same objects are positioned very differently in both (i.e. the

LTTE, the Sri Lankan state, Tamil and Sinhala languages) or they are populated by

concerns, landscapes and experiences which are completely divergent and unrecognized

by the other. Relations or issues in one may be blurred, differently inserted or absent in

the other.

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The second half of this paper demonstrates how the possibility of different knowable

communities is structured by the creation of ethnically discrete audiences for the two

services, audiences whose expectations create certain kinds of claims of ownership. The

ethnic structuring of audiences does not directly reflect the possibilities of the news

covered by the services, what it does is shape the ways in which broadcasters understood

the news. Interactions between the audiences, the ethnic polarization and political

situation in Sri Lanka, and the world recreated by the broadcasters animate ideas of

objectivity and impartiality. In coming sections I focus on how and why these two

services produced differently attenuated ideas of objectivity structured by values

generated by specific worlds rather than abstract values. This of course casts a picture

obliquely on Sri Lanka’s current agonies, and the urgency by which we must understand

the ethnicisation of life in Sri Lanka in order to imagine empathic and political bridges

for the future. Not least it behooves us to understand the BBC not as a monolithic voice

and set of values but as a constantly negotiated and produced complex hydra.

Mapping ethnic polarization

In my account of the BBC services in Sri

Lanka hitherto, I have mapped their separate

journeys. However, here in this section I turn

to how integral ethnic polarisation in Sri

Lanka is to the workings of the BBC’s

regional language services. The BBC itself

observed in its 1991 survey of the Greater

Colombo “ there is very little overlap

between the regular audiences to the BBC in

different languages [I]t therefore seems the

case that each of the separate language services is reaching a somewhat different target

group, distinguished mainly by differences in language ability and ethnic background’.

(MS March 1991)xxiv This polarisation can be immediately seen in its 1995 survey which

examined the overlap of Tamil and Sinhala audiences for its two services in the areas of

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the island it was able to survey (all districts except the northern and eastern districts). The

separation of media provision in Tamil and Sinhalese can be seen in the negligible 0.3

overlap in the overall BBC listenership in 1995. In 1998, the near national BBC survey

concluded that ‘there is very little cross listening across languages, particularly Tamil and

Sinhala (pg 1) and that ‘the BBC Sinhalese and Tamil weekly audiences are largely

discrete’. BBC Tamil and Sinhala while broadcasting to the same island have completely

discrete linguistic and thus ethnic audiences.

This separation of audiences for the two services in Sri Lanka is not of recent origin. As

early as 1971, developments in one did not affect the listenership for the other. In the

April 1971 JVP insurrection in southern Sri Lanka, the Sinhala service was immediately

affected. It was removed temporarily from its customary rebroadcast on Radio Ceylon at

the time of the insurrection throughout April 1971 and continued to be affected up to a

year after the insurrection as reports by BBC staff showed. K.C Gould from the Eastern

Services Audience Research reported that there had been a 75% decrease in letters in

1971 from 1970. In 1970 Sandeshaya had received 2,300 letters, in 1971 only 536 in

total. He cited the decrease as due to the ‘emergency’ and also the effect on SS’s

temporary Sinhala clerical staff, mysteriously no longer able to help out with BBC letter

duties (see Appendix 2, WAC E3/200/1). A similar report on Tamil listeners’ letters for

the period between January to June 1971 by the same K.C. Gould reported, without a

trace of irony, that in the same period, letters from Sri Lanka to the Tamil service had

increased. Letters from Tamil listeners in Sri Lanka rose to a little over a thousand letters

in 1971. None of the letters to the Tamil service documented that year even mentioned

the emergency. In 1971 Sri Lankan audiences for BBC Tamil and Sinhala were living in

the same country but discretely.

Moreover, the full picture of ethnically discrete listening is unknown. As discussed above

BBC surveys in 1991, 1995 and 1998 were unable to been able to report on the

dominantly Tamil-speaking regions of the north and east (ibid). The mono-lingual Tamil

listeners in the north and east who would most probably listen exclusively to BBC Tamil

are not factored into the current picture. Thus its figures for cross listening amongst

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Tamil and Sinhala services are based on Tamil listeners in majority Sinhalese speaking

areas who would already have to possess some competence in Sinhala for daily life and

therefore could access Sinhala language services.

The effect of cross-listening in the south by Tamil speakers can itself be ascribed to

minority media usage of the ‘dominant’ language. Surveys also concluded that cross

listeners are most likely to be primary Tamil speakers (1 in 10 surveyed) than primary

Sinhalese speakers. While some Tamil speakers in southern areas listen to private Sinhala

language stations (Sirasa FM seems the most popular) as well as BBC Sinhala, in 1998

the BBC Survey concluded that ‘Sinhalese hardly listen to Tamil language stations’ (MS

Jan/Feb 1998: 5).xxv It is thus telling that more Tamil speakers in the South did not avail

themselves of Sinhala language media. Further, the cross-over audience itself is highly

specific. The 1998 survey highlights that while around 3% of their sampled Tamil

speaking population listened weekly to BBC Sinhala, most of these listed their ethnic

origin as Muslim. Southern Muslims and Malaiyaha (hill country Tamils) who speak both

Sinhala and Tamil, but speak Tamil ‘at home’ occupy grey areas within the ethnic

conflict. Both minorities have been heavily affected by the ethnic conflict without being

the representative population fought over.

BBC Sinhala was clearly such a national medium for a national Sinhalese audience The

majority of Tamil correspondence to BBC Sinhala comes from Malaiyaha Tamil

plantation workers. BBC Tamil was not listened to by Sinhalese or those of influence

within the south and was focused on Sri Lankan Tamils and a ‘national’ struggle in which

the plantation workers were little represented. Enmeshed within the heart of the southern

economy and yet marginal as an ethnic Tamil minority, workers wrote to publicize

strikes, wrongful arrests and their general predicament in a useful national medium.. This

also represents the practical and realistic dominance of the Sinhala language and that only

Sinhala language stations could represent a national public.

However, the enthusiasm with which BBC Sinhala has reported plantation issues and

nurtured and represented its plantation worker audience to an often indifferent ethnic

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Sinhalese population should not be underestimated. BBC Sinhala in particular has come

under repeated attack for its extensive sympathetic reporting on minority Tamil lives in

the war-zone. However, if we examine the broadcasters at work, both what the services

share and what differentiates them, we can see that, despite their own intentions this

widening of news agendas is still within ethnically discrete audiences and expectations. It

is to this and the daily workings of journalists in Bush house that we now turn.

5. FROM WITHIN ‘THE FIELD’: OBSERVING JOURNALISTS AT BUSH HOUSE Studying the BBC service necessarily entails examining the actual interactions within the

space of production itself. I understand the BBC services here as if Bourdieurian fields,

situated social universes which are also ‘spaces of play’ and spaces of struggle, in which

one of the major things at stake is the status and limits of the field (the BBC) itself. The

two BBC services in Sri Lanka both responded and were structured by prevailing

political climates but also worked within their own institutional imaginations of their

audiences, which at times was at odds with the political climate. As Bourdieu cautions us

one cannot read what happens within a given field only by its ‘external determination’:

“the external determinations that bear on agents situated in a given field…..never apply

to them directly, but affect them only through the specific mediation of the specific forms

and forces of the field” ( 1992: 105). It is through entering these situated social universes

that we can come to understand how they mediate and produce specific understandings of

Sri Lanka, the news and the BBC itself. ‘Fields’ are ‘manned’ by agents and actors -

translators par excellence. I only began to understand the complexities of both the BBC

Tamil and Sinhala from observing journalists, from the BBC routines they followed

which structured their days and news outputs, to their own struggles to redefine what

their mandate in Sri Lanka and indeed their own positions on the Sri Lankan war.

BBC routines

Both BBC Tamil and Sinhala are housed in the same open front office. The atmosphere

in the room is one of friendly camaraderie. Often there was collaboration between

individual reporters and the heads of the services on tracking a story, exchanges of

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information, and more general conversation across the room. There is also the obligatory

cigarette and food sharing. Conviviality is evident, and I began to wonder if ironically

cosmopolitan ethnic transcendence was more represented by Bush House than its

listeners.

The services follow the same time-determined BBC routines. In the mornings there are

two sets of meetings: the larger regional daily meeting and the service daily meeting.

This is followed by the intense period of quiet working hours. Journalists investigate

local stories, phone contacts, receive copy from stringers or chase up local politicians and

actors for telephone interviews. BBC Sinhala tunes into the daily news report and items

sent by its Colombo head of staff. The producer of the day puts together on the computer

the different items for the day as they are recorded and writes Tamil/Sinhala copy for the

bulletin. For world news, all BBC reports and packages are available on the central

computer service. Journalists select the most appropriate and begin to modify and

translate English copy into Tamil or Sinhala. Translation is a quick and effective practice,

journalist don’t focus on ideological categories but on the easiest ways of translating

standard English into standard Tamil or Sinhala against the clock. If there are any

difficulties with specific words, the journalist concerned casually asks colleagues out

loud what the most appropriate word would be. By around 4pm both services are in the

last stages rushing around preparing for the days broadcast. After the broadcast, a couple

of hushed hours prevail; journalists update the website and prepare longer running

features for the next few days.

Since the 1990s, the BBC regional language services and regions have been accorded

more autonomy and power to decide their own news selection. Moreover, BBC English

language websites and larger news picks up some of its news through regional meetings.

The position of different languages and countries within the BBC can only be understood

by the structure of the “region”, which is the primary interface through which general

news and the relative balance of stories and countries is produced. These daily meetings

are the first of the day and representatives of both services attend the South Asia

meetings. Different services relate the news that they will be covering accompanied by

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open-ended and frank discussion of the major South Asian news. No item is discussed at

the meeting for longer than a couple of minutes. Discussion balances genuine interest

with the demands of worthiness for broadcast. The web service picks up some stories for

coverage in the South Asian website and contributes other stories it is covering with its

general BBC English language correspondents stationed in respective countries. The

chair of the regional services also offers major global news items and recommends BBC

packages already on the computer systems which can be translated and reworked by the

respective services.

The attending representative is generally the appointed producer of the day. Both services

follow BBC policy (though Tamil with a smaller and more concentrated staff than

Sinhala follows it more assiduously) of rotating producers daily or in two day slots. This

means that assertions about the BBC that treat it as a monolithic and consistent voice

have to be evaluated in relation to actual practice within the BBC. Each producer

‘produces’ the news, albeit under the watchful supervision of the head of the service

(who themselves are also part of the rotating producers) for the day including the order of

news, the decisions on news items, and overseeing the broadcast.

The production of the day’s news takes place at individual services’ daily meeting which

follows regional meetings. News items for the day, possible means of investigating some

stories, the world news and packages available are discussed. In BBC Tamil these

meetings could actually become often rather vigorous debates about what consisted of

news; for one staff member the opening of the legendary Tamil film star Rajnikanth’s

latest film Sivaji, the highest earning Tamil film was a news item worth listing on the

daily run down, for another staff member it was frivolous and did not fit the other items

on the run down, it was unworthy of being called ‘news’. The shaping of what was

considered the news and who the mysterious listeners and what they ‘should’ expect as

news was further continued in these discussions, alongside what they should expect to get

from the BBC.

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Autonomy came from services’ coverage of regional (not global) news and ‘packages’.

Packages covered news items in greater depth and allowed one to collate interviews and

comments interspaced with bridging text. Either as presentations on particular news items

or as long running features on cultural events, personalities or issue based series allowed

the broadcaster to show their ability to construct news as opposed to simply reading

aloud standard copy. Both BBC Tamil and Sinhala with evening broadcast times and

limited resources within Sri Lanka could not produce ‘breaking news’, so packages on

specific news items allowed some ingenuity and journalistic integrity. Otherwise, as one

BBC Tamil journalist remarked gloomily, it felt as if the daily broadcast about Sri Lanka

was just the same as ‘reading out an obituary every day’.

Global news allowed less flexibility and required clever use of regional perspectives on

world events and the relative freedom accorded to smaller and strategically unimportant

regional perspectives. For example, the Sinhala service had run an exceedingly popular

special service during the days of the second Iraq War. They had been able to broadcast

daily reports from Sri Lankan sources in Iraq such as the Sri Lankan ambassador.

Following the general mood in Sri Lanka which was strongly against the Iraq war rather

than the official mood of the BBC in relation to British troops, they had conveyed a

rather more critical view of the US/UK campaign. Broadcasters thus portrayed

themselves as playing a dual role, introducing a Sri Lankan perspective into the BBC and

introducing a BBC perspective into the Sri Lankan political landscape.

As I observed journalists, I realized worlds rarely apparent from the listener’s

perspective; each unit nestled within a larger unit, and each demanding a different

contextual placing. The structure both constrained units within rather stringent

requirements, but also allowed some freedom and autonomy at levels. The greatest

constraint was the seemingly invisible but large and constantly unavoidable machine of

the BBC itself, mobilized for production but also protection of the BBC name and legacy,

a projection of a supra-voice and agency. Each language service could be and was

randomly checked at unspecified intervals, its content translated and reviewed by an

external board. The monthly reports on letter sent to the service were also part of this

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internal check, though as I argue, these letter reports also functioned as a co-production

where broadcasters and listeners collaborated in investing the BBC with a coherent and

clear agency.

Within Bush House, BBC Tamil and Sinhala are placed within descending regional and

institutional contexts. Both services encompassing only a 30 minute daily broadcast and

staff barely making it into double figures in both cases are ‘small’ in BBC terms. The

new ‘hot’ services were the Arabic world service and those others broadcasting to

‘strategically important’ areas. BBC Tamil, Sinhala and others such as the Nepali service

though broadcasting to troubled areas were not considered ‘hot’. However, as soon as

broadcasts left Bush House, they became rather more powerful and their influence and

name spread rhizome-like. Listeners and often political parties in Sri Lanka accorded the

BBC regional services with immense power, influence and agency within the Sri Lankan

landscape. Journalists were aware of the way in which these broadcasts could circulate in

the mysterious, unknown and unpredictable world of the listeners, even if within the

larger confines of Bush House, they were small fry. So, just as the BBC Sinhala and

Tamil services were being constantly contextually translated, the full-time broadcasters

straddled these translations.

6. ‘PUBLIC FORUM’ AND ‘TRUTH PRODUCER’: THE DIFFERENT SPHERES

OF BBC TAMIL AND SINHALA

Thus, BBC Tamil and Sinhala convivially share the same working routines. Further, they

both worked under a constant barrage of abusive emails and letters. The head of the

Sinhala service called it his ‘fan mail. Many of the daily emails for the Tamil service

were only strings of swearwords and general abuse. The majority of complaints, letters

and comments were on Sri Lankan news coverage and thus they were both conscious that

BBC Tamil and Sinhala had important public roles within Sri Lanka as global re-

presenters of Sri Lankan news. It is thus in relation to Sri Lankan news and actors, rather

than BBC routines and presentation of global news, that one can see distinctive roles for

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the BBC Tamil and Sinhala. It is there that subtle if significant differences do begin to

emerge.

The Sri Lanka war with its high human toll and multiple shadowy actors generates

particular journalistic dilemmas. Bodies are recovered in mass graves, on the sides of

roads, by the sides of houses and schools, but naming who the killers are is often near

impossible. Was it the state, the LTTE or groups linked to the state such as a breakaway

faction of the LTTE? In most cases the killers are known or at the least can be guessed

with a high degree of accuracy, but naming has dangerous consequences. In Sri Lanka

naming killers is viewed as a partisan act, significant for a news service such as the BBC

which has strict rules about sources and which prides itself on being impartial. Both BBC

Tamil and Sinhala journalists gloomily alluded to the problem of naming perpetrators

without fear of reprisal.

Furthermore, BBC Tamil also had to deal with unexplained killings which could also be

LTTE assassinations. , which, On the whole, BBC Sinhala have little access to or stay

clear of these ‘internal killings’, preferring instead to document probable state and state

linked assassinations alongside the southern clearly attributed LTTE suicide bombings.

BBC Tamil has however come up with complex and ingenious ways to code ambiguous

perpetrators, using well known phrases that ordinary Sri Lankan Tamils themselves use

to refer to different kinds of perpetrators. These phrases are well used in the Tamil media

and in informal conversation to ‘point without pointing’. Most commonly in the pro-

LTTE media, all killings by the security forces are identified while those by the LTTE are

named as ‘unidentified gunmen’. There are other codes, often those killers who arrive in

a white van are often linked to the state security forces or groups associated with them,

those killers on motorbikes and bicycles are often LTTE, and most of all assassins who

survive are never LTTE whereas all suicide bombing is a clear signature of the LTTE.

BBC Tamil would often fix upon one of these phrases or its own phrases for an

ambiguous perpetrator and then consistently use the same ambiguity for the same

perpetrator, building up thus a complex code of communication between it and its

listeners. Journalists recognized clearly the multi-layered nature of truth within the Tamil

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community, and broadcasts indirectly played with such a subtle notion of the news. These

are the kinds of communications which build up intimacy between audiences and

broadcasters, one which is an ethnic intimacy because it is premised on the way that

secrets circulate within the Tamil community.

Sources of information were also a problem for BBC Tamil, a journalistic problem that

arose out of a larger political malaise. BBC Sinhala maintained an active journalistic

presence within Sri Lanka, it had a Colombo office and head and also Tamil and Sinhala

stringers scattered all across the island. BBC Tamil possessed nothing like this presence

in Sri Lanka, they were a much smaller operation and they simply could not regularly

guarantee the safety of Tamil journalists in Sri Lanka. Fear of the LTTE and the state

within the Tamil community meant local Tamil journalists shied away from broadcasting

on such a public and well known Tamil forum. In most cases BBC Tamil had to rely on

news from BBC Sinhala stringers which they could report and re-interpret. All the Tamil

service journalists found this frustrating, they spoke of their own desire to push further

into stories but the constraints placed upon them by dangerous situation in Sri Lanka. As

one said, “We don’t sometimes know what is going on….what is propaganda and what is

not… we can’t do any investigative journalism”. Some expressed their feelings of

distance and inability to feel what was going on. BBC Tamil’s Indian journalists, in

particular, spoke of their difficulties in negotiating the fear in the Sri Lankan Tamil

community and the levels of extremism and polarization in Sri Lanka. We talked about

their shock at many different things they had encountered from the extreme opinions

expressed by Buddhist monks to their now altered opinions of the LTTE after seeing how

dissident opinion was crushed. For them, their Indian working backgrounds had

presented them with very different challenges. As one explained to me:

In India there is media freedom, the news percolates more, and there is greater accessibility to all kinds of news. Here you have only the Government and Tigers…..in the Tamil areas there are no independent voices. There is a total absence of civil society.

For one Sri Lankan Tamil journalist, fear and polarisation had equally contributed to the

situation. He felt that the Tamil and Sinhala press approached the news from already set

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ethnic positions which only served to reinforce the effects of fear within the community

towards speaking out.

The Tamil media is completely ‘pro-Tamil’. If I wrote in the Tamil media, they always make us position our reports in a pro-Tamil way. We have to cover the Government reports too, otherwise we all get in trouble, but otherwise…neutrality is not part of the Sri Lankan media.

For him, the situation that BBC Tamil faced was indicative of a greater malaise within

the Sri Lankan media and society, one which only gave him greater purpose in what he

was doing;

I’m from the same target area, I’m Sri Lankan so then you see things differently. We may be just reporting something, just an incident. But our mind and hearts bring us deeper. We can go further. I was arrested in Sri Lanka, I have experiences, when I hear or talk about other incidents, it brings back these memories for me….

BBC Sinhala also constantly feared reprisal against its Sri Lankan based journalists,

especially in relation to its few Tamil stringers. However, given their emphasis in

reporting to southern Sri Lanka and exposing southern actors, their stringers faced greater

danger from the state and state linked Tamil actors rather than the LTTE. BBC Sinhala

has already suffered casualties. Their regular stringer from northern Jaffna, M.

Nimalrajan was killed on the 19th of October 2000 by a government linked group. His

photograph was displayed and garlanded in the SS office. In eastern Sri Lanka, one

broadcaster told me, he sometimes substituted the voices of those reporting in order to

protect the stringer. On a few occasions reports were pulled as too dangerous for the

stringer. At the end of the day, the stringer’s safety came first.

However, while BBC Tamil journalists saw themselves operating within a vacuum, a

Tamil media muzzled by the LTTE, BBC Sinhala faced constant challenges within a very

different southern media landscape. While journalism in southern Sri Lanka has

undoubtedly become ever more dangerous (especially for Tamil journalists attached to

mainstream outlets), nonetheless there are multiple English and Sinhala language

newspapers and multiple private and public radio and TV stations. BBC Sinhala

acknowledged this dense media landscape even as it made a distinct role for itself within

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it. Journalists imagined their role as steering a ship which did not bend to pro-government

or nationalist pressure and attempted to cover war news in a non-partisan manner.

Abusive emails and the many attacks directed against them in nationalist Sri Lankan

newspapers for being unpatriotic and not supporting the war effort, functioned as

touchstones for the journalists that ‘they were doing something right’. Further, all of the

BBC Sinhala journalists lived within the Sri Lankan diasporic community in London and

thus could locate their broadcasts within comments made to them weekly by others they

met. They located themselves within a field of constant feedback and evaluation which

represented the more open nature of the media and politics in southern Sri Lanka.

In the files of clippings that BBC Sinhala journalists kept, alongside much valued letters

from listeners thanking them for news items and coverage, was a collection of all their

bad press. One journalist showed me these with some pride. The majority railed against

the Sinhala service for being ‘biased’, ‘unpatriotic’, ‘traitors’ and “LTTE lovers’. On the

15th of March 2006 there was even a demonstration by Sinhalese protesters outside Bush

house organized by a group called ‘Sri Lankan against Terrorism’ and the London based

branch of the SLFP (Sri Lankan Freedom Party) the current president’s party and the

dominant party in Sri Lanka’s ruling coalition. Protesters handed over a petition to the

BBC and brandished banners reading ‘Biased Broadcasting Corporation’ and ‘BBC, Stop

Supporting Terrorism in Sri Lanka’.xxvi A month prior to this on the 6th of April, the

BBC correspondent in Colombo had been assaulted by protesters at a march he was

reporting on. The march protesting against Norwegian mediation in the then current

peace talks was led by Buddhist monks and the NMAT (National Movement against

Terrorism).xxvii These incidents only spurred the journalists on. The greater the influence

the Sri Lankan media and listeners letters accorded them the more it shored up their

ability to translate their minority status within the BBC into a meaningful player within

Sri Lanka. Thus they frequently cited their unpopularity with rightwing and nationalist

commentators and politicians in Sri Lanka to me.

These constraints and differences outlined above meant that BBC Tamil and Sinhala play

rather different roles, one aiming to become an alternative ‘truth producer’ and the other

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a ‘public forum’, within their respective media worlds. BBC Sinhala was able to produce

different kinds of news through its stringers. Often its presence on the ground meant that

it could investigate further news items from letters written to it, thus in a very real way

performing the ‘publicizing suffering’ role attributed to it by some correspondents. It also

could use telephone interviews to ask sharp and critical questions of major actors in news

items. It expanded into a truth telling role, one in which official news was contradicted

and the news agenda itself was widened to include the voices of those who would not

have otherwise been heard, from broadcasting to its Sinhalese audience the situation of

those Tamils living in the war zone to exposing news about government corruption

scandals. The BBC Sinhala head told me of periods when the national SLBC news

broadcast would be followed by the rebroadcast of BBC news which would flatly

contradict every item of the national news. The timing was crucial. Coming as an evening

broadcast in Sri Lanka and immediately after the national news, most of the news of the

day would have already been reported by various organs. Instead it established and set

the tone for what ‘the “real” news had been’ that day. It was a foreign owned radio

station that was becoming more the national news than even the national news. It was

these that led to accusations of it being anti-government and unpatriotic.

While BBC Tamil did report news and information into the war zone, it could not

investigate or follow up news items in Sri Lanka. It could not adequately focus on

‘alternative truth production’ instead it could function to report up to date accurate and

non partisan and trustworthy news. Its distinctive feature was the telephone interview

which was of greater significance in BBC Tamil than Sinhala. BBC Tamil used on-air

telephone interviews and its featured interviews on the Tamil website to perform the most

significant function it could within Sri Lankan Tamil society - it acted as a public forum

in a situation where there was no public forum. LTTE and Government officials were

asked searching questions over the phone on live air. Tamil dissidents were also

interviewed about their opinions on what was going on in Sri Lanka. Examples of the

latter include their interview with K. Sritharan of the human rights group UTHR (J)

(University Teachers for Human Rights-Jaffna) on the occasion of UTHR winning the

prestigious international Martin Ennals award for human rights defenders. This interview

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posted on their website attracted hundreds of email complaints by pro-LTTE Tamils

complaining that the TO was broadcasting the voice of anti-LTTE Tamils who were ipso

facto Tamil traitors. Public events which would not have normally been covered by the

Tamil media were covered, such as the public memorial meeting in London for the Tamil

dissident and member of the government peace secretariat K. Logeswaran, assassinated

in Colombo by the LTTE. Thus BBC Tamil did not speak, but panoply of other voices

spoke instead, and assembling this polyphonic voice through the features and telephone

interview is BBC Tamil’s current means of finding a place within the Tamil media. It

provided less ‘news’ than the many Tamil internet news websites but it provided

something that others could not, an undivided public forum which even LTTE officials

could not avoid having to participate in. These roles that both BBC Tamil and Sinhala

play are thus, highly specific to themselves and the different media landscapes they

inhabit within Sri Lanka.

Being Traitors

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On my first day with BBC Sinhala, I immediately noticed the two cartoons they had

pinned up on their notice board. Both of the cartoons were from mainstream Sinhala

newspapers. One showed the BBC within a large coffin shaped like a cross alluding to

them as a Christian agency, the other showed them whitewashing a Tiger’s stripes and

thus inferring that they were LTTE supporters.

On May 15th 2006, Bernard Gabony, the online web editor of the South Asia desk

tackled the frequent accusations of bias leveled against the BBC’s coverage of Sri Lanka.

xxviii Gabony cites the ‘white washing’ cartoon and lists criticisms launched in Colombo

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based Sinhala and English language newspapers about the BBC being anti-government

and anti-Sinhalese. He also refers to a pro-LTTE website which bombarded the BBC with

emails and phone calls alleging it was taking bribes from the Sri Lankan government.

Gabony concludes that

The two campaigns from opposing ends of Sri Lanka's political spectrum illustrate two things. One is that people really care what the BBC says about Sri Lanka. It is the only international broadcaster with a permanent presence in Sri Lanka. The amount of coverage we give Sri Lanka through English language online, TV and radio reports and through the Sinhala and Tamil language services is vast compared to our competitors. The second is that, no matter how much we strive to maintain our guidelines of impartiality and accuracy, there will always be people on either side convinced we are biased against them

What Gabony does not highlight in his article is that these reflect everyday complaints

which different regional services receive constantly. What Gabony brings together as a

general criticism of the BBC are in fact focused on specific services. BBC Sinhala does

not get emails from pro-LTTE writers complaining that it discriminates against the

LTTE, ignores the plight of Tamils or is not a good advocate in the way that BBC Tamil

does. While Sinhala nationalist groups and newspaper assume that BBC Tamil is pro-

LTTE, they do not listen or access its services and do not attack it for being unpatriotic

and anti-government in the way they attack BBC Sinhala. It is assumed that these have

different loyalties that they are both defaulting on. BBC Sinhala is accused of betraying

Sinhalese in favour of Tamils and being pro-terrorism. BBC Tamil is accused of

betraying Tamils by not being pro-LTTE and by attempting to include a wider range of

Tamil voices. Criticisms, lampooning and abuse are themselves constituted within limited

spheres; they are accusations of betrayal of the inside by insiders.

One day when the head of the Tamil service and I were surveying his emails, he laughed

and told me “we are a room full of traitors…we are Tamil traitors” and, pointing across

the room at BBC Sinhala staff “they are Sinhala traitors”. All the staff had become highly

used to being called traitors and made frequent jokes about it. The BBC Tamil head was

sanguine about this. As he explained to me both criticism and appreciation of the BBC in

the letters he received all centred on a similar theme of ownership. The listeners felt that

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BBC Tamil by being a Tamil language station was an advocate for them. Thus abusive

emails were in fact saying all the time “you are ours, you are not standing up for us’. He

told me in reply “yes we are BBC Tamil but we are not an advocate for Tamils. We tell

the news in Tamil, but they expect us to play a partisan role for Tamil nationalism and the

LTTE. We cannot perform that role, we perform a professional role”. Many listeners, he

told me, expected that they should be naturally ‘pro-Tamil’ and thus ‘pro LTTE’.

This was paralleled in the abusive correspondence to BBC Sinhala which also accused

them of being pro-LTTE and pro-Tamil and anti-Sinhalese and anti-patriotic because

they broadcast news unfavorable to the Sri Lankan government. Language and ethnicity

intrinsically involved questions of loyalty. Thus even though BBC Tamil and BBC

Sinhala functioned as part of a global media, they also functioned as ethnicised

institutions and objects of ownership. Broadcasters are named as traitors, that is those

who betray not others but ourselves. While both services explicitly rejected nationalistic

stances and ethnic polarization, nonetheless their practices and audiences they in turn

imagined and responded to were also shaped by being ethnic objects of ownership, quite

far from the dispassionate global producer that we might have initially imagined the BBC

to be.

7. ATTENUATED WORLDS?

Claims of treachery and ethnic betrayal return us to knowable communities. The

differences between who the services are meant to betray illustrate very differing ideas

about who key actors are and where they should be placed. The way in which the Sinhala

service approaches the LTTE and the Tamil service approaches the LTTE are quite

different, though they may share a critical approach to the Sri Lankan state. The Sinhala

service has often been accused of being soft on the LTTE harshly by Sinhala nationalists

(also at times by anti-LTTE Tamil dissidents). Its approach to the LTTE is structured by

its position within a highly discriminatory southern polity governed by a state pursuing

an aggressive military campaign against both the LTTE and ordinary Tamils, and thus

that it does not speak to a Tamil community interlaced with fear of the LTTE. It is the

state and the southern media and political parties, which have the greatest impact on the

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Sinhala service’s practice. BBC Sinhala journalists attempting to widen nationalist

Sinhala attitudes and highlight government corruption and discrimination, thus see being

non-partisan and objective as maintaining critical distance from the Sri Lankan state. The

LTTE is an unknowable object.

For BBC Tamil, conversely, it is the LTTE which is the dominant and intimate power for

its listeners, and the LTTE which is the knowable object. For BBC Tamil journalists to be

objective and non-partisan is to be critically distant from the LTTE and highlight internal

dissension within the Tamil community and present alternative news items and voices.

Furthermore, their coverage of general southern affairs is highly limited, and instead it’s

political and national coverage also covers Indian news and political events in Tamil

Nadu, absent in BBC Sinhala. The differences between the two services’ approach to the

LTTE usefully demonstrates how both services operate with differently attenuated

notions of objectivity in relation to actors.

Another key example of the differences between the kinds of social universes the two

services inhabit is the frequent accusation that BBC Sinhala faces of being a ‘Christian

western conspiracy’ epitomized in the cartoon reproduced above - a claim which never

gets launched at the Tamil service. This is due to a very different imagination of the

international community and conjoining of religious and ethnic identity amongst Tamils.

Tamils have consistently relied on invoking the international community as witness to

‘the abuses of the SL government’ and thus the appeal to the ‘national’ and ‘the

international’ is different. Moreover, there is little anti-Christian antagonism within the

Tamil community where nearly 15% are Christian. In contrast, among the Sinhalese not

only given a strong Sinhala Buddhist identity but also a long distrust of English-speaking

elites, the charge of ‘Christian western conspiracy’ sits much easier.

These two examples illustrate very powerfully how the invisible net of assumptions,

important players and obligations shared between listeners and broadcasters for each of

the services is - despite both being directed at the Sri Lankan war - very different. These

two fields are distributed and populated according to different stakes and positions

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internal to them. There are different stakes for each of the services in how they

understand and report the same news items about the same actors. These actors’ positions

are distributed differently in the political and social universe of the listeners, even though

these overlap in the same country.

Journalists from both BBC Tamil and Sinhala share a commitment to impartiality and

non-partisan reporting but the way in which they do it and see their fields is from within

positions internal to them. These different approaches are not just matters of changing

perspectives; they are different systems of recognition. The larger argument of this paper

has been that these systems of recognition are ethnicised and ethnicising; they constitute

and reproduce different knowable communities.

Moreover, the BBC ‘s position as a strong global brand with a long powerful imperial

and post-imperial history within Sri Lanka not only gives it legitimacy, it also makes it an

object par excellence through which issues around ethnic representation and ownership,

who ‘we’ are, can be projected and evaluated. This paper has intimated that the BBC far

from providing a window onto the global world, becomes potent by representing to

listeners possibilities about how the global world may ‘know’ Sri Lanka and as a mirror

to ourselves of how and who ‘we’ Tamils and Sinhalese are. Listeners participate actively

in their letters and complaints and in the weight of their presence as targeted audiences in

shaping these possibilities. The two services are ethnic objects, totems that stand in for

social universes they are meant to represent and recreate ‘accurately’. The nature of this

representation is what brings the kinds of abuse and constant criticism that both services

face; ethnic objects they always nonetheless fall short of being for their listeners adequate

ethnic mirrors, fuelling desire even further.

This examination of the BBC’s regional services in Sri Lanka illustrates most powerfully

the value of looking at regional services as straddling two worlds, that of the BBC and of

highly specific media landscapes and audiences. Specific struggles to shape translations

and positions are themselves conducted within a matrix of nested hierarchies. Moreover,

as I have sought to demonstrate, our own notions of the BBC’s values of objectivity and

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impartiality have to be continually embedded back into the social universes co-produced

by broadcasters and listeners they are generated from and to. The BBC’s slogan

‘Wherever you are, you’re with the BBC’ potently recalls this complexity of a globally

present but nationally and regionally shaped media object.

i 1986 Annual Report. Tamil Service Annual Correspondents Reports. Appendix C: Tamil Service Listener’s Correspondence Summary. WAC E3/579/1 ii A Times online article interview of Nigel Chapman the head of the BBCWS, suggests that such countries are ‘classic world service territory….small groups of people transmitting information into countries’ where as Nigel Chapman suggests there is “very restricted access to information [and] where you can’t rely on local media”. Times online 14/12/2007 iii The 1998 BBC survey suggested that the weekly audience for radio (83%) was higher than that for television (77%) though that figure for television audiences is probably now significantly altered. Media Survey in Sri Lanka, Jan/ Feb 1998. Report written by David Ostry, August 1998. WAC: Box file: S.Asia, Nepal, Sri Lanka iv Tamil speakers surveyed tended to listen in greater numbers to public radio provided in Tamil than Sinhala speakers who also listened widely to private radio stations such as Sirasa FM. ibid v Media Survey in Sri Lanka, Feb/March 1995. WAC: Box file: S.Asia, Nepal, Sri Lanka vi Media Survey in Sri Lanka, Jan/ Feb 1998. WAC: Box file: S.Asia, Nepal, Sri Lanka vii Media Survey in Sri Lanka, Feb/March 1995. WAC: Box file: S.Asia, Nepal, Sri Lanka viii 1986 Annual Report. Tamil Service Annual Correspondents Reports. Appendix C: Tamil Service Listener’s Correspondence Summary. WAC E3/579/1 ix They have been highly discriminated against: the first act of Sri Lanka’s new parliament in 1948 was to disenfranchise them x In the 1833 reforms the three unofficial representatives nominated were; a Tamil, a, ‘low country Singhale’ and one Burgher. In 1889 a Kandyan ‘high-country’ Singhale and a ‘Moor’ were added ( Nissan and Stirrat 1990: 29) xi From the late nineteenth century onwards in Tamil Nadu, there was a concerted movement of Tamil revivalism enjoining devotion and love to Tamil personified as the deity Mother Tamil- ‘Tamilttay’ (cf Ramaswamy). The glorification of Tamil (and the anti-Hindi movement) only quickened its pace in the twentieth century. Language fervour peaked by the 1980s. xii Sri Lankan Tamil militancy emphasized not cultural revival but a very strongly ethnically attenuated identity focused on specific territory within Sri Lanka. xiii This paradox is audible within BBC Tamil Osai which attempts to transcend religion but whose signature tune is the ‘nateswaran’, characteristic of Hindu temple worship. xivAudience research, OS Eastern Services quarterly reports 1952-1955: pg 11 WAC: E3/34/2 xv Broadcast on Urdu on the 5th of Feb, on Sinhala on the 7th of Feb and Burmese on the 6th of Feb xvi 1986 Annual Report. Tamil Service Annual Correspondents Reports. Appendix C: Tamil Service Listener’s Correspondence Summary. WAC E3/579/1 xvii Lanka Market Research Bureau Limited (commissioned by the BBC) conducted July 1996 research study on attitudes to BBC Sinhala’s services educational programmes, particularly those focusing on sex and reproductive health. Lanka Market Research Bureau Limited. BBC: Educational programming. July 1996. WAC Box file: S.Asia, Nepal, Sri Lanka xviii See iii xix Sinhala Service Annual Correspondence Reports. International Audience Correspondence, Sinhala Service, Annual 1992 and January 1993. Summary of Correspondence. WAC E3/ 575/1 xx See iii

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xxi ibid xxii Sinhala Service Annual Correspondence Reports. International Audience Correspondence, Sinhala Service, Annual 1992 and January 1993. Summary of Correspondence. WAC E3/ 575/1 xxiii As above xxiv The BBC in Sri Lanka: Survey in Greater Colombo. March 1991. WAC Box file: S.Asia, Nepal, Sri Lanka xxv ibid xxvi http://www.bbc.co.uk/sinhala/news/story/2006/05/060515_protest.shtml http://www.tamilnet.com/art.html?catid=13&artid=18145 xxvii http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/704034.stm http://www.tamilnet.com/art.html?catid=13&artid=4923 xxviii http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/4986748.stm