Our professor was Anjali Premachandran. After years of hearing about her from Sir, I could hardly believe I was about to step into her classroom. She was still the only woman on the medical faculty, and had just returned from a year’s sabbatical in England. . .She had an unusually direct gaze and manner. In those violent days people had fallen out of the habit of sustained eye contact. But if she spoke to you, it was with a relentless concentration that was nearly blinding. Her default expression was a smile. Almost thirty, she was known to hold sway not with the authoritarian tactics of older academics, but through an intense moral engagement. – p. 143
Rajani Thiranagama (1954–1989) was a Sri Lankan Tamil human rights activist, feminist, physician, and academic who became a powerful, and ultimately silenced, voice of dissent during the Sri Lankan Civil War. Her life, and especially her death, embodies many of the tensions explored in Brotherless Night: the blurred lines between resistance and repression, the cost of speaking truth to power, and the profound moral dilemmas faced by civilians caught between warring sides. The character of Anjali in the novel is based on her.
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Born into a progressive Tamil family in Jaffna, Rajani was the fourth of seven sisters. She was an outstanding student who pursued medicine at the University of Colombo and later became a lecturer at the University of Jaffna. Like many young Tamils of her generation, she was initially sympathetic to the Tamil liberation movement. Her younger sister, Nirmala, even joined the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). Rajani traveled to the UK for further medical training, and while there, she married an activist Sinhalese fellow student, an unusual and politically charged union during a time of rising ethnic polarization.
But Rajani’s deepest transformation came after her return to Jaffna in the mid-1980s. As the war escalated and the LTTE gained dominance in the Tamil resistance movement, she began to witness and document systematic violence not only by the Sri Lankan state but also by the LTTE itself. She was particularly disturbed by the LTTE’s use of child soldiers, suppression of dissent, and targeting of rival Tamil voices.
In 1989, she co-authored The Broken Palmyra, a groundbreaking book that documented the suffering of civilians in Sri Lanka’s north and east and directly criticized abuses committed by all sides in the conflict—government forces, Indian peacekeepers, and the LTTE. It was a brave act of intellectual and moral courage. She faced terrible censure and risk from the LTTE. Weeks after the book’s publication, Rajani was assassinated near her home in Jaffna, shot while riding her bicycle home from work. Though no one claimed responsibility, it is clear that the LTTE carried out her killing as retaliation for her outspoken critique.
In Brotherless Night, the character of Anjali was inspired by Rajani. Like Sashi, the novel’s protagonist, Anjali was a woman of science and conscience, navigating a world in which women were marginalized, neutrality was impossible, and silence could be complicitness. Both faced the pressure of choosing between personal ethics and political loyalty, both witnessed the corrosion of liberation ideals by authoritarian practices, and both understood the risks of speaking out in spaces dominated by violence.
Today, Rajani Thiranagama is remembered by many as a martyr for peace and justice. Her work remains vital for understanding the human cost of war and the importance of defending truth, even when it means standing alone. Although her portrait hangs today on the wall of the University of Jaffna Teachers’ Association Senior Common Room, it was only added in 2022. In the classroom, her story invites students to consider the role of intellectuals in times of conflict, the ethics of dissent, and the courage it takes to hold all sides accountable in a deeply polarized world.
Possible discussion questions for students:
- How does the author develop Anjali’s character as both a medical professional and an activist? Which scenes best illustrate her growing moral awakening?
- In what ways does Anjali’s gender influence how other characters respond to her activism? How does the novel explore the intersections of gender and political resistance?
- Which scenes involving Anjali best capture the moral dilemma of speaking truth to power? Did you find her choices courageous, foolhardy, or something else entirely?
- What aspects of Anjali’s character challenge or complicate the notion of martyrdom as presented elsewhere in the novel?
- If you were to have a conversation with Anjali, what would you most want to ask her about her choices and perspectives?
- The novel portrays collaborative authorship as a form of resistance, mirroring the real-world creation of ‘The Broken Palmyra’ by multiple teachers in Jaffna. In the case of the novel, authorship of accounts of the violence is shared between Anjali, her husband, and eventually Sashi. How does/can collective, anonymous writing serve as a tool against oppression? What strengths and vulnerabilities might emerge from this approach to documentation?
