From Murder to Violence Against Women:

The re-emergence of Adeline Vitharne in Sri Lanka [i]

 

-- Nimanthi Perera-Rajasingham

 

 

In 1985, the Voice of Women special issue on Violence Against Women states:

 

This issue of Voice of Women (Kantha Handa) is devoted to a theme with which women have been increasingly concerned in recent years- women and violence.  Women are subjected to many forms of violence- from harassment in the streets and the workplace to domestic violence, rape and incest.  Many cases of women victims of such violence have been highlighted recently in the national press. [ii]

 

The special issue is one of the earliest attempts to focus on violence against women in Sri Lanka, and includes in its issue “a number of papers presented at the February [1984] seminar on ‘Women and Violence,’ they give some account of the existing situation in Sri Lanka with regard to crimes against women.  We also reproduce articles describing the situation in other countries where some form of organized resistance to violence against women has already emerged.” [iii]   The conference referred to here, is also the first in Sri Lanka to focus on women and violence. 

 

The cover page of this journal is for this paper as important as some of the contents in this issue.  The cover page has a scene from one of the final shots of Vasantha Obeysekere’s award winning film Dadayama (1982).  The two visuals placed one below the other is of the heroine of the film, Ratmali Kekulawala, brandishing a pole moments before her death (even here not a passive victim but an angry woman fighting for her life till the end) at her murderer who is placed above her in the cover page driving in the shattered vehicle that he uses to kill her.  This cover page then opens up a space, or is emblematic of the topic to be discussed in the special issue of violence against women by leading feminists in Sri Lanka such as Kumari Jayawardena, Rohini Dep Weerasinghe, Manouri Muttetuwagama, Rohini Weerasinghe.  The film and a discussion of it that occurs only in the Sinhala edition of the journal entitled “Sinhala Cinemave Nirupita Kanthave” is an important moment, but so are the articles that are in this issue that the cover in one sense opens up for discussion. [iv]

 

This film is interesting not only because of its cinematic excellence, but also because it is at least partially a re-depiction and a re-narrativization of a murder that occurred in 1958 in Sri Lanka in which Adeline Vitharne was murdered at the turn to the Wilpattu national park by her lover Jayalal Anandagoda.  This incident which was a sensation at the time was documented in Judge A.C. Alles’ well-known The Wilpattu Murder case [v] in 1975 and translated into Sinhala as Wilpattu Sihiwatanaya in 1976.  The case’s popularity is further testified in the multiple appearances it makes in newspaper reportage over the decades, even as late as 1991 when Alles sues director of film Obeyesekere over copyright issues. 

 

What this paper hopes to do is to locate the shifts in discourse that took place by the 1980s over this event from those in the 1950s and 1970s.  This paper will then be an exploration of how an event can be re-figured at different times according to the concerns of the times.  As one of the main focuses of this paper is to do with the emergence of violence against women in Sri Lanka, I will focus predominantly on the re-emergence of the Adeline Vitharne case in the 1980s in Sri Lanka.  For this, I will look at her re-emergence in what one may call part of the public domain: the print media such as newspapers and journal articles.  This paper does not attempt to be a film analysis, but rather hopes to look at responses to the film made by a public that accepted and determined it as a re-depiction, at least in part, of the famous Vilpattu murder case.  I hope then to locate some of the shifts in discourse through an analysis of responses to the film.   Here, I wish to suggest more than the fact that a feminist consciousness makes it possible for us to see the category of violence against women, rather I hope to explore the very shifting nature of the category itself.   

 

Who was Adeline Vitharne? [vi]

 

Shanti Adeline Vitharne was born on June 10^th 1937 in the village of Palletalawinne in the Kandy District to baker Abraham Vitharne and Punchimanike.  She has an older sister named Agnes.  Palletalawinne came to be the family’s eventual residence and where Adeline would continue to live till her death in 1959. 

 

While travelling on a train on 2^nd Novembr 1956, Adeline Vitharne met a young man named Jayalal Anandagoda (nee Gernel Anandagoda).  She along with her father and grandmother had caught the train to Kandy from the forte railway station.  During this train journey he conversed with Adeline Vitharne and both of them planned to meet again in the near future.  At this time and for some time to come Anandagoda had given his name as Lal Attapattu and had stated that he was an employer of the Bank of Ceylon.

 

For some time afterwards, Adeline Vitharne and Lal Attapattu (Anadagoda) continued as lovers and often met at the Kadugannawa Guest House.  By December Adeline was pregnant with child and after discussions with Lal and Adeline’s family, Lal had promised to marry Adeline once he had finished his exams.  During the months of her first pregnancy Lal refrained from visiting Adeline and her telegrams and letter to an address in Panadura did not bring forth any information from Lal.  Sometime during the last two months of Adeline’s pregnancy, she and her mother Punchimanike travelled to Panadura in search of Lal.  At this point they met Anandagoda’s friend Muttulingam who told them that he knew no one called Lal Attapattu.  A few days later Adeline Vitharne had given birth to a child.  Later Adeline would visit Muttulingam again and learn of Lal Attapattu’s real name and that he was a teacher at the Nanodaya College, Kalutara. 

 

In June 1958, Adeline finally traced her lover.  At this time Adeline had been working in Colombo, but Anandagoda had renewed his promises of marriage to her and had convinced her to return home and give up her employment in Colombo.  By this time Anandagoda had already become engaged to a young woman living in Kalutara of the same social standing as him.  Hence, Adeline Vitharne would simply be an obstacle to his realizing his dreams.  However, from this time onwards the two became lovers once more. By October 1958, Adeline was again pregnant with a second child. 

 

Anandagoda was a teacher at the Nanodaya College in Kautara, but was also a car dealer and ran a guest house in Moratuwa called The Park-view Guest House. 

 

Adeline Vitharne by Alles’ accounts and newspaper reports seemed to be determined to marry Anandagoda and rise above the scandal that was facing her in her home town.  The continued threats, and payments that Anandagoda had made to her had no effect as she continued her demand that he marry her.  He was becoming desperate to get rid of her. 

 

It was at this point then that he set up a plan to intimidate and humiliate her further.  In November 1958 Anadagoda arrived with two women who he claimed were his mother and sister.  Adeline, Anandagoda, and these two women met at the Kandy railway station and travelled to Punchimenike’s house.  Here, Anandagoda’s mother apologizes to Punchimenike for the shameful treatment his son had put her and Adeline through.  They claim that they had come to take Adeline home with them and get both Adeline and Anandagoda married.  (By this time Adeline’s father Abraham had abandoned the family and left for his native town Gongala because of Adeline’s actions.)  Adeline left her child behind, and travelled with the other three in Anandagod’a car and stayed at a house in the village of Walakuumbura close to Alawwa.  Here Anandagoda left Adeline with the two women.  It turns out that the woman who claimed to be Anandagoda’s mother was actually a woman named Millie who ran a “house of ill fame” [vii] there.  Adeline stayed there for 12 days, and then returned home [viii] . 

 

After this episode Adeline was determined to get Anandagoda to marry her.  She had visited him again but he had been unmoved by her pleas.  Her persistence was becoming a nuisance to him as he and his fiancé had fixed a date for their marriage in August 1959.  If Anandagoda’s fiancée were to find out about his affair with Adeline, the wedding would have been cancelled.

 

On the 2^nd of March in 1959 Adeline stated that she would go to visit her father who had returned to his native town in Gonagala, but first would visit Anandagoda in Kalutara.  Anandagoda with the help of Podisingho Perera housed Adeline for a week at Podisingho’s brother Alo Singho’s house in Kalawellawa in Kalutara.         

 

On the 14^th of March in 1959, Anandagoda picked Adeline up from Alo Singho’s house on the pretext of finally marrying her. She left Alo Singho’s house in Anadagoda’s fiat car with Podi Singho accompanying both of them.  He later picked up Sirisena, a well known chandiya, who worked as a security guard at Anandagoda’s guesthouse in Moratuwa to accompany them on their journey.     

 

By approximately 10 pm that night Anandagoda had stopped at a restaurant in Puttalam.  There he and the others had dinner, and Anandagoda had drugged Adeline before they started their onward journey through the Puttala- Anuradhapura road.  While driving towards the Wilpattu national park, Adeline had started perspiring and struggling against the drugs she had been given.  According to Anandagoda’s accomplices he had asked them to hit her on the head with a iron rod to quieten her down.  Sirisena hit her hard on the head with this the rod after which she had lain quietly for a while only struggling once with the use of her umbrella as defence.  Later, the umbrella was found close to where her body lay. 

 

Close to the small village of Timbiriwewa, they lowered Adeline’s body close to the car and drove over her four times.  After this Anandagoda returned to Kalutara in the early hours of the morning.     

 

Adeline Vitharne’s body was found the very next day by a truck driver, descriptions of the body were placed in the newspapers on the 16^th and 17^th of March.  Her body was soon identified and Anandagoda, Podi Singho and Sirisena were tried at the Anuradhapura Assize a few months later.  A.C. Alles was the acting solicitor general for the Anuradhapura jurisdiction at the time.

 

There then seem to be the ‘basic facts’ of the story, reported in the newspapers from when the body was found on the 15^th March 1959, till the end of the court proceedings in 1960.  Much of the details of the proceedings had been carefully collected and written down in later years by Alles.  Why then in the eighties does Obeysekere’s film on this age old incident create a forum upon which feminists can re-discuss this issue in a very different light?  What are the shifts in discourse on this incident in the 1985 Voice of Women special issue and in other commentaries?  Let me attempts to answer the second question first by comparing the different kinds of vocabulary used at the three significant moments in this narrative while retaining my focus in the 1980s.

 

 

Adeline Vitharne:  From Murder to Violence Against Women

 

At the moment of the incident in 1959 and its immediate aftermath during the murder trial, in Alles’ recounting of this incident in 1975-1976 and in the re-discussion of the murder case through Obeysekera’s film, there are certain ways in which ‘the event’ is recounted and narrated.  In comparing the differences in discourse of these moments, this paper will look at three areas which are notable.  

 

1.                  The definition of what happened to Adeline Vitharne

2.                  Adeline Vitharne’s sexual encounters with Jayalal Anandagoda

3.                  The figure of Millie [ix]

 

While there are differences between the way the event is described in the 1959-1960 period and that of the 1975 Alles’ publication and responses to it, for the purposes of this paper I will draw only on the marked differences between the earlier analyses of Adeline’s Vitharne’s death and the 1980s take on it.  I hope through this to illustrate tentatively the fact that what becomes fact or real, of what we ‘see’ is conditioned by the questions posed and the dominant concerns of our time.  Feminists do not encounter instances of violence against women simply because it is there objectively to be grasped, but because of certain conditions that constitute what the event may be.  Hence, what today to me, conditioned by over two decades of discourse on violence against women, appears ‘obvious’ forms of gendered violence do not appear so before the 1980s.

  

In the reports of the murder trial in the Daily News newspaper in 1959 and in Alles’ book The Vilpattu Murder Case Adeline Vitharne’s death is a murder case only.  The accusations against Anandagoda and his two accomplices are only conspiracy to commit murder and the murder of Adeline Vitharne. [x]   There is no real attention paid as to how she may have been treated by Anandagoda, as to whether there was abuse or intimidation except the statements that she had been ‘ravished’ and drugged and induced to have sexual intercourse with him.  Both reports see Adeline Vitharne as an innocent victim of a heinous murder crime.  It is her virtue and honour that are shamed because of her relationship with Anandagoda. [xi]   In the Daily News reports of the crime, the very nature of her ‘seduction’, of being drugged by him and then ‘ravished’ and the very nature of her death, again drugged, beaten by an iron rod, and then finally driven over while alive and in an advances stage of pregnancy do not in any way cause the public to suggest any form of gendered violence on Anandagoda’s part.  For example, in the reports that were written at the time of her death, there is really very little  mention of any form of sexual violation being made upon her person.  Any overt discussion is stopped because of the very indecent nature of such a discussion.  It is rather commented that “Adeline was “an unsophisticated and pretty Kandyan girl a good student a sports woman, a simple village lass who had endeavoured to master something in life.” [xii]   Much of the energy of the prosecution was to establish her good nature and seriousness of intent.  Despite the terms seduced and ravished being used during the trial, there are no suggestions that she may have been a victim to violence against women. 

 

 Let me quote an extract from Alles’ book:

 

She had an unblemished moral character and although she had fallen to the wiles and glib talk of a smooth-tongued young man from the South, she never stooped to becoming a common strumpet.  After her seduction her one object was to use all means within her power to get her seducer to marry her honourably.  In this venture she failed and paid for it dearly with her own life.  When Anandagoda in later years took her away on the pretext of getting married and kept her at bawdy house, she returned home after a short time, indignant that she should have been treated like a common prostitute [xiii] .   

 

Alles too obviously sees Adeline as a victim of a manipulative man, but not a victim of gendered violence. Commentaries on Alles’s publication do not differ greatly in their analysis of the Adeline Vitatherne case in this regard.  It is obviously this that allows both the trial and Alle’s book to gloss over the very nature violations against Adeline Vitharne.  In regards to her sexual relations with Anandagoda, there is mention of how he may have taken advantage of her and the possibility of violence against her:

According to her [Adeline’s account of her sexual encounter with Anandagoda as stated to the police at the Wattegama police station during her first pregnancy] Anandagoda met her in the car and invited her to go to Colombo regarding a job.  She refused as she had come without her parents’ knowledge.  He then took her to the Kadugannawa Rest House, where Anandagoda signed the book and invited her to come inside the room.  At first she refused, but after some coaxing on Anandagoda’s part, she entered the room.  Anandagoda then gave her some aerated water….  He then closed the door and she felt herself lapsing into unconsciousness.  When she recovered consciousness she realized she had been ravished….  If Adeline’s account of her seduction represents the truth, Anandagoda had committed a criminal offence behind the closed doors of a room at the Kadugannawa Rest House. (emphasis mine) [xiv]

 

Notice the possibility of violence against Adeline arising in the horizon to be reduced to the term ‘seduction’ rather than rape.  Alles’ awareness that it is a possible rape case is suggested in the term criminal offence that he uses to describe the incident.  He however does not name it but rather defines it as seduction and drops the subject entirely. 

 

Similarly, attitudes toward Adeline’s stint at Millie’s house are glossed over and ignored.  In the 1960 reports on Adeline’s stay with sex-worker Millie to whose house Adeline goes to under the belief that she is Anandagoda’s mother these are some of the statements.  “As Adeline went upto the car, she asked Anandagoda ‘have you come to take me away again with these two prostitutes?  Adeline then said that she had not told her mother that she was taken to a brothel.” [xv]   In another instance when reporting the testimony of Chandra de Silva, the young woman who posed at Anandagoda’ sister, the papers say “she [Chandra] had lived in Ragama and Pussellawa with Milly Fernando.  From Waturugama they were compelled to leave as the neighbours were hostile to Milly Fernando.  At this stage, Crown Counsel said that the witness had not been brought there as a paragon of virtue but there were certain standards of decency in cross-examination.” [xvi]

 

In Alles’ book the instances when Adeline stays with Millie and Millie herself are described with little reference to what may have happened to Adeline while she stayed there.  Firstly, Millie is described as “a woman with a murky past” who “went on a man hunting spree” and ran “a house of ill fame.” [xvii]   She was “such a miserable specimen of womanhood that she had no qualms about making immoral arrangements for her own relations.”  At Millie’s house Adeline had been “treated like a common prostitute.” [xviii]

 

How Adeline may have been treated like a common prostitute is of no interest to Alles or to the reading public at the time.  Alles’ book comes out in 1975 and a Sinhala version of it in 1976, both of which do not gather much comment from feminists despite the text’s rich insinuations.

   

While, one may argue that by 1960 the feminist movement in Sri Lanka had not organized itself sufficiently to demand the analysis of the case as an instance of violence against women, by the 1970s feminists had organized far more to combat patriarchy, but we see that there is still no such response.  While Alles may not have been savvy with feminist terminology, it becomes clear that to feminists violence against women had not arrived at the horizon of their inquiry.  Surely, the 1970s was a time of rich feminist scholarship and activity?  Feminists such as Kumari Jayawardena, Manouri Muttetuwagama, Selvy Thiruchandran, Mala Dasanayake, Hema Goonatileke were all part of the feminist movement in Sri Lanka.  They had organized branches of Voice of Women throughout the country and spoke out vociferously on women and oppression.  This gaze however had not yet seen violence against women as an analytical problem. 

 

I do not refer here only to the lack of response to Alles’ publication, but to the murder by the armed forces of Premawathie Manamperi during what is termed the 1971 JVP insurrection.  Premawathie, a beauty queen from Kataragama was detained at the army camp in the area overnight, made to march naked and then killed by the armed forces.  Feminists at the time did not see this as a moment of gendered oppression, but only as a murder case. [xix]   It is only much later that this issue becomes mobilized.  A careful look at H.A.I. Goonetileke’s A Bibliography of Ceylon (Sri Lanka [xx] ) which records published works until 1979 will confirm that the feminist gaze was elsewhere.  A survey of pre-1980 literature will render very little that focuses on women and violence.  While most feminists may suggest that violence against women is an age old phenomenon, it is not an issue that has been the focus of feminist intervention in the  pre-1980 period of feminist work. 

 

By the 1980s, this has changed.  From the ‘80s to date this issue has been one of the most important debates in Sri Lanka. 

 

The special issue of Voice of Women on violence against women in 1985 foregrounds the film and through it the death of Adeline Vitharne very differently.  I do not attempt here to suggest that the creative work of the film can parallel reality.  Why I have chosen to look at commentaries of this film to discuss the case of Adeline Vitharne is because of the very realist mode in which the film is put forth.  In addition, there is a general acceptance of the film as a re-depiction of the Adeline Vitharne incident not only by the general public, but also by the director himself.  Obeysekera in the numerous interviews he gave after this film repeats his commitment to realist film that would reflect the true experiences of people. [xxi]    When asked why Obeysekera chose to work on the film he admits that it is because the murder happened in his home town and he wished to re-capture that incident. [xxii]   Many of the commentaries cross from the film to the Adeline Vitharne case very easily.

 

In the article which translates as “Best Portrayal of a Woman in the Sinhala Cinema,” the writer has this to say: “With a feminist revolution in mind, this film portrays a contemporary woman’s ability to fight against oppression.  Rathmalie (the character of Adeline Vitharne in the film) contains within her all the virtues of an Eastern woman. Her obeisance to Jayanath (the character of Anandagoda) reflects the one weakness in womanhood.  She dies only when she destroys the life of her rapist.  Rathmalie’s character portrays the real struggles of today’s women.” [xxiii]

 

Let us look at some other commentaries.  In 1983 Jagath Senaratne writes in the Lanka Guardian in an entitled “Dadayama:  a fugue on the politics, resistance, passion and despair of woman” that the film “is based upon an actual event that took place in the 1950s.”  In it the heroine, an innocent young village woman who had fallen in love with an indifferent lover “begins to slough off her naiveté….  Her resistance is not merely that of violated motherhood….  It is violated motherhood that fights back, and hence deeply subversive of capitalist patriarchal ideology.”  Later Senaratne comments on the final death scene as “the culmination of the sex-politics within their relationship, the metamorphosis from lover- violator to violator- killer.” [xxiv]   In this article not only does the term violator come in but I believe there is an addition made here to the earlier debates on the Adeline Vitharne case.  In the past, this event was defined in terms of

                                   

Lover à killer =  murderer

By the ‘80s as suggested by Senaratne an addition has been made to the equation

                                   

Loveràviolateràkiller= violence against women + murder

 

Adeline Vitharne’s case is no longer an instance of only murder, it is an instance of gendered violence, of rape, or violence against women.  Sexual conduct and misconduct is opened up at this time for discussion.  In later years when Alles sued Obeysekera over copywright issues, Obeysekera himself admits the insertion of an incident that had not been documented in Alles’ book.  He states “Rathmalie was raped by an outsider in the film …. By this rape incident Jayanath shows her that he was not interested in marrying a prostitute.” [xxv]  This Millie incident refigured in the film and discussed in the public domain suggests the shifts that had occurred by 1982 that enable a portrayal and a discussion of violence against women.  A careful analysis of this shift in the 1980s makes it very clear to us that violence against women is not a stable, objective category that feminists were able to see and understand. 

 

The ‘event’ and what that may be shifts according to different historical moments depending on feminist locations at the time.  Even in today’s feminist politics then, we must not assume that the violated woman is a transparent object/ subject of inquiry, but realize the very contextual nature of what constitutes a subject.  What gave way to such a reading of an old incident by feminists in the 1980s is a question then that needs to be traced next