Adilah Ismail
IN ISLAM – the faith that indents my life – there is a pragmatic acceptance of the inevitability of death. Muslims believe our life on earth is transient, and that death only marks a temporal separation between soul and body until the hereafter. This is reiterated in scripture, hadith – accounts of the life of the Prophet Muhammad – and many other aspects of Islam. For instance, the prophet reminded Muslims to “be in the world as if you are a stranger or a traveller.”
Preoccupations with living and dying were heightened during the Covid-19 pandemic, when we were repeatedly confronted with our mortality. It was especially sharpened when the government of Sri Lanka, then led by Gotabaya Rajapaksa, ordered in early 2020 that all those who died due to the coronavirus were to be cremated, contravening the funerary rites centred on burial that are customary among Muslims and many Christian communities too.
Sri Lanka was the only country in the world to take this stance. It then doggedly clung to it despite mounting evidence that the virus was not transmitted through dead bodies, and that burials did not pose a public health risk. Despite lobbying by local civil society and international authorities – despite everything – the government enforced the policy for many agonising months.
In February 2021, amid increasing international pressure, this policy was finally reversed. But even then, the Sri Lankan government only allowed Covid-death burials in the eastern town of Oddamavadi, near Batticaloa. Amid the pandemic, grieving families all across the country were forced into the expense and hassle of transporting themselves and the remains of their loved ones to this often unfamiliar place. From March 2021 to March 2022, over 3600 people, predominantly Muslims, were buried in Oddamavadi. It was only in July 2024 – after Rajapaksa was forced out of office by waves of public protests, and ahead of a fresh presidential election and an upcoming session of the UN Human Rights Council – that the Sri Lankan state apologised for enforcing its “cremation only” policy.
The director Aman Ashraff’s Oddamavadi: The Untold Story takes on this painful chapter in Sri Lanka’s recent history. The documentary spends time providing context on the coronavirus and the early effects of the pandemic, on the global scenario and scientific precedents that guided the international response. We glimpse some of those who lobbied against the forced cremation policy, and parts of the networked activism, advocacy and citizen action that took place in the face of the state’s extraordinary cruelty. In one scene, a social worker recalls trying to heave wooden coffins laden with bloated corpses that had piled up in the morgue as anguished families appealed to the government to withdraw its policy on forced cremation. He describes how fluids oozing from the dead bodies trickled down his hands in the process.
The documentary takes considerable time to outline and debunk the frail fallacies put forward by the government’s expert committees to prop up the policy. In many ways, especially now that the early stages of the pandemic feel like a haze, the documentary serves as a critical reminder of the gaslighting and equivocation that Muslims and people of other faiths who wished to bury their loved ones had to face. Speculative theories on how burials could result in water contamination were key talking points in favour of forced cremations. In a BBC interview, a Sri Lankan official even went so far as to suggest that dead bodies could be wielded as bio-weapons if buried. At one point, there was even discussion about exporting Covid burials to the Maldives.
Through multiple testimonials and stories, the documentary explains to those unfamiliar with Muslim funerary practices just why burials were such a vital issue. Islamic funeral rites are muted, sparse and quick – burials are done as rapidly as possible, preferably within 24 hours of a death. In preparation, the body is washed and shrouded in a plain white cloth; and there is a communal prayer for the deceased.
But a relative absence of those personally affected by the forced cremation policy looms large in the documentary. A more robust inclusion of these voices, and a slight shift in narrative focus, would have made for a far more nuanced account. Of the 30 individuals featured, there are only four, from two families, whose loved ones were forcibly cremated. Yet it is these succinct interviews that mark the documentary’s most powerful moments, articulating the deep grief and loss caused by what amounts to a racist policy. Although the film is titled Oddamavadi: The Untold Story, we do not hear from anyone whose loved ones were buried in Oddamavadi. The names of those buried in Oddamavadi are relegated to a list that flashes across the screen along with the end credits.
Across the individuals who are shown on screen – including officials who were part of Gotabaya Rajapaksa’s regime – there is a considerable repetition of key points. The documentary names certain members of the expert committee that contributed towards the forced cremation policy, and explores how they flouted scientific and international precedents, but there is a hesitance to confronting Rajapaksa’s role in enforcing the policy. It would be easy to miss that the expert committee was ultimately one small cog of the larger apparatus responsible for the forced cremations.
Another blind spot is evident in how the documentary features only two women. This results in the archiving and mythologisation of a largely male-driven narrative, discounting women’s efforts in the struggle to end the forced cremations as well as the impacts that the policy had on them.
ASHRAFF – the son of the late M H M Ashraff, who founded the Sri Lanka Muslim Congress in the 1980s – also assisted in producing a coffee table book developed concurrently with the film and sharing its title. In an email, he explained that the book covers aspects of the forced cremations issue that the documentary was unable to explore due to time constraints. Conceptualised by Ashraff and written by Roshanara de Mel, the text is accompanied by images from the Colombo-based documentary photographer David Blacker. The book follows the same trajectory as the documentary but provides more detail on the first years of the pandemic, the origins and global spread of the coronavirus, the history of Muslims in Sri Lanka, the rise of anti-Muslim sentiment here after the end of the country’s civil war in 2009, individuals affected by the forced cremation policy and the efforts to lobby against it.
Like the documentary, the book falls into the trap of repetition in its effort to include multiple voices. We hear variations on the same theme, iterated in different ways: how the expert committee turned a blind eye to scientific evidence and global precedents, how Sri Lanka was the only country in the world to follow this path, and the Sri Lankan Muslim community’s incredulity at the state’s treatment of its citizens.
The book is successful in certain aspects. Perhaps most critically, it foregrounds insights and key details that were either left out of the news cycle during the Covid-19 crisis or have been forgotten since. This serves to compound the cruelty of some of the state’s actions and directives.
In testimonials from six families directly affected by the policy, we hear of how the bodies of their loved ones were taken out of hospitals, unceremoniously bundled off to crematoriums, and cremated without the families’ consent. The families also speak about how they were informed that their loved ones had died of Covid but were not provided proof when they asked to see positive Covid tests. One family reflects on their experience with burial at Oddamavadi and wonders how many grieving families were able to contend with the exorbitant costs and logistics of the journey to the country’s east just to arrange a dignified funeral.
The cremation of Sheik Fahad Fahim, a 21-day-old infant who was forcibly cremated in November 2020, during Sri Lanka’s second Covid wave, marked an inflection point in the public conversation on the issue. In the book, Sheik’s family members speak of how they were not allowed to proceed with a court petition challenging the cremation on the basis of fundamental rights. The petition highlighted the hurry with which the baby was cremated, the refusal of a second PCR test to confirm Covid infection, and how the parents were not allowed to view the body of their son. Fahim, Sheikh’s father, recalls how the hospital where his son died refused to release the child’s body to them, and how the deceased child was abruptly taken to a cemetery in suburban Colombo and cremated without his parents’ knowledge or consent.
When the family was alerted to the possible cremation of their dead son, they hurried to the cemetery. Fahim stayed outside as he could not bear to see his child being cremated. “I did not have the heart to witness that act,” he explains. “Had the child had been handed to us, we would have at least made supplications to God.”
After the news of the infant’s forced cremation broke, many people from different faiths gathered outside the crematorium, tying white cloths on the gate in expression of protest and solidarity. Fahim reflects, “…the fact that they took our baby and cremated him. That is what is most difficult to bear. We don’t even have a grave to visit.”
De Mel’s text is juxtaposed with Blacker’s photographs which gravitate towards dark colour palettes and play with light and shadow. The book’s cover shows rows of graves at Oddamavadi against a foreboding sky, conveying a sense of the scale of the loss and grief the book delves into. Apart from portraits of the interviewees, the book contains emotive photographs of people making the journey to the isolated burial lot in Oddamavadi and praying at the graves of their loved ones. We see rows of graves marked with numbers in place of names, tightly-focused black and white portraits of still-grieving family members, flowers blooming amid the gravestones, group pictures of officials and social workers assisting with burials as well as vignettes from the pandemic. In a chapter outlining the significance of burials for Muslims, there are photographs showing the key funeral rites step by step, including the washing of the body.
Another aspect where the book and documentary succeed is in showing the networks of mutual aid that worked in the face of the state’s apathy and cruelty. We hear of citizens coming together to cover the costs of the logistics of burial in Oddamavadi, and even building rough infrastructure and facilities for those travelling long distances for the burials. We hear of grave diggers working in extraordinarily hard conditions exacerbated by the pandemic; some hospitals did not have coolers and many corpses would arrive at Oddamavadi in a decomposed state. Towards the east of the burial ground was a garbage dump frequented by wild elephants in the evening, which cast a threat of elephant attacks on those working to facilitate burials in the night.
The book also touches upon the militarisation of the state that characterised Rajapaksa’s presidency, and provides a brief insight into how this shaped the country’s zeitgeist at the time. Military personnel were appointed to key posts, and the military played a key part in the country’s response to the pandemic, including some of the logistics around the transport of dead bodies and burials at Oddamavadi.
THERE ARE 2986 MUSLIMS, 293 Buddhists, 269 Hindus and 86 Catholics or Christians buried at Oddamavadi. In September 2024, Sri Lanka’s cabinet gave its approval to publish a Burial and Cremation Rights Draft Bill and submit it to the country’s parliament. The bill proposes to grant an individual the right to consideration of their religious, cultural or personal beliefs when it comes to rites around death. This is a step in the right direction in the wake of the forced cremations, but wider calls for accountability and justice over the policy remain unheeded, with little movement or closure in this regard.
The Oddamavadi project – both the book and the documentary – serves as a vital archive. It reminds us that unjust policies such as Sri Lanka’s forced cremations do not occur in a vacuum and need to be contextualised within the country’s history: its post-war trajectory, the aftermath of the heinous Easter Sunday bombings of 2019, the state’s habitually callous treatment of minority groups.
When it comes to the treatment of Muslims, Sri Lanka’s record in recent years, even before the pandemic, has been dire. Rising anti-Muslim sentiment after the civil war resulted in riots in Aluthgama, in south-western Sri Lanka, in 2014; and in Digana and other parts of the Central Province in 2018. The aftereffects of the Easter Sunday attacks by Islamist extremists saw a further heightening of anti-Muslim sentiment, leading to several high-profile cases of persecution.
In May 2019, a local newspaper published a front-page article alleging that a Muslim doctor, Shafi Shihabdeen, had secretly and forcibly sterilised 4000 Sinhala Buddhist women after caesarean deliveries. Shihabdeen, who worked in Kurunegala in the North Western Province, underwent months of harassment only to later be exonerated and acquitted on all charges.
In April 2020, the attorney-at-law Hejaaz Hizbullah was arrested under the Prevention of Terrorism Act (PTA) and detained for 22 months. He spent eight months in custody without access to a lawyer, ten months without being charged. Released on bail in February 2022, he is still undergoing trial.
Also in April 2020, Ramzy Razeek, a retired government official and social-media commentator, received death threats for an online post. He complained to the police, who – instead of taking action against those who made the death threats – arrested him under the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights Act and Computer Crimes Act. Razeek spent five months and eight days in remand with limited visitation rights, all while facing several medical problems.
In May 2020, the poet Ahnaf Jazeem, was detained for more than one and a half years under the PTA, with authorities alleging that his poetry promoted extremism. He has since been acquitted. Jazeem was detained in squalid conditions which harmed his health, coerced into making false confessions and allegedly made to sign documents in a language he did not understand, and denied legal representation until ten months into his detention. His privileged lawyer–client conversations were recorded by the authorities, and he was refused even family visitation for five months.
Multiple interviewees in the documentary and the book express incredulity at the state’s cruelty against its citizens. The forced cremation policy is framed as an aberration, an “evil”, with calls for something like this to never be repeated again, but this perspective is perhaps naive. The forced cremation policy was a product of Sri Lanka’s contemporary history, an example of what happens when prejudice coagulates within the state machinery and begins to seep outwards. And it is not only Muslims who suffer. For decades, Sri Lanka’s Tamils have faced discrimination, harassment, intimidation and worse, all of which continues today. Sri Lanka’s PTA has been weaponised to target minority communities and civil society groups for over 40 years – and it is perhaps only in recent years that the country’s Muslim community has borne the brunt of these laws.
A country’s successes and failings, its complexities and horrors, the everyday indignities and discrimination it metes out are embedded in all of those who live in it. It is vital to realise that the struggles of those who suffer are inter-connected, and to build shared solidarities. Until this is done, Sri Lanka will be paying lip service to reconciliation and is doomed to repeat its mistakes.
source : himalmag