Jaffna

Jaffna's rise began with the Tamil kingdom that ruled the northern peninsula from the 13th century under the Aryacakravarti dynasty. Its capital at Nallur, on the edge of today's city, controlled the pearl fishery and the trade routes through the Palk Strait, and the Kandaswamy temple there remained the kingdom's religious centre. The Portuguese conquered the kingdom in 1619, executing its last ruler, Sankili II, destroying temples across the peninsula and building a fort by the lagoon.

The Dutch took Jaffna in 1658 and rebuilt that fort as the great star-shaped fortress that still dominates the waterfront, ruling the peninsula as a separate commandment and bringing with them the Reformed church and Dutch law, traces of which remain in local land custom. The British, who arrived in 1796, joined the north to the rest of Ceylon and left education largely to American and British missionaries; the schools they founded made Jaffna a source of teachers, doctors and civil servants for the whole island and for Malaya and Singapore beyond it.

Independence brought conflict over language and university admission, and the city became the focus of Tamil political demands. The burning of the public library in 1981, with nearly 100,000 books and irreplaceable palm-leaf manuscripts, marked a point of no return. From 1983 Jaffna was fought over repeatedly: an Indian peacekeeping force occupied it in the late 1980s, the LTTE ordered a mass exodus of the population in 1995 as the army advanced, and the city spent years under military control, shelling and curfew. Since the war ended in 2009 the library, the fort, the railway and the airport have been restored, and returning residents and the diaspora have rebuilt much of the city.

Jaffna is the cultural capital of Sri Lankan Tamils, and it knows it. Its dialect of Tamil is regarded as preserving older forms than the speech of Tamil Nadu, its schools and colleges are objects of fierce loyalty, and learning has long been the route out and up: the professions, the university and the examination results are matters of family pride. A large diaspora in Canada, Britain, France and Australia keeps close ties, sending money, funding temple work and returning in numbers for the Nallur festival.

Religion is Saiva Hinduism above all, with hundreds of kovils, morning and evening worship, and the Nallur festival as the high point of the year, when devotees carry kavadi, pull chariots and perform acts of penance over 25 days. A substantial Catholic community, strongest in the fishing quarters and on the islands, keeps its own feast days and processions, and a small Buddhist presence centres on Nagadeepa. Carnatic music, bharatanatyam and Tamil literature are taught widely, and palmyra weaving is a traditional craft.

Custom is conservative. Dress is modest, shoes are left at doors, and visitors are fed generously. Caste remains a quietly present factor in social life, as does the memory of the war: almost every family lost members or property, and commemoration is watched closely by the authorities. Cricket is followed keenly, and the evening belongs to temple visits, tuition classes and the seafront air.

About 90,000 people live in the city itself, with several hundred thousand more across the peninsula in a dense pattern of villages that runs almost continuously between the towns. It is the capital of the Northern Province, so government offices, the courts, the teaching hospital and the University of Jaffna are among the largest employers, alongside schools and a growing number of small businesses.

The land does the rest of the work. The peninsula's thin limestone soil, watered from thousands of shallow wells, produces red onions, chillies, tobacco, bananas, mangoes and grapes, and palmyra palms cover large areas, supplying timber, fruit, jaggery and toddy. Fishing from Gurunagar, the islands and the northern coast lands crab, prawns and fish for the city and for export. Money sent home by relatives abroad is a major part of household income, and rebuilding — houses, temples, schools — has employed a generation of builders.

Days begin very early, before the heat, with temple bells, the market and the school run; the middle of the day is slow and shuttered, and business resumes in the late afternoon. The city is visibly recovering but unevenly: new hotels, cafés and shops have opened, while unemployment, the fate of the disappeared, land still held by the military and the emigration of young people remain live issues discussed in every election.

Jaffna cooking is the most distinctive on the island: hotter, darker and more heavily spiced than southern food, using its own curry powder of roasted chillies and spices. Crab curry, nandu kari, made with lagoon crab, is the dish the city is known for, and it is matched by odiyal kool, a thick seafood soup loaded with crab, prawns, cuttlefish and vegetables and thickened with flour ground from dried palmyra root. Mutton curry, fish curries and dried-fish sambols fill out a rice and curry plate.

Rice is not the only staple. Pittu, steamed cylinders of rice flour and grated coconut, string hoppers, thosai and idli appear at breakfast and dinner with sambar and coconut chutney, and vadai — lentil fritters, sometimes sold with a fried chilli — are the standard snack. Muslim and Indian influences show in biryani and short eats, and kottu roti is chopped on hot plates in the evening as it is everywhere else in the country.

The palmyra palm shapes northern food as the coconut shapes the south: its sap becomes toddy and dark palm jaggery, its fruit is made into sweets and fritters, its young shoots are dried, and its root becomes odiyal flour. Jaffna mangoes, especially the karutha colomban, and locally grown grapes are prized across Sri Lanka, and sweets such as muscat and palm-sugar confections are sold in the market. Strong milky tea is drunk all day, and king coconut, thambili, is sold from roadside stalls.