Mark P. Whitaker Quotes

It was a roadblock, manned by an officer and several other soldiers.
Sivaram and the trishaw driver were ordered out of the vehicle, and I was
told to stay where I was. The soldiers held their rifl es aimed and ready as the
offi cer interrogated the trishaw driver, a Muslim man, who fumbled out his
documents. He was soon allowed to get back in his trishaw. When it was
Sivaram's turn, he just stood there, completely quiet. After several questions,
the offi cer started screaming at him. Then he ordered his soldiers to take him,
and gestured for the trishaw driver to go on. Without thinking, I jumped out
of the trishaw. I was a visiting professor at Colombo University and he was one
of my students, I lied, approaching them. I threatened to call the American
Embassy if they arrested my 'student.' The offi cer yelled, in English, for me to
come no closer, to get back in the trishaw. Then he barked an order, and one
of the soldiers lifted his rifl e and aimed it directly at my head. I kept babbling
on about the embassy, but even I did not hear myself. All I could see was that
hole at the end of the rifl e and, above it, the sweaty face and very frightened
eyes of the soldier. He looked very young, maybe 18. I thought, I'm going to
die right now. And then we grew very quiet.
The offi cer barked another order, the soldier lowered his gun, and the
other soldiers pushed Sivaram bac

He began
to think, here, of local intellectuals such as the pulavar and of his friends
in the Readers' Circle, as keys to this side of the struggle. That is, he began
to argue that if one viewed such intellectuals as 'folk repositories' of local
knowledge, then it was obvious that they had a dual potential. Dual because,
on the one hand, such intellectuals could be (and mostly were) co-opted
by the hegemonic 'web' as teachers, graduate students, journalists, and so
forth, in which case they merely, 'organically,' reproduced the overmastering
'web'; yet, on the other hand, they could become (to their peril and inherent
risk) the central sources of inspiration and knowledge for the production
of a counter-hegemonic revolution. He began to imagine this duality as a
singular, existential choice open to such intellectuals, to all intellectuals, and
to himself.