Jaffna Public Library

The Jaffna Public Library was first built in 1933 and grew, over four decades, into one of the largest libraries in Asia — by the late 1970s it held more than 97,000 books and manuscripts, including irreplaceable palm-leaf texts of Tamil literature. In May 1981 it was burned down. The loss is treated, in Jaffna, as one of the great cultural wounds of the civil conflict.

The current building was rebuilt and reopened in 2003 in the same Indo-Saracenic style as the original — white walls, scalloped arches, a square central tower. It is again a working public library, used by students from Jaffna University and from the schools of the surrounding wards. The collection has been slowly rebuilt with donated books from across Sri Lanka and the diaspora; the manuscripts cannot be replaced.

Visitors are welcome on the ground floor and around the gardens. There is no formal tour, no museum-style interpretation. The building speaks for itself, and the quiet inside the reading rooms — students at long tables, the slow pages of newspapers, the strip of light from the high windows — is the most direct way to understand what it stands for.