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# Thevakantha Sarma, 55, Dies in Exile in Berlin
- URL: https://www.jaffnamonitor.com/thevakantha-sarma-55-dies-in-exile-in-berlin/
- Published: 2026-11-13T02:24:21.000Z
- Updated: 2026-11-13T02:24:21.000Z
- Author: Our Reporter
- Tags: Obituary, November 2026

Thevakantha Sarma died in Berlin, where he had lived for many years. He was a former member of the Tamil militant group EROS who later taught mathematics, worked as a nurse in Germany, and encouraged young Tamil writers. He was 55.

His family announced his death and gave the date as 23 October 2026\. They did not give a cause. His friend and comrade, the Paris-based poet Sugan, wrote in a tribute that Sarma had been living alone in his last years, and that nobody can say for certain on which day he died.

Known to friends as Sarma and to his family as Kantha, he was born on 10 October 1971 and grew up in Selvanayagapuram, Trincomalee. He was the second son of Shanmugaratnasarma Jegatheeswara Sarma and Sebastiampillai Jesiamma.

What happened to his elder brother shaped the family’s life. On 23 June 1990, during a military operation in Trincomalee, soldiers took Thevaraja Sarma, a motor mechanic, from the family home in Anpuvalipuram as their mother watched. They also took their father and three other men. According to the account the family later gave the United Nations, Thevaraja was handed to a Corporal Sarath at the Ananda Stores Compound army camp, where he was reportedly beaten and tortured. He was then moved to Kalaimagal School, hooded and interrogated, and taken that evening to the Plantain Point army camp. Their father was released. The family’s evidence also showed that the army suspected Thevaraja of being a member of the LTTE.

In May 1991, an army officer told their mother that her son was dead. On 9 October 1991, their father saw Thevaraja in a military van outside the pharmacy where the father worked, and Thevaraja signalled him not to come closer. The army later said Thevaraja had never been in its custody.

Their father spent the following decade asking the state for answers. He complained to the Prime Minister in 1993, testified before a Presidential Commission of Inquiry in 1995 and appealed to the President in 1998 and 1999, all without result. In October 1999, without a lawyer, he took the case to the UN Human Rights Committee in Geneva. The government told the committee that its own investigation had found that Corporal Sarath and two unidentified men had abducted Thevaraja, and that Sarath had been indicted for abduction in March 2002\. It argued that the state bore no responsibility because the army had not known what the corporal did.

In July 2003, the committee rejected that argument. It said it made no difference whether the corporal had acted beyond his authority or whether his superiors knew. It found that Sri Lanka had violated Thevaraja’s right to liberty, and that holding him without any contact with the outside world amounted to ill-treatment. It found that the parents’ rights had been violated as well, because of the anguish and uncertainty they had suffered over their son’s fate. It called on Sri Lanka to investigate, to release Thevaraja if he was alive, to compensate the family, and to bring those responsible to trial quickly.

The compensation never came. The Human Rights Commission of Sri Lanka recommended that the family be paid Rs. 3,888,000, and the state did not pay. In 2010, the parents asked the Court of Appeal to order the Treasury to pay. On 16 October 2015, the court dismissed their application, ruling that it had no power to force the state to carry out a recommendation of the Human Rights Commission.

Sarma joined the Eelam Revolutionary Organisation of Students as a young man in the 1980s and later left. EROS was founded in London on 3 January 1975\. It was one of the five main Tamil militant groups of the 1980s and the smallest of them.

For a time, he taught mathematics to Advanced Level students. Sugan wrote that Sarma’s intellect and command of mathematics could have put him at the front of any gathering. After moving to Germany, he worked for some years as a nurse at a Berlin hospital.

Friends remember him as a kind man who took a real interest in younger writers. He read their work and urged them to keep writing. Some time before his death he gave his entire book collection to a fellow reader. Around the same time, he bought 20 copies of *Untouchable*, Sugan’s English-language anthology of Eelam Dalit short stories, and gave them to friends. In the late 1980s and 1990s, Sugan was a central figure in the small dissident Tamil magazines published in exile, and he has edited several collections of dissent writing and Dalit criticism.

He had thick curly hair and a gentle voice. Two women loved him deeply at different times, and he kept both relationships within the bounds of friendship. He loved celebrations and would look forward to a gathering for weeks before it happened. He told funny stories about his father. A young doctor of Greek background became one of his closest friends and often took him along on holidays. Sugan wrote that ordinary friendship was what sustained him.

In his tribute, Sugan described Sarma as someone who never elbowed his way forward in a diaspora where competing for position is close to the only way to get ahead. He wrote that people who come out of armed struggle often find ordinary life hard to bear, and that exile and the sense of not belonging where one lives bring their own inner troubles. He compared Sarma to the Tamil novelist G. Nagarajan.

In his last years, Sarma lived alone in a single room. His friends tried repeatedly to help him through a long decline, and he turned their help away. He was admitted to hospital under care his doctor friend had arranged, and he left and went home against that medical supervision. He had once worked as a nurse at the same hospital, and Sugan noted that the staff there knew him well.

His brother and sister in London, who had supported him through those years, travelled to Berlin to recover his body. Sugan wrote that this was some comfort, because many Tamil refugees who die in Europe are never claimed and are buried by the state without a name.

Sugan ended his tribute with a line from Pudhumaipithan, the Tamil short-story writer who died poor, ill and neglected in 1948\. Pudhumaipithan wrote the poem about his own death. In it he asked that no money be raised in his name, no memorial be carved in stone, and no one mourn that the immortal from the sky had come and gone.

Thevakantha Sarma is survived by his mother; his brother Thevanathasarma and sister-in-law Ranjini; his sister Thevarani; his niece Tharini; and his nieces Suruthi, Juvetha and Thanu. All of them live in the United Kingdom.

**Funeral:** Friday, 20 November 2026, 11:30 to 14:00, Krematorium Ruhleben, Am Hain 1, 13597 Berlin.

**Family contacts:** Natha (brother) +44 7538 635000; Kanthy (sister) +44 7908 278820; Suruthi (niece) +44 7780 774777; Juvetha (niece) +44 7340 581090; Thanu (niece) +44 7470 725568.