Jaffna, art and tourism

Saturday, 10 August 2024 00:00 - - {{hitsCtrl.values.hits}}

You need to look quite hard to get more from a tourist visit to Jaffna than the normal FIT Trip (Fort, Icecream, Temple). If you take the trouble to seek you will find.

I have visited the T.P. Hunt Art Gallery in Chavakacheri before. For the first time we met the founder Evangeline Alagaratnam, known by her middle name Yogamany.

Named in memory of her great-grandfather, the Rev. Thomas Peter Hunt, the institution is gallery and studio and art school.

Yogamany splits her time between her adopted home in Boston USA and her native home in Jaffna. She was able to build a substantial gallery and continues to subsidise its operations. This provides a venue for artists to display and also a place for people old and young, talented and not, to escape the world for a couple of hours painting and drawing and musing.

The talent on display in the professional level gallery is marvellous. For visitors particularly from the diaspora, with their minds calibrated in £s and $s, the art is very reasonably priced. The gallery takes 5%, the rest goes to the artist.

I won’t talk anymore, I will show some examples from our visit. Three are no longer at the gallery, they are at my place. To visit, you should contact the gallery and agree a date and time.

Here is the GoogleMaps location: https://maps.app.goo.gl/k2reXaUCm9pRbmnDA

Note: This 2nd short piece by Jekhan Arulliah this week contributes to creating a canvass of possibilities for a truly authentic people tourism model. This is part of a series of South Asian short narratives on humanity centric tourism narratives we are working on. Our upcoming Harmony page edition will feature narratives from the Hunza – Karakuram mountain range in Pakistan.