On February 11, Jeevan Thiagarajah, Governor of the Northern Province of Sri Lanka, expressed that Sri Lanka is grateful to the Indian government and people for building the Jaffna Cultural Center.
Speaking at the event commemorating the dedication of the Jaffna Cultural Center to the people of Sri Lanka, Thiagarajah said: “We thank the government and people of India for this donation. It reaches out and connects with the art world”. Built with funding from the Government of India, the center will be a symbol of the growing bilateral and developmental relationship between New Delhi and Colombo.
The event was also attended by Union Minister of State for Information and Broadcasting (MoS) L Murugan, who is on a four-day visit to Sri Lanka from February 9-12.
In his speech, the Governor said that the Jaffna Cultural Center is associated with Sri Lanka’s rich regional history and celebrates art, faith and culture. “We have a lot of architectural work from many cultures in the region,” he said.
The Governor said: “The government is currently designing a visa system for people of Sri Lankan origin abroad to allow seamless and continuous access and presence. The region has been influenced by a variety of overseas cultures. Spiritual connections cannot be mistaken”.
The Governor said Sri Lankans went to India to collect taxes in the states of Tamil Nadu, Gujarat, Karnataka and Telangana for market access opportunities. Adjacent to the iconic Jaffna Public Library, the Jaffna Cultural Center will be the tallest building in the town of Jaffna. Conceived as a reconciliation project, the center primarily aims to expand the cultural infrastructure for the people of the Northern Province, helping them reconnect with their cultural roots and the rest of the country while revitalizing Jaffna’s ancient cultural heritage.
The center is equipped with state-of-the-art facilities, including a two-story museum, a state-of-the-art theater-style auditorium that seats more than 600 people, a single-story learning tower, and a public plaza that doubles as an amphitheater, among others. It also has a temporary exhibition hall (air-conditioned), an open exhibition hall, a gift shop, museum shop and workshops, a 100-seat conference facility, a cafeteria, a multimedia library, lecture rooms, workshops and gallery space.
On June 9, 2014, a memorandum of understanding for the construction of the Jaffna Center was signed. Once construction is complete, the facility is almost complete during the visit of Foreign Minister Dr S Jaishankar to Colombo in March 2022.
