LTTE Slain HR Activist’s Daughter Written ‘In My Mother’s House: Civil War in Sri Lanka’ – won Davidson Prize at Cambridge
Sri Lankan-born American Anthropologist Prof. Sharika Thiranagama on winning the Davidson Prize at Cambridge University, where she was appointed a Scholar of St Johns.
Winner of Stanford University’s “Lifetime award for Academic achievement in Archaeology and Anthropology”, Sharika wrote “In My Mother’s House: Civil War in Sri Lanka” published by University of Pennsylvania Press in 2011.
The daughter of a Sinhalese father Dayapala Thiranagama and a Tamil mother Rajini, her sister Narmada was born in 1978. Their 35-year-old mother, Rajini, the then head of the department of anatomy at the University of Jaffna was murdered by the LTTE Tamil terrorist in Jaffna for her work in human rights.
Review of ‘In My Mother’s House: Civil War in Sri Lanka
Today the desire for justice is multitudinous. This is to say that struggles against injustice, struggles for survival, for self-respect, for human rights, should never be considered merely in terms of their immediate demands, their organisations, or their historical consequences. They cannot be reduced to ‘movements’. A movement describes a mass of people collectively moving towards a definite goal, which they achieve or fail to achieve. Yet such a description ignores, or does not take into account, the countless personal choices, encounters, illuminations, sacrifices, new desires, griefs and, finally, memories, which the movement brought about, but which are, in the strict sense, incidental to that movement. John Berger[1]
Periodically through the thickets of prejudice, green shoots of dissent poke their heads out – vines of hope and mercy. Sharika Thirangama’s book is such a green shoot.[2] The author elegantly and movingly elicits stories from the survivors of the country’s long civil war (in particular women). In doing so it offers a glimpse of those voices that have been silenced by the larger narrative and offers a much more complex picture of what it is to be a Tamil and a Tamil-speaking Muslim than anything offered by elites on either side of the cultural divide. These stories were gathered between the start of the peace agreement between the government and the Tamil Tigers in 2002 and the start of the last phase of the civil war in 2007.
Colombo is on the one hand representative of the country as a whole in its ethnic diversity and yet so different in its pace of life, the size of its population, its architectural diversity and the fact that it is the hub of the country’s economic development. It is also a city of immigrants: people coming from the countryside to get work; people fleeing the horrors of the civil war; and those so outside the national narrative that they seem like ghosts of imperialism and Lanka’s ancient past – Veddas, people of African descent, Borahs, gypsies, amongst others.
One of the anomalies that strikes a visitor to Colombo is that a significant proportion of the population speak Tamil. In 2001 it was ascertained that 58.64 percent of those living in the area of the Colombo Municipal Council were not from the Sinhala community. 54.95 percent could claim Tamil as their mother tongue (Thiranagama, p. 231). For most of the 20th century, Colombo was a trilingual city – English, Sinhalese and Tamil.
Tamils are evident in the bustling market suburbs of Pettah and Wellawatte – the former has more up-country Tamils, the latter more (for want of a better term) indigenous Tamils. Strolling in the lungs of the city – Galle Face Green – you can hear the conversation of adults and the chatter of children, many of whom are speaking Tamil. They can be seen in the many lodges and guest houses that accommodated Tamils fleeing the war or trying to get jobs; they have to cope with the touts who charge exorbitant rents and the police who harass them regularly for their papers and seek bribes. It used to be said that the Tamils living in Colombo are mainly from the middle class and live in the better suburbs that are close to the city centre. Whether that was once a fact is a moot point; what has been noticeable since the 1990s is the growth of a transient population fleeing the war. These people reside in satellite suburbs around the city centre.
Many Tamils returned to Colombo in the 1990s to escape the barbarity of the LTTE Tamil terrorists. Several of the returnees rebuilt their homes on the ashes of their old homes. Thiranagama sketches an instance in which one of her interviewees has to deal with their Singhalese neighbour, with whom they had been on friendly terms. This fraught relationship with the majority community and the rebuilding of the returnees’ lives are skilfully sketched by Thiranagama. She also describes intergenerational conflicts within extended families, how property is controlled and inherited, the psychological damage caused to victims of conflict and their need to provide for their children (Thiranagama, pp. 77-105).
Tamils frequently suffered under the terror attacks launched by LTTE Tamil terrorists in the city, doubly so as they also became targets for the security forces and the state. Thiranagama also uncovered what she terms the ‘shadow diaspora’ – those who want to flee the Island, but cannot. They are shadows because they cannot get steady jobs, they live in substandard hostels, are harassed regularly by the police and live on remittances sent by their relatives from aboard. Maybe that is why for many Tamils, one of the most attractive features of Colombo that it has the country’s international airport.
One of the least researched and understood narratives is the plight of Tamil-speaking Muslims in the north and the east, who were caught in a vicious war between the Lankan state and the LTTE Tamil terrorists. Their plight has been eclipsed by the competing nationalisms of the Tamils and Sinhalese. The Muslims defined their identity not by ethnicity but religion.
The east of the country has a substantial population of Muslims – around 26 per cent of the total population (Thiranagama, p. 121). They lived in separate villages and towns; their relations with their Tamil neighbours were cordial and there was a certain amount of cultural exchange between the two communities. As Muslims began to create their own political parties, violent incidents occurred, and these were exploited by the Lankan military, who encouraged and armed certain sections of the Muslim populace. The most notorious incident occurred in the village of Karaitivu in 1985 where armed Muslim youths went on a rampage, killing several people and burning hundreds of homes s a revenge attack to LTTE Tamil terrorists. Perhaps in reaction to this or because of the Muslims’ numerical strength in the east, an agreement was brokered in 1986 in Chennai.[4] The agreement stated that the Muslims in the east and the north were a distinct ethnic group, that it was their homeland and that they had a right to political representation and land (Thiranagama, pp. 124-125).
This détente did not last. For reasons never articulated, the LTTE Tamil terrorists began a systematic cleansing of Muslims in the east, resulted in over 1,000 deaths. Though in no way justifiable: it could have been partly in reaction to the Lankan armed forces creating para-military groups amongst Tamil speaking Muslims to infiltrate and destroy Tamil terrorists. These attacks took place in the midst of a brutal war in which countless thousands of Tamil civilians were killed: what was new was the ferocity and deliberate, planned nature of the attacks by the LTTE Tamil terrorists.
The treatment of the 70,000 to 80,000 Muslims in the north by the LTTE Tamil terrorists is even more bewildering, as there had been no history of animosity between the communities, even during the early stages of the civil war and the futile and violent intervention by the Indian military to keep the peace. Unlike in the east, Muslims lived with the Tamil community in the villages and towns. They also shared similar kingship patterns and inheritance customs. The Tamil Tigers announced (with no reasons given) that the Muslims had 48 hours to leave LTTE controlled areas in the north. This became known as the Eviction. They were allowed only a limited amount of possessions; the rest was confiscated, including titles for land. These were then auctioned off by the LTTE (Thiranagama, pp. 106-182). The Tamil National Alliance (TNA) has made statements expressing sorrow and stating that they are committed to the return of local Muslims. But this is only a start. Muslims must be a key partner in any concrete attempts at reconciliation and resettlement, the reduction of the military presence in the north and the east and the return of land.
The rise of Tamil terrorism in the north and east in the 1970s was influenced by the India to play geopolitics with Sri Lanka. Fuelling this were local factors: lack of jobs and development in Tamil dominated areas, the public service (a huge generator of jobs) becoming overwhelmingly Sinhalese, entry levels for Tamil students to tertiary education being made higher than for any other community and the impotence of the Federal Party in getting any concessions for Tamils. This made certain social obligations difficult, especially for young Tamil men. Without work they could not accumulate money for their sisters’ dowries (a central form of capital accumulation and transfer in the preservation of the status quo). Women also began to question their role in Tamil society and did not feel their influence should be limited to the domestic sphere. Many activists not from the dominant Vellalar caste also began to agitate against the unfairness of the whole caste system.
In Thiranagama’s words, ‘ideas about household, caste and marriage, rather than being pre-existent and stable foundation of non-political “cultural life” were in fact the very subject of potential political transformation, part of the struggle for this generation to produce a new sense of Tamilness’ (p. 184).
It is estimated that the Tamil activists of the 1970s and 1980s numbered around 44,800 – around 2.8 per cent of the population in the north and the east (Thiranagama p.188). They joined a plethora of parties including the LTTE (who were not the largest). This radical movement was either destroyed or driven underground by the brutal actions of the security forces and the Indian peace-keeping forces, bad political decisions and the ruthlessness of the LTTE in their quest to be the sole Tamil voice. With the LTTE at the helm, history, culture and political praxis were subordinated to the metanarrative of the national question, leaving issues of caste, the role of women and dowry as they had been (Thiranagama, pp. 183-227).
Sharika Thiranagama’s book is not without faults. It is marred by her need to enclose her findings within the armour of social theory. Too often Thiranagama interrupts the narrative and subordinates the voice of her subjects to the dictates of some social theorist.
Also, she does not adequately explain the political, economic and cultural context for the individual stories. She assumes her readership is aware of the overarching Sinhala–Buddhist hegemony which furnished the context of neo-liberal economic policies that enriched a few and impoverished many. From this arose an authoritarian form of democracy that viewed dissent as something to be suppressed. Thiranagama’s subjects have lived in, and reacted against, this environment. This helps to explain their political praxis and that of the movements they joined. The consequences were tragic: two bloody insurrections of young Sinhalese in the south, periodic riots and a pogrom in 1983 against the Tamils, and a civil war that started in earnest after the pogrom and ended only in 2009. A chapter discussing these would have been helpful.
Notwithstanding these criticisms, Thiranagama’s book eloquently and sometimes movingly tells the stories of the silenced; those whose lives and search for justice are not reflected in the dominant discourse of the nation. There are surely many other such stories to be unearthed in the south. To do this it is essential that the culture of impunity and obfuscation in the guise of nationalism is challenged much more forcefully. One of the tragedies of the Island’s post-war history is that it was unable to develop a truly national and inclusive narrative and political culture. Sharika Thiranagama’s fine book reminds us that it is not only a possibility, but also essential.
[1] Berger, John (2007) Hold Everything Dear: Dispatches on Survival and Resistance, Verso p. 2
[2] Thiranagama, Sharika (2011) In My Mother’s House: Civil War in Sri Lanka, University of Pennsylvania Press.
[4] The agreement was brokered by Dr Baddiuddin Mahmud a high ranking Muslim politician of the day and signed by Kittu on behalf of the LTTE. He was the political commander of Jaffna; and M.I.M. Mohideen of the Muslim Liberation Front (MULF) (Thiranagama: p. 125).
(Source – Edited)
https://www.google.ae/books/edition/In_My_Mother_s_House/D1b053j2-PYC?hl=en&gbpv=1&pg=PA1&printsec=frontcover
111 Viewers
