The Dissertation Committee for Hyojin Han certifies that this is the approved version of

the following dissertation:

Sacred Bodies, Profaned Bodies: Psychology, Politics, and Sex

in the Literatures of Sri Lankan Ethnic Conflict

Committee:

___________________________________

Hannah Chapelle Wojciehowski, Supervisor

___________________________________

Katherine Arens

___________________________________

James B. Brow

____________________________________

Snehal Shingavi

___________________________________

Helena Woodard

Sacred Bodies, Profaned Bodies: Psychology, Politics, and Sex in the Literatures of

Sri Lankan Ethnic Conflict

by

Hyojin Han, B.A.; M.A.

Dissertation

Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of

The University of Texas at Austin

in Partial Fulfillment

of the Requirements

for the Degree of

Doctor of Philosophy

The University of Texas at Austin

December 2010

iii

Acknowledgements

I would like to express my gratitude to these individuals for their support and

assistance in completing this dissertation. My deepest gratitude is to my advisor, Dr.

Hannah Wojciehowski, whose unfailing encouragement, patience, and guidance made

this project possible. I am also indebted to the Graduate Advisor, Dr. Wayne Lesser, and

the English Department for their support throughout my graduate career. My committee

members, Dr. James Brow, Dr. Helena Woodard, Dr. Snehal Shingavi, and Dr. Katherine

Arens, have been extremely generous with their time and offered many constructive

criticisms of my arguments. Dr. Sankaran Radhakrishnan was an invaluable resource on

Tamil language and culture.

Many friends have helped me navigate through the difficult years of writing this

dissertation. I would like to acknowledge Elizabeth Pommier and Catalina Popescu in

particular for their patient listening and timely assistance.

Finally, the dissertation would not have been possible without the loving support

and understanding from my family. I am grateful to my parents, Junsoo and Okhee Han,

for their unconditional love. Also, my husband Steve Boyles helped me push through the

last critical phase of completing this dissertation.

iv

Sacred Bodies, Profaned Bodies: Psychology, Politics, and Sex in the Literatures of

Sri Lankan Ethnic Conflict

Hyojin Han, Ph.D.

The University of Texas at Austin, 2010

Supervisor: Hannah Chapelle Wojciehowski

This project examines the literal and literary bodies associated with the Sinhalese-

Tamil conflict in Sri Lanka as they are represented in literary, journalistic, and

anthropological accounts. These texts are populated by historical personages and

fictional characters spun from imagination or based on actual people who serve as

representatives of those who live in the day to day reality of violence. The goal of this

project is to offer a re-visioning of the power relations between the aggressor and victim,

the victor and vanquished, in violent conflicts.

Island of Blood: Frontier Reports from Sri Lanka, Afghanistan and Other South

Asian Flashpoints, a memoir by Anita Pratap, and The Terrorist, a feature film by

Santosh Sivan, illustrate how Velupillai Prabhakaran, the leader of the Liberation Tigers

of Tamil Eelam, fashioned his own absent or invisible body and the bodies of the suicide

v

bombers as the focal point of Tamil nationalism. Prabhakaran developed the cult of

personality around himself by fostering an aura of mystery and employing religious

symbolism. In particular, feeding emerges as the quintessentially nurturing function

misappropriated by this malignant maternal figure Prabhakaran.

The other category of bodies is comprised of the victims: the dead, the raped, and

the other defiled bodies that are anomalous in military conflicts. These are the profaned

and violated bodies. In Michael Ondaatje‘s Anil’s Ghost, the unidentified bodies of

human rights violations provide forensic evidence for legal proceedings and in turn attain

sanctified status as the survivors use their remains to build legal cases against the atrocity.

Their mute presence serves as a powerful amplifier for the survivors. A. Sivanandan‘s

When Memory Dies has as its focal point an ethnically incited rape and murder. During

intergroup conflicts rape is often used to weaken the enemy group‘s integrity. However, I

argue that When Memory Dies challenges this norm and suggests that those who are

considered threats to group integrity, whether they be minorities, outcasts, unwed mothers

or raped women, could paradoxically be the agents of social integration, especially in the

time of unrest.

vi

Table of Contents

Map of Sri Lanka……………………………………………………………….............viii

Introduction……………………………………………………………………………….1

Chapter One: ―Mother, Father and God All Rolled into One‖: the Charisma and Danger

of Velupillai Prabhakaran………………………………………………………..21

Chapter Two: Recovering the Dead: Victims of Political Murders in Michael Ondaatje‘s

Anil’s Ghost………………………………………………………………………79

Chapter Three: Polluting Bodies and Redeeming Bodies: Raped Women and Bastard

Children in A. Sivanandan‘s When Memory Dies………………………………128

Conclusion……………………………………………………….……………………..171

Works Cited…………………………………………………………………………….181

vii

List of Figures

Fig. 1.1 Malli cradling her stomach after she finds out that she is pregnant…………… 70

Fig. 1.2 Malli getting dressed for the assassination…………………………………….. 71

Fig. 2.1 The Head of Medusa by Caravaggio…………………………………………... 90

Fig. 2.2 Perseus holding up Medusa‘s head by Benvenuto Cellini……………………. 92

Fig. 2.3. Perseus (Wit has Triumphed over Grief)[Der Witz hat uber das Leid gesiegt]..93

viii

Map of Sri Lanka

Online source: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/78/Sri_Lanka-

CIA_WFB_Map.png

1

Introduction

This project examines the literal and literary bodies associated with the Sinhalese-

Tamil conflict in Sri Lanka as they are represented in literary, journalistic, and cinematic

accounts. The Sri Lankan civil war is but one of the several violent conflicts of the last

century incited by ethno-religious differences and complicated by social inequalities. In

this project, I trace the unique contours of the Sri Lankan situation and also draw some

affinities with other large-group conflicts. In analyzing the role of the leader, the fate of

the victims, and the treatment of the marginalized that appear in these texts, I offer an

understanding of the trajectory taken by this particular conflict and explore a revisioning

of the power relations between the aggressor and victim, the victor and vanquished. I

argue that the two types of bodies examined broadly in this project, the perpetrators of

violence and their victims, are indistinguishable at times. Yesterday‘s victims are today‘s

aggressors. The works I discuss focus less on apportioning blame than on examining

how hatred and violence have vitiated all those involved. Literature and other creative

works provide a space to envision and gradually actualize an end to the vicious cycle of

retribution by altering our perspective and inviting us to acknowledge our own

responsibility.

Since the latter half of the twentieth century, the domestic politics of the island off

the southeastern coast of the Indian subcontinent currently known as Sri Lanka has been

mired in a civil unrest, largely between the Sinhala Buddhist and the Hindu Tamil

sections of the population. Sinhala Buddhists, the numerical majority, are viewed as

2

claiming the island for their own while relegating minority groups to the place of second-

class citizens based on the argument of historical precedence: the island has traditionally

belonged to the Sinhalese ever since the legendary north Indian prince Vijaya landed on

the island with his crew of seven hundred around the fifth century B.C. In response to

the Sinhalese dominance, the Tamils, who constitute the second largest ethnic group,

have advanced a similar claim for the northeastern third of the island, demanding the

creation of a separate state for the Tamils in this region, which had been ruled by Tamil

kings before the colonial occupation and where they make up the majority of the

population.

S. J. Tambiah points out in Sri Lanka: Ethnic Fratricide and the Dismantling of

Democracy that the violent ethnic clashes on the island are a modern phenomenon that

started after the independence from Great Britain in 1948. Since then there have been

seven massive destructions carried out by the Sinhalese civilians against the Tamils,

culminating in the July 1983 anti-Tamil pogrom which started on the night of July 24 and

ended on August 5.1 Also known as the ―Black July‖, this brief two-week span generated

the death toll that amounted to 350 by the Sinhalese government count and 2,000 by the

Tamil estimates,2 and left between 80,000 and 100,000 people homeless (19-22). The

consequence of July 1983 was the civil war that plagued the island for twenty-six years

involving three military powers: the Tamil guerillas, the Sinhalese army, and the Indian

1 The immediate ―provocation‖ of this attack was the killing of thirteen Sinhalese

soldiers by Tamil guerillas.

2 Jonathan Spencer writes ―between 300 and 3,000 people dead, nearly all of them

members of the minority Tamil population‖ (―Collective Violence‖ 603).

3

Peace Keeping Forces. The UN estimated that between 80,000 and 100,000 were killed

during the civil war that ended in May 2009 (―Up to 100,000 Killed‖). Although the

number of deaths in the Sri Lankan conflict cannot rival those of other mass ethnic

violence of the twentieth century that were given the term genocide, the intent and

consequences are the same. According to Tambiah, Tamils have been systematically

discriminated against in education and job recruitment prior to the attacks (17). Tamils

would argue that the Sinhalese government and civilian population alike make their lives

difficult through discrimination and killings with the intention of driving them out of the

country in order to secure the island as a pure Sinhala state.

As often is the case, the territorial claim is waged in the name of higher values

such as religion. Religion and ethnic identities are sources of enrichment, as they give

meaning and purpose and a sense of belonging to people. At times, however, these group

identities are used to incite attacks against other groups, denying their right to be shaped

by those identities. A disturbing trend of the late twentieth century that has been carried

over to the twenty-first century is the waging of wars are increasingly based on religious

and ethnic differences. The case of Sri Lanka is but one example, yet a paradigmatic one.

This project delineates similarities and differences between the lived-faiths of Buddhism

and Hinduism in Sri Lanka, not the held-beliefs of their sacred scriptures and traditions,

but their incorporation into the everyday experiences, personal and public, and their

manifestations during times of crisis. Furthermore, in exploring the group psychology

behind this particular large-scale violence, I hope to shed light on other wars by

extracting commonalities. Although the Sri Lankan conflict contains components that are

4

unique to its cultural, historical, and geographic milieus, it also shares similarities with

other conflicts.

The study of literature is a valuable vehicle for such an undertaking. Historians,

anthropologists, and psychologists have analyzed the causes and symptoms of ethnic

conflicts, and their contributions have been invaluable, but fictional writers add

imaginative insights into the human component, allowing readers to connect to and

vicariously experience the lives of the characters, thereby inviting them to see the

situation from multiple perspectives, and to alter and enlarge their worldview. Writers of

Sri Lankan origin, mostly expatriates in English-speaking countries, have been engaged

in this imaginary enterprise, but to my knowledge there has been no extensive analysis of

their works. This project examines the literary outcroppings of the Sri Lankan conflict by

authors who reflect the multiethnic composition of the island‘s population: Sinhalese,

Tamil, and Burghers of mixed European ancestry with the mostly Dutch influence with

the addition of the English and Portuguese presence. In particular, I have selected two

fictional narratives, Michael Ondaatje‘s Anil’s Ghost and A. Sivanandan‘s When Memory

Dies. In addition, works by two South Indians, Island of Blood: Frontier Reports from

Sri Lanka, Afghanistan and Other South Asian Flashpoints, a memoir by Anita Pratap,

and The Terrorist, a feature film by Santosh Sivan, illustrate how the Sri Lankan conflict

was perceived by its nearest neighbor. From each text I draw out various engagements

the human body has with the members of its own group, with the enemy group, and with

the conflict itself. Existing literary criticism of these works has not considered references

to the individual and collective bodies, and this project adds a valuable perspective to the

5

discussion of an ethno-religious conflict.

In considering Sri Lankan authors, I have limited my selection to works by

expatriate writers who are active in English-speaking countries. Although the authors

rooted in Sri Lanka gain a sense of authority by living amidst the ethnic tension, it could

be difficult for them to envision reconciliation. In contrast, those outside the purview of

the conflict possess clarity of vision that comes from distance, and lack of firsthand

experience allows them to be relatively dispassionate and impartial. These expatriates

might propose presumptuous western solutions, but they are also able to situate the Sri

Lankan conflict in the global context.

Being works by individual authors with personal and political biases, each text

discussed in this project carries within it limitations as well as unique contributions to the

understanding of the Sri Lankan situation. Island of Blood and The Terrorist offer a rare

glimpse into the inner workings of Velupillai Prabhakaran, the leader of the Liberation

Tigers of Tamil Eelam, and the ritualistic preparations involved in suicide bombing.

Public statements by Prabhakaran were limited to the Heroes‘ Day speech delivered

annually on November 27,3 and records of private communication and interaction with

the elusive LTTE leader are even scarcer. Most likely, Anita Pratap met with Prabhakran

more than any other person outside the LTTE. Having said that, meant foremostly for an

Indian audience, these works interpret the Sri Lankan situation from India‘s own regional

interest.

3 Prabhakaran‘s Heroes‘ Day speeches are meant to garner support for the

organization and to deliver policy statement for the coming year. Some of the

translations can be accessed at South Asia Terrorism Portal (www.satp.org).

6

Arguably Anil’s Ghost has done more to bring the Sri Lankan civil war to the

world‘s attention than any other literary work, thanks to Michael Ondaatje‘s international

fame. The novel presents a model for individual healing and reconciliation, but does not

delve into the historical and political context of the conflict. Moreover, the novel‘s heavy

emphasis on Sinhala Buddhist tradition and deletion of Tamil grievances are deeply

problematic, the concerns that I will address in Chapter Two.

When Memory Dies gives a synopsis of civil and military unrest in Sri Lanka from

the early twentieth century to the 1980s, interwoven with the narrative of a family saga.

The novel records a version of marginalized history superseded by the official one,

namely, the labor movement before the Independence that rose above communal

differences and the subsequent efforts by the Sinhalese government to disenfranchise the

minorities. The novel offers the activity of writing as a venue for generating discussions

that facilitate understanding amongst different groups, but stops short of envisioning its

reconciliatory power. As in Anil‘s Ghost, mitigation of conflict is observed on personal

level.

The most palpable impact of any armed conflict is the material destruction of the

land and its human population. Dead, mutilated, and dismembered bodies litter the

landscape of the Sri Lankan civil war as the corollary of violence. This project will

investigate the representations and roles of various bodies and their relation to the group

psychology. I divide the bodies into two categories: one category of bodies, those of the

Buddha and Velupillai Prabhakaran, are responsible for, or are used by the actants to

7

generate the conflict. Both have taken hold of the collective imagination of the

respective groups as indestructible and sacred. Buddha‘s bodily relics and related objects

have been venerated for centuries and contributed to the unique contour of the Sinhala

ethno-religious consciousness. Instead of turning to an historical religious figure for an

object of collective devotion, the leader of the LTTE Velupillai Prabhakaran has

fashioned his own absent or invisible body and the bodies of the suicide bombers as the

focal point of Tamil nationalism. Prabhakaran has developed the cult of personality

around himself by fostering an aura of mystery and employing religious symbolism. I

argue that in many ways he is to Tamil nationalism what Buddha is to the Sinhala-

Buddhist nationalism.

The other category of bodies is comprised of the victims: the dead, the raped, and

the other defiled bodies that are anomalous in military conflicts. These are the profaned

and violated bodies. On the one hand, the unidentified bodies of human rights violations

provide forensic evidence for legal proceedings and in turn attain sanctified status as the

survivors use their remains to build legal cases against the atrocity. Their mute presence

serves as a powerful amplifier for the survivors. On the other hand, victims of rape who

are mostly women, the perennial victims in armed conflicts, have to carry the stigma of

contamination, along with the physical and psychological wounds of the violation. This

project also investigates rape during warfare as a weapon of terror against the enemy

population.

Literary, journalistic, and anthropological accounts of various scholars and

creative writers offer examples of these different categories of bodies. Written texts are

8

populated by historical personages and fictional characters spun from imagination or

based on actual people who serve as representatives of those who live in the day to day

reality of violence.

Understanding Group Identity and Conflict: Some Methodological Approaches

This project draws from the group theories in psychoanalysis for a general

application to mass violence, anthropological field works in Sri Lanka for the socio-

cultural specificity, and gender theories for a reconceptualization of dominance and

subjection.

Theorists have speculated on the causes of group aggression and violence. In this

project, I draw from the works of psychoanalyst Vamik Volkan for a conceptualization of

group violence and works by child psychoanalysts Melanie Klein, Christopher Bollas,

and Donald Winnicott for the impact early-childhood development has on the leader-

follower dynamic. Anthropologist Mary Douglas and group psychoanalyst Didier

Anzieu‘s analyses of the body as a symbol of society and psychical imagining of the

group provide insight into the mechanism of the group in physiological terms. To this

general perspective on group violence, contributions from anthropological field works on

Sri Lanka situates the present study in a particular social and cultural context of one of

the ethno-religious conflicts that began in the second half of the twentieth century.

R.A.L.H. Gunawardana, S.J. Tambiah, Jonathan Spencer, Nur Yalman, James Brow,

Steven Kemper, Bruce Kepferer, and Narayan Swamy have observed and analyzed the

contemporary expressions of historical memory, religion, and the practice of sorcery in

9

the Sinhala-Buddhist and Hindu Tamil politics, mob violence, and guerilla warfare. In

addition, I turn to feminist scholars such as Susan Brownmiller, Catharine A.

MacKinnon, Veena Das, Beverly Allen, and Karen Engle‘s works on sexual violence

inflicted on women during warfare that show how the group, working as an organic unity,

behaves and manifests itself.

In this project I will apply the works of these theorists to show how the identity of

a group is closely tied to its feelings about bodies, individuals, and their relationality by

examining the fates of various characters, fictional and factual, found in the literature of

the Sri Lankan conflict. A brief synopsis of the evolution of two groups involved in this

conflict, the Sinhalese Buddhists and Hindu Tamils, will indicate areas in which various

categories of individual bodies intersect with the shaping of the collective group identity.

Sinhala Buddhist Nationalism

Scholars contend that in many former European colonies, multi-ethnic

populations became conscious of their religious and ethnic differences during the time of

the colonial era. Ceylon, the name by which the island was formerly known, became a

part of the Portuguese maritime empire in the sixteenth century, then was successively

handed to the Dutch and the British. During the Portuguese and Dutch colonial periods

in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the indigenous governing power maintained a

nominal sovereignty in the central region of Kandy, but the entire island became the

British colony in 1818. During the foreign occupations by people of vastly different

cultures and histories, religion again served as the focal point of identity. The nineteenth

10

century saw the revival of Buddhism, Hinduism, and Islam in Sri Lanka as a response to

the encroachment of Christian missionary activities. Religion also became a popular

means of protest since the British tended to condone religious polemics while being wary

of nationalist sentiments (Jayawardena 358). The Buddhist clergy in particular held

public religious debates with Christian proselytizers with the goal of undermining the

foundational teachings of Christianity. The most famous of these debates was the two-

day event held in 1873 at Panadura in front of a combined audience of 15,000 where the

Buddhist clergy carried the day with a resounding success (Frost 944). Jayawardena

sums up the impact of the Pandura debate in these words:

The elation and jubilation which was felt by Buddhists after this event was not

limited to purely religious emotions. The feeling was that Christianity—the

foreign religion, the religion of the colonial masters and the aggressive

missionaries—had suffered a reverse, whereas Buddhism—the national faith, the

religion of the masses—had triumphed. (45)

The Pandura debate became a defining moment in the Sinhalese Buddhist consciousness.

Henceforth, religious argument was employed to awaken nationalist feelings, causing the

intelligentsia to ―identify themselves with the religion and culture of the majority of the

population‖ to rally the masses, in this case the religion and culture of the Sinhalese.

Although the appeal to religious sentiments of the people might have proven useful under

colonial conditions, it is possible that the divisions created along religious and cultural

lines during the struggle for independence became extremely polarized in the later time

of trying economic conditions (Jayawardena xii-xiii). Once unleashed, the communal

11

argument, which foregrounded ethnic and religious identities at the center of national

policy, was difficult to contain. In 1956, the Official Language Act, popularly known as

the ―Sinhala Only‖ bill, was passed, and the Sinhala became the sole official language of

the nation in spite of a strong Tamil demand to institute both languages to the official

status. Moreover, Sri Lanka ceased to be a secular state in 1972: the constitution declared

that ―the Republic of Sri Lanka shall give to Buddhism the foremost place and

accordingly it shall be the duty of the state to protect and foster Buddhism while assuring

to all religions the rights secured by Section 18 (i)(d) [religious freedom]‖ (Ross and

Savada 175, 184). The preferential treatment given to the Sinhala language and

Buddhism had the effect of alienating other ethnic and religious groups, and the Tamils in

particular demanded a larger share of official recognition as the second largest ethnic

group.

Along with the religious revival, late nineteenth-century Ceylon witnessed a

transformation in the understanding of racial categories. The grouping of the people

under ―Sinhala‖ and ―Tamil‖ labels existed prior to this period; however, the notions of

racialism based on hierarchy imported from Europe gave a new impetus to the division

among peoples. In his much-cited article, ―The People of the Lion: the Sinhala Identity

and Ideology in History and Historiography,‖ R.A.L.H. Gunawardana puts forth a claim

that in pre-modern times, Sinhala identity was shaped and transmitted by a small group of

literati, mostly members of the sangha or the Buddhist clergy, but this emergent

ethnocentric sentiment was not shared by the majority of the population (78). It is not

until the late eighteenth century that the Sinhala chauvinism gained a mass appeal. The

12

philological investigation then in vogue in Europe discovered an affinity between

Sanskrit and several European languages, and gave birth to the concept of a family of

Indo-European languages.4 After some initial disagreement among scholars on whether

Sinhala had a kinship with Sanskrit and other Aryan languages or belonged to the south

Indian languages, the German indologist Max Müller made a decisive pronouncement in

1861 that classed ―the idioms spoken in Iceland and Ceylon as cognate dialects of the

Aryan family of languages‖ (60; qtd. in Gunawardana, ―The People‖ 72). The German

Romantic Friedrich Schlegel extended this linguistic concept to the realm of

anthropology and brought forth the myth of an Aryan race who supposedly shared a

common language (Poliakov 190-91). By the end of the late nineteenth century, the

Aryan theory made frequent appearances in the writings of Sinhala nationalists

(Gunawardana, ―The People‖ 74). The trend continues to this day: standard history

books on Sri Lanka treat the Aryan heritage of the Sinhalese as an established fact (see

Nicholas and Paranavitana, A Concise History of Ceylon Chapter 2 and K.M. de Silva‘s A

History of Ceylon pp. 7-9).

Dividing people along racial lines tends to result in the notions of superior and

inferior races. Ironically, the superior or pure race is not so much the victor, but an

endangered species whose continued existence is threatened by the degenerating

influence of an inferior but more virile race. Thus Hitler argued for the preservation of

the Aryan race in apocalyptic terms: ―Should he [the Aryan] be forced to disappear, a

4 Poliakov writes that ―The discovery of the family of Indo-European languages is

normally dated from [William Jones‘] publication [of Asiatic Researches] in 1788‖ (190,

356).

13

profound darkness will descend on the earth, within a few thousand years human culture

will vanish and the world will become a desert‖ (qtd. in Poliakov 100). The Sinhalese

nationalists imported this fear of persecution and extinction of the Aryan race from

Europe. But instead of the Jews, which were not many in Ceylon, Muslims and Tamils

were assigned the role of antagonists. Anagarika Dharmapala, an influential Buddhist

revivalist of the early nineteenth century, wrote in his newspaper Sinhala Bauddhaya in

1912 that ―From the day the foreign white man stepped in this country, the industries,

habits, and customs of the Sinhalese began to disappear, and now the Sinhalese are

obliged to fall at the feet of the Coast Moors and Tamils.‖ In 1915, Dharmapala wrote in

a letter in a similar vein to the secretary of state for the colonies, borrowing from the anti-

semitic language of the Europeans: ―The Muhammadans, an alien people who in the early

part of the nineteenth century were common traders, by Shylockian methods became

prosperous like the Jews….The alien South Indian Muhammadan comes to Ceylon, sees

the neglected, illiterate villagers, without any experience in trade…, and the result is that

the Muhammadan thrives and the sons of the soil go to the wall‖ (Guruge, Return to

Rightousness 540; qtd. in Tambiah, Buddhism 8).

This short synopsis of the modern Sinhala-Buddhist nationalism indicates that an

offshoot of nationalism in former colonies is the fear of extinction heightened by

centuries of foreign occupation. In recent times this fear is projected onto minority

groups within the multiethnic polity. To counter indignities suffered at the hands of

western colonial powers and to justify their right to exist, Sinhala nationalists turned to

past glories and ―native‖ achievements such as Buddhism and its rich cultural legacy,

14

thereby creating a sense of ―national‖ self-esteem.

However, such a positive self-image has its downside. In the minds of

nationalists, it followed that a civilization that has contributed so much to the world

should be prevented from disappearing and perhaps encouraged to dominate the less

worthy races or ethnic groups. In an article titled, ―Self-Compassion: An Alternative

Conceptualization of a Healthy Attitude Toward Oneself,‖ psychologist Kristin Neff

reviews recent criticisms of self-esteem as the gauge of individual psychological health.

The main problems of self-esteem are that it is evaluative and comparative in nature: in

order to merit self-esteem one‘s performance must reach a certain standard and must be

superior to that of others. In an attempt to rate oneself more highly one is likely to think

the worse of others. Prejudice against out-groups is often associated with high rather

than low self-esteem, and in extreme cases, when the ego is threatened, one may resort to

force to preserve the ego.5

Although Neff‘s discussions of self-esteem and self-compassion are on the level

of the individual, I argue that they are also applicable to large-group psychology. When

the Sinhala Buddhists tried to boost their ethnic pride, it was accompanied by the

denigration of other ethnic groups. The vicious cycle of victims turning into perpetrators

is seen in the Tamils‘ treatment of Muslims. In recent years, Muslims who form a

minority group in the Tamil-dominated region of the north and east of the island have

5 Neff formulates the concept of self-compassion, based on the Mahayana

Buddhist philosophy, as an alternative to self-esteem and theorizes that a self-

compassionate person, who accepts one‘s limitation, inadequacies and failures, is likely

to extend that understanding and kindness to others, for such a person sees one‘s

suffering as a part of the larger human experience (85-87).

15

been persecuted and forced to relocate by the Tamil militants in an attempt to secure

ethnically ―pure‖ Tamil territory (Bloom 68). The discrimination they suffered at the

hands of the Sinhalese has not made the Tamil separatists more sensitive to the rights of

other minorities, because their rationale for the separate state is that the territory belongs

to the Tamils traditionally and, by extension, rightfully. Ironically, this is the same

argument advanced by the Sinhalese in denying the Tamils their homeland.

As the Sinhala Buddhist nationalism intensified after the Independence, Hindu

Tamil consciousness resurged especially in the north and eastern areas of the island. The

following section will discuss the rise of the militant wing of Tamil nationalism

spearheaded by the guerrilla group Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam and their

secessionist movement.

Sri Lankan Tamil Nationalism

After Sri Lanka gained independence from Great Britain in 1948, the majority

Sinhalese assumed power through the voting system of ―one man, one vote.‖ As the

Sinhalese gained more political ascendancy, ―there has been a series of increasing

virulent pogroms against the Tamil people by the Sinhala state‖ (Sivanandan, ―Sri Lanka:

Racism‖ 1) which met a strong resistance from the Tamil guerillas. The communal

conflict turned into a full-blown civil war that plagued the nation from the early 1980s to

2009.

Among the five principal Tamil militant organizations, the Liberation Tigers of

Tamil Eelam (LTTE) was the largest and the most well known. The LTTE, better known

16

as the Tamil Tigers, was founded in 1976 by Velupillai Prabhakaran, with its locus of

activity in the Jaffna Peninsula, the Tamil-dominated northern region. Until the

organization‘s defeat by the Sri Lankan army in May 2009, the raison d‘etre of the LTTE

was to achieve a separate state, called the Eelam or homeland, for the Tamils in the

northern and eastern third of the island. In its early stages, the group mostly carried out

assassinations of moderate Tamil politicians who sought the parliamentary process to

achieve a Tamil agenda rather than demanding an independent nation by any means

necessary. The turning point in the Tamil militancy occurred in July 1983, when a group

of Tamil Tigers, led by Prabhakaran, ambushed a Sinhalese military convoy and killed

thirteen soldiers (Swamy, Tigers 90). This attack precipitated a massive and systematic

reprisal against ordinary Tamil citizens by Sinhalese mobs, an event that came to be

seared in the Sri Lankan psyche as the notorious anti-Tamil pogrom of 1983, and was

later known as the single bloodiest incident in the ongoing ethnic conflict. During a

week-long period of violence, angry Sinhalese mobs armed with residents‘ lists killed

hundreds of Tamils and created some 80,000 refugees. This event resulted in irreparable

damage to tenuous ethnic relations, prompting further development of the Tamil militant

resistance. Having lost their basic trust of the Sinhalese government, the Tamils turned to

the militants as their saviors (Swamy, Tigers 93-96). Henceforth, violence was no longer

reserved for the Sri Lankan army and Tamil politicians who were deemed obstacles to

achieving a Tamil homeland; ordinary Sinhalese citizens became victims of the campaign

of retribution.

In 1987 the Indian Peacekeeping Force was deployed to ensure peace between the

17

Sri Lankan government and the Tamil separatist militants. The presence of the foreign

troops did not please either side: the Tamil militants were unhappy because India did not

back their demand for an independent nation, but rather forced them to settle for an

autonomous state. The Sinhalese were particularly dissatisfied because they felt that their

national sovereignty was threatened; it felt too much like an occupation. Soon the

violence resumed: in the north and east where the Tamil population was concentrated, the

LTTE took on the Indian army on top of the Sri Lankan army they had been battling for

years.

The Tigers‘ loyalty to their cause for a homeland and their willingness to sacrifice

their lives are legendary. They carried with them cyanide capsules presented to them at

the end of initial training which they were to swallow in the event of capture so that they

would not divulge any organizational secrets. By 1989, over 300 Tigers, approximately

10% of the force, committed suicide by swallowing such capsules (O‘Balance vii). The

organization was also famous for its highly successful suicide bombings that counted

among their victims such prominent figures as the former Indian prime minister Rajiv

Gandhi and the former Sri Lankan president Ranasinghe Premadasa. The suicide

bombings were carried out by the elite squad within the organization known as the Black

Tigers. The LTTE was responsible for the largest number of suicide bombings in the

world, about 150, more than those carried out by all other groups that resort to this tactic

of violence put together (Chandran).6

Jonathan Spencer‘s article ―Collective Violence and Everyday Practice in Sri

6 This figure is from October 2001.

18

Lanka‖ puts the phenomenon of suicide bombing in a broader socio-cultural context. He

notes that during the period between the Independence and 1990 the overall suicide rate

in Sri Lanka steadily rose. The increase in suicide rate was most notable among the rural

youths between the ages of 15 and 29, due to the growing number of well-educated but

underemployed youths. The suicide rate was highest in the Tamil-dominated areas, and

the same demographic group was most likely to join the Tamil militant cause (611-12).

Another interesting observation was that suicides were generally motivated by a desire to

inflict pain on others, especially close family members, as an act of revenge (613).

Again, one can detect a similar mentality behind the tactic of suicide bombing, which

uses one‘s death to destroy others.

Analyzing the idea of sovereignty as the potential to destroy, Achille Mbembe

writes in his essay ―Necropolitics‖ that: ―The perception of the existence of the Other as

an attempt on my life, as a mortal threat or absolute danger whose biophysical

elimination would strengthen my potential to life and security—this…is one of the many

imaginaries of sovereignty characteristic of both early and late modernity itself‖(18).

Thus, it is the fear for one‘s safety that goads people to destroy and eliminate the

perceived enemy. This fear is reinforced if one had such experiences in the past, and

most large groups are likely to have had suffered at the hands of some enemy in the past.

Vamik Volkan, a psychoanalyst who specializes in large group behavior and international

crises, writes in his book Bloodlines: From Ethnic Pride to Ethnic Terrorism about the

chosen trauma from history that a group carries over generations and that becomes a

19

continued source of bitterness and insecurity. The face of the enemy might change, but

with each new contention the memory of the past suffering and humiliation resurfaces to

cloud the current situation.

Sinhalese historical records of the past and political leaders of today have isolated

military clashes between the Sinhalese and Tamil as pivotal moments in the island‘s

history. The Mahavamsa, the Sinhalese-Buddhist chronicle, highlights major clashes of

the two peoples in what one can identify as the chosen traumas of the Sinhalese group

consciousness. The most famous is the second-century BCE war between Dutthagamani,

the Sinhalese overlord of one of the southern kingdoms, and Elara, the Tamil king of the

northern plains. The ambitious Dutthagamani sought to unify the island under his

leadership, and Elara posed the biggest challenge. The Mahavamsa elevates

Dutthagamani‘s victory to the triumph of Buddhism over Southern Indian invaders on

whose land Buddhism had suffered persecution and virtual extinction. As Steven

Kemper explains, it was a ―drama that concretized Sinhala Buddhist identity in an

evocative way‖ (K.M. de Silva 14-15; Kemper 63).

Although the story of Dutthagamani‘s victory has served as a source of ethnic

pride for the Sinhalese, the threat of a conquering enemy has never been entirely

resolved. The Sinhalese make up roughly two thirds of the population of the island, but

they suffer from a minority complex in relation to the Tamils who, though less than one

third of the population of Sri Lanka, are spread throughout South Asia and outnumber the

Sinhalese globally by six to one (K.M. de Silva 513-14). Thus the Sinhalese view the

Tamils as an alien mass within the Sinhalese body that might serve as a direct link to the

20

larger regional threat.

For the Sri Lankan Tamils, the event that has been etched in their collective

memory and imagination as the chosen trauma is the anti-Tamil pogrom of July 1983 by

the Sinhalese mob. Although there had been earlier violence against the Tamils, none

had matched the organizational efficiency and scale of destruction of the ‘83 pogrom.

The LTTE effectively used the ‘83 pogrom as the justification of terrorist activity against

the Sinhalese civilians and a claim for a separate state for the Tamils.

These historical synopses of Sinhala and Tamil nationalisms overlook the

psychological factors behind their rise and continued appeal. One such area is the role of

the tangible and intangible bodies of religious and political leaders in shaping and

holding group consciousness. Sinhala Buddhist nationalism is indebted to the enduring

presence of Buddha in the form of Buddha‘s relics and material expressions. Although

the historical Buddha passed away more than two millennia ago, his material remains and

images continue to elicit devotion in his followers and fear in his opponents. Sri Lankan

Tamils, who lack a religious body that guarantees group cohesion, turned to a military

leader to serve as their nationalism‘s figurehead. Velupillai Prabhakaran, the leader of the

LTTE, inspired fierce devotion among his followers to the point where some thought the

movement was based on a cult of personality (Hopgood 65). Chapter One examines the

role this malignant yet charismatic leader had on the unfolding of the Sri Lankan conflict.

21

Chapter One

“Mother, Father and God All Rolled into One”: the Charisma and Danger of

Velupillai Prabhakaran

Introduction

On May 21, 1991, former Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi was assassinated in

a rural town in Tamil Nadu while on a campaign tour to win back the premiership. The

female assassin had posed as a supporter and came to greet the candidate. After placing a

garland of sandalwood around his neck, she bent down as if to touch his feet in a token of

respect, but in actuality to press the switch that would detonate the explosives strapped

around her waist. The blast killed eighteen people including the assassin and her target,

injured forty-four, and stunned the world (Kaarthikeyan 10-17).

Within days, word got around that the killer was a member of the Black Tigers,

the suicide squad of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (Weinraub). The LTTE was

known for their use of human bombs to carry out highly effective attacks on prominent

political figures and institutions. They also had a motive: the group resented Rajiv

Gandhi's decision to send the Indian Peacekeeping Forces to Sri Lanka to suppress the

Tamil separatist movement as part of The India-Sri Lanka Peace Accord of 1987. Had he

been reelected, Rajiv Gandhi planned to stand firmly by the Accord (Kaarthikeyan 132).

Although the LTTE denied involvement in the assassination, the event catapulted the

LTTE to the status of one of the world's most dedicated and innovative terrorist

22

organizations (Reuter 156).7

As the initial shock of having identified the assassin as a woman wore off, the

media speculated on the logic of the choice. The police commissioner in charge of Rajiv

Gandhi's security on the day of assassination commented that the mastermind behind the

assassination took advantage of the former prime minister's popularity with women—

Gandhi was known to encourage female supporters to approach him at political rallies. A

woman could cross the security cordon relatively easily since the police were less likely

to conduct a body search on a woman out of modesty and out of the belief that women

are lower security threat than men (―Assasin ‗Exploited‘‖). Most significantly, the

contours of the female body makes it more suitable for concealing explosives, which the

assassin exploited by wearing a loose-fitting clothes that suggested she might be pregnant

(Ganguly). Ironically, the bump in her stomach that could be seen as the sign of life

growing inside her turned out to be a bomb that robbed many of their lives. At first, it

was suggested that a remote control device was used to detonate the explosive, but

subsequent forensic investigation concluded that ―woman was in full control, switching

on the electrical device herself to activate the explosive‖ (Weinraub). It was unnerving to

think that someone, a woman at that, would purposefully press the switch that would

blow her up into bits.

The circumstances and the rhetoric surrounding the Rajiv Gandhi assassination

highlight the complicated relationship India has with Sri Lanka and especially with the

Sri Lankan Tamils. As the regional superpower and a country with a large Tamil

7 In June 2006, the LTTE spokesperson Anton Balasingham apologized for the

assassination of Rajiv Gandhi in an interview on Indian television (―Rebels Apologize‖).

23

population of its own, it could be assumed that India is quite interested in the affairs of its

neighboring island. On their part, many Sri Lankans, both Sinhalese and Tamils, trace

their origin to the Indian subcontinent. As discussed in the introduction, some Sinhalese

scholars, among them the influential epigraphist and philologist Senerat Paranavitana,

espoused the theory that the Sinhalese are the descendents of Aryan migrants from

northern India based on the linguistic categorization of the Sinhala as an Indo-European

language. Similarly, Sri Lankan Tamils, whose language belonged to the Dravidian

family, were believed to have come from India‘s southern tip.8 Another factor that may

have contributed to India‘s involvement in Sri Lanka is that during the time of the British

Empire, there was a large influx of Indian Tamils into Sri Lanka brought by the colonial

masters to work as manual laborers on tea plantations. The majority of these Indian

estate Tamils are among the most disenfranchised in the Sri Lankan society. These

historical factors contributed to India's continuing awareness and involvement in the

unfolding of the Sri Lankan ethnic conflict. Tamil Nadu in particular has served as the

training ground and safe haven for various Sri Lankan Tamil militant groups including

the LTTE since the 1980s, and has absorbed a large number of Tamil refugees from

Jaffna.

India has also produced more works on Sri Lanka, both of a political and an

artistic nature, than any other country. This chapter analyzes two such texts that engage

with the Sri Lankan Tamil separatist movement. Anita Pratap is an Indian journalist and

frontline correspondent who covered the Sri Lankan conflict for various Indian

8 The Aryan theory has been challenged by many respected scholars such as

R.A.L.H. Gunawardana and Gananath Obeyesekere (Tambiah, Sri Lanka 183-84).

24

periodicals. Her twenty-year experience reporting on the major events of the Sri Lankan

civil war and exclusive interviews with the charismatic LTTE leader Velupillai

Prabhakaran were recounted in the book Island of Blood: Frontier Reports from Sri

Lanka, Afghanistan and Other South Asian Flashpoints. In particular, I will unravel the

paradoxical fantasy of the feeding and devouring maternal bodies that underlies various

―mother‖-child relationships represented in her book, between herself and her son, India

and Sri Lanka, and Prabhakaran and his followers. The female body as a site of

nurturance and as a potentially destructive weapon is also the focus of The Terrorist, an

internationally acclaimed film by Santosh Sivan. Inspired by the Rajiv Gandhi

assassination, the film imaginatively recreates an attempted murder of a prominent Indian

politician by a young female suicide bomber who finds herself pregnant. This twist in

plot foregrounds the maternal activity of feeding and contrasts this nurturing role with the

malignant influence of the organization's leader, fashioned after Prabhakaran, who feeds

upon rather than nourishes his followers.

Before discussing Pratap and Sivan‘s texts, however, I will examine

Prabhakaran‘s biography and the organizational structure of the LTTE to better

contextualize these texts. Then I will approach the themes of nurturance and destruction

depicted in Pratap and Sivan‘s narrativization of the dynamic between Prabhakran and his

followers from psychoanalytic perspectives ranging from object relations theory, as

developed by Melanie Klein and Christopher Bollas, to the theory of large-group

behavior during times of crisis, as formulated by Vamik Volkan. Among Melanie Klein's

25

contributions, I focus on her foregrounding of the oral nature of this first encounter with

the non-self, that the first link to the outside world is the mother's breast which supplies

the basic necessity, food (Mitchell 19), and also her construction of ―part objects‖, or the

infant's tendency to split objects into good and bad parts (Segal 44-45), which in adult

life contributes to the perception of the world as all-good or all-bad, and to the creation of

idealized objects. Christopher Bollas traces the origins of idealization to the infant's

initial experience of the mother as the transformational object, the concept which he

develops from Donald Winnicott's idea of the environmental-mother. The infant's earliest

experience of the mother is one who transforms its external and internal environment not

as a separate being but in a ―symbiotic relating‖ with the infant (Bollas 14). In such a

state of fusion, all the infant‘s needs are met. Later in life, other objects and experiences

that activate the memory of this transformational state exert a powerful influence on the

adult individual. Vamik Volkan's analysis of large-group behavior during the time of

shared catastrophe and conflict suggests that the collective rallying around a charismatic

leader at those times is one way of recapturing the enviro-somatic transformation

experienced in the earliest period of one's life. The danger is when the leader who has

such a powerful hold turns out to be harmful.

Both Pratap and Sivan‘s works foreground the natural bond between mother and

child as the antithesis of the dynamic found between a strong but malignant leader and

his followers. In the context of the Sri Lankan Tamil separatist movement, Prabhakaran

emerged as a charismatic leader who commanded devotion among his followers.

Through the combination of indoctrination and instilling a common purpose, Prabhakaran

26

fashioned one of the world's most successful paramilitary organizations. Before

discussing Pratap and Sivan‘s texts, I will give a brief background information on the life

of Prabhakaran before he founded the organization that later became the LTTE. An

account of his early childhood facilitates an understanding of his adult psychological

makeup, and suggests how his personality might have played a role in shaping the Tamil

separatist movement.

A Short Biography of Velupillai Prabhakaran

Prabhakaran was born on November 26, 1954, to a middle-class Tamil family in

Velvettiturai, a coastal town on the northern tip of the island well-known for smuggling

activities. As the youngest of four children, Prabhakaran was adored by his parents and

older siblings who used to call him durai, or master. As a child he was a mediocre

student, which might have been a source of concern in a culture that valued education.

The worried father assigned him tutors in an attempt to raise his academic performance.

Aside from the pressure at school, his father‘s transfer due to his work as a district land

officer in the government added discontinuity and sense of dislocation (Swamy, Tigers

49).

In 1958, when Prabhakaran would have been four years old, the first of a series of

violent anti-Tamil riots took place. This was the first island-wide riot. (Tambiah, Sri

Lanka 13).9 During an interview with Pratap, Prabhakaran mentioned that the events of

9 The others happened in 1977, 1981, and 1983, the last and the most destructive

one marks the beginning of the First Eelam war.

27

this riot profoundly affected him and later served as a motivation for an armed resistance

(72-73). Growing up, Prabhakaran had ample opportunity to be exposed to the news of

the growing ethnic tension on the island: his house served as the village meeting place for

long discussions on the Tamil-Sinhalese situation, and the boy Prabhakaran listened

attentively to these adult conversations. As he grew older, he attended town political

meetings where he heard personal accounts of ―Sinhalese atrocities.‖ One story in

particular seems to have stuck in his mind: during the 1958 riot, a Hindu priest was

caught by a Sinhalese mob and was burnt alive, tied to the cot in which he was sleeping.10

This image of unprovoked cruelty is thought to have contributed to Prabhakaran‘s

militancy (Swamy, Tigers 50-51).

As a schoolboy, Prabhakaran was more interested in building bombs, practicing

marksmanship, and subjecting his body to physical discomfort and feats of endurance to

prepare for future action (Swamy, Tigers 52). He gradually got involved in the youth

wing of Tamil political parties, but he was more interested in a military solution than the

peaceful parliamentary approach favored by the then Tamil leader S.J.V. Celvanayakam.

By the early 1970s, however, discrimination against the Tamils only grew worse, and the

support for an armed struggle was gaining in strength.11

In 1972, at the age of seventeen,

Prabhakaran started a militant group called the Tamil New Tigers with a few Tamil

youths and renamed the organization the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam in 1976

10

According to the LTTE propaganda literature, Prabhakaran saw his uncle

burned alive in that riot (Ramachandran). 11

Even Celvanayakam came to abandon the federalist path and demanded a

separate state, albeit in non-violent manner (Schalk 62).

28

(Schalk 61-62). The organization‘s first task was to destabilize the police network in

Jaffna and to eliminate moderate Tamil politicians who were not committed to the

establishment of a separate Tamil state. One such assassination of the Jaffna mayor

Alfred Duriappa made Prabhakaran and the TNT famous (Swamy, Tigers 53-56). After

that, the LTTE did not swerve from the goal of achieving independence for the Sri

Lankan Tamils.

The LTTE gradually evolved into a sophisticated governing structure with

political and military wings. The military wing was comprised of four units: the naval

unit, the elite fighting unit, the Black Tigers or the suicide squad, and the intelligence unit

(Ramasubramaniam 8). At its height in 2000, the size of the LTTE was estimated at

5,000-10,000; in contrast, the Sri Lankan army‘s strength was estimated at 120,000.

Between 1982 and the cease-fire of 2002, nearly 18,000 Tamil Tigers died in combat

according to the official LTTE count (Hopgood 43-44).

Within its territories, the LTTE had set up a sophisticated governing structure

with civil administrative capabilities such as ―a police force, law courts, postal services,

banks, administrative offices, television and radio broadcasting stations,‖ in short,

institutions that would be necessary once the Tamils gain independence from the Sri

Lankan government (Ramasubramanian 8-9).

The Black Tigers

The LTTE was perhaps most famous for its volunteer suicide squad known as the

Black Tigers. Although the LTTE was not the first to use suicide attack, their methods

29

were so successful that, before the September 11 attack, the LTTE was considered ―the

deadliest terror organization in the world,‖ with other terrorist groups, including Al

Qaeda, emulating their tactics (Waldman).

S. Thamilchelvam, the former head of the LTTE political wing, stated that the aim

of a suicide attack was ―to ensure maximum damage done with minimum loss of life‖

(Waldman). It was initially developed to offset the LTTE‘s numerical disadvantage: the

first suicide attack was attributed to Captain Millar on July 5, 1987, when he drove a

truck filled with explosives into a Sri Lankan army base and killed 40 soldiers. Since

then, the LTTE‘s official policy has been to target only military sites; however, the range

of suicide missions was much wider: the LTTE was held responsible for suicide attacks

involving assassinations of prominent political figures and damage to the infrastructure

and financial centers as well as sites of cultural significance (Gunaratne 107-108). Some

of the most famous and successful Black Tiger operations were the assassinations of the

former Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi (1991) and the former Sri Lankan President

Ranasinghe Premadasa (1993), the bombings of the Central Bank (1996), the World

Trade Center in Colombo (1997), the Dalada Maligawa, or Temple of the Tooth Relic, in

Kandy (1998), and the Katunayake air force base and Bandaranaike civilian airport

(2001) (Gunaratne 108; Kleinfeld 109).

The LTTE was known to be distinct from other terrorist groups in that they

employed suicide attacks sparingly as ―case-specific tactic[s]‖ with a specific aim rather

than as ―an overall strategy‖ to incur a widespread terror among civilians (Pedahzur 80).

Shortly after September 11, the US embassy spokesperson in Colombo, Stephen Holgate,

30

made a statement that ―the LTTE is not involved in unbridled terror, has specific political

demands and is not averse to negotiations‖ (Hopgood 59). Civilians were never the

intended target of the LTTE, although civilians were certainly killed during Black Tiger

operations,12

and nearly a quarter of suicide attacks by the LTTE were assassinations

(Peduhzar 72). The Tigers did not distinguish between these political assassinations and

military objectives, as Thamilchelvam said in an interview: ―In the politics of Sri Lanka

the military is only an instrument of a genocidal policy, of annihilation…. Political

decisions…become military policy or action‖ (Waldman). These non-military operations

were not included in the LTTE‘s official tally of suicide missions, and allowed the

organization to claim that it was not a terrorist organization (Guneratne 107).

The LTTE rejected the use of the phrase ‗suicide‘ in describing Black Tiger

operations. The Institute for Counter-Terrorism (ICT) defines suicide bombing as an

―operational method in which the very act of the attack is dependent upon the death of the

perpetrator. The terrorist is fully aware that if she/he does not kill her/himself, the

planned attack will not be implemented‖ (Zedalis 2). However, the LTTE evaded the

stigma attached to suicide and elevated the Black Tiger operations by using the Tamil

word thatkodai, which means ‗to give oneself‘, instead of thatkolai, or ‗to kill oneself‘

(Waldman). This substitution of words allowed the LTTE military spokesperson Irasiah

Ilanthirayan to claim that ―Our suicide bombers do not take their own life, but give it to

the cause…. They are not killers, they are givers. They give their lives for the Tamil

nation‖ (Goodwin).

12

For example, in 1996 bombing of the Central Bank in Colombo, at least 91

civilians were killed (―Timeline‖).

31

The LTTE insisted that the Black Tigers were ―strong in spirit and firm in

purpose‖ unlike suicide bombers of other organizations whom the Tigers deem ―dejected

in life.‖ Being accepted into the ranks of Black Tigers was a selective process that started

with a written application to Prabhakaran that highlighted one‘s motivation, skills, and

record of service. After being selected, Black Tigers underwent a rigorous training for at

least a year and sometimes had to wait for years for an assignment (Hopgood 60-62).

Other accounts contradicted this image of mentally strong and committed

warriors. Perhaps the Black Tiger unit, and the LTTE in general, had once been an

exclusive group that only allowed highly motivated individuals. However, as the civil

war dragged on, lowering of standards and allegation of forced recruitment were leveled

against the LTTE. UNICEF accused the LTTE of kidnapping and forcing children to join

the fighting force (Hopgood fn. 72), and thirteen-year-olds had been found wounded on

the battlefield (Dugger). S Manoranjan, a Tamil newspaper editor, claimed that orphans

as young as five or six years old were taken from refugee camps and brainwashed into

becoming suicide bombers, and that most Black Tigers were mere robots with no political

understanding or ideological conviction (Rubin). Interviews of captured Black Tigers

confirmed this picture. One would-be-suicide bomber revealed that he was kidnapped by

the LTTE as a child and later volunteered to become a suicide bomber in order to protect

his siblings from being recruited (Weerakoon). Menake, a female suicide bomber who

was apprehended before she could carry out the assassination of Prime Minister Ratnasiri

Wickremanayake, was sexually abused as a child and was handed over to the LTTE

against her will by her relatives who considered her an economic burden. She explained

32

that when she applied to be a Black Tiger she was ―depressed and in pain‖ from a nerve

damage to her spine that would potentially make her paralyzed (Goodwin). Menake‘s

account was sharply different from the assertion by the head of the female cadres

Thamilini, who explained that ―People dejected in life won‘t be able to go as Black

Tigers…. There must be a clear conception of why and for what we are fighting. A deep

humanitarianism is very necessary—a love of others, for people‖ (Waldman).

However, the most noticeable characteristic in the Tamil Tigers, and the Black

Tigers in particular, was not the love of the people or the conviction in their cause, but the

blind devotion to their leader Prabhakaran, which has raised the question that the LTTE is

no more than a personality cult (Sprinzak 71-72; Mydan). Psychoanalyst Vamik Volkan

writes that after a traumatic experience such as natural calamity or man-made atrocities, a

group is more vulnerable to suggestions of a strong charismatic leader. In the next

section, I discuss the impact of a strong leader on a group exposed to a prolonged trauma.

Large-Group Regression and the Charismatic Leader

In his book Blind Trust: Large Groups and Their Leaders in Times of Crisis and

Terror, psychoanalyst Vamik Volkan writes about large-group regression during and after

a traumatic experience. Regression on an individual level ―involves a return to some of

the psychological expectations, wishes, fears, and associated mental defense mechanisms

of an earlier stage of human development‖ (12). Like individuals, groups regress to

child-like states in times of stress in order to cope and perhaps to find ways to adapt and

progress. Regression is an effort to feel secure in the face of danger or a threat, and in

33

itself is neither good nor bad. However, when a group regresses, individual members

tend to lose the ability to distinguish between real and imagined danger, which makes

them more prone to collectively engage in acts of brutal violence. Volkan identifies

twenty signs and symptoms of large group regression among which are the loss of

individuality, the blind rallying around the leader, and a sharp division between ―us‖ and

the ―enemy‖ (Volkan, Blind Trust 13-14, 60-61).

During the prolonged ethnic civil unrest in Sri Lanka that lasted over a quarter

century, the land of this beautiful island and its people suffered much trauma. Especially

in the Tamil majority areas of the north and east, recurrent military and guerilla warfare,

economic sanction, and coercion by the Tamil Tigers made an ordinary life virtually

impossible for the Tamils. The land was reduced to rubble, people died of starvation, and

most families lost their members in a violent manner, whether through a military strike,

stray bullet, or recruitment into the Tiger ranks. Pratap who had a rare glimpse of the

northern region of Sri Lanka in November of 1987, shortly after the Indians got involved

in the civil war, recounted what she saw there:

Earlier in the year, before the Indians arrived, Sri Lankan air force planes had

carpet-bombed important Tamil towns in the Jaffna peninsula, like Velvettithurai

(Pirabhakaran‘s home town), Point Pedro, Vasivilan and Urupiddy, and reduced

them to ghost towns. The main streets looked like disused sets from a World War

II film. Ruined hulks of buildings with collapsed ceilings and facades riddled

with bullet holes were mute testimony to a brutal war. Artillery shells had left

behind craters on the potholed roads. There was not a soul in sight—no human

34

beings, no dogs, no birds. Nothing but eerie silence. It was as if one had

stumbled upon a lost, ruined and forgotten civilization. (Island 44)

Conditions only worsened with the prolonged conflict. The inhabitants of this region

who were unlucky enough to remain there eked out a precarious existence. This state of

affairs primed the Tamils for manipulation by a charismatic leader.13

Volkan contends that at such times the role of a strong leader is crucial, for

without a strong leader the group loses purpose and falls into chaos. However, all is not

well with a strong leader: depending on the severity of his or her own individual

regression, the leader influences the group either to remain in regression or advance into

progression. In other words, a strong leader has more potential to influence the group for

ill or good (Blind Trust 58-59).

Volkan stresses the importance of learning the psychobiography of the leaders, in

particular their childhood experiences in the family of origin, for signs of personal

regression. How these leaders function later in their position as the heads of large groups

is to an extent determined by these early childhood experiences and how well they have

managed their regression. One such leader that Volkan discusses is Abdullah Ocalan,

nicknamed Apo, the leader of the Kurdish Workers‘ Party (Partiya Karkari Kurdistan—

PKK).14

The PKK is often paired with the LTTE in the organizational analysis because

13

Historian and psychoanalyst Peter Loewenberg observes an analogous situation

in Nazi Germany where the generation that grew up in deprivation responded to Hitler‘s

message (240-283).

14

A comprehensive psychobiography of Prabhakaran does not exist; however,

Volkan did an analysis of the Kurdish leader from a long interview of Ocalan conducted

by a Turkish leftist writer Yalcin Kucuk. In this interview, Ocalan ―returns again and

35

again to his childhood memories, as if he wants to understand the internal motivations for

his adult activities.‖ Given the similarity between the two leaders, it would be useful to

learn about the ―psychoanalytic reconstruction of [Ocalan‘s] internal world‖ (Volkan,

Bloodlines 248).

Ocalan, nicknamed Apo, was born in a poor family from a small village in

southeastern Turkey (Witschi). His father was ―the weakest, palest person in the village‖

and ―a nobody,‖ and his mother a strong-willed woman who dominated her husband.

Both parents were shunned and detested by the villagers and, to compensate for their own

sense of frustration and humiliation, they encouraged Apo to be ―rebellious, cruel, and

revengeful.‖ Apo became aggressive and violent in part to reverse the humiliation his

parents suffered at the hands of the villagers and in part to gain his parents‘ love and

acceptance. Young Apo was hungry for his parents‘, especially his mother‘s love, and

according to him, ―In order to receive love, I had to be molded as she wished me to be.‖

Apo recalls one such incidence of ―molding‖:

I remember it as if it were happening now: I was fighting with kids in the village,

and they cracked my head open [the skin was cut]. I returned home sobbing and

saying that I had been beaten up. Of course, by crying, I expected my mother to

protect and defend me. As soon as I came home, instead of protecting me my

mother said to me: ―Go and take revenge or I will not allow you to enter this

house.‖ She insisted that I do this. Even though it was forced on me this first

time, my tendency for action [toward taking revenge] had started. I began to be

an attacker; I cracked the head of many children. (172)

As an adult Apo declared that ―This battle that I am conducting [the Kurdish separatist

movement] is for love,‖ indicating that he was still carried his need for his mother‘s love

with him.

At the age of ten or twelve Apo ran away from the humiliating home environment

and lived with his relatives. Volkan explains that because of this escape, Apo lost the

crucial chance to resolve his ―earlier developmental tasks‖ and ―to free himself

somewhat from the images of his parents‖ during the ―second individuation‖ process of

adolescence. The result was that Apo carried his ―earlier developmental tasks‖ to

adulthood and attempted to resolve them by merging the Kurdish identity to his own

personal identity. By saving the Kurdish people, Apo would save himself. As Volkan

puts it:

[Apo] perceived the existing Kurdish identity as ―nothing,‖ or as an oppressed

child, and thereby identified with it. In turn, he tried to help it. ―The Kurds will

grow up with me,‖ he said. For Apo, the Kurdish identity—like his own—would

start from ―ground zero,‖ and ―new‖ Kurdishness and ―new‖ Apo would have no

ties to the traditions of feudal Kurdishness and Apo‘s victimized, childhood self.

So as leader of the PKK, Apo could order the destruction and killing of

ordinary villagers—including women and children—many of Kurdish origin.

These people represented his own unloved childhood self, and since they were

―nothing,‖ he had no need to feel guilty for destroying them. Instead, he felt

entitled to get rid of them so the new Kurds (and, by extension, Apo himself)

36

of the similarities they share. Among others, both movements started as a radical leftist

movement then took up an ethnonationalist agenda, both exhibit sect-like features

centered around a charismatic leader, and both employed suicide bombing especially

using female operatives (Pedahzur 70-71; Reuter 163-64). But what was most striking,

according to Ami Pedahzur, was the similarity between two leaders, Prabhakaran and

Ocalan. Pedahzur observed that they had ―almost identical leadership style‖:

Neither tolerated resistance or disagreement and reacted very aggressively to any

signs of challenge. They also were not lenient, to say the least, towards political

personages outside the ranks of the organization who did not fully agree with their

politics. Finally, in both cases, these organization leaders were the ones

responsible for adopting the idea of suicide attacks, devising strategic guidelines

for activating bombers, and they also served as the principal source of inspiration

for the suicides themselves. (71)

By mid-1990s, the PKK had killed about 5,000 Kurdish people who refused to join the

movement, as well as 4,000 Turkish troops. Along with about ten thousand PKK activists

who were killed by the Turkish government, the death toll for the Kurdish people is

around 15,000 (Volkan, Bloodlines 169).15

Unfortunately, during the independence

struggle, those who suffered the most were the people the movement was supposed to

free.

could renew their existence in a purified form. Angry Kurds would replace

devalued ones. (Bloodlines 178-79)

15

The International Policy Institute for Counter-Terrorism (ICT) puts the figure at

4,276 civilians dead and 5,083 injured by the PKK and 20,822 PKK members killed by

the Turkish security forces by mid-1997 (―Kurdistan Worker‘s Party‖).

37

A similar accusation had been leveled at the LTTE. Some, including Pratap, felt

that the Tiger supremo‘s inflexibility hurt his own people more than the enemy he was

fighting against (Island 95). Prabhakaran‘s unswerving vision for a separate state for the

Sri Lankan Tamils had once been an object of admiration, but as the conflict was

prolonged, it became a source of fierce criticism. Unlike other rival Tamil organizations,

which were willing to negotiate for federalist solutions, Prabhakaran‘s commitment to

independence was uncompromising, and he sacrificed the lives of thousands of Tamil

civilians. However, without the support of his dedicated followers, Prabhakaran would

not have been able to continue his effort for so long. In the next section, I discuss the

group psychology of the followers which complements charismatic leadership.

Large-Group Identity During a Time of Crisis

Volkan explains the concepts of individual and group identities through an

analogy of coverings meant to protect our bodies. He compares individual identity to

clothes that each person wears and group identity to a large tent that envelopes all the

individual members inside. In other words, all the members share a collective covering.

Under normal circumstances, individual identity takes precedence and the members of

the group function as unique individuals, more interested in the upkeep of their own

garments. However, when the group‘s safety is threatened, the collective covering or the

group identity takes over as of primary importance (Blind Trust 36-37).

In a regressed society, members lose their individual qualities and turn into

faceless homogenous masses as they identify more strongly with their collective identity.

38

Volkan gives an example of SS officers in Nazi Germany: not only was it difficult for

outsiders to distinguish among the SS officers, but more significantly, ―it was difficult for

each SS officer to differentiate himself from others‖ (Blind Trust 62; italics in the

original). This loss of personhood may result in the disregard for one‘s life for the sake

of the group integrity. When one cannot distinguish oneself from others, what does

personal death matter? In a sense, one would live on through the survival of others.

Pratap noticed a similar feature in Tamil Tigers. After interviewing several Black

Tigers or the suicide bombers of the LTTE, Pratap described them as emotionless time-

bombs:

[The Black Tigers] are everything the ordinary Tigers are, but to a much higher

degree. They are more reticent, more disciplined, more motivated, and utterly

emotionless. I tried to get at least a flicker of emotion out of them—nostalgia,

homesickness, regret. I talked about childhood memories, missing their mother,

giving up life‘s pleasures, fear of imminent death. But I got nothing. No reaction

at all. They sat, still and clear-eyed, answering calmly and dispassionately. It was

disconcerting. They could have been lobotomized for all I knew…. (Island 103)

Memories of their individual past and the love of the family are replaced by the collective

identity and the struggle for the Eelam (Island 102). Prabhakaran insisted that

nationhood was for the good of the people, that only an independent state could ensure a

fair treatment for the Tamils. In order to attain this goal for all the people, individual

sacrifices are necessary. As in any war situation, soldiers give up their lives for the

benefit of the group. The survival of the group supersedes the survival of an individual.

39

Prabhakaran as a Transformational Object

The subsuming of individual identity by large-group identity during a time of

crisis, as argued by Volkan, can explain in part the Tamil Tigers‘ willingness to sacrifice

their lives for the survival of their ethnic group. The loss of individuality was combined

with a collective devotion to the leader, and the result was highly motivated patriot-

followers who were willing to risk, and even welcome, death. Christopher Bollas‘

concept of transformational objects posits an explanation for their extreme devotion to

the cause of Eelam and to their leader Prabhakaran. Prabhakaran‘s appeal among the Sri

Lankan Tamils centered around the fact that he gave out an impression that he cared

about his people and was concerned about their welfare. In a stroke of genius,

Prabhakaran fashioned himself into a nurturing and caring deity and mother for his

followers. The result was the creation of devoted ―children‖ willing to give up their lives

to please their ―mother‖ and ―God.‖

In The Shadow of the Object: Psychoanalysis of Unthought Known, Bollas

theorizes that the infant experiences the mother as its first transformational object during

the pre-object phase. ―Object‖ refers to anything that is distinct from the self, both things

and people. Generally, the mother is the infant‘s primary object since she is the first

separate being the infant encounters. However, Bollas posits that before the mother is

―fully identified as an other, [she] is experienced as a process of transformation‖ (14). In

this Bollas expands upon the concept of environmental mother developed by Donald

Winnicott. Winnicott postulates that during the phase that precedes the infant's awareness

40

of distinct or ―not-me‖ objects, the mother provides the total environment for the infant

that contributes to its psychological as well as physiological well-being (―Parent-Infant‖

43-44). The infant distinguishes between this environment-mother, who is responsible

for the infant's comprehensive care and development, and the object-mother, who

satisfies its physical needs. The infant feels toward the environmental-mother, with

whom it experiences the sense of merging, ―all that can be called affection and sensuous

co-existence,‖ whereas the object-mother is ―the target for excited experience backed by

crude instinct-tension‖ (Winnicott, ―Capacity for Concern‖ 75-76). Bollas states that the

environmental mother is experienced by the infant with the process of ―cumulative

internal and external transformations‖ (14), the memory of which is sought to be

recaptured later in life:

[T]his feature of early existence lives on in certain forms of object-seeking in

adult life, when the object is sought for its function as a signifier of

transformation. Thus, in adult life, the quest is not to possess the object; rather

the object is pursued in order to surrender to it as a medium that alters the self,

where the subject-as-supplicant now feels himself to be the recipient of enviro-

somatic caring, identified with metamorphoses of the self…. The memory of this

early object relation manifests itself in the person‘s search for an object (a person,

place, event, ideology) that promises to transform the self. (14)

The earliest experience of the mother serves as a template for the later searches for

transformational objects that recapture the memory. Religion and aesthetic objects are

some examples that elicit transformational experiences in adults, and as these examples

41

suggest such encounters are imbued with a sense of the sacred and reverential (Bollas 15-

16). Charismatic leaders who impart a sense of purpose and meaning to their followers

also meet the description of transformational object. Such leaders are able to inspire

object surrender from his followers in which the followers ―hand over their egos to the

leader and remain susceptible to his commands and directives‖ (Zaleznik 119). The

followers lose themselves in submitting to the leader‘s vision and experience a sense of

oneness with him, which is reminiscent of the symbiotic fusion with the mother.

In the context of the Sri Lankan Tamil nationalism, Prabhakaran offered the

Tamils, whose lives had been diminished by institutional discrimination and shattered by

the civil war, a chance to become a part of something larger, of the nation they were

helping to create. In a move that ensured blind devotion from his followers, Prabhakaran

equated loyalty to the homeland to the loyalty to his person. One Black Tiger tellingly

declared, ―For us, [Prabhakaran] is mother, father and God all rolled into one‖ (Pratap,

Island 103). Although Prabhakaran was commonly addressed as annai or older brother

in Tamil,16

which is reminiscent of the Big Brother of 1984 both in name and attributes,

Tiger cadres also experienced Prabhakaran as a nurturing presence who ―loves and

protects them‖ as a mother, father, or God would (102). Patriotism, filial piety, and

religious sentiment were all mobilized in the fashioning of these particular suicide

bombers. Their lives were transformed when they were accepted into the elite echelon of

suicide squad: their personal identity and past were erased, substituted by the single

16

Initially Prabhakaran was called thambi or younger brother, a term of affection

that made him approachable (Pratap, Island 73). But as he gained in authority, he

adopted the title of annai which exacted respect and put distance between him and his

followers.

42

purpose of ―inflict[ing] the kind of damage on the enemy that would make Prabhakaran

happy‖ (103). Death, the most radical experience since birth, served as the ultimate

moment of transformation. During a suicide mission, their physical bodies were altered

from living, breathing intact whole to mangled and fragmented organic matter. And in

death they entered into the symbolic fusion with their leader and the collective, at least in

their fantasy.17

This point was illustrated by the death of a fifteen year-old female suicide

bomber who, upon being fatally wounded after a mission, called out with her final breath

―not to her mother, not to her father, not even to God, but to ‗Annai, Annai!‘‖ (104).

The transformational effect that Prabhakaran had on his followers had been

viewed as predatory rather than nurturing by some critics. Under the guise of admiration

for the Tiger leader‘s unswerving dedication for the Eelam, Pratap divulges details that

underscores Prabhakaran‘s malignant impact on his people. In the next section, I will

analyze more closely the Sri Lanka section of Pratap‘s memoir Island of Blood which I

have already discussed in part. Specifically, I will focus on various mother-child

relationships that appear in the text, some of which are conscious representations on the

author‘s part, and the others seemingly arising from her unconscious psyche. Many of

the mother-child relationships allude to the dynamic between Prabhakaran and his

followers, and portray this charismatic leader as a ―bad‖ mother in the Kleinian sense.18

17

Schalk mentions an LTTE Tamil text that refers to the blood of the martyrs as

watering the seed of independence (79). According to this metaphor, the LTTE cadres

become one with the tree of Eelam that grows out of the seed.

18

Melanie Klein‘s formulation of ―good‖ and ―bad‖ breast/mother refers to the

infant‘s early tendency to split the first object, the breast or mother, into good and bad

part-objects before the infant acquires the ability to integrate both aspects of the mother

43

Pratap‘s text reveals a complicated dichotomy in relation to Prabhakaran: to his followers

he was their savior and an object of devotion; to the rest of the world he was a ruthless

and dangerous terrorist. Pratap explores this contradiction by contrasting herself as a

―good‖ mother to Prabhakaran as a ―bad‖ one.

Island of Blood: The Paradox of Feeding and Devouring Maternal Bodies

Anita Pratap is an Indian journalist from Kerala who has reported on the Sri

Lankan conflict for twenty years, starting with her first assignment on the 1983 anti-

Tamil pogrom. She was also the first journalist to conduct a media interview with

Prabhakaran in 1984, and she met with him on several occasions since then

(Sabaratnam). Pratap has worked for leading Indian and American newspapers and

magazines including India Today, Sunday, the Indian Express and Time magazine. Most

recently she was the South Asia Bureau Chief of CNN till January 1999. Pratap currently

freelances as a magazine columnist and TV documentary maker (Pratap, ―Curriculum

Vitae‖). In 2001 she published Island of Blood, the book that recounts her experiences as

a reporter in sensitive South Asian conflict zones. In the Sri Lanka section of the book,

she writes about her several trips to the island at key moments during the civil war and

her interviews with Prabhakaran. Instead of using a linear chronological narrative device,

she organizes the experience thematically.

In Island of Blood, the images of pregnancy and motherhood are intermingled

with the acts of militancy and destruction. In particular, feeding emerges as the

into a whole person. Nonetheless, the tendency to divide the world into black and white

survives in adult life.

44

quintessentially nurturing maternal function that is misappropriated by the malignant

maternal figure Prabhakaran. In Pratap's narrative, the metaphors of motherhood and

feeding recur under various guises such as mother and fetus, host and parasite, predator

and prey. In these images of maternal bodies and fantasies of feeding, Pratap imagines

herself as the nurturing and sacrificial mother, in contrast to Prabhakaran, who feeds on

and exacts sacrifice from his children/followers—a process that culminates in mutual

destruction.

As noted earlier, Melanie Klein‘s formulation of the good and bad mother/breast

is useful in unraveling Pratap‘s fantasies of mutual destruction that lurks underneath the

mother-infant relationship. As will be discussed later, Pratap‘s text contains many

frightening examples of motherhood in which both the mother and child attack and

deprive each other, as well as examples of oneness and contentment. As the infant grows

beyond the symbiotic fusion phase described by Christopher Bollas, it learns to

differentiate between self and others. Through the interaction with its mother, the infant

becomes aware of the existence of the outside world and of objects, both things and

people, which are distinct from the self. According to Klein, the infant whose needs are

satisfactorily met by its mother enjoys a sense of fusion or oneness with her, but when the

infant's needs are not met, the mother, or the mother's frustrating breast to be exact, is

experienced as an object separate from itself (Mitchell 16). The infant feels anger and

hatred towards this frustrating object, the breast that disappears when it is needed, and

mounts an attack against this hateful object in its phantasy, which is an amalgam of

external reality and the internal world of imagination (Mitchell 22). In turn the infant

45

fears retaliation from the attacked breast and, "in self-protection, splits itself and the

object into a good part and a bad part and projects all its badness into the outside world so

that the hated breast becomes the hateful and hating breast," which is the "prototype of all

internal persecutors" (Mitchell 20). Klein observes that these phantasied attacks on the

object/breast and feared retaliation by the object/breast are oral-sadistic in kind ("Play

Technique" 50) that involves "biting, devouring and cutting" ("Oedipus Conflict" 71)

which reflects the oral relationship the infant has with the breast and the mother.

Significantly, Pratap frames the Sri Lankan section of the book with an homage to

mothers. Under the chapter title ―Mothers and Sons,‖ Pratap opens the book with her

initiation into motherhood, ―the birth of [her] firstborn which she recalls as ―the miracle

of life unfold from within my body‖ (3). What follows is the account of her giving birth

to her first child, what she describes as the most mundane yet miraculous event in her

life—indeed, in any woman‘s life. She describes the difficulty, joy, and anxiety of being

the first-time mother, and what makes a woman a ―normal‖ mother. Pratap couches her

personal experience of motherhood in terms of the shared experience of all mothers as to

establish what it means to be a good or normal mother. A good mother undergoes the

perils of pregnancy and childbirth that tax her own body. For three months leading up to

the caesarian birth of her child, Pratap ―had been vomiting for no apparent reason and

had become thin and weak. The doctor decided it was no longer safe for the baby to

remain inside‖ (3). Subsequently, her belly was ―cut open‖—in a way, violated—to save

her child. Whether it is a natural birth accompanied by much pain or a birth mediated

through medical intervention, childbirth involves some type of sacrifice on the mother‘s

46

part.

Pratap‘s preoccupation with her own motherhood in the narrative does more than

serve as a foil to Prabhakaran‘s malignant leadership: it serves as a metaphor for various

maternal roles suggested in the book. The birth of her son, with which Pratap opens the

book, calls attention to the bloody struggle the island is going through for the birth of a

nation. It also exemplifies the effort involved in producing a book, the author or the

reporter as the mother of her story. Pratap‘s memoir is replete with anecdotes of her

daring and self-sacrificing devotion to her work, times that she endangered her safety for

the sake of a good story. To those represented in the narrative, the author is a conduit

through which their side of the story is relayed to the world. In that sense, Pratap served

as a mother to the Sri Lankan Tamil cause on the world stage. At one point, even

Prabhakaran acknowledges her contribution. He says to Pratap: ―It was your reports [of

July 1983 riots] that internationalized the Tamil problem, and for that the Tamil people

will always be grateful to you‖ (Pratap, Island 72). Largely due to her pioneering

coverage, the events of the Sri Lankan civil war were given a place in the world history.

Along with giving birth, feeding is a crucial aspect of motherhood. Before birth,

the fetus receives nutrients from the mother's body in a state of symbiosis; after birth, the

mother provides milk to the infant. In both cases, the ―good‖ maternal body is the source

of food, and in some ways, it becomes food. In Pratap‘s other recollections, her maternal

role extends beyond that of the bearer to the fantasy of the nurturer, of serving as food to

her ―children.‖

However, feeding also intensifies the elements of exploitation and deprivation in

47

the mother-child relationship. Instead of being a happy symbiosis, Pratap‘s pregnancy

exemplifies a state of mutual rejection that exists between the mother and the fetus. As

Pratap writes, towards the end of her pregnancy, she started to vomit ―with no apparent

reason‖ (3) and it is not easy to say who is to blame, the mother or the fetus, for this

deprivation of food. On the one hand, there is a sense that nurturing and feeding of the

fetus occur at the expense of the mother‘s welfare. The fetus, an alien being inside the

mother‘s body, not only appropriates nutrients from her, but even causes her body to

reject food meant for herself through vomiting, thus weakening the mother and

endangering its own existence. On the other hand, it is also possible that the mother‘s

body rejects the alien invader by refusing to feed it and herself. What is important is that

both scenarios harbor an element of mutual and self-destruction, simultaneously

homicidal and suicidal. The destruction of the other can only happen at the expense of

one‘s own welfare, just as the suicide bombers inflict damage on others through self-

destruction.

Pratap‘s other recollections prominently feature the oral destructiveness found in

the infant-mother dynamic. One such example of Pratap, as the text's exemplary mother,

becomes food to nourish her story occurs on the trip through a Sri Lankan jungle which

Pratap took in November of 1987. It was a month after the disintegration of the India-Sri

Lanka Accord and the war between India and the LTTE erupted in northern Sri Lanka.

Indian journalists were banned from entering the northern and eastern parts of Sri Lanka

controlled by the LTTE. However, determined to be the first journalist to interview the

elusive Prabhakaran after the desolution of the accord, Pratap and the photographer

48

Shyam ask their Tiger contacts to smuggle them to Jaffna, the capital city of the area

populated by the Tamils where they would be able to meet Prabhakaran. What results is a

six-day journey through the jungle to reach the city that is accessible in a couple of hours

under normal circumstances (13-14).

As Pratap rides in the back of a tractor-trailer through the jungle, she is rapidly

covered with mud that is flung by the front tires and along with it a myriad creatures that

made the jungle their home. In her imagination Pratap becomes a part of the earth that

provides a home for these creatures:

I looked at my arm, and my arm looked back at me. Two bulging, bulbous eyes

of an insect or reptile glared at me from my arm. I screamed in terror, flailing my

muddy arms in panic that exploded from the depths of my being. But the eyes

still remained, clinging to my arm, its owner frozen with terror that probably

exploded from the depths of its being. One of the Tigers caught my arm and

shook the thing off….

I kept looking at the spot on my arm where the creature had been…I

almost expected to see its little babies rise and stare back at me. I kept scratching

the spot as if to erase the memory. (17)

Pratap‘s fantasy is akin to that of motherhood—after all it is the creature‘s babies Pratap

is afraid would spring from her body. She provides the body, the host upon which the

alien invader makes its home, and the creature multiplies at her expense.

Pratap‘s body not only serves as the womb for the jungle creatures, but it is even

swallowed up by the earth to become food for them:

49

I couldn‘t help thinking how fertile the wet earth was—what seemed like just mud

to us was home to a million different organisms. Of course, it would have been

much nicer if they didn‘t make a home of my skin, but that couldn‘t be helped in

the circumstances….

I could feel slimy creatures biting my face and arms. Wet earth had coated

my hair a clammy brown, and I could feel a zillion organisms slithering all over

my scalp.…

And then we sank into the earth…. (18)

Covered with mud, Pratap‘s body becomes a part of the earth and is eaten alive to sustain

the life of the jungle. In a brief moment of suspended reality, she sees herself disappear,

die, or devoured by the earth, so that her body might feed others.

Pratap‘s imagination does not acquiesce readily to the call for sacrifice demanded

from a maternal figure, however. The second episode Pratap chooses to recount in the

book after the birth of her son is the story of an encounter with jungle leeches. Twenty

years after the birth, she and her now college-age son Zubin are ―meandering through the

hills and forests and beaches of south India‖ on a three-day road trip. They decide to

spend the night in a jungle resort ―located in absolutely the most stunning surroundings‖

(6). After a walk in the hills, they realize that unwelcome guests had accompanied them

back to the hotel: tiny leeches that are almost invisible until they start sucking blood and

get swollen. The landscape from which the leeches spring from is associated with

fertility (9), and Pratap‘s body gets subsumed into that landscape: she becomes a feeding

mother, the leeches draining her not of her milk but of her blood. Unbeknownst to her,

50

Pratap has offered her body as a source of nourishment to the leeches, and the

consequence of this offering is her own depletion: she worries that the loss of blood will

make her anemic (11).

Interestingly, Pratap‘s imagination does not stop at her own danger and loss but

directs her to the image of mutual destruction: she questions ―What if a leech crawls

inside my ear? It will suck blood, and become so big my ear will explode‖ (12). Like a

suicide bomber, the tiny leech infiltrates her body and ―explodes‖ inside her, hurting her

and itself be killed in the process. At the height of her anxiety, Pratap is oblivious to the

hotel attendant‘s assurance of the leeches‘ benefit: ―leeches are not dangerous. They suck

a little blood, and then they fall off. In fact, there are treatments in which they use

leeches to suck our impure blood. A few leeches once in a while are actually good for

you‖ (12). It is only when she sees the leeches ―succumbing so easily to the white

[antiseptic] liquid‖ (13), only when humans triumph over nature, does Pratap regain her

composure and perspective.

In the zero-sum economy represented by Pratap, one grows at the expense of

another. Though probably unconscious on her part, Pratap‘s war with the leeches has

something in common with the ethnic struggle she is charting. In the mind of each group

members, the rise and prosperity of the other group results in the loss and diminution of

their own group, creating a wider division between ―us‖ and ―them.‖ When a large group

collectively engages in a sharp division of ―us‖ and ―them,‖ the consequences could be

dehumanization and, in extreme cases, the genocide of those deemed as enemies (Volkan,

Blind Trust 14).

51

Motherhood and nurturance as they emerge in Pratap‘s narrative are associated

with sacrifice and deprivation: as the fetus, parasite, or predator feeds on the mother,

host, or prey, the latter becomes weak and is even in danger of being devoured or

destroyed. This phenomenon is in keeping with Klein‘s observation that children

routinely engage in phantasied attacks on the mother‘s body. Indeed, in a child‘s mind

the persecution of the ―bad‖ breast/mother is the result of her own attack on the

breast/mother: the child mounts an attack against the breast/mother in her phantasy and

fears retaliation as a consequence (―Play Technique‖ 48). Incidentally, this feeling of

being attacked by one‘s own child is a sentiment some Indians have toward the Sri

Lankan Tamils whom they have supported. During an interview with Prabhakaran,

Pratap phrases the sense of betrayal in maternal terms: the LTTE‘s attitude towards India

was akin to ―bit[ing] the hand that fed‖ the Sri Lankan Tamil cause (68), using the

language of nurturance to characterize the mother-child dynamic between the two

countries.

The mother-child dynamic between India and Sri Lanka, at least from the Indian

point of view, is augmented by a unique geographical arrangement: a thin strip of shoal

that connects the two landmasses. Called Ram Setu, or Rama‘s Bridge, by the Hindus

and Adam‘s Bridge by British cartographers, this chain of shoals is 30 miles long and no

deeper than four feet. Geological evidence suggests that it is a remnant of a former land

connection between India and Sri Lanka. The shoal is featured in the epic story of

Ramayana, as the bridge constructed by the god Rama for his army to cross the sea from

52

India to Sri Lanka in an effort to rescue his wife Sita who was kidnapped by Ravana, the

demon king of Sri Lanka (―Adam‘s Bridge‖).

As recently as the fall of 2007, the prospect of dredging the shoal for easier

navigation in the region caused uproar in India. Part of the concern was religious as the

devout Hindus opposed the destruction of the bridge constructed by the god Rama

(Naqvi). However, one has to wonder if the shoal has a metaphorical significance of the

uncut umbilical cord that maintains a tenuous physical connection between the two

countries. In this construction, India stands for the mother who is reluctant to let go of its

child. It is interesting to note that the news of the dredging did not cause a similar uproar

in Sri Lanka.

India's relationship with the Sri Lankan Tamils is not an entirely salutary one, as

exemplified by the Rajiv Gandhi assassination. The LTTE saw India's involvement in the

island's affairs, in particular the signing the India-Sri Lanka Accord that suppressed the

Tamil separatist movement, as stemming from India's own fear of disintegration

(Kaarthikeyan 167). If Sri Lankan Tamils succeeded in establishing a separate state,

would it not incite various ethnic groups in India to aspire to a similar goal? The

prospect of a fragmentary subcontinent is not a far-fetched one, since India was made up

of disparate states before its independence from Great Britain in 1947, and the partition

with Pakistan is a traumatic memory. The LTTE was more than a wayward child to

India: the movement had the potential of robbing the mother country of her other

children.

53

In Island of Blood, Pratap distinguishes between good and bad mothers: a ―good‖

mother, exemplified by herself, would fulfill the role of nurturer by offering her own

body as food to her ―children‖ whereas a ―bad‖ mother feeds on her own ―children‖. I

argue that the relationship between the LTTE leader Prabhakaran and his followers, as

revealed in Pratap‘s reportage and other journalistic accounts, illustrates Prabhakaran as

the devouring breast/mother whose ―retaliation‖ is feared by his children/followers.

Nothing illustrates this better than the ritual of the last supper that takes place before a

suicide mission.

Prabhakaran as the Devouring Mouth

Most of the operations of the LTTE were shrouded in secrecy and obscurity, but

one of the rituals widely mentioned in conjunction with the LTTE was the Last

Supper every Black Tiger partakes with Prabhakaran or another senior leader before

embarking on a suicide mission. Whether intentional or accidental, the name of the

LTTE ritual resembles that of the Christ‘s Last Supper before the crucifixion in which

Christ symbolically gives his flesh and blood to his disciples to eat, one of the most

recognizable symbols of sacrifice in Christianity. Sri Lanka has a long history of

European colonization starting from the sixteenth century; thus, a certain amount of

Christian elements has been incorporated into the Sinhalese and Tamil cultures. Along

with the Tamil Sangam literature and nationalist liberation movement, Christian themes

had influenced the development of the LTTE ideology. Patrick Hogan argues that the

LTTE borrowed the concept of martyrdom, which was a crucial element of its ideology,

54

from other faith traditions. He writes, ―Hinduism does not really have a concept of

martyrdom. Martyrdom is found primarily in proselytizing religions, religions that

advocates spreading doctrine and converting unbelievers. But, for the most part, one is

born a Hindu or not. As such, dying as a witness to one‘s faith does not have a significant

role in Hinduism‖ (65). However, in the LTTE ritual, it is the bodies of the followers that

are torn into pieces to strengthen the leader‘s position. Whether intentional or accidental,

the allusion to the Christ‘s Last Supper, which is, in the Black Tigers‘ ritual meal before

death reveals something about the LTTE group fantasy.

Through the appropriation of the well-known Christian ritual of communion, the

Black Tigers were indoctrinated to view the relationship with their leader as one of

―fusion.‖ The account of the Christ‘s Last Supper according to the gospel of Matthew is

as follows:

As they were eating, Jesus took bread, blessed and broke it, and gave it to the

disciples and said, ―Take, eat; this is My body.‖ Then He took the cup, and gave

thanks, and gave it to them, saying, ―Drink from it, all of you. For this is My

blood of the new covenant, which is shed for many for the remission of sins.‖

(New King James Bible, Matt. 26:26-28)

Theologians and artists have linked the mystery of the eucharist to Christ‘s crucifixion.

Historian Caroline Bynum calls our attention to the depictions in medieval and

Renaissance devotional art in which Christ‘s body on the cross is literally depicted as

nourishment for the faithful. Food protrudes from the wounds on his side and from the

nail marks in the form of the wafer, the blood of the eucharist, or as the wheatstalk and

55

grapevine (106-07). What is more interesting is that the nourishing body of Christ was

often depicted as ―female, as lactating and giving birth‖ (82).19

During the Last Supper, when Christ symbolically gave His flesh and blood to His

disciples to eat, He not only nourished them, but also entered their bodies and became a

part of them. At least in the English language, the subsequent ritual to commemorate this

event is called communion, which has its roots in ―oneness‖ or ―union‖ (Def. 1a. OED).

Bynum also points out that at the center of the Eucharistic devotion is the desire to be

Christ: ―One becomes Christ's crucified body in eating Christ's crucified body‖ (146;

italics in the original). Interestingly, the condition of being Christ led one to be pregnant

with Christ: the ingestion of Christ‘s flesh during the Eucharist sometimes resulted in

mystical pregnancies in which the recipients‘ stomach literally swelled up as if with child,

thus allowing the communicants to become mothers of Christ (146). The implication is

that those who have Christ in them would give birth to good deeds (Mark 3:35) as a proof

of becoming more like Christ.

If we were to apply the analogy of the Christian communion to the Black Tigers‘

Last Supper, then the meal offered an occasion for the followers of Prabhakaran to

become one with their leader. The parallel to the Christ‘s Last Supper does not end there,

but also includes the manner of these suicide bombers‘ imminent death. During the

Lord‘s Supper, the bread that symbolized Christ‘s body is torn to pieces, and the wine that

19

One painting, Man of Sorrows and Mary Intercede with God the Father (ca.

1450 in the style of Konrad Witz), draws a parallel between Mary‘s breast and Christ‘s

wound on the side from the sphere (Bynum 113). In an illustration from a French

Moralized Bible, Christ gives birth to the Church through the same wound (MS 270b, fo.

6r, Bodleian Library, Oxford (ca. 1240); in Bynum 99).

56

stands for His blood is poured. Similarly, in the blast of the explosion, the method used

by the Black Tigers to ensure success, the bodies of the suicide bombers were often

blown to bits, flesh and blood splattered on the ground. The manner of their death

generated yet another metaphor for transformation and fusion. According to a LTTE

propaganda literature, the blood of these ―martyrs‖ symbolically watered the soil of the

future Eelam (Schalk 79). Thus, in death they become one with the homeland as a source

of nourishment. On the conceptual level, the Black Tigers ceased to exist as individuals

as they entered into the collective vision of the future Eelam, just as the Christians who

receive the communion enter into the community of the followers of Christ throughout

history.

There is a significant difference between the Christ‘s Last Supper and that of the

LTTE, however. Christ gave His body to his disciples to ―eat,‖ but in the LTTE context,

the followers‘ bodies were torn to pieces presumably to nourish the leader. Pratap

stumbles upon this implication in what looks like a moment of free association. One of

Pratap‘s interviews with Prabhakaran was held while the latter was hiding in the jungle

from the Indian army. Upon meeting him again after several years, Pratap was surprised

to discover that Prabhakaran had gained weight since they last met, an unexpected

situation for someone who was ―on the run for two and half years from the world‘s third

largest army‖: she had expected him to look haggard and harassed (89). To her

observation, Prabhakaran answered with a laugh: ―Actually, I haven‘t been on the run

literally. I don‘t take part in the attacks any more because my physical safety is of

paramount importance. So I usually remain in well-fortified, underground bunkers

57

directing the operations. I am like a spider at the centre of the web‖ (Island 89).

Prabhakaran‘s preoccupation with his own personal safety belied the heroic image of the

propaganda, that of the leader ―fighting from the front‖ (102). On the contrary,

Prabhakaran deliberately hit upon a disturbingly predatory image in his simile: a spider at

the center of the web waiting for prey to feed upon.

The question is, then, ―Who or what is this prey? What is the food that is feeding

Prabhakaran?‖ Based on the ritual of the Last Supper and the fate of the Black Tigers,

one might conclude that Prabhakaran, as the spider at the center of the web, protected by

layers of security that ensured his safety, consumed and was fattened by the bodies of the

suicide bombers, as well as their Sinhalese victims, an emblem of a bad parent who

devours his own children.

Whereas Pratap exemplifies a normal mother who would sacrifice herself for the

safety of her child, Prabhakaran exacts sacrifices from his children/followers. During her

complicated pregnancy, Pratap is unable to eat and grew weak because of her child (3);

Prabhakaran, on the other hand, is a ―bad mother‖ who feeds on his children/followers

and grows fat: he is the parent whom the Tigers are afraid to disappoint and would

willingly die for in order to win his approval. As Pratap puts it: ―I detected one fear in all

of [the Black Tigers whom she interviewed]: the fear that they might let Pirabhakaran

down. They would die happily; their only hope was their death would inflict the kind of

damage on the enemy that would make Pirabhakaran happy. Securing Annai‘s happiness

was all that mattered—then, they would not have lived and died in vain‖ (103-04). The

Black Tigers exhibited the ideal of filial piety as they make sacrifices for their parent, and

58

not the other way around.

As one Black Tiger remarked, Prabhakaran was not just the mother to them, but

also ―father and God all rolled into one‖ (Pratap, Island 103). Although meant to

describe Prabhakran as a nurturing and protective figure, this remark also equally applies

to the authoritative and exacting aspects of a father. One can draw a parallel between

Prabhakaran who ordered his followers to commit suicide and the Judeo-Christian God

the Father who demanded that his son die on the cross. During an interview, Pratap saw

in Prabhakaran another predatory animal, this time a phallic snake. In the course of the

interview, Prabhakaran received news that some of his men had been attacked by the

Indian Peace Keeping Forces. Pratap describes the Tiger supremo‘s transformation:

His eyebrows furrowed and bristled and were raised at sixty-degree angles. His

eyes slanted, his mouth pursed and his even, clean features seemed to dissipate….

His face swelled and turned even darker, becoming almost the colour of his hair. I

felt the hair on my arms rise. I was scared and yet mesmerized by the

metamorphosis…. In Pirabhakaran‘s place, I saw a large king cobra, poised to

strike. (Island 84-85)

Interestingly Pratap does not compare Prabhakran to a tiger, a more fitting choice for the

leader of the Tamil Tigers, but selects a phallic symbol which elsewhere she associates

with excessive eating. Pratap tends to compare the satisfactory condition after a large

meal to that of a well-fed snake, such as ―a python that had just swallowed a goat‖ (48) or

a ―family of boa constrictors‖ after their dinner (208). This snake image aptly combines

Prabhakaran‘s male and female aspects: it is a phallic symbol yet it also has an oral

59

association we have seen in Klein‘s persecutory and devouring breast/mother. D. Wilfred

Abse and Lucie Jessner point out that successful leaders often combine the paternal and

maternal aspects to more effectively appeal to the followers (695). As indicated by one

Black Tiger‘s comment, ―For us, he is mother, father and God all rolled into one‖ (Pratap,

Island 103), the strategy of mixing the masculine and feminine aspects served

Prabhakaran well. Once inspired with love and awe for their leader, the Tigers were

willing to dedicate their lives to Prabhakaran and the cause he espoused.

The call to sacrifice oneself for the sake of the Eelam was given out to all Tiger

cadres and by extension to the ordinary Tamil civilians who paid the highest price in the

war of independence. Not only were they targeted by the enemy troops, they were also

harassed by the LTTE to provide the fighting force and material support. Moreover,

during confrontations with the enemy, the Tigers hid among the civilians to protect

themselves. As Narayan Swamy puts it:

The first casualty of the fighting were civilians who never imagined that the

deployment of the IPKF would lead to bloodier fighting. The civilians bore the

brunt of the hostilities at the hands of the Indians, who ran amok as they were

unable to differentiate between civilians and the Tigers. The entire population

looked like the ―enemy.‖ Prabhakaran exploited the situation to the hilt. LTTE

guerillas would sporadically emerge from behind civilian cover, open fire or lob

grenades and make a quick getaway. Indian troops, blunted by the flash attacks,

reacted recklessly causing civilian losses that turned more and more Tamils

against them.

60

Prabhakaran‘s game plan of causing disaffection among civilian Tamil

population against the Indian army was working just fine. Even Tamils who may

have been unhappy with the LTTE started sympathizing with it as the Indians

caused large-scale casualties and destruction while advancing to Jaffna town

along the main arteries of the peninsula. (Inside 186)

Under the guise of civilian cover, the Tigers were able to be more effective. The Tigers‘

invisibility also gave the Sinhalese and the Indian Peace Keepers a justification to treat all

Tamils as potential Tiger cadres, thereby augmenting civilian casualty. It is interesting to

note that the Tamils were angered at the Indian troops rather than at the Tigers who used

them as human shields. Like obedient children, they did not know how to criticize their

parent.

Tamil youths who joined the LTTE had to adhere to a strict code of conduct that

extended to their personal lives: they were not allowed to smoke, drink, or play cards

(Hopgood 63), and family visits were rare and brief (Arnestad). Most crucially they were

prohibited from having extra-marital sex and, during the early years of the movement,

also from marriage, since sexual activity was believed to sap their strength. The ban on

marriage was lifted only after Prabhakaran‘s own wedding in the mid-1980s; even then

there was the age restriction, 25 for women and 28 for men (Ramasubramanian 12), what

could be considered ripe old age in an organization composed largely of teenagers

(McGowan).

In Pratap‘s account of Prabhakaran‘s marriage, another instance of feeding

intrudes into the narrative in a sinister manner. This time food and sex are collapsed into

61

each other to reveal the distortion of female sexuality in the LTTE‘s organizational

practices.

Forcible Feeding, Rape, and the Suicide Bodysuit: Misappropriation of the Female

Body in Suicide Bombings

In 1982, a group of Jaffna University students went on a hunger strike protesting

the discriminatory practices of the Sri Lankan government. At the time, the LTTE was

against hunger strike and peaceful protest;20

consequently, the LTTE kidnapped the

students, ostensibly to prevent them from needless deaths. Among the students was

Prabhakaran‘s future wife Mathivathani (Swamy, Inside 113). Pratap‘s brief account of

the courtship and marriage adds another dimension to the association between feeding

and violence.

Pratap calls Prabhakaran‘s marriage ―the culmination of a sweet love story.‖

However, what follows is anything but sweet:

20

The LTTE was not always opposed to hunger strikes. In September 1987, the

LTTE wrote a letter to the Indian envoy to Sri Lanka, J.N. Dixit, expressing concern over

the India-Sri Lanka accord and outlining the Tamil demands. When Dixit did not respond

to the letter, 25-year-old Amirthalingam Dhileepan, an LTTE senior commander, went on

a hunger strike in a variation from self-immolation through suicide bombing. Refusing

even water as well as food, Dhileepan‘s condition deteriorated rapidly, and he died twelve

days later while Prabhakaran was negotiating with India (Swamy, Inside 174-77).

Swamy writes that Prabhakaran was criticized for having a deputy undertake a

hunger strike. An Indian foreign ministry spokesman said, ―In our days, Mahatma

Gandhi used to himself undertake fasts and not ask his followers to do so‖ (Tigers 261).

Each year on the day of Dhileepan‘s death, there was a commemoration throughout the

areas held by the LTTE. The pictures of Prabhakaran published on tamilnation.org

paying homage to Dhileepan captured the irony of the situation: the thin frame of the

hunger striker in the photograph was in stark contrast to the heavy-set leader who

possibly had ordered the fast-unto-death protest.

62

Once, in the mid-1980s in Madras, Pirabhakaran brought his wife and three-

month-old son along for the interview. His marriage was the culmination of a

sweet love story. A few young girl students were on a fast-unto-death to protest

against the examination policy of the Sri Lankan government that discriminated

against Tamil students. Under orders from Pirabhakaran, a group of Tiger

guerillas swooped down on the spot where the girls were fasting, abducted and

forcibly fed them. Then Pirabhakaran married the prettiest of the fasting girls.

No one in the LTTE spoke against him for breaking their cardinal rule of celibacy.

As she sat by his side during the interview, Pirabhakran‘s wife did not speak even

once out of turn. She wore a printed wrinkle-free sari and a modest blouse. She

seemed gentle and domesticated. At his request, she handed him their son. ‗His

name,‘ said Pirabhakaran looking down at his infant, ‗is Charles Antony.‘ (Island

76)

It is interesting to note how Pratap‘s version differs from that of Narayan Swamy in the

biography of Prabhakaran. The picture Pratap draws is one of sexual predation on the

part of Prabhakaran and of lost agency for his wife. It presents a series of passive

situation for the future wife: she was abducted, force fed, and then selected by

Prabhakaran to be his wife. Nowhere in the passage is her wish reflected. All the

decisions are made by Prabhakaran. Even Pratap colludes in stripping the wife of her

agency in the narrative: Pratap never identifies her by name, calling her merely

―Pirabhakaran‘s wife,‖ nor does she report what Mathivathani said during the interview.

The young girl whose agency was taken away by her husband and leader remains

63

nameless and voiceless.

Swamy‘s version of the love story is less troubling. According to Swamy, the

fasting students included men as well as women (Inside 113), whereas Pratap specifically

reports that they were all girls and adds a detail that Swamy leaves out, that they were

force fed. These two details in Pratap‘s version introduce a hint of sexual predation.

Moreover, according to Swamy, the attraction between the couple was mutual. He quotes

Adele Balasingham, author of LTTE propaganda literature and the wife of LTTE political

advisor Anton Balasingham: ―Love for a woman filled [Prabhakaran‘s] heart and he was

absolutely besotted with Mathy and she with him.‖ Love-struck Prabhakaran made

frequent visits to Balasingham‘s residence where the students were kept (Swamy, Inside

114). When heard about the impending marriage, Mathy‘s parents rushed from Jaffna to

Madras, where she was held, to make sure that their daughter really wanted to marry the

guerilla leader. In Swamy‘s rendition, the ruthless leader who had absolute control over

the lives of his cadres was at the mercy of love and his bride-to-be.

One detail that Pratap mentions and Swamy omits entirely is that of forcible

feeding of the fasting students by the LTTE. Pratap spares the details of the forced

feeding; in fact, she mentions that detail cursorily almost in passing. In the absence of

information, the readers are forced to supply their own knowledge. Forcible feeding,

especially of women, has gained a notorious reputation during the British suffragette‘s

movement in the early twentieth century. In her essay ―Writing on the Body?

Representation and Resistance in British Suffragette Accounts of Forcible Feeding,‖

Caroline Howlett provides a graphic description:

64

Forcible feeding, as it was carried out in British prisons between 1909 and 1914,

was a brutal and life-threatening procedure. The hunger-striking prisoner was

first held down on a chair or bed by several wardresses. Feeding was then carried

out by doctors, either orally or nasally. If the feeding was oral, a gag made of

wood or metal was inserted to prevent the mouth from closing; where the patient

resisted, a metal gag was generally forced into the mouth, cutting the gums and

lips and often breaking the teeth. Once the gag was inserted, it was screwed open

to widen the mouth, and a thick rubber tube was inserted into the throat and

pressed down into the stomach. Alternatively, a thinner rubber tube was inserted

via the nostril, causing severe pain, particularly to the eyes. Food was then

poured from a jug into the tube via a funnel; milk and Bovril were two of the

commonest ingredients. Quantities given appear to have varied considerably;

many suffragettes vomited continuously during the feeding, and few managed to

hold the food down for any length of time. Damage to the tissues of the nose and

throat was almost universal; on some occasions the tube was accidentally inserted

into the windpipe so that food was poured into the lungs. (5-6)

Most suffered psychological and physical damage, and some even died. The damage was

done regardless of whether the prisoner resisted or not. The government rationale for

using the method of forcible feeding was to save the lives of the suffragettes; however,

Howlett dismisses such claim as hypocritical. Forcible feeding was not administered to

―the famous, the titled, and the influential,‖ but repeatedly used in the cases of ―relatively

unknown middle- and working-class women.‖ Howlett argues that the actual motive

65

behind the forcible feeding was to punish and deter the prisoners, and not to treat them

(6-7).

In addition to inflicting physical damage, the intent behind forcible feeding was to

humiliate and degrade the suffragettes. Howlett writes that, ―Most suffragettes felt that

forcible feeding was a horrific assault on their persons, and many were implicitly

equating the experience with rape‖ (22). Those who administered forcible feeding were

also aware of the connection between forcible feeding and rape. Howlett analyzes that in

a contemporary cartoon that depicted forcible feeding of a suffragette, ―the supposed

pleasure of [the cartoon] comes from her very attractiveness: the viewer is invited to

share in the doctor‘s enjoyment of this oral ―rape‖‖ (14).

Food, when literally stuffed down the throat, is like semen inserted into a

woman‘s body to impregnate her. Pratap‘s rendition of the romance between

Prabhakaran and Mathivathani suggests this reading. The abduction and forcible feeding

of the fasting girls are followed by the sentence, ―Then Pirabhakaran married the prettiest

of the fasting girls.‖ By the end of the paragraph, the marriage culminates in

Mathivathani bearing a son for Prabhakaran (Island 76). Food, a source of nourishment

and life, is turned into an agent of coercion and control through the juxtaposition of

forcible feeding, marriage, and motherhood.

The connection between forcible feeding and rape is particularly disturbing in the

context of the LTTE‘s signature tactic, that of suicide bombing. Female participation in

suicide terrorism among the Tamil Tigers was proportionately high compared to the

number of regular female cadres: about one third of the active Tamil Tigers were women,

66

but the ratio among the suicide commandoes was approximately twice that number, sixty

percent (Reuter 160).21

One explanation for the high rate of female involvement was ―a

division of labor by gender‖: men were considered more suited for combat, whereas

women‘s anatomical features were thought to be more readily adapted to conceal

explosives. Male suicide bombers used methods of carrying explosives that did not

involve the body, such as trucks, bicycles, and scuba diving gear, whereas women suicide

bombers generally had bombs strapped close to their body in abdominal belt, body suit,

or brassiere bomb. The exploding belt, one of the most commonly used devices in

suicide bombing, was originally designed for the female body (Reuter 161;

Ramasubramanian 29). As mentioned earlier, in the case of Rajiv Gandhi‘s assassination,

a female assassin wore an abdominal belt to feign pregnancy (Cronin 12). Therefore, the

method of suicide bombing preferred by the LTTE involved women‘s anatomical features

related to reproduction, such as the abdomen and the breasts. It is ironic and highly

suggestive that the parts of a woman‘s body that are associated with reproduction and

giving life were exploited to become the means of death. But then again, those suicide

bombers believed that in giving up their lives, they contributed to the birth of the Tamil

Eelam.

It has been suggested that many of these female suicide bombers were victims of

rape by the Sri Lankan army and the IPKF (Goodwin), a devastating event in a

patriarchal society that values female sexual purity. Volunteering for a suicide mission

was a socially acceptable way of reclaiming the lost honor. By carrying out a suicide

21

Other estimates were more conservative, between 30 to 40 percent (Zedalis 2;

Mydans).

67

mission, the violated woman purified her polluted body and exacted revenge from the

enemy whom she saw as responsible for her dishonor (Herath 4). These women felt that

the LTTE offered a way for them to regain their lost agency; others have criticized the

LTTE for perpetuating the patriarchal notion of womanhood rather than achieving real

advances in these women‘s lives (Ramasubramanian 10).

Devoted Mothers and Devouring Children in The Terrorist

Pratap explores the notions of the mother-child bond through the images of

pregnancy, childbirth, and feeding and contrasts the ―good‖ mother, who sacrifices

herself for the welfare of her child, to the ―bad‖ mother exemplified by the malignant

leader Prabhakaran, who feeds on the sacrifices of his children/followers. Pratap further

uses the mother-child analogy to describe the relationship between India and the Sri

Lankan Tamils: India as the maternal ―hand that [feeds]‖ the Sri Lankan Tamil cause and

the Sri Lankan Tamils, specifically the LTTE, as the ungrateful child who ―bites‖ that

hand (Island 68). In this analogy, India is the mother who suffers attacks from her child

whom she nurtured. Indeed, this is the fate of some mothers whose selfless devotion

turns out to be detrimental to their welfare. In The Terrorist, critically acclaimed 1998

film by a South Indian director and cinematographer Santosh Sivan, one of the

characters, a mother who lost her son, wastes away in a comatose state. A minor detail

within the dominant plot of a suicide mission, this mother‘s strong love for her child

raises the question of misguided devotion, both on the personal level and in the context of

the liberation movement.

68

Born in Madras to a documentary filmmaker, Sivan started working as a

cinematographer in South India under well-known directors such as Mani Ratnam. The

Terrorist, his second film as a director, received critical acclaim and won several awards,

including one at the Cairo International Film Festival in 1999 and the National Film

Award for Best Feature Film (Gulzar and Nihalani 633).

The Terrorist is loosely based on the events of the Rajiv Gandhi assassination.

Although the LTTE officially denied involvement, India‘s Central Bureau of

Investigation concluded, based upon circumstantial evidence, that the female suicide

bomber known as Dhanu was an LTTE associate. The film is in no way a factual

rendition of the assassination; rather it is an artistic speculation from a ―human point of

view.‖ As Sivan states in an interview, in making The Terrorist he was grappling with the

questions, ―How would someone do something like this? And what possibly could make

her not do it?‖ (Walsh). What deters the would-be assassin in the film from dying a

martyr turns out to be motherhood.

The protagonist of the film is a 19-year-old female militant Malli chosen for a

suicide mission, the assassination of a prominent politician deemed an obstacle to the

resistance movement to which she belongs. The film follows a few days in the would-be

assassin‘s life before she carries out the suicide mission. At first Malli is proud to be

chosen and is determined to carry out her mission. However, when she learns that she is

carrying the child of her dead lover, her resolve wavers, and ultimately, she chooses

motherhood over martyrdom.

The immediate motive behind Malli‘s readiness to volunteer for the suicide

69

mission, the film suggests, is the death of her lover. The film opens with the execution of

a traitor by a group of militants in which Malli is given the privilege to pull the trigger.

Through several flashbacks during the course of the movie, we learn that her lover, who

was also a militant, died because of the betrayal by the traitor she executed in the

beginning of the film. The death of her lover, with whom she had spent one night as he

lay wounded, haunts her for the remainder of the film and propels her to revenge and

self-destruction.

The path to Malli‘s suicide mission is littered with the graves of the others who

are important to her. When she was still a child, her older brother Ramu, a militant whom

she loved and admired, swallowed cyanide to prevent capture by the enemy. A day

before Malli embarks on her suicide mission, her best friend is killed in a minor skirmish

along with her other campmates. Lotus, the child messenger entrusted to take Malli

through the army posts, is killed by the soldiers minutes after safely conducting her to the

boat that carries her across the sea. Malli‘s mission is then to give meaning and purpose

to the sacrifices of these people in her life.

Therefore, Malli finds herself in a predicament when she discovers that she is

carrying the child of her dead lover, and that completing the suicide mission would mean

killing that child. Once she learns of her pregnancy, Malli spends much of her time in

reverie, touching her stomach. The film lingers over her body in various poses, with her

hand on her belly as if she is caressing the baby inside her (Figs. 1.1 and 1.2).

70

Fig. 1.1 Malli cradling her stomach after she finds out that she is pregnant

71

Fig. 1.2 Malli getting dressed for the assassination

Through these scenes, the film challenges the LTTE tactic of utilizing women‘s

generative capacity to engender death.22

When the time comes for Malli to get dressed

for the assassination, what seems to bother her the most is that the plastic explosives are

strapped around her waist, above her womb where the child is growing (Fig. 1.2). During

the final rehearsal, Malli is unable to press the trigger, in stark contrast to the first

22

It is interesting that Perumal, Malli‘s handler, describes her mission in terms of

giving birth. He explains, ―Your great sacrifice…your valiant death…will herald a new

era for our people.‖ By accomplishing her mission, Malli will become a mother to the

Eelam.

72

rehearsal when she pressed the trigger with determination and then looked up with a

triumphant smile. Fulfilling the role of a culturally normative mother, Malli recoils from

carrying out an act that would harm her child, an act that she did not hesitate to perform

when only her life was at stake. Having to choose between saving her nation and saving

her unborn child, Malli chooses the latter. However, either choice involves some form of

sacrifice from Malli. She is deleted in the process, for she does not live or act for herself,

but is treated as a vehicle to carry out the will and destinies of those around her.

In his book Understanding Indian Movies: Culture, Cognition, and Cinematic

Imagination, Patrick Hogan analyzes The Terrorist from the perspective of one of the

universal narrative prototypes, sacrificial tragi-comedy. In the sacrificial narrative, an

extreme form of sacrifice, often that of human life, is required to rescue the society from

some form of devastation, in most cases deprivation of food or famine, and leads the

society to the state of plenty (55-58). Hogan argues that many Sri Lankan Tamils saw

their condition under the IPKF as ―one of devastation, devastation requiring

sacrifice"(59). A suicide bomber was needed to rectify this problem by eliminating the

person considered responsible for this devastation: Rajiv Gandhi who sent the Indian

troops to Sri Lanka. The life of the suicide bomber is the sacrifice necessary to restore

the state of plenty. Hogan points out that the film introduces the element of food, often

an important feature in the sacrificial narrative, through Malli‘s cover story while she

prepares for the assassination: she poses as a student of agriculture. As Hogan puts it,

―Malli is supposedly [in India] to do things that will eventually aid the production of food

back in Sri Lanka—precisely what the sacrificial narrative says she is doing in killing

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herself and the VIP‖ (60).

I argue further that the sacrifice required in the narrative of the film, Malli‘s

thadokai, or giving of self, is more than providing food for the society: it entails giving

herself as food to nourish the societal cause. The film hints at Malli‘s giving of herself as

nourishment by connecting food and sharing of meals with the sacrifice of motherhood

exacted through the deprivation of the mother‘s body for the sake of her child.

Food and eating have multiple significations in this film: sharing a meal is a way

of forming a connection, whereas fasting is done to identify with the dead. Feeding

someone, in contrast, has the connotation of preparing him or her for slaughter. In a

different context that nevertheless sheds light on the film, Caroline Howlett quotes a

doctor who carried out forcible feeding of an imprisoned suffragette during the British

Suffragette movement as having said that it was ―like stuffing a turkey for Christmas.‖

Before the turkey is eaten in a holiday meal, it is first fed plentifully. Howlett points out

that this image of fattening the bird for consumption ―identifies eating with being eaten in

a sinister gesture that underlines the deadly intentions behind forcible feeding‖ (16). A

similar mechanism is at work in this film with regards to Malli. As a chosen suicide

bomber, Malli has the privilege of having lunch with the Leader in an enactment of the

Last Supper. But instead of sharing the meal together, Malli eats alone in the presence of

the Leader while he briefs her on the mission. Similarly, the day before the assassination,

Perumal, Malli‘s handler, asks her for any last wishes, specifically if she would like ―to

eat something.‖ The implication is that Malli is being fed before she would be killed for

a higher cause.

74

Motherhood also entails giving of oneself through feeding. Although a mother‘s

sacrifice for her child could be viewed as a noble trait, it also serves the purpose of

furthering the continuation of the species at the expense of the individual, and when

viewed in conjunction with the Black Tigers‘ last supper, it acquires a troubling

connotation. In the film, the first indication that Malli is with child is her enhanced

appetite. For a few days while she prepares for the assassination, Malli boards with a

man named Vasudevan. In a telling scene during a meal, Vasu and his servant Gopal

observe Malli with amazement as she relishes her food. We later learn that this is when

Vasu first suspects Malli‘s condition. Although seemingly innocent, this scene results in

the erasure of the mother, for Malli is eating for her child and not for herself. Just as the

meal she had with the faceless Leader suggested that she was eating in order to serve as

fodder for the cause of the movement, her body craves food in order to nourish the child

inside her. Malli fulfills the societal expectation that a mother protects and cares for her

child at the expense of her own wishes and desires. Vasu‘s injunction that motherhood

should be celebrated has the effect of negating Malli‘s volition.

Malli‘s enhanced appetite during pregnancy contrasts sharply with the condition

of another mother in the film. During her first meal with Vasu, Malli notices an empty

place set for meal, and Vasu explains that it is for his wife who is dead. However, Vasu‘s

wife Padmavathy is not dead but went into a coma seven years earlier when their grown

son died. As the paradigmatic mother figure of the film, Padmavathy shares her son‘s

fate. The implication is that this mother's love is so strong that she is inexplicably

affected by her child's death. Padmavathy‘s comatose state, which resembles death,

75

indicates that in a way she is at one with her son again, just as she had done when she

carried him in her womb. Fasting is yet another way to preserve the bond between

mother and son. Every year on the anniversary of their son‘s death, Vasu, the father,

fasts. Fasting has several meanings, among which is to commemorate the dead and, more

pertinently in this film, as a way to identify with the dead‘s inability to eat. By carrying

out a perpetual fast in her comatose state, Padmavathy not only identifies with her son‘s

death: it also reflects the fact that she can no longer fulfill one of the primary functions of

motherhood: to feed her child. When she could not fulfill this basic role, she refuses to

eat as if to indicate that she has no right to eat when she cannot feed her child.

The film accentuates the enmeshed bond between mother and child through the

characters of Malli and Padmavathy, and in doing so tacitly implies that a woman‘s

primary purpose is to give birth and care for her children, especially sons.23

Additionally,

there is a sense that it is her dead lover‘s legacy that Malli is preserving in deciding to

live. Malli says to Vasu at one point that the child‘s father is dead. In accordance with

Vasu‘s agricultural metaphor of comparing a woman‘s body to earth and sperm to seed, it

would be her lover‘s seed that would perish if she were to carry out the assassination.

Motherhood is honored, but the body that has served its function is discarded. In

a telling scene Malli grieves over a bird‘s nest that has fallen from the tree after a storm.

Vasu, one of the voices of male authority in the film, chides her for staying out in the rain

in her condition, saying, ―It‘s only an empty nest. It‘s purpose for nurturing the young

ones has been served. The birds have flown. Don‘t research this. Come inside. There‘s

23

It is interesting that Malli believes her unborn child to be a son even though

there is no way for her to know this.

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life in you. That is important. The rain isn‘t good for you.‖ What would happen to Malli

when the nurturing purpose of the life in her is served? Would she be tossed away like

the empty nest? Is she supposed to lose all desire to live like Padmavathy?

It is significant that the only meaningful action Padmavathy performs in the film

is to save the life of a child, Malli‘s unborn son. Before Malli sets off to the assassination

site, she visits Padmavathy for the last time and tells her that she will soon lose her own

son just as Padmavathy had a long time ago, thus drawing a parallel between the fates of

the two women. At this, Padmavathy shows a sign of life for the first time by holding

onto Malli's hand tightly and not letting it go for a while as if to prevent Malli from

leaving and killing the unborn child. She does for the child what she would not do for

herself: giving it life when she refused to live her own.

Conclusion

The Terrorist depicts a mother who literally wastes away through her

unwillingness to let go of her dead child. The Sri Lankan Tamil situation is in some ways

parallel to Padmavathy‘s condition. The LTTE and in particular their leader

Prabhakaran‘s stubborn adherence to a doomed cause plunged the people into further

devastation. The call to sacrifice oneself for the sake of the Eelam was given out to all

Tiger cadres and by extension to the current generation of the Tamils. Prabhakaran had

been criticized for refusing peace negotiations and unnecessarily prolonging the conflict.

Anita Pratap was among those who shared this belief. One of her interviews of

Prabhakaran was conducted after the Elephant Pass debacle, the first conventional battle

77

the LTTE fought against the Sinhalese army. The LTTE was defeated; nonetheless,

Prabakaran gloated to Pratap: ―We have shown the world that we have evolved from a

guerilla force to one that can fight a conventional war with a modern army‖ (Island 94).

To this Pratap responds:

I asked Pirabhakaran the question that had been haunting me for a year and a half:

Why hadn‘t he opted for peace when it was in his grasp? After all, Premadasa had

virtually given Eelam to them on a platter.24

Pirabhakaran denied they had started

the war and laboured the Tiger version of events, that the Sri Lankan army had

violated their agreement and come out of their barracks. Any anyway, he said,

‗We don‘t want Eelam on a platter. We will fight and win Eelam.‘

That then was the crux of the matter, the reason for the fresh violence.

Pirabhakaran did not want anybody else‘s version of Eelam—he wanted his own,

an Eelam that he liberated militarily. ‗Thousands of my boys have laid down their

lives for Eelam. Their death cannot be in vain. They have given their life for this

cause, how can I betray them by opting for anything less than Eelam?‘ He asked.

He didn‘t see the conundrum he was in—by fighting for the dead he was

engineering the death of the living. Unable to bury the past, he was digging a

burial ground of a nation. I told him that at the rate he was going, it would not be

Eelam but a graveyard he would create. If Eelam finally dawned, expatriate

Tamils would rejoice but by then, most Tamils in their homeland would be six feet

under. Pirabhakaran scoffed at the idea. (94-95)

24

Premadasa was assassinated by a Black Tiger in May 1993.

78

This passage suggests that in fighting for his people‘s independence, Prabhakaran was

killing them off. Instead of serving as a womb for the nation, the liberation movement

was digging a tomb for its people. Under the direction of their leader, the present

generation of the Sri Lankan Tamils committed a slow collective suicide for the sake of

the dead and those yet to be born. Premadasa‘s offer was not the first or the last peaceful

compromise Prabhakaran rejected. In pursuit of the military solution to counter the

majority government‘s discriminatory practices, in its initial stage, the LTTE or TNT

(Tamil New Tigers) as it was called then, targeted moderate Tamil politicians who

furthered Tamil interest through parliamentary means. In 1995, President Kumaratunga‘s

government proposed the formation of a unified ―northeastern‖ region and promised to

devolve power to this Tamil-majority area. The LTTE rejected the proposal (Joshi 37-

38). The federalist solution was revisited during the 2002 peace talks mediated by

Norway, and the LTTE seemed open to the idea for the first time (Botsfold). However,

violence resumed four years later because, as one journalist put it, ―Prabhakaran had done

nothing to convince Sri Lankans or the international community that he wanted peace and

had used the lull in fighting to regroup and rearm‖ (―Obituary‖). In May 2009, the civil

war that lasted for more than a quarter of a century ended with the LTTE‘s defeat and

Prabhakaran‘s death.25

A countless number of Tamil civilians were sacrificed along the

way, their blood shed to nourish the dream of the unborn Eelam.

25

I will discuss Prabhakaran‘s death further in the conclusion.

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Chapter Two

Recovering the Dead: Victims of Political Murders in Michael Ondaatje’s Anil’s

Ghost

Introduction

In the early morning hours of January 26, 1998, three suicide bombers charged a

truck filled with explosives through the gate of Sri Dalada Maligawa in Kandy, Sri

Lanka, the golden temple in which the Buddha‘s left eye-tooth, the most sacred relic of

the Sri Lankan Theravada Buddhism, is enshrined. The blast, which killed eight people

in addition to the bombers and injured twenty-three others, failed to harm the tooth, its

ostensible target (―11 Killed‖). Nonetheless, the attack convulsed the Sinhalese Buddhist

population, who immediately blamed the LTTE for this attack against their symbol of

Buddhism. The bombing also derailed the 50th

-anniversary celebration of the island‘s

independence from colonial rule, which was planned to be held at the temple (Hopgood

note 47).

The bombing of the Temple of the Tooth Relic, as Sri Dalada Maligawa is better

known in the west, underscored the significance of Buddhism in the Sinhalese national

identity and the Tamil resentment against the Sinhalese hegemony. Since the government

declared Buddhism the national religion in the 1972 Constitution (Ross and Savada 175),

minority religious groups, including Tamils, who are mostly Hindus, have been

marginalized. The government‘s decision to hold the country‘s half-century

independence celebration at the epicenter of Theravada Buddhism essentially excluded

minority groups from the national polity.

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Anil’s Ghost, Michael Ondaatje‘s first novel since the Booker Prize-winning The

English Patient, was published two years after the bombing of the Temple of the Tooth

Relic. Ondaatje was born in Sri Lanka of Dutch, English, Sinhalese and Tamil ancestry.

He was educated in England and now lives in Canada (Cook 6). As an internationally

acclaimed poet and novelist, Ondaatje was able to bring the Sri Lankan conflict to the

forefront of global consciousness through the publication of this novel. In spite of the

criticisms that Anil’s Ghost glosses over the ethnic and religious contention in the civil

war and the prominence it accords to Buddhism, it has become a contemporary classic of

the Sri Lankan conflict. The novel was hailed in Canada and the U.S. as a great literary

achievement, became a bestseller in Canada, Ondaatje‘s country of residence, for almost

a year, and won numerous awards, including ―the Governor General‘s award, the Prix

Medicis for foreign literature, and the Kiriyama Pacific Rim Book Prize; it was also the

co-recipient of the prestigious Giller Prize‖ (Kanaganayakam 6).

In contrast to the glowing reviews from the West, the novel has been denounced

by some Sri Lankan academics who are aware of the intricacies of the island‘s politics

and the history of the ethnic tension. In his article ―In defense of Anil’s Ghost‖ Chelva

Kanaganayakam summarizes the contradictory criticisms leveled at the novel. Some,

represented by Kanishka Goonewardena, are troubled by the novel‘s aestheticism that

refuses to probe beyond the effects of the war into its causes. He accuses that ―Anil’s

Ghost reads like a story about people dragging a constant flow of dead bodies out of a

river that has no hint of what‘s happen upstream. Who is throwing the bodies in? Why?

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Is that not worth knowing?‖ (Goonawardena 2), and concludes that ―The decision to

write an apolitical novel set in the tragic situation of Sri Lanka is profoundly political‖

(43). Goonewardena feels that it was irresponsible of the author to bypass any political

discussion and ignore the historical complexities behind the social and ethnic upheaval

depicted in the novel (Kanaganayakam 14).

Others have accused the novel of being biased towards one ethnic group at the

expense of the other. At the one end of the spectrum is Ranjini Mendis, who charges that

the novel is harsh on the Sinhalese government while sympathetic towards the Tamil

separatist movement (Mendis 8; Kanaganayakam 12). At the other end is Qadri Ismail,

who sees the novel as ―blatantly against all minority groups and decidedly pro-Sinhalese‖

(Kanaganayakam 13). According to Ismail, ―when all the significant actants in a story

about Sri Lanka are Sinhala, when in addition all the place names noticed by the text

when it sees the National Atlas of Sri Lanka are Sinhala ones ([Ondaatje] 39), and when

the novel‘s only list of the Sri Lankan disappeared contain exclusively Sinhala names

([Ondaatje] 41), its country begins to seem very like that of Sinhala nationalism‖ (―A

Flippant Gesture‖ 24; qtd. in Kanaganayakam 13). In other words, the novel denies the

multiethnic reality, past and present, of Sri Lanka and presents the country as a

monolithic polity. This representation of Sri Lanka as a Sinhala nation, Ismail feels, leads

to the downplaying of the minority grievances. He writes: ―nowhere in the entire novel

do we find any engagement with the Tamil claim to being oppressed, or with the

liberal/human rights/leftist argument that Sinhala (Buddhist) nationalism in Sri Lanka has

82

an extremely repressive, criminal, perhaps even genocidal record‖ (―A Flippant Gesture‖

25). In short Anil’s Ghost denounces the government‘s human rights violation against the

Sinhalese population, but is silent on the question of the rights of the minority groups.

To these critics who accuse the author for being misguided or altogether lacking

in a political stance, Kanaganayakam points out that ―to insist that the novel must

validate a particular position is to reduce the text to an ideological construct…. For the

critic to wear the mantle of historian or sociologist can be risky, counterproductive, or

even unfair, particularly when the effect is to tell both the reader and the author what

merits attention‖ (19). Kanganayakam further suggests that the novel‘s ambivalence is ―a

deliberate gesture‖ on the author‘s part (15), and it is the critic‘s task to distinguish

between the realism of the historical context and the artifice of the novel (19).

In an interview Ondaatje has conceded that the part of the message of the novel

is the universalism of war: ―the book isn‘t just about Sri Lanka; it could be Guatemala or

Bosnia or Ireland‖ (Jaggi 7). The novel opens with the main character Anil, who is a

forensic anthropologist working for the UN, digging for the remains of nameless victims

of Guatemalan civil war. This opening suggests that others around the world share

similar atrocities and sufferings that have taken place in Sri Lanka. Perpetrators and

victims are interchangeable with those of other civil wars. What is even worse,

perpetrators and victims are often indistinguishable from one another. In the Author‘s

Note that precedes the narrative, Ondaatje briefly describes the political backdrop of the

conflict:

From the mid-1980s to the early 1990s, Sri Lanka was in a crisis that

83

involved three essential groups: the government, the antigovernment insurgents in

the south and the separatist guerillas in the north. Both the insurgents and the

separatists had declared war on the government. Eventually, in response, legal

and illegal government squads were known to have been sent out to hunt down

the separatists and the insurgents.

The antigovernment insurgents in the south are the JVP and the separatist guerillas in the

north are the LTTE. Ondaatje never mentions these groups by name, and the readers who

are unfamiliar with the history behind the Sri Lankan civil disturbances would have a

hard time distinguishing the events surrounding the two groups. Ondaatje‘s aim in

producing this fictional account is not in unraveling or in educating his readers in the

intricacies of the conflict, but in exploring the universal characteristics of any conflict in

which ―the reason for war was war‖ (43; italics in the original). In their first meeting,

Sarath says to Anil:

Every side was killing and hiding the evidence. Every side…. The

government was not the only one doing the killing. You had, and still have, three

camps of enemies—one in the north, two in the south…. There‘s no hope affixing

blame…. What we‘ve got here is unknown extrajudicial executions mostly.

Perhaps by the insurgents, or by the government or the guerilla separatists.

Murders committed by all sides.

‗I couldn‘t tell who was worst. The reports are terrible.‘ (17-18)

It is impossible to weigh out the relative culpability of each group, for their combined

effort has contributed to the escalation of violence. The last act of brutality recorded in

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the novel is the assassination of the Sri Lankan president by a suicide bomber. It is based

on the assassination of President Ranasinghe Premadasa in May 1993, allegedly by a

Tamil Tiger. The assassination implies that the senseless violence touches everyone,

including those in positions of power and privilege, as well as ordinary people, plunging

the nation deeper into chaos by depriving it of its leader.

Ondaatje claims that Anil’s Ghost is not ―a statement about the war as though this

is the ‗true and only story.‘‖ Rather it is an ―unhistorical, unofficial‖ story, his

―individual take on four or five characters, a personal tunneling‖ (Jaggi 7). The novel

follows the quest of Anil Tissera, a young Sinhalese woman who was trained as a forensic

anthropologist in England and America. Hired by an international human rights group,

she returns to her native country at the height of the government‘s crackdown on

terrorists and insurgents in the late 1980s to investigate possible human rights violations.

Anil is teamed up with a Sri Lankan government representative, Sarath Diyasena, an

archaeologist by training. Together they seek to identify the skeleton of an unknown

man, whom they nickname Sailor, suspected of being a victim of government-sanctioned

murder, for they can establish a case for human rights violation only when they can

produce an identifiable victim. With the help of Ananda Udugama, a gifted artist, Anil

and Sarath are able to recreate Sailor‘s face and recover his identity. But when the Sri

Lankan government gets wind of their findings, it tries to destroy evidence and discredit

their investigation. In an act of self-sacrifice, Sarath returns Sailor‘s skeleton to Anil so

that she can testify. In turn Sarath becomes yet another victim of government reprisal, a

fact that we learn as Gamini, Sarath‘s brother and a doctor, identifies his body from the

85

weekly human rights report. Sometime after Sarath‘s death, Ananda oversees the

reconstruction of an old Buddha statue that has been blown up to pieces and the

simultaneous construction of a new statue. In the last scene of the novel, Ananda

performs netra mangala on the new Buddha statue, an ancient ritual of eye-painting on

otherwise completed holy figure which ―brings to life sight and truth and presence‖ and

turn the statue into ―a God‖ (97, 99).

In this chapter I attempt to distinguish between the author‘s goal of ―personal

tunneling‖ through the experiences of a few characters and the political and historical

context in which the novel is set. I argue that although the novel suggests that healing

and reconciliation on individual level are possible by confronting the truth of the past, it

remains blind to the contribution of Sinhala nationalism to the rise of the ethic conflict

between the Sinhalese and Tamil populations. The private and public stories intersect

each other in the image of severed heads which litter the landscape of the novel. I turn to

the myth of Medusa‘s decapitated head as the central trope of my analysis of Anil’s

Ghost. The Medusa myth is rich in resonance of mediated vision, mirroring, and

apotropaic effect, elements that abound in this novel which depicts painful sights and

memories, invisible enemies, distorted history, and elusive peace.

The Gorgon: Dichotomy of the Apotropaic Vision

In the section on the Gorgons in the Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion,

Jane Harrison calls attention to the prominence of the head in the myth of the Gorgons:

"in her essence Medusa is a head and nothing more; her potency only begins when her

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head is severed, and that potency resides in the head; she is in a word a mask with a body

later appended" (187). Although Anil’s Ghost never explicitly refers to Medusa‘s head,

the motif of heads severed from the body and their horrible visages recurs throughout the

novel. Sailor‘s skull takes the center stage as the plot revolves around the reconstruction

of his face; heads of schoolboys are mounted on poles to frighten the villagers; and

Ananda tries to kill himself by cutting his throat in a gesture much like decapitation.

Ironically, the closest connection to the myth of Medusa in the novel is found in

the description of netra mangala which signifies regeneration of a community. Palipana,

Sarath‘s teacher and a renowned epigraphist, describes this consecration ceremony of a

Buddha image:

[The artificers] climbs a ladder in front of the statue…. The painter dips

a brush into the paint and turns his back to the statue, so it looks as if he is about

to be enfolded in the great arms. The paint is wet on the brush. The other man,

facing him, holds up the mirror, and the artificer puts the brush over his shoulder

and paints in the eyes without looking directly at the face. He uses just the

reflection to guide him—so only the mirror receives the direct image of the glance

being created. No human eye can meet the Buddha‘s during the process of

creation….

His work can take an hour or less than a minute, depending on the

essential state of the artist. He never looks at the eyes directly. He can only see

the gaze in the mirror. (99)

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Ondaatje‘s source for the ritual of netra mangala is art historian Ananda

Coomaraswamy‘s influential work Mediaeval Sinhalese Art.26

Coomaraswamy

comments on the use of the mirror during the ritual as follows: ―The purpose of the

mirror was to receive the glance (belma) of the image… to avert the effects of the evil

eye by receiving the glance.‖27

In the footnote, Coomaraswamy further speculates: ―Is

this a parallel to the Gorgon‘s head, which could only be safely regarded in a mirror? It

seems to belong to the same group of ideas‖ (74), thereby establishing a connection

between this Sinhala Buddhist ritual, Greek myth of Medusa, and the nearly universal

phenomenon of the evil eye concept.

One of the most recognized readings of the Medusa myth in the West is Sigmund

Freud‘s famous essay ―Medusa‘s Head‖ in Sexuality and the Psychology of Love. The

26

Ondaatje mentions in Acknowledgments that he consulted Mediaeval Sinhalese

Art (310). Coomaraswamy calls the ritual Netra Mangalya. 27

Anthropologist Richard Gombrich makes the connection between the evil eye

and the danger associated with the eye ceremony even more clear. Writing on the ritual

which he observed in 1965 in the Kandyan hill country, he explains that ―[t]he ceremony

is regarded by its performers as very dangerous and is surrounded with tabus‖ which

protects those involved in the ceremony from the evil which results from ―arousing the

malevolent attention of a supernatural being, who usually conveys the evil by a gaze

(bälma).‖ The craftsman sets the eyes in the same manner that Coomaraswamy

describes, ―while looking into a mirror, which catches the gaze of the image he is

bringing to life.‖ Nonetheless, the craftsman acquires a dangerous gaze by painting

Buddha‘s eyes; therefore ―[h]e is led out blindfolded and the covering is only removed

from his eyes when they will first fall upon something which he then symbolically

destroys with a sword stroke.‖ The danger associated with the ritual is taken seriously at

least by the craftsman ―on whom the evil influence may fall‖ and he consequently ―insists

on the importance of every detail of the ceremony‖ (24-25). Gombrich concludes that the

―ceremony is so obviously motivated by fear that it cannot be rationalized in terms of

respect and affection for the memory of an omnibenevolent Buddha, whether dead or

alive‖ (24).

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most well-known aspect of the essay is Medusa‘s head as the symbol of castration: Freud

theorizes that ―To decapitate = to castrate. The terror of Medusa is thus a terror of

castration that is linked to the sight of something…. sight of the female genitals,

probably those of an adult, surrounded by hair….‖ Medusa‘s decapitated head is

horrifying because it represents the feared event of castration. For the purposes of this

chapter, however, what follows is of interest. Freud then goes on to identify the display

of Medusa‘s decapitated head as an apotropaic act: ―If Medusa‘s head takes the place of a

representation of the female genitals… it may be recalled that displaying the genitals is

familiar in other connections as an apotropaic act. What arouses horror in oneself will

produce that same effect upon the enemy against whom one is seeking to defend oneself‖

(212-13) Here Freud underscores the dual nature of the Gorgon, which is dangerous and

at the same time protective.

The protection comes from inflicting violence and pain on the enemy. In The

World’s Eye, Albert M. Potts attests to the widespread use of ―the representation of a

menacing face‖ for its apotropaic function in ancient cultures of which the image of

Gorgon is an example (26). In many cultures, masks with menacing features were

mounted on the highest point of a building to scare off the assailants and protect its

inhabitants. An important characteristic of the apotropaion, or an object with ―the power

of turning away evil,‖ is its capacity to strike terror into the heart of the onlooker. Potts

speculates that originally apotropaia ―owe their terrible and repellent properties to the

representation of the skull or the severed head of an enemy‖ (41). For example, when

threatened by an attack, the Maori of New Zealand set up the heads of the previously

89

slain enemy ―on stakes outside as a set of apotropaic symbols‖ (45). Presumably the

sight of the severed heads of their own people caused the enemy to lose courage, petrified

into inaction.

The potency of an apotropaion is not restricted to the enemy, however. Its

destructive effect is non-discriminatory and at times descends on the wielder of the

weapon. Returning to the myth of Medusa, French philosopher Louis Marin posits an

analysis that what kills Medusa is not Perseus‘ decapitating sword stroke, but her own

petrifying gaze reflected on the surface of his polished shield. In To Destroy Painting,

Marin writes on Caravaggio‘s Head of Medusa in the Uffizi Gallery, Florence (Fig. 2.1).

The artist had painted Medusa‘s face on a round shield for his patron, and this

painting/shield, like many other depictions of Medusa produced in the sixteenth and

seventeenth century, ―played a classic, prophylactic role of the apotropaion‖ (139).

However, Marin detects another story in Caravaggio‘s representation, namely, ―the trap

laid by Perseus‖ (144) to trick Medusa into looking at her own reflection in the shield.

The result is that ―Medusa is stupefied and turned into a statue by her own reflection.

The singular potency of her own gaze is applied intransitively to itself, reflecting itself

and thereby producing its own petrifaction…. Instead of a metamorphosis, one might

speak of an automorphosis in which Medusa immobilizes herself at the acme of her

violence‖ (148). Perseus does not vanquish her with his valor or ability, but by turning

her ―own strength against herself‖ (158). Ultimately Medusa‘s terrifying visage, which

has protected her from countless assailants by turning them into marble columns, causes

her own demise.

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Fig. 2.1 The Head of Medusa by Caravaggio. 1590-1600. Oil on canvas mounted on a wooden

shield. Galleria degli, Uffizi, Florence.

Online source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Medusa_by_Caravaggio.jpg

It could be inferred that Perseus who ―uses his shield…as a mirror to capture

Medusa in the trap of her own deadly gaze‖ (Marin 158) would himself become a victim

of the same reflective power. Not that Perseus turns into stone by his own reflection;

rather, Perseus grows to resemble Medusa, the Gorgon he slays. At least two artistic

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representations of the myth, one from the sixteenth century and the other from the

twentieth century, demonstrate this mirroring of the hero and the monster, the victor and

the victim (Dumoulié).28 In The Mirror of Medusa, Tobin Siebers analyzes Benvenuto

Cellini‘s sculpture Perseus which depicts Perseus holding up Medusa‘s severed head

(Fig. 2.2):

When the statue is seen from behind, Perseus and Medusa resemble each other;

the hero‘s tangled locks mimic the coils of the serpents that entwine his victim‘s

head…. Viewed from Perseus‘s right side, the statue resembles another Janus

figure; the hero and monster displaying identical profiles. The aquiline noses,

delicate cheek bones, and lowered eyes twin each other, presenting a baffling

spectacle for those in need of clear distinctions between the heroic and monstrous.

Standing in front of the statue, the beholder is mortified to discover that the faces

of the slayer and victim are doubled. Both the Gorgon and Perseus poise

themselves in serenity and peace, the only trace of violence being the twisted

limbs and spurting neck wound of Medusa‘s headless corpse. (12)

According to Cellini‘s vision, the hero and the monster are not very far apart. Paul Klee's

28

These paintings are Benvenuto Cellini‘s Perseus, 1554, bronze sculpture at

Loggia dei Lanzi, Florence and Paul Klee's L’esprit a combattu le mal (1904), which

seems to be the French title for Perseus (Wit has Triumphed over Grief)[Der Witz hat

uber das Leid gesiegt].

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Fig. 2.2 Perseus holding up Medusa‘s head by Benvenuto Cellini. 1554. Bronze sculpture.

Loggia dei Lanzi, Florence.

Online source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Persee-florence.jpg

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Fig. 2.3. Perseus (Wit has Triumphed over Grief)[Der Witz hat uber das Leid gesiegt]

from the series Inventions (Inventionen). Paul Klee. 1904. Etching and aquatint, plate: 5

x 5 5/8" (12.7 x 14.3 cm); sheet: 16 9/16 x 12 1/2" (42 x 31.8 cm). ARTstor. Web. 30

Nov. 2010.

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L’esprit a combattu le mal takes the matter even further (Fig. 2.3): his painting ―portrays

a complete reversal of roles -- Perseus is painted full face with a terrible countenance,

while Medusa turns aside‖ (Dumoulié). In this depiction, the transformation of the hero

into a monster is complete.

These artistic interpretations of the Medusa myth illustrate the inherent danger of

resorting to violence to counter violence, something Anil’s Ghost also warns against.

Anil’s Ghost is set in the midst of a civil war among ―three essential groups,‖ the

government, the insurgents in the south, and the terrorists in the north‖ who are caught up

in the vicious game of retaliation, the most prominent characteristic of which is the

mirroring of each other. Their efforts to scare off the enemy only intensify the conflict.

The novel is also populated by individuals who are profoundly affected by the terrible

sight and painful memories as a result of the war. These characters have averted their

eyes from the violence around them and turned the force of destruction inward, onto

themselves. The novel tells of their struggle to be freed from this petrifying past and to

mount their apotropaion, not of a menacing visage but one of ―peace and calm.‖

“The antigovernment insurgents in the south”: The Rise and Fall of Janatha

Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP)

Although the Author‘s Note identifies three essential groups involved in the Sri

Lankan conflict during the time Anil’s Ghost is set, the bulk of the novel deals with two

groups, the government and the insurgents in the south. The skeleton nicknamed Sailor,

whose identity provides the central mystery of the novel, came from ―an insurgent area‖

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(89). The terrorists in the north are only mentioned in about fifty pages in chapters ―The

Mouse‖ and ―Between Heartbeats,‖ and that only to serve as a backdrop to Gamini‘s

story. Therefore, I provide a short history of the insurgents and their impact on the Sri

Lankan civil war and politics.

Janatha Vimukthi Permuna (JVP), also known as People‘s Liberation Front, is a

leftist revolutionary movement founded in the late sixties by Rohana Wijeweera, who

remained its leader until the organization‘s demise in late 1989. Wijeweera‘s

commitment to leftist politics was a legacy of the previous generation: in 1947, when

Wijeweera was four years old, his father, who was a member of the Communist party,

was manhandled during an election campaign and as a result was bed-ridden until his

death in 1965. In 1960, Wijeweera won a medical degree scholarship to an International

University at Moscow and spent the next three and a half years in Moscow immersed in

Marxist Leninist political philosophy. In Moscow, Wijeweera got involved in the Sino-

Soviet ideological dispute of the time and became a supporter of the Peking wing, of

which he believed remained true to the teachings of Marx and Lenin, and rejected the

Soviet form of Communism as leaning towards a capitalistic form of government. As a

consequence, in 1964 Wijeweera was denied a return visa to Moscow, and he began a

career in Ceylon as ―a professional revolutionary politician, a Marxist-Leninist, a modern

Bolshevik and a proletarian revolutionary‖ (Alles 2-5). Thereafter, Wijeweera prepared

and delivered a series of basic lessons or classes aimed at instructing the rural proletariat

in politics. Those who showed particular interest were invited to educational camps

where they attended more theoretical classes in Marxist philosophy and economics, as

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well as initiated into some military training (Alles 13-21). Wijeweera believed that the

only way to take power away from the capitalist ruling class is through the means of

violent revolution: any time the socialist class is about to gain power through democratic

means, the capitalist government prevents it by seizing power by establishing a military

dictatorship (Alles 42-43). Therefore, Wijeweera planned an insurrection at 11:30 pm on

April 5, 1971, to overthrow the government through simultaneous attacks on 74 police

stations nationwide, army units, prison, and power stations, and by capturing the prime

minister. The plan was foiled, however, when the premature attacks on two of the police

stations alerted the police and the security forces (Alles 103-110). Subsequently, the

leaders of the insurrection were convicted and sentenced to various terms of

imprisonment under the Criminal Justice Commissions Act of 1972. The Act was

repealed in October of 1977, and the JVP leaders including Wijeweera were released.

Henceforward, the JVP tried to gain power through democratic process and won the

support of the masses during the time of economic downturn.

Meanwhile the Government was criticized for the misuse of authority in cases

such as suppressing legitimate public protests and dismissing the decisions of the courts

of law, culminating in the highly contested Referendum of 1982 that extended the life of

the Parliament for a further period of six years. Furthermore, the JVP in particular lost

faith in the Government when the party was proscribed for causing the ethnic riot of July

1983 in the absence of any evidence for such charge. The organization became interested

in the Tamil question mainly because it provided a convenient catch phrase to mobilize

the masses in its ideological war against the government, but in theory ethnicity was not

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an issue for the JVP. Its nationalist streak could not allow the division of the country as

the Tamils demanded, and its Marxist leanings saw India as the capitalist evil. Thus

when the IPKF set foot on the island after the accord, the JVP saw the event as the

beginning of an occupation and yet another proof for the Indian expansionism

(Chandraprema 118).

The government proscription against the JVP after the anti-Tamil riot drove the

organization underground to plot another armed insurrection (Alles 275-278). In 1984

the JVP resurrected military training camps in jungle areas, and robbed banks to supply

the organization with cash and raided military service camps and police stations for arms.

The late 1980s saw the height of violence in Sri Lanka. While the LTTE was trying to

establish a separate state in the north and the east, the JVP vied for control in the rest of

the country, or two-thirds of the island. The JVP sought to create the condition for class

revolution by destroying the economic infrastructure of the country: ―transport,

electricity, public utilities, postal services, irrigation works and factories‖ were

systematically sabotaged. Their aim was to make life impossible for ordinary citizens so

that they would rise up against the government (Chandraprema 26). Along with crippling

the infrastructure, the JVP carried out a campaign of terror by eliminating its political

opponents, government supporters and prominent citizens and businessmen, extending to

―threats against innocent citizens, the imposition of hartals and unlawful curfew resulting

in immense hardship to the masses.‖ By the end of 1989 approximately 12,000 people

were reported to have been killed by the JVP (Alles 286-88). At the height of their power

in 1987-89, they struck fear into people‘s hearts in the way that the LTTE had never done

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(Chandraprema 4).

The JVP‘s dissolution was singularly spectacular. This organization which had

been built up for two decades and had struck so much fear into the hearts of people at the

height of its power was decimated completely in a relatively short period. Starting in

October 1988, anti-JVP vigilante squads and paramilitary organizations began to

eliminate suspected JVP members in shockingly brutal fashion. In the process between

70,000 to 100,000 Sinhalese, mostly civilians, were also killed (Purnaka L. de Silva 53).

The leadership and composition of the vigilante squads remained undisclosed, but as

Alles suggests, their operations were tacitly condoned by the government (292). The

government also joined forces in earnest in the latter half of 1989, capturing and killing

Wijeweera on November 12, 1989, and in the span of two and a half months liquidated

the organization (Chandraprema 4).

The above information was compiled from two works, Sri Lanka: the Years of

Terror: the JVP Insurrection 1987-89 by C.A. Chandraprema and The JVP 1969-1989 by

A.C. Wells. The book by Chandraprema is the collection of fifty-one articles that the

author contributed to The Island between February and June of 1990. The Island is the

English daily that commands the widest circulation. Since it is an English newspaper, its

readers are most likely the educated elites of Colombo whose complacent attitude the

Marxist JVP attempted to undermine. Chandraprema attributes the ascendancy of the

JVP to the despair many unemployed youths felt during the time of economic uncertainty

which drove them to wreck havoc on the lives of the privileged class. Chandraprema‘s

goal in writing these articles is to understand the JVP‘s organization and ideology so that

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a similar insurgent organization might be prevented from being formed in the future.

A. C. Alles, the author of The JVP 1969-1989, has served as former Solicitor-

General and Judge of the Supreme Court of Sri Lanka. He was also a member of

Criminal Justice Commission that investigated the JVP‘s failed insurrection of 1971. His

aim in studying the JVP is similar to that of Chandraprema: to prevent the rise of a

similar organization in the future. The solution Alles provides is to pit the disgruntled

youths, who composed the rank and file of the JVP, against the Tamil militants. This

measure would eliminate the ―terrorist menace‖ posed by the LTTE and the JVP in one

stroke without addressing the more fundamental societal problems that fostered the

emergence of such groups.

Accounts of the counterterrorism measures adopted by the licit and illicit

organizations against the JVP have often underscored the fact that those organizations

used the same tactics employed by the JVP, at times magnified manifold in their brutality.

Purnaka L. de Silva has written on the mimesis of violence found amongst the

paramilitary groups and the state in Sri Lanka. The JVP, the LTTE, and the state

creatively imitated each other‘s tactics to suit their own needs. Moreover,

revenge/counter revenge killings were rampant. The demise of the JVP was accounted to

the backlash against the JVP ―executions‖ of the family members of the security

personnel. According to Purnaka L. de Silva, ―Soldiers, policemen, airmen and navy

personnel, reacted in a most extreme fashion, many in defence of their families. Whole

villages of suspected JVP sympathisers were wiped out, especially in the North-western.

central and southern provinces.‖ Thus began ―a brutal no-holds barred terror versus

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counter-terror contest‖ which turned out to be the prelude to the JVP demise (174). In

effect, the government held up a mirror against the JVP and terrified them with their own

reflection. However, in the process, the government came to be indistinguishable from

the enemy it was fighting against, like Cellini‘s Perseus, who resembles the Gorgon.

Michael Ondaatje‘s novel Anil’s Ghost is set during this period of turmoil in Sri

Lanka when the state forces were clandestinely eliminating insurgent sympathizers. In

the escalating exchange of reprisals, the novel points out, those who suffer the most are

the civilians caught in the crossfire.

‗I wanted to find one law to cover all of living. I found fear…,‘ the narrator of

Anil’s Ghost quotes Canadian poet Anne Carson in the section that discusses the

amygdala, the bundle of nerve cells that ―houses fearful memories‖ (134). Amygdala is

derived from the Greek word for almond, named so because of its shape. In turn,

almonds are associated with the eye and the eye-shaped apotropaic amulet, as Pierre

Bettez Gravel points out in The Malevolent Eye: ―As symbols, the oval, the almond shape

and the eye cannot be separated from each other‖ (91). Thus the etymology of amygdala

suggests that fear is inexplicably linked with sight.

There are two types of fear in Anil’s Ghost: a fear that arises from a terrible sight

and a fear induced by an unseen sight. Those who witness a terrible sight are encased in

an immobilizing nightmare, whereas those who are denied the visual proof become like

restless ghosts, haunted by specters of their own making. Those who wield violence, the

instigators of fear, skillfully adopt the two tactics to maximize fear and to escape

accountability.

101

The Living Dead: The Horror and Regression Suffered by the Survivors

During the height of the war between the Sri Lankan government and the

insurgents in the south, one of the government counterterrorism tactics was to display the

decapitated heads of the insurgents in their own villages to deter potential dissidents.

Sarath describes such a scene to Anil:

We have seen so many heads stuck on poles here, these last few years. It was at

its worst a couple of years ago. You‘d see them in the early mornings,

somebody‘s night work, before the families heard about them and came and

removed them and took them home. Wrapping them in their shirts or just cradling

them. Someone‘s son. These were blows to the heart. (184)

Such terrible sights produced the desired effect. Those who saw what they should not

end up being figuratively petrified like those who gaze on Medusa‘s head. Several

characters‘ lives were altered or affected after they witnessed fearful sights. Sirissa,

Ananda‘s wife, was a servant at the school when several students were executed and their

severed heads mounted on poles along the path that led to the school. One early morning,

as Sirissa was on her way to her customary work, she ―sees the heads of the two students

on stakes, on either side of the bridge, facing each other.‖ She sees more heads as she

continues to walk on the path as if sucked into a nightmare: ―She would shrink down into

herself, go back, but she cannot. She feels something is behind her, whatever is the cause

of this…. She begins running forward, past their eyes, her own shut dark until she is past

them‖ (175). Later, we find out that she disappeared after this event, most likely rounded

up by the government as an insurgent rebel sympathizer (185).

102

Another character, Lakma, the blind epigraphist Palipana‘s adolescent niece, ―had

seen her parents killed…in the civil war‖ when she was twelve years old. Subsequently,

―the shock…had touched everything within her, driving both her verbal and her motor

ability into infancy‖ (103; italics added). As a coping mechanism to the traumatic event,

Lakma regressed to the condition of childhood and self-inflicted isolation. She became

―silent, non-reacting,… unable to deal with the possible danger around her.‖ She cut

herself off from the outside world and human contact until her uncle took her as his

companion and guide in his blindness. There Lakma learned to trust him; nonetheless,

she never regained her ability to speak. She was silenced by the awful sight.

Like those who had a full view of Medusa‘s head, these characters became frozen

with terror. The way to deal with this problem is to avert one‘s eyes or somehow avoid

direct scrutiny in order to mitigate the awfulness. Much of Anil and Sarath‘s

investigation of the bodies of the alleged political victims is conducted in dimly lit dark

places: the lab on the old ship Oronsai is lit by sulfur lights. Ananda is notorious for

avoiding any brightly lit places, preferring torches and batteried lights to electrical lights.

The message is that the awfulness of the truth must be examined dimly ―in the light of a

burning rhododendron bush‖ (156). When Ananda attempted to kill himself in the middle

of the night, Sarath lights an oil lamp, but ―it was too bright for them at that hour, and he

turned down the wick, because what he could see was terrible‖ (196). The dim light

makes the confrontation with the terrible reality more tolerable.

Similarly, for his weekly human rights violation reports, Gamini does not directly

look at the bodies of the torture victims, but works from the photographs of their wounds.

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He further minimizes his emotional toll by covering the faces of the victims (212-13).

Direct exposure to terrible sights is harmful, and one must take protective measures that

safeguard one‘s sanity.

Encountering a terrible sight, such as the death of one‘s family members and

neighbors, affects the survivor deeply. But what is even worse than seeing the

dismembered bodies of the loved one is ―when a family member simply disappeared and

there was no sighting or evidence of his existence or his death‖ (184). There are

countless number of bodies littering the landscape of Anil’s Ghost, yet most of them are

unidentified and unclaimed by the family members anxiously looking for them. There

are bodies washed onto shore like fish caught in a net (213), bodies blasted by anti-

personnel mines or shredded to pieces by suicide bombers (294), and bodies intentionally

hidden or burned by their murderers to cover up any wrong doing (42). In many cases

the faces of torture victims are disfigured to forestall recognition: ―cases where every

tooth had been removed, the nose cut apart, the eyes humiliated with liquid, the ears

entered…. They could in their hideous skills sniff out vanity‖ (290). Their identities

have been deleted and their forms made invisible along with any acknowledgement that

horrible things have happened, and the survivors are left with the legacy of searching for

those missing bodies.

The novel opens with Anil at work in Guatemala prior to her Sri Lankan

assignment, exhuming bodies interred en masse in unidentified graves. Every day

someone from the community would wait by the excavation site to find out if it contains

the body of their missing family members:

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There was always the fear, double-edged, that it was their son in the pit, or that it

was not their son—which meant there would be further searching. If it became

clear that the body was a stranger, then, after weeks of waiting, the family would

rise and leave. They would travel to other excavations in the western highlands.

The possibility of their lost son was everywhere. (5)

The presence of the unaccounted for permeates the landscape and haunts the waking

moments of the survivors. In Sri Lanka, Anil read the reports on missing people filed by

their family members detailing the ―hour, location, apparel, the activity. . . Going for a

bath. Talking to a friend. . .‖ (42; italics in the original), any shred of information that

would help with the investigation. Unless the condition of uncertainty created by ―the

vacuum of disappearance‖ (307) is addressed, the survivors, unable to rest, wander

restlessly searching for the missing proof.

Invisible Murderers: “A Perfect Participant in the war”

Like the victims who remain nameless and faceless, the identities of the

murderers are not revealed. Upon arriving in Sri Lanka, Anil recalls the lines from

Archilochus she translated at university: ―In the hospitality of war we left them their dead

to remember us by. But here there was no such gesture to the families of the dead, not

even the information of who the enemy was‖ (11; italics in the original). The enemy

hides behind a mask or strikes in darkness to escape detection. The person who accused

Ruwan Kumara, better known as the skeleton nicknamed Sailor for the most of the novel,

was ―a billa—someone from the community with a gunnysack over his head, slits cut out

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for his eyes—to anonymously identify the rebel sympathizer. A billa was a monster, a

ghost, to scare children in games‖ (269). Earlier in the novel, the readers encounter a

murder of a government official on a train by an unknown assailant. The man described

only as ―carrying a bird cage with a mynah in it‖ and ―wearing a sarong, sandals, a Galle

Road T-shirt‖ (31) strangles the government official while the train is passing through a

tunnel. The darkness and the buffeting noise of the tunnel conceal his action. To all

purposes these murderers are unknown yet familiar, the next-door neighbor or a fellow

passenger whom one encounters throughout the course of the day.

Moreover, it could be that the victim and the murderer are not that different from

each other. Teresa Derrickson points out the juxtaposition of the scene in which the

skeleton of Sailor is introduced and the scene of the murder of the government official on

the train, and writes that the young assailant on the train ―could very well be a living

version of Sailor himself‖ (140). The novel does not vouch for Sailor‘s innocence, and

he could very well have been a member of the anti-government insurgency movement

who contributed to ―[t]error everywhere, from all sides‖ (Ondaatje 154).

The character who has the most in common with these faceless executioners is

ironically Gamini, a doctor who wields a scalpel to save lives, the antithesis of a soldier

who takes lives through violent means. Gillian Roberts feels that those in the medical

profession are the true heroes of the novel: ―Throughout, the figure of the doctor and the

location of the hospital are crucial in their positions of neutrality, embody-

ing Ondaatje‘s notion of ‗furious heroic pacifism‘ (‗My Thank-You‘ r2)‖ (969). Yet

Gamini‘s dedication as a doctor is accompanied by impersonality and invisibility. As the

106

younger brother to Sarath, "the intelligent and bound to be successful older son," Gamini

was nicknamed "Meeya" or the Mouse as a child, and was a quiet observer of the family

drama whose "parents much of the time weren't even aware of him half buried in an

armchair" (221). He developed a talent as a mimic, and "remained invisible, even to

himself, seldom looking into mirrors save when dressed in costumes" (223). As an adult,

Gamini appears as a creature of the darkness, in a perpetual state of stupor induced by

drugs and sleep deprivation, constantly being woken up by a night-shift nurse. He is

most comfortable in anonymity, whether at a costume party or behind the surgical mask

of the emergency room. Masks and disguises invade even his private relationships.

Gamini proposes to the woman he loves at a fancy dress party disguised as a yakka, and

at first she does not recognize him (210). Another romantic encounter is with a Tamil

nurse during a surgery, both of them wearing masks, so that later Gamini fails to

recognize the nurse (246). Disguises and masks provide him with a hiding place where

he does not have to reveal himself or be seen by others.

Those around Gamini are denied their names and identities, as well. As a surgeon,

―[h]is duties made him come upon strangers and cut them open without ever knowing

their names‖ (211). The identities of those who matter to Gamini are also deleted; the

readers never know the names of the women he loved. When Gamini tells Anil about

Sarath‘s wife on the train, Anil asks whom he is speaking of, and Gamini spits out, ―What

would you do with a name?‖ (252). The Tamil nurse who resembles Sarath‘s wife also

remains nameless. While Gamini is stationed in a field hospital in the northeast, the

nurse assists him in performing Fallot‘s tetralogy, a difficult heart operation, on a boy.

107

Later Gamini searches for her name in the registrar's log. The entry contains these

names:

Prethiko

Seela

Raduka

Buddhika

Kaashdya

He moves his fingers down the ledger to check the assignments, discovers her

name. (248; italics in the original)

However, Gamini‘s discovery is not shared with the readers. It is unclear whether the

name of the nurse is included in this list. The identities of these two women are lost in

the vacuum of Gamini‘s past, like many casualties of the civil war.

The novel‘s verdict on Gamini is that he is ―a perfect participant in the war‖ (224).

Perhaps it is because, as Margaret Scanlan points outs, some of the patients Gamini treats

―will recover only to resume terrorizing other‖ (311). Perhaps the fact that Gamini ―felt

himself on a boat of demons and himself to be the only clearheaded and sane person

there‖ (224) is a dangerous hubris shared by those involved in the war. Or perhaps there

is a streak of irresponsible violence as hinted at in an incident from his childhood. One

day while staying at his aunt‘s house, Gamini tries to shoot out the flame of a candle with

an air gun. He placed the lit candle ―on a side table a yard or so to the right of‖ the group

of ladies gathered to play bridge on the porch. Then Gamini ―crawled on his belly with

his air rifle through the grass, stalking his way from the bottom of the garden towards the

house. He was wearing a small camouflage hat of leaves to disguise his presence even

further.‖ Gamini misses the flame and instead hits an ankle: ―At that instant,

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simultaneous with the gasp from Mrs. Coomaraswamy, his aunt looked up and saw him

with the air rifle hugged against his cheek and shoulder, aiming right at them‖ (226).

This disconcerting episode brings together the military tactic of striking without being

detected and the reference to the ethnic war brewing in the nation: it is interesting that

Gamini‘s victim, Mrs. Coomaraswamy, is one of the two Tamil characters mentioned by

name.29

Shounan Hsu observes that the novel refers to the dynamic between Sarath and

Gamini as a ―secret war‖ (Ondaatje 221), utilizing the domestic fraternal competition as a

metaphor and commentary on the political war of the nation (Hsu 2). The war between

brothers ―had begun with the desire to be the other, even with the impossibility of

emulating him‖ (Ondaatje 221). Unable to be his brother, Gamini chooses to construct

his identity in opposition to Sarath, courting wildness and notoriety in contrast to the

responsible and mild Sarath. Gamini is a counterpart and an antithesis of his older

brother, yet they are also ―too similar in essence‖ (289), as indicated by the resemblance

of Gamini‘s name with gemini, the Latin word for twins.30

As Sarath‘s ―unhappy

29

The other is Lalitha, Anil‘s childhood ayah.

30 Gamini‘s name comes from Duttu Gemunu (also spelled Dutthagamani), the

legendary Sinhalese king who defeated the Tamil king Elara of Anuradhapura. Duttu

Gemunu was the king of the south-eastern principality of Ruhuna in the second century

B.C. Elara, known as a usurper, was a Tamil from the Cola country in south India who

ruled the northern kingdom of Rajarata. Duttu Gemunu, who was the descendant of the

royal family of Rajarata, defeated Elara in a famous battle and united the island under one

ruler for the first time in history. The account of Duttu Gemunu‘s campaign and victory

against Elara was resurrected by the Sinhalese during the modern day ethnic conflict and

was used as the justification and inspiration for the war (Nicholas and Paranavitana 54-

67).

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shadow‖ (288), Gamini is caught up in ―[t]he false and true alternatives‖ (249), trapped in

the mirror image of his own making.

The familial war between Gamini and Sarath culminates in the suicide of Sarath‘s

wife who is caught between the two brothers: married to the older brother, the novel

suggests that she was involved in an affair with the younger brother (251). However, just

as the novel is reluctant to explore the origins of the civil war in Sri Lanka and to assign

blame, dismissing that question with a remark, ―[e]very side was killing and hiding the

evidence‖ (17), it is also not interested in clarifying the reasons behind the suicide of

Sarath‘s wife. After her death, Sarath ―buried. . . their life‖ and did not seek ―whatever

motives she had for leaving him, whatever vices and faults and lack he had within him

that drove her away‖ (279). More significantly, her perspective is never given, and only

a few pieces of her story are reflected and refracted through other characters. She

remains murky and fragmented like ―a tableau in somebody‘s dream‖ (31). Even her

name is undisclosed for the most part of the novel, like so many anonymous victims of

the civil war.31

As for Gamini, he reveals the aftermath of this romance to Anil on a train-ride

through the tunnels, in keeping with his tendency to hide behind disguises and masks and

his preference for the stupor of drug-induced sleeplessness:

I was the one she should have loved, Gamini said….

[T]he train swept unhesitatingly into the darkness of tunnels and he would turn

from looking at his hands towards his reflection in the glass. That was how he

31

The Tamil nurse, who resembles Sarath‘s wife, also remains nameless (248).

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told her, looking down or away from her, and she seeing him only in a wavering

mirror image lost when they moved back into light. (251; italics in the original)

Gamini turns to the dim reflection in the glass when he chooses to revisit his past, like

Perseus who dares not approach his enemy directly but gazes at Medusa‘s reflection on

his shield. Gamini‘s body language mirrors his attitude towards his past. In explaining

the reason‘s for the suicide of Sarath‘s wife, Gamini says, ―There are always a lot of

suicides during a war. At first that seems strange, but you learn to understand it. And

she, I think, was overcome by it‖ (252). Gamini exonerates himself from any culpability

in her suicide, blaming it on the war, on what is external to their relationship. Like Paul

Klee‘s depiction of Perseus, Gamini has turned into a monster, one of the ―demons. . . on

a boat‖ (223).

“What would you do with a name?”: Resurrecting the Dead

The goal of the investigation against the civil war is to reclaim the identities of

disappeared victims, to match the names with the bodies, and to make visible what had

been carefully hidden. Anil and Sarath start out by identifying one such victim they call

Sailor, who is supposed to be the ―representative of all those lost voices,‖ for, as Anil

believes ―[t]o give him a name would name the rest‖ (56). In recovering the identity of

this victim of the public war, the central characters also confront the ―skeletons‖ of their

past and thus bring a resolution to the private wars that have been raging inside them.

Chelva Kanaganayakam points out that ―The identity of Sailor is established at

the end, but it leads to no resolution, no denouement. It is thus no more than an aside‖

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(21). If the reader expected an unlocking of a grand mystery as in a detective novel, to

which Anil’s Ghost has been compared, the aftermath of the disclosure of the Sailor‘s

identity is disappointing. What Anil and Sarath discover about Sailor is summarized in

one paragraph, bare-bones like his remains: ―Sarath and Anil had identified Sailor at the

third plumbago village. He was Ruwan Kumara and he had been a toddy tapper. After

breaking his leg in a fall he had worked in the local mine, and the village remembered

when the outsiders had picked him up‖ (269). The story of Ruwan Kumara is a

representative, rather than an individual one. What had happened to him could easily

have happened to countless men and women. For example, Ananda, who restores Ruwan

Kumara‘s face, shares many parallels with him: both worked in the mines after they were

no longer able to work in their previous occupations. Ananda‘s occupational marker as a

miner, the strictures on the ankle bones, becomes instrumental in putting together a story

for Sailor (179). And given Ananda‘s involvement in the investigation of a human rights

violation, he could have suffered a similar fate. And ultimately, Sarath is tortured to

death for exposing the government involvement in the murder of Ruwan Kumara. One

way or another, the fate of Sailor becomes an exemplary one; it happened to him sooner

than to Sarath. What the readers fail to learn about the back-story behind Sailor‘s

disappearance, they gather in regards to Sarath, Ananda, Gamini, and Anil. Theirs is the

story before the disappearance, and the novel is ultimately for the living, not for the dead.

The novel‘s mission of reclaiming the identities and voices of the dead is joined

by another one of providing closure and peace to the survivors, those victims who have to

live with the grief over the loss of their loved ones and the fear of what might also happen

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to themselves. Ganapathy-Dore suggests that by identifying the anonymous dead, the

survivors are no longer haunted by the ghosts of the missing loved ones: ―In war-torn

nation like Sri Lanka, naming a dead body is an act of political resistance and personal

appeasement. The symbolic representation of the anonymous and decaying body helps

sublimate its entry into formlessness. The onlooker is no longer petrified by guilt at the

sight of a corpse and is able to proceed with the business of living‖ (5). By reclaiming

the lost loved ones, the survivors reclaim their own lives that had been trapped in the

trauma of the past.

Many characters in Anil’s Ghost are skilled at repressing painful memories by

adopting self-destructive measures as coping mechanisms. Anil and Sarath turn to work

to compensate for the lack of relationships in their lives, and Gamini turns to drugs to

cope with the loss of the woman he loved and to deal with the madness of violence

around him. After his wife Sirissa is abducted, Ananda descends into the abyss—literally

into the earth as a miner and figuratively into the darkness of his soul marked by a period

of avoidance and of regression, of drunken stupor to forget his loss. These are ill-suited

safety defenses that result in isolation. These characters spin a cocoon of protection that

is meant to shield them from further harm, but also make them more isolated and cut off

from human contact. Though alive, they are like the living dead; they have already

experienced the worst, and consequently they are immune to the threat of death, not

caring what would happen to them.

Recovering the dead also means confronting the painful past. The novel

conceptualizes fear in terms of sight—fear induced by a terrible sight and fear induced by

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the disappearance from the sight. The way to counter this onslaught on the vision is to

maintain a clear sight. In some cases, the ability to see clearly is linked to life itself. As a

miner, Ananda had to descend into the earth and work in a cramped space dimly lit by a

single candle. If the candle blew out, it is sent to the surface to be lit again while the

miners wait patiently for its return. Incidentally, the flame of the candle also indicate that

the air is breathable and its extinction means danger (92).

Eyeglasses, another visual-aid device, also serves the function of protection.

When Ananda tried to kill himself after reconstructing Sailor‘s head, Anil panicked to

find out that he was not wearing his glasses:

Oh my God—he wasn‘t wearing his glasses. He couldn‘t see. She found

them on the floor….

She rubbed the blood on her hands onto her sarong and placed the

spectacles on his face. Suddenly, in spite of his wound, in spite of the knife still

in his right hand, still a threat, he seemed to be back with her, among the living.

(197)

Ananda is brought back to the land of the living with the aid of his glasses. The ability to

see prevented him from slipping into unconsciousness and to death.

Palipana‘s glasses also serve a protective measure. Palipana handed down ―his

old, weathered spectacles‖ to Lakma before he died, and after his death, ―she would take

only this talisman of these glasses with her when she went into the forest‖ (107). Here

the glasses become a talisman, an apotropaic object that averts evil and protects Lakma

who was endangered by seeing what she should have not.

114

Although confronting the painful past is crucial to healing and reconciliation, it

comes at a cost. In Anil’s Ghost mining, an activity fraught with danger, serves as a

metaphor for digging for the missing bodies, searching for the evidence, and uncovering

the truth. Therefore, it is fitting that Ananda, the character who is associated with mining,

should be entrusted with the reconstruction of Sailor‘s head. But in his descent into the

realm of the dead ―to call forth the dead‖ (196), he encounters the image of his missing

wife Sirissa and inscribes on Sailor‘s countenance an expression of ―a calm [h]e had

known in his wife, a peacefulness he wanted for any victim‖ (187). Shortly afterwards,

Ananda attempts to kill himself to join his wife, but fortunately, Anil‘s timely

intervention saves his life. And it is after he is rescued from the realm of the dead that he

puts his life back together. It is only after the descent into the darkness that one can

ascend to the light again; it is only after looking at the face of the terror that one wakes

from the nightmare.

Sarath is not so lucky. In the end Sarath refuses to be complicit in the government

cover-up of human rights violation and returns Sailor, which was confiscated by the

government, to Anil so that she could make a case against the government. The novel

describes his choice as stepping out the darkness of denial into the light: in a symbolic

gesture, Sarath emerges from a dark tunnel with Sailor and ―broke out into daylight‖

(280). And it is with this public acknowledgment of the societal wrong that Sarath is able

to confront the pain of his personal past: it is then that Ravina, Sarath‘s nameless wife, is

given back her name, reclaimed from the darkness of anonymity (279). Sarath‘s sacrifice

also ends the ―secret war‖ between the brothers. On a Friday afternoon during his weekly

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human rights report, Gamini recognizes the picture of Sarath‘s body, the face covered as

usual so that Gamini can ―work better‖ in identifying the wounds. But this time Gamini

does not avert his eyes from the terrible sight; instead, he races over to the morgue to

verify the truth. Holding the dead body of his brother and dressing its wounds, Gamini

finally takes off the mask that has been separating him from the world. He unlocks his

heart, blurting out all that had been unsaid, breaking the barrier that separated the two,

and coming to terms with the loss (291-95, 223).

The novel uses religious language to describe this last meeting between Gamini

and Sarath, as ―a pieta between brothers‖ (288). Gamini‘s grief over Sarath‘s dead body

is compared to the lamentation over Christ‘s dead body, a connection reinforced by the

fact that ―there seemed to be a mark like that made with a spear. A small wound, not

deep in [Sarath‘s] chest‖ (289). Thus the sight of a tortured body that is meant to produce

fear becomes an occasion for a sacred moment. Similarly, Sailor‘s restored head loses its

power to terrify and petrify, and instead draws the community together. Sailor‘s face is

displayed like the severed head of the students witnessed by Sirissa. But this head is not

meant to be a ―blow to the heart‖ (184). ―[A]n unknown, unwished-for drummer had

attached himself to it, begun playing beside it‖ until the face would be recognized, given

a name (205).

Albert Potts informs us that in ancient cultures, skulls of ancestors were preserved

as well as those of the enemies, and two types of heads served different purposes--the

ancestors‘ heads were used during ceremonial occasions whereas the heads of the enemy

were used to scare off the attackers (45). Sailor‘s restored head is not a ―specter of

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retaliation,‖ but an emblem of the restoration of the community, an apotropaion against

the message of fear disseminated by the invisible agents of violence.

“Truth is just an opinion”: The Case of Senerat Paranavitana

―Without the eyes there is not just blindness, there is nothing. There is no

existence. The artificer brings to life sight and truth and presence‖ (Ondaatje 99), thus

explains the blind epigraphist Palipana to Sarath and Anil in regards to netra mangala or

the eye-painting ceremony which any representation of the Buddha has to undergo before

it becomes a God. In the character of Palipana, sight, both physical and intuitive,

assumes another importance, the ability to see beyond what is readily available into the

hidden truth. Therefore, it is ironic that the novel betrays some blind-spots in regards to

Palipana‘s real-life model Senerat Paranavitana, the eminent epigraphist and philologist,

who dominated the Sri Lankan archeological scene for three decades in the mid-twentieth

century. Paranavitana‘s prolific career in conservation and the extent of his publications

are impressive. He was the first Ceylonese to hold the post of Archaeological

Commissioner (1940-56), and in this capacity, he excavated and restored a large number

of historical sites and monuments and filled in the gaps in the island‘s history. After his

tenure as Archaeological Commissioner, he was Research Professor of Archeology at the

University of Ceylon, Peradeniya until 1965 (Marcus Fernando 174). Like his fictional

counterpart, Paranavitana‘s greatest passion and achievement involved the fifth-century

fortress of Sigiriya (Devendra 33), and like Palipana, he was accused of forging his

evidence towards the end of his career. Thus far the parallel between Paranavitana and

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Palipana is accurate. What the novel leaves out is that Paranavitana was also a staunch

proponent of the Aryan theory, which helped fuel the island‘s ethnonationalism. Instead,

Palipana, the fictional counterpart of Paranavitana, is portrayed as a wise sage who peers

into the hidden truth.

Anil’s Ghost introduces Palipana living in seclusion after this preeminent Sri

Lankan epigraphist, who is also Sarath‘s former teacher, had lost much of his reputation

due to his unverifiable discovery of interlinear inscriptions. The novel describes

Palipana‘s downfall as follows:

This began with his publication of a series of interpretations of rock graffiti that

stunned archaeologists and historians. He had discovered and translated a

linguistic subtext that explained the political tides and royal eddies of the island in

the sixth century. The work was applauded in journals abroad and at home, until

one of Palipana‘s protégés voiced the opinion that there was no real evidence for

the existence of these texts. They were a fiction. A group of historians was

unable to locate the runes Palipana had written about. (81)

In spite of the controversy over the supposed fabrication, the novel is sympathetic

towards Palipana‘s predicament over his ―unprovable truth‖ (83). Jon Kertzer calls

Palipana ―an Ondaatjean hero: a flawed, romantic scientist so in touch with his work that

he can read the language of stone and ―leap from treetop to treetop‖ by making daring

inferences‖ (123). Margaret Scanlan sees a parallel between Palipana‘s discovery of the

banned history of the fourth and sixth centuries and the novel‘s central investigation of

the government cover-up (309). Just as those in power concealed and destroyed evidence

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in the twentieth century, certain ―truths‖ unfavorable to the ruling classes of the past were

suppressed from the official history and were clandestinely passed down to the posterity

hidden between the lines of the official ―lies.‖

The novel suggests that Palipana‘s physical blindness is what gives him authority in

this novel. This handicap, not found in Palipana‘s real-life model Paranavitana, allows a

comparison between Palipana and Tiresias (Burton 47), and, as R.G. A. Buxton observes

in the context of the ancient Greece, ―Poets and seers have in common the power to see

and know more than ordinary men…. But, precisely for that reason, they blur the

distinction between god and man. In order to preserve the distinction intact, special

powers possessed by mortals are, in the logic of myth, balanced by special defects‖ (29).

Similarly, as Palipana lost his eyesight, he ―felt something else, the way those who are

colour-blind are used to see through camouflage during war, to see the existing structure

of the figure‖ (191). Palipana‘s ―potent sightlessness‖ (97) allows him an access to the

truth that lies beyond what one can gather with the senses.

As Marlene Goldman points out, Palipana‘s career and the circumstances of his

downfall closely resembles those of Senerat Paranavitana (5). Between the years 1966

and 1972, Paranavitana published three books based on his discovery of ―historical

documents in Sanskrit, engraved between the lines in Sri Lankan inscriptions‖ (Guruge,

―Senarat Paranavitana‖ 157).32

Ananda Guruge calls this finding ―[a] massive discovery,

which if authentic, would have brought Sri Lanka the same high degree of prestige and

32

These are Ceylon and Malaysia (1966), The Greeks and the Mauryas (1971),

and The Story of Sigiri (1972).

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attention in the scholarly world as that of the Rosetta Stone or the Dead Sea Scrolls‖

(161). However, as Guruge points out, the existence of these historical documents were

called into question as ―[n]o epigraphist has yet succeeded in seeing what Paranavitana

had seen‖ (164). D.P.M. Weerakkody charges Paranavitana of composing these

interlinear inscriptions himself and presenting them as evidence to support his own

theories which were being challenged at the time (269). Guruge also concludes that ―All

the evidence of language and style and the modernity of the contents and the underlying

knowledge base compels one to come to the conclusion that every word presented as

found on ―interlinear inscriptions‖ is written by none other than Paranavitana himself‖

(―Senarat Paranavitana‖ 178). The picture of Paranavitana that emerges from the

analyses of Weerakkody and Guruge is that of an undeclared writer of historical fiction at

best and a forger of evidence motivated by covering his own back at worst.

‗Most of the time in our world, truth is just opinion‘ (Ondaatje 102), says Palipana

to Anil, suggesting that she curb her reliance on the material truth of science found in

―bones and sediments.‖ What transpired among the Sinhalese politicians and academics

in the late nineteenth century demonstrates the power of opinion in shaping the fate of a

nation and the lives of those who live in it. The late nineteenth century witnessed the

emergence of the Sinhalese nationalism based on the claim that the Sinhalese people on

the island have had a continuous history as a nation for 2,500 years (Rogers 11). This

primordialist argument was advanced by Sinhalese nationalists to support their rights to

the land and to disenfranchise minority groups. R.A.L.H. Gunawardana writes, ―The

―historiographical‖ project undertaken by some Sinhala ethnonationalists has been the

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construction of a past in which the Sinhala language and the Sinhala ethnic identity had

been always present since the beginning of history. In this imagined past all the Sinhala

ethnics are Buddhists while their enemies who invade, create disruption and occupy their

land are Tamil-speaking Hindus‖ (Historiography 10).

Paranavitana, as an eminent epigraphist and historian, was instrumental in the

consolidation of the Sinhalese identity. In Sinhalayo, a short introductory book on the

history of Sinhalese civilization published in 1967, Paranavitana traces the history of the

Sinhalese people to the earliest recorded history. Sinhalayo opens with the words ―Ceylon

is referred to, in ancient Sanskrit literature, as Simhaladvipa, i.e. the Island of the

Simhalas. The people called by this name have inhabited this Island from the earliest

historical times. The name by which it is now known internationally is a modification of

Simhala‖ (1).33

Sinhalayo was reprinted in 1999 and was used to propagate the Sinhalese

claim to the island. Dr. Vernon Mendis, who was referred as the Sri Lanka‘s Father of

Diplomacy, hailed the book as ―the early history of the civilization of Sri Lanka, as the

creation of the Sinhalayos who were its indigenous inhabitants augmented later by

immigrants. The original inhabitants were Indo-Aryan in their language and culture who

33

Paranavitana makes a similar claim in A Concise History of Ceylon. In

―Chapter II: Aryan settlements and the early kings of Ceylon,‖ he subscribes to the Aryan

theory: ―The recorded history of Ceylon begins about the sixth century before Christ,

with the settlement in this Island of a people named Simhala. The majority of the people

still inhabiting this Island are known by that name and the language which they speak,

while being akin to the Aryan languages of North India, has been evolved in the course of

centuries from that of the earliest inscriptions found in various parts of Ceylon, dating

from the third century B.C. downwards. The tradition recorded in the Pali chronicles that

the ancestors of the Sinhalese migrated into this Island from a region in North India is

thus confirmed by the evidence of their language‖ (Nicholas and Paranavitana 17).

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were attracted to the island around 5 centuries before the Christian era and founded the

civilization of the island which would endure for over 2500 years.‖34

This primordialist argument advanced by Paranavitana and others were

challenged by many respected historians. For example, R.A.L.H. Gunawardana, K.N.O.

Dharmadasa, and S.J. Tambiah argue that the term Sinhalese first referred to the ruling

family and gradually extended to cover Sinhalese speakers and assumed a cultural

connotation over time (Rogers 11-12).35

Even the idea of the Sinhalese ethnic group was

the nineteenth-century creation not shared by the earlier inhabitants of the island. Rogers

writes that before the nineteenth century, ―Sinhalese seems to have functioned more as a

cultural and political label‖ rather than to ―a belief in shared ancestry‖ (17). Moreover,

subsequent immigration and intermarriage over the period of several centuries render the

claim that the present-day Sinhalese are the descendents of the sixth-century B.C. settlers

meaningless (Nissan and Stirrat 22-24).

Paranavitana was at the center of another ethnonationalistic project surrounding

the interpretation of an inscription on a gold foil found at Vallipuram in Jaffna, the Tamil-

dominated area in the north of the island. In a 1939 publication, Paranavitana concluded

34

It would be inaccurate to refer to these Indo-Aryan speakers as the ―indigenous

inhabitants‖ of the island. According to Paranavitana, Pali writings mentions that people

referred as Milkkhas and Nesadas were already on the island when the Indo-Aryan

settlers arrived (Nicholas and Paranavitana 26-27).

35

These scholars differ in the timing and the nature of the coalescing of the

Sinhalese identity. Dharmadasa posits that the Sinhalese identity was established around

the fifth century, whereas Tambiah argues that the term Sinhalese assumed a broader

cultural connotation around the tenth century. Gunawardana‘s timeframe is the latest: he

concludes that the term Sinhalese was extended to cover all Sinhalese speakers around

the twelfth century (Rogers 12, 17).

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that the language of this first century A.D. inscription was Sinhala, and this claim was

seized by some as ―justification for Sinhala domination over the Jaffna Peninsula.‖

Paranavitana revised his initial assessment in his later publication based on the generally

accepted scholarly opinion, which dates the emergence of the Sinhala language in the

eight or the ninth century. However, Gunawardana points out that Paranavitana‘s revised

view has been largely ignored since his earlier view proved more useful in the

nationalistic debate (Historiography 10-15). The controversy surrounding the Vallipuram

inscription exemplifies how no historical insight is permanent, and how historiographical

projects can be manipulated to serve the interests of certain groups.

The history of the ethnic conflict on the island illustrates the dangerous

consequences of the ―creative imagination‖ exercised by historians such as Paranavitana

in overlapping the present and the past. As Marlene Goldman points out, in Anil’s Ghost

―the blending of fact and fiction in Palipana‘s translations of the inscriptions…highlights

the predicament in Sri Lanka where ―myth has become historical reality and history

myth‖(Kapferer 34)‖ (5). The story of the real-life model of Palipana is that of select

opinions, not suppressed reality, parading as truth. The novel writes that Palipana was

―for a number of years at the centre of a nationalistic group,‖ not for bolstering Sinhalese

nationalism at the expense of the minorities, but for ―wrestl[ing] archaeological authority

in Sri Lanka away from the Europeans‖ (Ondaatje 79). In neglecting to include

Paranavitana‘s contribution to the exacerbation of the ethnic conflict in the portrayal of

Palipana, the novel betrays a blind-spot with regards to an important historical truth.

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The Reconstruction of Community: A Sinhala Buddhist Vision

The last act of violence depicted in the novel is that of the assassination of a

fictitious Sri Lankan president by the name of Katugala, which closely resembles an

actual assassination of President Ranasinghe Premadasa in May 1993. Thus far the novel

was mostly concerned about the human rights violation by the government, in particular

focusing on establishing the identity of one victim who would represent all the rest. But

the table is turned with the assassination of the head of the state as it was proven that

those in power and wielding authority are also potential victims. The selection of this

particular historical event to showcase the vulnerability of those in power is problematic

in that the actual assassination of President Premadasa was allegedly perpetrated by a

Tamil Tiger suicide bomber named Kulaweerasingham Weerakumar (Pratap, Island 99),

whereas the civilian victims murdered by the government mentioned by name in the

novel are exclusively Sinhalese. Thus ethnic politics intrudes in the narrative in spite of

Ondaatje‘s intention to steer clear of it. Katugala‘s assassin, whom the novel calls R___,

is the only identifiable killer in Anil’s Ghost, a novel in which murders are past events

committed by nameless and faceless agents.

President Katugala‘s assassination parallels the destruction of a Buddha statue in

Buduruvagala: both are blown up to pieces by a bomb. Thus, the demise of the Sinhalese

president is linked to the destruction of the Buddha statue, and the reconstruction of the

community symbolized in the rebuilding of the statue is presented as a strictly Buddhist

one that excludes participation of the minorities. Ananda, who reconstructed Sailor‘s

head, lives on to complete the reconstruction of the statue. Concurrently, he builds a new

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statue and performs netra mangala on the new statue. Ananda‘s association with

Buddhism is implicit in his name: he is named after Gotama Buddha‘s premier disciple.

Just as the restoration of Sailor‘s head has a redemptive meaning to Ananda, the

reconstruction of the Buddha statue serves to bring the community together. Instead of

making war or engaging in fighting, they combine their effort to restore and create

religious artifacts and works of art.

M.S. Nagarajan is among many critics who find in the conclusion of the novel a

humanistic vision that transcends violence: ―The superb ending is on a positive note of

affirmation that even with the escalating number of politically motivated murders and

arson, there is the coming together of people in breathing fresh life, in recreation … there

is the life-affirming and life-sustaining spirit that conquers and survives, towering over

and above death and destruction‖ (Nagarajan). However, a close examination of the

Buddha statue‘s eye-painting ceremony reveals a less peaceful picture. Earlier in the

novel, Palipana had described netra mangala as follows: ―A special artist is needed to

paint eyes on a holy figure. It is always the last thing done. It is what gives the image

life. Like a fuse. The eyes are a fuse. It has to happen before a statue or a painting in a

vihara can become a holy thing‖ (97).36

The use of the word ―fuse‖ introduces the notion

of an explosive to this religious ceremony. Not only does this word recalls the suicide

bombing that was used as the mode of assassination of President Katugala in the

preceding section, it also calls attention to the incendiary possibility harbored in

Buddhism in inciting religious and ethnic differences.

36

Vihara means Buddhist monastery.

125

An aspect of netra mangala that the novel fails to foreground is the Hindu

element imbedded in the eye-painting ceremony. Ananda Coomaraswamy, Ondaatje‘s

source on the particulars of the ritual, underscores the Hindu influence in this ritual

presented by the novel as the quintessential Buddhist devotional act:

Some idea of danger (as of ‗playing with fire,‘ or ‗calling down lightning from

heaven‘) appears to attach to this consecration of the image, whereby it is made a

medium between the worshipper and his god (which would be a Hindu not a

Buddhist idea); and the object of the ceremonial is, in this connection, to avert

misfortunes, akin to those resulting from a glance of the ‗evil eye,‘ which might

otherwise afflict the presumptuous builder and artist…. The image appears to be

regarded as charged with power, like a Leyden jar, and similarly, when dealing

with it, means should be taken to avoid a shock; but all this is rather foreign to the

spirit of Southern Buddhism, and belongs to the Hindu stratum in it. (71)

Anil’s Ghost is silent about the Tamil element in netra mangala.37

In fact, the novel‘s

account of the ritual omits the evil eye association altogether and presents only the benign

and life giving aspect of the ceremony. Professor James Brow spoke of the idea behind

the spirit possession somewhat differently: the human body, or in this case Buddha‘s

statue, is a medium to be inhabited by the spirit of a god or demon (personal

37

Richard Gombrich who has witnessed an eye-setting ceremony disagrees with

Coomaraswamy on this point. However, Ondaatje consulted Coomaraswamy‘s work

Mediaeval Sinhalese Art and not Gombrich. In a book with an intriguing title Medusa’s

Hair, Gananath Obeyesekere observes a strong influence of Hinduism in Sinhalese

ecstatics in the famous pilgrimage center of Kataragama, which provides another

example of Buddhist and Hindu syncretism (5).

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communication, April 2007). Moreover, spirit possession is a widespread phenomenon in

both Sinhala Buddhist and Hindu Tamil religious expressions. Thus the novel

simultaneously ignores the undercurrent of the destructive potential and the syncretistic

origin of netra mangala. In effect, the Tamil side of the story, both the victims and the

cultural contributions, are ―intentionally lost‖ in this novel.

Conclusion

The 1998 attack on the Temple of the Tooth by the Tamil Tigers was a challenge

against the Buddhist hegemony on the island and against the government which upholds

the Buddhist tradition. The veneration of Buddha‘s relic is not merely a feature of folk

religiosity; rather, it is a state-sponsored activity that has strengthened its authority for

many centuries. The successive governments established their legitimacy through their

access to the tooth relic. The attack on the tooth relic is also an acknowledgment of the

Buddha‘s living presence among the Sinhalese polity. An anguished cry from an old

Sinhalese man upon hearing about the attack makes this point: ―You terrorists, kill us, eat

us, but don‘t attack our shrines where Buddha lives‖ (―11 killed‖). For him, and for

many Sri Lankan Buddhists, Buddha‘s tooth relic is literally living—it is fed, clothed and

worshipped daily. Robert Sharf asserts that Buddha‘s relics are ―treated as presences pure

and simple. That is to say, a relic did not represent, symbolize, or denote a transcendent

presence, numinous absence, or anything in between, any more than the person of the

Buddha represented or symbolized the Buddha‖ (167; italics in the original). Nor is the

belief in the living status of relic confined to devote Buddhists. Hannah Wojciehowski

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writes that the Portuguese Goan forces who invaded the northern part of Ceylon in the

sixteenth century saw the tooth relic as a part of the mouth of evil which would devour

and destroy the Christian polity. When the Portuguese created the Goan Inquisition, they

first put the tooth on ―trial‖, denounced it, and had it destroyed in a solemn ceremony as

if it were alive, only to have not one but two daladas reappear in Ceylon in a few years.

For the Ceylonese, the tooth relic‘s indestructibility was a reinforcing testament to the

invincibility of the dhamma and the Buddhist polity (182-83). As this account attests,

Buddha‘s corporeal remains are believed to possess special power.

Anil’s Ghost draws a parallel between Sailor‘s remains and the living Buddha

statue, imbuing the skeleton of a political murder with a sense of sanctity. Many cultures

commemorate and even venerate the dead as their memory gives meaning and continuity

to the community. In times of military conflict, identification of victims‘ bodies—the act

of assembling the scattered bones, giving a face to the bones, and matching the face the a

name-- affirms their existence and death. To honor the dead without using their memory

to fuel violence, without turning their suffering into yet another reason for future

aggression, is a challenge faced by every community fractured by violence.

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Chapter Three

Polluting Bodies and Redeeming Bodies: Raped Women and Bastard Children in A.

Sivanandan’s When Memory Dies

Introduction

The Sri Lankan conflict has not produced mass rape on the scale found in other

ethnic conflicts seen in India, Bangladesh, and Bosnia, nor is there evidence that rape has

been used as an officially sanctioned means of ethnic cleansing. However, as it is the

case in many national and ethnic tensions, episodes of rape dot the landscape of the Sri

Lankan conflict. As the focal point of his novel When Memory Dies, A. Sivanandan

selected an instance of ethnically charged rape and murder of a Sinhalese woman married

to a Tamil man, and included two other rapes of Tamil women by Sinhalese men. Their

fates exemplify the tragedy that descends not only on the lives of the women but also on

their families and communities. In this chapter, I will analyze how the concept of

hybridity plays a role in these interethnic rapes and how the novel offers a challenge to

the accepted norms.

If Anil’s Ghost has been criticized for being apolitical and merely esthetic,

timorous in assigning blame and criticizing particular groups or individuals for the

continuing violence in Sri Lanka, Sivanandan‘s epic novel When Memory Dies is the

polar opposite in its approach. It is intensely engaged and not shy in being critical of

historical events and characters. It delineates the sociopolitical circumstances on the

island, starting in the early twentieth century when Ceylon was still a British colony, to

the early days of the Sinhalese-Tamil conflict in the mid-eighties. Spanning three

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generations of a Tamil family, the novel focuses on historical events as they affect the

lives of the principal characters.

Sivanandan left Sri Lanka for Great Britain in the wake of first serious communal

riots in 1958. He explains the reasons for leaving his homeland in a speech about the

situation in Sri Lanka at the annual Marxism conference in 2009, the largest left wing

gathering in Britain: ―My parents‘ house was attacked by a Sinhalese mob, my nephew

had petrol thrown on him and burnt alive, and friends and relatives disappeared into

refugee camps. I was a Tamil married to a Sinhalese with three children, and I could only

see a future of hate stretching out before them‖ (―Ethnic Cleasing‖). In England he

became the founding editor of Race and Class, one of the foremost English language

journal on racism and imperialism in the world today, and he is the current director of the

Institute of Race Relations in London which publishes it. When Memory Dies is his first

novel, which he began in 1970s while working on racial and class issues at the Institute

of Race Relations.

When Memory Dies traces the development of ethnic conflict in Sri Lanka from

the turn of the twentieth century when the island was still under the British rule until the

early 1980s just as Tamil militancy begins in earnest. An epic in its scope and proportion,

the novel spans over the course of three generations of a Tamil family from a poor

peasant origin in Jaffna, and is in part loosely based upon the author‘s own background.

It is told in three books, each focusing on a male protagonist from that generation. The

novel opens with the story of Sahadevan, a Tamil youth from the northern Tamil-

dominated area of Jaffa. Although he is from a humble peasant family, Sahadevan‘s

130

intellectual gifts win him a college scholarship and then a position in the government

postal service in Colombo. The capital city gives this rural youth an opportunity to

interact with people from various backgrounds, including the Sinhalese. Ethnic tension is

not palpable yet in this pre-Independence Ceylon; the population is divided along class,

rather than ethnic lines, and a major source of agitation comes from labor unions, which

demand better working and living conditions for industrial workers. Sahadevan is briefly

involved in the labor movement but is soon disillusioned by the demagogic approach of

its leaders.

Book Two narrates the story of Sahadevan‘s son, Rajan, who is loosely modeled on

the author himself. Like Sivanandan, Rajan is the eldest son of a Tamil postmaster who

rose from a peasant background in Jaffna. Their coming of age was marked by the

tension between the Sinhalese and Tamils. After the nation‘s independence from Great

Britain, some labor leaders scramble for power on the strength of communal feelings.

Sinhalese politicians in particular woo the majority population by stoking their sense of

cultural solidarity and superiority. Politically naïve Rajan is briefly drawn into the labor

movement as a university student through Lal, a Sinhalese medical student. More

importantly, he falls in love with Lal‘s sister Lali, in spite of the fact that she is Sinhalese.

Lali initially repulses Rajan‘s interest, not because she does not share his affection or

because of the ethnic difference, but because she is carrying the child of her fiancé Sena,

a militant activist who shortly after impregnating her is killed during the 1953 hartal.38

38

The Hartal of 1953 was a countrywide general strike protesting the policies of

the incumbent United National Party. Ten people were killed during the one-day strike,

and Prime Minister Dudley Senanayake resigned as the result (―Hartal‖).

131

When Rajan learns of Lili‘s situation, he marries her over his parents‘ objection and

adopts her son Vijay. This unconventional family is broken up, however, as the

communal tension mounts in the nation. On an excursion to the countryside, the family

is accosted by a group of Sinhalese thugs ready to attack any unfortunate Tamil who

comes across their path. Initially Rajan is able to pass as Sinhalese due to his fluent

Sinhala, but Lali inadvertently blurts out his name and betrays his Tamil identity.

Mistaking Lali to be Tamil as well, they turn on her instead: they tie Rajan to a tree and

rape, kill, and mutilate Lali.

In Book Three the readers learn that Rajan has left for England to seek psychiatric

help for the shock he suffered from Lali‘s death, and the narrative resumes with the story

of his step-son, Vijay. Although he is a full Sinhalese and not Rajan‘s biological son,

Vijay is the symbolic heir to this Tamil generational saga. Vijay grows sympathetic to the

Tamil cause as he witnesses the systematic revision of history carried out by the

Sinhalese government and its obstruction of democratic processes. Vijay, being the

symbolic offspring of interethnic union between Rajan and Lali, represents a hope for

coexistence and understanding between two ethnic groups. Vijay transgresses not only

the ethnic line but also the class divide when he falls in love with Meena, an estate Tamil

-- i.e., Tamils who constitute the lower caste. However, the intergenerational saga comes

to an abrupt end when Vijay is killed by a Tamil militant commander, who is also his

cousin, before he and Meena can consummate their love.

This chapter focuses on the unique situation women face during group conflicts.

Catherine MacKinnon notes that in times of war, ―Women are violated in many ways in

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which men are violated. But women are also violated in ways men are not, or that are

exceptional for men. Many of these sex-specific violations are sexual and reproductive‖

(44). I will first discuss some of the biological and cultural reasoning behind violation of

women as well as some of the twentieth-century examples of intergroup rape. Then I

analyze the ways in which When Memory Dies addresses various stigmas associated with

the crossing of sexual boundaries.

Women, Rape, and the Group Envelope

Both Sinhalese and Tamil polities fear for the survival of their political and

cultural identities. This fear is made more palpable by imagining the destruction as an

organic one dealt to a physical body. The body as a metaphor for society has a long

history and almost a universal application. Cultural anthropologist Mary Douglas

formulates in Purity and Danger, her seminal work on pollution and rituals of

purification published in 1966, that in many societies, the body and its functions serve as

symbols for complex social relations, and vice versa (115). Through the prohibitions on

the human body and the uses of animal bodies in sacrificial rituals, primitive cultures

sought to regulate and protect the community and individuals within it. In particular,

Douglas observes in the symbolism of the body that ―all margins are dangerous. If they

are pulled this way or that the shape of fundamental experience is altered.‖ The orifices

such as mouth, nose, anus, etc. are considered especially vulnerable areas because matters

issuing from them are marginal: ―spittle, blood, milk, urine, faeces or tears by simply

issuing forth have traversed the boundary of the body‖ (122). Many cultures have

133

prohibition against the reentry of the marginal matters into the body as those objects are

considered highly polluting (124). Cultures which are threatened with dissolution have

particularly rigid rules of pollution regarding the bodily secretions to protect its integrity.

It would not be surprising, then, if Sri Lanka, which has been threatened by the

secessionist movement in the Tamil-dominated regions in the north and the east, should

be concerned over some sort of pollution issues.

Whereas anthropologists have observed societies inscribed in whole animal and

human bodies, psychoanalytic work on groups has unearthed a different type of body

fantasy. In The Group and the Unconscious, a pioneering work on group psychology

published in 1975, Didier Anzieu theorizes that groups ―suffer from not having a body

and consequently imagine one…. A group does not exist as such until it has acquired an

‗esprit de corps‘… a substitute for the biological body that doesn‘t exist‖ (241).

However, this imagined body does not constitute a coherent person; rather it emphasizes

a particular physical function that corresponds to a psychical one. Thus a group may be

imagined as a devouring mouth or waste-depot toilet, among other bodily functions.

Most important of these body-part analogies, Anzieu argues, is that of ―the enveloping

‗ego skin‘, which guarantees [the group‘s] unity, its continuity, its integrity, the

differentiation between inside and outside, in which one finds areas of selective

exchanges, implication and things forgotten‖ (243). What holds the group together is not

its center but the margin that separates the group from the outside world, and the group‘s

identity hinges upon, not the members at the nucleus, but those on the fringes of the

group.

134

The analogy of a group envelope is useful for thinking about a group‘s attributes

of permeability and impermeability, and of the possibility of exchange with the outside

through an opening. Can this opening allow contamination, serving as a conduit through

which foreign elements can infiltrate? Women can be seen as a problematic opening in

ethno-nationalistic group identity. In many inter-group conflicts, there is the practice of

raping women of other groups with the purpose of shaming and forcibly inseminating

them. Behind the practice of rape lurks the genocidal intention to destroy the

antagonistic group‘s purity.

Women‘s sexuality has often been considered a threat to the purity of the

community in many cultures. Douglas argues that the double standard in sexual practices

arose from the interpretation of the difference between male and female physiology:

Females are correctly seen as, literally, the entry by which the pure content may

be adulterated. Males are treated as pores through which the precious stuff may

ooze out and be lost, the whole system being thereby enfeebled…. In a patrilineal

system of descent wives are the door of entry to the group…. Through the

adultery of a wife impure blood is introduced to the lineage. So the symbolism of

the imperfect vessel appropriately weighs more heavily on the women than on the

men. (Purity 126)

In such cases, male sexual indiscretions do not pose a threat to the group integrity and are

treated lightly, whereas lapses in females were a serious matter and warranted a drastic

intervention, since women were ―the gate of entry to the castes‖ and their sexuality

carefully controlled to ensure the continuation of the caste system (Purity 125).

135

Douglas‘ observation is pertinent to the situation in Sri Lanka. As Nur Yalman,

who studied the caste system of Ceylon and South India, notes, the burden of preserving

―the honour and respectability of men‖ fell on their women (33). Yalman links the

preservation of caste purity through women in Ceylon to the practice of hypergamy in

general-- that is, sexual relations between higher-caste man and lower-caste woman.

Throughout Ceylon, hypergamy was a widely accepted practice, whereas its counterpoint,

hypogamy, was virtually prohibited. It was believed that a man who has sexual relation

with a lower-caste woman is only externally polluted, whereas as a woman who sleeps

with a lower-caste man is internally polluted and can introduce ―polluted‖ blood into the

caste or family if she bears a child through him. The end result is a more strict restriction

on women‘s sexuality. Yahlman notes, ―The Sinhalese always used to say, ‗it does not

matter where a man goes; he may sleep with anyone, but the woman must be protected.‘

Men, in other words, can have sexual commerce with women high or low, but women‘s

pleasures are curtailed‖ (41). A woman who has sexual relations with lower-caste men is

treated harshly to the point of being excommunicated from her caste and consigned to the

lowest of the Sinhalese caste-hierarchy.39

Though this fate seems harsh, it is humane

compared to the past practice in which both the mother and children were drowned to

guarantee that caste pollution did not occur (42).

The rules and the logic of the caste system that govern female purity and

hypergamy were extended to the interracial relations during the colonial times. For

39

On the other hand, hypergamy in which the male is of higher caste is permitted

and sought after by the lower-caste women. Children of such unions belong to their

mothers‘ caste, but the status of the mother and children are enhanced within their caste

through the connection with the higher-caste male (Yalman 42).

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example, the Dutch Burgher Union of Ceylon which founded in 1908 granted

membership to legitimate children of European ancestry on the paternal line, but expelled

any woman member who married a man less European than she (McGilvray 248).

The notion that women are the guardians of purity and honor of a community is

found in many cultures across the world. In Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape,

Susan Brownmiller traces the insistence on female purity to the system of patriarchy that

subjects women under male protection. Brownmiller postulates that women have often

relinquished the control over their sexuality to certain men such as fathers, brothers, and

husbands, in exchange for protection from sexual violence from other men. She sums up

the situation as follows: ―The historic price of woman‘s protection by man against man

was the imposition of chastity and monogamy.‖ An unforeseen consequence of this

contract, control in exchange for protection, is that the ownership of the woman's body

was transferred to her protector, and rape became a crime not so much because it is

violence against woman‘s body, but as a property crime against the man who held its

ownership (18; Wald 488). According to this logic, the real victim is the male protector

and not the woman who suffers the violence. This state of affairs made women

vulnerable to being pawns in the male power struggle: an attack on a woman became an

indirect way to inflict damage on her male protector.

Inter-group violence is the prime example in which sexual violence against

women is utilized as a weapon whose real target is men. Men commit rape during war

for various reasons: to humiliate the opposing side, to perform an act of revenge, or to

demonstrate the other‘s subjugation. However, the feature common to all these

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motivations is that ―the woman‘s body … became a sign through which men

communicated with each other‖ (Das 56). Rape is a message of domination not only over

women, but more significantly, over other men (Card 11). In patriarchal societies,

violation of enemy women constitutes a method of inflicting a wound on the enemy men,

for it is an affront to the honor of men, who are humiliated and emasculated in not being

able to protect their women (Chinkin 328). The focus shifts to man as the real victim.

Dubravka Žarkov comments on the media depiction of Serb women impregnated by rape

that, ―the suffering of Serb women—so emphatically depicted—served to create empathy

with the central figure through which nationhood is constructed in Serbian media—the

Serb man. For he is the one who is deprived of generation of brave soldiers‖ (Žarkov

250; qtd. in Hayden 32). As this quote shows, women's suffering is recognized in so far

as it is subservient to the fashioning of the larger national identity. From there the shift

from the protection of woman's honor to woman as the upholder of community honor is a

facile one. In many societies, woman's sexual integrity has become the indicator of the

community's masculinity (Jayawardena and de Alwis xvii) and when the community

honor is jeopardized or compromised through sexual violence on women, the victims pay

the price.

Woman's body literally becomes a battleground upon which men fight their wars.

Anthropologist Roland Littlewood notes in ―Military Rape‖ that destructive male

violence is sexual in its expression, and that sexual violence against the enemy women is

―a working out of boundaries on the woman‘s body, symbolically but also pragmatically

(as destruction of the opponent‘s social institutions‖ (11). Similarly, Menon and Bhasin

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have observed in the context of the Partition of India that

The range of sexual violence . . . – stripping; parading naked; mutilating and

disfiguring; tattooing or branding the breasts and genitalia with triumphal slogans;

amputating breasts; knifing open the womb; raping, of course; killing foetuses – .

. . treat women's bodies as territory to be conquered, claimed or marked by the

assailant,‖ and that ―[the women of both religious communities] . . . became the

respective countries, indelibly imprinted by the Other. (Borders 43; italics in the

original)

The assailants' equating of the enemy women with territory follows the tradition of

treating women as ―objects in the possession of a male national collectivity.‖ But as the

above quote indicates, the attacks specifically destroyed women's reproductive capability,

signaling the fact that what was targeted was women's ―biological role as reproducers of

the nation‖ (Jayawardena and de Alwis x). On the one hand, the enemy womb is the

territory that can be sown with ―our‖ seed, which would dismantle the social fabric of the

other group. If the raped woman becomes pregnant, the resulting hybridization

introduces the contaminating ―half-breeds‖ that can alter the genetic makeup of the

opposing group and disrupt the group integrity. As Julie Mostov put it, rape is ―invading

the space of the other, stealing the identity of the alien society and installing its own

culture" (517). On the other hand, the destruction of women's reproductive organs

signals the intent to exterminate the enemy by impairing their women's capacity to bear

and nurture the future generation. In this case, the enemy territory is made barren.

In the next section, I will illustrate the concepts of the feminine body as the site of

139

masculine honor and community's integrity through well-known examples of mass rapes

from the twentieth-century conflicts in South Asia and the Balkans. I have included both

the ―spontaneous‖ mass rapes perpetrated by non-combatants and more systematic and

strategic ones with policy implications to correspond with the situation in the Sri Lankan

ethnic conflict.

Recent Examples of Mass Rape

A notorious example of turning woman‘s body into a contested site of national

hegemony occurred during the partition of India and Pakistan in 1947. During the mass

transfer of populations across the newly created national borders, Hindu, Muslim, and

Sikh women were abducted, forcibly converted and married by the men of these

communities. The number of abducted women was estimated at 50,000 Muslim women

and 33,000 non-Muslim women (Menon and Bhasin, ―Abducted‖ 7). The abduction and

conversion of women were interpreted by the victims and their families as a way of

disrupting and polluting their ethno-religious identity. The irony is that many women

were killed by their family members or coerced into killing themselves to prevent the loss

of their individual, familiar, and community honor. As Menon and Bhasin put it, ―with

the cruel logic of all such violence, it is women ultimately who are most violently dealt

with as a consequence [of a sexual threat]‖ (Menon and Bhasin, Borders 43).

Brownmiller documents the consequences of another mass rape during the 1971

Bangladesh War of Independence. During the nine-month conflict, between 200,000 and

400,000 Bengali women were raped by Pakistani soldiers (80). Although the Bengali and

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Pakistani share the same religion, that of Islam, they differ in language, culture, and

physical appearance. Brownmiller postulates that the fates of the raped women were

tragic in a society ―in which female chastity and purdah isolation are cardinal principles‖

(83). The Bangladeshi government launched a campaign to declare these women national

heroines and to reintegrate them into society; however, Brownmiller somewhat

pessimistically concludes that their husbands and natal families were not as enlightened

(78-86).

The conflict in Bosnia and Herzegovina in the early 1990s introduced the

terminology ‗genocidal rape‘ to describe an age-old phenomenon.

Genocide is defined in

the Genocide Convention of 1948 as:

[A]ny of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a

national, ethnical, racial or religions group, as such:

(a) Killing members of the group;

(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;

(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring

about its physical destruction in whole or in part;

(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;

(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group. (―Convention‖)

Catharine MacKinnon and Beverly Allen have argued for the recognition of mass rape in

Bosnia-Herzegovina as genocidal rape.40

In their pursuit of territorial expansion, ethnic

40

Charli Carpenter summarizes two scholars views:

MacKinnon described rape as genocide on three counts: 1) ―the war is an instrument of

the genocide; the rapes are an instrument of the war‖ (187), 2) ―rape as genocide [as in]

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Serbians raped close to 20,000 women, mostly Bosnian Muslims, as a part of systematic

policy of ethnic cleansing ―to terrorize and displace the local population, to force the

birth of children of mixed ―ethnic‖ descent in the group, and to demoralize and destroy‖

(Niarchos 658). Among these policies, several feminist scholars have singled out ―forced

impregnation as what makes rapes genocidal‖ (Carpenter 439).

Many Bosnian Muslim women were herded into ―rape-camps‖ by Serbian

soldiers and raped repeatedly until they became pregnant and were held until it was too

late for them to obtain an abortion (Niarchos 657).41

The intention of such forced

impregnations was proportionally to enlarge the Serbian population and diminish Bosnian

Muslim population, since it was believed by both Serbian perpetrators and Bosnian

Muslim victims that the offspring of these rapes would be considered Serbian. One rapist

told his victim that she would ―give birth to good Serbian children‖ (Askin, ―Sexual

Violence‖ 119). MacKinnon asserts that ―The idea seems to be to create a fifth column

within Muslim and Croatian society of children—all sons?--who will rise up and join

their fathers‖ (51). Karen Engle offers an insightful analysis of the assumptions

underlying this logic. She refers to the belief widely held by Serbians and unchallenged

by feminist scholars: that Serbian sperm impregnating any egg would result in Serbian

rape directed toward women because they are Muslim or Croatian‖ (188), 3) ―rape as

ethnic expansion through forced reproduction‖ (191). Allen describes three different

―types‖ of rape in Bosnia: 1) public rape of women, children, and men in front of

members of community. 2) abduction, rape, and murder of women, and 3) detention and

repeated rape with the intent to impregnate, then detention until abortion is impossible

(Allen 62-63)‖ (Carpenter 438).

41

In Sudan, Janjaweed militiamen also used systematic rape as a weapon of

ethnic cleansing (Boustany).

142

offspring. Supplementing this belief is the Islamic law and culture which rules that the

father determines the ethnicity of the child and that ―the children of non-Muslim Serbian

rapists are not considered to be Muslims‖ (Wing and Merchan 18-19). According to this

patrilineal view, women are mere receptacles and do not contribute to the genetic and

cultural makeup of their children (Allen 87). Engle argues that that the assumptions of

the feminist scholars have been culturally reductionistic and fundamentalist in ways that

might not be applicable to the realities of Bosnia-Herzegovina, and that the Muslim

population‘s reaction to the rapes and the resulting offspring might have been more

understanding and accepting of the victims' misfortune. She also points to a significant

rate of mixed marriages in the region prior to the conflict which was estimated at 27

percent (Vranić 25) as the indication that the region has a history of integration and

cooperation among different ethnic groups. Moreover, after the war, some religious

leaders encouraged men to marry women who were raped and to ―raise the progeny of

the rape in a Muslim spirit‖ (Drakulić 271). Engle remarks that ―some religious Muslims

apparently felt less constrained by ―Islamic law‖ than some of the feminists‖ (808), and

contends that feminist scholars are complicit in perpetuating certain assumptions

concerning Muslim communities in ways that ignore their diversity and complexity.42

Furthermore, these scholars underestimate and circumscribe women‘s agency and

resiliency in casting them in positions of vulnerability and victimization.

Rape would become a less effective weapon in war and interethnic conflict if the

42

Carpenter also voices criticism at the feminist scholars who ―reify, rather than

question, the patriarchal and nationalist agenda that is manifested in a rejection by

Muslims of children born to genocidal rape victims‖ (456).

143

woman‘s body ceased to be ―a sign through which men communicated with each other‖

(Das 56), and if the concept of honor was separated from woman‘s sexuality. Although

the recent advancements in the international law have come to recognize the seriousness

of wartime sexual violence, Niarchos argues that various international laws see rape as a

violation of honor and dignity, not as a physical assault. This categorization results in

rape being treated not as seriously as other physical assaults and also perpetuates the

notion that raped women are soiled, defiled, and dishonored (672-76).

Rape Avoidance: Communal and Military Examples

Not every ethnic and nationalistic violence is accompanied by mass rape of the

opposing group. Elizabeth Wood and Robert Hayden studied the neglected phenomenon

of rape avoidance in communal violence and military conflict from the perspectives of

anthropology and political science respectively. Their analyses help explain the relative

absence of sexual violence in Sri Lankan conflict. In addition, understanding the

circumstances under which sexual violence does not occur would be important in

anticipating and preventing the occurrence of mass rape.

Elizabeth Wood attributes the lack of sexual violence on both sides of the Sri

Lankan conflict, but in particular among the LTTE, to the strong command structure. The

ethos of the LTTE discourages practices of private life including sexual relations and

even marriage,43

anything that would distract its cadres from the goal of attaining the

43

Cadres have to be with the organization for five years before they are allowed

to marry (Wood 149).

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Eelam. LTTE leadership condemns rape of the civilians, which is against the Tamil

cultural mores, and the strong command structure effectively enforces that discipline.

Any breach in conduct is severely punished, and some cadres who broke the prohibition

against sex have been expelled or executed (Wood 149-152). As a result, sexual violence

on the part of LTTE is virtually unheard of, even during the forced expulsion of Muslims

from Jaffna in 1990, in spite of the fact that ―ethnic cleansing is the classic setting for

rape as a strategy‖ (143).

The Sinhalese army's record is less exemplary than that of the LTTE – there have

been cases of rape of Tamil women by Sinhalese soldiers and police during military

operations and at checkpoints – but even the Sinhalese army exhibits far more restraint

than the armies in other ethnic conflicts. The modest number of military rapes

perpetrated by the Sinhalese army can also be attributed to its leadership's condemnation

of the practice. The widely publicized prosecution of the rape and murder of Krishanthy

Kumarasamy in Jaffna in 1996 indicates that the Sinhalese government does not condone

the rape of Tamil women, let alone endorse or promote it. The decreased number of

reported incidences of sexual violence after this prosecution suggests that the

government‘s measure served as deterrence (Wood 146).44

Whereas Wood examines the role of the organizational hierarchy in mass rape,

Robert Hayden analyzes the rape avoidance in crowd behavior in which the centralized

structure is absent. Hayden compares the mass abduction and rape during the Partition

44

Sunila Abeysekera attributes the awareness against sexual violence to the works

of women's rights and human rights groups (64) and not to the Sri Lankan government's

efforts.

145

of India to another ethnically incited violence in Delhi about forty years later in which

sexual violence was noticeably absent. The 1985 assassination of Indira Gandhi by her

Sikh bodyguards exacerbated the existing tension between Hindus and Sikhs who lived in

proximity. In Delhi, Hindus attacked and killed Sikh men, but what was surprising was

that women were deliberately not harmed. Hayden argues that sexual violence is apt to

occur when the separation of the two groups is imminent, such as in the case of Partition,

and each group is vying for control over the territory. During such times, rape is used to

signal the end of coexistence, to push the other group over the border and make them not

want to return by instilling hatred and shame in the victims, for, according to Hayden,

―rape seems a powerful weapon, even more powerful than murder, to bring about that

end‖ (31) of separation.45

In contrast, the goal of the Hindu attackers in Delhi was to

display dominance over their Sikh neighbors but not to expel them from the area. Mass

rape was avoided because it would have made such living together difficult, if not

impossible (32).

The limited occurrences of rape by the Sinhalese follows Hayden‘s analysis,

which indicates that rape is avoided when the communities plan on living side by side.

Since the Sinhalese are opposed to granting the Tamils their homeland, but seek to

maintain their majority status in a unified nation, they would avoid rape on a large scale,

an action that would solidify Tamil‘s secessionist aspiration. Hayden's reasoning also

45

To be more precise, sexual violence tends to occur during the uncertain time

―when the state itself is liminal, and the questions of whose state it is, and how the

population will be defined, are open. Here we have the circumstances in which the

messages of subordinated coexistence or expulsion will be sent. After these issues are

settled, mass rape is no longer likely, because either coexistence will have been

reconstituted or the newly consolidated groups will have separated‖ (Hayden 33).

146

explains why the Indian Peace Keeping Forces would be the only group accused of rape

on a regular basis in the Sri Lankan conflict (Wood 144; Abeysekera 87) especially

during the months of October to December, 1987 (Somasundaram 244). As a foreign

army temporarily stationed on the island, the IPKF do not have a strong incentive for

maintaining long-term relations with the local population. Moreover, the sexual violence,

mostly of Tamil women, would serve as an effective deterrence against their seeking

refuge in the subcontinent.

Women’s Sexuality in When Memory Dies

If Anil’s Ghost has been criticized for portraying the civil unrest in Sri Lanka from

the Sinhala-Buddhist perspective and being oblivious to the Tamil grievances against the

discriminatory practices of the Sinhalese government, When Memory Dies has been

favorably received as a work that engages deeply with the history of the island. Qadri

Ismail, who was particularly condemning of Anil’s Ghost for being orientalist and

aestheticizing, writes that, ―When Memory Dies abides by the country. Patiently. It has

taken the time and the trouble to become familiar with the place, with its questions and its

struggles, without which intervention is impossible‖ (Abiding 180). Other scholars found

the novel to be an unbiased assessment of culpability in the Sri Lankan conflict. Notably

Walter Perera led the way in an article published in 1997 where he declared that ―the

novel does not valorize the cause of Tamils at the expense of the majority community‖

(22), but that it criticizes ―Sri Lankans from both sides of the racial divide who by their

147

apathy or active involvement in the conflict made the polarization complete‖ (25).46

Suvendrini Perera finds the novel to go even further: it exposes this polarization between

ethnicities as a construction, and affirms the ―politics of coexistence,‖ by which she

―refers to the parallel and intersecting trajectories of everyday desires, aspirations and

struggles, the daily proximities of peoples who have lived together over centuries, in love

and war, conflict and collaboration‖ (―'We can be killed'‖ 16).

When Memory Dies experiments with various combinations of ethnic, religious,

and class mixes. It arranges Sinhalese, Jaffna Tamils, and estate Tamil characters in

various combinations of friendships and romantic relationships that cross communal lines

and restructure their ethnic and class identities. In Book One, Sahadevan‘s mentor S.W.

and best friend Tissa are both Sinhalese, and through them Saha comes to appreciate the

Sinhalese way of life:

Tissa invited Sahadevan over to his parents‘ home near Kalutara. Within hours of

meeting Tissa‘s family, Sahadevan felt more at ease with himself than he had for a

long time, whether at the chummery or at his uncle Segaram‘s house. Tissa‘s

coastal village, with its coconut palms, flowering rhododendrons and green

vegetables, in tiled roofs and cemented verandahs, was nothing like his own. And

yet there was a familiar warmth and hospitality and an easy-going acceptance of

him that he had not known since he had left Sandilipay. Quite easily and simply

Sahadevan slipped into Tissa‘s way of life, got wearing a sarong, which he found

46

Minoli Salgado reports that ironically the LTTE seems to have felt that the

novel is sympathetic to its cause; the organization prominently displayed the novel in its

entirely on its website at some point (7).

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less inhibiting than the verti, developed a taste for the milder Sinahalese curry,

and saw in Tissa‘s sister a brasher beauty than he had been accustomed to. (20)

The proximity allowed the Tamil youth to realize that the Sinhalese are not very different

from his people: the human relation, which is what matters, is the same as those found in

his village, Sandilipay, and the slight differences in habitation, modes of dress, and food

are ―easy and simple to slip into.‖ In Book Two, Sahadevan‘s son Rajan also discovers a

meaningful friendship in a Sinhalese, Lal, and goes even further by marrying his sister

Lali despite his parents‘ objection, as noted earlier. It is significant that their wedding is

on the Buddhist and Hindu New Year‘s Day at the Registrar‘s Office (198). The choice

of the religious holy day shared by the Sinhalese and Tamils calls attention to the cultural

affinity between the two groups; in addition, their marriage is a gesture towards the

symbolic union of the two groups and a new era in the interethnic relations.

The logical continuation of this intermarriage is the birth of children of mixed

ethnicity who represent the intermingling of the two groups. However, Sivanandan

makes a curious decision at this point in the novel. The child Rajan and Lali raise

together is not their biological son, but the child Lali had with Sena, her fiancé before she

ever met Rajan. Sena dies shortly after fathering Vijay, and Rajan adopts Vijay when he

marries Lali. Therefore, Vijay is biologically ―pure‖ Sinhalese in spite of the fact that he

is raised in an ethnically mixed household.

That the character of Vijay is biologically Sinhalese is also worthy of attention in

that, up to this point, the family circumstances of the principal characters resemble

Sivanandan‘s own background. The author has much in common with Rajan, who is the

149

narrator of the novel: their grandfathers were Jaffna farmers, and their fathers raised

themselves from humble background, received a good education and became

postmasters. Like Rajan, Sivanandan worked as a teacher before pursuing a more

lucrative career in the financial industry and married a Sinhalese. However, this is where

the similarities end: Sivanandan has three children with his wife and emigrated to

England shortly after the ethnic unrest in 1958. Rajan, in contrast, has no biological

child, and loses his wife in an anti-Tamil attack.

This raises an interesting question: why does Sivanandan choose to make the

character of Vijay a ―bastard‖ and a full Sinhalese instead of a ―half-caste‖? Or perhaps

more applicably, what implication does this choice have in the narrative? In the next

section, I will argue that Sivanandan‘s decision regarding Vijay‘s paternity reflects the

patriarchal reality of the society depicted, and illustrates that ethnic loyalty is not

determined by biology. But more importantly, it defies the societal demand on women‘s

sexual purity. By making Lali a fallen woman and by having her and her son be accepted

by the man she later marries, the novel takes a step toward a society where women are no

longer ―a sign through which men communicated with each other‖ (Das 56).

Sexual Double Standards and Rape in When Memory Dies

The critics who have praised When Memory Dies for its impartial treatment of the

ethnic issues have pointed out its failure on the level of gender equality. Minoli Salgado

praises the novel for ―its monumental inclusiveness and celebration of a century of ethnic

hybridity and co-existence,‖ but also remarks that it ―is awkwardly marked by a gender

150

bias and a privileging of the male perspective‖ (7). All three principal characters from

the generational saga are male, following the patrilineal line of succession. Qadri Ismail

appraises the novel as being ―resolutely leftist,‖ and that it ―cast its lot with the organized

working class‖ (Abiding 180), yet ―on the register of gender, [it must be read] as not just

inadequate but a failure – indeed, as something to be critiqued‖ (199). Ismail points out

that whereas the text explicitly engages with the issues of labor and communalism, it

does not address the inequalities that women face in society. His verdict is that the novel

is ―firmly on one side of the sexist or phallocentric divide‖ (200).

I agree that the novel exhibits the gender bias pointed out by Salgado and Ismail.

However, the novel is also progressive in other respects: for the most part the inequality

reflects the attitude of the time period and with each generation the attitude becomes

more egalitarian. In Book One, none of the female characters protests against her lot; in

fact, they are not even aware that things are unfair. There are some egregious examples

of sexual double standards. Male and female sexual indiscretions are treated differently:

the former as a humanizing lapse, the latter as a shameful mistake that cannot be undone.

For example, Sahadevan learns for the first time at his mother's funeral that his father had

a mistress and an illegitimate child. Saha's older brother Mahadev is light-hearted in

breaking this news:

'Father was naughty,' giggled Mahadev, and went on to explain how

Pandyan had fallen in love with the new midwife who had come to deliver

Sahadevan. It had been a difficult birth, and their mother would not have

survived it had not Ponnamma nursed her through. Pandyan, as usual, had been

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helpless while it went on, and Ponnamma had nursed him too. The result was

Para. . . .

Sahadevan began to like his father more. He had always thought him a

straight and upright man, not that his father had held himself out as such, but it

was nice to know that he could unbend a little, fall a little. Sahadevan chuckled to

himself: in a sense it was all his doing. (30-31)

Mahadev also extols Ponnamma for the fact that she ―wouldn't take a cent from Father,

and never complained,‖ even though she lost her work as a midwife when she became

pregnant and was reduced to selling hoppers. For the most part, women in the first

generation have internalized the double standard imposed on them by society, and the

discrepancy between the message of labor protest and women's acceptance of societal

injustice is quite jarring.

In Book Two, Lali‘s fate as an unwed mother shows an improvement over

Ponnamma‘s situation: she is accepted by the man she loves. When Rajan discovers that

Lali had Sena's child without being married to him, his immediate reaction is one of

condemnation:

Sena's? How, when? What was she saying . . . Sena's? . . . Before he died? But

they were not married . . . oh God . . . no . . . How could she? The whore . . . no

wonder she had turned me down . . . couldn't face herself . . . couldn't face me . . .

'I can't', she had said. The shame of it . . . the stigma . . . (197)

To Rajan's credit this initial reaction is replaced by renewal of love for Lali and

acceptance of her child. However, the double standard persists: Rajan's ―escapades‖

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while trying to forget Lali, which consisted of ―on occasion, spending the night with an

errant wife or a thwarted girlfriend‖ do not even merit a confession (192).

In this patriarchal society where a woman‘s sexual purity is synonymous with her

virtue, rape serves an easy weapon to defile the woman and those associated with her.

Thus Lali becomes the target of violence by Sinhalese thugs, whereas Rajan was forced

to witness her rape and murder and then spared of his life to relive the memory. The

shock is too much for Rajan, and he loses his grip on reality. What would have happened

to Rajan if Lali had not been killed? How would the incident have changed their

relationship? Book Three gives a partial answer to this question in the romance between

Vijay and Meena. In keeping with the more liberated era, Meena is more casual about

sex – ―It was a part of their love for each other‖ (277). Meena is also raped though in a

less traumatic manner than Lali—she is raped by the lorry driver, who helped her and her

father in their flight. In spite of her fear that the rape could be a stigma that would repel

Vijay‘s love, Vijay‘s pain is more for her than for himself (401). Rape has lost some of

its threat as the potential disruptor of the fabric of relationships.

Radhika Coomaraswamy contends that if rape were not considered a shameful

and devastating violation, it would cease to be an effective weapon. She envisions a

future in which men tell their women, ―You have been raped and we understand your pain

and we can forget the shame. Let us help you rebuild your life.‖ Coomaraswamy further

argues that in a pluralistic society that embraces hybridity, woman‘s body would not be

considered the boundary marker that maintains ethnic purity and that ethnic pollution

would cease to exist (97). By having its two principal female characters involved in

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sexual transgressions, one consensual and the other forced, and having them accepted by

their men afterwards, the novel challenges some of the patriarchal assumptions.

Paternity and Patriarchy in When Memory Dies

Sivanandan‘s decision to make Vijay a full Sinhalese rather than of mixed

heritage circumvents one of the problems posed by the reality of the patriarchal system.

If Vijay were to be born to Rajan and Lali, his cultural identity would have followed that

of the father rather than reflecting his mixed heritage, since intermarriages rarely result in

equal integration of two cultures. Writing on the pattern of intermarriage in the former

Yugoslavia prior to the genocidal war, Mirjana Morokwasic-Muller notes that ―the

dominant pattern of interethnic union involved a man from the ethnic majority and a

woman from the ethnic minority‖ (141). The implication of these gender-based pairings

is that minority women are subsumed by the majority culture since, in patrilineal

societies, a married woman is expected to renounce her natal identity and adopt that of

her husband. Morokwasic-Muller sums up the situation thus:

[A] woman who marries out of the group is lost to the group, whereas a woman

who marries into the group is gained by the group. A man, on the contrary,

usually preserves his position in his social group, and his descendants will in

principle continue to belong to his group (when patrilineal transmission prevails).

(137)

Therefore, the union between majority man and minority woman results in the

assimilation of minority culture into the majority culture and gradual erosion of the

154

minority culture. Because of this reason groups are more willing to accept a woman from

another group than they are to accept a man from another group. The assimilation of the

minority wife is most pronounced during the period of ethnic tension when the family

may decide to move to the area controlled by the husband's ethnic group to ensure his

safety and the wife may decide to change her given name to disguise her natal ethnicity.

However, this does not guarantee the wife's safety.

In Sri Lanka, interethnic marriage has been promoted as a possible solution to the

ethnic conflict, at least on the Sinhalese side. In 1998, the public television produced and

broadcast several teledramas depicting the theme of interethnic marriage/romance.

However, Neluka Silva notes that in these teledramas the male protagonist is invariably a

Sinhalese and the female protagonist a Tamil. Once married, the women relinquished

many of the identity markers that signaled their Tamilness: they acquired their husbands'

Sinhala surname, the language used at home is Sinhala, and their children were raised as

Sinhalas (154). The Sri Lankan government which approved of the airing of these

teledramas felt that the interethnic romance is acceptable so long as the resulting family

followed the Sinhalese way of life. The message of these public broadcasts is not one of

integration but of perpetuation of the Sinhala hegemony. The comment with which Silva

opens her article further reinforces the picture of domination and subjugation. In the

same year that these teledramas were broadcasted, ―a brigadier of the Sri Lankan army

commented that the solution to the ethnic conflict in Sri Lanka lay in Sinhala soldiers

marrying Tamil girls‖ (147). Here again, the converse situation of Sinhala women

marrying Tamil men is not mentioned, and the use of words such as ―soldiers‖ and ―girls‖

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suggests an imbalance of power bordering on military aggression.

Rajan and Lali's interethnic marriage does not follow the dominant pattern of

majority man and minority woman, but it exhibits certain patterns of the patriarchal

norm. Lali started wearing the pottu on her forehead, which is a marker of Tamil

ethnicity, and is expected by Rajan to learn to cook rasam, an Indian dish (223). Granted

that Lali's embracing of Tamil identity might be a form of protest against the Sinhalese

aggression; nonetheless, these gestures and expectations are in agreement with the

patriarchal social structure which dictates that the wife conforms to her husband's culture.

The expectation that the wife belongs to her husband's people has another implication,

that she no longer belongs to her natal group and at times is cast out from the group. The

expulsion of a woman who married outside of the group is most apparent in Lali's tragic

death. During a family outing in the countryside, Rajan and Lali are accosted by a group

of drunken Sinhalese men who were intent on discovering whether they are Tamil or not.

Rajan is able to deceive them for a while, but when the men start beating him, Lali comes

out of the hiding to protect him.

Lali rushed out of the bushes brandishing a stick and shouting to the men to leave

her husband alone.

'Oh Rajan, what have they done to you?' she asked trying to stem the

bleeding from my nose.

'Rajan, Rajan, did you hear that? Rajan?' Weasel-face screamed in

triumph. 'A dhemmala. What did I tell you, he is a dhemmala.'

'Tried to cheat us, did you, you son of a whore,' the swarthy one yelled at

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me. 'We 'll teach you a damn good lesson. Cheat us, hah, you Tamil bastard/'

And with that he tied me to a tree while the others ripped Lali's clothing, shouting,

'We will show you what we do to Tamil cunts.' And one by one they raped her. I

lost consciousness.

The next day I learnt, in hospital, that my Lali was dead. (234)

The men mistook her for a Tamil, assuming that she must be Tamil since she was married

to one. Thus, her identity becomes an extension of that of her husband.47

Yet on another

level, Lali's death by her own people is the logical consequences of her transgression. I

have mentioned earlier how in many societies, including Sinhalese and Tamil societies,

women are considered the opening to the group envelope. Women's sexuality is

regulated to preserve the purity and legitimacy of the group. In the caste system, a

woman who defied the rules of hypergamy by having sexual relation with a man of lower

caste was expelled from her caste and, in extreme cases, even killed for exposing the

caste to contamination. Similarly, Lali's murder serves as a punishment for marrying

outside her ethnic group and a way to purify the group.

In another example, the target of the cleansing activity extends to the offspring of

mixed heritage. Sellamma is a Tamil estate worker who is raped by Sinhalese thugs who

―appeared in the middle of the night and attacked the line-rooms, terrorizing the sleeping

families and destroying their pitiful belongings‖ (285). She is pregnant as the result of

the rape and subsequently dies in childbirth, leaving her ―Sinhalese son‖ with her

47

This incident is an illustration of what Veena Das calls ―The woman's

body....be[coming] a sign through which men communicated with each other‖ (56). The

rape and murder of Lali are not actions perpetrated against her but against her husband;

they were meant to teach him a lesson.

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husband Perumal.48

In yet another ethnic attack, Perumal is killed while trying to protect

the infant and the child is also brutally murdered. Sanji, Sellamma's brother, relates the

story to Vijay:

'What happened to the baby?' The question was out of Vijay's mouth before he

could take it back, but Sanji appeared to take it in his stride.

'They killed him, didn't they,' he began calmly, 'the sons of whores, they

killed him.' His eyes glazed over....

'Perumal hid him . . . in a basket . . . tried to fight them off . . . and they

hacked him to death . . . and they took the little fellow, another child saw it all . . .

they took . . . he was smiling and gurgling . . . and they picked him up by . . . by . .

. aiyo, amma . . .' and between sobs he went on compulsively, 'by his legs and

smashed him against the wall. Oh, Ganesha,' and he started crying softly. (356)

The specificity of the attack – the men searched for and murdered the baby while sparing

another child who witnessed it – and its brutality indicate that the murder was not a

random act of violence but a calculated one. Sellamma was raped during a racialized

attack that meant to humiliate and pollute the Tamils. But the twisted logic of the ethnic

hatred dictates that the consequence of the rape, the racially mixed child, must also be

eliminated as a source of pollution.

In making Vijay a full Sinhalese and not of mixed ethnicity, the novel circumvents

the patriarchal reality that would have made him a Tamil, and endorses the position that

48

It is telling that the baby follows the rapists' ethnicity. Again, the mother's

contribution to the child's genetic pool is ignored.

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loyalty should not be based upon one's biological heritage. Vijay's Sinhalese identity is

firmly established through his name. Vijay is named after prince Vijaya, whom the

Mahavamsa records as the first settler from Northern India and to whom the Sinhalese

trace their ancestry.49

Upon Rajan and Lali's marriage, Vijay carried Rajan's family name

to minimize any embarrassment that might arise from his parentage, but after Lali's death

and Rajan's departure to England, Vijay is raised by Sena's parents and thereafter carries

his biological father's Sinhalese surname, Pathirana (254). Vijay's Sinhala identity

accords him protection in the society dominated by this majority group; his safety is

never threatened, like most of the Tamil characters in the novel. Yet, due to his stepfather

Rajan's influence, Vijay feels affinity to the Tamil culture and identifies himself as ―partly

Tamil‖ (323). To borrow Edward Said's terminology, Vijay is a product of cultural

affiliation rather than filial belonging. If Vijay had been sympathetic to the Tamil cause

because he had genetic claim to being Tamil, such a situation would have reinforced the

separation of the people along the ethnic lines.

A family scene in Vijay's childhood illustrates how the bicultural family attempts

to be inclusive. In the following scene in which Rajan and Lali try to feed the toddler, the

appropriate kinship terms are used to refer to the family members:

Lali got up to fetch Vijay's dinner. 'You had better feed him; he has been off his

49

In the Mahavamsa, the story of Vijaya starts with that of his grandparents.

Vijaya‘s grandmother was a princess of the Vangas which Wilhelm Geiger locates in the

Bengal. It was foretold that the princess would be united with ―the king of beasts,‖ and

upon the fulfillment of this prophesy, she bore a twin, a son and a daughter. When he was

sixteen-year-old, the boy Sihabahu killed his lion-father and founded the kingdom of Lala

with his sister as his consort. Vijaya was their eldest, but due to his evil conduct, Vijaya

and his followers were banished by the king on a ship, and they eventually land in Lanka

(Geiger 41-54).

159

food while you were away.'

She brought Vijay's plate to me and called to the boy.... 'Come to eat; appa will

feed you.'

That seemed to appeal to him, because he immediately gave up his fight with

the bush and waddled towards me....

'Come on, putha, just two mouthfuls more, one for amma and one for appa, all

right?'

'Seeya?' he put up his little finger to indicate that there was one for grandfather,

too. (208-09)

The linguistic markers in this domestic scene provide a glimpse into the negotiation the

family has to navigate through daily. Vijay's Sinhalese identity is affirmed in putha,

Sinhala for son. Rajan is called appa, the Tamil word for father-- a fact which

Sahadevan, Rajan's father, notes with approval later on (212). Seeya, Sinhala for

grandfather, is appropriately used here to refer to Vijay's paternal grandfather. The case

for amma, or mother, is more ambiguous, for it can be either Sinhala or Tamil, which

incidentally coincides with Lali's in-between status as a Sinhala woman married to a

Tamil man.

The inclusive atmosphere in which Vijay is raised allows him to embrace both

Sinhala and Tamil identities. But such a move also puts him in the margin as someone in

danger of being rejected by both groups. Because of his sympathetic stance towards the

Tamil cause, Vijay's Sinhala identity was called into question by his close friend and by

society at large. During a discussion with a good friend Gamini, Vijay's passionate

160

defense of the Tamil position earns him an accusation of being a Tamil:

'You are a bloody Tamil too, that's your trouble,' Gamini shouted, . . . , then,

catching himself in mid-flight: 'Half a Tamil anyway.''I didn't mean that,' he went

on sheepishly, realizing too late that he had opened up an old wound in his friend.

Gamini was one of the few people who knew the full story of Vijay's parentage.

It had all come out at a meeting of a PLF cell . . . Vijay . . . was accused . . . of

having been fathered by a Tamil. Pathirana, it was alleged, was not his real name

though that was how it stood in his birth certificate. Vijay was suspended from

the party 'for further enquiry' and . . . it was not until Vijay was discovered to be

the 'real' son of a real Sinhalese hero of the hartal of 1953 that he was allowed

back into the fold. But the aftertaste of that adolescent discovery, that even a

bastard was preferable to a Tamil, lingered like a bitterness in Vijay's mouth long

after the PLF had gone from him.

'Yes, you are right,' he said. 'I am a Tamil, and a Sinhalese, and a bastard,'

and, finding that his bitterness had suddenly left him, he added more lightly, 'and

that's why I am more civilized than you.' (254)

Vijay inhabits the margins of society not only because he is culturally hybrid but also

because of his illegitimacy. But to his credit Vijay is able to find positive value in his

status. S.W. Perera comments on Sivanandan‘s decision to have two important characters

in the novel, Vijay and Para, as bastards. He writes, ―Such a strategy allows the author to

challenge the notion of a pure race and to focus on the intersections among races rather

than the binary opposition favoured by those who wish to maintain differences between

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them; in other words, Sivanandan…gives hybridity a positive value‖ (19). Perera equates

bastardy with hybridity, thereby conflating two definitions of bastard, that of ―one

begotten and born out of wedlock‖ and that of ―a person of mixed breed‖ (―Bastard,‖

OED def. 1.a and 1.b). What two meanings have in common is the notion of impurity, a

negation of discrete, categorizable identity. Both bastards and half-castes fall outside the

accepted convention of society and inhabit the fluid and malleable space between class

and race.

Incidentally, the purported intention of ethnically motivated rape, which is the

insemination of the enemy women with alien seeds, results in the birth of bastards who

encompass both definitions, one born out of wedlock and also of mixed breed. As I will

argue in the next section, these impure beings—bastards, half-castes, and children of

rape—are not necessarily sources of contamination. Rather, they offer an opportunity for

renewal.

Bastard Children as Liminal Figures

Bastard children have been celebrated as the symbol of fluidity in the literatures

of other eras. Writing on the prevalence of illegitimate children in the eighteenth-century

English novel, Wolfram Schmidgen notes that the bastard is ―associated with

intermixture, open affiliation, and unregulated sociability‖ (138) and is ―permanently in-

between culture and nature . . . a creature of the threshold: while he emerges from society,

he is not able to take up a position within it and thus remains both inside and outside‖

(139). Schmidgen sees the bastard as a ―liminal‖ figure in Victor Turner's sense of the

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term. Turner writes in The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure that:

The attributes of liminality or of liminal personae ('threshold people‖) are

necessarily ambiguous, since this condition and these persons slip through the

network of classifications that normally locate states and positions in cultural

space. Liminal entities are neither here nor there; they are betwixt and between

positions assigned and arrayed by law, custom, convention, and ceremonial. (95)

This betwixt-and-between status endows some bastard characters in the eighteenth-

century English novel with the opportunity to move across physical space and class

boundaries and, through fluctuations of fortune, to experience ―life from its highest

gradations to its lowest‖ (Schmidgen 145). They are less bound by social convention and

enjoy more freedom of movement, literally becoming wanderers for a time being. In

When Memory Dies, Para exhibits similar characteristics: in his youth, he was ―a railway

guard and travelled all over Ceylon‖ (336). With regards to social convention, Para is the

only family member from Rajan's side to attend Rajan and Lali's wedding, whereas the

rest of Rajan's family had to show a public disapproval of his triple transgression in

marrying ―a Sinhalese . . . a hospital attendant with a child by another man‖ (198). That

the real reason for the boycott is the concern for social repercussion is expressed in

Sahadevan's letter to Lali in which he explains that ―neither he nor [Rajan's] mother had

anything against her personally but, society being what it was, the stigma of [Rajan's]

marriage would attach to [his] younger sister, for whom they had still to find a husband‖

(198). In contrast to his ―legitimate‖ brother Sahadevan, Para has less concern for social

customs. His endorsement of Rajan and Lali's unconventional union is accentuated by

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the fact that he did not attend Rajan's sister Leela's more socially acceptable engagement

(198).

Turner's formulation of liminal beings as those inhabiting in-between states finds

resonance in Mary Douglas' concept of dirt, pollution, and defilement observed in the

primitive cultures. Borrowing Lord Chesterfield's definition of dirt as ―matter out of

place,‖ Douglas elaborates further that ―dirt is a kind of compendium category for all

events which blur, smudge, contradict, or otherwise confuse accepted classifications. The

underlying feeling is that a system of values which is habitually expressed in a given

arrangement of things has been violated‖ (Implicit 50-51). Douglas goes on to emphasize

that ―the idea of dirt implies system,‖ that dirt delineates order, its antithesis, and

assuming control over dirt is a way to regain order and mastery over the external reality

(53).

Dirt avoidance then should be the norm, and indeed on the daily basis that is the

case. However, Douglas notes that there are spectacular examples to the contrary during

the renewal rites in which what had been habitually rejected as polluting and dangerous is

raised to the level of the powerful and sacred.50

Douglas employs the metaphor of

50

―But instead of consistent dirt-rejecting, we find the extraordinary examples of

dirt-affirmation with which this chapter started. In a given culture it seems that some

kinds of behaviour or natural phenomena are recognised as utterly wrong by all the

principles which govern the universe. There are different kinds of impossibilities,

anomalies, bad mixings and abominations. Most of the items receive varying degrees of

condemnation and avoidance. Then suddenly we find that one of the most abominable or

impossible is singled out and put into a very special kind of ritual frame that marks it off

from other experience. The frame ensures that the categories which the normal

avoidances sustain are not threatened or affected in any way. Within the ritual frame the

abomination is then handled as a source of tremendous power‖ (Douglas, Purity 165).

164

gardening to illustrate her point. She writes:

[I]f all the weeds are removed, the soil is impoverished. Somehow the gardener

must preserve fertility by returning what he has taken out. The special kind of

treatment which some religions accord to anomalies and abominations to make

them powerful for good is like turning weeds and lawn cuttings into compost.

(Purity 163)

Dirt and pollution which threaten our understanding of the world as an orderly and

manageable place are nonetheless integral to its regeneration and fertility. Without dirt to

continually replenish the soil, the world becomes barren and finite.

In the earlier sections of When Memory Dies, the images of agriculture serve as

the motif of the life force. Book One opens with a reference to rain, which is essential to

the cultivation of land. Sahadevan's father Pandyan was a farmer who owned a small plot

of land which stays with the family through the course of the century. However, the

novel rejects subsistence farming on small plots of land as holding no future, and worse,

a stepping stone for an armed struggle. A whole generation of unemployed youths return

to their bits of land to see what they can grow on it, but as Para points out, they are soon

met by a battery of systemic ills, such as dowry system that breaks up land into every

smaller subdivisions, caste system that despises manual work, and the lack of market.

Frustrated by the systemic injustice, the youths turn to arms, as does Para's grandson

Ravi. The last person to cultivate Pandyan's plot, Ravi abandons farming to join the

militant group that fights for the Eelam. Instead of the water pump used in turning the

brown, barren earth into a blooming desert, he picks up a gun, and he exchanges his

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talent for ―concocting chemicals and fertilizers from dung and decay‖ with the

knowledge to fashion bombs that destroy things (391-392). Land and farming no longer

promise renewal.

In When Memory Dies, writing replaces farming as a means to usher in a new era,

and it is significant that the novel‘s two bastard characters, Para and Vijay, engage in

writing to bring about social change. At this point I would like to argue that in many

ways the bastard‘s status as a social outcast corresponds to Douglas' polluting object.

Neither belongs properly to the central system of the physical or social body. Bastards

are the result of transgressive sexual relations, the uncontrolled excess that defy social

custom of marriage. They are despised and shunned as posing a threat to the order of the

community. But as Douglas points out, dirt that gets rejected on the daily basis becomes

a source of power during special, ritual occasions. Similarly, anthropologists who study

the ritual process have observed that it is those outside the accepted pale of society,

liminal figures such as tricksters and clowns, who are called during ritual performances to

breathe in new life and restore order to the community. Liminal figures‘ position on the

margin of society allow them to cross the boundary between order and disorder and direct

the unwanted elements, such as disease and affliction, away from the center (Werbner

61). As it is the case with dirt and pollution, the despised members of society are

paradoxically essential to the health and well-being of the community.

In the context of When Memory Dies, Para and Vijay are liminal figures who fall

outside the neat social boundary of the institution of marriage and, as those occupying the

marginal space, challenge the stability of the established system and represent the

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possibility for change and renewal. Para is the voice of wisdom and experience in the

novel especially on the topic of the ethnic relation. The title of the book comes from a

conversation between Para and Vijay when the octogenarian says to his grandnephew on

his last visit:

'When memory dies, a people die,' Uncle Para broke into [Vijay's] reverie,

and Vijay had the eerie feeling that the old man was privy to his thoughts before

he was. But, remembering his experiences of the past few days, he asked: 'What

if we make up false memories?'

That is worse,' replied the old man. 'That is murder.' (335)

Para spends his last years fighting against this fading away of the memory, against the

encroachment of formlessness, by recording his understanding of the social reality and to

reflect on the possibility for change:

It was late morning before Uncle Para had finished his ablutions and his prayers

and sat down with yet another cup of tea and a biscuit to 'talk' to his Exercise

Book. It was the hour he looked forward to when, having mulled over what he

had read the previous day in the newspapers and the clippings that his librarian

friend sent him twice a week from Colombo, he entered into deep conversation

with himself about the world out there, but in writing. Writing reflected and

refracted that world through his numerous selves, brought those selves together,

cohered them, and connected him with events he could no longer enter into. It

gave him a hold on reality and allowed him to go along with those who wanted to

change it. It kept him involved and active. And in the evenings, when he had

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woken from his afternoon slumber, he would talk to the authors of the books

which his friend sent him from time to time – philosophers, novelists, essayists,

he talked to them all – and meditated gravely on what they had to say. Meditation

lifted him above the world and allowed him to see how it had to be changed;

reflection engaged him in the changing. (329)

As the only character who lived through the entire scope of the novel, he is ideally poised

to comment on the events of the century. Para characterizes his writing activity as a

series of ―talks‖ or conversation, with his exercise book, with himself, and with other

writers. Thus, it is through engagement, with himself and with others, that Para

―involves‖ in the events of the day. His approach of building connections is in contrast

with the method employed by the militants like his grandson Ravi, who seek to bring

about change through destruction.

It is no coincidence that Vijay also takes up writing as a means of social

engagement. He is outside the social norms as a bastard and also as a child of mixed

ethnicity, culturally at least. Distressed by the intensifying dominance by the Sinhalese,

Vijay moves to the Tamil-majority area of the north with Meena as the region begins to

be militarized. There he finds a calling in recording the situation:

Vijay now began to keep notes of his conversations. He saw himself as a serious

writer, a reporter from the front line at the least. He found an old exercise book in

Yogi's room and every night, before going to bed, wrote down the things he had

learnt that day, and the thoughts and reflections that arose from them, till writing

itself became a discovery. And soon he had a feel for Eelam as he had never had

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before. He had understood it in his head, but he had not felt it in his imagination;

and the imagination, he knew now, had to be felt to become material. (404)

For Para and Vijay writing becomes a generative activity. Out of the chaotic occurrences

of the period they glean out the meaning and mold their understanding of the reality.

Their mental universe is a realm in constant flux, a place of ―conversation‖ and

―imagination‖ where nothing is fixed and immutable but forever changing and in

formation. Even the self is not absolute but multiple. Thus, writing challenges the

essentialist thinking of the communal politics that denies the possibility of alterity.

Conclusion

At the conclusion of the novel, Vijay dies before he makes any lasting political or

journalistic contribution to the conflict. Nagesh Rao comments on the ending of that

novel as follows: ―Its artistic integrity lies in the fact that it does this not by proposing

simple 'solutions', but through an unstinting affirmation of a revolutionary, democratic

vision‖ (Rao). Vijay dies while trying to save the life of Kugan, the crippled Tamil

toddy-tapper accused of informing the enemy. Ravi, the Tamil paramilitary commander

fashioned after the LTTE leader Prabhakaran, who also happens to be Vijay‘s cousin, sets

out to make an example of Kugan, not because of any substantial evidence, but because

Kugan‘s double marginality, of low-caste status and physical handicap, makes him an

easy target. Thus, in attempting to save Kugan‘s life, Vijay challenges the structure of

privilege and seeks to expand the group envelope. Unlike his cousin Ravi who upholds

the hierarchical social order by imposing a ―high-handed and top-down‖ command

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structure, Vijay envisions an egalitarian community built on socialism where there are no

outcasts and second-class citizens (406). As one who inhabits the margins of society as a

bastard, Vijay is suited for this role.

Vijay is a foil to Prabhakaran, whom I have discussed in the first chapter.

Prabhakaran exacted absolute loyalty and devotion from his followers to the point of

demanding their death for the cause of the Eelam. Prabhakaran‘s followers willingly died

under his orders to the point of purposefully blowing themselves up, while he remained

protected by layers of security. In the process, Prabhakaran, like Ravi in When Memory

Dies, enlarged the gulp between the Sinhalese and Tamil communities, and eliminated

those who, like Vijay, offered to bridge the gap. Prabhakaran‘s version of Eelam had

every indication of replicating the politics of privilege and exclusion committed by the

Sinhalese government where the minorities, such as Muslims, low-caste members of

society, and women, are discriminated against.

Prabhakaran insisted on separation and preservation of the group purity, whereas

Vijay challenged the social norm. Before his death, Vijay was on the verge of marrying

Meena, an estate Tamil, thereby crossing ethnic and class boundaries. Vijay‘s story could

have taken several different forms: he could have been a biological child of Rajan and

Lali; his parents‘ ethnicities could have been reversed, so that his father was Sinhalese

and his mother Tamil; he could have been an estate Tamil; or he could have been the

child of a rape. However, all these permutations would have had one thing in common:

Vijay‘s life would have contained an element of change, bringing about a world that is

different from what we are accustomed to. When Memory Dies offers one possible

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version of that change and suggests that those who are considered threats to social

integrity, whether they be minorities, outcasts, unwed mothers or raped women and their

children, could paradoxically be the agents of social integration, particularly at times of

crisis and social transition.

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Conclusion

The human body is the thematic coagulant of this project. These chapters turned

to the literary, journalistic, psychoanalytical, and anthropological accounts to investigate

the roles various bodies play in the Sinhala-Tamil conflict in Sri Lanka. Through a close

analysis of journalist Anita Pratap‘s first hand encounter with the Liberation Tigers of

Tamil Eelam and other literatures on the activities of the organization, the first chapter

examined how the transforming body of the LTTE group leader Prabhakaran and the

exploding bodies of the suicide bombers sent by him undermined their dream of the

motherland as they attempted to break apart the enemy. Chapter Two looked at the

phenomenon of mirroring in armed conflict, drawing from the anthropological

observations and artistic interpretations of the Medusa myth. This chapter also suggested

that a group‘s recovery from fragmentation through violence depends on its

acknowledgement of the bodies that are not deemed whole and thus traditionally

excluded from the group. Michael Ondaatje‘s novel Anil’s Ghost tells how the bodies of

the victims who have crossed the threshold of death are reclaimed and incorporated into

the group bodies in ways that strengthen the group unity. Chapter Three postulated that

the potential for integration is in the society‘s changed attitude toward those on its

margins. A. Sivanandan‘s novel When Memory Dies shows how in armed conflicts,

especially ones over ethnic identity and purity, women have been considered a liability to

the group integrity, as their bodies have been viewed capable of contamination by enemy

seed. It would be interesting to see how a different way of conceptualizing women‘s

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body and hybridity might affect our understanding of ethnicity and other markers of

identity. For example, the patrilineal tradition that excludes women from the group

identity fuels the logic of intergroup rape during ethnic conflicts. The expansion of

women‘s rights is but one piece in the struggle for equality that destabilizes social

hierarchy and privileges. Through an analysis of the collection of these texts, this project

offers alternate perspectives on the marginalized bodies and point out the possibility that

renewal comes through them.

The body of literature I have chosen has as its common denominator the human

casualties in war. Not religion or political ideologies, but human bodies serve as the

propagators of fear, weapon of destruction, target of violence, and the building site of

redemption and peace. I hope that an examination of the implications of the body in

various situations and cultures will result in seeing the enemy not as the other but one of

us. After all, our bodies are what we have in common with the rest of the humanity.

Franz Fanon wrote in The Wretched of the Earth that ―Violence alone, perpetrated

by the people, violence organized and guided by the leadership, provides the key for the

masses to decipher social reality (96). Fanon‘s injunction fits well with the LTTE

ideology. The LTTE was bent on wrestling Tamil Eelam from the Sinhalese state through

military means, ultimately suffering a defeat that forfeited any bargaining power the

organization had garnered for the Tamil people. I will conclude this dissertation with a

short synopsis of the end of the war, the effect of the LTTE‘s defeat on the Sri Lankan

Tamil movement, and how the body of literature I have chosen is relevant in this post-

civil war era.

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The End of the Sri Lankan Civil War

The twenty-six year old civil war finally ended in May 2009 with the LTTE‘s

defeat and the death of their leader Velupillai Prabhakaran. The LTTE, which had

controlled about one-quarter of the island between the mid-1990s and 2006, was virtually

eradicated by the Sri Lankan military (DeVotta 1023). There are several factors that have

contributed to the LTTE‘s eventual defeat; here, I will highlight those that surfaced from

the LTTE‘s own internal fault-lines and miscalculations.

Sivanandan ends When Memory Dies with a scene of infighting within the

leadership of the Tamil Separatist group. Yogi, the second-in-command, supplants Ravi,

the leader of the group, when the latter turns increasingly autocratic (411). The closing of

When Memory Dies, which was published in 1997, seems eerily prophetic when read

with the benefit of the hindsight. The beginning of the LTTE‘s demise runs parallel to the

ending of When Memory Dies. In a speech to the annual Marxism conference in 2009,

the largest left wing gathering in Britain, Sivanandan refers to the defection of

Vinayagamoorthi Muralitharan, a senior member of the LTTE, to the Sri Lankan

government‘s side in 2004 as one of the decisive factors in the LTTE‘s defeat. More

commonly known as Colonel Karuna Amman, Muralitharan was the LTTE commander

of the Eastern region and the second-in-command after Prabhakaran. The insider

information provided by Muralitharan was instrumental in the Sri Lankan army‘s victory

over the LTTE (―Ethnic Cleansing‖). Other scholars have also pinpointed Muralitharan‘s

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defection as one of the pivotal moments in the development of the Sri Lankan civil war.51

Neil DeVotta elaborates on the motivation behind the Eastern Province‘s revolt against

the LTTE as stemming from caste differences. Easterners suffered from forcible

conscription and heavier tax by the LTTE while upper caste northern or Jaffa Tamils were

treated more leniently (DeVotta 1036). It is ironic that, while struggling against the

Sinhalese domination, the LTTE leadership, composed mostly of Jaffna Tamils, was

engaged in discriminatory practices against other Tamils.

Along with the unequal treatment of its own people, which resulted in the division

within the organization, the LTTE made a tactical mistake in boycotting the 2005

presidential election, thereby ensuring a narrow victory for Mahinda Rajapakse who was

committed to defeating the LTTE militarily. Rajapaksa‘s main challenger was the former

prime minister Ranil Wickremesinghe, who brokered the 2002 ceasefire treaty with the

LTTE, and who was known to be more invested in the peace negotiation than his rival.

One explanation for the LTTE boycott of the election was that the organization was

internally weak at the time and did not want to engage in a serious negotiation, something

it feared the Wickremesinghe government would have pursued (Mishler, Finkel, and

Peiris 209). The low turnout among the Tamil voters, who would have most likely voted

for Wickremssinghe, ensured the election of Rajapakse who was less interested in the

right of the minorities and the devolution of power to the regional governments.

Shortly after Rajapakse was sworn in as the new president, the hostilities between

the Sri Lankan army and the LTTE resumed, both sides accusing the other of violating

51

See Shastri 91, Wickramasinghe 192, and DeVotta 1036.

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the ceasefire truce (―Truce and Fiction‖). In January of 2008, the Sri Lankan government

formally ended the six-year ceasefire agreement after several military victories in the

previous year (―Sri Lanka: Cease-fire is Annulled‖), claiming that the LTTE had been

using the ceasefire agreement ―to rearm, recruit, and to prepare for further acts of

terrorism‖ and that the organization was never serious about the negotiation

(―Government Takes‖). Thereafter, the Sri Lankan army mounted a relentless military

attack against the LTTE, finally capturing Kilinochchi in January of 2009, which had

served as the LTTE headquarters for over a decade (Reddy). By early April of 2009, the

Sri Lankan military had taken all the territory controlled by the LTTE in the northeast and

drove the tigers into the 20-square kilometer no-fire zone set up for civilians (Andarasan).

The last phase of the war was marred by particularly bloody battles and casual

disregard for civilian lives exhibited by both the LTTE and the Sri Lankan army. During

the final month of fighting, the LTTE was accused of using Tamil civilians trapped in the

no-fire zone as human shields and preventing them from escaping to the government-

controlled areas (Natarajan). On their part, the Sri Lankan military was accused of

shelling the no-fire zone, killing and injuring civilians who were trapped there (―UN

Mourns‖). The U.N. estimated that at least 7000 civilians, most Tamils, were killed

between January and May of 2009, and 280,000 Tamil civilians were displaced by the

civil war and were interned in refugee camps (―Civilians Displaced‖). Most of the LTTE

leadership, along with the leader Prabhakaran, was killed by the time the organization

surrendered to the Sri Lankan government.

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The Controversy over Prabhakaran’s Dead Body

The Sri Lankan military declared victory on May 16, 2009, but the whereabouts

of the LTTE leader remained a mystery for a few days. Some believed that Prabhakaran

had already eluded the grasp of the Sri Lankan military, and that most likely had left the

area where the battle was fought. Anita Pratap was among those who held this view and

stated that ―[Prabhakaran] is an excellent military strategist, a good chess player who

anticipates his enemy‘s every move. I don‘t see him doodling his thumbs and waiting for

the army to advance and capture him‖ (Nolen and Reinhart). Others speculated whether

the leader who demanded sacrifices from so many followers would himself give his life

for the cause. As a captured Black tiger put it, one of the main factors that contributed to

the loyalty of the Tiger cadres was ―a firm belief …that Prabhakaran would not be killed

by the army. He would bite his cyanide capsule and commit suicide rather than be

captured or be killed‖ (Weerakoon). Prabhakaran had supposedly left an elaborate

instruction for his bodyguards in case ―he cannot or will not fight longer‖: they were

supposed to ―shoot him, douse his body with gasoline and set it alight, to deprive the Sri

Lankan government of that prize‖ (Nolen and Reinhart).

Therefore, when the state media released two conflicting accounts of

Prabhakaran‘s death, many in the Tamil community were skeptical about the veracity of

the Sri Lankan government‘s claim. Initial report on May 18 carried in the newspaper

Daily Mirror stated that Prabhakaran was killed that morning while trying to escape in an

ambulance, and that his body was badly burned (―Prabha Killed‖). However, the next

day the Sri Lankan army spokesperson issued a different account stating Prabhakaran‘s

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bullet-ridden body was found that day on the banks of the Nanthikadal lagoon in north-

east (Lawson).52

Television stations broadcasted the footage of what they claimed to be

Prabhakarans‘ dead body with a bullet-hole on the forehead and the identity tag that read

LTTE 0:01 (―The Corpse‖).

In spite of this visual evidence, the doubt over Prabhakaran‘s death lingered on. A

Colombo-based diplomat questioned, ―Is it really credible that a man reputed to have

numerous lookalike doubles to avoid capture by the army would really carry [an identity

tag] around with him?‖ (Lawson). The initial denial by the LTTE International Relations

chief Selvarasa Pathmanathan of Prabhakaran‘s death also fed the controversy

(―Government Shows‖).53

The truth about Prabhakaran‘s last days may never be fully known. The official

position of the Sri Lankan government and the LTTE is that Prabhakaran was killed in

battle (DeVotta 1046). According to the University Teachers for Human Rights, Jaffna,

an organization dedicated to exposing human rights violations by all parties in Sri Lanka,

there is a possibility that Prabhakaran and his younger son were captured and tortured

before being killed (―Prabhakaran: Likely Scenario‖). Anita Pratap thinks that

Prabhakaran killed himself to evade capture and that the proud Tiger chief would have

made sure that his body was never found. In her column for The Week, India, published

52

For a more detailed account of the conflicting reports on Prabhakaran‘s death

see the University Teachers for Human Rights, Jaffna (UTHR(J)), ―1.4.3 17th

-19th

May:

Enigma of Prabhakaran‘s Several Deaths‖ and ―1.5 Prabhakaran: Likely Scenario‖

(http://www.uthr.org/SpecialReports/spreport32.htm#_Toc232409724).

53

On May 19, Pathmanathan claimed that Prabhakaran was safe and well (―War

crime‖), but acknowledged a week later that their leader ―attained martyrdom fighting the

oppression of Sri Lankan state on 17 May‖ (―Claims‖).

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on May 31, Pratap writes:

Remember, one of [Prabhakaran‘s] favourite heroes is Netaji Subhas Chandra

Bose. Even today, there are people who believe that Bose is still alive. The

mystery and the mystique remain. If Prabhakaran‘s body is never found, no one

can be sure whether he is really dead or alive and the conspiracy theories will spin

forever—keeping him alive in people‘s imagination. Purpose served, especially if

he is dead. (―Lion‖)

Whether or not Pratap is right about Prabhakaran‘s mode of death, she has a point on the

effect of the controversy. Didier Anzieu writes in The Group and the Unconscious that

―Often the absent, dead or idealized leader becomes all the more powerful because

fascination with an imago of authority is stronger when the leader is not continually

present in the flesh. A purely psychological power is greater than physical or social ones‖

(215). In life Prabhakaran had proved this axiom true by carefully cultivating an aura of

mystique for decades. His power was not purely psychological since he had a body of

flesh and blood, but by making his physical presence scarce even to his followers,

Prabhakaran was able to occupy a larger psychological space in the minds of his

followers and enemies. His tactical absence was evocative of the Sri Lankan Tamil‘s

dispossession of the land and representation, and there is some indication that this trend

continues after his death. Although the Sri Lankan army issued a statement on May 28,

2009, saying that the army medical experts have matched the DNAs of Prabhakaran and

his eldest son Charles Anthony, the rumor that the Tiger leader is alive is still entertained

by many, especially by Sri Lankan Tamils living abroad (―DNAs‖). As late as September

179

of 2009, the Tamil community around the world subscribed to the literal meaning of a

popular song by Sellappah, a Tamil Nadu musician, which declares that Prabhakaran is

still alive and will return someday to resume the fight for Tamil Eelam (Upal Fernando).

Future of Tamil Eelam

Many scholars believe that the prospect of a separate homeland for Sri Lankan

Tamils is unlikely given the current situation. The LTTE leadership has been virtually

exterminated during the last phase of the war. Some have surrendered and the rest has

been captured by the Sri Lankan military, including the new LTTE leader Selvarasa

Pathmanathan in August 2009 (DeVotta 1047). Therefore, Jayadeva Uyangoda concludes

that ―regrouping and reorganizing would seem to be quite difficult for the LTTE in the

foreseeable future‖ (105). Moreover, the Sri Lankan nationalists are determined to

dominate the island by using the policy of ethnic flooding. In the formerly Tamil-

dominated northern region, the vacuum created by Tamil refugees is being filled by

Sinhalese settlers. By detaining the refugees in detention camps for an unnecessary

length of time, the government gave these Sinhalese settlers time to consolidate their

presence in the north. Once released, the Tamils have no choice but to disperse, which

prevents them from clustering. Through the policy of ethnic flooding, increased troop

presence in the north, and frequent checkpoints, the Sinhalese Buddhist nationalists seek

to prevent the Tamils from amassing enough strength to challenge their hegemony

(DeVotta 1048-49). However, if Vamik Volkan’s observation is correct, the bloody

conclusion to the war will be seared into the future generations of the Sri Lankan Tamils

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as the chosen trauma and someday come to haunt the Sinhalese majority.

In the post-civil war era, the struggle for Sri Lankan Tamil rights and political

power has shifted to the shoulders of the diaspora (DeVotta 1034; Ranganathan 81).

Even during the war, most of the LTTE funding, about 95 percent, came from abroad

(Ranganathan 73). The Tamil diaspora is split into two camps—those who seek political

solution to the ethnic problem and those who still pursue a separate homeland. This

division further weakens the Tamil cause. Moveover, the bid for Eelam gives the Sri

Lankan government an excuse to suppress the Tamils in Sri Lanka (DeVotta 1047).

In the current political climate, the body of literature discussed in this project is

pressingly relevant. Reaching out to the world Tamils and the international audience,

these works have the power to generate a discussion on the complex ethnic and social

issues in Sri Lanka and other communities caught in similar fratricidal violence. In the

course of the civil war that spanned a quarter of a century, we can see some recurring

patterns: the oppressed turning into the oppressor as in the case of the LTTE driving out

Muslims from the Tamil-dominated region; the splintering within the LTTE that is

reflected in the division in the Tamil diaspora; and the erosion of civil liberties that has

crept upon the Sri Lankan society which is reminiscent of the government‘s anti-terror

campaign against the JVP in the late-1980s. The works discussed in this project provide

a record of the conflict as well as a vision of an alternate future, not by casting blame on

one particular group, but pointing out how we have all contributed to the tragedy.

181

Works Cited

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Experience.‖ The Impact of Armed Conflicts on Women in South Asia. Ed. Ava

Darshan Shrestha and Rita Thapa. Colombo: Regional Centre for Strategic

Studies, 2007. 59-104. Print.

Abse, D. Wilfred, and Lucie Jessner. ―The Psychodynamic Aspects of Leadership.‖

Daedalus 90.4 (1961): 693-710. JSTOR. Web. 30 Nov. 2010.

―Adam‘s Bridge.‖ Encyclopaedia Britannica. Encyclopaedia Britannica Online, 2010.

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Bridge>.

Allen, Beverly. Rape Warfare: The Hidden Genocide in Bosnia-Herzegovina and

Croatia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996. Print.

Alles, A.C. The J.V.P.: 1969-1989. Colombo: A.C. Alles, 1990. Print.

Anbarasan, Ethirajan. ―Army ‗Routs Tigers in North-east.‘‖ BBC 5 Apr. 2009: n. pag.

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Anzieu, Didier. The Group and the Unconscious. Trans. Benjamin Kilborne. London:

Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984. Print.

Arnestad, Beate, dir. My Dauther the Terrorist. Morten Daae, Producer. Women Make

Movies, 2007. YouTube. Web. 30 Mar. 2010.

Askin, Kelly D. ―Sexual Violence in Decisions and Indictments of the Yugoslav and

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―Assassin ‗Exploited Soft Spot.‘‖ Sunday Mail [Adelaide, South Australia] 2 June 1991:

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―Bastard.‖ Def. 1a and 1b. Oxford English Dictionary Online. 3rd ed. N.p., Nov. 2010.

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Bloom, Mia. ―Ethnic Conflict, State Terror, and Suicide Bombing in Sri Lanka.‖ Dying to

Kill: the Allure of Suicide Terror. New York: Columbia University Press, 2005.

45-75. Print.

Bollas, Christopher. The Shadow of the Object: Psychoanalysis of the Unthought Known.

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Botsford, Flora. ―Norway Optimistic About Sri Lanka Talks.‖ BBC News 6 Feb. 2002: n.

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