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HILDEGARD ANNE MARIA

MA ENGLISH

ST.ALOSYIUS COLLEGE

MANGALORE

7907865343

Silverreeeds97@gmail.com

21 JANUARY 2019

THE EXPERIENCE OF DIASPORA TO SRILANKAN TAMIL

LITERARY OEUVRE; CHANGING LANDSCAPES AND IDENTITIES
IN TAMIL CULTURE
This paper explores on the literature of the exile and diaspora, their imagination
within the alienation from their native culture, their struggles, perceptions, and their
confrontations with an another culture etc. Tamilians had migrated into several parts of the
world; but major migrations occurred towards Srilanka and Malaysia. The people from these
places in fact had immensely contributed to the Tamil literary hemisphere despite of the
political, economic and social distinctions from the mother culture. The quest for self-
identity(suya adayalam) and Tamil identity (tamizh adayalam) is in jeopardy. Perhaps this
juxtaposition of identities help in creating distinguished identity, one that is intrigued by the
mixed cultural experience and heritage. The paper also explores on the life of the people in
those migrated areas of Srilanka and the reflection of their lives in the culture.

KEYWORDS: Diaspora, Tamil, identity, displacement, migration, multiculturalism.

The collective self-identification of a diaspora as a distinct community in a triadic

relationship with host society and home society also has political implications. Collectively,
the diaspora community is strategically positioned to engage in both immigrant politics (say,
to better its situation within the host society) and homeland politics (say, to better the
situation in the land left behind). The latter, a form of “translocal” political involvement, has
come to be labeled as ‘long-distance nationalism’ (Anderson, 1998) or ‘diaspora nationalism.
(ibid. p.496)

These themes are perhaps more relevant today than ever as there is a growing
relevance in the study of diaspora and especially of that of Tamil literary oeuvre. The
writings of this genre are rising to the point that it explores the scope and exponents of one’s
true identity that is being questioned. One of the eminent writers, V.N. Giridharan showcases
the lives of Srilankan people through his short stories. His exploration into the effects of
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asylum-seeking as well as immigration in Canada and the most vital and cherished
components of traditional Tamil culture and Tamil homeland of Sri Lanka had received
international attributions. His books discusses on the consciousness of linkages within the Sri
Lankan Tamil diaspora so that, despite being numerically small and geographically dispersed,
it has emerged as a vocal and influential force in shaping political developments in Sri Lanka.
The diaspora’s economic, cultural, and political importance in relation to the Tamil
community in Sri Lanka has also increased. (p. 496)

V.N. Giridharan reveals the altered fibre of a community that has tried to adhere
rigidly to the traditional ideals of an idealized Tamil culture in a North American nation that
physically serves as home, yet remains insistently alien. Recognizing the ambiguity of the
boundaries of diaspora, he presents the plight of the diaspora which cannot still feel a
homeland as a place that has to be imagined by nurturing a sense of communal
distinctiveness, socially though not geographically. Under these circumstances, the
imagination of “home”, however, does not have to take the shape of a particular community
rooted in a particular sort of place, whereas modernist theories of nation conceptualize
nations as a particular community rooted in a specific place, geography, or physical setting
(Billig 1995).

Whenever the homeland people who have their relatives and friends in the immigrated
countries contact them over the phone or letter, the immigrants never fail to express
emptiness, a sense of boredom resulting from the mechanized life style and a reservation to
mingle with the host community resisting assimilation into their socio-cultural framework.
Though they express a yearning to be in their mother land within their familiar social and
physical setting, their priority for personal, political and economic security lures them to
settle in these new lands.

The long-hour monotonous odd jobs and labours do not satisfy their fundamental
longings for socio-cultural identity. They are not able to find themselves a political identity in
their host countries. These are the identities which can give fulfilment and complete meaning
to their personal and social life. As a result, their social conscience pushes them to see a wide
gap

Under these circumstances, the imagination of “home” and “identity”, however, does
not have to take the shape of a particular community rooted in a particular sort of place,
whereas modernist theories of nation conceptualize nations as a particular community rooted
in a specific place, geography, or physical setting; transcending to the conflict between what
they feel as a ‘freedom’ in their land and what their kith and kin feel as a “freedom” in the
homeland. This gap creates a vacuum in life in the west and instils a thrust to practice a long
distance nationalism and culture in their host land. It also persuades them to support the
political struggle financially and instils in them a moral commitment to the political
resistance in their homeland.

Given its size and strategic location, Sri Lanka has been more open to the world and
international flows of goods, people and ideas than some of its larger and more land-locked
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neighbours. While from ancient times to the present, Theravada Buddhism was carried by
monks from Sri Lanka along the "Sea Silk Route”, travellers, visitors and colonisers were to
leave behind an island of hybrid histories and ambivalent legacies. The island’s people and
cultures were romanticised in colonial anthropological literature that dwelt extensively on the
cultural diversity of its inhabitants and their harmonious coexistence − until the program of
July 1983, which sharply divided the island’s two dominant communities and precipitated an
unprecedented outflow of refugees. The post-1983 mass migration gave rise to the most
clearly articulated Sri Lankan Tamil diaspora identity. Recent studies of the Sri Lankan
diaspora have focused primarily on migration during the past 30 years of conflict between the
state and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), which resulted in a large flow of
refugees to all parts of the world. Some families have been divided and live in multiple
continents. However, prior to this conflict-induced displacement and migration, there were
earlier waves of migration from the island during the colonial and early post-colonial period.
During the conflict between the government and the Marxist-Maoist Janatha Vimukthi
Peremuna in the 1970s and 1980s, there was a refugee exodus from southern Sri Lanka,
particularly to London. More recently, a large number of women and men have found
employment in the Middle East and constitute transnational communities. The notion of
“diaspora” may be broadly defined to signify not only the “scattering of people” due to
political persecution (as in the original use of the term in the Jewish tradition), but also the
emergence of transnational communities and the economic and socio-cultural dynamics of
migration. Conflict-induced migration and economic migration has often merged and blurred
the distinction between economic migrants and refugees. In recent times, the Sri Lankan
diaspora has grown and been engaged with post-colonial conflicts and, increasingly,
reconstruction and development in the homeland. Reclaiming a Multicultural Diaspora for
Peace and Reconciliation In the aftermath of almost 30 years of armed conflict between the
state and the LTTE, which has generated and accelerated waves of migration from Sri Lanka
and fractured a multicultural social fabric that was once famed for the peaceful coexistence of
diverse faiths and cultures, the diaspora metaphor may be ‘good to think with’. Diaspora also
connotes the mixing and mingling of cultures, peoples, histories and the pluralityof identity.
It signals multiculturalism and hybridity while connoting cultural, religious and historical ties
to Sri Lanka, Ceylon, Taprobane and Serendip (from which the English word serendipity
originates), as the island has been known at different times to different trading communities
that settled there. The study and understanding of the Sri Lankan diaspora may serve to
pluralise history and identity and, indeed, the history of identity in Sri Lanka beyond the
confrontational ethno-nationalist identity politics that was consolidated in the recent armed
conflict. It may provide a conceptual frame for the accommodation of cultural diversity and
pluralism and reclaiming Sri Lanka’s multicultural past.

Romesh Gunesekara a Sri Lankan born British author keeps revisiting his home
country through his poems, novels and short stories. In an interview to the Gaurdian he says,

I have always written out of an urgency... because, any minute, everything

can fall apart – including life.‖ [353] When asked as to why his stories were
always set in Sri Lanka he replies, ―One reason the stories have tended to go
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back to that setting is my desire to understand violence... It could as easily be

Nazi Germany or Rwanda, But Sri Lanka is the one.‖ Further down in the
interview when talking of his novel, ‘The Match’ he says that Sri Lankan
ethnic divides are ‗all manufactured‘ he also says that when goes down the
history they are not deep rooted and are infact intermingled. He aimed to
create a fictional and imaginative Sri Lanka through his words and adds that,
―It doesn‘t matter to me if it corresponds with reality.‖ [354]

In an interview with Ka Bradley in Granta to the Magazine of New Writing

Gunesekara speaks of the protagonist of his novel Noontide Toll. Vasantha a taxi driver finds
himself in a ―world where people are fundamentally talkative but sometimes too frightened
to speak, or prone to forgetfulness. The scenario being post war it is easy to comprehend as to
why people were afraid. The uncertainty ‘lulls over them and their hesitation to participate in
the reconciliation are only obvious. Gunesekara recollects the words of a famous Sri Lankan
journalist in the 1950s, long before the recent war began but at a time when trouble was
brewing, called Ceylon (as it was then) the land of amnesia‘.

Jean Arasanayagam has a rich contribution to the Anglophone Sri Lankan literature.
Born of Dutch Burgher parents and married to a Tamil, she offers insights as to what it is to
be the other in a race conscious hyper pseudo society. Through her poems and short stories
she keeps reassuring the fact that she shares a common heritage in the Island Nation. She
brings in the complexities that are involved in feminine identity in a conflict zone. The
domestic alienation by her in-laws who did not appreciate their son marrying a lady of a
different ethnic background, the larger picture of the conflict zone and the ‗displacement
faced by a minority citizen‘ are the overpowering themes one can find in her works.

We have to record the history of our times. Our personal histories are related
to the cataclysmic events that have swept away our dislocated lives. Memory must not
be effaced. What we have learnt, what we have experienced in these camps are the
lessons of humanity, a shared humanity.‖ [357]

She says talking of the refugee camps and the displacement of people during the war.
Speaking of the polarisation of the relationships between the Sinhalese and Tamils she notes
Suspicion, Alienation and Hostility. All these things became a part of society here. Sge
thought of those who died in holocaust here, while nature, undisturbed, proliferated. It was
happening that should never be erased from living memory. It was the moment of the loss of
humanity. Bestiality was rampant. This was seen in the looting, burning, rape, killing. We
were all de-humanized

Answering to a question on search of her identity, she says, ‘Hybridity’ of her

ancestral roots and its transplantation in the indigenous roots of Sri Lanka gives her a strong
feeling of belonging here and yet being part of there.‘ This is the collective voice of a number
of people in Sri Lanka. While the country is busy demarking the boundaries and divides
between Tamils and Sinhalese, what happens to those who were engaged in inter-ethnic
relationships and marriages are they being ‘assimilated’ or are they being ‘alienated’.
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Sections of literature tell us of how families have disowned their children who chose to marry
the ‘other’. And most of them sought refugee off shores as they were sceptical of their future
in the Island Nation.

Vasugi. V. Ganeshananthan the Sri Lankan American fiction writer and journalist in
her famous novel Love Marriage (2008) gives voice to the hundreds of Diasporic couples and
individuals who despite the geographical distance from the war zones of Sri Lanka face the
turbulence in their domestic lives when married to the opponent ethnic group. In a review of
her novel Salil Tripathi remarks that the story, ―mixes up the sequence, tossing before the
reader shards of memories which look like pieces of broken bangles. But when we look at
those broken bangles through her kaleidoscope, her twisting of the lens reveals patterns that
make it possible to understand aspects of the conflict, even if the horrors cannot be excused.

Nothing is simple about the Sri Lankan conflict, in which (as the writer Suketu Mehta
pointed out to me) nobody accuses Muslims of fanaticism, Hindus are suicide bombers, and
Buddhists can be brutal. A global terrorism study found that Muslims did not lead the league
table of suicide bombers; the Tamil Tigers did. [360]

There has been the temptation in some quarters to dismiss the seminal work as some
sort of an apology for the Tamils. To fall for this easy line of thinking would in quite
unsophisticed for Subramanian also records the fashion in which the Liberation Tigers of the
Tamil Eelam went about its business in the name of achieving the stated objectives. Ten
years, I calculate to myself. That was long it had taken for the Tigers to go from killing out of
perceived necessity to killing for sport‘ he has said in his well researched book going to talk
about the rise and fall of the LTTE chieftain Velupillai Prabhakaran, his massive operation,
audacity to run a government within a government, large scale destruction, lack of
compassion leaves us speechless.The author has made the argument that even as the Tamils
were tormented enough in being denied their identity and sense of belonging, they were also
traumatised by the tactics of an organisation that they looked up to.

And this would naturally bring forth the debate on whether the LTTE lost the ―war‖ even
before its final conclusion in 2009. And scholars like Subramaniam will make the point that
the LTTE lost the war much before 2009 when they lost the faith of the Tamils themselves.
By the time the Tamils, the author makes the point, had realized that their struggle for an
identity was misrepresentated a decade had passed by and enough damage was done. They
were sandwiched between the Tigers and the Lions. Inter-twined with the concept for the
searching identity is that of the Displacement of the Tamils--people constantly running for
their lives, either by themselves or being chased by both parties. To live in this bedlam,
where nothing was constant, one had no clue of the whereabouts of the rest of the family, or
safety of the kith and kin.

Subramanian‘s work is not just an addition to the Literature on immigration, identity

and social change for This Divided Island has also been seen as another brilliant contribution
to media and the ethnic conflict as it throws light on the tremendous pressures faced by Sri
Lankan media outlets to survive in the course of the conflict journalists were intimidated,
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violated, abducted and at times killed. Press offices were set on fire and the whole world was
watching this unable to do anything. In End Games he records the reconstruction of the entire
nation, where the Rajapaksa government is trying its best to scrub clean of all evidences,
challenging the cries and screams of humanitarian voices, rewriting history and archaeology.
The contribution of authors like Subramanian brings about mixed emotions. Stories enthral,
entertain, and educate. Questions of Identity‘that became critical during war were seen
through the literature sections and the Social Change that constituted the post – war Sri Lanka
highlighting the Triumphantalism‘, Majoritarianism’ and ‘National Reconciliation‘ from the
works of these authors. In fact an argument can be made that even during the post conflict
phase, these very themes have been loudly debated both within Sri Lanka and outside, the
argument being that even if the ethnic conflict has been largely won by the government in
Sri Lanka by wiping out the LTTE, the contributing factors that led to the unfortunate scheme
of things continue to be largely unaddressed and only complicated by tizzy notions of
triumphantalism, majoritarianism and a so-called national reconciliation that refuses to
address issues of Tamil identity and assimilation two core issues that are at the heart of the
problem. The pain of living away from the homeland is reflected in a different perspective,
which includes the blacks, and the Indians in addition to Sri Lankan Tamils. The empathy
shown mutually among them is really heartening. What binds them together is the identity
crisis of living as refugees doing odd jobs. They were well off in their country with social
respect and they found some meaning in life over there.