Source: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10576100590950129?src=recsys

Tamil Tiger “Martyrs": Regenerating Divine Potency?

Michael Roberts

Pages 493-514 | Received 27 Jul 2004, Accepted 14 Oct 2004, Published online: 23 Aug 2006

 

Contrary to claim, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) are not overwhelmingly secular in their practices. While their successes as a liberation movement have been built on organizational skills and techno-military prowess, they mobilize both the Hindu majority and a significant Christian minority within the Sri Lankan Tamil population via modalities that are deeply rooted in the lifestyles and religious practices of Tamils in India and Lanka. To grasp these capacities a reading of the deep history of Tamil civilization writ-large as well as the anthropological literature on religious cross-fertilization in Sri Lanka is essential. The weight attached to propitiatory rituals in Tamil culture inform the LTTE's burial of the dead and the building up of a sacred topography centered on their fallen (the mavirar). Just as heroic humans were deified in southern India's past, regenerative divine power is conceivably invested in today's Tiger mavirar. These facets of Tamil Tiger practice suggests that “enchantment” can nestle amidst secularized rationality in the structures of a modern political movement.

 

Misunderstanding the Tamil Tigers1

The heightened global emphasis on suicide bombers and “terrorists” has led to a greater interest in the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (the Tamil Tigers). In general surveys two gross errors are sometimes perpetuated. It is assumed that all the Tiger activists are Hindu and that the LTTE project, in contrast to that of the jihadists, is purely secular. “The Tamils are Hindu and the Tamil Tigers are secularist,” says Peter Coleman.2

Such popular misunderstandings in international circles seem to be grounded in both ignorance and in the rather truncated view of “religion” espoused by Westerners nourished in rationalized realms that have been cleansed of “magical enchantment.” This article points here to Max Weber's emphasis on “disenchantment” as the corollary of secular rationality. In Weber's argument “rational empirical knowledge has consistently worked through to the disenchantment of the world and its transformation into a causal mechanism.” He did not see this as a one-way linear process, however. In his view this process created tensions within each religious realm for its circle of carriers. The religiosi responded by rendering their beliefs more bookish and literary; but this trend only encouraged the eruption of “prophets” and mystics” among thinking lay devotees; and thus a re-emergence of the “irrational."3

Set within this context the intention of this article is to flesh out the syncretistic religious hues nestling within the rational, pragmatic goals of the LTTE, namely their strategic use of rituals to mobilize supporters and legitimize their cause among Tamil-speakers, while also cementing the loyalty of their personnel. In the author's argument, therefore, the threads of pluralistic religious symbolism are part of the self-motivation and the instrumentality of a highly modern force4 seeking statehood on the principle of self-determination. But the instrumental function rests also on the meaningfulness of the symbols that are selected. Any old symbol plucked from within Tamil culture would not work. So the selections matter. Moreover, the ramifications of these symbols and rituals go beyond the intentions of the composers.

Pursuing this task calls for explorations that the author terms “deep culture” and “deep history” and a study of the folk culture of Tamilian India, present and past. This is necessarily an ambitious goal. This article must therefore remain preliminary.

The movement for Eelam originated largely among those identified as Sri Lanka Tamils (SLTs).5 Initially, in the 1970s and early 1980s, the center of militant Eelamist activity was within the Jaffna Peninsula, the heartland of SLT culture and the principal district in what is known as the Northern Province. There were hardly any Sinhalese dwelling in the Northern Province in 1981, with the exception of Vavuniya District.6 Among the SLT is found a significant Christian minority. The vast majority of these Christians, perhaps around 90% of them, are Roman Catholics, an outcome of the Portuguese colonization in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. Thus, in 1981 the Mannar District even had a Roman Catholic majority, accounting for 41% of the total population as opposed to 27.1% Hindus, whereas the proportion of Catholics in Jaffna and Mullaitivu districts was 11.5% and 15.2% respectively.7

The Catholic and Protestant clergy in both the Northern and Eastern Provinces have supported the Eelamist struggle in considerable measure. As the LTTE developed into the principal force for Eelam, this support extended to the LTTE. Indeed, support for the Tigers among the generality of SLT has been “fierce” and the LTTE has a “strong emotional hold on the population."8 The Tiger fighters seem to be drawn mostly from the lower middle class and the laboring poor. The Westernized middle class is said to have provided only a few recruits. From the early 1990s the farming and fishing villages of the Eastern Province and the northern Vanni seem to have been a major source of Tiger fighters.9

Velupillai Prabhakaran is a Hindu (Saivite) from the Karaiyar caste in the Velvitathurai (VVT) locality. The LTTE has been “a Karaiyar-led and dominated group.”10 The Karaiyar are traditionally associated with fishing,11 but their own lore points to roles as warrior mercenaries and sea captains in the distant past. They “[consider] themselves something special” and have a general “reputation for toughness,” while VVT in modern times has been a smuggler's haven.12 Although the Karaiyar of VVT and the Eastern Province are mostly Hindu, the Karaiyar community is known to have a higher proportion of Catholics than other castes, especially in the Mannar District.

The Karaiyar networks, therefore, facilitated cross-religious cooperation in the clandestine guerrilla activity of the LTTE during the first 15 years of its existence. The early Tiger commanders included such Catholics as Seelan, Victor (Marcelin Fuselus), and Rahim (Canagaratnam), whereas Kittu was a Hindu who adopted Catholicism.13 Seelan was the nom de guerre for Charles Anthony, a close friend of Prabhakaran whose early death on 15 July 1983—effectively a suicide by order and in this sense the first Tiger suicide—was a personal loss for Prabhakaran.14 His mateship has since been inscribed on the Tiger dispensation. One of the LTTE regiments is called the Charles Anthony Brigade. What is more Prabhakaran's son is called Charles Anthony. The homage to the dead, therefore, begins in its leader's heart.

Victor led the Tiger commando raid that slaughtered 146 civilians in Anuradhapura in May 1985. He died in battle sometime in November 1986. The priest who delivered the funeral oration for this “Mannar area leader” deployed a metaphor from St. John's Gospel, “the motif of the seed that shall not bring forth life unless it fall on the ground and die.”15 The same Tamil source notes that this idea has become common currency in the poetry and other imagery espoused by the Tigers and their sympathizers. Moreover, Victor was accorded a “state funeral” and his body traversed the length and breadth of the Mannar area and the Jaffna Peninsula in daytime. Catholic clergymen feature in the video film depicting this ritual moment, a video that then traversed the networks of Tamil migrants and their sympathizers in the global circuit.16

These are not isolated cases. Those with some experiential or research links among the Tigers are positive that the Black Tigers, the elite corps from which the suicidal attackers have generally been recruited in the last 18 years, includes Christians.17

The issue, however, is not one of personnel. The question is whether the Tiger symbolism has elements that are either inspired by religious motifs of some sort or have the potential to embody supernatural meanings and mystical power for those Tamils attuned in devotional directions? The argument here is that the images employed in LTTE commemorations have the capacity to draw on śakti and accaryam—divine power and marvellous potency;18 and that some Tamil participants engage in these rites in ways that render them into acts of propitiatory regeneration. It is this suggestion that this article shall develop—thereby indicating that a modern organization can effectively mix a measure of enchantment within its rational methods.

The Struggle for Tamililam (Eelam in short)

The political struggle by Sri Lanka Tamils against what was deemed to be impending Sinhala hegemony took an important turn in early 1949 when a breakaway faction formed the Federal Party, one year after independence was secured.19 These activists were thoroughly Ceylonese and were arguing within the framework of the state known as “Ceylon.” Their nationalist sentiments were a form of sectional nationalism. As indicated by their limited success during the 1952 general elections, they did not command majority support among the SLT voters. Thus, the transformation of Tamil nationalism from a sectional nationalism arguing for federalism to a separatist nationalism, as embodied in the new meaning attributed to the term “Eelam” (or rather Tamililam)20 as the future state of Sri Lankan Tamils, occurred between 1956 and the early 1970s.

In 1972 the FP transformed itself into a broader front called the Tamil United Front (TUF); and then became the Tamil United Liberation Front (TULF) at the point when it gathered at a mass meeting in May 1976 and adopted the Vaddukoddai resolution defining their goal as Tamililam. The die had been cast. Even the moderate Tamil politicians of yesteryear had become separatist in sentiment. Behind this shift was their awareness of the profound discontent of the Tamil peoples, especially the younger generations. This discontent was strongest in the Jaffna Peninsula: by the mid-1970s the center for Tamil political leadership had shifted to the Jaffna Peninsula and away from the elite Tamil families with residential stakes in the city of Colombo.

In brief, the chief reasons for this heightening of Tamil grievances and aspirations were (1) the ramifying economic and political implications of a program that made Sinhala the language of administration after the populist victory of the MEP led by the Sri Lanka Freedom Party at the 1956 general elections; (2) a measure of discrimination inserted into state policies in administrative recruitment and educational criteria as a result of statutory acts and the growing influence of administrators with Sinhala prejudices; (3) the implications attached to the mini-pogrom in Sinhala-majority areas in 1958; and (4) the manner in which a new republican constitution was set up in 1972, one that discarded the meager constitutional safeguards valued by some lawyers. This process was encouraged, however, by the constitution of 1947, one modeled on that of Westminster and involving a system of parliamentary elections on the first-past-the-post scheme. Given the respective numerical proportions of Sinhalese, Sri Lanka Tamils, Indian Tamils, and Muslims and their peculiar spatial distribution, this meant that victory at the general elections was decided in the Sinhala-majority areas; and, further, that a small swing in the percentage of votes generated major swings in parliamentary power. Once a wave of Sinhala linguistic nationalism with populist tendencies secured control of the government in 1956, therefore, it was not in the interests of the leading parties to grant concessions to the Tamils. In the result the Tamil political forces moved to the extremes between 1956 and 1976.21

The bullish policies of the two different governmental regimes in the period 1970 to the 1980s, the mini-pogrom of 1977, and the major pogrom that terrorized Tamils in the southern and central parts of the country of 1983 sealed the fate of a united Sri Lanka. Support for Tamil militancy and armed struggle among Tamils everywhere swelled thousandfold. Politicians in Tamilnadu as well as the Indian government stepped into the fray as supporters of the Eelamist forces, in ways that attempted to extend India's regional hegemony.

Several underground revolutionary organizations had taken root among the Sri Lanka Tamils in the Jaffna Peninsula in the 1970s, most “origin[ating] from TU(L)F youth organizations.”22 By 1983/84 they numbered over 30, but 5 (TELO, PLOTE, LTTE, EROS, and EPRLF) were of some consequence23 and profited from the explosion of Tamil hostility after the pogrom of 1983. Their militancy was sustained by the competition for recruits. It was only the LTTE, however, that insisted that its fighters should take an oath of loyalty. One can safely presume that this oath involved the reiteration of the LTTE's “holy aim” (putantiram) and the credo that is widely proclaimed in many of its posters and publications, namely: “The task (thirst) of the Tigers (is to achieve) Motherland Tamililam.”24 This initiation was linked to the promise to carry a cyanide vial and to swallow it if captured.25

The cyanide vial is called a kuppi in Tamil. “The vial is fully and consciously exposed hanging on a chord around the neck in processions and in daily encounters [with] LTTE cadres and civilians…. The vial is dear to the LTTE fighters and there is even an LTTE song praising the taking of cyanide,” states Schalk. As significantly, the kuppi”—is regarded as a friend especially by woman fighters.” Its virtues are also promoted by poems and other martyrologies that focus on the agonies of slow death through wounds or torture.26

The kuppi became a beacon evidencing the commitment of the Tigers as well as the legitimacy and justice of the Tamil cause. The “devotion that the Tigers showed was unmatched” and thereafter the people required no further proof of this dedication, said a Tamil octogenarian when the topic of arppanippu, an evocative Tamil word referring to “dedication or gift (of human to god),” entered the conversation.27 The Tiger personnel were, henceforth, walking witnesses to the idea of tiyakam, “abandonment” and sacrifice thus potential tiyaki and in some ways proximate to “martyrs” in the Western tradition.28 Needless to say, this practice provided the LTTE with an edge over the other groups in attracting support from the Tamil peoples, although it was their ruthless extermination of the leadership of TELO, EPRLF, and PLOT that eventually left them masters of the armed wing of the struggle for Eelam.29

In the initial stages during the 1980s, and even into the 1990s, the LTTE was a guerilla force battling what was considered to be an occupying army. They were in a position of military weakness. The power balance was one of marked asymmetry. In this situation the sacrificial suicidal commitment of the LTTE fighters was of special value. Converted into smart bombs these Tiger personnel became precision tools.30 These precision bombs were not only used in ambush or battle. They were deployed as weapons of assassination and bomb blast in the heart of enemy territory—especially Colombo. These means were used to eliminate the commander of the navy, a president-of-state, potential presidents, and a defense minister. By using truck bombs on occasions massive damage was inflicted in the very heart of a teeming city. The goal here was to evoke anxiety among the people residing in the metropolitan area, while also disrupting the economy.

The first truck bomb was driven into an army camp at Nelliyady on 5 July 1987 by a fighter known by the code name Capt. Miller.31 His act consolidated the development of the special commando regiment known as the Black Tigers from 1986, a body that has become an integral apart of the LTTE forces32 and from whose ranks most of the suicidal raiders and/or assassins appear to have been drawn in subsequent decades. Indeed, 5 July has been demarcated “Black Tigers' Day” in the ritual calendar set up for their people by the LTTE from the year 1989. It is marked by acts of homage to the fallen Black Friday personnel throughout Tiger-controlled territory as well as the networks of Tamil migrants in other lands. Conventionally, the LTTE websites reiterate this image: “Black Tigers' identities are closely guarded. Having completed their training, they serve in regular LTTE units, concealing their membership. When called up for a mission, they take routine leave and if they survive, return to regular service again. Membership is only revealed if they are killed in combat.”33 The significance attached to the Black Tiger personnel within the military machine of the LTTE from the late 1980s is indicated by the fact that those sent on suicide missions have the privilege of a last meal with their tesai talaivar or “national leader.”34

The most significant day in the LTTE ritual calendar, however, is 27 November when the tesai talaivar,35 Velupillai Prabhakaran, delivers an oration in commemoration of all the fallen Tiger personnel, the mavirar or “great heroes.” There are 10 ritual days in the annual calendar, among them the 19 April and 26 September in memory of Annai Pupati (a mother of 10 children) and “Tiyaki” Tilipan (Thileepan), respectively: both fasted unto death in protest against the Indian Peace-Keeping Force's presence in Tamil country.36 Figures presented by the LTTE indicate that between 1982 and September 2002 there were 241 Black Tigers among their fallen, set apart from the 17,648 “fighters” killed.37 Within the latter figure, 3,766 were women and 13,882 men. All these personnel, in the Tiger, and thus in the Tamil, view, are “mavirar”—translated by the LTTE as “heroes” and/or “martyrs.” Mavirar only applies to dead persons and is therefore not deployed in the Western sense of heroes.38 Indeed, Schalk is careful to draw out the distinctions between the Tiger's connotation of martyr and that in the West, thereby confirming the opinion conveyed to me by several Tamils, namely, that mavirar is an innovation.39

Moreover, a veritable sacred topography has been composed in “Tigerland” through cenotaphs and cemeteries as well as more isolated gravestones that dot the country. The cemeteries are symmetrical in design and kept in immaculate order, in effect indexing and replicating the regimented character of the LTTE. These sites are augmented on ritual days by arched billboard pandals and pictures of specific heroes placed at nodal points in the populated areas.40 As Schalk observes, the “LTTE has produced an elaborate symbolism of death and metaphors for the survival of the holy aim, and a sacrificial commitment to the nation.”41 They even set up an Office of Great Heroes in 1995 to oversee the memorial sites and mold the mavirar cult.42

The influence of these architectural symbols and the pictorial imagery deployed in LTTE websites and publications cannot be understood without attending to the insidious power of visual and oral modes of cultural transmission in such societies as India and Sri Lanka. Storytelling, poetry, films, and ritual practice in South Asia are all characterized by enormous redundancy. That is, messages and patterns of representation are endlessly repeated.43 This means that the populace absorbs the ambience and/or message of a rite, picture, building, or pandal unreflectively because of a familiarity gained by endless exposure to the style of representation. This understanding can extend, say, to color coding. So billboard images of Annai Pupati in bright red tinged with gold immediately inscribe a religious aura to her action and her commemoration, especially when it is framed as a lotus (for a red lotus is the symbol for the fierce goddess, Durga and conveys the idea of strength).44

The LTTE practices of commemorative homage are reminiscent of the northern Irish landscape where “new memorials are being built all the time, creating an extensive and expanding network of sites for the growing number of commemorations.”45 As in Ireland then, the memorials, rites, and even some dramatic performances (kuttu) carry a quality of sacredness that could appeal to those Hindu, Catholic, and Protestant Tamils who are devoted to Eelam and/or the LTTE. Such orchestrated practices, therefore, help deepen and expand Tamil patriotism and Eelamist sentiment, while accumulating social capital for the LTTE. As such, they point to the active fostering of a mavirar (tiyaki) cult. The rationale, clearly, is to reaffirm and cement the beliefs of the existing band of Tiger personnel on the one hand and, on the other, to induce new, younger generations of Tamils and those older Tamils on the sidelines to join the Eelam struggle.

The author holds, however, that such an instrumental explanation is only one part of the story. The Tiger leaders are not outsiders. They are a body of individuals who have not only seized the position of leaders of their people fighting for their people. The author goes further on a speculative basis and asserts that they are, in some senses, of the people.46 They are ready to practice what they preach. High-ranking Tigers have committed suicide in order to protest and/or protect their comrades or to prevent incriminating evidence falling into enemy hands. Again, at least two district commanders, Pulendran and Kumarappa, were among the 17 Tigers who swallowed cyanide vials when they were being despatched to Colombo after their boat was captured in October 1987.47 In January 1993 no less a person than Kittu (Krishnakumar Sathasivam), virtual no. 3 in the hierarchy, went down with a LTTE merchant ship as it was being sequestered on the high seas by the Indian Navy.48

One's inquiries, moreover, should not be confined to the thinking of the LTTE leaders. The sentimental practices organized by the Tiger regime, whether rites or icons for the fallen, or poetry, song, drama (kuttu), and feature article, engage the Tamil people. The ramifications of these cultural practices among these people, the principal audience addressed, should be one of the arenas examined. It is the reception of these practices that is as central as anything else.

This combination of focus, that centering on roots of inspiration and that on reception, must necessarily delve into the cultural backdrop for such practices. Deciphering the symbols and participatory activities of the LTTE calls for extensive participant observation, no easy task without expertise in Tamil and explicit sympathies/links with the Tamil-cum-Tiger struggle.49 Along another methodological track one requires cultural exploration. It is the latter course that the author is partially qualified to take, although constrained by his lack of competence in Tamil.

Indeed, without attention to culture one can hardly comprehend the significance of a momentous innovation initiated by the LTTE in the late 1980s,50 one that is on a par with the use of cyanide vials (kuppi)—the decision that their fallen should be buried rather than cremated.

Because most Sri Lanka Tamils are Hindus and roughly 50% of the people in the Jaffna Peninsula are of the highest caste, namely Vellalar,51 for centuries the conventional manner of respectfully treating the deceased has been the cremation of their bodies.52 Only Christian Tamils and perhaps some of the depressed castes buried (bury) their dead.53 A “standard” Hindu village, therefore, would not have a cemetery, only a cremation ground. Cremation carried value and status. For the Tiger hierarchy to order the burial of their dead and impose it on the peoples under their thumb was a radical measure.

On a priori reasoning at least two pragmatic considerations could be said to have directed such an innovation. First, cremation is an expensive business and the Jaffna Peninsula in particular is short of wood. To bury the dead was cheaper and would conserve wood in a context where the number of bodies could be considerable. Second, the Tigers would have seen the strategic advantage of a mavirar cult as a mobilizing device and a justificatory tool. It is possible that their knowledge of the Irish scene and the history of Nazi Germany made them alive to such potentialities. It is likely that the Christian personnel in their ranks promoted such a modus operandi. But even without such inspirations, instrumental and rational considerations could have led the Tiger leaders to such a momentous policy decision.

They may also have been directed by special themes in Hindu tradition and practice. Not all Hindus are cremated. Sannyasins are a special category of persons: the path to the status of exemplary ascetic involves the burning away of one's former life, a form of death in other words. So sannyasins are buried and their shrines are regarded as a locus of divine power.54 So, too, popular heroes or heroic sati-suicides were revered in the distant past and their persona marked by a commemorative stone slab or shrine. Perhaps adopting pre-Hindu practices, then, for many centuries Hindu Indians have enshrined these special humans in what are called “memorial stones” or “hero stones.”55 This practice embodied a broader process that one can depict as “the deification of humans and the humanising of the deities.”56

Narrowing the regional focus, let it be stressed that the practice of erecting hero stones, that is, natukal or viragal, prevailed in many parts of Tamilnadu as well as the Kannada-speaking area of Mysore (Karnataka) and Kerala for many centuries.57 The evidence goes back even to the Cankam poetry of the first-to-third centuries B.C.E. “These heroes often became tutelary divinities or demons and were worshipped with offerings of food and flowers.”58 Such heroes included great men who suffered “voluntary death when some irretrievable disgrace or insult befell them.”59 This suicidal act, then, could even be a form of protest and a chastisement of powerful figures by those weaker.

The critical point is that some of these deified local heroes became one facet of a more general category, the guardian deities protecting villages from outsiders. Such guardian deities are identified by the generic terms mavirar or bhairavar,60 although at the same time one could have a specific, named shrine in a locality that is called Mavirar or Bhairavar. The more popular deities, such as Maduraiviran, became deities with some regional reach. During his research in the early twentieth century Whitehead discovered that Maduraiviran was “a male attendant of nearly all the village goddesses throughout the Tamil country.” While often represented by a small conical stone, Maduraiviran's image at the Azhargiri Temple in Madras was “covered with spears, guns and arms.”61 In Shulman's classic interpretation Maduraiviran (Maturaiviran) “is a quintessential Tamil hero (viran, Skt vira) endowed with a perilous plenitude of power that cannot but spill over the paltry limits set by society.”62

Indeed, it is possible that the goddess Kannaki (Kannagi), to whom numerous temples are dedicated in Kerala, Tamilnadu, and Sri Lanka, originated in distant time as a village deity that was taken up by a kingly court and thereafter diffused and developed into a major force.63 Kannaki has both a chaste dimension as well as the character of an avenging goddess. There are several temples for Kannaki Amman in Sri Lanka and she is a figure known to every Tamil.64 It is not surprising but yet significant, therefore, that Kannaki in her militant and yet chaste form has been incorporated into Tiger literature as an inspiration for their female fighters.65

My point, therefore, is “simple”: such icons and shrines are a source of power, capable of wrathful or bountiful intervention. Where appropriate, they are propitiated by the faithful for these reasons. These deified humans inspire hope. They help one to surmount fear and to derive mystical power. They protect, and thereby renew, one's being. The act of an individual devotee is, in such contexts and especially at collective rites, at once individual and yet collectively ramifying. They renew the being of the collective people, usually a village writ large. But such communitarian implications can embrace larger collective units.

Natukal in Tamil literally means “planted stones.”66 So it is significant that the LTTE literature speaks of planting their dead rather than burying their dead. Peter Schalk's close association with the LTTE67 enables him to state conclusively that “a LTTE martyr never ‘dies’. His body is planted as seed to be reborn. ‘The LTTE never buries its dead, it plants them’ to quote a LTTE leader.” Thus, LTTE posters on Black Tigers' Day proclaim: “We are not dead; we have been sown.”68 This viewpoint is in tune with the metaphoric picture of their fallen brave as “seeds,” that is, vitai.69 Thus, in paying homage to their comrades as sacrificial seeds at commemorative rites, the living fighters and supporters are not only emphasizing their debts of obligation. They are drawing energy (sakti, accaryam, darsan, akarsana, haskam)70 from these “seeds” of divine force for their ongoing endeavors. It is a regenerative act. So the author infers.

Propitiation and Pluralistic Religious Practice

The just mentioned inference arises from an awareness of religious practices of propitiation in Sri Lanka favored by Buddhists, Hindus, Catholics, Protestants, and even Muslims. Although the author has personally witnessed such ritual moments, his understanding is based on secondary sources rather than extensive participant observation. It derives from the anthropological work of a wide range of scholars: Obeyesekere, Gombrich, Kapferer, Stirrat, Garbett, Bastin, Tanaka, Pfaffenberger, and Lawrence. Most of these analysts pursued their research in the southwestern and central parts of the island and not in the north and east.71 But SL Tamils figure in the work of Garbett,72 Bastin, and Obeyesekere, whereas Tanaka's detailed ethnographic study of religious rituals embraces a Tamil Karaiyar village on the western coast.

With the exception of Tanaka's research, these studies do not focus purely on localized religious activities. Several sites of divine power (śakti draw supplicants from distant places, a process that is assisted by the extensive public transport system in Sri Lanka and the relative cheapness of travel. Indeed, Kataragama, Munnesvaram, and Kudagama are major pilgrimage sites that attract large numbers of people at specific times, besides those who visit the shrines at other moments to request favors.

The acts of propitiation, or “votive rituals” as Tanaka calls them, are performed in public. Only the most vicious and powerful forms of sorcery (kodivina) are enshrined in secrecy and only the very rich and powerful can organize private rites.73 In Sinhala-speak the most prevalent rites are called bara, (vows), although its literal meaning, “in charge of,” is not without significance.74 People approach powerful deities and divine forces for all manner of favors: to secure a job, to achieve pregnancy, to secure a business deal, to find a marriage partner, to resolve interpersonal conflicts, and so on. Many seek protection from afflictions and illness; or from imagined acts of sorcery; or from the effects of the evil eye, evil tongue, or evil thoughts. Indeed, retributive vengeance (paligahanava, or simply pali) is openly demanded and specific persons can be targeted—for such acts of counter-sorcery are regarded as entirely legitimate. Justifiable vengeance enables one to rely on pali and kodivina openly and to approach the “beings of sorcery,” that is, “transcendent god-like or demonic figures who are extraordinarily violent, amoral beings [and] Janus-faced creatures of the boundary.”75

Propitiating assistance in this manner also stacks reciprocal demands on each supplicant. Where benefits accrue from any vow, the supplicant or beneficiary must fulfill the promises attached to the request. This often calls for return visits to the potent shrine to offer propitiatory thanks. Where the visit is on a popular day each supplicant may have to wait for hours to receive the mediation of the ritual specialist. Enormous patience is called for, a requisite usually accepted with equanimity.76 Among the Hindu Tamils these votive promises can embrace exacting tasks: such as firewalking, rolling round a temple building, or self-mutilation. Indeed, Tanaka “did not come across any case in which a votary failed …to perform a votive rite.”77

Visitors to the more powerful shrines come from all walks of life and are spread across the class spectrum. Gombrich and Obeyesekere affirm “there is a widespread belief in [the spirit] cults even among the educated and elite segments of the society.”78 This was also true for the devotees—mostly Catholic, but also Buddhist and Hindu—visiting the shrine to Our Lady of Lourdes at Kudagama in the 1970s.79

The empirical data produced by all these scholars make it clear that a large section of the population residing in the southwestern and central parts of the island engage in such propitiatory acts. Consider the information collected by Rohan Bastin at the cluster of shrines at Munnesvaram temple during the mid-1980s. During the festival period the crowd was estimated to be roughly 20,000 per day. During the rest of the year there were usually about 150 visitors per day, but more on weekends. Again, Obeyesekere estimated the crowd at Kataragama over the whole period of a 15-day festival in the early 1970s to be somewhere between the official figure of 800,000 and his lower estimate, so that one could speak of roughly 40,000 per day.80 The pictures of temple festivals in the north and east displayed on LTTE sites in recent years also reveal enormous crowds of devotees.81

If one considers the fact that there are numerous other Kali shrines in Sri Lanka and that people are also visiting shrines to other avenging deities such as Huniyam, Kataragama, Dädimunda, Devol Deviyo, Kadavara, Gini Kurumbara, and Sihavatuka—most of whom have many shrines located throughout the land—then the implications are staggering: a fair proportion of the population spend a little time each year making or fulfilling vows.82

The visitors to these shrines are not confined to believers of one faith. To those readers nourished in the belief that religious faiths are mutually exclusive, let it be stressed that the supplicants cross religious boundaries to seek help. As in India, there is considerable cross-fertilization, pluralism, and borrowing in religious activity.83 This facet of religion in Sri Lanka simply cannot be overestimated.

Thus, even a handful of Muslims visit Munnesvaram to appeal to the deities. The Kahatapitiya shrine at Gampola researched by Obeyesekere is a shrine of a Muslim saint; yet most of the clients making propitiatory appeals at Kahatapitiya were Sinhala Buddhist.84 Indeed, both Obeyesekere and Bastin are quite clear that the majority of people visiting Munnesvaram are Buddhist. The principal temple at Munnesvaram is for the Saivite goddess Ambal, although Sinhala Buddhist worshippers are more likely to attend to her in the name of Pattini. But the most popular site at Munnesvaram is the temple for Bhadrakali, or Kali for short: “it is the marvellous potency (haskam) associated with this origin site [for Kali] that contributes most to Munnesvaram's Sri Lanka-wide fame.”85 Bastin's sample of worshippers revealed that 82% of those visiting the Bhadrakali temple were Sinhala Buddhist, while 78% of those visiting the Ambal/Pattini shrine (main temple) were also Sinhala Buddhist.86

Bastin illustrates “the potency of the [Munnesvaram] temple's dynamic” as he observed it in 1985 through details describing the event that conventionally concludes the annual festival. This is the water-cutting rite where the statues of the temples' deities are brought to the neighboring river in a procession and housed in an octagonal pavilion. One statue, the guardian form of Śiva known as Astara Devata, is then given a sacred bath, a moment when worshippers indulge in “wild splashing and bathing.” A striking scene during this stage of the rite is the moment when the statues are installed at the pavilion: “there was a sudden onset of trance and abandon in front of the bo tree near the pavilion.”87 Bastin's informants clarified this by saying that a guardian deity called Kadavara had “manifested in the tree” and that the rush of “lower guardian deities into the space was …a direct result of the presence of the high deities inside the octagonal (lotus) pavilion.” Apart from the specific religious motifs (lotus-shape, bo tree) associated with this place, most of those who were moved into trance states were Sinhala Buddhist. Furthermore, when Bastin subsequently observed the festival in 1994 he found that “alongside the solitary bo tree there now stood a trident (weapon and symbol of Siva, especially in his guardian Bhairavar form) and a small cement structure housing a painted statue of Kali.”88

Catholics, whether Sinhalese or Tamil, were among those supplicating the deities at these shrines. Likewise, Catholic shrines at such places as St. Anthony's in Kotahena, Colombo, and at Kudagama, Suvagama, and Katunayake cater to the needs of the troubled and afflicted—mostly Catholic at these sites, but also Hindu and Buddhist in minor proportions.89 At Kudagama in the 1970s most worshippers were seeking exorcism from demonic possession, but the popularity of the place, its relic and mediating priest had developed to the point that devotees approached this site for all manner of assistance. The site was regarded as a place “imbued with divine power.”90

Significantly, Stirrat found that the understanding of suffering among the Catholic supplicants “owe[d] much to Buddhist notions of dukkha,” and that the “ideas of demonic possession …depend[ed] upon a fairly detailed knowledge and reworking of Sinhala Buddhist ideas about gods and demons.” Although some clergymen and lay Catholics were unhappy with these practices, the Kudagama shrine and its practices were “still within the framework of the institutional church.”91

These descriptions by a diverse band of scholars, therefore, reveal the rich pluralism and cross-fertilization in religious practices, together with their associated symbols, in the southern half of the island. It is probable that similar patterns prevail in the northern and eastern parts of the island. In any event Tanaka's village study reveals patterns of sacrificial symbolism among Hindu Tamils that enable one to understand the milieu that has rendered Sri Lanka Tamils amenable to sacrificial resistance in circumstances they deemed intolerable.92

Some Tamil devotees from Jaffna who make the long journey to the place Kataragama to worship Murukan do so not for any cures, protection, or specific worldly gains, but in order to “restore their faith.” This desire is fulfilled through embodiment: for “Murukan reveals himself by conferring trance ecstasy.”93 Some of the devotees who make the pilgrimage to the Kataragama festival, both Tamil Hindu and Buddhist Sinhalese, also walk the fire. “The firewalkers,” says Obeyesekere, “clearly agree on one thing: all of them walk the fire to renew their power.”94 Tanaka is even more explicit when he describes this practice during the Draupadi Festival at the village Cattiyur: “firewalking is homa …a ceremony of symbolic death and rebirth in which the medium and votaries …sacrifice themselves.”95

Significantly, Pfaffenberger reported that Hindu worshippers in the Jaffna Peninsula offer velvi (heating offerings) to a certain class of deities, the “self-born deities” who are “commonly thought [to have] once lived a corporeal existence;” and that the “hot offering par excellence is blood sacrifice, which involves the giving of a life (uyir) to sustain the life of a deity.”96 Such blood offerings are usually goats and chickens. The key concept in this traditional practice is uyir. It seems to have inspired the LTTE to coin a new concept, uyirayutam, so as to legitimize and extol the dedicated acts of fighters on suicide missions—for uyirayutam translates as “life-as-weapon” (or life-gifted-as weapon) and has now been popularized in the international circuit.97

Clearly, though, direct observation of the LTTE rituals as well as the individualized practices of kinfolk and others who visit the cemeteries and cenotaphs is required in order to test the author's speculation that some Tamils (including some Tigers) may renew their faith and derive śakti from their sincere acts of devotion to the dead—dead who may even be regarded as deities. The author is not in a position to administer such a test. But, coincidentally, an ardent Tiger apologist named A. J. V. Chandrakanthan has provided strong evidence of this facet of LTTE and Tamil practice.

Religious Threads in Tamil Nationalism

Chandrakanthan was a lecturer at the University of Jaffna in the 1990s and was among those who fled when the government's army broke out of the beachhead at Palaly and took control of the western half of the Jaffna Peninsula. He was therefore part of the exodus enforced by the LTTE as their response to this threat.98 He became part of the migrant Tamil population in Canada. When the eminent political scientist, A. J. Wilson, who had settled down in Toronto on retirement, was commissioned to write a book on Tamil nationalism by Hurst and Company of London, Chandrakanthan was at hand to provide an “Inside View” in a separate chapter within this book.

Both Wilson and Chandrakanthan argue that Tamil nationalism was a reaction to the excesses of Sinhala nationalism and organize their material as a legitimation exercise.99 Chandrakanthan's essay, however, goes further than Wilson in providing paeans of praise for the LTTE. In the process, he takes the reader into the heart of LTTE practice and thinking when he eulogizes “the self-sacrificing spirit of thousands of Tamil youth who call themselves uyirayutham(life-as-weapon).” His immediate elaboration is of central import for present purposes:

Heroic death founded within the fire of Tamil nationalism has given birth to a new set of terms, almost all derived from the ancient Tamil religion of Saivism; indeed, within the North and East Tamil nationalism has the appeal of a new religious movement. Prabhakaran …requests the people to venerate those who died in the battle for Eelam as sannyasis (ascetics) who renounced their personal desires and transcended egoistic existence for a common cause of higher virtue. I have seen hundreds of shrines erected in Jaffna by the friends and relatives of those LTTE cadres who have died in various actions; and the rituals performed with offering of flowers and lighting of oil lamps are those normally reserved to Saivite deities and saints.100

The importance of this description is that much sharper because Chandrakanthan is a Catholic priest. One must, however, qualify the sweeping character of his analysis by drawing distinctions between official and public LTTE rituals and those pursued by individual families. The Tiger hierarchy is fully alive to the dual Hindu–Christian base of support it draws on. Therefore, one would expect its cultural producers to avoid too overt a leaning toward specific deities.101 But, given a context where the lighting of lamps, the deployment of the metaphor of “seed(s),” veneration for monastic/ascetic self-negation and the propitiation of divine forces in order to gain śakti and accaryam have been common to both Saivite (Hindu) and Catholic worship among the Tamils, it is not a major difficulty for them to mix and match these signifiers and to thereby incorporate devotees from both backgrounds into the LTTE dispensation.

 

The possibilities afforded to the LTTE composers and the participatory faithful from the store of stories embedded in Tamil culture are indicted by referring to Shulman's work on temple myths. Several, such as the Tiruvanaikka myth, “link” the standard symbol of the temple tree (which is conventionally understood to link heaven and the worlds below) to “the birth of the divine seed”—a story about Siva that also embodies the “idea of self-sacrifice.”102 Such rich details support Shulman's stress on the manner in which Tamil myths differ from those of other regions of India in “the absolute localization of all symbols.” He concludes that the “notion of a divinity inhering in a particular place or object seems to belong to the oldest stratum of Tamil civilization.”103

The organization of LTTE rituals for their fighters is localized in this manner. On Black Tigers' Day and mavirar (“Heroes”) Week the various functions have a local emphasis. Living Black Tigers pay homage to Black Tiger dead from that particular region.104 The mothers of specific heroes/heroines place garlands on their children's tomb-stone or photo; Capt. Miller's mother appears at Nelliyady to mark his landmark blow at that cultic spot, a new shrine for the Tiger cause.105 When, in July 2003, the LTTE's political chief for Vavuniya District placed a garland on the tombstone of a local lad who had died in battle in 1990 as a Black Tiger, moreover, the LTTE described his gravestone as a nadukal—in an innovation (see Plate) that implants a southern Indian meaning within Sri Lankan Tamil consciousness.106

The association of particular deities with specific shrines/places and landscapes in Tamil history and culture renders it forceful for Tamilians to advance their land claims through such idiomatic modalities. In effect, there is a stress on autochthony. For all his emphasis on the purposive rationality in the ideological productions of the LTTE, Schalk supports Chandrakanthan as well as the thrust of the present argument when he notes that the LTTE “stipulates that every sepulchre of dead hero is a seal by which the LTTE confirms its ownership of the land” and asserts that “it is the [hero's] death that brings Tamililam.”107 In keeping with the metaphoric emphasis on their dead as vitai or seeds, as well as the LTTE's reference to the planting of their dead, moreover, “among the most prevalent theme[s] in Eelam poetry is the regeneration of life from death.” “The imagery,” continues Margaret Trawick, “is vegetative, horticultural.” Furthermore, Trawick's interviews with female fighters showed that “the close bonding of combatants means that when one combatant is killed, her friends are all the more motivated to fight. In this way they redeem her.”108 The idea of redemption is not as dead as Schalk asserts.109

Caveats

Lest the author be misunderstood, limits must be set around his claims. The author is not saying that the LTTE rituals are solely directed by purposive endeavours to draw on supramundane forces or that such expectations dominate the participation of all those who engage in public or private rites for the Tiger fallen, the mavirar. The author is suggesting that it is a potential facet that may inform the work of those who compose both the visual representations and the rituals. In stronger tones it is contended that regenerative and protective expectations of the type associated with practices of propitiation in Tamil society, whether Hindu or Christian, inform in some measure the participatory practices of those Tamils attending the rites or visiting the cemeteries. In this manner the author proclaims the significance of the cosmological conditioning of the Tamil peoples, a grounding that goes back many centuries and cannot be grasped without attending to the evocative power of these historical motifs.110 These historical conditions include facets of bhakti religiosity that have been unreflectively absorbed or purposively re-worked in the everyday life of Tamils over many centuries.

This article does not claim that this dimension of LTTE activity has had a central bearing on the military success of the Tigers enterprise or that the LTTE leaders see this to be the most significant reason for their successes, both political and military. That they devote significance to these activities, however, is manifest: manifest both in the fact that they set up an Office of Great Heroes in 1995 and in the care they devote to their “hero stones” and sepulchres. If spiritually oriented sportsmen in the modern world (e.g., Michael Johnson, Matthew Hayden, Chaminda Vaas) can openly seek divine support or thank the gods for their triumphs, it should be no surprise that so many ordinary Tamils, Hindu and Christian, engaged as they are in such an extraordinary and dangerous project as that directed by the LTTE, should gild their rational, down-to-earth measures with actions that please their deities; or even render their own dead into hero-deities in the fashion of some Tamils of old. The deification of human beings, it seems, continues afresh.

It may be possible to treat such reformulations of old and new as “original articulations” that are “thoroughly modern”—as Kapferer contends in his clarification of contemporary sorcery practices. But Kapferer's theoretical position is one that also speaks of “hybridizing continuities” and attends to the cosmological conditioning in ways opposed to the modern/tradition dichotomy on the one hand and, on the other, to any sharp temporal distinctions between a pre-colonial past and the modern era in the fashion favored by scholars attached to positivist or post-modern perspectives.111 In sum, then, there is a prima facie case for explorations of Tamil culture across the span of the Palk Straits and for engagements with the works of such scholars as Blackburn, Hart, Kailasapathy, Krishna Shastri, Ramanujan, Shulman, and Zvelebil and, on the other, with such scholars of contemporary folk culture as Val Daniel, Diane Mines, and Margaret Trawick, if one wishes to comprehend the phenomenon of Tiger devotional sacrifice.

Notes

1. The author discovered the pertinence of a book by M. Tanaka, Patrons, Devotees and Goddesses. Ritual and Power among the Tamil Fishermen of Sri Lanka (Kyoto: Institute for Research in Humanities, Kyoto University, 1991), only after this article had been accepted for publication. Reference to this work is therefore limited because its material will serve as the foundation for another essay working in the same direction. Again, Peter Schalk's article (“Beyond Hindu Festivals: The Celebration of Great Heroes' Day by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Ealam [LTTE] in Europe,” in Martin Baumann et al., eds., Tempel und Tamilien in zweiter Heimat [Ergon Verlag, 2003], pp. 391–411) on mavirar rites was only received by the author at an advanced stage of the publication process. As it calls for a series of challenges, the author has only incorporated its data in a minimal way.

2. Summarizing and reviewing Christoph Reuter's book My Life is a Weapon: History of Suicide Bombing (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), Weekend Australian 3–4 July 2004, R 10. Also see Pape, “The Strategic Logic of Suicide terrorism,” American Political Science Review 97 (2003), pp. 343–361, at 343, where the Tigers are mistakenly said to have “elements of Marxist Leninism.” Pape, clearly, has not consulted Hellmann-Rajanayagam, The Tamil Tigers. Armed Struggle for Identity, (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1994), pp. 4, 136, 142. Likewise, misled by Pape, Riaz Hassan describes the Tamil Tigers as “a radical nationalist group whose members [are] from Hindu families who were adamantly opposed to religion” (ISM Newsletter14, June 2004, p. 8. cf. “The LTTE hero is a ‘secular’ hero” and the “Black Tiger's sacrifice is made in a secular setting” (Schalk, “Resistance and Martyrdom in the Process of State Formation of Tamililam,” in Joyce Pettigrew, ed., Martyrdom and Political Resistance (Amsterdam: VU Press, 1997), pp. 61–84)—statements that are contradicted by Schalk's own data.

3. M. Weber, “Religious Rejections of the World and Their Directions,” in Gerth and Mills, eds., From Max Weber. Essays in Sociology (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1948), pp. 350–351. Also see Weber, “The Social Psychology of the World Religions,” in Gerth and Mills, eds., From Max Weber. Essays in Sociology (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, pp. 267–301; and “Science as a vocation,” in From Max Weber. Essays in Sociology, eds. Gerth and Mills, (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1948), pp. 129–156; and M. Weber, “The Soteriology of the Underprivileged,” in W. G. Runciman, ed., Weber. Selections in Translation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), pp. 174–191. Cf. R. Bastin, “Sorcerous Technologies and Religious Innovation in Sri Lanka,” Social Analysis 46 (2002b), pp. 169.

4. The modern rationality and corporate structure of key “terrorist” organisations, such as Al Qaeda, have been validly pinpointed by scholars (Bruce Hoffman, “Terrorist Leader as CEO,” Interview, 2003, in www.rand.org; and K. Ramakrishna and A. Tan, “The new terrorism: diagnosis and prescriptions,” in A. Tan and K. Ramakrishna, eds., The New terrorism: Anatomy, Trends and Counter-strategies (Singapore: Eastern Universities Press, 2002), pp. 3–29, at 6–7.

5. The Tamil speakers in Sri Lanka of Tamil ethnic origin are broadly divided into two categories in the censuses, the Sri Lanka Tamils and the Indian Tamils. In the first three quarters of the twentieth century there were relatively few Indian Tamils in the Northern and Eastern Provinces. However, their ranks were swelled by those who moved to these provinces after being displaced from their localities/jobs in the Central Highlands during the land reforms of the 1970s.

6. Respectively, 0.85, 5.1, 8.1, and 16.55% in the Districts of Jaffna, Mullaitivu, Mannar, and Vavuniya (Census of 1981, Colombo: 1985, Table 7 for each district).

7. These statistics are for all ethic groups because the census data does not cross-tabulate ethnic group and religious category. Vavuniya District, the southernmost part of the Northern Province, has a number of Sinhalese along its borders and is therefore the odd-place out. Note that in 1921, when cross-tabulations were available, the proportion of Christians among the “Ceylon Tamils” in the Northern and Eastern Provinces of that day was 14.3% and 8.2%, respectively (Census of Ceylon, 1921, Vol. IV, Table XII, p. 197).

8. Hellmann-Rajanayagam, The Tamil Tigers, 136, 22. This statement needs some qualification now for the Eastern Province after a major split led by the military commander Karuna in early 2004.

9. D. Hellman-Rajanayagam, “The Jaffna Social System: Continuity and Change under Conditions of War,” Internationales Asien Forum 24 (1993), pp. 251–281, at 273 and Hellmann-Rajanayagam, The Tamil Tigers, pp. 35–36; and information from a young Tamil in Australia whose name cannot be revealed. It is supported by a conversation with the late Mahen Vaithianathan in the 1990s that has remained indelibly in my memory bank. He said that most of the recruits were from the poor villages in the Vanni and East and that the Tigers acquiesced readily in the middle classes pursuing their usual paths of economic advancement because the latter eventually became useful resources of money or skilled personnel beyond Tigerland; that is, in the author's annotation, those located in Colombo and in global diasporic settings. This contention is supported by Hellmann-Rajanayagam, “The Jaffna Social System,” p. 279.

10. Hellmann-Rajanayagam, “The Jaffna Social System,” p. 274. Re Karaiyar domination and the reservations of Vellalar conservatives in the Jaffna Peninsula, see Hellmann-Rajanayagam, The Tamil Tigers, pp. 138–142.

11. This does not mean that even the majority of Karaiyar in the twentieth century has relied on this occupation, although it is probable that the Karaiyar is the biggest single group among fishermen.

12. Hellmann-Rajanayagam, “The Jaffna Social System,” pp. 267, 265, 268. She also notes that the Karaiyar networks within the LTTE have used this background to present the LTTE as Kshatriya warriors and protectors of the Tamil people and that the Tigers attempted to “appropriate the symbols of ‘Tamilness’ …and extend them horizontally and vertically” (pp. 278, 251). Earlier, the author conjectured that the Mukkuvar of the Eastern Province and the Karaiyar have stronger roots in the popular cults of southern India than the Vellalar. M. Roberts, “Filial Devotion and the Tiger Cult of Suicide,” Contributions to Indian Sociology, 30 (1996), pp. 245–272.

13. Kittu's conversion may have been induced by the crystallization of a love affair with a Catholic medical student who was from an established middle-class family in Mirusuvil (information from a Tamil university student in her time).

14. Tamilnet.com, 24 November 2002, describing the Heroes' Day ceremony at Trincomalee (Seelan's home district) and M. R. Narayan Swamy, Inside an Elusive Mind. Prabhakaran (Colombo: Vijitha Yapa Publications, 2003), pp. 77–78; see also pp. 62, 73. Schalk provides graphic details of the grief among the early LTTE leaders when Sankar (Selvasintaran Sathiyanathan) died on 27 November 1982. This day is now earmarked as Mavirar Day, while Prabhakaran fasts for 24 hours on this day every year (“Beyond Hindu Festivals, pp. 400–401).

15. UTHR, Frozen Minds & the Violence of Attrition (Thirunelvely, Jaffna: Report No. 13 of the University Teachers for Human Rights, Jaffna, 1994), p. 81, which adds: “The last song contains a rationalisation at least partly borrowed from Christianity—the Saviour who voluntarily takes upon him, and dies for, the sins of the world.”

16. The author saw the uncut version in the home of one such supporter in Europe in 1987. For a recent commemoration for Victor see www.tamilnet.com, 12 October 2004.

17. Information communicated personally by Dagmar Hellmann-Rajanayagam. One young Tamil (name cannot be disclosed) nurtured in the Jaffna Peninsula even says that there are “a significant number of Catholic suicide bombers.” However, Rajan Hoole indicated that he was not aware of many Catholic suicide bombers (e-mail note conveyed 14 December 2003 via an intermediary). So far the authors can identify the following Catholics among the fallen: Alphonsraajah Jancyraani of Jaffna, Vinayakamoorthy Rason Pandivirichchan of Mannar, Somasunderam Jude Subendran of Amparai, and Joseph Ganeshkumar alias Captain Pavalaratnam of Batticaloa (www.tamilnet.com, 16 October 1999, 10 December 1997, 27 October 1998, and 24 December 1998, respectively).

18. The term accaryam is Tamil for “potency” and “marvel(s”)—see R. Bastin, The Domain of Constant Excess. Plural Worship at the Munnesvaram Temples in Sri Lanka (New York: Berghahn Books, 2002), pp. xv, 133–144. Śakti (also written as shakti) refers to “divine power” or “essential power” and is a term familiar to both Sinhalese and Tamils, although especially significant in Tamil and Hindu culture [R. Gombrich and G. Obeyesekere, Buddhism Transformed. Religious Change in Sri Lanka (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), pp. 190, 90; S. Wadley, “Power in Hindu Ideology and Practice,” in Kenneth David, ed., The new wind. Changing identities in South Asia (Hague: Mouton Publishers 1977), pp. 133–157]. Thus “shakti is neither moral power nor physical power, but both” and “Hindu deities are power-filled,” that is, shakti-sanpann. There is also a goddess Shakti and in this sense shakti implies the female energy of the universe but shakti does not mean just female power …, but power in general” (Wadley, “Power in Hindu Ideology and Practice, pp. 139, 138). Also see B. Kapferer, The Feast of the Sorcerer. Practices of consciousness and power (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), pp. 112, 261.

19. See M. Roberts, “Nationalisms Today and Yesterday,” in G. H. Peiris and S. W. R. de A. Samarasinghe, eds., History and Politics. Millennial Perspectives. Essays in Honour of Kingsley de Silva (Colombo: Law and Society Trust, 1999), pp. 23–44, and “The Many Faces of Eelam,” Daily Mirror, 8 August 2002 (also in Tamil Times, August 2002).

20. Ilam or Eelam was originally the Tamil word for the whole island.

21. This argument has been spelled out by the author in 1978, an essay written in Germany in 1976—for by 1973–74 he had lost hope in the possibility of rapprochement (M. Roberts, “Ethnic Conflict in Sri Lanka and Sinhalese Perspectives: Barriers to Accommodation,” Modern Asian Studies 12 (1978), pp. 353–376).

22. Hellmann-Rajanayagam, The Tamil Tigers, p. 40.

23. Hellmann-Rajanayagam, “The ‘Groups’ and the Rise of Militant Secessionism,” in C. Manogaran and B. Pfaffenberger, eds., The Sri Lankan Tamils. Ethnicity and Identity (Boulder: Westview Press, 1994a), pp. 169–207, and passim; and M. R. Narayan Swamy, Tigers of Sri Lanka (Delhi: Konark Publishers Pvt Ltd., 1994), pp. 72ff, 115–153.

24. Schalk, “Resistance and Martyrdom,” p. 64; and Hellmann-Rajanayagam, “The ‘Groups,’” p. 177.

25. Narayan Swamy, “Inside an Elusive Mind,” pp. 201–202, 109. Narayan Swamy says this policy was adopted in 1984. There are no means of verifying all the information in his book (although the author am sure that a proportion of his facts would be wrong—that being the nature of the historical beast).

26. Schalk, “Resistance and Martyrdom,” p. 74. “We are married to our cyanide,” said one LTTE publication in Tamil (Hellmann-Rajanayagam, The Tamil Tigers, p. 67). Also see Schalk, “Historisation of the Martial ideology of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE),” South Asia 20 (1997), pp. 35–72, at 62–63. Schalk notes that the cyanide vials are manufactured in Germany. The first Tiger to swallow the cyanide kuppi was Celvam (Selvam) Pakin on 18 May 1984 (Ibid., p. 62).

27. Interview with S. Rajanayagam (b. 1908) in Adelaide, 7 January 2004. On arppanippu, see Schalk, “Resistance and Martyrdom,” p. 66.

28. Schalk, “Resistance and Martyrdom,” p. 67. The Tamil word tiyaki (also written as tiyahi) is one of the terms used by the LTTE to convey the idea of martyr although other words are also used according to Schalk. Schalk stresses that this concept “does not exactly correspond to what in Judeo-Christian tradition is meant by 'martyr' and 'martyrdom.'” (Ibid.). The term tiyaki is related to the Sanskrit word tyagi. Both were deployed in colonial India to describe the Indian freedom fighters of the anti-British struggle. It is probably from this intellectual thread and the representations surrounding the life and times of Subhas Chandra Bose that Prabhakaran and his associates adopted this term for their personnel. Christian missionaries and Christian Tamils used the terms catci (pronounced satsi) or ratacatci as the term for “martyr” (Schalk, “Resistance and Martyrdom,” pp. 66, 80, and “Historisation of the Martial Ideology,” as well as the author's Tamil and Christian informants).

29. Narayan Swamy, Tigers of Sri Lanka: chapters 7 and eight and Inside an Elusive Mind, pp. 132–149. Also Hellmann-Rajanayagam, The Tamil Tigers, pp. 42–48, 138.

30. The LTTE leadership was also convinced that the kuppi gave them a motivational edge in battle: “As long as we have this cyanide around our neck, we have no need to fear any force on earth! …In reality this gives our fighters an extra measure of belief in the cause, a special edge; it has instilled in us a determination to sacrifice our lives …for the cause,” said Kittu during his interview with Peter Schalk (76). This comment points to the indoctrination of recruits, while yet revealing how the commanders are themselves true believers and had internalized these attitudes. Also see M. Trawick, Notes on Love in a Tamil family (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990).

31. Narayan Swamy 1993: pp. 155–156 and Schalk, “Resistance and Martyrdom,” p. 77. Captain Miller was the son of a bank clerk and had attended Hartley College in Point Pedro (information from Tamil friends). Schalk, who has a tendency to purify all Tamil names, refers to him as “Capt Millar” not Miller, although all the LTTE Internet sites and the author's Tamil friends use the spelling “Miller.” Indeed, if Yogi had any influence on the naming scheme, it is likely that he chose Keith Miller as his inspiration for this nom de guerre.

32. For the date when the Black Tiger corps was set up, see Schalk, “Beyond Hindu Festivals,” p. 396. Also see S. Hopgood, “The Black Tigers of Sri Lanka,” Mss. due in Diego Gambetta, Making Sense of Suicide Missions (London: Routledge, 2004) for a review of the role of the Black Tigers and their possible motivations. Also see M. Joshi, “On the Razor's Edge: The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam,” Studies in Conflict & Terrorism 19 (1996), pp. 19–42; R. Gunaratna, International & Regional Security Implications of the Sri Lankan Tamil Insurgency (Colombo: Unie Arts Ltd for International Foundation of Sri Lankans, UK, 1997) and Sri Lanka's Ethnic Crisis & National Security (Colombo: Unie Arts Ltd for South Asian Network on Conflict Research, 1998); and Reuter, My Life is a Weapon, pp. 155–162.

33. From www.tamilnet.com, 6 July 1997. However, other accounts indicate that the Black Tigers do operate as units, especially at sea.

34. Grapevine stories and Reuter, My Life is a Weapon, p. 160, and Schalk, “Resistance and Martyrdom,” p. 396.

35. Talaivar can also be read as “hero” (Trawick, Notes on Love, pp. 26, 30) or “lover” (K.V. Zvelebil, Tamil Literature [Leiden: E. J. Brill]), p. 98n.

36. Schalk, “Beyond Hindu Festivals” and www.tamilnet.com on these days in any one year.

37. The first table is taken from www.eelamweb.com and the second from www.tamilcanadian.com. Although the figures do not match, they are close enough. For other estimates, see Hopgood, “The Black Tigers of Sri Lanka.”

38. Schalk, “Beyond Hindu Festivals,” pp. 397–399.

39. That is, before the 1980s mavirar was differentiated from tiyaki, catci, and ratacatci. The first LTTE mavirar in their martyrlogy is Lt. Shankar who died on 27 November 1982 after being wounded in one of the Tiger ambushes in July, whereas the first woman mavirar is Malati, who committed cyanide suicide when wounded fatally (Narayan Swamy, Inside an Elusive Mind, pp. 77–78 and Schalk, “Resistance and Martyrdom,” p. 72).

40. See the picture of one cemetery in www.tamilcanadian.com and the many pictures in the sub-segment entitled “Warriors Statues” in www.eelamweb.com.

41. Schalk, “Resistance and Martyrdom,” p. 66.

42. Schalk, “Historisation of the Martial Ideology,” p. 63.

43. As conveyed, independently, by Neloufer de Mel and Kingsley Garbett (in conversation). This argument has been developed elsewhere by the author in relation to war stories and oral transmission in the era before and after the extension of print technology (M. Roberts, Modernist Theory. The Printed Word. The Instance of Pre-Modern Sinhala Society [Colombo: ICES Monograph Series, 2002]).

44. See www.tamilnet.com and its news item, c. 19 April 2003 with pictures of a cut-out at a road junction in the Batticaloa area (her home locality). For the red lotus see Bastin, The Domain of Constant Excess, p. 139.

45. Sluka 1998: 50. Sluka stresses that in Ireland funerals are “sacred events” and that commemorations are “funerals remembered” and “past funerals re-experienced” (1998: 51, 52).

46. The author came to this conclusion on a priori grounds in the course of a conversation with David Olney of the Politics Dept, University of Adelaide. Subsequently, the author came across a similar claim built on ethnographic experience by Dagmar Hellmann-Rajanayagam: “the Tigers are from the people and therefore of the people” (The Tamil Tigers, p. 67). This said, note that some Tamils in Sri Lanka are ambivalent about the LTTE and yet others vehemently opposed—at the same time that they are critical of the Colombo-based governments. See R. Hoole, Sri Lanka: The Arrogance of Power. Myths, Decadence and Murder (Colombo: Wasala Publications for the UTHR, 2001).

47. Narayan Swamy, Inside an Elusive Mind, pp. 179–181. These cyanide vials, according to Narayan Swamy, were slipped to them by Balasingham and others during a visit to their jail. Grapevine information within Tamil circles suggests that Rahim did not swallow his kuppi when captured by the Indians; and that his departure from the LTTE was precipitated by this event.

48. Ibid., pp. 244–245. The ship was a 290-ton vessel registered in San Lorenzo.

49. The work of Schalk, Trawick, and Hellmann-Rajanayagam is particularly valuable because they command these characteristics. It usually comes at a price, however.

50. Approximate date conveyed by Dagmar Hellmann-Rajanayagam (e-mail, 6 July 2004) on information she derived from Peter Schalk.

51. B. Pfaffenberger, Caste in Tamil Culture: The Religious Foundations of Sudra Domination in Sri Lanka (Maxwell School of Foundations and Comp Studies, 1982), p. 47; and M. Banks, “Caste in Jaffna,” in E. R. Leach, ed., Aspects of Caste in South India Ceylon and North-West Pakistan (Cambridge University Press, 1960), pp. 61–77. The Karaiyar are computed at 10%, the Koviyar at 7%, Pallar at 9%, and Nalavar at 9%. Thirteen other castes are named, but none made up over 3% of the population in the Jaffna Peninsula according to Banks' estimates.

52. Information conveyed by Vamadevan of Sydney (a former police officer whose home village is near Palaly) and Dr. Ravindran of Adelaide. The latter added: “This [the practice of cremation] was in keeping with the belief that that body was impermanent or 'unreal' …the 'atma' alone was permanent or 'real'. The only exception to this was the body of a saint (a person who had realized the 'Ultimate') as usually the place of burial was consecrated & became a place of worship.”

53. Vamadevan indicated that some depressed caste people would receive financial support from their patrons in order to bury their dead.

54. Information conveyed by Arthur Saniotis on the basis of his interview with a monk at Shivananda Ashram in Rishi Kesh, India. Also note the independent confirmation of this note by Dr. Ravindran in Note 52.

55. See S. Settar and G. D. Sontheimer, eds., Memorial stones (Dharwad: Institute of Indian Art History, 1982), passim.

56. This quotation is a modified version of a title used by A. Aiyappan, “Deified Men and Humanized Gods; Some Folk Bases of Hindu Theology,” in Kenneth David, ed., The New Wind. Changing Identities in South Asia (Hague: Mouton Publishers, 1977), pp. 95–104. Also see Schalk, “Historisation of the Martial Theology,” p. 64. Note, too, that among the Sinhala-speakers “demon deities are regarded as having once been human beings or the children of a divine-human union” (Kapferer, The Feast of the Sorcerer, p. 32, relying on Obeyesekere's work on the Pattini cult).

57. See Settar and Sontheimer, Memorial Stones; Settar, “Memorial Stones in South India,” in S. Settar and G. D. Sontheimer, eds., Memorial Stones (Dharwad: Institute of Indian art History, 1982), pp. 183–197; and K. V. Soundara Rajan, “Origin and Spread of Memorial Stones in Tamil-Nadu,” in S. Settar, and G. D. Sontheimer, eds., Memorial Stones (Dharwad: Institute of Indian Art History, 1982), pp. 59–76.

58. Pope as quoted in K. Kailasapathy, Tamil Heroic Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968), p. 76. Also see H. Whitehead, The Village Gods of South India, 2nd edition (New Delhi, Cosmo Publications, 1983 [1921], pp. 91, 93, 102, 117–119.

59. Kailasapathy, Tamil Heroic Poetry, p. 76.

60. I nformation conveyed by Dagmar Hellmann-Rajanayagam and Rohan Bastin (e-mail notes late May 2004 and 16 March 2004, respectively).

61. Whitehead, The Village Gods of South India, pp. 25, 114. Spears are a common symbol of village deities in Southern India and stand for śakti (D. Shulman, Tamil Temple Myths. Sacrifice and Divine Marriage in the South Indian Saiva Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), p. 44.

62. Shulman, Tamil Temple Myths, p. 355.

63. A speculation voiced by Rohan Bastin (telephone conversation, 31 March 2004).

64. Opinions conveyed by K. Sivathamby and S. Rajanayagam (interviews 3 October 2003 and 7 January 2004, respectively).

65. Schalk, “Resistance and Martyrdom,” pp. 73–74.

66. Kailasapathy, Tamil Heroic Poetry, p. 235. Among the Tamils of Sri Lanka the word natukal is familiar, but is associated with the symbolic cornerstone for a new house. The southern Indian sense of a memorial or hero stone does not seem to be part of popular understanding (responses of Tamil friends).

67. Schalk was able to interview Kittu in London on 30 March 1990 (“Resistance and Martyrdom,” pp. 83, 68, 76) and is known in LTTE circles as “the White Tiger” (a LTTE organizer who cannot be named).

68. Ibid., p. 66 and www.tamilnet.com, 6 July 1999.

69. UTHR, Frozen Minds, p. 81 and Schalk, “Resistance and Martyrdom,” p. 79.

70. See Note 18 for śakti and accaryam. Akarsana is a Sinhala concept and refers to the “pull,” “current,” or “magnetic force” residing in an image of Buddha or a deity—so that akarsana balaya “is the śakti of the god reaching the body of the devotee” (Gombrich and Obeyesekere, Buddhism Transformed, p. 190). The author is not certain of the Tamil equivalent. Haskam (“marvels,” “potency”) is a Sinhala concept, whereas darsan would be understood in both Tamil and Sinhala as “the quality of seeing or being seen by a divine force”—in itself a boon or a blessing.

71. Pfaffenberger, “The Kataragama Pilgrimage: Hindu-Buddhist Interaction and Its Significance in Sri Lanka's Polyethnic Social System,” Journal of Asian Studies, 38 (1979), pp. 253–280 provides material on religious practices in the Jaffna Peninsula in the 1970s and Tamil pilgrimages to Murukan at Kataragama, whereas P. Lawrence, “Grief on the Body: The Work of Oracles in Eastern Sri Lanka,” in M. Roberts, ed., Sri Lanka. Collective identities Revisited (Ratmalana: Marga Institute, 1998), pp. 271–294 provides harrowing accounts of oracular mediation in the Batticaloa region during the traumatic situation in the 1990s. I am aware of Mark Whitaker's work, but his focus is not on religious action at shrines per se. In sum, their work does not add up to the scale of work done by the others. Note, however, that Bastin spent several months researching in the Batticaloa locality in the mid-1980s before moving to Munnesvaram which is chiefly a Saivite temple cluster in a borderline area that services both Tamils in the northern and northwestern regions as well as those in the rest of the island, besides Sinhalese and other ethnic categories from all parts of Sri Lanka. Bastin has subsequently worked in Kalutara South.

72. Garbett's research included the shrines at the Hindu temple in Mutwal, the mosque at Dematagoda, the Buddhist temple at Bellanwila and St. Anthony's Church in Kotahena, every one of them in Colombo. No publications have resulted, but as he is a colleague, the present author has gained information about his findings over the years.

73. Bastin, The Domain of Constant Excess, p. 29 and Obeyesekere, “Sorcery, Premeditated Murder and the Canalization of Aggression in Sri Lanka,” Ethnology 14 (1975), pp. 1–23, at 4–5. As widely known, Mrs. Bandaranaike was among those who frequented Munnesvaram in the past.

74. Cf. In appealing to deities as sources of śakti, devotees in north India expect saran, that is, shelter—so that they are placing themselves within a particular deities' fold (Wadley, “Power in Hindu Ideology and Practice,” p. 147).

75. Kapferer, The Feast of the Sorcerer, pp. 13 and 14. Also Bastin, “Sorcerous Technologies,” p. 156.

76. The story goes that when a famous cricketer jumped the queue at Kataragama, many devotees in that queue incorporated his name into their curses. The patience shown by worshippers at shrines is in marked contrast to the push and shove of Sri Lankans at bus halts.

77. Tanaka, Patrons, Devotees, and Goddeses, pp. 90–92.

78. Gombrich and Obeyesekere, Buddhism Transformed, p. 142. These two scholars' research not only embraced religious sites in Colombo, but also at such spots as Gampola, Kataragama, Seenigama, and Munnesvaram. In his small sample of clients approaching Huniyam at Seenigama in the early 1970s Obeyesekere found that 40% were from what he defines as “non-traditional occupations,” whereas 12% were shopkeepers and 16% “landed proprietors” (“Sorcery,” pp. 12–13 and “Social Change and the Deities: The Rise of the Kataragama Cult in Modern Sri Lanka,” Man 12 (1977), pp. 377–396).

79. R. L. Stirrat, Power and Religiosity in a Post-Colonial Setting. Sinhala Catholics in Contemporary Sri Lanka (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 62. Note that 13% of Stirrat's small sample was Buddhist and that roughly 2000 pilgrims visited Kudagama every week in 1974 (pp. 153, 63).

80. Bastin, The Domain of Constant Excess, p. 28 and Obeyesekere, “Social Change and the Deities,” p. 194.

81. For instance, see www.tamilnet.com on 19 April 2003 for Amman Festival and April 2004 for the Chariot Festival at the Pathirakali Ambal Temple.

82. Huniyam's main shrine (and thus his most powerful site) is at Käbälläva in the northwestern interior; Kali's at Munnesvaram and Murugan's (Kataragama's) at Kataragama in the extreme southeast.

83. Note Susan Bayly's argument that in southern India Christianity is a thin veneer overlaid on an essentially Hindu form of popular religion (Saints, Goddesses and Kings: Muslims and Christians in South Indian Society, 1700–1900 [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989], pp. 454ff and passim).

84. Obeyesekere, “Sorcery,” p. 7.

85. Bastin, The Domain of Constant Excess,” pp. 164–165, 19–34, quotation from p. 22; and Obeyesekere, “Sorcery,” p. 7.

86. Bastin, The Domain of Constant Excess, p. 28.

87. Descriptions of ecstatic trance and uninhibited outpourings of emotion can also be found in Obeyesekere, “The Fire-Walkers of Kataragama: The Rise of Bhakti Religiosity in Buddhist Sri Lanka,” Journal of Asian Studies 37 (1978), pp. 457–476; and Pfaffenberger, “The Kataragama Pilgrimage,” pp. 260, 269. Bastin notes that the “potency of the riverside bo tree stems from the deity pavilion and the festival bathing site, which draw out the symbolic association of the site as ambiguous juncture of land and water” (“Sorcery,” p. 4). Note, too, Kapferer's emphasis on the boundary in the quotation within the text.

88. Bastin, “Sorcery,” pp. 3–5.

89. Stirrat, Power and Religiosity, passim and information from Kingsley Garbett.

90. Ibid., pp. 63, 78.

91. Ibid., pp. 121, 150, 122, with the emphasis being the author's. Significantly, the terms dukkha and tapasa were used interchangeably (p. 134).

92. Tanaka's work is so important that the author will be using it as a foundation for another essay that addresses Schalk's thesis on mavirar rituals.

93. Pfaffenberger, “Sorcery,” p. 262.

94. Obeyesekere, “The Fire-Walkers of Kataragama,” p. 466 (author's emphasis). The author has strong reservations about Obeyesekere's social dislocation thesis, one that sees urbanised rootlessness as the main reason for the increase of such activities and the participation of Buddhists (allegedly a new phenomenon) in this event. However, for current purposes what matters is the reading of these practices as a facet of bhakti religiosity”—for bhakti devotionalism has a long history in India especially in the Tamil south and goes back to the sixth century B.C.E. if not earlier. This does not mean that it was an unchanging tradition.

95. Tanaka, Patrons, Devotees, and Goddesses, p. 181. Unlike Kataragama only men walked the fire at Cattiyur in 1982 when Tanaka estimated that around 1,000 people undertook this exercise. Note that the devotees at the Draupadi Festival included people from the surrounding districts as well as Colombo and Jaffna (p. 184).

96. Pfaffenberger, “Sorcery,” p. 260. On blood sacrifices (ve vi) also see Tanaka, Patrons, Devotees, and Goddesses, pp. 114, 118–119 and Bastin, The Domain of Constant Excess, pp. 198–199.

97. Schalk, “Historisation of the Martial Ideology,” pp. 40, 63 and Chandrakanthan, “Eelam Tamil Nationalism: An Inside View,” in A. J. Wilson, Sri Lankan Tamil Nationalism. Its Origins and Development in the 19th and 20th Centurie (London: Hurst and Company, 2000), pp. 164; and the title of Reuter's book (2002).

98. Typically, his account of this episode lays the whole onus on the Sri Lankan army (“Eelam Tamil Nationalism,” p. 162). One needs grapevine information and the reports of the other Tamil organizations (e.g., AUTO, “Tigers and us,” Island, 20 January 2004. [AUTO = Association of United Tamils Overseas, London]) to gain some sense of the manner in which, so to speak, the “sharks took the sea with them” when the LTTE gave up untenable military positions.

99. A. J. Wilson, Sri Lankan Tamil Nationalism. Its Origins and Development in the 19th and 20th Centuries (London: Hurst and Company, 2000), pp. 43, 116ff; Chandrakanthan, “Eelam Tamil Nationalism,” pp. 157–159, 161; and Roberts, “Narrating Tamil Nationalism: Subjectivities & Issues,” South Asia 27 (2004), pp. 87–108.

100. Chandrakanthan, “Eelam Tamil Nationalism,” pp. 164–165.

101. Hellmann-Rajanayagam, The Tamil Tigers, p. 69.

102. Shulman, Tamil Temple Myths, pp. 45–46.

103. Ibid., pp. 47–48.

104. “The Black Tigers' day was celebrated in the Trincomalee district Saturday, with the opening of a memorial at Sampur village in the LTTE controlled Muttur east for Black Tiger cadres from the Trincomalee district, by the Trincomalee district area commander of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, Colonel Pathuman, as the main event in the morning, sources said” (www.tamilnet.com, 5 July 2003). “The parents of Black Tigers killed in action also participated in the ceremonies. Like their children, the parents are also revered by their local communities” (describing the ceremony on 5 July 1997 in the Vanni—www.tamilnet.com, 5 July 1997).

105. See www.tamilnet.com, 5 July 2004.

106. See www.tamilnet.com, 5 July 2003—an item that the author discovered after this article was drafted. As such it is a discovery that confirms the author's previous speculations. Note that the “t” and the “d” are synonymous in Tamil. Most of the author's SLT informants told him that natukal referred to a ritual foundation stone for a new house. Thus, its usage as a hero stone is an importation from southern India, albeit one that is consonant with local culture.

107. Schalk, “Resistance and Martyrdom,” p. 81 and “Historisation of the Martial Ideology,” p. 57. Such contentions contradict his insistence that the “secular setting” in which the LTTE operates renders all their actions ‘secular’ (single quotation marks signifying some qualification?) in some sense. The problem lies with Schalk's overwhelming focus on the motivations of the Tiger fighters and Prabhakaran's rationality rather than the cosmological universe of being that conditions the interpretations of the Tamil people addressed by the Tiger leaders as well as the selections of the Tiger cultural producers themselves. Their cosmos bears on their emotions. Praxis is not purely purposive and rational.

108. Trawick 1997: 155, 180. See also the statements clarifying their reasons for firewalking provided by worshippers at Kataragama and Obeyesekere's article on the subject (1978).

109. Schalk, “Resistance and Martyrdom,” p. 67. That said, the theme of redemption and expiation does not seem to have the prominence it does in Judaic and Christian strands of martyrdom.

110. It was with the intention of stressing the importance of the cosmological and historical dimensions of Tamil political lifeways and their bearing on sacrificial action that the author penned an explicitly speculative article on “Filial devotion in Tamil culture and the Tiger cult of martyrdom” in 1996. Schalk has interpreted that essay to be a form of “historisation,” that is, naïve history-writing that draws a continuous chain of links between past and present, and as such replicating the ideological work of the LTTE without the same justification—for he considers the latter to be natural and legitimate in their circumstances, whereas the present author's work is derided as that of an outsider demonizing the LTTE (Schalk, “Historisation of the Martial Ideology”). But throughout his corpus of writings Schalk proceeds to draw on historical roots whenever it suits him: for instance he goes back to a famous fourth or fifth century B.C.E. text when he clarifies the force of the iratta (t) tilakam (the red dot imprinted in real blood, or symbolic blood, on one's forehead) as a sacrificial relationship with a god or even with a living being in the process of becoming a deity (such as Tilipan as he fasted unto death in 1987) in modern Tamil practice. Remarkably, he even asserts that the LTTE's Office of Great Heroes is “sovereign and not predisposed …in their approach to the cultural heritage” (Ibid., p. 63). Although his article is bedevilled by a materialist bias, a species of Orientalist positivism and a misreading of the present author's English metaphors, it is an essential text for any study of the Tigers and happens to provide ample support for the author's contentions. Amen.

111. Kapferer 2002a: 15, 20 and 2002b: passim.

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REFERENCES

• Kapferer, B. 1983. A Celebration of Demons, Bloomington: Indiana University Press.  [Google Scholar]
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Edited October 15, 20223 yr by நன்னிச் சோழன்

Source: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09584930802271323

Building cemeteries, constructing identities: funerary practices and nationalist discourse among the Tamil Tigers of Sri Lanka

 

Cristiana Natali 

Pages 287-301 | Published online: 06 Aug 2008

 

Abstract

The present paper explores the importance of new burial practices within the process of nation-building in the Sri Lankan territories controlled by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). In particular, the paper focuses on the perception that Tamil people, both civilians and fighters, seem to have of the Tigers' cemeteries as symbolic centres of Tamil Eelam, the new separate state claimed by the LTTE. This article analyses the reasons that have led to this perception. On the one hand, it discusses the functional analogies between the LTTE cemeteries and the war graveyards belonging to military western traditions. On the other hand, it emphasizes the peculiarity of the LTTE cemeteries of being perceived as holy places. The Tigers' cemeteries are called Tuilum Illam, literally in Tamil ‘Sleeping Houses’, and are often described as temples. The paper offers an explanation why the LTTE, in spite of their asserted secular nature, have decided not to reject this religious interpretation; namely, because it allows them to include the Tuilum Illam in the mainstream of Hindu tradition. In this context, the ability to integrate the religious dimension represents a crucial component in the process of nation-building. This article draws upon the findings of fieldwork carried out since July 2002, especially in the northeastern regions of Sri Lanka controlled by the LTTE.1

 

The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) are a separatist movement active in Sri Lanka since 1976. They started as a small guerrilla group but progressively—and especially since 1983, when the conflict with the Sinhalese-majority government erupted2—they have developed into a much stronger organization. The length of the conflict (20 years) and the recruitment of many people have brought, on the one hand, the establishment of a regular Tigers army (including a navy unit), and on the other hand the military, political, and administrative control of vast regions. At present these territories, located mostly in the north, constitute a true state within a state3 with specific laws that translate the revolutionary principles of the movement into practice (for instance, a law that banned caste system). Since 2002 the Sri Lankan Government and the Tigers have been involved in peace talks with Norwegian mediation, even though the present situation appears to be characterized by a further outbreak of clashes and attacks.

The cost of the war has been high both for civilians and fighters. Out of about 19 million inhabitants, during the conflict 50,000 Sri Lankan civilians have died, 12,000 have disappeared, 200,000 have been injured, and 800,000 have been displaced. In the Sri Lankan Army 14,000 soldiers have lost their life, while in the ranks of LTTE more than 17,000 fighters—men and women—have died (see Table 1). It is precisely the distinctive handling of the latter dead bodies that is the topic on which this paper will be focusing.

Building cemeteries, constructing identities: funerary practices and nationalist discourse among the Tamil Tigers of Sri Lanka

Cristiana Natali

https://doi.org/10.1080/09584930802271323

PUBLISHED ONLINE:

06 August 2008

 

Table 1 of 1

Table 1.  Maaveerar statistics, 1982–2002^a

  District     Jaffna Batticaloa Vanni Trincomalee Mullaitivu Mannar Other Total Year Male Female Male Female Male Female Male Female Male Female Male Female Male Female Male Female Total 1982 01 – – – – – – – – – – – – – 01 – 01 1983 11 – – – – – 04 – – – – – – – 15 – 15 1984 20 – 07 – 03 – 08 – 06 – – – – – 50 – 50 1985 46 – 60 – 14 – 41 – 08 – 14 – 05 – 188 – 188 1986 91 – 92 – 20 – 48 – 21 – 36 – 09 01 317 01 318 1987 246 05 76 – 46 03 54 – 17 01 48 05 15 – 502 14 516 1988 126 07 114 01 39 01 37 – 18 01 18 01 16 – 368 11 379 1989 147 02 86 – 54 – 47 – 37 – 27 – 18 – 416 02 418 1990 277 41 178 04 140 11 124 02 73 11 64 01 33 02 889 72 961 1991 510 104 310 18 180 33 169 18 114 19 100 15 22 01 1405 208 1613 1992 224 46 240 09 83 06 65 01 40 07 48 06 13 – 713 75 788 1993 215 49 279 18 118 28 76 06 55 11 61 12 05 – 801 124 925 1994 90 11 161 – 30 – 40 – 18 01 22 – 02 – 363 12 375 1995 419 177 433 15 150 43 81 06 60 25 64 19 10 03 1217 288 1505 1996 446 142 321 33 129 53 83 13 54 26 55 14 04 04 1092 285 1377 1997 520 227 641 65 168 92 118 19 91 52 46 44 15 08 1599 507 2106 1998 360 271 429 94 133 140 99 36 58 69 54 22 17 16 1150 648 1798 1999 362 203 323 68 144 118 79 19 86 57 51 23 07 05 1052 493 1545 2000 473 318 228 79 234 179 100 27 105 78 62 45 35 17 1237 743 1980 2001 171 117 119 28 74 58 45 12 41 27 31 22 08 06 489 270 759 2002 08 05 02 04 05 01 02 – 02 03 – 01 – 01 19 15 34 Male total 4763   4099   1756   1320   904   807   234   13,883     Female total   1725   436   766   159   388   230   64   3768   Total 6488 4535 2522 1479 1292 1037 298 17,651 17,651 Note: ^aNumber dead. Source: Tamil Eelam Maaveerar's office, Puthukudiyiruppu.

 

The change in funerary practices

At the beginning of the 1990s, in a Sri Lanka ravaged by the conflict, a significant change took place in the funerary practices dedicated to the LTTE fighters. Until then the bodies of the Maaveraar (literally in Tamil ‘Great Heroes’) were cremated in accordance with Hindu tradition and the ashes were given to the families. From the 1990s onward, however, LTTE began to bury their dead fighters and to collect them in cemeteries called Tuilum Illam, literally, ‘Sleeping Houses’.

In order to understand the meaning of this change in ritual we have to consider the customary mortuary practices performed in the north and in the east of Sri Lanka. These practices depend on the religion professed by the families of the dead. Both Christians and Muslims bury their dead, and put the bodies in their graveyards.4 Hindus cremate their dead and immerse the ashes in rivers, although there are some exceptions that I will discuss later. Therefore, in these areas burial is not unknown, but it is reserved for Christians and Muslims: most people, being Hindu, are not accustomed to this practice. In this paper, after showing how the shift from cremation to burial has implied a radical change from traditional practices, I examine both the reasons for this change and the reactions to it.

Before discussing the strategies that the Maaveerar's relatives and Tamil civilians use in order to accept the new practices, I would like to quote the official explanation given by the LTTE leadership to justify this change. When questioned about the reasons for the shift in ritual, Mr Pontyagam, in charge of the Maaveerar's office in Puthukudiyiruppu, stated:

Before 1991 we burnt [the fighters] according to Hindu rituals. If the parents asked for the ashes, we gave them. But Christians and Muslims didn't take ashes. We had this problem. There were Christian soldiers, and the parents didn't want to burn them. A meeting of the leaders was organized and they decided to study what other countries like America and England did for their soldiers. They saw that they used to bury their soldiers. Then they decided to proceed in the same way.5

 

Then, when asked about the reaction of Hindu relatives, Pontyagam replied: ‘Yes, relatives agreed because they [the LTTE leaders] explained to them it was a worldwide custom. Before that there were problems, and then they decided, Prabhakaran6 decided, what to do’. Indeed if we have a look at the pictures of Tuilum Illam, we can recognize in their structure the pattern of western war graveyards, particularly if we compare the Tuilum Illam with other cemeteries in the area (see Figures 1 –6).

Figure 1. Christian cemetery in Trincomalee, 2002.

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Figure 2. Cenotaphs in Tunukkai Tuilum Illam, 2002.

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Figure 3. Cenotaphs in Kodikamam Tuilum Illam, 2005.

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Figure 4. Cenotaphs in Uduthurai Tuilum Illam, 2005.

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Figure 5. Tombs in Kilinochchi Tuilum Illam, 2002.

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Figure 6. Tombs in Koppai Tuilum Illam, 2002.

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It might seem surprising that the LTTE chose to adopt funerary practices utilized by western armies. However, the Tigers do not like to be labelled as ‘terrorists’ and claim for themselves the status of liberation army. That is why they never miss an opportunity to emphasize that they are a regular army. From this perspective, their acceptance of western military funerary customs must be considered a logical consequence of such a claim.

What is really surprising, however, is that the official explanation for the transition from cremation to burial is never mentioned by civilians or fighters. When questioned on this issue, both tend to refer to different explanations for the change. During my fieldwork, I interviewed LTTE fighters, Tamil civilians living in both LTTE-controlled and government-controlled territories, and Tamils living in Italy. The persons I interviewed7 gave me different interpretations for the transition, but nobody referred to the official one. It appears that the official explanation is neither significant nor acceptable to Tamil civilians, particularly for the relatives of the dead. When a daughter or a son, a sister or a brother are given burial as opposed to the customary ritual cremation, it is unlikely that relatives would be satisfied with an explanation that justified this practice on the basis of conformity with western military tradition.

There are in fact two main interpretations8 they use to justify the change in LTTE funerary practices. The first emphasizes the need for remembrance, while the second one places the burial practice within the mainstream of Hindu tradition.

Tuilum Illam as places of remembrance

To elucidate the process that makes it possible for the Tuilum Illam to be regarded as places of remembrance, I would like to quote some passages from fieldwork interviews I took in Sri Lanka. A fighter in Vavuniya asserted: ‘This is a place of memory, if you burn them [the Maaveerar] the history will be destroyed’. Similarly, a man in charge of Koppai's Tuilum Illam explained:

At the beginning we burnt them [the Maaveerar]. Then we thought: ‘It is not nice, it is better to have a place to remember them’. If you have a monument, every year you can celebrate them, and the relatives can come to visit them, they often do this.

 

A civilian in Jaffna affirmed:

In this situation we needed a place to make our people happy. When our children ask [about the Tuilum Illam]: ‘What is it?’, we reply: ‘Here there are the people who sacrificed their life for the freedom of Tamil Eelam’.9

 

A young Tamil man living in Bologna (Italy) pointed out:

The Maaveerar are people who defend the land, our homeland. If we burn them, they become dust, and they will disappear. To keep their memory alive, the Tigers bury them and build tombs. They write on the tomb ‘This person died to defend the homeland’ and in this way they are with us longer.

 

Finally the sister of a fighter fallen at Elephant Pass clarified: ‘We have to preserve the bodies; at least the bones must be preserved’.

We may observe that in order to have places of remembrance it is not necessary to have tombs. However, we must keep in mind that in Hinduism, as Maurice Bloch and Jonathan Parry stress:

nothing of the individual is preserved which could provide a focal symbol of group continuity. The physical remains of the deceased are obliterated as completely as possible: first the corpse is cremated and then the ashes are immersed in the Ganges and are seen as finally flowing into the ocean. The ultimate objective seems to be as complete a dissolution of the body as possible.10

 

Such a dissolution implies the absence of a public space where the dead are remembered. Even if there are post cremation rituals in which ancestors are worshipped,11 such rituals are performed in the private space of the house and are carried out by relatives. This cultural background provides reasons for the absence of any connection between cremation and public place of remembrance.

According to my informants—both civilians and fighters in Sri Lanka as well as Tamil Diaspora people in Italy—the perception of Tuilum Illam as places of remembrance also explains their destruction by the Sri Lankan Army.12 M.R. Narayan Swamy, a journalist, describes the capture of Jaffna in this way:

It is clear Prabhakaran will one day certainly try to recapture Jaffna, whatever be the cost, if nothing else to avenge the humiliation of 1995 when victorious Sri Lankan troops rolled into ancient Tamil town amid frenzied celebrations across the country. The LTTE has not forgotten the way the military destroyed without trace the LTTE's sprawling martyrs' graves that were spread over a vast open ground. 13 (Emphasis added)

 

At the entrance of the Tuilum Illam in Koppai and Naundil, the visitor can see, encased in glass, the collected pieces of devastated graves and cenotaphs. A small stone book has been placed on the pieces, and the following words are carved in it:

• After our displacement in

• 1995, the Sri Lanka army

• damaged and destroyed

• the monuments of our

• war heroes, treasured by us.

• The stone remains of the

• left over have been collected

• by us. Let us bow our

• heads and wait at this

• point for a few moments.

The destruction of tombs by the Sri Lankan Army can be considered evidence of the government soldiers' appreciation of the Tuilum Illam's significance for the Tigers. In order to better understand the symbolic value of the LTTE's burial grounds, we need to pay attention to the functional analogies between such places and the military war cemeteries of western nations.

 

Functional analogies with war cemeteries in western military traditions

The Tuilum Illam share many functions with war cemeteries in western military traditions. As George Mosse points out, to concentrate all the dead soldiers in the same space provides the opportunity to stress the importance of their deeds and to focus people's attention on their sacrifice for the nation:

The role assigned to the fallen as German heroes was crucial for their symbolic value. But the fallen as symbols would have had much less impact if it were not for the public spaces and memorials which bore witness to their deeds and their heritage. The purpose which the fallen were made to serve was given true meaning when their resting places became shrines of national worship and when monuments erected in their honour became the focus of the public's attention. The fallen were transformed into symbols which people could see and touch and which made their cult come alive.14

 

It is exactly in this perspective that we should read the words of Prabhakaran, who affirms, when talking about the graves, ‘The tombs of the fallen Tigers heroes will be the foundation of our new nation’.15

Another important function of western war cemeteries is to be places of commemoration, which is also the case of Tuilum Illam. The Maaveerar are celebrated on 27 November, officially remembered as the day on which the first Tiger, Shankar, died. On this day the LTTE pay honours to their dead fighters all over the world. Tamils of the Diaspora organize celebrations in public places such as theatres and public halls,16 while in Sri Lanka the ceremonies take place in the Tuilum Illam (see Figure 7). Ceremonies start in the afternoon. People go to the Tuilum Illam bringing flowers, incense, camphor and candles, and stay by the tombs. Women weep and cry out in pain. Maaveerar Day is a central LTTE political event—not only because of the extensive involvement of civilians,17 but also because it is the occasion in which Prabhakaran's yearly speech is delivered and broadcast through loudspeakers in all Tuilum Illam. Prabhakaran's speech is considered, as Cheran emphasizes, ‘a sort of throne speech in which he usually elaborates on the victories, ground situation, future plans and an analysis of the current political situation’.18 In this sense the Tuilum Illam are the settings for the exercise of ‘intentional rhetorics’, which, as Elizabeth Tonkin stresses, are a central element in the processes of nation-building. For Tonkin, ‘intentional rhetorics’ are utilized ‘to convince people of a social identity which they may not otherwise experience as such’.19

Figure 7. Maaveerar Day in Tunukkai, 2002.

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To conclude the analysis of functional analogies, we can say that in both the Tuilum Illam and in war cemeteries belonging to western tradition there are symbols that can be interpreted in different ways. As George Mosse clarifies:

English cemeteries were centred upon the Cross of Sacrifice and the Stone of Remembrance. The Cross of Sacrifice, in Rudyard Kipling words, has ‘a stark sword brooding in the bosom of the cross’ whose symbolism, by the Commission's own admission, was somewhat vague. It could signify sacrifice in war or simply the hope of resurrection […]. The Stone of Remembrance and the Cross of Sacrifice projected a Christian symbolism which dominated the cemetery, though originally the Stone was conceived by its architect, Sir Edwin Lutyens, as a non-Christian pantheistic symbol. Yet, at times, the Stone of Remembrance was referred to simply as ‘the altar’, conferring the same religious significance upon it that the Cross of Sacrifice possessed.20

 

Similarly in the Tuilum Illam the ‘flame of sacrifice’ burning on the central platform could be compared, as suggested by the chancellor of Jaffna University, with the flame of the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, but at the same time it could also be perceived as a symbolic substitute of the fire of cremation.

Tuilum Illam as temples

I shall now examine the second interpretation that emerges from popular narratives to justify the transition in funerary practices. This interpretation is given mainly by civilians, and places the burial practice within the mainstream of Hindu tradition. As already mentioned, in Hinduism there are some exceptions to cremation. In the context of the Sri Lankan conflict, such exceptions are utilized to give a sense of cultural continuity to the funerary practices reserved for the LTTE fighters. An analysis of the exceptions to cremation within Hinduism is obviously beyond the scope of the present paper. Therefore I will restrict myself to mentioning that these exceptions are associated with either economic reasons (poor people do not have the resources to cremate their dead) or religious ones. From a religious perspective, the concept of the cremation ritual as a sacrifice offered to the gods has in fact several implications: in the case of ‘bad death’, which is an unexpected and untimely death (for instance, death by drowning, as act of violence or some kinds of disease), the body would not symbolize an appropriate sacrifice to the gods, and therefore is not cremated.21

However, there are other cases in which the corpse is not cremated: this happens when the dead is a child or an ascetic. There is much cross-cultural evidence of specific practices performed for those who die in the early years of their life. The reason for the specific treatment of dead children's bodies within Hinduism has given rise to a widespread debate.22 Scholars have suggested several interpretations, including the characteristic of liminality represented by children. Ascetics can also be regarded as liminal figures because they transcend the customary partitions of Hindu society and are located in the symbolic limen between life and death. The burial of ascetics is in fact justified on the basis of their renunciation of ordinary life. As Charles Malamoud points out:

La cérémonie complexe qui marque l'entrée en ‘renoncement’ consiste à laisser s'éteindre les feux sacrificiels après y avoir fait brûler, ultime oblation, ultime combustible, les divers ustensiles du sacrifice. Les feux ne sont pas abolis pour autant: ils sont intériorisés, inhalés, on les fait ‘remonter’ en soi […]. Cuit de l'intérieur, et de son vivant même, le samnyasin[ascetic] n'a pas a être cuit après sa morte: il n'est donc pas incinéré, mais inhumé[…]. En intériorisant leurs feux, ils ont aussi aboli la possibilité d'être transportés vers une divinité qui leur soit extérieure. En s'instituant d'emblée comme offrande, et en persistant jusqu'au bout dans ce rôle, ils ont fait de leur propre personne, de leur atman identifié au Soi universel, leur divinité.23

 

The exception represented by the interment of ascetics allows Tamil civilians the opportunity to place the LTTE burial practices within the mainstream of Hindu tradition. In order to come to an understanding of the symbolic analogy between the ascetics' interment and the Maaveerar's burial we have to consider the representation of LTTE fighters. LTTE combatants are represented as men and women who are not involved in the ‘bad habits’ of ordinary people: they do not drink, do not smoke and do not have forbidden sexual intercourse (pre-marital or extra-marital sex). Abstaining from alcohol and cigarettes is significant particularly for male fighters, because in Tamil culture women are already assumed not to drink or smoke. For female fighters the most important distinction is therefore their sexual purity. As Radhika Coomaraswamy stresses:

The LTTE ideal of the armed guerrilla woman puts forward an image of purity and virginity […]. The women are described as pure, virtuous. Their chastity, their unity of purpose and their sacrifice of social life supposedly give them strength. The armed virginal woman cadre ensures that this notion of purity, based on denial, is a part of the social construction of what it means to be a woman according to the world view of the LTTE.24

 

Michael Roberts suggests that the ascetic mould of the LTTE fighters implies ‘the influence of Hindu tradition of tapas (strength via abstinence) as well as Maoist strains of revolutionary self-discipline’.25 The ascetic discipline of fighters is also a subject of LTTE filmography. Peter Schalk, explaining the plot of a film on the suicidal commandos, the Black Tigers, points out:

The hero of the film is described as a tavan, ‘ascetic’, not by the word, but by his behaviour. Although he is of marriageable age, there is no sign of a girlfriend […]. Living in the group of Black Tigers, he seems to be dedicated to the holy aim [independence] only’.26

 

The symbolic association between fighters and ascetics is not restricted to their behaviour in life. After their death, the combatants, like the ascetics, are worshipped and regarded as gods. When I asked whether Tuilum Illam were cemeteries, very frequently the people I interviewed replied saying ‘How can you say such a thing? Tuilum Illam are temples, gods are seeded [buried27] there’. If we take into consideration the expected behaviour of the Tuilum Illam's visitors, we will see that the prescribed practices for going to or coming back from the Tuilum Illam are exactly the reverse of those prescribed for visiting cemeteries; at the same time they are very similar to the practices prescribed for going to temples. The absence of women and the need to take a bath when coming back from burial grounds are the central differences. A fighter in Sambur explained: ‘This place [the Tuilum Illam] is like a temple. I'm Hindu, when I come from cemeteries I have to take a bath, when I come from here I don't’. A woman in Kilinochchi asserted:

People go to cemetery when the dead bodies have to be burned or buried. Otherwise they don't go. Sometimes the Christians may go for doing some prayer. For cemetery, ladies and children are not allowed to go and only men go. People mainly children are afraid to pass the cemetery even in day time. In normal dead, some rituals are followed. When the males move towards the cemetery with dead body, after the leaving, there is a mortar stick placed on the entrance. The males, after coming from cemetery they should pass the mortar stick and take bath. And turmeric water is sprinkled on every one and every where. […] Here in Tuilum Illam all the people, even a child can go. The people often visit there like the birthday of the son or the remembrance day of the daughter. When we go to Tuilum Illam we feel peace, when you go to cemeteries you feel fear. […] Coming from Tuilum Illam we don't do any kind of these things. Bath before go to Tuilum Illam is not compulsory, but we willingly do it because it is a pure place.

 

The identification of Maaveerar with ascetics/gods28 and of Tuilum Illam as temples is not rejected by the LTTE, in spite of their asserted secular nature. During my fieldwork I observed that not only civilians but also some people involved in the movement affirmed that the Maaveerar are gods and Tuilum Illam are temples. Prabhakaran himself compares the fallen Tigers with ascetics. A.J.V. Chandrakanthan observes that ‘Prabhakaran, the leader of the LTTE, requests the people to venerate those who die in the battle for Eelam as sannyasis (ascetics) who renounced their personal desires and transcended their egoistic existence for a common cause of higher virtue’.29

Conclusions

In my view, the LTTE do not reject the interpretation that places the burial practice reserved for their fighters within the mainstream of Hindu tradition, because they need it in order to make the introduction of the new funerary rituals acceptable. As pointed out by Paul Connerton, in his book How Societies Remember:

All beginnings contain an element of recollection. This is particularly so when a social group makes a concerted effort to begin with a wholly new start. There is a measure of complete arbitrariness in the very nature of any such attempted beginning. […] But the absolutely new is inconceivable. It is not just that it is very difficult to begin with a wholly new start, that too many old loyalties and habits inhibit the substitution of a novel enterprise for an old and established one’.30

 

The attitude of the LTTE towards the identification of the Maaveerar with ascetics/gods emerges, therefore, as an ambiguous but necessary one: the idea that Tuilum Illam are temples where the Maaveerar are worshipped allows the LTTE to avoid a break with the religious feelings of the civilians, thus guaranteeing popular consent for the new project of nation-building. At the same time, the establishment of Tuilum Illam gives the LTTE the opportunity to display the secular values of their future nation: the ideological rejection of all differences among people (i.e. caste, class and gender differences) is symbolically carried out by performing the same funerary rituals and building equal tombs for everyone.

Acknowledgements

The author is grateful to Uoldelul Chelati Dirar, Ivo Quaranta and to the anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments.

Notes

1. Fieldwork in Sri Lanka was conducted over the following periods: July 2002–September 2002, November 2002–January 2003, July–October 2005, December 2005–January 2006. Most of the research was performed in the LTTE-controlled area of Vanni, with some periods spent also in the districts of Batticaloa and Trincomalee, in Vavuniya, Jaffna and Colombo. I carried out participant observation, conducting both qualitative interviews and informal talks with civilians and fighters. Since 2000, I have interviewed Tamil Diaspora people in Italy.

2. The conflict started in July 1983 when, after the killing of 13 soldiers of the Sri Lankan Army by the LTTE in the north, a pogrom against Tamil civilians in Colombo and other areas of the island took place. For a recent and critical analysis of the causes of the conflict, see Dhananjayan Sriskandarajah, ‘Socio-economic inequality and ethno-political conflict: some observations from Sri Lanka’, Contemporary South Asia, Vol 14, No 3, 2005, pp 341–356.

3. Regarding the LTTE state-building efforts and the effective size of the LTTE-controlled areas, see the paper by Kristian Stokke, ‘Building the Tamil Eelam state: emerging state institution and forms of governance in LTTE-controlled areas in Sri Lanka’, Third World Quarterly, Vol 27, No 6, 2006, pp 1021–1040; and the rejoinder by Muttukrishna Sarvananthan, ‘In pursuit of a mythical state of Tamil Eelam: a rejoinder to Kristian Stokke’, Third World Quarterly, Vol 28, No 6, 2007, pp 1185–1195.

4. Christians are sometimes buried close to the area where Hindus perform cremation.

5. Personal interview, Puthukudiyiruppu, 7 December 2002.

6. In passing we may observe that the leader of the movement Prabhakaran is supposed to make all central decisions regarding the fighters. The LTTE members themselves explained to me that, although many decisions are joint resolutions, it is actually better to ascribe them to the leader, so that the people will accept them more easily.

7. In line with the ethics codes of the main associations of anthropologists, names of my informants are not reported to guarantee anonymity; see, for example, the American Anthropologist Association Code of Ethics, 〈http://www.aaanet.org/committees/ethics/ethrpt.htm〉, accessed 20 December 2007.

8. Although a detailed description of all possible interpretations is beyond the scope of this article, I should mention that to some fighters (but not to civilians) the burial of dead fighters is considered a return to the practices of the ancient Tamils, who buried their fallen warriors. References to the customs of the Cankam period are also quoted in some of the LTTE publications. As Øvind Fuglerud points out, ‘The ideological project of the LTTE is directed towards homologising the pre- and post-colonial situation, of linking the present claim for statehood with the restoration of authentic Tamil culture’; see Øvind Fuglerud, Life on the Outside. The Tamil Diaspora and Long Distance Nationalism (London: Pluto Press, 2001), p 203. With regard to the presence of images from Cankam and Bhakti literature in the LTTE poems, see Dagmar Hellmann-Rajanayagam, ‘And heroes die: poetry of the Tamil Liberation Movement in northern Sri Lanka’, South Asia, Vol 28, No 1, 2005, pp 112–153; but for a discussion of traditionalism and revivalism in LTTE ideology, see also Peter Schalk, ‘Historisation of the martial ideology of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE)’, South Asia, Vol 20, No 2, 1997, pp 35–72.

9. The last two statements remind the attitude to also see western civilians cemeteries as places of cultural transmission and reinforcement of generational obligations. See, for instance, D. Francis, L. Kellaher and G. Neophytou, ‘The cemetery: a site for the construction of memory, identity, and ethnicity’, in J.J. Climo and M.G. Cattel (eds) Social Memory and History. Anthropological Perspectives (Walnut Creek: Altamira Press, 2002), pp 95–110.

10. Maurice Bloch and Jonathan Parry (eds), Death and the Regeneration of Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), p 36.

11. David M. Knipe, ‘Sapi[ndot][ddot]īkarana: the Hindu rite of entry into heaven’, in F.E. Reynolds and E.H. Waugh (eds) Religious Encounters with Death (London: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1977), pp 111–124.

12. It must be remembered that the destruction of the Tuilum Illam is not officially acknowledged either by Sri Lankan government or by international organizations such as the International Committee of the Red Cross.

13. M.R. Narayan Swamy, Tigers of Lanka. From Boys to Guerrillas (Colombo: Vijitha Yapa, 2002/03), p 355.

14. George Mosse, Fallen Soldiers: Reshaping the Memory of the World Wars (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), p 80.

15. Quoted in the 1995 LTTE diary.

16. For further details on the ceremonies outside Sri Lanka: for the Canadian case, see R. Cheran, ‘The sixth genre: memory, history and the Tamil diaspora imagination’, Marga Monograph Series on Ethnic Reconciliation, Vol 7, 2001, pp 1–30; and for the Italian case, see C. Natali, ‘Uno spazio scenico per la memoria: la commemorazione dei caduti tamil attraverso la danza’[‘On stage for remembrance. To commemorate Tamil war dead through dance’], in A. Destro (ed.) Antropologia dello spazio[Anthropology of Space] (Bologna: Patron, 2002), pp 77–11.

17. The ceremony I attended in Sri Lanka in 2002 took place in Tunukkai (Vanni area), and I estimated the participants to be around 10,000. In the same year in Kilinochchi, participants were around 30,000 (Sunday Leader, 1 December, p 8).

18. Cheran, op cit, Ref 16, p 17.

19. Elizabeth Tonkin, Narrating Our Pasts. The Social Construction of Oral History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p 130.

20. Mosse, op cit, Ref 14, p 85.

21. This does not necessarily mean that the body is buried: sometimes it is set adrift on a river. Children are also often treated in this way.

22. See Veena Das, ‘The uses of liminality: society and cosmos in Hinduism’, Contributions to Indian Sociology, Vol 10, No 2, 1976, pp 245–263; and Charles Malamoud, Cuire le monde. Rite et pensée dans l'Inde ancienne (Paris: La Découverte, 1989).

23. The complex ceremony which marks one's entry into ‘renunciation' consists of allowing one's sacrificial fires to extinguish after having incinerated one's sacrificial utensils, as an ultimate fuel source, in a final oblation. One's fires are not abolished for all this: they are rather internalized, inhaled; they are made to ‘mount back' into oneself […]. Because he is cooked from the inside while still alive, the samnyasin [ascetic] has no need of being cooked after his death: he is therefore not burned, but buried […]. By internalizing their fires, they have also abolished the possibility of being borne upwards to a divinity located outside of themselves. By establishing themselves as offerings from the outset, and by adhering to this role down to the very end, they have transformed their own persons, their atmans identified with the universal Self, into their divinity. Malamoud, op cit, Ref 22, p 65.

24. Quoted in J. Schrijvers, ‘Fighters, victims and survivors: constructions of ethnicity, gender and refugeeness among Tamils in Sri Lanka’, Journal of Refugees Studies, Vol 12, No 3, 1999, p 316.

25. Michael Roberts, ‘Filial devotion in Tamil culture and the Tiger cult of martyrdom’, Contributions to Indian Sociology, Vol 30, No 2, 1996, p 256.

26. Peter Schalk, ‘The revival of martyr cults among Ilavar’, Temenos, Vol 33, 1997, p 160.

27. When referring to the Maaveerar, many civilians refuse to use the verb ‘to bury’ and prefer the verb ‘to seed’. The LTTE also introduce this terminological distinction. In a LTTE booklet in Tamil describing the ceremony of 27 November, we found these assertions: ‘We call these bodies “seed bodies”. They are sowed in the Tuilum Illam and a stone is laid in memory of the Maaveerar. We don't believe that the Maaveerar are dead. We believe that the Maaveerar are the seeds of independence. So they are not buried, they are sowed. And the body is not called a dead body, it is called Viththudal[seed body]’. See also Peter Schalk, op cit, Ref 8, pp 49–50; and Hellmann-Rajanayagam, op cit, Ref 8.

28. A deeper analysis of this complex connection is carried out in C. Natali, Sabbia sugli dèi. Pratiche commemorative tra le Tigri tamil (Sri Lanka)[Sand over Gods. Commemorative Practices among Tamil Tigers (Sri Lanka)] (Turin: il Segnalibro, 2004).

29. A.J.V. Chandrakanthan, ‘Eelam Tamil nationalism. An inside view’, in J.A. Wilson (ed.), Sri Lankan Tamil Nationalism. Its Origins and Development in the 19^th and 20^th Centuries (London: Hurst, 2000), p 164.

30. Paul Connerton, How Societies Remember (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p 6.

Edited October 15, 20223 yr by நன்னிச் சோழன்