Killing Rajiv Gandhi: Dhanu's sacrificial metamorphosis in death

Abstract

Set within the context of the Sri Lankan Tamils' liberation war dominated by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), this article examines the series of events that followed Pirapāharan's (Prabhākaran) decision to eliminate Rajiv Gandhi in 1991 in order to pre-empt his election as Prime Minister. The details of the LTTE's intricate killing operation under operational commander Sivarāsan set the scene for a focus on facets of the attire adopted by suicide bomber Dhanu. Saffron-green outfit, kanagambaram in hair and sandalwood-pellet garland may have been directed by pragmatic reasoning. But circumstantial contentions also point towards cosmic reasoning. Taken together with the kill team's preceding supplications to the god Ganapathi at a temple in Chennai, these indications suggest that Dhanu's explosive transformation into ash was geared towards a transvaluation of self in the cycle of rebirth. Information on Hindu practices taken from the researches of Mines, Fuller and Tanaka amplify the significance of the details deployed during this operation as supplements to plastic explosives, ball bearings and suicide vest.

The kill and its context

Late at night on 21 May 1991 Rajiv Gandhi attended a campaign meeting in the southern town of Sriperumbudur in support of a Congress Party candidate in the forthcoming general elections. As he greeted a bespectacled woman in a green and orange salwar kameez who carried a sandalwood pellet garland, she bent down in a standard act of respect and he was blown apart by a vest bomb that she detonated.

The assassin was Dhanu, an experienced fighterFootnote ¹ in the ranks of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). Under her original nom de guerre Akino, she had been trained in a Tiger camp at DindigulFootnote ² in India in the mid-1980s. Dhanu has been identified by different names; all that is clear is that she was the daughter of Rājaratnam,Footnote ³ a government clerk and activist in the Federal Party in Sri Lanka who was part of a small splinter group of firebrands known as the Pulip Padai (Tigers' Army) that took an oath in 1961 affirming faith in armed struggle.Footnote ⁴ Rājaratnam (who died in 1975) was one of those who ‘had inspired a number of youngsters’,Footnote ⁵ including Pirapāharan in his teenage days. Significantly, he was posthumously honoured in mid-late 1991 at an LTTE ceremony chaired by Pirapāharan himself.

I begin with a clarification of the context of this event. By the 1970s disaffected Sri Lankan Tamils had moved to a position where even their moderate parliamentarians were impelled to declare (on 14 May 1976) that their goal was a separate state to be called Thamililam or Eelam. By the late 1970s, moreover, a medley of clandestine militant groups committed to armed struggle existed in the north of Sri Lanka. The scene was set for the moderate Tamil parliamentarians to be shunted out of centre stage. At stage a transformative event occurred, namely, a horrific pogrom directed against Tamils living in the Sinhala-majority districts in July 1983 – a process of terror that involved both government functionaries and ordinary people from many walks of life. Thereafter, it was a hot war with strong ethnic hues. During the guerilla stage of the Tamil liberation struggle in the years 1983–1987 the massive growth in the various Tamil fighting groups was assisted materially by the support of the Indian Government, as well as various political forces in Tamil Nadu. All the fighting Sri Lankan Tamil groups received military training in camps in India, and at least 10–12 batches of LTTE fighters (among them Dhanu) were trained in such camps.

When the Sri Lankan government launched a military offensive in the Jaffna Peninsula in mid-1987, the Indian Government intervened against the Sri Lankan state. Pressure was also exerted on the Indian state's little allies, the Tamil fighting groups. Pirapāharan was flown to New Delhi as part of this process and had meetings with Rajiv Gandhi as well as senior Indian officials. Eventually, these manoeuvres resulted in the government of J.R. Jayewardene accepting the idea of an Indian Peace Keeping Force (IPKF) entering the northern and eastern districts in order to maintain order. The understanding was that the separatist rebels would disarm and work towards regional autonomy under Indian guarantee.

The degree to which the Indo-Lanka Accord of 27 July 1987 was acceptable to the Sri Lankan Tamils is a bone of contention.Footnote ⁶ Be that as it may, the LTTE took a different line: ‘we have been betrayed by the government of India, by Rajiv Gandhi. I have been stabbed in the back’, is one statement attributed to Pirapāharan himself as he was confined to Room 518 in the Ashoka Hotel in New Delhi.Footnote ⁷ However, the IPKF troops were initially ‘greeted as saviours’ by the residents of the Jaffna Peninsula, where ‘people thronged to welcome them … wept and garlanded them’.Footnote ⁸ Even Pirapāharan was a hero when he was brought back. A massive crowd assembled at the grounds of Sudumalai Ammān K0vil Temple to hear him speak on 4 August 1987, a peroration that was ‘a fine tightrope walk’ that revealed seeds of dissent and potential resistance.Footnote ⁹

These seeds quickly sprouted. By 10 October 1987 the LTTE and the IPKF were at war, with the Tigers reverting to guerilla tactics. Atrocities and rapes by Indian troops did not help their cause.Footnote ¹⁰ Despite the presence of some 132,000 Indian personnel at some stages and a 20:1 balance of the forces in their favour, by the time a ceasefire was agreed upon in September 1989, the IPKF dead numbered 945 and that of the Tigers 754.Footnote ¹¹ Insofar as the LTTE held out against the might of the Indian army, this episode in the history of the LTTE and the Tamil struggle raised Pirapāharan to the status of ‘a living legend’ as Dayan Jayatilaka remarked shortly thereafter.Footnote ¹² The foundations for Pirapāharan's decision to kill Rajiv Gandhi were created during this series of events, events that involved the loss many of his comrades and embraced the sufferings of the Tamil people under the IPKF regime. The LTTE hierarchy's intense hostility to both the Indian Government and Gandhi himself was revealed in a compendium entitled The Satanic Force, which they began preparing in March 1989 under the guidance of Baby Subramanium, their political chief in Tamil Nadu. As many as 3000 copies of this compendium had reached binding stage by mid-1991 at an establishment in Chennai run by a Dravida Kazhagham activist linked to the LTTE. This massive dossier revealed quite ‘starkly the LTTE's hatred for the IPKF and Rajiv Gandhi’.Footnote ¹³

Among circumstantial evidence, in March 1991 Pirapāharan reacted in anger to Kāsi Ānandan's evaluation of Rajiv Gandhi and virulently remarked that Gandhi ‘deserved to die at the hands of a woman’.Footnote ¹⁴

The preparation of The Satanic Force was informed by the changing political scene in India. V.P. Singh's coalition government was on unstable ground in a situation where the Congress Party remained the largest single group in Parliament. When Singh's coalition collapsed in late 1990, it was anticipated by most that the Congress Party and Gandhi would return to power at the forthcoming elections. This is where Pirapāharan's deep antipathy to Rajiv Gandhi seems to have led to a set of adamantine convictions, namely, that on his return to power (1) Gandhi would not only resist any progression towards a separate state of Eelam but (2) would also re-introduce Indian troops into the island. In retrospect, we know that the second reading was surely a prejudiced leap in the dark.

Convinced thus, the LTTE leader proceeded in his manner born. That is, his generalship has always been marked by three aspects that have usually contributed to outstanding military achievements and ‘feats’ of assassination: (1) long-term contingency planning, (2) meticulous preparationFootnote ¹⁵ and (3) pre-emptive strikes on the principle that attack is the best form of defence. Clearly, such an assassination was deemed simpler before Gandhi came to power as Prime Minister. Contingency preparations for the assassination are believed to have begun as early as November/December 1990. Baby Subramanium proceeded to cultivate both Drāvida Kazhagam and other local Tamils with an eye on the expansion in the LTTE's network of safe houses. Such pan-Dravidian extremists as Muthurāja, Subhā Sundaram, Arivu and Irumborai were already on board, while the family of Padma and her two children Bhāgyanāthan and Nālini were gradually converted to the LTTE cause.Footnote ¹⁶ The actual assassination project was organized by operatives of the LTTE's ‘Intelligence Wing’ (INT) headed by Pottu Ammān and his deputy, the female commander Akilā (Somasekaram Satyadēvi). Pottu Ammān chose Sivarāsan as his operational commander and kept in regular wireless communication with him throughout the exercise. Born at Udupiddy as Chandrasēkaram Pakiachandran, Sivarāsan (‘Raghu Anna’ or ‘Siva Master’ in Tiger circles) was a former government functionary turned experienced fighter. Critically, he had knowledge of Chennai and had been one of the leaders in a commando strike in June 1990 that massacred the leadership of the Eelam People's Revolutionary Liberation Front at an apartment in the city.Footnote ¹⁷

Armed with gold biscuits as readily convertible assets, Sivarāsan went to Chennai early in 1991 where he was joined by Murugan in February for their early preparations. He returned to the Jaffna Peninsula for the final briefing from Pottu Ammān on April 28, a meeting that involved Akilā as well as Dhanu and Subhā, with Subhā designated as standby for Dhanu. The team then embarked for Kodiakkarai on the Indian coast on the night of the April 30 where they met their partners at a safe spot. Proceeding to Chennai, Dhanu and Subhā were placed in Nālini's house and quickly developed a bond with her, while the others were located in different safe houses.

On 7 April 1991 the hit team made a dry run by attending a major election meeting, with a local photographer Haribābu recording the occasion. A little later Dhanu went shopping with Nālini and purchased a salwar kameez in the Congress colours of orange (saffron) and green, a combination that happened to be in fashion at that time.Footnote ¹⁸ On 21 May Subhā helped Dhanu fit the suicide vest under her salwar kameez, after which photographs were taken. Sivarāsan, dressed like a journalist in kurta pyjama, joined them at Nālini's flat and with Nālini making a fourth they headed in the early afternoon for the bus stand where Haribābu was waiting for them with a garland of sandalwood pellets which he had bought as instructed.

At the electioneering rally at Sriperumbudur they latched unto a local Congress activist named Lātha Kannan and her daughter Kōkilavāni. Kōkilavāni had right of access to the podium to read a poem and Dhanu moved cleverly in her wake in order to penetrate the relatively lax security cordon and detonate her explosives – an eruption that killed Gandhi, herself, Kōkilavāni, Kannan and 14 others, including Haribābu, and wounded 44.

Like the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi, the assassinations by the LTTE, whether by suicide bomber, sniper or electronically triggered explosive, carried out in the years 1990–2007, were meticulously worked out and have been, for the most part, successful.Footnote ¹⁹ One facet has been a policy of videotaping their major operations for both training and propaganda purposes: soldier teams of video camera persons from a section known as ‘Truth Tigers’ monitored their sea and land attacks.Footnote ²⁰ For this projected assassination in foreign territory, however, they decided to hire a local photographer, one Haribābu, to record the scenes, and SIT investigators came to the conclusion that Haribābu was privy to their deadly intent. In any event, he got too close and was killed along with Dhanu, Gandhi and others.Footnote ²¹

His camera however did not ‘die’. Dhanu, Sivarāsan and others were thus caught napping, so to speak, and revealed to the Indian intelligence services (Figure 1).Footnote ²² The final moment with Dhanu behind Kōkilavāni with kanagambaram in her hair and two steps away from garlanding Gandhi was also captured by the cameraman (Figure 2). From these striking images, as the cliché has it, the plot unfolded. It was this film that enabled the Indian investigators to identify the assassins, hunt them down and assemble comprehensive evidence of their guilt, thereby foiling the LTTE's conviction that ‘the assassination could be so fine-tuned that it would never be traced to the LTTE’.Footnote ²³

Figure 1. Dhanu and Sivarāsan wait for the moment to strike. Dhanu is in spectacles between Kōkilavāni on her right and Lātha Kannan on her left. (Courtesy of Ashik Bonhofer and the Observer Research Foundation.)

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Figure 2. Rajiv Gandhi listens to Kōkilavāni in paternal fashion, little realising that Dhanu (foreground with kanagambaram in hair) is waiting patiently to greet him and blow him apart. (Courtesy of Ashik Bonhofer and the Observer Research Foundation.)

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A suicide bomber was central to this clause of ‘being untraceable’. Apart from ensuring certainty of kill and not calling for an exit strategy, such a killer cannot be located and questioned or even easily identified from the remains when s/he is from another country. The LTTE is unique in demanding that all its fighters take an oath to bite the cyanide capsule (kuppi) they carry during operations whenever they are in danger of being captured. As Pirapākaran told the BBC in late 1991:

Suicidal commitments therefore began for the Tigers around 1983/1984 as defensive suicide to avoid torture and to protect one's comrades, and it was not till 5 July 1987 that the first suicide attack was launched in battlefront conditions. By then the special force of suicide attackers known as Black Tigers or karumpuli was in existence. This commitment marked a spirit of selfless sacrifice as well as courage among the LTTE personnel. It endeared them to many Sri Lankan Tamils – though not to all. This vital constituency took heart from the arpaNippu (dedication) symbolized by such acts. The kuppi was a talisman that legitimized their cause and assisted the mobilization of recruits.

The cause was a separate state within Sri Lanka, one that was explicitly proclaimed to be a ‘secular state’. Thus, many scholars regard the LTTE to be a secular organization.Footnote ²⁵ Secular is understood in the conventional Western sense of not being attached to religious principles in any significant way so that its suicide bombers are not motivated by thoughts of the afterlife or ideas of redemption or atonement. Behind this reading, of course, is an explicit or implicit contrast with the Islamic suicide bombers on the path of shāhadat, personnel that are deemed to be ‘fundamentalists’ inspired by religious goals. I have consistently challenged this position by focusing on the embodied practices of LTTE fighters, their supporters and the kinfolk of their fallen. In a setting marked by pluralistic forms of religious worship, and considerable cross-fertilization of practices across the Hindu/Christian divide, it is feasible for the LTTE to provide scope for the religious principle of sakti (divine energy) without the use of markers that distinguish a particular religion. As regards the idea of being ‘secular’, I am concerned not so much with the play of religion, but rather a broader and more encompassing notion – one associated with a cluster of concepts, namely, the overlapping ideas ‘enchantment’, ‘cosmic’ and ‘supramundane’. I am guided here by Weberian sociology and its reading of the transformations in Western Europe between the late medieval period and the modern era. The secularization of society was seen to occur hand in hand with the implantation of rationality, including the rationality of market capitalism. This process undermined the degree to which the lifeways of people and institutions were enmeshed in what Weber called ‘enchantment’ (linked in turn with ‘magic’ and ‘irrationality’).Footnote ²⁶ This essay, then, is part of my larger project in this direction through a focus on the empirical specifics associated with the LTTE's assassination of Gandhi, that is, with the murder team's activities on the way to their kill as well as afterwards. The technological pragmatism of an improvised explosive device and the pragmatic steps taken to circumvent the security cordon around Gandhi, I contend, were girded and threaded by a number of enchanted embellishments.

Dhanu and the meaning of ash in Tamil cultural praxis

In a speculative argument that cannot be empirically substantiated, I contend that there was a careful threading of Dhanu's persona with religiously significant artefacts, for instance the ideationally valourized sandalwood, which would balance and mediate her own explosive death, thereby enabling her to secure a enchanted form of transcendence-cum-transvaluation. It may have even rendered her act into a rite des passage that metamorphosed her being into a particle of ash within a higher realm. This cluster of conjectures, clearly, is informed by attentiveness to a religious context where a majority of Hindus understand that each person has many lives and that one's ‘worldly existence is a stage of transition from past existence towards future worldly lives’Footnote ²⁷ ; that this continuous movement into different realms is conditioned by the karmic laws of cause and effect that are, in turn, directed by one's morality. Thus, ‘Hindus believe that they can be reborn as any living thing – depending on the merit earned – as grass, plant, bird, reptile, human, dēva or asura’ (email from S.V. Kāsynāthan, 6 February 2007). Because ash is such a pervasive and central aspect of meaningful transactions in the course of Hindu worship, its significance in the Saivite Hindu world is elaborated at the outset in order to underline my deployment of this element as metaphorical tool. The intention here is to emplace the reader within an appropriate milieu.

The specific context for this illustrative preamble is the pseudonymous village of Yanaimangalam (hereafter Y) in the extreme south of Tamil Nadu as depicted in the ethnography provided by Diane Mines. In Village Y, as throughout India, ash (vipūti, or vibhūti, in Tamil) is Siva's special substance. The ash that is ‘distributed liberally’ in Siva temples is made from cow dung, though scented factory-produced ash is also available nowadays. As directed by Hindu myth and ritual, ash is considered ‘cooling’, ‘pure’ and ‘generative’.Footnote ²⁸ While produced out of destruction, it is regarded as a remnant ‘seed’ that regenerates the cosmos. Once ash is transvalued through contact with a specific deity, it becomes prasād, that is, it is transformed and rendered into a ‘beneficial substance’.Footnote ²⁹ Thus, in smearing ash on body or forehead a person imbibes the deity's qualities. Ash-smearing and ash distribution is a common and vital aspect of most festivals (kotai, which also means ‘gift’) at Village Y. At ‘temple festivals ash transactions are dense: outstretched surround and follow god-dancers, who push through the crowds hastily flouring palms and foreheads’. This is not merely a transmission of a religious boon: at Y ‘the giver and receivers not only conform to acknowledged [village] rankings, they make and re-make those rankings publicly’.Footnote ³⁰

Ash is not only amenable to body decor, it is also edible and can be ingested as prasād, sometimes as a potent transformative device. Take the unscripted moment at a rite in Village Y where the elderly AM was serving as an oracle before the god Muntacāmi. An entranced woman rushed across the space to him. She was deemed to be possessed by an inappropriate spirit, so AM promptly took countervailing measures. One procedure was to feed her the deity's ‘divinely charged, pure, and cooling ash’. When later asked by Mines whether the ash had the power of sakti (cakti, shakti) to effect an exorcism, AM's exasperated response – for any local would not have asked such a stupid question – ran thus:

Besides having these ‘capacities’, ash has the advantage of being ‘infinitely’ divisible. It is understood, moreover, that one's corpse dissolves into ash when it is cremated, a practice that many, if not most, Hindus in India adhere to. In the context of rebirth beliefs and a cultural theory that emphasizes the transvaluation of bodily substances in this world, it follows that this corporeal transformation at death is also divisible. One's ash, logically, can fructify (or decrease) and take multiple routes in future lives in various realms. That is a logical possibility,Footnote ³² not necessarily a theory that is explicitly ordained by some religious authority. This capacity on its part is also in step with the fundamental Hindu principle of the many goddesses being part of the one goddess Sakti, a holographic principle where each part also embodies the whole.

Interpretation

Just as the LTTE's machinations unravelled as a result of Haribābu's film roll, so, too, does my picture develop from his photographs. Consider photographs 1 and 2 both taken by Haribābu.Footnote ³³ Dhanu knew she was going to die. The suicide belt with plastic explosives (and ball bearings) as well as her salwar kameez and appearance would have been geared to the pragmatics of the occasion and her cover as a supporter of the Congress Party. In purchasing a salwar kameez with the aid of Nālini, Dhanu selected a colour combination, namely, green with orange (of saffron hue) that was popular at that time, one that matched the colours of the Indian national flag and thus would help her to blend in with the mass of people.Footnote ³⁴ It was towards this end that Sivarāsan and Dhanu befriended a local Congress Party worker, Lātha Kannan, who is the women standing to the left of Dhanu in Figure 1, her daughter, Kōkilavāni on the other side, both blissfully unaware of the deadly human bomb between them. Garland and appearance, therefore, were obviously organized in generally coherent ways.

Nonetheless, there are several clues that point to a supramundane perspective in the accoutrements so carefully designed for herself by Dhanu, perhaps in collaboration with the mastermind Sivarāsan. Let me stress here that the clues are several and circumstantial. When unconnected clues point in the same direction, any good detective follows the import. That is what I do here – rather like my previous analysis of a famous Sinhalese story depicting the arrival of the first Portuguese ships in the sixteenth century.

The garland was obviously part of the rational-means-to-end. It was not a garland of flowers, but one made up of sandalwood pellets: thus a symbolically meaningful garland appropriate to a high-value person – quite pragmatically rational. But this does not prevent another theme, a form of cosmic rationality, from being part of the ‘mix’ created by Dhanu/Sivarāsan. Sandalwood, as earlier observed, is deemed a cooling substance in Hindu Saivite worship. Many deities are deemed, that is known, to be powerful, heated and thus potentially dangerous beings. During ritual episodes their icons and/or substances embodying their essence have to be encased within, or attached to, what are believed to be cooling substances such as margosa leaves, sandalwood and turmeric. Sandalwood also has medicinal and purifying properties that enhance its religious character.Footnote ³⁵ It is therefore an item of prāsad in some parts of southern India. In this sense sandalwood is a religious, cosmic substance of considerable import.Footnote ³⁶ Let me illustrate.

In both the fishing village of Udappu (occupied mostly by Karaiyar Saivite Tamils) and in the temple complex at Munnesvaram on the western coast of Sri Lanka there is an annual festival to Bhadrakāli. One preparatory rite during the Munnesvaram festival involves the priests flouring the image of Bhadrakāli with sandalwood paste in order to encircle, and thus balance, the expansion of the goddess's heated potency, while also ‘enliven[ing] her gaze’.Footnote ³⁷ Likewise, at the kotai (festivals) held at Village Y in Tirunelveli, India, the young girls and boys fulfilling previous vows made on their behalf by elders were dressed in a new cloth after a bath at the river and then had ‘light yellow sandalwood paste [smeared] all over their chest and arms’ together with red kumkumam powder.Footnote ³⁸

It is in this setting, one permeated by the cosmic ideas imbricated within such embodied practices, that one should consider the question: why did Dhanu/Sivarāsan choose a garland of sandalwood pellets rather than one of flowers? My speculative answer is that sandanam, sandalwood, would cosmically ‘englobe’ Dhanu with what is symbolically believed to be a cooling and purifying substance as she – her being that is – passed through into another world. By itself this pointer may seem fanciful. But there are other clues directing us in the same direction of supramundane transvaluation. Take Dhanu's salwar kameez outfit: it is orangish-saffron in colour with a green top to embellish it. Moreover, as Figure 2 reveals,Footnote ³⁹ she has upon her head ‘orange/saffron-coloured flowers, locally known as kanagambaram’, a type of crossandra that is as much favoured in Hindu worship as the jasmine flower. Footnote⁴⁰ Kanagambaram is widely used for decorations in Tamil Nadu, but on religious occasions it is often mixed with jasmine when strung into garlands (kadambam), while the outer ring of the headpiece worn by bharatanatyam dancers is kanagambaram.Footnote ⁴¹ Bharatanatyam is a dance form that is ‘unique to the south’ of India, especially Tamil Nadu and Karnataka; and ‘most of the repertoire’, inclusive of the music, is ‘based on devotion to God’ (email from Māyā Ranganāthan, 7 February 2007). In brief, among Tamils the kanagambaram flower carries conventionally profound cultural resonances with interlacing religious threads. It is the orange-saffron-hued salwar kameez however that carries greater significance. As Sathiyamoorthy informed me, in India the colour saffron is associated with the idea of sacrifice and it is for this reason that it constitutes one-third of the Indian national flag. It therefore has a religious connotation, and many sanyāssin and sādhus in India adorn saffronFootnote ⁴² as a proclamation of their endeavour (though orange, red and yellow may also be adopted by some). This cluster of colours also animates gatherings of personnel associated today with the Hindutva movement.

The sandalwood in Dhanu's garland, moreover, takes a pellet form rather than being a continuous chain fashioned like a sausage. This form of garland, as Māyā Ranganāthan forcefully insisted in opposition to my initial conjectures, is common in southern India. It is not constituted of pure sandalwood, rather it involves hollow beads made of wooden shavings that would have been scented with sandalwood perfume. In short, we have ersatz sandalwood, not the pure, godly substance (but does that change its signification and its meaning for religiously oriented Tamils?). Again, because politicians never keep to time, it is sensible for followers to deploy sandalwood garlands rather than flowers that are liable to wither. Given Dhanu's intent, moreover, a cumbersome flower garland was more likely to draw a security search than a bare string of pellets.Footnote ⁴³ So a string of sandalwood pellets was pragmatic. But that, to repeat, does not preclude a further cosmological import being intentionally overlaid on the rationality of means.

Herein, there is an intriguing angle to add to the set of clues favouring the argument that there were cosmic fibres within the pragmatics of the Dhanu/Sivarāsan operation. As Angela Hobart suggested on the foundations of her Balinese fieldwork, beads are ‘an aesthetic form that allows the adept (Dhanu in this case) to “bud forth sprouts of beauty,”Footnote ⁴⁴ that is to become absorbed in the essence of the Divine (understood as the immaterial, “invisible world”)’.Footnote ⁴⁵ This is a Tantric principle. Whether Tamil-speaking Hindus in India and Sri Lanka are attuned to Tantrism or not, the suggestion here is that this specific Tantric notion embodied in artefact (bead, bangle, amulet, necklace) may have been insidiously incorporated into Saivite Tamil practices without a necessary reference to its origins. So the sandalwood pellets carried a double import, cooling and sacred as well as enchanted, beautifying.

Finally, there is the act itself of garlanding. This is, of course, a ‘mundane’ political act, the honouring of a person. The garlanding act was the ostensible means for Dhanu to get within reach of Rajiv Gandhi. But it so happens that the motion of encircling and encompassment is a central, significant and widespread operation in Hindu worship. Indeed, the forms and means of encirclement are as manifold as they are profoundly significant. There is a whole genre of ‘circling rituals’ (ārati in Sanskritic Tamil) that are ‘intended to remove unwanted negatives’ from a person or place.Footnote ⁴⁶ Officiating personnel at many temple rites throughout India commonly make circling motions with lamps or camphor flames in order to encompass the worshippers, or a particular vow-giver, within the grace of the deity reigning at the site. As god-dancers or vow-givers moved through Village Y in procession during festivals, people emerged from their houses and gifted them bangles or fragrant garlands to the point of excess.Footnote ⁴⁷ Some Hindus wear amulets and bracelets as a form of protection, while a ‘woman's marriage tāli [around the neck] must never be cut off except at the death of her husband’ – for the ‘[severance] of encircling ties that bind and protect is to open one to danger’.Footnote ⁴⁸ Again, virtually everywhere in the Tamil-speaking world village processions circumnavigate the central part of the village to signify the community's protection and renewal. At Village Y this circumnavigation explicitly defined the ur, the interior heart of the village and demarcated it from the ghost-ridden katu, namely, the adjacent wasteland/wilderness/outside.Footnote ⁴⁹ This fundamental Hindu practice has also become an integral part of the LTTE commemorative iconography. During Heroes' Week every flagpole at various LTTE offices and display sites in Kilinochchi had a small circle of jasmine flowers adorning its base, while a picture of the flagpole at the entrance to their tuyilam illam (resting place) at Vavuniya reveals a profusion of nitya kalyani (periwinkle, a species of jasmine) around it.Footnote ⁵⁰ In brief, their fallen, the māvīrar, are also symbolically encircled and protected by cosmic forces.

This set of clues within the ‘attire’ associated with Dhanu does not mean that she was treating Rajiv Gandhi as a god. On the contrary, from the LTTE viewpoint he was more like an Asura standing in the path of the Tiger Suras and liberation fighters. And like an Asura, Gandhi was destined for obliteration. But insofar as Dhanu, gifting herself as uyirayūtam (weapon) to the LTTE cause,Footnote ⁵¹ was destined to turn to ash in the same process, she and Sivarāsan made sure that she was suitably ‘attired’ for the ‘journey’. She had an orange/saffron dress and orange/pink flowers to signify her sacrificial character. She had the sign of sandalwood to serve as a cooling and purifying substance balancing the heated process of transvaluation she was about to undergo. That is, the sandalwood was for Dhanu herself as she passed into heated, explosive oblivion in what one can, in further embellishment, present as a cosmic process of transvaluation. Dhanu's blow was a sacrificial act of destruction directed towards the creation of Eelam. In effect, it was a generative strike in aid of the LTTE's punita cutantiram or ‘holy’ goal of ‘liberation’. This objective, in her eyes and that of the LTTE, rendered her work transcendental. Dhanu herself then became immortal in their eyes,Footnote ⁵² transformed both literally and figuratively into a particle of ash within a higher realm.

In this reading Dhanu's act entailed an extinction of self that secured a ‘cosmic union’ that was, for her, a ‘liberation’.Footnote ⁵³ The idea of ‘union’ arising here is not incidental. As Penelope Logan stresses, a basic process in Hindu pūjā, or worship, is that ‘embodying the deity and disembodying man’.Footnote ⁵⁴ This point is utilized by Chris Fuller when he develops the argument that Hindu worship involves a ‘movement toward identity between deity and worshipper’. This identity of being is revealed not only ‘by the sequential logic’ of a ritual, but, to add, also by a multi-media ‘assault’ on all the senses that seeks to enfold and subsume the participants in one ‘globe’. It is because of its englobing and pervasive capacities that a camphor flame is a favourite ‘tool’ in a Hindu pūjā in front of a deity's image and so often scheduled for its climax. At that moment, the

This basic principle holds for acts of worship among the Tamil Saivites in Sri Lanka. At some rites its character as a fusion of beings is extended in metaphoric ways. At Udappu the final rite at the Bhadrakāli festival, known as velvi, is the offer of a consecrated black goat to the goddess, a moment when the crowd shouts ‘arohara’ as the neck is cut off. This rite is understood to complete the process of securing Bhadrakāli's protection for the community. However, Tanaka extends the meaning of this rite of velvi: because the goat is garlanded and a pandal (canopy) is erected for the ceremony, he suggests that it is akin to a marriage ceremony where the goddess Bhadrakāli herself is transformed from fierce deity into a benevolent one, a cosmic force oriented towards the protection of Udappu.Footnote ⁵⁶

Many such rites involve ritual specialists of some sort. For a Hindu bhakta worshipper, however, an intermediary adept is not required. Bhakti practices involve personalized devotion to a deity through heartfelt participation. The devotee's focused mind linked to a loving heart is believed to secure unity with the deity through participatory love-linked-awe.Footnote ⁵⁷ This koinonia can be achieved even within a shrine at one's home. But the beauty of transcendental unity and the greatness of a deity's sakti increases enormously when the worship occurs at a primordial site associated with that deity, the one towards which pilgrims travel. The tapas arising from the pilgrim's ascetic regime and the rigours of journey to such a place, often located on some mountain top, helps deepen the cosmic character of the ‘marriage’ between devotee/ascetic and powerful deity. From her position, therefore, Dhanu's deadly embracing of Rajiv Gandhi was a step towards a transcendental metamorphosis of self on a path to a greater good.

Reflecting creatively on the possible thoughts flashing through Dhanu's mind in the period immediately before the kill, as she was ‘dressed’ with explosives by a specialist, assumed to be male, Charles Sarvan fashioned a literary piece, a fiction, that likened her anticipation to that of a bride as the moment of marriage approached.Footnote ⁵⁸ An interesting and powerful trope, is it not this image of marriage/wedding? We know that it is deployed in many contexts and can even locate on LTTE publication in Tamil, which insisted that ‘we are married to our cyanide’.Footnote ⁵⁹ Sarvan's brilliant composition is a product of his literary imagination. But, as we may understand from the ethnographic practices described by Tanaka, the image of marriage is one that is commonly deployed in Hindu religious practice. It is no surprise, therefore, that my initial, one-page formulation of the thesis embodied in this article evoked thoughts of marriages when it reached peers for comment. One such response came from Tanaka himself, who noted that the ideas of wedding and sacrifice overlap strongly and neatly in the thinking of some Tamils (email, 27 January 2007). Even more significantly, Sathiyamoorthy in Chennai deciphered the direction of my thinking and made a connection between my question to him about the colour of flowers used to garland sacrificial goats in the rites of velvi and my questions on Dhanu: ‘if there is any relation to your query on “sacrificial lambs”, the question obviously is were the suicide-bombers (male or female) prepared as if they were for their wedding, or any other celebration’ (email note, 31 January 2007). This was a perceptive piece of dialogic analysis. He echoed Sarvan without ever having read Sarvan's essay.

The speculative thesis here is that, in carrying out a suicide attack on behalf of the goals set by Pirapāharan, Dhanu's sacrificial step was ‘wrapped’ in cosmic ingredients that would assist her metamorphosis into a better realm. The proposition is not demonstrable. The issue is whether it is plausible.

Pertinent to this evaluation is the ordination that all LTTE soldiery went through in being inducted into their fighting force. They took an oath and committed themselves to their holy (punita) aim: ‘The task (or thirst) of the Tigers (is to achieve) Motherland Tamilīlam’.Footnote ⁶⁰ They committed themselves to biting the cyanide vial, the kuppi, which they carried with them on most perilous occasions. This was a commitment that many Tigers, both ordinary soldiers and leaders, men and women, have adhered to. Indeed, Schalk calculates that as many as one-third the personnel who died between 1983 and 1992 killed themselves by swallowing the kuppi, a staggering proportion.Footnote ⁶¹ The determination of the LTTE fighters was widely attested. We also know that their best fighters were those selected for the Black Tiger suicide ranks.

Sivarāsan, Dhanu, Subhā and Murugan were Black Tiger quality. Their commitment was not only to the ideal of Eelam, but also to the leader Pirapāharan, to whom Tiger personnel pledge personal allegiance on top of their affirmations for Eelam.Footnote ⁶² By 1989–1990 Pirapāharan undoubtedly stood forth as the embodiment of Eelam for many Sri Lankan Tamils. Chandrakānthan, a Catholic clergyman who moved to Canada in 1995, affirms that several migrant Tamil households have pictures of the talaivar (leader) Pirapāharan, images which are treated as that of a deity.Footnote ⁶³ During the Sri Lankan army's successful conquest of the Sampur region just south of Trincomalee in late 2006 the regional centre Sampur was a ghost town as they marched in, but they discovered ‘an old lady abandoned by her sons [who] was carrying a photograph of Prabhākaran. She called him “Ishwara”’.Footnote ⁶⁴ Ishwara is ‘the One and the Supreme God’ in much of India, but in the south is suffixed to various names for Sīva. Clear evidence of Pirapāharan's hallowed status was gathered by Chris Morris and Stephen Lambert when they anchored a BBC team's visit to Tiger territory in late 1991.Footnote ⁶⁵ In visiting the Kilinochchi area in May 2003 Brendan O'Duffy's interviews with senior Tiger leaders ‘reinforce[d] the [evidence of] mythic reverential perceptions of the leader’. Indeed, Sanappah Master insisted that ‘he and others considered Prabhākaran as “God become man” ’.Footnote ⁶⁶

Two items of evidence unearthed by the Indian security team confirm the degree to which Pirapāharan looms as inspirational hero within Tiger ranks. Cornered within his hideout in Bangalore and aware of his impending death, Sivarāsan proceeded to destroy all documents in his possession, but left a Tamil poem written by himself for public consumption: ‘extolling the Tiger chief and their flag and urging all Tamils to wake up and strengthen the leader's hands’.Footnote ⁶⁷ The second item of evidence is even more significant because it was a private exchange. This was on 12 June 1991 when Sivarāsan and Subhā, on the run, and with narrowing options, had wireless communications with Pottu Ammān.Footnote ⁶⁸ The latter's orders were clear: ‘do not allow yourselves to be caught alive, come what may’. In response Sivarāsan sent ‘a terse message, swearing upon the “sweet” name of his leader Prabhākaran that no stigma would be attached to the LTTE on their account’.Footnote ⁶⁹ Here, then, Pirapāharan was the equivalent of a Bible or Quran. Later, on June 20, when Sivarāsan broached to Pottu Ammān the idea of attacking the headquarters (Malligai as it was called) of the Indian Central Bureau of Intelligence, he said: ‘The soul of sister Anbu (Dhanu) would find some peace and the CBI's morale would come down a little’.Footnote ⁷⁰ Dhanu, therefore, had an atman.

It was entirely in keeping with such fundamental beliefs that after the successful assassination on 21 May, and before they were fully alive to the dangers they themselves would be facing soon, on 25 May ‘as desired by Sivarāsan Bhāgyanāthan arranged a taxi that took Sivarāsan, Subhā, Nālini, Murugan and Padma to Tirupati, South India's most famous pilgrimage centre, [on] a thanksgiving trip (emphasis mine)'.Footnote ⁷¹ This step, a propitiatory worship of the Hindu gods, was but proper given that, just before their journey by bus from Chennai for Sriperumbudur on 21 May for their task of assassination, when Sivarāsan met Dhanu and Subhā at Nālini's home at 3:15, the group of four first repaired to a local temple to offer prayers before meeting the cameraman Haribābu near the bus terminus. This was because Dhanu wished ‘to say her final prayers’.Footnote ⁷² The temple was a Pillaiyar kōvil lorded over by that prince of powerful guardians, Ganapathi, the elephant-headed ‘Remover of Obstacles’ or Vināyakar.Footnote ⁷³ It is reasonable surmise that Dhanu and Sivarāsan propitiated Ganapathi, the protector, to ensure a successful assassination. Assisted by Dhanu's initiative and contingent luck, the god could, indeed, be said to have fulfilled his promise to these earnest devotees … up to a point anyway.

These votive visitations provide circumstantial support for the speculative thesis presented in this essay. Central to this interpretation is the enchanted religious context within which most Tamils have been nourished and the cultural premises they have imbibed relating to such fundamental beliefs as the atman – the many realms of existence that embrace all forms of animal life and every person's cycle of many lives. Working within such cultural foundations, I contend that Dhanu, while serving her gods Eelam and Pirapāharan by laying her body on the line as weapon, also ensured that she carried cosmic ingredients that would effect a transvaluation of her being and would metamorphose her body/being into particles of ash within a higher realm.

1. Tamil and pro-Tiger sources circulated stories that Dhanu (or her mother) had been raped by IPKF soldiers; and this point has invariably been stressed by foreign scholars, usually with the proviso ‘alleged’, but without entering further caveats that recognise the likelihood that this was a legitimisation exercise by LTTE spin-doctors. It is likely that this is disinformation for the reason that (1) Black Tigers, both men and women, routinely engage in suicidal missions and it is ridiculous to think that all have been raped and (2) Dhanu was a Black Tiger of relative seniority in the LTTE military structure. Note, too, a radical parental background that is clarified in the body of the essay.

2. One source (Sarin 1998) says Dhanu (alias Anbu) trained at the Maithiya Camp rather than Dindigul. The LTTE trained 10 or 12 batches in India in the period mid-1983 to mid-1987, some under the aegis of Indian agencies and some independently run. Gunaratna, International and Regional Security.

3. Telephone interview, February 9, 2007. Sabāratnam is a journalist and author of a serialized biography of Pirapāharan on web. Sabaratnam, Pirapāharan. Also, Kaarthikeyan and Raju (hereafter KR), Rajiv Gandhi Assassination, 128–9, 142.

4. Narayan Swamy, Tigers of Sri Lanka, 24; Jeyaraj, ‘Composition, Ideology and International Dimensions’, 289–90.

5. KR, Rajiv Gandhi Assassination, 128.

6. Cf. Clarance, Ethnic Warfare in Sri Lanka, 48; ‘Jain Commission Interim Report’.

7. KR, Rajiv Gandhi Assassination, 124.

8. Email note from Dayā Somasundaram, May 5, 2007. For a more detailed description see Somasundaram, Scarred Minds.

9. Samaranayake, ‘Amirthalingam in Retrospect’. This was confirmed by the Indian journalist P.K. Bālachandran who was present at Sudumalai and said that Pirapāharan's review was ‘tinged with great sadness’ (tel. conversation, May 5, 2007).

10. Clarance, Ethnic Warfare in Sri Lanka, 52.

11. KR, Rajiv Gandhi Assassination, 177.

12. Videotaped interview for BBC's ‘Suicide Killers’ in Inside Story (1991).

13. KR, Rajiv Gandhi Assassination, 122–3, 41; ‘Jain Commission Interim Report’.

14. KR, Rajiv Gandhi Assassination, 75. The precise connotations of this second-hand report (Sivarāsan's information conveyed to his aide, Murugan, another ‘hardcore’ Tiger) is a puzzle. Cf. ‘Prabhākaran had Rajiv killed for being “anti-Tamil”’, http://www.rediff.com/news/1998/jan/28rajiv3.htm

15. Thus, for instance, specific situation plans with mock-up landscapes of battlegrounds have generally been part of its preparation for major assaults.

16. KR, Rajiv Gandhi Assassination, 40–7, 50, 151. Note that, in any event, Murugan's cultivation and ‘indoctrination’ of Nālini in early 1991 developed into an intimate liaison. Nālini's child was born on January 21, 1992.

17. KR, Rajiv Gandhi Assassination, 35–6, 44, 60, 75–7.

18. Ibid., 51. Māyā Ranganāthan had precisely the same combination of colours in her salwar kameez at that time when she was working as a journalist and covered the case for Indian Express. It was because of this intimate knowledge that she knows about Dhanu and Nālini's shopping expedition (email note, February 5, 2007). Also see Ranganāthan ‘Cover Girl’.

19. For a long list of killings, trawl through IPCS at http://www.ipcs.org/; UTHR at http://www.uthr.org; http://www.spur.asn.au/ltteatro.htm and sites maintained by the government of Sri Lanka.

20. ‘Sri Lanka. The Truth Tigers’, The Australian Broadcasting Corporation, May 15, 2002.

21. It is alleged that Haribābu must have had some inkling of the subversive character of the LTTE operation and that he had been ‘brainwashed’ into believing that the IPKF operations in Sri Lanka had been brutal. The fact that he was a protege of Subhā Sundaram and was privy to incriminating evidence led the SIT team to a similar verdict of complicity. KR, Rajiv Gandhi Assassination, 40–1, 69. This however does not quite fit with his proximity to the blast – unless he had been misled by a statement that it was another dry run or was unaware of the lethal distance of the ball bearings.

22. ‘Penchant for photographic record nailed LTTE’, http://www.rediff.com/news/1998/jan/28rajiv.htm; Subramanium, ‘Unraveling the Plot’.

23. KR, Rajiv Gandhi Assassination, 185.

24. Videotaped interview for BBC's ‘Suicide Killers’. In another segment of this documentary, Yogi, a senior LTTE spokesman at the time, was careful to stress the requirement that they bite the kuppi not just swallow it.

25. Reuter, My Life Is a Weapon; Pape, ‘Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism’, 243; and Gambetta, ‘Can We Make Sense of Suicide Missions?’, 261–3.

26. For a brief review, with a critical note on Weber's ‘theoretically unwarranted antithesis’ (to use Talcott Parsons’ comment) between rationality and irrationality, see Roberts, ‘Pragmatic Action and Enchanted Worlds’, 77–9. Apart from Weber's own oeuvre, see, in particular, Kalberg ‘Max Weber's Types of Rationality’; Gellner, Legitimation of Belief, 188–9.

27. Sax, ‘Pilgrimage Unto Death’, 202.

28. Mines, Fierce Gods, 31, 127.

29. Prāsad is a divinely charged substance/artefact, the transformation emanating from contact with a deity.

30. Mines, Fierce Gods, 86, 88.

31. Ibid., 170.

32. Responding to my argument S.V. Kāsynāthan (who taught philosophy in my time at Peradeniya University) stressed that ‘rebirth in Hinduism is conceptually related to the atman and not to the body’. But he then remarked that the ‘physical body dissolves into its elements and may regenerate through the normal decay and growth processes in the biosphere – as plants, those that eat the plant etc. That of course means that parts of your body can find rest or unrest in a very large number of places or realms as you put it’.

33. I thank Ashik Bonofer of the Observer Research Foundation in Chennai for sending me better quality images.

34. See note 18.

35. In affirming that sandalwood was considered purifying, Māyā Ranganāthan noted that ‘most women (and beauty parlours here [in Tamil Nadu]) use it as a face mask’ (email, February 7, 2007).

36. Ironically, a log of pure sandalwood was dropped into the funeral pyre of Rajiv Gandhi as normally done for extraordinary people (email note from Māyā Ranganāthan, February 5, 2005).

37. Bastin, Domain of Constant Excess, 25, 141.

38. Mines, Fierce Gods, 160.

39. The girl reaching Gandhi is Kōkilavāni (with white jasmine on hair), so it is the back of Dhanu's head with kanagambaram that is in the foreground of the image.

40. Kōkilavāni, who had just recited a poem in praise of Gandhi, has jasmine flowers on her head. On the importance of flowers in both Tamil culture and in contemporary LTTE commemorative practices, see Roberts, ‘Pragmatic Action and Enchanted Worlds’, 86–91.

41. These invaluable insights on the kanagambaram flower have been provided by Māyā Ranganāthan (email note, February 5, 2007).

42. When Rajchandra Mehta, the ascetic Jain householder in Bombay, proceeded to fast unto death and died in the samādi maran position in the presence of many observers, devotees all, ‘the people said there was a rain of saffron’. Laidlaw, ‘Life worth Leaving’, 181.

43. In fact the police had designated only three garlands for the occasion and had security checked these three beforehand. Rajasingham, ‘Sri Lanka: The Untold Story’; KR, RajivGandhi Assassination.

44. Zoetmulder, Kalangwan, 179.

45. Email note from Angela Hobart, January 11, 2007.

46. Mines, Fierce Gods, 219, 39.

47. Ibid., 157–62.

48. Ibid., 38–9.

49. Ibid., 40.

50. Personal observations during visit to Kilinochchi on November 25–27, 2004; Roberts, ‘Pragmatic Action and Enchanted Worlds’.

51. The term uyirāyutam (also uyirāyutham) translates as ‘life [gifted-as-] weapon’ and is a clever innovation of Tiger coinage that describes those who sacrifice their lives by swallowing cyanide or serving as human bombs. See Chandrakānthan, ‘Eelam Tamil Nationalism’, 164; Schalk, ‘Resistance and Martyrdom’, 74, 76.

52. ‘The Great Heroes Day observances provide [the Tigers] with the feeling that by sacrificing their lives they would grasp eternity and ensure immortality’. Jeyaraj, ‘No Public Speech Ceremony’.

53. I am indebted to Angela Hobart for this idea.

54. Quoted in Fuller, Camphor Flame, 72.

55. Fuller, Camphor Flame, 73.

56. Tanaka, Patrons, Devotees and Goddesses, 119.

57. See Prentiss, Embodiment of Bhakti, 6–7, 15–18; Cutler, Songs of Experience, 1, 8, 10–11; and Fuller, Camphor Flame, 156–8, 164–9, 210–7.

58. Sarvan, ‘Appointment with Rajiv Gandhi’, 357–61. Though it does not matter for his fiction, Sarvan has assumed that the explosive specialist was male, but we now know that Subhā helped Dhanu to dress – indicating a knowledge of explosive devices befitting the Black Tigers.

59. Hellmann-Rajanāyagam, Tamil Tigers, 67.

60. Schalk, ‘Resistance and Martyrdom’, 64–5.

61. Schalk, ‘Beyond Hindu Festivals’, 396.

62. BBC's ‘Suicide Killers’.

63. Chandrakānthan, ‘Eelam Tamil Nationalism’, 159–70. Also a statement during a personal conversation in mid-April 2006.

64. Ranga Jayasuriya, ‘Military Gains Which Went Obscure’, Sunday Observer, October 29, 2006. For outside observers there is irony here. With a command economy and a command state at his biding, this reading is not far wrong. It is partly because of Pirapāharan's supremo status as well as his name that staunch Sinhalese opponents depict him in ironic disparagement as ‘the sun god’.

65. Conversations with Morris in Oxford, February 2007.

66. O'Duffy, ‘LTTE: Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam’, 265.

67. KR, Rajiv Gandhi Assassination, 105, 138.

68. Both wings of the LTTE in Tamil Nadu had skilled wireless operators and sophisticated equipment. They used alphanumeric codes. After the assassination, India put extra effort into deciphering these codes and succeeded, being aided subsequently by the recovery of some code sheets.

69. KR, Rajiv Gandhi Assassination, 94.

70. Ibid., 145.

71. Ibid., 50. Bhāgyanāthan was Nālini's younger brother and Padma their mother. This family seems to have become embroiled with the LTTE for financial incentives.

72. Sarin, ‘Confessions of an Accomplice’; Subramanium, ‘Unraveling the Plot’.

73. The god Pillaiyar is also known as Vināyakar (‘Remover of Obstacles’) and as Ganesh, Ganapati, etc. ‘He is the most beloved and revered of all the Hindu gods, and is always invoked first in any Hindu ceremony or festival. He is the son of Parvati [the wife of Shiva, the Destroyer, the most powerful of the Hindu trinity of principal gods]’. http://www.lankalibrary. com/myths/ganesh.htm.