Over ten years have passed since the end of Sri Lanka’s civil war and Tamil refugees continue to arrive in Australia in search of safety. The (Re)creation of Home by the Sri Lankan Tamil Diaspora in Australia investigates Tamil people’s lives in the aftermath of Sri Lanka’s civil war through diverse approaches and interpretations. This book is for researchers, students and members of the community who are interested in understanding post-war developments for the diaspora. Collectively this book is about the political, psychological, creative, social and cultural processes that are formative in this context.
The Sri Lankan Tamil Studies Network, comprising of early career researchers across Australia, first formed in 2017. We recognised that there were scholarly interests and a need to understand the experiences of Tamil people in Australia. We held our first meeting in Western Sydney, home to a growing number of Tamil immigrants, including some of the contributors to this book. In the meeting, we shared our personal stories of migrating from Sri Lanka and our current work within the Tamil community as community workers, activists, artists and practitioners. These personal and professional insights led to discussions about our research interests concerning Tamils in Australia and, more specifically, helped us to identify “home” as a key concept in need of further inquiry. A critical point of discussion was how home was conceptualised in our respective disciplines, but more importantly, how home was understood by the Tamil community themselves. Our collective research interests traverse various disciplines of creative arts, humanities, social sciences and psychological sciences. While we seek to highlight these disciplinary perspectives, we give equal value to the voices of Tamil people, engendering a more rigorous approach for understanding forced migration, political influences and the homeland-resettlement nexus. Taking inspiration from Samia Khatun’s (2018) seminal work, we position this book as an intervention into dominant understandings of South Asian migrants by the Australian nation-state that has established itself as sustaining one of the most racist border regimes in the contemporary world.
In the Australian population of approximately 23 million, the number of people who count as migrants arriving from Sri Lanka is 109,850 (ABS, 2016a). In the last national census, the number of people born in Sri Lanka who elected Tamil as the language spoken at home came to 27,352 (ABS, 2016b). The number of Sri Lankan-born people who elected Hinduism as their affiliated religion (the dominant religion for Sri Lankan Tamils) was 20,629 (ABS, 2016c). However, this is not an accurate representation of the Sri Lankan Tamil population as it does not account for generations who were born outside of Sri Lanka or people who identify as Sri Lankan Tamil yet do not speak Tamil at home or affiliate with Hinduism. Therefore, we estimate the Sri Lankan Tamil diaspora in Australia to be closer to 50,000 people, with the majority of the population concentrated in the cities of firstly, Sydney (state of New South Wales) and then, Melbourne (Victoria) where the bulk of the research in this book is situated. Therefore, the Sri Lankan Tamil diaspora in Australia is relatively small when compared to numbers in other Western sites such as Canada (300,000) (Baumann, 2009), London (180,000) (Ratnapalan, 2011) and France (100,000) (Goreau, 2014).
Sri Lankan Tamils began arriving in significant numbers to Australia from the 1970s as a result of intensifying political upheaval in Sri Lanka. This first group of Tamil migrants were professionals and university students searching for better economic and educational opportunities. The second group of Tamils fled Sri Lanka in the early 1980s due to the commencement of armed conflict. Since then, Tamils continue to seek asylum in Australia due to a fear of persecution and violence in their homeland. While the migration patterns of Tamils in Australia have been documented (Reeves, 2013), the voices of Tamils, particularly in the post-war context, have received far less attention. In this book, we highlight Tamil people’s experiences and analyse how they construct a home that is part of Australia’s social, cultural, political and historical makeup.
This book raises questions about meanings of home—in its various forms—for Tamil people resettled in Australia: what happens to forced migrants’ constructions of “home” following the end of a civil war? How is the multifaceted concept of “home” (re)built, (re)created and (re)imagined in exile? In what ways does “home” encompass intergenerational experiences, psychological effects, cultural practices, politics of home and autobiographical reflections? Drawing on interviews, observations, personal reflections and creative works, we show that Tamil people’s continued engagement with the homeland (including the physical and virtual movement between homeland and host country) makes the nature of home a vexed concept (Feldman, 2006). Taken together, the 12 chapters of this collection exemplify recent scholarship about home, focusing on materiality (Tolia-Kelly, 2004), political influences (Ashutosh & Mountz, 2012), trauma and loss (Ratnamohan, Mares, & Silove, 2018), gender (Longhurst, Johnston, & Ho, 2009), intergenerational experiences (Perera, 2017), war memory (Kandasamy, 2018) and resistance through creative expression (Sivanesan, 2019). In short, we emphasise how forced migrants navigate their war-torn past. We argue that home is a multifaceted concept through which people’s experiences of home are negotiated at the intersections of age, gender, race, caste, class, religion, ethnicity and legal status.
Sri Lanka’s Civil War and Post-War
The historical and political developments that led to the forced migration of Tamils out of Sri Lanka have been exhaustively researched (see de Mel, 2007; de Silva, 2005; S. Perera, 2016; Tambiah, 1986; Thiranagama, 2011; Weiss, 2011; Wickramasinghe, 2006; Wilson, 2000). There is not enough space in this book to acknowledge the many factors that have impacted on Sri Lanka’s peace and the sustained violence that strains its society. Even as we write this chapter, we are in the aftermath of the Easter Sunday bombings of 2019, and witnessing the mob-delivered backlash towards Muslims in Sri Lanka, acts reminiscent of the attacks against Tamils during Black July in 1983. This is another piece of evidence of violence in the post-war phase which leads us to ask if conflict remains as the predominant state of politics in our homeland (see also S. Perera, 2016; Subramanian, 2014). Indeed, there are multiple events in Sri Lanka’s history that mark the plight of Tamils, their experiences in the homeland, and their journeys of migration, before, during and after the 26-year civil war.
Sri Lanka has a history of colonisation by the Portuguese (1505–1658), Dutch (1658–1796) and British (1796–1948). Under British colonial rule, the seeds were sown for divisions based on ethnicity and class. Burghers (descendants from European settlers) and Tamils were favoured because of their higher proficiency in English (Wickramasinghe, 2006), and this kind of “ethnic favouritism … was consistent with Britain’s divide-and-rule policies” (DeVotta, 2001, p. 76). British rule also played a role in forming a Sinhalese nationalist identity (Wickramasinghe, 2006). Following independence from British rule in 1948, the government’s decision to make Sinhala the official language in 1956 was a catalyst for Tamil people to form a separate state (Coperahewa, 2009; de Silva, 2005; DeVotta, 2004; Perera, 2015). In response to the Sinhala Only Act of 1956, Tamil politicians held a non-violent protest in Colombo; however, Sinhala mobs attacked the participants and Tamil civilians around the city. Anti-Tamil riots followed periodically in 1958, 1977 and 1981. During these periods, Tamils began migrating out of Sri Lanka for better economic and educational opportunities. The failure of the Sri Lankan Government to guarantee ...
