In the Tamil director
Mani Ratnam’s film,
Kannathil Muthamittal (
2002), a middle-class family from Tamil Nadu in southern India travels to war-torn northern Sri Lanka in an attempt to trace the biological mother of their nine-year-old adopted daughter. The girl, Amudha, was abandoned in a refugee
camp as a baby, but is now desperate to learn the truth about her past. While walking in the countryside with a local guide, Amudha’s father, Thiruchelvan, is captured by Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) fighters. As he is dragged away at gunpoint, his guide’s pleas that he is ‘a Tamillian from India’ fall on deaf ears, and in desperation, Thiruchelvan begins to recite Tamil poetry:
Our eyebrows are lowered, our eyes closed, lips parched, teeth clenched. We walk with our backs bent. We whom you rule over, lock us up in cages, flay us with staves. Let the skin of our backs fester!
The cadres halt and raise Thiruchelvan to his feet. He continues to speak the poem as the mood of the unit’s commander shifts from hostility to recognition and fraternity, and the two men complete the recitation in solemn unison:
One day our eyebrows will arch. Our closed eyes will open again. Our puckered lips will throb and our clenched teeth grind. Rule over us until then!
Thiruchelvan and his guide are released unharmed, with the commander promising to arrange a meeting with Amudha’s biological mother; who, it transpires, is also an LTTE fighter and the commander’s sister. Meanwhile, a parallel scene depicts Amudha straying alone into the dense jungle that surrounds the family’s village lodgings. From the undergrowth emerge girls—little older than her—but dressed in the battle fatigues of the LTTE and carrying rifles. The girls regard Amudha in silence for a moment, before she flees, crying, back to the village.
As portrayed in Ratnam’s film, Tamils are an ethno-linguistic population whose historical homelands transcend the modern state borders of India and Sri Lanka, and who, through historic and contemporary processes of migration, are now also a global population; including a significant presence in Britain. Existing research on Britain’s Tamil population has focused on Tamils of Sri Lankan origins or heritage, who are the largest group and who have largely migrated to Britain as refugees (or through associated migration) following the outbreak of civil war in Sri Lanka in 1983. But Britain is also home to Tamils of other state origins; mainly South Indian, but also (in much smaller numbers) Malaysian, Singaporean, Mauritian and South African (communities resulting from colonial-era migrations from southern India explored in Chap. 3). This study is the first to give detailed consideration to the narratives and experiences of Tamils from these diverse state backgrounds, and addresses the question of if, when and how diasporic identification is experienced and expressed amongst nominal members of a superdiverse diaspora population, whose ascribed membership comprises different state origins, but also differing migration histories, a consequent diversity of relationships with the ‘homeland’ and varied socio-economic and legal statuses in the country of settlement. The book draws on thirteen months of ethnographic fieldwork completed as part of doctoral studies at the University of Bristol (awarded 2013). The fieldwork involved observational work in community associations and supplementary schools, political gatherings, places of worship and public religious festivals, and in Tamil people’s homes. I also conducted in-depth interviews with forty-six Tamil migrants from diverse state backgrounds (and with associated diverse characteristics), who had, at the time of research, settled in cities and towns in the West Midlands and South West of England.
This introductory chapter sets the broader context for the study, but first provides an overview of the intricacies of Tamil ethnic identification in the South Asian ‘homelands’ and the complex interplay of trans-state versus state-based Tamil identities this involves. I then introduce the migration context which was the backdrop to the study’s empirical work, and establish the relevance of the superdiversity concept—the recognition of ‘multidimensional’ diversities within diversity (Meissner and Vertovec 2015; Vertovec 2007)—to the Tamil case.
Tamils in South Asia: Cultural Connections and Divergent Politics
There are almost seventy million Tamil speakers in India (6% of the total population)—with most residing in the southern state of Tamil Nadu (Office of the Registrar General India 2011). In neighbouring Sri Lanka, the most recent census (Department of Census and Statistics 2012) records Tamils as 11% of the island’s population (as compared to the 75% Sinhalese majority). A further Tamil community within Sri Lanka—termed ‘Indian Tamils’ or ‘Up-Country [Malaiyaha] Tamils’—are the descendants of Tamils from South India who migrated to labour on tea plantations under British colonial occupation (Bass 2013: 11). Considered a separate community in official statistics, these Tamils represent just over 4% of Sri Lanka’s total population. The majority of Sri Lanka’s larger Tamil minority (sometimes characterised in the literature as ‘Ceylon Tamils’ or ‘Jaffna Tamils’ to distinguish them from the smaller Malaiyaha Tamil population), reside in the island’s northern and eastern regions, although Sri Lanka’s capital city Colombo also has a substantial Tamil population. The Malaiyaha Tamils are concentrated in the central highland region where tea cultivation takes place, although diversification of labour market participation beyond the plantation sector has encouraged some movement to other areas (Piyarathne 2008: 20–21).
These historic Tamil homelands are connected by cultural commonalities. Although dialectic differences are found, the common lingua-franca is Tamil, with the language’s rich and ancient literary tradition suggesting a long heritage of circulation and exchange across these regions (Wickramasinghe 2006: 255–256). In both areas, Saivite Hinduism (veneration of Siva as the supreme being) is the predominant religion and is marked by shared regional particularities such as devotion to the god Murugan. Historically, Tamil Saivite pilgrims have travelled to the holy sites of Sri Lanka, while Sri Lankan Tamil Hindus made the reverse journey to the grand Siva temples of India’s south (256). The ‘composers of the great Saivite hymns in Tamil Nadu included temples in Jaffna [Sri Lanka’s Tamil cultural capital in the island’s Northern Province] in their praise as a matter of course’ (Hellman-Rajanayagam 1994: 128), and this shared religious heritage is also reflected in common appreciation of devotional art forms such as Bharatanatyam —a classical dance. In the contemporary era too, a shared popular cultural milieu has emerged through the circulation of Tamil cinema, produced in Tamil Nadu and consumed by audiences there, by Tamils in Sri Lanka, and in global sites of Tamil settlement (Velayutham 2008: 183–185).
But alongside these similarities, Tamils in these two lands have experienced very different recent histories. In southern India, throughout the Freedom Struggle and into the early post-colonial era, an ethno-national Tamil movement resisted the Hindi-speaking hegemony of the emergent Indian state and mobilised around calls for an independent Tamil nation (Wyatt 2002: 733–734, 2004: 237–238). But by the 1960s, these demands had been defused through concessionary measures by the central government including the establishment in 1956 of the Tamil-speaking state of Madras within India’s federal system (renamed Tamil Nadu in 1969) and the Tamil nationalist parties’ increasing acquisition of ‘mainstream’ political power through electoral success in Tamil Nadu (Chadda 1997: 7) and, from the 1990s onwards, as influential partners of national parties (Stepan et al. 2011: 136; Wyatt 2002: 736–737). In contrast, Tamils in post-independence Sri Lanka have been subjected to discrimination and violence by a state apparatus that has consistently privileged the language, culture and Buddhist religion of the island’s Sinhalese majority at the expense of its Tamil (and other) minorities. Successive governments’ intransigence towards accommodating Tamil demands for recognition and representation led, by the mid-1970s, to the emergence of a secessionist movement within which the LTTE established itself as the pre-eminent armed force (Krishna 1999: 66–78; Wilson 2000: 113–134). Violent anti-Tamil riots occurred periodically in Sri Lanka throughout the post-colonial era (Tambiah 1986: 13), but the most severe took place in July 1983 when a week of appalling violence against the Tamil population began in Colombo, before spreading to other parts of the island. Tamils were brutally killed, or raped, sexually assaulted or injured and Tamil-owned homes and business were torched. While often described as an act of ‘retaliation’ for the killing of thirteen Sri Lankan soldiers in Jaffna by the LTTE, this reading of the riots as a popular, spontaneous act is questioned by accounts which instead characterise events as state sanctioned and orchestrated: ‘it was a series of deliberate acts, executed in accordance with a concerted plan, conceived and organised well in advance’ (Sieghart 1984: 76). Security forces failed to halt (and indeed, sometimes joined and encouraged) the violence; eyewitness accounts report mob leaders consulting copies of the electoral-roll to locate Tamil households; and politicians including the Prime Minister, J. R Jayewardene, declined to condemn the rioters, instead offering justifications for their actions (Tambiah 1986: 21–28; Weiss 2012: 51–55; Wilson 2000: 113–114). The violence resulted in the internal displacement of thousands of Tamils and prompted the first exodus of refugees across the Palk Straits to Tamil Nadu (Krishna 1999: 116–117; Weiss 2012: 51–55; Wickramasinghe 2006: 257–258).
These events became known as ‘Black July’ and marked the transition to civil war between the Sri Lankan state ...
