Courtesy: Lakbima News
(June 16, Colombo, Sri Lanka Guardian) 1. capitalized a: the settling of scattered colonies of Jews outside Palestine after the Babylonian exile b: the area outside Palestine settled by Jews c: the Jews living outside Palestine or modern Israel 2 a: the movement, migration, or scattering of a people away from an established or ancestral homeland
The above is an extract from the Merriam Webster dictionary’s definition of the word diaspora. As you can see, the word first used to describe the scattering of Jews after the Babylonian exile, has now been enlarged in meaning to include any migration or scattering of people from any ‘ancestral homeland’.
Hence, those who were perfectly capable of living comfortably in their lands of birth but migrated due to a gold rush of yuppie prospects abroad, are also classified under the border rubric of ‘diaspora’.
I say that in the main, it proves the word has lost its true meaning. Uber-rich Indians who are perturbed about increasing racial attacks in the west, for instance, were also referred to recently in Indian TV channels as part of the ‘Indian diaspora’.
Obviously, no longer does the word diaspora necessarily connote the meaning “a scattering of exiled people”.
Any old guy abroad qualifies to be a member of the diaspora these days, and this obviously has bad connotations for the organized Sri Lankan Tamil diaspora also.
No assured sympathy
Being members of a diaspora does not bring them any assured sympathy anymore; they are not considered people who were exiled or persecuted, even though a smattering of them may have been fleeing the violence in 1983.
The fact that nobody can consider himself as belonging to a persecuted species just because he or she has migrated, is underscored by the fact that Sri Lankan Sinhalese abroad organized themselves as a diaspora remarkably well. Now the Indians are dropping the D-word willy-nilly, and the fact that they are being at the butt end of some amount of race related persecution in their adopted new homes, no doubt gives strange new meaning to the word diaspora.
It is in the backdrop of these facts that the claim for the Tamil struggle going ‘transnational’ acquires some quizzical import.
Only on the web
A transnational Eelam is one that more or less defines itself as a cyber-country with no location to call its own, except its location on the worldwide web.
Some analysts now say that it’s only the diaspora that can keep alive the basic fiction that has underpinned the so called Tamil struggle, the narrative that there is enough discrimination in the island of Sri Lanka against Tamil civilians to warrant the establishment of a separate state.
Unfortunately for the pro Eelam sections of the diaspora, the word diaspora has lost its currency while their own fantasy of Eelam has turned out to be a cyber entity as diffused and as fantastic as a Facebook community set-up to ventilate some pet rant — say, for example, a rant against Shane Warne, the Australian spin bowler.
It’s why those who say that the diaspora could still fuel Eelam as a sustainable slogan need to have their heads examined. Short of carving out a state of Eelam in Norway, there is no chance the diaspora can physically locate Eelam even though Hampstead or Corydon maybe a distant possibility.
It’s why the Tamils living in the West have been advised to turn to concerns that have more immediacy such as the increasing racial attacks against Asian students in Australia for instance. The eruption of attacks Down Under has now been followed by some copycat attacks in Canada for instance, which fact might make transnational Eelamists want to seek exile from their cyber-land in peaceful Asian Sri Lanka...
No joking matter
However, the fact that there are increasing attacks in Australia against Indian students is no joking matter. These attacks have the full potential of spilling over to the rest of the expatriate community, both the Tamil and Sinhala diasporas, in Melbourne or Sydney for instance. The time has come, therefore, for the most extreme elements of the Tamil diaspora to join hands with the Sinhala diaspora in the interests of self-preservation, instead of making themselves willing victims of manipulative elements who seek to perpetuate the chimerical Eelam call, through the agency of the Tamil diaspora.
Since they see Sri Lankan Tamil parties as unlikely to be flag bearers for an Eelam because most Tamil leaders do not want to miss out on the kind of upward mobility of the Karunas and the Devanandas etc., and since the recent election results in India show clearly that Tamil Nadu is no vehicle for keeping Eelam consciousness alive, the disapora has become the last desperate hope of some who want to keep the Eelam myth alive for their own cynical manipulative reasons.
But the diaspora has lost currency particularly due to the Sri Lankan Tamil diaspora’s current state of denial, much in the same way as the word diasopra itself has lost currency in the recent past. As somebody observed, not one in the Tamil diaspora has lit a candle for Prabhakaran, so deep is that sense of denial. It’s a fact that reinforces the narrative that Eelam increasingly exists if it does at all, in fantasy land, located in an imaginary transnational moksha.
(The writer editor in chief of the "Lakbima News", Colombo based weekly news paper. -Sri Lanka Guardian
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