A review of Pathways of Dissent:Tamil nationalism in Sri Lanka edited by R Cheran. Sage, 2009By Sivamohan Sumathy
(March 10, Colombo, Sri Lanka Guardian) On May 19th, 2009, with the violent deaths of the top rung of the LTTE leadership, including that of its leader V. Prabakaran, the 30 year old civil war came to an abrupt halt. While the conclusion was a traumatic event to many in the country, not necessarily because of the destruction of the LTTE, but because of the huge loss of life and immense suffering of roughly 300, 000 people and the sheer scale of the destruction of social cohesion, it also ushered in an era of possibilities, particularly in rethinking the pathways of nationalism. With these ideas uppermost in my mind, I began to read Pathways of Dissent edited by R. Cheran.
What would one expect from a volume on Tamil nationalism at this critical juncture?
My reading of Pathways of Dissent is an engaged act of trying to tease out a relevance for our work today in the social and political arena. Given my sense of acute involvement in the project, having written and worked on this subject for many years, I found wading through the many chapters a painful and frustrating act. Frustrating, because it provides no direction to any of the burning questions posed for the academic and the activist, situated in the cusp of the post-war political scenario. . Today, we are trying to seek answers to the questions that became very pressing in the context of the disastrous conclusion to the war. At the conclusion to the war 300, 000 people were trapped in a few square miles for almost a month, trapped in by the LTTE in order to save the lives of the elite while the rest of the ‘nation’ looked on helplessly. Again, the Tamil diaspora, paying scant attention to the lives of these people, turned out in hundreds of thousands in the capitals of Europe and Canada to demand the release of Prabakaran, the leader of the LTTE. What was so wrong with Tamil nationalism, that it became consonant with the actions and imperatives of LTTE and Prabakaran? The essays of the volume were written not so long ago, but they had not been able to touch upon what should have been apparent as the destructive path Tamil nationalism was taking right along and particularly in the post-90s and in the new millennium. Going through the volume was also a painful act because I had to read the rather uninteresting essays in the volume carefully in order to do my own argument justice.
Let me get back to how I read the volume. The title provides a lot of food for thought. The academic allure of the term ‘dissent’ in the title provides me with an analytical entry point into the volume and the entire project: Tamil nationalism. For me, dissent has a political salience that is useful and productive, particularly at this juncture of charting new directions for those of us who work with and within the idea of a Tamil nation. I will use the idea of dissent and myself as a dissenting reader in my own reading of the volume.
The first dissonant chord for me is struck in the sweeping hegemony of Jaffna centrism so very evident in the volume. It in a fundamental sense contradicts the idea of dissent. The volume is unabashedly Jaffna centric and makes no apology for this dominance. Its Jaffna centrism is not an accident. If the chapters, barring just one, take Jaffna as their focus, they do so, not in the spirit of dissent, not to scrutinize its dominant place in the narrative of nationalism, but to, through academic sleight of hand, reinforce its dominance. How is this dominance borne out in the theoretical and political thrusts of the essays in the volume?
Let me begin with Cheran’s introduction to the volume which provides the framework for the chapters. Interestingly and perhaps inevitably, given the very linear narrative of the history he charts, Cheran’s trajectory of Tamil nationalism collapses itself into the imperatives and dominance of the LTTE within the Tamil nationalist scenario. This is so, not because the introduction is uncritical of the LTTE, but because it follows the familiar nationalist path of recounting the linear and dominant text book version of history of the Tamils. Though certain class and caste implications of nationalism are signaled in the manner of political correctness, the approach itself does not plug the dissonances of caste and class as a theoretical device of inquiry. In the concluding section of the introduction, the critical tool of gender is brought in to prise open LTTE’s ‘ideology’ of totalitarianism. But unfortunately, given its narrow focus on the LTTE, the criticism is confined to the LTTE. Overall, the analysis stays within the confines of the militant struggle, leaving almost untouched Tamil nationalism. One might ask what is so wrong with this? For me, it is the familiar path that many scholars have taken up till now and which in my view has neglected to account for the dynamism and the dissonances within the Tamil polities that we need to pay attention to in evaluating the import of nationalism to us today.
While Cheran’s introduction lays the foundation for such a reading, the chapters of the book, fall neatly into a linear historicist paradigm. Sitrampalam and Nithiyanandan approach the issue from the ‘root causes’ angle or from the perspective of causality. How did Tamil nationalism emerge? Loosely reactive, focusing on the formation of the Sinhala state, the chapters by Sitrampalam and Nithiyanandam, on the historical and the archaeological and on the economic angle of the rise of the Tamil nation respectively, chart little that would speak to the varying forces that sit in unease within the so called Tamil nation. Nithiyanandam attempts to trace the historical formation of the economy of the Jaffna as a separate socio political entity; he gives little sense of the political economy of the entire region as a historical force that nourished and pushed the emergence of Tamil nationalism in multiple ways. Once again, it is a Jaffna centric monolithism that prevails.
On the political front, the chapters on militancy are disappointing. Ravi Vaitheespara’s ‘Towards understanding militant Tamil nationalism in Sri Lanka’ is contradictory and unanalytical. Its attack on the authors of the Broken Palmyrah and the UTHR is partisan. Disguising its nationalist rhetoric in a thinly veiled populist brand of left wing discourse, it relies on the ‘ignorance’ of its readership in making its case. For an informed reader, the polemics of the chapter are too partisan and of course nationalist. Maunaguru’s essay, "Brides as Bridges?’ is anthropological and focuses on evolving filial patterns in transnationality. It is, once again, quietist on the political front. While it provides a kind of insight into movements of people that go beyond the boundaries of territoriality, one does not quite understand what the writer envisions as its impact on the construct of the Tamil ‘nation’. Similarly, Rajesh Venugopal’s chapter on the neo-liberal economy brings up certain interesting questions regarding the anxieties of a statist nationalism, the structural framework of the LTTE during the peace process of 2002-06, but stops short of pushing this analysis through to its logical conclusion, the unviability of the the nation-state as envisioned by the LTTE and separatist Tamil nationlists. Its clinical approach and its narrow focus on the textual rather than on textuality makes it politically and theoretically narrow in scope and texture.
Daniel Bass’s essay on the Malaiyaha community, ‘Making sense of the Census’ is perhaps the only chapter that strikes a discordant chord, questioning the monlithism of the Tamil nation in its entirety. While, one could not call it dissenting in the way I mapped out earlier, his chapter on the marginalized and minority Tamil community of plantation workers does move away from Jaffna centrism in a critical fashion. Academiclly speaking, he moves from tracing the genealogy of nation making through enumeration, initiated by the colonial government, to notions of citizenship and belonging to Sri Lanka as expressed by the community at present. His essay does not connect itself all too clearly to the project of nationalism until the very end when he concludes with ‘the rise of a distinct up-country Tamil ethnic identity has thus undermined the supposedly pan-Tamil appeal of Sri Lankan Tamil nationalism, while providing a counterpoint to dominant discourses of Tamil identity.’
The chapters on literature and art and the artist raise interesting issues and then ultimately disappoint us. The chapter on the literatures of the nation by Chelva Kanaganayakam is selective and wittingly and unwittingly makes a case for the homogeneity of the nation. Also, the commentary is too text based and analytically distanced from the context of production. On the contrary, Shanaathanan’s ‘Painting the Artist’s Self’ reveals an engaged reading of the emergence of the artist as Tamil. His historiography of the artist is interesting and useful in an informative kind of way. But when it comes to the theoretically marked commentary one feels a sense of loss and disappointment. The strength of the essay lies in the fact it begs many questions, questions which need to be asked of the entire project. The fragment and the collage which Shanaathanan says has come to dominate the scene in the ‘90s are understood in purely formal terms, historically situated. He repeats the clichés of ‘theory’: ‘In post-traditional (sic) societies individualization of the artist is also associated with commercialization and commodification of art work. In post-colonial societies it also directly or indirectly is connected with emerging nationalist sentiments.’ Of course one could ignore this as marginalia and look for something more substantial and theoretically sustained in the crux of his essay. But once again, we are confronted with another cliché of theory, the postmodern and the fragment, sitting this time, uneasily with the dominant thread of Tamil nationalism. I read the essay not with the kind of anger that I felt on reading those on historiography, economics and militancy, but with a sense of disappointment, feeling entrapped by the inevitability of the nationalist discourse in any narrative of the Tamil.
Nimanthi Rajasingam and Radhika Coomarasamy’s chapter, ‘Being Tamil in a different way’ on the ramifications of gender in colonial and postcolonial times and importantly during militancy, is at one level a survey of history and its gendered dimensions and at another, a survey of literature. Yet, it does bring up the dissonances more pronouncedly and is perhaps the only chapter that does talk about dissent as resistance within the Tamil community. But it lacks a cogent and incisive critical analysis of gender as a dynamic acting within society. I am not too happy with what I consider as its over emphasis of and singular focus on Arumuga Navalar for the earlier period and on the LTTE for the latter. Its historicity too becomes hegemonic in that sense. It does not seek to critically formulate a platform for the subaltern voices that the authors say should be recovered. Strangely, the authors bring in a totally unrelated and unengaged writer, Sumanasiri Liyanage, at the end, as the authoritative voice on subalternity. One the whole, one would have asked for a greater intimacy with the material and a more engaging critical positioning. Nevertheless, the essay does present an inquiry into dominance and dissent through the subversive category of gender which is lacking in the rest of the volume.
One of the central absences of the volume is any work on the Muslims. A glaring omission, it is also an admission of the overarching politics of dominance of the volume. Why are the Muslims so important? Politically, Muslims posed a challenge to the hegemony of Tamil nationalism, from within and without. Laying claim to the north and east as their homeland, the Muslim polities provided an alternative reading of Tamil nationalism and its framings that could have been productively exploited by the essayists of the volume and by the undertakers of the volume itself. The resounding silence on Muslims has an intricate connection with the Jaffna centrism of the volume. The volume’s nationalistic platform, which refuses to take even the east as a full fledged category for inquiry is an additional aspect of this.
The east provides a counterpoint to the hegemony of the Tamil nationalism. Overtly and politically, much more multi ethnic than Jaffna, a serious and sustained engagement with the happenings in the east today would have opened up faultlines that would have been productive and illuminating. Tamil nationalism in the east has had a chequered career and has posed great challenges to the myth of the cohesiveness of the nation. In deciding to focus almost exclusively on the north, particularly Jaffna, the volume could, conveniently, side step the complexities informing the fraught unity of the nation and the challenges of the Muslim polity. Yet surely, even the story of a Jaffna centric nationalism cannot easily gloss over the mass eviction of roughly 85000 Muslims from the north? It is interesting that Kanaganayakam leaves out prominent Muslim literary figures in his chapter on literature, writers who had brought in an inquiring note to the literary quest of nation (un)making. Similarly, caste, as I have mentioned earlier, is another major absence in the volume which is rather revealing of the politics of the project. It is dealt with only cursorily and is ‘suppressed’ even at the point of telling.
The title Pathways of Dissent is both academically wanting, as the volume does not in anyway touch upon the critical tools afforded by dissent and is, politically, hegemonic. We may need another volume to bring that critical thrust into the analysis of Tamil nationalism. Today, there is a need to rethink the terms of our discourse, in a questioning of what I think as the overarching imperatives of the nation. For me, this includes raising questions nationalism itself, in all of their different manifestations; aggressive, like the Sinhala dominant state of Sri Lanka and its unabashed chauvinist-nationalist platform; the nationalism of victim hood, vulnerability and submission/dominance projected by Tamil nationalism; and other emergences of exclusivity, including the diffused strands of Muslim nationalism that one might encounter today.
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