“Coolie Poesis: Plantation Sounds and Labor Heritage on Sri Lanka’s Tea Estates” by Mythri Jegathesan (UC Davis College of Letters and Science)

Mythri Jegathesan at the UC Davis Global Tea Initiative for Tea Culture and Science 2nd Annual Colloquium: “The Sensory Aspects of Tea” on January 19, 2017. This talk explores the relationship between tea plantation labor and production and coolie identity formation and heritage in Sri Lanka. Also how the human voice—through the poetry, and song written and performed by Tamil plantation residents—reinforce coolie narratives of labor, connectivity, and desires for social recognition in a multicultural, postwar Sri Lanka. This reinforcement creates a coolie poesis—an emergence of a complex labor heritage to be duly acknowledged in Sri Lanka’s colonial and postcolonial history and present.

source: UC Davis College of Letters and Science

“Wally Bastianz and Chorus Baila” by Prof Shihan De Silva Jayasuriya (Sri Lankan Literary Society, ZOOM No:92)

We like to share Profesor Shihan de Silva Jayasuriya’s presentation on “Wally Bastianz and Chorus Baila” given online for the Sri Lankan Literary Society

Profesor Shihan de Silva Jayasuriya presents the history of chorus baila through the life of the composer – Wally Bastianz. Evolving at a euphoric moment in Sri Lankan history, independence after three successive waves of European colonisation, chorus baila gave Sri Lankans a new post-colonial identity. Important messages to the newly independent nation are engrained in the poetry of chorus baila. A selection of Baila was broadcast

source: Sri Lankan Literary Association Youtube Channel

“Dynamics of Tamil Urban Ethnoterritories in Diaspora” Video Podcast of Delon Madavan’s presentation during Cornell University’s South Asian Program Seminar (2020) 

We would like to share the online video presentation on “Dynamics of Tamil Urban Ethnoterritories in Diaspora (Kuala Lumpur, Paris, Singapore)” given by Delon Madavan on Monday October 5th at 11.15AM (New York time)/ 5.15 PM (Paris time).
Sharika Thiranagama was the respondent for this presentation.
This online event was hosted by the South Asia Program of Cornell University

About the Seminar:

Studying the ties and practices that bind Tamils to the districts they inhabit or visit is essential to understand the ways Tamils use and transform space in diaspora. The territorialization of Tamil identity, that is, their spatial extension and the continuation of their socio-cultural practices, is not always immediately visible in multi-ethnic cities in which Tamils are a minority. Tamils transform those spaces where they are dominant according to their own cultural and social practices and establish venues conducive to social interactions. Furthermore, the polarization of space and the dynamics of identity networks explains the various attitudes of Tamils towards the social frequentation of certain areas. Finally, the presence and role of places of sociability, such as religious, cultural or commercial establishments, are essential to understand Tamils’ relationship with locality and thus the reasons for which these districts are recognized or not as “Tamil” by Tamils themselves. With specific examples drawn from fieldwork in Kuala Lumpur, Singapore and Paris, this paper shows that the affirmation of Tamil identity and the constitution of Tamil ‘ethnoterritories’ in certain areas is not only the outcome of Tamil action but also the consequence of state-sponsored urban planning policies, such as eradication of slums, gentrification and heritagization of specific zones, and the frequentation of these zones by non-Tamil migrants.

About the Speaker:

Delon Madavan was the Tamil Studies Visiting Scholar at Cornell’s South Asia Program in Spring 2020. He completed his PhD in Geography at Paris-Sorbonne University (France) in 2013. He has taught at the Department of Geography at Sorbonne University and also gave lectures at the National Institute for Oriental Languages and Civilizations (INALCO) in Paris. Madavan is Researcher Fellow at the Centre of Studies and Researches on India, South Asia and its Diaspora (University of Québec à Montréal, Canada) and Post-doctoral Research Fellow at the Centre of Studies and Researches on India and South Asia (CNRS-EHESS, France). In his research, he examines the articulation between migration, identity and space to analyze forms of integration of the Tamil populations in several cities (Jaffna, Colombo, Singapore, Kuala Lumpur, Paris & Montréal). Madavan is the author and co-author of several articles and books on Tamils in Sri Lanka, Malaysia, Singapore and France.

About the Respondent: 

Sharika Thiranagama, is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Stanford University. Her research explores the intersection of political mobilization and domestic life, focusing on highly fraught contexts of violence, inequality, and intense political mobilization. Her major work has been on the Sri Lankan civil war and research with two different minority ethnic groups, Sri Lankan Tamils and Sri Lankan Muslims, exploring the ways in which militancy, political violence and large-scale displacement became folded into intergenerational transmissions of memory and ethnic identification. Most recently, in new fieldwork on Dalit communities in Kerala, South India, she examines how communist led political mobilization reconfigured older caste identities, re-entrenching caste inequities into new kinds of private neighborhood life. She focuses on the household as the prime site of the inheritance of work, stigma and servitude as well as the possibility of reproduction, dignity and social mobility. She is the author of “In My Mother’s House: Civil War in Sri Lanka” (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011).

 

“A Letter To Lanka: Soil that Breaks, Soil that Binds” by by Ilakkiya Mariya Simon

We would like to share an article by Ilakkiya Mariya Simon about her documentary “A Letter To Lanka” and her reflection on the question of identity for a person from the second generation of an exiled family living in Norway.

to read the article

About “A Letter To Lanka” documentary

A Letter To Lanka moves between memories of the civil war to the present political turmoil during Aragalaya’s protests. Told through a poetic and personal journey of the filmmaker`s reconnection to land, soil and people, it invites the audiences into existential questions of belonging in a chaotic world. What does it mean to be at home in the world? What binds people together, and what can break them apart?

About Ilakkiya Mariya

Ilakkiya Mariya Simon has recently completed her Master of Visual Anthropology at UiT The Arctic University of Norway. She holds a BA in Social Anthropology from the University of Bergen, where she founded The Ethnographic Film Club. Prior to getting into anthropology, she was a teacher and movement practitioner from different disciplines and arts. Her experiences with movement and her Sri Lankan ancestry are what underpins her anthropological interest exploring existential themes of home, belonging, identity, and the environment. Ilakkiya is passionate about her intimate and fragmented relationship to Sri Lanka.

“Re-imagining the State in Sri Lanka” by Mahendran Thiruvarangan

“The election campaign of the Tamil National Alliance (TNA) and the Tamil National People’s Front (TNPF: Gajen Ponnambalam’s new outfit) in the North-East has re-animated the discussions on the political solution to the national question. While the major political parties in the South have rejected federalism, the federal solutions presented by these two fronts include the recognition of the Tamils as a nation or a nationality, their right to self-determination and the merged north-east of Sri Lanka as their homelands.”

see: http://www.sundayobserver.lk/2015/08/09/fea06.asp

“The Cultural, the Nominal, and the Secular: The Social Reality of Religious Identity Among Sri Lankan Tamil Youth in Canada” by Amarnath Amarasingam

You could find below a link to download Amarnath Amarasingam’s chapter on “The Cultural, the Nominal, and the Secular: The Social Reality of Religious Identity Among Sri Lankan Tamil Youth in Canada.”

via: https://www.academia.edu/9919491/The_Cultural_the_Nominal_and_the_Secular_The_Social_Reality_of_Religious_Identity_Among_Sri_Lankan_Tamil_Youth_in_Canada

“Politicising the personal: Who am I, Who are ‘we’ as people?” by Sinthujan Varatharajah

We would like to share a deeply personal and beautifully written piece on caste identity by Sinthujan Varatharajah.

“What does it then mean to utter these words in public? That you are a Dalit or an inter-caste Dalit? How will it affect my parents if we choose to identify with what we were taught to deny? How will it affect the people around us? How will it affect us?”

“Piece by piece am I learning to process and share, to no more live in fear and silence. To no more deny the validity of our own voices. This is part of an ongoing journey which I share in the knowledge of the vulnerability I produce not just for myself, but also those I love the most. But our pain isn’t just ours, our experiences aren’t exclusively ours, and our stories are neither isolated events. They mirror this society and culture we cherish but hardly critique.

The struggle goes on and so does our our emancipation and liberation. This is part of my own contribution, the coming out I chose for myself.”

via: http://roundtableindia.co.in/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=7530%3Apoliticising-the-personal-who-am-i-who-are-we-as-people-3&catid=119%3Afeature&Itemid=132

Sinthujan Varatharajah is a PhD candidate in Political Geography at the University College London and the Founder of Roots of Diaspora (www.facebook.com/rootsofdiaspora), a narrative project on refugees and migration of Tamils from Sri Lanka. He previously researched questions on caste in migration and diaspora for his master’s thesis at the London School of Economics and Political Science.You can follow him on Twitter @varathas

source: http://roundtableindia.co.in

“Sri Lankan Migrants and Identity in Contemporary British Fiction: Roma Tearne’s Art of Memory” by Marianne Godard

We are pleased to share a link to download the Master thesis of Marianne Godard which deals with “Sri Lankan Migrants and Identity in Contemporary British Fiction: Roma Tearne’s Art of Memory”. This work, headed by Professor Ruth Morse, was realized in the framework of the Master in Anglophones studies at the University Diderot Paris 7.

Master Thesis Marianne Godard

Référence: Godard M., 2011, “Sri Lankan Migrants and Identity in Contemporary British Fiction: Roma Tearne’s Art of Memory”, Master’s thesis in Anglophones studies, Paris, University Diderot Paris 7, p.57

“Prince Salie: A story of sapphires and steamships” by Ramla Wahab (Groundviews)

“Mohammed Usuff Mohammed Salie was born in 1877. He was the grandson of Mohamed Usuff, the Alim of the Kandawatte mosque in Galle, who was responsible for handwriting a Quran he knew by memory for his mosque.

Prince Salie was sent at a young age to Madras for his religious education. Like generations before and after him he learned to speak in the Arwi tongue, more commonly known as Arabo-Tamil which is a written register of the Tamil language that uses an Arabic alphabet. The language was an outcome of the cultural synthesis between seafaring Arabs and Tamil speaking Muslims of Sri Lanka.”

Via http://groundviews.org/2013/07/11/prince-salie-a-story-of-sapphires-and-steamships/

source: Groundviews

“From Merchant Prince to Akbar Brothers: Inayat Akbarally and the Bohras of Sri Lanka” by Kannan Arunasalam

Inayet Akbarally tells the remarkable story of his great grandfather Careemjee Jafferjee and how he became the first member of the Dawoodi Bohra community to set foot in Ceylon believed to be around 1830. A “Peterite” thorugh and through, he reflects on the days when where you went to school trumped ethnicity and even religion.

Groundviews is honoured to feature, for the first time, the photography of his daughter Alefiya Akbarally who was given unprecedented access to photograph the visit of the His Holiness the Syedna in January 2007.
In addition to the video above, listen to seven interview segments with Mr. Akbarally on the site.

Access everything here.

source: Groundviews

“Interview with MIXED RICE: Standing up for a diverse Sri Lanka” by Groundviews

The fact is, there are peaceful Sri Lankans all over the country, who contribute heavily to the society, love Sri Lanka as much as anyone else, and could not dream of being anything other than Sri Lankan. These people are having their rights and lifestyles threatened by those who seemingly wish to create a racial and religious hierarchy. Sri Lankans are being treated as outsiders in their own land, and as fellow human beings, we cannot and will not stand for that.
Read more here.
source: Groundviews

“Sheep No More…” by SCT (Groundviews)

This evening (Friday, April 12th 2013) around 7.15pm on Havelock Road in front of the Sambuddhatva Jayanthi Building adjoining Laurie’s Road, I was reminded anew that there is no freedom in our land.

I am nearly 45 years old now, and for 30 long years, I have been reminded over and over again in different places, at different times that in many ways the citizens of Sri Lanka are trapped. We have been and still are, in fact increasingly so, trapped by our fear, our intolerance, our ignorance, our sheep like obedience, either to the powers that be or to our own desperate need to play safe and stay safe.

I am not a lawyer, a journalist, an academic or an activist. I am just an ordinary citizen who is sick of being intimidated by the forces that are empowered by us to protect us. I am tired of our short sighted, nepotistic governments, our corrupt politicians, our arrogant law enforcement officers, our extremist religious leaders, and our ignorant, complacent citizenry. I am just plain tired.

Read the article in full – http://groundviews.org/2013/04/13/sheep-no-more/

Source: Groundviews

“Police in Sri Lanka show their true saffron colors” by Groundviews

Clearly then, in Sri Lanka today, Buddhist “monks” destroying private property are kosher, but citizens attempting to light a candle, and walk peacefully in solidarity, are fit to be physically assaulted, hurled abuse at, arrested, intimidated and brutishly dispersed.

Our tweets and retweets are reproduced below, and include links to several Facebook status updates as well that clearly highlight fear, concern and opposition to what is now mainstream ethno-religious extremism, condoned by Police and with complete impunity, openly supported by Gotabaya Rajapaksa and the government of Sri Lanka.

Via http://groundviews.org/2013/04/13/police-in-sri-lanka-show-their-true-saffron-colours/

source: Groundviews

“Nationalism as meaningful life projects: identity construction among politically active Tamil families in Norway” by Stine Bruland

We would like to announce the release of an article written by Stine Bruland on “Nationalism as meaningful life projects: identity construction among politically active Tamil families in Norway”

Abstract

This article explores the motivations for how and why national Tamil identity becomes so desirable for politically active Tamil parents in Norway. What leads them to socialize their children into an embodied understanding of what it means to be Tamil – closely related to the Tamil Tiger discourse and practice? The article discusses how private practices of relatedness become technologies of nationhood, and vice versa. I argue that in their transnational lives, the children’s Tamil identity offers a way for the politically active parents to ease nostalgia for their own childhoods and a way to create a meaningful life for themselves and their children in a transnational context.

Author biographies

STINE BRULAND is a research assistant at the Department of Ethnography at the Museum of Cultural History, University of Oslo. From August 2011 she will be a PhD fellow at Norwegian University of Science and Technology.

Reference of the article: Stine Bruland, “Nationalism as meaningful life projects: identity construction among politically active Tamil families in Norway”, in Ethnic and Racial Studies, Volume 35, Issue 12, 2012

source: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/ref/10.1080/01419870.2011.599851#tabModule