AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST

Making Tigers from Tamils: Long-Distance Nationalism

and Sri Lankan Tamils in Toronto

Sharika Thiranagama

ABSTRACT This article discusses the Sri Lankan Tamil diaspora in Toronto and its relationship to the Tamil

separatist group, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). Taking the case of the Sri Lankan Tamils, oft-cited as

the example par excellence of long-distance nationalism, I argue against naturalizing diasporic ethnonationalism to

investigate instead how diasporas are fashioned into specific kinds of actors. I examine tensions that emerged as

an earlier elite Tamil movement gave way to the contemporary migration of much larger class-and caste-fractured

communities, while a cultural imaginary of migration as a form of mobility persisted. I suggest that concomitant

status anxieties have propelled culturalist imaginations of a unified Tamil community in Toronto who, through the

actions of LTTE-affiliated organizations, have condensed the Tigers and their imagined homeland, Tamil Eelam, into

representing Tamil community life. While most Tamils may not have explicitly espoused LTTE ideology, as a result of

the LTTE becoming the backbone of community life, Tamils became complicit with and reaffirmed the LTTE project

of defending “Tamilness” militarily in Sri Lanka and culturally in Toronto. I suggest that the self-presentation of

diasporic communities should be analyzed within specific histories, contemporary conflicts and fractures, and active

mobilizing structures. [Tamils, diaspora, memory, migration, nationalism, Sri Lanka, Toronto]

RESUMEN Discuto aquı la diaspora de los esrilanqueses de origen tamil en Toronto y su relacion con el grupo

separatista tamil, Liberacion de los Tigres de Tamil Eelam (LTTE). Tomando el caso de los tamiles de Sri Lanka,

frecuentemente citado como el ejemplo por excelencia del nacionalismo a larga distancia, argumento en contra

de una naturalizacion del etnonacionalismo diasporico para investigar como las diasporas moldean especıficas

clases de actores. Examino las tensiones que emergieron en la medida en que el movimiento elite tamil cedio

el paso a la expansion contemporanea de migracion a comunidades tamiles con fracturas mucho mayores de

clase y casta—mientras un imaginario cultural de migracion como una forma de movilidad persistio. Sugiero que

ansiedades concomitantes de estatus han impulsado imaginaciones culturalistas de una comunidad tamil unificada

en Toronto quien, a traves de acciones de afiliadas organizaciones al LTTE-, han condensado los Tigres y su imaginada

tierra natal, Tamil Eelam, representando la vida de la comunidad tamil. Mientras la mayorıa de tamiles pueden

no haber explıcitamente apoyado la ideologıa de los LTTE, porque los LTTE llegaron a ser la columna vertebral

de la vida de la comunidad, la gente se convirtio en complice y reafirmo el proyecto de los LTTE defendiendo

la “Tamilinidad” militarmente en Sri Lanka y culturalmente en Toronto. Sugiero que la auto-presentacion de las

comunidades diasporicas debe ser analizado dentro de historias especıficas, conflictos y fracturas contemporaneas,

y estructuras activas movilizantes. [tamiles, diaspora, memoria, migracion, nacionalismo, Sri Lanka, Toronto]

AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST, Vol. 116, No. 2, pp. 265–278, ISSN 0002-7294, online ISSN 1548-1433. Copyright C© 2014 by the American Anthropological

Association. All rights reserved. DOI: 10.1111/aman.12099

266 American Anthropologist • Vol. 116, No. 2 • June 2014

I n July 2003, I began fieldwork in a high-rise buildingdominated by Sri Lankans and nicknamed “Little Jaffna”

in downtown Toronto (Canada). Northern Jaffna was one ofthe disputed territories in the civil war (concluded in 2009)between the Sri Lankan state and the separatist guerillas, theLiberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (the LTTE), also known as“the Tigers.” Jaffna Tamils form a clear majority among thenearly one million Sri Lankan Tamils living abroad. One af-ternoon when I was sitting with some elderly Jaffna women,a young man approached to ask his grandmother Nesarat-nam who I was and what we were talking about. Nesaratnamtold him that we were talking about Jaffna, and the otherwomen added that we were talking about our ur (home).He rejoindered, “Why are you separating Batticaloa (easternTamil) people from us?” Valliamma, another woman, said,as if to pacify him, “If we talk about Sri Lanka, then thereis no trouble.” He snapped, “No, you must not call it SriLanka if you are Tamil! You must say Tamil Eelam if youare Tamil!” (conversation with author, August 2013). TamilEelam is the name of the promised Tamil-only homeland inSri Lanka and was the center of the LTTE’s war. Nesarat-nam acquiesced, “Tamil Eelam includes everything.” Whenhe walked away, one woman said, “Anyway, we can talkabout Jaffna.” Another agreed, “When we get together, wesit and talk about our home that we know about, that isJaffna.” There was no more mention of Tamil Eelam. I wasstartled. I had just come from a year of fieldwork in Sri Lankawith internally displaced northern Sri Lankan Tamils and SriLankan Muslims. In Sri Lanka, Tamil Eelam was a politicalname that described an allegiance to the LTTE. In Toronto, Ifound young people using Tamil Eelam as a proper name fora seemingly known geography—a mono-ethnic term thatwas supposed to refer to the multiethnic and deeply frac-tured areas from which I had just come. Few young TorontoTamils I met were aware what they called Tamil Eelam wasalso home to sizeable Muslim minorities.

The centrality of LTTE ideology in Canadian Tamil lifecame back to me in the final phases of the civil war betweenJanuary to May of 2009. These months saw a standoff with330,000 Tamil civilians trapped between the Sri LankanArmy and the LTTE. By May, around 40,000 civilians haddied, and the LTTE had been eliminated after both sideshad committed gross violations (UN 2011). The Sri Lankanstate still stands accused of crimes against humanity (UN2011). In these months, the Tamil diaspora emerged on theglobal stage. Thousands demonstrated almost daily in Paris,London, Toronto, and Melbourne, displaying pictures oftrapped relatives and demanding a halt to bombardments(Pathirana 2009). However, the protesters did this whilebrandishing Tiger flags and slogans and arguing that West-ern governments should recognize the LTTE as the “sole”representative of the Tamil people. Despite considerable am-bivalence about the ruthlessness of the LTTE among Tamilsin Sri Lanka (Thiranagama 2011), it appeared as if for thou-sands of diasporic Tamils the LTTE was the only answer. Theinternational community did not rally to stop the Sri Lankan

state’s use of heavy weaponry. Today, the Sri Lankan statecontinues to discriminate against Tamils and propel postwarexpansion of the army, citing as one of its reasons preciselythe LTTE-ness of the diaspora.

Why did the LTTE become synonymous with beingSri Lankan Tamil in diasporic communities? Is it inevitablethat transnational communities will support nationalist or-ganizations? This is the commonsense assumption in muchliterature on long-distance nationalism: distance from homein time and space coupled with marginalization within hostcountries can lead to nostalgia and reification of homelands.In this article, though, I seek to go beyond this seeming in-evitability of diasporic ethnonationalism to investigate howdiasporas are actively fashioned into specific kinds of actors.Here I investigate how the LTTE was able to shape the waysin which Tamilness was experienced and shared away fromthe “homeland” and, thus, how the LTTE came to stand forthe Tamil diaspora.

THE TAMIL DIASPORAThe term diaspora is commonly applied to those with a “tri-adic relationship” between “(1) a collectively self-identifiedethnic group in one particular setting, (2) the people’s co-ethnics in other parts of the world, and (3) the homelandstates or local contexts whence they or their forebears came”(Vertovec 1997:279). Tamils epitomize this characteriza-tion better than most. One in four Sri Lankan Tamils liveoutside the island, and Tamils are one of the largest asylum-seeking groups in the world (McDowell 1996; Sriskandara-jah 2004). As a paradigmatic case, they are mentioned inpassing in most writing on long-distance nationalism. Tamilshave become a common case study in work on migration andtrauma (Gronsreth 2010), asylum law (Good 2003), conflictresolution (Orjuela 2008), and as sponsors of “terrorism”(Wayland 2004).

However, the usefulness of diaspora as a descriptionis questionable. The proliferation of scholarly and lay us-age of the term diaspora has limited its analytic purchase(Brubaker 2005; Vertovec 1997). Diasporic consciousness isnow routinely attributed to multiple migrant communities.Much of this literature presents the necessity of examining di-aspora and transnationalism—which are often conflated—intwo ways (Brubaker 2005:7–10): as an empirical phenom-ena prompted by current seemingly unprecedented globalflows of people and capital and newly porous borders (e.g.,Glick Schiller et al. 1992) or as initiating a new postna-tional and hybrid perspective on older paradigms of inte-gration and the nation-state (e.g., Appadurai 1996). More-over, diasporic consciousness as fluid and hybrid has becomevalorized as a contemporary social condition of modernity(Vertovec 1997:281–282). Claims of exceptionality standon difficult empirical ground. While there has been recentmass arrival of formerly colonial subject populations intoformerly colonial “metropoles,” nonetheless there has al-ways been large-scale global movement. There is no evi-dence that contemporary borders are more porous given

Thiranagama • The Sri Lankan Tamil Diaspora in Canada 267

that state surveillance of borders is ever increasing. Norcan we argue that older migrant communities were notequally dispersed and as attached to their previous homesas are current migrants (Foner 1997). The most distinctdifference is the technology that fashions and enables moreintense transnational relationships (Anderson 1994). Thisexpansion of the scope and phenomena of diaspora has ledto two unresolved questions. First, there is little clarityabout why some groups are more transnational than others(Vertovec 1997). Second, there is a tendency to understanddiasporas as actors in themselves by virtue of their empiricalmovement as opposed to their own crafting of themselves asactors (Brubaker 2005:12). In this article, I attempt to tackleboth questions. I deal with the question of historical depthhere, while the second half of this article will discuss theLTTE’s fashioning of the Tamil diaspora as a unitary actor inToronto, Canada.

First, while some communities have only embarked oninternational migration more recently, many have long his-tories of movement throughout the 19th century that shapetheir experiences of contemporary migration. BenedictAnderson (1994) proposes that, rather than exiled iden-tities challenging the nation-state, it is the sensation of beingexiled and dislocated that is a precondition for nationalism.1

For Anderson, the causes of exile are multivalent: industrialcapitalism transformed and thus exiled people from familiarlandscapes, and forced mass movement. These created newcategories that were relational even as they were seen as ab-solute (e.g., creole, native, colonial). Along with this camethe new self-consciousness of belonging imparted throughnew mass education systems standardizing and transformingvernacular languages into national ones. It is not surpris-ing that the two groups Anderson particularly focuses on asprime examples of long-distance nationalism, Sikhs and SriLankan Tamils, have been historically some of the most mo-bile populations within the British Empire (though he doesnot make this link). Ideas about a Tamil homeland were notpredominantly created in the diaspora, as has been intimatedfor the Sikh Khalistani movement (Axel 2001)—the impe-tus and the histories of Tamil nationalism clearly come fromSri Lanka. However, it is significant to our understanding ofthe “Tamil Diaspora” that northern Tamils’ social aspirationshad already been imaginatively fashioned around migration.It is through the aspirations that migration conjures up thata critical tension emerges, examined in the first half of thisarticle, between a cultural memory of elite transnational mi-gration as social mobility and the contemporary migrationof more class- and caste-fractured (as well as often deeplytraumatized) Tamil communities.

THE SRI LANKAN CIVIL WARThe Sri Lankan conflict was the longest running conflict inSouth Asia. While historically ethnic identities have beenfluid in Sri Lanka, from the 19th-century colonial regimeonward a bipartite divide has emerged between a major-ity Sinhalese-speaking community (74 percent) and multi-

ple minority communities, most of them Tamil-speaking(Spencer 1990). The conflict centered on the relationshipbetween the majority and the largest Tamil-speaking mi-nority, Sri Lankan Tamils. The two other Tamil-speakingminorities involved in the conflict, though not officially ac-knowledged to be so, are Sri Lankan Muslims, also residentin the disputed north and east (Thiranagama 2011), andMalaiyaha Tamils, descendants of 19th-century Indian plan-tation workers brought by the British (Daniel 1996).

State discrimination against Tamil minorities and thefailure of Tamil parliamentary parties to address discrim-ination gave rise to multiple militant groups in the 1970scalling for a separate Tamil homeland, Tamil Eelam, thatwould encompass the Tamil majority areas in the northernand eastern provinces (Tambiah 1986). Popular support formilitancy increased as a series of anti-Tamil riots in 1956,1958, 1971, 1977, and, most fatefully, in 1983 pushed Tamilminorities to an impasse (Tambiah 1986). The aftermath ofthe 1983 riots saw the first major flow of refugees out ofSri Lanka. As civil war dramatically escalated, hundreds ofthousands of Tamils continued to flee abroad.

The LTTE (the Tigers) began as a small militant organi-zation amid many others (Thiranagama 2011:185–189). By1986 the Tigers had emerged as the dominant Tamil militantcombatant in the war by eliminating or absorbing other mil-itant groups (Krishna 1999; Thiranagama 2011:201–211).The LTTE’s primary features were a pyramidal structurefocused on their leader Prabhakaran; a disciplined and mili-tarized cadre; the use of suicide bombings and cyanide cap-sules; an extensive intelligence network; and, generally, areliance on fear and intimidation to control Tamil politics.The group had a conventional land army, navy, intelligencewing, and a rudimentary air force. These were divided intoelite corps, female and male battalions, and the infamouschild “baby brigades.” These were buttressed by interna-tional shipping and smuggling networks.

By 1990, the LTTE began to build up a quasi-statestructure, first in northern Jaffna and then in 1995 in north-western Vanni after being dislodged from Jaffna by the SriLankan army. Recruitment became formalized: the Tigersdemanded that families in areas under their control sup-ply at least one member to fight. They had a militarizedadministrative structure focused on punitive taxation andpolicing with their own police force, judiciary, and prisonsystem. In addition, they taxed all businesses and monopo-lized commercial functions, controlling most cooperatives,running their own bus service, and so on. Relationships withthe LTTE were essential for any organization, business, orindividual to survive in LTTE-controlled areas. By the late1990s, the LTTE began to ritualize itself, building vast ceme-teries for cadres and holding an annual “Martyrs’/Heroes’Day Celebration” where thousands came to mourn deathsof loved ones (Schalk 1997). Until their defeat in 2009, theTigers’ political and economic dominance was uncontested,although many Tamils chafed at the rigidity of their control(Thiranagama 2011). The acceptance of the LTTE was partly

268 American Anthropologist • Vol. 116, No. 2 • June 2014

because the Sri Lankan state and army, with its routinizedarrest, torture, execution, and surveillance of Tamils, didnot present Tamils with a viable democratic alternative(Thiranagama 2011). Between a rock and a hard place, manyTamils would tell me, at least the LTTE were “our boys.”

Some have claimed (e.g., Fair 2005) that the LTTEsuccess partly stemmed from its relationship to the Tamildiaspora. The LTTE reputedly maintained offices in 40 dif-ferent countries. It was most visible through various civilorganizations that staged cultural events, provided services,acted as political lobby groups, and channeled funds to theLTTE. In Canada, the umbrella groups Federation of Associ-ations of Canadian Tamils (FACT), World Tamil Movement(WTM) in Toronto, and the NGO Tamil Rehabilitation Or-ganization (TRO) presented the public face of the LTTE. Itwas this face of the LTTE that I encountered in Toronto.

The backdrop for this article is my larger researchon the long Sri Lankan civil war, particularly on inter-nally displaced northern Tamils and Muslims in the capi-tal Colombo and refugee camps in northwestern Puttalam(Thiranagama 2011). I had already conducted a year of in-tensive fieldwork (2002–03) in Sri Lanka when I arrived inToronto in 2003 for three months of fieldwork.2 In Toronto,I concentrated on interviewing different generations withinTamil families: children, parents, and grandparents. Thisarticle draws upon long interviews with six (though at timesmore) middle-aged and elderly women who I met for three-to four-hour group interviews weekly for three months.I had met them through the Senior Women’s Associationin a “Sri Lankan” downtown neighborhood. This is supple-mented with interviews from women I met through anothergroup for victims of domestic abuse. Some material comesfrom a return trip to Toronto in 2005, where, through field-work with ex-militants, I interviewed people about LTTEintimidation in the diaspora (Thiranagama 2010).

“CANADA ANNAI” (MOTHER CANADA)The largest Tamil population outside of Sri Lanka is inCanada—around 200–300,000 individuals (InternationalCrisis Group 2010:2), most arriving from 1990 onward(Aruliah 1994). Canada’s generous immigration policies andits sympathy toward Tamils led to a high degree of asylum ac-ceptance. Furthermore, Canada’s practice of including thoseoutside the nuclear family in family reunion policies meantthat refugees could send for family very soon after beingestablished. Many Tamils thus saw Canada as the ultimatedesired location. Most of these Tamils live in Toronto.

Toronto consists of almost 50 percent recent migrants,with 47 percent said to be “racialized” minorities (SocialPlanning Toronto 2009:11–12). While there are large, long-standing South Asian communities all across Toronto (pre-dominantly Hindu and Sikh Punjabis, and Pakistanis), SriLankan Tamils are categorized as wartime refugees, withcorresponding high school drop-out rates and residence inlow-income areas (Ornstein 2006:iv) in inner-city Torontoand the suburb of Scarborough. Despite low socioeconomic

status generally, many Sri Lankan Tamils had indeed be-come very successful, moving from unskilled shift jobs uponarrival to stable 9-to-5 jobs and investing heavily in theirchildren’s education. Most (though not all) Tamils lived in“high rise” low-income housing, though most aspired to-ward the semidetached houses that marked migrant success.The dilapidated high rises shaped new types of sociability—resembling microcosmic neighborhoods, providing supportas well as community surveillance. Family members wereoften spread across several floors, and homes were imaginedvertically across floors, children playing between elevatorsand stairs. Apartments spilled over with things and people,the overcrowding that is symptomatic of Toronto immigrantlife. Yet many middle-aged people matched their complaintsabout conditions in the high rises with attestations of lovefor Canada.

One of my first visits to “Little Jaffna” coincided witha large debate organized by the Senior Women’s Associ-ation. I was ushered into a packed room to meet around50 women. The debate was on which was better—“CanadaAnnai” (Mother Canada) or “Thaynatu” (Motherland—SriLanka). Saroja, speaking up for Canada Annai, put acrossher argument forcefully: in Canada they had everything theycould have at home, but here there was no war and theycould talk with and see each other all the time, so theyshould be grateful to Canada Annai. Besides, she concluded,almost everyone from home was in Toronto. Rosa, speak-ing for Sri Lanka, pursued a different strategy, describingthe bewildering nature of Canadian society and the trans-formation of Tamils: “When you organized a marriage foryour daughter from Sri Lanka for a Toronto boy, everyonetells you that he is a nice traditional boy who wears kadukan(traditional earrings) in his ears . . . then you come hereand find out that all this kadukan stuff is rubbish, and heis running around with girls and all kinds of things” (fieldnotes, August 2003). In the break, I sat and discussed thisfurther with the women. Many told me that Canadian societywas bewildering for them; their grandchildren dressed andspoke like aliens. Some described their feelings of entrap-ment living in apartments on the 20th and 30th floors. Yet,the same women also told me how in Toronto they werereunited with family and former villagers as whole commu-nities had moved from the north and east to Toronto. Forthem, Toronto was fast becoming a Tamil place. At the endof the debate, Thaynatu won only by a few votes, as quitea few of the old women cast their votes for Canada withouthesitation. Canada could indeed be a place where the Tamilcommunity found itself, albeit transfigured.

However, Tamils did not always recognize the positionin which they found themselves within this world. At thetime of my Canada research, a series of violent CanadianTamil gang conflicts were extensively covered in the localpress (Jayawardhana n.d.). For my Canadian non–Sri Lankanfriends, it was gangs that formed the dominant stereotypeof Sri Lankan Tamils. Tamils were deeply troubled by thischaracterization, given their attempts to project themselves

Thiranagama • The Sri Lankan Tamil Diaspora in Canada 269

as a respectable community. Young Tamils told me of con-stant discrimination at schools, where they were stereotypedas gang members. Most young Tamils I interviewed discussedgang membership in terms one can find in many places, someciting boredom, the fun of camaraderie and sociality withtheir peers, freedom from adult supervision as their parentsoften worked two jobs, clashes with their parents’ “tradi-tional values,” disillusionment with school, and the limitedcapacities for advancement in the high rises. Some middle-aged adults blamed gang membership on lax parental valuesand Westernization, suggesting it was a “Canadian habit”inimical to Tamil culture despite the fact that most of thosemiddle-aged Tamils had engaged in some militant activity intheir pasts (Thiranagama 2011). Others wondered uneasilyabout parallels to the violence in Sri Lanka from which theyhad so recently fled. On a walk we took together, Valliammatold me,

Our children grew up in war and they learnt all of this. They solvefights by hitting each other . . . it is difficult for our children here,especially those who came paying great debts who have to workall the time and send home money . . . they don’t have anythingelse to do, they are depressed and they end up getting stuck inthis. People look at us when we say Sri Lankan because of thegangs. [conversation with author, October 2003]

My encounters with gang members were limited andnever formed part of my research. Instead, I introduce thesesnippets here because these conversations reflected how re-ports of Tamil gang membership and deprivation pressedthe Tamil community into a category in which they did notrecognize themselves: the urban poor. This was at odds witha much deeper cultural myth of migration among Tamils,specifically Jaffna Tamils, a historically mobile group forwhom geographical migration previously had been seen asthe premier route toward upward mobility.

Migration as Class MobilityI first came across the name “Little Jaffna” (Sinna-Yalpannam)in archival research on Jaffnese migration to Malaysia; Sinna-Yalpannam was a 1920s Jaffna Tamil enclave in KualaLumpur. The transition between these two places, KualaLumpur to Toronto, is central to our story here aboutcontemporary Tamil migrant experiences. The moniker“Little Jaffna” is indicative of two factors: first that mostmigration out of Sri Lanka to Europe and North Americahas been from the northern Jaffna peninsula, although warmigration has been from many regions, and second thatthere are many “little Jaffnas” for this historically migratorycommunity.

The Jaffna peninsula had high rates of outmigrationthroughout the colonial and postcolonial period. Periph-eral to emerging plantation economies, Jaffna’s missionaryschools and the riskiness of its cash crops, land scarcity, andoverpopulation led in the 19th century to its premier asset:education (Bastin 1997). Educated Jaffna Tamils travelledall around the island and in the British colonial territoriesas civil servants and overseers becoming “a nation of pen

pushers” when “there was a great demand for pen-pushersall over the British Empire” (Arasaratnam 1986:40).3

This was particularly evident in British Malaya andSingapore, where Jaffna Tamils arrived from 1870s onward.British civil servants transferred to work there brought theirCeylonese (mainly Jaffna Tamil) staff with them. For ex-ample, when C. E. Spooner of the Ceylon Public WorksDepartment became the state engineer in Selangor’s pub-lic works department, he brought with him experiencedCeylonese office workers, overseers, clerks, and engineers(Rajasingam 1968:38–39). Upon becoming the general man-ager of the Federated Malay States Railways, Spooner contin-ued employing Ceylonese Tamils. T. A. Cook, the railwaytraffic manager, even made a deal in 1917 to recruit youthsstraight from St. Johns College, Jaffna (Rajasingam 1968:38–39).

These Jaffna Tamils first came as single men. How-ever, soon they began to bring their families, setting upenclaves (Rajasingam 1968:125, 173). Nondominant castes(such as Dhobis, etc.) also followed when regular settle-ments and temples were built (Rajasingam 1968:125, 173).However, this migration remained that of upper-caste ed-ucated professionals. Ceylonese predominated in the juniorranks of the Malay government in railways, public works,surveys, posts and telegraphs, rubber estates, and firms(Nagaratnam 1962). In 1899 the Selangor State railwayswere 90 percent staffed by Ceylonese—and these weremostly Jaffna Tamils (Rajasingam 1968:179). This domi-nance continued. Reporting on the Ceylonese in Malayafor the Ceylonese government, V. Coomaraswamy (1946)wrote that, in the 1920s, more than 50 percent of the ju-nior officers in government services were Ceylon Tamils.As E. B. Denham concluded, “Jaffnese do not emigrate aspioneers, cultivators, settlers, but as passed candidates andexamination successes” (Denham 1912:69).

The impact of this migration within Jaffna was well re-membered by elderly Jaffna Tamils with whom I talked.The migrant Malayans visited Jaffna regularly for villagetemple festivals and to find girls to marry, the marriageof female Jaffna “substance” with male enterprise. Migrantsinvested their savings from their overseas enterprises intobuying Jaffna land as dowry for their daughters, with wholestreets in particular upper-caste areas of Jaffna being theproceeds of waged labor in Singapore or Malaysia. Thethree Tamil and English-language Jaffnese newspapers JaffnaCatholic Guardian, the Hindu Organ, and the Morning Star allhad separate sections on news from the Federated MalayStates and the Straits Settlements.4 Thambapillai Adigar ofJaffna Town could thus write of the peninsula,

The price of land has more than doubled in Jaffna during the pastdecade. This, as well as other signs of general prosperity amongthe people, is due not to any improvements in local industriesand trade, but to the very large number of the sons of Jaffna whoare employed in various capacities outside Jaffna . . . There isnot a village in the Jaffna district which is not benefited by theemployment of its inhabitants abroad. [Denham 1912:69]

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This constant reinvestment in Jaffna showed how it con-tinued to be the cultural heart for Jaffna Tamils even aftermigration. After World War II, most of these migrants, hav-ing lost almost everything under Japanese occupation, camehome to Sri Lanka. However, this period represents thedeep cultural memory of migration as upward mobility and aremittance-led economy in which migrants were consideredrepresentative of Jaffna character rather than people ren-dered inauthentic by their departure. By the 20th century,“a spirit of migration mostly by middleclass Tamils, becamebuilt into Tamil cultural aspirations” (McDowell 1996:69).

Migration as an UnderclassDuring the civil war, Tamil migration exponentially in-creased. While the Sri Lankan government argues thatTamils are economic migrants and have nothing to fear athome, this is clearly untrue given continual discrimination,arrest, and torture of Tamils in Sri Lanka (see UniversityTeachers for Human Rights [Jaffna] 2009; Malik 2012a,2012b). The Sri Lankan civil war has enhanced the culturalideology of migration as class mobility by increasing the per-ception that Tamil life in Sri Lanka is under threat and canonly be re-created elsewhere. In addition, through asylumprocedures that privilege victims of political violence, mi-gration has become accessible—however traumatically—toa much wider range of people than previously was the case.

Historically, the upper-caste Vellalas dominated migra-tion. By the 1970s, Vellalas had become a “mega-caste,” com-prising nearly 70 percent of the Jaffna population, internallydivided into “big” and “small” Vellalas (Pfaffenberger 1982).While as Delon Madavan (2011) shows the mass exodus fromthe Jaffna peninsula has been from the Vellala caste, most ofthe new migrants were the “small vellalas,” not the profes-sionals of the 1930–60s (Daniel and Thangaraj 1995:143).Furthermore, while the majority of migrants in Toronto areVellala, they are not exclusively so. There has been increas-ing migration from other castes, and much larger numbersof Eastern Tamils since the late 1990s and the expansionof the warzone. Furthermore, those migrating were notpart of an educated English-speaking elite. Thirty years ofpolitical turmoil, school closures, and militancy had dramat-ically reduced educational possibility in the Jaffna peninsula(Thiranagama 2011:41–77). In Michael Ornstein’s (2006)survey of ethnoracial groups in Toronto, his categories “SriLankan” and “Tamil” have some of the lowest university grad-uate populations among the East and South Asian groupsin Toronto, and the proportion of persons between 25and 34 who have not completed high school is more than30 percent. These figures reflect the experiences of thosecommunities who came as young non-English speakers toCanada (Ornstein 2006:iv) and often as refugees (2006:16).Ornstein’s figures show that the younger age ranges (theCanadian born) have educational achievement levels closerto the general population range (2006:16), reflecting the in-vestment by all the Tamils that I encountered in Toronto in

their children’s education, no matter what their own levelsof education were.

Since the late 1980s, Tamils—especially JaffnaTamils—have been engaging in migration wherein they en-ter into host countries not as overseers, clerks, and students,as is the myth of good migration in Jaffna, but as refugees,petrol-shed workers, minicab drivers, security guards, andso forth. Many told me about their first experiences withracism and their realization that they might be stuck in theirlow-paid, low-status jobs rather than moving on to sub-sequent white-collar work. In my interviews, the elderlywomen expressed profound sympathy for their children. Asone woman explained, many of their children were workingtwo jobs or awkward shifts. Life was a struggle, she said,and one could understand that their children did not havethe time to teach them how to cope with life in Canada.Nesaratnam’s story of her arrival was typical:

I came in the snow time . . . My son came and picked me upand then they [son and wife] told me all the things I needed toknow. I shouldn’t just use the phone whenever I want, even ifit is relatives. I shouldn’t trouble people in the night just ringingon the telephone. They would have come from work, and theyneed to sleep. I need to turn the lights out if I am not using them.I must not just watch TV all day. My son goes to work in themorning. Sometimes his friends will come and take me out forthings. There was another friend in the building so she will comeand talk. He cooks when he comes home, and my daughter-in lawwill also cook and leave things for me before she works.

My son had gone to Paris at 17 on his own and slept in parksand things and sent money home to us. Now here he is workinghard, and he called me over. He sponsored me. I didn’t even bringa woman for him. Everyone scolded me. He had done so muchfor us, and I hadn’t brought a wife for him. And I had arranged amarriage for my daughter in Denmark! Then I did a marriage forhim, a good one with a girl with a BA. He left home at 17 withouta home, and he is such a good child. He was the one who sent allthe money and got everyone married, all his sisters. [conversationwith author, November 2003]

As Nesaratnam and some of the other women corroborated,many of them before arriving in Canada had little idea ofthe difficult circumstances in which their children lived,as they had previously registered the flow of remittanceshome to them as a sign of prosperity and well-being. How-ever, Nesaratnam also illustrates the high value of migranthusbands—her own preference was to send her daughterwho had a dowry (provided by her brother) to Denmark,and a girl with a B.A. was considered a good bride for herson even though he had little, if any, higher education.

In short, while the Malayan migration bears many of thehallmarks of “transnationalism” (attachment to home, fre-quent travel, communication, marriage, and trade), thereare crucial differences between this earlier movement andthe large-scale contemporary phenomenon of Tamil move-ment I address here. The contemporary Tamil diaspora arewar refugees, not educated workers. The reality of such mi-gration in the 1980s and 1990s to Europe and North Americawas to inhabit an underclass. Thus, migration since the 1980shas become (while still valorized) increasingly more plebian

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in composition, and while people are mobile in relation tothose left behind in Sri Lanka, in status terms they have ex-perienced little upward mobility in daily experience. Theseclass tensions underwrite the complex Tamil diaspora inToronto and, I would argue, inform the kinds of desire forTamil dignity and for a unified Tamil culture that the Tigersmobilize and shape.

TAMILNESS THROUGH TIGER EYESRaji had slaved to send her daughter to Canada to get mar-ried. However, when Raji and her husband arrived, theirson-in-law kicked them out. A lively small woman with aconstant flow of witty remarks often about her husband andhis many incapacities, her stories of Sri Lanka were domi-nated by stories of bombing, fear, violence, and the constantdesperate hope to send her daughter abroad to free her. Sherepresented the large majority of those I met in Toronto,who although talking of their difficulties in Canada nonethe-less believed that Tamils could only prosper after leaving SriLanka. Her lack of ability to speak English meant that Raji’slife was in almost exclusively Tamil-speaking domains. Rajiembraced my research, bringing me Tamil books to readfrom her personal collection. These were, like all the booksand leaflets that she had encountered since her arrival, LTTEpamphlets and books distributed at community events andon sale in most Tamil stores. Raji was, like most I met,casually shaped by an LTTE circulation that had becomepolitically neutral by becoming what most knew as “Tamil.”

The few studies of the Tamil diaspora in Toronto areroughly of two kinds. The first follows a security studiesstyle, describing the comprehensive LTTE network but dis-connecting this from any account of the larger community(e.g., Fair 2005; Wayland 2004). The other trend is to de-scribe the Tamil community in Toronto but largely erasethe LTTE in favor of neutral descriptions of the village so-cieties, Tamil banking practices, and social organizations(e.g., Cheran 2003, 2007). Rudramoorthy Cheran, for ex-ample, has done valuable work in documenting migrant lifebut argues that the Tamil diaspora should be considered asingle actor and should be more powerful in representing SriLankan Tamils (Vimalarajah and Cheran 2010) while con-spicuously omitting the role of the LTTE in actually beingthat single actor.

Fundamentally, the presumption that the Tamil diasporacould be considered in the singular is problematic. RogersBrubaker argues that the simultaneous use of diaspora as adescriptive term and a stance on the world, the “diasporicperspective,” falls prey to “groupism”—treating “various cat-egories of people as if they were internally homogenous,externally bounded groups, even unitary collective actorswith common purposes” (Brubaker 2005:28). Instead, dias-pora should be understood as a “category of practice” thatis “used to make claims, to articulate projects, to formulateexpectations, to mobilize energies, to appeal to loyalties”(Brubaker 2005:12). This means, as Martin Sokefeld pointsout,

if we assume that the discursive imagination of community isnot a direct and necessary outcome of migration movements, thecrucial question becomes why and how a diaspora discourse arisesamong a certain group of people and how people are made toaccept a certain discourse and to participate in it. The formationof diaspora is therefore an issue of social mobilization. [2006:268]

Drawing from Sokefeld’s (2006:269) suggested prescrip-tions, I propose to see the LTTE as a “mobilizing struc-ture” that has managed to construct a common interpretive“frame” for a heterogeneous and diverse set of migrant ex-periences. To do so, I combine the approaches to the Tamildiaspora outlined above, bringing together studies of com-munity practice and LTTE networks.

THE TIGERS IN TORONTOIn Sri Lanka, the LTTE could not be divorced fromits armed cadres and the constant threat of violence(Thiranagama 2011:41–77, 127–144, 195–227). I hadthought this would be different in Toronto in the absenceof military coercion. However, wherever I went, I sawLTTE paraphernalia, flags, calendars, and so on. Tamilgrocery shops had pictures of Prabhakaran next to theirpictures of Hindu gods. There was coercion: independentTamil media outlets and individuals were repeatedly attacked(Nallainathan 2007). But it was also true that almost alllarge Tamil community gatherings in Toronto were LTTE-organized events. Thousands of Tamils attend the HeroesDays celebration in Toronto without military coercion. Therecently established festival “Pongu Tamil,” which drawsthousands in various diasporic locations, was couched as acultural revival with shows of traditional Tamil dance anddrama. While “Pongu Tamil” is not billed as an LTTE event,participants and performers are bedecked with flags and cos-tumes in the LTTE red and yellow, showing how the LTTEwas framing Tamil culture as a whole rather than appearingas a segment of Tamil cultural expression. The LTTE wasmoving from being a political organization to being a cul-tural background. Pictures published in national Canadiannewspapers of stalls outside some Hindu temples with pic-tures of Prabhakaran, LTTE collecting cans, and miniatureLTTE flags, which were greeted with outrage in the largerpress, were a normal feature of cultural events when I wasin Toronto (Bell 2012).

Was this evidence of, as Anderson describes, “Tigers inJaffna [stiffening] in their violent struggles by Tamil com-munities in Toronto, London and elsewhere, all linked onthe computer by Tamilnet” so “that same metropole whichmarginalizes and stigmatizes him [the diasporic] simultane-ously enables him to play, in a flash, on the other side ofthe planet, national hero” (Anderson 1994:327)? One couldeasily find evidence that the LTTE provided a marginalizedcommunity with a sense of dignity, pride, and importanceon the global stage and allowed them to play national pol-itics in Sri Lanka without having to be accountable for therisks of LTTE involvement. Their children were free fromthe Sri Lankan Army and from being commandeered by the

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LTTE. This is Anderson’s “politics without accountability”(1994:326). But this didn’t explain Raji to me. How hadso many ordinary people (that is, noncombatants and non-LTTE activists)—who often had come very recently from SriLanka and with complex experiences of the war—becomeco-opted into a particular understanding of Tamil sufferingand Tamil community? As I demonstrate below, one way tounderstand this is to look at how the LTTE made its activ-ities the public space of a community, thus constructing aunified community with common spaces and common net-works that otherwise would be segregated by caste, class,and religion.

Stine Bruland states in her work in Norway that “beforeLTTE’s defeat, the decision to engage or not in the LTTEsupportive activities was . . . the most important decisionin Norwegian Tamils’ everyday life” (2012:3). Bruland sug-gests that such a choice has come to supersede other differ-entiations of caste, migration pattern, and class (2012:3).5

Her work builds upon Øivind Fuglerud’s (1999, 2001) in-sightful studies of Norwegian Tamils, which document indetail the enormous class and caste tensions between ear-lier migrants and the “asylum seekers” and highlights howthe “activities of the LTTE”-sponsored organizations havebeen central “in upholding a sense of common identity inexile” (Fuglerud 2001:198). Fuglerud argues that there aretwo competing visions of Tamilness in exile. The first is a“conservative–traditional” vision based on reinstating hier-archies of age, gender, and caste in exile (2001:199). Thesecond, a “revolutionary” perspective espoused by formermilitants, constantly relates exile life to Sri Lanka, particu-larly to the notion of Tamil Eelam, and imagines overturn-ing existing hierarchies (Fuglerud 2001:205–206). While Iagree with Fuglerud’s larger conclusions, this particular dis-tinction does not help us understand why ordinary peopleget involved in a LTTE-framed world; even Fuglerud ac-knowledges that these cultural models are more applicablefor LTTE activists than for the majority of the exile popu-lation negotiating them (2001:207). In fact, I would arguethat seeing the LTTE from a diaspora perspective (that is,without witnessing them as an armed organization on theground) can lead to two mistaken assumptions: first, thatthe LTTE model of behavior for LTTE cadres is what theLTTE ideology prescribes for ordinary Tamil people and,second, that it is interested in overturning hierarchies inexile life.

Despite its forced recruitment of children (and thusradicalization of Tamil families) and its mobilization ofwomen and oppressed caste communities as cadres, theLTTE continued to emphasize cultural purity and conser-vative values for Tamil civilians (Thiranagama 2011:216–217). For example, female cadres were armed and uni-formed while the Tigers repeatedly decreed that civilianwomen should wear traditional saris and modest dress(Maunaguru 1995:169). Thus, what Fuglerud describes asbehavior that was not “uncommon” but “contradictory”—that is, “supporting the LTTE’s ideological project while

working hard to raise dowries for their sisters, or denouncethe violent strategy of the LTTE while attending their meet-ings” (Fuglerud 2001:207)—is in fact the norm for mostTamils I encountered. LTTE ideology presented people withthe deferment of radical action to its cadres while maintain-ing the status quo.

In Toronto, it was LTTE affiliates that actively encour-aged the pursuit of “traditional” Tamil cultural values fordiasporics. There were multiple classes to teach the high“culture” (kalacharam) pursuits of Tamil dance, ritual, re-ligion, and poetry.6 Most children I met were sent to suchTamil weekend schools. One boy I met recited a long Tamilpoem and then to my amusement asked me to translateit for him in English. “I have no idea what it means,” hesaid. Kalacharam also denoted the Tamil values of modesty,respectability, and obedience to parents, which seeminglymarked the distinction between Tamils and white Canadians.These “Tamil values” attempted to punctuate how one wasmarked as a “visible minority” in larger Canadian life. Thus,the LTTE could guard Tamil life against “Sinhalese genocide”and against “Western culture” simultaneously. Young peo-ple’s danger of “moral corruption” by Canadian society wasconstantly touted (as many teenagers complained to me),and they were exhorted to “keep their culture.” What wasoffered as the gateway to that culture was paradoxical, giventhat parents complaining of their children’s involvement ingang violence saw no contradiction in taking them to LTTErallies that valorized death and the militarization of youngpeople as the necessary solution to anti-Tamil discrimina-tion. One young man I met who had been involved in gangviolence had been “rehabilitated” through becoming pressedinto community activities and getting to “know his culture.”As he enthusiastically told me about one exhibition aboutTamil culture in which he has been involved, I realized thathe was repeating to me almost verbatim an LTTE versionof Tamil history in Sri Lanka, one that omitted all kindsof ambiguous historical details, such as evidence of Mus-lim and Tamil co-existence, and presented a natural pathtoward an LTTE-controlled Tamil Eelam. For many youngpeople, with few alternative views of Tamilness available,to go against LTTE ideologies about Sri Lanka and TamilEelam had become tantamount to rejecting one’s own com-munity in the midst of fighting already exhausting battlesabout personal freedom.

Alongside services provided for teaching proper Tamil-ness, the LTTE organizations also functioned in Torontoas civil networks that also managed the interface betweenlarger Canadian society and institutions and Tamils. Thosewho went with parents to schools as translators, ran helpcenters, gave legal advice, and assisted with housing andimmigration applications were “soft” Tiger community ac-tivists. I met numerous activists embedded within everycommunity organization, particularly the ones that mediatedbetween state and city service provisions and the commu-nity. The first day I began interviews in the Senior Women’sAssociation, a middle-aged Tamil man sitting in the office

Thiranagama • The Sri Lankan Tamil Diaspora in Canada 273

without any obvious role in the organization called me tomeet him. Inquiring into my purpose, he then summonedme to come for a further meeting. As my inquiries abouthim immediately established later, he was a known LTTE-affiliated activist. Whether one espoused LTTE politics ornot, many Tamils needed the services that these organi-zations provided. The LTTE thus came to constitute thesocial space of the community as it actively brought sucha community together. This enabled the LTTE to providea seeming welfarist face in Toronto that was largely absentin Sri Lanka, where in actuality they were a highly milita-rized state (Uyangoda 2007:39–41). These practices onlybecame controversial in Canada after a change of govern-ment from Liberal to Conservative in 2006 led to the officialdesignation of the LTTE as a terrorist organization and sub-sequent investigations in 2008 into organizations such as theWorld Tamil Movement and civic and religious institutionsfor sending money for charitable enterprises to LTTE or-ganizations. Indeed, the most successful LTTE mobilizationwas around remittances and the transformation of individualmigrant remittances into the large-scale public politics ofLTTE nationalism.

Remitting Home, Remitting to the LTTEThe major flow of monies is that of remittances sent byindividuals to their families back in Jaffna. Another, moresegmented set of remittances are sent through multiple asso-ciations, whereby Tamils send money back to their formervillages and or old schools for building and other projects(Cheran 2003:11). Such a remittance economy has domi-nated Jaffna Tamil life since the 1910s (Bastin 1997), andits continuance in Toronto is consonant with older culturalexpectations of the gains and purpose of migration, as is thecase with most migrant communities.

However, in contemporary remittance economies, evenas monies flowed home, the focus and purpose of reinvest-ment has transferred from “home” to abroad. Remittancesin the 1930s were frequently aimed at acquiring dowry landin Jaffna; many “Malayan pensioners” did retire home afterall. Status was measured in relation to valued goods backhome. Contemporary remittances are sent home to sustainfamilies and to help them get out and migrate. Because warhas made displacement a fact of life and land a highly inse-cure good, dowry among Tamils has become dominated notby the high-status land but by low-status and yet magicallyliquid cash. Most dowries are now cash aimed at attractingoverseas husbands. Notably these trends have affected thestatus of women in marriage: women are now sent abroadto live with their husband and often his family (the reverseis true in Jaffna), and while dowry land continued to bewomen’s property after marriage, cash goes straight to thegroom and his family. The wife’s family often compromisesto keep bad marriages together to protect the investmentthey have made in dowry and to preserve the overseas pathfor future migration. Now it is overseas where status maybe accrued, with Jaffna as the poor partner.

The other major transformation is the enormousamounts of monies flowing from migrants to the LTTE.Human Rights Watch (2006) suggests that between 80and 90 percent of the LTTE’s budget came from over-seas sources, including diaspora contributions, investments,and businesses, and that in the late 1990s between CAN$1and 12 million per year came from the Canadian diaspora.Part of the LTTE’s funds did come from its business ven-tures, from distribution networks to its bought businesseswith proxy owners (Fair 2005). However, it also verysignificantly transformed everyday Tamil community lifeinto a network of contributions, collections, and taxes. Onone hand, the LTTE played upon well-established genres.Community events, birthdays, weddings, and fundraisers allrequired immediate and extravagant shows of generosity,which Tamils highly prize in contrast to the also-espousedfrugality of individual families (Mines 1994). LTTE events—from rallies to dance shows—also relied upon donations andpublic shows of commitment, this time to the communityand poor suffering Tamils in Sri Lanka who required the helpof their better-off brethren.

Furthermore, collections in public events were supple-mented by LTTE “door-stepping.” LTTE activists routinelyvisited Tamil families, demanding from them monthly do-nations. I heard about this from many families, who, thoughstruggling to make ends meet, nonetheless were so fright-ened of the LTTE that they would give the required pledgefor however many dollars per month. Threats used againstfamilies were customarily about the safety of their families inSri Lanka or refusals for permission to visit LTTE-controlledareas in Sri Lanka.

Increasingly, the LTTE had switched over fromcash donations to monthly direct debits (Human RightsWatch 2006). This was such a widespread practice thatHuman Rights Watch in 2006 compiled a report on LTTEextortion that interviewed hundreds and documented theroutine collection of bank and passport details and the veryordinary way in which the LTTE financial structure cameto encompass most Tamil families in Toronto and to someextent in London. The launch of the HRW report in 2006in a public meeting in Toronto was enormously controver-sial. As one organizer told me, guest speakers were heckledand abused by LTTE activists who came with cameras. After-ward, photographs of the Tamils who had attended the meet-ing were published in Tamil newspapers under the captionof “Traitors” with warnings of reprisal. Significantly, thoughfew Tamils attended the meeting, one of the translators ofthe report into Tamil told me that the Tamil translation wasdownloaded from the HRW website thousands of times inthe following weeks.

Aside from this coercion, the LTTE also tapped success-fully into feelings of guilt and obligation that migrants felttoward the home they left behind. Many Tamils, despite thehardships of migrant life, felt that they were better off inToronto. Toronto did seem to provide the means for Tamilcommunity life to flourish unlike in Sri Lanka, where Tamil

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community life was seen as struggling under war and re-pression by the Sri Lankan state. Images and representationsof Sri Lanka, especially to young Toronto Tamils who hadnever lived in Sri Lanka, were images of poverty—the blanklook of children pasted on the collecting tins in every Tamilshop. Toronto Tamils talked of how lucky they were to livein peace and sent their children to Tamil classes and put onclassical Tamil dance shows. Through this process, Jaffna,formerly the site of investment, instead became that whichmust be left behind to survive as a Tamil. Jaffna was seen asa place of authentic suffering, and Toronto the site of Tamilrevival.

Framing MemoriesThe embeddedness of Tiger networks within civic structuresand financial flows in the Tamil community was critical tothe ways in which the LTTE equally fashioned an imaginativepublic for diasporic Tamils. I realized how LTTE ideology, asI argued above, had moved from political ideology to culturalidentity particularly through seeing how LTTE understand-ings created a particular moral geography of suffering thatmade some memories public and some memories private.This was most evident in my conversations with women inthe Senior Women’s Association about their memories ofwartime suffering. My argument is not dissimilar to BrianAxel’s argument regarding the centrality of images of tor-tured Sikh bodies in articulating the Sikh diaspora aroundthe promised Khalistan (2002:414–416), with one crucialdifference—Axel is surprisingly vague on what agencies areat work in forging this discursive scaffolding (2002:421–425).

The centrality of war and anti-Tamil discrimination inshaping the biographies of the elderly women I interviewedwas clear when I asked them to talk about their lives inToronto. Saroja immediately said to general assent that theywould talk of “stories of the war . . . what else is there!”(conversation with author, September 2003). The preva-lence of this understanding of war experiences as Tamilsuffering was emphasized to me when Chella (from anothergroup), an elderly victim of domestic abuse whose final sepa-ration from her husband had led to her ostracization by otherTamils, began our conversation by counterposing public andprivate suffering: “The war . . . everyone suffered under thewar, but if you want to know my real suffering, it startedthe day that I married that man” (conversation with author,November 2003).

My interviews with the “seniors” were extensive, andthe stories easily emerged, requiring little prompting fromme. All the stories narrated the profound disillusionmentsof being a Tamil minority in Sri Lanka; all of them hadbeen caught up in anti-Tamil riots in southern Sri Lanka orwere part of families that received riot victims. They retoldemotional experiences of the constant aerial bombardments,displacement, and the fear they had for their children as theSri Lankan army and then the Indian peacekeeping forcesconstantly arrested young Tamils on suspicion of being LTTE

(Hoole et al. 1990; Thiranagama 2011). Their lives wereentangled with militancy. Raji related with pride how theLTTE girls would come to her house to eat. Saroja had amore ambivalent twist: “When they come after fighting andask us, ‘Amma make us a coffee please,’ then you have todo it. What can you do . . . ? They were always coming toour house and asking us to hide them. We were frightenedbecause of the army” (conversation with author, August 14,2003). These war stories thus retold the horrific experiencesthat had come to define the discrimination and fear for Tamilsin Sri Lanka. They were, however, notably silent about LTTEcoercion against Tamils, from the targeted assassinations tothe forced remittances. One event changed this and revealedfor me the ways in which the LTTE had come to frame whatnarratives bound the community together and what dividedthem.

In one interview, through their persistent interrogation,the women had figured out finally who I was. My mother,Rajani Thiranagama, a Tamil doctor, university professor,and human rights activist, was one of the authors of thebook The Broken Palmyra (Hoole et al. 1990), which had im-partially documented atrocities by the Sri Lankan state, theIndian Peace Keeping Forces, and the LTTE. She was assassi-nated by the LTTE outside our home in Jaffna in September1989. In Sri Lanka, levels of fear among Tamils meant thatI always went through introductions so everyone was awareof who I was. In fact, this impartial position where I wasclearly opposed to both the LTTE and the state openeddoors for me. In Toronto, doing fieldwork, I found my-self on new ground. Like everybody else I could reinventmyself—or could I? The week after I became aware thatthe women had realized who I was, I returned to the Se-nior Women’s Association, suddenly nervous about walkinginto a place notorious for being an LTTE stronghold. Newshad spread fast. As I approached the community offices,one old man came out to welcome me and send his regardsto my grandfather, his former schoolteacher. Resigned tothe destruction of my anonymity, I walked in. More thanmy normal numbers of women were waiting for me. Theyasked me to turn on my recorder. One by one, each womantold me what they had thought when they heard about theLTTE murder of my mother. One said, “Because of whatyour mother did for us, you will always have a motherin this community” (conversation with author, August 14,2003). Then another said, “Now, let’s talk about the boys[the LTTE].” For two hours, for the first time, the womentalked about the LTTE, their recruitment practices, the fearand control under which they had lived in Jaffna, and theculture of violence they felt was growing within the com-munity. After that day, they never talked about “the boys”again.

I do not choose this one episode as “true memory” and“the real story,” submerged knowledge underneath an of-ficial story of suffering. For the women, it was only partof the many stories and memories they had. The stories ofalienation, of discrimination, and of fear of the Sri Lankan

Thiranagama • The Sri Lankan Tamil Diaspora in Canada 275

army and Indian forces were not made up. However, theframes by which suffering was narrativized and solidifiedas “cultural fact” served to marginalize some stories andhighlight others. Stories about Sri Lankan army and Indianarmy actions were no less true or genuinely felt than storiesabout the LTTE. But some memories were suffused witheffects of publicity and served to bind the community to-gether, while others had become more private and moredivisive.

In one session, I asked the women, “Do you tellyour grandchildren born here these stories?” (conversa-tion with author, October 2003). Their replies illustratedthe overdetermination of authorizing frames for personalmemories.

Raji: They don’t understand us at all. They won’t understand ourstories. First they have language problems. Their Tamil is not thatgood. And also they don’t want to understand us that much.Shanthi: My grandson is a big Tiger supporter. Because of hisparents, my children. They put LTTE stickers on their van, andthey go to all their events. For the children, it’s fun, you holdthe flag and sing the songs. They don’t know anything about thefights. [All agree.] They don’t have any interest in what actuallyhappened to Tamil people. They can talk like it, but really theydon’t understand the fighting. And my daughter doesn’t try tomake them understand it either. She just wants to be like everyoneelse. The children take it from their parents. And my children,they grew up mainly in Colombo so they don’t really rememberthat well either.Raji: We are also forgetting the situation. We are forgetting ourstories. Our old memories are going.Shanthi: All the things that happened to us. All the events. Weneed to scatter them outside. It sometimes feels like we haveforgotten them.Valliamma: See, then how will we even make our grandchildrenknow if we are forgetting them?Shanthi: In Canada, everyone has their own stories of the trou-bles. In the park, we old people sit, and after a while we starttalking. Now not so much after we have been here a while.Shanthi: [ . . . ] It is not as easy for us as they think at home. Westruggle here too. [conversation with author, October 2003]7

Criticism of the LTTE and talking openly about its atrocitiesagainst Tamils could not be aired in the same way withinthe community as those against the already well-demarcatedand external other: the Sri Lankan state. These stories allowpeople to express grief, brutal war experiences, and the dis-crimination they felt in Sri Lanka—the primary reasons thatpeople left. However, the narrative of collective victimiza-tion mobilized them behind the LTTE rhetoric of perpetualvictims, because the stories they find public space for turn onviolence perpetrated by outsiders rather than insiders—“theboys.” Even while war stories of communal suffering createa community that becomes united and tangible, the mobi-lization of these stories around the LTTE also makes themdisappear from view. The narrative of collective sufferingevocated in Toronto was already determined by the orga-nizing narrative propagated by the LTTE media and activiststhat clearly demarcated which suffering could be narratedand celebrated in public and which was to remain withinhomes and individuals.

CONCLUSION: THE PURITY OF TAMIL EELAMLet me now return to the young man who told his grand-mother that we should refer to Tamil areas in northern andeastern Sri Lanka not by their actual geographical names(Jaffna, Batticaloa, Vanni, etc.), nor by their personalizedrelationship as ur (home), but rather as Tamil Eelam, theLTTE’s projected homeland. This anecdote highlights themajor arguments of this article. First, I have argued that theexpansion and plebianization of migration is the fundamentalanxiety that haunts western Tamil diasporic communities.These migrants cling in the midst of downward mobilityto a cultural myth of respectability and dignity, which, as Iargue, the LTTE imaginatively and practically enables. Sta-tus anxieties have propelled culturalist imaginations of newcommunities in Toronto, who, through the actions of LTTE–affiliated organizations, have condensed the Tigers and theirimagined homeland, Tamil Eelam, into standing for Tamilcommunity life in general. LTTE celebrations and the civicnetwork of LTTE activism unites different fragments intoa cohesive actor—“the Tamil Diaspora”—toward which allcan donate and become part of a privileged authentic Tamilculture as opposed to the needy, suffering Tamils in SriLanka. While most Tamils did not explicitly espouse LTTEideology, inasmuch as the LTTE came to be the backboneof community life, people came to be complicit with andreaffirm the LTTE project of defending “Tamilness” mil-itarily in Sri Lanka and culturally in Toronto. Thus, thediasporic protests in 2009 that brandished LTTE flags andslogans were not only about Tamils stranded in Sri Lanka;they also expressed the uniting force and frame of Tamil lifein Toronto. The impossibility of Tamil Eelam enables thepossibility of life in Toronto. It is in this sense that whenwe grapple with diasporic communities, rather than assumea nostalgic innocuous and inevitable embrace of ethnona-tionalist homelands, we should place them within specifichistories, contemporary conflicts and fractures, and activemobilizing structures.

A final note: the elimination of the LTTE in 2009 hashad significant effects for my interlocutors. The feeling thatI describe in this article—that diasporic Tamils were betterable to and should represent Tamils in Sri Lanka—was epit-omized by elections held across diasporic locations (U.K.,Canada, Norway, France, etc.) in May of 2010 to electa “Provisional Transnational Government of Tamil Eelam”(Jeyaraj 2010). However, this Translation Goverment ofTamil Eelam (TGTE) is clearly identified with the LTTEand many of its most doctrinaire middle-aged activists andis spoken about as such. The subtleties by which the LTTEcame to represent Tamilness are no longer possible. Youngpeople I met in 2011 in Toronto had already begun to pokefun at some figures and their predictably LTTE line. The eraI document has ended for Tamil Canadians; the study of anew era with this legacy lies ahead.

Sharika Thiranagama Department of Anthropology, Stanford Uni-

versity, Stanford, CA 94305

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NOTESAcknowledgments. I would like to thank both editors and allanonymous reviewers at American Anthropologist who commented onvarious drafts of this article. Your comments have made the piecewhat it is. I am grateful to Beth Drexler who encouraged me to writethis and to all those who talked to me in Toronto.

1. See Anthias 1998 for how contemporary iterations of diaspora ashybridity rests on territorialized notions.

2. This was followed by shorter stints in Sri Lanka (2004, 2006,2011).

3. This makes them distinct from the formerly indentured dias-poric communities in the Caribbean, Africa, Pacific Islands, andMauritius, who are working class and come from a plurality oflanguages and Hindu and Muslim backgrounds (Eisenlohr 2006;Khan 2004).

4. Accessed via the Sri Lankan National Archives, Colombo.5. Bruland’s sample is one family.6. LTTE-affiliated organizations were also prominent in Tamil lan-

guage and arts children’s programming in Norway (Fuglerud2001:198).

7. All names used in this article are pseudonyms.

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