The Self at a Time of War in Northern Sri Lanka

The Self at a Time of War in NorthernSri Lanka1

SHARIKA THIRANAGAMA*

Abstract The article takes one young Tamil woman, Vasantha, and her account ofgrowing up in the northern war zone of Jaffna in Sri Lanka. Vasantha’s narrativeand her adolescence, like others of her generation, was framed by living at themargins of the Sri Lankan state (though under its bombardment) and under thecontrol of a repressive quasi-state actor, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam(LTTE). In this article, I twin Vasantha’s fashioning of her life-story with a medi-tation on the ways in which the Sri Lankan war, specifically LTTE control overTamil lives, has come to ambivalently frame and produce particular understand-ings of selfhood, articulations of collectivity and individuality. Here, I argue thatindividuation takes many different forms, and, specifically, that the ruptures ofwar produces individuation in unexpected ways. I take Vasantha’s story to expli-cate the experiences of young people in northern Sri Lanka, and, as an illustrationof the contraction and expansion of particular possibilities of selfhood in the midstof political.

*****

Over the years I will probably learn to have an understanding with myself aboutwhat I went through. When you are living in that time, living in this closed place thatis what life is about. So you never know anything different. I certainly didn’t. I don’tknow if anyone else did. That was normal because that is what you are growing upwith

[. . .] For a long time I thought that was normal, just how a human being is going tolive. That’s how my life is going to be

Vasantha

Vasantha is a Sri Lankan Tamil woman in her late twenties. For-merly from the northern warzone Jaffna, she is now living inLondon. She was 18 and her sister Sakuntala 14 when they cameto Britain as refugees after their parents died within six monthsof each other in Jaffna. In our interviews, Vasantha repeatedlyreturned to the years she had spent growing up in Jaffna in themidst of the Sri Lankan civil war as that which was most funda-mental to explain herself to me. Vasantha’s narrative and heradolescence, like others of her generation, was framed by living at

* Sharika Thiranagama is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the NewSchool for Social Research & Visiting Assistant Professor of Anthropologyat Stanford University (2011–2013). 6 East 16th Street, New York, NY10003. [email protected]/ [email protected]

Journal of Historical Sociology Vol. 26 No. 1 March 2013DOI: 10.1111/johs.12013

© 2013 Blackwell Publishing Ltd 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA02148, USA.

the margins of the Sri Lankan state (though under its bombard-ment) and under the control of a repressive quasi-state actor, theLiberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). In this article, I twinVasantha’s fashioning of her life-story with a meditation on theways in which the Sri Lankan war, specifically LTTE control overTamil lives, has come to ambivalently frame and produce par-ticular understandings of selfhood, articulations of collectivity andindividuality.

Examining individual narratives as a means to understand theself in South Asia has been contentious, having to contend with theDumontian legacy of viewing South Asian selves as primarily col-lective selves opposed to the radical individualism of the “West”(reviewed in Mines 1994, Arnold and Blackburn 2004). Leaving thisdebate aside, here I argue that individuation takes many differentforms, and, specifically, that the ruptures of war produces indi-viduation in unexpected ways. First, I argue that war itself recon-stitutes ongoing life projects in novel form. Secondly, I discussVasantha’s stories to understand the experiences of young north-ern Tamils and the contraction and expansion of particular possi-bilities of selfhood in the midst of political terror and war.

Wartime Subjectivity

War in Sri Lanka

Sri Lanka’s postcolonial history of state and minority relations hasbeen extensively documented elsewhere (e.g. Tambiah 1986,Spencer 1990 etc.,) so I am brief here. Continued anti-Tamil dis-crimination in postcolonial Sri Lanka gave rise in the 1970s tomultiple small Tamil militant groups calling for a separate Tamilhomeland comprising the Tamil majority areas of the north andeast (Krishna 1999). Popular support for militancy increased as aseries of anti-Tamil riots in 1977 and 1983 – following earlieranti-Tamil riots in 1956 and 1958 – pushed Tamil minorities to animpasse (Krishna 1999). The militarily brutal LTTE emergedsupreme in 1986, when it violently proscribed or absorbed othermilitant groups (Hoole et al. 1990).

War intensified in brutality in Sri Lanka from 1987 onwards,encompassing a period of occupation by Indian Peace KeepingForces (1987–1990) and three failed peace talks (1990, 1995, and2002) all of which consolidated and transformed the LTTE hold overnorthern and eastern Sri Lanka, and Tamils in Sri Lanka and thediaspora. The failure of peace negotiations in 1990 saw the LTTEsetting up a parallel state in areas they controlled, including ajudiciary, police force, and taxation system. The subsequent failure

20 Sharika Thiranagama

© 2013 Blackwell Publishing LtdJournal of Historical Sociology Vol. 26 No. 1 March 2013

of the 1995 peace talks saw the Sri Lankan army takeover ofnorthern Jaffna and the LTTE moving its capital to the Vanni regionin north-central Sri Lanka. The third peace talks begun in 2002had collapsed by 2004, moving Sri Lanka back into war. A newdimension emerged when the LTTE split into northern and easternfactions in 2004, the eastern faction eventually allying with thestate. In 2009, the Sri Lankan government began a renewed mili-tary campaign pushing the LTTE into a northeastern coastal strip.The LTTE took with them more than 300,000 civilians as humanshields. An immense crisis resulted. The LTTE forcibly conscriptedcivilians and shot those trying to escape to government territory.The Sri Lankan army bombarded the area where civilians werecrammed in temporary shelters and bunkers leading to immenseloss of life and injury (UTHR 2009) with the disputed death toll putat anything up to 40,000 (UN 2011). In May 2009, the LTTE leaderPrabhakaran and most of the senior leadership were killed by theSri Lankan army effectively ending the civil war. The agony for thecivilians who survived February to May 2009 did not end. The SriLankan government incarcerated them in insufficiently resourcedmass camps for security clearance. Most have now been released toareas destroyed by the war. However, a cautious militarized peacewithout political reconciliation is all that is currently offered by anever more triumphalist state.

Contemporary Sri Lankan Tamil society has been integrallytransformed by the civil war, especially through the rise of the LTTEas a repressive quasi-state entity. Contemporary scholarship hasbeen fascinated with the self-pronouncements of the LTTE, itsformer quasi-state structure, ritualizations, and its female suicidecadres (e.g. Schalk 1997, Trawick 2007, Stokke 2006) but hasconsequently naturalized the LTTE as expressions of Tamil culture(e.g. Roberts 1996).For example, Margaret Trawick’s (2007) EnemyLines exploring LTTE cadres in eastern Sri Lanka, analyses theLTTE as immanently expressing Tamil cultural themes2, refusing tosee the LTTE as a coercive, politically astute, militarized organiza-tion intent on mobilization on the ground. However, the key issueis, I argue, how to understand the intimate place of the LTTE withinTamil society without collapsing Tamils into the LTTE.

The LTTE’s violent political regulation has actively produced newpossibilities and alienations, significantly transforming Tamil lives.It inserted itself at the heart of Tamil society primarily through(forced and voluntary) recruitment. LTTE requisitioning of youngTamils from each family and its widespread intelligence networkand pervasive presence within the Tamil community led to a situ-ation where networks of trust amongst Tamils progressively shrunkas fear of others rose. The LTTE interceded in temple quarrels,

The Self at a Time of War in Northern Sri Lanka 21


between parents and children, in farming and fishing collectivesetc. It came to inhabit the inside of families and communities ratherthan the outside (the Sri Lankan state). Thus, the battlefields of thiswar also came to be the internal life of Tamil communities andfamilies (see Thiranagama 2011).

War as Object; War as Subject

Anthropological work in the 1990s such as Carolyn Nordstrom’s ADifferent Kind of War Story (1997) primarily highlighted the destruc-tive nature of war on social life, emphasizing ordinary people’sheroic creativity(1997, 115). War, here, is understood primarily asviolence (ibid). In his refutation of such approaches, StephenLubkemann argues that war is a complex social condition suggest-ing that: “rather than treating war as an “event” that suspendssocial processes, anthropologists should study the realization andtransformation of social relations and cultural practices throughoutconflict, investigating war as a transformative social condition”(2008, 10–11). Thus, Lubkemann argues ethnography of warsrather than assuming total devastation and suspension of socialprocesses should instead pay attention to “the reconfiguration ofthe social fields within which culturally scripted life projects areenabled” (ibid).

Stories from the northern Tamils and Muslims tell of an enor-mous difference between the years before war, yutham and after.The Indian Army, the Sri Lankan army and the LTTE and otherTamil militants, patrolled the streets with guns. People disappearedor died violently. There was mass internal and external displace-ment. People’s stories and accounts constantly named and clus-tered around yutham and gave war a thickness and agency. Thisyutham was described differently from the also frightening violenceof ethnic discrimination and anti- Tamil riots of the 1950, 70s and80s. Thus war appeared not as a continuum with other forms ofsocial life or forms of violence, but as a powerful and distinct forceand duration.

To understand the nature of this force in people’s lives, I takeinspiration from Judith Butler’s (1997) The Psychic Life of Powerand her reformulation of Foucauldian subjectification throughtheorizing the (Freudian) attachment and libidinal investment insubjection. As she suggests, unlike theories of power which seepower as something external pressing down on given individuals,Foucauldian “subjectification” sees power which subordinates asalso that which inaugurates. Subjection “activates” or “forms” thesubject through the “principle of regulation according to which asubject is formulated” (1997, 84). The subject that arises, however,



is not fixed in place, it “is the occasion for a further making” (1997,99). Her central argument in The Psychic Life of Power is that ifpower thus forms and activates the subject, then paradoxicallypower is also what “we depend on for our existence” (1997, 2) . Thisdependency produces an ambivalent attachment to that whichinjures us: “subjection consists precisely in this fundamentaldependency on a discourse we never chose but that, paradoxically,initiates and sustains our agency” (Butler 1997, 2). For Butler, thisambivalent attachment to subjection is the most “insidious’ psychiceffect of the operation of power (1997, 6–11). Because subjection assuch confers upon us existence, and we desire to be intelligible, wedesire existence as such (1997, 28, 104, 129–131; 2004). Thus,Butler’s account of the ambivalent passionate attachment to ourown categorization and interpellation into the social world –because of this existential longing to be intelligible and recognizedwhich propels our subjection – speaks very strongly to how onecould theorize the civil war in the lives of those I interviewed, asinjurious and yet productive and constitutive.

The war was presented, by those I interviewed, as belonging tono-one and yet to everyone; war had assumed a radical exteriority,a self-propelling force seemingly out of everyone’s control whichthen became an existential condition, a ‘thing’ in itself. This ‘thing’which could be described through bombing, forced displacement,rape, recruitment and so on, events that “happened to” one, wasalso, as people frequently described, something that happened“inside” one. The most common way of describing the war by Tamilswas to tell me of the fear that they felt towards other Tamils, unsureof who was LTTE or not: “There is no trust (nambikkai) amongstTamils anymore” people often said. Over thirty years, this unpre-dictable war became a normal negotiated everyday, providing ahorizon of meaning by which lives were understood and spoken of.Thus, while the war threatened lives in its very brutality, it consti-tuted multiple social processes and personas and as a “horizon ofmeaning” gave shared intelligibility to stories.

The new Muslim and Tamil identities which were producedthrough this war cannot now ( after the end of the war) evaporatebut have to contend and negotiate with the disappearance of thathorizon of meaning. By this, I do not suggest that my intervieweesdesired war, all constantly hoped for a life without war. It is ratherto understand with Butler, that existence as such is desired andthat what makes us and unmakes us is the site of ceaselesslygenerative ambivalent attachment/ investment. This account ofhow war grounds life even as it takes it away – producing newpeople, new possibilities of voice, forms of heroism – is central to mylarger work and Vasantha’s story.



Vasantha’s Story

Growing up at War: The Alienated Individual

Vasantha was born in 1979 in the northern peninsula of Jaffna toa middle class, upper caste family. Her mother was an outspokenprofessional, her father a gentle semi-retired man who devotedhimself to Vasantha and her sister. Vasantha’s parents were centralin her narratives about navigating her move from childhood toadolescence at a time of enormous change. Her adolescence untilher traumatic departure in 1998 were also the years of greatesttransformation in Jaffna. She was part of a “generation” of youngpeople who, in contrast to their parents, only knew Jaffna at war.

In the late 1980s and 90s, as combat intensified civilians inJaffna were subjected to food shortages, curfews, roundups andintense aerial bombardment (Hoole et al. 1990). This was accentu-ated by fighting (1987–1990) between the LTTE and the IndianPeace Keeping Forces (IPKF) sent to enforce the negotiated peace inthe Indo-Lanka accord. After the failure of the accord, exit of theIPKF, and breakdown of the 1990 peace talks, the LTTE took overlarge sections of the north and east, and was in full control ofnorthern Jaffna between 1990–1995. Jaffna’s landscape was trans-formed in these climactic years. Temples, churches, and schoolswere broken by shrapnel and shell damage. Coastline areas werecordoned by the Sri Lankan Army and LTTE as high security zones.A third to nearly two thirds of Jaffna’s population left the peninsula(McDowell 1996). Strictly controlled residential caste restrictionswere scrambled by internal displacement.

After 1990, the LTTE turned themselves into a quasi-state entityin the north, with their own police force, judiciary, taxationsystem, and cultural celebrations. Cadres patrolled the streets inuniforms and undercover amidst families and neighborhoods. TheLTTE placed their own “people” and supporters in fishing andfarming and other collectives. They sought to not only infiltrate,but actively reform sociation around their own structures. The SriLankan state manifested itself in Jaffna primarily as a coercivemilitary force attacking the north, and thus softened the priva-tions of life under LTTE control by giving the LTTE seeming neces-sity. Furthermore, in the absence of the state, LTTE enforcing oflaw and order in Tamil by Tamils seemed desirable in the midstof chaos.

Youth as a category became significant in multiple ways. Firstly,the LTTE regime undertook an intense institutionalization andpoliticization of “youth”. Vasantha and her peers were the centralfoci of LTTE attempts to actively create new subjects of an idealTamil Eelam (Tamil Homeland) who had to willingly sacrifice their



lives on the battlefield. Secondly, young people talked of theirexperiences, and were imagined by others, as the very personifica-tion of the war. Older people described war as forcing new expedientpractices. However, they talked differently of their children as ifdirect products of war time life. Children were the figures throughwhich people disseminated common-sense sociologies about whatwas happening to them; young people became indices of socialchange.3 Thirdly, rapid transformation of landscapes and possibi-lities in war opened up an immense experiential gap betweengenerations.Vasantha realized that the Jaffna she knew was expo-nentially different from her parents’ prior experiences: Uthayan, inhis forties, told me

For you and your generation none of you know what Jaffna was like in peacetime.Now for us, we have gone around it freely. . . . remembered when the army was notthere, when there were no arms on the street.

With constant bombardment, children grew up detecting theminute different sounds of bombs, shells, cicadas, fireworks fromeach other. For Vasantha, the shock of the first use of the silentSupersonic bomber by the Sri Lankan government was the betrayalof an already understood bodily reflex.

I remember the first time Supersonic bomber bombed. We were just sitting there andthen dedum, we didn’t hear it, and we were like ‘what’s happened?’ Then we werejust sitting there shocked. Nobody moved, nobody ducked we were just sitting there.Then somebody screamed [. . ..] it was very close to us, a few yards away.

Daily routines were improvised and yet routinized around LTTErecruitment possibilities, government military attacks, the lack ofmost food stuffs and imports, and, the predictably constant unpre-dictability of bombing, shelling, and death.

The schools were going on as usual. If there was bombing in your area then youwouldn’t go to school. They will say they are going to have fights. On other days wewould go.

Normal in some senses then signified civilian adaption to exigen-cies, the art and techniques of everyday life. At the same time it alsosignified the predictability of the arbitrary violence and death thatalso characterised life in Jaffna at the time.

Vasantha clung to her mother’s stories of adolescence that wasunlike the militarised landscape she knew

My mother was really worried and she was trying to tell me that there was this otherlife that she grew up without this pressure. Even though they had racism, they hadproblems with riots and things but she was saying there was no worrying about



what you can read or write or what exactly what you can talk about [. . .] You knowmy mother would tell stories and it was like magical days, but that was normalitybut I just didn’t know that was normality. I think for my mother it was such a sadthing because she felt like she couldn’t let her children enjoy all these things in life.

Children’s relationship to their parents and adults was complicatedby the inability of adults to be able to protect them. In situations ofbombing and curfew, adults were equally vulnerable as childrenand the desire for safety and protection had to be counterbalancedwith the knowledge that very few could provide it. Vasanthadescribes this and her parents, however, with tenderness,

Even though there were struggles and things we were going through. . . . they werethere. It doesn’t make sense, my father is not superman, he is not going to stop thebombs falling on us, but they were there to take care of us.

The most critical differences in generational experiences, struggles,and expectations were produced by the existential dilemma LTTErecruitment presented in the lives of every young person. The LTTEimposed harsh pass-laws and restrictions on leaving for thosebetween the ages of 10–25.4 Many families were unable to leave thenorth. Vasantha’s family was told that her parents and her sistercould leave Jaffna if they left Vasantha behind for the LTTE orfound an equivalent child as a guarantor for the LTTE. Those whowere able to circumvent these pass laws were either connected tothe LTTE, able to bribe LTTE cadres, and/or from middle-classfamilies who already had family abroad. Even those who managedto get an LTTE pass had to then navigate the Sri Lankan armycheckpoints on the other side of no-man’s land. In governmentterritory, Tamils were equally at risk, suspected to be LTTEmembers and facing arrest and torture.

Pass laws served recruitment; as adult voluntary recruitmentdecreased, the LTTE stepped up their recruitment of children (HRW2004).5 Children were saturated with images that valorized milita-rization; the Jaffna Kittu memorial park for children was built withseesaws in the shapes of machine guns (UTHR 1994). Childrenwere the focus of national building events: one of the most commonpictorial representations of the LTTE all over Jaffna was of an LTTEcadre holding children and walking towards a hilltop with a gunplanted upside down (UTHR 1995). Vasantha recalled the wargames that all the children played, and the ones she played withour other childhood friend,

At the back of the house we used to play games. We used to have these trainingsessions. We would have camp and camp attacks. This was when I was ten, eleven.I used to play with the boys. . . .



Parents lived in the fear that their children would be either forciblyconscripted or run away to join the LTTE. Rajesh, who avoidedjoining the LTTE himself, told me of his and his parent’s continualfear that his teenage brother would join. Parents, even while sup-porting the LTTE feared recruitment, as Rajesh told me: “Nowoutside they’ll talk: one person will tell another person’s child, yougo and fight for the movement, but will they let their own childrengo? Of course not”.

Many told stories of young people who would threaten theirparents that they would join the LTTE if they did not get their way(see Boyden 2007 on eastern Batticaloa). Family disputes didindeed push many young people towards the LTTE (Boyden 2007)but these stories were also apocryphal stories. Stories of childrenbeing able to demand things from their parents through the LTTEbecame stories about generational relationships for the youngpeople who passed these stories on. Awareness of the LTTE’s powerover adults lay like a ghost within the family. Youth became imbuedwith a diffused agency in potentia, an agency which also put themin thrall to the LTTE.

The major recruitment drives were in schools, where freeperiods were kept for LTTE visits. Education as the primarymeans for mobility, employment and self-improvement has beendeeply embedded within Jaffna Tamil culture from the late nine-teenth century onwards (Arasaratnam 1994). Until the war, Jaffnaconsistently had the highest school attendance figures in theisland (Kearney and Miller 1985: 90). Thus, the LTTE targeted oneof the most socially significant spaces within Jaffna society, and,young people struggling to fulfil the expectations of their familiesat a time of privation with little possibility of that educationleading to further success. These were spaces filled with desire,aspiration, guilt and fear of failure, as well as a space of cama-raderie and alliance against adults. Instead, the LTTE offeredopportunity to all. Frustrated education was placed in oppositionto glorious “heroism”; albeit a dangerous and valorised route thatparticularly appealed to the teenagers it was designed for (Boyden2007). Moreover, anger with the continuing military barrage by theSri Lankan Army seemed to many young people present them withlittle alternatives. Instead, the LTTE promulgated images of itselfas highly disciplined and self-sacrificing. It valorised death as theultimate sacrific: renaming the Tamil word for suicide thatkolai asthatkodai “the gift of oneself” in its suicide squads (Schalk 1997).It presented as an ordered authoritarian vision of society at a timeof war when the experiences of debilitating change was a perma-nent pervasive feature of growing up. At the same time, as Vas-antha and others told me, stories also circulated about how one



could not leave the LTTE once you had joined, and the brutaltraining and routine beating into submission that characterisedtheir military structures (Human Rights Watch 2004). Many youngpeople attempted to find ways to steer clear of recruitment,though it was not always possible.

Vasantha herself had always distanced herself from the LTTE.Her parents, particularly her mother, were very critical of the LTTErepression and so significantly she had access to an alternativeworld at home. Moreover, Vasantha is by instinct nonconformist.On one occasion the LTTE female cadre had come to her girls’school for a recruitment event. All the girls were assembled to listento the cadres, who exhorted them to join the LTTE and to fight anddie for the nation. Seeing Vasantha smile, one cadre had asked hersharply why she was laughing. Stung, Vasantha had stood and said“I was just wondering if we are all meant to be dying for TamilEelam, who will be around to enjoy it?” Other girls had concealedtheir smiles, and the cadre had rejoindered “it is people like youwho let down our nation”. Vasantha, summoned to the headmis-tress’ office, was upbraided and asked “if she wanted to end upcausing trouble like her mother” a reference to her own mother’soutspokenness.

Pervasive LTTE control over public life was a feature of all inter-views. Interviewees told me that all words outside of small circles oftrust had to be measured carefully in case the other person was anLTTE supporter and would inform on one. For many, the only safespace was inside their family homes. Furthermore, the LTTE pro-duced and circulated their own films and music. Thus, the LTTEregime was aural and visual too. One went to school, tuition classes,played cricket, football, and other school games, and listened toLTTE music and watched LTTE films. Many young people also foundplaces to hang around, to chat and engage in passing time together,but they were also wary of being caught by the LTTE in any largenumber and subjected to scolding about not fighting, or forced to goand do labor for the LTTE.

However, as Vasantha herself pointed out, her own sense ofgrowing dissonance was twinned with a tacit acceptance that thiswas their world.

The rest of the school boys and girls this was all they grew up with, so the Tigers waspart of the government for them, even for me. I did not know anything different untilyou come and see the other side. But I can still see that some of the things they weredoing wasn’t right. It’s almost like living in a place where everything is controlled.

[. . . .] I knew, when you are thirteen, fourteen, you are learning. I could see thingschanging. And I’m thinking Ok, is this how the rest of my life is going to be? ShowingID, going to sentry point. And you just think that’s how it’s going to be. It’s notsomething you can change so you accept it.



Within this prosaic and alienated acceptance of reality, trying todiscern dissent is less a matter of open rebellion and more a subtleunderstanding of dissent but also accommodation with, for youngpeople, their everyday world.

Nonetheless, if young people were more vulnerable to LTTErecruitment they also did not have utopian visions of militancy. TheLTTE was a deeply normative force for them which provided norma-lised routes of power and recognition. No wonder that young peoplelike Vasantha traduced their lives as examples of the ambivalenceagencies of war, simultaneously the targets and instruments ofpower.

Vasantha talked of her adolescence as an increasingly alienatedinterior life, in which her commonsense understanding of how tosurvive that world simultaneously appeared as a strange adaptionto a life that had no outside to it. Her narratives about her ownsubjective understandings of her society serve most basically toreiterate that the individual self is never merely composed of cul-tural frames, influences and motivations of necessity alone, a dan-gerous assumption in highly politicized situations which hasnonetheless predominated in current analyses of the LTTE (e.g.Trawick 2007). Simultaneously, Vasantha’s notion of herself as anindividual was formed around the kind of political regulation shegrew up in: conversations traced a disassociation, alienation, andthe construction of a divergent interior and exterior self which wasin fact a hallmark of many of my interviews of Jaffna Tamils.Suggesting that particular moments of social transition, extendedor rapid, propel some meanings of what individuals are or can dowith more urgency than others, I argue that the civil war hasreinvested the possibility of being an individual for Tamils in unex-pected ways.

If, as Mattison Mines (1994) argues in his ethnography of “bigmen” in South India that it is commonly believed among SouthAsians that all individuals are not born equal and that individualityis achieved, then the immense upheavals of war and displacementhave altered traditional routes of achievement of individuality. Forexample, recruitment of dalits into the LTTE, displacement of resi-dential caste segregation and overseas migration for a wider cat-egory of people meant that achievement and recognition of statusand individuality was dramatically widened. The war both revealedmore starkly the contradictions between selves and collective obli-gations and simultaneously made it possible for more to see them-selves as individual actors.

Furthermore, internal repression by the LTTE has also rendered“the individual” as a site of tactical contraction. As the LTTEstamped down on public protests and independent organisations



and groups, expressions of discontent, dissent, and the sharingof secrets moved into individual lives and the home. Distrust ofother Tamils, fearing that others could be undercover LTTE orcould report one to the LTTE, meant that people constantly dis-sected conversations with others. People told me of how conversa-tions required a participating self and another self inside whoconstantly evaluated the other person, their intentions, anddecided what could be shared and not. Tamils were constantlytrying to advise me on how I should speak and what I shoulddeduce from others. Sritharan, a human rights activist told me“everybody is reading between the lines, thinking that you arefooling them and they are fooling you”. I found that sarcasm inprivate, and, double and secret intonations in public were pervasivefeatures of public life, as has been reported widely elsewhere inrepressive regimes (e.g. Wedeen 1999). Alienation from sharedassumptions put the notion of individual navigation more squarelyon the table.

The repression of independent collective political and social orga-nization and reification of the LTTE as the supreme collectiveemphasized dissent as “individual selfishness”. For the LTTE,refusing to pay taxes, be recruited, saying public criticisms amongother activities were marks of selfish individuals who chose them-selves over the greater good of the Tamil nation and its necessarycollective sacrifices. Refusals or seeming presentations of oneself asan distinct individual were translated as potential expressions ofdissent, investing such expressions with macabre significance andpower. Thus LTTE targeted terror at individuals and families putindividual responsibility and biography at the centre of narratingdissent.

This equivalence between acting as an “individual” with one’sown moral compass and “dissent” meant that in interviews, peoplehad a heightened consciousness of the complexity of relationsbetween the self and collectivity and the sensation of a dissonancebetween private and public faces and speech which propelled alien-ated individuation and introspection. This did not create a dead-ened sociality; instead sociality became ever more intense when inseeming scarcity. Thus implicit in my retelling of individual storiesis not only an acknowledgement of the empirical phenomena ofmultiple persons as historical and social agents (Holland and Lave2001), but also the intense politicisation of the idea of having anindividual biography and private face.

This understanding of what it meant to grow up at war and themeanings given to forms of individuality in LTTE controlled Jaffna,was particularly emphasized in Vasantha’s accounts of the erasureand emergence of forms of collectivity in civil war.



Collective Life and Mass Movement

Vasantha often spoke of the togetherness and community in herneighbourhood and her own position as a child there. One recol-lection was of sheltering from bombing in shared bunkers,

I remember as a child, I remember building the bunker in-between those twohouses. It was like an overnight event. S – Aunty had lots of girls staying with herand I loved hanging around there. It was in our house that we were building thebunker. We had the big lanterns, really powerful and people were making tea. . . . Wewent to bed so late. [. . . .]

My father always used to let me sleep in the morning. He used to say “kids only growif they sleep properly”. . . . Once in the morning they started bombing and everyonewas in the bunker. Half an hour later. . . . everyone realised that I was not there andI’m still in bed. . . .

My mother was screaming. My father was waking me up and by the time he got meup there was a helicopter. It was literally in front of our home. My father is rushingme into the bunker and I could see the man’s face in there. He didn’t shoot becauseit was just me and my father and everyone in the bunker was screaming becausethey thought they were going to bomb us.

I remember being so scared and also at the same time like “cool I saw the army”.[laughs] It was so stupid. Then I remember my mother giving me a hug and then aslap. ‘How could you not get up, how stupid’. I was like “none of you saw the army”,and my father was “yeah, yeah that was cool”. My mother was looking at both of uslike she could kill us.

War, Vasantha told me, had brought many closer together as oneshared common fears and risks. Yet, this intimacy was still struc-tured by social differentiations, from the ethnic one of Tamil andMuslim (Thiranagama 2011) to that of caste which had organised aresidential segregation that war and profound displacement con-stantly threatened. For young people like Vasantha, these hypocri-sies were made obvious in wartime. Vasantha remembered abombing that had caused a bunker to collapse close to where she hadlived where an oppressed-caste family had been trapped inside.Vasantha recalled how her neighbors stood outside their houseswaiting for the municipal workers to arrive instead of rushing to helppersonally as they would have done in the case of any other family,especially as there were children trapped in the bunker. Her angrymother had finally forced two young men to come with her and begundigging the family out. Her neighborhood’s attitude haunted Vasan-tha particularly when it was turned against her. As a teenager,Vasantha had pursued a relationship with a boy of a “lower caste”.Neighbors came constantly to inform her father and to tell himthat they did not want “such people” to be hanging around in theirroads. Her father, to Vasantha’s relief, refused to discipline her. In arapidly transforming peninsula, caste could not be contained under



manageable residential distance any longer. Instead, caste becameopenly visible as displacement and war threatened to constituteoverwhelmingly collective experiences. Fear of this collectivity con-stantly reinstated longings for caste segregation even while narra-tives of common suffering under war were reproduced.

Instead, Vasantha’s accounts of mass displacement were themoments where she moved from talking about herself and “I” tomake her own story emblematic of Tamils more generally. The mostcommon experience of war related by all Tamils is movement. WhileJaffna itself was historically the site of migration for employmentfrom the nineteenth century onwards, the war saw unprecedentedinternal displacement and the creation of a sizeable refugeediaspora. In 2004, estimates suggest that one in two Sri LankanTamils have been displaced, and, nearly one in four live outside thecountry (Sriskandarajah 2004). Jaffna saw two major forced move-ments: the 1990 Eviction of Muslims from the North (70,000–80,000)and the 1995 Exodus of Tamils from Jaffna city (450,000–500,000)both ordered by the LTTE. From 2004, internal displacement roseeven more dramatically in the battle for eastern and northern SriLanka. Vasantha’s accounts of collective displacement are stories ofimmense suffering, but unlike her other memories, they are alsoof survival measures taken together in crowds, groups, and briefalliances. They were stories of experience fashioned en-masse.

For Vasantha, the most formative experience was the 1995“Exodus”. After the failure of peace talks in 1994, in 1995, the SriLankan army was despatched to capture LTTE controlled Jaffnacity. Vasantha was studying for GCSE’s, and her father had justreturned home after a serious heart attack. As the army came closeto Jaffna city, the LTTE announced on the 30th of October that theentire population of Jaffna Town must leave. It told the interna-tional audience that the people had chosen to leave of their ownvolition unable to live under the Sinhalese. The town was a town ofrefugees, both from previous years and those fleeing the bombing inthe rural areas. Around 450,000 people were forced to leave on foot,on the Chemmani/Kandy road through the bottleneck of the pen-insula (UTHR 1996). It took the LTTE two weeks to clear a recal-citrant, unwilling population out of Jaffna Town. By the time the SriLankan army arrived in Jaffna on November 16, for the first time inover six-hundred years, Jaffna Town was empty. The Exodus is anunforgettable event for all Jaffna Tamils, it happened to almost allof them and every family has an exodus story including my own.

When the announcement came, Vasantha’s parents wanted tostay as her father was too weak to travel. They sent Vasantha andher sister and their housemaid with a family friend leaving with theothers walking on the Chemmani road winding through one small



bridge that crossed the narrow bottleneck of the peninsula. It wasmonsoon time and rains pounded muddy flooded roads and the searose.

I started to cry because I don’t know what’s going to happen, my parents are stayinghere, I’m going to Chavakachcheri and they say that they are going to come later, butI don’t know what’s going to happen. . . . Then I see the LTTE blocking half of thebridge. . . . Half is occupied by the LTTE and half by the people. So the people aregoing on bikes, little motorbikes, and bullock carts and walking with bags on theirheads and all the things they could take and they don’t know where they are going,to a school or whatever it is, they are moving there. And then we see the LTTE’s carsand vans and all the things they confiscated from the people and they are filled, filledwith stuff.

Vasantha recalled,

They were ruthless and that time people were very angry. People were saying ‘are theynot fighting? Why are they withdrawing? Because that’s what it looked like. Peoplewere starting to talk about it. I remember telling this uncle who was taking us ‘whyare they withdrawing if they are going to fight for us then why are they withdrawing?’and then this other man who was passing by, and he turned and looked at me. I’llnever forget his face because it’s sort of agreeing with me but he never thought aboutit straight away but I had said it out loud. So he’s thinking now ‘why’?

Vasantha remembered this moment vividly. In another’s eyes, shetraces the recognition that she had said out loud what he wasthinking. At the moment of complete erasure of Jaffna a new strangesense of collectivity briefly flared. For Vasantha who had beenfeeling alienated from others and at odds with what she saw asprevailing opinion, it was here, that she found a moment of accep-tance. The upheaval of mass displacement threatened the individualalienation and the fear of others that informed mundane life in thewar. As a mob, Tamils became restive and rebellious throwing off theconformity of previous years. The human rights group UTHR(J)related how Tamils started shouting and protesting at the LTTE forthe first time openly showing their anger (1996).

Vasantha’s parents failed in their attempt to stay in Jaffna. TheLTTE insisted on clearing them with all the others who had beggedto stay in their homes,

People didn’t want to go. People said ‘we live or we die, let us die in our own home’,especially old people. And also they didn’t know where to go to . . . my mother beggedthem “if I take my husband he will die, he is really ill he can’t move”. But there wasno arguing with them, they had guns and they were ruthless, they are startedbeating up some man who was arguing. . . .

It was so crowded; my mother said that people were stepping on people. . . . awoman had actually dropped her baby, my mother couldn’t see her but she couldhear her screaming. . . . nobody could stop and help her out because you couldn’t



move. . . . Nobody could rescue anyone. It was raining so badly that day. . . . Myfather’s state was bad, he was really tired. . . . This is one of the reasons he [later]ended up having another heart attack.

Luckily Vasantha’s family ended up in one end of the peninsulain her father’s ancestral village, rather than in the north centralarea of the Vanni where the LTTE had moved its new headquartersand where refugees moved into makeshift camps. Six months laterin 1996, over 200,000 Tamils from all directions defied the LTTE’sban on return and fled back home to forbidden army territory.

Even though the army was in Jaffna, the Tigers had told us that they were stillfighting for it and that the Army wouldn’t let you in. So nobody tried to go back. Thenthese few families were the first to go. They literally packed up their bags andescaped. And what they had found is that the Army is letting people go and one ofthem came back to get his family and the news spread. And then we keep hearingthis, my mother was saying “let’s go, I’m not staying here”. If you go, everybody’s ideawas, if you go in there, then you can get out wherever you want to go. If you go intothe area controlled by the government then you can move, there is no passsystem.

Vasantha’s dream of “you can get out wherever you want to go” wastestament to how the control of movement was the hallmark of wartime life for most.

When Vasantha and her family went home, their house and allthe other houses in the neighbourhood had been raided by theLTTE, opportunistic looters and the army:

They had raided the houses after we left . . . When we got home all our clothes werepiled up like a mountain. They had been through our stuff they had taken stuff.Even tables they had turned the other way around. . . . It was everyone’s house. Nextdoor neighbour’s things were in our house. It took us weeks to clean. . . . The housewe were living in, it was private land, and there was four houses around us, and thenwe all came in, all our stuff was in this private lane, so we were all picking up ourstuff as we were coming in. That was horrible. Tables and sofas you can’t pick up,but you’re looking, ‘that’s ours’ ‘that is yours’. Of course all your neighbours youhaven’t seen for seven eight months and of course when we left we all got lost sonone of us knew what had happened to the others. . . . It changed a lot of people’slives there.

The returnees were cautious, especially young people like Vasanthawho had only known the LTTE:

When we came back it was the start of something new. You see, for years and yearswe had never been part of the government. . . . We heard these scary stories that theArmy is going to rape you or kill you. . . .

Army controlled Jaffna did indeed prove to be fraught with multipleincidents and violations (see UTHR 1998). Eighteen months later



Vasantha’s father died from a heart attack, and six months after thather mother was attending a meeting between the army and localJaffna council officials, including the then mayor, when an LTTEbomb designed to destroy collaboration killed them all.6 After Vas-antha’s parents died, she and Sakuntala went to Britain where hermother’s family lived.

We got to Colombo by ship. I remember that day well because it was just me and mysister leaving, we are standing there waiting for the Red Cross people and they calledour names and I was feeling responsible for the first time in my life. My sister wasonly eleven. I remember our godfather saying ‘be good girls, be very good girls’. Ithink he was so sad. Funnily enough I cried. . . .

My uncle got a trishaw and the private lane that we were going on, all the people stoodout and waved, and everyone was crying. We were so close to the neighbourhood.Everyone was crying. We were crying and we felt this great departure of our life. Likea great journey. It’s like a movie because we were leaving. You are not sure what thedestination is going to be, you don’t know who is going to come and pick you up.Everything was uncertain, trusting someone you don’t know and you are leaving.

I remember getting on the ship, my first ship journey. It was a cargo ship but it feltlike a cruise. Once the ship started going, I went on the deck and stood there reallygetting scared. It didn’t sink in until about an hour after I got on the ship that Irealised, that I don’t know what the fuck I am doing. I don’t really have anyone inColombo. I can’t speak the language, I don’t have that much money and if thesepeople don’t come to get me [her mother’s family in London] what the hell am I goingto do? Really, really terrified. . . .

I remember my sister . . . I remember hugging her and telling her “it’s going to bealright, I will look after you”, because she started crying halfway through thejourney. I was really feeling the responsibility and thinking I just want a sister whoI can fight, because that was the story previously; an annoying little sister. But thenI had to take care of her. It was a scary feeling.

Vasantha presents the two common motifs of departure thatoccur in most of the stories I heard. She leaves in the Exodus,surrounded by others; they walk as a mob towards a collectiveunknown destination. This image of mass displacement andmemory of forced migration contrasts with her departure to go toColombo and abroad. Here she and her sister leave alone wavinggoodbye to others, leaving the neighbourhood, their departuretraces the slow haemorrhaging of population from Jaffna. Shearrives thus in London, to an unclear future. Revisiting the Exodusis painful after the final battles in 2009 where the LTTE forced330,000 civilians to march with them as human shields and theSri Lankan army used heavy weaponry on those civilians in theirbid to destroy the LTTE (UTHR 2009) It is in these moments thatTamils describe how their individual survival was linked to collec-tive survival, and that both were inimical to the survival of the LTTE(ibid). The 200,000 who returned to Jaffna in 1995 were luckier but



similar to the thousands fleeing LTTE territory in 2009 even as theLTTE shot at them, coming to a fate in government controlled landwhich is still uncertain. Then and now, it was not the LTTE nor theSri Lankan government who ensured the safety of Tamils, butunarmed individuals and their families, without adequate water orfood, who nonetheless ran, waded, and hid in small groups andattempted to protect themselves. Paradoxically, it is in thesemoments of erasure that some forms of collectivity have flared, evenif evanescent, and in which forms of togetherness non-identicalwith the more heavily framed LTTE re-presented Tamil nation haveemerged through rupture.

Conclusion: “I Miss It . . . [That Life]”

Upon arrival in London, Vasantha and Sakuntala had initiallystayed with her mother’s family, but Vasantha ran away after badtreatment at their hands. She managed to find herself a job and putherself through university, doing a BA and an MA. Forbidden tohave contact with Sakuntala by her family, nonetheless Vasanthamade a home in which Sakuntala joined her. Now a successful anddynamic professional, Vasantha made a new life and new friendsfor herself in a new country. Yet, as Vasantha told me,

Who would I talk to? The people who live here, unless you go through it withsomeone . . . I talk to you, but you have a particular interest in the subject. Thereis no way that Aunty would understand. Even though I can explain to Sam andMona, they would never understand the extent of this thing, for them it’s like theLord of the Rings III. It’s not something they can grasp. It’s not their fault. I don’thave Sri Lankan friends who used to live there.

Her difficulties talking to her middle-aged Sri Lankan landlady“Aunty”, whom she lodged with after leaving her mother’s family,were political. The Sri Lankan community in London was composedof a number of different phases of migration from different periodsin the civil war with concomitantly quite different understandingsof the conflict and the Sri Lanka they had left behind (Daniel andThangarajah 1995). Often different sets of migrants found eachother’s experiences difficult to understand in such a rapidly chang-ing situation. Not least, Vasantha rebelled against the diasporicreconstruction of conservative forms of community through food,cultural events, temple visits, arranging marriages etc. Vasanthafound most diasporic Tamils pro-LTTE and unwilling to listen toher stories of LTTE controlled Jaffna, and felt that the diasporiccommunity were lost in a Tamil nationalism that refused to acceptthe brutalities of the war as the actual reality that Vasantha andothers experienced.



In turn, whilst the complete author of her own experiences to herfriends where she was the only voice and the dictator of all termsand meanings of her experience, Vasantha nonetheless foundherself feeling disempowered. She explained to me that she endedup sounding as if she was telling “story of tragedy after tragedy” andyet it had not been like that for her.

Instead, in our formal interviews Vasantha chose to present thewar as her life story. Our shared experiences in the war drew ustogether; it gave her story intelligibility as a life rather than as anexotic tragedy. Vasantha’s difficulties are also not uncommon.There was something about the intensity and specificity of herexperiences which made it difficult for her to share them with thosewho had not experienced them. This is a much wider phenomenon,especially for those who become refugees and cut off from theirformer worlds. While, Vasantha was physically safe, her life and lifegoals achievable, nonetheless she frequently felt her past wasshorn of meaning in her present life. She had never known peace-time Jaffna, so her memories of past life and childhood in Jaffna,happy and sad, were integrally connected to the war. Jaffna is theonly place she has known her parents. Safe in London, Vasanthanonetheless described it as the site of her orphanhood and intenseloneliness. In our first interview Vasantha told me, “I don’t havefeelings of home anymore. . . . it has nothing to do with what I havebecome”. Jaffna was too far away she said. However, another timeshe told me of the impossibility of forgetting her experiences inJaffna; “I can’t forget it, how can I? It’s a part of me, it has shapedme, and I can’t forget any of my experiences. How can I?”. The warhaunted her in its absence as it had done in its presence, it was thehorizon of meaning that had produced her as the person she wasand given her intelligibility even as it had threatened her survival:as she said, “it’s like another life. I miss it sometimes. It’s weird asshitty as it was, I miss it”.

In this essay, I attempt to understand the relationship betweenfirstly, the reflexive consciousness of the individual, and secondly,the social and political conditions as well as narratives (of power)out of which selves can become visible. I ask, what are the framesas well as specific individual biographies that emerge through andof war? Through Vasantha’s story among others, I have sought, toillustrate how war, in Sri Lanka as elsewhere, produced particularforms of self-formation and creation, forms of extreme isolation, aswell as new forms of collectivity and recognition. I reproduce Vas-antha’s stories of wartime and displacement, both to “tell her story”but also because her story is emblematic of particular experiencesfor one generation of young people in Jaffna, that of fear of recruit-ment, distrust of others, profound displacement, and the sense of



being trapped in a world not of their own choosing but that whichthey and their bodily and social instincts were undeniably theproduct of. These stories illustrate, as I suggest, how people talkedof the war as both “happening to them”, as an external force overwhen they had little power, and as “making them”, formative expe-riences waged within communities and families. The war thus wasexperienced as external, and as internal. It was however a war inwhich being young brought ambivalent agency, where young peoplefound their own agency valorised, even as this agency was that ofthe potential to die for the nation.

Perhaps, it is not then surprising that Vasantha felt so ambiva-lent about Jaffna, it was both what she had fled from, and yet it waseverything that she sought to retell when I asked her about her life.

There are times when I feel I owe a lot to my country, how I was brought up, how itmade me strong and able to cope, but then I think maybe I have a lot to thank myparents for, but not my country [. . .] we have no choice we cannot forget. I wish Icould forget a lot of things that has happened. Even though there are plenty of goodmemories of my childhood, little things.

Vasantha repeats, what I encountered with others, where thedesire “to forget” was more often mentioned than “to remember”.Yet, if granted, that forgetting would be of her own “becoming”. Thisis the ambivalence of being shaped by war, the qualities of personone becomes to deal with that war are at the same time one’strauma, and marks of that war. As new realities are slowly unfold-ing in Sri Lanka - the end of three decades of civil war if not ofanti-Tamil discrimination – there is real need to understand thisyounger generation who, products of this war, could possibly createa more peaceful Sri Lanka.

Notes

1 The research for this article was enabled by an ESRC postgraduatestudentship. The article benefitted immensely from the comments of Naya-nika Mookherjee, three anonymous reviewers, and Thomas Blom Hansen.The greatest thanks are for “Vasantha” for everything past, present, andfuture.

2 Trawick problematically analyzes Sri Lankan Tamil society along thesame lines as her work on South Indian literary traditions, poetry andforms of love (Trawick 1992).

3 See Durham (2000) for a larger discussion of youth as indices ofchange in African contexts.

4 Amnesty International 1996 (http://web.amnesty.org/library/pdf/ASA370081996ENGLISH/$File/ASA3700896.pdf).

5 Human Rights Watch’s 2004 report states that “assessments ofLTTE soldiers killed in combat during the 1990’s found that between



40 and 60 percent of the dead fighters were children under the age ofeighteen” (http://hrw.org/reports/2004/srilanka1104/). See also www.child-soldiers.org.

6 The LTTE murdered three successive Jaffna mayors in the late 1990s.

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Documents

The Self at a Time of War in Northern Sri Lanka