Journal articles on the topic 'Malaiyaha Tamil (Sri Lankan people)'

Sri Lanka is a multi-communal country that consists of four major ethnicities, namely: Sinhalese, Tamils and Muslims.The country has experienced several ethnical conflicts and riots since 1948. As a result, certain literary works in post-colonial Sri Lankan literature deals with war and ethnic conflicts in Sri Lanka. On this basis, this study was conducted to analyze the post-colonial Sri Lankan English literature in relation to ethnical conflicts in Sri Lanka. This study was an analytical research. In this study, the poem “Gajaga wannama” and the drama “Rasanayagam’s Last Riot” were analyzed to identify how the post-colonial Sri Lankan English literature describes nugatory ethnical violence against minorities in Sri Lanka. According to the review and analysis of the literary works such as the poem “Gajaga wannama” and the drama “Rasanayagam’s Last Riot”, several anti-minorities conflicts and riots have been recorded in the Sri Lankan history since 1948. Especially, the 1983 July riot was the massive anti-Tamil violence which was led by the fundamental thugs and mobs with the support of the United National Party government. Based on the analysis of the selected poem and drama, it is obvious that Tamil People lived Colombo, the Capital City of Sri Lanka were brutally killed and their assets and belongings were destroyed over a night following a bomb blast carried out by the Liberation of Tiger Tamil Ealam (LTTE) in the Northern part of Sri Lanka. This riot is primarily concerned with the nugatory anti-minority’s violence in Sri Lanka.

Charting the life course of Malathi, a young Sri Lankan Tamil woman, this article attempts to discuss the ways in which people and places in Sri Lanka are remade through experiences of violence. The article suggests moving away from a notion of 'home' as fixed on one place; instead, it considers the movement of people between different places. Further, it suggests that senses of home are also embedded within uneasy, constantly negotiated relationships with those people with whom we feel at home. Moreover, the article argues that ideas about 'the future' as equally as 'the past' inform the possibility of being at home.

This study discusses the reflection of Indian’s Athithi Devo Bhava policy towards Sri Lankan Tamil refugees during the hostility staged in the island since 1983. The enduring Indian practices of tolerance and goodwill resulted in following a benevolent policy towards all those who sought asylum. In ancient India, there were four cultural maxims: (1) Matru Devo Bhava, your mother is like God; (2) Pitru Devo Bhava, your father is like God; (3) Acharya Devo Bhava, your teacher is like God, and (4) Athithi Devo Bhava, your guest is like God. The refugee has considered as an Athithi (guest) to the country and treated them as God. India has accorded asylum to more than 25 million people in spite of the absence of strong refugee laws, but the treatment has been given on an ad hoc basis. The study is descriptive in nature. The information was collected from secondary sources. It underlines that the Indian government has been providing accommodation, food, and security to refugees. Subsequently, the services enjoyed by the Indian citizens are extended to refugees. There is a harmony between Sri Lankan Tamils and Indian Tamils in language and culture. Tamils in India and the Indian government has treated the refugee as a guest.

The Sri Lankan civil war began in 1983 and lasted until 2009. The tension stems from Sri Lanka's colonial period and subsequent post-colonial policies that harmed the Tamil people. Without viable alternatives, a part of the Tamil population resorted to the degree of brutality that precipitated a second civil war. Regional, domestic, and global attempts to bring the war to a halt have been futile, though some more local measures have been active. A ruthless military campaign brought the conflict to an end. However, nothing has been done in the aftermath of the war to try to resolve the civil war, including its roots. Sri Lanka's civil war exemplifies the uncertain existence of civil war resolution. With this in mind, the war's conclusion was unquestionably the product of a strategic triumph. However, the civil war should have ended; a unique constellation of structural, state, and national forces collaborated to allow for unrestricted military aggression. As long as the dominant forces, including the United States and significant European countries, understood that enough bloodshed had happened, the country's aggression could be brought to a stop. China and India, with India abstaining, voted to support the Sri Lankan government in its major offensive against insurgents. Internationally, the newly restored government used the full might of the forces against the rebels. As a consequence, those variables are deemed unusable in other situations. Tamil-Sinhala rivalry stretches all the way back to Sri Lanka's colonial period. The Tamil community took advantage of numerous market opportunities under British rule, which lasted from 1815 to 1948. Additionally, many group members attended school in colonial countries owing to a shortage of educational facilities in their home countries. With the exception of a few, the Sinhalese culture, on the other side, maintained its isolation from the British. As could be anticipated, the proportion of Tamils employing in the civil service, academia, and law increased dramatically following Sri Lanka's independence in 1948. Historically, the Sinhalese population has been hesitant to accept pluralism, having collaborated with the British to effect a shift of domination since the 1930s. When Sri Lanka's compulsory adult franchise was expanded to all citizens in 1931, there were no arrangements for minority rights. Tamil and Muslim community members shared discontent in the inconsistency with which their desires are pursued. T was dissatisfied with current political developments, and a large number of Tamils boycotted the elections conducted in compliance with this document. Also immediate liberty was abolished in 1947 by the Soulbury Constitution. The argument that no individual should be discriminated against on the grounds of racial origin or faith, though, proved to be a procedural impediment. Finally, in effect, it established a unitary and majoritarian state.

Abstract This article explores the multiethnic and multireligious sacred place of Kataragama (Tamil: Kathirkamam) located at the southeast corner of Sri Lanka. For the devotees, Kataragama’s main attraction is the god Skanda, also known by many other names, for example Murukan, Kataragama Deviyo, or Mahasena. Kataragama attracts people from all ethnic and religious communities, as well as from all social strata in Sri Lankan society. Using Marianne Qvortrup Fibiger’s notion of “religious hotspots” as a starting point, this article analyzes how the “thaumaturgical power” of Kataragama forms the basis for the coexistence of multiple religious systems within the defined space of the sacred city. This coexistence, however, is under constant pressure from exclusionary nationalist and political forces. This transformation is analyzed with reference to the recent decades of Sinhala Buddhist politics of public space to “restore” Sri Lanka to dhammadipa, that is, sacred Buddhist territory. This raises questions about the possible loss of “thaumaturgical power,” as Kataragama is moving from having “ontic” multireligious qualities to “epistemic” qualities along majoritarian lines.

This article provides a contextual analysis of Janakaraliya (‘Theatre of the People’), a theatre company acclaimed for its excellence in theatre for social justice and peace building in Sri Lanka. It discusses the governing conditions that enable its practice and evaluates its impact, whether this be the biopower of the state and non-state actors during periods of political violence, donor funding frameworks, or the Janakaraliya archive itself as an actant shaped by donor rationalities. Drawing on a recent research project entitled The Theatre of Reconciliation, the article builds an argument for changing the terms on which the arts in peace building are evaluated, and for a shift in the dominant narrative on Janakaraliya which collapses its sophisticated aesthetics to a binary of Sinhala–Tamil ethnic relations. The logic of this revision would be fuller acknowledgement of the troupe's aesthetic forms and styles as a more robust signifier of the pluralities that constitute Sri Lankan society today and therefore of post-war reconciliation itself.

In 2004, a tsunami caused unprecedented damage and destruction in the Indian Ocean region. For Sri Lanka, the second-most affected country, with over thirty-thousand deaths and five-hundred-thousand displaced, the tsunami resulted in the introduction of new disaster management institutions, logics, and technologies. The formation and implementation of these new institutions, logics, and technologies must be understood alongside a human-made disaster: the decades-long civil war between the Sri Lankan government and the militant insurgent group of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). I outline the ways that the tsunami opened the door for national and social restructuring in Sri Lanka: the devastation of the tsunami and the logics of disaster risk management that followed it offered a political opening for new techniques of state power and projects of nation-building—a process I call disaster nationalism. This governmentality of disaster risk management plays out through an anticipation of disasters, in which disasters, both natural and human-made, are ever-possible future threats that justify ongoing practices and technologies of securitization. Yet state attempts to control the future remain in constant tension with the attitudes and opinions of people who have been affected by both the tsunami and war. These collective relations, practices, and structures of feelings are what I refer to as anticipatory states. From the calculative risk management projects of the Sri Lankan state to the everyday state of being ready and aware in the spaces of disaster, anticipation weaves into and out of experiences and encounters, its different forms and possibilities shaped by complexly layered histories and landscapes of disaster and violence, and, even, forces beyond the control of the anticipatory state.

In human society, from the time of the Sangam to this period, politics can be bound up with social life. Accordingly, literature and grammars were developed. Through these, it would be appropriate to know the history of literature and the great social history of literature. In the early days, Jaffna Kasichetti, M.S. People like Purnalingampillai have recorded the basis on which the poets write history. After that Ka. Subramaniapillai was the first to write the history of Tamil literature in a literary and century-based content system. He was followed by Sri Lankan V. Selvanayagam was the first to write literary history in a political content manner. After these, he has created a history of Tamil literature from the point of view of the Tamil language. The Sangam period was called the "Dark Ages." Venkataraman mentions. Because of its historical background, the members of the Velar community took possession of the land from the tribal community and made it their own. This shows that they have transformed the tribal community into slaves to themselves. It is noteworthy that the content of literary history is written based on the synthesis code. Following this code, we learn that literary historians have written with an emphasis on social history, political history and time history.

The question asked by this article is as follows: How do different kinds of people live together in a hierarchical world that has been challenged and transformed through the leveling effects of deep ethnicization and war? I examine two different kinds of relationships in contemporary postwar Jaffna: first, an inter-ethnic, external Tamil/Muslim division that has led to people relating to each other as categorical strangers; and second, an intra-ethnic, internal caste relationship through which different castes relate to each other as intimate strangers. These inter-ethnic and intra-caste distinctions have been forged through recent histories of violence and struggle, and indicate key tensions and transformations around postwar life on the Jaffna peninsula, part of the former warzone during the Sri Lankan civil war and long considered the ideological heart of Tamil nationalism. When ethnic mobilization—the possibility of egalitarian mutuality and solidarity as well as the pain, trauma and sacrifice of war, and ethnic cleansing—emerges within deeply hierarchical worlds that continually produce modes of distinction, what kinds of struggles arise within inter-ethnic and intra-caste relations? Given that public life is historically built on unequal participation, and that living together has been a historical struggle, we need to ask how we understand the particular embedded civilities that have made living together such a problem over time. Rather than see civility as an abstract code of prescriptions in relation to the maintenance of non-violent order, I suggest that it is possible to see different modalities of civility produced with regard to specific others/strangers. These modalities can conflict with each other, given that civility can be either hierarchically produced or governed by an egalitarian drive toward public forms of dignity and equality. I propose that civility has a social location, discourses, and understandings in hierarchical worlds that are necessarily different depending on who is speaking.

Theatrical performances are not real, but a unique creation of real-life, It consists of two aspects, which are visual (Optical) and audible (acoustic). Both aspects take place in performing time and make a dramatic piece of real life. It is performed only for a limited time. It starts at a certain moment and then lasts and ends at another certain time. There is an actual real lifetime transformed as dramatic time. Then spectators are in real-time and dramatic time at the same time. In North Sri Lankan plays are produced by the stories of war-affected people. Since 2002, the Active Theatre Movement has brought many war-affected people’s stories to the theatre. The personal story expresses the form of effective social relationships, and gives many meanings, because those stories are complex, interconnected, and contradictory, a story performed by the human body is an expression of cultural conflict. Active Theatre Movement worked with no of war-affected people’s stories, like people who have been displaced and homeless for twenty years, struggling people resettled on their own lands after two decades, people suffering from war, not being able to live on their own lands, families lost their property and lives due to war, poverty, land becoming barren, deliberate people being evicted, etc. These factors influence the real life of North Srilanka. These stories have been the theme of the Tamil theatre in the last three decades. When conflict and oppression seem overwhelming, drama can offer hope. Tamil theatre relies on the real stories of the people. It allows people to imagine how struggles and situations can be overcome. This paper employed the Performance as a research method and take advantage of the author’s direct observations and participation Information was also obtained from actors and spectators. The paper concludes that when performing their own stories were very powerful and presented with extraordinary energy even though they are non-actors.

While a stalemate in the predominantly Tamil North and East of Sri Lanka continues despite Indian intervention on the government's behalf, in the Sinhala South death squads associated with the pseudo People's Liberation Front, the JVP, have been ruthlessly eliminating its opponents. The United National Party (UNP) and the Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP), having created and nurtured popular racism for over thirty years in order to get into power (through a ready-made Sinhalese majority of 70 per cent of the population), * would now like to draw back from the brink of another crippling civil war, this time in the South. But they are unable to do so because the JVP has taken up the Sinhala cause and pushed it to the point of social fascism through assassination and murder. Popular racism based on Sinhala-Buddhist nationalism promoted in the schools and expressed in song, textbook and media served to fuel the anti-Tamil pogroms of 1958, 1977, 1981 and 1983, in which thousands were killed at the hands of street mobs. Some of the most violently anti- Tamil propaganda (deriving inspiration from mythical Sinhalese history) has emanated from the present government. Colonisation of Tamil areas by Sinhalese was justified on the pretext of protecting ancient Buddhist shrines. And it is an open secret that ministers hired their own hit squads in the 1983 pogrom. When, in a bid to end the unwinnable war with the Tamils, the UNP signed the Indo-Lanka Accord in 1987, allowing Indian troops to operate on Sri Lankan soil, it alienated the very Sinhala nationalists it had itself fostered. And it was the JVP which capitalised on the resentment over India's interference in Sri Lanka's internal affairs. Accusing the UNP government (and other supporters of the Accord) of treachery, it enlarged and deepened popular racism into fanatical patriotism. But what has given the JVP terror tactics a hold over the population has been the steady erosion of democratic freedoms, on the one hand, and the self-abasement of the Left, on the other. Both the SLFP and UNP governments have postponed elections to stay in power, but the UNP went further and got itself re-elected en bloc on a phoney referendum to postpone elections. Local elections were never held under the SLFP and whatever elections took place under the UNP have either been rigged and/or carried out under conditions of massive intimidation. In the process, the political literacy that the country once boasted has been lost to the people and, with it, their will to resist. At the same time the collaborationist politics of the Left in the SLFP government of 1970-77 have not only served to decimate its own chances at the polls (it obtained not a single seat in the election of 1977) but also to leave the working-class movement defenceless. So that it was a simple matter for the UNP government to crush the general strike of 1980, imprison its leaders and throw 80, 000 workers permanently out of work. And it has been left to the JVP to pretend to take up the socialist mantle of the Left even as it devotes itself to the racist cause of the Right, and so win the support of the Sinhala-Buddhist people. In the final analysis the choice before the country is that of two terrors: that of the state or that of the JVP. Below we publish an analysis of the situation as at October 1988, put out by the underground Campaign for Social Democracy in the run up to the presidential elections.

AbstractThis paper takes as its subject the 1905 opening and 1990 closure of the Northern Railway Line, the major Sri Lankan railway which ran the length of the island from south to north. It argues that it can been seen as a social compact in which the life of the individual, the community, and the state became integrally intertwined. It focuses on two dimensions of what the Northern Railway Line enabled in Sri Lanka (formerly Ceylon): first, a physical and symbolic representation of stateness, and, secondly, the pursuit of mundane everyday life. These are embedded within Sri Lanka's landscapes and histories of colonial and post-colonial rule, and the ethnic conflict, riots, and war which inextricably shaped the railway's journeys and passengers. Railways are more often thought of as large-scale, high-tech artefacts rather than the smaller everyday technologies that are the themes of other papers in this special issue. However, this paper highlights the ways in which railways also make particular kinds of everyday life possible and how, in being woven into routine daily and weekly journeys, the Northern Railway Line came to intertwine the changing circumstances and histories of its mainly Tamil passengers within an increasingly ethnicized national landscape. In the aftermath of its closure, the railway has now come to symbolize a desire for a return to the normalcy of the past, an aspiration to an everyday experience that younger generations have never had, and which has, in consequence, become a potent force.. . . the Northern Railway Line to be opened tomorrow would be a great boon to the Jaffnese in and out of Jaffna. . . it has become possible to travel to Jaffna in a single day. . . At last the railway which was characterized as a ‘tantalising vision’ by a previous Governor and ‘a railway to the moon’, by a quondam Colonial Secretary, has become a fait accompli.1This line has been completely destroyed between Vavuniya and Kankesanthurai (KKS) a track length of 160km. . . The Northern Railway Line is the main line connecting Colombo with Jaffna. . . the third largest town in Sri Lanka prior to the conflict and the Northern Railway Line was in high demand from both passengers and freight. There is a great sentiment amongst the people of the north for restoration.2

The culture of a community plays a major role in narrating the history and life of that particular community. This culture includes various aspects such as religion, ritual, faith, food, customs or practices as well as art and culture. Among these aspects, art is not only for entertainment; but it is also for exposing the social character and tradition of that particular community. The undeniable thing here is the factor that art forms in every country, and in every region are not only to create entertainment but also to preserve the antiquity of their existence up to now. In that respect, Vasanthan Kooththu, one of the Sri Lankan Tamil art forms, is a notable art form in that category. Even though this art form is found in Batticaloa and Jaffna areas, they have differences between each other. This study focuses on the songs of Vasanthan Kooththu performed in the Katuthavalai area of ​​Batticaloa. This type of Kooththu is an art form of tapping and dancing with two sticks in the hands; however, these sticks are also used to express the function of the meaning of the song with dance. Even though this type of Kooththu is a dance form, the greatness of the songs used in this Kooththu is significant. There are 62 types of Vasanthan poems have been in use in the Art Form performances. These have been compiled around the year 1940. These 62 genres of songs are divided into six genres and compiled, namely 'Kattiyam', 'Thoththiram', 'Sariththiram', 'Tholil', 'Vedikkai', 'Vilaiyaattu' and are still in the practice during Kooththu performance. As mentioned earlier, these Kooththu song systems emphasize the art expression of the culture of a community. The songs related to the professions or job involved in these Kooththu songs express the whole series of activities of the agricultural industry. The reason that these Kooththu songs to aim to explore only a specific industry is to be explored. It is vital to discover this factor; and this article explores about how these Kooththu songs are still in operation today as a popular form of folk music performance to describe a particular social professional life, beyond globalization trends, imposition and blends of colonization thinking. This article also explores the significance of these Kooththu songs hold, the importance they have gained in the life of people as well as the value that these Kooththu songs have even today.

This article considers data on London Tamils from Jaffna peninsula, northern Sri Lanka, to examine caste interactions in relation to their efforts to reconnect with people in the diaspora and ‘at home’. The Tamils are part of a substantial number of ūr (home/native place) associations in London and areas outside London. I consider their efforts through changing and unchanging attitudes to caste to recreate a sense of community away from home. They do so by forming associations comprising members of a specific caste group, hailing from a particular village, region, or island in Sri Lanka. I examine the diaspora communities’ understanding of the institution of caste as a wider landscape of belonging. This further considers how caste divisions in the ūr become re-territorialized among the Tamil diaspora. The historical context of these activities relate to the wide dispersal and separation of Tamils from their Sri Lankan homeland during the upheaval of the armed conflict. The article also demonstrates how caste-based relationships and kinship ties shape the lives of members of the Tamil diaspora in London, and how caste-based and fragmented identities operate in such transnational Tamil diaspora localities.

Malaya was under colonial rule by the British at the beginning of the industrial revolution in the world. Rubber was considered an essential commodity for the car industry. The UK government approached East India Company entrepreneurs and advised them to set up rubber plantations in Malaya. Those suggestions were accepted and arrangements were made for deforestation in order to plant rubber trees throughout Malaya. The locals retreated to do the work. On the advice of the British rulers, South Indian Tamils ​​were brought to Malaya by the kangani system and by contract system and settled in rubber plantations. The Tamil people destroyed the jungles surrounding Malaya and planted rubber trees. Later, they were hired as rubber tapper in rubber plantations. The Tamil people who worked in this way suffered from the British investors, the Sri Lankan Tamils ​​who worked as plantation managers and the non-Tamil Indians who worked as clerks. C.Vadivelu, a senior Malaysian Tamil writer, has made clear through his short stories the cruelty of the hegemonism of British investors. His three collections of short stories are considered as the primary sources of this study and the historical references of Malaysia as supporting sources of the study. Data collected from short stories have been analyzed based on postcolonial theory. This study reveals the fact that the Malay Tamil people were sociologically and economically dominated by the British colonial rulers.