transcurrents

Tamil Politics III: Kinship, caste and the Diaspora in Tamil nationalism

December 9th, 2007

By Rajan Philips

In my earlier articles I traced the trajectory of Tamil political leadership from the old elites, through a difficult transition, to the phenomenon that is the LTTE, and recounted the specific contributions of the Sri Lankan State and governments to these developments in Tamil politics. I have also traced the roots of LTTE militarism and pointed out its paradoxical outcomes. While being the principal reason for the enactment of Thirteenth Amendment (that constitutionally reversed the State’s previous positions on Tamil rights), the LTTE has also been a major factor in its non-implementation. Equally, the militarism of the LTTE that arose as a response to State militarism and mob violence against the Tamils has left them internally devoured and now defenseless in the face of the army’s pounding that is now going on against the LTTE. In my last article I suggested that the LTTE’s resilience and durability are better explained in terms of the traditional structures of Tamil society, namely, caste, extended family and the village community than in terms of nationalism or fascism. I will expand on this theme in this installment.

Two modes of politics: The modern and the traditional

To say that the rise of the LTTE could be explained through the traditional institutions of caste, extended family or kinship and the village community, is not to imply that particular castes, families or villages are behind the LTTE. That is not what I am saying here. It is the organizing principles of these institutions, the norms and values associated with them, and the social ethos that defines Tamil society that inform my understanding of the ties between the LTTE and Tamil society. Remarkably, these ideologies have also been ‘globalized’, in that they are part of the baggage that Tamils leaving their natal provinces in Sri Lanka have taken to their new homes in far flung countries. What are these ideologies and their consequences for Tamil politics?

Simply put, these are the principles of: (a) hierarchy, typically based on caste, status within castes, age and gender; (b) holism or the subordination of the individual to family and the community; (c) kinship obligations that bind individual members of joint or extended families to pool their resources and support one another under the paternalistic gaze of mostly male family elders; (d) community exchange that emphasizes more personal reciprocity than impersonal market exchange; and (e) the village community which among the Tamils, as among the Sinhalese and other South Asian communities, was centered on the temple as the place of worship as well as learning.

As an organization operating entirely outside the formal political process, the LTTE has had to work through the medium of traditional social structures and relationships to establish itself as a political force in Tamil society. Although the ultimate source of LTTE’s current authority is the power of coercion, it did not start the same way. My contention is that the authority without accountability, trust without transparency, and loyalty without criticism that the LTTE has attained over time, and is now struggling to retain primarily by force, are consistent with the culture of hierarchy and holism, mediated by the emotional ethos of kinship operating in the absence of traditional moral constraints.

To make myself clear, I will contrast the traditional (or ‘asecular’) values that I have been outlining with their modern, secular antitheses. In a well-known and rather grand generalization, Louis Dumont, the French Anthropologist and celebrated Indologist, characterized the traditional (Indian) society “Homo Hierarchicus”, and contrasted it with the modern (Western) society, “Homo Aequalis.” The former enshrines the principles of hierarchy and holism, and the latter emphasizes individualism (liberty) and equality. If the nation-state provided the matrix for modernity and Homo Aequalis in Europe, its role in India is marked by the operation of at least two modes of politics-the modern and the traditional.

The modern mode of politics includes the constitutional and legal structures, the processes of government and democratic participation, and the news media. The traditional mode is in the realm of caste and kinship structures and values that influence the formation of political alliances, and the language and idiom informing the political discourse. The two modes function within the globalizing market economy that has overwhelmed but not totally replaced traditional modes of production and exchange. While the relative weight of the two modes may vary from situation to situation, the presence of the state at least formally privileges the operation of the modern mode, although the functioning of the state itself is greatly influenced by traditional norms, values and practices.

W.H. Morris-Jones, the Welsh Political Scientist and well-known expert on Indian politics, used to speak of the three languages of Indian politics and society-the modern, the traditional and the saintly. The saintly language is the moral compass of the traditional mode of politics. Just as rationality and utilitarianism underpin the modern mode of politics, the traditional order in South Asia derives its sustenance from the values of asceticism, compassion, selfless generosity, tolerance, reciprocity, and acting through persuasion rather than coercion. The exercise of power and authority should encompass these values; otherwise it would degenerate into abuse of power, tyrannical authority and plain thuggery.

Sri Lankan Tamil politics, like the Sri Lankan State and the politics of the Sinhalese, has been straddling both the modern and the traditional spheres. The rapid identification of the State, after independence, with the politics of the Sinhalese and the exclusion of others pushed Tamil politics more and more into traditional modes of operation. The push was accelerated by the protest politics of the Federal Party, the high-watermark of which was the Satyagraha Campaign, a healthy blend of the modern, the traditional and the saintly. The growth of Tamil militarism and the Sixth Amendment ultimately made the constitutional and parliamentary modes of operation, already ineffective, irrelevant to Tamil politics. It is this vacuum that the LTTE has filled, working through the traditional social structures and relationships.

To the extent it is deaf to the saintly language of politics, the moral compass in the traditional social order, and given its operations outside the checks and balances of the modern mode of politics, the LTTE has come to rely on its coercive powers as the main source of its authority. The LTTE’s main sophistication has been in the business of building up a state-of-the-art arsenal and using it to hold off two fully fledged state armies. It has also shown its capacity for blending the modern with the primitive in the cult of suicide killing. The LTTE was not the only Tamil militant group to operate outside the democratic process and use violent means to political dominance. Other groups in the 1980s tried as well, but when they failed to overpower the LTTE and could not stand its heat they got out of the Eelam kitchen. Many of the Eelam turncoats became democratic parliamentarians overnight after lampooning for a decade the parliamentary cretinism of the TULF. Others have gone on to become ‘deep penetrating’ government mercenaries.

Not inexplicably, Tamil political demands-balanced representation, federalism and national self-determination-belong to and have escalated within the modern political mode. The fact that these demands presuppose the acceptance of constitutional democracy has created difficulties for the LTTE’s mode of operation and so far it has not shown any great capacity to deal with this essentially political and non-military challenge. Its difficulties are compounded by the State’s continuing refusal to address democratic Tamil political demands within a reformed constitution.

Kinship, caste and Tamil nationalism

The kinship ethos is well woven into nationalist politics in South Asia, so much so that in some instances the manifestation of nationalism is mostly ‘kinship writ large’. More so, when nationalism emerges as a political force without a self-reliant economic base, and Tamil nationalism is a living example of this aberration. A positive aspect of this aberration has been the absence of familial succession in Tamil politics. G.G. Ponnambalam ended the Muttu Coomaraswamy-Ramanathan-Arunachalam political dynasty when he defeated Arunachalam’s son, Mahadeva, in in the electoral “battle of Jaffna” in 1947. Ever since, Sri Lankan Tamils, unlike the Sinhalese and other South Asian societies, have steered clear of filial male succession, residual female succession and overall family bandyism. Those who tried to swim against this anti-feudal current have ended as political rejects.

The evidence of kinship ethos in Tamil politics is in the common use of the main male kinship terms to refer to political leaders-thanthai (father) for Chelvanayakam, annan (elder brother) for Amirthalingam, and thambi (younger brother) for Prabhakaran. The term, podiyal (boys, also male children), was endearingly used to describe all Tamil militants in their formative years. The early violent exploits of the ‘boys’ were a source of both amusement and amazement. A society that prided itself in its system of providing highly disciplined education, allowed its ‘boys’ to go into politics without adult supervision, and they went in with guns. What began as parental and paternalistic enjoyment of children’s precociousness with guns soon turned out to be not only misplaced but also dangerous and went out of control. The ‘boys’ are no longer boys; they are grown men and what went out of control earlier is now under their brutal control.

The ‘boys’ learnt their political shooting by killing Tamil politicians who were supportive of the government and therefore deemed traitors. Deeming political opponents as traitors is the ‘unsaintly’ legacy of the Federal Party. Driven by electoral opportunism and not principled politics, the Federal Party vowed not to join a government or accept cabinet positions until the Tamils’ basic demands were met, and declared that anyone who flouted this restriction would be a traitor to the Tamil nation. Governments, for their part, have been adding fuel to the fire by co-opting Tamil individuals to cabinet positions for the sake of appearances without addressing any of the Tamil political grievances.

Rejecting Tamil presence in the cabinet while insisting on jobs for Tamils in government was illogical, and the whole purpose of the Federal Party’s holier-than-thou isolationism was to characterize G.G. Ponnambalam as a traitor for joining the D.S. Senanayake government soon after independence. The curses came home to roost when Amirthalingam who had pilloried Ponnambalam earlier was himself deemed a traitor when he became, not a cabinet Minister, but the Leader of the Opposition in 1977. By that time the punishment for ‘treason’ had been raised from electoral defeat to death sentence. This is nothing less than the political equivalent of ‘honour killing’ of women who marry outside the family in certain traditional cultures.

Caste and nationalism are a strange mix in South Asian politics. While certain castes have played a catalytic role in the rise of linguistic nationalisms in some South Asian communities (e.g. the non-Brhamin castes in Tamil Nadu, non-Goyigama castes among the Sinhalese, and the Ezhavars in Kerala), the essence of nationalism is in the achievement of an overarching political unity in a community that is otherwise divided by caste, class and status. Tamil nationalism is the overarching political unity achieved in spite of its internal divisions and it arose as a defensive response to State discrimination and militarism. It is not a scheme of the Jaffna Vellalas, as is sometimes asserted by ignorant commentators as well as by learned lawyers in the South, to secure more power and oppress the non-Vellala castes in the North and all the Tamils in the Eastern Province.

This assertion is ignorant of the fundamental features of caste in Tamil society. The Vellalas and sub-Vellalas are highly differentiated and porous groups themselves. There is a world of difference in wealth, power and status between the “Hindus of Cinnamon Gardens”-as Arunachalam caricatured them with his back to the mirror on the wall in his Horton Place home, and the poor Vellala yeoman tilling his bone-dry patch of land in a Jaffna village. There are other castes, the Karava, or Mukuva, and the artisan castes, which are socially and economically independent of the Vellalas. All members of the Karava caste are not fishers just as not all Vellalas are toiling farmers. The non-fishing Karavas have traditionally been involved in ship building and maritime trade-until the Dutch came and banned it as ’smuggling’, and a Catholic concentration of them in what was once Jaffna town accounted for one of the most westernized and professionally accomplished kin-groups in all of Tamil society. At the bottom of the inverted Tamil caste pyramid (unlike in most instances in India, the caste structures of the Sinhalese and the Tamils are inverted pyramids-with the upper castes also being the numerically larger castes) are the depressed castes. Their social exclusion and economic exploitation by the Vellalas, mostly as landless agricultural labourers, has been the moral shame of Tamil society, more so as the traditional institution of caste predicated on subsistence reciprocity was transformed into an instrument of exploitation in profit-seeking cash crop (mostly tobacco, as well as onions and chili) production.

The profit seeking exploitation began as early as the Dutch rule, but its intensity has significantly waned in later times. With the virtual cessation of farming during the last two decades of war, the old opportunities for exploitation have also disappeared. More to the point, the discriminatory policies and the militarism of the Sri Lankan State did not spare the Tamil under classes and the lower castes in the North and no less in the East. In fact, these groups were hit harder than the more well-to-do Tamils who were able to leave their natal Provinces for safer sanctuaries elsewhere. The large-scale out-migration of Tamils created the space for the filtering-up of the under classes and lower caste groups in the North and East. Nationalism, besides being an overarching unity is also an agent of social levelling. So too are the conditions of war, as Trotsky observed at the outbreak of the First World War, when the baker brings himself to fell as important as the prince. The LTTE has benefited from a heady mix of both: defensive Tamil nationalism compounded by periodical Eelam wars. The departure of Tamils in significant numbers made it easy for the LTTE to establish total control over those who remained, fewer in numbers to resist and more amenable to authority.

Diaspora nationalism

Late 20th century globalization has added a new twist to the concurrent phenomenon of ethno-nationalisms. Along with the market driven economic integration of the world economy, globalization has created significant population movements from the former colonial peripheries to the old colonial centres. The marvels of modern technology have enabled these shifting populations not only to maintain perpetual contacts with their natal homes but also to reproduce the old cultural specificities in their new countries. Far from dissolving the traditional ethos of hierarchy, holism and kinship, the global economy and technology have cemented and ‘wired’ them. For people leaving countries with ethno-nationalist conflicts, the new global circumstances have provided safe long distance bases from which they could remain engaged with old conflicts and find in these engagements their antidote to the alienation that most first generation immigrants suffer in new countries.

These long distance engagements are a necessary part of the new global reality even though they are blamed as the conduits for moving weapons from the arms dealers to conflict locations. The relatively unimpeded global arms movements are really the result of the global deregulation of the arms industry. Western governments and post-Soviet countries are hypocritical in claiming to fight the evil of terrorism while allowing the free production and sale of arms. The national governments in conflict countries are equally hypocritical in blaming Diaspora ethnic groups of supporting armed conflicts at home while refusing to find political solutions to these conflicts.

The Sri Lankan Tamils are among half a dozen or so ethnic groups who are active in the business of long distance nationalism. Expatriate Sinhalese have also got in the act detracting and challenging the nationalist exertions of their Tamil counterparts. The common accusation against the Tamil Diaspora is that they are bankrolling the LTTE’s war apparatus, with the simplistic corollary that Sri Lanka would return to normalcy in a jiffy if the overseas remittances are stopped. Monetary remittances have long been a key part of what Pieter Keuneman once called the “Money Order economy of Jaffna.” In the old and good times, overseas Tamils not only looked after their extended families back home but were also the benefactors to their village communities sending remittances for the upkeep of village temples that dotted the Tamil landscape and the community activities that were centered on them. In the current embattled times of flattened temples and displaced communities, Tigers have replaced the temples as the beneficiaries of expatriate generosity.

“Eelam is a state of mind” was journalist Sivanyagam’s sharp response, during the 1977 riots, to the more veteran journalist S.P. Amarasingham, when the latter mockingly asked if the new State of Eelam could be sustained by the onion and chili economy of Jaffna. After 30 years of bloodletting, Eelam is no more than a state of mind, although it will remain a state of mind for many Tamils. But the symbolism of Eelam and the name itself can and should be accommodated within an undivided Sri Lankan State. That, in my view, is a necessary first step in bringing the wretched state of affairs that is now ongoing to a just and fair constitutional resolution.

Friendly responses to my earlier articles have suggested that in addition to tracing history, I should also focus on what is to be done to get Sri Lanka out of these vicious spirals. Therein lies the rub. As advocates of political solution based on territorial power sharing, we very well know what is to be done, but nothing can be done without either the Rajapakse regime or the LTTE making a sincere commitment to work towards one. Writing with resonating desperation, Jayadeva Uyangoda has emphasized the role of the international community in helping to de-escalate violence and restart political talks. I tend to think that international mediation will have little effect without an internal agency that articulates the frustrations against the government’s ransacking of the economy in the South, the hopes for redemption in the war ravaged North and East, and the objective need of all Sri Lankans for peace and political settlement.

I will offer some thoughts along these lines in my concluding installment next week.

Related:

-Thamilchelvan and Tamil Politics-I

-The roots of LTTE’s Militarism and Political Culture

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