About the Book
This book explore the
development of nationalism in Sri Lanka during the past century. particularly with in the dominant Sinhala Buddhist and
militant Tamil Movements. Tracing the ways women from diverse background have
engaged with nationalism. Neloufer de Mel argues that
gender is crucial to an understanding of nationalism and vice versa.
Traversing
both the colonial and postcolonial period in Sri Lanka’s history, the author
assesses a range of writers, activists, political figures and movements. With
her rigorous, historically located analyses, de mel
makes a persuasive dace for the connection between figures like stage actress
Annie Boteju and intellectual Anil de Silva; poetry written
by Jean Arasanayagam Tamil revolutionary women; and
political movements like the LTTE, the JVP, the Mother’s Front, and
contemporary feminist organisation. Evaluating the colonial period in the light
of the violence that animates Sri Lanka today , de Mel proposes what Bruce
Robbins has termed a “lateral cosmopolitanism” that will allow coalitions to
form and to practice an oppositional politics of peace. In the process, she
examines the gendered forms through which the nation and the state both come together
and pull apart.
About the Author
Neloufer De Mel is
a senior lecturer in the department of English, University of Colombo, Sri
Lanka, and a member of the visiting faculty in the women’s programme at the
same university. She was the founder editor of Options, a magazine on Sri
Lankan women’s issues. Her teaching and research range from cultural studies
and theatre art to gender, politics and nationalism.
Introduction
This Book Marks the production of
important "events", 1 temporal moments and selected strands of
nationalism in Sri Lanka? of the 20th
century, particularly within dominant Sinhala Buddhist and militant Tamil
nationalisms. Its main focus however lies in the way gender has been, and
continues to be, a central trope within them. Through a discussion of how women
from diverse professional, class, caste, religious, ideological, ethnic and
linguistic backgrounds have engaged with nationalism, the book attempts to
foreground the relationship between gender and nationalism and how feminism engages
with the ideology of the nation. If tenets of bourgeois respectability, ethnic
exclusivity, patriotism, self-sacrifice, etc., are cornerstones of the
collective imaginary of the nation, it shows how women have both participated
in this project and contested it, forwarding other, alternative ways of
imagining the nation. At the same time it marks the fact that nationalism and
patriarchy are never static institutions; they shift, at times adopt, a certain
feminist stance and adapt to exigency. The engagements of the women fore grounded in this book show how women can, and have
been, appropriated by such a protean nationalism. But they also show when and
how women act on their own behalf, in their own right, and negotiate
patriarchy, capitalism and political opportunity, as well as contradictions
within nationalism itself, to their advantage. The book is engaged, then, in
signalling that gender is crucial to an understanding of nationalism and vice
versa. It also marks the fact that feminism, when it occurs, is not an
autonomous practice but deeply bound to the signifying network of the national
contexts which produce it.! As such,
feminism too, like nationalism, is rich in paradoxes and ambiguities.
Women have been incorporated into nationalist
projects in diverse and often contradictory ways. Nationalism, particularly in
the Third World's post-colonial terrain, has been commensurate with the rise of
feminism, women's movements and the construction of the "modern"
woman through social and legal reforms encompassing education, marriage and
inheritance laws, and religious/cultural customs. Equal
rights for women has been a part of this campaign, from obtaining the
vote to entry into public service. Nationalism has also subordinated women, at
times through these very social and legal reforms, to keep them at the
boundaries of the nation by controlling their sexuality, mobility, the trope of
motherhood, rights of citizenship and a variety of personal laws that became
codified with the advent of the modern nation state." Indeed
these very boundaries of the nation have needed, for their organisation, the
subordination of women even as they are posited in nationalist projects as
central in the grounding of the nation. Thus even when women have been the
sites of liberal reform, it has "always contained a degree of
instrurnentalism, a sense that transforming women's place in society and the
state represented an opportunity that was only partially about women
themselves". 5 Despite repeatedly affirming the centrality of
women to nationalist projects-whether as signifying sites of modernisation or
for their allegorical value as mothers of the nation-women have in this respect
been primarily a discursive terrain on which significant socio-cultural tenets
of the nation are produced. Women are constructed as the nation's subjects not
only as citizens, but also as members of ethnic, class and caste
groups-differently to men."
Four discursive arenas provide useful insights
into the way nationalism is shaped and gendered; their significance as shifting
sites of control and struggle in the story of nationalism and gender in Sri
Lanka will be seen throughout this book. First, nationalism produces normative
ideas-about sexuality and gender with which it closely intersects and on which
it rests." Its discourse also constructs a division of gender which
renders the male as the author and subject of the nation.!
while the female stands for the nation itself, in need
of male protection, the reproducer and nurturer of future generations and
transmitter of cultural values. As reproducer she carries the responsibility of
avoiding-miscegenation to ensure ethnic, class, caste or racial
"purity". Her sexuality has to be policed and regulated to this end
in the service of the nation. In another context, when European nationalism
from the 17th century onwards began to fuel the imperial conquest of
territories in the Americas, Africa and Asia, it was projected, in its
colonialist discourse, as aggressively masculine in its penetration of feminised
colonial territories." Wars have, through the :
years, been fought in defence of the nation by "sons of the soil".
Modern technologies of aggression take place, yet again, within a framework of
a penetrative male discourse. The very names of the most recently developed
missiles on the Indian subcontinent Trishul (trident
of the god Shiva) on the Indian side, and Half (the lance of the Prophet
Mohammed) on the Pakistani side, simultaneously invoke male prowess and
resonate as symbols of Hindu and Islamic iconography. Following the Indian
nuclear tests of May 1998 Bal Thackeray, the leader of the Shiv
Sena which expounds a right-wing Hindutva
ideology proudly proclaimed, "We are not eunuchs anymore"; and when Nawaz Sharif, Pakistan's Prime Minister, delayed responding
to India's nuclear challenge with tests of his own, he was the recipient of
glass bangles by a section of the public intent on shaming him for his lack of
male virility and courage-hence the "gift" of women's ornaments.
Evident here is the notion that male virility and aggression are the traits
that protect a feminised nation. Politicians and a military unable to fulfil
these roles fail the nation. Conversely, women who break the mould of a
feminised subjectivity and refuse the obligatory roles of chaste and dutiful
wives and daughters become the target of attack. Such emasculation and female
transgression blur gender distinctions and produce a confusion seen as
compromising the potency of the nation.'? This. in turn evokes an anxiety that permeates political rhetoric
as well as popular culture, with very specific consequences for both men and
women.
During the formation of the modern nation
state, when the concept of a fraternity of national subjects took hold of 18th
century Europe after the French Revolution, women were conspicuously left out
of this fellowship. They were excluded from its civil law through a
dispossession of their inheritance in favour of their brothers, and through the
legal regulation of their sexual, biological and reproductive roles.!' Muslim and Hindu personal laws continue, in South
Asia, to deprive women of inheritance and equality in marriage.
In India,
under the Hindu Succession Act of 1956, only patrilineal
forms of inheritance are legitimate. Accordingly, a Hindu woman cannot inherit
a share of ancestral property at birth as her brothers do. It is only to her
father's self-acquired wealth that she can lay claim equally with her
brothers.'! In Sri Lanka, under the Thesavalamai, the laws governing Tamils of
Malabar origin who live in Jaffna, in the north of Sri Lanka, women cannot
dispose of their property without written male consent. Under the Muslim
Intestate Successions Ordinance of 1931 which recognised the right of Muslims
to inherit according to their sect, women within the Shafie
sect (the majority Muslim sect in Sri Lanka) can only inherit half the
equivalent of the male, although there is some protection for her in that her
property cannot be willed away. Again under Muslim personal law in Sri Lanka,
it is only the male guardian's consent that is required for a woman's marriage.
Under the Hudood Ordinance, operative in Pakistan,
one man's evidence in a court of law is considered the equivalent of two
women's. In this way women have been constructed as partial
citizens of the nation-state. Moreover, that women's regulation is seen to take
place in the private spheres of the domestic and familial, rather than the
public domain of the state has hitherto encouraged the erasure of women and
gender from discourses on the state and nation.':' It has been the task of
feminist scholarship of the late1980s and 1990s to dismantle this idea of a
polarised, dichotomous public private binary. Partha Chatterjee, in a path-breaking essay for the time, noted
that in mid to late 19th century India, the Bhadralok
nationalist elite invested heavily in a private domain epitomising
indigenous/spiritual values because the public sphere, associated with the
material, was contaminated by the presence of the
coloniser. While in public the male Bengali elite had lost its power, it could
still determine events and discourses in the private domain. Women were central
signifiers of this private domain.!" It has since
been the task of feminist scholars to show that Chatterjee's
understanding of the Bhadralok's
"resolution" of the women's question as a subaltern move is
predicated on an erasure of women's agency,15 that in
fact, "this division between outer and inner, with its homologies no
longer corresponds to the lived reality", 16 and that
women have redefined their limits and (re)crossed their boundaries to make the
private/public not water-tight, but porous.
The second arena is the nexus between
nationalism and modernity. The growth of feminism and women's movements in the
20th century is distinctly related to the modernising impulse of the
nation-state. -What agentive moments and acts women have been able to achieve
have taken place under circumstances that pushed towards a new modernity. Kumari Jayawardena has shown that
in the 20th century it was at the historical junctures of
anti-imperial struggles that women participated most keenly in nationalist
projects. I? As the colonised elite at the vanguard of anti-imperialist struggles
were keen to modernise their societies to claim parity with their colonial
masters, women's emancipation became an essential and integral part of this
process. Modernity would better equip native society to jettison its colonial
bondage, and creating a "New Woman" became part of this campaign.
Thus the terminology of the "New Woman" which had become fashionable
in 19th century Europe was adopted in the colonies with zeal.
From the publication of a book on women's emancipation entitled The New Woman by Kassim
Amin in 1901, to the association in 1919 of Egyptian
women under the Society de la Femme Nouvelle, the new agenda for women spread
to East Asia. Japan saw the establishment of the Association of New Women also
in 1919, and in 1919 and 1920 respectively, magazines entitled The New Woman were published in China
and Korea.
Jayawardena cautions
that what actually defined this "New Woman" varied from region to
region according to historical specificities and cultural traditions.
Nevertheless, in colonial situations the idea of women's emancipation allowed
women a degree of freedom they had not enjoyed before either in pre-colonial or
early colonial society. Obtaining access to colonial education, albeit with
different emphases than what was on offer for men, they went on to professional
careers, becoming doctors of western medicine and leading educationists. When
women were part of militant struggles as in Palestine, China and Vietnam they
secured a degree of mobility and public presence they had not enjoyed before in
their traditional societies. In Palestine, from 1917 onwards, urban women
openly demonstrated against the Balfour Declaration, travelling to villages,
holding demonstrations at both Muslim and Christian holy sites thereby subtly
subverting the highly segregated gender roles within traditional Arab
society." In India, the slogan of swadeshi and
the ensuing boycott of British goods, made even the handicraft sector, often
associated with women, a site of political significance.2o· Women
took to the streets for social service-helping in health care, slum education,
cottage industry. In Sri Lanka, women took an active role in organising against
British imperialism through the Suriya Mal movement.
Launching their campaign in 1933 on Armistice Day, or Poppy Day on which
poppies were sold to raise funds for British soldiers, they named their
campaign after a common local flower, suriyamal, instead of the poppy associated
with the western war effort. The proceeds of their sales went towards educating
an undercaste girl." These women creatively
subverted an imperial symbol for radical ends. In Sri Lanka today, .there are
women militants who, as frontline combatants in nationalist! revolutionary
groups, are active participants in nationalism. The women cadres of the
Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) undergo
as rigorous a military training as their male colleagues, are confident users
of weaponry and other military technology at their disposal, and are part of
elite fighting squads such as the Sea Tigers .and Black Tigers, the latter
being the death squad from which L TIE suicide bombers await their call-up.
Suicide/ sacrifice is already gendered, in that women have traditionally been
called upon to make sacrifices for the family as wife and mother, as well as
for the community as mothers who sacrifice warrior sons during war. But the LTTE
women have redefined this role to collapse the distinction between private and
public by making their. sacrifices highly visible and
manifest.
Modernity, however, is a complex set of
co-ordinates. These women can also embody the hallmarks of what Rajeswari Sunder Rajan terms a sufficient modernity that spells out the cost of such
emancipation. This is when, in recognition of the needs of national
development, human rights and civil liberties, women are no longer denied a
role in "the time-space of the modern". But, as Sunder Rajan points out, When women become conspicuously visible in the
spaces of modernity (such as the street and the work-place, places of mixing of
the sexes), they are treated as having chosen the "risk" of
harassment voluntarily-and treated accordingly. In other cases, more subtle
ideological pressures are enacted to contain women's "modernity", to
incorporate them within its class-caste frame. In influential
anti-Enlightenment critiques, when gender and modernity are read together it is
only to indict "modernity" for producing anomie, aggression and reactive orthodoxy in men,
"feelings" which are then (inevitably) directed as violence against
women. This comprehensive indictment not only leaves no room Jor ascribing other reasons for violence against women-of
which there are myriad, complexly interrelated-it also refuses to recognise the
benefits of modernity, not least for women."
Contents
Acknowledgements |
ix |
Introduction |
1 |
Setting the stage, gendering the nation |
57 |
Framing the nation's respectability |
102 |
A question of identity |
162 |
Agent or victim? |
203 |
Mother politics and women's politics |
233 |
Bibliography |
282 |
About the Book
This book explore the
development of nationalism in Sri Lanka during the past century. particularly with in the dominant Sinhala Buddhist and
militant Tamil Movements. Tracing the ways women from diverse background have
engaged with nationalism. Neloufer de Mel argues that
gender is crucial to an understanding of nationalism and vice versa.
Traversing
both the colonial and postcolonial period in Sri Lanka’s history, the author
assesses a range of writers, activists, political figures and movements. With
her rigorous, historically located analyses, de mel
makes a persuasive dace for the connection between figures like stage actress
Annie Boteju and intellectual Anil de Silva; poetry written
by Jean Arasanayagam Tamil revolutionary women; and
political movements like the LTTE, the JVP, the Mother’s Front, and
contemporary feminist organisation. Evaluating the colonial period in the light
of the violence that animates Sri Lanka today , de Mel proposes what Bruce
Robbins has termed a “lateral cosmopolitanism” that will allow coalitions to
form and to practice an oppositional politics of peace. In the process, she
examines the gendered forms through which the nation and the state both come together
and pull apart.
About the Author
Neloufer De Mel is
a senior lecturer in the department of English, University of Colombo, Sri
Lanka, and a member of the visiting faculty in the women’s programme at the
same university. She was the founder editor of Options, a magazine on Sri
Lankan women’s issues. Her teaching and research range from cultural studies
and theatre art to gender, politics and nationalism.
Introduction
This Book Marks the production of
important "events", 1 temporal moments and selected strands of
nationalism in Sri Lanka? of the 20th
century, particularly within dominant Sinhala Buddhist and militant Tamil
nationalisms. Its main focus however lies in the way gender has been, and
continues to be, a central trope within them. Through a discussion of how women
from diverse professional, class, caste, religious, ideological, ethnic and
linguistic backgrounds have engaged with nationalism, the book attempts to
foreground the relationship between gender and nationalism and how feminism engages
with the ideology of the nation. If tenets of bourgeois respectability, ethnic
exclusivity, patriotism, self-sacrifice, etc., are cornerstones of the
collective imaginary of the nation, it shows how women have both participated
in this project and contested it, forwarding other, alternative ways of
imagining the nation. At the same time it marks the fact that nationalism and
patriarchy are never static institutions; they shift, at times adopt, a certain
feminist stance and adapt to exigency. The engagements of the women fore grounded in this book show how women can, and have
been, appropriated by such a protean nationalism. But they also show when and
how women act on their own behalf, in their own right, and negotiate
patriarchy, capitalism and political opportunity, as well as contradictions
within nationalism itself, to their advantage. The book is engaged, then, in
signalling that gender is crucial to an understanding of nationalism and vice
versa. It also marks the fact that feminism, when it occurs, is not an
autonomous practice but deeply bound to the signifying network of the national
contexts which produce it.! As such,
feminism too, like nationalism, is rich in paradoxes and ambiguities.
Women have been incorporated into nationalist
projects in diverse and often contradictory ways. Nationalism, particularly in
the Third World's post-colonial terrain, has been commensurate with the rise of
feminism, women's movements and the construction of the "modern"
woman through social and legal reforms encompassing education, marriage and
inheritance laws, and religious/cultural customs. Equal
rights for women has been a part of this campaign, from obtaining the
vote to entry into public service. Nationalism has also subordinated women, at
times through these very social and legal reforms, to keep them at the
boundaries of the nation by controlling their sexuality, mobility, the trope of
motherhood, rights of citizenship and a variety of personal laws that became
codified with the advent of the modern nation state." Indeed
these very boundaries of the nation have needed, for their organisation, the
subordination of women even as they are posited in nationalist projects as
central in the grounding of the nation. Thus even when women have been the
sites of liberal reform, it has "always contained a degree of
instrurnentalism, a sense that transforming women's place in society and the
state represented an opportunity that was only partially about women
themselves". 5 Despite repeatedly affirming the centrality of
women to nationalist projects-whether as signifying sites of modernisation or
for their allegorical value as mothers of the nation-women have in this respect
been primarily a discursive terrain on which significant socio-cultural tenets
of the nation are produced. Women are constructed as the nation's subjects not
only as citizens, but also as members of ethnic, class and caste
groups-differently to men."
Four discursive arenas provide useful insights
into the way nationalism is shaped and gendered; their significance as shifting
sites of control and struggle in the story of nationalism and gender in Sri
Lanka will be seen throughout this book. First, nationalism produces normative
ideas-about sexuality and gender with which it closely intersects and on which
it rests." Its discourse also constructs a division of gender which
renders the male as the author and subject of the nation.!
while the female stands for the nation itself, in need
of male protection, the reproducer and nurturer of future generations and
transmitter of cultural values. As reproducer she carries the responsibility of
avoiding-miscegenation to ensure ethnic, class, caste or racial
"purity". Her sexuality has to be policed and regulated to this end
in the service of the nation. In another context, when European nationalism
from the 17th century onwards began to fuel the imperial conquest of
territories in the Americas, Africa and Asia, it was projected, in its
colonialist discourse, as aggressively masculine in its penetration of feminised
colonial territories." Wars have, through the :
years, been fought in defence of the nation by "sons of the soil".
Modern technologies of aggression take place, yet again, within a framework of
a penetrative male discourse. The very names of the most recently developed
missiles on the Indian subcontinent Trishul (trident
of the god Shiva) on the Indian side, and Half (the lance of the Prophet
Mohammed) on the Pakistani side, simultaneously invoke male prowess and
resonate as symbols of Hindu and Islamic iconography. Following the Indian
nuclear tests of May 1998 Bal Thackeray, the leader of the Shiv
Sena which expounds a right-wing Hindutva
ideology proudly proclaimed, "We are not eunuchs anymore"; and when Nawaz Sharif, Pakistan's Prime Minister, delayed responding
to India's nuclear challenge with tests of his own, he was the recipient of
glass bangles by a section of the public intent on shaming him for his lack of
male virility and courage-hence the "gift" of women's ornaments.
Evident here is the notion that male virility and aggression are the traits
that protect a feminised nation. Politicians and a military unable to fulfil
these roles fail the nation. Conversely, women who break the mould of a
feminised subjectivity and refuse the obligatory roles of chaste and dutiful
wives and daughters become the target of attack. Such emasculation and female
transgression blur gender distinctions and produce a confusion seen as
compromising the potency of the nation.'? This. in turn evokes an anxiety that permeates political rhetoric
as well as popular culture, with very specific consequences for both men and
women.
During the formation of the modern nation
state, when the concept of a fraternity of national subjects took hold of 18th
century Europe after the French Revolution, women were conspicuously left out
of this fellowship. They were excluded from its civil law through a
dispossession of their inheritance in favour of their brothers, and through the
legal regulation of their sexual, biological and reproductive roles.!' Muslim and Hindu personal laws continue, in South
Asia, to deprive women of inheritance and equality in marriage.
In India,
under the Hindu Succession Act of 1956, only patrilineal
forms of inheritance are legitimate. Accordingly, a Hindu woman cannot inherit
a share of ancestral property at birth as her brothers do. It is only to her
father's self-acquired wealth that she can lay claim equally with her
brothers.'! In Sri Lanka, under the Thesavalamai, the laws governing Tamils of
Malabar origin who live in Jaffna, in the north of Sri Lanka, women cannot
dispose of their property without written male consent. Under the Muslim
Intestate Successions Ordinance of 1931 which recognised the right of Muslims
to inherit according to their sect, women within the Shafie
sect (the majority Muslim sect in Sri Lanka) can only inherit half the
equivalent of the male, although there is some protection for her in that her
property cannot be willed away. Again under Muslim personal law in Sri Lanka,
it is only the male guardian's consent that is required for a woman's marriage.
Under the Hudood Ordinance, operative in Pakistan,
one man's evidence in a court of law is considered the equivalent of two
women's. In this way women have been constructed as partial
citizens of the nation-state. Moreover, that women's regulation is seen to take
place in the private spheres of the domestic and familial, rather than the
public domain of the state has hitherto encouraged the erasure of women and
gender from discourses on the state and nation.':' It has been the task of
feminist scholarship of the late1980s and 1990s to dismantle this idea of a
polarised, dichotomous public private binary. Partha Chatterjee, in a path-breaking essay for the time, noted
that in mid to late 19th century India, the Bhadralok
nationalist elite invested heavily in a private domain epitomising
indigenous/spiritual values because the public sphere, associated with the
material, was contaminated by the presence of the
coloniser. While in public the male Bengali elite had lost its power, it could
still determine events and discourses in the private domain. Women were central
signifiers of this private domain.!" It has since
been the task of feminist scholars to show that Chatterjee's
understanding of the Bhadralok's
"resolution" of the women's question as a subaltern move is
predicated on an erasure of women's agency,15 that in
fact, "this division between outer and inner, with its homologies no
longer corresponds to the lived reality", 16 and that
women have redefined their limits and (re)crossed their boundaries to make the
private/public not water-tight, but porous.
The second arena is the nexus between
nationalism and modernity. The growth of feminism and women's movements in the
20th century is distinctly related to the modernising impulse of the
nation-state. -What agentive moments and acts women have been able to achieve
have taken place under circumstances that pushed towards a new modernity. Kumari Jayawardena has shown that
in the 20th century it was at the historical junctures of
anti-imperial struggles that women participated most keenly in nationalist
projects. I? As the colonised elite at the vanguard of anti-imperialist struggles
were keen to modernise their societies to claim parity with their colonial
masters, women's emancipation became an essential and integral part of this
process. Modernity would better equip native society to jettison its colonial
bondage, and creating a "New Woman" became part of this campaign.
Thus the terminology of the "New Woman" which had become fashionable
in 19th century Europe was adopted in the colonies with zeal.
From the publication of a book on women's emancipation entitled The New Woman by Kassim
Amin in 1901, to the association in 1919 of Egyptian
women under the Society de la Femme Nouvelle, the new agenda for women spread
to East Asia. Japan saw the establishment of the Association of New Women also
in 1919, and in 1919 and 1920 respectively, magazines entitled The New Woman were published in China
and Korea.
Jayawardena cautions
that what actually defined this "New Woman" varied from region to
region according to historical specificities and cultural traditions.
Nevertheless, in colonial situations the idea of women's emancipation allowed
women a degree of freedom they had not enjoyed before either in pre-colonial or
early colonial society. Obtaining access to colonial education, albeit with
different emphases than what was on offer for men, they went on to professional
careers, becoming doctors of western medicine and leading educationists. When
women were part of militant struggles as in Palestine, China and Vietnam they
secured a degree of mobility and public presence they had not enjoyed before in
their traditional societies. In Palestine, from 1917 onwards, urban women
openly demonstrated against the Balfour Declaration, travelling to villages,
holding demonstrations at both Muslim and Christian holy sites thereby subtly
subverting the highly segregated gender roles within traditional Arab
society." In India, the slogan of swadeshi and
the ensuing boycott of British goods, made even the handicraft sector, often
associated with women, a site of political significance.2o· Women
took to the streets for social service-helping in health care, slum education,
cottage industry. In Sri Lanka, women took an active role in organising against
British imperialism through the Suriya Mal movement.
Launching their campaign in 1933 on Armistice Day, or Poppy Day on which
poppies were sold to raise funds for British soldiers, they named their
campaign after a common local flower, suriyamal, instead of the poppy associated
with the western war effort. The proceeds of their sales went towards educating
an undercaste girl." These women creatively
subverted an imperial symbol for radical ends. In Sri Lanka today, .there are
women militants who, as frontline combatants in nationalist! revolutionary
groups, are active participants in nationalism. The women cadres of the
Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) undergo
as rigorous a military training as their male colleagues, are confident users
of weaponry and other military technology at their disposal, and are part of
elite fighting squads such as the Sea Tigers .and Black Tigers, the latter
being the death squad from which L TIE suicide bombers await their call-up.
Suicide/ sacrifice is already gendered, in that women have traditionally been
called upon to make sacrifices for the family as wife and mother, as well as
for the community as mothers who sacrifice warrior sons during war. But the LTTE
women have redefined this role to collapse the distinction between private and
public by making their. sacrifices highly visible and
manifest.
Modernity, however, is a complex set of
co-ordinates. These women can also embody the hallmarks of what Rajeswari Sunder Rajan terms a sufficient modernity that spells out the cost of such
emancipation. This is when, in recognition of the needs of national
development, human rights and civil liberties, women are no longer denied a
role in "the time-space of the modern". But, as Sunder Rajan points out, When women become conspicuously visible in the
spaces of modernity (such as the street and the work-place, places of mixing of
the sexes), they are treated as having chosen the "risk" of
harassment voluntarily-and treated accordingly. In other cases, more subtle
ideological pressures are enacted to contain women's "modernity", to
incorporate them within its class-caste frame. In influential
anti-Enlightenment critiques, when gender and modernity are read together it is
only to indict "modernity" for producing anomie, aggression and reactive orthodoxy in men,
"feelings" which are then (inevitably) directed as violence against
women. This comprehensive indictment not only leaves no room Jor ascribing other reasons for violence against women-of
which there are myriad, complexly interrelated-it also refuses to recognise the
benefits of modernity, not least for women."
Contents
Acknowledgements |
ix |
Introduction |
1 |
Setting the stage, gendering the nation |
57 |
Framing the nation's respectability |
102 |
A question of identity |
162 |
Agent or victim? |
203 |
Mother politics and women's politics |
233 |
Bibliography |
282 |