Meena Kandasamy records the gruesome first-person experiences of two women of the Tamil Eelam struggle
The picture of a woman with cropped hair, attired in camouflage shirt and trousers, and wielding a gun, can symbolise the ultimate dream of empowerment. More so if the woman is part of an armed liberation struggle.
Often invoked in the depiction of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) in Sri Lanka, the image of a Tamil militant woman challenged some prevalent social norms, but could it overturn the entrenched biases in society?
Meena Kandasamy’s
The Orders Were to Rape You: Tigresses in the Tamil Eelam Struggle, is in part an essay, with narratives of three Tamil women the wife of an LTTE fighter, a female combatant from the LTTE, and the author herself. Its second part is a collection of resistance poems by female guerrillas and militants.
Meena Kandasamy’s documentary on Sri Lanka’s women Tamil warriors is now her latest book
With ‘The Orders Were To Rape You’, the writer takes the trauma of the participants towards posterity. LTTE women soldiers | Marietta Amarcord via Flickr / CC BY 2.0
Tamil nationalism grew stronger within the Tamil diaspora every day even as its flames died down with the end of the prolonged war in Sri Lanka in 2009. The end was not a quiet one, and it was not a war with a clear beginning or end, writes academician Sharika Thiranagama.
What happens when you grow up surrounded by conversations of this war in Tamil Nadu and your whole life becomes an act of documenting it, unravelling the entangled threads and ensuring that suppressed voices find a way to be seen and heard? This book, first intended as a documentary, emerges as a witness to the Sri Lankan conflict.