Filial devotion in Tamil culture and the Tiger cult of martyrdom

The popular responses to the first instance of cyanide suicide in the Jaffna Peninsula, that of Ponnadurai Sivakumaran in 1974, highlight the value that is accorded to devotional sacrifice in Tamil culture on both sides of the Palk Strait. The circumstances of Tamil dissatisfaction with Sinhalese society and the state apparatus provided an ideal scenario for the crystallisation of this emphasis. The LTTE have seized the opportunity and built up a cult of martyrdom as a mobilisational device, cementing force and precise weapon. Such instrumental usages should not obscure the likelihood that, among the Tiger leadership, the cyanide vial is both instrument and faith.

Speculatively it is suggested that the varied expressions of Tamil sentiment in northern Sri Lanka during the 1960s and 1970s-before the Tigers secured their dominance—will reveal an emphasis on filial devotion in ways which draw on Caizkam and bhakti traditions. The article therefore draws attention to certain continuities in the popular folk cults in Tamil lands—traditions which provide a seedbed of evocative symbols that, in specific contexts, can impel, or be made to impel, individuals in sacrificial directions.

The essqy argues that the understanding of such subjectivities and these essentialising moves among the Tamil militants requires a measure of essentialisation in our approaches. It elaborates this view through a critical review of Pandian's instrumental and semiotic analysis of the MGR phenomenon, a review which enables the author to introduce the hermeneutic approach of the early Taussig and his own subjectivist emphasis on the manner in which some Tamils merge their being with that of the icon of their hearts, be it MGR, Eelam or Prabhakaran.