.jpg)
At the start of this year, between 1 and 7 January, KUNST Gallery in Mattancherry, Kerala, held a lively exhibition titled "The Eelam Dialogues: Voices of Resistance" as part of the sixth edition of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale. The exhibition was a week-long programme of discussions, performances, speeches showcasing Tamil visual arts, poets, novelists, political commentators and musicians. Following the exhibition, Dr. Nimmi Gowrinathan spoke to the Tamil Guardian about the conference.
1. Your speech stresses the need to not confine our movement to political demands and even rhetoric – to ground ourselves in our own sensory experiences, experiences which transcend borders and even generations. It is these experiences which enable us to reclaim a sense of our collective self, as Eelam Tamils. Could you speak to the importance of collective imagination and why we should leave space for this within our political discourse?
What typically we consider the realm of politics (halls of parliaments, the frames of international law, the paradigms the academy offers us, the narrative constructions of the media) are all structures that are entrenched in the agendas of empire.
Rather than push back against this, at this stage my work aims to expand political imagination. A collective imaginary allows us to map our political possibilities without being bound to their constraints. For me, the music, art, writing of Eelam folks everywhere is beginning to fill out the contours of this.
2. On Eelam Tamil identity, you describe it as bound by “a kind of substance that is dense enough to hold together, while remaining porous to new identities and ideas”. As a community that was torn apart by colonialism, genocide and now exists spread across all corners of the globe, there is an ever-present fear, particularly amongst the diaspora, of losing our connection to this identity. This, in turn, often leads to forms of social conservatism as we try to preserve our heritage. Could you speak to this and comment on how we keep this collective identity alive?
There is an identity of birth and the identity of lived experience. While they are connected, anchoring the work in the latter allows for a more expansive mobilizing effort with others who have absorbed the forces of state oppression in many of the same ways.
There are of course external identity markers we read as Eelam Tamilness, a particular short-eat, an unmistakable cadence to the language, a Thai Pongal ritual. But there is also a way of being. How we engage with our elders, the same tiny tensions alongside the same deep respect. The stories of “back home” told and overheard. The way food can dominate a conversation for days. The intricacies of life in an Eelam Tamil household anywhere can collapse false borders on this new political terrain we are all building.
As we pull history into the present to anchor a (new) collective sense of self it is important to note that what is available to us is already limited: for those under siege identity is flattened alongside the physical decimation of war. Entire civilizations collapsed into a single term or narrative.
Much of the work of recovery (rather urgent with our elders) will require asking questions before assuming answers. When Meena translates the revered text of the Tirukurral she pulls apart the lines of couplets to suggest that for the Tamil woman “it is her autonomy that protects her, not her lack of it.”
On the ground, alongside the fight for a safe space was a conversation on what liberation looked like: from multiple sites of social and political oppression. Some of these threads of liberation theology will soften a more rigid construct of what it means to be Eelam Tamil.
The kind of art I am drawn to, what we showcased in Kerala, is doing this very important work of filling out a fuller picture of our histories then in ways that create an expansive space for all Eelam Tamils to step into.
3. There has been previous work which attempted to undermine the agency of female cadres, almost attempting to present them as agents of “captors”. When we examine the poetry of former cadres, how should we understand their political imagination and how they carved out a space between state oppression and patriarchal norms?
Dr. Meena Kandasamy did a beautiful review of the poetry of the female fighter in Guernica Magazine, highlighting how their words pull from the feminine experience but speak directly to the desire for emancipation.
On the question of agency, my own work (Radicalizing Her: Why Women Choose Violence) pulls from nearly two decades of conversation with the women in the Tamil struggle and elsewhere whose complex thinking and strategic decisions push back, so clearly, on the lazy impulse to see them as brainwashed.
While there has never been a political organization that could claim to have elevated gender equality to exist equitably alongside a demand for racial/class/national liberation, there is almost always an internal conversation that many don’t search for, led by the women fighters themselves.
4. A key aspect of your writing, more generally, is the interconnected nature of the Eelam Tamil struggle with that of occupied people across the world. In your speech, you draw on Palestinian and Black American authors and even detail how hip-hop started in the Bronx as a form of resistance.Could you speak to the importance of global solidarity and how Eelam Tamils can understand ourselves as a defined entity within a wider universal struggle?
This too requires that we build our imaginations from a place that is heavy, weighted in history. The connections have always been there. Women leaders in the Tamil movement were reading “Gaza Writes Back” by the recently martyred Dr. Rafaat shortly before dying.
A 1980’s Tamil movement song “O Perished Warrior” was inspired by the work of Palestinian poet Samih al-Qasim. We have been welcomed by members of the Colombia liberation struggle because stories of the Tamil fighters preceded us. Links to the black liberation struggle in the United States run through the Caribbean and run deep.
Tamil liberation struggle, articles, speeches, and conversations of key thinkers and strategists indicate that the movement always saw itself as integrated with the struggles of all oppressed people.
5. Your speech highlights the sacrifice of Thileepan’s hunger struggle and gives a detailed account of the detail to the slow deterioration of the human body deprived of nutrients. You offer a description of his sacrifice as “history, emotion, pain and determination embodied, in one”.
Your upcoming book, “Occupation and the Body” focuses on human body as a site of resistance against occupation? Could you expand on this and offer insight on how we should understand how those occupied resist?
“In Northern Sri Lanka last year, I stood alone on a bridge waiting for my son to tire of his futile bid to find fish in scant streams. An army truck with soldiers spilling out the back began to shout and gesture lewd in the occupier’s language. My shoulders go concave as if I might flatten into safety. I immediately recall flipping through a local paper’s thinning pages in the archives earlier that day and paused at a moment: when the warning of an raid pierced the air a young Tamil schoolgirl folds her limbs into a hollowed-out sand bunker. The space demands compression, her body complies. I remember thinking, this should not be a child’s pose. In occupied space our bodies adopt postures of preservation. We sacrifice movement for life.” ( Excerpt)
Politics happens in the body. Gendered and racialized bodies are most vulnerable (and visible) to the violence of the state. The occupation of once-safe space settles in the body. Centering injury from the intimate terrain of the body locates deeper impulses towards liberation.
Read from the body, state violence is always gendered and gender-based violence is always political: truths we sense to be self-evident. Like a muscle under strain, consciousness rips in a moment of violence but grows stronger in the practice of resistance. In Arabic, the hunger strike is a “battle of the empty intestine”. I return to the lives of Thileepan Anna and others to understand the collective groundswell that formed around individual sacrifice. Occupation and The Body (Yale University Press, 2026) clears new ground from which to theorize resistance.
6. What advice would you give to young aspiring Tamil writers to help them find their own voice and their location within this struggle?
We are all products of a legacy of violence. This moment is defined by an insatiable desire for racialized, sexual supremacy embedded in emboldened states – reinforced through a carefully constructed set of narratives designed to sustain subjugation.
I believe the lines of narrative captivity must first be revealed before liberatory desires can be articulated.
Objectivity is the impossible demand made of marginalized communities whose embedded analyses are a threat. Neither intellectual curiosity nor humanitarian intent is inherently neutral.
Academic writing scrapes the emotional life out of a vessel, emptied out to re-produce the Empires’ enlightenment. Even those who want to “center the voices” of survivors often decide which part of the story is told. Editorial manipulations pull our raw pain into their agendas.
The most difficult, and critical work, is to locate your political voice. And allow it to exist however it emerges. The Eelam Dialogues revealed the wide spectrum of form, from multi-media installations to theatrical monologues and fictional texts that we are all working to produce a collective counter-narrative.
Political voice,
is not defined in opposition but anchored in an alternative.
defies capture…over and over again.
can be found anywhere, even under cover of a conference.
is an articulation that, in itself, creates a reverberation in the bodies of the besieged,
It is a page that becomes a reflective surface,
For each of our battles with shadow and light.
Read Dr. Nimmi Gowrinathan's exerpts of her address here: Sensory Reclamation: On Being Eelam Tamil
Read more about the exhibition here: 'Eelam Dialogues' - Sixth edition of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale