ragmatic ction and nchanted worlds · 74–75, 76) notes in distilled summary after conversations...

PRAGMATIC ACTION AND ENCHANTED WORLDSA Black Tiger Rite of Commemoration

Michael Roberts

Abstract: Since Weber’s time, it has been believed that ‘enchantment’ progressively gave way to secular rationalism and its disenchanted ways. This essay breaks the twinning of enchantment with ‘irrationality’ in developing the argument that enchanted practices and pragmatic meth-ods co-exist fruitfully in the activities of the LTTE. Circumstantial evi-dence, arising from pictures and descriptions of hero rituals sponsored by the LTTE, provides the foundation for this argument. It is suggested that the Saivite universe of being has nourished these symbolic compositions. A photograph of Black Tigers paying homage to their dead with guns in the left hand and flowers in the right provides a condensed demonstra-tion as well as a point of departure for this suggestion. It is a moment of conjunctiveness that has the potential to fuse past, present, and future, thus achieving ‘fusion force’.

Keywords: commemoration, embodied practices, enchantment, ‘fusion force’, martyrdom, rationality, suicide

The de facto state commanded by the Liberation Tigers for Tamil Eelam (LTTE) in Sri Lanka has established a number of calendrical rituals to remember and honor its fallen heroes and heroines, the mavırar. These are persons who have died in action as part of the LTTE goal of political independence, namely, Thamilılam or Eelam, as the latter is more widely labeled. The most significant of these rituals is Heroes Day, which is celebrated on 27 November. As part of the ceremony, the LTTE’s talaivar (leader), Velupillai Prabhakaran (more properly, Pirapaharan), delivers a peroration for 25 minutes immediately prior to the 6:06 AM lighting of the flame of sacrifice at the designated tuyilam illam (resting places) for the mavırar (see fig. 1).1 As Natali (2005) discovered, the

Social Analysis, Volume 50, Issue 1, Spring 2006, 73–102 © Berghahn Journals

74 | Michael Roberts

Tamil people do not see these sites as “cemeteries.” Rather, they are “portrayed as temples.” Indeed, like the people she talked to, a semi-official LTTE site described the locations as “holy places” (ibid.; see description of Mavırar Nal at www.tamilnet.com, 27 November 1998).

Among the nine other rituals observed annually by the LTTE, perhaps the most significant is Black Tiger Day (5 July), which commemorates the occa-sion when an LTTE fighter, known by the nom de guerre Capt. Miller,2 drove a truck laden with explosives into a school compound at Nelliyady in 1987, killing about 40 soldiers of the Sri Lanka Army (SLA). The compound had been the site of a camp occupied by the advancing SLA forces during the army’s Vadamarachchi offensive, which threatened the Tamil heartland, the Jaffna Peninsula. Institutionalized around the time of this attack,3 the Black Tigers are the LTTE men and women who have been specially selected for dangerous operations, including suicidal attacks. These commandos are the LTTE’s ver-sion of the SAS, the British Army’s counter-revolution and counter-terrorism special forces organization.

FIGURE 1 Tuyilam Illam at Kopay, Near Jaffna Town, November 2004

The original tuyilam illam (resting place) at this site was bulldozed by the Sri Lankan Army when it captured the western part of the peninsula in mid-1995; this is a rebuilt ‘temple’. Each tuyilam illam is kept in immaculate condition. This photograph was taken at a time when Kopay was being prepared for the major ceremony on 27 Novem-ber 2004. Stands with oil lamps have been placed in front of each gravestone so that kinfolk can light them simultaneously at the appointed time. Photo by Michael Roberts.

Pragmatic Action and Enchanted Worlds | 75

While the Black Tigers’ dutiful commitment to self-sacrifice through suicide attacks is one dimension of their capacity, they are not alone in this measure of commitment. From very early on, the LTTE leadership has demanded that all their personnel should take an oath of loyalty expressing a readiness to die for their cause, even by their own hand. This commitment-cum-expecta-tion was (and is) embodied in the cyanide vials (kuppi) carried around their necks—a ready instrument for use if captured. This practice, adopted around 1983–1984,4 immediately garnered admiration among all classes of the Tamil population, giving an edge to the LTTE in the competition with other militant groups for recruits and supporters. As a Christian Tamil octogenarian in Ade-laide informed me, the “devotion that the Tigers showed was unmatched.”5

Indeed, the Tigers regard the kuppi as “a good friend,” as Schalk (1997a: 74–75, 76) notes in distilled summary after conversations with Kittu (third-in-command) in 1991 and other LTTE personnel.6 Thus, sacrificial devotion to the point of suicidal self-annihilation was (and still is) expected of every LTTE fighting person, as well as other personnel committed to the cause. However, a temporal gap between 1984 and 1987 accompanied an internal debate regarding the use of human weapons of death. The LTTE hierarchy was eventually won over by those who argued that there was no difference between swallowing pills to avoid capture and mounting suicidal attacks7 (and thus assassinations, too). Self-sacrifice was seen as a logical step forward with the instrumental benefit of creating a precision weapon. The situation of beleaguered military asymmetry confronting the LTTE and the Tamil people, of course, conditioned such reasoning. In brief, as so many analysts have stressed, human bombs have been perfected by those in a disempowered situation.

Since then, the Black Tigers (fig. 2) have been the best fighters, carefully selected because of their skills as well as their supreme qualities of com-mitment. A semi-official statement notes that “[t]heir identities are closely guarded. Having completed their training, they serve in regular LTTE units, concealing their membership. When called up for a mission, they take routine leave, and if they survive, they return to regular service again. Membership is revealed only if they are killed in combat.”8 The significance attached to the Black Tiger personnel within the military machine of the LTTE from the late 1980s is indicated by the fact that those sent on suicide missions have the privi-lege of a last meal with their tesai talaivar or national leader9—a practice that has surely been inspired by the Christians within the movement. By September 2002, there were 241 Black Tiger mavırar among the 17,889 LTTE fighters who had died for their cause; that is, they made up 1.3 percent of the fallen.10 In November 2004, a special commemoration shed at Kilinochchi was devoted to displaying pictures of selected Black Tiger dead.

Each of the calendrical rites designated by the LTTE is not confined to one site. Remembrances may be held at several regional sites, while Mavırar Nal on 27 November is conducted at 21 locations (personal communication from Joe Ariyaratnam and www.tamilnet.com),11 besides being observed by migrant bodies of Tamils in various parts of the world, whether Toronto, Dusseldorf, London, Geneva, Melbourne, etc.


Commemorative Rite: Black Tiger Day, 2003

My focus here is on the ethnographic details depicting the manner in which the LTTE supporters from Trincomalee District inaugurated a memorial for the Black Tigers at Sampur village within Muttur East on 5 July 2003. The cere-mony was presided over by Col. Pathuman12 and included Uthayan (the LTTE’s military commander for the Trincomalee town) and other area commanders, as well as Thurairetnasingham (the Tamil National Alliance parliamentarian) and Thilak (the LTTE’s district political head).

This new memorial was dedicated to 16 Black Tigers from Trincomalee Dis-trict who had fallen up to that date, in addition to the first Black Tiger, Capt. Miller, and the first woman Black Tiger, Angayarkanni. From the Web site description, it appears that the ritual activities followed in this order:

• Col. Pathuman, Thilak, and other area leaders took the salute while the Tamil national anthem was sung.

• A relative of a fallen Black Tiger lit the flame of sacrifice.• Uthayan hoisted the Tamil Eelam national flag. • Col. Pathuman then declared open the memorial by cutting the ribbon.• Col. Pathuman, Thurairetnasingham, Thilak, and LTTE area commanders

laid floral tributes to the fallen Tigers. Thereafter, “leading citizens, principals

FIGURE 2 Black Tigers Marching

This image was extracted for me by a Tamil friend from a Web site partial to the LTTE, namely, www.Puthinam.com. The location is definitely on the A9 road at Kilinochchi. The Black Tigers are elite commando troops and do not always function as units. It is from their ranks that the suicide attackers and assassins are selected.


of schools, teachers, students and the public also paid their homage to the Black Tigers” (www.tamilnet.com, 6 July 2003).

• A paramilitary training exercise followed (in order to demonstrate the LTTE’s capacities and inspire the audience).

My principal focus is upon one of the accompanying images of Black Tigers queuing up to honor their immediate ‘lineage’ of mavırar. In one hand they carry a weapon, and in the other, white flowers, probably the jasmine flower (fig. 4). To me, these two symbols embody the currents of ‘practical rational-ity’ and ‘enchanted power’ that inspire and guide the LTTE struggle. These are currents that the LTTE fighters draw on for protection, mobilization, and com-mitment. It is toward an elaboration of this hypothesis in mostly conjectural, yet logical, ways that my article is directed.

In contrasting rationality in all its complexity with ‘enchantment’, I am clearly informed by Max Weber’s writings. The idea of ‘enchantment’ is inti-mately connected with Weberian sociology and its stress on the process of ‘dis-enchantment’ toward religious faith and ‘magic’ that accompanied the growth of rationality, science, and market capitalism. The hegemony secured by math-ematico-logical and scientific skills from the seventeenth up to the nineteenth centuries included a cluster of processes, such as secularization, the growth of materialism, and an emphasis on the individual (D. Gellner 2001; Keyes 2002; Tambiah 1990; Weber 1948, 1978a, 1978b).

FIGURE 3 Velupillai Pirapaharan Pays Homage to the Black Tiger Fallen, 5 July 2005

The picture that serves as a distilled representation of all Black Tigers is that of the first LTTE suicide bomber, Valipuram Vasanthan, better known by his code name, Capt. Miller. The son of a bank clerk and a product of Hartley College Point Pedro, Miller drove a truck bomb into an army camp at Nelliayadi on 5 July 1987. Courtesy of TamilNet.


Specialists in Weber’s oeuvre note his “casual and unsystematic” use of some of his own concepts (Brubaker 1984) and the relational “perspectivism” that qualifies his evaluations of the rationalization process taken in sum (Kal-berg 1980: 1155).13 But it is widely agreed that Weber’s principal focus was the “specific and peculiar rationalism of Western culture,” more especially its capitalist economy and “its objectified, institutionalised, supra-individual form” of bureaucracy, an emphasis that was informed by the international mastery secured by European forces (Brubaker 1984: 2 and 9, with the first quotation being the words of Weber himself). This supremacy, in Weber’s view, was secured through multiple interrelated processes. In Brubaker’s summary, three motifs underline the Weberian analysis: “increasing knowledge, growing impersonality and enhanced control” (ibid.: 9–10).

In Weber’s view, as Ernest Gellner (1974: 188–189) notes, the process of rationalization involved the institutionalization of “ordered regularity” associ-ated with the bureaucrat and means-ends efficiency; moreover, “rationality and disenchantment [were] intimately connected.” Thus, Weber’s ideal typical con-cept of “practical rationality” referred to the individual pursuit of egoistic ends in calculating ways attuned to given realities—with “a concomitant inclination

FIGURE 4 Black Tigers Pay Homage to Their Fallen at Sampur in Muttur East, 5 July 2003

Significantly, the pictures on this Web site present fallen comrades from the locality (pre-sumably Trincomalee District). The territorial localization of some rituals is a significant aspect of symbolic connectivity and legitimation in LTTE programs of mobilization and land claim. One of the questions arising from this act of veneration is whether the table on which flowers are being offered/laid is called a pıtam, that is, a ‘sacrificial altar’, which is placed in front of religious icons at shrines in Asia. Courtesy of TamilNet.


to oppose all orientations based on transcendence of daily routine” (Kalberg 1980: 1152). To Weber, therefore, the “modern proletariat … [was] character-ised, like the greater part of the authentic modern bourgeoisie, by indifference to, or rejection of, religion.” The proletariat, moreover, is said to have aban-doned “all thought of dependence on cosmic processes, the weather or other natural processes seen as capable of being influenced by magic or providence” (Weber 1978a: 178).

Given his focus on the historical trajectory of rationality to its position of eminence, Weber’s remarks on enchantment and irrationality are, not surpris-ingly, unsystematic. But no less a person than Parsons (1947: 15) has observed Weber’s “marked tendency … to move in terms of the dichotomy of rational and irrational” because of his methodology of ideal types. As such, deviations from rational norms were seen as irrational, leading, in Parsons’s evaluation (ibid.: 16), to “a theoretically unwarranted antithesis.”

In this tendency Weber was reproducing the dominant current within intel-lectual circles in the West in his time, a perspective that regarded magical practices and religious faith as inferior phenomena. Ardent religious faith, even that among Christians, was deemed ‘zealotry’ and, eventually, in the twentieth century was decreed to be ‘fundamentalism’—something suspect because of its dogmatism and its literal readings of a book.14 In this disenchanted, rationalist perspective, therefore, ‘enchanted practices’ were seen as equivalent to magic/irrationality. My article is partly directed toward questioning this linkage and enforcing its separation in specified contexts.

Since rationality was, often implicitly, associated with individual advance-ment in one’s lifetime and with an individuated, transactionalist reading of the good, seeking benefits in the afterlife assumed inferior status. Following this logic, therefore, seeking death happily was more irrational than attempting suicide in a state of depression: the latter was regrettable yet understandable, whereas the calm pursuit of death by a healthy person was madness.15 Suicide by immolation, involving as it did horrific fire, was doubly crazy.16

Fire is not seen in quite this horrified way in Hinduized cultural settings. The third eye of Siva, at the center of the forehead, is the point at which his fiery power is said to flow out (Fuller 1992: 60). The “immaterial medium of a flame” is treated as a form of divine power. A camphor flame is a central item in conventional worship (puja) at a temple. The camphor flame and a devotee’s offerings of prasada “together divinize the human actor to achieve … identity between deity and worshipper” (ibid.: 74). Again, Tanaka (1991: 181) argues that when devotees walk the fire, they are not merely keeping a promise and thanking a deity for boons conferred; they are also performing “homa, a form of fire sacrifice.” That is, “firewalking is a ceremony of symbolic death and rebirth in which the medium and the votaries [whom] he leads sacrifice themselves.”

Against this background, the immolation of self through fire in special cir-cumstances requires but one extra step, so to speak. In relatively recent times in India sati matas, who immolated themselves on their husbands’ cremation fires, were heroines who became deified and served others as tutelary village deities (Fuller 1992: 49). The praise and celebration of suicide extended to great


men who killed themselves “when some irretrievable disgrace or insult befell them” (Kailasapathy 1968: 76). Such acts were usually carried out in ways that were deemed to be a chastisement of powerful figures by those weaker—in brief, a classic case of a weapon wielded by the weak.

Suicide attacks emerged as a Tiger weapon in precisely this situation of military asymmetry. They were one facet of a tactical response directed by a rational marshaling of available resources.

LTTE Success and Its Hard-Headed Capacities

The date when the LTTE emerged is shrouded in obscurity.17 Its predecessor is said to be the Tamil New Tigers, formed in 1974, while its formal existence as the Liberation Tigers for Tamil Eelam is attributed to the year 1976.18 Its com-mitted core of fighters in mid-1983 are said to have numbered only 27 and were certainly not more than 50 (personal communications from K. Sivathamby, August 2005, and S. Sivadasan, 1 August 2005). But like the other underground militant forces, this ragtag guerrilla group expanded hugely after the July 1983 pogrom. In the next four years at least 10 batches were trained at military camps in India, several of them LTTE-run. By early 1987, having ruthlessly eliminated the TELO forces in April to May 1986 and the EPRLF leadership in December 1986, the LTTE had become the leading resistance force among the Sri Lankan Tamils.

When the relationship with the Indian government soured in October 1987, and the LTTE went to war with the Indian Peace Keeping Force in Sri Lanka, they lost significant numbers of their cadre. But they replenished their ranks and withstood a massive Indian Army presence. After the Indians left in Febru-ary to March 1990, they established a de facto state, dominating much of the Tamil-speaking territory within Sri Lanka.

In no time the LTTE became a conventional army, with guerrilla extensions in certain areas. Between 1990 and 2001, they secured significant victories against the Sri Lankan state forces, notably at Pooneryn (November 1991), Mul-laitivu (July 1996), Puliyankulam and Kanakarayankulam (September 1999), and Elephant Pass (April 2000), and in response to the army’s ‘Agni Kheela’ offensive in April 2001 (aided here by personal communications from Jagath Senaratne and Ponnadurai Thambiraja). Though outgunned and outnumbered, they used to advantage the state’s foolhardiness in fighting in fixed positions on numerous fronts by relying on mobility, the tactical concentration of limited resources, and superior intelligence about their opponents’ dispositions.

From early days, moreover, they developed a brown water navy of speed-boats, which used the sub-continental coastlines to advantage—perhaps the only modern liberation force to develop such a capacity. Purchasing a fleet of freighters that sailed convenient ‘pan-ho-lib’ (Panama-Honduras-Liberia) flags, they developed a shipping network that functioned as legitimate businesses, while also bringing them arms when feasible. They also have an embryonic air force that is causing widespread anxiety.19


One word sums up the LTTE’s success and reach: organization. Within Sri Lanka, for instance, their key personnel have been protected since the late 1980s through extensive underground facilities, while state-of-the-art underground hospitals have serviced their rehabilitation needs. From the mid-1980s, they have grown into a transnational corporation with numerous subsidiary enter-prises, some criminal and clandestine, as well as affiliated front organizations. As one militant told Davis (1996: 31), Prabhakaran “thought like a good mer-chant capitalist.” This multi-national corporation has three dimensions: fund-raising, arms procurement, and publicity. As Peiris (2002: 115) sees it, the “LTTE has established over the years a massive empire of business and commerce with a global spread for which the Eelam war provides the motive force.”

In this sense, the LTTE is an epitome of successful etatism or state capital-ism—as anyone who visits Tigerland today and sees the thriving restaurants, transport services, and customs collections would attest. Such productive investments call to mind, albeit in minute comparison, the developments within Nazi Germany in the 1930s. Enabling both instances of growth was the foundation provided by a people’s investment in education over many decades in ways that provided a pool of personnel with technological and organizational skills—that is, with the bureaucratic rationality-cum-precision that Weber and so many identified as the path of dominating modernization.

Managerial Abilities, Pragmatism, and Scenario Planning

The wide-ranging activities and success of the LTTE, therefore, demonstrate their managerial skills. The demi-god status attached to Velupillai Pirapaharan among some Tamils must not lead one to think of the organization as a one-man show. Pirapaharan is not only supported by thinkers, investment bank-ers, and logisticians (such as the mysterious Kumaran Padmanabha) abroad, but also has had the support of able men such as Shankar, Kittu, Mahattaya, Ponnamma, Kerdelz, Tileepan, Shangar (Soranalingam Vaithiyalingam), all of whom have died, as well as Soosaipillai, Baby Subramanium, Yogi, Bal-asingham, Pottu Amman, and Basheer Karder during the 1980s. Since then, capable individuals honed by battle and organizational experience, such as Sasi Master and Kaushalyan, both of whom have died, along with Thamil Chelvam, Karuna, Karikalan, Mano Master, Sornam, Bhanu, Puhalenthi, Ramesh, and Kuttu, have added steel to the senior ranks—until a major split in early 2004, centered on Col. Karuna and Batticaloa District, generated a spanner within their works. But the critical point is that there has always been a high command that directs operations along multiple channels and relies on watchful devolution.

As such, the Tigers are the epitome of modern entrepreneurship and what one can call ‘practical rationality’. This capacity is leavened by pragmatism. “The LTTE lives by the day,” said Dharmeratnam Sivaram in conversation with me at Wella-watte one day in 2000. Sivaram himself is better known to the world as ‘Taraki’, the name he adopted for his newspaper columns. Widely read in philosophy and


well versed in Tamil history,20 Sivaram came from the Eastern Province and had been active in PLOTE, one of the militant groups fighting for independence, before taking up the pen. As a staunch Eelamist, his sympathies had moved increasingly toward the LTTE. But it is his perceptiveness and knowledge that I wish to mark in highlighting his evaluation of the LTTE.

The Tiger leadership, in this evaluation, adjusts its goals according to tac-tical requirements as well as its strategies. This is a point that has also been stressed by Peter Schalk (1997c, 2003) from a position sympathetic to the LTTE project. Schalk observes that many fighters in the LTTE know a famous quo-tation from their talaivar by heart: “Poritta vativankal maralam. Anal ematu poratta ilatciyam marapovatillai” (The methods of war may change. But the aim of our war will not change). This was a statement made on 4 August 1987 by Velupillai Pirapaharan at Cutumalai Amman Kovil in the Jaffna Peninsula. At the time, the LTTE was confronting a dilemma—whether to accept the inter-vention of the Indian state in the form of the Indian Peace Keeping Force or to reject the imperialistic relationship implied in such actions. Schalk presents this principle as a form of Kautalyan wisdom suited to the LTTE situation.

The subsequent successes of the LTTE on the battlefield, in the global order, and in the field of diplomacy indicate that its pragmatism is paying dividends. The comparison can be taken beyond Kautalya to the figure of Bismarck due to the ruthlessness that the LTTE has displayed in eliminating key opponents, marshaling the Sri Lankan Tamil population, and generally using the instru-ments of power—notably, guns, explosives, assassinations, and propaganda—to pursue its cause. Whereas in the late 1980s the Tamil moderate party (TULF) was firmly opposed to the LTTE, from 1999 this very same party and its succes-sors have fallen into line behind the LTTE and accepted the principle that the LTTE is the “sole representative of the Tamils” (a phrase used widely by the LTTE and its fellow-travelers) in the ongoing peace negotiations. Here, then, we see a degree of similarity with the manner in which so many German liberals of the mid-nineteenth century sat at Bismarck’s feet after he united Germany by means of power and immorality in 1870. The conqueror is victor, so to speak, and, as so often, writes the ‘history’ after the victory. Realpolitik can reshape the past world according to it own image.

The molding of opinion by the LTTE among the Tamil population in Sri Lanka and the Tamils of the diaspora has involved careful and wide-ranging efforts through press, radio, television, and performative modes of presentation. From an early date, the LTTE has also trained two-person video teams that go into action with their fighting units in any major battle. The footage on their victories is then suitably edited by a state-of-the-art studio to produce videos and DVDs for propaganda and mobilizational purposes, both in Sri Lanka and abroad.21

The day-to-day adjustments of a pragmatic and opportunistic character, how-ever, are seconded by long-term planning as well as schemes for several contin-gencies. One reason for the LTTE’s success has been this foresight. A striking example of their long-term vision was the manner in which they planted one of their committed loyalists, Babu (alias Kulaveerasingham Veerakumar), as a mole in the working-class urban quarter where Ranasinghe Premadasa, the


United National Party (UNP) politician who had risen from the slums to the position of president, had his origins and roots. There in Kehelwatte, over a period of two years, Babu insinuated himself into Premadasa’s circle of fixers and low-level intermediaries. On 1 May 1991, the familiar figure of Babu (wear-ing a hidden suicide vest) was able to breach Premadasa’s security cordon with relative ease, blowing to smithereens himself, the president of Sri Lanka, and others in the area (Gunaratna 1997: 86–87). It was not only the timing of Babu’s act of suicidal assassination that was impeccable. From the viewpoint of realpolitik, the moment chosen by his LTTE masters was geared toward their objectives: they had got rid of two of the most capable leaders within the ruling UNP within one month in 1991 in ways that encouraged all manner of conspiracy theories and maximum uncertainty.22

The LTTE discovered the value of long-term contingency thinking the hard way. Again, we are indebted to Sivaram (Taraki 2004a) for clarifying this point. “The Tigers,” he explains, “were utterly unprepared for the Indian military intervention in 1987.” When they eventually took on the might of the IPKF, many LTTE fighters were known to the Indians, and they lost a significant num-ber of their pool of personnel, then around 2,000 persons. Thereafter, however, the LTTE attended meticulously to ‘scenario planning’.23 “The first military les-son that Tamil guerrillas learned in the early 1980s was that a plan of attack, however small, should always include as many alternative routes of withdrawal as possible to ensure the safe return of fighters and their weapons. Training with scenarios makes commanders more agile in making decisions in the battle-field” (ibid.). Such long-term thinking extends beyond battlefield situations to the overall military and political prospects. As such, Taraki tells us, they have always “plan[ned] ahead for possible future foreign military interventions on behalf of the Sri Lankan state.” This military thinking itself is “not as an end in itself but as a means to achieve the fundamental political objectives espoused by the Tamil national movement in Sri Lanka since 1948.”24 Thus, the Tigers developed the concept of ‘asymmetrical deterrence’ as one part of this two-pronged strategy. This idea describes a situation in which an outgunned and outmanned antagonist positions its forces strategically to deny military victory to an opponent with superior resources. Such a program is designed to secure a “stable equilibrium” that enables a political thrust (Taraki 2004a, 2004b).25

In sum, therefore, it is foresight backed by organizational skill that has enabled the LTTE to move from a position of pronounced military asymmetry in the mid-1980s to one, since 2001–2002, in which they have effective military deterrence and have revealed a capacity to breach the heartland of the Sinhala-dominated state through commando operations.26 This organizational capacity has been a feature of the Eelam movement in its widest range from the 1970s and applies to other Tamil-run outfits, both those that have been aligned with the LTTE and those that are quite hostile to it (the University Teachers for Human Rights). One has only to review the Web sites sustained by the LTTE or its front organizations to comprehend the thoroughness of their activities (e.g., see Jeganathan 1997; Ranganathan 2002; Whitaker 2004). These sites are efficient tools of LTTE propaganda. Not only are they updated regularly, but


also their historical data pool is maintained meticulously—with an LTTE slant, of course. The efforts of the government in Colombo and those of hard-line Sin-hala activists in the diaspora pale in significance when compared to the streams of Internet transmission mounted by the Eelamists over the years—streams that not only cater to the true believers but also target those on the fringe, serving as instruments of legitimation for those watching the scene.

The LTTE, therefore, is the epitome of a cohesive outfit pursuing its ends with tactical acumen and organizational efficiency. Attentiveness to this capac-ity is a requisite for all those surveying the scene, including those adamantly hostile to the LTTE.

Deciphering the Black Tiger Rite

We are now in a position to return to the image (fig. 4) that provides the point of departure for this article: a group of Black Tigers, with guns in one hand and jasmine flowers in the other, paying homage to the garlanded photographs of their fallen, local Black Tigers. Though occurring in open air, the table that is the focus for the line of Black Tigers at Sampur resembles that of a pıtam, the table or ‘sacrificial altar’ placed in front of religious icons at shrines in Asia.27

As significantly, the photographs of the mavırar are garlanded. Garlands are a sign of importance but can convey different shades of meaning according to context. Politicians and important persons in South Asia are garlanded as an expression of honor. Such an act cannot be deemed religious in any sense of the word, but within the context of death and a funeral rite, the ambience asso-ciated with a garland ‘deepens’. The LTTE garlands its mavırar gravestones, as well as memorials for stellar mavırar such as Malati and Miller of Nelliyady fame. One such star in their firmament is Lt Col. Bork (Mapanapillai Arasarat-nam of Arumuhathan Puthukulam), who attempted in 1990 to breach the for-ward defenses at Mankulam as a human-bomb-in-makeshift-bulldozer. Thus, we witness official recognition of his valor in his home locality of Vavuniya on 5 July 2003 (fig. 5).28

As significantly, the LTTE call the gravestone a nadukal,29 that is, a memo-rial stone or hero stone. This term refers to a practice in India of enshrining special humans, a practice that Aiyappan encompasses within the phrase, “the deification of humans and the humanising of the deities.”30 The practice of erecting hero stones prevailed in many parts of Tamilnadu as well as the Kan-nada-speaking area of Mysore (Karnataka) and Kerala for many centuries (Settar 1982; Settar and Sontheimer 1982; Soundara Rajan 1982). The evidence goes back even to the Cankam poetry of the first to third centuries BCE. “These heroes often became tutelary divinities or demons and were worshipped with offer-ings of food and flowers” (Pope, as quoted in Kailasapathy 1968: 76; also see Whitehead [1921] 1983: 91, 93, 102, 117–119). Indeed, in southern India it was believed that the spirits of the dead entered the hero stones (Rajam 2000: 8ff.).

Honoring Lt. Col. Bork in this way with a garland was not an isolated act. Witness the manner in which every gravestone at tuyilam illam is ‘ordained’


with a garland prior to an LTTE ceremony (fig. 6). Such official practice is amplified by the kinfolk, who bring flowers, incense, camphor, and candles to ‘embalm’ each gravestone (Natali 2005). As Chandrakanthan has observed elsewhere (2000: 165), these acts of bedecking are one facet of activities that resemble actions at shrines and temples. Just as strikingly, in 1998 the Voice of Tigers radio station announced in its night-time broadcast that “aircraft of the Air Tigers sprinkled flowers on the LTTE’s Heroes’ memorials in the Vanni this evening during the Mavırar Day ceremonies” (www.tamilnet.com, 27 Novem-ber 1998). Seen in this way, the functions of 27 November are rites rather than mere ceremonies.

Perhaps the most significant parallel between the garlanded Tiger grave-stones and a Saivite rite is the blood sacrifice known as velvi, which occurs at the climactic stage of the Bhadrakali festival for Tamil Saivites and other wor-shippers. Officiants hang a garland round the neck of a black goat, anoint it with consecrated water, and wave incense over it, while the crowd shouts “Arohara!”

FIGURE 5 Lt. Col. Bork’s Nadukal Worshipped by LTTE Official, 5 July 2003

“LTTE’s Vavuniya Political head Mr. S. Elilan is seen garlanding Black Tiger Lt. Col. Bork’s ‘Nadukal’ at the Eachchankulam Maveerar Thuyilum Illam. Lt. Col. Bork (Mapanapillai Arasaratnam of Arumuhathan Puthukulam Vavuniya) was killed on 23.11.1990 when he helped destroy the entrance to strategic Mankulam SLA camp” (www.tamilnet.com). Courtesy of TamilNet.


before the head is cut off (Bastin 2002a: 65–66, 196–199; Tanaka 1991: 72, 114, 118–119). We might also note the multiple sensory media that are called into play during such rituals, with sound, smell, touch, and sight in kaleidoscopic fusion, engaging each devotee’s basic channels of consciousness.

It is the garlanding, however, that is my focus here. There does not seem to be a standardization of the flowers used for the goat’s garland, though red is favored according to some informants.31 As an analytical extension, Tanaka (1991: 119) conjectures that the rite of velvi is akin to a marriage and symbol-izes the marriage between Bhadrakali and her “devotee husband,” represented by the he-goat. Etymologically, velvi means (i) spiritual discipline, (ii) the site of a rite, (iii) service or worship, and thus (iv) a desire or offering in search of a goal (personal communication from Sivathamby, November 2004). It is the

FIGURE 6 Garlanded Gravestones at a Tuyilam Illam in Batticaloa District

This image was located for me by a Tamil friend, and I have no details with regard to the time and place. The red and gold (yellow) color schemes for buntings, shades, and other décor are conventional for most LTTE rites and assemblies. They convey a warm familiarity and perhaps even a Hindu Saivite religious ambience.


idea of a gift that appears to prevail at the folk level among the Sri Lankan Tamils: Hellmann-Rajanayagam (2005) found that in the context of mavırar ceremonies, it is often expressed as veta velvi in the sense of “donation.”32 This vocabulary is consonant with the concept of uyirayutam, an innovation of Tiger coinage that describes those who sacrifice their lives by swallow-ing cyanide or serving as human bombs and translates as “life-[gifted- as-]weapon” (Chandrakanthan 2000: 164; Roberts 2005a; Schalk 1997c). Thus, uyirayutam (also written commonly as uyirayutham) carries a legiti-mation of suicidal operations.

The enchanted traditional dimension is accentuated by the fact that in the act of homage at Sampur, each Black Tiger carries a flower in his right hand, while his weapon is in his left. The right hand is the ritual hand, the clean unpolluted hand. It would be unclean to bear flowers in one’s left hand. Whether this choice was intentional or not, it was a choice—the more signifi-cant if it was taken-for-granted ‘tradition’ or convention.

The force of convention is deepened by the choice of flower. My educated speculation is that the Black Tigers are carrying white jasmine flowers. In one of its species forms (that with two petals), jasmine is widely favored by Tamil worshippers because of its fragrance and common availability in the popular color, white. But other flowers, such as hibiscus, roses, crossandra, and chrysanthemum, are also deployed. Roses (roja) are probably a colonial import, now deemed normal because of long usage. But bougainvillaea, another colonial import, is never used because it has no fragrance and is considered unsuitable.33

Some Tamil informants stressed that jasmine was used because of its wide-spread availability, a line of utilitarian reasoning that denies symbolic implica-tions. Nevertheless, the fact remains that jasmine is deeply etched within Tamil folklore and culture from Cankam times as the symbol of meaningful connectiv-ity. Whether identified in its specific forms as mullai, malikai, or nitya kalyani, jasmine stands for the stoic fortitude of a female lover waiting for her warrior hero (Thaninayagam 1966: 80–81). Hart ([1975] 1999: 164–165, 187) notes that jasmine signals the heat of desire and the smell of love making because it is associated with the expectant heroine waiting at dusk for her hero chief to return from war. Thaninayagam (1966: 33) refers to its evocation of pathos when a poet addresses the jasmine in his elegy at the death of a chief. Taken in sum, these tropes emphasize the degree to which the jasmine is associated with critical conjunctures or passages—what Turner (1982: 29) in another context refers to as “conjunctiveness.” It appears to be the ‘liminal’ flower par excellence in Tamil culture, in the anthropological sense of the term.

As originally presented by van Gennep, the concept of liminality identified the transitional stage in a rite of passage, that which was betwixt and between and therefore shared aspects of the stages preceding and following it. Turner expanded the idea to encompass enduring figures, such as the jester or the poet, or social principles, such as matrilaterality in patrilineal systems of kin-ship. Such diverse phenomena tend to share specific features, such as para-doxical symbols as well as a “lurking sacrality” associated with “movement


towards the borders of the uncharted and the unpredicted” (Myerhoff 1982: 117; see also Turner 1982: 52, 237–239, 241, 255, 263, 274).

This ‘deep culture’ of speaking in flowers—with “different flowers signify[ing] different strategic movements” (Thaninayagam 1966: 34)—is now implanted in LTTE practice. In November 2003, they proclaimed the karthigai or karnthal (kaantal) to be their “official national flower” (www.tamilnet.com, 14 April 2004).34 The karthigai is the gloriosa superba or glory lily. This choice was justified on three grounds: (1) “in November, the month of Heroes Day cel-ebrations, [the karthigai flower] ubiquitously spreads, sprouts new shoots and blooms throughout the North East”; (2) it was the practice for ancient Tamil kingdoms to have a favorite flower, just as modern nation-states opt for such emblematic signs; and (3) the karthigai was the flower of the “War God, Muru-gan” (ibid.). In the Cankam traditions, one might add, the karthigai or kaantal is described as a “blood red flower” and associated with “lovers in the hills” (the tinai landscape identified as kuriñci) (Thaninayagam 1966: 104, 30).35 Since the glory lily (fig. 7) has flame-like tubers and is either red, deep pink, or yellow in color, its symbolization of love (Cankam) and sacrifice (LTTE) seems apposite. One could not ask for a better visual image of immolation in flames.

For our interests here, however, the more significant flowering, both literally and figuratively, of this tendency lies in the fact that a small circle of jasmine surrounded the LTTE’s flagpoles at various sites in Kilinochchi in November 2004 (my observations), while a profusion of wild jasmine (nitya kalyani) adorns the base of the flagpole at the tuyilam illam at Vavuniya (fig. 8). In car-rying jasmine in their right hand, the Black Tigers at Sampur were reaffirming the liminal significance of the moment. They were establishing and conveying profound connections.

From an analytical perspective, what, then, were the connections and mean-ings that are being secured by the ritual action at Sampur depicted in our key figure 4? Clearly, as explicitly argued by LTTE sympathizers,36 this was an act of commemoration, a remembrance of deeds done and the ultimate sacrifice of life by heroes past. This action could also be deemed one of camaraderie between the deceased Black Tigers and those Black Tigers participating in the rite, an act that at the same time reaffirms comradeship and a special form of connectivity among those fighters participating in the homage.

One can build logically on this reasoning in ways that are in line with instrumental reason and emphasize the strategic advantages to the LTTE from this type of ritual venture. It could be conjectured that the living fighters draw strength and courage from such acts and go away with the firm knowledge that their deaths would be remembered in similar fashion should they die in action. Thus, such rites can be considered a renewal of commitment to cause. As such, the LTTE hierarchy could be said to be deploying ritual intelligently in order to strengthen its military capacity. For my part, I have no doubt that such reasoning would be at play.

The question remains as to whether there are additional dimensions to this type of ritual act, either at the individual level of participating Black Tigers or among those who organize these moments. Here I move into the more tenuous


FIGURE 7 Karthigai in Varied Styles

These four pictures of the gloriosa superba, or glory lily, have been taken from a Web site. The image on top is from an LTTE pageant held in a German city during the com-memoration of Mavırar Day one November in the early twenty-first century (kindly located from pro-LTTE cyber-world presentations for me by a Tamil friend who did not supply details, but this source is Puthinam). The glory lily, called karthigai or kaantal in Tamil and niyangala in Sinhala, is one of the flowers highlighted in Cankam poetry (Thaninayagam 1966: 30, 57, 104). An artistic form of this flower has since been incor-porated as the logo for the television network launched by the LTTE in early 2005.


terrain of conjecture. Let me provide one of the Black Tigers in figure 4 with the pseudonym ‘Kandasamy’ and develop my argument in question form.

Could Kandasamy’s flower offering and act of homage expand beyond remembrance to a votive request, an act of propitiation? Could Kandasamy (silently?) ask the mavırar at the ‘altar’ before him for some assistance in the manner of Saivites and Christians who make offerings at shrines? If one grants this possibility, what would each fighter ask for? Protection and safety, that is, staying alive? That would seem the obvious type of request. But these are Black Tiger fighters, no ordinary persons. They have been disciplined and honed as

FIGURE 8 Flagpole Surrounded by Jasmine Flowers at Tuyilam Illam at Vavuniya

This image was located for me by a Tamil friend, with source details not specified. The type of jasmine is probably nitya kalyani (i.e., periwinkle) because that species is more profuse than other related ones. Duane Plummer’s essay on the flower (www.garden-guides.com/articles/jasmine.htm) describes jasmine as “(1) A common name for plants of the genus Jasminum. (2) A common name for other plants that have heavily fragrant flowers. (3) A synonym for jessamine, also spelled jasmin.” The article also includes the fact that it is a “genus of about 200 species of tender and tropical shrubs and vines.”


members of a special commando force. They are fully aware that at any time they could be chosen for a suicidal attack, a special privilege in the universe of being that surrounds personnel in the LTTE. In such circumstances, therefore, my conjecture is that Kandasamy would earnestly ask his dead mates to provide him with a ‘good death’. For a Black Tiger, a ‘good death’ would be a successful strike, a mission that is accomplished without letting any comrades down.

Considering all the probable and possible dimensions attached to the Black Tiger rite at Sampur on 5 July 2003, therefore, one can extract a significant analytical point. Such an event has the capacity to become a conjuncture that “draws different dimensions toward itself” (Copeman 2004: 131), or a conjunc-ture that develops “fusion force,” in Kapferer’s vocabulary (1997: 261). Since the context for Kapferer’s elaboration is that of sorcery, I shall limit myself to Copeman’s clarification. Copeman develops this contention from an analysis of recent blood donation events in India centered upon statues of dead celebrities, such as Indira Gandhi and Rajiv Gandhi. At such events, the blood of the donor is usually “identified with the blood of the person being commemorated.” It therefore “holds the past within it.” But “in being propelled into the veins of others … it simultaneously holds the future within it” (Copeman 2004: 131).

Such an extrapolation of meaningfulness, I fear, will be meaningless to readers of this text unless they have some awareness of the heritages and cosmologies within which these practices secure worth. To grasp Copeman’s argument, one has to comprehend the value attached to such Hindu practices and expectations as prasada (Skt), darsanam, arul, and accaryam. The concept of darsanam—known as darsana or darsan elsewhere—can be translated variously and sever-ally as the act of seeing and being seen by a deity, an exchange of vision, an auspicious sight, or a blessing deriving from the gaze of a deity.37 Arul refers to grace or divine presence, while accaryam describes marvels and surprises arising from divine responses to devotional fervor (Bastin 2002a: 122).38

A prasada—that is, a piracatam in Tamil—is “the indispensable sequel to all acts of worship in popular Hinduism” (Fuller 1992: 74). A brief description of a piracatam in a Saivite temple in Sri Lanka serves to illustrate its meaningful relationships and potentialities.

[As the concluding act of worship] the priest passes around among the devo-tees the fire of the pancaratti, which remains after the last worship of the main idol. They place their hands over the fire, and move them towards their faces, touching them lightly over their bodies from the eyes down to the chest—as if they were absorbing the divine body from the fire into [each] body. Then sacred ash, sandal paste and vermilion powder are passed around the congregation. They … make a pottu mark (a sign of Saivites) on their foreheads. Finally the priest distributes rice balls. Prasada, which includes fire, sacred ash and other non-edibles, is considered to contain divine power and religious merit accrues to those who eat it. (Tanaka 1991: 70)

Contextualized in this manner, Copeman’s blood donation ritual may not be considered a prasada in the strict sense, but the description of such devotional practices underlines the ideas of connectivity, transmutation, and transmission


that gird and thread the South Asian world of religious belief. The central point is this: the deity in sculpted form or within a poster calendar is treated as if he or she is alive. The deity is thus “immanent,” charged with akarsana, that is, the “power of divine magnetism” or attracting force (Obeyesekere 1987: 14).39 It is this conviction that leads so many South Asians to place food offerings before the deities on appropriate occasions. Indeed, in worshipping a deity, a devotee brings that deity to life, rendering the deity akarsana and darsanam. It is a two-way connectivity. The internal energy of the devotee, organically engaging all the sensory modes available to a human being, helps invoke the deity’s powers.40

It would be stretching one’s imagination to suggest that the Black Tiger rite at Sampur was an act of piracatam (prasada). But could Kandasamy have propitiated the mavırar before him in the manner of those seeking arul or darsanam? One would be ill advised to dismiss this possibility in peremptory fashion. The background of religious practice in which Tamil Saivites and Cath-olics—especially those from working class, farming, and fishing families—have been nourished over the years suggests the potentiality for such modes of inter-relationship and expectation.

Be that as it may, within such a context the Black Tiger rite at Sampur can be read as a nodal, liminal moment in which past, present, and future meet in fused unity, gathering an empowering form of fusion from the Tiger point of view. At this moment, the past is embodied in the mavırar, sacrificial heroes from the recent past, perhaps deified dead like those reposing in nadukal in the Tamil past. The present is borne by the Black Tigers, the ‘point men’41 in the LTTE proj-ect. The future is the iconic goal of the LTTE and the Tamils they command—the independent state of Eelam, that nationalist utopia of the true believers.

Moving On, Moving Beyond

In my argument, therefore, the ritual at Sampur neatly encapsulates the com-bination of hard-headed instrumental rationality on the one hand and an ‘enchanted universe of being’ on the other within the organizational ‘invest-ments’ of the LTTE. That the rational, tactical, and strategic calculations demanded by their military-cum-political requirements have dominated the activities of the LTTE for over two decades cannot be denied. But my point here is to indicate that their practices are also influenced in some measure, no doubt in lesser measure, by sentiments that are ‘beyond reason’ and rooted in the cosmos of their upbringing as Tamils of South Asia, whether Christian or Hindu. I have, in other words, attempted to introduce the fabulous dimensions of their existential situation of uncertainty/risk and to highlight the manner in which they attempt to augment their rational military/political strategies with practices drawn from the “mythologized realities” (Kapferer 2002, 2004) of their everyday world.

They are not the only radical militants to draw on the phenomenologi-cal subjectivities embedded in their everyday world of upbringing. Take, for


instance, the 9/11 attackers who shocked the Western world with their dev-astating attacks on the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Washington. These were thoroughly modern revolutionaries, using ‘simple’, rational methods to turn a modern machine into a flying smart-bomb—with enormous and terrifying effect. As one of the arms of Al-Qaeda, moreover, they were part of an organization that can be, like the LTTE, viewed as a multi-national corporation with multiple sites and a globalized reach. It is now commonplace for security experts to stress that Al-Qaeda is thoroughly modern and that Osama bin Laden has adopted the managerial practices of modern economic corporations into his outfit.42

Yet take their preparation for their tasks in the heightened moment of the eleventh hour. “The Last Night,” probably drafted by Mohammed Atta, the operational commander of the strike force, sets out the requisite (thus ideal) precautionary and preparatory practices for each Al-Qaeda commando.43 The first injunction runs thus: “Mutual swearing of the oath unto death and renewal of [one’s] intention. Shave excess hair from the body and apply cologne. Shower.” Among the subsequent commandments are these:

5. Staying the night [praying], pressing onward in prayer, divination (jafr), strengthening [one’s self], [obtaining a] clear victory, and ease of heart that you might not betray us.

6. Much remembrance [of God], and know that the best way of remembrance is to read/recite the Noble Qur’an.

7. Purify your heart and cleanse it from all uncleanliness. Forget and become oblivious to that thing called “this world.” The time for play is over and the appointed time for seriousness has come.

Thereafter, in moving to what the author saw as the “second phase” of their operation, we find the following orders:

When the taxi is taking you to the a[irport], then recite the devotional of travel, the devotional of [entering a] town, the devotional of praise and other devotion-als. When you have arrived and you see the a[irport] and have gotten out of the taxi, then say the prayer of shelter; every place you go say the prayer of shelter in it. Smile and be tranquil for this is pleasing to the believers. Make sure that no one of whom you are unaware is following you. Then say the prayer: “God, make me strong through your entire creation … Then you when you have said it, you will find matters straightened; and [God’s] protection will be around you; no power can penetrate that. [God] has promised His faithful servants who say this prayer that which follows: ….

1. [They will] return with grace [from God] and His bounty2. Evil will not touch them3. [They will be in] accordance with the grace of God… All of their devices, their [security] gates44 and their technology will not

save them nor harm [anyone] without God’s permission.

“The Last Night,” it should be stressed, was drafted by someone “well acquainted with the Qur’an” and possessing “a strong basis in Muslim pious


literature” (Cook 2002: 21). Without an understanding of the spirituality that permeates Qur’anic interpretations, one can hardly comprehend the pervasive emphasis on prayer as an essential tool to sustain each commando assassin’s determination and goal orientation. In this sense, “The Last Night” was a psychological preparation for the difficulties of battle—in short, a trainer’s manual. But this manual also contained a mantra, a profound belief in Allah as their guardian and a force that would render them invisible, powerful, and successful. Here, then, enchanted cosmological being was merged with careful planning and rational action.

The picture of the Black Tigers’ act of ritual homage and “The Last Night,” in this argument, share a shoring in cosmological realities, that is, what Weber would regard as a world of enchantment antithetical to the rational order ush-ered in by the Enlightenment, market capitalism, and the terrors of modern war as well as the epistemologies of individualism and materialism. This is not to say that the Tigers and the radical Muslims of Al-Qaeda share a similar men-tality. At face value, their cultural backgrounds could be deemed substantially different. The similarity is one step removed, at the level of abstraction that I have framed as the ‘enchanted world’ in opposition to the disenchanted world of materially grounded instrumentalities and rational calculation rooted in an emphasis on the individual.

In speaking of an ‘enchanted world’, I stress that it should not be equated with the supernatural and the other-worldly in the sense of being ‘out there in the skies’. My suggestion is that in many parts of Asia today, people engage in daily activities that are layered with non-tangible forces and possibilities. The ‘evil eye’, for instance, is a possibility within daily life for many people in southern Asia. The idea that someone can harm another person by look-ing at the other’s property or person—the ‘eye of envy’, as it is sometimes called—remains widespread in contemporary South Asia and among Greeks all over the world, though it is impossible to indicate precisely the proportion of people who adhere to this belief and take precautions, such as amulets and black pottus for babies, against these dangers (Maloney 1974: 174–176; 1976; Pocock 1981).45

Where such potentialities inhabit the everyday, and where acts of sorcery by jealous others remain real to so many people, protective rites are not uncom-mon (Bastin 2002a, 2002b; Tanaka 1991). In this sense, they are ‘everyday’. They may not be daily acts, but they are highly significant acts and sometimes even expensive acts calling for investments of planning, time, and money. Just as the use of ädura (specialists in exorcism) and healing rites to cure a bodily or mental affliction does not preclude a suffering family from resorting to Western or ayurvedic medicine,46 thoroughly modern warriors are quite ready to propitiate the spirits that inhabit their world. Within their mind-set, there is no necessary contradiction. The universe of being in which most Tigers and Tamils have been nourished would have oriented them toward multiple strat-egies and the contingencies of the life-world. Calling on the powers of their cosmos to protect them and to regenerate their enterprise is as meaningful a rite as a puja that seeks to inspire the rains to fall at the right time for farmers’


agricultural work or to protect fishermen on their daily ventures at sea.47 The ritual acts of the type depicted in figure 4 and the whole LTTE enterprise of calendrical rituals and cemeteries with tombs for fallen mavırar (Hellmann-Rajanayagam 2005; Roberts 2005b; Schalk 1997a, 2003) are reasoned actions seeking to renew the fighters’ strength and to enlist the powers of the cosmos in this work of regeneration.

There can be no better illustration of this deadly combination than the scene of Black Tiger commandos at a ‘shrine’ with guns in one hand and jasmine flowers in the ‘unpolluted’ hand. Such a moment sits neatly with one of the LTTE’s expressive propaganda acts that depicts a tombstone with a clenched fist encoded with a gun punching the air (fig. 9). Here we see an enshrined warrior attempting to inspire Tamils with his or her fighting spirit and affirma-tion of defiance. The dead promise power and redemption. In the Tamil and Asian world, therefore, power and empowerment does not rest solely on disen-chanted rationality. The dead, whether a Rajiv Gandhi-as-statue or a mavırar-in-tombstone, can be invested with an “ongoing agentive capacity” (Copeman 2004: 135, who is informed by Gell 1998: 222) in the manner of saints and deities of the past.

Michael Roberts is presently Adjunct Associate Professor, University of Ade-laide. He is a Sri Lankan Australian whose special interests are in cultural anthropology and historical sociology. His research tends to straddle the fields of politics, history, and culture. His expertise encompasses social mobility, social history, agrarian and tenurial issues, peasant protest, popular culture, urban history, caste in South Asia, practices of cultural domination, and issues in ethnicity and nationalism. His major works include Elites, Nationalisms and the Nationalist Movement in British Ceylon (1977); Caste Conflict and Elite Formation: The Rise of a Karava Elite in Sri Lanka, 1500–1931 (1982); People Inbetween: The Burghers and the Middle Class in the Transformations within Sri Lanka, 1790s–1980s, Vol. 1 (1989); Exploring Confrontation. Sri Lanka: Politics, Culture and History (1994); Crosscurrents: Sri Lanka and Australia at Cricket (1998); Sinhala Consciousness in the Kandyan Period, 1590s–1818 (2004).


FIGURE 9 Bodies That Fight On

This “memorial tomb” is a specific act of “veneration” for the 398 Tiger fighters who “attained martyrdom” during a three–day operation, known as “Unceasing Waves,” directed by Prabhakaran himself that “liberated the territory of Kilinochchi from the Sri Lankan mili-tary that occupied the Tamil homeland.” This cenotaph, located along the A9 road to Jaffna at Kilinochchi, administrative capital of the LTTE, was unveiled on 27 November 2004. The inscription is in English, and the words quoted above are from this representation. Note the embellishment provided by flame-like stalks of the karthigai (glory lily) cradling the fallen mavırar in the manner of a lotus base. Courtesy of Vaitheespara Ravindiran.


Notes

1. See Schalk (2003), Roberts (2005b), and www.tamilnet.com (late November, any year). 2. See Narayan Swamy (1993: 155–156) and Schalk (1997a: 77). Capt. Miller, or Valipuram

Vasanthan, was the son of a bank clerk and had attended Hartley College in Point Pedro (information from Tamil friends).

3. Schalk (2003: 396) says that the Black Tigers were initially organized in 1986. This requires verification.

4. Narayan Swamy (2003: 201–202, 109). The first Tiger to swallow the cyanide kuppi was Celvam (Selvam) Pakin on 18 May 1984 (Schalk 1997b: 62). But a Tiger named Seelan, who ordered one of his juniors to shoot him when he was injured and cornered, can be deemed the first to commit suicide (Narayan Swamy 2003: 77).

5. Personal communication from S. Rajanayagam, Adelaide, 7 January 2004. 6. “We are married to our cyanide,” said one LTTE publication in Tamil (Hellmann-Raja-

nayagam 1994: 67). Also see Schalk (1997b: 62–63), who notes that the cyanide vials are manufactured in Germany.

7. Personal communication from RSM, a former fighter. 8. From www.TamilNet.com, 6 July 1997. However, other accounts indicate that the Black

Tigers do operate as units, especially at sea. 9. Grapevine stories (Reuter 2002: 160; Schalk 2003: 396). 10. Figures from www.eelamweb.com and www.tamilcanadian.com. These are not official

sources, and they do not quite tally with the total of 17,780 mavırar up to November 2004, a figure given by www.tamilnet.com, the closest to an official site.

11. These include the following: Kopay, Vannivilaankulam, Kanagapuram, Vaani, Vis-vamadu, Aandaankulam, Poonagary, Vannivilaankulam, and Pandivirichchaan.

12. See www.tamilnet.com for details about the memorial. Pathuman was closely associ-ated with Col. Karuna, and after Karuna’s breakaway circa March 2004, Pathuman was recalled to the Vanni headquarters. It is likely that he has been executed. ‘Pathuman’ and ‘Thilak’ are both code names.

13. For an instance of scholarly disagreement with Steven Lukes regarding a reading of Weber, see Ernest Gellner (1974: 189n).

14. For the emergence of the concept ‘fundamentalism’ in the United States in the 1920s, see Harding (1987).

15. Thus, the Dutch troops effecting the imperial expansion of Dutch power in Bali were “thoroughly bewildered” in 1906 when they had advanced to the edge of the state of Sanur “where the king [of Sanur], his wives, his children, and the entourage marched in a splendid mass suicide into the direct fire of [their] guns” (Geertz 1980: 11). This act was repeated by the king’s palace entourage in the state of Klungklung two years later. Young (2002: 413) has noted: “Nowadays [in the West] the act of suicide is ipso facto evidence of mental illness. The current Western standard would indicate that suicidal behavior is, by and large, irrational and merits psychiatric intervention.”

16. When a young Kurdish girl set herself alight in London in February 1999 as an act of protest against the situation of the Kurds and the front pages of newspapers depicted the event, a proprietor of a news agency I visit waved the picture of the girl in flames in front of me and in considerable alarm inquired how anyone could take such an extreme measure. He stressed that he could not even contemplate such a step. This outburst was entirely unsolicited and thus an ethnographic gem (see Roberts 1996, 1999).

17. This section is based on Chalk (1999), Davis (1996), Gunaratna (1997), Narayan Swamy (1994, 2003), Peiris (2002), and Senaratne (1997).

18. Given the variations voiced by different scholars, these dates should not be taken as definitive.

19. See Shanaka Jayasekara, “Air Capabilities of Global Terror Groups and Non-formal States,” Daily Mirror, May 2005. Also see B. Raman, “The World’s First Terrorist Air Force,” Observer Research Forum, June 2005 (sent to me by Victor Melder).


20. See Whitaker (1999, 2004) for some facets of Sivaram’s intellectual background and capacities. Sivaram was a key figure in running TamilNet until he was assassinated (prob-ably by Karuna’s faction) in Colombo in late April 2005.

21. The Australian Broadcasting Corporation presented a documentary entitled “Sri Lanka: The Truth Tigers” as episode 32 in series 11 of Foreign Correspondent on 15 May 2002. The synopsis reads: “The extraordinary story of the camera crews who record the bloody exploits of the Tamil Tigers of Sri Lanka. Mark Corcoran meets the cameramen and -women who’ve routinely put their lives on the line recording the pitched battles between the Tigers and Government troops.” I have also seen this documentary on one of the channels on individual television screens during Qantas flights. Note that videos of attacks are also shown in the bunkers occupied by LTTE fighters as motivational tools (see Siemon-Netto 2002 with reference to a captured female warrior).

22. So much so that a recent publication by Bradman Weerakoon (2004: 30), a senior administrator who worked directly under Premadasa, does not unequivocally discount one of the conspiracy theories of 1991 to the effect that Premadasa had bumped off Athulathmudlai (a rival within the UNP). Lalith Athulathmudali, a senior minister, had been assassinated by pistol shot previously at an election rally on 23 April 1993.

23. ‘Scenario planning’ seems akin to the concepts of ‘situation plan’ in the vocabulary of good sports coaches. I first heard the phrase ‘situation plan’ from Joe Hoad, a cricket coach. This idea refers to efforts to train players to think on their feet and to adjust to the vicissitudes of a game. In this sense, ‘situation plan’ is an issue of tactical adjustment within a strategy or game plan.

24. Sivaram underlines this point with the remark that “anyone who has cared to study the LTTE’s negotiating behaviour in the past two years even superficially would under-stand that the Tigers see their military power [as subordinate to their political goals]” (Taraki 2004a).

25. In this instance, the LTTE has been materially aided by a ridiculous state policy of fight-ing its war on about six fronts. Taraki (2005a, 2005b) rather conveniently, but perhaps deliberately, slides over this facet of the situation, especially when plugging another line in another article.

26. The devastating attack on Katunayake airport on 24 July 2001 was perhaps the most significant of these operations. The infiltration of a unit that mounted an assault in the Borella area of Colombo on 10 March 2000 was another. The truck bomb driven by a sui-cide bomber that devastated the Central Bank (which held the country’s gold reserves) on 31 January 1996 was supported by a few other Tigers who came by three-wheelers and used RPGs to cause mayhem in the heart of the central business district.

27. Clearly, ethnographic detective work is required to ascertain whether this term is used in LTTE or contemporary Tamil circles. For pıtam, which is called pıtha elsewhere in India, see Tanaka (1991: 134–136).

28. Bork helped destroy the entrance to the strategic Mankulam SLA camp on 23 Novem-ber 1990. There is also a special memorial honoring him on the A9 route south of Mankulam. He ranks with such figures as Angayarkanni, Malathi, Miller, and Kittu in the LTTE pantheon of mavırar.

29. The literal meaning of nadukal is ‘planted stone’, a conceptualization that fits in with the LTTE’s construction of their dead as vitai or seeds (see Hellmann-Rajanayagam 2005; Roberts 2005b; Schalk 1997a: 66, 79, 81). Nadukal can also be written as natugal.

30. This quotation is a modified version of a title used by Aiyappan (1977). Also see Schalk (1997b: 64). Note, too, that among the Sinhala-speakers, “demon deities are regarded as having once been human beings or the children of a divine-human union” (Kapferer 1997: 32, relying on Obeyesekere’s [1987] work on the Pattini cult).

31. In noting the absence of standardization, I am informed by Val Daniel (personal com-munication). While he himself thought red and white were favored and sometimes marigold was used, M. Ponnambalam (a poet nurtured in one of the islands off Jaffna)


said that red or reddish flowers were usual for the velvi garland (personal communica-tion, December 2004).

32. This emphasis was elaborated in her original draft of an article that I refereed, but see also the eventual version (Hellmann-Rajanayagam 2005: 124).

33. Information from Mrs. Krishna Kumar and Mrs. Pushpa Selvanayagam, both in Jaffna, with the former observation being expressed at the mavırar commemoration shed at the Jaffna Campus. Further clarified by Mrs. Bragatheeswaran in Adelaide.

34. A subsequent piece dismissed claims that the poisonous features of the karthigaipoo had informed the LTTE’s choice.

35. In one verse, the kaantal is described thus: “its red petals shining like lamps lit at sun-set” (Thaninayagam 1966).

36. For instance, D. P. Sivaram in conversation, 26 October 2004. 37. Tanaka (1991: 70), Fuller (1992: 59–60), Bastin (2002a: xvii, 122), and personal com-

munications from K Sivathamby and Val Daniel. 38. Bastin’s (2002a) chapter 6, entitled “The Look and the Thing Seen,” is essential reading

for these contexts and details. Note that arul and darsanam seem to have considerable overlaps, though they are not quite synonymous.

39. Elsewhere, this force is described by Gombrich and Obeyesekere (1988: 90) as “the ‘magnetic power’ of the … essence of the deity.” Bastin (2002a: xv) summarizes it in the following terms: “‘attracting’, a type of sorcery.” Akarsana is a Sanskrit word and is thus understood in both Sinhala- and Tamil-speaking regions.

40. I am indebted to one of Christopher Pinney’s seminars detailing practice at the grassroots in Madhya Pradesh (India) for my initial acquaintance with this point, while I have prof-ited immensely in recent years by my exposure to Arthur Saniotis’s phenomenological approach to human action. Also see Bastin (2002a: 122).

41. For those unfamiliar with military terminology, ‘point men’ are those individuals at the head of a V-formation in an infantry squad advancing cautiously into dangerous terrain. If ambushed, they are likely to die first.

42. Hoffman (2002), Stern (2003: chap. 9), and Ramakrishna and Tan (2002: 6–7). Also note Bruce Hoffman, “Terrorist Leader as CEO: Interview, 2003,” at www.rand.org.

43. David Cook’s (2002) translation of this document is available as an appendix in his article in Novo Religio. Cook inserts several annotations via asterisks, while refining the text for English grammar through insertions marked by square brackets. These have been omitted except at one spot where I have added Cook’s note as a footnote.

44. This is “the section designed for passing through the security devices of the airport” (Cook 2002).

45. Ananda Wakkumbura brought the prevalence among the Sinhalese today of fears of äs vaha, kata vaha, ho vaha (poison by eye, mouth, and thought) to my attention when we were translating old war poems. His grass-roots knowledge is impeccable. Those who saw media pictures of Baby 81, the infant discovered under a garbage pile in Kalmunai on the eastern coast of Sri Lanka after the tsunami and the object of conflicting parental claims, who was eventually identified after DNA tests as Abilash Jeyarajah, would have noticed the black pottu (pottu is the mark of the Saivites) on his forehead. And so too did Junita Jeyarajah, the infant’s mother, sport a black pottu, ritually administered to ward off evil. To indicate the significance of such fears among Sri Lankan Tamil people is not to deny the currents of secularism fostered among them by strands of the Dravidian movement and the presence of this strand within the LTTE through such individuals as Baby Subramanium.

46. The most detailed case studies are from among the Sinhalese (Kapferer 1983: chaps. 4 and 5), but the work of Tanaka and Bastin point to a similar universe of being among the Tamils. Copeman informs me that two of his relatives in Delhi who are receiving treatment for a serious blood disease keep their daily medicine beneath idols of Ganesh, Krishna, and Jesus Christ so that the medicines are blessed.


47. Thus, on 27 August 2004, “the sea-faring residents and fishermen from the town of Val-vettiturai … [took the] elephant-faced god ‘Ganapathi’ around the town in a boat-shaped vehicle.” This account also noted that the “deity’s protection is sought with a visit to the [Kappalodiya] Pillaiyar temple by everyone before he/she ventures out into the sea” (www.tamilnet.com, 27 August 2004).

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