[TamilNet, Thursday, 27 October 2011, 12:42 GMT]“When the emissary of India, a country that backed Sri Lanka in its genocidal campaign against the Tamil people, marks out an artist to promote ‘cultural revival’ in their homelands, can this act and the performance be devoid of politics,” asks Mr. RM Karthick, a social science researcher from Tamil Nadu working in a British university, commenting on the recent ‘cultural tour’ of Chennai based Carnatic singer T M Krishna in the occupied country of Eezham Tamils. The Hindu on October 23 carried an article by Krishna on his visit to Jaffna, saying the performance went ‘beyond the scars’. “Artistes don't stand for elections, don't fight on the battlefield but we offer to everyone the very breath of life —happiness,” Krishna said in The Hindu article.
Full text of the article by Mr. RM Karthick, a research scholar studying Political Theory at University of Essex, UK., follows:
ART IN THE TIME OF GENOCIDE
The recent cultural tour of T.M. Krishna, a Chennai based Carnatic singer, in the Northern areas of the occupied territory of Tamil Eelam, was praised by quite some in the Indian media and the Sri Lankan media. It was reported that there was a substantial turn out in Jaffna, where the artist had performed solely in Tamil. While observing the “conflicting images” in the Tamil homelands and asking some moral questions to himself, the singer concludes with an apolitical message in an article published later in The Hindu that “Artistes don't stand for elections, don't fight on the battlefield but we offer to everyone the very breath of life —happiness.”
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