Tamil Nationalism, Population Control And Gender Rights – A Response To Dr.Vallipuranathan
Nirmala Rajasingam
I write to express my concern and bewilderment over Dr. Murali Vallipuranathan’s recent pronouncements on the legalisation of polygamy in Sri Lanka, in a bid to arrest the dangerous decline in Tamil population numbers. Such suggestions, to be expected from the lunatic fringes ofTamil nationalism, or the Bodu Bala Sena in the South, are especially worrying when coming from a respected health professional working in mainstream academia.
It is often the trope of extremist nationalism and its advocates to draw the demographic and ideological boundaries of the nation on the bodies of their women, thereby claiming control of their sexuality, and reproductive rights and choices. Dr. Vallipuranathan, whose recent comments fall directly in line with the above, laments the decreasing numbers of the Tamil community, and in doing so ostensibly raises the attendant concerns of keeping the ‘nation’ pure, of keeping its women’s sexuality contained, to eliminate the possibility for the transgression of miscegenation. The sexual, procreative energies of ‘our women’ are only to be harnessed in the service of ‘our nation’; this is obvious to Tamil women, beset by the predatory gaze of the Sri Lankan armed forces on the one hand, and, on the other, the disciplining Tamil male gaze, which constantly supervises, circumscribes, and exhorts the woman not to be the agent of cultural degeneration. Much has been said about how ‘cultural degeneration’ within Tamil society has been precipitated by the Tamil woman since the end of the war, and this endorsement of polygamy perhaps laughable and far-fetched at face value, is in reality a foil for all of these concerns.
With regard to the Kilinochchi incidents, where allegedly several women were administered contraceptive hormonal implants without their informed consent, who is it that is accountable for these procedures? Is it only the Sinhala Buddhist state? Or can the responsibility also perhaps lie with those Tamil health professionals who may not think much of poor Tamil women? Would they be able to pull this off on a middle-class professional Tamil woman in Jaffna? And would it not be just as easy to impose these implants on poor rural Sinhala women in Moneragala or Mahiyangana just as in Kilinochchi? To attribute the motivations that undergirded these incidents solely to the issue of ethnicity is to misunderstand the multiplicity of processes at work here. There are criss-crossing patterns of oppression that function together to disempower women at the bottom of society. Caste, class and gender act with equal force.Read More
