The Future Of The Tamils
Jan Jananayagam
Thank you for the opportunity to address the Tamil Writers Guild on the 10th Anniversary of its founding by Mr CJT Thamotheram.
I have been asked to talk on the ‘Future of the Tamils’. I am conscious of the weight of the topic. And of the impossibility of doing it justice in the time available. It is somewhat like the story of the team of blind men touching an elephant and trying to describe it. My comments are in a personal capacity rather than on behalf of Tamils Against Genocide (TAG) because this is a cultural event and some aspects of the topic fall outside of TAGs mandate.
I start with a story. Bear with me, with luck its relevance will become clear.
On the Hawaian Island of Kauai, that is rich in its own sacred traditions, and for its beauty and lushness the Hawaians call it the garden island, on this Island stands a Saivite monastery with some twenty monks most of them American by birth and Caucasian by ethnicity. The monks are prolific writers and it is for this reason that I have chosen their example as relevant to this audience. For it is not widely known among the Tamil Diaspora that they are also publishers and editors of one of the leading English language Hindu magazines – Hinduism Today. Last year they published a book, the ‘Guru Chronicles’ on the history of their Guru Parampara [lineage]. They trace their Parampara to Yogaswami of Jaffna and from him 2000 years back along the Kailasa Parampara.
So this is their story –In the late 1940s, a young man from San Francisco went seeking enlightenment, and at some point in his travels arrived at Yogaswami’s ashram in Jaffna. In time Yogaswami ordained him as a successor – thus a Satguru in his own right – and instructed him to take back his religion to American, ‘go build a bridge’. In another anecdote from a Jaffna disciple, when this disciple visited Yogaswami, some years before he died, he found the Swami in tears. When asked for the reason, the Swami replied that he was crying for the coming tribulations of his people. Thus the monastery and its followers believe that Yogaswami foresaw the civil war and the destruction it would cause. The monks thus see themselves as the spiritual guardians of Yogaswami’s Saivite traditions precisely at a time when their Guru had foreseen great risks to his tradition as well as forced migration that would create a vast Diaspora.
