
Fresh flower, you were torn to shreds We wipe our tears and strengthen our resolve - Captain Vanathi (Tigers)
Warrior
When I first met the guerilla women of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam in Sri Lanka they controlled the homeland. “People feared us,” wrote the unit’s leader Captain Thamilini in her memoir. She walked the streets with a hand on the long gun slung casually across one shoulder, her belt an unnecessary reinforcement around a straightened spine. Thinking back to her battalion marching single file behind her she reflects, “Maybe more importantly, they respected us.”
1083. She looks, her look a face-off to mine – Looks like she has brought along a shock troop of terrifying goddesses
These couplets are from the Tirukkural, an ancient Tamil text that young Tamil women traditionally commit to memory. Recitation leads to a resting mind and a still body. Culture can subdue, sometimes subjugate.
I had been raised in the first re-enactment of Tamil cultural conformity in America. In California, too, Tamil women were meant to be dedicated to education, matched in marriage, and sacrificed in motherhood, performing, as activist and author Meena Kandasamy notes, “accham, madam, naanum” (fear, ignorance, modesty). When I met the fighters on the island twenty years ago as a young adult and watched them patrol these lands, I thought how the Tamil woman has often been either reviled or revered. At least these warriors crossed over contested states on their own terms.
I was not yet married but beginning to feel the pinch of radial nerves cinched by cultural cuffs of expectations. My own yearnings for liberation were still only drafty sketches, animated by the flesh-and-blood tales of combat these women offered me.
Inside the secure sanctum of church arches, I spoke to warriors who were demobilized but not yet at ease. They told me of the racist regime in Sri Lanka and the repressive society that pushed them to eke out a safe space in a separate state.
Their existence excavated a model of Tamil-ness that had been embedded in them, and me. In their curiosity, they looked west to project a different kind of liberation for American women, assumed to be free from patriarchal restraints. I explained how cultural coding was reinscribed on foreign passports. Also that masculinity is a force too overwhelming for borders to contain. In their presence I began to dig an escape from the life that was expected of me. Then, they asked if I knew Bharatanatyam and if so, could I teach it to them. I was surprised.
In Tamil imaginaries everywhere, my own included, the disciplined figure of the woman fighter held new possibilities of power. Tired of captivity to protect her identity, she traded folded sarees for loose fatigues. She did not absorb blows, she shot soldiers. Even motherhood was a collective commitment to reproduce resistance.
When the war began Tamils who could, left Sri Lanka. For young girls like me inside a survival-bound refugee community, both culture and caste were re-infused through dance. Anointed as classical, Bharatanatyam was the teacher, and we, its disciples.
Through this displaced diasporic pedagogy, I trained in refined Tamil womanhood. As a dancer I was technically proficient, but my face refused to conform to emotive demands of portraying the gods. My body stood at attention, but my face was stiff: unable (unwilling?) to show fear or modesty.
We didn’t know each other yet, but across the Palk Strait, Meena was chafing under the rules for Tamil womanhood when she first learned of the Tamil Tigers. “It became easier to forget our own restrictions,” wrote Meena, “if we could identify with these warriors who appeared to us like living legends, so real… yet somehow distant and mythical.”
On their former battleground, when faced with the fighters’ request for dance lessons I attempted to defer out of deficiency, but they were adamant. Having left the trenches, they were trying to regain social capital as marriable women. Once positioned to re-imagine the boundaries of freedom, now the space to move existed only between warrior and goddess.
And so, we began. Hair pulled back. Chiffon shawls substituted for stringent saree lines, wrapped and tucked tight. Backs extended and erect. Their posture was perfect. Their faces were blank.
Goddess
In Hindu mythology, Devi is a warrior-goddess created to destroy evil. In the stories we danced to life, the male gods could not defeat a buffalo demon without her.
1088. My legendary valour Made foes tremble, Now it lies shattered Seeing her lustrous brow
The stars above the subcontinent cast different shadows onto this complex social hierarchy. Depending on birth order, the goddess would appear before her devotees as Durga, Shakti, or Amman.
Devi was created by men to kill and handed to me by my mother whose faith kept her alive. She was the scientist but I was the skeptic.
My mother’s hair and her wedding thali (necklace) were always tied at the base of her neck. If they were available, she also tucked long strands of malligai poo (jasmine flowers) into the metal clip in her hair. As she moved in choreographies of worship, I wondered what pulled her so far from us, from her earth. In the wake of her soft steps, she left faint traces of the goddess behind.
I occupied the form of Devi long before I understood her. In the contortions of dance class the too-long limbs of my awkward teenage body sought temporary reprieve in the shape of the goddess. I was an angsty atheist shushed inside temple walls; rote ritual pulled my lanky frame to fold in front of her spirit entombed in white marble.
In Smithsonian magazine, writer Bruce Hathaway described the goddess Devi in his own terms:
“Even as fierce warrior heroically slaying the most vicious demons,
She retains her composure and radiant beauty”
“She can be quiet and nurturing.
But she is also a cosmic force.”
In captive (captivating) lines, he sees Devi as:
pure and violent,
chaste and sensual
She is a disciplined object of desire.
As an adolescent whose flat topography was filling out into new constraints, I thought perhaps liberation was possible if I fell in line.
With soft hips firm enough to tuck a saree into, Devi slid easily into the confines of femininity. She was not on the receiving end of violence but valorized for wielding it. Even motherhood was more reign than role: earth, land, and life all fell under her purview.
I danced a story from the heavens I didn’t fully believe to be real, as my heels cracked open the earth in search of the women who fought to be free.
Intermission
A Bharatanatyam recital cannot take place without the bevy of backstage aunties, outfitting the dancers against movement. Hair is extended in a braid beyond the tailbone, flowers are impaled against the head with an iron maiden of bobby pins. Saree-skirt costumes must be fitted to blooming bosoms. Safety pins hang perilously from the edges of the elders’ mouths, as their fingers constantly fidgeted towards propriety. A choker is paired with a bejeweled block. Both posture and sensuality must be cinched into a wide metal belt just above the hips.
Bharatanatyam (Dance)
Decades after bartering my limited artistic expertise for political insights, I hosted a dance workshop in the Bronx for my guru’s daughter, Mythili, to showcase her latest piece. She’s Auspicious is a Bharatanatyam performance that, in her own words, “blurs the lines between the Goddess Devi and [the] woman to explore the paradox of femininity.”
Mythili begins by defining her space. Lines in my living room softened by rose petals as she encircles herself inside the limits of movement.
Divorced and a mother of two boys, a carceral sensation returned even in the liberated territory of my own home.
Mythili stands as if cast in stone. She is the goddess. Balanced on one leg, perfectly still. She begins to move by defining the eyes. Forefingers twisted in a soft stroke foreshadowing something other than peace.
“Sit still,” I remember being told. On the day of my age attainment ceremony, backstage as a dancer, on the mandapam at my wedding.
Mythili disentangles her limbs, freeing them to take on multiple forms. Performing the pantheon of masculinity, she mimics the men sculpting the woman who will resist the darkness.
My mind wanders as her body holds the storyline. Her muscles tighten around a stable core as my body unclenches in relief. I am beginning to see the frame of a fighter.
Mythili enters motherhood gracefully. Slow and steady movements sway a baby to sleep, while her legs bend easily, accustomed to their own strength. Her movements quicken until they are frenetic. Her legs begin to shake as her face unsettles into anxiety. She falls completely still.
The temporary paralysis of caretaking limbs creates a visceral discomfort. As time passes in a singular pose I am anxious for her to move, again. She cannot remain at rest, can she? The body that motherhood sets in motion must stay in motion: carrying, calming, creating.
The body of a child disappears as sensuality spreads. Her hands move inwards, through her center. She turns towards ecstasy alone.
I feel the familiar fatigue of isolation: an internal bleed that is constantly reproduced.
For a moment, the dancer’s desire is untamed inside artistic discipline.
The music changes. A wandering posture is read as cheap, reviled. Mythili explains, “The miruthangam (drum) is disciplining. It is the male gaze. It is the body being policed.”
1247. Give up desire or Give up shame, good heart; I cannot suffer the both of them
It was the first dance performance I had watched in nearly two decades. In the gap between young training and grown resistance, I had collapsed culture into its confinement: stories spun to immobilize.
In a rhythmic dismantling, Mythili had weaponized it—breaking open the body to build consciousness.
With the wide stance of a seasoned dancer Mythili stretches her body to straddle as many roles as possible before she falls to the floor
Intermission
Inequality falls heavy: weighing both the ankle bells of a dancer and the boots of the fighter.
1089. Doe-eyed and bashful, She casts a guileless look. Does she need these jewels? They run alien to her nature Bharatanatyam originated amongst the women born into courtesan dancing. Doused in gold, these women, the devadasis, were tethered only to the divine and pulled power from their independence.
The British overlords couldn’t place the temple dancer. “She was neither nun nor whore,” Mythili reflects. As colonialism colluded with caste, their goddess was absorbed into an all-powerful pantheon, now the base camp for Hindu nationalism.
Tirukkural (Poetry)
Several weeks before Mythili’s movements altered my construction of culture, Meena, now a constant comrade, had arrived at my home from India with several copies of her latest book, The Book of Desire, a re-translation of the Tirukkural.
1115. She wears aniccham flowers With their stem intact- No parai drumbeats will cheer Her (breaking) waist Meena measures a new space to maneuver. “What is a kural? A poem in two lines. The first line consists of four feet (cir in Tamil) and the second of three.” I knew of other Tamil teens who, like Meena, spent summers learning these lines.
If, as poet Cynthia Dewi Oka notes, art is “always in excess of power” then interpretive work is an act of redistribution. Meena is only the second woman in two thousand years to translate the Tirukkural.
In the stanzas in the third of this trifecta of morality clauses, Meena finds the contours of a “deadly, intoxicating” Tamil woman. A woman whose ability to incite fear only increased her allure.
1125. How could I forget The one with battle-ready eyes
The Tamil woman’s body is disciplined to be desired.
Yet, Meena insists, the prose presents a hollow structure. The Tamil woman herself is disappeared: as translator, philosopher, commentator.
Recitation strengthens neural networks and cognitive powers. Meena begins to interrogate. “Does this woman exist outside the text? Will she, in her paratextual incarnation strike?”
Here too, the fighter appears where I didn’t expect to see her.
Deconstructing presumptions of a societal tendency towards control, Meena 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.”
As she “carries the battle-axe of politics” with her into loftier spheres, Meena reorients the Tirukkural’s task, directing it towards liberation. “A woman is not someone to be imprisoned, her movements watched over,” she writes.
Intermission
Mythili notes that even as Devi heads to battle, she is depicted with both legs slung over a tiger: an impossible balancing act of piety and ferocity.
Whether guerilla fighter or fantastical goddess, rebellious women are presented in poles. Starkly opposed superficialities (manicured nails on an AK-47) that reveal only the gaps in limited gendered imaginings. A woman that exists only in the space of juxtaposition is robbed of a fuller composition, conjunctions jumping over a complexity with which we cannot reckon.
She is forced to hold equilibrium over a binary, rather than move freely within an evolving continuum of political thought.
In 2002, the women of the Tigers still dreamt, as Captain Thamilini would write later, “of bending the sky to a bow.” They were revered. That year, the Tamil newspaper the North Eastern Herald, captured a picture of a young woman in the center of town, sitting still inside a rope cage.
Marigolds are attached to her braided hair. Hands pressed against vertical bars, in the midday heat, she wears a thick green silk saree. Her ears, chest, and wrists are weighted by gold. The belt highlights hips that have not yet birthed babies.
She could be a bride or a dancer. With no accompanying text, the caption reads “The rope-cage, symbol of double oppression. As women and Tamils.”
Kummi (Folk Dance)
Conceived in the heavens, one incarnation of the goddess emerges from a furrow in the fields. Proximity to earth reifies purity for Kotravai in Tamil literature. The goddess of war and fertility, she is a creation of what Meena calls, “the Tamil universe.”
In diasporic restorations of both art and uneven social strata in the West, Bharatanatyam is elevated to the main stage and village dances to honor Kotravai, Kummi, are relegated to the streets. At harvest time, the drum (parai) is cradled by the women. In this form, the lyrics turn the women into flowers themselves, spinning in gratitude for Mother Earth. Here, art conforms to the labor of life.
To the generous Mother Earth Sprouting flowers Do the playful dance
To save time, the Kummi dancer pulls long locks into a messy bun on the side of her head. She dons a saree-skirt that stops just below the knee, serving function instead of piety. She wears the same small gold earring she was gifted as a small child or at birth.
The dance moves in circles that are scattered and porous, open for others to join. Returning to this form after training in Bharatanatyam, one Canadian-Tamil artist would say, “I feel more grounded, less concerned with looking like a statue.”
Released from muscular discipline, desire finds a way through.
In the liberation geometries of gender, a fleeting sensation of freedom inside this particular artistic orbit will always be encircled by social superiority: these dancers were cast as “loose” women.
As she moves, the face of the Kummi dancer shows only joy.
Intermission
Porattam. In Tamil, the word for struggle draws dance into the fight.
A ranking member of the U.S. military, a woman whose only qualification for security expertise came from aging out of the ranks, once said to me, “These women in the Middle East seem independent, they even wear jeans, but they just blindly follow militants to war.”
I asked whether she was fighting for her gender or the nation. Without hesitation, “The nation always comes first.” In the West, uniformity is discipline; in the East, sublimation of desire.
A display of strength will always be choreographed, towards dominance or resistance.
As the year is re-born, Chiapas lit up with the anniversary celebrations of the Zapatista struggle. Save for the occasional contouring, the female fighter is virtually indistinguishable from her male comrades. Mimicking the close order maneuvering of the state, she stands at attention and also falls easily into a playful dance.
A body playfully undulating outward cannot be flattened into the presumed conformity of quick time cadence. In a slight etymological twist, she is neither reviled or revered: the rebel revels.
A Fighter
Mythili’s mother, the teacher in her younger years who would tap our elbows up and pull our scarves taut, watched She’s Auspicious. She asked, “Did we make the goddess, or did the goddess make us?”
When the guns went silent for a moment, the paratextual incarnations of the Tamil fighter Meena sought out moved from battlefield to the stage. Leveraging the stillness to build cultural capital, female fighters were known to dance in full fatigues. Bharatanatyam and village forms were conducted on the streets; tradition sanctioned art was wielded against socially sanctioned evils. These performances blurred the line between audience and observer and, in our communities of resistance, left porous the boundaries of belonging.
Two decades ago, the women Tigers I met folded their bodies into underground bunkers to wage war. Their hair was shorn to prevent entanglement in a weapon. They donned camouflage cotton pants for safety, pulled in place by a wide leather belt. Ears and clavicles were bare.
Desire emboldened by determination dances on the edge of death.
In the early weeks of summer, before Mythili and Meena re-acquainted me with culture (in a form deconstructed and instrumentalized for its component parts) there was a conference, an annual regeneration of tradition for the children of Tamil immigrants.
As I sat at the bar with the men who raised me in the struggle, a line of young girls walked past us to watch a Bharatanatyam performance. In this parade, they were, individually and together, exact replicas of the Tamil woman in a cage. Still sensitive to the lingering sensation of my own marital trappings, I could only see their sarees swinging in a line dance towards a cultural chopping block.
Staying immersed in a liberation of the mind, the conversation moved through reckonings and ruminations inside the long shadow of a liberation struggle. Did the fighters sacrifice for nothing?
One former fighter told me recently of a marital moment: her husband threatens her with a broken glass for withholding money, “Nobody else will marry you.” Like a social snapdragon, the pressure of oppression briefly opened the cultural space for the woman warrior to emerge before soft petals close in around her, tighter than before.
At the conference I stepped on stage to pull stories of a warrior from the heavens into setbacks on the ground to renew rebellious energies. Invoking movement poetry, “Sky to the ground, we’ll bring it all down….reveling all around.” I was looking for fighters.
My hair was half-tied, my saree inexpertly pinned, my chest rose and fell at ease, free from the golden yoke of marriage. A lazy attempt at propriety to push a political agenda. My face was both earnest and pained.
A friend handed me a string of malligai poo. Borrowing a single pin from an overstocked auntie, I loosely attached the buds to my curls. The smell reminded me of my mother.
We will build the tomb For women’s exploitation We will dig the graves For society’s backwards ideas - Captain Vanathi (LTTE)