25-year-old Selva joined the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) seven years ago after her parents were shot dead in front of her eyes in Jaffna. She is taking me to an LTTE 'girls hostel' through darkness punctuated by only the feeble rays of a kerosene lamp. The hostel is located in the LTTE economic centre at Vatakatchy in the Killinochchi region in Wanni. This is territory where the LTTE has run a de facto army for 19 years.
The walk through the centre to the girls hostel is a winding journey through demolished buildings standing deathly white in the dark. On reaching the hostel, a worn building with peeling walls and a thatched roof, Selva arranges some meagre bedding on a hard wooden bed. There are three rooms in the hostel in which they sleep on mats on the floor. The beds have apparently been brought in specifically to accommodate the four female journalists, myself included, who are visiting the premises.
The war in Sri Lanka, which began in 1983, was brought to a truce at the close of 2001. Since that time, both the government and the LTTE have been preparing themselves, and 'their' people, for life on a peace island. When asked if she has any plans for the future if ongoing peace talks succeed, Selva laughs. "I'll be with the movement, it is good this way", she says with steel in her voice.
The LTTE's armed struggle – along with political developments on the island and the forced changes in life – have fundamentally altered many aspects of Tamil society, not the least of which being a radical transformation of many Tamil women. While upper-class Sinhala women in southern Sri Lanka were largely emancipated along Western lines during the colonial era, traditional social expectations and obligations bound female Tamils. Fighting the war, which claimed an estimated 65,000 civilian lives, female LTTE cadres were instructed to embrace androgyny and develop a stoic disposition. Undoubtedly, the inscription of women into the LTTE's fighting force has had an impact on traditional gender roles in Tamil society. There have also developed two defining ideals of womanhood – the militant mother and the armed virgin. The question now is how these transformed women, and the millions of other lives shaped by the island's strife in myriad ways, will react to and participate in a revived body politic. With the holding of the ceasefire for more than one year now, a return to 'normalcy' in the island's northern and eastern Tamil-majority areas seems to be on the horizon.