On 19 May 2009, with the violent deaths of the top rung of the LTTE leadership, including that of its leader V Prabhakaran, Sri Lanka's 30-year-old civil war came to an abrupt end. While the conclusion was a traumatic event for many in the country – not necessarily because of the destruction of the LTTE, but because of the huge loss of life and immense suffering of roughly 300,000 people, as well as the sheer scale of the breakdown of social cohesion – it also ushered in an era of possibilities, particularly in rethinking the pathways of nationalism. With these ideas in mind, this reviewer began to read Pathways of Dissent, edited by the sociologist R Cheran.
What would one expect from a volume on Tamil nationalism at this critical juncture? Having written and worked on this subject for many years, wading through the volume proved to be frustrating. The work provides no direction to any one of the burning questions that are currently posed for the academic or the activist situated at the cusp of the post-war political scenario. This is distressing, as so many are today seeking answers to questions that became so pressing in the context of the disastrous conclusion to the war. At that time, the Tamil diaspora, again paying scant attention to the lives of these people, turned out in their hundreds of thousands in the capitals of Europe and Canada to demand the release of Prabhakaran. What had gone so wrong with Tamil nationalism that it had became consonant with the actions and imperatives of LTTE and Prabhakaran? Unfortunately, although the essays of this volume were written fairly recently, they do not touch upon the destructive path that Tamil nationalism has long been taking, particularly in the new millennium.
The academic allure of the title's use of the term dissent provides an analytical entry point into the volume and the entire project of Tamil nationalism. Dissent has a political salience that is useful and productive, particularly at this juncture of charting new directions for those who work with and within the idea of a Tamil nation. The sweeping hegemony of Jaffna-centrism dominant in the volume contradicts the idea of dissent, striking a note of dissonance from the very beginning. This bias is no accident – if all the chapters, barring one, take Jaffna as their focus, they do so not in the spirit of dissent, nor to scrutinise its dominant place in the narrative of nationalism. Rather, through academic sleight of hand, they do so to reinforce its dominance.
Dissent without resistance
Let us begin with Cheran's introduction to the volume, which provides the framework for the subsequent chapters. Interestingly – and perhaps inevitably, given the very linear narrative of the history he charts – Cheran's trajectory of Tamil nationalism collapses itself into the imperatives and dominance of the LTTE within the Tamil nationalist scenario, following the familiar nationalist path of recounting the 'textbook' version of the Sri Lankan Tamils' history. Though certain class and caste implications of nationalism are signalled in the manner of political correctness, Cheran's approach itself does not plug the dissonances of caste and class as a theoretical device of inquiry.