Interviews

JVP Still Denies the Tamil Ethnic Question. Interview with Sharika Thiranagama – 17 September 2025

From Jaffna Monitor

Kaniyan Pungundran: I see your life as a story of human resilience — or perhaps more broadly, the resilience of Sri Lankan Tamils. Your mother, Rajani Thiranagama, was killed when you were very young, at an age when you could hardly have processed what was happening. Yet today you are an Associate Professor at Stanford University. In the short time she was with you, how did her presence — though brief — shape the person you have become?

Sharika Thiranagama: My mother had a tremendous impact on me, even though I was only ten when she passed away. All my formative years were spent with her, so her influence on me was very deep.

I grew up in Jaffna until her death. Apart from a year and a half in the UK, when my mother was finishing her PhD, we lived with my grandparents here. My father, Dayapala Thiranagama, who is Sinhalese, was often underground because of his political activities, so we did not see him much in those years. Jaffna was my home, and like many children here in the 1980s, I grew up cut off from the rest of the island. My experience was one of being constantly bombed — by the Sri Lankan state, by the Indian army, and also living amidst the violence of different militant groups, including the LTTE as it rose to dominance. Those years left a permanent trace on me.

Later, when I returned between 2002 and 2004 to do research, I began to evaluate my own childhood differently. Interviewing displaced Northern Tamils and Northern Muslims in Puttalam, as well as Tamils in Colombo, was humbling. I realized how fortunate I was that, despite the war, my family still had a home. Many others had been displaced multiple times. On a few occasions, we sheltered in a church, but mostly we were able to remain in our house.

Talking to displaced Northern Muslims also expanded my understanding. Listening to them made me see how people from the same place, speaking the same language, could nonetheless have very different trajectories. In the 1990s, Northern Tamils experienced the 1995 exodus, while Northern Muslims were expelled in 1990. Both were marked by violence, but shaped differently — politically and socially.

I came to think of it this way: Tamils in Jaffna had the right to belong here, but not the right to speak. Everyone lived in fear — fear of the state, fear of the LTTE, fear of being informed on. People would often tell me, “Among us Tamils there is no nambikkai (trust) anymore.” By contrast, Northern Muslims had lost their right to belong in the North, but they never lost their right to speak. In refugee camps in Puttalam, when I was doing my research, they spoke openly and publicly about their experiences — something Tamils rarely dared to do.

Doing this research showed me that resilience is not a single story. Class, caste, and community shaped people’s vulnerabilities. For example, many of those who died in 2009 were disproportionately from Dalit or Panchamar communities, as well as from the Malaiyaha Tamil community settled in the Vanni. We often fold all of this into a single Tamil nationalist narrative, but the truth is more complex: not everyone had equal access to escape, to resources, or to survival. The diaspora is overwhelmingly Vellalar caste, while those who remained and bore the brunt of displacement, child recruitment, and loss were often from marginalized castes.

Even my own refugee experience in London shaped me. We were lower-middle-class in Jaffna, but in Britain we started again at the bottom, like many Tamil refugees. My father eventually rebuilt his life through menial jobs before returning to university and becoming a social worker. Those years taught me humility and what it meant to grow up in a working-class immigrant neighbourhood. Later, when I went to Cambridge, the biggest shock wasn’t about being Sri Lankan, but about class — coming from East London into a very posh world. That sense of difference taught me to always pay attention to how social position shapes experience.

I think my mother instilled in us a passion for people, for life, for engagement. She never simply sat back; she wanted to act, to make a difference. That was the ethos my sister and I grew up with: if you understand something, and if you feel empathy, you don’t just leave it — you try to do something with it.

And as a woman, she taught us something even more important. In conservative Jaffna society, she was often gossiped about — for marrying a Sinhalese, for raising two daughters on her own, for refusing to conform. But she showed us that Tamil women did not have to live within narrow, conservative definitions. She was a mother, a teacher, an activist, and a woman full of joy and sorrow, conviction and doubt. She taught us that there are many ways to be a woman, and that women should support one another rather than pull each other down.

Because of her, we met many other Tamil women — through the Poorani Women’s Forum, through her students, through her networks — who also lived full and difficult lives, breaking norms and enduring pain. That was perhaps the most lasting lesson: that our stories are never only our own, but are always connected to the struggles and resilience of others.

[READ THE REST]

, , , , , , , , , ,
Views: 46
More content from this blog
, , , , , , , , , ,