Life Beyond Survival: Social Forms of Coping After the Tsunami in War-affected Eastern Sri Lanka [1. Aufl.] 9783839426012

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Katharina Thurnheer Life Beyond Survival

Culture and Social Practice

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Katharina Thurnheer (PhD) is an associate researcher at the Institute for Social Anthropology, University of Bern. Her research interests focus on war, disaster, international aid, and gender.

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Katharina Thurnheer

Life Beyond Survival Social Forms of Coping After the Tsunami in War-affected Eastern Sri Lanka

2014-04-28 14-35-07 --- Projekt: transcript.titeleien / Dokument: FAX ID 03a4365106300902|(S.

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Published with the support of the Swiss National Science Foundation

Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available in the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de © 2014 transcript Verlag, Bielefeld

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Cover layout: Kordula Röckenhaus, Bielefeld Cover illustration: Navalady, November 2005, © Katharina Thurnheer Typeset by Mark-Sebastian Schneider, Bielefeld Printed by Majuskel Medienproduktion GmbH, Wetzlar Print-ISBN 978-3-8376-2601-8 PDF-ISBN 978-3-8394-2601-2

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Contents Acknowledgments  | 7 A Note on Transliteration and Presentation Manner  | 9 Prologue: The Day of the Two Suns  | 11 Chapter One: Introduction  | 21 Research Focus | 22 The Conjunction of War and Tsunami | 24 Batticaloa: An Introduction | 30 Fieldwork Processes | 39 Methodology and Guiding Concepts | 46 Book Synopsis | 58 Chapter Two: A Transitional Place – The Post-Tsunami Relief Camps  | 61 The Post-Tsunami “Welfare Centres” | 63 Upon Entering the Field | 70 Fieldwork Relationships | 73 Stories of Suffering | 79 A Different Fight for Aid | 87 Sandai: Picking a Fight | 95 Conclusion | 105

Chapter Three: The Tsunami’s Gender Face  | 107 Discriminatory Disasters | 110 Order in Disorder | 113 Sudden Changes | 123 Conclusion | 133

Chapter Four: Family Ties – Striving for Control in an Upset World  | 135 Kudumbam: Family and Household Concepts | 136 ‘Tsunami Love’ | 144 Remarriages: Widowers and Widows | 152 Prawn-like Men? Discussing Domestic Violence | 162 Conclusion | 173

Chapter Five: Dealing with Aid and Anticipating New Homes  | 175 Gendered Aid and Strategic Victims | 179 Relocation Politics | 188 Towards New Homes | 197 Conclusion | 211

Chapter Six: A New Beginning  | 213 Sudarshini | 214 Tsunami Babies | 223 Negotiating Responsibilities | 235 Conclusion | 240

Chapter Seven: Paittiyam – Risking Madness  | 243 Contextualizing Paittiyam | 244 Prasanniya: Keeping Busy | 249 Ramesh: Just Sitting | 259 Dealing with Paittiyam | 268 Conclusion | 275

Chapter Eight: Closing Words  | 277 Arguing with the Gods after the Tsunami | 279 Amidst War, Tiraimadu at Last | 287 Reviewing Forms of Coping | 300

Appendices  | 307 Appendix 1: Frequently Used Abbreviations | 307 Appendix 2: Glossary | 307 Appendix 3: Name List | 309 Appendix 4: List of Illustrations | 314

References  | 315

Acknowledgments

This book has benefited from the priceless support of various persons and institutions. Submitted as a PhD thesis at the University of Bern, Switzerland, in May 2012, its publication eventually coincided with the year that marked the 10year anniversary of the Indian Ocean Tsunami. The underlying research developed over eight years, accompanied by a great many changes in political situations and personal lives. Having envisaged a project on Muslim and Tamil women’s networks during a period of “no war no peace” in eastern Sri Lanka in 2004, the tsunami radically changed this plan by the end of that year. When I returned to the field in late February 2005, there was no way to bypass the disaster. Eventually I established relationships with women who had survived the massive waves, who lived in relief camps, and who expected a future in new homes at a relocation site. It is thanks to these women and their families that this research was possible. Vathany, who joined me as an interpreter, was a vital facilitator. Violence and armed incidents marked fieldwork from the beginning. Targeted murders and grenade attacks accompanied daily life in Batticaloa even when public attention remained focused on the effects of the tsunami during the first year. Subsequently, armed conflict intensified and led to military defeat of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), first in the east, later in the north of the island. There was a strange feeling attached to writing this research’s sociohistorical context of Batticaloa during 2011, when a protagonist dominantly involved in the lives of our research contacts had to be relegated to the past. Fieldwork periods encompassed roughly two years. The research developed primarily from my stays in the field from February to November 2005 and from March to October 2006. Preceding these visits was one from September to November 2004, and follow-up stays from February to April 2007, in September 2007, and from February to March 2009. At this point I wish to acknowledge the support received from various sources. I am grateful to the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNF) for a one-year scholarship and additional funding from the Commission for Partnerships with Developing Countries (KFPE) with which this research started off (2004 – 2005). An SNF scholarship for doctoral students,

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extended over three years, provided for the following returns to the field and a great deal of the research and writing period (2006 – 2009). Contributions from the Commission for Fieldwork Expenses at the University of Bern allowed additional return trips to Sri Lanka. I also wish to thank Helvetas, a Swiss organization for international cooperation, for its support in visa matters. My deepest thanks go to the many people that made this research possible. First of all, I thank our research contacts for the time spent together and for all that I learned from them. I am grateful for their trust, their openness, and for allowing me a glimpse into their lives. I thank Vathany and her family for all her support and long-lasting friendship. A great thank-you goes to my friends Mary Heather and Shanhiepan, with whom I shared a home at Batticaloa’s lagoon area. Further thanks go to the numerous people and institutions in Sri Lanka and Switzerland who contributed in various ways to this research. The interest in my research by several academic and non-academic institutions helped to get it all started, while the insightful comments that I received at workshops encouraged me over the longer process. Special thanks go to the colleagues, the coordinator, and the chairs of the Gender Graduate Course “Scripts and Prescripts” at the University of Bern. I further thank all those who commented on earlier drafts, and those who helped with corrections and editing. Most of all, I would like to thank my supervisor Prof.  Heinzpeter Znoj, and co-supervisor Prof.  Dennis B. McGilvray, for their assistance and critiques. Prof.  Znoj’s open-mindedness and support encouraged me from beginning to end. Prof. McGilvray’s in-depth ethnographic knowledge of the Batticaloa region and his interest in my own research signified a source of inspiration and motivation, especially vital during the time I was completing my thesis. The onset of this project related back to the unexpected death of my father. At its heart lie the sudden deaths of so many children, women, and men whom I came to know about through the fond memories of their bereaved. Our eldest research contact, great-great-grandmother Nallamma eventually died in 2009. Parallel to her death were the deaths of tens of thousands of people as a result of the final phase of war in Sri Lanka. By then, I was living in Syria, where thousands more died in political turmoil during the following two years and beyond, as I was completing this research. Yet, despite all the tragedy, there are many unforgettable and thoroughly pleasant moments that nourished fieldwork, and intense relationships carried me through my research. Vathany later married into the family of some of our research contacts, and several more marriages and births took place among our acquaintances over the course of time. My relationship with Marc began during my fieldwork, and the birth of our daughter occurred during the writing of the thesis. It is to all of them, and for the shared joy in life, that I say: thank you.

A Note on Transliteration and Presentation Manner

Tamil words and expressions are shown in italics and transliterated with English spellings that aim to come as close as possible to the Tamil original, though without use of diacritical marks. Tamil caste names and names of gods are capitalized and introduced in italics but subsequently presented in regular font. Except for initially, when I took notes “on the spot”, field-notes were written down following field conversations and frequently in collaboration with Vathany (interpreter-cum-field-assistant). I use single quotation marks (‘...’) for expressions by our interlocutors, based on these field-notes. Double quotes (“…”) are used when quoting from literature or in order to mark specific expressions. All the personal names in this book are fictitious, and I have omitted details, where deemed necessary, to protect anonymity. Place names are retained in their original. I speak of research contacts, acquaintances, and friends interchangeably in reference to our informants. As an acknowledgement of Vathany’s presence during fieldwork, I refer to the fieldwork as “ours”. However, any errors or misunderstandings are clearly my responsibility.

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Map 1: Sri Lanka

Source: http://www.lib.utexas.edu/maps/middle_east_and_asia/sri_lanka_pol01.pdf (accessed 09 April 2012).

Prologue: The Day of the Two Suns1

Vathany, my fieldwork assistant and interpreter, and I were cycling along the gravel road leading towards the site of temporary shelters where our research contacts were residing. We rehearsed what we intended to do that day in October 2005, which was to record life story interviews of several of our female acquaintances, as agreed with them. Vathany and I joked as we discussed our plans, knowing by experience that we were likely to end up doing something quite different as a day’s events would wash away any previous intentions. Yet we did not expect what we were about to witness – and what would then nullify any idea of conducting interviews. We had barely realized the presence of army personnel further down the street when a soldier stopped to check us. As usual, Vathany had to show her identity card and open her bag. I was glad to be treated as a privileged whiteskinned foreigner when another soldier gave the sign for me to pass without showing the contents of my bag. This spared me from having my recording equipment discovered and thus from having to answer to possible inquiries. We continued to cycle, passing army buses and watching the green-clad figures of soldiers and police personnel swarming the yellowish, sandy terrain. In front of the first site of post-tsunami shelters, women and men sat on the ground in separate groups, and a tall, uniformed man towered between them, his head fully covered beneath a black cloth. A similar picture presented itself to us at the site of our research contacts. Women and men sat separately in the sand surrounded by soldiers, though there were no masked men around yet. We joined a group of women who squatted in what little shade was available next to the shelters and who greeted us with giggles and some gesturing about the situation. When I pushed away my bicycle, 1 | Reconstructed from field-notes of October 2005, this prologue summarizes a day so rich in details and particularities and incorporated so many recurrent patterns of my field observations that it has often occurred to me as a day that offered sufficient material on which to write my whole thesis. Hence I have chosen to describe that day as a way to introduce key research aspects and actors. The next chapter (Introduction) provides more background information.

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a mid-ranking military official, accompanied by five silent, staring young soldiers, greeted me in a cheerful voice. I asked what was happening but was merely told that they were carrying out a cordon-and-search operation. Once they left, Deepa, a 28-year-old woman known for her boldness, came to tell Vathany and me that a confrontation between the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) and its splinterfaction, the so-called Karuna group, had occurred close-by during the night.2 As we sat down to observe what was happening, Deepa’s mother approached us and whispered that she was very afraid: the day before, two sons of one of her sisters had come to visit her. They were members of the iyakkam (“movement”, a common expression for the LTTE), and though she kept asking them not to visit her, they did not listen. So she served them meals (‘rice and curry’): what else could she do? But she feared that others might give her away, because, she said, there was no unity among the people of her village. In the meantime, the security forces checked men and women separately in a way that paid respect to some gender sensitivity not always characteristic of these procedures. Men were body-searched by male personnel in the middle of a lane that served to separate those waiting from those who had passed the procedures. Female personnel patted down women inside a shelter. Some small boys, roughly between the ages of five and 10, had to go through the procedure as well (I did not see any girls, but then, it was a time when most children were at school). A man who, based on his looks, I suspected to be the policeman from the women and children’s desk at the local police station shook their hands in greeting before searching their clothes. By this time, masked men had appeared. We recognized the man we had seen before with the black cloth over his head like a hangman out of a medieval storybook. Several other men also disguised their faces with black cloth wrapped below their eyes or with a fabric resembling nylon stockings pulled over their helmet-covered heads. Another mid-ranking military official addressed me in a friendly, chatty manner and asked what I was doing there. In reply, I stressed an interest in the effects of the tsunami on the daily life of those affected, and he advised me to visit the south of Sri Lanka where his hometown too had been heavily affected. I briefly expressed my sympathies, though in my mind I understood his suggestion within the framework of a common reproach by Sinhalese that foreigners were only interested in the situation of the Tamil population.3 As for 2 | The LT TE and the Sri Lankan government had been at war since 1983, though the incident described occurred in the period following a ceasefire agreement in 2002. The eastern commander of the LT TE, Colonel Karuna, broke away from its leadership in March 2004 and established a rival, armed Tamil group that cooperated with government forces. 3 | By that time, anti-foreigner sentiment had developed among Sinhalese nationalists, especially in the south. It would increase in the following months, accompanying the escalation of war. Part of that sentiment accused international organizations of being “proTamil” and equated aid with political support for the LT TE (see also Goodhand 2010, S348).

Prologue

my question on their purposes here, I was told that they had received information of hidden weapons in the area. When he left, I tried again to reach my friend Sheila by cell-phone to inform her of what was happening while previous attempts had failed due to network failures. I finally reached her, and she informed the Sri Lankan Monitoring Mission (SLMM) of the incident.4 In the meantime, I tried to observe what was happening. At least, that was what I thought I was doing. Later, I realized that I had failed to note basic information such as a clear estimation of the number of uniformed personnel and their particular affiliations with the various police and army units. Indeed, I was as much concerned with “marking presence”, hoping that none of the people risked getting “disappeared” as long as a white-skinned foreigner was witnessing the scene. The security forces had finished ‘ironing’ (body-searching) the people, and all the men and a group of women sat separately on the other side of the lane under the blazing sun. Several other women, among them our closest research contacts, remained on our side of the lane, huddled against the walls of the shelters that offered some shade, or resumed some of their daily household chores. We observed how soldiers separately and thoroughly questioned two young women standing on the opposite side of the lane. One of the girls had short hair, which was unusual for Tamil women and invited the suspicion of having served as a combatant for the LTTE. The other was of a particularly dark complexion and carried an identity card that revealed her origins to be from a village under LTTE control. Both points made her too appear suspicious of direct links to this armed group.5 At the same time, the masked man who looked to me like a hangman addressed the squatting women. Speaking in Tamil, he told them that having to sit in the sun that day was their punishment for supporting the LTTE, and this punishment was to be repeated as long as they extended their support. He threatened them, saying that – though the military was not taking any actions against them at that moment – his people knew ‘everything about everyone’ and therefore knew exactly who was 4 | The SLMM consisted of observers from Scandinavian countries who monitored actions of the Sri Lankan government and the LT TE in accordance to the ceasefire agreement of February 2002. However, its mandate did not go beyond reporting. At the time of the roundup described, the SLMM still had an office in Batticaloa town but withdrew the following year after having been directly attacked. 5 | Persons with dark skin were said to be suspicious, because dark complexion is taken to indicate a person’s exposure to sun and therefore, in more twisted logic, a likely LT TE combatant (see also Lawrence [1997, 222] for her argument on dark skin being associated with low caste and forming a crucial element in constructing the degraded “otherness” of an enemy). Security forces were suspicious of anyone affiliated with villages under de facto LT TE control, and it is likely that all women who had to endure sitting on that other side of the lane originated from such villages (as revealed by their identity cards). Lastly, Tamil men in general, and fishermen in particular, tended to be suspected of involvement with the LT TE (see Chapter One for the fishermen caste’s specific association with the LT TE).

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‘serving water to the terrorists’. The “hangman” then stood in front of the group of sitting men. He stated that he was a Muslim, but that while Muslims were said to keep changing the directions in which the visors on their caps pointed, the Muslims’ caps in fact sat straight on their heads, while the Tamils changed their minds in different ways these days.6 His remark effectively hinted at the menacing situation resulting from the recent split in the LTTE within the region. He went on to accuse his addressees of having started the piraccinai (problem, trouble) as soon as they had moved from their previous post-tsunami camps to this remoter location.7 He left no doubt that punishment would be swift and merciless: were they to support the LTTE again, the army would not warn them any longer but take immediate action. He threatened that one person’s support would be enough for reprisal action against the entire village population. He continued to state that people would find a body in front of their homes one morning without being able to identify the murder. He warned the men not to be misled into thinking that they could side with the LTTE during the ceasefire or mistake the ceasefire for peace: ‘Some people think there is peace now, and they think they can help the LTTE without being questioned. But this is not peace. Peace has already come to an end.’8 At some point, he asked by name for a young girl who worked for the Tamil Rehabilitation Organization (TRO), a social organization tightly linked to the LTTE, to step out.9 In fact, this whole scene occurred within shelters built by the TRO as temporary homes for these families displaced by the tsunami. Though the girl was present among the women sitting in the sun, nobody said a word. The masked man then asked other people working for that organization to identify themselves. As silence continued, he demanded that people identify whoever helped any international organization that had established the various sites of post-tsunami shelters in that area. While that question met with silence as well, he went on to accuse all the organizations and anyone receiving post-tsunami aid from them, of supporting the LTTE, which he claimed misused donations to procure arms. By then I had become increasingly impatient for the SLMM to arrive, wondering what was keeping it away for so long. Suddenly there was a commotion: 6 | The eastern Muslim population and its parliamentarians had acquired the reputation of “reversing their hats”, that is, changing political orientation or party affiliations in order to gain opportunistically from power politics (see also McGilvray 2008, 316). 7 | Piraccinai is the common expression by Tamil speakers to refer to the war. 8 | The ceasefire in Sri Lanka tended to be called “peace” in colloquial parlance. Thus the masked man made it clear that the ceasefire had unofficially come to an end. 9 | Due to its closeness to the LT TE, the TRO had come under increasing scrutiny and was about to move out of the district at the time of the incident. During the previous month, one person was killed in the latest of a series of grenade attacks on TRO’s main office in Batticaloa town.

Prologue

soldiers started to leave the scene, climbing into the buses and walking towards their camps in the neighbourhood. After some calling, the same policeman who had body-checked the boys and men appeared with a video camera and recorded the group of men who remained sitting on the soil. Then he almost ran away. One of the departing soldiers cheerfully waved good-bye to a young girl who smiled back embarrassed. They knew each other from the time when security forces were stationed in the post-tsunami relief camps where our research contacts had stayed previously. Finally, after all the uniformed personnel and vehicles had disappeared from sight, SLMM’s white pick-up truck arrived at the dusty-red roadside. Several men (and a 14-year old boy who had been slapped by a soldier earlier that morning) quickly approached them, eager to inform them about what had happened. However, no one volunteered to make a statement in writing on the incident, either on that day or later on. Such a report would have been the basis for a formal case against the army. Yet that also meant a risk of being persecuted by the same actor or any proxy. No one was prepared to take it. Vathany and I went to join some of our closest research contacts, Indurani, her husband, and their adult daughter, Nanthini, who sat at their shelter with a few of their relatives. Indurani exclaimed that they lived in a ‘bad place’ and that she wished to return to Navalady, their former village, where they never experienced such harassment. Everyone present supported that view and ventured to talk about what had just happened. A young man was especially worried about the video that the policeman had taken before leaving. Was it taken for identification purposes and would arrests follow? In a low voice, he told us what he and some friends observed during the night preceding the round-up. According to his account, armed members of the breakaway Karuna faction had come in search of TRO members (which translated into LTTE members) who usually stayed in their offices within the temporary shelter site. A bit later, another young man elaborated on why their area was particularly ‘bad’: it had a war-stricken past that continued to bring risks to its residents. Formerly, it had been a site of fighting and massacres. By the time of the round-up, our friends deemed it dangerous, because its relative remoteness from established settlements was thought to invite intrusions by all armed groups operating in the area. The round-up itself confirmed the danger of the place in regard to massive operations by government forces. But, in addition to all of this, this site of temporary shelters for those displaced by the tsunami had also brought people into close contact from various destroyed villages and those of opposing political affiliations. While their own village was largely linked to the LTTE, by choice or force, some of their new neighbours were known supporters of Tamil groups that collaborated with the government. Just across the lane from where we sat lived a person who enjoyed the services of security guards, according to the young man. Moreover, he was confident that the “hangman” was stationed as part of the

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governmental security personnel in the post-tsunami camps earlier that year.10 Our acquaintance’s observation clearly indicated that the posting of security units served for surveillance. As his unperturbed attitude towards my further questions suggested, people simply seemed to have accepted this as inevitable. In the meantime, Indurani and Nanthini had started to prepare rice and curries for lunch. They had more news to share: the morning had started with two suns appearing in the eastern sky. According to them, this signified the pending ‘end of the world’. Indurani knew about such matters from the evangelical church meetings she had started to attend after the tsunami, disappointed as she was in the Hindu gods who she deemed failed to prevent the disaster. Nanthini, who lost her husband and baby due to the waves, cheerfully joined in expecting an end of the world but emphasized that she intended to eat a lot of fish and meat every day before that. As proof of the phenomenon of the two suns, Nanthini’s maccaan (male cross-cousin) Murali showed us a photo that he had taken of it with his cellphone. Yet he cautioned that the impression of two suns may have been linked to that day’s solar eclipse. Nanthini’s brother Suresh briefly joined our circle and was glad that he had not known about the spectacle. Had he seen the two suns, he would not have dared to go fishing that morning for fear of what might have happened. Consequently, he would not have left his home before the soldiers’ arrival and would not have been spared the round-up as he had been. However, he added he knew of another sign of pending death: it was being said that people like him with asthma-like symptoms were to die within the year. We had turned to talk of different family issues when our conversation suddenly shifted to ghosts. Murali started the topic by relating that his father had heard the sounds of a crying baby in their former village where Nanthini’s home used to be. Indurani and Nanthini stiffened visibly. Yet Nanthini pulled herself together, saying that many children died crying in the tsunami, and that was why one could hear such sounds at present. Unimpressed, Murali continued that, on a previous occasion, his father and one of his father’s sisters, Pusparaji, had heard a voice calling ‘thampi’ (younger brother, also used for calling any boy) where their own house used to be. Murali emphasized that even Pusparaji, who was a Christian and thus explicit in not believing in ghosts, got very afraid. Indurani asked in a coarse voice whether the call came from Murali’s mother, who died in the tsunami, but Murali shrugged off the comment by repeating that the voice could not be identified. He went on to talk of further frightening encounters during the days immediately following the tsunami, when he and two male 10 | According to this person, the masked man belonged to the so-called Razeek group, whose leader was killed in Batticaloa town one month before the round-up. The Razeek group was one of the armed Tamil groups opposing the LT TE. After the LT TE’s massive campaigns against this and other such Tamil groups in the 1980s, its surviving members joined the Ninth Battalion of Sri Lanka’s army National Guard (Subramanian 2005, 117– 132; Tamilnet 2005).

Prologue

relatives went to their destroyed village in search of missing family members. The group of young men had ended up running away in fear of the voices they heard. Recently a man had also told him that he had heard a cracking and splashing sound while out fishing one night. It sounded as if it was a banyan tree collapsing, just as happened in the tsunami when the collapse of one such large tree drowned dozens of people who had sought refuge on it. There was also a story of another relative, Manjula, whose baby had died in the tsunami and who heard it crying one night when staying in their former village. Since then, she refused to stay there any longer. Nanthini countered that she too had once stayed overnight in Navalady with her mother, brother, sister, and other close relatives, but that they had not heard any sounds. Murali replied that this was typical. Only when one was alone there, would one hear all those sounds, not in the company of many others. When alone, he insisted, one felt the presence of pey (ghosts or spirits): ghosts existed, and they were not merely an idea people made up to frighten themselves, as some other people liked to say. Our interlocutors agreed with each other that ever since hundreds of people ‘died before their time’ due to the tsunami, ghosts roamed their former village in large numbers. Yet the group, by now enlarged by two of Indurani’s grandchildren and her daughter-in-law Sasika, deemed that there had always been ghosts in Navalady. It was a dwelling place for ghosts, because a forest used to exist there until the recent years and because it hosted several temples where people danced as pey during annual festivals.11 Remembering these former temple festivals triggered stories of the excitement that these occasions had offered and the roles our friends and their relations had played during these occasions. Hence a different kind of memories flared up, memories of a life of amusement and joy, and flashbacks that spoke of a positive identification with the supernatural. As ever so often when speaking of their lives in Navalady, conversation soon centred on fishing matters and the delicious taste of fresh fish. As we relaxed after lunch, a van that dropped off two foreigners at the neighbouring shelter offered a new conversation topic. Deepa passed by, saying that these foreigners planned to take Neelam, a grandson of one of Indurani’s sisters, abroad with them. It was taken as a promise of good education rather than anything else, but it squelched as gossip soon enough. Once the foreign visitors had left, Murali called Neelam, who told us that the visitors promised him yet another new bicycle. The boy snapped with his fingers and boasted jokingly that this was how it went in the ‘thangam (golden) tsunami’ – that is, in the golden wave of post-tsunami aid. Nanthini called out that Neelam’s father had already received several bicycles, while nobody of her parental family had ever gotten one. 11 | Our acquaintances often used the terms pey (ghosts, spirits) and theyvam (deity) interchangeably. What they talked about at that moment referred more precisely to theyvam aatukira, persons possessed by a deity, who typically dance during the annual festivals of local (low-caste) amman (mother goddess) temples in eastern Sri Lanka.

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She wished she had a male’s bike, so that a relative could pedal her to wherever she needed to go, since there were no public transport facilities available at their site of temporary shelters. Conscious of her new status as a widow, she did not want to ride a bicycle herself, because that would invite everyone’s gossip about where she, a woman alone, could possibly be roaming around. The “golden tsunami” kept us entertained with the next event of that day: a bus pulled up with clothes donated by a factory to the so-called tsunami victims. Indurani went to the distribution and returned with an armful of clothes to be shared with her adult children and her grandchildren. The items were appreciated for being new, but most of them were either slightly damaged or stained with mildew. It had also been impossible to get anything that actually fit any of the family members. Other women passed by, including more of Indurani’s female relatives. They showed their bounty and joked about the struggle to have gotten something. Everyone agreed that the clothes would be useful for stuffing pillows. Later in the afternoon, Vathany and I went to visit Renuka and her daughter Lakshmi, a daughter and granddaughter of Indurani’s eldest sister, Nallamma. That morning’s round-up started our conversation there too, as we sat under Lakshmi’s cadjan-thatched extension to her family’s shelter. Lakshmi was angry that those, who had gone through the tsunami, had to face such harassment. She asked whether the international organizations could do anything about such intrusions. Renuka was also worried about an earthquake that was about to strike Sri Lanka, according to what Lakshmi’s husband had told her. A huge shift had apparently ‘swallowed’ half of America already, and Renuka was glad to accept our suggestion that this news had merely been made up to tease her. Meanwhile, Renuka’s younger daughter Sudarshini, pregnant at the time, remained secluded inside Lakshmi’s shelter. Every now and then, Renuka advised her not to talk, not to scratch any mosquito bite, and not to laugh. Sudarshini was to remain immobile inside the shelter to avert any potential harm or bodily marks to affect the unborn child during this special day of a solar eclipse – a precaution she had not been able to observe in that morning’s upheaval. Suddenly Lakshmi’s three-year old son came out of the same shelter. Still drowsy from his afternoon nap, he asked his grandmother where Neela akka (elder sister) was? Renuka replied softly that Neela had died: ‘she went away in the water’. To Vathany and me, Renuka added that the little boy often asked for Sudarshini’s children, all of whom had died in the tsunami. Having observed the dark clouds that had built up in the meantime, Vathany and I left early that evening to make it home before the seasonal rain set in. It was expected to flood the temporary shelters as happened before. Later that night, as I was writing my notes of the day at home, a sudden, loud thunder clap made me jump off my chair. Immediately the electricity was out. Housemate Yogesh came running downstairs, closing the shutters of the windows (lacking glass since the tsunami). The explosion-like sound reminded him of a landmine, and after a detonation of that kind, loose pieces were likely to swirl around, and more

Prologue

firing was possible. But locked inside with the electricity out and without even the slightest breeze, it got unbearably hot and, alone in the room, I opened the shutters again: after all, closing them had been a reaction triggered off by memories of war. That was the past, I thought at the time, having come to “normalize” a great deal of the violence observed during the past eight months of fieldwork.

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Chapter One: Introduction

Reconstructed from field-notes, the events in the Prologue touch upon crucial elements of our fieldwork and, consequently, on core topics of this book. They demonstrate the political insecurity that reigned at the time, with government forces and various armed groups intervening into our acquaintances’ daily lives. Indeed, there was no peace in Batticaloa at the time. The “hangman” neatly summarized the threats: people were killed with impunity on a daily level. The depictions also indicate some of the ways in which our friends were, indeed, “involved” in the political dynamics just as they reveal the impossibility of remaining “outside” such involvement. Tsunami aid too could not escape from such intricacies. A similar case can be made for my own and Vathany’s positioning as we went through the checking, observing, and chatting with those who were being suspected, conversing with military personnel leading the operation, and calling in the SLMM. At the same time, the Prologue points out the immediacy of the losses experienced due to the tsunami. Some 10 months after the massive waves had destroyed our interlocutors’ fishing village, the dead remained present in recollections, dreams, and sometimes in encounters with ghosts. Memories of their former village often provided a means of escaping the difficulties and suggested alternatives to the living situations experienced in the aftermath of the tsunami. And still that village also represented a place of devastation to which they did not wish to return. The “golden tsunami”, as the excess of post-tsunami aid was called in colloquial terms, did little to address these dimensions of insecurity. What it did offer, besides material goods, were opportunities for personal conflicts or simple entertainment. Rumours of aid obtained by others and rumours of death and devastation circulated together, sometimes taken hot-headedly and often with a great deal of self-irony. The Prologue also reveals the kin-based relationships and the dominance of women among our research contacts.

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R ese arch Focus When I formulated the title for my research project – “life beyond survival” – in early 2004, I did not imagine that I would get as close to its direct meaning, regarding life and death, as I eventually did. Originally, I intended to study Tamil and Muslim social relationships and women’s networks in the Batticaloa region during the time of a fragile ceasefire agreement between the government and the LTTE. The tsunami of December 2004 as well as the deterioration in Sri Lankan political relations thwarted the research plan. On one level, these developments strengthened my principal interest in exploring social processes for coping with disruption and insecurity in the island’s war-torn east. On another level, the fieldwork context I encountered upon my return to the field (in February 2005) differed sharply fom my previous visit (from September to November 2004). There was then a context of immediate suffering, of large-scale physical destruction and human losses. There were also suddenly numerous international aid workers and volunteers present who focused on the tsunami disaster with little concern for situations facing the rest of Batticaloa’s war-affected population. My attention also shifted to the tsunami survivors. With Vathany, who assisted fieldwork as my interpreter, I began visiting the two relief camps where those families who came to be our research contacts were residing since the complete destruction of their coastal village, Navalady. Initially hesitating to compare their situations with residents of a more remotely located and more exclusively war-affected village, my focus remained with these families for the whole period of fieldwork. This promised a more in-depth empirical study, and fieldwork eventually spanned several years.1 Over this time, war intensified. My last visit to Sri Lanka in early 2009 coincided with the campaign that led to the government’s military victory over the Tamil Tigers, which included the killing of LTTE’s top leaders in May 2009. Yet, as seen above, war characterized the era long before official abrogation of a ceasefire by the government in early 2008. From its beginning, fieldwork among the tsunami survivors was accompanied by the sounds of grenade attacks and the news of murder and abductions.2 Hardly any of these incidents received the 1 | Fieldwork periods covered September to November 2004, February to November 2005, March to October 2006, February to April 2007, and two shorter stays in the field in September 2007 and February to March 2009. 2 | Armed incidents in Batticaloa town had unmistakenly increased by early 2005 compared to the situation during my preceding stay in the field in 2004 (that time, some political observers used the expression “low-intensity warfare” to describe the situation in eastern Sri Lanka that had remained a volatile area throughout the ceasefire period). Locally, stories circulated according to which some of the violence during the post-tsunami period targeted people who had left Batticaloa in previous years, returned upon news of the devastation caused by the tsunami, and were killed by their political adversaries. Most of the observed murders and armed incidents were carried out between the LT TE and rival

Chapter One: Introduction

attention of the news media or that of the international relief agencies who had come to support those affected by the tsunami. One friend and peace activist described it tersely: the general focus on “the tsunami” provided an occasion for unrelenting killing. The killings received no public acknowledgement, effectively silencing all talk of them, even from those who knew only far too much of them. Like the Prologue, several parts of this thesis will show that the notion of a “life beyond survival” raises the question of “which” life and survival. More than two decades of war marked the biographies of our acquaintances and their daily life situations. Within minutes, the tsunami inflicted great human and material losses, while the renewed escalation of armed conflict impinged on the survivors’ means of coping with their bereavement. Hence the experiences of surviving amidst suffering and destruction extended deep into the past, vehemently marked the presence, and shaped future expectations. In this sense, distinctions between a pre- and post-tsunami time became blurred. Precisely within this blurring, it seems to me, questions about continuities and discontinuities between former and present lives gain relevance. They are the questions posed through this research. At the same time, these considerations are analytical tools to sort out what is most interesting: the actual conjunction of the tsunami’s effects and of armed conflict in the everyday worlds of particular people. Starting off from this conjunction, my interest lies in exploring how people dealt with its unfolding dynamics. What did this conjunction mean in their daily lives? And what forms did it take? In what ways did they respond to and further shape these developments? It is in regard to this latter question that I make use of the term “coping” in a broad sense: exploring practices through which our research contacts organized their everyday lives. In that sense, my research itself explores what “coping” actually comes to mean and include within the specific context. The research focuses on the observed realities and contradictions of daily life, shaped by and imposed upon our acquaintances. It covers a time during which they lived in post-tsunami relief camps and temporary shelters until they moved into their new, permanent houses in a relocation site. I am particularly interested in what developed as priorities in these specific social worlds and how people related to each other in supportive or conflictive manners. As I observe how daily life was reorganized, I reflect further on how it related to former ways of living and what future expectations may affect the present practices. My principle interest lies with the gendered worlds of our female friends, many of whom were closely related by kinship to each other. While men counted among our daily contacts, we primarily shared in the perspectives of women and their quotidian activities within the camps and transitional shelters. That daily life had largely to do with remembering one’s own survival and the death of loved ones, with negotiating access to post-tsunami aid, with armed Tamil groups corresponding to a pattern of “war by proxy” (Muggah 2008, 175) by which the Sri Lankan armed forces confronted the LT TE through Tamil paramilitary groups.

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establishing social relationships within changing life circumstances or shifting political processes, and with settling down in a new environment away from their former homes. Thus my research is concerned with stories of recent survival and memories of former losses, with present opportunities and disappointments, with hopes for a better future, and ironies about the futility thereof. It examines these dimensions with an explicit interest in underlying gender relationships and their relevance in structuring the experiences and processes. In the following subchapter, I outline the conjunction of the effects of the tsunami and war more closely, focusing on the eastern part of Sri Lanka where my research took place. This is followed by a subchapter introducing Batticaloa: firstly, by means of selected references on the build-up of Sri Lanka’s militarized context, and secondly, in view of social anthropological and gender interests. Then I continue to look at “the field” of my ethnography and discuss fieldwork methodology within this specific context marked by violence and human tragedy. The following part touches upon basic concepts that guided my analysis and its representation. They are largely drawn from feminist anthropology and the anthropology of violence. Hence this chapter serves to introduce the social, political, and ethnographic context of fieldwork and the methodological and conceptual basis of this research. It concludes with a brief overview of the chapters of this book.

The C onjunction of W ar and Tsunami The tsunami’s devastation in Sri Lanka was preceded by more than two decades of armed conflict between the predominantly Sinhalese government forces and the LTTE. That war was fought primarily in the country’s north and east. By the time the tsunami struck, it had accounted for over 80,000 dead or missing and more than 800,000 people displaced from their homes (Frerks 2010, 146). As warfare was resumed after the tsunami, another estimated 21,000 people were killed as of December 2008, followed by further tens of thousands in the final campaigns of 2009 (ICG 2010, 1; Kuhn 2010, 46). The ways in which the tsunami effects and those of armed conflict in Sri Lanka interacted with each other span a broad spectrum of developments. These include unequal distribution of post-tsunami aid between the regions affected by the tsunami and the inequities produced in terms of aid for those affected by the tsunami versus those affected by the war. They further include ways in which armed groups intervened in aid allocations and personal coping experiences of multiple displacements facing so many survivors of war-related and tsunami-caused destruction. Below, I limit considerations to pointing out some of the overlapping effects in regard to Sri Lanka’s geo-political landscape, vulnerabilities, and political responses to aid, particularly with regard to the east.

Chapter One: Introduction

Following a seabed earthquake of at least 9.0-magnitude off Sumatra’s west coast on 26 December 2004, tsunami waves radiated out into the Bay of Bengal, the Andaman Sea, and the Indian Ocean, affecting twelve countries in Asia and Africa.3 A series of waves that morning hit more than two thirds of Sri Lanka’s coastline where they, within 20 minutes, killed more than 30,000 people, left several thousands missing, and displaced about half a million, according to early government figures of January 2005.4 The waves struck the island’s eastern and northern coastlines especially hard. The three eastern districts of Ampara, Batticaloa, and Trincomalee together made up some 40 per cent of all Sri Lanka’s tsunami casualties, and the north accounted for approximately 16 per cent, though the south was more densely populated.5 Thus the waves particularly impacted those areas of the island that had formed the major arenas of war. In further consequence, the tsunami largely devastated regions already marginalized politically and economically, where the majority population faced lower living standards than the residents of the southern coast. The waves affected all the country’s three major population groups of Sinhalese, Tamils, and Muslims, all of whom are identified as ethnic groups in Sri Lanka. These three groups have become increasingly polarized due to the decades of war waged in ethno-political terms.6 Given that predominantly Tamils and Muslims 3 | It most severely affected Indonesia, Sri Lanka, Thailand, the Maldives, and Somalia besides another six countries in Asia and Africa. The tsunami of 2004 has been called one of the worst disasters for humankind so far, killing more than 250,000 people and rendering more than 2.5 million homeless (Action Aid 2006, 13). 4 | Figures for the dead, missing, injured, and displaced as well as other statistics on the destruction caused by the tsunami vary according to sources and point in time of assessment. They are best accepted as being uncertain. The second Joint Report of the Government of Sri Lanka and Development Partners (Joint Report 2006, 1) states 35,322 killed or missing, 21,441 injured, and 516,150 displaced. 5 | This rough calculation is based on a map compiled by the Department of Census and Statistics (2005a) that provides an overview of the number of reported deaths due to the tsunami per district. For the eastern districts: Amprai 10,436; Batticaloa 2,840; Trincomalee 1,078. For the north: Mullativu 3,000; Jaffna 2,640. For the southern and western districts: Hambantota 4,500; Matara 1,342; Galle 4,214; Kalutara 256; Colombo 79; Gampaha 6; Puttalam 4. 6 | According to the 2001 census, Sri Lanka’s overall ethnic composition was estimated at a 74.5 per cent Sinhalese, 16.5 per cent Tamil, 8.3 per cent Muslim, and additional minorities (including 0.2 per cent Burgher). This census remains an estimate, because it covered only 18 out of 25 districts due to the armed conflict (Department of Census and Statistics 2001, 10). Please note that, due to war and the resulting migration and deaths among the Tamil population, Sri Lanka’s ethnic composition might look quite different today with the percentage of Tamils estimated as low as seven to eight percent by some (Manoharan 2012). The uncertainty of actual numbers complicates the question of which

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populate the northern and eastern coastline and Sinhalese the less-affected south and west coast, the tsunami resulted in ethnically discriminate effects.7 Contributing to one third of the tsunami fatalities, Muslims were especially affected in regard to their overall population ratio. This outcome resulted from the high concentration of Muslims along Ampara’s coastline, where the tsunami killed more than 10,000 people (McGilvray and Raheem 2007, 43–44). Yet a recent publication based on statistics for damaged houses has shown that Tamils faced relatively greater losses than Muslims, even in Ampara (Kuhn 2010, 48). Indeed, according to Kuhn’s (2010, 60–61) analysis, especially Tamils were likely to live in the most heavily affected parts of the Eastern Province. This pattern can be explained in part by the limited possibilities of living in the interior, which had been settled by Sinhalese or occupied by army and LTTE camps. Batticaloa’s geographical and political landscapes as the tsunami hit are cases in point for the conjunction of war and tsunami – a combination significant for the former village of our research contacts, Navalady. The district, with a majority of Tamils, accounted for some 3,000 dead due to the tsunami. It needs to be noted that roughly 80 per cent of the population lived in approximately 20 per cent of the district at the precise time of the tsunami. The great majority of the population lived along the narrow stretch between the sea and Batticaloa’s large lagoons. That demographic development resulted largely from war; people fled the remoter areas that were controlled de facto by the LTTE and where intense fighting reigned between government forces and the LTTE. Hence a highly populated coastal belt had developed and remained under government control, while the LTTE controlled a vast but poorly inhabited hinterland. Residing close to the sea and the lagoon in turn increased people’s vulnerability to the tsunami. Moreover, since the lagoon signified a demarcation line between the government-controlled coastal stretch and the land west of the lagoon controlled by the LTTE, government forces destroyed the lagoon’s thick mangrove vegetation. This was intended as a security measure and aimed to hinder LTTE movement across the lagoon. However, this measure was found to heighten the tsunami’s impact, unfettered by protecting vegetation (Bohle and Fünfgeld 2007, 677). All of this was significant for Navalady, located at the tip of a narrow peninsula between the lagoon and the sea. The tsunami destroyed the village entirely, and its location made it a death trap as the lagoon prevented people from “running away” from the waves.

ethnic group was proportionally most severely affected by the tsunami – a question that itself gains in significance against the backdrop of the ethno-political polarization between these population groups and a politicized distribution of (and rivalry for) post-tsunami aid. 7 | I am not aware of any official statistics breaking the tsunami death toll down ethnically. However, Kuhn’s (2010) study reveals interesting findings about the inequitable effects of the tsunami as well as post-tsunami aid based on quantitative analysis at the divisional and village levels (see further text below).

Chapter One: Introduction

Overall, the tsunami especially affected the poorer districts of Sri Lanka (in relation to Gross Domestic Product) where the poorer population segments were notably hard hit (Frerks 2010, 150; Joint Report 2006, 13). The tsunami’s destructive waves, limited to the coastline, took their heaviest toll on people engaged in the fisheries sector. Moreover, assessments indicate that there were many more women than men as well as a significant number of small children and the elderly among the casualties (Ariyabandu 2009, 11–12; Birkmann and Fernando 2008, 89–90; Department of Census and Statistics 2005b; Hyndman 2008, 109; Oxfam International 2005). Gender inequality is linked to differences in labour division, which resulted in more women than men being at the exposed coastline during the tsunami. It is also indicative of socially produced behaviour and dress codes, which aided the survival of men (see Chapter Three). The tsunami’s impact in Sri Lanka thus reveals the decisive importance of the political, socio-economic, and gender-related parameters of the effects of disasters, however “natural” their cause may have been (Bankoff, Frerks, and Hilhorst 2004; Enarson and Chakrabarti 2009; Enarson and Morrow 1998; Hoffman and OliverSmith 2002; Oliver-Smith and Hoffman 1999; Rodríguez, Quarantelli, and Dynes 2006). As Hilhorst and Bankoff (2004, 4) formulated it, a natural hazard turns into a calamity, depending on social and historical factors that determine the vulnerability and resilience of the people affected. The concept of vulnerability captures the ways in which the disasters’ effects vary in their risk distribution according to a society’s political, social, and economic structures and processes (Oliver-Smith 2004, 10–11). Resilience, in turn, focuses on the differing capacities of people or social groups to deal with such risks and recover from the effects (Bernard Manyena 2006). In the case of Sri Lanka, vulnerability and resilience figure within the context of armed conflict: the tsunami’s effects can be seen as a further consequence of war (Frerks and Klem 2005a, 1). Conversely, as elaborated below, the politics of post-tsunami aid contributed to a further polarization and ultimately to escalation of armed conflict (Bastian 2005; Frerks 2010; Goodhand and Klem 2005, 58–60; Keenan 2010; Rajasingham-Senanayake 2005). The ceasefire agreement brokered with the mediation of Norway in February 2002 was still in place at the time of the tsunami. However, by December 2004, political tensions reigned high, and a renewed outbreak of war was expected. The tsunami’s subsequent devastation, the human tragedies experienced islandwide, and the many incidents of spontaneous, mutual help among people irrespective of their political or ethnic affiliations (including reported cooperation between members of the LTTE and the Sri Lankan army) stirred hope that peace negotiations would be resumed.8 Instead, established politics retained the upperhand, and both the government and the LTTE sought to strengthen their positions 8 | Following the ceasefire agreement, six rounds of peace talks between the government and the LT TE outside Sri Lanka were achieved by March 2003 but then came to a stand-still (Goodhand and Klem 2005, 20–21).

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via control of post-tsunami aid. While the parties agreed on a joint mechanism to distribute aid early on, the Post-Tsunami Operational Management Structure (most commonly known as P-TOMS), was never implemented (Goodhand and Klem 2005, 58–60; Raheem 2005). Sinhalese nationalist groups brought it to the Supreme Court, which declared it unconstitutional in key parts by mid-2005 (ICG 2006, 9). There had been little political support for this agreement that could have served the conflict parties as a power-sharing model (Keenan 2010, 24–28). In the meantime, killings continued, including the murder of eastern LTTE leader Khausaliyan as early as February 2005. Foreign Minister Lakshman Kadirgamar was killed barely six months later. As seen by some peace-building actors in the aftermath of the tsunami, the “window of opportunity” (Goodhand and Klem 2005, 58) for rebuilding trust between the conflicting parties was lost.9 The international actors, endowed with a significant amount of financial resources from unprecedented global donations for post-tsunami rehabilitation, failed to use their potential power and to act as one towards promoting political solutions. Principles for equitable and conflictsensitive post-tsunami reconstruction, formulated soon after the disaster, seemed to have been discussed rather than implemented (see also Frerks 2010). After the assassination of the foreign minister, the European Union eventually banned the LTTE as a terrorist organization in May 2006, following the example of the United States. That move undermined the Tigers’ global fund-raising, and it withdrew the basis for peace negotiations. As seen above, the tsunami’s impact overlapped with the established arenas of war. In the words of Kuhn (2010, 60): “On the day of the tsunami, striking regional variations in the coastal vulnerability and tsunami impact largely reflected the cleavages of Sri Lanka’s ongoing civil conflict.” Post-tsunami aid was also allocated along lines of inequalities (Frerks 2010; Keenan 2010; Kuhn 2010). Despite Sinhalese nationalist claims to the contrary, studies show that the heavily affected areas of the north and east received less aid, and at a later date, than the less-affected Sinhalese stongholds in the south and west. Keenan (2010, 28) noted that the number of livelihood items and houses donated or of schools and hospitals constructed as well as the point in time of their hand-over, varied across the regions and ethnic affiliations to a degree that corresponded to “what language its residents spoke and who its political leaders were.” Kuhn (2010) revealed the greater emphasis international relief agencies placed on the Southern Province 9 | The case of Sri Lanka thus demonstrates the significance of the political situation predating the disaster and the way in which activities related to its mitigation could at best catalyse action towards peace rather than offer really new diplomatic opportunities. More of this becomes apparent when comparing Sri Lanka with Aceh, where a memorandum of understanding between the government and the Free Aceh Movement was achieved eight months after the tsunami (Enia 2008; Gaillard, Clavé, and Kelman 2006; Le Billon and Waizenegger 2007).

Chapter One: Introduction

through calculations of financial assistance, presence of aid workers, and the pace of housing reconstruction. The mentioned authors agree that rather than a matter of blatent discrimination, these results reflect the structures of a highly centralised state and the workings of an extensive political patronage system (see also Frerks 2010, 154–159). Viewed from this light, the findings confirm an ethnic bias. The politically more dominant areas may also be those more accessible to relief personnel, humanitarian items, and financial aid (Kuhn 2010, 42–43). Moreover, the prevailing insecurity in the east and the actual outbreak of armed hostilities in 2006 delayed reconstruction. By the end of 2005, the road had already been paved for war. Mahinda Rajapakse was elected president in November on the basis of a political campaign that targeted the ceasefire agreement, the LTTE as “terrorists”, and the presence of international actors (see also Keenan 2010, 33). The LTTE actually aided in his victory by preventing Tamils from voting in the areas of their direct control (and as far beyond as their influence reached).10 Sri Lankan Army General Fonseka narrowly escaped a suicide attack in April 2006. In response, the government resorted to its first bombings since 2001, and open warfare broke out in the east three months later. It was waged over control of an irrigation canal in Trincomalee (ICG 2006, 9–12).11 Government forces moved to conquer the eastern regions under LTTE control – first, in their jargon, “liberating” the northern part of Batticaloa district and subsequently the district’s western interior. An estimated 3,500 people were killed and almost 300,000 displaced (Goodhand 2010, S350). By July 2007 the government claimed victory over the entire Eastern Province. Officially, the ceasefire was maintained until January 2008, when the government formally withdrew from it. A massive campaign in the island’s north followed this act and targeted the LTTE’s last territorial control. During the course of this campaign, some 300,000 Tamils were trapped under heavy fighting, and those who survived were subsequently confined to internment camps under government forces. Tens of thousands of Tamils are estimated to have lost their lives, and both parties have been accused of severe forms of war crimes (CPA 2009; ICG 2010). The campaign ended with the government’s military victory over its rival and the killings in May 2009 of top LTTE leaders, including its founder Velupillai Prabhakaran. By February 2010, Sri Lanka’s President Mahinda Rajapakse celebrated his re-election and arrested his former ally and war leader, General Fonseka, who had contested him in the presidential elections. Nothing 10 | It is thought that more Tamils would have voted in favour of the other candidate Ranil Wickremasinghe, the former prime minister, under whom the ceasefire agreement had been reached in 2002. 11 | During the course of military action, aid workers were also targeted, and 17 local staff (mostly Tamil) of the French non-governmental organization Action Contre la Faim were killed in August 2006, presumably by Sri Lankan military and police personnel (see UTHR(J) 2008).

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pointed to developments that would lead ultimately to a less militarized society. Nor were signs obvious that the political issues which had given rise to the Tamil militant movement more than three decades earlier could be addressed in the future.

B atticaloa : A n I ntroduction Sri Lanka’s history and politics are highly contested grounds, and a number of publications provide a variety of insights and arguments (Hellmann-Rajanayagam 2007; Ismail 2000; Manogaran 1987; Mayer, Rajasingham-Senanayake, and Thangarajah 2003a; Meyer 2003; Spencer 1990b; Sriskandarajah 2006; Tambiah 1986; Tiruchelvam and Dattathreya 1998; Wilson 2000). Following the ceasefire, moreover, ample studies focused on chances for peace-building and, eventually, with the faltering of the peace process in Sri Lanka (Goodhand 2001; Goodhand and Klem 2005; Nadarajah and Vimalaraja 2008; Perera and MacSwiney 2002; Rupesinghe 2006). The situations in the east emerge as especially complex in terms of conflict dynamics. The complexity partly results from the co-residency of the three major ethnic groups. Each had become the target of killings and reprisal attacks in spirals of war. The presence of different armed groups, and the interest in a continuation of war by all those to whom it offered opportunities for extra profits further fuelled the dynamics (Rupesinghe 2002). Moreover, violent processes in Sri Lanka had not been confined to the armed conflict fought between the government and the LTTE but had erupted at other moments parallel to war. Examples span from the massive suppression by state agencies of two insurrections led by the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP) political party in the south in the early 1970s and late 1980s that resulted in tens of thousands of fatalities, to the frequency of arbitrary arrests under the Prevention of Terrorism Act (PTA), and the regular violent incidents accompanying political elections (Perera 1999; Uyangoda 2003, 2008). As de Mel (2007a) described it, Sri Lanka had long become a society in which militarism was routinized into ordinary life, and violence served as a legitimate part of social relations. Rather than summarizing the vast literature, I wish to offer but a limited account of some developments for better comprehension of the fieldwork context. For that purpose I draw particularly on the work of the historian HellmannRajanayagam (2007) and on McGilvray (2008), whose anthropological studies focus on the Batticaloa region and include an historical perspective. As a source for the brutal period of war reigning in Batticaloa in the 1990s, I refer mainly to Lawrence (1997) and Thangarajah (2003a). The more recent trends are accounted for based on my sojourns in the country and processing news-media coverage and human rights reports.

Chapter One: Introduction

From a “rice bowl” to an arena of war Historically, Batticaloa formed part of the Vanni, a dry zone that can be seen as a buffer between the Sinhala power centres in the south and the Jaffna Tamil Kingdom in the north (McGilvray 2008, 9). At the time of Portuguese and Dutch presence in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the east was part of the Sinhalese kingdom of Kandy, yet daily-level local politics lay with the heads of the Tamil land-owning caste, the Mukkuvars. According to HellmanRajanayagam (2007, 385–386), the Dutch valued the Batticaloa region with its extensive paddy fields as a “rice bowl” in the eighteenth century. Yet the British colonial administrators came to consider the by-then-impoverished area a hot and unhealthy place in the early twentieth century. While Batticaloa had never been under Jaffna authority, the region was undisputedly perceived as socioculturally “Tamil”. However, the relationship between the Tamils of the east and north had been noted as ambivalent for centuries, with Jaffna Tamils known to look down upon the allegedly lower-caste easterners.12 This ambivalence has remained, though there were increasing attempts to view Jaffna and the east as belonging together within the politics of the early twentieth century (HellmannRajanayagam 2007, 228–229). It was in the face of the increasingly discriminatory policies by a Sinhaladominated government after Sri Lanka’s independence in 1948 that the Tamils of the north and east found more common grounds (Hellmann-Rajanayagam 2007, 89, 228–231). Among the events that came to dominate in the collective memory of Tamils were: the language question with the “Sinhala-only” language policy introduced in 1958; the issue of land and resettlement; the question of education and employment when a “standardization” in the education system effectively hindered the entry of Tamils into the administrative services; and the massive human rights violations against Tamils, especially after 1980 (Thangaraja 2003a, 17). Among these grievances, effects of the state-promoted and internationally funded irrigation, hydroelectric, and resettlement schemes were possibly the most significant elements for political developments in eastern Sri Lanka (Manogaran 1987, 88–114). In what became better known among its critics as “colonization” schemes, two giant, bureaucratically managed programmes effected significant and permanent changes to the country’s spatial demography (Muggah 2008, 82– 93). More precisely, they brought hundreds of thousands of Sinhalese peasants from

12 | Chronicles of British civil servants and missionaries report on the arrogant attitudes of Jaffna Tamils in Batticaloa and Trincomalee and the resistance of the eastern population against any claims of the “Jaffna man” (Hellmann-Rajanayagam 2007, 228). There is ambivalence today in the way people in Batticaloa speak of those from Jaffna, respecting them as highly educated and brave yet resenting their alleged notion of superiority.

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the south to newly irrigated land in the dry zone and the north and east.13 While government planners claimed that the project benefited all farmers, some Tamils saw their land set under water, while newly irrigated land was being allocated to the new settlers (Hellmann-Rajanayagam 2007, 393). The demographic changes this entailed also produced anxieties in relation to political influence. With the principle of territorial representation and the expectation that people would vote along ethnic lines, competition developed to achieve Sinhalese, Tamil, and Muslim electorates. In fact, the Ampara district came into being precisely due to such reasons when it was carved out of Batticaloa in 1960 and established as a new district with a large number of Sinhalese and Muslims, while the remainder of Batticaloa held a predominantly Tamil population (Hellmann-Rajanayagam 2007, 378–396; Manogaran 1987, 140–148; McGilvray 2008, 4–5, 21–23). Dissatisfied with what they saw as the failures of past generations to achieve improvements through non-violent parliamentary means, Tamil militant groups developed in the 1970s (Hellmann-Rajanayagam 2007, 480–494; Manogaran 1987, 167–185; Wilson 2000, 113–135).14 The rise of these militant movements resulted as much from discrimination against Tamils under Sinhalese governments and economic neglect of dominantly Tamil-populated regions as they did from the younger generation’s disappointment in the older generation’s promises of political and social reforms (Hellmann-Rajanayagam 2007, 485). Among them was the LTTE, which took up arms in order to achieve Tamil Eelam, an independent state for the Tamil-speaking population in the north and east. Under the lead of Prabhakaran of the Karaiyar (fishermen) caste, the LTTE achieved a mixed-caste membership under a lower-caste leadership. This was a remarkable achievement itself, which further suggests that some opposition against the LTTE was fed by the established elite (the largely paddy-field owning Vellalar), who resented the rise of the Karaiyar (Hellmann-Rajayanagam 483, 490). The LTTE’s vision was nurtured by social reforms – including the “liberation” of women and abolition of dowry – and by the past glory of Tamil myths and kingdoms, with martyrdom, the notion of sacrifice for the cause, playing a central role (Hellmann-Rajanayagam 2005; 2007, 485; Meyer 2003, 174–193). An LTTE land-mine attack in 1983 that killed 13 government soldiers in the north sparked off massive anti-Tamil riots in Colombo and elsewhere on the island. In what became known as Black July, more than 1,000 people were killed and over 70,000 Tamils fled to the north and east (Meyer 2003, 177). State support for the 13 | According to Fuglerud (2003, 72), the Sinhalese population in the Eastern Province rose from four per cent in 1921 to 25 per cent in 1981. 14 | Wilson (2000, 126–131) referred to the existence of 37 groups. Besides the LT TE, another five achieved lasting significance: People’s Liberation Organization of Tamil Eelam (PLOTE), Tamil Eelam Liberation Organization (TELO), Eelam People’s Revolutionary Front (EPRLF), Eelam Revolutionary Organization of Students (EROS), and Eelam People’s Democratic Party (EPDP). See also Manogaran (1987, 73–75).

Chapter One: Introduction

perpetrators was as evident as the dynamics of localized, neighbourhood conflicts (Jeganathan 2000; Kanapathipillai 1990; Perera-Rajasingham 2003). These events are commonly taken to signify the outbreak of war between the government and the LTTE that would last for almost three decades. Besides fighting government forces, the LTTE also sought to wipe out its rival Tamil groups, claiming sole representation for the Tamil cause. The 1980s were thus also years of “internecine warfare” (Wilson 2000, 126) among Tamil militant groups, from which the LTTE emerged as the main protagonist in the fight for Tamil Eelam. Towards the end of that decade, neighbouring India intervened and facilitated the Indo-Lanka agreement of 1987 that implicitly recognized the north and east as constituting the “Tamil homelands”. Large parts of these predominantly Tamilpopulated areas fell under LTTE’s administration (Chandrakanthan 2000, 166; Thangarajah 2003b, 76). The intervention also brought Indian Peace Keeping Forces (IPKF) into the country, which resulted in a particularly harsh period for the eastern population. It is remembered as a time of rape, targeted violence against Muslims, and forced recruitment of young Tamil males (often under-aged) into the Tamil National Army set up by the IPKF at the time (Alison 2009, 136–137; ICG 2011, 4–7; Lawrence 1997, 270; Somasunderan 1998, 221–255).15 Following withdrawal of the last IPKF troops, LTTE attacks opened a second period of war, the so-called Tamil Eelam War II, in June 1990. Starting in the east, government forces responded with brutal campaigns in order to recapture the north and east. As they entered Batticaloa, anyone suspected of being linked to the LTTE was killed or “disappeared”. Burnt bodies appeared along roadsides, and whole villages were virtually wiped out (Fuglerud 2003, 66; Thangarajah 2003a, 31–32; 2003b, 76; Lawrence 1997; UTHR(J) 1990). Some of our acquaintances referred to such scenes of rising smoke and, in the case of women, of anxiously sitting and waiting outside the prisons where their male family members had been kept. Some 15 years later, round-ups or other military intrusions triggered memories of this particularly harsh period. Much of the violence occurred amidst politicization of ethnic affiliation. In Batticaloa, where Tamils and Muslims had been living in neighbouring and mixed villages for centuries, warfare caused separation and embittered relationships between them. The government formed Muslim Home Guards who collaborated in campaigns against the Tamil population, and the LTTE targeted Muslim settlements. LTTE killings of hundreds of Muslim policemen, massacres of Muslims at prayer time, as well as deliberate acts of Hindu temples desecration, 15 | The numerous cases of rape committed by the IPKF (and the Sri Lankan forces) form a legacy of unknown social dimensions. One informant, who gave us a vivid unsolicited account of past war developments one day in 2005, referred to the IPKF as soldiers who ‘produced many Tamil children for the Tamil nation’. The consequences that resulted for these children, their mothers, and the rest of their families form an urgent yet difficult subject of study.

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reportedly by groups of Muslims, figured among the tragically infamous atrocity cases (Lawrence 1997, 127–128; McGilvray 1997, 2001; 2008, 313–329). Such targeted violence along ethnic criteria produced fears of remaining in mixed settlements and of moving through those in which the other group predominated. Hence they contributed to what Hyndman and de Alwis (2004, 542) defined as the core of Sri Lanka’s “geopolitical discourse”: the construction of safe versus dangerous spaces. In governmental parlance, areas in the east and north were designated as “cleared” or “uncleared” depending on the presence of the LTTE, while the Tamil Tigers reportedly distinguished between the “liberated” and “non-liberated” zones. With the great majority of the district controlled de facto by the LTTE during the time of the ceasefire agreement, Batticaloa was thus considered largely “uncleared” in dominant speech, except for the coastal stretch and an interior access route to the rest of the country. However, spheres of influence were not simple in their spatial definitions: not only did borders shift over time, but authority remained overlapping and competitive, even within government-controlled parts where administration was unable to function free of LTTE’s involvement. Thus much of so-called “cleared” Batticaloa is better understood as being formed of “grey zones” where no single actor prevailed in establishing a monopoly of violence (Goodhand, Hulme, and Lewer 2000, 400; Bohle and Fünfeld 2007, 673). These circumstances demanded that people negotiate continuously with and seek forms of protection from a variety of local authorities. As Lawrence (1997, 178) formulated it, civilians could not simply work out a modus vivendi with one controlling force but faced daily threats from government forces, paramilitaries, and the LTTE. After the failed peace negotiations in 1985 and 1994, the ceasefire of 2002 and subsequent rounds of high-level talks between the government and the LTTE brought a longer period of relative calm, more freedom in mobility, and hopes for political solutions. According to my observations during that time, however, the hope of achieving “peace”, evident among Colombo-based speakers, was not shared in the east. Indeed, the eastern districts remained a volatile area with frequent, politically instigated violent clashes between Muslims and Tamils and the pressures that armed groups and security forces exerted on the population. Moreover, the ceasefire agreement allowed the LTTE free movement, and it set up offices within the government-controlled area for “political work”. This enhanced the LTTE’s capacities to pressure people into contributing to their armed struggle, namely by imposing additional taxes and by recruiting fighters (see also Goodhand 2010, S348). These effects were also felt in Navalady, the former village of our research contacts, where the LTTE regained a strong position during that time. It became especially difficult for its residents to withstand the Tamil Tigers’ pressure to join their forces, and many young men and women did join or were taken by

Chapter One: Introduction

force.16 Consequently, many of those young people took the chance of leaving the LTTE and returning home when a split within the movement made that possible in 2004. Since then, ex-combatants lived in Navalady and in many other villages, with no specific support in reintegrating them into civilian life. What is more, they were left at risk of being re-recruited by Tamil groups and threatened by the government forces. The presence of these ex-combatants among their families was experienced as a threat to all their neighbours when Tamil groups and government forces further increased their pressure on the Tamil population soon after the tsunami, as noted in the Prologue. The split of the LTTE occurred in March 2004, when the LTTE commander of the east, Vinayagamoorthi Muralitharan alias Colonel Karuna, broke away from the movement with reportedly several thousand combatants. Whatever Karuna’s real motives and interests, he couched his move within a vocabulary of liberating the eastern Tamils from the yoke of the “Jaffna Tamils”.17 In doing so, he played on a general resentment among eastern Tamils who saw their young disproportionately recruited and killed on the front-lines. The LTTE attacked the splinter group the following month. This resulted in a few days of heavy fighting until Karuna disbanded his troops and left Batticaloa with a group of loyalists. Many young men and women returned to their families, some officially released, others deserting. Karuna’s defeat did not last long. Soon, his supporters gained power through violent means and governmental support. Primarily based in Batticaloa, Karuna’s influence gradually extended to neighbouring districts, and the brightly-coloured camps of his group, known by then as Tamil Makkal Viduthalai Puligal (TMVP), started to dot the main road. While the government always denied its involvement with this armed group, collaboration was evident enough to any observer, such as when joint military operations expelled the LTTE in the northern part of Batticaloa in 2006 (see also HRW 2007a, 2007b). While Karuna may have enjoyed some sympathy among eastern Tamils (especially in the beginning), the split brought havoc over the longer term and produced great insecurity for all residents. There was no longer a relatively clear demarcation between pro-LTTE and pro-government sides but a blurring of affiliations. This became even more tragic as both sides engaged heavily in recruitment, including abductions and conscription of minors. Subsequently, the 16 | The LT TE and later its splinter group (the so-called Karuna group) have long been internationally criticized for their recruitment of youth under the age of 18 as combatants and for forced recruitment. Besides the clear cases of forced recruitment (such as by abduction), there have been many incidents in which forced and voluntary ways of joining the movements are more difficult to discern (see Alison 2003; 2009, 128–133; Chakma 2006, 104–105; HRW 2007a; ICG 2009, 18–19; Trawick 2007; UNICEF 2008, 44). 17 | There are indications of LT TE internal problems including rumours about corruption charges and leadership rivalries, as well as governmental involvement in promoting the split (see also Whitaker 2007, 200).

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TMVP fell victim to internal tensions that finally resulted in opposing groups supporting Karuna or his former deputy Pillaiyan, with the government likely to support each enemy group to its own advantage. Following the first local election held amidst intimidation and violence in May 2008, Pillaiyan was appointed chief minister of the Eastern Province. Ironically enough, Karuna, who had fled abroad earlier, became a Member of Parliament upon his return and was granted the title of minister for integration and reconciliation by 2009.18 With these developments having passed the time period of direct relevance to this research, I turn now to some ethnographic features of Batticaloa.

Anthropological and gender perspectives The socio-cultural structures of eastern Sri Lanka offer much to attract the special interests of anthropologists and feminists, past and present. Such attractions lie in the local matri-focal structures, non-Brahmin Hindu religious practices, and the region’s ethno-social profile. All these points increase in complexity, if not “nostalgia” (Obeyesekere 2004), when examined against the backdrop of decades of war. McGilvray (2008, 337) noted the persistence of matrilineal institutions despite years of social fragmentation, while Lawrence (2007, 96–97) observed that large-scale displacement of people from their villages may be particularly felt as a loss of female networks. In view of religious practices, Lawrence’s (1997, 2000, 2003) work demonstrated the importance attached to rituals and festivities for amman (mother) goddesses during the years of war. Likewise, renovations and new constructions of temples and mosques over the past decades testify to the vitality of religious activities (see also McGilvray 2001, 2008; Whitaker 1997). In regard to the region’s ethnic composition, eastern Sri Lanka historically presented a different image than the one tainted by war seen above: one in which its ethnically mixed population took pride in a largely peaceful co-existence, tensions not withstanding (Hellmann-Rajanayagam 2007, 324; McGilvray 2001). McGilvray’s work (1982a, 1982b, 1989, 2001, 2008) demonstrated the tight socio-cultural links between eastern Muslims and Tamils who live in adjacent, ethnically separated villages or semi-urban neighbourhoods in the Batticaloa region. Both share the Tamil language, though with slight differences in intonation and vocabulary as well as origins from Kerala and Tamil Nadu in south India. Most distinctively, they share the forms of matrilineal kinship organization and matri-uxorilocal settlement patterns that make the east unique in Sri Lanka. Though McGilvray’s work says little about the social worlds of the Karaiyar, to which our research contacts belonged, his publications provided my research with a rich source of ethnographic reference on the local Tamil kinship and caste system. That system is intriguing in its matrilineal base and its composition of 18 | Regarding these developments see also the reports by HRW (2007a, 2007b) and ICG (2008a, 2008b, 2009).

Chapter One: Introduction

exogamous, matrilineal subcategories (descent units) called kudis (kudi). Matriuxorilocal settlement and transfer of the parental home to the daughter as dowry have been as central to our acquaintances, as McGilvray’s findings suggested (see Chapter Five). Maternal connections are emphasized and highly valued, and motherdaughter relationships tend to be considered as specifically strong and intimate, as I observed during fieldwork. McGilvray (2008, 115) noted this importance that people attached to maternal ties, as his respondents pointed out the relevance of maternal emotions and matrilocal attachments in discussions on caste. His remark on these bonds gives credit to the daily life significance of the maternal dimension prevailing locally: “The expression tay pacam (maternal bonds) is something of a cliché everywhere in the Tamil-speaking world, but in the Batticaloa region, where the matrilocal household provides a kind of sociospatial continuity, where dowry is the main channel of property transmission, and where the matriclan plays a role in one’s social rank and identity, it seems to reflect a more substantial feature of the social structure.” (McGilvray 2008, 116)

These matri-focal characteristics of the east coast may provide ground for wishful feminist imaginations (Ruwanpura 2006). Nevertheless, as mothers and daughters reside in mutual vicinity while men move into their wives’ homes upon marriage, these features can be associated with a greater autonomy of women in relation to men compared with other regions of South Asia (Agarwal 1994; Kapadia 1995). The “localization of married sisters” (Obeyekere 2004, 10) in neighbouring dowry houses may have provided them with forms of solidarity and possibly with a support system even during the war. Thiruchandran’s (1999) study underscores this point. It noted that women affected by the war in the east considered kin belonging to the “mother’s side” to be those providing emotional, physical, and (limited) financial help (Thiruchandran 1999, 23). Yet Lawrence’s depiction (2000, 177) illustrates the tragic complexity of social arrangements and the unmaking of social responsibilities during war for this local pattern of matrilocality: when neighbours learn to refrain from intervening in each other’s homes upon hearing screams, this may cut sisters off from each other. Gender relationships, in general, developed in what may best be called ambivalent ways in Sri Lanka over the past decades (de Alwis 2002; Manchanda 2001a, 2001b; Rajasingham-Senanayake 1999, 2001; Schrijvers 1999). Hence feminist writing on the ways in which armed conflict there affected women confirms the arguments made for other global contexts: that the gendered impacts of war remain little understood when women are portrayed within stereotypical images of women as victims or, conversely, the heroines of peace-building efforts (Cockburn 1998; Coomaraswamy and Fonseka 2004; Giles et al. 2003; Giles and Hyndman 2004; Lorentzen and Turpin 1998; Meintjes, Pillay, and Thurshen 2001; Sorensen 1998). For the case of Tamil women in Sri Lanka, a complex issue

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lies in LTTE’s mobilization of women as active fighters since the 1980s. Alison (2003, 39; 2009, 128) estimated that women made up about one third of the LTTE’s force.19 In as far as this recruitment had “liberating” effects for women towards gender equality, as claimed by its promoters, and in what ways, if any, this different role of women impacted the wider society, formed elements for debate (Alison 2003, 2009; Brun 2008a; de Mel 2003; Hrdlicková 2008; Manchanda 2001a; Maunaguru 1995). Besides recruiting women as combatants, the LTTE simultaneously mobilized women as heroic mothers, who sent their children to the liberation war, and as the bearers of Tamil culture (Alison 2009; de Mel 2003; Hellmann-Rajanayagam 2005; Maunaguru 1995; Samuel 2001). As combatants or mothers, these images of women carry powerful symbolic force in nationalist projects (see Yuval-Davies 1997). The situations of women-headed households, which increased due to the death, lasting injury, recruitment, or migration of husbands, further illustrate the argument of ambivalent gains and losses in women’s lives due to the armed conflict (Rajasingham-Senanayake 1999, 2001; Ruwanpura 2004, 2006; Ruwanpura and Humphries 2003a, 2004; Thiruchandran 1999, 2003). A major challenge for women in such circumstances lies in the way in which they are forced into a role as the main income generator (with possibly empowering effects) while facing criticism regarding their moral status from within their social environment. Neighbours are prone to accuse women working outside their homes and single women of sexual permissiveness. Rajasingham-Senanayake (1999, 2001) reported on widows who resorted to wearing the pottu, the red forehead mark of married Tamil women, as indicative of an ambivalent empowerment in which their married status remains the socially accepted one. Similarly, studies on residents of displacement camps noted tensions in gender relationships when women, rather than men, take over the active economic role (Elek 2003; Zackariya and Shanmugaratnam 2002). These studies also point out the risk of being physically and sexually assaulted faced by single women and women in camps for the displaced. Such violence is not confined to these social groups; local women’s organizations noted a general increase of domestic violence, which they linked to the culture of impunity in war (see also ICG 2011, 29). Conversely, women made political use of an allegedly non-political status as mothers in their engagements for peace in Sri Lanka (Samuel 2003, 2006). In the north and east, mothers are known as the driving force behind demands for the release of abducted youth; they have asked relentlessly about the whereabouts of their children at LTTE and TMVP camps. Women are also the ones following up on arrests and “disappearances” of their husbands, brothers, or fathers at the hands of government forces (see also Lawrence 2007). In this respect, women may 19 | The actual proportion of female cadres is difficult to ascertain. Samuel (2006, 195) claimed that female participants amounted to 50 per cent within the LT TE, which is likely an exaggerated estimate.

Chapter One: Introduction

be said to have gained in (physical) mobility due to war. However, their mobility and relative strength in the role of protecting male relatives went hand in hand with risks they took when passing borders and check-points. There is ample evidence of rape and other forms of sexual violence committed by the Sri Lankan security forces, and official check-points counted among the possible places of severe sexual transgressions (see also ICG 2011; Lawrence 1997, 268–272).20 Just how protective a shield of “motherhood” – and how fragile newly acquired forms of autonomy could be – was revealed in a campaign launched against Tamil and Muslim female employees of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in eastern Sri Lanka in April 2006. In the interface of post-tsunami aid and renewed escalation of full-fledged war, leaflets circulated that accused local women working for post-tsunami NGOs of sexual permissiveness. The leaflets demanded that women stop going to work and threatened their lives in case they ignored this demand. The campaign caused considerable fear among women workers and their families, and sensationalist news media reports increased suspicions. As I see it, these developments represented effective forms of vilifying international aid and the income opportunities it offered mainly young, unmarried women as minor means in the larger attempt to claim control over people’s lives.21 Women’s bodies and societal concerns over women’s sexuality proved to be the targets of nationalist projections and terrorizing messages.

F ieldwork P rocesses Having outlined the context, the question arises: what precisely constituted my “field” and how I went about the research. With an emergence of “fieldwork at home”, “multi-sided fieldwork”, and questioning of the local/global dichotomy, contemporary anthropologists have scrutinized the meaning of “the field” (Clifford 1997; Gupta and Ferguson 1997a, 1997b). Malkki (1997a, 1997b) explicitly problematized social anthropological concepts and practices in relation to refugee camps where anthropologists interact with people who have been deprived of their homes and driven away from what many would think of as their rightful places. 20 | The Sri Lankan military and police forces have long been known to be responsible for rape and sexual violence against Tamils, especially against suspected LT TE supporters. A recent report by Human Rights Watch exposes the frequency of such forms of violence, along with other forms of torture, against Tamil men and women detained for being LT TE sympathizers, even after the end of open warfare (HRW 2013). In contrast, the LT TE had not resorted to sexual violence in its repertoire of brutal tactics (see also ICG 2011, 7). 21 | See also de Mel (2007b, 252), Hrdlicková (2008), and de Silva (2009, 261–262) on this campaign. An interesting parallel is found in Maunaguru (1995, 171–172) who quoted a letter published in an LT TE newspaper in 1991 that accuses women travelling to Colombo as being sexually permissive.

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I take up these matters below when reflecting firstly upon the specifics of the field and secondly on my fieldwork roles. It often occurred to me that “places”, and the movement between them, played a prominent role during my fieldwork. On one hand, clearly delineated locations of relief camps and sites of temporary shelters marked where our research unfolded. On the other hand, I noted the absence of a place where our acquaintances’ former village had stood and which they regularly recalled in our conversations. Indeed, our research contacts’ lives were fundamentally marked by being “in between places” as they remembered their village while eking out a living in temporary arrangements and expecting construction of their permanent housing elsewhere. In a following subchapter, I will discuss my fieldwork methods and relate them to a broader debate about ethnographic work in a crisis context. I then offer an introduction to some of the key terms and concepts that guided my research. I conclude this chapter with an overview of the book’s structure.

Circumscribing “the field” During the first half-year of fieldwork, our research contacts lived within relief camps and, thereafter, in temporary shelters at the relocation site. Concrete walls – or simply the way in which shelters were located away from established settlements – clearly demarcated these living spaces. It was within these confinements that almost all our fieldwork took place. These were the sites that Vathany and I visited daily, thus entering and leaving “the field” at least twice a day.22 These localities also hosted foreign and Sri Lankan representatives of humanitarian or development aid, the news media and research institutions as they stepped in and out. Goods from other countries were distributed here, and, thanks to the “golden tsunami”, persons could acquire cell-phones that connected them to relatives and friends close-by and abroad. And eventually, more and more TVs entertained them with Indian soap operas (provided the make-shift electricity set-up did not collapse). As they lived confined in the crowded camps and hot sheet-metal shelters, our acquaintances spoke fondly of their former village, Navalady. They recalled it as a place aired by a fresh breeze and that offered relaxing, shady corners. As they horded their ration cards for rice, lentils, and sugar, they told of the ample fresh fish they used to catch, cook, and eat. When conflicts erupted among the residents, memories of Navalady offered images of social harmony and unity, freedom and stability. Yet it was also a devastated place where they did not wish to live again. Only hesitantly and on rare occasions did they visit the village, fearing to relive the horrors of the tsunami, either in memory or as part of an expected pending next disaster. They waited instead to receive new homes in a settlement yet to

22 | Vathany lived in her parental home, and I shared a household with friends within the urban area (though occasionally we spent a night at one of our research contacts’ homes).

Chapter One: Introduction

be constructed by international donors in Tiraimadu.23 Located a few kilometres from the sea, it would be the place where they wanted to see their children grow up in safety. As they were moved to settle down in temporary shelters within this relocation site, the new place confronted them as hostile. It seemed to deliver them into the control of armed groups and security forces, as noted in the Prologue. Delays in constructing the new settlement made them doubt if the scheme would be realized. And they wondered aloud if they were to remain permanently in the temporary construction or return to their former place after all. Thus the field of our research consisted of families, former residents of a particular village, who lived in successive makeshift places arranged to serve as temporary solutions only. Their existential context was one characterized by fleetingness, instability, and temporality. They were “in transition” from one place to the next rather than “fixed” to a particular one. Nevertheless, the dynamics within specific places constituted the field as well: the processes and practices that evolved from and marked our acquaintances’ daily life situations. They spoke of themselves as ahadi (refugees) who had to live in a muham (refugee camp), little concerned with aid agencies referring to them as internally displaced people (IDPs) and state terminology defining them as living within “welfare centres”.24 While they knew how to use such vocabulary to gain post-tsunami aid, by using the terms ahadi and muham they also drew attention to their involuntary “exile” from their destroyed homes and claimed help for a change in their living conditions. At the same time, they positioned themselves in the war context within which ahadi and muham have been familiar terms in Sri Lanka for decades.25

23 | In fact, the new housing scheme was designed to adjoin the previously existing neighbourhood or village of Tiraimadu, from which the relocation scheme gained its name. Once constructed, parts of this new settlement fell administratively under other preexisting settlements (for example, Pannichaiadi). 24 | The abbreviation “IDPs” for “internally displaced people” denotes persons who remain within their home countries after displacement. It differentiates this category from people who cross international borders and become “refugees”, according to international terminology. From a legal point of view, the situations of refugees and IDPs (or of external and internal displacement) clearly differ from each other (Barutciski 1998). However, the distinction seems rather artificial in other ways, and I avoid using the abbreviation of IDP in my thesis, agreeing with Finnström (2006, 15) on its dehumanizing side. Moreover, in general Tamil parlance in Sri Lanka, displaced people are called ahadi whether they remain in the country or migrate out (Somasunderan 1998, 138). For a critical article on displacement, see Colson (2004, 118) who notes that IDPs figure as people controlled by those who have a right to extend care to them, symbolically and, at times, by brutal force. 25 | There was also continuity in the camps’ location. Some post-tsunami camps served as shelter for the war-displaced in the 1990s and were re-established in the war’s later stages in 2006 and 2007.

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Malkki (1997a, 67) noted that refugees may value their status precisely for that reason: emphasizing the temporary character of their exile, while the homeland may figure as the “moral destination”. Yet, in the contexts of states and sedentary lives, migration is viewed as “a problem” (Spencer 2004, 3), and displaced people tend to be perceived as a threat to stability (Colson 2004, 110). Refugee studies (and humanitarian aid) make the status of refugees appear unnatural and problematic to the extent that it demands corrective and therapeutic interventions (Malkki 1997a, 63). That is, possible problems are seen to lie with the refugees rather than in the socio-political contexts that gave rise to them. Anthropologists also working within this environment are challenged about their “sedentarist assumptions” (Malkki 1997a, 64). More familiar by training with focusing on patterns of durability, anthropologists must then face what is more readily associated with temporary arrangements, anomaly, and extreme situations (Malkki 1997b, 88–89). Similar to Malkki, Passaro (1997, 161) argued that a challenge for anthropologists lies in actually seeing the “the unstable, hybridized, and non-holistic experiences” rather than the durable and quotidian routines. While I agree with this point and am ready to admit to disciplinary blinkers of my own, a great many of my observations and interpretations go along the lines of continuity, de-fragmentation, and daily life practices. Contrary to situations in which large numbers of refugees from different places, torn apart from family members, find themselves in a common camp, our research contacts lived with relatives and primarily among people who used to be residents of one village (except during the days immediately after the tsunami). Some of them lost incredible numbers of close and distant family members in the tsunami, and their own survival placed all of them in new social, emotional, and economic situations. They were assigned to places where they had to share rooms or neighbourhoods with strangers, while former neighbours may have perished. Yet they shared more with each other than “accidentally” shared memories of the devastating tsunami, for there was more to their daily social relationships than what they shared as victims of transitional processes. Our acquaintances generally appreciated having their relations staying close by in the post-tsunami camps and shelter sites. Spatial closeness allowed practical and emotional support, and this often signified continued interaction patterns when the same relatives had been their former neighbours. It thus helped the bereaved to deal with their losses and unstable life circumstances. The value of having surviving relations close by became especially evident among those who lacked such a continuity of networks. Among them were women who originated from other villages and had come to live in Navalady due to insecurities prevailing in their birthplaces before the tsunami destroyed their homes in Navalady and killed their closest family members there. However, most of our acquaintances considered Navalady their ur, their natal village and place of belonging, where women remained with their female kin after marriage, while men expectedly married “out”. Indeed, our fieldwork proceeded largely along kinship networks and centred on the daily life of women and their immediate families.

Chapter One: Introduction

I return to a brief description of our research contacts in the methodology section. Before that, I will discuss my fieldwork roles and their impact on my research.

Fig. 1: The way to Navalady, February 2005 (© Katharina Thurnheer)

Reflecting on fieldwork roles Particularly at the beginning of fieldwork, I found myself juggling what I considered to be different kinds of roles: varying roles related more directly to a researcher, a social worker, a witness to human rights violations, a foreigner with privileged access to information and security, a confidante and friend. I felt these roles to be at odds with each other. Despite my trust in the critique of a research model that starts off with the researcher as a distant, unattached, and neutral observer, I saw myself failing in the idealized fieldworker role – one who systematically pursues research questions and collects “data” in neatly stored notes and records. Such notions did not harmonize with the ways, for example, in which our intentions to follow-up on particular points with our acquaintances would simply get brushed aside by the force of a particular day’s events. Indeed, fieldwork was comprised of a day’s happenings (and at times it seemed to me to be carried away by them). It was shaped at least as much by the specific interests and priorities of our research contacts as by subjects or questions that I might have wished to address. I was always clear on the primacy of my “partiality” in favour of our acquaintances and their concerns. However, it took some time (and

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many moments of doubt about the overall feasibility of my research intentions) to actually reconcile myself with having what I considered different roles in the field. This meant finally accepting and affirming that precisely these roles made research possible, while the events in which I became entangled formed what the research was about. That is, I experienced what was obvious in theory: that qualitative research (and especially ethnographic work) is always “interpersonal and intimate” (Coffrey 1999, 56) and fieldwork becomes a means of “engaged learning” (Carrithers 2005, 437). The researcher invariably finds a role as part of an interactional complexity, and research is essentially a process of mutual creation (Adler and Adler 1994, 378; Olesen 1994, 166). The varying roles and, correspondingly, the ways of interacting with our research contacts, developed my “ethnographic self”, and this itself formed an implicit part of the research (Coffrey 1999, 36). However, having various roles also allowed me to perform one role or the other strategically, depending on the situation. For instance, I found it important at the beginning of fieldwork to single myself out (accompanied by Vathany) as “only a researcher” or “only a student” in order to correct the more obvious misimpression of many people that I was working for an organization engaged in post-tsunami relief work. We repeatedly explained that our purpose for being in the camps was related to research and that we were not in a position to fulfil requests for items lost or damaged in the massive waves.26 This not only served to make our aims and limits transparent; it also helped to build relationships that would not be perceived primarily as potential sources of material benefit. At other moments, however, the possibility of being associated with the “post-tsunami context” (and its sudden influx of “experts”, “helpers”, and news media reporters) proved very useful. That was the case, for example, in regard to armed groups and security forces questioning my presence. For instance, during the round-up described in the Prologue, I emphasized an interest in the “tsunami victims”, which offered a less political cover for my broader concern that indeed encompassed the ongoing human rights violations of that time. In similar scenarios, our acquaintances also explained my presence with a post-tsunami arrival and interest, rendering my being there at once plausible and “harmless”. Hence the ambiguity in roles could also serve as a welcome cover when necessary. While I struggled internally with being a research fieldworker rather than someone actually “out there to help”, the clear over-supply of post-tsunami aid limited my moral qualms. There was no shortage of food or shelter around me. What proved more difficult to handle was what I perceived as irregularities and inequities that accompanied many aid distribution measures. I was often surprised and appalled to observe the degree to which practices of humanitarian and development interventions differed from the claimed standards for intervention 26 | See also Hastrup (2011) and McGilvray (2006) for what it may mean to carry out ethnographic research in an environment dominated by relief workers and NGOs.

Chapter One: Introduction

promoted by these same agencies. What I witnessed was a surplus of top-down approaches that left people confused, irritated, and afraid. In many instances, people lacked basic information. Thus processes tended to stagger forward in a way that bespoke the general difficulties of acknowledging and building upon citizens’ rights in militarized Sri Lanka. This also raised the question of how to deal with such communication gaps in relation to my research. The question was significant, because I also regularly attended coordination meetings of the post-tsunami aid actors and talked to governmental and nongovernmental representatives, especially during 2005. The discussions in such settings frequently seemed worlds apart from the daily-life realities I encountered during my daily visits to the camps. On one hand, these discrepancies and their consequences were of evident research interest, as they offered themselves to further interpretation. On the other hand, I could access information directly affecting our interlocutors but which they lacked knowledge of. The most significant case regarded issues of relocation and development of rehousing schemes. Not sharing this kind of information was quite unthinkable to me, hence I often attempted to explain some of the decisions taken or official guidelines to our acquaintances. Yet the assumption of having privileged access to information proved questionable, and my abilities to contribute meaningful knowledge remained limited at times. Not only did I find myself at a loss when decisions or guidelines remained non-transparent or changed over time, but the actual ways in which post-tsunami aid allocations operated frequently had little to do with discussions or criteria mentioned in meetings with donors, NGOs, or state representatives. In this respect, access to relevant knowledge lay clearly with our research contacts. Despite varying means and degrees of success, they knew how to access information and items on the basis of patron-client networks significant in resource distributions. Whatever limited insights we obtained into these mechanisms obviously depended on our acquaintances’ openness towards Vathany and me as well as their willingness to share their knowledge with us. This brings me back to the point of research being created out of interpersonal interactions – and especially so in ethnographic work. Ethnographers depend on their informants for insights, and power in that sense lies in the hands of their interlocutors rather than in their own (Cassell 1980). A crucial question is how ethnographers deal with their insights. That is where the risk of one-sided power and exploitation by the researcher looms large. These considerations are especially significant in emotionally demanding research settings (Stacey 1988). Conflict and disaster contexts too pose ethical challenges for researchers (Goodhand 2000; Kovats-Bernat 2002; Stallings 2006, 77–79). I agree with Stallings (2006) that the ethical considerations for research in disaster contexts are more a matter of degree than of uniqueness. However, I do not share his opinion that the researcher requires “detachment” (Stallings 2006, 78). I maintain the value of “involvement” or “taking sides” in respect to ethnographic work. I address these issues below by first describing some of the methodological implications.

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M e thodology and G uiding C oncepts Fieldwork consisted primarily of daily visits to our acquaintances in the posttsunami camps and temporary shelter sites. From an initial contact with two young women, our network extended to include 20 women as our principal research contacts. We also entered into close relationships with some of their husbands, brothers, and cousins, maintaining contact with other people on a sporadic level. However, women remained our selected main interlocutors, and their gendered points-of-view and everyday practices are the cornerstones of my research. Research relationships developed largely along matrilineal kin networks, including sisters, mothers, daughters, and daughters-in-law. Research also spanned across generations with young, unmarried Selvy being in her early 20s and her mother’s sister, Nallamma, being a great-great-grandmother. Two extended families (each consisting of sisters and their families over generations) and five families of the parent-child form made up our core research contacts, with some of their members again related to each other through marriage.27 All of them belonged to the Karaiyar caste and therefore occupied a middle position within the local caste hierarchy. Frequently being looked down upon as lower caste by the paddy-field-owning Vellalar, they tended in turn to comment with some contempt or ridicule on those belonging to still lower-positioned castes such as the Washermen. Almost all of our acquaintances depended directly on fishing for their livelihoods, both maritime and lagoon fishing. The husbands in only two families earned an income through government or non-government jobs. Furthermore, all of our close acquaintances were Saivite Hindus except for two individuals who had converted to Christianity within an evangelical denomination. One of them, Indurani, had done so only recently in reaction to the tsunami. Vathany joined me as interpreter and assistant right from the beginning of fieldwork in 2005.28 Besides a short involvement as an interpreter with an international medical team after the tsunami, this was her first professional assignment and her introduction to fieldwork. She is of Vellalar background, and the fieldwork experience demanded she adapt to the way-of-life and language 27 | Chapter Two elaborates further on how research relationships developed and includes two kinship diagrams that show some of the research contacts frequently mentioned. A name list with basic family information is also provided in Appendix 3. 28 | Another young Tamil woman helped with interpreting during 2004, but she quickly found a job working for an international organization after the tsunami. In fact, for some time after my return to Batticaloa in 2005, I had been slightly worried about finding an interpreter at all, as all capable English-speaking Tamils seemed to have been engaged by post-tsunami relief agencies. A representative of a local organization eventually introduced me to Vathany after I mentioned my search for an interpreter. For a brief, initial period we even formed a team of three that included a young man who liked to help but very soon found a job with an international organization.

Chapter One: Introduction

habits of people from the Karaiyar caste. Accompanying me throughout the 10 months of fieldwork in 2005, she contributed significantly to development of close research relationships. In her early 20s, she shared the generation of our young research contacts and was viewed affectionately by their mothers. While my Tamil knowledge remained too limited to enable in-depth conversations or to understand our acquaintances’ often elaborate stories, the need for interpreting did not interfere with the quality of our field conversations. We had soon formed a well-functioning team, and the many discussions with Vathany proved invaluable. Vathany also participated in later fieldwork periods, though she had a full-time job by then with an NGO. During these later stages, I went alone to visit the families or with Sarojini, another Tamil friend, who helped with interpreting. Besides these family visits, I attended post-tsunami aid coordination meetings, predominantly on shelter issues, gender, psycho-social work, human security, and more wide-ranging interagency meetings. Furthermore, I interviewed representatives of state and non-state agencies involved in post-tsunami aid and conferred with local peace activists. I also worked part-time as a consultant for a Swiss NGO, Helvetas, during 2006 and 2007 (relating back to earlier employment in the country). This job involved me in the same relocation project that also affected our research contacts. All these tasks, meetings, and interviews provided me with important insights into the ongoing work and concerns of NGO representatives, officials, and other local residents. These insights generated a better understanding of the fieldwork context and thus enriched my research. Yet my research relies primarily on encounters with those women and families displaced from Navalady due to the tsunami, who expected to be relocated to Tiraimadu.

Fieldwork tactics By and large, fieldwork was based on participant observation, which proved to be the most appropriate method in this context of general unpredictability, lack of security, and people’s grief for their deceased family members. More precisely, fieldwork was based on conversations coupled with observations. We only participated in our acquaintances’ daily life chores to a very limited degree; most often we would spend time by simply sitting and talking together. Our long-term presence and the many conversations we had paved the way for observing how outside interventions shaped life in the camps and temporary shelters as well as how people established daily routines and coped with their situations. We came to discern patterns of situations that evoked particular stories or memories, and we gained some insight into the roles that the various armed groups played in everyday life at present (as well as in the past). We would also listen to painful personal recollections, often told at unexpected moments. Thus the strength of social anthropology’s core research method was confirmed, with its emphasis on close, trusting relationships with informants. However, my anthropological background

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also had evident limits. For example, during highly emotional accounts or at moments involving aggression and threats, I was glad to be somewhat familiar with concepts and techniques of communication and mediation. During roundups and similar incidents, I wished in turn for preparation connected with human rights monitoring. I eventually dismissed the method of life story interviews, which had seemed so appropriate to me before commencing fieldwork. Initially, when our acquaintances resided in the post-tsunami camps, basic requirements were hardly met: the crowded camps allowed no privacy, and the constant movement of people, coupled with unpredictable events (such as fights, sudden meetings, or the arrival of large numbers of people due to rumours about the possible distribution of relief goods), could never have assured interviews free of interruption. The level of noise also made audio recording impossible. Furthermore, the very act of recording – a performance of “foreigner interviewing a tsunami victim” – risked positioning me closer to the circle of news media and post-tsunami aid representatives than I wished and to trigger speculation about possible material “rewards” for the interview.29 By the time Vathany and I had become more familiar figures to the families, and life in the transitional shelters had changed enough to allow some privacy, the security situation had deteriorated further. The day we prepared everything for biographical interviews was described in the Prologue: that day’s massive round-up landed another lasting blow to my voice recording plans. In the following year, frequent incidents involving armed crime kept me from resuming my intentions. The risk of having intimate personal accounts falling into the hands of security forces, armed groups, or gang members was one I was unwilling to take.30 Security threats fell unevenly on our Tamil friends and on Vathany. Foreigners were generally not targeted, though several governments called for their expatriates to leave Batticaloa in 2006. Moreover, my greatest privilege was my ability to leave the district and country at any time. Therefore, I was primarily concerned with ways to ensure confidentiality and protect our research material. During the course of fieldwork, we increasingly refrained from taking notes on the spot. Instead we trained ourselves to memorize the events of the day, the information obtained, or the content of particular conversations. In what was at times a painstaking team process of reconstruction, I would write down detailed field-notes later in the evening or during the following days, covering up the most sensitive issues with acronyms (or by writing in German rather than English, to discourage an uninvited reader). These protective measures in turn demanded particular 29 | This is not to say that interviews ought not to be paid. What matters was a context of constant conflicts and rivalries in relation to post-tsunami benefits and a general suspicion that some individuals were gaining more than others through personal relationships with foreigners, NGO staff, or state representatives. 30 | On this point, see also Lawrence (1997) and McGilvray (1997; 2008, 357–360).

Chapter One: Introduction

effort to maintain the transparency of our research goals. I was concerned that our interlocutors might “forget” over time our research relationship given the friendship that had developed – and was positively surprised whenever I realized how clearly they realized I was “writing a book”. Hence the confusion about research and friendship was very much my own problem. Indeed, relationships with our acquaintances developed an intensity linked to the specific circumstances of our encounters: where mistrust, instability, and insecurity reigned high, relationships involving empathy, frankness, and discretion were rare and vulnerable resources. This intensity of fieldwork relationships ultimately led to my return to the field in the following years. Anthropologists who worked in other conflict zones reported similar challenges and strategies in relation to carrying out their fieldwork (Hoffman 2003; KovatsBernat 2002; Nordstrom 2004; Pettigrew, Shneiderman, and Harper 2004). Kovats-Bernat (2002) elaborated on the specifics of “dangerous fields”. These demand that anthropologists improvise their methodologies, while the discipline as a whole may be asked to rethink some of its basic assumptions: “What are needed are updated field strategies that address the unique considerations and concerns of the anthropologist conducting research in dangerous fields – those sites where social relationships and cultural realities are critically modified by the pervasion of fear, threat of force, or (ir)regular application of violence and where the customary approaches, methods, and ethics of anthropological fieldwork are at times insufficient, irrelevant, inapplicable, imprudent, or simply naïve.” (Kovats-Bernat 2002, 208–209)

As Kovats-Bernat (2002, 211) argued, researchers need to acknowledge that whatever data an anthropologist seeks in “dangerous zones” is not merely embedded within but embodied by violence. An all permeating, existential dimension of danger makes it impossible to circumvent violence in attempts to select pure data not contaminated by it, and the ethnographer cannot avoid this pervasive force either. As in the case of my fieldwork, it became impossible to perceive instability and violence as merely the context of something else I might have wished to examine. In sum, a great deal of my fieldwork experience can said to be part and parcel of ethnographic work in general, especially viewed from a feminist, interactionist, or “postmodern” theoretical perspective (Burgess 1984; Carrithers 2005; Coffrey 1999; Denzin 1994; Denzin and Lincoln 1994; Fontana and Frey 1994; Olesen 1994; Skeggs 2001): a dilemma of research roles arises between interference and disengagement or that of concealing and sharing knowledge; the issue of “deceit” also looms in the trusting and friendship-oriented research relationships developed, especially when notes are taken “covertly” after conversations; tension may also emerge between richness in details and protection of information sources at the later stage of writing. However, fieldwork in crisis contexts tends to sharpen these features, forcing the researcher more pressingly to acknowledge

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and negotiate the challenges as well as to account for the ways in which research developed from the field conditions and relationships. Thus fieldwork in conflict zones may emphasize the need for a modest and honest consideration of the roles and options open to ethnographers. It likely suggests ethnographies that acknowledge the ways researchers (and assistants) are involved in the field under review. These approaches should reflect on the aspect of taking part in observation and accounting for relationships of power and dependency. In terms of techniques for collecting data, it may become crucial to value more pragmatic and improvised approaches in situations where formal methodologies reach their limits or fail to yield further insights. This does not mean working in methodologically naïve ways nor, as in my case, advising systematically against particular techniques such as audio recording. Rather, it means being faithful to the understanding that methodology is situational and that research methods cannot be separated from findings.

“Witnessing” In his essay on cockfights in Bali, Geertz ([1973] 2000a) related how his and his wife’s presence during a police raid transformed their positions in the village completely: from being ignored up until then they became popular and established “rapport”, that “mysterious necessity of anthropological fieldwork” (Geertz [1973] 2000a, 416). Moreover, attending the cockfight introduced him to what he considered to be of major significance to the society he was to explore (Geertz [1973] 2000a, 416–417). The presence of Vathany and myself during the massive round-up described in the Prologue had somewhat similar consequences. Existing relationships acquired an additional dimension and gained in intensity thereafter. Among our closer acquaintances, it also marked the beginning of a running joke: they were spared troubles (such as being slapped in the face by security forces) when I was around. Clearly, though, any kind of protection was merely temporary, if not an illusion altogether, as everyone was aware. People with whom we had had little or no contact up until the round-up approached us to tell us of other incidents. For instance, male sources liked to tell us of difficulties they risked as fishermen on their way to the sea or when out fishing, in encounters with state security forces. Or women expressed the hope that “the foreigners” could possibly do something against the daily threat of having their young forcefully recruited. Hence our presence during the round-up incident helped to transform us in the eyes of a wider circle of people. We became potential witnesses of a form of suffering beyond that immediately related to the tsunami. This position gained relevance in the following periods of fieldwork, especially during 2006 and 2007, when armed hostilities turned into open warfare in Batticaloa. It was not always a comfortable position to be in, since it could also subject us to manipulation in the prevailing contested political grounds. Informing the SLMM at the time, as noted in the Prologue, and my more general concern

Chapter One: Introduction

about such intrusions and a desire to record them in the form of this thesis ended the parallel to Geertz’s ([1973] 2000a) introduction in “Deep Play”. These points instead reflect contemporary anthropological concerns with the insecurity and instability that frequently characterize the social worlds anthropologists continue to study. Or, as Spencer (2007a, 161) argued, these points stand for an anthropology that has become more concerned with moral or ethical positions than having actually moved to new thematic fields. Such anthropology is likely to find faults with Geertz’s way of “missing out” on the violence that so marked his research regions (Java and Morocco) at different times (Scheper-Hughes and Bourgois 2004, 6; Suárez-Orozco and Robben 2000, 12). In writings related to violence, crisis, or suffering, it has become popular for scholars to refer to their observations as “witnessing”. Scheper-Hughes’ (1995) article about the “primacy of the ethical” formed a cornerstone in this development within social anthropology. An increasing number of anthropologists working in crisis contexts demonstrate the relevance of this kind of ethnographies. The authors typically emphasize that ethnographic methods are specifically suitable in such dynamic fields. More precisely, they point out how significant the discipline’s characteristically extensive fieldwork and close relationships with research contacts are as means of gaining insights. Furthermore, the resulting ethnographies are expected to enrich contemporary theories within and outside the discipline (Greenhouse 2002; Greenhouse, Mertz, and Warren 2002; Hoffman 2003; Keenan 2006; Robben and Nordstrom 1995; Scheper-Hughes and Bourgois 2004; Sponsel and Gregor 1994). In line with this, Greenhouse (2002) argued that ethnographies in unstable environments are especially wellpositioned to stimulate discussions on how to conceptualize improvisation, social fragmentation, performance, and structure/agency dualism. These ethnographies, more urgently than studies situated in comparatively peaceful and stable contexts, raise questions of ethical responsibilities and of the “political” in research processes. As Robben and Nordstrom (1995, 18) formulated it, anthropologists working in conflict contexts invariably face tragedies and have to deal with the implications for their work. Hence the question arises of “what to do” with the tragedies witnessed: what role do anthropologists assume when faced with massive violence and suffering? Can this role be defined at all? While contemporary anthropologists may criticize their predecessors for having been blind to the violent politics amidst which they conducted their research, the question remains of how political (or actually moral) ethnographies can or ought to be (Clifford 1997; Spencer 1997, 2007a, 2007b). Scheper-Hughes’ (1995) call for witnessing stresses the obligation of anthropology as a discipline to take action on behalf of the people directly affected by lawlessness or suffering. It remains a famous and often criticized point of departure for more differentiated positions (D’Andrade 1995; Kovats-Bernat 2002; Meskell and Pels 2005; Valentine 2003). Hardly any anthropologist would disagree with Scheper-Hughes’ demand to carry out research in a manner committed to

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and accountable to those they work with. And few would deny that ethnographic work is political – especially in highly politizised contexts where there is no “outside” from which to observe and write about violence (Spencer 2007a, 159; Spencer 2007b, 177). Problematic are her points of postulating pre-cultural ethics and addressing the call in the form of anthropology’s obligation as a discipline rather than at the level of ethnographers’ responsibilities and skills in negotiating differing positions within fields of intersecting power relationships. Kovats-Bernat (2002, 214) argued instead in favour of “localized ethics” and therefore in favour of practices that develop from interaction with research participants: such ethics stem from the advice of informants about what to talk about, and when to remain silent, or what behaviour to adopt to protect the researcher’s security and that of assistants and participants. In a similar vein, Spencer (2010, S298) suggested thinking about “ethics as a kind of skilled practice” rather than to expect to find safe spaces in presupposed, simple ethical truths (or in ethical codes, for that matter). This aligns with anthropological scepticism against universal formulas, as Valentine (2003) remarked: “In complex social worlds, a final, primary, ethical stance is always complicated by good ethnography […] In order to be ethical – and to try and act consciously, effectively, and with passion – we need to pay attention to the differences, complexities, and contradictions exposed by critically-informed ethnography, our most powerful tool as anthropologists concerned with violence and suffering.” (Valentine 2003, 46)

The specificity of ethnographies in crisis contexts notwithstanding, this should not lead to its celebration as “particularly good ethnography” within the discipline. I do not claim that engagement in such settings elevates anthropologists to a privileged position from which to gain knowledge, as though an aura of the adventurous produces special value (see also Hoffman 2003, 10; Passaro 1997, 147).31 Likewise, rather than conjuring up the strength of ethnographic work in competition with other research approaches, collaborative forms of sharing insights proves more constructive. As Gupta and Ferguson (1997c, 39) noted, an anthropologist’s political task may lie in forging alliances across the disciplines. In regard to witnessing and ethical as well as political attitudes, my own “meandering” through fieldwork reflected on what was described above (see also Thurnheer 2007). I followed the example of most people around me, keeping a low profile and maintaining a mix of transparency and disguise of research interest in order to prevent putting our acquaintances at risk. I respected their advice concerning their safety (as well as Vathany’s and my own) and paid 31 | There is a tendency for impressive expressions in some of the literature reviewed such as “dangerous zones” (Kovats-Bernat 2002), “fieldwork under fire” (Nordstrom and Robben 1995), “frontline-anthropology” (Hoffman 2003), even though it may not be the intention of these authors to dramatize their experiences.

Chapter One: Introduction

attention to their significant silences in conversations. In accordance with KovatBernat (2002, 218), it seems dubious to me to attempt to define a discipline’s standpoint monolithically in contexts where even individual angles are hard to capture. With my partiality in support of our research contacts evident, such a stance did not fit easily into clear-cut political positions. Rather, it was a matter of situated positioning, as my own attitude, as well as that of our acquaintances, was likely to shift, depending on a particular situation. In addition, there was always the possibility of sharing experiences and witnessing with activists and monitoring circles outside academia. Yet the dilemmas remain of producing academic texts developed from intense field relations, emotionally charged situations, and witnessed suffering.32 As Stacey (1988, 26) famously argued, there can at best be “partially” feminist ethnographies: that is, ethnographies enhanced by feminist perspectives and calls for empathetic, concerned, and reciprocal (research) relationships. The risks of exploitation and betrayal of informants can be substantial in highly qualitative work when “the lives, loves, and tragedies” that they share with the researcher “are ultimately data, grist for the ethnographic mill” (Stacey 1988, 23). I am very much aware of this critique in relation to my own research, where every new tragedy in the lives of our acquaintances offered additional interesting material for my thesis. Yet I contend that the fact of having been drawn into these tragedies makes it morally obligatory for me, as an ethnographer, to account for them through the means I have available. This leads to further questions of representation significant for the particular field context. In other words, how should one write about violence or the incredibility of a sudden disaster? Questions need to address the “how to” when representing experiential dimensions commonly described as moments that fail language, produce a loss of words, or constitute the unspeakable (Daniel 1996; Das 1990b, 2007; Nordstrom 1995; Spencer 2003). Of importance to me was to give credit to the many stories I listened to and to the personal situations that we encountered during fieldwork. Writing in largely descriptive forms, I furthermore hope to portray the liveliness enjoyed even in tragic circumstances. I also seek to give a face to those who often risked being treated as anonymous numbers – merely “IDPs”. Closing the loop to the question of witnessing, I share Das’ (2007, 237) remark that it essentially involves “attesting […] to the creativity of life”, remembering that there is more to violence than destruction, and making use of social anthropology for precisely this purpose.33

32 | See especially also Lawrence’s (1997, 1–26) careful considerations of how to write her thesis based on fieldwork amidst massive suffering in Batticaloa in the 1990s. 33 | In the work of Das (1987, 2000, 2007) witnessing centres on the “voice” in its various forms – of the sufferer of violence and the efforts undertaken in repairing shattered social relationships.

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Conceptual framework In this section, I turn to concepts that guided my interpretation and analysis. I will do so by accounting for literature that especially influenced my perceptions. Later chapters will deepen the discussion when the concepts mentioned below are directly related to fieldwork data. In relation to my notion of a “life beyond survival”, social anthropological work on violence, social suffering, and the meaning of everyday social worlds provided a rich stock of literature, primarily Das (2007) and the three volumes co-edited by Das, Kleinman, and others (Kleinman, Das, and Lock 1997; Das et al. 2000; Das et al. 2001). Already having captured my interest at the very beginning of my research, the following quote remained one I frequently turned to as I was writing my thesis. “Yet in the midst of the worst horrors, people continue to live, to survive, and to cope. This might appear as an obvious, even banal statement, especially if we think of the everyday only as the site of the taken-for-granted, the “uneventful”, from which one seeks escape in the realm of the transcendental. Yet in relation to lives severely disrupted, to be able to secure the everyday life by individuals and communities is indeed an achievement. What is at stake, then, in the everyday after such overwhelming experiences of social suffering, and how do people learn to engage in it?” (Das and Kleinman 2001, 1–2)

Das and Kleinman (2001, 2) continued to ask whether this re-engagement with ordinary life is comparable to a healing process on the individual and community level. This question of healing is not one I explicitly pursued in my research, where I have chosen to adopt the term coping, as discussed further below. Moreover, their work is not focused on suffering in the aftermath of a “natural” disaster. Questions of remaining alive may pose themselves differently to survivors of massive violence than in situations in which human acts have not accounted for suffering directly. However, the quote remains significant for its understanding of “the everyday” as an achievement in circumstances marked by violence and suffering. As people go beyond merely surviving, they repair social relationships, creating the realities in which their traumatic memories are eventually buried, and readdress the future (Das and Kleinman 2001, 4). Thus they work towards re-establishing the everyday as the site of the ordinary and familiar in contexts in which the illusion of a taken-for-granted world has been so profoundly shattered. That is, people engage in re-establishing unspectacular notions commonly associated with daily life. The everyday then emerges for the anthropologist as the “eventful”, the arena where survivors restructure their personal and social worlds.34 34 | Similar points are raised in two other studies that draw on the work of Das (2007) and which share thematic affinity with my research: Hastrup’s (2011) study on a Tamil fishing

Chapter One: Introduction

Continuing with life poses simultaneously a source of opportunities and deep-felt perplexities (Das and Kleinman 2001, 24). The question develops from this of what actually emerges from that moment of potentialities as people go about repairing the fractures and their shattered social worlds. This question is as relevant for a study about daily life after a natural disaster as it is in relation to massive violence and insecurity. In this respect, I use the term coping in the broad sense described by the same authors: it is the way in which people “read, endure, work through, break apart under, transcend” (Das and Kleinman 2001, 3) massive violence and other forms of suffering. Morever, Das’ (1990b, 2007) work explicitly links these processes of coping with gender, demonstrating how different social positioning interacts with women’s and men’s varying means of dealing with endured losses and injuries. For a more analytically operative understanding of coping, von BendaBeckmann and von Benda-Beckmann’s (1994) reflections on social security proved helpful. The co-authors were concerned about formulating a functional approach to social security that went beyond a discussion of institutions or state welfare systems.35 They proposed that any social organization provided (more or less satisfactorily) a range of ways to deal with material and immaterial forms of uncertainty and insecurity. Social security was then recognized to represent all the efforts of individuals, groups, or organizations to overcome their existential insecurities beyond the purely individual ones, as well as the (intended or unintended) consequences of these efforts (von Benda-Beckmann and von Benda-Beckmann 1994, 14). “Coping with insecurity” then referred to all the practices, concepts, relationships, and institutions relevant for people’s dealings with specific, adverse conditions. In like manner, I use coping as a term to look at the variety of social, economic, political, and ritual practices through which people dealt with the complex crisis represented by conjunction of the tsunami and armed conflict. I perceive that conjunction as the occurrence of a crisis within a crisis. Therein, I make use of two conceptualizations of crisis: one of a sudden and deepgoing rupture of familiar contexts, and another of a long-term fragmentation and incoherence (Vigh 2008). In the former sense, I refer to the way in which a sudden catastrophe, the tsunami, signified a breakdown of previously held certainties or social frames of reference for the survivors. A disaster is thus also described as a moment when norms are seen to fail (see also Perry 2004, 11; Voss 2006). At that moment potential for change arises, as some scholars have argued, not least village in Tamil Nadu, India, after the tsunami, and Walker’s (2010) perceptive discussion of violence and the everyday, as it too relates to war-torn post-tsunami Batticaloa. 35 | See Nooteboom (2003, 33–60) for an extensive overview of conceptualizing social security. He himself focused on the livelihood dimension and defined social security as the “provision of care, support, and welfare to individuals and groups by social means” (Nooteboom 2003, 49; italics in original).

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based on their understanding of a crisis as a “critical point” that, though highly threatening, also offers opportunities (Boin and ‘t Hart 2006, 43). Conversely, Vigh (2008, 9) holds that a crisis foremost represents “a state of somatic, social or existential incoherence.” Viewing a crisis as a condition of fragmentation and instability, the term allows social scientists to frame circumstances that mark the lives of a great number of people in this world: for example, chronic poverty, marginalization, or, in the case of Batticaloa, the effects of decades of armed conflict. Crisis, in this sense, becomes the actual context and condition within which people go about their lives (Vigh 2008, 11). This understanding complicates the ability to see, in crisis, an opportunity for change and it relegates to the fringe the question of social change, commonly posed in regard to disasters (see also Hastrup 2011, 14; Hoffman 1999a). This possible change in itself is indeed of less interest to me than openness to “what happens” during a crisis or in the aftermath of the disaster – in other words, an interest in real people’s real practices.36 Reflecting upon crisis and the everyday emerging from massive social disruption sheds light on how people respond to challenged norms and notions of normalcy. This approach reveals the ways in which order and normalcy are “made” through social practices. As Vigh (2008, 11) put it: however “normal” a crisis context may appear over the long-term, it is not appreciated as what the norm would represent qualitatively. Instead normalization of a crisis is based on people’s efforts to create order – not on their indifference to disorder. Similarly, von BendaBeckmann and Pirie (2007, 8) found that people usually feel they need to draw a line separating order from chaos. Order then emerges through the “creative ways in which people create small spaces of order in situations of disorder and disruption” (von Benda-Beckmann and Pirie 2007, 2). While these points may seem trivial, they counter casual opinions (such as I came to hear in relation to my fieldwork) about people who constantly face hardships yet somehow “suffer less”. It may be argued instead that social actors who base their actions against a framework of fragmentation rather than on stability may become particularly aware of the fragility of their efforts to establish notions of order, predictability, and normality (Vigh 2008, 17; von Benda-Beckmann and Pirie 2007). While disorder refers as much to a social construction or perception as it does to an objective state or quality, what constitutes order is not shared equally within or between societies. Likewise, “normalcy” may mean different things and experiences for different social groups. From a feminist perspective, this may be summed up by asking “whose normalcy?” counts as the dominant one. Von Benda-Beckmann and von Benda-Beckmann’s (1994) elaborations on social 36 | I thus share Ortner’s (1996b, 2) interest in “looking at and listening to real people doing real things in a given historical moment”. Measured against this primary interest, neat classifications that differentiate between “disaster” versus “catastrophe”, “crisis”, or “conflict” recede to the background, however valuable such typologies can be (see Clausen, Geenen, and Macamo 2003; Perry 2003; Voss 2006).

Chapter One: Introduction

security make it clear: the reasons for distress and the means to overcome it are linked to socio-cultural constructions that define what is normal and what is not. This applies for societies’ members in general and categories of people in particular. These same constructions also designate relationships and social units responsible for providing support in problematic situations. Yet, while social security can be promised, provided, or achieved, it always remains partial and related to social differences such as gender, age, class, or status (von BendaBeckmann and von Benda-Beckmann 1994, 8–9, 14).37 The point about the partial nature of support underscores the relevance of gender in coping processes. The insight that the category of gender relates invariably to other forms of social differentiation, from which it cannot be examined in isolation, has become commonplace in contemporary concepts (Anthias 2002; Anthias and Yuval Davis 1992; Davies 2008; Hill-Collins 1989; McCall 2005; Mohanty 2003; Mohanty, Russo, and Torres 1991; Moraga and Anzaldùa 1983; Nicholson and Seidman 1995; Yuval-Davis 2006). Likewise, established conceptual grounds against the pitfalls of essentialism can be provided by reflection on the situational nature of gender and on ways in which notions of femininity and masculinity result from interactive constructions, from “doing” or “making” gender (Goffman [1959] 2004; Ortner 1996a; West and Zimmerman 1987). Moreover, from a social anthropological perspective, one can perceive gender productively as embedded within kinship positions and practices. This perspective allows one to see gender relationships as shifting over the course of a life-time and as responsive to specific, interactive situations. It also reveals differences as well as similarities between women and men (Busby 1999, 2000; Carsten 2004; Howell and Melhuus 1996; Moore 1988, 1994a, 1999, 2007; Ortner and Whitehead 1981; Yanagisako and Collier 1987). My own research follows this intersectional understanding of gender and examines kinship as an area in which gender differences and similarities are created and contested. Indeed research revealed the importance of kinship as the “elementary structures” (Lévi-Strauss [1947] 1971). I came to recognize kinship as an “area of life in which people invest their emotions, their creative energy, and their new imaginings” (Carsten 2004, 9). Das’ (1990b, 2007) work relating to coping remains a powerful account to me of the intricate ways in which gendered kin positions circumscribe differing ways for women and men to repair their shattered social worlds.

37 | De Jong’s (2005) study, which follows von Benda-Beckmann and von Benda-Beckmann’s (1994) conceptualization of social security, provides one such example of the combined relevance of gender and generation in regard to extending care for the elderly poor in Kerala. It pointed out the limits of kinship support insofar as situations for elderly women without a husband were particularly precarious, because family and relatives did not support these widows to the extend they did elderly couples or men.

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Overall, feminist ethnographies and their concerns with power relationships, the agency of socially embedded actors, reflexivity throughout the research process, and questions of representation form the backbone of my research (Abu-Lughod 1990, 1991, 1993; di Leonardo 1991; Goddard 2000; Mohanty 2003; Rippl 1993; Skeggs 2001; Visweswaran 1994). Ortner’s (1996b, 2006) discussion of practice theory from a feminist and “subaltern” perspective has been helpful in thinking about subjectivity as the basis for agency. It offers an effort to understand how people act within their social worlds while they are acted upon (Ortner 2006, 110). Moreover, it supplies a perspective that acknowledges people’s creative ways of weaving coherence across damaging forms of oppression (Ortner 2006, 57). The stock of feminist work on war and peace has also been influential in perceiving a continuity of violence marking the daily lives of women (Coomaraswamy and Fonseka 2004; Giles and Hyndman 2004; Giles et al. 2003; Meintjes, Pillay, and Turshen 2001; Seifert 2001, 2003; Yuval-Davis 1997). Lastly, I took a particular interest in disaster research that accounts for gender differences and similarities (Ariyabandu and Wickramasinghe 2003; Bradshaw 2004; Cupples 2007; Enarson 1998, 2000; Enarson and Chakrabarti 2009; Enarson and Morrow 1998; Enarson, Fothergill, and Peek 2006). In terms of interpreting our fieldwork conversations and observations, biographical and narrative analysis guided my approach (Cortazzi 2001; Dausien 1994; Dausien and Kelle 2005; Plummer 2001; Rosenthal 1995; Rosenthal and Fischer-Rosenthal 2003). As for representation of fieldwork, I proceeded along two basic concerns: I chose to work with descriptive, narrative forms, to maintain the immediacy of fieldwork encounters. Yet, in respect to confidentiality of sources, I decided at times against greater ethnographic “thickness” by omitting particular details. I shared a fundamental interest in a writing style that pays attention to differences while bringing forth the similarities shared, as Abu-Lughod (1991) formulated it in her strategy of writing “ethnographies of the particular”. “To say that we all live in the particular is not to say that for any of us the particulars are the same. […] But the dailiness, in breaking coherence and introducing time, keeps us fixed on flux and contradiction. And the particulars suggest that others live as we perceive ourselves living, not as robots programmed with “cultural” rules, but as people going through life agonizing over decisions, making mistakes, trying to make themselves look good, enduring tragedies and personal losses, enjoying others, and finding moments of happiness.” (Abu-Lughod 1991, 157–158)

B ook S ynopsis Together with the Prologue, my first chapter has pointed out my research interest, the theoretical framework guiding my interpretation, and briefly introduced the context of Batticaloa. In the following chapter, Chapter Two, I address life in the

Chapter One: Introduction

post-tsunami relief camps. The discussion focuses on how research relationships developed and on the relevance of storytelling. The chapter also reveals conflicts that reigned among camp residents and the processes of inclusion and exclusion that operated in regard to allocation of post-tsunami aid. Lastly, the camps are depicted as deeply gendered places where symbolism on women’s sexuality played an important role. Chapter Three looks at the ways in which gender relationships impacted upon death and survival in the tsunami, against the backdrop of a substantially higher number of female casualties. The selected narratives of Shanthi and Shivam demonstrate how notions of femininity and masculinity significantly affect the survival experience by revealing how the experience challenged what it means to be a “woman” and a “man” in the local context. My input elaborates further on what developed (or did not) in respect to local gender relationships in the tsunami’s aftermath. Chapter Four concentrates on family ties, as both constraining and supportive relationships. More precisely, it examines episodes of elopements, remarriages of widowed persons, and domestic violence in daily life situations within posttsunami relief camps. By discussing these processes, the “post-tsunami” focus gives way to a larger picture of kinship practices and people’s “survival skills” in dealing with decades of armed conflict. Chapter Five addresses the topics of (international) disaster responses, relocation, and strategies of the so-called beneficiaries. I look at how underlying gender models of aid intervention contradicted local social relationships and how women and men positioned themselves in regard to aid allocations. Relocation – in many ways perceivable as a forced move of people – gains a different face when seen through our acquaintances’ stated wish to relocate to a new environment after destruction of their former village. Yet that wish is also accompanied by a variety of fears of the new place being a “bad” and insecure one, as revealed by depictions of the early “settling down” phase in the transitional shelters. Chapter Six is devoted to hopeful new beginnings under old names: I consider the many babies born into families who had lost a child or several children due to the tsunami. This discussion shifts attention to the specifics of parental grief and also raises questions regarding reincarnation concepts which acquired a new dimension in the immediate aftermath of the tsunami. Since the names chosen for newborn babies closely resembled those of their deceased siblings, the naming practices observed bespeak the bereaved’s attempts to create continuities between past and present lives. Chapter Seven takes on an altogether less hopeful note and reveals more of the disruptive features that marked our research contacts’ biographies. Based on two personal portraits, the issue of “going mad” is approached in response to massive human and material losses endured due to the tsunami and the war. This testimony again highlights the conjunction of war and tsunami as revealed in personal stories and social situations.

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Lastly, Chapter Eight takes us to the beginning and end of fieldwork. It elaborates on our research contacts’ interpretations of the tsunami’s occurrence and on their relationships to the gods in the disaster’s aftermath. The chapter also follows people moving into their new homes after the relocation scheme was finally implemented during a time of war. I conclude the chapter by reviewing the coping processes that provide the cornerstone of this research.

Chapter Two: A Transitional Place – The Post-Tsunami Relief Camps

Vathany and I started in March 2005 to visit families from Navalady, who counted among the survivors of a village that lost approximately one third of its original population due to the tsunami. They had seen their former settlement reduced within minutes to a desert of sand, rubble, knocked-over walls, and miraculously still-standing palm trees. Now homeless, they moved from hospitals, temples, and schools to camps for the displaced in public buildings and adjacent compounds in Batticaloa town. They expected to be relocated from there to a place they did not even ‘know the colour’ of – that is, a place they knew nothing of – a settlement yet to be constructed. Meanwhile, life in the relief camps meant staying with strangers (some of whom became new friends) and with relatives, from whose attempted control many of the young wished to escape. The camps brought people together in their grief and anger, paved the way for mutual support and blame, formed a stage for personal dramas and violent fights, and helped craft love stories and humiliations. External interventions encouraged dependence on cash and other disaster relief distributions, fostering mutual rivalry for such goods. During all of this, we observed the residents’ humour and their disillusion in all who came for their support with assessment forms and surveys, played with the children, listened to (female) victims, consulted with (male) camp representatives, or scolded the women for dirty toilets and wasted drinking water. Suddenly, one morning in July 2005 – after weeks of rumours – people were told to move to their transitional shelters that same day. The news resulted in a struggle over house numbers, packing up newly acquired belongings, tears of anger and stress, as well as some degree of happy anticipation in regard to life in a new place. After that day, the families continued to live in shelters built with foreign money, ‘boiling’ in the heat, and fearing their children’s throats would be cut by tin sheets flying off of their huts when strong winds blew – as was said to have happened during the tsunami when loose material smashed people – and getting their huts in the new relocation site flooded during the rainy season. While construction of their permanent housing was delayed – by unresolved land issues,

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changes in relocation policies, poor coordination among the stakeholders and donors’ lack of commitment to initial pledges – the site of their temporary shelters and its surroundings had to accommodate more than 100,000 newly displaced persons seeking refuge from shelling occurring just a few kilometres away. But long before these mass movements of people could be orchestrated, the signs of war – daily explosions, intrusions of armed personnel in uniforms or plain clothes, murders, abductions, and mass cordon-and-search operations by security forces – had become common features of everyday life again. In the previous chapter, I touched upon the difficult relationships between people and places that characterized fieldwork: our research contacts lived in places designed as temporary dwellings, shared painful but also comforting memories of a former place of living, and anticipated staying in an altogether different place in the near future. Displacement, Brun (2008b, 2) argued, “indicates a state of ‘inbetweennesss’; a state of being attached to several places and simultaneously struggling to establish the right to a place.” Displacement is about movement from one place to another. It is also a matter of power, as inclusion and exclusion processes differentiate between those who belong and those who do not. Jackson (2002, 89), referring to refugee lives, argued that words “such as displaced, dislocated, fugitive, uprooted, and stateless describe the refugee’s objective situation, but they describe with equal metaphorical force his or her state of mind.” Flight and bereavement shatter inter-subjective contexts and may result in a person feeling as if moving through a destabilized and fragmented world, oscillating between uncontrollable, contradictory images of a here and there, of past, present, and future (Jackson 2002, 89–90). Taking differing perspectives, these observations render evident the processes of social differentiation and subjective experiences equally important in discussions on displacement. These processes become evident within the following pages, starting with descriptions of our first visits to the post-tsunami relief camps. Thus I chose to approach “displacement” here by focusing on a transitional place: the camps where our research contacts lived during the first half-year after the tsunami and where our research developed.1 I do so by means of descriptive and analytical sections that deal with camps as places organized through external intervention and as fieldwork locations. Moreover, camps are seen as spaces for storytelling, conflict, and competition where people seek relief items and negotiate social identifications.2 Lastly the camps are discussed as deeply gendered places. 1 | Chapter Five takes up from here and follows our research contacts’ moving to transitional shelters and the relocation site where they expected their permanent houses to be built. 2 | Without discussing or clearly distinguishing between, “place” and “space”, I share an understanding of space as a product of social relationships that is always in the making (Massey 2005). I furthermore follow Brubaker and Cooper (2000) and speak of processes of “identification”, avoiding the more static term of identity.

Chapter Two: A Transitional Place

This chapter’s first section gives basic background on establishing posttsunami relief camps in Batticaloa at the time, while the next describes some scenes from our early fieldwork days. I then introduce some of our core research contacts and briefly describe basic features of our research relationships. This is followed by discussion of narratives shared by our acquaintances during our first visits to the camps. My interpretation sees these narratives as stories of suffering that testify to people’s efforts to create coherence and a sense of belonging to a “greater”, comprehensive story. An additional description allows discussing fights for relief items that occurred frequently at the time. These rivalries are observed in terms of inclusive and exclusive social processes as well as actual performances of social status. The last subchapter takes up a different struggle focusing on gender relationships, followed by a conclusion. Viewed as a unit, the descriptive sections tend to raise more issues than can be examined at one time. However, they indicate the complexity involved and hopefully allow the reader some glimpses into the very lively places that the camps revealed themselves to be.

The P ost-Tsunami “W elfare C entres ” Accompanied by Vathany, I began visiting people from the destroyed fishing village Navalady, located at the outskirts of Batticaloa town (see Map 2). Its survivors came to stay in two post-tsunami relief camps within town area. One was at Central College, a school consisting of two buildings, situated in the old part of Batticaloa town. One of the buildings was reclaimed for school purposes just before we started our fieldwork. Therefore, what I call “Central College camp” represents that school’s second building, which continued to serve as a posttsunami relief camp. The people who had occupied the other building moved to parts of a newly established camp. This camp stood on the premises of the vacant Zaeera College, also within Batticaloa town area. It accommodated people from Kallady and Thiruchendur besides those from Navalady. Flags that indicated each site as a “welfare centre for tsunami-affected people” adorned both camps. This was the case for all of post-tsunami relief camps in the area at that time. Some two to five members of the Sri Lankan army, police, and home guards (a unit of armed civilians set up by the Sri Lankan government during the war) also marked their presence at each site. As a whole, this chapter depicts how these outwardly visible signs stood metaphorically for processes taking place inside the camps: effects of created dependency, struggles to resist homogenization, mourning for human and material loss, and militarized ways of managing conflict and insecurity. For now, I briefly describe the processes of camp management and conclude by referring to the residents’ aid entitlement.

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Map 2: Batticaloa (Manmunai North)

Adapted from: http://ochaonline.un.org/srilanka/MapCentre/GeographicMaps/ tabid/2593/language/en-US/Default.aspx: LK00338_Admin_Batticaloa_ ManmunaiNorth_DS_Div20Oct05.pdf (accessed 22 March 2009). A kind of spontaneous organization seems to have characterized the period immediately after the tsunami. Survivors reported having been brought to the general hospital when severely injured or having followed others to find themselves in temple or school grounds. Somehow people moved, found relatives and neighbours, and formed groups without specific outside intervention. People spoke of how they frantically searched for family members, escaped hospital admission by ‘removing all the strings’, or fell asleep somewhere to awake reunited with a grandchild or another closely related person. They also mentioned help received from those who lived far enough from the sea to remain unaffected by the waves. These backup people provided clothes and food, and sometimes they offered their homes or bathroom facilities. Thus a picture emerges from people’s accounts with similarities to other immediate post-disaster contexts in which mutual and self-help organization dominates over impressions of chaos and panic (Ethridge 2006; Hoffman 1999c). Meanwhile, international organizations under governmental auspices organized tents and relief camps for some 60,000 people displaced by the

Chapter Two: A Transitional Place

tsunami in the Batticaloa district alone.3 While camps and tent sites (especially outside Batticaloa town) dominated the area, most survivors stayed scattered at the homes and compounds of relatives. The relief camps often consisted of public buildings, commonly schools, with additional sheet-metal shelters built on vacant compounds. Survivors were assigned to camps or to another area within a camp, according to their village affiliation. These camps commonly failed to meet basic requirements needed to address women’s situations. For example, they frequently lacked separate bathing areas for women and men. This case even applied despite promotion of gender-sensitivity for many years by and within these humanitarian organizations. Concerned activists and NGO representatives formed the Women’s Coalition for Disaster Management-Batticaloa (WCDM-B) to address these pressing gender issues (see also Maunaguru and Emmanuel 2010, 2–3). Our acquaintances, all having lived in Navalady up until the tsunami, initially came jointly to stay in Central College camp. There, they had to live under very crowded conditions while occupying two school buildings. Barely three months later, as one of the buildings was restored for schooling, some people moved to the Zaeera College camp. Many who could afford to left the camps to stay with relatives or in rented homes – especially once they had been assured of entitlement to the same kind of aid as those remaining within the camps. Hence Navalady’s remaining population basically lived with relations in other neighbourhoods or in the two camps at the beginning of our fieldwork. We limited our visits to families living in the two camps. They later came to stay in transitional shelters at the Tiraimadu relocation site, where those who had chosen to stay outside the camps joined them.4 Central College camp consisted basically of five connected rows of large, ill-lit, and damp rooms of varying sizes. Individual families occupied sections in the 3 | According to a map compiled by the Department of Census and Statistics (2005c), the tsunami displaced 61,912 people in Batticaloa District as of 25 January 2005. The neighbouring districts of Ampara and Trincomalee counted 75,172 and 81,643, respectively, according to this source. As was the case with numbers of dead and missing after the tsunami, the numbers of displaced people varied over time and according to the source. Based on statistics from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) of 9 February 2005, 57,049 IDPs resided in Batticaloa district. By then, approximately one third of them lived in the relief camps. The whole of Sri Lanka counted 570,968 IDPs at the time, 121,058 of them staying in 282 camps and 449,910 living with relatives and friends (UNHCR 2005). 4 | The term “camps” refers to the post-tsunami relief camps organized in public buildings such as schools or for which sheet-metal enclosures or tents were built during the initial emergency phase. Later, people moved to stay in shelters at relocation sites (or at their former compounds) where they remained until completion of their houses. I use the terms “transitional shelters” and “temporary shelters” synonymously for this kind of accommodation that preceded people’s move into new, permanent homes.

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rooms and frequently separated these units by hanging up sarongs or stapling relief items. People shared the existing common latrines, bathing spaces, and tanks of drinking water provided by an NGO. Central College camp was a particularly noisy place, especially at the beginning of fieldwork.5 Whenever relief items were distributed (or expected to be distributed), the camp became busy with visitors: all those who lived outside the camps came to await the allocations, hosted as guests of their relatives who had remained in the camp. While these formed the specially lively and crowded moments, a constant movement of people coming and going occurred on other days, too. These passers-by primarily included NGO workers and government employees, foreign volunteers, and the news media. Zaeera College camp provided more space and fresh air. It consisted of rows of newly constructed sheet-metal compartments set up in the large compound of a vacant school building. Each compartment was assigned to a family. While it was not as crowded and damp as Central College camp, people had to bear living under the blazing sun. No trees sheltered the site, and social life seemed mostly confined to the early mornings and evenings outside the peak times of Batticaloa’s blasting heat. As in Central College camp, people used common latrines, washing areas, and drinking water. In contrast to Central College, which was limited to former residents of Navalady, Zaeera College camp provided space for people of several destroyed villages, though village identification was maintained in spatial compartments within the camp. Issues such as dirty toilets or use of drinking water for washing purposes provided source for quarrels in both camps. Yet, given that people from different villages stayed in Zaeera College camp, the quarrelling parties were quick to blame other villagers for any dirt or misuse, always describing another village as the hotbed of allegedly “bad people”. Initially, the TRO was a key player in managing camps in Batticaloa. Established in Tamil refugee camps in south India during the early 1980s, the TRO had been tightly linked to the LTTE, and some observers called it the LTTE’s social (if not political) arm.6 According to a TRO representative in April 2005, the organization had maintained 80 camps in Batticaloa until the preceding month, distributing meals and organizing aid distributions. For practical purposes, they formed camp committees consisting of an equal number of TRO staff and camp representatives. According to that source, the TRO expected to be the one organization remaining 5 | By mid April, there were notably less people in Central College camp than when we started fieldwork one month earlier. According to the figures provided by the security officers in the camp, 65 families, or 188 persons remained in that camp by 25 April 2005. 6 | Previously largely confined to areas under direct LT TE control, the TRO widened its operations after the ceasefire of 2002 with the support of international agencies that promoted it as a vehicle in peace-building approaches. The organization then expanded, especially after the tsunami, thanks to large-scale donations. By 2006, however, government action had begun to effectively curtail its activities, not least by freezing its funds (Walton 2008, 151–155).

Chapter Two: A Transitional Place

to stay in the area long after all the foreign organizations left. The TRO had also managed Central College camp, and, though the organization left its activities just before we started our regular visits, its presence was still very much felt there. In fact, the TRO entered almost every camp within the Batticaloa town area. A critical observer commented that the TRO had simply taken over the camps, even though these camps had functioned well without its intervention (and with governmental support). None of the residents dared to object to the take-over, given the LTTE’s authority in its background. Still in the words of this observer, under the slogan “the TRO is looking after you”, the organization thus seized an opportunity to establish control within a heavily disrupted segment of the population. Later political developments overhauled both this critic’s opinion, as well as the TRO representative’s. TRO had closed its Batticaloa offices by September 2005 and largely left the government-controlled part of the district. This reflected the LTTE’s dwindling power within this area while its splinter group, the TMVP or so-called Karuna group, gained in influence, thanks to government support. Forming committees of elected camp (or village) representatives was a common way of internally organizing the camps over the longer course of time. Initiated by external actors such as NGOs and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), these committees need to be seen as largely a donor’s instrument to facilitate aid allocation and communication with the camp residents. From the initiators’ standpoint, the committees were nevertheless expected to foster and assure participatory processes in running the site and allocation of aid. In practice, people tended to elect persons whom they felt pressured to vote for (that is, those with politically powerful links) and those from whom they expected to gain personally (namely relatives and friends). Camp committees remained unstable over time, and new elections periodically brought together people with little experience, support, or even interest in community-level dealings. Quite a few of the (varying) members of the committee in charge of the camps at Central College and Zaeera College at the beginning of fieldwork had been active in the local fishing society before the tsunami. Not surprisingly, obvious connections existed between leading members of this initial committee and the LTTE. It could hardly have been any other way, given the initial TRO involvement in the camps, the LTTE’s previous strong influence in Navalady, and the general, sheer impossibility of people in leadership positions acting independently of that particular armed group. Moreover, the elected representatives were predominantly men. At a later point in 2006, some women, including some of our female acquaintances, became committee members – a change largely in response to pressure exerted by international and non-governmental organizations to have women included. During the first half-year after the disaster, Sri Lanka’s “tsunami victims” received a variety of compensations administrated by the state. Cash payments comprised a sum of LKR 15,000 per fatality to meet funeral costs and LKR 2,500 for each affected household in order to purchase new kitchen utensils. They further comprised the sum of LKR 5,000 per family that, in the case of eastern Sri Lanka,

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was issued on three occasions to compensate for lost income. In addition, the state welfare system, Samurdhi, issued ration cards that entitled each member of an affected family to weekly cash payments of LKR 375 and food items such as rice, dhal, sugar, and oil, worth LKR 175, to be obtained from government cooperative shops.7 Later on, people received LKR 250,000 for reconstruction of fully damaged houses paid in subsequent instalments and commonly “topped up” with financial support from donors.8 Besides such compensation, primarily NGOs and private helpers donated a variety of aid, ranging from livelihood utensils – for example, tools for artisans, fishing equipment for fishermen, cooking utensils for women to promote cottage industry – to cash contributions for children’s school expense. However welcome the support, these entitlements caused much conflict among recipients. There was significant resentment against the way in which aid was allocated – especially when we started our fieldwork in early March 2005. Partly, that related to delays in implementing the governmental scheme, which were strongly felt in Batticaloa (see also Frerks 2010). As Frerks and Klem (2005b, 15) noted, by the end of January 2005, some 75,000 ration cards had not yet been issued according to official sources. The World Food Programme (WFP) continued to face difficulties in distributing food items in the following months. Our acquaintances often complained that payments handled through Samurdhi were delayed for weeks, and it was generally unclear if and when the bank transfer of LKR 5,000 could be expected. Another concern was that people unaffected by the tsunami managed to receive aid as well. Indeed, several neighbourhoods located in completely unaffected parts of Batticaloa received relief items, though such developments diminished at a later stage when beneficiary lists were more effectively monitored. Furthermore, rivalries for access to and control over 7 | In early January 2005, LKR 100 amounted to approximately $ 0.96 (US). It is worthwhile comparing these compensations with information from household surveys of the pre-tsunami period: the mean household income per month for the Eastern Province was LKR 7,640 (with 50 per cent of the population earning less than LKR 5,500) according to the official household surveys of 2002 and 2003 (Department of Census and Statistics 2003, 2). Furthermore, a livelihood assessment carried out by an NGO in the two districts of Ampara and Batticaloa in January 2005 offers the following data on average monthly incomes: fishermen in the “small coastal sea canoe fishing” category earned an estimated LKR 5,600 before the tsunami; labourers depending on (karaivalai) beach seine fishing earned LKR 4,200, and fishermen who owned one-day, outboard motorized, deep-sea fishing boats earned approximately LKR 9,000 (Save the Children 2005). Most of the families among our research contacts would have had an approximate, monthly income of between LKR 4,000 and LKR 9,000 depending on whether the men worked as labourers, canoe-based fishermen or boat owners, though the income varied according to the seasons. 8 | Conversely, partially damaged houses were compensated with LKR 100,000 (see also Chapters Five and Eight on reconstruction guidelines and housing schemes).

Chapter Two: A Transitional Place

donations not only estranged the “beneficiaries” but often provoked quarrels between close family members. This was due not least to the compensation amounts generally being issued to a stipulated male head of household or to the eldest male member of a family (see Chapter Five). Many of our interlocutors finally deemed it unjust that entitlements failed to differentiate between those affected in regard to their actual human losses. That is, they deemed those who lost their immediate family members more deserving of (extra) aid than those who had escaped with merely material losses (or losses of more distant relatives). Such considerations point out how survivors negotiated entitlements in response to aid allocation and competed with each other to gain control over the definition of the “real” victims. While much of the state administered compensation payments ceased after the initial six months of what was known as the emergency phase, conflicts over what was extended in terms of livelihood support continued over the long term. NGOs formed the main actors within this more development-oriented approach. Problems remained essentially the same, with a great many revolving around those actors in charge of defining beneficiaries’ lists and organizing distribution of material. Village-level government representatives, the grama niladhari (GN), and the camp committee members mentioned stood at the lowest level for these processes. That made them most approachable as well as most exposed to criticism. Some of these people quite obviously benefited from their power, managing to reserve items and cash for themselves, their immediate kin, and friends in ways of patron-client relationships. Yet that was also what was expected from them, and people around them tried by various means, and to varying success, to influence them.9 Arguably men tended to be in a better position than women to attain their goals in these ways of exerting influence, since the necessary negotiations were seen to be more appropriately a space for men than women. Men’s rather than women’s networks often went beyond kinship, and their wider scope of personal links was a potential resource for more support. In the specific local context, furthermore, the influence of locally operating armed groups could be decisive in distributing aid. For instance, local representatives in charge of handling lists of beneficiaries and organizing distributions could hardly ignore a person’s entitlement to an outboard boat engine, when this person was equipped with what was called an LTTE letter of acknowledgement. This point about the role that local authorities (including armed ones) played in aid allocations brings us back to a topic mentioned above: that is, the presence of security personnel in the post-tsunami relief camps. While their posting was supposedly to protect people within the camps, it must have had as much to do with 9 | A great deal has been said and written about the importance of personal links and political patronage at work in organizing post-tsunami aid, see Fraser (2010), Gamburd (2010), Moonesinghe (2007). These developments have to be seen against Sri Lanka’s structural framework of politicized allocation of welfare resources (Silva 2002).

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maintenance of order and surveillance. As the Coalition for Assisting Tsunami Affected Women (CATAW) noted, deployment of armed personnel in the camps enforced militarization, while the personnel’s exact role and purpose in these places remained concealed. According to that coalition’s statement, the personnel appeared in the second week after the tsunami. The coalition observed that despite many reports on sexual violence against women and child abuse, those on duty had not received any clear orders to deal with complains by women and children. Interestingly enough, according to this same statement, policemen (that is, civil service personnel) were put on duty in southern parts of Sri Lanka, whereas it was the military police (Special Task Force, STF) that was stationed in the camps in the east (CATAW 2005, 20–21). The personel in the camps of our research contacts represented a mix of forces, including police, soldiers, home guards, and the dreaded members of Sri Lanka’s army National Guard’s Ninth Battalion.10 That was seen in the Prologue when one of our acquaintances suspected influencial paramilitaries to have been stationed in Central College camp. Their presence bespeaks the aspect of surveillance and control aimed at by this measure, which in turn needs to be seen against the backdrop of the suspected LTTE influence in the camps. Indeed, security forces viewed the camps as possible hideouts for LTTE supporters. This manifested itself in military and police search actions of the camps following armed incidents in town. I turn to describe some scenes below of our very first visits to the two camps. This is followed by discussion of fieldwork relationships and the forms of storytelling encountered.

U pon E ntering the F ield Viji and Selvy, two young women in their early 20s, came to greet us as Vathany and I went to visit Central College camp for the first time. I had met them at a WCDM-B meeting the week before, and they expected our visit that day. Viji immediately called for some other women to come and sit with us. As soon as Vathany and I had introduced ourselves and the research purpose, Viji took over and said that she wanted to tell us her ‘tsunami experience’ (using this English expression while speaking in Tamil). That took us by complete surprise. Actually, we had asked to know more about the women’s current living situation in the camp. But Viji had other priorities, and she gave a vivid account of how she had survived the tsunami and of how others had died, including her mother. The other women listened attentively, seemingly sharing in this story that was so similar 10 | Members of this Ninth Battalion are known to function as ‘tellers’, that is, as identifiers of LT TE supporters. The Ninth Battalion includes members of former armed Tamil groups that opposed the LT TE (see also Prologue). Together with the STF, it is a known perpetrator of severe human rights violations.

Chapter Two: A Transitional Place

to their own. When Viji finished her narrative, another woman took over, and then yet another until altogether eight women had told their survival stories and accounted for their dead family members. Some of them just told their story and left; others remained seated in order to listen to the others. Still more women and children joined our circle to simply listen for a while. More than three hours passed in this way. When the women’s circle finally broke up, it was because they had to tend to their cooking. One of them advised us to come in the late afternoon the next time when they had more free time. There was a certain pattern in which the women told their stories. Besides first mentioning their name (thereby following Viji’s example), they usually started off their stories by accounting for the number of relatives lost in the tsunami. The numbers reached up to 45 persons in one woman’s narrative. Other shared features in the narratives included: mistaking the sounds accompanying the destructive waves for a renewed outbreak of war; a disbelief in the actuality and enormity of what was happening, and, for instance, dismissing the warnings of others as teasing; last glimpses of their children before they vanished, never to be seen again; and the moments when others on boats appeared for their rescue. The similarities of these stories were offset by the variation in their details: one woman knew the exact time when she was told that her husband was dead; another had found herself waking up looking at the dead body of her mother lying next to her in hospital; a girl’s family had run into their house as the waves approached, expecting to find shelter under the chimney. At some point during this session of narrating and listening, a group of men next to us broke into a heated discussion with camp committee members. Another man, who had been silently observing the agitation, explained that it was about an expected distribution of boats to everyone from Navalady. The protesters were former boat owners fearful of a shortage of crew members, should all have a boat of their own. It was very difficult, the man added, for men to be confined to a life in camps when they were used to working hard all the time. Eventually the group of men dissolved, and the place calmed down. European volunteers from an NGO providing psychological counselling in the camp packed up their tea service and left. Lastly, the soldier who had been pacing next to us for a while, continuously clicking the trigger of his rifle, disappeared as well. The women too had gone to their quarters in the camp, and a lunch-time quietness set in. A few of our interlocutors remained, and Vathany and I resumed some of our prepared questions. We asked about how they had come to this camp and where they had been before, how they organized themselves in this place, and what kind of assistance they received from governmental and non-governmental sources. An elderly man, Kamalanathan, and an elderly woman seemed glad to vent their anger. They rejected the rule that all persons affected were to receive the same amount of ration cards and cash compensations irrespective of how much (or how little) the person or family had actually suffered from tsunami-related losses. More outrage followed in the form of stories about whole neighbourhoods that had

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‘not even seen the water’ but nevertheless received tsunami aid. There was also a complaint about ‘bad rice’ that had been donated and made everybody feel sick, and disappointment in state representatives whose promises remained unmet. Kamalanathan pointed out that the government had failed to protect them. Unlike the cyclone of 1978, when radio broadcasting warned people to leave the seaside, there had been no warning issued before the tsunami. Kamalanathan stated what we were to hear many times over the coming months: that though the cyclone had destroyed all the trees, no one was killed at the time. However after the tsunami, the trees remained intact, though countless people lost their lives.11 Lastly, the two persons made it clear that the greatest need was land for people to relocate to. They could no longer tolerate living under camp conditions, though they never again wanted to return to live in their former village. One week later, Vathany and I went for our first visit to Zaeera College camp. Viji came to greet us there too and, before leaving again, introduced us to Rasamma, who sat outside her shelter compartment. Shortly afterwards, a sister of Rasamma joined us; both were grandmothers in their late 40s and early 50s. This time our introduction did not result in a wave of tragic stories. Instead, Rasamma gave us a quick description of the difficulties faced in the camp and what was most needed. She deemed the compensations that they received insufficient, because daily expenses were much higher than previously when they subsided on their own fish and ample coconut trees for their daily meals. The cash-for-work programmes offered by NGOs were said to underpay and offer labour-intensive work such as road repair considered inadequate for men, who had been fishermen. Rasamma insisted that boats and nets formed their most urgent needs, because all the families depended on fishing. Besides that, they needed a safe place to live. Therefore land and houses should be in a planned relocation site far away from the sea and the possibility of another tsunami.12 As we talked, staff from the NGO providing psychological support appeared at the edge of the shelter row and distributed games and bananas, which children ran to grab. A woman turned up from within the shelter area and screamed that these people from Navalady always received everything, while her village people, who stayed more within the camp site, never got anything. Speaking to us, Rasamma 11 | The waves crushed houses and caused large trees to collapse, though coconut palm trees frequently survived the tsunami. 12 | The conversation with Rasamma that day exemplified our acquaintances’ wish to move away from the coastline following the tsunami, despite their dependency on the sea as fishermen families (see discussion in Chapter Five). Her complaint about poorly paid cash-for-work programmes must be seen in relation to strategic performances of a victim in need of more aid (noting also that the daily wages offered by these programmes tended to overpay when compared to similar pre-tsunami labour arrangements). The alleged inappropriateness of such work for fishermen further hints at processes of social identification.

Chapter Two: A Transitional Place

countered this claim, arguing that it was other neighbourhoods that received everything, while they did not: those from Navalady suffered most but received the least. On top of this, they were being poorly advised and cheated by those in charge of distributions. By this time, two men had joined us and supported the claimed lack of assistance. They pointed out that they had more than enough in terms of food and clothes, but they urgently needed to earn money on their own and stop ‘sitting idle’ in the camps. Shortly after that, a foreign representative of an international organization appeared and was quickly approached by several men. They included two young men in wide black trousers of a style that tended to raise suspicion of their wearers originating from remote inland areas (and thus possibly infiltrated iyakkam “helpers”). As we observed this scene, Rasamma said that, in contrast to their current situation, life in Navalady had always been very peaceful and without any violence. And nobody had ever come to check their homes. Similar events and processes made up much of our subsequent camp visits. That is, we were repeatedly immersed in stories of survival and massive human losses. We heard complaints about inadequate, morally flawed, and failing posttsunami aid and living conditions. Then vociferous quarrels among groups of people accompanied our discussions or brought them to an end. In some ways the depiction resembles what Pratt (1986, 41) critically discussed as “arrival scenes” of anthropologists – a means used to establish an authoritative “I-was-there-andsaw-that” voice before disappearing from presumably objective monographs. What remained missing in these accounts of first field encounters were insights describing how fieldwork conditions actually formed part of the study (Pratt 1986, 41). Reviewing our early visits to the relief camps, I am reminded of how much I struggled to realize precisely this: that fieldwork conditions were part and parcel of my study focus. Instead of forming some recurrent obstacles to what I hoped to study, they were essential to my research. Similar struggles on my part in relation to my various fieldwork roles accompanied me throughout my stay, as discussed in the preceding chapter. Before continuing with our initial camp visits, I wish to briefly describe how fieldwork relationships developed and introduce some basic characteristics of our research contacts and networks. These illustrations also serve to bring to light some of the typical social processes that we came across in the post-tsunami relief camps.

F ieldwork R el ationships I initially intended to study the relationships between Tamils and Muslims, severed after decades of ethno-political war, with a focus on women’s networks in eastern Sri Lanka. But, with the occurrence of the tsunami, I found it impossible to follow through with such plans. When I arrived back in Batticaloa in late February 2005, I was instead drawn into the consequences of that disaster. And so

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my research interest too shifted to people who had lost their homes and families in that calamity. Gradually I decided to focus on families from the village Navalady located on the outskirt of Batticaloa town on a narrow peninsula between the Bay of Bengal and parts of the lagoon.13 This entire peninsula was destroyed under the force of the massive waves and governmentally declared a zone forbidden from construction of permanent buildings. It was a village known to have grown massively in population due to an influx of those fleeing from areas of more intense warfare, especially during the 1990s. I saw an opportunity in this to research both the social impacts of the recent tsunami and those of decades of armed conflict. Other experiences continued to feed my interest in Navalady. One was an NGO representative’s remark during a coordination meeting that the people from Navalady lacked meaningful aid and were under pressure to relocate with little option for a return to their former place of living.14 The chance to establish contact with Navalady’s surviving residents came when Viji and Selvy attended a regular meeting of the WCDM-B. Viji spoke as a representative of Central College camp and was concerned over the uncertainty of relocation: while the residents of Navalady were demanded to relocate away from their former village, people did not know when nor exactly where they were to move. I approached her after the meeting, and she encouraged Vathany and me to come and see them in the camp on a following day. At the initiative of my friends Sheila, who also attended the meeting, we took the two young women to see the planned relocation site in Tiraimadu. Located next to a neighbourhood of the same name, this site had been recently bulldozed of its Palmyra tree vegetation, and NGOs were in the process of constructing temporary shelters planned to accommodate the relocating population.15 On the way there, Viji and Selvy told us that – in addition to never having visited this site – they did not dare go back to their destroyed former village. They feared being overwhelmed by memories of what had happened there and of another tsunami striking. This was how a long-lasting relationship was born, marked by the tensions between these three places: the camp, Navalady, and the as-yet-unknown place of future relocation, Tiraimadu. 13 | According to official numbers, 1,855 people lived in Navalady before the tsunami, while 1,228 were registered residents living outside this village in April 2005 (Department of Census and Statistics 2005d). 14 | Soon after that remark, problems of “duplication” (if not triplication etc.) developed in NGO interventions among Navalady people, as organizations were keen to find potential “beneficiaries” for their projects at the time. As for the question of relocation, see Chapter Five. 15 | The relocation project encompassed residents of four different villages: Dutch Bar, Navalady (including Puthumukatuvaram), Palameenmadu, and Thiruchendur. Temporary shelters were constructed by Oxfam Australia for people from Palameenmadu and Thiruchendur, by Swiss TRO for residents from Navalady and Thiruchendur, and by Worldvision for those from Dutch Bar.

Chapter Two: A Transitional Place

Along with the examples of Viji and Selvy and our first visits to the two camps, additional elements merit mention. These have to do with the importance of kinship that characterized our acquaintances’ daily lives. And kinship processes simultaneously constituted a social feature of the camps. As noted above, it was Viji who facilitated our first contacts in both camps. With a little knowledge of English and about to attend university, she also acted as a liaison to other foreign and national visitors to the camp. In fact, she married one of these early visitors (at the time a student at the local university) a few years later. She moved out of Central College camp soon after we started our visits and we kept contact only indirectly through her relatives. However, Selvy became one of our very close friends throughout and beyond fieldwork, together with her parents, her elder sister, her brother, and his wife. Having dropped out of school at age 14, Selvy, is more representative of the educational background shared by the majority of our research contacts than Viji. Most of our acquaintances of Selvy’s generation had left school without formal qualification, and their parents had typically spent even less time in school. This also meant that many among our research contacts and their fellow camp residents required help in understanding the documents and filling in the forms that were so frequently distributed in the aftermath of the tsunami (even when they were written in Tamil). Not surprisingly, most of them placed great importance on the schooling of their children and wished for them to gain the credits and socio-economic opportunities of a good education. Like Viji and Selvy, who were related to each other, our acquaintances were largely related to each other. This was due to the fact that, on one hand, as people explained to us, ‘in Navalady, all are somehow related.’ Not all always knew their exact relationship to each other, though the elders were usually better able to determine the connection between our various contacts than the younger ones On the other hand, our research also became based on networks of relatives, because we developed contacts from existing ones. Given our focus on quotidian situations, our acquaintances’ daily interaction partners often became regular interlocutors as well. This was especially the case with our female friends, our major research contacts, whose main interactions were largely with those from among their close matri-kin, who often shared their spatial vicinity too. This reflects on the dominating matri-uxorilocal settlement pattern of eastern Sri Lanka that mirrored the previous neighbourhood pattern in Navalady as well as the current living arrangements in the camps and temporary shelters. Men’s radius of social interaction tended to be wider, given their additional contacts gained as fishermen and the social ease with which they could leave their homes, in contrast to women. Indeed, kinship proved perhaps the most stable element in the web of our research relationships. As fieldwork proceeded, we ultimately maintained close relationships with two extended families and a few other families who were only distantly related to them, if at all (see Figures 2 and 3 below and the name list in Appendix 3). Hardly any contacts occurred between the two extended families mentioned during the fieldwork periods. This was due not least to the fact that

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they, to my knowledge, had only few kinship relationships in common. These counted as rather distant ones. Nor did they share an immediate neighbourhood, either in their former village or in the camps and site of temporary shelters. Our relationships to these families can be traced back to our initial visits to the relief camps at Central College and Zaeera College. From Central College camp, there was Selvy and her maternal family. Her mother, Indurani, soon made a point of inviting us regularly for lunch. We developed close ties with her, her two daughters, Selvy and Nanthini, and her husband, Ramesh, who resided in the camp. Her son Suresh and his wife Sasika, who stayed with relatives elsewhere at the beginning of our fieldwork, likewise became our daily interlocutors later on. We further became closely acquainted with Nallamma, Pusparaji, and Sharmala, three of Indurani’s sisters. The three of them shared space with Indurani’s family in Central College camp, along with some of their children and grandchildren. Still further relatives occupied other rooms within the camp. Among them was Sudarshini, who had told us during our first visit there about the death of her three children and the subsequent birth of her fourth baby only a few days after the tsunami. It was Sudarshini’s sister Lakshmi’s invitation for delicious tea that brought us into regular contact with additional relatives, including their mother, Renuka, and sister-in-law, Deepa. Our first visit to Zaeera College camp began our relationship with the other extended family of sisters and daughters. We remained in contact with Rasamma throughout fieldwork, though a deeper relationship soon developed with her eldest daughter Padma and Padma’s husband, Prakash. During the early visits we also established close relationships with Rasamma’s sister Kamala and her daughters, especially the eldest, Kumari. Among those more distantly related was Panjali, a daughter of Viji’s father’s sister, who told us during our second visit to Central College camp about how her own sister had died in the tsunami. She became a regular contact during 2006, after we had rushed her to hospital in the early stage of her second pregnancy. Also in this camp, we established contact with Thangavel and his wife Nirmala, though it was only in the following year that we conversed with them more extensively. The couple was related to Indurani’s family, as Indurani’s father was a brother of Thangavel’s paternal grandfather. Furthermore, a brother of Nirmala was married to a daughter of Indurani’s sister, Sharmala. In Zaeera College camp, Prasanniya approached us early on to tell us about her deceased son and daughter. Through her, we got acquainted with her (deceased) sister’s daughter-in-law Shanthi and husband Kumar. Prasanniya and Shanthi both lived in the natal village of their husbands until the tsunami, and their situations illustrate some of the special challenges for women living outside their immediate matri-kin. Prasanniya’s and Shanthi’s husbands were related to Kamala’s and Rasamma’s parental family but contact between these families was basically limited to polite attendance at specific life-cycle rituals. We also met with Priya and her brother Shivam in Zaeera College camp. Their mother was a sister of Renuka’s deceased husband, but these families avoided any contact with each other.

Chapter Two: A Transitional Place

The following diagrams (Figures 2 and 3) show frequently mentioned research contacts of the two extended families.

Fig. 2: Extended family 1 (extract) (© Katharina Thurnheer)

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Fig. 3: Extended family 2 (extract) (© Katharina Thurnheer) However, the camp situation also fostered new relationships between people who had not known each other previously, creating what was often referred to as ‘tsunami friends’. Foremost, some of our female interlocutors in their 20s, appreciated these new relationships that signified sources of instrumental help in looking after small children and in borrowing any items required for cooking. Some of these relationships also provided emotional support at stressful moments.16 These friendships formed valuable alternatives to kinship ties at times of conflict with one’s own relatives. Such conflicts between relatives tended to be quite frequent. Sudarshini was among those who especially valued these relationships outside her immediate maternal family. One of her new friends was Vasuki, with whom she shared a room in Central College camp, each with their husbands and children. Vasuki too appreciated new friendships after the tsunami killed her parents and left her feeling rather estranged from her brothers thereafter.17

16 | I adhere to Schnegg and Lang (2002, 19–21) and Schweizer (1996) in differentiating dimensions of social support in analysis of personal networks. 17 | Vasuki’s parental family was not originally from Navalady, and her own husband came from a neighbouring village, leaving Vasuki with few relations in the camp and transitional shelter site. Besides Vasuki and Sudarshini and their families, Parvati, another young woman and her husband had also stayed in the same room of Central College camp (and later returned to stay in Navalady). Vasuki called Parvati her maccaal (female cross-cousin) to emphasize her appreciation of their relationship. Though it could be expected to form a more common pattern, I did not come across other persons who addressed each other as maccaal or maccaan in that sense.

Chapter Two: A Transitional Place

All of our close research contacts originated through their matriline from Navalady or were married to persons whose ur (natal village) was Navalady. Yet the often-stated expression ‘Navalady aatkal’ (Navalady people) was also a wider term used to refer to all former residents of the village. In other words, “Navalady people” could have a different meaning depending on whether reference was made to Navalady as ur or as kiramam, the administrative term for a village.18 As a group of affected people, they shared the same entitlements to tsunami aid, and they could act as one in response to administrators. However, it was clear among them who originated from Navalady and whose ur was located elsewhere. To have been living in one’s natal village at the time of the tsunami did not preclude mobility. Some of our regular contacts had worked abroad for some time or contemplated doing so. Many more had stayed in other areas of Batticaloa previously, which often meant having lived in their spouses’ area of origin.19 This move was mainly motivated by economic and security reasons, and couples settled down in the place that offered better livelihood opportunities or more autonomy from the influence of armed groups. Several also experienced multiple displacements due to war and the massive waves. For instance, Pusparaji used to live in an economically comfortable position in an area further north in Batticaloa district that fell under LTTE control. Along with her husband and one remaining son, she had fled this area in nightly walks along the coast after that son had been detained and another one killed. Some 15 years after having settled down again in her natal village Navalady, the tsunami killed three of her granddaughters along with additional relatives and robbed her once more of her few possessions. I return to the depiction of our first camp visits below in order to discuss stories of tragic death and survival as well as accounts of difficult living conditions with which we were confronted at the time. More precisely, I wish to discuss the aspect of storytelling, which also accompanied a great deal of our fieldwork.

S tories of S uffering While “storytelling” has become quite a popular term for different reasons, I connect the term here primarily with Jackson (2002), who discussed the relevance of storytelling in times of crisis, and with Richardson (1997), who promoted use of stories and narratives in sociological writing.20 Jackson (2002) argued for understanding an existential need for refugees to tell stories: they are driven to tell their stories in a similar vein as they need to breathe 18 | See Daniel (1984, 61–77) for this differentiation between ur and kiramam. 19 | In those cases when women resided in their husband’s ur, they would typically return to their natal places for each delivery, at least among the elder generation. 20 | Please note that I do not differentiate between the terms stories and narratives for the present purpose.

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or defecate. Yet this need is simultaneously confronted with loss of language in regard to what has happened (Jackson 2002, 93–95). Storytelling emerges as a way of claiming agency, of taking some form of control over events that have shattered their lives (Jackson 2002, 36). In telling a story, words recreate the world, and the narrator’s experience of the world can be transformed. In that sense, stories serve to rework the events. Moreover, while stories are told from within one’s imagination, they are always produced in dialogue with others (Jackson 2002, 15–18). Discussing five ways in which narratives can be sociologically significant, Richardson (1997, 29–33) identified what she termed the collective story.21 This type of story, according to Richardson (1997, 32) “displays an individual’s story by narrativizing the experiences of the social category to which the individual belongs.” It goes beyond telling an individual’s story and represents more than the cultural story (which includes general understanding of meanings and their mutual relationships). The collective story refers to a social category to which the speaker appeals while holding on to his or her particular story of a life transformed. It emotionally binds people with the same experiences and thus helps overcome feelings of isolation or alienation (Richardson 1997, 33). We should be cautious about an alleged need for survivors to make sense of their suffering, as Das (1990b, 2007) argued. However, a case can be made for the importance of “achieving a voice” and finding acknowledgment by being “heard” by others. The concept of collective stories and the idea of an urge to speak and be heard help us to think about what stories of survival and ongoing suffering described above have been about. I wish in this subchapter to delineate some characteristics of these stories in regard to their gender implications and the way in which they were produced as well as the possible functions they held. For this purpose, I start off by specifying two types of stories: that of survival and that of post-tsunami suffering. The discussion ends with comparison of the stories to a genre – that is, with seeing the stories represented more generally as a model for expressing experiences of suffering. I may add here that later chapters probe in greater detail such stories of survival and suffering.

Gendered appeals and ways to lament Basically, I distinguish between two types of stories: on one hand the stories dealing with survival (told by several women); on the other hand, the stories recalling posttsunami suffering (accounts of inadequate living conditions faced ever since the disaster). Both types were told within a setting of first-time encounters in which the storytellers related to Vathany and me as strangers. Such stories can thus be seen as a means of introduction: people told us what they deemed important for us 21 | These five ways comprise: the logistics of daily life “timing”; the autobiographical, through which persons organize their life experiences; the empathy for other people’s life stories; the cultural, and the collective story (Richardson 1997, 29–33).

Chapter Two: A Transitional Place

to know. In that sense, they also assigned us roles as witnesses. Conversely, it can be argued, they told us what they expected us to want to know. This interpretation accounts for the general attention that tsunami survivors gained from the news media and aid agencies. The survival stories into which we were drawn immediately upon our first visit to Central College camp took us by surprise. At this very first encounter I had intended to approach the women with rather general and open questions about their lives in the camps and to probe gently for any potential research relationships. Thus we introduced ourselves as student researcher and associate, stating our interest in their daily life situations, the problems they faced, and the ways they dealt with them. In retrospect, I was overly cautious not to appeal to the tragedies they had lived through and actually illusionary about “avoiding” these traumatic experiences. It was then little surprising that while our introduction was listened to patiently, it was immediately brushed away by narratives of death and survival. This meant in effect: no need for impersonal assessments; there was suffering to be listened to. It was Viji who initiated this kind of response with her clear wish to tell her ‘tsunami experience’. Yet the women present seemingly shared this wish and freely narrated their experiences, as did others who came to join the circle for precisely that purpose. The same kind of narrating and listening developed on two following visits to Central College camp. That was the case even when attempting to distance ourselves from questions raised by media reporters or other outside visitors, we told the women and children present that we did not expect them to tell us of these painful experiences. Women’s and men’s stories of post-tsunami suffering were more obviously a response to our questions – to the point of caricature: we asked about their living conditions, they complained about them. When we asked about their problems, we were served with material needs. Questions for possible remedies were met with requests for outside assistance. Overall, people emphasized their deserving situation given their massive human and material losses and further stressed their plight by referring to “others” who received more aid while being less affected (if at all). The requests for us to “help” or support in whatever way was an obvious feature in these stories. Yet there was also the appeal for recognition and a moral demand of us to acknowledge their states-of-living. Interestingly, only women talked about their survival, while both women and men described their post-tsunami suffering in these particular episodes reviewed above. It was only during later encounters that men narrated their survival experiences and expressed their grief over the loss of their loved ones. Possibly women were socially more at ease than men in verbalizing their suffering in first-hand encounters and in doing so in quite public settings. Whenever men elaborated on their survival and the drowning of others, it happened at moments when only close relatives or family members were present besides Vathany and I. The fact that Vathany and I were both women, who moreover stated an interest in women’s situations obviously played an additional role in regard to those who

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narrated during these initial encounters. Having formed a circle of women on Viji’s initiative, it would have been seen as rather awkward in the local context of separate gender spheres if men had joined and participated in our female circle. Conversely, in their stories of post-tsunami suffering, men made a point about how their dependency on aid – ‘sitting idle in the camp’ – affected them as men. That is, they experienced the camp situation as detrimental to their social status and, more precisely, to their masculinity. In contrast to their grief over lost family members, this seemed a deep concern that could be discussed with strangers. It may be worth noting in this regard that women made no issue of the way in which camp life affected them as women. Instead they remained silent about how physically threatening this kind of life could be to them; only in the later-established trustful relationships would women relate to us fears of sexual harassment. Lastly, it can be observed that during the encounters reviewed here, the two types of stories did not overlap in terms of who spoke: none of the women who told us of their survival complained about their continued suffering. Vice versa, the women and men who spoke of living difficulties had not talked about their survival. The concept of the collective story relates particularly well with the tsunamisurvival stories, as they place the dramatic experience of near-death and the loss of loved ones centre-stage. Beyond the personal grappling with these events and possible attempts to create cohesion in the narrative, those listening to the story could also identify with what was said based on their own experiences, while the narrator found her or his experience acknowledged in this identification. Quite likely, storytellers even borrowed from each other’s images or memories in dialogical interaction, especially when such forms of mutual storytelling occured more frequently. We can imagine stories being told that borrow another person’s phrases and metaphors while still remaining highly personal and subjective. Thus the stories emerge as a way to create a larger group of people sharing similar suffering, which also brings about some coherence in experience. However, this aspect of collective identification through storytelling can also be seen in stories of post-tsunami suffering. These narrators too asked for recognition and acknowledgment of their specific experience and situations. In this type of story, though, the appeal is more accentuated – not only for sympathy but also material help. Part of the subtext of the stories about inadequate shelters, unjust compensation, or lack of useful relief or livelihood items was a request for direct help. The “professional victim” (Sorenson 2008, 102) who approached any passing foreigner with a story of endured hardships, which ended with a clear list of requirements, was indeed a familiar figure in Batticaloa in the tsunami’s aftermath. That development resulted in turn from the countless people who

Chapter Two: A Transitional Place

travelled to the destroyed areas, glad to help with clothes, food, or cash in the early weeks after the tsunami.22 Given the post-tsunami context with its masses of “consumers” seeking stories of suffering – the media, private helpers, the humanitarian-aid workers, volunteers, researchers, all of who flocked to the scenes of devastation – Vathany and I must have fallen neatly into the category of these typical figures, more than willing to portray victims and to be of aid with hand-outs. Even when no requirements were formulated, the stories can be seen as appeals to us as moral beings to respond to their needs. In regard to the survival stories, Viji’s shift to the English expression “tsunami experience” while talking in Tamil is telling of a preceding audience. Yet their richness in detail speaks against viewing these stories as mere tools to gain sympathy and possible help from outside visitors. Simpler and more generalized versions would have been enough to attain such aims. And they did, as many flourished at the time. Even so, I think the presence of Vathany and me offered those we interviewed an opportunity to narrate, and the narrating itself may have been most important to the speakers. The way in which other women and, occasionally, children passed by and sat down to join our circle for varying lengths of time, illustrates this point. Some of those present chose to tell their stories, while others simply listened. I was intrigued by the serious attention with which all these persons followed the accounts of others, though they must have lived through very similar stories. There was a dimension of mutual comfort in this, created by telling, listening, and sitting in each other’s company. Personal tsunami experiences were inevitably tied to accounts of how family members died. Herein emerges another notable similarity: by relating to the dead, the stories could follow a pattern of lamentations at funerals, typically performed by elderly women. This was reflected in the manner in which some elder women told their stories, during that first visit as well as on later occasions. Their gesticulating, throwing up their hands over their heads, beating their chests, and intonating their narratives mimicked very closely the lamenting of women at funerals. The way in which they praised the dead and bemoaned the present is analogous to how, during funerals, female mourners idealize lost loved ones and recollect a joyful past in contrast to a deplorable present (see also Nabokov 2000,

22 | My introduction to the consequences of such generosity was a little boy approaching me on my way home in February 2005 with a begging gesture demanding ‘kaasi’ (money). Up until then, such behaviour had been unknown to me from Batticaloa. See Gaasbeek (2010, 131) for a vivid account of the influx of “curious well-wishers” following the fourth day after the tsunami who jammed the roads and distributed whatever they brought with them to whomever they met.

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155). This underscores the point mentioned above that women may have greater ease than men in sharing survival stories.23 Seeing the narratives as a lament for the dead introduces the argument that the stories followed a specific genre, something suggested by the stories of two women heard on later occasions. In both cases, the storytellers had worked in the Middle East at the time of the tsunami and returned to Batticaloa only several months later. One woman spoke very vividly about the fate of her sister who had died in the tsunami, making it sound as if she had been present, as if it was really her story. Deepa’s mother was another who told us in great detail of an incident in which she, her daughter, and her grandchildren almost drowned during a boat accident many years before the tsunami. In both cases, the style of narrating, the gestures, and some of the verbal expressions used made it sound very much like a personal tsunami survival story. I would like this observation to lead into an additional dimension of the depicted survival stories. This added aspect is linked to the way in which stories change in focus and detail over the course of time according to the speaker’s situation at the moment of recollection. Experiences and memories of other moments may become entangled with what is referred to. Here I venture to address something left unsaid in the frequently made comparison of a past (1978) cyclone to the (2004) tsunami: the many thousands of deaths due to war that occurred during this specific time-span between the two “natural” disasters. Just like Kamalanathan, who introduced us to this comparison during our first visit to Central College camp, people would not openly refer to these human losses. And yet, there were potential alternatives to such “silencing” after the tsunami.

Voicing sur vivals I mean to place the stories in this section within their broader context: that of a history of suffering due to war. The point here is that tsunami-related survival and suffering could be voiced, while silence (or political appropriation) prevailed over the experiences of war. As a consequence, it may be argued that attention paid to the tsunami victims potentially formed an opportunity to verbalize other survival experiences directly or indirectly as well as the suffering induced by decades of war. In that sense, stories about the tsunami or its aftermath could serve a purpose similar to that of attending a person’s funeral but actually mourning the death of another. Such was the habit of a friend’s mother, and she represented many others in dealing with her bereavement over the killing and “disappearance” of family members for whom there had never been any (satisfying) funerals during war.

23 | Women are frequently the performers of lamentations at funerals in various sociocultural contexts. Other studies suggest a link between such a role and political action following massive social suffering (for example, Das 1990b).

Chapter Two: A Transitional Place

Lawrence’s work (1997, 2000, 2003, 2007), based on her fieldwork in wartorn Batticaloa in the 1990s, deals with these issues of silencing and practices to counter the imposed silence. What I suggest in the case of tsunami survival stories, Lawrence (2000) clearly pointed out in relation to the way in which some of her interlocutors talked about the experience of the 1978 cyclone. She demonstrated that some of them at times confused the experiences they were recalling: when describing a scene of taking shelter from the cyclone, it could become unclear even to the narrator whether this memory was actually that of one seeking shelter from the storm or from the shelling experienced later in life. As Lawrence (2000, 182) formulated it, it was “politically correct” to talk about devastation caused by the cyclone, whereas there was no space to safely speak about war experiences. Likewise, I think that “tsunami experience” stories were “safe” in that sense, collective stories in which different survival experiences could merge. For at least some people sometimes, they provided opportunities to tell about other moments of near-death and to lament the dead from other times. Lawrence (2010, 102) made the same point in a recent publication when she indicated a short period following the tsunami when, after decades of silence, “graphic descriptions of death were freely voiced”. Some painful and horrifying accounts of survival and death may well have functioned as an “emotional release” from the imposed decades of censorship (Lawrence 2010, 102). In a further step, I wish to point out briefly how the overlapping of war and tsunami experiences came through in the contents of the tsunami survival stories. This also reveals practices with which people responded to the tsunami based on preceding war experiences. A prominent motif in the narratives was comparison of the sounds immediately before the massive waves struck the beach to those of shoot-outs and shelling. Many people obviously mistook the sounds accompanying the tsunami for those of an armed confrontation between the government and the LTTE (see also de Mel 2007; Hyndman 2008). As seen in the preceding chapter, political tensions reigned high at the time of the tsunami, and an outbreak of war was generally expected. Furthermore, it was striking that people we spoke with usually began their narratives by stating the number of family members lost in the tsunami. It is interesting to note here that Lawrence (1997, 141) too reported a practice of relating first the number of family members killed in the case of persons recalling a particular massacre, committed in Batticaloa in 1990. In view of this common pattern among those affected by war and the tsunami to declare the number of family members killed (in a massacre or due to the waves), one is reminded once more of the fact that the extensive suffering following the waves had its precedent (and its parallels) in that caused by the war in Sri Lanka.24 In addition, incidents of people seeking refuge under their kitchen chimneys or by 24 | On this point compare Hastrup (2011, 117–118). Her study of a tsunami-affected fishing village in Tamil Nadu noted on the contrary that some people there spoke at length about their material losses but hardly mentioned the death of their children, as though

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placing their child there during the tsunami made tragic sense: with the hearth considered a place providing some protection from shelling and thus presumed to be a relatively safe place during warfare. Another such example, heard on another occasion recalled the way some people reportedly laid down flat on the floor, expecting shootings rather than massive waves. Many of our interlocutors said they had run to the sea for safety as a first reaction. That logic can also be related to previous experiences when the sea provided a possible escape from threatening “round-ups” or shootings inland, similar to how people ran to the sea, lagoon, or into the jungle to hide during war (Lawrence 1997, 136). A last point I would like to mention here is the showing of earlier living photos of the dead as happened on many occasions during fieldwork (though not during the initial visits to Central College camp). Mothers and fathers especially liked to show us photos of their children, photos which were often only available if they had been with relatives who had remained unaffected by the waves. Many chose to enlarge and frame these photos of their dead family members, though most would only hang them against a wall or place them upon a self-made shrine at a later stage.25 Family photos had a specific power to show the missed unity and mark the absence of lost loved ones.26 What became possible and popular after the tsunami was creation of new family photos based on old pictures. Thanks to new digital technology, family members could be reunited in one single picture. The examples of storytelling revealed the continued suffering, the stories’ additional role in creating social identifications, and how they signified Vathany’s and my introduction to the field. They also indicated overlapping memories and survival skills that linked the tsunami and war experiences; a feature taken up in a later chapter. I now turn to the frequency of quarrels that accompanied life in the post-tsunami camps, and the ever-close backdrop of armed incidents. For this purpose I continue with depictions from our early visits to Central College camp in March 2005.

there was “no genre in which to voice the suffering and the bereavement” (Hastrup 2011, 118). 25 | It is common among Hindu Tamil families to place a picture of the deceased on a shrine or in an extra “shrine room” to be respected in daily puja (ritual to a deity). Only a few among our friends established such a shrine or hung up photos of their deceased in their temporary shelters. Most refrained from doing so, finding it too painful to be daily confronted with the picture of a lost loved one. Furthermore, some of them did not wish to engage in anything like religious practices due to their anger towards the gods that had let the disaster happen (see Chapters Seven and Eight). 26 | See Lawrence (1997, 128) for a similar point about Tamil interlocutors commenting on the dead or “disappeared” when showing family photos. However her argument regarded the lack of documentation to verify killings of Tamil civilians as opposed to other ethnic groups that could produce actual records of atrocities committed.

Chapter Two: A Transitional Place

A D ifferent F ight for A id As we walked towards the back of the camp at Central College on our fourth visit, a man suddenly approached us and screamed about the injustice of aid allocations. He yelled that theirs was the most affected village, but its people never received anything. It was only the others’ villages, which were hardly or not at all affected, that received all the help. He continued this protest: all aid was given only to those staying in the camp’s front rows, whereas people like him, who stayed more at the back, got nothing and were never informed about anything. Those persons who cried in front of the donors, always received everything, and so did those with influential networks at their disposal. Everybody else missed out on everything. He shouted that they (the people from Navalady) had always been called the ‘bad dogs’, and that was exactly how they were being treated these days. Other men quickly joined in, perhaps as much for his support as to engage or prevent a larger fight. There was general agreement that NGOs kept turning up in the camps with forms to be filled out, but no action ever followed. At some point, the angry man went to a neighbouring room and pulled out another man, who looked rather uncomfortable, as an example of someone who had lost his whole family but had never received any support. The agitation ceased once we expressed our sympathies and offered to meet them for a specific discussion of their requirements, but we stated our limited abilities to do anything more than to pass on their messages, since we were not attached to any organization. With the circle of men dispersing, we sat down next to Thangavel, whose wife and sisters-in-law we had talked to on previous visits. He had been silently knitting a fishing net all the while. Shortly after, the man who had been introduced as one who had lost everyone but had received nothing, approached us. He whispered that we ought not to believe everything that the people said: many claimed to receive nothing, while their rooms were packed with bags full of donated rice, dhal, clothes, and the like. He said that he was a member of the camp committee and knew that there was more than enough of that kind of help. Yet he maintained that there was a need to address people’s futures and therefore to help fishermen regain their fishing vessels and gear. Once he left, Viji and several other women and girls joined us and wished to talk about their tsunami experience. Later, Vathany and I took a brief walk through the camp yards, witnessing what many women had complained to us about: the accumulating dirt, littered garbage, and dire state of the latrines. We also came across a huge pile of clothes. A young woman explained that nobody wanted these clothes, because they had been worn before their donation: Immediately after the tsunami, people had been glad for such items but later refused them. Saratha, an older woman, overhearing this explanation, scolded the younger, whom we later discovered was linked to the camp management. Saratha claimed that those in charge of the camp had hidden these clothes for their own purposes but then thrown them out into the sun because they had turned mouldy. Saratha continued

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to accuse the camp committee of falsely informing people in regard to relocation and its consequences for their homes and compounds in their former village. We continued talking with Saratha about the problems of returning and relocating, and just before leaving the camp in the afternoon, we met with Susil, a leading member of the camp committee. He told us that he had just answered the request of an NGO about women’s needs in terms of livelihood support. He said he had replied by describing how women used to tend poultry, sew, or weave mats. He then turned to tell us about the beauty of his two daughters and how much he missed his wife, all of whom had died in the tsunami. On the day when we had agreed to hold group discussions with men, women, and the camp committee on what aid they required, we were not surprised to find that none of the men who had previously expressed their anger appeared. The only exception was a man who greeted us in a happily drunken manner and wanted us to stay for lunch. He showed us the tsunami compensation money that he just received through the Samurdhi system. To his and my own surprise, Vathany took it and handed it over to his wife, whom she deemed the rightful manager of this cash. We eventually left him as politely as possible, and he later left his room in the company of another intoxicated man. We then sat down in the camp courtyard, and soon several women joined us. We started to talk about what they had received already and what they still required in terms of aid. For a while, the man who had greeted us so angrily on the previous visit sat down next to us and listened silently. The women stated their requirements, and these neatly reflected what was being distributed at the time to some people from this camp as well as to others affected. Among the needs discussed were bicycles for school-going children, sewing-machines for women, and additional money for all the families. The most outspoken woman in our circle, Pungode, remarked that the toilets should best be cleaned by people from outside the camps.27 Suddenly, in the midst of the discussion, the women jumped up, and I was almost thrown over as the mat I had been sitting on was pulled out from under me. ‘Kadal!’ (sea), a boy was calling out, and people ran in all directions, expecting a tsunami. Yet some went towards the entrance, where something seemed to be happening. Vathany and I joined to have a look. We saw a group of agitated men, including Susil and other committee representatives, and then two motorbikes, each manned by two armed soldiers, drove right into the compound. Their 27 | Pungode’s remark implied that lower-caste (Cakkiliyar) persons associated with cleaning public toilets should be called to do the job. This was not a commonly shared opinion. However, the demand revealed the negotiations over status and caste in regard to the camp situation (see below in text). Dirty toilets remained an issue as long as all the camp residents used the same latrines. It seems that the camp committee and NGO in charge of water and sanitation had simply appointed a few young women to clean them; an approach that left nobody feeling responsible. Later, when people lived in the temporary shelter, each latrine was assigned to four families, and maintenance worked much better from then on.

Chapter Two: A Transitional Place

colleague stationed in the camp told them something in Sinhala, and they drove off again. Some bystanders told us that there was no news about a tsunami but a few drunken men had gotten into a fight. People stood around until Susil clapped his hands and shouted at everyone to disperse. Several rumours reached us after that about an armed incident in town that resulted in one person killed. Yet the women present seemed interested in talking further about their requirements. When I raised a question about what may have happened in town, it was politely ignored. Only our most outspoken interlocutor responded and did so by claiming that they had never known such troubles when they lived in their former village. Some women had remained standing in view of the entrance from where we could hear more howling motorbike engines. Two policemen came looking later for someone in one of the rooms. By then, our interlocutor, who did most of the talking, claimed that it was the Muslims who received all the aid, thanks to their links to politicians, while they as Tamils lacked such support. I pointed out the things that they had just told me they had received, and the woman laughed to say that yes, that was the way ‘Tamil people’ were: always jealous and fighting amongst themselves. On our next visit, Selvy immediately called us to join her and several of her female relatives in one of their rooms. All of them were upset about a recent distribution of fishing gear that had bypassed their husbands and brothers. They had threatened the camp committee to get the LTTE involved, and the committee members in response threatened to delete their names from any beneficiary lists. The women then described an impressive picture for us about the political affiliations of all these committee members and their families. The discussion turned from there to explain the women’s version of what had happened during our previous visit. According to them, the fight erupted because a drunken man accused another man of stealing relief items. The accused man had come from the LTTE-controlled area in the north and turned up to stay with his mother in the camp after the tsunami, even though he had not been affected by the waves. He responded to the allegations by physically attacking the accuser. Eventually the military and police intervened. After a while, during which the women revelled in ideas on how to quarrel most effectively with the camp committee, the excitement ceased, they turned to prepare the meals for lunch, and we started to talk about other things. Similar scenes accompanied our fieldwork throughout, and we gradually became accustomed to the ease with which quarrels erupted, language turned insulting, and arguments became physically violent. Indeed, our friends liked to joke about their capacity for ‘good fights’. These eruptions of insults or physical violence usually ended as quickly as they started. The threat to involve more powerful actors occurred often, and sometimes happened. Especially during 2005, when aid was widely distributed, quarrels about what was considered fair (and what was not) marked daily life. Quarrels typically involved issues depicted above: anger voiced about never receiving what someone else had – that is, what other persons, families, neighbourhoods, or families were said to have obtained at one’s cost.

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During the time reviewed here, conflicts focused primarily on expected or actual distributions of boats and other fishing gear. The conflicts continued, though far more canoes and outboard motorboats were soon distributed to “tsunami victims” from Navalady and elsewhere than had existed before the massive waves. The incidents described during these first few visits to the camp represent developments quite typical for those days when “male heads of household” obtained the compensation money and purchased alcohol. With alcohol at play, a greater chance of violence arose in the camps, even when many men simply chose to sleep off their alcoholic state. Vathany’s reaction to handing over compensation cash to a wife in one case illustrates the underlying local understanding that the woman manages household money, though the man is expected to earn it. Furthermore, the scenes depicted reveal the potentially profitable (but always contested) positions of camp committee members. They further hint at NGOs’ consultation practice, which was generally limited to talks with these primarily male representatives even when it concerned women. The episode when people ran away in reaction to a boy calling out “sea” testifies to people’s fear of another tsunami, a fear that could result in panic with the slightest rumour of another disaster. Such fears and rumours were frequent and at times linked to actual geological activities In fact, a few days previous to that visit, the government issued a tsunami warning following a heavy earthquake in Sumatra on 28 March 2005. Roads filled with people that night, as they left the beachside to stay with relatives and friends further inlands. Despite Central College’s location far away from the sea, some residents ran away in panic to the temple grounds. That site was considered the highest point in town (people had also stayed there immediately after the December 2004 tsunami). Though fear of another disaster lost some of its grip on our acquaintances over the course of fieldwork, the expectation of the next tsunami remained present throughout. The scene which eventually involved a scuffle in the camp and provoked rumours about confrontations between the country’s war-faring parties testifies to the frequency of all kinds of rumours and the level of insecurity reigning within and outside the camps. During all of this, Vathany and I were seen as following the various developments increasingly confused. Leaving aside many of these details, the scene in the last visit depicted brings us back to the prominence of fights for relief items in the camps. As discussed below, such fighting occurred due to the excessive availability of aid rather than its scarcity.

The most affected, most neglected In many more instances during fieldwork, people tended to present themselves as victims – not simply of the tsunami but of incorrect aid allocations. Hence people would describe themselves as among those especially affected by the tsunami who missed out on relief aid. Or as those who appeared as members of a hardest-hit group, which nevertheless received less in comparison to what other (allegedly less

Chapter Two: A Transitional Place

affected) groups did. Thus emerged the “most affected, most neglected” individuals or groups. This identification process ultimately resulted from post-tsunami aid interventions. At issue here is not the “truth” about such victimhood claims (that is, whether or not Navalady should be considered more affected than other villages and how to respond to it) but how the claims interacted with external offers of aid. Further, the fights following aid distributions reflect tension between claims to homogeneity and differentiation; processes of establishing an overarching group of “people from Navalady” which fragmented into subgroups depending on how much or little they were seen to benefit from aid. This partly mirrored the way outside categorizations on one hand homogenized villages into a group of affected villages (opposed to those unaffected) and, on the other hand, differentiated between and within them when defining and addressing specific social groups. That was the case, for instance, when general entitlements of all tsunami-affected households gave way to specific support extended only to social groups, such as women-headed households, school-going children, carpenters, or boat owners. Moreover, as in the angry man’s words, some deemed that relief items were being allocated according to criteria such as location within the camps, personal skills in staging theatrical performances of grief in front of donors, or influential relationships to those within the aid-giving chain rather than being based on an actual need assessment immediately after the tsunami. Hence aid distribution fostered processes of inclusion and exclusion. Groups formed in response to particular situations of aid allocations. This contrasts with a brief time of reported solidarity among (and beyond) survivors immediately after the tsunami. The overall process then suggests a development comparable to what Turner ([1969] 1995) delineated for the ritual process: the sense of communitas among survivors, who are seen to have been “between and betwixt” (Turner [1969] 1995, 95) social roles in the initial liminal phase following the tsunami. This soon gave way to processes of social differentiation tied to the availability and allocation of aid resources at a later point. These differentiating processes took particularly political turns whenever links to power-holders seemed decisive in receiving aid or when threats arose along such connections. When portrayed among the larger group, the politicization could feed into established, polarizing stereotypes of Muslims accused of benefiting at the expense of Tamils. Along this line, eastern Tamils (versus those from the north) could be depicted as the utmost sufferers, losing human lives disproportionally due to the war and the tsunami, while being deprived of whatever promised them a swift recovery. Some of that was seen in Pungode who blamed “the Muslims” for their plight and who, self-mockingly, hinted at rivalries among Tamils when I questioned her accusation. However, comparisons of this kind of “grand” inequality stories remained limited among the people with spoke with, who more often referred to specific, current relationships: they observed what the next-door neighbour received and demanded the same. Or they called

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for removal of someone from the donor side – hoping that a replacement would be more supportive of one’s claims. Arguably rivalries for relief items always constituted moments of struggle for recognition as a victim. The quarrels were both unmistakeably moral and moralizing ones. Claims debated who deserved aid and who did not – or at least who ought to obtain less. As speakers tended to see themselves as the deserving ones, the rest were accused of greed and selfishness. A general understanding prevailed that those who had lost many immediate family members (particularly children) suffered most. In the case of those specifically affected, such suffering was then expected to result in comparable entitlements. Yet these subjective levels of suffering did not translate into privileged objective entitlement to aid. Little in the allocation of aid could match such an understanding of victimhood, since support concentrated on replacement of material items. Instead, those who ventured had ample room to gain the most of what was available. This applied irrespective of both emic considerations of deservedness and the rather technical criteria underlying distributions on the donors’ side. That situation, in turn, allowed those with fewer skills and networks to compete with to label the winners as ‘bad’ people: those ‘greedy’ for ever more things who selfishly acted only for their own benefit. Interestingly, this vocabulary overlapped with how higher caste persons tended to characterize those in a lower caste when speaking contemptuously of their allegedly unrestrained behaviour. Proverbs also developed to express what was considered to be the wrongful ways of allocating aid: ‘those who lived in a hut, live in a house; those who lived in a house, live in a hut’ meaning, those who had had nothing, gained, and those who had possessed, lost. Gamburd (2010) noted the same kind of expressions in southern Sri Lanka.28 Her article revealed the “micropolitics of status negotiations across a series of identities” (Gamburd 2010, 65). In line with South Asian caste hierarchies and political patron-client relationships, those who receive are at the lower end of the status ranking, while the act of giving augments status (Gamburd 2010, 71, 73). The act of receiving hand-outs thus diminishes status and reinforces the lower position of those placed towards the bottom of social hierarchies. This helps explain the angry man’s outburst and his statement about his group being perceived as and treated like ‘bad dogs’. It further illuminates the fact that many of our interlocutors were themselves glad for opportunities to give something. The many invitations for tea and lunch we received also partly expressed such a wish to give rather than to merely receive. Occasion to perform the privileges of higher rank came some two years later with establishment of camps for newly war-displaced families within the neighbourhood of the temporary post-tsunami shelters’ site. The pride with which some of our friends told us of food parcels that they handed out to these families attests to the status-gaining effect of this kind of gift-giving. 28 | “The person who had, lost. The person who didn’t have, gained.” (Gamburd 2010, 74)

Chapter Two: A Transitional Place

The processes of group identification and moral negotiations outlined so far need to be seen against the backdrop of an almost excessive distribution of aid in the disaster’s early aftermath. According to several observers, the chaos so often evoked during this period only came about with the influx of aid. Many persons who had been working in the development sector in Batticaloa prior to the tsunami held that the sudden arrival of large numbers of “experts” actually aggravated the situation. Gaasbeek (2010) makes a clear point about the expertise of the local population and already operating NGOs in responding to emergencies gained from years of dealing with annual floods and consequences of armed conflict. He argues that such expertise was simply brushed away by the newcomers (see also Fraser 2005). Thus Gaasbeek’s (2010) article illustrates how aid organization, though initially effective, was swept away by a wave of professional and private helpers who arrived the second week after the tsunami. As the angry man said, at this point, help was often offered according to the principle of “first come, first served”. That was also the time of some turbulent scenes of women, men, and children snapping items away from each other and of private donors practically fleeing a place of well-meant donations. Mutual accusations of greediness among the survivors in their competition for aid was soon replicated by the donors, who complained about lazy beneficiaries who demanded ever more without ever “doing anything” in return.29 Such disputes and antagonisms lost their grip on the quotidian, as outside support thinned. Yet tensions remained below the surface, ready to erupt at the slightest provocation. The specifics of the post-tsunami context notwithstanding, anthropologists have described similar processes as characteristic for post-disaster contexts in general. Hoffman and Oliver-Smith (1999, 9) and Oliver-Smith and Hoffman (2002, 11) formulated the social anthropological interest in asking who actually defines or has the “ownership” over a calamity, on what terms, and to what ends. In regard to group processes among survivors and between survivors and “outsiders”, Hoffman (1999c, 138–151) pointed out three phases that reveal the depiction above as typical for a specific time after a disaster. That is, it represents a period when differences are formulated about who is considered “a true sufferer” (Hoffman 1999c, 142) and who is not. It also marks the moment when rivalries develop in response to outside aid. As a period, it follows initial unity among survivors in the face of the disaster, and precedes a time in which these tensions gradually fade while resentment lingers. Typically too tension develops between the survivorsturned-beneficiaries and external agencies. At the peak of tensions, each side is seen as robbing the other, while both claim to possess the better principles 29 | My own growing impatience during the conversation with the women that focused on “needs” largely created by what was “on offer” reflected a similar expectation of people to move towards principles of self-help (a sentiment rather ill-placed since I had initiated the specific constellation by directly asking the women about their requirements in the camp situations).

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(Hoffman 1999c, 146). The survivors savour a special experience that outsiders appear unable to understand, while the initial sympathies of these outside actors turns into opposition towards what are increasingly deemed undeserving and ungrateful “abusers of aid” (Hoffman 1999c, 145; see also Hoffman 1999b, 185– 186). I often felt rather uncomfortable with the frequent remarks about people’s greedy, ungrateful, or “bad” behaviour that dominated during fieldwork.30 In Goffman’s (1961) consideration of the self and his elaboration on “the amoral arts of shamelessness” (1961, 169) I found an alternative reading of these distribution fights and idiomatic statements of never having received anything. In his book Asylum, Goffman depicted the rich “underlife” (1961, 199) of adaptive strategies by which inmates of a closed institution, such as a mental clinic, survive and protect their own sense of self-worth. Through forms of “ritual insubordination” (1961, 316), for example, by complaining, using irony, or by adopting a stiffness in comportment as an exaggerated show of dignity, inmates managed to perceive themselves as in command in interactions with superiors without provoking any straightforward punishment (1961, 315–318). Underlying this is Goffman’s (1961, 320) definition of the self as that something which positions itself between identification with a larger unit and opposition to it. In any situation of social interaction, it aims at striking a balance between these two poles. A person’s sense of being him or herself thus results from his or her sense of belonging to a larger group; simultaneously, the sense of individuality results from strategies to withstand the controlling nature of this group (1961, 318–320). Far from taking the post-tsunami relief camps as representatives of closed institutions or camps’ residents as inmates of a mental ward, Goffman’s (1961, [1959] 2004) notions of adaptive strategies and his sociological perception of the self as embedded in concrete situations of social interactions provide a useful framework for thinking about the depicted processes of claiming the greatest victimhood and engaging in fights for relief items. These then appear as the almost exaggerated performances of “the greedy beneficiary”: exemplified by verbally defiling any competitor or physically pushing him or her aside during distributions, or claiming never to have received anything worth mentioning. In reference to Goffman’s work mentioned above, such practices may allow a performer to gain a certain distance from the situation that otherwise detrimentally affects his or her own sense of self-worth. From that perspective, the processes emerge of establishing a “most affected, most neglected group” and of vehemently engaging in practices that in many ways diametrically oppose notions of socially correct behaviour – all within a light of “normal”, commonly-shared elements of social interactions. I turn below to describe yet another moment of anger and excitement. 30 | I have the impression that “ungratefulness” was primarily what expatriates of Western countries reproached “their beneficiaries” for, while Tamils spoke of “bad” (kuudaada) behaviour. Both shared the terminology of “greedy” and “selfish” attitudes.

Chapter Two: A Transitional Place

S andai : P icking a F ight As I reached Central College camp one morning in June 2005, it was strangely quiet. Deepa’s little daughter pulled me happily into her family’s room and, when I asked her where her mother was, gave a long response. I mainly understood the word ‘sandai’, fight, which had come to be quite familiar to us by the time. Thus I gathered that her mother and other women (who were obviously not in the camp at the time) had gone to “pick a fight”, that is, to pursue their interest in any odd distribution of relief items. Meanwhile, Vathany had arrived, and we went to see Renuka, who had remained in the room shared with her eldest daughter Lakshmi and her family. Just as we sat down, a group of excited women returned, including Renuka’s daughters and daughter-in-law, Selvy and her sister Nanthini, and Vasuki. Between laughter and exclamations, we came to learn that the quarrel had not dealt at all about getting fishing nets, kerosene lamps, or sewing machines. Instead, there had been a fight with a woman of a different village who stayed in another relief camp (occupying another vacant school, Sinhala Maha Vidyalaya). This woman allegedly claimed that ‘all the widows’ in Central College camp were pregnant; a claim said to have been published in a widely read Tamil newspaper the previous day. An upset Lakshmi explained that it had been impossible for them (Navalady women), to go anywhere since its publication without receiving ‘bad remarks’: for instance, a man at the market had asked one of the women staying in their camp whether he could ‘go with her’. The teacher of one of Lakshmi’s young relatives had called ‘all people from Navalady bad people’, and the girl had refused to go to school since. That was why these women, along with two of their husbands, had gone over to the camp at the Sinhala Maha Vidyalaya to challenge the person who reportedly had so vilified them. Relishing their storytelling, it was mostly Lakshmi, Deepa, and Selvy who told us what had happened. They described how the woman had quickly hidden herself in a room as soon as they had arrived at the camp, and other women had stepped out to protect her. The women from Central College camp had scolded and insulted them in turn. Alerted to the agitation, soldiers on duty in Sinhala Maha Vidyalaya camp had arrived at the scene, and Lakshmi had taken the opportunity to accuse the women of sleeping with these soldiers. Lakshmi spectulated that this woman, who (allegedly) had given all false information to the media, had been married three times already and her mother even six times. Selvy added to this by reporting that she had challenged this woman, by asking whether she had come to Central College during the night and switched on the lights to see which widow was sleeping with whose husband? Deepa remarked that she wished to ‘break the woman like a crab’ with her own hands. Lakshmi suggested that the best moment for attacking the woman was when she was queuing for relief items: then, she could be pulled out of the queue and beaten up in front of everyone. Many more details were revealed excitedly, but Vasuki and Nanthini, though

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seemingly enjoying the fun of the agitation, cautioned the others to reduce their voices to avoid intervention by soldiers in their own camp. In the meantime, we found out that nobody had actually read the newspaper article. It was quickly brought to us, however, and, as we read it, we realized that the printed story was quite a different one. Largely based on an interview with a woman from Dutch Bar, a predominantly Burgher (Eurasian) village adjacent to Navalady, it described the problems that people faced in the post-tsunami camps and made the point that the crowded conditions were particularly difficult for women. We proposed reading the article aloud, to which everyone present agreed and silence fell as Vathany read. Once finished, I remarked that there was no mention at all of their camp nor of them as “Navalady people”, and that not a word had been written about pregnant widows or any other pregnant women, for that matter. Our friends agreed, only to burst out with excited comments the next moment. Lakshmi called out that she had indeed asked the woman from the Sinhala Maha Vidyalaya camp to which camp she had been referring – and to ‘which woman without a husband’. Deepa brought up the point that a women’s organization had facilitated the article, whereupon Lakshmi responded that she did not want any member of such an organization to enter their camp any longer: these were all ‘bad women who have no work at home’. Renuka, who had remained silent so far, repeatedly ventured to ask in a sad voice why all of this had to happen. She added that the people from Navalady had lost so many of their relations and all their possessions, and yet such ‘bad work’ was done against them. Lakshmi emphasized this point: due to that article they could no longer say that they were ‘Navalady aatkal’, because everyone thought of them as ‘bad people’ (kuudaada aatkal). She went on to claim that people from Navalady had indeed endured such heavy losses while those from neighbouring villages had been hardly affected by the tsunami. 31 Thus, she concluded, the others had nothing to do but to ‘sit idle’ in their camp and concoct lies. Yet her own village people were full of sorrow over their losses and had no time to create such stories. Eventually we were told that a few men from Central College camp had already confronted the woman in Sinhala Maha Vidyalaya camp the previous night, and that they had also complained about her to the police and the LTTE. Then the women dispersed to take up their cooking for lunch, which brought the excitement to an end. As we left the camp later on, Lakshmi was relaxing outside her room with her mother. She pictured another punishment that she wished for this woman: have her head shaved and her face marked with green patterns.32 31 | This remark brings us back to the point of the “most affected, most neglected”, as discussed above. The village of Dutch Bar was heavily affected by the tsunami and its residents expected relocation to Tiraimadu. 32 | Vathany used the expression ‘like a tattoo’ in her translation and explained that this kind of marking was reportedly a common punishment in LT TE-controlled areas.

Chapter Two: A Transitional Place

In the late afternoon, Vathany and I went to Zaeera College camp. Kamala greeted us there, worried about her eldest daughter Kumari, who was an active member in a woman’s group. Kumari frequently faced problems because of this, with people remarking on her liberty to be active outside her own home. Publication of this article and the commotion it had caused made Kamala fear for her daughter’s safety. The previous night a man from their camp had attacked another woman who was also quoted as an informant in the article (and who stayed in the same camp but was from Thiruchendur, a neighbouring village of Dutch Bar and Navalady). This incident had prompted the intervention of soldiers and the police. The following morning, Kumari had gone to the LTTE office in town but was advised to see the police (– I found this an amusing episode in regard to the locally reigning power relationships). Her mother hoped that the whole story would be resolved soon: at a time when everyone was expecting an outbreak of war, such a piraccinai (problem) needed to be solved quickly, or it risked lingering forever. Once war started, the police would be too busy to take up such a case, and hence Navalady’s reputation risked being spoilt for good. Later that evening, when darkness had fallen, we sat with Padma and her husband Prakash.33 Suddenly we heard people calling out that there was a fire in the main street. Prakash countered calmly that probably some person had not respected that day’s hartal (strike; usually called for by the LTTE), and consequently ‘somebody’ had set fire to some tyres in the streets to counter the offence.34 But then word had it that a major bakery in town was burning. Indeed, large flames rose into the dark sky. People around observed and exchanged their opinions of whether this was an attack, a punishment, or simply an electrical failure. Worries increased about whether or not the fire would spread to the neighbouring gasoline station and ultimately even affect their own camp. Kamala joined us briefly and remarked that the flames reminded her of the 1990s when ‘Sinhala soldiers’, some ‘uneducated rowdies’, burnt Tamil men alive on tyres in the street. Thus the day ended with an indication of the many overlapping layers of violence and trauma that marked the social environment as well as the personal biographies of our research contacts. Violent processes also dominated in the narrated fight with which our day in Central College camp had started. However, I take this field description as a way of discussing below primarily the relevance of gender relationships in respect to the camps’ living conditions. The depiction allows this by taking, on one hand, a different perspective on gender issues in regard to life in relief camps. Instead of dwelling on women’s vulnerabilities, as is often 33 | Padma is Rasamma’s daughter, that is, Kamala’s sister’s daughter and Kumari’s classificatory sister (see also Appendix 3). 34 | The LT TE usually called for a hartal in response to what it deemed anti-Tamil policies or incidents. A hartal demanded closure of businesses, sometimes of schools. Whoever did not take heed had to expect punishment. On strict hartal days, Batticaloa’s unusually empty streets made it resemble a ghost town.

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done, I start off from the demonstrated agency of women defending their position and, in doing so, also creating social control circumscribing their lives. On the other hand, the depiction confirms precisely the precarious situations of women in these places; this reiterates the more common gender concern that feminist studies especially have raised concerning conditions in relief camps across the globe. My discussion is based on the questions of how a newspaper article could provoke such a reaction and what may have accounted for the vehemence with which the women responded upon its publication. For that purpose, I refer to general Tamil concepts of women’s sexuality and of village identification, but more specifically to locally circulating stories that carried sexualised images of women. With reference to Turner (1980, 1987, [1969] 1995), the scene of the newspaper fight depicted are also read as a “social drama” that involved units of breach, crisis, redress, and reintegration/exclusion.

The drama of women’s reputation It was not the actual printed text but what our acquaintances came to know by hearsay that had provoked the agitation at the time. Thus the depiction of this incident demonstrates the power of rumours. What was central to our friends above was that widows or ‘women without husbands’ among them were said to be pregnant. That image conveyed the message that women from their own natal village engaged in non-legitimate sexual relationships: in their words this translated into such women being ‘veecai’ (prostitutes). The force of this accusation lay in the manner in which all women from Navalady (and consequentially the village itself) risked being stigmatized. Thus a group of women strode out to re-establish their “good name”. In attempting to do so, some village women risked exclusion, as the case of Kumari illustrates. Kumari, in turn, acted to protect herself from physical assault and moral condemnation by seeking LTTE support as a local authority.35 It was also through this institution (or alternatively the police) that her mother hoped to rehabilitate her daughter’s reputation as well as that of their village. It is commonly argued that a Tamil woman’s greatest social asset is her karpu (chastity), that is, her controlled sexuality. With the onset of menstruation, Tamil girls are curtailed in their mobility and interaction with the opposite sex outside of family and kin. Chastity before marriage is expected of women to a larger degree than of men, and a woman remains chaste during marriage by being only with 35 | People frequently turned to the LT TE and later to its splinter group with personal or family-based disputes. This step helped intimidate any adversary, thanks to the threat of violence from these power-holders. However, it seems to me that people also sought involvement of these groups as a form of negotiating relationships to restore personal and social standing. See also the reference to kauravam (prestige) later in the text and to the prominence of kauravam piraccinai, which Whitaker (1999) describes within the Batticaloa context.

Chapter Two: A Transitional Place

her husband (Hrdlicková 2008; Leslie 1992; Reynolds 1980; Thiruchandran [1997] 2006; Wadley 1980). The image of widows as leading sexually permissive lives has flourished widely across the globe. In the Tamil context, it relates to the notion of a woman’s shakti, her inherent power, remaining uncontrolled in the absence of a man (Reynolds 1980, 36; Wadley 1980, 158–159). Thus, especially unmarried, divorced, or widowed women are cautious to avoid being seen as unrestrained. Otherwise they risk gossip, derisive name-calling, and social stigmatization. Fractures in a woman’s good reputation have repercussions for her immediate family and that of her parents. Wider kin and neighbours may respond by avoiding contact with such women in question and their families. Since villages develop on kin-based clusters, one can see that a negative reputation of some female residents affects the overall village’s name. In any case, to be seen as coming from a village known for veecai or prostitutes likely translates into occupying a socially disreputable position. Moreover, Pfaffenberger (1982, 151) delineated a tight symbolic link between the moral status of the female inhabitants and the order and prosperity of villages. This kind of link, argued for the case of Jaffna Tamils, corresponds to symbolic imagery drawn between women and villages in eastern Sri Lanka. What matters more precisely is people’s relationship to their ur, their natal village, which plays a major role in people’s sense of belonging and in categorizing others.36 Furthermore, maintenance of a good reputation and respectability in society is of general importance, as the frequent remarks of our acquaintances (especially the males) made clear. This brings the Tamil concept of kauravam, respectability or prestige, to the forefront. Whitaker (1999, 18, 81–93) emphasized its utmost importance for social processes in eastern Sri Lanka: “Kauravam, a mutable personal quality, the socio-psychological substance of social standing (nilamai), is a thing worked out, day by day, between people in the world.” (Whitaker 1999, 85) Personal conflicts revolving around kauravam essentially question a person by asking: “Are you really what you say you are?” (Whitaker 1999, 82) Such conflicts amount to socially dangerous prestige battles that pose great strains on all the persons and groups involved. The scenes depicted may well be associated with such a fight in defence of Navalady women’s chastity and of the village’s prestige altogether. In reference to Turner (1980, 1987), what has been described also represents a “social drama”: units of non-harmonic social processes that arise in conflict situations and which typically comprise the four phases of breach, crisis, redress, and either reintegration or exclusion (Turner 1980, 149–152; 1987, 74–75). These phases correspond to what Turner ([1969] 1995) termed the ritual process, that is, the process through which 36  |  Daniel (1984, 61–103) elaborated on this significance of a Tamil person’s identification with her or his ur, based on an underlying theory of a person’s shared substance with kin and with their place of origin. Yet this particular kind of substance-based theory does not necessarily apply to the local context, as McGilvray (1982a) demonstrated.

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social status is transformed by means of rituals. Given this backdrop, newspaper publication (or more precisely rumour about its contents) amounted to a breach of norms. Through this, a social drama manifested itself, and a crisis was provoked which demanded a mechanism of redress. The redress sought to re-establish the moral integrity of the group, while clear forces were being formed against those seen as the initial transgressors and their alleged associates. In line with Turner’s (1980, 1987, [1969] 1995) note that in seeking redress, the actors’ behaviour can be quite extraordinary, our female friends’ depictions of themselves contradict the usual notions of Tamil femininity that centre on “passivity and submissiveness” (Maunaguru 1995, 165). Indeed, the women used such vilifying and sexualized language that Vathany simply refused to translate some of their expressions. Moreover, the redress had to be public to counter the accusation, which had also been public. This included a confrontation and public shaming of the culprit in the form of Lakshmi’s imagined punishment. It also corresponded with what she later said had been demanded from representatives of Sinhala Maha Vidyalaya camp when they came to negotiate with representatives of Central College camp: an extensive apology must be published in the same newspaper based on a statement claiming that the principal woman informant was taken by ‘paittiyam’ (madness).37 The manner in which our acquaintances described the fight arguably provided some of them a platform to demonstrate their own moral standing. For instance, one of the outspoken actors, Lakshmi, dealt at the time with considerable gossip that invited restrictive measures by her husband. A beautiful woman, she was believed to provoke and enjoy the attention she gained from security personnel on duty in the camp. Similarly, Selvy’s assertive manners as an unmarried woman risked dreaded gossip. These examples reveal how fragile a woman’s good reputation and respectability was, especially given the camp conditions that offered abundant opportunity for harmful gossip. This point, along with a look at the longer history of socially-detrimental sexual accusations against Navalady women’s reputations, is addressed in the next section. Before doing so, I would like briefly to ask what other motive may have been behind instrumentalizing the image of women’s bodies. Rumours aside, it is also conceivable that other interests had provoked women from Central College camp to insult those in Sinhala Maha Vidyalaya camp. The women may in fact have been fighting a battle within a greater war. I suspect that the overall rivalries for posttsunami aid and the urge to demonstrate power between camp representatives played a key role behind the scenes of the fight depicted. It is important to note in this respect that the actors involved represented different former villages associated with opposing political forces. While Navalady was said to have been tightly linked 37 | More precisely, this woman was said to have gone mad with grief over the death of her children in the tsunami. See Chapter Seven for more on this frequent label and the convenience with which it was also used to excuse disturbing behaviour after the tsunami.

Chapter Two: A Transitional Place

to the LTTE, surrounding villages tended to be associated with other armed groups, particularly with government support. Against this backdrop, the fight acquires the features of a skirmish between competing political forces. Rivalries for aid and influence in allocations offered likely opportunities for actual local-level proxy wars. At its very base, the fight depicted was also about emphasizing affiliations and boundaries while demonstrating the skill of Navalady’s representatives to organize threatening protests.

A legacy of precarious positioning Vasuki, though embarrassed, had participated half-heartedly in the events above. She exclaimed two months later: ‘Women lost half their kauravam in the tsunami; I don’t want to lose the rest in these conditions!’ She was angry about the state of their temporary shelter site, where the families had moved to the previous day. Made of grids above waist level, the shelters made it impossible for women to change clothes comfortably. The latrines’ doors held to the frame so loosely that Vasuki feared they would fly open with the slightest wind. The shelter site was expected to increase people’s privacy compared to the camps, but in many ways the difficulties remained – especially for women. On the basis of Vasuki’s statement that day I introduce other concerns that form a background for the vehemence with which our female acquaintances acted out in defence of their reputation. It was mainly Kumari who shared more of these concerns with us. Moreover, her case illustrates the caution that women took in order to avoid gossip whenever their activities took them “outside home”. Vasuki’s reference to women’s loss of dignity and respectability during the tsunami expresses the shame many women felt as they struggled for their survival: the massive waves tore off their clothes or otherwise exposed naked parts of their bodies in public, not least to the person who came to their rescue, who was often a male. Furthermore, many women’s corpses lay naked wherever the waves had thrown them. In a conversation in June 2005, Kumari talked to us about the specific fears that women faced during and immediately after the tsunami. She deemed that young girls especially died in the tsunami because they were hiding naked in the ruins of former homes when subsequent waves killed them. Kumari went beyond that point when she added that some women were said to have been found alive and raped by men. She was referring to a television broadcast on this matter and declared that this had happened in Navalady as well. As if to soften her point, she immediately added a ‘but we don’t know’; while she suggested knowing, she cautioned that one could never really be sure about what happened.38

38 | I often came across cautious phrasing such as in ‘We don’t know’ during fieldwork. It was a typical comment when exchanging news about a recent murder and possible perpetrators. As for the allegation of rape of tsunami victims, see Abeysekera (2005),

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The post-tsunami camp situation added another layer to women’s vulnerabil­ ities, on one hand, and to rumours, on the other hand. Vathany referred to these circumstances as well when I first met her in early March 2005. At the time she said that Central College camp was known to be ‘the worst place’. It was where the most severely affected people lived, and rumours spread about child abuse and violence against women occurring within its walls. She said that when outside organizations tried to investigate further, camp residents would remain silent on what was going on among them. It was mainly women’s organizations who took up the issues of these reports and, in so doing, left themselves open to accusations of spreading false information, as in the response to the newspaper article depicted. This renders evident the difficulty in handling concerns most people wished to silence. Another example that illustrates this difficulty was Renuka’s reaction in early 2005 to an NGO-sponsored play performed in their camp that aimed to raise awareness about domestic violence: she simply said that no violent incidents whatsoever occurred in their camp. An encounter with Vasuki in July 2005 serves to bring the point still closer. When we came to see her that day, after having been told by several other women that her husband had beaten her, Vasuki praised him as a ‘gift from God’. Hardly able to get up (and with her sleeping husband close-by), she explained that she had slipped while taking a bath. Unasked, she went on to describe the gentleness and understanding nature of her husband who, unlike other husbands, never pressured her to sleep with him in these crowded camp conditions. While she pre-empted the suspicion of having been beaten by her husband, suggesting an accident, she called attention to stressful situations resulting from intimacy for wives in the camps. It was evidently important to people directly concerned that violence and sexual assault remained hidden. Anything else was deemed detrimental to their already precarious personal and collective status due to their living in the camps and dependency on hand-outs. Thus the denials resulted from the concern to maintain a good reputation, and the moral status of women seemed to play a central role in these endeavours. This is also illustrated by the fact that many families chose to have young, unmarried daughters stay with relatives outside the camps (a point raised in the article as well). Parents hoped in this way to remain in control of their daughters’ social interactions. Whatever happened, the chastity of a girl was at stake when one considered living in such a “mixed” place as the camp. And this karpu was essential for attaining marriage, a bond considered any woman’s ultimate social goal. These practices of maintaining respectability also need to be seen in relation to camp outsiders’ ways of “othering”, which neatly delegated any malpractices to camp insiders only.39 It was a convenient step for and Wijewardene and Rajasingham (2005) for reported cases of sexual violence against women at the time of the tsunami in Sri Lanka. 39 | “Othering” basically refers to the social process of “constructing” or “making” “the other” (that is, the other is always produced and never given). It is more precisely

Chapter Two: A Transitional Place

outsiders to attribute the violence reported to the camp inhabitants’ ‘uneducated’ status and, implicitly, to their lower caste affiliations. Hence those living inside the camps, needed to avert real threats, deal with actual harm, and build up and maintain status in their own and other people’s eyes. Residents used to complain or joke about the consequences of crowded living conditions and the lack of intimate space in the camps. However, they did not want the problem to become public knowledge, at least not if knowledge went beyond that of generalized stories about difficult post-tsunami life circumstances. The newspaper publication broke with this etiquette, regardless of its actual text. Indeed, there was little in the article to which our regular interlocutors would have objected, had its publication not been seen as an affront to their overall status. It was not actually the text but the related rumours which were deemed so provocative. In regard to the agitation that this article provoked, the longer history of sexualized images about Navalady is noteworthy. I was told at an entirely different violent incident that the tree-lined coastline leading towards Navalady was a known place for soldiers to meet sex-workers.40 Additionally, during a conversation in June 2005, Kumari revealed contempt for ‘bad practices’ that had occurred in her village before the tsunami. She related that non-married couples had disappeared behind nearby bushes during the village’s famous annual temple festival. Such stories strengthened rumours about the village’s questionable status. Moreover, this story represents an explanation for the tsunami itself: according to a dominant interpretation model, the disaster resulted from godly anger with morally flawed people. This model, further discussed in Chapter Eight, bespeaks the various facets that made up the overall precarious situation of tsunami victims. It became evident at several points in the elaborations so far that it was mainly women’s organizations that took up sensitive gender issues. It was their members who took the risk of talking about what many others preferred to leave unsaid. Lakshmi was seen venting her anger against women who ‘had no work at home’, a very common expression to devalue women’s activities outside their home. Kumari’s situation reveals tension that developed from engagements outside her immediate home and her concern about keeping a good reputation within her social environment.

discussed as a process of differentiation and demarcation by which one’s self (or group) is constituted as different from this described other who is often degraded and devalued in comparison. On the question and concept of “othering” see also Fuchs and Berg (1995), Fabian (1995), and Spivak (1985). 40 | This information was told in connection with the murder of an auto (three-wheeler taxi) driver in May 2005. One rumour had it that the driver used to transport sex workers to soldiers at an army camp in Kallady close to Navalady. This explanation attributed the killing to the LT TE, since the LT TE did not tolerate sex work, and the case was seen to serve as an exemplary punishment.

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In her late 30s, Kumari was a mother of three who had competently managed money lending and other businesses in the past. She used to hold the leading position within an NGO-organized women’s group in Navalady many years before. Upon her husband’s wish, she withdrew from that position after marriage but remained the active person behind all dealings, which her mother had formally taken over (the NGO later retreated, and the group dissolved). After the tsunami, Kumari again got involved in women’s groups that another NGO promoted in the camps, and she later set up a well-equipped grocery shop in the temporary shelter site. Especially during our early conversations in 2005, she expressed frequent exasperation over her neighbours and camp co-residents who, knowing her to be a competent person, would refer any information-seeking foreigner or NGO representative to her. She sensed that the same people then blamed her for acting for her own benefit or used any opportunity to cause her troubles. As long as she was without her husband, who was in the Middle East working until late 2005, she was particularly cautious about the risk of gossip. An example was her attitude during a conference on post-tsunami gender-issues, where we met unexpectedly in July 2005. Before leaving the camp dressed up in a nice sari, she had strictly told her three children to refrain from any troublemaking that day, as she expected people to blame their absent mother for any mischief. During the conference, Kumari whispered to us about her concerns for women’s physical safety both after the tsunami and within the camps. She also shared her concerns for women’s property in terms of house ownership after the tidal waves. However, in group discussions, Kumari said that there was no violence, and women faced no problems in the post-tsunami relief camps. She knew from the newspaper episode and numerous other incidents that it was better to not speak publicly about matters deemed shameful. As trust grew between our research contacts and us, and we came to be present regularly in the camp, people no longer sought to hide violent processes from us. There were also some instances of us being approached by women wanting to talk about their difficult situations and beating husbands. The developing openness was not least due to the fact that at the time we did not publicize the violence encountered or stories confided in us. This position evidently brought about later challenges. Indeed, our friends’ response to the newspaper article at the time left me wondering how I would ever be able to write a thesis. This question of “how to write” about the many sensitive issues encountered during fieldwork accompanied a great deal of my writing process. The next chapter’s narratives testify further to that dilemma, while they elaborate on the relevance of gender identifications in the tsunami survival experience.

Chapter Two: A Transitional Place

C onclusion This chapter introduced key actors and processes of our research based on depictions of early fieldwork encounters. Thus a picture emerges of how the post-tsunami relief camps and humanitarian aid were organized during the first six months following the disaster. The depictions further reveal the process of establishing initial research relationships – a process that entailed an overwhelming introduction of Vathany and me to stories of suffering. It has also been noted that kinship formed an important element in the daily lives of our interlocutors and in shaping of our further research. The struggles for relief items described within the context of a surplus of aid also reveal how outside aid created room for solidarity and rivalry, “othering”, and media-effective self-orchestration. Part of this is seen in narratives of survival and human losses as well as stories of continued needs for survival skills in which unjust or ineffective aid intervention were experienced. Overall, rivalries for relief items point out the underlying processes of differentiation and status negotiation among survivors in response to allocation of aid. The example of women fighting for restoration of their “good name” and that of their natal village further indicates the precarious socio-moral situation facing our acquaintances, especially that of women living in relief camps. At the same time, the example raises questions relating to wider, political dynamics within which the fight occurred: the protest carried out in the name of women’s reputation likely dealt with a demonstration of power between politically differing villages. It may be fair to ask “which survival” was at stake in the fight depicted, one rich in real and threatened violence. Indeed, tsunami aid in terms of direct hand-outs would decrease over time, but the dimension of physical insecurity would become more pronounced over the following months. While the immediate post-tsunami context provided a potential platform to consider previously silenced suffering due to long-term war, this potential diminished rapidly as armed conflict re-escalated.

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Chatting with our male acquaintance Murali one morning in August 2005, we observed two-year old Sashi sitting by herself in the doorframe of her family’s shelter. She seemed content, playing with her feet and an empty tin. There was no trace of her mother Deepa, and Murali stated that this was how it had always been: Deepa never looked after her children properly. She just let them roam around to play wherever they wanted. Murali added that this lack of control was the reason why all four of Deepa’s children survived the tsunami. When Deepa had realized the pending catastrophe, she grabbed Sashi, fetched her four-year old daughter at a neighbour’s, and ran towards her husband’s boat, shouting for her two elder sons, who joined them on the way. Without losing a second, Deepa had gotten the boat started and brought her family safely across the lagoon.1 Murali reasoned that because they were often left to fend for themselves and knew how to run fast, these children were capable of saving themselves at the crucial moment. Likewise, their mother knew exactly what to do, her usual boldness enabling her to reach their boat and swiftly drive off. A little later in our conversation, Murali seemingly contradicted what he had just been arguing by stressing the need for parental control. Referring to the behaviour of another young relative of his, he criticized parents who gave in to the wishes of their children. Children needed to be controlled, if not, there were bound to be problems. Later in the year, we spent a day in Navalady watching fishermen drag their boats over the sandbank that seasonally closes in the lagoon. One of Indurani’s grandsons was jumping happily in the waves by the seashore, and Murali observed that growing up with the sea allowed people to acquire the skills to survive the tsunami.2 Just like that boy, children used to play in the shallow sea and thereby learned to swim. That was the case primarily for boys, who enjoy greater freedom 1 | Her husband had been at the Kali temple in Punnaichcholai (located close to Tiraimadu) and was not directly confronted with the tsunami. 2 | The boy we observed had not been caught by the tsunami. Children who had actually survived the tsunami might not have played with such ease at the seaside at that time in October 2005.

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than girls in their upbringing. Yet girls would also learn to deal with the water as they grew up learning to contribute to a family’s daily meal. Murali mentioned Sudarshini as an example, who knew how to keep herself above water since she was used to catching crabs and mussels in the sea, and who survived the waves, despite having been in her last terms of pregnancy. In contrast to this observation, Murali’s own family situation differed tragically: his mother and little sister died in the tsunami. And they invariably appeared particularly gentle, well-mannered, and virtuous in the memories of their relatives. There was a certain logic to Murali’s observation that less parental control could have proven life-saving during the tsunami. Yet the value of social control remained defended. I chose these contrasting episodes to introduce this chapter’s underlying issue, which has to do with the tsunami’s power to question common social values while at the same time revealing the continuing force of these norms and their appeal to survivors in the aftermath of the tsunami. The focus lies on gender, and local gender ascriptions that specifically confine movement of women and girls while leaving boys and men more social and physical freedoms. Thus I dedicate this chapter to what is deemed appropriate male and female behaviour and how these gender notions related to the tsunami experience. The fatality baseline during the tsunami reveals that gender difference affected survival in life and death terms: the waves killed far more women than men in Sri Lanka, as elsewhere. In addition, the tsunami had a generation bias, killing a greater number of children and the elderly. The story of Murali’s own immediate family exemplifies many others: men survived the tsunami, while women and children died. Murali’s little sister was swept off the tree where her parents had placed her for safety after the first wave, and she has remained missing since. The more powerful wave that followed also caught his mother, whose sari-clad body was later found entangled in the barbed wire of a fence. She was said to have turned to walk towards the sea, fearing for Murali, who had just left home to go fishing. His father, who had been with his wife and daughter, survived. So did Murali and his two male relatives, Suresh and Jegan, with whom he had gone out to sea; their fishing boat was dragged off course by the strong waves but did not capsize. All of them lost their closest family members: besides Murali’s mother and sister, Jegan’s wife and two daughters and Suresh’s little son were killed. Murali refused to go fishing thereafter, saying that he was too angry with the sea. He grieved for his mother and sister, while despairing for his father, who resembled a broken man, ever so often overwhelmed by the final images of his wife and daughter. In contrast to this story stands that of Deepa’s and her children’s survival. Murali, and with him many other observers, respected Deepa for having acted so bravely during the tsunami and for having saved all her four children. Deepa was generally known for her boldness. Her relatives appreciated having her fight for their cause just as much as they feared finding themselves in a quarrel with her. In most other circumstances, however, she did not earn much credit from them, for

Chapter Three: The Tsunami’s Gender Face

they considered her dirty in her household chores and neglectful of her children. Her braveness was deemed more appropriate for a man than for a woman, and some liked to joke that in marital disputes, it was Deepa who beat up her husband rather than the other way around.3 What highlights can be taken from these two stories? Notably they include the survival of a woman “as brave as a man” but the death of ever so many women of wifely virtues; the survival of children who grew up with few restraints from their mother, but the death of those whose good manners testified to their parents’ controlling influence; and lastly the survival of men who had been absent when the tsunami hit the coast or who were also caught but survived at the cost of witnessing the death of their wives and children. Slightly overdone, these images reappear throughout this chapter. It focuses on the relationship between gender and disaster: how gender relationships influenced the tsunami experience and how that experience further impacted the relationships between men and women. It asks ultimately how far the tsunami transformed the meanings of gender. Murali and his relatives sometimes commented that had his mother not worried about his safety and gone towards the sea, she might still be alive. Had her sari not gotten wrapped in the wire, she might have survived. As for his little sister and what has been said above: was there a doubt that she would have survived if only had she been brought up less protectively and had learned to swim – even as a girl? If these doubts existed in Murali’s mind and in the thoughts of several others, how did they affect people’s daily lifestyles? Could the tsunami experience have brought about changes in the way parents decided to raise their sons and daughters in the aftermath of the tsunami? More to the point: What implications emerge for relationships between women and men when women who are “as brave as men” survived while those who display essentially “feminine” features perished? And what happens when real men failed to live up to popular notions of male heroes? This chapter approaches these questions based on the survival narratives of two research contacts, Shanthi and Shivam. Shanthi’s story is revealing for the way in which behaviour and dress codes appropriate for “good women” were considered decisive in their death. The conversation with Shivam illustrates how the tsunami experience challenged local notions of masculinity. These two stories are presented here in highly summarized versions while the conversations of which they were a part are also considered. Hence, the traumatic events remain contextualized within the narratives and dialogical situations. But this also means 3 | Deepa is Ketesh’s wife, married to the son of Murali’s father’s sister’s daughter (see Figure 2 in Chapter Two, and Appendix 3). She was also a vociferous actor in the fight following the newspaper article discussed in the previous chapter. Even his sisters considered Ketesh rather helpless without Deepa, yet despite the joke about his role in marital disputes, it was clear from several examples that physical violence remains the husband’s preregotive in this couple’s relationship too.

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that some issues remain implicit without being further elaborated – for instance the degree to which armed conflict and economic hardships mark the personal biographies and daily life situations. Before these two portraits, I pause briefly to consider disasters from a social anthropological and feminist perspective.

D iscriminatory D isasters Oliver-Smith (2002, 24; 2004, 10) described disasters as “complex material events and, at the same time, as a multiplicity of interwoven, often conflictive, social constructions.” Being at once physical and social processes, disasters are made up of a multidimensionality that affects human life in all its aspects and conditions. Therein lies the power of disasters to challenge social systems in material, social, and ideological ways. In terms of impact, the socially and materially constructed effects get unevenly distributed within societies, linked to prevailing political, social, and economic factors (Oliver-Smith 2002, 24–25; Oliver-Smith 2004, 10–11). Thus, while disasters come across as the extraordinary that disrupts former social lives and threatens previously held certainties or worldviews, they are explicable at the end in regard to the prevailing “normal order” (Oliver-Smith 1999, 23). In that sense, disasters can be said to discriminate along established categories of difference, including social class, caste, gender, ethnicity, and age. Ultimately, power relationships lie at the core of a disaster’s impact. Gender relationships have been seen to form part of that “deep social grammar” (Oliver-Smith and Hoffman 2002, 10) that disasters and their aftermaths reveal. Though a gender perspective still awaits full incorporation into mainstream disaster research, it has become widely acknowledged that disasters differentiate in terms of impacts on men and women as well as in regard to the strategies of men and women to deal with the resulting situations (Ariyabandu, Malalgoda, and Wickramasinghe 2003; Bradshaw 2004; Byrne and Baden 1995; Enarson 1998; Enarson and Chakrabarti 2009; Enarson and Morrow 1998; Fothergill 1998). Feminist scholars demonstrate that beyond revealing local, regional, or global power structures, disasters also pinpoint the “power relations within intimate relations” (Enarson and Morrow 1998, 2). In her account as a survivor of a firestorm in California, Hoffman (1999b) elaborated on the non-anticipated emergence of gender patterns long thought overhauled. It was seen that men quickly took over command and strode to action in public spheres, while women were taken up in domesticity, though the home was gone (Hoffman 1999b, 175–177). Hence, even if one may see for change a potential moment after disasters, what develops may not be so much revolutionary, as it is grounded in the conventional. Disaster response and research often stopped short of arguing between stereotypical images of women as a most vulnerable group on one hand or women on the other hand as heroic caretakers of shattered families in the aftermath of a disaster; a dichotomy that also characterized a great deal of the “women

Chapter Three: The Tsunami’s Gender Face

and war” studies (Cockburn 1998; Lorentzen and Turpin 1998; Skjelsbaek and Smith 2001; Sorenson 1998). Moreover, men and masculinities seem only at the discovery stage in much of the existing research and aid practice (El-Bushra 2000; Fordham 2004, 178–179; Mishra 2009). Increasing studies in disaster research demonstrate the fruitfulness of viewing gender not in isolation but in intersection with other relevant social differences, mirroring concerns within wider feminist theory (Cupples 2007; Enarson, Fothergill, and Peek 2006; Hyndman 2008; McCall 2005). As outlined in Chapter One, the disaster brought about by the tsunami in the case of Sri Lanka must be seen in connection with decades of war that have plagued the island. Hyndman (2008, 105) used disasters in its plural form to emphasize this kind of intersection of the armed conflict and the tsunami within the Sri Lankan context. In terms of representation, de Mel (2007b) noted a readiness to naturalize the war and politicize the tsunami in dominant discussions on Sri Lanka: killings along ethnic lines tended to get referred to matter-of-factly as if murder was somehow normal. Conversely, the tsunami impact was seen within its concrete, socio-political framework. Hence, it was generally acknowledged that the tsunami struck the generally poorer areas worse as well as those ravaged by years of war. It was further acknowledged that the waves took the greatest toll on the population segments of lower social status and on social groups commonly known to stand at particular risks of vulnerability such as women, children, and the elderly. Yet in the face of these tragedies, there was a tendency to marginalize the deaths due to war de Mel (2007b, 238–243). In regard to gender, mortality due to the tsunami contrasted with that resulting from war. That is, the tsunami killed far more women than men and produced, if only temporarily, a sudden new social group of tsunami widowers. In the years of war, in contrast, primarily men were killed, casting women into the roles of primary providers for their families, facing social discrimination, and often experiencing multiple displacement (see Rajasingham-Senanayake 2001; Ruwanpura and Humphries 2004; Thiruchandran 1999).4 I will look at possible social implications of some of that in Chapter Four, especially with respect to remarriages. For now, I elaborate on the identified direct, social impacts of the tsunami in Sri Lanka.

4 | The fact that predominantly men lost their lives due to war persists despite LT TE recruitment of women as combatants and the corresponding suspicion of security forces and their proxies against Tamil women as well. Some findings from 2007 illustrate Tamil men’s vulnerability to murder in Sri Lanka. According to a human rights’ documentation, 90 per cent of the reported killing victims between January and August 2007 were men, thereof 71 per cent Tamil men (and it needs to be remembered that Tamils constitute only a minority of the overall population), in contrast nine per cent Sinhala and six per cent Muslim men (Civil Monitoring Commission, Free Media, and Law and Society Trust 2007).

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Available assessments indicate important differences in tsunami mortality according to location and occupation, gender, and age.5 With the devastation limited to the coastlines, they affected foremost that population segment living off the fisheries and thus primarily one endowed with lesser social status within a caste-based thinking. While no reliable gender disaggregated data is available from the regional or national level, several sources based on local surveys reveal significantly more female than male casualties. For example, according to a study from Ampara, women made up some 66 per cent of the dead (Joint Report 2006, 5).6 Emmanuel (2007, 43) quoted data from the Batticaloa District Secretariat according to which almost 60 per cent of the dead were women.7 As for Navalady, of special interest here, Lawrence (2010, 84) claimed that the ratio was five females to one male. Birkmann and Fernando (2008, 89) likewise demonstrated the relevance of gender for death due to the tsunami, with men making up 44 per cent and women 56 per cent of the dead and missing in their household survey in Batticaloa.8 Their surveys also reveal that young (zero to 10 years) and elderly people (61 years and older) were most at risk to be killed in the tsunami (Birkmann and Fernando 2008, 90).9 Reports from other tsunami-hit areas reveal similar trends: Oxfam (2005) drew attention to the way in which the tsunami had discriminatory effects along the axis of gender in India and the province of Aceh in Indonesia besides Sri Lanka.10 In addition, Rofi, Doocy, and Robinson (2006, 347) found that nearly two-thirds of the presumably dead were female in their 5 | Ethnicity, again coupled with location, can also be seen as one of the differences among the casualties with the Tamil (and Muslim) population most severely hit by the tsunami (see Chapter One). 6 | In Ampara, the district bordering south to Batticaloa and the one most severely affected, altogether more than 10,000 people died. In that specific study, 3,677 women as opposed to 1,926 men were found dead (Joint Report 2006, 5). 7 | According to that source, 1,157 male dead contrasted to 1,658 female dead (Emmanuel 2007, 43). Other available statistics from Batticaloa District indicate that of 1,643 dead, 585 were male and 1,056 female, and, in addition, of the 110 missing, 41 were male and 69 female (Department of Census and Statistics 2005b). 8 | Their findings for Galle were even more pronounced with males accounting for 35 per cent and females for 65 per cent of the dead and missing (Birkmann and Fernando 2008, 89). 9 | Their analysis of their Batticaloa survey shows that, in absolute numbers, fatalities were highest among the young (zero to 10 years). However, in relative numbers of the dead and missing in relation to total numbers in that age group, the elderly (11 per cent) and young (eight per cent) made up most of the casualties (Birkmann and Fernando 2008, 90). 10 | For instance, in four villages in Aceh Besar men outnumbered women three to one among survivors; likewise in Cuddalore in India, almost three times more women than men died (Oxfam 2005, 2). Similarly, Ariyabandu (2009, 11) reported that women accounted for only 40 out of 750 survivors of five villages in a sub-district of Aceh.

Chapter Three: The Tsunami’s Gender Face

survey of almost 400 households in Indonesia’s heavily affected districts of Aceh Barat and Nagan. There too mortality reigned highest among children under the age of 10 and among adults above the age of 60. The remainder of this chapter looks at the possible stories behind these numbers. It begins below with Shanthi’s story of her survival and the death of her baby. After a discussion on the femininities observed in this account, I resume the point of a “gender gap” in the tsunami’s death toll when reviewing some of our acquaintances’ explanations. A following conversation with Shivam reveals how the tsunami experience could directly affect notions of masculinities. Both accounts show that by rendering established routines “out-of-order,” disasters may make visible the order at stake.

O rder in D isorder We were spending a relaxed late afternoon in the company of Shanthi, her husband Kumar, and their close relative Prasanniya in early June 2005.11 Prasanniya’s two youngest children were playing inside one of the thoni (outrigger-canoe) that had lain around unused ever since it was donated by an NGO. They soon became bored with it and cried until their mother took them aside and bathed them in a bucket. Around us, other people relaxed, chatting in these cooler hours of the evening while children ran around and played ball. The previously sterile-looking rows of sheet-metal shelters had by then acquired the features of a village. Coconut scrapers, plastic buckets in different colours, bicycles, and laundry adorned the different family units. Garbage was littered everywhere, attracting the attention of some roaming goats, while every now and then a cow strolled by and sipped from the water tanks until it was chased away by a high-pitched female voice. A group of heavily equipped soldiers on mine-searching patrol was passing by on the street, which struck me as forming an awkward but otherwise undisturbing, contrast to this overall peaceful setting. At some point, Kumar took a photo out of his wallet and showed us his beautifully dressed little daughter. She had died in the tsunami when only 18 months old. Kumar and Shanthi described how mature she had been for her age and how well she had already been talking. Kumar then related that they had made a puja (ritual to a deity) for their baba (baby, affectionate term for small children) because it was suffering from diarrhoea. And yet the baby was dead two days later due to the tsunami. Kumar had lost faith in the gods since then and halfheartedly thought of converting to Christianity. Shanthi commented that she did 11 | We had met Prasanniya during our first few visits to Zaeera College camp, and through her got acquainted with Shanthi. Prasanniya’s sister was Shanthi’s mother-in-law (Kumar’s mother), who died in the tsunami. Kumar is also the son of an elder brother of Prasanniya’s husband (the two sisters married two brothers; see also Appendix 3).

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not differentiate between Hindu (shaivam) or other gods and that she liked to pray to any god. Then, Kumar left to go fishing, and we turned to look at photos of Prasanniya’s two children who had also died in the tsunami. Suddenly it was Shanthi’s moment. Almost without any interruption, a cascade of words poured out of her. It was a long story of how she had been caught in the tsunami, how she had struggled against the force of the water, about the pain she had suffered, and how they had lost their child. She spoke in a calm voice while her body vividly performed the narrated events. Shanthi’s two hands were clasping her cheeks, touching her hair, and, again and again in imitation of herself at the time of struggling in the water, she pushed down her dress to her ankles with one hand and stretched out the other as if clinging to something. In a highly summarized version, this is the story she told: It was a poya day (full-moon day, therefore a holiday), and they were at home with the TV on (Shanthi and Kumar lived in Kumar’s parents’ home at the time). Their baba had been crying all morning, which was unusual for her to do. She had refused to be taken by her grandmother, so Shanthi had had to keep carrying her around until she would finally fall asleep. Kumar was sitting outside, weaving a fishing net. Suddenly she heard very loud noises. First, she did not pay further attention to them, because she thought they came from the neighbours’ quarrelling, as happened ever so often. Yet the noises were getting louder and louder, so she asked her husband to go and see what was happening, thinking that someone was getting seriously hurt. Never had she expected it to be ‘the sea coming’. Her husband went to see, while the noises kept getting louder. By then she was afraid. She tried to switch off the TV, but her hand was trembling. Finally she managed to switch it off, and she went outside as well. There she saw people running away, and was told to run as well because ‘the sea was coming fast’. So she ran, tightly holding her baby who still did not sleep. She did not think of anyone else at the time, either of her husband or of her mother-in-law. She reached the lagoon, but she could not see anyone there. She thought she was alone, and kept looking straight ahead where she saw a thoni. Had she looked towards her right side, she would have seen many engine-driven boats. Yet she only saw that thoni with a family of three in it. She pleaded with them to take her along; first they refused, but finally they allowed her to join. As the second wave arrived, the thoni capsized. She found herself standing in the lagoon, with her baba still in her arms. She looked back towards the village and saw her husband. He came towards them and took the baby in his arms. Shanthi somehow connected what was happening to a cyclone her mother used to tell her about: people then had also stood in water up to their throats, but no one had died. She had never heard of tsunamis. Meanwhile, her husband had started to walk away with the baby. The next wave broke in, and a Palmyra tree collapsed, hitting her husband right on his back. He fainted and fell down. That was when he lost the child. He cannot remember what happened after this incident, but some people on a boat rescued him. They

Chapter Three: The Tsunami’s Gender Face

managed to identify his body among all the things that were floating around in the water: pieces of wood, parts of broken houses, and animals too – cows, dogs, hens, all floating along. Shanthi remained alone, clinging to the kollam (outrigger) of the capsized thoni. She struggled against her dress floating up to the water’s surface. She was wearing a ‘nightie’ that held tight around her neck and could not be washed away, and a dress underneath.12 Therefore, her clothes luckily never came off (as had happened to other women). But the clothes constantly floated up her body. She had to keep pushing them down with one hand, while holding on to the kollam with the other. It was so difficult to hold on to this kollam and struggle against the water. So many things, branches and concrete parts, crushed against Shanthi, and she felt a lot of pain. She was in pain but kept holding on to the kollam. She floated along in the lagoon, while dogs and hens passed by her at eye-level, and everywhere there was thick foam. Her hair was full of that foam, but she could not get it off, because she had to cling to the kollam and hold down her dress. Once she swallowed a lot of this awful water when she took a breath. She also lost grip of the kollam once, but succeeded in regaining it. Boats passed, but the people did not see her. They could not recognize her amidst all this foam and debris. And she could not call for help because she could not open her mouth without having it filled with water. Finally, a boy in a boat passed by and saw her waving at him. As she waved, her dress floated up to the water surface. The boy threw a rigifoam box towards her, but she could not reach it, out of fear of letting go of the kollam. Then the boat reached her, and a man helped her on board. As she was being rescued, she struggled hard with her dress, pushing it down her legs with both hands. There were also two other women on that boat, both of them unconscious. A little boy with a bleeding forehead was there too. And there was even her husband, unable to move. All the while, water entered the boat through a hole. She took a can and started to scoop out the water. She kept bailing out water but managed to do so only very slowly. Then they reached the shore, and people helped her to a hospital. A ‘Muslim woman’ there gave her a large nightdress so that she could remove her wet clothes. Her mother, whose home in a neighbouring village had been spared the disaster, came to visit her. Shanthi remained in the hospital for two days, hardly able to move due to the pain. On the third day, she simply left the place to search for her baby. When still on the boat, her husband had told her that he lost the child. At the time, she thought she alone had lost her baby, and she had cried and cried. Only later did she realize that what had happened to her had happened to everyone in Navalady: the whole village had been destroyed. With these words, Shanthi closed the narrative of her survival and her baby’s death. The ending was a common one, representing a typical phrase used by the 12 | A “nightie” stands for a long, casual dress which Tamil women commonly wear at home.

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bereaved. ‘It happened to everyone from Navalady, not only to me’ – an expression used to describe how they had first felt absolutely alone and overwhelmed by their loss, but how later they had found some comfort in knowing they were not alone in their grief. It was also the common phrase used to comfort a person crying in memory of lost family members. The words reminded the bereaved that many others shared their suffering. They helped counter a bereaved person’s feeling of being singled out or somehow feeling guilty for the deaths.13 There was no direct accusation against her husband for having lost their child in Shanthi’s narrative that evening nor in other conversations with us. Nor did she express any particular anger with a god that failed to prevent the disaster. Shanthi’s position on these points seemed to differ from that of many others who engaged in vociferous allegations against other persons and against the gods concerning their roles in what happened. Some of this shows up in Shivam’s account shortly and in later chapters. For now, I will continue to summarize the rest of our conversation with Shanthi that evening and discuss further points of her story. Following her long narrative, Shanthi stated that she wished to leave the camp. She found it difficult to live among people who were always afraid of another disaster. Even a minor incident could result in panic. She remembered an episode when all the surviving residents of Navalady were staying in the camp at Central College: a man had started to scream suddenly and called for help, and everyone ran away. People wanted to run to the temple where they had stayed immediately after the tsunami (it being located slightly higher than the rest of the town), until soldiers on camp guard duty could convince them that there really was no tsunami. Actually the man had been in pain, and that was why he had cried out. Yet it caused people to panick and flee. People were overcome by fear on many other occasions. More recently, for example, when the bakery burned, and everyone expected a terrible explosion. Or earlier, a woman ran out of her shelter in burning clothes, causing others to run off in all directions, crying that everyone was going to die.14 Shanthi said she was already afraid herself and wished to be spared these unwanted commotions; the camp was a ‘bad’ place to live. She had difficulties sleeping, and just the previous night she had leapt out of her sleep screaming when her husband returned from fishing in the night and she mistook him for a ghost. Being in her third month of pregnancy, she was also worried for the safety of the child that she was expecting. That morning, for example, strong winds had blown a tin sheet off a shelter’s roof and had almost hit a small child. Shanthi and her husband were considering moving away at the time and staying in a hut in her mother’s compound. There was no space for them in her 13 | Interestingly, Samaraweera (2003, 210) noted the same phrase as a significant coping mechanism among war-affected Tamils in Sri Lanka (see also Chapter Six and Chapter Eight). 14 | This example refers to an incident when a husband set fire to his wife during a quarrel (see discussion on the frequency of domestic violence in Chapter Four).

Chapter Three: The Tsunami’s Gender Face

mother’s house, which was already occupied by her two unmarried siblings, another sister with her husband and children, and her mother. Yet there was enough space outside, and Shanthi and Kumar were thinking of erecting a shelter there, provided they continued to receive post-tsunami aid.15 Shanthi then restated her wish to leave the camp. She mentioned that she did not relate well to people from Navalady, and that she limited her contacts to her relative, Prasanniya. That had been the case before the tsunami as well; she used to stay at the home of her parents-in-law. Shanthi stated another example illustrating her aloofness from Navalady people by referring to the fight following the newspaper article described in the preceding chapter: when women from Central College camp arrived to recruit others to join in their fight against a woman in another camp, she had refused to go along. They called her names in response and accused her of sexual permissiveness – that is, of having herself ‘done all that what was said in the newspaper’. Shanthi said she did not care about such quarrels, and she simply did not want to get involved. She added that she used to work in the Middle East before her marriage, but nobody knew about this outside her family. She did not want to have it known in Navalady, out of fear of gossip and its harmful consequences. By the time of our conversation, it had become dark. The families opposite Shanthi’s and Prasanniya’s compartments had lit a fire in the sand, children sang and danced, and adults clapped to the rhythm. It seemed so idyllic, this camp, so much a little village. If only all these tragic stories had not lied beneath it, shattering the fragile surface every so often. We left the camp impressed by Shanthi’s story and how it related to previous conversations we had had with her.

Biographical note During a previous visit, Shanthi had advised Prasanniya not to give any food to the children at sunset. That time was reserved for the God Shiva arranging a dish for everyone in paradise. Shanthi continued to be a source of such kind of knowledge to us, well versed in possible causes of misfortune and ill-health. This could be inflicted by malicious spirits or the evil eye, so Hindu Tamils knew how to respond when such precarious situations did occur. These things especially mattered during Shanthi’s pregnancy and in regard to care of her baby after its birth in December 2005. Shanthi also continued to impress me by her direct way of asking for advice or help in terms of their living situation. I also noted the way she remained close to her mother and parental family, who lived a few kilometres away. 15 | Indeed the UNHCR encouraged people to move out of camps (often so they could stay in huts within the compounds of relatives). Though Shanthi often toyed with the idea of moving to her mother’s compound and of building a family home there, the couple continued to stay in the camp and later in the transitional shelter, before obtaining a new house within the relocation scheme.

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As she had explained during our conversation depicted above, Shanthi indeed interacted little with her neighbours. Some two months after our conversation, the good relationship with Prasanniya broke down, and the two families did not speak to each other for more than a year.16 Shanthi remained largely with her husband Kumar, his father and sister, and her new baby when they lived in the transitional shelters. The relationship with Kumar’s father was a fraught one, given his alcohol dependence and troublesome manner when drunk. The father’s excessive drinking also burdened Kumar, who took over most of his younger sister’s responsibilities until she married in 2006. The father excused his drinking habits on several occasions as a consequence of grief for his wife and grandchild who had both died in the tsunami. The rest of the family did not object to this explanation, but its members also made it clear that he used to drink and ‘make troubles’ in the pretsunami time as well. At the time of my brief return to the field in early 2009, Shanthi had had another child, her third daughter, all three of them sharing similar names.17 The young family was living in its new home in the relocation site, sharing the household with Kumar’s sister and her husband and baby. Kumar’s father was said to be in a somewhat better state, and the relationship to Prasanniya’s family as well as the relationship to Kumar’s brother’s family was re-established after having broken down during a quarrel in 2005 as well. However unstable the relationship with Kumar’s parental family had been during the first two years after the tsunami, Shanthi always maintained close contact with her mother and siblings who continued to live in a village close to Navalady. Her father had died when she was in her late teens, pushing the family into poverty.18 Her mother had engaged in small businesses and earned only some LKR 70 to 100 per day even in 2005 by pounding rice in other people’s homes. At the time, Shanthi’s younger unmarried sister gained a daily income of even less

16 | Contacts between relations commonly included periods of “not speaking to each other” due to quarrels over money or breaches of etiquette (for instance, when one party felt left out in marriage arrangements). 17 | The two babies born after the tsunami were named after the first daughter. See Chapter Six for “post-tsunami babies” and name-giving practices. 18 | Shanthi had six siblings. Among them, one brother was never heard of since childhood when he had been sent away to the capital with neighbours. Another brother died at the age of three due to an illness. An elder brother was killed as an adult; the murder followed that of his brother-in-law (Shanthi suspected these killings to be related). A younger brother was kidnapped on his way to school by the LT TE but escaped at the time of Karuna’s split in 2004. He remained at his mother’s, yet paramilitaries increasingly threatened his family during 2005. The family at last managed to send him abroad as a migrant worker (a common strategy for protecting young people from recruitment).

Chapter Three: The Tsunami’s Gender Face

with some LKR 45 for stitching work.19 For such reasons Shanthi had previously migrated to the Middle East to earn a better salary and provide herself with the means of building a dowry house. Before migrating, she met Kumar, who wished to marry her and made no dowry demands. She agreed, and they married after her four years abroad. They stayed in Kumar’s parents’ home, planning to have their own house close to Shanthi’s mother one day. The fact that Shanthi stayed among the residents of her husband’s village, rather than in her own natal place seemed to place her in a precarious situation concerning social relationships and reputation before and after the tsunami. Her relative social isolation in Navalady was dramatically revealed during the depicted survival narrative when she stood alone, begging a family to be taken aboard their thoni. That scene can be taken as a symbol of her living apart from her own matrikin, from whom support seemed more readily granted. Furthermore, Shanthi’s wish to conceal the fact that she had spent years abroad bespeaks a fear of maligning gossip. Though labour migration had become a frequent pattern (and however welcome the remittances involved), when women migrated, it enhanced the gossip they risked as soon as it was known that they worked outside their homes.20 She also risked gossip due to frequent absences from her home as she continued to spend a lot of time with her mother. By supporting her aging mother in many ways, she did not differ from other women around her, though she had to cope with the decisive difference of doing so at some distance from her own home. The incident in which women enraged by the newspaper article reportedly accused Shanthi of sexual permissiveness brought her risk of social harm to the crisis point. Shanthi also complained that others disputed her claims for relief items. Indeed, the couple faced difficulties in gaining a separate shelter during their transition from the camp to the temporary shelter site.21 19 | In comparison, the “cash-for-work” programmes offered by NGOs after the tsunami usually paid a worker LKR 350 or 450 a day in government-controlled Batticaloa in 2005 (see also Chapter Two). 20 | See Thangarajah (2004) for female labour migration from eastern Sri Lanka. Such migration is often motivated by women’s wish to earn the means to build their dowry houses as was the case for Shanthi. These women thus aim at acquiring the basis for marriage while being socially accused of undermining family values. 21 | Shanthi and Kumar indeed faced entitlement difficulties. The couple’s claim of forming a separate household and thus being entitled to separate aid allocation could be disputed according to official post-tsunami aid criteria, because they had lived with Kumar’s parents before the tsunami. However, this same kind of (shared) household arrangement did not prevent other couples from being recognized as a separate household and thus being entitled to aid allocations as a family. I suspect that it was mainly the couple’s permanent residence in Navalady that was disputed. If Shanthi and Kumar were treated as residents of Shanthi’s mother’s village (where they had started building a house), they would not have been entitled to post-tsunami aid. Residence (and thus entitlement) depended on

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Shanthi’s fears of harmful gossip and social exclusion in the aftermath of the tsunami parallels in several ways the paradoxical situation of women forced into the role of primary household providers due to absences, deaths, or disabilities of their husbands due to war. Several studies noted that women working outside their homes to maintain their households economically risked being accused of neglecting their families or engaging in sex work by their neighbours and coresidents in camps for the war-displaced (Elek 2003; Thiruchandran 1999; Zackariya and Shanmugaratnam 2002). More specifically, the fears and allegations reflected her socially fragile status of living apart from her matri-kin, within an environment where matri-focality predominates at least on a normative level. Prasanniya shared a similar situation, discussed in Chapter Seven.

Femininities obser ved Shanthi’s narrative of her survival in the tsunami recalled her struggle to survive “as a woman”, trying to adhere to expected behaviour appropriate for any decent woman in the given context. This can be seen by the importance she placed in keeping her body covered and bearing no naked parts to others (especially not to men). In her description of the chaos breaking loose during the tsunami when objects, animals, and people floated around, the image of the foam encroaching on her hair also expresses the horror of dirt that marred a specific symbol of femininity. Indeed, Shanthi wore particularly long and well-kept hair, a point of pride for any “good” Tamil woman, according to local gender repertoire. The story underscores the metaphors of physical and social survival; in other words, it expresses how “nature” and “culture” relate to each other. Shanthi’s narrative demonstrates her will to survive and illustrates how she takes action to survive as a woman. Instead of mimicking a helpless victim, she helped keep the boat trip safe, sensing herself to be the ‘only one present with a good mind’ at that moment. I elaborate on these points below with reference to many other survival narratives. Shanthi’s fear of being seen naked mirrors that of many other women’s concerns at the time of the tsunami. Several women noted their embarrassment when they had to face their rescuers half-naked. The force of the waves tore the clothes off people, especially if they had been wearing only a sarong at the time. While embarrassing to anyone, the shame of being seen undressed differed by gender and generation. For instance, Rasamma, Kumari, and Priya elaborated on different occasions that many young women in particular died in the tsunami because of shame at being seen naked by (male) strangers: having lost their clothes, these women hesitated a moment too long, refused to be rescued, or hid their bare bodies in houses that then collapsed upon them. Another explanation for the death of “girls” was that these unmarried women lacked husbands who confirmation by the local state representative at the village level after the tsunami, since actual residence did not always match a person’s official record.

Chapter Three: The Tsunami’s Gender Face

could have saved them. Such an explanation neatly conjures up men as the “natural” rescuers of women, as discussed in regard to the following conversation with Shivam. In contrast to the depicted sense of young women’s shame, several old women laughed at their memory of having passed all day bare-breasted, searching for their family members after the tsunami, without eve-9*/= n noticing their condition. In a similar vein, Padma joked about one of her male relatives who had been staggering around naked after the tsunami. It seemed that nakedness in men and old women could still be joked about; yet the shame and fatal consequence of being seen undressed specifically handicapped and even doomed young, unmarried women. Like Shanthi’s story, that of Panjali below testifies to the particular difficulties women struggled with during the tsunami. But it also explicitly bears witness to their demonstrated strength in the face of death. Panjali, another young mother, told us about her survival during one of our first visits to Central College camp. She started off her narrative by describing how she saw her sister drown in front of her eyes; she kept seeing the scene in her sleep again and again. The following story indicates Panjali’s feelings of guilt for her sister’s death. Yet it also illustrates some of the frequently mentioned points in regard to women’s death and survival. They had been together that morning: Panjali with her three-year old daughter, Panjali’s sister with two of her daughters, and Panjali’s mother. When the waves arrived, her sister urged all of them to climb up a tree, and she helped her eldest daughter, Panjali, and Panjali’s child to do so. Apparently, Panjali’s daughter wore a salwar kameez (a long blouse with slacks), and she could climb up the tree quickly. In contrast, Panjali, wore a dress which made it very difficult for her to get up that tree. Her sister had helped and remained standing underneath the tree. She had held herself to its trunk, but the next strong wave had swept her away. Panjali then witnessed her sister getting entangled in barbed wire: her long hair, kept untied that time as she had just been about to take a ‘head bath’ next to the compound’s well, got hooked in a loose part of a fence, which captured her whole body. Despite these scenes, Panjali expressed her amazement over the capacities of women during the tsunami at the end of her narrative. Her elderly mother, for instance, managed to get on top of a tall tree with a six-year old granddaughter, and Panjali’s sister-in-law saved herself in a tall tree despite her advanced pregnancy. Out of fear, said Panjali, women had gained such strength that it enabled them to do what they never thought themselves capable of doing. Panjali’s amazement over women’s strengths and skills at a time of danger was a rather unique expression compared to the more common lament over the tragic death of loved female relations. As seen so far, survivors tended to relate the reasons for women’s numerous deaths to what specifically characterized women in terms of behaviour, attitudes, and appearance. Women seemed to have attended to others at the expense of their own lives. They were prevented from swift life-saving actions by lack of previous experience or by being seen as simply too weak physically to withstand the waves. What women were typically

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wearing at the time of the tsunami further seemed to undermine their chances of survival: the home dress hindered agility, the bathing sarong was torn away, and the sari worn in anticipation of a temple visit effectively entangled them. The reported shame vis-à-vis the possible rescue of women who had lost their clothes has already been noted. This tragedy of their death partly reflects the way in which the bereaved represented their dead in virtuous terms: ‘all the good people died in the tsunami’ was a frequent statement. Those lost appeared on the best of terms in the memories of those who remained alive. Hence, all the “good” (docile, selfsacrificing, and chaste) women were lost due to the massive waves. However, a case can be made for the actual force of socially produced differences in attitudes and skills as well as the relevance of dress styles as it affected women’s and men’s chances to survive the tsunami. Differences in socialization and daily life practices likely positioned boys and men at an advantage compared to girls and women. These varying attitudes related to climbing up trees, running fast, or, indeed, swimming (see also Ariyabandu 2009, 11–12; Hyndman 2008, 109; Oxfam 2005; Samuel, Kottegoda and Kuru-Utumpala 2005). What remained less elaborated in survivor accounts but may have been decisive were people’s locations at the moment when the tsunami hit. That is, the likelihood of being directly exposed to the waves’ force differed by gender and was linked to prevailing gender-based division of labour. Based on our fieldwork conversations, it is evident that many men had been out at sea fishing. The waves there had moved underneath their boats relatively calmly but swelled as they approached the coast (see also Oxfam 2005, 3, 6). In fact, expectations of a particular good catch seemed to have prevailed that day, which possibly attracted even more fishermen to leave for the sea.22 Several men had also left their coastal village to go to the market further away from the sea. Doing Sunday shopping at the market fulfilled what is considered a typically male activity in the local context. In contrast, women remained largely at the coast, together with young children and the elderly. Since the tsunami struck around nine o’clock in the morning, it coincided with the time when women were engaged in household chores or about to bathe at the well within the compounds of their homes. Some had also been ready to go to a temple to observe the poya day. In sum, with the waves’ destructive force unfolding upon the coastlines, they killed primarily the many women, children, and old people who typically stayed in and around homes that dotted the seashore. In that sense, the local division of labour that ascribed the sea to men and the beach with its

22 | According to some of our acquaintances, large swarms of fish had been spotted the previous day, raising expectations of another good catch on that 26 December 2004. Whenever signs for good fishing opportunities emerged, the sea would swarm with boats and canoes. The expectation of a good catch may have also encouraged more men to go out for fishing despite that day being a religiously important poya day.

Chapter Three: The Tsunami’s Gender Face

homes to women (together with their children and the elderly) proved fatal along the axes of gender and generation.23 Resuming the point of how people tended to explain the obvious difference in tsunami mortality for men and women in gender-specific behaviour terms, one may ask whether women were encouraged in the aftermath to act differently. That is, did women learn to swim, climb up trees, wear trousers, and be “bold” rather than “chaste”? Were they urged to develop the skills and strengths which Panjali noted that women demonstrated when the tsunami struck? Shanthi’s portrait suggests the opposite. It illustrates instead what was at stake for women if they were to give up customary notions of appropriate female roles and behaviour. And what was more likely than consciously rupturing social patterns was taking precautions to remain on the “decent” side of things. An anecdote of yet another young woman demonstrates this: each time Sasika returned to Navalady after the tsunami, she wore trousers under her long dress to prevent showing her bare legs in the case of another expected disaster. I now turn to describe a conversation with Shivam, which culminated in a narrative of how he survived the tsunami and grappled with guilt feelings for the death of others in its aftermath. It discusses what may happen to men who were indeed at home when the tsunami struck but failed to fulfil expectations of heroic men acting to rescue women.

S udden C hanges We met Shivam, a young, unmarried man in his 20s, through his older sister Priya in May 2005. Priya was a widowed mother of two, with whom we had already spent some time talking about her former life in Navalady, the fear of returning there, and the overall uncertainty related to the prospects of relocating to a new place.24 Shivam popped up at times during our conversations with Priya and other 23 | The same finding relates to Indonesia and India, two other areas heavily affected by the tsunami: while details on gendered division of labour differed, women, children, and the elderly remained exposed along the coast, while men were out at sea fishing or engaged in other activities away from the beachside (Oxfam 2005). 24 | Priya’s husband died (possibly by murder) several years earlier, and she managed to provide for her two children through various means of gaining a little income, such as tending a person’s coconut trees, selling snacks, and hiring out the family’s canoe. When still very young, Priya’s father died, and her mother remarried and had more children (including Shivam). That husband subsequently left the family. At the time of our conversation, Priya’s and Shivam’s mother formed a household with Shivam and with her youngest daughter. An elder daughter died in the tsunami (leaving behind a small child), while one son had been killed by government forces and another had been abducted by a militant Tamil group several years earlier.

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female relatives and neighbours to tease everyone for what he claimed to be our main interest: dwelling on personal tsunami experiences. He also sought our help in obtaining treatment for a friend from Navalady who used to be well-off but now lacked the means for a necessary operation. Shivam challenged the presence of NGOs and foreigners and stated that what was primarily needed was financial help for his village. Thus, while our conversations with his sisters developed in a relaxed way, our encounters with Shivam had been rather confrontational up until that evening. And the challenges remained after the evening’s unexpectedly long conversation with Shivam, who joined us as we sat with Priya and a neighbouring woman in front of Priya’s shelter in Zaeera College camp. At the beginning of our conversation, we talked about that day’s news: a dead body discovered in the lagoon. According to the police, it was the corpse of a tsunami victim. However, our acquaintances maintained that it was yet another recent murder, referring to the frequent killings and likewise frequent occurrence of finding casualties in the lagoon. They thought that the police simply wanted the corpse to be a tsunami victim, because the police would obviously be unable to identify the perpetrator in case of murder. Just the previous day, the driver of a three-wheeler taxi had been killed in Batticaloa town, and two days earlier a corpse was found dumped on the main street. Nothing ever happened in such cases other than, at best, a note in the daily paper about a person shot down by “unknown gunmen”. Shivam said laughing that he had stopped his activities for TRO, which he had undertaken after the tsunami, precisely in fear of being killed when seen as connected (even indirectly) to any armed group. Soon our topic of conversation shifted to the prospect of a canoe distribution by an NGO in which Shivam revealed that he already received a thoni through some private help. That donation had enabled him to engage in the recent prawn season and make good money. He pointed to his golden necklace and finger-ring that he said he purchased from the proceeds. Most of his village’s other men had missed out on this chance, still lacking the necessary fishing equipment lost in the tsunami. Shivam reflected on the rapid changes brought about by the tsunami, rephrasing a popular idiomatic expression of the time: ‘Who never had a boat has one now; Whoever was living in a house made of bricks now lives within metal sheets’. He mentioned his friend who used to own two boats and a thoni but could no longer afford the costs of an operation in one of Colombo’s well-known private hospitals. With that, Shivam went on to elaborate on the economic development that had occurred in Navalady before the tsunami, stating that people had become rich and lived in solid houses. He too used to have a motorized fibreglass boat, several different kinds of fishing nets, and a big stereo set. All that wealth was acquired through fishing. All this was lost in the tsunami. Priya’s neighbour summarized his points in affirmation: ‘The sea gave us everything we needed, the fish for curries and extra money. And then it took everything away.’ Shivam continued to praise the fishing trade and former life in Navalady, picturing the wealth of the sea as open to anyone: ‘The sea is a bank for which

Chapter Three: The Tsunami’s Gender Face

you don’t need a key.’ He admitted to the unreliability of income, when fishermen returned home without any gains, only to triumphantly claim that a fisherman could as easily gain LKR 9,000 within 10 minutes.25 This was a larger sum than many with a government job could expect to get at the end of month. The only problem with all that, according to Shivam, was that the youths did not take their education seriously enough. They dropped their schooling because of the easy money that fishing offered, he concluded. That was the case for boys and for girls as well, Shivam said laughing, because they expected to marry a fisherman who would provide them with everything. He started fishing early himself, doing his homework on the boat, holding the books in hand with a fishing net tied to his toe. Thus he finished his O-levels.26 However, he regretted not having learned any English, so that he could now communicate directly with the many foreigners who had come after the tsunami. He also mused that he could work for an NGO if only he knew some English. Then Shivam explained a particular fishing method to us, the karaivalai or beach seine fishing, a highly lucrative business in his account. He claimed that one could earn ‘three laks’ (LKR 300,000) within two hours. Some 20 men at the beach pull ashore a large net extended from a boat and immediately load the rich catch into a cooler. One third of the profit was said to go to the boat and net owner, and the men who pulled in the net shared the rest on equal terms.27 Women, according to Shivam that evening, are not involved in this work. Contradicting Vathany’s remark based on an earlier conversation with Lakshmi, Shivam was clear on his point that women played no role in this endeavour. He maintained that the men threw away the small fish when handling the catch. Later women collected these fish on the beach and could keep them to make dried fish or hand them over to the net owner for a minor payment.28 In Shivam’s words, women

25 | See the preceding Chapter Two, footnote seven, for currency rate and average income data. 26 | Secondary school, commonly completed at the age of 16. Most of Shivam’s agemates among our acquaintances had left school already by age 14. 27 | Hence the main part of the claimed LKR 300,000 goes to the owner of the boat and net, who is also solely entitled to the particular stretch on the beach. Evidentally the actual profit varies, and other informants referred to a differing number of men involved and payments received. According to an assessment by Save the Children (2005), the average daily income can be as low as LKR 100 to LKR 200 for those who depend on that fishing technique as the labourers who pull in the net. On karaivalai in Navalady, see also Lawrence (2010). 28 | Lakshmi had told us on another occasion that the women in Navalady too used to participate in this endeavour of pulling the net in. The women received some fish in return, which they sold and thus earned a little cash. Shivam vehemently rejected that observation and maintained that women in Navalady did not play a role in pulling in the

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were merely doing the ‘boring work’ (aluppu veelai), which was of no interest to men. Following this account of karaivalai, our acquaintances stated their wish to return to their former homes and their fear of doing that. Shivam elaborated on the changes that the tsunami had brought about in terms of Navalady’s landscape, with the coast shaped differently ever since. Even the seawater tasted different, he said. Moreover, he claimed, it was impossible to build houses there, because the sandy ground was no longer firm. This remark gave impetus to the opinion that the ‘vellaikarangel’ (foreigners) pushed people to return to their former homes out of self-interest. Our interlocutors referred to a recent development facilitated by the UNHCR and NGOs that supported people’s return to their former village despite an initial government guideline calling for their relocation. That development stirred considerable commotion among those affected, as will be seen in Chapter Five. During this conversation, Priya claimed that the devastated Navalady, resembling a place of the dead, was too disturbing for these foreigners who liked to go jogging or swimming there. But Shivam laughed at his sister, claiming that only Tamils knew such fears: Tamils were afraid of cemeteries, of the dark, and of any possible spirits in Navalady – not the foreigners. Without further specifying the reasons, however, he shared the view that the foreigners held some interests of their own for promoting people’s return rather than relocating them. We shared a moment of sympathy with Priya and her neighbour concerning their fears of returning to a place where they had seen so many people dying, when Shivam intervened. He remarked that more than 100 people had already returned to live in their former village by then. He emphasized that all of them were men, because ‘men can do anything’, and they knew how to ‘fight with death!’ Women objected to a return out of fear, but men feared nothing, Shivam continued laughing. Imitating a fight, he joked that ‘Tsunami akka (elder sister), tsunami anna (elder brother), any relative of tsunami can come. We men are not afraid.’ Priya supported him by saying that, in contrast to women, men had nothing to fear because they were strong and able to deal with anything.

A fisherman’s failure Fond memories of life in Navalady, the central role that fishing played in that former lifestyle, and a striking polarization of men and women dominated our conversation up to that point. Shivam’s comments revealed his closeness to the sea and his concern about the geographic and social changes brought about by the tsunami. The conversation reached a point when Tamils seemed to be held back by fears allegedly unknown to “foreigners” and, crucially, when fears were assigned to women only, while men appeared as bold fighters. It was at that point net. The neighbouring woman solved the disagreement somewhat by stating that perhaps further north in the district, women likewise participated in karaivalai.

Chapter Three: The Tsunami’s Gender Face

that the conversation took an unexpected course. However surprising at the time, what followed was in retrospect well grounded in the preceding, narrative’s logic. Shivam came to tell of the day when the tsunami struck, and the imagery of brave men and weak women took on a different meaning. At this point I resume summarizing our conversation. Shivam turned to describe the morning when the tsunami happened. He was walking towards his mother’s shop at the time, brushing his teeth. People came running and yelling that ‘the sea was coming.’ He ran away from the seaside towards the lagoon with his mother and sisters without losing time. At the lagoon, they split up to board boats. After the next strong wave hit them, the boat with his elder sister and her children capsized. Shivam, who was operating the other boat, tried to reach them, but it was very difficult to move because the engine was not working. Priya, who was on the same boat, threw the heavy nets over board to facilitate the rowing. Finally, they reached the sister and took her children on board. However, the sister remained in the sea. Shivam held her hand and tried to pull her into the boat as well. She clung on to him but did not get over the railing. She struggled, finally let go of his hand, and drowned. He could do nothing. He kept remembering that sight of her outstretched hand vanishing into the water. Shivam broke down in his narrative at that point, and his younger sister intervened to explain what had happened: Shivam had remained immobile on the boat as if ‘frozen like a statue’. All the others had screamed at him to row but he had made no move; he had only cried. The women finally grabbed some wooden parts floating in the water and started to row by themselves. They continued to shake, slap, and call him until he ‘came back to the world’ at last, and their boat reached the shore safely. Shivam resumed his narrative to tell us that he had seen another woman in the sea at the time. He had wanted to steer over to rescue her, but there were 27 women on his boat who had all been shouting at him not to risk their lives for that of one single person. He had gone to that woman’s daughter to apologize later, but she refused to forgive him. She retorted that he would have acted differently had her mother been his relative. Shivam added that other persons also blamed him for the loss of their family members after the tsunami, including some of his mother’s relatives. One case hurt him especially deeply because he had been very close to these two children who had died in the waves. They used to come to his home, and he had played with them and had helped them with their homework. He held great affection for these children, but their parents nevertheless blamed him for being responsible for their deaths, because he had not warned them when the waves approached. Yet Shivam was sure that they had known what had happened but had underestimated the force of the wave. As he put it: the parents had thought only of locking up their valuables instead of saving their children’s lives. In another case, the in-laws of one of his mother’s (classificatory) brothers (that is, Shivam’s maama) accused Shivam of the death of their daughter and grandson during the tsunami. Before these allegations, Shivam had looked after this bereaved maama,

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and they had gotten along well together. But when the man’s in-laws appeared, he turned away from Shivam. The direct accusations had ceased by the time of our conversation, but Shivam sensed that people still talked behind his back, even though they smiled in greeting when they happened to meet in the camp. Another relative once informed his mother of the allegations, and she was so upset that Shivam had to calm her down. He said he was aware that people talked in that way because of their own grief. Shivam had tried to speak to the parents who blamed him for the death of two of their children. However, they refused to listen to him, and he did not want to talk about his feelings either. The family organized a big ceremony on the children’s eighth day of death.29 He did not attend. Yet the following night he went to the place where the ritual had been carried out, sat down, and cried. He did not tell that to anyone else. He had loved these children as if they were his own; but his sadness over their death was ‘his own right’, and he did not want to talk about it to anyone. At the end of his story, Shivam said he felt relieved. He had been keeping everything in his ‘manatu’ (“heart/mind”) until then, and talking made him ‘forget’ these memories.30 He reckoned that it would take him another one or two years to overcome the sadness; already in these few months since the tsunami he came to feel a bit better. Then, pulling himself together, he laughed that he had thus told us his ‘tsunami experience’ – and that he had done so only to get our help for his friend who needed to undergo an operation in a private hospital. With that move, Shivam took the upper hand again, after having shown himself so vulnerable during his narrative. We left shortly after this conversation, which had taken us quite late into the evening. Soon after this encounter, Shivam temporarily left the camp to stay in Navalady with friends following a quarrel with Priya and their mother.

Masculinities betrayed Shivam’s experience of having been unable to save his sister was paramount in his narrative of that evening. He seemed further haunted by the death of several other people for whom he was made responsible, and by the memories of his relatives’ children. Beyond the personal, these recollections point out a widely shared sense of guilt for having survived amidst the death of others. They hint at the shattering experience of having been unable to prevent the death of a loved one. 29 | On the eighth day, relatives commonly offer food to the deceased. That eighth day ritual was widely held among our friends in contrast to other mortuary rites that were often not performed, especially when the corpses remained missing. 30 | Manatu can be translated as conscience, mind, or “heart” (not the organ) and invokes a concept that processes of thinking and feeling occur at the same place (see Desjarlais and Wilce 2003, 1180).

Chapter Three: The Tsunami’s Gender Face

Thus they relate to what is known as “survivor’s guilt,” when survivors struggle with the guilt over their own survival at the expense of the death of others (Lifton 1967). Shivam’s account further demonstrates that the bereaved cannot always be comforted and also turned against each other soon after the tsunami. Moreover, it illustrates the way in which self-blame and accusations against others operated as part of a gender repertoire. At this point I focus on how Shivam’s experiences and ascribed failures to rescue others were tightly linked to his identification as a fisherman from Navalady. In that respect, his experiences had a lot to do with what it means “to be a man” in the context described. With such meaning thriving off relationships between men and being typically nurtured by a contrast with what is considered female, any shortcomings conjure the risk of emasculation or effeminisation (Connell 1987; Connell and Messerschmidt 2005; Mehta 2006). Hence, the possible need for Shivam to ridicule women, including his female listeners that evening, and to attribute any weaknesses and fears to them rather than to men. What, then, characterizes a fisherman? Before I address this question, there is a need for some caution: evidently, a great deal of what was said that evening should be seen against the backdrop of the narrative’s own logic. For example, the highly emphasized differences claimed to exist between women and men in their roles and emotions make tragic sense in view of Shivam, grappling with his experienced “failure” in regard to his own performance. The accentuations as well as the contradictions within Shivam’s account also represent what typically characterizes a biographical narrative: that is, the possibility that the speaker will create continuity and coherence across biographical ruptures and life-events through narration (Richardson 1997; Rosenthal 1995). In addition, the way the conversation developed as a form of interaction, also allowed gender to play a significant role, as Shivam was the main narrator and the only male present. That said, and however situational and personal, Shivam’s story also appeals to a socially shared imagery of life in a fishing village such as Navalady. Shivam’s fond memories of Navalady mirror how our acquaintances were generally pleased to talk of their former village and to depict it with some nostalgia. Former lives were usually drawn to contrast living conditions after the tsunami, the past having offered whatever remained missing since: the daily availability of fresh fish, the sea’s cool breeze, and one’s own coconut trees. Likewise, Shivam praised Navalady for providing good fishing opportunities and a sense of freedom and contentment. Moreover, he depicted the village as having prospered well in recent years and linked that development to the fishing trade. According to his elaborations that evening, residents of Navalady had become rich, thanks to fishing, and could invest their profits in status symbols such as stereo sets and

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motorbikes.31 The way in which he positioned himself within this wealth also implies his skill at being a fisherman who knew how to harness the bounty of the sea. This brings us to the point of what makes “a fisherman”. The conversation with Shivam suggests an intricate relationship between the fisherman and the sea: practiced over years, fishing results in a man’s becoming intimate with the sea, experienced in its currents and familiar with its coastline. Besides this knowledge, what comes across in Shivam’s account is the necessity of luck and endurance that make great gains possible and help bridge the meagre days. Furthermore an egalitarian notion seems to characterize fishing, with the wealth of the sea said to be open to everyone. Fishing, according to Shivam that evening, was exciting, interesting, and exclusively male. A fisherman stood out as strong and fearless; his manliness rooted in physical strength and manifested in a certain degree of autonomy in dealings with the sea. Therein, men contrast with women for whom men provide and who appeared in his narrative only in marginal, furnishing, and dependant roles. Corresponding to Shivam’s depiction were many other male acquaintances’ assertions of the relative autonomy and equality among fishermen at sea. The sea was said to be open to anyone, and the idea of customary access rights were frequently rejected as absurd: who could ever control the sea? Such depictions represent idealizations that stand in some tension against the practice of anchoring boats only at specific places and especially to the reality of different categories of fishermen, such as marine fishermen, lagoon fishermen, boat owners, and fishermen labourers. In these positive self-identifications of “being a fisherman”, there was no space for socio-economic differences. The image of such a fisherman corresponds to how other male interlocutors took pride in depicting their trade. In terms of practice, the degree of concentration and observation skills required by fishermen, their knowledge about the movements of fish swarms, and their orientation at sea based on triangulation are indeed impressive, as any trip with a fishing crew reveals. Suresh, another fisherman in his late 20s, conjured up the effect of chewing bettilai (betel). According to him, bettilai relaxed and invigorated, helped to endure the long hours spent under the blazing sun, helped to concentrate when necessary, and to relax when possible. After a day’s hard work, moreover, arrack was his and many other fishermen’s choice, as it was said to release their body and mind. These two items, bettilai and 31 | At the time, many of our acquaintances shared such depictions of Navalady as a prospering village before its destruction. The poverty of many residents was not mentioned, and neither was the fact that some villagers migrated and earned the money elsewhere (especially when the ceasefire period allowed greater mobility). That is, the money, which could then be displayed in solid houses and electronic items, was likely earned in the Middle East rather then by fishing in Batticaloa. This kind of depiction had partly to do with a wish to impress Vathany and me at the beginning of fieldwork and to emphasize the good life previous to the tsunami.

Chapter Three: The Tsunami’s Gender Face

arrack, bear important gender (and generational) symbolism: betel consumption in daily life was typically a pleasure reserved for men (and old women), and alcohol was socially accepted exclusively in the case of men.32 Busby’s (2000, 27–52) study from south India reiterates such descriptions of fishermen and the way in which the sea represents very much a “world of men” (Busby 2000, 28) that differs from the scene on land. Men are attributed with physical strength and bravery connected to their daily exposures to risks encountered when at sea. They have a reputation of being quick-tempered and eager to engage in violent fights; as being specifically “hot” men who need to discharge their energy physically and require strong food, liquor, and especially fish for every meal (Busby 2000, 38–39). Thus a form of masculinity appears rooted in caste-based identification as Karaiyar. This can differ stongly from masculinities expected in other castes (especially higher-positioned ones) or other types of Hindu masculinities that prevail at specific historical moments. This also means that these notions of masculinity relate to status differences between castes and other social differentiations such as economic positions and ethnicity (Osella, Osella, and Chopra 2003, 12). Taking pride in being a fisherman also allows for momentarily setting aside the fact that Karaiyar occupy a middle to low position within the overall caste hierarchy in the local context (see also Hastrup 2011, 70). Conjuring the wealth that can be gained by fishing also permits emphasizing the economic superiority of well-off fishermen. In view of the high-staked ideals of brave and strong fishermen, the experience of helplessness was also shattering to the extent of questioning men’s sense of “being male”. Shivam suffered particularly from his seeming inability to rescue his sister. The way he polarized women’s and men’s roles and attitudes in our conversation that evening at once culminated in his “failure” to live up to the depicted manly ways and offered some means of ascribing the experienced weaknesses and fears instead to women. Suresh, as another example, had been absent when the waves had hit the coast. He grappled with the idea of having played Yaman, the god of death, when he had hurried his crew to leave for fishing that morning.33 The reasoning was that if he and his men had stayed at home, they could have saved their wives, mothers, sisters, and children who were to die in the waves. Their feelings of guilt and shame notwithstanding, men like Suresh 32 | In practice, some women also consumed alcohol, but that was not approved of as it was in the case of men. In the case of bettilai, the age played an important role, with old women regularly chewing betel, which would have been disapproved of in the case of young women. 33 | Suresh had urged his crew, consisting of Murali and Jegan, to hurry up and leave. Hence the idea that, had they only lingered 10 minutes longer, they would have been at home when the tsunami struck. The point about Suresh having played Yaman at that moment was elaborated in a story about the tsunami day jointly told by Suresh and Murali the morning following a night spent in Navalady in October 2005.

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who had not been together with their families when the tsunami happened, could maintain a notion of brave men as rescuers of women and children in the absence of an experienced proof to the contrary. More often than not, women, present at such narrative moments contributed to maintaining such constructions. That was seen above in Priya’s and in Shivam’s younger sister’s support of their brother’s elaborations. Without any obvious irony, Priya further stated that men did not need to be afraid like women, because men were so much stronger than they were. The elaborations so far point out how the tsunami affected the fishermen as “men”; I now shift attention to how these men were affected as skilled “fishermen”. The way in which Shivam described the changes on land and sea resulting from the massive waves testify to how profoundly the tsunami impacted their daily trade. Fishermen like Suresh and Murali, who experienced the tsunami at sea, were not only dragged off course but also failed to recognize their whereabouts at the time. In fact, Suresh’s crew finally reached shore further north along the coast, left the boat there, and walked back to Batticaloa. Conversely, Murali knew of fishermen who had thought they were elsewhere, only to discover that they had steered right back into Navalady on that day of the tsunami. Arguably, the loss of orientation due to missing navigation points was not only a momentary shock but held consequences in the longer-term. The fishermen needed to refamiliarize themselves with an environment transformed by the tsunami, adjust their triangulation techniques, and re-establish trust in their skills to do this. In conversations with fishermen from Tamil Nadu, Hastrup (2011, 70) noted a similar bewilderment when known landmarks had disappeared. In addition to the human and material losses, the tsunami impaired fishermen’s orientation on land. Recovery therefore depended on restoring the precise environmental knowledge that lies at the core of fishermen’s daily life activity: fishing (Hastrup 2011, 59–70). Lastly, a note is needed in regard to the reviewed social position of fishermen. Fishing, after all, is simply what men do when they are of the fishing caste, as Hastrup (2011, 69) succinctly noted. Like many others among our research contacts, Shivam oscillated between a proud identification of being a fisherman and a wish to be open to alternatives. Some of that surfaced in Shivam’s remark belitteling government employees, who indeed enjoy a social prestige that an “independent” fisherman lacks.34 It also figured in the drawn opposition to nonTamil foreigners jogging fearlessly through cemetery-like areas. Such suspense in identification may best be hinted at in Shivam’s wish for better education: higher schooling could have helped him get a job in an NGO, and, therefore, outside the fishery sector. This aim was one shared by almost all of our research contacts who hoped their children would be better educated in order to escape the 34 | Our acquaintances generally explained the high social status entailed by government employment with a regular income and the prospect of a pension, though one may see traces of the larger colonial history in this estimation of the civil servant.

Chapter Three: The Tsunami’s Gender Face

hard life of fishermen. Suresh too sided with the parent who did not ever want to teach his sons knowledge of fishing; the young were instead to perform well at school, find a different occupation, and rise socially upwards. While they may ultimately not escape their caste identification, our acquaintances thus dreamed of other employment opportunities. It can be said that the tsunami, which affected primarily fishing villages and the promising availability of post-tsunami aid fed into this dynamic of contradictory social identifications. While the tsunami invited karmic interpretations as to its cause (discussed in Chapter Eight), the post-tsunami context could also hold relevant socio-economic chances as seen in the next chapter. This chapter looked at gender relationships on a narrative and rather symbolic level. The next chapter deals with some developments in regard to marriages, as they connect people’s massive human losses endured and new living conditions following the tsunami. It also touches upon domestic violence and continues the themes of challenged masculinities and strategies to construct men-in-control versus weak women.

C onclusion The two portraits underscore Das’ (1990b, 2007) arguments that survivors are never stripped bare of their social (and therefore gendered) position. They also reveal the force of norms, even at moments when norms are seen to fail. They give evidence of the way in which the “lived experience of disasters” (Enarson 1998, 167) can differ for women and men and their intimate relationships. Yet the elaborations also indicate that by appealing to the primordial, “naturally given” ways of being, gender stereotypes can help to recreate spaces of “normalcy” when ordinary worlds have been so thoroughly shaken. Little points to consciously sought ways of emboldening girls and women in an effort to endow them with skills to perform what is considered more exclusively male behaviour in order to prevent them from future harm, such as that expected in the form of a next tsunami. Furthermore, the case of betrayed masculinities in some men’s tsunami experiences shows the significance of recreating notions of men as rescuers of women. Thoughout the narrative of survivors, many men indeed appear steering boats that rescue women, but the strength and courage of women gets little emphasis. These narratives suggest that victimization of women also offer both male and female survivors socially important ways of re-formulating notions of brave men and weak women in the aftermath of the disaster. Thus it seems that this potential for social change, which is being commonly imagined in regard to disasters, is unlikely to promote novel trends in gender relationships in Batticaloa or anywhere else. Older forms carried over from generations may be quicker at hand – and possibly reassuring to some degree.

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Fig. 4: Thoni, Navalady, October 2005 (© Katharina Thurnheer)

Chapter Four: Family Ties – Striving for Control in an Upset World

Previously, all the children went to school, Priya recalled during our conversation in May 2005. They took tuition classes, did their homework, and were always studying. They did not waste their time or hang around chatting. Their parents always kept an eye on them. ‘But now it’s not like that anymore’ she complained. ‘Everything changed completely. There is no control. There are no boundaries. Now the children roam around like cattle. They don’t do any homework. They chat and flirt all the time.’ She deemed this to be the parents’ fault. ‘They don’t control the children. Some children here have no parents or brothers and sisters anymore. And when they get scolded, they start to cry. So people feel sorry for them and let them do whatever they like.’ Priya almost seamlessly continued to describe the lack of privacy in the camp. ‘If someone in Navalady had entered your compound, you would have asked this person: ‘What are you doing on my land?’ No one would have done that anyway, for nobody would have just entered another person’s place without asking permission. But here it’s different. Everything belongs to everyone. There are no boundaries, and all places are the same. Nobody would have sat in front of one’s house previously, but here you cannot question anyone for sitting there. Everyone sits anywhere here – in front of other people’s places.’ Making use of a familiar idiomatic expression of the time, Priya noted during that conversation how the tsunami had apparently changed everything. Before the tsunami, she implied, everything and everyone had been “good” – society was well-ordered and respectful. But the disaster set everything out of control, and life had remained upset ever since. In this aftermath, children misbehaved, young men and women interacted freely with each other, and parents lacked authority. People lacked respect for each other’s belongings, while former properties and demarcations were lost. However, Priya’s remark also indicated the difficulties of recreating and maintaining family relationships after the death of beloved members. This chapter is concerned with precisely such intra- and inter-family relationships as observed in the post-tsunami relief camps and temporary shelters.

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In the work of contemporary anthropologists, a great deal of the formalism and normative assumptions that typified earlier kinship studies has given way to analysis concerned with what “being related” means or how it affects people living in specific contexts. The term relatedness has come into use, be it in contrast to or alongside that of kinship (Carsten 2000, 1–5; see also Moore 2007). Thinking in terms of relatedness may help to avoid the pitfalls of a dichotomy that assigned families to the “West” and kinship to the “rest”, as Carsten (2004, 15) argued. In this chapter I am interested in what being related may signify in the specific circumstances under review here. In the following discussion, people’s distinction between a well-ordered and “good” pre-tsunami era and a dysfunctional or “bad” post-tsunami time will often reveal a great deal of continuity between these two timeframes. Ways in which people responded to their changed life situations after the tsunami connect to ways in which they cope with long-lasting insecurities stemming from war and poverty. Nevertheless, it is important to acknowledge the specific circumstances developing from the sudden human losses in the tsunami and subsequent life together in crowded, aid-focused relief camps. The issues of this chapter reiterate in many ways what previous chapters have reviewed: questions of social control and the notion of a world upset, the relevance of gender relationships, both genders’ differing social scopes for action, and the ways in which people engage in suppressing or emphasizing differences within the camp and in response to tsunami aid. The chapter’s cornerstones form three points that attracted considerable attention inside and outside these places. These include the frequently reported elopements of young couples, the remarriages of persons who had lost their spouses due to the tsunami, and domestic violence within the camps. I first introduce the concept of kudumbam (family) as we observed it in daily life situations and the biographies of our research contacts, complemented with references to local kinship structures. On that basis, I follow with discussion of elopements, remarriages of widow and widowers, and domestic violence in separate subchapters.

K udumbam : F amily and H ousehold C oncepts Before looking at some specific processes concerning kudumbam, it is worthwhile to review what a family actually signified in the local context. The following element from a conversation with Nanthini in May 2005 shows how kudumbam referred simultaneously to different concepts of family at the time. When we asked the young widow how many kudumbam shared in the room with her, she counted the following: Pradeepan, a son of Nanthini’s mother’s elder sister Sharmala, with his three remaining children and his new wife; Sharmala herself with her two orphaned grandsons; Pusparaji, another older and widowed sister of Nanthini’s mother; Pusparaji’s widowed son Raman; and Nanthini herself with her mother

Chapter Four: Family Ties

and sister. In other words, three sisters and some of their remaining children and grandchildren shared the room at the time, and Nanthini counted them as forming altogether five distinct families. But as soon as she mentioned her own family setup, she corrected herself by referring to six families: she actually formed a family separate from that of her mother and her unmarried sister, though they ‘cooked together’. Then she became increasingly confused in discussing the subject, since Pusparaji too cooked for Raman, because he was alone. She resolved the confusion by declaring laughingly that each family was registered separately as a distinct kudumbam regarding allocation of post-tsunami aid. Each of the six families expected a new house of its own, based on having formed separate households before the tsunami. Yet the confusion with ‘cooking together’ was important. On one hand, therefore, kudumbam represented the categorization as a family, in the form of distinct domestic units, within post-tsunami aid administration. Whereas “household” was the standard expression for such a unit in corresponding documents in English, in Tamil kudumbam was invariably used, colloquially as well as in official documentation. On the other hand, according to Nanthini’s account, kudumbam was seen as a unit that cooked together, or rather, developed cooking relationship with or for another member.1 This understanding reflects common concepts of a household as a unit of people who share resources (Moore 1992; von Benda-Beckmann and von Benda-Beckmann 2000). In line with such a concept, Busby (2000, 117) noted that kudumbam “is a term of contextually shifting definition, which can incorporate several households, or differentiate within a single house.” The nuclear family of a couple and their children is the smallest unit in which money is shared, while a more encompassing group may link additional persons within a house who share food and work and still more “patterns of consumption, cooperation, and exchange, [which] mark off boundaries of assumed interdependence that pull separate households together” (Busby 2000, 117–118). Similar to these observations from a fishing village of south India, household composition tended to vary over time among our research contacts and homes could accommodate more than one kudumbam. Typically, parents bestowed their daughters a house upon marriage, the ciitanam viitu (dowry house), which the couple shared with the wife’s unmarried siblings and parents until they shifted to another house to be provided as dowry for the next daughter. In their old age, the parents commonly remained in the household of one of their daughters. Or, as it seemed from the situations of our circle of acquaintances, they frequently shifted between these households depending on the support granted by a daughter and her husband. In addition, close relations formed common, temporary household members or, at least, regular recipients of meals provided by a wife. In the case of adults, these relatives contributed in cash or kind for the meals received. 1 | This perspective may be particularly one promoted by women, who are responsible for preparing meals. Compare Kottegoda (2004, 27) on that point and empirical household definitions based on interviews with low-income urban households in Colombo, Sri Lanka.

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In daily life parlance, kudumbam was usually understood to mean a couple and their children. Besides daily moving to and fro between homes when the mothers remained in a close vicinity, it was common for children to spend some time during their childhood within the household of a sister of their mother (or, less frequently, with a mother’s brother’s or father’s sister’s family). That could be the case, for instance, when the parents were too poor to raise all their children, when the relatives’ areas provided better schooling opportunities or more security for youths who risked recruitment in their own natal villages. Yet, having children stay with close relatives could also be motivated by a wish to “share” the children, especially between sisters, and hence further strengthen relationships between the adults, as Trawick (1992) noted for south India. By indicating a unit whose members relate to each other through cooking and eating, kudumbam encompasses a significant affective dimension. As Thiruchandran (1999, 34–36) noted as well, in this understanding of the “household family”, a kudumbam is associated foremost with a site of maternal love and emotion. The understanding that a woman’s cooking for the couple and the couple’s sharing of meals forms the basis of a marriage is also a ritualized element of Tamil wedding ceremonies. Examples in this chapter will illustrate these overlapping affective and economic dimensions of kudumbam and the ways in which emic views on relatedness and external categorizations came into play in the post-tsunami context. Cooking arrangements lay at the heart of an understanding of kudumbam outside immediate administrative purposes (though post-tsunami administration always loomed large in these daily life contexts). This also illustrated the centrality of women in a definition of family. Cooking in daily life was a female activity: a wife cooked for her husband and children, with elder daughters helping. As a consequence, a mother cooked for the unmarried or widowed son or a daughter likely for the widowed father. The different kudumbam could be discerned at the moment when women left for their cooking places. While mothers and married daughters or sisters frequently sat together to prepare the meals – cleaning the fish, chopping the vegetable, grinding the coconut – cooking was done separately. Each woman then retired to her own kitchen arrangement, that is, to the donated gas cooker when they stayed in the camps, or to the fire-place made up of three bricks that was more likely reused in the temporary shelters. “Cooking together” meant sharing resources for meals. In that sense, Nanthini formed a kudumbam with her mother and sister: they pooled resources and used the same cooking place. Likewise, Sharmala “cooked for” her adult, widowed son, who contributed to the expenses. These cooking arrangements could also provide the cook with a little profit, for instance, when female relatives prepared meals for widowed men who paid in cash or kind. But joint cooking could be stopped for economic reasons as well. That was the case when Nanthini and her mother demanded that Selvy (by then married) cook separately in September 2006. It was

Chapter Four: Family Ties

an attempt to force her alcoholic husband to meet his responsibilities and provide her with at least enough money to cook their own meals. Besides the economic dimension, it is important to note how cooking arrangements ran parallel to relationships of affection and obligation.2 Providing meals for her family amounted to one of the most significant tasks of a wife and mother. It represented wifely and motherly care. Consequently, a wife, mother, or grandmother could be deeply hurt when her husband, child, or grandchild refused her meals. After the tsunami, many persons felt the absence of such “caring cooking” bitterly. Widowers expressed their grief over the death of their wives by saying how well their wives had always provided their meals. Murali despaired over always having to ‘go somewhere else’ for his rice and curry, since his mother died in the tsunami. Meanwhile, mothers frequently mentioned what they had given (or failed to give) to their children or husbands for breakfast on that tsunami morning before they died. In line with the dimensions of care and obligation by providing meals to family members a wife might refuse to cook for her husband as a strategy during martial disputes (though her relatives might urge her to cook after all to avoid further trouble). Kudumbam as the administrative category was of strategic relevance in the given post-tsunami setting, since the tsunami-affected household was the basis for several kinds of aid allocations. For instance, LKR 5,000 was paid to each family on three occasions during the first half year, in compensation for a monthly income. This was a fixed sum per family, irrespective of the number of family members. As for the link that Nanthini drew between a kudumbam and the promise of a new house post-tsunami, it needs to be noted that houses were donated on the basis of “a house for a house”. That is, anyone who could prove to have been living in a separate home before the tsunami was to be compensated with the donation of a new house.3 This complicated the situations of all those smaller or differing family units that used to share the same house but now hoped 2 | What comes across in these examples must also be related to other significant roles of food offerings. For instance, such offerings may become crucial elements in mortuary rituals when the living “feed” the dead. Offering food is also a matter of prestige, and people take pride in generous hospitality. Husbands urged their wives to cook for their guests, and wives gladly reported on how many curries they had given to others on a given day. In fact, the kind, amount, and prestigious degree of a curry a family consumed or offered to its guest always became a question of great interest among our friends. Finally, meal invitation or sharing a meal must also be seen within a context in which higher caste persons traditionally rejected cooked food from lower castes (for comparable context on food and restricted caste interactions, see Lüthi 1999, 132). 3 | This guideline allowed for donation of new houses to families irrespective of whether they had lived in a make-shift hut or in a solid house previously. However, people renting a home were not entitled to a house (see the following Chapter Five for more details about housing policies). Additionally, this guideline created problems for those who had been in

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to gain separate ones based on their recognition as kudumbam. It was up to the government representative at the village level (the GN) and camp committee members to identify families and produce lists of entitled families. Since it was generally of interest to be categorized as a separate family, people used whatever means they had to find themselves registered on these name lists. The administrative category of kudumbam entailed a kind of “nuclearization”. That is, it tended to create nuclear units rather than to emphasize cross-cutting ties. Hence this categorization stood in contrast to the care and affection dimension associated with kudumbam described above. Depending on the persons and situations concerned, the allocation of aid to nuclear units could result in further encompassing support or a rivalry for benefits. Among our research contacts, this was particularly evident in the case of widows who had no direct dependents or, conversely, depended on others due to their age or physical condition. Widows who were accepted to form a separate household received the same compensation as that issued to a family (that is, the same amount of family-based compensation as a family with several members) and could also benefit from special-support schemes for women-headed households extended by several NGOs. Thus Nanthini, who lost her husband and only child in the tsunami, supported her parents and her unmarried sister with the aid that she received. Even during 2006, when aid had largely stopped, her mother used to say that they depended on making Nanthini’s previously received money ‘roll and roll’ to cover daily expenses. While this example demonstrates mutual support, the situation of Renuka, an elderly and handicapped widow, revealed competing attempts of family members to control such benefits. Renuka often found herself in conflictive relationships, because her children (or rather their spouses) would pressure her to hand her benefits over to them, a situation further detailed in Chapter Five.

Arranging marriages A kudumbam develops through marriage, and by resuming the conversation with Priya from May 2005, some expectations can be delineated of how such alliances ought to be formed. That evening, Priya had actually been concerned about her brother Shivam’s relationship with a girl in the same camp. She held no esteem for the girl, who she described as flirting with any man and influencing Shivam negatively. Previously (long before the tsunami) her brother had been in love with a girl in Navalady who was his maccaal (female cross-cousin and therefore preferred marriage partner in the local context). Yet that time he had listened to Priya’s advice and given up this relationship, focusing his energies instead on fulfilling his responsibilities towards their younger and still unmarried sister as well as their widowed mother. Thus he worked hard, built a house for that sister the process of building, or who had not yet received legal recognition for, dowry houses when the tsunami struck, as later discussion will show.

Chapter Four: Family Ties

to serve as her dowry, and established a shop for the mother as a basis for her livelihood. Then came the tsunami and destroyed everything. Just then the girl in the camp threatened to lead Shivam astray. Priya and their mother urged him to end that relationship and think again of his sister’s future.4 This episode accurately illustrates basic social responsibilities of parents, sons, and daughters vis-à-vis each other. The ideal of a parentally arranged marriage of the young and the transfer of a ciitanam viitu for the daughter upon her wedding plays a significant role here. Brothers are expected to contribute to provision of a dowry and postpone their own marriages until all sisters attain married status. This is linked to an expectation that a son’s allegiances and income become directed towards his wife and family as soon as he marries. Hence Shivam’s latest “love affair” represented the risk of his maternal family losing him at the time as the family’s main income provider to a woman with whom he would have established a separate household. This prospect threatened his sister’s future, which depended on his willingness to work towards providing her with a house and additional valuables as dowry. Shivam eventually heeded his elder sister and their mother and did not “run away” with the girl he met in the camp. This topic of elopement is discussed in the next subchapter. I continue below by pointing out a few more characteristics of local marriage practices from a rather normative point of view. According to idealized procedures, parents, and elder members of the wider family arrange the unions of their young people. Traditionally, cross-cousins (maccaan, maccaal) formed the preferred marriage partners. That is, marriages were promoted between the children of a person’s mother’s brothers or father’s sisters (and their classificatory equivalents). This group again includes classificatory cross-cousins too, thus extending the preferred pool of marriage partners beyond a person’s direct maccaan and maccaal. Underlying this practice of cross-cousin marriage is the wider Tamil or Dravidian kinship system that differentiates between cross-cousins and non-marriageable parallel cousins, a person’s mother’s sisters’ or father’s brothers’ children. A traditional scholarly interest lay precisely in the way in which Dravidian kinship terminology implied the assumption of cross-cousin marriage in that its terms for marriage relationships correspond to those of descent relationships (Trautman 2003, 1108).5 Hence the term maama 4 | In addition, Priya suspected Shivam’s many male friends in the camp might negatively influence her brother. To have ‘too many friends’ often concerned mothers or sisters in relation to young men. His family’s opposition against the girl of his choice led to quarrels, mentioned in the preceding chapter, that led to Shivam staying temporarily in Navalady. 5 | Among the wealth of studies on Dravidian kinship see Dumont (1975), Lévi-Strauss (1971), and Trautmann (1981, 2003), all interested in the underlying reasons and functioning of the system. More recently, Busby (1997; 2000, 72–88) reviewed Dravidian kinship on the basis of gender and personhood concepts and argued that transfer of female and male substance by mothers and fathers explains the characteristic differentiation

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(mother’s brother) and maami (father’s sister) overlap with the terms for fatherin-law and mother-in-law. Conversely, one’s mother’s elder and younger sisters are called “big” or “small mother” (periyamma/cinnamma), and father’s elder and younger brothers are considered one’s “big” or “small father” (periyappa/ cinnappa). The children of these classificatory mothers and fathers are a person’s classificatory elder/younger brothers (annan/thampi) and sisters (akka/tankaicci). Marriage among them would be incestuous. Arranged marriages are based on proposals undertaken by the parental family and elder relatives. Presently, arranged marriages often involve the dealings of (nonkin-related) marriage brokers, and the maccaan-maccaal marriage may be thinning out. Put differently, cross-cousins have come to include an ever-expanding circle. Marriage negotiations proceed within caste affiliation, within which additional factors play a role, including age, personal horoscopes, and education. Crucial in marriage proposals is the transfer of dowry. Considering present-day dowry discussions, it seems that the dimension of dowry as a “price” for a bridegroom has become far more significant in the last few decades (Goonesekere 1996, 314). In eastern Sri Lanka dowry typically consists of a house for the marrying woman, and increasingly added jewellery and cash. Families with daughters find it increasingly difficult to meet the demands, and marriages may be postponed over a considerable time until the necessary financial resources can be mobilized. In this respect too, the years of war left their traces, with bridegrooms becoming increasingly rare due to men’s death or migration (McGilvray 2001, 24; 2008, 341). Lawrence (2007, 97) noted the sheer impossibility of many impoverished parents in the eastern villages to establish dowry houses and marry off their daughters. McGilvray (1982a, 1982b, 1989; 2008, 103) elaborated on a specific feature in marriage practices of eastern Sri Lanka by demonstrating the relevance of matrilineal, exogamous sub-caste categories for marriage relationships: marriages are arranged between members of matriclans or descent units called kudis (kudi). However, our Navalady friends did not seem to follow such a rule. Possibly, the kudi system and the entailed marriage practice more characteristically describe the paddy-field cultivating Vellalar or Mukkuvar and other castes rather than the Karaiyar, to which our research contacts belonged. Possibly, too, it is more pronounced overall in the southern part of the Batticaloa region, where some between parallel- and cross-cousins. According to her, a mother transfers female substance to her daughter, and a father transfers male substance to his son. The children of sisters and brothers are thus considered radically different from each other and may therefore marry. In contrast, the children of brothers or sisters share in the same substance which renders them “the same” and thus prohibited from marriage. Despite the commonalties, there is variety within the Dravidian kinship system, too (Kapadia 1995). For the particular context of eastern Sri Lanka, see McGilvray (1982a, 1982b). McGilvray (1982a) moreover questions the relevance of substance-based personhood concepts in eastern Sri Lanka, thus limiting the force of Busby’s argument for the local context.

Chapter Four: Family Ties

Karaiyar are known to have kudis. The comparative irrelevance of the kudi among our acquaintances may further be linked to closer relationships with Karaiyar from northern areas of Sri Lanka where the matriclan system is not practiced. Also, since the kudi system historically evolved along temple (and mosque) and ritual hierarchies, it may be of lesser significance for impoverished fishing families who could not sustain elaborate temple organization.6 In any case, the few whom we asked directly about their kudi during a brief field visit in 2009 knew little to nothing about that subject. Some of them who belonged to the same extended family contradicted each other about possible names of their kudi. We took as the final answer, at the time, Sharmala’s response: kudi was something that mattered to those further down south along the eastern coast but was not practiced among their families in Navalady.7 However, there was an evident pattern of marriage relationships between families from Navalady and from Morakkottanchenai, a village area located approximately 25 kilometres away. The biographies of many of our acquaintances suggested such a marriage pattern based on the maccaan-maccaal model over generations. For instance, Sharmala was married to her maccaan from Morakkottanchenai, and attempts were undertaken in mid-2005 to marry her youngest son to his maccaal from that area. Likewise, Padma’s father originated from Morakkottanchenai and married her mother from Navalady, and Padma’s younger brother was married to his maccaal from Morakkottanchenai. Though I inquired about possible explanations for the relationships between the two places, finding a satisfying answer proved beyond the scope of this research.8 However, once established, the relationship 6 | I thank Prof. Dennis B. McGilvray for these points in regard to the kudi system and the question of its relevance among our research contacts (email communication, 10 June 2010 and 29 March 2012). 7 | This remark supports McGilvray’s observations that the kudi system may be more pronounced further south. At the same time, the question about kudis needs to be further pursued with other people from Navalady. A viable alternative start would lie with members of families who continue to play a significant role in organizing Navalady’s main temple dedicated to the sea goddess, the Kadanacciyamman temple. 8 | A frequent answer to my question was that both areas offered opportunities for fishing. This answer likely implies a common Karaiyar identification of both villages besides the obvious point of livelihood. Morakkottanchenai is not located at the sea but offers river and lagoon-based fishing, and its distance to the sea did not prevent fishermen there from engaging in karaivalai beach seine fishing around Eravur in the past (according to what Thangavel told us in 2006). Morakkottanchenai additionally offers opportunity for chena (slash-and-burn) cultivation. Hence the relationship may have developed in connection to livelihood and seasonal migration. Alternatively, one settlement developed out of the other. My preferred speculation for now is that Navalady, as more exclusively a fishing village offering direct access to both the sea and the lagoon, developed at a later historic moment, with residents from Morakkottanchenai settling down more permanently in

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was obviously perpetuated by the exchange of marriage partners according to the local Dravidian kinship logic. Lastly, it needs to be noted that being married meant living together as a couple among our friends before as well as after the tsunami. Many of them had not legally registered their marriage with the state administration and several did not undergo a religious ritual to mark their co-habitation either.9 Absence of such formalism was especially the case in elopements or so-called love marriages, the subject of the next subchapter.

‘Tsunami L ove ’ On the occasion of a young couple’s elopement in May 2005, Lakshmi remembered a previous episode and described the mother’s reaction when her daughter returned to the camp with the man she had ‘run away’ with: ‘She removed all her jewellery and cried out that she no longer had a daughter!’ ‘This one has fallen in love,’ Deepa laughed aloud, rendering the girl in question slightly embarrassed. Deepa’s laughter was in reaction to my expressed concern for the girl’s schooling as we met the girl at Deepa’s place in early August 2005. I remembered her as having requested tuition opportunities for students in the camps a few months earlier. There was no longer any need for tuition classes in this case: the young woman had since dropped out of school and run away with the son of Deepa’s ‘brother’. It did not take much longer to realize that she was pregnant by that time. ‘Tsunami love, Tsunami love!’ Padma joked as she introduced us to one of her (classificatory) brothers. He had come with his fiancée to visit his mother in the temporary shelters in September 2005. The couple originated from different villages and had fallen in love when both of them were staying in the same relief camp. If it had not been for the tsunami, they would not have met, or so the logic went. A wedding was planned for the near future. These are just three examples among many more of love relationships that developed in the post-tsunami relief camps. Typically they involved young men Navalady. These questions concern the real origin of Navalady as a permanent settlement, marriage alliances based on kudi (or not), possible status differences among Karayiar, and the likely creation of “endogamous areas” (de Munck 1996, 707) between villages. They open up a range of considerations that merits deeper research. Another interesting point in regard to the relationship between Navalady and Morakkottanchenai is found in a story about the origins of three sister goddesses, related by Lawrence’s interlocutor (Lawrence 2010, 92). 9 | Co-habitation without registration is common and widely accepted in Sri Lanka though courts tend to demand evidence of a wedding ritual in case of separation and subsequent claims or marriages (Goonesekere 1999, 308).

Chapter Four: Family Ties

and women in their late teens. Regarding the first example, nothing of the rupture mentioned between the daughter and her mother was revealed in their relationship a year later when the mother looked fondly after her daughter’s baby girl. As for Deepa’s young relatives, they moved into their newly donated house in the relocation site with their little son within two years of their elopement. Lastly, Padma’s brother’s wedding plans were tragically never realized: only a few weeks after our encounter, the young man was killed in the streets of Batticaloa town. Thus that particular case of “tsunami love” simultaneously demonstrated the continuity of disruptions marking our friends’ lives in the aftermath of the massive waves.10 Before continuing with my elaborations, I would like to caution that “love” is evidently difficult to define. Some marriages may have developed out of a certain sense of despair resulting from individuals’ massive human and material losses. Moreover, some new family unions may even have resulted from abusive relationships when women married a person who sexually assaulted them.11 However, these are personal impressions that I cannot pursue further, but I admit they render questionable my choice of the heading “tsunami love”.

The symbolism in “running away” Camp residents as well as outsiders commented on the frequency of new marriages following the tsunami, and most did so in a quite disapproving, morally condemning manner. Camp residents and outside observers, in a similar manner, suspected the crowded living conditions in the camp of encouraging cross-sex contacts and blamed parents lacking authority to prevent the young from “running away” with each other. As Priya implied in the earlier quote above, many of our 10 | His murder was furthermore revealing for the numbness with which the news of his death was met by family outsiders. When his upset cinnamma Rasamma walked out of the transitional shelters site in search of transport to town, crying that someone shot her ‘son’, there was not the slightest discernible reaction among the group of people we sat with at the time (in fact, we were gathered for a funeral). The silence reigning above this murder and the whispering through which Padma’s husband chose to conjure the innocence of the victim to us in the following days could hardly have been of a more striking contrast to the public attention and the laments that followed the tsunami deaths. Outside the circle of his bereaved family, relatives, and friends, the killing remained a non-issue; since it also involved a known member of a militant Tamil group opposing the LT TE, there seemed no need for further reasoning. 11 | Sexual violence within and outside families was reportedly high in post-tsunami relief camps (Fisher 2005, 2009). Forms of sexual abuse, including rape, are generally widespread in and beyond Sri Lanka and are highly silenced topics at the same time. Trawick (2003, 1160) noted that Tamil women are expected to conceal what happened or to marry their rapist in order to safeguard a family’s reputation.

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acquaintances tended to view further proof in the elopements of a world upset and out of control ever since the tsunami. That was especially the perspective of people who spoke as parents wishing for a socially respectable marriage for their own grown-up children. The younger ones, like Lakshmi, Deepa, and Padma, chuckled about the incidents, having usually married on their own initiatives. Their children were still too small to raise worries about socially disgraceful marriage initiatives. This carving out of elopement, described as ‘they ran away’ but also called love kaliyaanam’ (“love marriage”), is nurtured from its contrast with the “arranged marriage” or marriage based on proposal, briefly outlined in the preceding section. As de Munck (1996, 703–705) pointed out, the existence or lack of love is not really crucial in distinguishing between a so-called love marriage and an arranged marriage. It is rather the way in which parental authority and normative procedures are considered, respected, or undermined that distinguishes between an arranged marriage and one primarily motivated by love. Indeed affection likely plays a role in arranged marriages, but love does not figure in formal procedures in which dowry negotiations become central. Conversely, elopements typically result from love affairs that turn public. As de Munck (1996) found, when taking a closer look at actual examples of love kaliyaanam and arranged marriages, the distinctions become quite blurred. His analysis of marriages in a (Muslim) village in eastern Sri Lanka revealed that marriages based on love between cross-cousins as well as on parental arrangements were more frequent than either elopements or marriages arranged by parents that were not based on the young couples’ preferences (de Munck 1996, 711). However, local parlance tended to juxtapose love marriages, as exemplified by elopements, and arranged marriages in symbolic representations of “bad” versus “good” marriage practices (de Munck 1996, 711). These findings parallel what is being argued here. The people we spoke with tended to connect the incidents of elopements within the camps to the perceived instability and “wrongfulness” of the period that set in with the tsunami’s devastation. In this regard, it is helpful to remember that marriages are interpreted along the cross-cousin marriage model as socially sanctioned ones (Trautman 2003, 1108–1109). Priya’s worry about her brother’s love of a “stranger” is a case in point: it seemed to many that every new case of elopement proved that social disorder reigned ever since the tsunami. Coupled with a preferred distinction that our acquaintances made between good former days in Navalady and bad times ever after, it seemed as if elopements were symptomatic of the post-tsunami situation. Besides this symbolism, a case can be made for the perceived frequency of marriages in the aftermath of the tsunami. Indeed, the rise in newly formed households soon became a concern for those engaged in post-tsunami aid, as it complicated entitlement issues. That was perhaps most evidently the case in relation to the housing sector with its large resources involved. Were families established only after the tsunami to receive a house of their own within the post-tsunami reconstruction schemes? And, if yes, until when were such new

Chapter Four: Family Ties

marriages to be considered, given that the housing construction spanned over a period of roughly two years? The initial official policy of “a (new) house for a (lost) house” would have prevented entitling any couple that married in the aftermath of the tsunami. Yet the actual outcomes differed, as the example of Deepa’s young relatives showed. Not every new couple shared their luck, however, as will become evident from a later case. Hence, the reportedly frequent elopements that followed soon after the tsunami must be seen against the backdrop of powerful symbolism as well as of a possibly real, temporary rise in new marriages in the tsunami’s aftermath. Rather than forming a “post-tsunami” phenomenon, I see the developments as intensification of well-established social processes within a micro-scale space such as the posttsunami camps. I reveal some specifics below of the context that fostered this intensification. They include economic, social, and emotional dimensions. Moreover, over the course of events, this context increasingly demanded adoption of protective marriage strategies, as broad-based politics moved towards a renewed outbreak of war.

Seeking care and security During a conversation with Mallika, a woman barely 20 years old, we realized that she had married a man who was her maama, her (classificatory) mother’s brother. As seen above, such marriage is considered wrong in eastern Sri Lanka with its preference for the maccaan-maccaal model (and where a maama thus more likely represents a woman’s father-in-law).12 Mallika (a friend and neighbour of Sudarshini) explained to a surprised Vathany that she had married the man because she felt sorry for him after he had lost his mother and sister in the tsunami. She considered it pavaam (sin, or, a “sorrowful thing”) that he was then ‘alone, with nobody around to cook for him.’ Her words bespeak the metaphoric “cooking for” expression for affective kudumbam relationships reviewed earlier. By the time of our conversation, Mallika was living in a rather pitiable arrangement herself, sharing a shelter with her heavily drinking husband and his likewise alcoholic father. Yet the explanation of her marriage can be taken as indicative of a wish to recreate relationships of care and affection after the endured human losses. A similar argument can be 12 | More precisely, such marriage would entail customarily disapproved endogamous marriages within matriclans among groups that practice the kudi system in Batticaloa (as is the case among the Vellalar to which Vathany belonged). Yet in other areas of Dravidian kinship, for instance in southern India, a girl’s marriage to her maama can be an acceptable option (see Kapadia 1995, 16). Therefore, Vathany called such marriages the ‘Indian way’ of marrying. Since kudi affiliation was not a prime concern, among our acquaintances, there may also be less social resistance against marriages to a mother’s brother than in other parts of eastern Sri Lanka.

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made for the elopement of two classificatory siblings in August 2005. That event shocked anyone who heard of it, and it seemed to form the ultimate proof of a world completely out of order.13 It brought about the social isolation of the families involved for a substantial period of time – and especially the ostracism of the girl’s parental family by their extended family. They blamed the girl’s loose character and her parents’ lack of control for the shame that fell upon the extended family due to this incestuous relationship. During an interview in March 2005, a local NGO representative linked the observed frequency of elopements in relief camps to economic considerations rather than to a dimension of care. She spoke more specifically about “early marriages”, that is, marriages among partners in their teens, who ran away together, registered marriage elsewhere, returned with the status of a kudumbam, and therewith received cash compensations and relief items as a separate family.14 According to this informant, no problems arose in registering these under-age marriages with local officials: the young simply claimed to have lost all legal documents in the tsunami and offered some benefit from aid allocations to the clerk as an incentive. She jokingly added that these marriages in fact rendered everyone involved ‘happy’: not only the new couple but also their parents, who were relieved of a member depending on their family-based benefits. Hence, from this perspective, at least those aid distributions oriented towards family units (rather than the number of family members) could foster a strategy of “running away together”. In addition, since elopements do not require any dowries, the parents of daughters were said to be happy to have escaped from having to come up with special valuables so soon after the loss of all their assets. Ultimately, these economic reasons can be said to have resulted in some parents forcing their underage daughters into marriage, a point made by Action Aid (2006, 46) in regard to post-tsunami eastern Sri Lanka and India.

13 | The girl’s elder brother swore to kill the man in question, and his parents and other sisters feared that he might very well realize this threat and bring all of them into further difficulties. As things developed, family relationships were repaired when the new sonin-law helped the girl’s parental family in a very difficult situation some five months later. From then on, even the girl’s brother addressed this brother-in-law again as annan, elder brother, expressive of what amounted to an otherwise quite unthinkable overlapping of kin-positions and terminology. 14 | The minimum legal age of marriage in Sri Lanka is presently set at 18 years for men and women according to the General Law (Social Institutions and Gender Index 2012). However, additional legal systems based on the customary practices of recognized ethnic groups govern family relations further, and Muslim girls may marry at age 15 or when puberty is reached (Kodikara 1999, 17–18, quoted in Ruwanpura 2006, 62). It may be useful to note that the reported average age of women at marriage in Batticaloa in 2005 was 23.1 years (Department of Census and Statistics Sri Lanka 2006).

Chapter Four: Family Ties

The wedding of Kumari’s youngest sister Tharishini, in September 2006, illustrates the weight of dowry consideration in impoverished circumstances. It moreover demonstrates a greater overlapping of reasons, including emotional and economical, that expectedly underlay marriages in the messier realities of actual life. It also reveals the complex insecurity many of our research contacts faced in daily life. Mother Kamala spent many months worrying how she could ever provide Tharishini, her youngest daughter, with a marriage following the family’s losses in the tsunami. Widowed since the tsunami, Kamala deeply missed the presence of her husband in that endeavour, who, she reckoned, would have taken all the ‘good decisions’. The tsunami had also destroyed the by then almost completed dowry house for Tharishini and robbed Kamala of any means and hopes to provide for a new house and the added valuables required for a respectable marriage. Moreover, Kamala considered this daughter spoilt, being the youngest one, and unable to earn any income. While Tharishini was Kamala’s only daughter who “remained to be married”, Kamala worried too about the future of her granddaughters who depended on her after their mother’s (Kamala’s second daughter’s) death in the tsunami, given their father’s neglect of them. After the marriage of Kamala’s youngest son, who was still supporting his mother until that time in 2006, Kamala lost even more confidence in her ability to provide for her dependents. Thus, when an opportunity offered itself to have Tharishini married to a young relative, she gladly urged the daughter to agree. The opportunity to marry off Tharishini came with a young man who had left his village located further north in Batticaloa district due to the LTTE’s mounting pressures in the face of the renewed outbreak of war in 2006. He fled to stay with his relatives in the post-tsunami transitional shelters, and there he fell in love with Tharishini. Kamala and her other children were pleased by his wish for marriage and urged Tharishini to agree. The young man had quickly found a job in town and was therefore in a position to provide for her economically. Given his love for her, no demands for dowry were made. These criteria helped overcome the fact that the young man was a maama for Tharishini, something which Kamala felt uneasy about but thought necessary to accept. Since the union granted the bridegroom the status of married life in an area that was relatively safe (compared to his own village), his parents did not seem to object to this marriage, which actually married their son to his “daughter-in-law” according to kinship terminology. This remark brings me to the further point of seeking marriage to achieve some form of physical security. It was a long-established practice in the north and east to get young people married in order to avoid their recruitment as fighters for the LTTE. This practice gained new momentum as soon as national politics steered towards another phase of open war, and it was evidently a strategy important to many families living in the post-tsunami shelters at the time. Married status offered some security since the LTTE’s recruitment drive, and that of the TMVP or

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Karuna group, commonly spared married persons or those who could otherwise claim that they provided for a family (for example, having to provide for a widowed mother or several unmarried sisters). Those reportedly most at risk to be recruited at the time were young ex-combatants who had left the LTTE when Colonel Karuna broke from the LTTE leadership in March 2004 (see Chapter One). Furthermore, in the competition for recruitment – and maintaining the LTTE’s demand that at least one child of each Tamil family should serve their cause – the two groups reportedly pressured families in which one child was fighting within one group to give another child to the other. For example, the TMVP demanded at times that a family send them a member when another was already serving the LTTE. Some of that is seen in the case of Padma’s youngest brother who was “married off” to one of his maccaal in September 2005. The bride was only 16, and the bridegroom 18 years old. The girl was said to sufficiently fancy her husband-to-be, but the young man demanded an extra incentive in the form of a motorbike before agreeing to the marriage.15 The girl’s parents promoted the marriage to save her from being recruited, because they lived in an area where both the LTTE and the breakaway Karuna faction strongly pressured residents to provide them active fighters.16 In yet another case, a mother married her son off to a girl whom she had admitted into her household earlier. In fact, the girl had been taken up following her own mother’s death in the tsunami and subsequent maltreatment by her father. Later, the marriage between the two teenagers was arranged in order to protect the young man (also an ex-combatant) from being recruited again. Many more examples could be cited from among our acquaintances, in which “early marriages” served primarily to protect young men and women from being recruited. These protective measures may raise concern in regard to their wider, social implications, and they obviously predated the tsunami. What intersected with these practices in its aftermath were the rivalry for combatants between Tamil armed groups, the escalation of war, the disruption of families following the human losses caused by the tsunami, and the material considerations when it came to avoiding (or increasing) dowry demands.

Continuities amidst disruptions In many ways the marriages touched upon above differed little from pre-disaster patterns, however much our friends liked to conjure up a radical contrast between 15 | Owning a motorbike became more wide-spread among our (male) acquaintances after the tsunami. Those who used to ride a bicycle previously but managed to gain extra cash through effectively tapping post-tsunami aid frequently invested in this status symbol and thereby further accelerated social competition for such purchases. 16 | In this example, not the girl herself but her sister was an ex-combatant who fled the LT TE during the split in 2004, and the girl’s parents strongly feared for the safety of both daughters.

Chapter Four: Family Ties

the “good” former days and the “bad” present. Indeed, the first of the “tsunami love” examples provided above hint at the ritualized process of a well-known practice, when the dramatic but temporary break in relationship between a young couple and the parents was typically overcome at latest by the birth of the first child. Among our research contacts, Vasuki shared such an experience when she had defied her parents to run away with her current husband at the age of 17 rather than marry the man they preferred. Some other “love marriages” went along smoother, when parents accepted their children’s choice of partners. That process could be described as a husband’s just ‘coming and staying’ in the girl’s parental home, as in the case of Lakshmi, who was then barely 18 years old. Alternatively, parents stepped in to provide their daughters with a wedding that sanctioned their love relationship as had been the case for Padma and had been planned similarly for her (classificatory) brother before he was killed. Lastly, several of our friends’ marriages related back to war-related displacement of at least one partner involved: what was argued in the post-tsunami context could likewise account for many relationships that developed when young men and women fled from their birthplace and found their partner (kin-related or not) in a new environment. Hence, while several marriages among our younger acquaintances (aged between 25 and 35) resulted from parental initiatives, and some were based on the maccaan-maccaal model that clearly was not the case for most of them. The maccaan-maccaal model more typically characterized marriages of our older research contacts (of 50 years or older). It may well be that marrying by ”running away” with each other or after “falling in love” took precedence over the last 20 years. Such a development would reflect wider demographic changes and transformation of family relationships, partly due to war-induced social fragmentation and migration. It may also be related to poverty among the people we spoke with and a willingness to accept love relationships that allow an escape from exaggerated dowry demands. These were seen to have dominated the “marriage market” over recent decades. Given these developments, the post-tsunami context can be seen as providing an additional layer of meeting opportunities for the young and unmarried – and to do so beyond parental efforts to channel their movement towards a socially “appropriate” partner.17 Moreover, the camp situation likely increased the difficulty of hiding love affairs and thus necessitating elopements. Affection and a desire to engage in emotionally-binding and hopefully lasting kudumban relationships arguably also influenced some of the newly established marriages. Economic incentives in terms of post-tsunami aid availability may also have encouraged 17 | See de Munck (1996, 699–700) for his argument on love as social construction. For instance, a social context that encourages cross-sex interaction between relatives and discourages interaction with non-relatives helps channel affection to the approved group of marriage partners. Hence “love” may not only be compatible with arranged marriage practices but even serve to maintain that model.

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some unions, regardless of any long-term economic prospects. At the same time, the tsunami could make the families affected desperate in the face of dowry obligations necessary for arranging marriages for their daughters. The longestablished “survival skill” of arranging marriages for youth at risk of recruitment received further momentum over the long term. Overall, such examples revealed the flexibility in which norms could be handled in practice – especially when physical or economic security was at stake. Altogether, these points indicate a wide spectrum of what it means to create or recreate family ties in the given context of grief, aid, and insecurity. I turn below to discuss further forms of marriages after the tsunami.

R emarriages : W idowers and W idows Remarriages of men and women who had lost their spouses in the tsunami figured among the frequently observed marital unions created in the post-tsunami camps. These occurred in the form of elopements, arrangements undertaken by the widower’s or widow’s extended family, or simply by a new couple moving together. Both widowers and widows remarried, yet their situations differed. Many widowers were known to have remarried within the first few months after the death of their former wife, and their remarriage was generally met with approval of our interlocutors. In contrast, when widows remarried, they did so at a later stage and faced gossip. I draw together some of my field observations below in regard to such marriages. The discussion takes place against the backdrop of differences in mortality for women and men due to the tsunami and war. As seen in the previous chapter, female casualties far outnumbered those of male in the tsunami. Hence, many “tsunami widowers” were left behind. Conversely, men stood a greater risk of being killed in armed hostilities, which produced the social category of “war widows”. That category has long gained the attention of actors within the development- and humanitarian-aid sectors and of scholars in Sri Lanka who delineated the economically and socially marginalized position of these women (Rajasingham-Senanayake 1999, 2001; Ruwanpura and Humphries 2003a, 2003b; Thiruchandran 1999). Part of this marginalized position was seen in a sheer impossibility of war widows to remarry; findings that seem to contrast with remarriages of “tsunami widows” (Hyndman 2008; 2011, 59–79). I use the following discussion as an opportunity to probe into questions of remarriage as practiced in eastern Sri Lanka that I find of specific interest from an ethnographic point of view. In doing so, I will raise more questions than I can offer clear answers for at present. Moreover, deeper insights into the situations of widows and widowers would evidently require differentiation of these categories. As Ruwanpura and Humphries (2003a, 2003b, 2004) demonstrated in relation to the category of “women-headed households”, a variety of factors – including

Chapter Four: Family Ties

the persons’ age, number and sex of dependent children, ethnicity, economic situation, and relationships to their parental families and in-laws – produce an (unsurprising) heterogeneity in situations for widows and widowers. I first discuss below the case of widowers for which I highlight a specific social way of maintaining kin-relationships that nonetheless appears to lose its grip on those concerned. I then turn to situations of widows where I also review the question of remarriage in regard to those widowed by either war or tsunami.

Widowers The tsunami seemed to produce a new social category for the Sri Lankan context that so far had become familiar with war widows: that of “tsunami widowers”. An NGO representative recalled crowds of widowed men roaming the streets of Batticaloa in the immediate aftermath of the tsunami. Another informant thought that sexual violence occurred in the post-tsunami camps particularly because of this large group of single men. Yet another observer mentioned that whole groups of widowed men reportedly left the camps and returned to stay in the ruins of their former homes in Navalady in early 2005. Whatever the associations, this possibly new social phenomenon seemed to dissolve largely within the first half year: widowers tended to remarry with comparative ease. Among our acquaintances, the remarriage of widowers within the first few months after the death of their spouse was generally well received, especially when he remained with children: ‘He is alone with his children. He needs somebody to look after them and to cook the meals.’ ‘It’s not that he wanted a new wife but he needed a mother for his children.’ A common agreement seemed to emerge that a man needed a helping hand in daily life that is, a caretaker for the children and a counter-part to manage all the home affairs. Hyndman (2008, 118; 2011, 78) pointed out that the remarriage of widowers maintained gendered division of labour within families and households largely intact. A new wife took over what was considered wifely and motherly duties. It may also be argued that – as long as a widower remained alone – other women’s workloads increased (as has been shown for other post-disaster contexts) when mothers, sisters, or daughters stepped in to help their widowed son, brother, or father (Enarson 2000, 14; Oxfam 2005). That, for instance, was what Vasuki complained about when she told us of all the ironing and cooking that her brother expected her to do since the death of his wife in the tsunami. She had wished for some support on his side when she was still unmarried and felt unwanted in her family, but with the brother suddenly alone, she was called into duty as a sister: ‘Before he hated me, but now he expects all help from me.’ In this case, a widowed brother ordered his married sister to do the household chores following the death of their parents and that of his wife and daughter. But in several other examples among our research contacts, surviving in-laws helped out the tsunami widowers. For example, Kamala provided her widowed son-in-law

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with meals whenever requested. Kamala’s own children disapproved of this, since the man had mistreated his wife during their marriage and did nothing to provide for his two remaining daughters, Kamala’s grandchildren. Yet, it was a matter of respect for Kamala towards a son-in-law that she deemed appropriate, irrespective of the man’s behaviour. At this point I pause to ponder what may happen following the death of a wife in the local context. I do so primarily in regard to a specific form of a widower’s remarriage that we frequently heard of during fieldwork: that of a man marrying his deceased wife’s sister. This observation is of considerable social anthropological interest and though I can make only a tentative sketch at present, it merits deeper research. It is indeed likely for a widower to live amongst his in-laws at the time of his spouse’s death, given the locally prevailing tradition of matri-uxorilocal settlement. That is, a widower would find himself among the family of his deceased wife, as in the example of Kamala’s son-in-law. The case of Vasuki and her brother instead reminds us that this matri-uxorilocal settlement pattern is being transformed not least due to the war when security reasons decide where couples and families come to live.18 This adds further social complexity to the widower’s fate and that of the bereaved. In regard to the pattern of matri-uxorilocal settlement, the question arising is whether or not a widowed man remains with the family of his wife after her death. Several factors speak in favour of the widower remaining with his in-laws. One is the common assumption that a man’s priorities shift from his parental family towards his wife’s family after his wedding. As implied in Kamala’s attitude towards her widowed son-in-law, a wife’s parents are said to respect a son-in-law deeply; possibly itself an expression of respect for this shift in priorities. Kamala was seen to provide this widower with cooked meals, and the general social logic may rather be one in which the widowed man continues his allegiances with his in-laws. Another factor for this continuation may be the underlying preferred model of cross-cousins marriage that maintains marriage relationships between related families over the generation. With the husband preferably a son of the wife’s (real or classificatory) mother’s brother or father’s sister, he is not a stranger to the family. A wish to maintain connections may be stronger than a desire to break up the relationship following the death of a spouse (say, by the widower returning to his parental family).

18 | A couple may settle down in the husband’s place of origin rather than in the wife’s, if a husband’s village offers more security within the war context. Or else families may come to settle down in altogether new places when seeking refuge from hostilities in their natal villages or places of residence. In fact, in the case of Vasuki’s parental family, the father originated from Jaffna and the mother from a place in interior Batticaloa, and parents, married sons, and daughter lived in Navalady at the time of the tsunami.

Chapter Four: Family Ties

The example of Kamala and her granddaughters illustrates a further point: the local practice of assigning children to their matri-kin. Consequently, after the death of their mothers, children typically remain with their maternal grandmothers and/or their mothers’ sisters. This was observed among many families after the tsunami as well as in other circumstances of a mother’s death. The practice may result in an impoverished household having to cope with additional members. However, it may also promote strategies to keep the father present among his deceased wife’s matri-kin and to assure his continued provision for the children. Or, to take a different perspective, social ways may be demanded that allow the father to remain with his children. This brings us back to the question about remarriage. In the case of Vasuki’s brother, he eventually married ‘a woman with a house’. This statement by a young woman (who herself had recently eloped) neatly addressed the point that Vasuki’s brother married a woman who had been given a house as dowry at a time when our acquaintances remained waiting for their permanent houses to be built and young women worried about never being given the customary ciitanam viitu. As for Kamala’s son-in-law, he remained a widower for as long as we knew, while the half-orphaned children stayed with Kamala and her other married daughters. Given his past violence against Kamala’s second daughter before her death and his liking for strong liquor, there could be no such thing as encouraging him to marry Kamala’s youngest daughter (who, as discussed above, remained unmarried until she agreed to marry one of her maama). However, the marriage of a widowed man to an unmarried sister of his deceased wife was promoted in several other cases related to us in field conversations – though almost exclusively in the form of attempts that failed. Only in one example known to us, a widower successfully married his sister-in-law. That was the case of the former husband of Sudarshini’s eldest sister. After the suicide of Sudarshini’s sister, he remarried, but the new wife died shortly afterward, leaving him behind with a baby. Upon that second wife’s death, he married her younger sister who took care of the baby.19 This particular case of a sororal remarriage occurred well before the tsunami; all the examples we heard in regard to a “tsunami widower” failed in the willingness of either the sister and potential new spouse, or the widower himself, or both. A case in point is the elopement described by Lakshmi earlier in this chapter – one which prompted the mother to reject her daughter temporarily. This young woman eloped in response to her brother-in-law’s wish that she marry him and care for the half-orphaned baby after his wife’s death in the tsunami. Her mother supported this wish, also appreciating this son-in-law for the comparatively good income that he gained as a regular employee. Yet the daughter (and younger 19 | Hence, this example of sororate relates to Sudarshini’s brother-in-law’s third marriage. As for the four children that Sudarshini’s sister left behind, Sudarshini and her mother took care of them while their father established new households (in fact, he had married five times up until early 2009).

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sister of the deceased wife) chose to “run away” with an older man and friend of the family. In another case, Nanthini’s later husband was also said to have tried to marry the younger sister of his deceased wife and mother of their surviving son some time after the tsunami. In yet another example, Pusparaji tried in vain to get her son Raman, who lost a wife and three children in the tsunami, to marry his sister-in-law who was looking after his two remaining daughters. It remains conjecture whether the examples of failed attempts at sororate in the aftermath of the tsunami indicate less parental or kinship authority, and thus more individual autonomy of the candidates involved, or whether more failed attempts occurred because there were so many cases of widowers seeking remarriage. Clearly, however, the concept of sororal remarriage existed, and the practice bespeaks a strategy to maintain basic kudumbam relationships beyond the loss of particular members. In fact, other fieldwork confirms this finding. McGilvray’s field-notes from the 1970s indicate that widowers are often observed to marry the younger sister of their deceased wife when possible (email communication, 2 June 2010). However, such a marriage expectedly depends on the availability of a younger, unmarried sister given the importance attached to the age hierarchy between a Tamil husband and his wife (see also Daniel 1984, 7). Besides marrying two candidates of the preferred kin-relationship, this practice also automatically paralleled established marriage relationships between local matriclans or kudis, the social units particularly important within the Mukkuvar and Vellalar castes. With the new marriage expectedly maintaining the former residence pattern, previous economic arrangements could be kept and allow a husband’s continued cultivation of his wife’s fields among paddy-field owners.20 These points may also hold for the Karaiyar, though they hold less importance where the kudi system does not impact on marriages and with fishing offering more flexible livelihood arrangements. Given that specific fishing rights exist, such as karaivalai beach seine-fishing rights, they give rise to inheritance issues, which include fishing gear. This leads more precisely to the question of dowry which functions effectively as a form of pre-mortem inheritance in the Batticaloa region. In fact, karaivalai rights are maintained within family groups in Navalady through the practice of maccaan-maccaal marriages according to Lawrence (2010, 93). One example among our friends suggests that a woman’s father’s karaivalai rights were given to her husband following their marriage.21 This touches upon 20 | I thank Prof. Dennis McGilvray for his 2 June 2010 email response to my queries regarding the practice of sororate (and levirate) in Batticaloa. 21 | This is the example of Indurani and Ramesh, with Ramesh having received karaivalai rights from Indurani’s father after the couple’s marriage. In this particular case, Ramesh later sold these rights to Renuka’s husband (that is, to the husband of Indurani’s sister’s daughter) and Renuka’s husband subsequently lost them by deceit to another family outside their kin – a loss bemoaned as affecting the whole extended family. However, in

Chapter Four: Family Ties

issues that cannot be pursued further in this research. But it would be interesting to know more about dowry issues relating to marriages of widowers. Could the dowry given to a (subsequently) deceased daughter, for instance, be seen as transferred to another daughter in the case of that daughter’s marriage to her widowed brotherin-law? Or, to render it in phrasing more appropriate to contemporary dowry issues: would such a second marriage relieve the daughters’ parents from having to provide (another) dowry? Or are widowers and their families likely to demand dowry in today’s circumstances? What remains clear – within the framework of preferred cross-cousin marriages – is that a widower’s marriage to his sister-in-law marries him to an appropriate partner in terms of kin-position. Moreover, considering the perspective of the children, the sororate practice neatly brings the father to marry his children’s cinnamma (their “small mother”). For daily life in which children often grow up under the multiple mothering of their own mother and her sisters, such familiar relationships continued. Against this backdrop of Dravidian kinship and the matri-uxorilocal settlement pattern prevailing locally, sororate appears indeed as an obvious and pragmatic social practice. Finally, a further point is worth considering. According to Goonesekere (1996, 304), polygamous families involving a man living with two sisters was an accepted social practice sanctioned in the past by Mukkuva law. This law prevailed for Batticaloa Tamils until the nineteenth century when it was annulled by introduction of the Matrimonial Rights and Inheritance Ordinance in 1876 (McGilvray 2008, 125–129). However, Whitaker (2007, 46–47) noted that establishing a household with a second wife was not uncommon in rural Batticaloa until the mid-twentieth century. This author in fact referred to a man who took his wife’s sister as his second wife. Indeed, polygamous arrangements might likely have been narrowed down to sisters in practice, given the kinship preferences in marriage partners and the matri-uxorilocal settlement (unless the husband moved between separate households located at a distance from each other).

Widows Given the familiarity of the concept of sororate described and its plausibility in the local context, the question arises whether its inversed pattern, levirate, could also be expected. Again, according to Goonesekere (1996, 304), polyandrous families made up of a woman living with two men was accepted by Mukkuva law in Batticaloa. Yet other social factors would complicate such marriages at another case known to us, karaivalai rights were transferred from father to son. In this case, the son remained living in his birthplace (Navalady), and his wife moved there after having fled from her own place of origin. Evidently, research specifically addressing these issues of inheritance and dowry (and of past and present practices) is needed to gain a clearer picture.

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the very least. Among them are the social preference of Tamil men for marrying a wife younger and of “virgin” status, and the practice of marrying a family’s daughters and sons in chronological order according to their age and gender (that is, preferably marrying off the daughters while the brothers remain unmarried to help cover the cost for the dowries). Moreover, more pronounced matri-focal structures in the past may have provided greater support for a widow and her children from her parental family and thus minimized the need for remarriage due to economic reasons. Therefore, it is no surprise that we came across no case of a widow marrying her brother-in-law during fieldwork.22 Women’s comparatively stronger social position within matrilineally orga­ nized societies notwithstanding negative social connotations of widows probably rendered their remarriage difficult in the past and present. Social ostracism of widows in Hindu-Tamil contexts is tightly linked to differing caste practices and is less pronounced in Sri Lanka overall than in the subcontinent. In India, upper-caste widows are generally prohibited from remarrying, though that rule does not hold for the lower castes. In Sri Lanka, widows can and do remarry (Thiruchandran [1997] 2006, xii, 39).23 However, they share a precarious social situation with unmarried and divorced or separated women that requires them to engage constantly in ways to avoid gossip and harassment. Widows are also specifically considered “inauspicious”, a bad omen. That view prevents them from partaking in auspicious Hindu rituals, such as puberty ceremonies and weddings, effectively marginalizing them from important social events (Hrdlicková 2008, 462–463; Leslie 1992, 176; Reynolds 1980, 39; Wadley 1980, 155). Among our acquaintances, at least, practice was more flexible, as the presence of widows at the puberty ceremonies we visited demonstrated. However, an expression with which several of our friends denoted a widow suggests a long-standing association of widows with the “inauspicious”: they spoke of a widow as an ‘eye wife’ (‘kan pencaati’), which evokes associations with concepts of the evil eye, that are very popular in Batticaloa.24 Among our regular research contacts, several women were widows or had been widowed at some time before remarrying. These cases suggest that remarriage 22 | Upon later questioning, we were told that cases of a widow marrying her deceased husband’s brother did occur in Batticaloa, but they were highly uncommon. It would be worthwhile considering whether both spouses in these cases had been widowed (as seen among our research contacts and their relations, widows frequently remarried a man who was himself a widow or separated from his first wife). 23 | Possibly, remarriages become more difficult with the tendency in families to aspire to higher castes’ attitudes as they economically rise towards middle class status (Kapadia 1995). The LT TE ideologies, however, opposed widow discrimination. 24 | See McGilvray (1982, 37) on evil eye (kannuru, kan patukiratu, tirushti) concepts specifically for Batticaloa, and Lüthi (1999, 301–304; 2001, 12) for observations from south India.

Chapter Four: Family Ties

was more common for young widows (rather than elderly ones), and for widows to get married to a man who had likewise been married before. Though possible and practiced, a widow’s remarriage tended to be more complicated than that of a widower. Foremost, our acquaintances did not seem to grant a widow the need for a ‘daily life helper’, though they did in the cases of their male counterparts. Widows, moreover, risked moral condemnation when they attempted to marry soon after the death of their husband. They were expected to remain a year in mourning. The way Lakshmi’s husband commented upon a neighbour in August 2005 illustrates that point: ‘She is a bad woman. Her husband only died eight months ago, and she already wants a new man.’ The case of Nanthini illustrates this societal expectation for widows to adhere to one year of mourning. Yet it also reveals that young widows could be pressured to remarry (rather than to remain alone), depending on family and economic situations. Nanthini was just 27 years old when she became a widow due to the tsunami. She used to say that the death of her husband and their baby had already ended her life. At times, this expression likely referred to the way in which social life can be considered “over” for a woman who has lost her status as sumangali (auspicious wife). Immediately after the tsunami, Nanthini’s mother-in-law even accused her of being responsible for the death of her husband. This allegation resonates with the Hindu view that a wife has power over her husband’s wellbeing, and a widow is likely to be blamed for not having prevented her husband’s death (David 1980, 99–101; Reynolds 1980, 55; Wadley 1980, 158). More often, however, Nanthini used the phrase to signify resistance. She therewith rejected the attempts of her elder brother (less often, her father) to control her: ‘My life is already finished; he has no right to control me.’ That was also the phrase which Nanthini initially used to counter her brother’s pressure to have her remarry as soon as the one-year mourning period for her husband and child ended. But she gave in gradually. She began to change her mind primarily in consideration of her economic situation. She knew she could expect no help from her brother, and her parents did not have even enough means to support themselves. Moreover, her father was ill and often difficult to deal with (see Chapter Seven). Post-tsunami aid was thinning out, and she saw no prospect for gaining a living. Having dropped out of school at the age of 14, she had no work experience outside home, though she had taken up several short-term cashfor-work opportunities after the tsunami. By mid-2006, she was ready to marry a man whom she had come to like, who was a relative on her mother’s side. He too had lost his spouse due to the tsunami (while his son survived and stayed with the child’s maternal grandmother since then). As we last visited Nanthini in early 2009, the couple was expecting a baby and lived in her new home within the posttsunami relocation scheme. Nanthini’s situation points out the relevance of economic considerations and family support as well as pressure for widows to remarry. It can be expected that economic means, family situations, social networks, normative expectations, and

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personal inclinations form crucial elements regarding a second marriage for widows. These factors may be decisive for them whether widowhood stemmed from armed conflict or owed to the tsunami. Yet the overall circumstances of the post-tsunami and war contexts differed. That said, I would like briefly to discuss the chances of remarriage for tsunami widows and war widows. This comparison is suggested given Sri Lanka’s long-standing social category of war widows, who largely remain unmarried, and the observation of tsunami widows remarrying (Hyndman 2008; 2011, 59–79). Yet the comparison is somewhat flawed, since the categories under review are highly stereotypical, disguising the heterogeneity of widows’ prevailing situations. Foremost, the category of war widows by definition fails to comprise those war widows who remarried. Though indisputably a high proportion remained widowed, some women who lost their husbands due to the armed conflict clearly remarried as well. Thus, to restate the point, while remarriage (and permanent widowhood) occurred in both groups, the extent of it likely differed between the groups. Interesting dimensions emerge in considering how widowhood is perceived (whether stemming from war or the tsunami). For instance, are the two forms of widowhood seen alike in terms of possible blame for a husband’s death being placed on the widow? What social responses apply towards a widow whose husband was killed in war? And in what ways, if at all, do these differ from responses that a tsunami widow faces? Hyndman (2008; 2011, 59–79) approached another set of questions when she looked into the meaning of widowhood and chances for remarriage after the massive waves. Based on interviews with tsunami widows and widowers in early 2005, Hyndman (2008; 2011, 69–79) found that a felt lack of social protection was said to motivate tsunami widows to remarry.25 That is, the widowed men interviewed held that their female counterparts remarried because they feared harassment or abuse when living alone, after having lost a great number of additional family members besides their husbands. This situation seemed to differ from that of war-widows, who primarily lost their husbands but retained other possible social protectors. Conversely, while some tsunami widows had remarried, the widows among the interviewees tended to be reluctant to remarry, suspecting a new husband would mistreat the children from the first marriage. Much supports an argument that women may have opted for remarriage in the hope of attaining a socially less precarious position than that of widowhood. Granted that, this entails the questionable issue of what can be considered a “choice” within such social constellations (Hyndman 2008, 113; 2011, 75). But there is some need for caution when it comes to the alleged greater human losses 25 | At the time of the interviews in February 2005, many widowers had already remarried while the situation for widows was more varied. Widowers remarried with relative ease and in correspondence of what has been outlined above in the text: being in need of a counterpart for the domestic roles.

Chapter Four: Family Ties

from the tsunami as compared to war, with the war context characterized by a shortage of men due to death and migration. As for the noted reluctance of widows to remarry, such statements must be interpreted against the backdrop of the normative expectation mentioned that widows remarry, if at all, only after a year of mourning has passed.26 More in-depth studies of the real situations of particular tsunami widows and/or war widows would need to address the related question of their chances to remarry. It seems to me that at least two fundamental differences prevail among war and tsunami widows and their eventual chances for remarriage. First of all, a difference lies in the demographic situations: by killing more women than men, the tsunami produced a sudden group of widowers along the coastal stretch. These widowers, it was seen, remarried relatively quickly, and their interest in remarriage did not necessarily discriminate against previously married women. In other words, we can assume a specific “pool” of available potential marriage partners after the tsunami, noting that a widow has generally been observed to stand a greater chance to marry a widower rather than a previously unmarried man in the local context. In contrast, over the long term, war resulted in large numbers of war widows and a general absence of men in many villages due to death, recruitment, or migration.27 As already mentioned, it generally became increasingly difficult for many families to find a bridegroom for their daughters. When young, unmarried women faced such difficulties, the chances for a remarriage of a previously married woman (especially one with children to provide for) were expectedly even lower. Another difference may be seen in economic circumstances. The generous aid for “tsunami victims” has no parallel in the frequently destitute situations of those affected by war. While an independent income or financial support may be said to enhance a woman’s autonomy, economic advantages just as likely increase her chances of remarriage: seen from an economic perspective, a tsunami widow could be considered more attractive than many war widows could ever hope to be. The economic advantage gained by post-tsunami aid would usually be only shortterm, since a widow would lose benefits allocated to households headed by women when she remarried. Moreover, this aid thinned out over the two years following the disaster. Yet tsunami widows likely came to preside over a valuable long-term asset in the form of a newly donated house of greater value than what many war widows probably had. This asset – and even the prospect of it – could function 26 | The fear, stated by Hyndman’s interviewees, of a new husband to mistreat the children of first marriage also finds its parallels in what, among our research contacts, relatives tended to suspect about the new wife of a widower once she was to have children of her own. I wonder whether such suspicion is especially raised in those cases of remarriage in which the relatives of the deceased wife or her husband had no say in arranging the new marriage. 27 | UNIFEM (2004) estimated approximately 40,000 war widows in Sri Lanka and 30,000 households headed by women in northern and eastern Sri Lanka.

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as a viable basis for remarriage in the local context by representing a woman’s ciittanam viitu. More on this issue of dowry houses in the post-tsunami context appears in the next chapter (Chapter Five). Before that, I turn to the issue of domestic violence as a third topic (often mentioned yet little addressed) regarding family life in the relief camps.

P r awn - like M en ? D iscussing D omestic V iolence ‘He is like a prawn: clean from the outside but full of dirt in his head.’ That was how Tharshan remarked on his maccaan Suresh who had recently beaten up his wife Sasika once more in mid-October 2005. Calling her a ‘good woman’, Tharshan saw no faults with Sasika but clearly disapproved of her husband. We were seated with Suresh’s parents and sisters who were all upset about their son’s and brother’s behaviour. Drunk and full of anger, he had beaten up his pregnant wife in front of their neighbours. Returning to this example further below, I examine the frequency of domestic violence as observed in the relief camps and temporary shelters. I limit discussion for this purpose to incidents of men’s physical violence against their wives. That was the most visible form of intra-household violence witnessed during fieldwork. Yet I am aware that domestic violence represents a much broader spectrum of violence, which also comprises harmful acts against children (Karlekar 2003). Such cases of violence at home should also be seen in relation to violent behaviour at large, including Sri Lanka’s high rate of suicide (see also Spencer 1990a). Domestic violence has been defined as being essentially a form of control over another individual (Houghton 2009, 101). It is a common and expected kind of violence in Sri Lanka and beyond, especially when alcohol is involved (Gamburd 2008, 119). Up until my fieldwork in 2005, when the Prevention of Domestic Violence Act was newly introduced in Sri Lanka, domestic violence was not considered a crime in a legal sense but a private matter best sorted out within the families concerned (Kodikara 2012). Among the first few cases of domestic violence that we came to know of in Central College and Zaeera College camp was the death of a woman in hospital after having been set on fire by her husband. In another case, a wife trying to run away from her husband, was caught by him and then hit against a cement wall until other men intervened. These most “visible” cases represent merely the tip of an iceberg. As fieldwork progressed, we realized the frequency of husbands’ physical violence against their wives, including past and ongoing cases of abuse among our friends and their wider family members. Except for the case in which the woman died, which led to the husband’s imprisonment, little seemed to change for the families directly involved – at least at the surface. While some women left their homes or camp to stay with relatives for a few days after violent incidents,

Chapter Four: Family Ties

they soon returned to remain with their husbands. The reasons stated for their return included fear for the safety of the children during their absence, economic dependency on their husbands with no prospect of gaining a sufficient income by themselves, and lack of an alternative place to stay in safety.28 There was also an expectation that the “blame” for a broken marriage lay with the woman, however much her husband may have been found at fault. Indeed relatives and neighbours usually encouraged women to return to their husbands, since this was considered their rightful place. Women were socialized into sharing this point of view.29 Matri-local residence expectedly offers women some protection from domestic violence. I know of several incidents when the direct or classificatory brothers of a battered woman stepped in to defend her – which consequently point out a wife’s brother as her main protector against a violent husband (this is also seen in Murali’s act and remark against Suresh later in the text). However, the frequency of wife-battering and the seemingly ultimate futility of efforts to stop it, remain impressive. In severe or persistent cases of abuse, a woman and her parental family resorted to the LTTE or the police for intervention. However, both these institutions likely advised the couple to remain together. Though the LTTE was known to oppose violence against women and to take action against a battering husband by advising or physically punishing him, it seems that the ultimate aim still lay in reuniting the couple. Hence, whether brought before the police or the LTTE, the couple tended to be told to “better themselves”, reconcile and reunite. Consequently, the woman would remain with her husband, having to find her own ways to deal with his violent acts. Women’s groups, other gender-sensitized organizations, and camp residents noted high levels of wife-battering in the camps and camp-like temporary shelter sites (see also Fisher 2005, 2009). But their responses differed greatly in terms of communication: whereas the organizations aimed to make these incidents a topic of public concern, the residents took measures to “silence” them. It lay to a large degree precisely in the public nature of an act rather than in the act itself that people condemned domestic violence. Domestic violence figured within tension being seen basically as a legitimate act against a deserving wife and an act to be hidden away and denied in front of others. Physical violence was usually 28 | Two “safe shelters” for women were run by NGOs in Batticaloa, but women hardly knew or trusted them and deemed it shameful to move into them. 29 | Tamil society tends to see the wife as the one responsible for the well-being of a family, linked to her ritual powers. That is also the reason why women are first asked to “change” their husbands – that is, influence his behaviour when marital conflicts emerge (Wadley 1980). In addition, women often stated in daily situations that it was more difficult for them to return to their parents in times of marital crisis when they had married based on love rather than parental arrangement. Yet such a return is probably linked more generally to the emotional support and economic means of the wife’s parental family than the way in which the marriage was forged (see also Peyer Strauss 2011).

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accepted as a rightful form of authority within couples and families. When beatings occurred in front of outsiders, however, they violated an understanding that “family problems” ought not to leave the doorframes of a home (see also, on south India, Peyer Strauss 2009). This transgression brought about shame – not only on those directly involved but on others connected to them as well – primarily the extended family but even beyond them. Even fellow camp residents feared their village’s reputation (and therefore their own) to be at stake when their neighbours engaged in openly violent behaviour. That said, however, there was also a little-defined and ill-definable degree beyond which domestic violence lost in social acceptance. Then violence was deemed exaggerated, and it ceased to be considered a perpetrator’s legitimate form of control. What NGO staff and direct witnesses of domestic violence seemed to agree on was the role that alcohol played: a man’s drunkenness, rather than the perpetrator himself, was usually blamed for the violence committed. That point is discussed at the end of this subchapter.

The burden of visibility This section relates back to Priya’s comments at the beginning of the chapter. The way she deplored the absence of demarcations between neighbours was a point frequently reiterated by others in response to violence within and between families. That was the moment when people tended to sigh that they had not previously seen or known of similar troubles when they lived in well fenced-in compounds in their former village. There again it resonated people’s idiomatic distinction between a “good” pre-tsunami time and a “bad” post-disaster time. For instance, Kamala told us in 2005 how her widowed son-in-law had provoked a violent fight with another man the night before. She was dismayed by his behaviour and stated that such violent incidents had been unknown in their earlier lives, when thick fences separated homes, and one would not be troubled by fights within other families.30 Her disapproval of the son-in-law paradoxically comprised the imagery of a former lifestyle free of such incidents and the hint of accepting violent outbursts as long as they remained behind locked doors rather than in an open site such as the camp. Her comments thus vented a great deal of symbolism, if not wishful thinking. This became clear upon recalling that Kamala had told us several times about how that man used to severely beat her daughter until her death in the tsunami. Hence this subchapter resumes what has been argued previously regarding elopements. That is to say, specific social processes were couched in terms of 30 | That she drew a picture of her neighbourhood as one consisting of solid houses within compounds marked off by fences formed by palm-leaves reveals the comparatively welloff economic positions she and her daughters enjoyed in their village. Even before the tsunami, many others lived in make-shift cadjan huts that offered less shelter from the noises of their next-door neighbours.

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a deplorable post-tsunami novelty while flashing back to a lifestyle before the massive waves. Again, much of what follows below can be seen as intensified forms of what was well established before. On one hand, intensifications may be attributed to a specific post-tsunami context that rendered more visible what was deplored as people lived in crowded camps where, moreover, NGO workers and other “outsiders” were regularly present. On the other hand, what seemed more intensified likely reflects an actual increase in domestic violence in the aftermath of the tsunami. Several studies from across the globe noted the tendency of increased incidents of domestic violence after disasters, though it remains difficult to make such an assessment (Bradshaw 2004, 33; Enarson 1999; 2000, 19; Houghton 2009; Wilson, Philips, and Neal 1998). Depending on theoretical premises, an actual increase may be associated with destabilized notions of masculinities following the disaster or with an increase in conflict sources that can lead to violent behaviour or a combination of such reasons. For instance, increased violence may be viewed as a kind of compensatory violence of men against women in situations in which men feel emasculated following their experience in the disaster and a life of dependency in relief camps (some of which is discussed in the two preceding chapters). It may also be seen against the backdrop of specific powerrelationships between men and women and the conflictive issues they face in daily circumstances. I relate to both of these perspectives by noting a certain general acceptance of domestic violence as well as particular moments that could result in violent behaviour. Lastly, any consideration of the post-disaster context needs to be related once again to the broader context of war effects. It has been argued in the Sri Lankan case as elsewhere that militarization of a society is accompanied by an increase in violence at all societal levels, including the domestic one (de Mel 2007; ICG 2011; Moser 2001; Seifert 2001). Against this backdrop, it becomes more problematic to determine whether or not domestic violence increased after the tsunami – once more demonstrating the inherent pitfalls of attempting to describe certain issues within a “before-and-after” sequence. In fact, more important to me than the question of an increase in domestic violence within the post-tsunami relief camps was the clear expression by several women who feared beatings by their husbands whenever something occurred within the family or outside it that could ignite their anger. Thus the presence of that fear and its realization was what impressed me during fieldwork. Such justified fear showed continuity between the past and present, foreshadowing what could be expected for the future in many lives. As for the discussion below, I am interested in how residents in relief camps and transitional shelters faced domestic violence issues and weighed what was accepted and what was not. As Riches (1986, 9–10) described, an act of violence is always one of contested legitimacy. At particular moments – for example, when violence occurs more often than usual – this challenge becomes more easily recognized. By analogy, I see the camps as places where (and moments when) the issue of legitimate violence was posed acutely and sometimes repeatedly.

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As a corollary, discussion – especially denial of domestic violence in the camps – also reflects processes of what comprises normalcy and who should have the upper-hand in defining it. These points are taken up in the last section of this subchapter in reference especially to Busby’s (1999, 2000) work among Tamil fishing-families in south India and Riches (1986) arguments on “alcohol violence”. I resume below episodes of Suresh’s violence against his wife Sasika in October 2005 as an illustrative basis for the discussion.

‘The shame falls always upon the woman’ With this remark, Sasika shrugged off our concerns regarding her situation as she chopped vegetables for the lunch her husband Suresh was expected to be served upon his return from the sea in October 2005. She had just come back to the temporary shelters, urged by her sister-in-law to do so after having spent the night with other matri-kin of her husband. She had fled to that home after her husband had beaten her up. As we sat together, everyone was disparaging of Suresh: his mother, his sisters, and Tharshan, all of whom were shocked by his angry violence against the seven-month pregnant wife. They especially condemned the fact that he had hit her despite her pregnancy and did so ‘in front of everybody.’ Sasika too resented the way her husband had beaten her in full public view. She did not expect people to criticize men’s acts as they did women’s behaviour. When the chairman of the camp committee at the time passed by, Sasika remembered that he had also witnessed the acts of the previous day. She wondered ashamed whether the man had seen her bare legs when she fell to the ground under Suresh’s blows. When Suresh appeared to have his lunch, he remarked that the curries were not tasty (also implying thereby that the curries had been prepared without affection). The remark caused his mother sneer at him, but Sasika made no response. Shortly after this, his mother’s eldest sister, Nallamma, dropped by to scold him for his behaviour and public outburst. As we asked Suresh how he felt about his acts of the previous nights, he answered with a grin, ‘vekkam’ (shame, or “loss of face”), which seemed to close the matter. While this episode followed a similar incident of Suresh severely beating his wife, his father, mother, and sister welcomed us again, sharply condemning Suresh’s behaviour only 10 days later. They reported excitedly on another fight that had occurred just before our arrival, this time in front of Suresh’s parents’ shelter. Therefore, again in full view of others, Suresh had pursued Sasika with a wooden pole. Suresh’s father, Ramesh, called out in his anger that he no longer considered him his son. He had wanted to fight against Suresh, but his wife and daughter had prevented him. However, two young male relatives, Murali and Ravindran, intervened and provoked Suresh to accuse them of wanting his wife. Both expressed doubt that a situation such as this one could ever change. Ravindran saw the problem in their ‘Tamil culture’ that held women to respect their husbands like a god. He also pointed out that the elected camp committee

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was supposed to deal with such cases, but the chairman himself simply ‘ran away’ on his bike when he saw what happened the previous time. Murali added that wives kept returning to their beating husbands despite their ill treatment. So what could anyone do? He said that he had intervened in the violent conflict as if a brother to Sasika, since she had no brother close-by to protect her (given that she lived among her husband’s relatives rather than in a dowry home with her matrikin). Murali had also reminded Suresh at that moment of how Suresh used to fight with his elder sister’s husband whenever that man battered his wife (that is, Suresh’s sister). When we talked to Suresh later that afternoon, he explained his outburst as a response to Sasika not fulfilling her role in their partnership and spoiling his reputation vis-à-vis his male friends. He said Sasika had not gone to the police, as he had expected, to sort out a ‘debt problem’ for him that morning. Nor had she prepared any lunch when he came home with his friends – a shameful situation for him since there was nothing to offer his guests. It seemed he had every reason to beat Sasika violently. This description shows how Suresh’s family members clearly disapproved of his behaviour and supported their in-law Sasika.31 It may leave one wondering about situations in which women cannot count on similar support in cases if, like Sasika, they reside in their husband’s village rather than among their own immediate kin. However, the support extended to Sasika was ambivalent. This was revealed when Suresh’s mother and sister urge Sasika to return to her husband and submit ultimately to his violent behaviour. The relatives were sincerely outraged by Suresh’s violence against his pregnant wife. Suresh’s family clearly rejected the degree of his violence: to use a wooden pole and attempt to strike it against a pregnant woman’s belly was well beyond the acceptable degree of acceptable behaviour within a husband’s “rightful” form of control over his wife. Ravindran disapprovingly referred to these rights as norms promoted in ancient Tamil scripts. Sasika, in turn, alluded to the related view that marital harmony lies within the powers of the sumangali. It is the “auspicious wife’s” duty to prevent her husband from exhibiting such public outbursts. Indeed, part of Sasika’s inlaw’s condemnation was caused by the “publicity” that the series of beatings had gained them. Moreover, the ambivalent support for Sasika stemmed from Suresh’s parental family’s own dependence on him. To condemn Suresh risked losing his good-will. Hence Suresh’s mother and sister prevented his father from intervening against his son, because they feared that Suresh was going to knock him down in turn. Such a turn of events not only would have provoked even more shame. Letting the father confront the son also risked them losing Suresh’s support on which his parental family depended: by taking his father along on his boat for fishing, he enabled the parents and remaining daughter a meagre, daily income. 31 | Sasika was not related to Suresh’s family before marriage; Suresh and Sasika met on the initiative of a marriage broker.

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Suresh admitted to be ashamed for beating Sasika publicly. Yet he was confident about his right to beat her. In the conversation with us, he did not refer to a godlike husband’s position to his wife but alluded to a more complementary model in which each of the spouses is assigned clear responsibilities.32 In this kind of partnership, he saw Sasika as having failed to fulfil her part. According to him, she should have managed the visit to the police while he was out at sea fishing. Moreover, she was at least expected to provide his meals. Instead, she had made him lose face in front of his guests – who included the businessman on whom Suresh, as a fisherman, depended to obtain credit in cash. Alone with Sasika a little later, we learned that both recent incidents were in fact related to ‘money problems’: the first incident happened after a male friend had come to request money he had lent Suresh. The second occurred when Suresh was pressured to raise a large sum to cover a debt he incurred before the tsunami. It had come to be a police case (that Sasika, interestingly enough, was asked to deal with).33 Overall, the conversations with Suresh and with Sasika mirror the gendered perspectives on marital disputes and violence that Gamburd (2008, 108–130) describes in her book dealing with cultural patterns in alcohol consumption in southern Sri Lanka: men focus on their wives’ faults, while women see money as a core factor when explaining household strife. Furthermore, much of the situation was blamed on Suresh’s drunkenness at the time. Sasika and Suresh’s parental family feared his capacity for sudden and violent anger. They knew that, when drunk, there was nothing anybody could do to reign in his temper. Suresh too said that he did not know what he was doing when drunk. The same case was made for other men who were well known for beating their wives (and children at times) severely. For instance, the husband of Suresh’s elder sister was known as a ‘good man’, kind and responsible, except when he was drunk. Then, he was said to turn into being the worst of all husbands, battering his wife. And he was often drunk. This notion of alcohol as a trigger of violence is not limited to the local context but finds wide resonance elsewhere in Sri Lanka and across the globe (Gamburd 2008; Riches 1986). Moreover, Busby’s (1999) findings suggest that feminist organizations and battered women in south Indian villages found common ground in campaigning against alcohol consumption: anti-alcoholism messages found better local resonance than a discourse that identified violence against women in patriarchal power structures. A similar case could be made for the posttsunami context reviewed here, where NGOs hesitated or even ignored addressing domestic violence other than possibly by offering psycho-social support to “women

32 | This model is generally common for Karaiyar (Busby 2000). It may also be noted that LT TE’s official ideology aimed to abolish Tamil “patriarchal culture” and promote greater equality between women and men. 33 | Our conversation suggested that Suresh simply wished to avoid confronting the police and thus asked Sasika to go there, accompanied by his mother.

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victims”. At a later stage, an attempt was made to address alcohol dependence directly among men, which met with little success. According to Riches’ (1986, 3) triangular model of violence, the scenes depicted above indicate the differing perspectives of those who perform, endure, or witness violent acts. This model invites criticism, since its reductionist basis forfeits understanding of the significance or meaning attributed to violence and the deep ambiguity inherent in it (Das 1987, 11). What remains of interest here is the way the model points to a contested legitimacy of violence. In the rest of this chapter, I briefly delineate a framework which relates the described cases of violence to local concepts on gender relationships as well as specific constellations in daily life when violence is performed. I also touch upon the question of social behaviour under the influence of alcohol.

Discussing domestic violence and “alcohol violence” Busby (1999, 228–230) discerned two main approaches to domestic violence within social anthropology. One, as exemplified by Harris (1994) among others, places the phenomenon within local concepts and seeks to understand how violence is connected to notions of masculinity and gender relationships in the specific socio-cultural context. Another approach, as represented, for example, by Moore (1994b), goes beyond these local understandings and perceives violence in terms of individuals’ conflicting strategies and practices. Busby (1999) sees her own study about discourses on gender-based violence in fishing villages in south India as a combination of these lines of inquiries: it looks at both local concepts that play a role in performing and accepting physical violence as well as particular moments in daily life when violence occurs. Moreover, her study is of interest here, because it shows several parallels to what we observed during fieldwork in eastern Sri Lanka. Hence, similar patterns emerge for the contexts of (matrilineally organized) Tamil fishing villages, irrespective of decades of armed conflict and the aftermath of a “natural” disaster. This background also allows one to think about the specifics as they become accentuated in the given context. Similar to what Busby (1999; 2000, 38) noted for Tamil fishing villages in south India, our research contacts had acquired a reputation for being quarrelsome and quick to engage in physically violent fights. Physical violence within a household and among family members formed a daily expectation. In most cases, violence was a legitimate means of exerting authority and control by husbands over wives, parents over children, or brothers over sisters. It often seemed the appropriate way to deal with conflicts within and among families. Violence also formed a significant feature in understanding the masculinity of fishermen. As Busby (1999) pointed out, violence is associated with a fisherman’s bravery and the strength required for his daily battles at sea. In terms of violence between spouses, reference can be made to Tamil personhood concepts that hold a person never wholly responsible for her or his actions but relate responsibility to a wider

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circle of people (Daniel 1984). Hence a socio-cultural concern for relationships rather than single individuals emerges that contributes to a perception of domestic violence as essentially arising out of the marital relationship. As a consequence, a woman is seen as largely co-responsible for the blows she receives. Concepts about a sumangali’s powers to influence her husband’s behaviour and maintain a family’s well-being and prosperity also augment women’s responsibility in marital disputes (Peyer Strauss 2009, 2011; Wadley 1980, 156, 160). While these concepts help to explain acceptance of violence and the perception of a battered woman as having “deserved” her husband’s beating, gendered practices in daily life may explain why violence actually occurred at particular moments. As in Busby’s (1999) account, control over household money formed a major source of conflict among our acquaintances. Within couples, these conflicts often linked to women’s and men’s differing priorities on how money ought to be spent. For instance, in line with what it means “to be a man”, it was important for men to be seen as a generous host to other men and to spend lavishly on alcohol and food for guests. This point was also seen in Suresh’s and Sasika’s case above when Suresh found his kauravam undermined in front of his male guests due to Sasika. Conversely, her own way of failing to cook was the response of an angered wife, after her husband left it to her to sort out their debt case with the police. Much can be said about how such conflicts increased in the post-tsunami context. Like Suresh and Sasika, many families found themselves pressed to pay back pre-tsunami debts shortly after they had lost all their possessions (usually including precisely that asset for which the loan had been sought). Also, the “free” cash that families received as post-tsunami compensation formed sources of conflict. We often came across husbands spending money on alcohol or status symbols such as TVs or motorbikes, while their wives resented the loss of this money, which could have covered other household needs (though wives too could take pride in acquiring whatever augmented the family’s status). Control over posttsunami compensation money could also provoke quarrels among wider family members. Such quarrels could ultimately lead a husband to beat up his wife, as if acting on behalf of his superior rights as a husband, even if other persons had stirred his anger. The sources of conflict are discussed further in the following Chapter Five that looks more closely at the strategies and discourses surrounding tsunami aid. For now, I would like to remain with the question of alcohol’s role in the instances of domestic violence observed. More often than not, a man’s drunkenness was taken to explain and excuse his violent behaviour. Most of the people we spoke with tolerated alcohol consumption among men. This was not the case for women, whose reputation suffered greatly when drinking. As such, the consumption of liquor was accepted as a legitimate way for men to relax from hard work or to deal with difficulties and sadness.34 Thus 34 | Gamburd’s (2008) elaborations on alcohol and masculinity for the south of Sri Lanka similarly apply for the context under review here. As Gamburd (2008, 87–108) noted, there

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a general tolerance prevailed for men who turned to drinking (or increased their previous drinking patterns) after the tsunami. Likewise, male family members were said to have taken to drinking after particular hardships earlier: for example, following the 1978 hurricane devastation, the killing or “disappearance” of a son, or the suicide of a daughter. Not all these men resorted to violence, though, and some only occasionally turned violent when drunk. People clearly distinguished between men who would simply ‘drink and sit’ (or ‘drink and sleep’) without bothering anyone and those who would start ‘troubling’ whoever they met – foremost their wives at home. Nevertheless, they tended to blame the alcohol involved when a man turned violent. Once more in reference to Busby (1999), it may be said that qualifying alcohol consumption with some kind of inherent violent consequence overlapped with a view of men as being less in control of their actions and more prone to follow their emotional impulses than women were. To see alcohol as the agent of violence could also relieve some women of a view that held them responsible for (and deserving of) their husbands’ violent acts. This argument may well explain the emphasis many of our acquaintances – most of them female – put on alcohol as the cause of their men’s violent actions. While men may similarly take alcohol consumption as an excuse, especially when they engaged in violence publicly, they were also comfortable with claims about their “rights” to beat their wives. A view that links alcohol consumption to violent behaviour is a widely shared view on the global scale. Yet, as social anthropological work reveals, a link between alcohol and violence is anything but self-evident. Instead, behaviour under the influence of alcohol is largely learned behaviour (Gamburd 2008; Riches 1986). As Riches (1986, 16–18) argued, alcohol consumption can generally be associated with exceptional social styles that differ from those of sober events. These extraordinary forms of behaviour can be peaceful or violent. Yet, even where violence is frequently involved, violent behaviour is socially channelled. Thus “alcohol violence” is foremost a social style that is culturally specified and not directed by consumption of alcohol itself. This conclusion aligns with Riches’ (1986, 12) broader understanding of violence as a “strategically employed resource” that a performer enacts for his or her own “social advancement” (Riches 1986, 17). Riches’ arguments here reflect many feminist scholars’ arguments that locate violence, including domestic violence and sexualized violence at large, clearly within power relationships (Grubner 2005; Houghton 2009; Moore 1994b; Seifert 2003). These considerations recall the point about the contestability of violence, and thus its contested legitimacy described by Riches (1986): a performer’s choice of violence as a means to an end will likely meet the resistance of the victim(s) and of witnesses, while both sides appeal to social rules and values. For his or her successful enactment of violence, these victims and witnesses will need to be are specific venues, such as weddings, when men are actually expected to drink.

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persuaded of the act’s justification in a given context (Riches 1986, 5). That is, the use of violence needs to be made acceptable to others. I argued at the beginning of this subchapter that such negotiations took place in the camp situation and focused on the acceptability of violence (or lack of it), as well as over its form and degree. Quite possibly, violence within and between families increased, connected to the intensified conflict situations and to gendered coping strategies described so far. In any case, the crowded living conditions invariably brought violence into the “public”, even when it was continued to be seen as something “private” (see also Bradshaw 2004, 33). The frequent presence of outsiders, in the form of NGO workers, volunteers, journalists, or researchers in the post-tsunami relief camps further risked making a public affair of what was deemed a family concern. Such “publicity” was an additional difficulty for the residents, since they not only saw the reputation of those directly involved at risk, but also those of others connected to them. One couple’s marital dispute turned visibly violent could then be deemed to impact the reputation of the whole camp detrimentally (that is, harm their village’s “good name”). In such an environment, ignoring, disguising, or denying violent behaviour appears as likely a response to its occurrence as was intervention and the moral condemnation of a husband’s physical violence against his wife. In short, the incidents forced all those confronted with violent processes to take a position on what was happening. And for many, as seen in Kamala’s and Priya’s remarks, a first reaction was a wish for fences to hide the violence. To conclude this subchapter, I would like to state that, developments could have taken a different course – potentially. The tsunami’s aftermath can also be seen as a moment that rendered acute the contestability of violence, in that people felt regret for any harm done to those who perished in the waves. For instance, Kamala’s son-in-law was said to be spending nights crying for his deceased wife whom he had mistreated during her lifetime. Sudarshini mentioned her contempt for all parents who continued to beat their children, since she lost all her three children in the tsunami. She told herself then – four months after the tsunami – that she would never hit children in the future as she had in the past. Given the grief for the deceased, the violent acts of the past seemingly lost their claims to legitimacy. This experience must have affected some family relations, indicated by the way Sudarshini largely refrained from using the stick against her later children. Priya’s comment at the beginning of the chapter also hinted at somewhat transformed relationships when she commented on the sheer impossibility of scolding children who had lost their siblings. The way in which repetitive cases of physical violence in the camp and temporary shelter site stirred discussions and at times despair among residents further indicates that these cases were not simply tolerated, but promoted by some and resisted by others. As with any social act, violent processes were being negotiated; in what form, to what degree, and in which situation they should be accepted, tolerated, rejected, or deemed legitimate. Given the combination of socio-cultural and economic powers of those who

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perform violently and the widely-shared interests of looking away from domestic violence, it seems that this form of violent process was to make up part of the created “normalcy” of living together for a while, however contested it was at the same time.

C onclusion This chapter shows how relatedness, primarily in the form of marital unions, was recreated in the aftermath of the tsunami. After the sudden and massive losses of close relatives and out of the camp-like living situations, new relationships were forged and existing ones negotiated. Economic gains and constraints often played a significant role in this, as did considerations of more broadly physical insecurities and political instabilities in the face of a renewed escalation of war. As social processes, cases of elopements, remarriages, and domestic violence are seen largely as intensifications of what has long been established. Yet elopements in particular offered themselves to symbolic, idiomatic expressions about a pre-tsunami time of harmonious social order and a post-tsunami disorder that was important for many of the survivors. Underneath a known symbolism of relationships in defiance of parental control one can detect the complex consequences of social disruption, new opportunities, economic considerations, and not least the hope for new beginnings along familiar paths. Remarriages of widowed persons acquire new meanings when widowed men come into focus and offer themselves as possible marriage partners to widows. Moreover, my elaborations on sororate indicate how a study may yield observations of specific ethnographic interest from a post-disaster context. Furthermore, an ethnographic approach discloses how relief aid in the form of housing may also have helped equip widows for remarriage by providing them a dowry home. The cases of domestic violence demonstrate the potential harm to women within the intimate ties that survivors sought so actively to establish and maintain. In respect to battered women, instrumental understandings of violence as goal-oriented strategic performances may serve as important political steps, though Das’ (1987, 13) advocacy in favour of “speech of the victim” in anthropological dealings with violence promises more complex and profound insights. Together, the reviewed examples speak to people’s efforts to create, recreate, and maintain relationships of lasting social obligations and care. This emerges despite and in response to experiencing the fragility of precisely these ties.

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Chapter Five: Dealing with Aid and Anticipating New Homes

The large-scale devastation and human suffering caused by the tsunami mobilized a great degree of local, national, and international aid. Endowed with up-to-then unknown financial resources, actors of humanitarian and development aid set out to rebuild the destroyed coastlines and enable the survivors to reorganize their lives. Soon enough, these efforts were criticized for lack of coordination, transparency, equity, and participation, as well as for undermining chances to promote peace-building in Sri Lanka (Bastian 2005; Keenan 2010; RajasinghamSenanayake 2005; Telford and Cosgrave 2007). Governmental agencies and NGOs as well as international, national, and local institutions blamed one another for delays and inefficiencies in reconstruction efforts, while each courted the news media to represent their positions and achievements. Use of the term tsunami itself became inflationary, and several critics compared international aid to yet another over-powering wave discharging itself over the local population (Korf 2005; Shanmugaratnam 2005). While raising important objections, some of the post-tsunami aid criticism ultimately reduced the people concerned to passive victims. By focusing primarily on criticizing outside interventions, the strategies and practices of the people affected remained largely neglected. I wish to go beyond a simple dichotomy of opposing powerful external actors and victimized recipients of aid. Arguably, the categories introduced by governmental agencies and NGOs to control the situation and allocate aid also offered the survivors ways to reorganize their lives, strategically as well as subjectively. This chapter consists of three parts. The first part looks at post-tsunami aid allocation and receipt by discussing the underlying gender models. The second part takes up questions of relocation and draws attention to our research contacts’ decisions in favour of a future home in a new environment.1 The focus in the 1 | These first two parts build and elaborate upon two previously published articles (Thurnheer 2009a, 2009b).

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last part lies on processes of settling down in temporary shelters while awaiting construction of permanent housing. Before these elaborations, I consider some critical issues in regard to post-tsunami aid, and I formulate my own position within the form of a counter-critique.

Disaster responses Victimizing discourses reigned high in the aftermath of the tsunami. After the devastating waves, images of victims in need of help circulated in the news media in what mirrors commercialization of suffering that occurred when the “existential appeal of human experiences” (Kleinman and Kleinman 1997, 1) gained market value in today’s media-focused era. According to Korf (2007), these powerful images of innocent, helpless victims that flickered onto TV screens during the Christmas holidays contributed to generate the extraordinarily large financial resources for international, post-tsunami aid. Korf (2007) argued that the donations – and consequently the chains of aid – functioned as asymmetrical gift-giving practices with humiliating effects on the recipients’ side: unable to enter into a reciprocal relationship, the recipients were still expected to perform expressions of gratefulness.2 This led to what another observer had termed the “posturing” (Nanthikesan 2005) of so-called beneficiaries in front of aid agencies and media, especially during events like the “handing-over” of relief items and houses in ritual-like fashion. Chapter Two touched upon these processes in regard to people’s constructions of a group described as “the most affected, and most neglected”. Women figured prominently among the images of victims, both as casualties and as survivors with specific vulnerabilities. Indeed, the political and practical need to point out women’s particular situations in order to challenge blind spots in disaster research and response tends to reproduce dichotomizing and victimizing stereotypes of vulnerable women. Feminist work has critically reflected on these pitfalls, while differentiated approaches remain difficult to implement (Ariyabandu 2009; Cornwall, Harrison, and Whitehead 2007). Moreover, the overall global attention placed on tsunami victims, stood in contrast to the scant publicity shed on other crises worldwide. Sri Lanka is a good example of that discrepancy, since the situations of those affected by war never received comparable attention or redress, either in the past or during the period of war following the tsunami. International sources came up with approximately $13.5 billion (US) to address the humanitarian needs of the countries affected after the tsunami, according to Telford and Cosgrave (2007, 2). With that estimate, post-tsunami aid 2 | De Alwis (2009) took a related though further-reaching stand when she reflected on the concept of aid as wounding. She critically discussed ways in which aid came to suggest a “salve” while further wounding those victimized by war and the tsunami in Sri Lanka. De Alwis also pondered the political meaning of such circumstances.

Chapter Five: Dealing with Aid and Anticipating New Homes

amounted to the most generously funded response ever. Besides well-established organizations, numerous others, including ad-hoc private “helpers”, flocked to the scenes of devastations with money to spend. An estimated 300 additional organizations arrived in Sri Lanka within one month after the tsunami (Harris 2006, 1). As for Batticaloa, the presence of international aid also increased significantly: while 14 international agencies and NGOs had been active in Batticaloa district during October 2004 according to the local NGO consortium, at least some 63 organizations were registered as actively involved in the district’s post-tsunami aid by June 2005.3 Island-wide, these high numbers of aid actors were under pressure to spend their donations, thus fostering competition among beneficiaries and possible projects. Many favoured cost-intensive yet mediaeffective activities. Housing construction projects offered themselves in these regards: they absorbed a great deal of money and could be handed over to their new owners in front of running cameras. Not surprisingly, many post-tsunami relief and reconstruction efforts fell short of the agencies’ self-proclaimed standards for project implementation. Shortcomings included competition rather than cooperation occurring between the various actors, their lack of knowledge of local contexts in which they came to operate, as well as flawed processes used to involve beneficiaries in project design and implementation (Couldrey and Morris 2005; Gaasbeek 2010; Frerks 2010; Telford and Cosgrave 2007). It seems highly dubious overall that the post-tsunami slogan was met: to “build back better” by turning the disaster into an opportunity to improve people’s living conditions and their capacities to manage future calamities (Khasalamwa 2010; Ruwanpura 2009). Assessments critical of ways in which post-tsunami aid was practiced frequently provide a list of recommendations for improved future action. Yet the point remains that some crucial issues inevitably exemplify how humanitarian aid works. Stirrat (2006) pointed out that competition among NGOs forms an inherent structure unlikely to be overcome with requests for better coordination. Organizational and individual interests arise from situations in which agencies operate; their interests which contrast fundamentally with their philanthropic principles. How an agency or an individual perform in a given disaster context is ultimately the proof of their relevance and thus the basis for an organization’s continued existence as well as the key in a career of “disaster professionals” (Stirrat 2006, 16). Therefore, sharing information and considering the strengths of other actors are likely pursued only to the degree in which these practices sustain an organization’s or individual’s own survival in the field.

3 | The estimated number of international actors is taken from an overview of registered humanitarian actors in Sri Lanka (United Nations Humanitarian Information Centre 2005). The numbers of tsunami aid actors in Sri Lanka remained fluctuating and difficult to ascertain.

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The criticized “top-down” approach of humanitarian aid can be further faulted to undermine long-term development goals.4 Feminists have argued in regard to gender concerns that the “tyranny of the urgent” tends to override development concerns in emergency contexts (Byrne and Baden 1995). Gender issues are commonly delegated to the margins of what are considered pressing concerns within humanitarian aid (Fothergill 1998; Scanlon 1998). A challenge lies largely in finding ways to integrate participatory approaches even when immediate needs in regard to safe drinking water, food, and shelter seem most obvious. This would demand of humanitarian aid “experts” that they acknowledge the significance of analysing social power relationships, work with existing grassroots organizations, and actively seek consultations with women beneficiaries. As long as such demands are ignored in practice, feminist criticism may see a “dominant masculine culture” expressed in the prevailing approaches to the extent that disaster response is identified to be of a “command and control” type that favours the “technical over the social” (Fordham 2004, 175). That is not to say that development aid itself has not met persistent criticism as well. Feminists and anthropologists among others have similarly voiced concerns about top-down approaches, neglect of what is considered local knowledge, and gender blindness (Chambers 1983; Gardner and Lewis 1996; Long and Long 1992; Moser 1993).5 While the development field may have been more receptive to such criticism, real integration of participatory and gender-sensitive approaches often remains problematic. As for gender issues, projects that specifically target women have become commonplace in development aid since the first United Nations Development Decade for Women was launched in 1975. However, critical feminist research that refrains from homogenizing women into one separate category is less well received. Long after Women in Development (WID) was replaced with Gender and Development (GAD), gender concerns in development remain focused mostly on women as an isolated “stand-alone category” (Enarson, Fothergill, and Peek 2006, 140). Drawing on Foucault’s work, anthropologists convincingly demonstrated how development operates as a powerful discourse that not only produced the “Third World” but also controls the knowledge about it. According to Escobar (2002, 83), understanding development as a discourse starts off from looking at the “system 4 | There are now increasing examples to bridge the gap between emergency or humanitarian aid and development approaches in attempts to see the two as complementary rather than opposing parts within a contiguum of efforts. 5 | Within anthropology, there has been longstanding tension between scholars and practitioners in their positions on and critique of development cooperation (Gardener and Lewis 1996; Grillo 1997; Little 2000; McGilvray 2006). But an increasing research interest in the actual “doings” of humanitarian aid and aid workers seems to be emerging today, therewith sharing a trend within disaster research (see Hilhorst, Dijkzeul, and Herman 2010).

Chapter Five: Dealing with Aid and Anticipating New Homes

of relations” between the various elements that ultimately forecloses perception: “It is this system that allows for the systematic creation of objects, concepts and strategies; it determines what can be thought and said.” Escobar (2002, 83) Yet, as Ferguson (1990, 17) cautioned earlier, whatever the intentions of aid projects, their effects hardly amount to a clear-cut transformation of local knowledge, precisely because they operate within complex social and cultural structures. Thus, while in many ways agreeing with Escobar’s arguments, I object to the implied determinism. As I see it, Foucault’s (1982, 1999) analysis of power relationships actually offers the means to criticize deterministic accounts. In this analysis, a power relationship is seen as present when “the other”, over whom power is exercised, is recognized as an acting person. This entails recognition “that, faced with a relationship of power, a whole field of responses, reactions, results, and possible interventions may open up” (Foucault 1982, 220). With that, my own position is in line with recent feminist scholarship that approaches development as discourse that not only constrains but also offers ways for people to make potentially new claims and construct or reconstruct their subjectivities (Cupples 2007; Klenk 2004; Sorenson 2008). As Klenk (2004) concluded for her study on portrayals of the “developed woman” in northern India, the power asymmetry inherent in development does not result in pre-defined forms but “plays out in complex, subtle, and sometimes surprising ways” (Klenk 2004, 75– 76). In a similar vein, I argue that, however unequal the power relationships, aid interventions never meet with a passive group of beneficiaries, and what actually comes out of policies may differ sharply from what the papers urge. “Simply, all manner of outcomes may unfold on the ground, quite unrelated to formal policy processes”, as Blaikie (2010, 4) succinctly stated. By looking at the ways in which real women and men process specific discourses or categories of aid, adaptive and resisting forms are revealed while the people cease to appear as victims of external agendas only. Ultimately, a case emerges for more diverse thinking and action than that allowed for in some of the criticism of humanitarian and development aid now available. That said, I turn to some of the gendered categories of aid and people’s strategic responses below. The following subchapter will intensify the argument when discussing our research contacts’ agendas in regard to relocation.

G endered A id and S tr ategic V ictims Besides the general criticism of post-tsunami aid, scholars and activists pointed out the surprising lack of awareness about both gender concerns and the local context from which many aid interventions operated in Sri Lanka (de Mel 2007; de Mel and Ruwanpura 2006; Emmanuel and Maunaguru 2007; Maunaguru and Emmanuel 2010; Ruwanpura 2008). These shortcomings spanned a wide

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spectrum from the lack of separate bathing spaces for women and men in the camps, neglect in promoting livelihood support for women that went beyond home-based, poor-income activities, to specific concerns for women in regard to construction and ownership of post-tsunami houses. Thanks to the activities of established feminist and gender-sensitized organizations, some of these shortcomings could be addressed locally or made visible as an issue at the national level.6 I share these concerns in this subchapter, in which I take issue with the dominant model of a “male head of household” that typically underlies aid interventions. The idea that a man represents the family or household lay at the bottom of the central government’s administrative dealings. It was carried further through practices of various governmental and non-governmental, international and local agencies that did little to question this notion. Our acquaintances too largely accepted the view of a man as head of the family, though the actual household arrangements proved more complicated. The consequences resulting from this stipulated male head of household can be traced through conflictive gender and family relationships. A brief review of processes in connection with the three basic pillars of post-tsunami aid – cash compensation, livelihood support, and housing reconstruction – illustrates the point. A review of these processes makes up this subchapter. These elaborations further demonstrate that the real outcomes of aid interventions need to be seen in relation to the strategies men and women employ to influence the course of allocations. Depending on their personal means, networks, and negotiation skills, some individuals could benefit greatly from post-tsunami aid. Especially men (compared to women) could accrue benefits which at times went far beyond what formal entitlement criteria would suggest. This occurred because these necessary personal resources were more readily available to men within the local gendered context. Women and men also tended to elect men rather than women as their village or camp representatives. These representatives often had direct influence on drawing up beneficiary lists, and it was largely expected that they looked after their own interests first and then favoured those of their relatives and friends (see also Chapter Two). Yet women also ventured to exploit any opportunities to receive a greater share in aid (and often successfully), though male support of their claims added weight to their strategies. Obviously these strategies to obtain more than the basic entitlements depended on and exploited poorly coordinated actions among donors. Lack of coordination compounded problems caused by the early presence of individuals or organizations of a variety of origins with little experience in aid allocation but a strong motivation and the money to “help”. The generous donations also contributed to fostering dependency attitudes, and people’s own 6 | In Batticaloa, the WCDM-B provided the necessary platform to raise pressing issues, as mentioned in Chapter Two. On the coalitions’ activities, see also Maunaguru and Emmanuel (2010). De Mel (2007) made the point that the preceding work in war-torn areas equipped feminist groups with specific expertise.

Chapter Five: Dealing with Aid and Anticipating New Homes

profit-making strategies at times undermined forms of autonomy in the longer term. Some families remained almost as empty-handed as before.

Cash flows The notion of a male head of household had very direct consequences in relation to monetary compensation that tsunami survivors received during the first six months and later in the form of instalments for home reconstruction. As seen in Chapter Two, cash transfers encompassed money paid for lost family members, contributions to household income, and compensation for damaged or destroyed houses. This cash was transferred to specifically created bank accounts of a family’s eldest male adult. The transfers thereby arguably increased the “bargaining power” (Agarwal 1997) of these male family members vis-à-vis claims of other members. This point was of specific relevance in regard to “nuclear families”, the main addressees of such cash flows, for it was the husband rather than the couple who received direct access to the money. At least, this was the case in eastern Sri Lanka, where state compensation money was paid predominantly to accounts in a man’s name (Joint Report 2006, 5). This procedure reflects the widely shared expectation of a husband and father being a family’s main income provider in Sri Lanka. Yet, while this can be said to form the normative model, actual arrangements differ. Especially in the case of poor families, women largely contribute to meet household expenses. Most of our female friends had also pursued a variety of subsistencebased economic activities. Moreover, issuing post-tsunami compensation directly to men disregarded local practice that designates the wife and mother as the person responsible for managing the household money in eastern Sri Lanka. This marital arrangement consists of a husband as the expected income provider and a wife as the income manager. It includes inherent tension over control of money, irrespective of any post-tsunami aid context.7 Husbands, for instance, may choose to keep extra money for themselves rather than to hand their entire gains over to their wives, as the ideal procedure envisions. Aid transfers thus arguably enhanced existing tension by effectively strengthening a husband’s position at the expense of his wife. It was indeed rather common for husbands among our research contacts to hold on to a larger part of the post-tsunami cash payments. This was especially problematical for families in which husbands spent the money received directly on alcohol, leaving very little means to cover household expenses. Payment days were thus ironically called ‘good drinking days’. Moreover, quarrels, marital disputes, and violence against women often ensued. Starting off with “male heads of households” had further consequences for widows or separated women, when banks insisted on male signatories (this 7 | See Busby (2000) for the tension inherent in the model, with differing claims over the money held by husband and wife, for the comparable case of a fishing village in Kerala, India.

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insistence related to assuming the prerogatives of a family’s male members that reigned among bank clerks or within individual banks rather than to national laws regulating a woman’s access to bank accounts). For instance, widowed Nanthini depended on her father to access her account, and her father could even withdraw her money without her presence. Other features of the procedure included conflicts over the LKR 15,000 paid to a family for each member who died in the tsunami (a sum actually meant to cover funeral costs). For example, in the case of parental death, that amount went to the eldest surviving adult son. This recipient did not necessarily use the money for funeral expenses, and not all senior sons were willing to share it on equal terms with their siblings, thus provoking a quarrel among them. The fact that disputes over control of money lay at the bottom of many minor and major conflicts and periods of katikka illai (remaining on non-speaking terms) among family members and relatives certainly preceded the post-tsunami situation. The degree of conflict may actually testify to the attractiveness of cash as a form of aid among our research contacts, for whom money was always short. The fact that gaining cash was a prime concern also emerged in people’s strategies to obtain relief items for the sole purpose of selling them on the wider market, as discussed in the next section. Conversely, cash transfers and compensation rations may also have fostered dependency attitudes among women and men. With some income guaranteed during the first few months, many persons refrained from pursuing other job possibilities. Some commented unfavourably on those who took up paid work, such as engaging in cash-for-work programmes organized by NGOs. People not affected by the tsunami and glad for income opportunities may have more readily taken up such programmes, which typically consisted of clearing away debris or preparing temporary roads in the destroyed villages. Some fishermen remarked that this kind of work was unsuitable for them, while women who took up such activities risked becoming objects of gossip and ridicule. Ultimately these programmes drew social distinctions between the survivors: those with no alternative but to pursue such work differed from those who could refrain from doing so.

Boats for men, sewing machines for women Besides compensation money, issued within what was considered the emergency phase of the first six months, people benefited from relief items and forms of support aimed at enabling them to return to regular income generation. NGOs, endowed with significant resources for post-tsunami aid, were key players for this kind of support. Among fishermen families, the help provided consisted basically of various kinds of boats and fishing gear distributed to men, and on promotion of small-scale businesses for women. The relevance of the male-headed household concept shows itself in the fact that livelihood support went primarily to men;

Chapter Five: Dealing with Aid and Anticipating New Homes

women benefited directly, insofar as they “deviated” from the model and were recognized as “women-headed households”. According to the official version of post-tsunami aid within the fisheries sector, entitlement was largely based on the criterion of former possession; for example, it granted a new boat for each boat lost in the tsunami. Fisheries quite possibly ranked among the worst in terms of duplication and corruption. Locally, allegations of high bribes implicated the top government representative in charge, while it was evident that the LTTE also played a significant role in supporting individual entitlement claims. In any case, more thoni and boats were surely made available to our acquaintances than had existed before the tsunami.8 Thanks to the equipment surplus due to generous post-tsunami donations and people’s strategies to obtain items irrespective of formal entitlement criteria, the actual results of distributions clearly differed from their formal criteria. In the case of people from Navalady, practically every male head of household received at least one thoni over the course of time, regardless of former possession. Some people also managed to obtain more expensive fibreglass motorboats without having had one previously or while still having one at their disposal. For instance, both Suresh and Ketesh received such a boat, even though their old ones had only been damaged in the tsunami and could be repaired. Suresh sold his former boat upon receipt of the new one and could therefore ease some of his debts. Ketesh owned two fibreglass boats with outboard engines by 2006. Using the new one himself, he hired out the older one and altogether made a decent profit. Among other examples, Tharshan fared very well with a new motorized boat, though he never had one before the tsunami. Having facilitated access to canoes and boats thus proved beneficial to some of our acquaintances over the longer term. However, many other fishermen did not make similar gains. The case of Rajan, for example, reveals strategic pursuit of a major post-tsunami aid item that ultimately failed to support the receiver. Rajan, whose family situation is further discussed in Chapter Six, had owned no fishing equipment but depended on opportunities to fish with and for others until the tsunami. Nevertheless, he received a sea-faring canoe through post-tsunami aid. Rather than using it, he waited for a chance to sell it for a good price. Yet the widely practised sale of relief and livelihood items lowered the market prices of such common donations. Meanwhile, he continued to go fishing with his brothers-inlaw Ketesh and Shanmugam, as he had done before the tsunami.9 At some point, he unmistakably wished to free himself from depending on work granted by 8 | In respect to large-scale distribution of canoes and boats after the tsunami, critics warned against over-fishing and harmful consequences owing to the lagoon’s delicate ecosystem (FAO 2006). 9 | That is, he worked for Ketesh, who owned a fibreglass, outboard motorboat (that had only needed repair after the tsunami). Shanmugam also worked for Ketesh occasionally. Usually, a crew of three men goes to sea together for one-day fishing trips (a crew

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others – and from the frequently quarrelsome relationships between his brothersin-law. He managed to obtain a boat equipped with an outboard engine through the entitlements of a classificatory brother living further south along the coast. Yet Rajan had to start off with considerable debts that the deal entailed and ultimately never managed to make any significant profit. More often than not, the gains at the end of a fishing day even failed to cover the necessary expenses for fuel and bait, and he faced difficulties paying whoever helped him with fishing. Thus those who lacked fishing expertise could actually sink into deeper debt and dependency despite maintaining a much-desired boat. Indeed, Rajan had returned to working as a kooli (daily labourer) for other fishermen by 2009. Thus the large-scale distribution of canoes and motorboats did not necessarily result in real livelihood support. In the case of canoes, many remained unused or were sold when an acceptable price was offered. Moreover, the highly generalized distribution of fishing equipment glossed over existing differences among fishermen, such as those between boat owners versus daily labourers, owners of nets versus owners of canoes, or marine versus lagoon fishermen.10 As seen in Chapter Two, boat owners could resent the idea of former kooli employees receiving their own canoes, possibly fearing the loss of their labourers and privileges of their own higher socio-economic status. Yet the almost random distribution of canoes also impacted local fishing arrangements based on partnerships between canoe owners and net owners. Thangavel, for example, had little to do with the thoni he received; always having been a producer and owner of nets, he preferred to earn a living by making fishing nets after the tsunami.11 Despite the large-scale distribution of thonis, the examples mentioned also reflect a finding that maritime fishermen benefited primarily from post-tsunami aid, due to their having been better organized and enjoying more effective political patronage before the tsunami (Fünfgeld, personal communication, July 2007). Gender specific consequences can also be noted among the social ramifications of these distributions. While the formal aid criteria that sought to replace lost or damaged goods were gender-neutral in formulation, the interventions still resulted in gendered effects. For one, women’s economic roles within the fishing sector were ignored. The very policy of replacing equipment could do little to support those whose activities did not involve any specific equipment in the first place. For example, there was nothing to replace in women’s work of catching arrangement that commonly involved the boat owner plus two helpers among our research contacts). 10 | See Fünfgeld (2007) on details concerning differences among fishermen and different fishing techniques in Batticaloa. 11 | Thangavel used to go fishing with a thoni-holding partner before the tsunami. While that former partner went fishing with other men after the tsunami, it was not quite clear why Thangavel refrained from entering new partnerships. However, he participated in other forms of fishing, primarily in the karaivalai (beach-seine fishing) during that season.

Chapter Five: Dealing with Aid and Anticipating New Homes

mussels or crabs by hand and feet for daily consumption or producing dry fish from their husbands’ catch.12 In addition, this policy fostered attitudes in women that supported the notion of primary male income providers. With the focus on men as the potential owners of fishing equipment, women held an interest in performing the role of the “vulnerable dependant” in front of donors. By stressing the need for her husband to receive the costly fishing gear and a canoe or boat for the sake of the whole family’s survival, a woman’s strategic behaviour also reproduced the notion of a male as the indispensible income provider. Donors very often limited their interaction to so-called camp or village representatives who were most often men, as seen in Chapter Two. In the rare cases of women being asked about their activities directly, they belittled their own contributions, which they deemed insignificant, because they resulted in little or no cash. These actually vital household contributions included the shallow water fishing mentioned, use of garden shrubs, and collection of firewood. Women likely described these activities at moments when they remembered their “good life” in Navalady. This they also recalled in terms of resources they used to have to provide their families with curry each day, irrespective of what their husbands brought home (or failed to) from their catch. Thus this example also points out differences that resulted when people were questioned directly or when information emerged from narratives and informal conversations about daily life. Women benefited from income-generating projects mainly when they corresponded to the category of “women-headed households” that encompassed single or separated mothers, widows, and women whose husbands were unable to fulfil the presumed role of a family’s main income provider. The support extended was usually in the form of financial grants for women to establish small shops or to produce home-made meals for sale, though some donors distributed the necessary utensils rather than the starting capital (see also Ruwanpura 2008). These opportunities met with great interest among entitled women and among all those who managed to gain entitlement regardless of their real family situation. In most cases the primary interest lay in the money itself: in receiving cash directly or in selling donated items to gain the cash. It was not until one leading organization started to monitor its intervention that several shops and snack-selling places mushroomed. As a result, only a marginal profit occurred. With no market analysis underlying the intervention, a plethora of little shops offering more or less the same things or services emerged within a small area that 12 | In regard to dry fish, it can be argued that this kind of work could be resumed once their husbands went out fishing again. As for women’s role within the fishery, it needs to be noted that women had in some cases owned a thoni as well, though this was not very common. For instance, Priya used to have one, left behind by her husband after his death, which she hired out to other fishermen. Pusparaji had had a thoni too that her married son used to use and from whom she hoped to gain some support for her own livelihood in return (an arrangement that reportedly caused many conflicts between mother and son).

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remained economically unviable. Thus identification of a particularly vulnerable group of women for support reproduced forms of dependency and marginalization rather than enabling an escape from such structures. This argument supports feminist criticism that this kind of women-focused aid often strengthens gender stereotypes and keeps women in poorly-paid economic niches (de Alwis and Hyndman 2002; Fulu 2007; Ruwanpura 2007). The example of the very popular distribution of sewing machines after the tsunami illustrates with metaphorical force the distributors’ bourgeoise gender model and the diverging interests of the recipients. Several donors, private initiatives, and established NGOs set out to allocate sewing machines to “tsunami victims” without considering the appropriateness or actual usability of their “gifts” for these predominantly fishing families. Moreover, the donation was seldom linked to a micro-business support plan. Almost all of our female acquaintances tried to obtain such a machine. However, hardly any of them had any previous experience with such a tool. Nor were they interested in actually using it for family or for business purposes. In fact, the one sewing machine that remained in operation among our acquaintances was that of Vasuki. However, she bought the machine herself after having tried in vain to obtain one from donors. Padma, who kept her donated machine, placed it in the living room of her permanent home, more like a status symbol than something ever to be used. What had made the machines valuable to many others was the money that could be made by selling the machine to local shop owners, thus providing the money necessary to cover the rising daily expenses, pay back pre-tsunami debts, or lend to others against a little interest. Indeed, daily life expenses were experienced as higher in the relocation site than in their village before the tsunami. This point on livelihood at the relocation site is taken up at the end of this chapter. I continue for now with problems entailed with the model of a male head of household as it regarded ownership of houses.

Loss of female property? The assumed model of a male head of household had further consequences in respect to ownership of post-tsunami houses. This was owed to the additional assumption that the head of household and owner of a house was the same person for housing schemes island-wide (McGilvray and Lawrence 2010, 106). Given administrative practices of addressing male heads of households, therefore, new houses were likely to be issued to the husband, rather than the wife. Such a procedure contradicted what has been described in previous chapters: that the matri-uxorilocal settlement typical for eastern Sri Lanka stipulated that ownership of a house and its compound lay typically with a wife. It was she who receives a home as dowry through her maternal family at the time of her wedding. Though land ownership may not be registered legally in many cases, a strong notion prevails that a house with its land belongs to the woman (see also Maunaguru and

Chapter Five: Dealing with Aid and Anticipating New Homes

Emmanuel 2010, 13). By issuing new houses in the name of a husband, women risked losing their properties a second time. That is, having first lost their homes in the waves, they lost them again in the post-tsunami reconstruction efforts.13 This loss is especially significant in view of frequently unstable and violent marriage relationships. The separation of a couple may make it difficult for women and children to remain in the house when it has become the husband’s legal property, while a lack of alternative housing may contribute to a woman’s reluctance to leave a situation of domestic violence. Maunaguru and Emmanuel’s (2010, 33–37) study on women’s land-rights issues in post-tsunami Batticaloa underscored these concerns. Their interviews with women revealed that some husbands threatened to chase away their wives during marital disputes once they had become owners of new houses. The security that the local dowry system had provided for women thus threatens to be lost due to the post-tsunami property changes. Feminist circles raised concerns about the loss of women’s property in posttsunami housing efforts with government and non-government institutions at the local and national levels early on. In terms of overall outcome, their efforts may have met with little success, as it seems evident that significant numbers of houses were built with the legal documents signed by the “male head of household”. Maunaguru and Emmanuel (2010, 26), for example, found that men signed the new housing documents in 66 per cent of the cases in a relocation site in Vaharai (Batticaloa district), though land had previously been owned by their wives. Especially organizations that had no prior work experience in eastern Sri Lanka and no deeper-going gender interests very likely followed procedures outlined by government agencies rather blindly. Yet legal alternatives existed, and some actors did make use of them. In the case of Tiraimadu, more differentiated approaches were practiced, at least by some donors and in some parts of the relocation site. For instance, one organization consulted future owners of houses as to who would sign the housing documents in a rather rapid attempt to ameliorate a process already initiated of addressing “male heads of households”. Another donor chose to issue the new house documents jointly in the names of both wife and husband. In both cases, the NGOs in charge had been active in Batticaloa before the tsunami and worked with staff interested in gender issues. However, it is important to note that these documents are temporary ones, and it may take many years until final documents have been issued for all post-tsunami houses. That is, at the time of writing, actual legal ownership has not yet been established, and the state remains the ultimate owner of the land. 13 | On the point of female loss of property in post-tsunami housing in eastern Sri Lanka, see also CPA (2005); de Mel (2007); Maunaguru and Emmanuel (2010); McGilvray (2006); McGilvray and Lawrence (2010); Ruwanpura (2009). Conversely, see Hastrup (2011, 47–48) for the situation in Tamil Nadu where the government focused on changing tenure practices in favour of women in post-tsunami housing policies.

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Overall few attempts were made to promote a woman’s sole property right. Issuing the new house to a couple in the form of joint ownership represents a wider, societal tendency to transfer a house jointly to the names of both wife and husband at the time of their wedding rather than to the woman alone. McGilvray and Lawrence (2010, 109) noted that joint ownership has become the preferred model in many Tamil families due to bridegroom demands. Thus posttsunami housing construction through state administration as well as actions of non-governmental circles may be seen as catalysing ongoing transformations within gender relationships, some of which contradict the goals of women’s empowerment. However, as I argue in the next subchapter, looking at some priorities and practices of real people allows for another reading of these housing policies. After offering some background in terms of governmental relocation guidelines following the tsunami, I point out the relevance of dowry houses and, therefore, of kinship practices that could come to “correct” external changes.

R elocation P olitics Immediately after the tsunami, the Sri Lankan government announced establishment of “buffer zones” prohibiting any permanent buildings along the coastline, varying (at mean high tide) from 100 metres in the south to 200 metres in the east.14 People who had been living within these no-build zones were to relocate to other areas and be granted the support of housing construction programmes through international organizations. The government claimed to issue the buffer zone guidelines as a means of protecting the coastal population from future disasters. However, this assertion was challenged island-wide, and the government was criticized for having hastily designed policies that paid no attention to the long-term consequences for the people affected (Ingram et al. 2006). Concerns were expressed that the regulations prevented fishermen from settling in the very areas necessary for their livelihood, while big businesses such as tourism enterprises were exempted from the restrictions (CPA 2005, 5). Thus the buffer zone resembled a “land grab for tourism” (Muggah 2008, 101), provoking an opposition advocating the rights of people to live in areas of their choice.15 A change in government after the presidential elections of November 2005 finally led to official revision of the guidelines. So-called relaxed regulations came into force in early 2006. They differentiated between a zone 1, where permanent 14 | The LT TE likewise ordered no-build zones (up to 400 metres) in areas under their control at the time. 15 | The issue of a land grab was most evident along southern Sri Lanka’s beaches, with tourist hotels finally established where citizens were prevented from residing any longer (Hyndman 2011, 31–32).

Chapter Five: Dealing with Aid and Anticipating New Homes

buildings were prohibited, and a zone allowing construction beyond that. Zone 1 corresponded to previous (but never actually monitored) regulations enforcing areas of governmental reservations.16 Thus the newly demarcated coastal area where settlement was forbidden varied locally from 35 to 125 metres. Hence relocation from the immediate seaside remained a goal but essentially affected a far smaller number of people. Consequently, the need for housing construction within relocation schemes dwindled, while efforts concentrated on supporting families in rebuilding homes in their former dwelling places (in situ). Criticism remained island-wide, even after the buffer zones had been revised, not least due to the fact that no guidelines had been based on consultation with the people directly concerned. The reforms can be said to have compounded the confusion and anxiety while further delaying reconstruction efforts (see also Boano 2009). Several scholars dealt with the contentious character of the buffer zones as well as the coastal “set-back” zones that followed in light of Sri Lanka’s decades of ethno-political conflict (Hyndman 2007, 2010, 2011; Korf and Hasbullah 2009; Shanmugaratnam 2005). Hyndman (2007) placed the buffer-zone regulations within Sri Lanka’s militarized context and demonstrated how these policies sharpened resentment among eastern Tamils and Muslims against the (Sinhalese) government. In her forceful interpretation, Hyndman (2007, 363) pointed to ways in which the government directly and indirectly propagated fear of another tsunami to legitimize its disputed regulations and gain control over the population. Korf and Hasbullah (2009, 249) argued that no-build zones and the consequent relocation of Muslims in the district of Ampara played into the country’s “politics of purification” that sought to separate people territorially into ethnically homogenous places. Given the country’s contentious history of state-promoted resettlement programmes, coupled with “colonization” by Sinhalese settlers of formerly predominantly Tamil-populated areas, relocation plans acquired a highly political character in Sri Lanka (see also Muggah 2008). As mentioned in Chapter One, state-sponsored irrigation-cum-settlement plans figured high among Tamil grievances leading to the outbreak of war. Housing programmes also figure prominently within the state’s poverty-alleviation plans and, as such, proved strategically important to successive governments and politicians (Brun and Lund 2010). As with other state welfare resources, political patronage played an important role in view of state-sponsored housing.17

16 | These largely corresponded to the Coastal Zone Management Plan. However this new “set-back zone” went beyond coastal management and referred to any area under governmental reservation, such as areas falling under specific departments – for example, the railway or irrigation department (RADA 2006). 17 | For accounts on the significance of patron-client relationships and patronage systems in regard to post-tsunami aid, see Frerks (2010). For a view that especially includes

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Strategic political and economic interests certainly factored into development of the relocation site under review here. A governmental plan to construct a semi-urban settlement at the outskirts of Batticaloa town in fact pre-dated the tsunami and was offered a good chance of implementation, given the various donors available thereafter. We found little opposition during fieldwork against abandoning former residential areas and relocation to a new site. This was the case among our friends as well as among families from other villages, who were to relocate to the post-tsunami housing area in Tiraimadu, located approximately four kilometres from the sea (see also de Mel and Ruwanpura 2006, 27–30, and Ruwanpura 2009). This lack of resistance may be surprising for fishing families so inextricably tied to the sea (both economically and socio-culturally).18 And yet our acquaintances welcomed the prospect of relocation on a variety of grounds. A brief summary of a conversation with Kumari and Padma in mid-June 2005 below serves to illustrate this point. Based on this conversation, I describe some factors that motivated people’s decision to relocate.

Opting to relocate In addition to the general buffer zones declared in 2005, some areas had been deemed special, and an extended no-build zone applied. That was the case for Navalady, which had initially been considered uninhabitable, requiring all its former residents to relocate to a yet-to-be constructed new settlement in Tiraimadu (see Map 2 in Chapter Two). Upholding the principle of a “right to return”, however, UNHCR, along with a few organizations operating in Batticaloa and in cooperation with the local government achieved a change in this regard: people wishing to return to their former places in Navalady were supported in doing so, within an area more than 200 metres from the sea. The initiative promoted voluntary return while respecting the general buffer-zone guideline of the time. This respect paid to the buffer zone suggested that the guideline itself should be applied. It became clear in coordination meetings held by the agencies involved in May 2005, that at least some representatives of these organizations expected all households beyond the 200 metres zone to return to their former villages. However, no official position was taken or communicated on this matter. Navalady’s camp representative Susil, who attended the meetings, told us that he did not intend to communicate such a turn of events to his people, knowing that pressure “from below” on patrons to deliver aid, see Korf et al. (2010). See Silva (2002, 5) on political patronage in regard to state welfare resources in general. 18 | Hastrup’s (2011) study on a fishing village in south-eastern India describes precisely such reluctance of families to leave their former homes at the coast after the tsunami and move to new houses located more inland. See also Lawrence (2010) for an account of some fishing families who eventually returned to live in Navalady. Lastly, for a general survey on acceptance or rejection of relocation, see Institute for Policy Studies (2005, 7).

Chapter Five: Dealing with Aid and Anticipating New Homes

it would be met with anger (‘They will kill me’). The lack of clarity contributed to abounding rumours of various rationales behind what was generally regarded as pressure to return rather than to relocate. Thus considerable commotion and anxiety reigned among all who preferred the prospect of relocation (and all our contacts wished to relocate). Tension also developed between those determined to relocate and those who decided to return. The conflictive relationship between these two emerging groups is discussed at the end of this chapter. For now I focus on the resentment with which our acquaintances reacted to the initiative that called for people to reconsider whether their future life should be in Navalady or in Tiraimadu. One evening in June 2005, we chatted with Padma’s husband, Prakash, while his wife attended a meeting on this issue of return and relocation. Prakash was sure that this event would make him so angry that he might lose his temper. Thus he left attendance to his wife. Padma returned soon and reported on the meeting with her classificatory elder sister Kumari. Convened by UNHCR, the leading organization on the subject, people were basically warned that they were likely to lose ownership of their land in the former coastal village if they relocated to the new area. They were also informed of the government’s likely plans to vacate the area from permanent settlement in order to establish a recreation area with additional amenities for tourism only. Kumari and Padma had little sympathy for these explanations. Both of them suspected ‘vellaikarangel’ representing the organizations of pursuing their own interests primarily and of forcing people to return to their former place of residence. Contrary to what these foreigners said, Kumari maintained that their own government had promised all the families affected new houses in a safe environment without compromising their pretsunami land claims. Padma declared finally that, whatever might happen in terms of ownership, their wish was to move away from a devastated place. She thought that if her own parents had moved away from the area 20 years before (when a cyclone had destroyed the whole village), she and her family would have been spared this latest destruction. Padma explained that she did not want to repeat this mistake. It was for her daughter and indeed all the children that she wanted to settle down in a place far away from the sea. Who knew whether another disaster would strike the coast in 50 or even 100 years? Padma reasoned that if the people of that day – their own grandchildren – would have to endure such conditions and spend their days in miserable camps they too would suffer from the parents’ failure to move inland. According to this conversation, Kumari and Padma did not perceive the government’s buffer-zone regulations as a form of discrimination or forceful eviction. Rather, the policies seemed to be an appropriate response to their fears of another tsunami and a show of respect for them as victims of a force beyond control. The image of a benevolent government protecting its people from havoc may have been attractive – not only to controlling aspirations of state authorities but also to those who had suffered from the disaster directly. Conversely, what

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was promoted as a “right to return” was perceived as serving only the promoters’ interests, while exposing those affected to unacceptable risks. In other words, our acquaintances rejected what was offered in a vocabulary of rights as a coercive move against their own intentions and, indeed, against overall security. While the alleged vested interests of “foreigners” remained rather opaque during the depicted conversation, another camp resident accurately predicted that evening how the international actors would disappear from the area in a short-time, while the local population would have to bear the consequences and remain under government rule in any case. Despite being confronted with contradictory statements from a variety of actors, all of whom claimed to speak in the best interest of the “tsunami victims”, Padma, Kumari, and others made up their minds according to their own priorities. These were guided by concern for their physical safety and that of future generations. The following discussion reveals how pragmatic and rational considerations of their present situation further influenced their decisions. It also draws attention to kinship practices as a motivating factor in many people’s wishes to relocate.

A house for a daughter Besides quelling the deep-seated fear that another disaster would hit the coast, women and men also welcomed the prospect of relocation in more material terms. The framework of buffer-zone guidelines established a category of people whose relocation would be compensated by new houses fully donated by various NGOs. Crucially, this compensation was promised for any affected “property” within the buffer zone, irrespective of its legal status. That is, families living in what now fell within the buffer zone had the prospect of gaining a new house without having to show any legal evidence of former land ownership (RADA 2006; TAFREN 2005). The same did not apply for households beyond that zone, where assistance in rebuilding their former homes was based on documented entitlements (see also Boano 2009, 771).19 Thus relocation immediately interested many residents of Navalady who lacked any legal documents (deeds or permits) demonstrating ownership of their former homes or compounds.20 19 | The reason for this difference is not clear, though it may have been meant to encourage relocation and discourage “illegal” reconstruction of homes in former places. 20 | Legal ownership includes deeds for private land and permits for legalized occupancy of state land (in the case of permits, the state remains the owner of the land). Permits are provided by divisional secretariats upon approval by the provincial land commissioner, while deeds are issued by lawyers and registered with the offices of the government agent, with copies kept in the Department of Registration in Colombo (information obtained from the Land Office, Divisional Secretariat, Batticaloa, March 2005). For an overview of land rights, especially in regard to landlessness, state land, and entitlements to post-tsunami housing schemes, see CPA (2005).

Chapter Five: Dealing with Aid and Anticipating New Homes

That was the case for a great many (mostly poor) families who had simply erected huts or built houses without legal sanctions. Thus they had encroached on state land, and, even when they could have applied for a legal permit to their compound after 10 years of occupancy, they frequently failed to do so. In addition, especially among relatives, permits to state land were sold, purchased, or pawned illegally, further complicating any requirement to demonstrate ownership. Lastly, the local dowry system proved a legal stumbling-block when transfer of houses from mother to daughter remained without legal registration, as was often the case. Padma, for instance, shared the situation of many women who received a house upon their wedding but retained the land permit in the name of their mother (the transfer of permits is allowed within families but not beyond). Similarly, in the more rare case of private property, any land demarcations to accommodate additional houses (often intended for dowry) may not have been legally registered. The compensation guidelines for those having lived within the buffer zone brushed away such legal difficulties and opened the prospect of gaining a well-valued house in a relocation site. Consequently, relocation was an attractive option for poor households which had never owned a similar property. For those who held private deeds on their former land, relocation could also be promising, since they could expect donation of a house in the new zone without losing the rights to their former land. Moreover, the house expected from international donors in such housing programmes promised to be of greater value than what could be built, based on the governmental compensation issued to households resettling on their former lands. Indeed, that sum of LKR 250,000 for reconstruction of a fully damaged house allowed for little more than a one-room house in the best of times. Even when it became clear that this sum was to be “topped-up” by donors who engaged in rebuilding houses in former villages, as was the case for those who returned to Navalady, many people preferred a home in the expected relocation site. In fact, several statements indicate that people we spoke with attributed better social status and potential beyond financial considerations to their former village and to the future relocation site. While all our friends longed for Navalady and described it as a place of tranquillity, fresh air, and easy fishing, many explicitly identified the new place as an area for socio-economic development. There was an expectation of “development” and “modern life” in Tiraimadu, sketched out in features ranging from access to good educational opportunities for children, to having the means to purchase electrical kitchen appliances for their new homes. Against this backdrop, Padma’s reference to her daughter’s future also alludes to another dimension: that of a post-tsunami house as the future ciitanam viitu for her daughter. Other parents shared that notion, and it was Priya who explicitly formulated it during a conversation in April 2005. She saw the new house not merely as a new home for herself and her two teen-aged children but also as the basis for a “respectable” marriage for her daughter. As noted on previously, an arranged marriage is considered almost impossible for a woman without

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provision of a house as dowry (McGilvray 1988, 108). Within this framework, the expected financial value and location of a house obtained through a post-tsunami relocation programme promised to be especially significant. In fact, Priya did not expect to find a “good” bridegroom for her daughter among fishermen interested in living within the seaside vicinity. Instead, she hoped her daughter would marry a government employee with a regular income (who was not expected to be willing to live in Navalady, a place exposed to the risk of another tsunami and associated with being a fishing village). Priya displayed a common parental wish in this sense for the children to leave behind the fishing families’ living conditions mentioned in Chapter Three. Relocation seemed a promising step in that direction, because it offered a valuable house in what was expected to be a “developed” area. Priya’s perception of her new post-tsunami house as her daughter’s future dowry mirrored other families’ concerns that resulted in favouring relocation. The concern for a good dowry could be pursued within a larger circle of family members. It could also play a part in conflicts – at times bitter ones – over control of post-tsunami aid. That was the case with Lakshmi’s husband, Shanmugam, who was well known for his eagerness to obtain ever more aid and his cleverness and success in becoming entitled to a variety of outside support. It was also obvious that he exploited his widowed and frail mother-in-law Renuka (while Lakshmi did not approve of Shanmugam’s ways, she usually sided with him). Renuka depended on her children, and Shanmugam pressured her to hand over any tsunami aid benefits to him. In a similar vein, he had demanded transfer of Renuka’s expected new house to his daughter as future dowry, ever since the beginning of post-tsunami aid. Remarkably, he made that claim even though he and his wife received a new house on their own which they could regard as their daughter’s future marriage asset. Shanmugam’s claim was backed by the fact that his daughter was Renuka’s eldest granddaughter and her eldest granddaughter by a daughter. Since Renuka was herself the eldest daughter of an eldest daughter, Shanmugam could appeal to the notion that his daughter represented the senior matriline, which enjoys the most status. Moreover, he could invoke the practice of bestowing the most significant dowry upon the eldest (grand)daughter in order to attract the “best” available husband. That candidate would be expected to fulfil future leadership roles in the family after the death of the wife’s father. Though these considerations were not all spelled out explicitly they corresponded to local kinship practice. However, they competed with other, more personal, wishes that weighed heavily on Renuka’s mind. These were Renuka’s other children’s moral claims to her future house and her own wish to obtain a home for her half-orphaned grandsons.21 Up until 2009, Renuka remained undecided as to whom she should 21 | Renuka’s eldest daughter’s suicide long before the tsunami left behind four boys whom she helped to look after, while their father failed to provide for them. Renuka’s wish to consider them as future owners of her new house is not easily accommodated by the

Chapter Five: Dealing with Aid and Anticipating New Homes

ultimately bestow her new and most precious resource. Her household having been acknowledged as “woman-headed” and Renuka having become entitled to a house in her own name at old age emotionally complicated matters of inheritance in her case and strained relationships with her children and in-laws. Other examples did not stir up as much conflict, while kinship-based inheritance practice was also dealt with flexibly. For instance, Renuka’s own mother, Nallamma, who likewise obtained a house based on her widowed status, left it to one of her sons who had married soon after the tsunami and fathered a daughter by early 2006. At the very least, the fact that elderly persons received a house of their own through post-tsunami aid (even when they would normally have been living in one of their children’s households) entailed unexpected new wealth and added to the dynamics of competing family relationships. The examples above also demonstrate that (the category of) women-headed households enabled women to be acknowledged as the new, official owners of post-tsunami houses, though houses were largely assigned to “male heads” among married couples (see also Maunaguru and Emmanuel 2010). In fact, one donor in Tiraimadu, specifically and exclusively addressed women-headed households in its housing assistance. While this resulted in the questionable demarcation of a housing zone for widows in the new settlement (see Chapter Eight), seeking to bestow non-married or widowed women with a house had significant consequences: as mentioned in the preceding chapter, such a house may also have formed an important asset for widows or divorced women in regard to their possibilities of remarrying, given that they then too controlled a necessary dowry. In sum, not only did relocation offer many families a welcome way to obtain a house while escaping legal scrutiny. It also promised to offer a base in a would-be semi-urban site and a better bargaining position regarding dowry negotiations than a home in what had always been known as a fishing village. Given this particular agenda and long-term rationale, the questions of gains and losses in terms of posttsunami house ownership reveal themselves as more complex than detailed above, where women’s property rights seemed lost. Whatever administrative procedure on the part of state and non-state agencies, many families with (unmarried) daughters were likely to perceive and seek the new house as the future dowry local practice of transferring wealth to daughters in the form of dowry (see McGilvray 1982a, 1989; McGilvray and Lawrence 2010, 121). In addition, Renuka hesitated to grant Shanmugam (and Lakshmi) the favour of the house, since Sudarshini, her other daughter (who became a mother of a daughter by the end of 2009), lived in impoverished circumstances, and her son had two daughters. She found it difficult to reject her son’s claims, because she wished him to organize a proper funeral for her when the day came and therefore depended on his good-will. – See McGilvray and Lawrence (2010, 121– 123) for an example of a post-tsunami house transferred as dowry property directly to a granddaughter in accordance with common kinship practice. In this case, it side-stepped a daughter-less daughter.

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of a female family member. Consequently, even when the house was issued in the name of the “male head of household”, that person (often the father) may transfer the house to his daughter upon her marriage, thereby correcting outside intervention in terms of local priorities. Alternatively, given the tendencies in dowry dealings mentioned, the house may be transferred jointly to the name of the daughter and her husband. A recent publication by McGilvray and Lawrence (2010) – specifically examining the effects of ignorant or indifferent bureaucratic post-tsunami procedures on the system of matrilocal household clusters – supports this argument (see also McGilvray 2006, 390). Their findings revealed that transfer of dowry houses was high in the mind of Tamil and Muslim recipients of post-tsunami housing programmes in eastern Sri Lanka. Based on their observation of “the resilience of the matrilocal dowry house system” (McGilvray and Lawrence 2010, 110), the authors end by suggesting that a possible reduction of women’s property rights would be only temporary (McGilvray and Lawrence 2010, 123–124).22

Reconsidering the option The wish to relocate was thus based to a significant degree on the prospect of gaining housing assistance without having to provide legal documentation for their former homes, which most of our friends lacked. Yet the attraction of relocation also clearly lay in the socio-economic progress associated with the specific housing programme and the way in which houses figured importantly in the dowry-based marriage market. All these points overlapped with our acquaintances’ deep-felt fear of another tsunami that could destroy the coastline. This effectively prevented many women and men from returning to their former homes at the time. Some of the people we spoke with implied that especially women feared a return and favoured relocation (see also Chapter Three). Against this backdrop, the question of return and relocation figures as a gendered issue, and it becomes important to examine who in the household may be the leading actor in deciding whether to return or relocate. And yet, most of our acquaintances felt men and women shared an outspoken fear of returning and opted for relocation based on the aspects considered. Furthermore, our friends frequently accompanied the idea of obtaining a particularly attractive ciitanam viitu by relocating with the wish for a later return to Navalady. That is, several parents expressed a hope to return to their former places in old age, once their eldest daughter occupied the new house 22 | Their work differs from my elaborations in an interesting way. We argue along the same lines when emphasizing people’s perception of the post-tsunami house as a daughter’s future dowry. However, McGilvray and Lawrence (2010, 117) found that it was precisely this logic that promoted people’s return to the coastline (as opposed to their relocating to the interior) identifying that area as corresponding to where “a well-situated dowry house” should be located.

Chapter Five: Dealing with Aid and Anticipating New Homes

in Tiraimadu. However, that plan may well disappoint them. Contrary to early governmental promises which Kumari referred to during the depicted conversation, it may be impossible to maintain former land ownership other than private deeds. As a government representative answered my question in this regard during a meeting in 2006: the ownership of any other such land ‘cannot be assured.’ Whoever obtained a compound and house in Tiraimadu expectedly lost any claims to former land unless that land had been legally registered private property. Later developments and explanations made the matter clearer. Upon their moving into the completed house, each new “owner” received and signed a document that awarded them land as persons who lost land due to the tsunami. This award was to be replaced subsequently with a certificate as issued under the Land Act. A local lawyer that I consulted in this matter in April 2006 explained that recipients of the new houses receive grants that provide for titled land to the owner after 10 years of occupancy. This means, firstly, that houses in the relocation site remain ultimately on state-owned land until final legal documents are issued to the residents. Given the high number of claims and the slow pace of bureaucracy, this process risks taking many years, even generations. It secondly means that occupancy of such land nullifies claims to other state-owned land, since land permits are issued to occupiers of encroached state land based on their prolonged occupancy and “landlessness”: in other words, dual occupancy of state land is not possible. Thus a future return is likely to be achieved only on the basis of non-legal occupation. In this case, people may again risk marginalization and vulnerability to disaster from which they had hoped to escape.

Towards N e w H omes What has been described above reveals some of the underlying reasons for relocation. I turn to look in this subchapter at processes of settling down in a new environment: I follow people’s moves to Tiraimadu where the temporary shelters were located. The shelters served to accommodate families until completion of their permanent houses close-by. By coincidence, these shelters were built by donations acquired in Switzerland; less of a coincidence, they were built by a section of the TRO under the name of Swiss TRO. Money collected by Tamils living in Switzerland was used for this and other post-tsunami reconstruction projects. Hence, I, a Swiss citizen, came to spend a great deal of time in these shelters without having had any connection to Swiss TRO. When the site of temporary shelters built by this organization came to be called Swiss Tamil kiramam, which was colloquially abbreviated into Swiss kiramam (or Swiss village), numerous jokes were made about my obvious preference for staying at this place. That it was Swiss TRO that constructed these temporary shelters and initially also promised to build permanent houses for “Navalady people” is likely a result of the TRO’s allegiance to the LTTE and the LTTE’s position in Navalady. In other words, it may

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be no surprise that what was frequently called the LTTE’s social or political arm chose to support families of a village known to have been a “Tiger area” during previous war periods. These political implications made me consciously avoid – as far as possible – being seen as connected to Swiss TRO. The same political set-up directly affected our friends, who knew far too well about the intricate connection between help and control laid out and operative in their new residence. This subchapter begins by describing the way in which our research contacts moved to their temporary shelters in Tiraimadu and proceeds to discuss how new and old fears marked their initial time there. I then consider people’s ways of making homes out of the shelters allocated while they waited for their permanent houses to be built. This is followed by a look at the relationship between those who relocated to Tiraimadu and those who returned to their former village Navalady. Finally, I touch upon economic aspects of life in the relocation site.

‘Ever ything is happening suddenly to us’ One fine day at the end of July 2005 our friends were told that this was the day they were to move to their temporary shelters in Tiraimadu. Thus many weeks of uncertainty about when this move would happen came to a swift end: the inhabitants of Central College camp received the message in the morning, while people in Zaeera College were only assured in the afternoon that they were also to move on that day. As Padma stated the following day, things seemed to have been rolling over them ever since the tsunami: ‘everything is happening suddenly to us.’ Around a cup of tea at Lakshmi’s place in Central College camp that morning, Shanmugam, Rajan, Murali, and a few other men joked about the prospect of moving to Tiraimadu. It had been deemed a remote and insecure place. Given the frequency of violent fights among themselves, they mused over hiring a private ambulance to transport injured victims; it was to circulate regularly between their new settlement and the hospitals in town. Still more, they envisioned with what ease the armed Tamil groups would be able to ‘snatch away’ young people there. The 23-year-old bachelor Murali laughed that he would be the first one abducted. Meanwhile, the women had packed up most of their families’ belongings, and everyone waited for whatever would happen next. Time passed, and people started to get hungry while no lunch had been prepared. At some point, a rumour circulated that there would be no moving that day after all. Then the GN finally appeared and proceeded to distribute the ‘house numbers’ of the new shelters to each family. There was much laughter and some aggression, as people competed with each other to be among the first to get their numbers. Excitement was great too, over who would be whose neighbour. Some of those who had been living outside the camps returned upon news of the relocation, but were disappointed to be told that it was not yet their time to move to Tiraimadu. By early evening, a first busload of people and their heaps of bundles and buckets at last left the camp. At that time, the allocation of numbers had only started at Zaeera College camp.

Chapter Five: Dealing with Aid and Anticipating New Homes

Upon their arrival at the relocation site, ad hoc organization and confusion continued. Foremost, numbers did not fit: the organization in charge of shelters had another list of families and expected fewer people arriving. Hence what had been received as house numbers were now replaced with other numbers, and the differently numbered families took over their respective shelters. Since more families arrived than expected, shelters that had not yet been completed became suddenly necessary. Some people made up a household as an individual (as in the cases of widowed Nanthini and her mother’s sister, Sharmala) and were asked to share their shelter with each other temporarily. That request was vehemently rejected, because no one really trusted this arrangement to be temporary. The next day, the site was opened ceremonially and a first shelter symbolically handed-over in front of TV cameras. Local state representatives and high-ranking Tamil politicians visited the place with their entourage of security forces.23 Some people took the opportunity to approach politicians and seek their support in sorting out their claims to a separate shelter as well as to solve other problems related to their entitlements as “tsunami victims”. A few of our research contacts chose to attend the official speeches. Several more preferred to stay at their new shelters, tired out from all the excitement and heat that radiated among these brand-new shelters made primarily of aluminium sheets. On this day, as on many more days during the initial time after their arrival at the relocation site, much of our conversation revolved around complaints about the boredom of living in this heat and being cut off from other neighbourhoods without any public transport. They complained too of having to use hand-pumps to get water while remembering the ease with which water was collected with hand-drawn buckets from wells in their former homes. They expressed annoyance over cramped kitchen sections and lack of privacy within the shelters, their walls made partly of wire grids. Only the children seemed happy, enjoying the space to run around at last. Yet everyone agreed on the beautiful sight that their new settlement offered at night, when the air cooled down: the bulbs in front of each shelter illuminated the whole site in a way that made people feel as if at a temple festival where market stalls would be lit up in the dark. Or, as Renuka and her daughter Sudarshini delighted in saying, the site at night looked like ‘heaven’. The description illustrates the frequently raised point about poor communica­ tion and poor coordination in allocating post-tsunami aid. People had remained uncertain about their move until the day it happened, and that day itself offered further misunderstandings and disappointments. These developments had much to do with top-down approaches that typically marked post-tsunami aid dealings. More precisely, this particular case revealed a hierarchical relationship between state representatives and “beneficiaries”, mirroring wider state authority-citizen interaction in Sri Lanka, and poor exchange of information between state agencies 23 | During the official ceasefire agreement between the LT TE and the Sri Lankan government, government forces protected Tamil politicians of the LT TE-supporting Tamil National Alliance (TNA).

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and NGOs. Yet the “beneficiaries” did not remain passively at the side of things but contributed their share to the developments. Underlying the confusion generated during the “house numbers” episode was a demand by the former residents of Navalady to move as a single group to the temporary shelter site. This was their response to the plan foreseen by NGOs to move all those families who had been living within the buffer zone first, then those beyond that zone.24 Among our acquaintances of Central College camp, this news stirred considerable agitation. Several of them, including vociferous Deepa, joined in a protest in front of the divisional secretariat. It emphasized the unity of “Navalady people” who objected to being split by sequential shifting. Their action proved successful, and camp residents indeed moved together in one go. However, this concession in response to the staged protest was not officially communicated to those in charge of allocating temporary shelters. Instead, the large group of people arriving surprised the leading (expatriate) representative of Swiss TRO who expected only part of the group’s arrival that evening. This example also indicates the various and conflicting interests in regard to the relocation site in Tiraimadu. The fact that a sequential shifting plan existed among NGOs suggests the organizations’ adherence to the notion of a dividing buffer zone that was also to be applied in the case of Navalady, as discussed above. Coupled with this adherence to zones was an expectation that families who had formerly lived beyond the demarcation line might be returned to Navalady rather than permanently relocated. This scenario was not only to meet opposition from families who wished to relocate, even though their homes had been located behind the buffer zone. It was also likely to be opposed by other actors with a vested interest in a grand, new housing development in Tiraimadu. For them, the plan for Tiraimadu was nurtured by the expected short- and long-term economic gains of establishing a new semi-urban settlement. But large-scale individual reconstruction of former homes in situ threatened to thwart these prospects. In other words, the protests may well have been instigated to meet these other ends rather than resulting from initiatives of those who simply wished to relocate rather than return to Navalady, and to do so in one irreversible step. While some of our research contacts appeared genuinely concerned about a possible “split” of their former village community, the protest itself was more probably staged for reasons other than support for “people’s interests”. It needs to be noted that it was not only the central government that promoted an ambitious relocation plan but the LTTE as well.25 In unusual harmony, both authorities favoured people’s 24 | Families living outside the camps were to be shifted last to the relocation site, since the primary aim was to vacate the camps. That plan materialized and these people moved to their temporary shelters some five weeks later. 25 | It was commonly noted that the LT TE supported the idea of relocation, with commentators giving differing opinions about the underlying reasons. Our acquaintances regarded the new site as providing the iyakkam (“movement”) better opportunities to

Chapter Five: Dealing with Aid and Anticipating New Homes

relocation away from their former village. Thus this example also indicates the political machinations of the time, when grassroots collective actions were hardly conceivable outside the influence of political authorities.

Overlaying fears Political machinations definitively lay at the bottom of many people’s fears of the new site as an easy arena for armed group interventions. Such fears were enhanced by memories of past atrocities committed in the area. These overlapped with other anxieties that in the local context typically accompany new settlements in areas that have previously been forest areas. One day after their move to the relocation site, Selvy and Nanthini told us happily how they had enjoyed sleeping outside their shelter in the cool air of the night and on the sandy ground, as they used to do back in Navalady. Their sisterin-law Sasika quickly advised them not to do so, because it was known that a ‘woman in a white sari’ had been seen on the site regularly when the shelters were being constructed. This warned them in effect about the appearance of a ghost in the area. Her acquaintance, also present at this conversation around a cup of tea, confirmed the threat. She grew up in a neighbouring settlement and had been warned as a child never to approach this ‘eye-digging’ place where the shelters came to be built. On another occasion, Shivam’s mother told us of people’s fear in this place where all kinds of creatures (including thieves, snakes, and ghosts) were expected to approach from the surrounding uninhabited stretch of land covered with cashew nut and palmyrah palm trees. These remarks reflect common Hindu Tamil cosmological associations of jungle and forest land with pey, ghosts and malevolent spirits. Our research contacts’ new residential area was only turned into a human settlement by construction of temporary shelters. Thus pey were still suspected of dwelling there. Women and men alike feared the acts of malicious spirits. Attracted by beauty, happiness, and blood (particularly menstrual blood of a “virgin girl”), ghosts are believed to prey especially upon young and menstruating women. Iron is commonly used as a protective measure against ghosts as are various ritual practices (Lüthi 1999, 91, 305; McGilvray 1982b, 37; Pfaffenberger 1982, 101, 124, 151). Such fears of the “haunted” new place received special note due to its marginal location in combination with references (always made in vague terms) that evoked past atrocities committed in this area in 1990. Fragments of stories circulated about Muslims who had killed Tamils or government forces that had massacred control people and recruit youth. Another source referred to LT TE’s long-term interest in a housing development for a time when the LT TE might control the entire northeast (and this had still been a political scenario in early 2005). Still another observer most pertinently pointed out the LT TE’s immediate interest in large-scale construction due to LT TE’s heavy involvement in the cement business.

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Tamil villagers in nearby locations at the time. The facts underlying these rumours are found in Lawrence (1997) who neatly documented the massacre of 184 Tamils by government forces in September 1990. Claiming to come in people’s rescue from an approaching Muslim mob, the soldiers herded a group of people – predominantly female and including children and elderly – from four villages near the local army camp in Sathurukondan and killed them the same evening (Lawrence 1997, 138–156). Finally, fears of forced recruitment kept especially the young close to their family shelters, at least during the initial settling-down period. Moving to the new site coincided with increasing regional recruitment by the LTTE and the Karuna faction. Transferred to a vast area consisting of basically nothing but some fragile shelters separated from established settlements, our acquaintances saw themselves as easy prey for intrusions by these armed groups. While people’s fear of a new tsunami at the site of the temporary shelters was somewhat contained by their distance from the sea, these combined threats turned the new place swiftly into a ‘bad place’, a dangerous area. A few of our friends surprised us with openly political statements that linked the residences to exposure to a resented LTTE influence: ‘if they control us like that here, what will they do when they get the country?’; ‘In the camp [under government control] we had freedom. Here we are caught like rats.’ Thus some people chose to speak clearly about their feelings when living at a site of shelters run by the TRO, whose members remained present in an office there day and night. Not all of our acquaintances would have agreed with the LTTE-critical points of view quoted, though they all feared LTTE’s intimidations. Instead, the statements illustrate differing political opinions among our research contacts. The second quote also expresses a personal shift in allegiance, since the speaker had been very active in the LTTE previously. Within three months of the move, tactics of government forces added to the insecurities: a massive round-up operation in the shelter area described in the Prologue threatened residents and accused them of supporting the LTTE collectively. Security forces continued to intimidate them with round-ups and spot-checking over the course of many months. They also harassed fishermen on their now-prolonged journey from their new homes to the sea. As the LTTE’s influence waned during that phase, the Karuna group’s influence increased. It manifested itself in an increasingly pervasive presence of “armed men in civilian clothes”, as occasional observers chose to refer to them. Soon enough, these armed members appeared regularly at the temporary shelter site on threatening missions. Their infamous “white vans”, associated with abductions, passed by with the surprising ease they had become accustomed to in government-controlled Batticaloa.26 26 | “Armed men in civilian clothes” was a typical expression referring to Karuna-group members who moved around boldly, showing off their weapons while the government denied any support for their activities (see also Chapter Eight). The “white vans” came to symbolize abductions of youngsters from their homes or off the street and forced recruitment by the

Chapter Five: Dealing with Aid and Anticipating New Homes

Given this insecure environment, the persisting camp-like living conditions of the transitional shelters acquired a special dimension. Many complained about there being ‘no unity’ among former residents of Navalady, and they feared differing and shifting political allegiances among neighbours. In addition, the relocation site brought together residents of four former villages. These villages tended to be associated with opposing political forces, as mentioned in the Prologue. Especially when residents of these villages came to live within the same sections in the temporary shelter site – the case with people from Navalady and Thiruchendur sharing immediate neighbourhoods – alleged or real political allegiances raised mutual suspicion. Where outside actors defined neighbourhood patterns within crowded conditions, and this proved destabilizing over time, betrayal of any kind seemed a daily risk. Trusting relationships increased in importance as they decreased in numbers, and social exchanges above the purely instrumental were often confined to close kin. While people engaged in settling down, armed conflict between the government and the LTTE escalated, and refugees of this renewed fighting also came to stay among them temporarily. Before turning to these developments, the following section deals with some ways in which our friends turned the transitional shelters into temporary homes and transformed the new site into something like a village.

Fig. 5: A shelter-turned-home, Tiraimadu, September 2005 (© Katharina Thurnheer) Karuna group (or TMVP). “White vans” continue to be feared in Sri Lanka as vehicles for abduction and possible “disappearance” by paramilitaries and security forces even years after the war ended.

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Making a new place familiar Temporary shelters for people from Navalady in Tiraimadu were a mix of sheetmetal and concrete construction. The walls were made up of a lower cement-stone edifice and an upper part of aluminium sheets and (in most cases) wire grids for air circulation. The roofs consisted of a tar-paper mix that was said to have cooling effects according to the contracting organization, Swiss TRO. Anyone having to sit or even live in them was bound to differ and avoided the inner shelter for its almost unbearable heat most of the time. An obvious way to transform the assigned shelters into real homes was to refashion them to meet occupants’ needs and likings. For example, Padma and her husband quickly constructed a closed annex to their shelter that served as a kitchen and added covered space for socialising. They placed metal pieces at the entrance to keep away ghosts. They also blocked the wall spaces the constructors had left open for ventilation with carton sheets to protect them from possible intrusions and the curious glances of passer-bys. Other families chose to build a kind of roof-covered veranda made of coco-palm leaves. Almost every household attached such a cadjan construction to their shelter sooner or later. It offered the only shade available, provided cooler and more airy space than the shelter interior, and was even better water-proofed when heavy monsoon rains drip-dropped through shelter roofs. Inside the shelters, stacks of mats and clothes, occasionally a bed, plastic chairs, or an electric fan typically cramped the small, single room. Padma and Prakash were among the few who soon hung up a picture of a deity within the shelter to be worshipped in daily puja (while others felt uncomfortable with such religious practice at the time and installed shrines in their permanent houses only later, as discussed in following chapters). While they had also been among the first to have a TV installed in Zaeera College camp, many more families became proud owners of such equipment during their stay in the transitory shelters. Within one year, an impressive number of TV antennas adorned shelter roofs, and the soap operas and video clips that flickered over the screens offered the families welcome entertainment and relaxation. Bicycles, unused thonis, and motorbikes leaned against shelter walls, while other outside spaces were taken up by laundry, freshly cleaned pots and pans, mosquito nets covering fish laid out to dry in the sun, and occasionally a few newly planted plants. Some shelters also served as little shops to sell basic necessities. Towards the evenings, several more stalls would open up to vend snacks like spicy fried manioc or “string hoppers” for dinner. It was indeed the rhythm of people’s daily routines that transformed the previously odd-looking place into a lively dwelling. Fishermen left their homes after tea in the dark early morning hours, and women started their household chores by sweeping the sand around their homes. Children went off to their schools, and vendors of vegetables and occasionally fish cycled through the site followed by ice-cream sellers later in the day. Soon after the men returned, the smell of fried fish perfumed the air; a smell that testified to the importance of

Chapter Five: Dealing with Aid and Anticipating New Homes

the daily fish meals that our acquaintances had described to us when they still lived in the camps. This rendered the site an unmistakable fishing village, despite its lack of proximity from the sea. The later afternoons offered mostly time for relaxation and social visits before dinner preparations went ahead, and some men ventured out for night-time fishing. These everyday practices arguably worked against the hostilities of the new environment, and the unknown became more and more familiar. The way in which these daily activities overlapped with gender roles assisted in creating a sense of “normality”: in other words, the continuity of gender roles helped bridge the gap between pre- and post-tsunami lives. As Thiranagama (2007a, 37–38) pointed out, a sense of being at home is not least produced by interactions with all the others – relatives and neighbours with whom houses and neighbourhoods are shared. In line with that, homes among the temporary shelters developed essentially through the presence of remaining relatives. The daily chores and their rhythm helped kin and neighbours regroup, with a great deal of working and leisure time spent in the company of kin. Women, men, and children preferably completed their daily tasks among siblings, parents, or in-laws, and sought relaxing moments with them. This was especially the case for women who carried out their daily chores at home. Men’s daily interaction partners could be more varied, though even fishing partnerships, said to be undetermined, were often forged among relatives.27 Likewise, daily life conflicts typically centred among close kin, and quarrels formed a frequent way of negotiating relationships. The settlement pattern within the site of temporary shelters partially supported the importance of kinship, with several of our research contacts neighbouring at least some of their extended family members. In this way, kinship remained a structuring principle in the new residence. In addition, memories of Navalady played a role in this process of settling down in a new environment. Quite clearly, memories of Navalady as a devastated place reinforced people’s desire to remain in the relocation site, despite the difficulties witnessed there. The presence of “known others”, especially relatives, kept the ghosts of memories at bay. As Murali was seen mentioning in the Prologue, the presence of ghosts was primarily felt when alone. An example was Manjula, who had refused to stay in Navalady after hearing what she described as the cries of her deceased baby there when she tried to follow her husband’s wish to resettle in their former place. The couple then moved to Tiraimadu as well, where Manjula felt relief in staying with her mother and her husband’s extended family. Other examples include spontaneous visits among women whenever memories of the tsunami overwhelmed them. 27 | Partnerships among fishermen are said to be free of any criteria but are commonly arranged between relatives. While there is some stability, the arrangements can change frequently over the months and years, as the men undertake fishing with different partners. These points relate to fishing from motorboats as well as canoes where a thoni owner works in partnership with an owner of the necessary fishing nets.

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However, memories of Navalady also offered different visions of life that provided an alternative to the living conditions of the day. Again in reference to Thiranagama (2007a; 2007b, 134), idealized memories of past social harmony can also lead to the future, and a home needs to be experienced as a space that opens up to opportunities. In other words, a noted nostalgia among our friends for their former place could also nurture hopes for a “better” future. Annoyed by the strong, hot, and sandy wind in Tiraimadu, Vasuki’s face suddenly lit up when she remembered a scene of empty plastic bags whirling up into the air like colourful balloons when the same seasonal wind had blown the garbage litter up to the sky during a temple festival at beach-side Navalady. Similarly, women and men recalled the past pleasures of shady trees around their former homes, the economizing effect of having coconut trees close by, and the way a home near the sea enabled fishing. They shared happy moments in remembering by-gone temple festivities and their zeal in participating in them despite now largely refraining from doing so. Furthermore, every intrusion of armed personnel in the shelter site conjured up images in their memories of the free and peaceful life enjoyed in Navalady. Such recollections not only enabled an escape from the present but also reminded people of how different things could be. Idealizations allowed one to dream of a more comfortable, secure, socially harmonious, and prosperous life in Tiraimadu some day. Thus the past informed the future in a way that allowed visions of opportunities. These visions formed an important part in people’s efforts to create homes where one indeed felt “at home”. Meanwhile, the temporary shelter site allowed celebration of life-cycle rituals in a way that had not been possible in the camps. For instance, a girl’s first menstruation led to the girl’s seclusion at home on a specific diet for several days or weeks until bathing rituals and an invitation to relatives and neighbours concluded the happy occasion.28 A first “death house” (cavitu, the home where the recently deceased remains for a specified number of days) within the shelter site of our research contacts was established in October 2005.29 Conversely, the birth of babies allowed more joyful rituals and visits to temples in the vicinity. Little temple shrines adjoining the shelter site were also uncovered and reactivated by some residents. With these rituals on a daily basis and those on more occasional and festive levels, Tiraimadu was transformed to a place for the living, and new home for most “people from Navalady”.

28 | See McGilvray (1982b) for a description of this ritual. 29 | That funeral was kept on a low-key, as it was held for a man suspected of committing suicide, following the death of his wife and other family members due to the tsunami. Though death in the tsunami was acknowledged in a way war-related murders were not, suicide formed a tragically frequent response among the bereaved survivors. Several other clear cases of suicide succeeded and preceded this death among tsunami survivors from Navalady and elsewhere (see also Chapter Seven).

Chapter Five: Dealing with Aid and Anticipating New Homes

Thus home-making had everything to do with transforming temporary shelters into places where one felt at ease by means of continuous daily-life practices, social relationships, and memories. Those affected by the tsunami elsewhere ventured to create homes in new sites, as our acquaintances had. But they all still remained attached to their former areas along the destroyed coastline. Hastrup (2011, 42–58) described comparable processes for a fishing village in Tamil Nadu, India. That study more precisely revealed people’s reluctance to relocate after the tsunami and their wish to return to the coastal area despite its devastation. This brings me to the section below in which I touch upon the conflictive relationship that developed between those who opted to relocate and those who returned to Navalady.

Questions of “belonging” and questions of livelihood ‘I have no relationship to Navalady any longer!’ Lakshmi replied when we asked her whether or not she intended to join a visit to her former village, organized by an NGO in April 2005. A few months later, Lakshmi was shocked when we showed her a map of the future Tiraimadu, in September 2005, ‘We won’t be able to say anymore,’ she observed, ‘that we are people from Navalady?’ The map revealed that former residents of Navalady were to be dispersed over different sections of the housing plan, living among residents of other relocated villages. People tended to vehemently reject this kind of “mixing” the villages, and Lakshmi feared that there would no longer be a core place where “Navalady people” lived. That settlement plan was later revised, and people from the four villages came to live largely within separate sections. Yet Lakshmi’s responses indicate the difficulties experienced in balancing the relationship to the former home with a relationship to the new place. Tensions between people who ultimately returned to Navalady and those who registered for relocation started with the possibility of return. Slightly more than 100 families had officially returned to Navalady by mid-2005, while most of its former residents stuck with their expectation of new homes in Tiraimadu.30 It was generally agreed that almost only men (if anyone at all) actually remained in Navalady day and night, while women and children were said to be too afraid of another tsunami occurring and of the memories that came alive in this devastated place. Moreover, the men who stayed there alone had the reputation of being heavy drinkers. This at least was the perspective of our research contacts who decided to relocate and found no words of praise for those who returned.31 At a time when our friends were still living in relief camps, not sure if they would ever move to 30 | Some 125 families out of a total of almost 480 families decided to return to Navalady by April 2005, and did so in two subsequent moves facilitated by the UNHCR. By September 2005, 105 families were registered as having returned to Navalady, according to numbers of the Batticaloa Divisional Secretariat (DS). 31 | See Lawrence (2010) for an account of people who returned to Navalady.

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the relocation site shelters, those who opted to return moved out with the support of humanitarian aid actors. Our acquaintances expressed resentment suggesting a rivalry for aid: they deemed that this move entailed negative consequences for their own positions. NGOs seemed busy helping returnees who, though living in tents in Navalady, were promised immediate livelihood support. Those relocating expected further delays in support for their own living conditions. Anger was commonly vented in remarks of moral disapproval. It accused those who returned of doing so merely for material gain: ‘They only return because of the relief item’; ‘They are all greedy for help.’ In turn, those who returned resorted to blaming all those who relocated for having ‘forgotten’ their place of birth. Hence, whenever some of our acquaintances visited Navalady during the first year after the tsunami, they typically risked questions as to their purpose in a place they had chosen to abandon. Much of this tension was vented with general ease. Insulting language was used freely among our research contacts and incidents of physical fighting provoked by such accusations were likewise considered common practice in quarrels.32 Nevertheless, these quarrels often resulted in great personal pain, such as when our relocating friends were confronted with disputed access to Navalady (while Tiraimadu’s fate remained highly uncertain). What came to be more directly threatening was the increasing presence of Karuna-group members in Navalady during 2006 and the vulnerability of the few inhabitants and occasional visitors there. This insecurity in Navalady prompted fishermen to refrain from leaving their boats and fishing gear there once they had moved to Tiraimadu and resumed daily fishing. Instead, they left their boats and gear along a coastal neighbouring settlement close to Tiraimadu, preferably with relatives and friends. Meanwhile, several of our female friends, accompanied by husbands or brothers, took to returning to Navalady from Tiraimadu regularly in order to collect firewood there (despite this being prohibited in order to protect the remaining vegetation there). These occasional returns brought the women a change from their shelter site’s bland environment, and a curry prepared from the re-grown vegetable leaves of former homes was distributed widely among relatives back in Tiraimadu for its special taste of Navalady. The brief visits allowed people to reestablish a limited relationship to their former places. Though they increasingly came to feel at ease there, they still wished to leave Navalady after a few hours in fear of another tsunami. These trips were largely undertaken as a way of economizing strained household budgets, since daily living expenses were considered higher during 32 | Similar antagonism as described between those who relocated and others who returned also figured between people from Navalady who came to live in Central College camp and those in Zaeera College camp, as well as between camp residents and those who stayed outside the camps. Depending on the situation, most commonly in regard to receipt of post-tsunami aid, these groups could engage in mutual and fierce “othering”.

Chapter Five: Dealing with Aid and Anticipating New Homes

post-tsunami times than in their former village. Vegetables were usually purchased from itinerant traders off their bicycles at a higher price within the temporary shelters’ site. It was located at a significant distance from a market place and had no functioning bus service for some time. As a result, women felt the absence of a variety of practices through which they had secured their households’ daily meals previously. These included using garden bush leaves for vegetable curries, catching mussels in shallow waters, processing palmyrah fruits, or collecting coconut shells (another source of firewood). These practices were deemed impossible for women at the relocation site, which did not border the sea or lagoon and were depleted of vegetation by the recent bulldozer work. Additionally, their experiences with the ‘golden tsunami’ (that is, with exaggerated availability of aid) coupled with the absence of community-based activities by NGOs contributed to people’s reluctance to engage in alternative sources.33 With references to the male head of household model, and with few alternative economic niches available to (married) women, families relied more and more on the fluctuating income generated by men. At the same time, pressure grew to repay debts from before the tsunami. Still considerate towards “tsunami victims” at the beginning, private lenders and institutions increasingly demanded repayment of loans as time passed.34 In a system very much based on credits, it was usual for families to have secured some loans after the tsunami, since fishing goes through a low season during the northeast monsoon months of November to January. Due to personal reasons (such as being engaged in building a house, coming up with a dowry, or wishing to send a family member abroad), some families had burdened themselves with considerable debts which they had to repay. Hence any relief item that could be sold for cash in hand provided some relief when outstanding loans weighed heavily in addition to material losses endured by the tsunami. Having to pay back enormous sums of money borrowed for a home subsequently destroyed was experienced as particularly hard. While a few individuals in Navalady had been in a position to engage in lucrative “money business” by lending substantial sums of money for even more substantial interest, it was more common for our research contacts to be on the dependent

33 | For instance, the seedlings that an NGO distributed to the residents in the temporary shelters were hardly maintained. As with other distributions, however, that intervention had not been undertaken within any framework of consultation or “community work” with the recipients. 34 | Private banks do not usually grant credits to fishermen or other persons without evidence of a regular income. Our friends instead took jewellery and other valuables such as land deeds to pawn shops or entered into deals with relatives or neighbours. These institutions and private persons often lent at such high interest rates that people could end up paying back double the amount borrowed.

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side and to pursue the business of loans at a very low level.35 For instance, women could gain a little extra when they received LKR 50 to 100 for any lent LKR 1,000. Women also used to form savings groups (chitty funds) in which each participant contributed a small amount weekly (or monthly). Several women’s attempts at re-establishing savings groups failed due to a lack of interest during the first year after the tsunami. Many women obviously lost their motivation, stating that saving made no sense to them any longer after having experienced the sudden loss of everything once thought worth saving and planning for. Some may have been reluctant, given a certain grudge when they had previously contributed to a savings group that had dissolved with the tsunami before they had ever had a chance of receiving the collective sum. The mentioned expectation of “free” aid during the first year after the disaster contributed to undermining such initiatives. Whatever the (lack of) motivation, savings circles only came into being the following year, and then, it was under the patronage of NGO-initiated women’s groups. Meanwhile, household expenses increased further due to price inflation as Sri Lanka’s government moved towards an escalation of war. Then, as open war resumed in Batticaloa in mid-2006, more and more refugees from the very poor areas controlled by the LTTE up-to then came to occupy camps located close to those of those previously displaced by the tsunami. The economic circumstances of our research contacts seemed privileged compared to those of these newly displaced by the war. My lasting memory of this was the blurring image of thin women carrying loads of firewood over considerable distances in the blazing heat. This image testifies to the economic hardship these women and families had faced and continued to face with their plight not stirring up an international wave of aid such as that following the tsunami. Before and during these developments, our friends still waited for their new houses. They waited for those responsible to find solutions and to start working, while they remained largely excluded from any decision-making power in these processes. As mentioned above, the first change towards a voluntary return to Navalady had already fostered ill-feelings among those who expected relocation. They observed whatever was done for those who returned with suspicion, perceiving in the housing and livelihood support granted further reason for delays in respect to their situation. When buffer zone guidelines changed nationally, even more people returned to their former areas. Hence more and more houses were being rebuilt in the former villages during 2006, while nothing seemed to be happening to relocate slightly more than 1,000 households to Tiraimadu. These families’ decision to relocate rather than to return proved to be a strenuous exercise in endurance. Murali already expressed the common fear of our research contacts in September 2005 of being permanently confined to the temporary shelters. He 35 | Kumari was among those who had the means to lend greater sums of money and to do so by demanding hefty interest, according to some of her creditors.

Chapter Five: Dealing with Aid and Anticipating New Homes

joked that they were bound to resemble the stereotypical images of poor, meagre, and dark-skinned people in African camps portrayed in TV broadcasts, as they expected their own skin to turn black by constant exposure to the sun’s reflections among the sheet-metal shelters and their bodies growing skinny under the hardships endured. And as people feared the imminent outbreak of war in their region at the time, our research contacts also expected it to end any foreign support for them as “tsunami victims”. The deteriorating security situation indeed contributed to additional delays of post-tsunami reconstruction efforts in eastern Sri Lanka during the following year. Re-escalation of armed conflict led to what Silva (2010) termed the “third wave”. After the first (the tsunami) and second (the influx of aid), this latest tsunami represented the exodus of expatriate staff from the district at the call of their own governments for security reasons, often bringing projects commenced previously to a stand-still. Major discrepancies in regard to reconstruction islandwide had already been evident before then, with the eastern and northern parts of Sri Lanka lagging considerably behind the south. This part of the island, which is predominantly Sinhala-populated, enjoys political (including presidential) patronage. More easily accessible, reconstruction had been proceeding at a faster pace and even resulted in an oversupply of new houses. By the end of 2006, only twelve per cent of the fully damaged houses had been completed in the north and 26 Per cent in the east compared to 86 per cent in the south, according to a government report (Joint Report 2006, 18). In the following year, 103 per cent of housing had been completed in the south, while only 59 per cent had been achieved in the east by March 2007 (RADA 2007 quoted in Boano 2009, 779). And yet reconstruction efforts in the east were not put on ice altogether, and Tiraimadu did materialize eventually. Padma and her family were the first to inaugurate their new house in February 2007. Nirmala and Thangavel, who still had not been assured of a house as of September of that year, finally moved into a new home in 2008. The war reigning in other parts of the district managed to help accelerate the process of what had long been deemed a project ‘beyond repair’ (according to the opinion of a leading actor for shelter issues in June 2005). This topic of Tiraimadu’s final establishment is continued in Chapter Eight. Before that, I take a look at some of the specific losses that our research contacts endured due to the tsunami and how these experiences intersected with suffering caused by war (Chapter Seven). Chapter Six probes more precisely into parental grief and the hope placed in having more children after the tsunami.

C onclusion Looking at post-tsunami aid and policies against the backdrop of the priorities and agendas of those affected, this chapter called attention to complex situations – ones rather more complicated than those suggested when discussing isolated

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intervention or when perceiving so-called beneficiaries primarily in terms of those victimized by outside rulings. As seen with our research contacts, relocation to a new place was not merely bemoaned as a loss of former homes but welcomed as a promise for future prosperity too. The allocation of post-tsunami aid according to pre-defined criteria, coupled with people’s varying strategies to make this system work for their own benefit, did not level out existing social differences. Instead it tended to enhance tensions along the axes of gender and generation within households as well as between households positioned differently in regard to their financial, social, and political resources. Some of this was seen in cash transfers exclusively to a husband, while the alternative of joint bank accounts could at least have acknowledged a wife’s responsibility in managing household economics. It is also seen in conflicts within household arrangements in which children and in-laws vied for aid entitlements of a dependent widow. It was also the case in the large-scale distribution of canoes and boats that unevenly affected the various categories of fishermen, benefitting “haves” rather than “have nots”. The example of post-tsunami house ownership has been discussed as a threat contradicting local gender relationships in important ways. It also undermined basic pillars for women’s relative autonomy when houses were newly issued in the husband’s name instead of the wife’s. Conversely, it has been seen that newly donated houses were handled within the framework of a dowry and a “good future” for daughters in the context reviewed. This suggests that female housing property may not necessarily have been lost in post-tsunami eastern Sri Lanka over the long term. The chapter furthermore shows our acquaintances’ ways of tentatively settling down in what was essentially a transitional space during their long wait for permanent houses. That this new environment was experienced as a hostile one additionally complicated a sense of being at home. Contrasting memories of former lives in former homes emerged nostalgically but also as the means to envision how things could and should be in a better future. Finally, daily-life relationships with surviving kin and frequently new neighbours as well as resumption and performance of basic and gendered daily routines were crucial to the endeavour to transform the unfamiliar, new place into a familiar and ordinary one.

Chapter Six: A New Beginning 1

Two days after the tsunami killed her three children, Sudarshini gave birth to her fourth child. As she recovered from labour, her husband Rajan told her that it was a baby boy, and that they had regained their eldest son through this newborn. Sudarshini recalled Rajan saying that they were to start their married life (vaalkkai) anew with this child. He wished to name their newborn after their eldest son, and so the baby was given the name of his deceased brother, Prashant. Sudarshini told us of this episode in September 2005. Sudarshini’s and Rajan’s situation was unique in that the birth of a baby followed so quickly after its siblings’ death in the tsunami. However, many other families who had lost one or several of their children due to the massive waves soon had another baby. Like Sudarshini and Rajan, the parents wished for a child of the same sex as the deceased and were happy to point out any similarities between the children once the baby was born. Invariably, they named the newborn after the dead one. Yet, differently from Sudarshini and Rajan, other parents maintained a minor difference in the names chosen. This chapter is about the importance of these babies against a backdrop of the massive, sudden death caused by the tsunami, and the particular challenge that the death of a child presents for parents. The birth of newborns and the names given to them raise questions regarding the concepts of reincarnation and the meaning behind naming. The discussion renders evident the significance of maintaining a sense of continuity through disruption. It also reveals the resulting ambivalence. Lastly, the chapter argues that post-tsunami births allowed women and men to reengage in parental responsibilities and ultimately to recreate binding gender relationships among kin. The example of Sudarshini’s family situation provides the basis for this more general discussion. I introduce Sudarshini below as one of our closest research contacts and give an account of her survival narrative, which includes a painful interrogation about responsibility for the death of all her first three children. 1 | In this chapter I elaborate on what I described in a previously published article (Thurnheer 2009c).

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From there, I turn briefly to the issue of sudden death and the way in which the many missing bodies after the tsunami complicated the grief of the bereaved. On that basis, the following discussion focuses on one specific way of coping with bereavement: the trend among parents of having a baby again, after the sudden loss of one in the tsunami. The wish for another baby after the loss of a child itself is not unique to the context, as studies on parental grief demonstrate. However, what is unique is the way concepts of reincarnation and naming practices found particular and transformed meanings in the aftermath of the tsunami. I conclude the chapter by reviewing Sudarshini’s and Rajan’s experience within the context of conflictive family relationships. The discussion reveals the importance of kinship positioning and of gender in regard to bereavement and people’s efforts to reengage in post-disaster life.

S udarshini Vasuki: ‘She is always joking and makes everyone laugh. We all missed her; it was so boring here when she spent the night at the temple yesterday!’ Sudarshini: ‘We are all expecting to die within a few days; people talk of the end of the world. That is why I am laughing and joking.’ (May 2005) In retrospect, this brief passage captures a great deal of what characterized Sudarshini as we knew her. Light-heartedness and profound sadness always seemed to accompany our encounters. Sudarshini was in her late 20s when we met her for the first time in Central College camp, where her mother Renuka, sister Lakshmi, and brother Ketesh, each with their own families, stayed as well. She had just returned from a temple festival further south of the district that day in May 2005. Sudarshini said that she wished to visit all the temple festivals that year; a remark that sparked fond memories of past festivals and pilgrimages among our current interlocutors: Sudarshini, Vasuki, and Parvati, all of whom shared a room with their husbands and children in the camp. Sudarshini’s eagerness to visit temples was not one that many of our friends shared; more typical of the time was Parvati’s reluctance to honour the gods that year, who were largely blamed for having failed to prevent the death of so many people in the tsunami. Accompanying this reluctance was the constant exchange of rumours and predictions of a coming disaster, spurred by sources spanning different faiths. Just that morning, leaflets which referred to an American preacher had been distributed in the camp predicting the end of the world on the last day of that month. This leaflet had left a disturbing effect on many of our acquaintances, especially Sudarshini’s maternal grandmother, Nallamma. But Sudarshini seemed to ease the tension with her gaiety. Throughout our conversation, Sudarshini’s five-month-old baby was the focus of attention, passed from arm to arm, his mother calling him affectionately ‘thangam raj’ (golden king) and ‘tsunami podiyan’ (tsunami boy).

Chapter Six: A New Beginning

In that last name, she referred to the baby’s bravery in the tsunami: at the time still in his mother’s womb, the boy was perceived to have shared in his mother’s struggle for survival. His birth came gratifyingly soon after the disaster, amidst his parents’ grief for the death of their three previous children. Thus he was his parents’ fourth child and their first son born after the tsunami. They would have another two children: only a few months after the birth of their “tsunami boy”, Sudarshini was pregnant again. The couple expected this unborn child to be a girl whom they planned to name after their second child, a daughter called Neela. When it turned out to be a boy, the baby was named after their third child who died in the tsunami. The daughter was “regained” with the couple’s sixth child born in 2009. Sudarshini was the youngest of four children. Her eldest sister had died some seven years before the tsunami, a casualty of self-immolation in reaction to years of maltreatment by her husband. Her father, said to have been a heavy drinker in his last years, died a few month before the massive waves. Sudarshini had met her husband Rajan during a funeral of one of her relatives, in the neighbourhood of Rajan’s parental family. They fell in love and married, neither yet 20 years old, and had been eking out a living in Navalady ever since. They had been living in a cadjan-thatched hut in Navalady within some 50 metres of the sea at the time of the tsunami. Rajan held no possessions in terms of fishing equipment but depended on any offer to work for others. He regularly joined Sudarshini’s brother Ketesh on his motorboat along with her brother-in-law Shanmugam. Rajan had also migrated to the Middle East for work, having to endure very difficult working conditions. He returned to Sri Lanka just before the tsunami, and what little wealth he acquired abroad was lost due to the waves. At the time, moreover, the couple had been expecting to move into a house within a state-sponsored housing programme that was about to be completed in their village. Reflecting their dire economic situation, their two eldest children used to stay with their father’s sister in a town in Ampara District. It had been too difficult to raise all three children, especially since Sudarshini was on her own during Rajan’s stay abroad. Their daughter Neela was not yet two years old when she was sent to their relatives; a step that bore great emotional difficulties for Sudarshini, who took comfort in knowing her sister-in-law’s family was happy to add this girl to their household.2 Once he reached school age, the elder son was also sent to stay there. Sudarshini hoped her children would benefit from their relatives’ better economic situation and thus enjoy a better upbringing and education (learning ‘good Tamil’) than she could provide for them in Navalady. The children usually

2 | It is common practice among relatives, most often among sisters, to have children grow up for a shorter or longer period in each other’s households. The reasons include economic hardship, protection from warfare, schooling opportunities, or simply the pleasure of having a young child within a household (see also Chapter Four).

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came to spend their holidays with the parents in Navalady, which was the case during that fateful December 2004. At the time of the tsunami, their children were seven, six, and almost three years old, with the fourth one due to be born in January 2005. Renuka, Sudarshini’s widowed mother, had come to stay with the family to help Sudarshini during her last months of pregnancy. In addition, Shankar, one of Sudarshini’s eldest sister’s sons, had been with them. Ever since his mother’s suicide, he had lived with Renuka or Sudarshini.3 All of them stayed together on the sandy stretch close to the sea that would be completely destroyed by the force of the massive waves. Many of Sudarshini’s maternal relations lived in the same area, and all lost close family members. Sudarshini spoke at length of that tsunami day on two different occasions during fieldwork. She referred to specific details and related memories of her deceased children on many other occasions. We were actually introduced to Sudarshini when we found ourselves in a circle of women narrating their “tsunami experiences” during our first visit to Central College camp, described in Chapter Two. She had told us in a monotone voice of her own survival along with that of her mother, the death of her three children, and the birth of the baby that slept on her folded knees as she spoke. She had spent a moment bracing her head in her right hand and facing the floor. We would come to observe this position many times during our fieldwork. It was one that expressed her thoughtfulness and deep sadness.4 She left immediately afterward, and other women continued with their stories. It was almost six months after this first contact that Sudarshini engaged us in a far richer account of what had happened during the tsunami. This was when we stayed overnight at her place in Tiraimadu for the first time in September 2005. While her husband was fast asleep and the baby demanding little attention, she talked almost seamlessly of what happened during that morning of December 26, 2004. She embedded these events in what had led to them and what followed in regard to her family life. Indeed, what she talked about dealt less with what had happened but how and why. That night, in a way that contrasted with her earlier chronology of events, she detailed the processes and relationships. I give a highly summarized account of that night’s narrative below.

3 | The sister’s death left behind four boys who grew up among their maternal family: three remained primarily in Renuka’s and Sudarshini’s households, while one stayed with one of Renuka’s brother’s family. Their father did not provide for them (and had remarried soon after the death of his first wife). The youngest boy died in the tsunami, at age eight. 4 | Our research contacts were usually quick to notice such withdrawn and pensive attitudes that signalled excessive “thinking” (yoosikka), preoccupations, and sorrow, see Chapter Seven.

Chapter Six: A New Beginning

Death, sur vival, and a newborn ‘They died because of me’ Sudarshini said, at the beginning of that night’s narrative. She reasoned that only because she had longed to see her elder children during their school holidays, had they come to stay in their natal village. And there, they became victims to the tsunami. Had they remained with her sister-inlaw, they would have remained unaffected by the waves. On the morning of the day of the tsunami, Rajan had returned from fishing to bring breakfast for all three children. While eating, Sudarshini had been surprised by the way Rajan was gazing at the children ‘as if they had just been born’. She made tea for them, and then the children had gone out to play, happy to spend their holidays with their friends in beautiful Navalady. Sudarshini had combed her daughter’s hair and tied it back with a bright yellow ribbon – a ribbon she was certain could not have come loose and would have made Neela easily identifiable after the tsunami, had they only found the child’s body. The morning of the tsunami, Sudarshini had urged the girl to take along her little brother, and the two had been ready to go out when Renuka had called Neela to come and see her. Afterwards, the grandmother told Sudarshini that the girl was already getting dark in complexion, and that it was best to send her away from Navalady again.5 At the same time, the eldest son Prashant had gone out with Shankar to cut some wood among the stretch of trees along the beach. Sudarshini had told him not to go there, because she thought it might be raining. Yet her son did not listen to her.6 These were her last moments with her children. Soon after they had gone, Sudarshini had heard very loud noises ‘like shelling’. She went out of the hut to find people running away in excitement. Rajan immediately went to search for the children. He met up with Prashant and Shankar, who came running towards him, warning of the approaching waves. Sudarshini added that Prashant had advised his father to take care of his mother, who would not be able to run fast with her huge, pregnant belly. In turn, Rajan told Shankar to climb up a tree with Prashant while he looked for the other children. ‘Kadavul (god) cannot be blamed for what happened’ Sudarshini stated at this point in her narrative.7 Instead, she used to blame her husband Rajan for the death 5 | Light-coloured skin is considered more beautiful than dark skin and is ultimately viewed as a sign of wealth, as it indicates a lifestyle protected from exposure to the sun. The episode reveals Renuka’s affection for the child as well as the opportunity she had in seeing her for a last time. 6 | This is one of many details which show Sudarshini’s motherly fashion of processing events in her narrative. A warning not to go out because of threatening rain contradicts people’s general observation of that morning as a fine day with blue skies (in itself an emphasis that there were no signs of the pending catastrophe). 7 | Kadavul generally refers to the god Shiva, the supreme god in the tradition of Shaivism followed by Hindu-Tamils of Sri Lanka, or, in Whitaker’s (1999, 84) words, the “paradigmatic

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of their first-born.8 As she described the scene of Prashant running towards his father, she pointed out that kadavul had thus made Prashant ‘show his face’ to his father at the time. Yet Rajan missed out on this god-given chance and failed to save his son’s life. This was how she used to blame Rajan at the beginning, supported by her mother Renuka, who similarly blamed Rajan. Only later, Sudarshini said, did she realize how much pain she was causing him with her allegations. From that point she started to ‘control her words’. Picking up where she left off in her narrative about that morning of the tsunami, Sudarshini told of how she had gone over to her handicapped mother, who was shivering with fear. However, Sudarshini, had not been afraid; she felt strong at that moment. The waves had struck the coast but, despite having been tossed around, she somehow managed to swim and keep her head above water. Yet she had been quickly separated from her mother. At some point, she caught sight of Rajan lying numbly in a thoni. She had called out to him, and together they had reached the shore at the other side of the lagoon. Sudarshini had immediately been brought to the hospital, worried about the effects on her unborn child. The doctors had examined her and reassured the couple that everything was fine. But two days later labour was induced without further explanation. She had not felt any pain during that birth; all she had felt was the pain from the wounds inflicted from the tsunami. She kept crying for her children who remained missing. In order to comfort her, Rajan would reply that so many others had died too and that their whole village had been destroyed. She had been reunited with her mother only after she had left the hospital and come to stay in the same camp. They never found any of their children. This summarized version of Sudarshini’s long narrative is illustrative of her maternal perspective, filled with details that demonstrate the affectionate ties among her immediate family members, the care with which the parents looked after the children, and the children’s happiness in being reunited with them in Navalady. A particularly vivid picture was given on Neela, whose memory the parents generally evoked with special frequency and pride. The daughter’s beauty and fine manners emerged in several instances and in the style people used when idealizing their dead. Yet more details on the circumstances of death centred on their eldest son, Prashant. Sudarshini’s narrative was rich in comments that foreshadowed the impending death of her children while, simultaneously suggesting that things could have taken a different course. There is an implication that – had the slightest detail been different – the tragedy would not have deity” for Hindus in Batticaloa. Other common words for a Hindu deity are caami and theyvam. 8 | Sudarshini did not blame the elder boy, Shankar, for the death of their son in that narrative or during any other conversations with us. Shankar, who survived the waves, had placed Prashant in a hole in a large tree that was to gain infamy for collapsing in the waves, taking to their deaths dozens of people who had sought refuge at its top.

Chapter Six: A New Beginning

happened. This can be seen as a way for survivors to rework traumatic experiences by depicting different scenarios in which the disastrous outcome could have been prevented (see Das 1990, 360). Taking it a step further, the narrative reminds us of how storytelling forms a vital strategy for the speaker to imagine a world in which her or his actions and words could have made a difference (Jackson 2002, 14). Sudarshini had begun her narrative by blaming herself for the death of her children. Yet, at a later point describing the scene of Prashant running towards his father before the waves struck, she unmistakably placed the guilt on Rajan for not having saved the boy at that moment. I return to the issue of allocating blame in the last part of this chapter. For now, I would like to elaborate briefly on the point with which Sudarshini had ended her narrative: her dismay at never having found the children’s corpses.

Bad death ‘Had I found their bodies, I would have placed them in coffins and done everything necessary for them. That would have given me some satisfaction. Yet, I didn’t find them, and I didn’t do anything for them. To think that somebody just dumped them in a hole …’ (Sudarshini, July 2005) Sudarshini had been looking through a stack of photos of tsunami fatalities made for identification purposes. Murali had brought it to the camp that day. It was not the first time she had looked through such photos; immediately after the tsunami, she had done so on several occasions with her husband. Once she simply identified a picture as their eldest son, because she could not stand the uncertainty of his whereabouts any longer. On that day in July, with the photos in her hands, she burst into uncontrollable crying. It lasted only a moment. Then she got up to prepare tea for everyone present in the room. By occurring so unexpectedly, pulling persons out of the midst of their lives and on such a massive scale, death caused by the tsunami broke with any notions of a “good death”. In the local context, a “good death” is expected to meet a person after a completed life, in the presence of kin who assist in the deceased’s afterlife journey through mortuary rituals. A “tsunami death” appeared bad in all regards: sudden, violent, premature, often leaving the bereaved in no position to perform the necessary rituals that prevent the dead from remaining restless spirits. Hence mortuary rituals that could turn a “bad” death into a “good” one.9 This was especially the case for the many bodies that remained missing after the tsunami, 9 | In many societies, unexpected death and violent death are termed “bad” deaths that contrast with a “good” death, which occurs after a fulfilled life: the former represents an absence of control, while the latter suggests a mastery over arbitrariness (Bloch and Parry 1982, 15–18; Michaels [1998] 2006, 161–162). Among Hindus, a good death commonly implies some preparedness for death and the presence of kin at the time of death (Das 1977, 123; Lüthi 1999, 88, 100; Michaels [1998] 2006, 148–153; Parry 1989, 503–505).

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having been swept away into the sea or lagoon, or – as Sudarshini feared above – thrown anonymously into mass graves in a hasty governmental attempt to restore order and prevent disease. In cases where the corpses were found, the perceived “badness” of the tsunami death seemed to be written all over them, since they were often injured and heavily deformed, having been submerged in water for so long. The overall extent of death exceeded the survivors’ ability to treat all the dead and bereaved in socially established ways. Thus the result was that the “proper repertoire”, covering how to deal with the loss of family members, failed utterly. People responded by improvising, at times with what they managed to salvage in the immediate aftermath of the catastrophe. Ravindran, for instance, buried a set of teeth and a leg, that he was sure were his father’s, in a brief, personal ritual when he found them in Navalady, three days after the tsunami. His sister Sujatha’s baby, who was found among piles of corpses in the hospital mortuary, was taken out of the arms of its screaming mother and buried by Sujatha’s mother’s youngest brother in a separate hole, along with this young man’s own baby, among other ad-hoc graves of tsunami victims. These and many more accounts testify to the survivors’ “ritual sense” (Bell [1992] 2009, 80) that allowed them to start off with the given and carry out rites for their dead even in up-to-then socially unknown situations.10 Some did manage to recover the bodies of their dead and have them cremated and buried in a proper cemetery.11 For example, Vasuki found her brother’s daughter after many days of searching and – with her brother’s help – washed and dressed that girl’s corpse and placed it in a coffin. Yet Vasuki’s parents as well as the wife, two daughters, and one son of her brother Susil, remained missing. The family organized a temple puja for them on the eighth day after death and continued giving puja for all lost family members on their birthdays. However, most of our other research contacts refrained from temple visits and from many religious practices commonly expected following the death of a family member. Such restraint resulted in what appeared as a dearth in ritual ceremonies for the dead during the time between the initial responses immediately after the tsunami and the first death anniversary one year later. Several aspects may help explain this observation. One is that long-term poverty impacted such an effect even before the 10 | According to Bell ([1992] 2009, 80) the “ritual sense” is a socially acquired sense that provides members of a group with knowledge of how to improvise on specific occasions. This means, for instance, knowing how to go through a funeral that can be accepted as sufficiently appropriate for its purpose in given circumstances. 11 | Cremation of dead adults and burials of deceased children (up to a varying age) is a common pattern among Hindus in India (Michaels [1998] 2006, 148–165). While our acquaintances seem to expect cremation and practiced it for their dead who died a “normal” death, burials may actually have been a common ritual in the Batticaloa region until more recent times.

Chapter Six: A New Beginning

tsunami, when it limited the services of religious experts. Another lies in our acquaintances’ frequently stated anger towards the (Hindu) gods who had not prevented the disaster. This anger had them explicitly refrain from worship after the tsunami, a matter discussed in more details in Chapters Seven and Eight.12 Lastly, there was also the case of people rejecting the mortuary rituals – possibly because they seemed insufficient for those lost in the tsunami or superficial compared to those practiced under more ordinary circumstances (see also Das 1990, 356). What seemed more important than religious ceremonies in these post-tsunami circumstances were other customary practices of the bereaved, such as handing out food and clothes to beggars. These offered themselves to highly personal engagements as an example from Sudarshini illustrates. She transformed the common way of handing out food or clothes to the poor into something more intimate and obviously more personally satisfying in her grief for her three deceased children. After having delayed performing any such hand-outs for months, she took action one day in June 2005 when she saw a young girl of poor background in the street. With the permission of the girl’s mother, she took her to the camp, gave the girl a bath, and did her hair, washed her dirty clothes, dressed her up in new clothes, fed her sweets and curries, and brought her back to her parents in the evening. In the comments of Sudarshini’s relatives, the girl then looked as beautiful as had Sudarshini’s deceased daughter Neela. Similarly, offerings of food to the dead on specific days after death were important to our acquaintances. Besides rituals on the eighth day, people seemed to have engaged widely in offering food to their deceased on the 41st day after their death in the tsunami. That day marked the final mortuary rite following those immediately after death, though it is usually held on the 31st day when the soul is said to be brought to judgement before reaching heaven (see McGilvray 1982a, 92). According to Ravindran’s and Sujatha’s mother, Vasanthi, the 41-day rule applies to all people who meet their death ‘in the water’.13 Several of our friends came to speak of how they had organized offerings that day. Many of those from Navalady returned briefly to their destroyed village. Among them was Sudarshini who also described what she and her husband did on that occasion: the couple spread out chocolates, biscuits, and the children’s favourite ‘shorteats’ (patties) on a piece 12 | Though our friends stated anger as their reason, I wonder whether the restraint also represented a way to perform the social role of the ritually impure or inauspicious that prevents the bereaved from engaging in specific ritual practices after the death of family members. 13 | Other persons we consulted did not know the reason for the difference in days observed. Vasanthi’s explanation suggests the need for more precise research into specific ways of Karaiyar dealing with fishing dangers and possibly related mortuary practices that relate to accidents at sea. All in all, it remains to be established why this mortuary ritual took place on the 41st day and how it related to other Hindu Tamil practices.

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of blanket, along with grapes, apples, and oranges (that count among the most expensive fruits locally). The blanket, which Rajan had found along the way to their former home, was one on which the children used to sleep. They spread it out where their hut used to be, placing the food and some money on it. Sudarshini described how it had been impossible for them, as parents, to eat any offerings, as is custom. With her sense of humour still intact, she related how they had urged the accompanying Shankar and Kanthan (a son of a brother of Sudarshini’s maternal grandmother) to do so instead, but that they too had hardly managed – except to take the money offered! Those who found the bodies of their loved ones had the certitude of their death, however despairing. Conversely, those like Sudarshini and Rajan, who never retrieved their children’s corpses, often maintained a hope for the survival of their missing ones. Such hope could prove more persistent than a belief that death had occurred and was acknowledged in a customized mortuary rite. One day in June 2005, for example, Sudarshini had been excited about the news of a boy called Prashant having been found in an orphanage. But she was to realize, shortly afterwards, that this news had been a joke played upon her by people she thought felt jealous of her new baby. Some parents and grandparents had continued to search orphanages for missing children for half a year after the tsunami. It was also common for people to consult the local sastriyar (astrologer or “fortune teller”) about the whereabouts and well-being of the missing. Rumours about miraculous returns further circulated for a considerable time-span following the tsunami. The death of a child has been noted as particularly challenging for humans to cope with, and societies may develop separate mortuary rituals for children that express the uniqueness that such premature death involves. The death of children may inflict a particular emotional dimension for bereaved parents, and cross-cultural comparisons indicate that parental grief in many societies is likely to include a sense of failure. That is, parents are said to feel robbed of their identification as providers and protectors of their offspring (Young and Papadatou [1997] 2003, 191–195). Against this backdrop, it may be argued that the loss of a child in the tsunami further complicated a parent’s survival and accentuated what is known as “survivor’s guilt”, a sense of having survived at the expense of others (see discussion in the last part of this chapter). It is this special case of “bad” death and its consequences that are of concern here: the sudden death of small children in the tsunami and the resulting bereavement of young parents. The question of how emotions (more precisely grief) are universally shared and culturally expressed has long concerned social anthropologists (Desjarlais and Wilce 2003; Lindholm 2005; Lutz 1982; Lutz and White 1986; Rosaldo 1984; Rosenblatt [1997] 2003). Possibly this question is prone to stir up a particular emotional edge when it concerns children’s death and parental bereavement. A suggestion, for example, that mothers in areas of high infant mortality do not feel sorrow for the loss of a child meets criticism and counter-studies (see Bowen [1999] 2005, 56–58; Scheper-Hughes 2008).

Chapter Six: A New Beginning

The position taken here is in line with the work of Das (1990a, 29; 1990b, 371; 2007), which considers the way in which social categories – gender among them – interfere with bereavement and experiences of survivors. This perspective also raises questions about how kinship positions and social relationships reveal themselves as supportive or burdensome to those involved. I turn at this point to describe the specific form of coping seen initiated with Sudarshini’s and Rajan’s fourth child: the many new births that followed the death of children in the tsunami and the names that the care-givers chose for the newborns.

Tsunami B abies There was a time during our fieldwork when jokes ran high about the number of pregnant women and the many new babies born among our friends and their close relatives. Less than half a year after the birth of Prashant, the “tsunami boy”, Sudarshini was pregnant again. Gheeta, one of Sudarshini’s classificatory sisters, gave birth in November 2005, and another three babies were born among her close relatives in the following months.14 Shanthi, described in Chapter Three, gave birth to a baby girl in December 2005, and one of her sisters-in-law had a son three months earlier. Furthermore, Sasika’s child was born in January 2006, and other babies were born during the first few months of that year, including those of Selvy and Panjali. Therefore, we spent many moments with young mothers and their small babies during our 2006 fieldwork. These moments introduced me to a variety of practices considered necessary for the healthy upbringing of a child, much of which had to do with averting the influence of malicious spirits and the evil eye. That children make up a happy home is a common local understanding shared in the wider Tamil context (Trawick 1992). However, there was possibly a case of a “mini-baby boom” following the tsunami among the families directly affected. What is of interest here is the remark of one of Kumari’s neighbours, Pradeepa, during her pregnancy in mid-2005: she wanted another baby because her only child had died due to the tsunami. This wish for another baby after the loss of children in the disaster was not limited to our circle of acquaintances. The hospital in Trincomalee in north-eastern Sri Lanka reported a highest ever number of birth some nine months after the tsunami, according to a news release (Mitchell 2005). A personal acquaintance further confirmed a clear trend among bereaved

14 | Gheeta is Sudarshini’s mother’s sister’s daughter (Vasanthi’s eldest daughter). The other three examples refer to a daughter of one of Sudarshini’s mother’s brothers, to Manjula (the wife of Sudarshini’s mother’s youngest brother), and to the wife of another brother of Sudarshini’s mother.

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parents of wanting another baby in the heavily-affected Aceh region in Indonesia (personal communication, November 2008).15 On that occasion, Pradeepa also expressed her relief at not having undergone sterilization previously, referring to a fairly common method of birth control in the local context, when the desired number and sex of children had been reached.16 She deplored the situation of another woman whose three children had died due to the massive waves and who could never get pregnant again. Pradeepa pointed out by this remark a tendency noted in other tsunami-affected regions and countries as well. That is, couples who lost children in the tsunami placed all their hopes in having another child, and medical personnel reported many women’s requests to reverse their sterilization (Mitchell 2005; Carballo et al. 2005). In India, the government responded by facilitating measures for women to undergo a reversal of tubal ligation in the tsunami’s aftermath (Carballo et al. 2005). The desire to have babies after the death of previous children tends to be regarded with suspicion by outside observers. For instance, the articles above raised concerns in regard to mothers’ health, especially when pregnancies occurred at an advanced age. They also pointed out the threatening economic consequences when couples lacked the means to provide for additional children. Furthermore, a psychological dimension often arises when a newborn is seen to serve as the “replacement” for a former child. This view relates to earlier clinical psychology studies suggesting that children born subsequent to the death of a baby were prevented from developing their own identities, thus risking development of psychopathologies. Contemporary psychology itself has come to criticize such conclusions. Rather than starting off from preconceived models of “good” and “bad” forms of parental grief, the meaning of losing a child and its consequences for later children is increasingly examined within concrete family situations. Such a perspective acknowledges the variety of ways in which parents care for their newborns and mourn for their dead child (Grout and Romanoff 2000, 2007). This last point parallels what I describe here. Based on my fieldwork observations, I argue that the newborns in question offered their care-givers ways to remember the dead and create continuity between previous and current lives without confusing those alive with those who have perished. This argument is described below in respect to local notions of reincarnation and naming practices.

15 | Besides parental grief, the return home of migrant workers in response to the tsunami likely contributed to a general “baby boom” as well (just as such absences of spouses often explained a birth gap). 16 | The acceptance of sterilization relates to vigorous campaigns that promote it as a contraceptive practice following the state’s commitment to reduce population growth in Sri Lanka in the late 1970s (see Tsui et al. 1989).

Chapter Six: A New Beginning

Reborn? As retold by Sudarshini, Rajan aimed to regain their deceased children through the birth of more babies. The couple hoped to reproduce a row of siblings with identical genders and names. Yet, when that wish fell just short of being granted (the second “post-tsunami” child being a boy rather than a girl), it was hardly seen as an issue. The baby was given the name of the couple’s previous third child, and the missing daughter was happily welcomed into the family once a girl was born three years later. Similarly, in other families that had another baby relatively soon after the loss of a child, parents and relations were keen to see resemblances and were happy to point out any shared features or manners between the living and the dead. Yet they also affirmed the difference and did so quite unreservedly. The uniqueness of each child did not seem to be questioned. These points are important in regard to the discussion mentioned above regarding “replacement children”. They are also important for another perspective that comes to mind within the local Hindu religious context, namely, that of babies as reborn versions of their dead siblings. I wish to emphasize that notions of rebirth were not raised as evident forms of an afterlife, and they did not amount to a kind of easy coping mechanism to deal with bereavement (as some outside observers implied at times). Yet I contend that the existence of reincarnation concepts can be evidenced in bereaved parents’ wish for another baby and their perception of the following newborns. Selvy explicitly formulated this link in a pensive voice, when she was four months pregnant, in September 2005: she said that she had dreamed of her sister’s baby and added that, according to what ‘people say’, a deceased child will be reborn when a pregnant woman dreams of it. Concepts of reincarnation did not figure prominently among the people we spoke with, but questions of possible rebirth popped up every now and then. These questions revealed reincarnation to be a possibility of which one knew little and upon which one pondered more often following the massive death of loved ones. Vasuki, for example, began singing a popular Hindu song about different forms of rebirth that children learn at school. It was her response when we asked what she thought of rebirth after she had mentioned such a possibility during a conversation. Indeed, our friends confirmed in many ways Wilke’s (1999, 88) observation that concepts of reincarnation commonly figure among Hindus as a little reflected model in the back of people’s minds. What most concerns people in daily life instead is promoting auspiciousness and well-being while avoiding misfortune (Wilke 1999, 88). McGilvray (1982a, 92) raised the same point and considered reincarnation hardly a topic for Hindu Tamils in Batticaloa.17 Wilke 17 | Pfaffenberger (1982, 102–103) also noted that concepts of reincarnation resonate little among Jaffna Tamils. Conversely, Peyer (2002, 62) found a clearer identification of people with notions of rebirth in her research within a village in Tamil Nadu. Most of her

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(1999, 93) also cautioned against popular Western concepts of rebirth by pointing out that rebirth is not a desired concept of afterlife among Hindus; after all, rebirth means renewed death. Vathany was shocked when I had asked her about rebirth during an early stage in fieldwork. According to her, ‘only criminals’ or other ‘bad people’ had to fear being reborn. What people hoped for was to remain with the god Shiva after successfully passing judgement after death, based on a selecting scale. Indeed, reincarnation is only one of several afterlife concepts in Hindu religions (Bowen [1999] 2005, 80–81; Michaels [1998] 2006, 165–173). Rather than perceiving this variety of concepts as contradictory, the plurality of concepts can be considered a particularly apt reflection of the ambivalence of life and death (Bloch 1988, 26–28; Michaels [1998] 2006, 165). Differing afterlife concepts also relate in some basic ways to varying causes of death and ritual practices of the bereaved. For example, it is said that small children (up to a varying age) reach god directly after their death. In contrast, people who have died suddenly and/or who do not receive the proper rituals after death risk remaining as spirits, as mentioned above. These spirits are believed to envy the living for their life and fortune. Compelled by this envy, they inflict suffering and misfortune on the living (Michaels [1998] 2006, 162; Pfaffenberger 1982, 101–106). These points relate well to how some of our research contacts recalled their lost family members during our conversations. Ramesh, for example, appealed to the common image of small children remaining with god when he told us one day that he often dreamed that his little grandson was happily with kadavul. Ramesh was referring on this occasion in May 2005 to his daughter Nanthini’s baby, who had died in the tsunami when only 10 months old. Conversely, Sudarshini and other mothers worried at times that their children were perhaps hungrily roaming the area. Hence they expressed fear that their children may have remained as restless ghosts. They also expressed a specifically motherly concern with their children’s nutrition. It was common for women to relate what meal they had prepared for their children before their death. This motherly concern was also a wifely concern, and women similarly expressed satisfaction or dismay over whatever they had cooked for their husbands before their death. The differing remarks on their children’s possible form of existence after death may partly be connected with the varying age of children at the time of their death. Yet it struck me that the afterlife concepts our acquaintances related during the daily life encounters of our fieldwork depended more on the speaker’s momentary situation than on any grander theories about life and death. This is hardly surprising in itself. Of interest, though, is that in the specific tsunami aftermath situation with its massive, personal, and collective bereavement, notions of rebirth could gain a specific relevance. informants believed they were reborn through their grandchildren, and sometimes told their grandchildren that they were their grandmothers.

Chapter Six: A New Beginning

What the concept of reincarnation crucially offers in Hindu thought, according to Parry’s (1989) theory of shared body particles, is a distinct perception of the person as one “never entirely new when born, never entirely gone when dead” (Parry 1989, 505). People are seen as being constituted of elements that they share with their relatives. Thus nothing is completely lost at the time of death. Instead the shared body particles exist further in the bodies of relatives and, ultimately, bodies and souls are parts of past and future persons (Parry 1989, 503–511). Death, in turn, is not reduced to a single event but understood as a transformative process. Bloch (1988, 15) reiterated this point and argued that life and death need not be perceived in terms of “all or nothing” as is said to be the case in Western cultures. Other socio-cultural contexts may offer personhood perceptions according to which a person is not seen as a confined individual but composed of parts that are themselves elements of a “different kind of cross-cutting whole” (Bloch 1988, 16). While these parts cannot exist in isolation, the death of a person does not mean the end of such components or of the whole. A person’s death may thus put an end to her or his individuality. But those parts that remain in other wholes can be recombined and come to form new individuals. From such perspectives “death stops being a total loss but rather becomes a stage in a long and continuous transformation of taking apart and putting together” (Bloch 1988, 17). These points can be criticized as accounting only for the specific, higher caste-based thinking of Brahmin males, as is the case in Parry’s work. Bloch’s elaborations on personhood and death are also based on an exaggerated divergence from so-called “Western” ideas. Indeed what is commonly referred to in terms of Western individualism more likely reflects assumptions of liberal philosophy rather than ethnographic accounts of daily life points-of-view in Western societies.18 In regard to the Hindu-Tamil contexts, Trawick’s (1992) work focused on such daily-life social worlds. One of her observations reveals the potential for reincarnation concepts at a family level: Trawick (1992, 99) noted that people in Tamil Nadu considered babies who show similar behaviour to deceased relatives to be their reborn kin. That is, not all babies were perceived as reborn but only those who showed similar manners. The reason: souls were said to prefer a rebirth among their kin. Comparing babies to deceased family members is obviously not a practice limited to Hindu-Tamils. And yet the last example demonstrates that observing such similarities may find special significance in contexts where reincarnation concepts exist: an acknowledgement of the continuation of life and of kinship. Against this backdrop, the joy of bereaved parents and their relations over any detected similarities between deceased children and newborn babies after the tsunami deserves a particular note. The concepts of reincarnation, occupying a rather marginal place among Sri Lankan Hindu-Tamil persons during more ordinary circumstances, then meant potentially solace and hope to tsunami 18 | See Carsten (2004, 97) with reference to Ouroussof (1993).

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survivors. Thus positive associations of rebirth, rather than negative ones, offered the bereaved a framework for relating their grief.19 Like reinterpretation of a text taken from an archive, reincarnation concepts could be activated and read in the specific light of that particular social and historical moment in the tsunami aftermath.20 In sum, the points described regarding reincarnation account for a great deal of my impressions of “post-tsunami babies” as at once unique persons with their own characteristics, as living evidence of their deceased brothers or sisters as well as members of a family that includes living and dead kin. Hence reincarnation concepts figured as one potential way for the bereaved to create connections with their recently dead children. In addition, the names chosen for the newborns emphasized this daily-life continuity between the living and the dead. This argument is addressed below.

Powerful dates and names As mentioned above, babies born soon after the tsunami to our acquaintances were given names closely resembling those of siblings who had died in the waves, with the difference being but a few letters. The resemblance in names occurred at the level of proper names and/or in regard to nicknames, when these were the preferred way of referring to a child in daily life. Three points need to be noted. Firstly, this naming practice occurred only among families who had lost small children in the tsunami, and the names of newborns resembled those of their deceased siblings. Thus, secondly, it was not a matter of naming babies after any deceased family member but of linking siblings by name.21 Thirdly, the names chosen were highly similar to their namesakes – and parents emphasized this similarity – but not identical. The case of Sudarshini’s and Rajan’s children formed an exception to this last point. I start off with this exception in order to illustrate the significance of other parents maintaining a minor difference in naming their “tsunami babies”. According to Sudarshini, it had been Rajan’s wish to give the name of their first-born child to their baby born immediately after the tsunami. Likewise, 19 | As Wilke (1999, 93) argued, positive associations of reincarnation with processuality, dynamism, and a continuity of life is an interpretation more popular among Western adherents of rebirth than among Hindus. 20 | I refer here to Assmann (1995) and his elaborations on use, reuse, interpretation, and reinterpretation of texts. 21 | There was one exception among our friends: Sasika’s and Suresh’s baby was given a nickname reminiscent of the nickname given to Nanthini’s son who had died in the tsunami at the age of 10 months (that is, the nickname resembles that of the baby’s father’s sister’s child). Sasika and Suresh had lost their previous son in the tsunami too, but he had been so young at the time that he had not yet received a name.

Chapter Six: A New Beginning

the next two children carried the exact same names as their deceased siblings. Taking the example of their first post-tsunami baby, Prashant, it was evident that Sudarshini had followed her husband’s naming wish with some discomfort. That uneasiness manifested itself particularly at times when Prashant fell sick or showed forms of behaviour that worried his parents and relations. Indeed, Sudarshini mentioned that her relatives and other people had advised the couple not to reuse the same name for the newborn, since it could cause ‘bad’ (therefore inauspicious) consequences for the baby. Moreover, Sudarshini’s worries over the name-giving overlapped with her concern that Prashant was born at a time which was not ‘good’ for him. Therefore, before discussing the specific name selection practice, I elaborate briefly on Prashant’s birth and moments of ill health during his first two years of life. Upon Sudarshini’s admission to hospital on the day of the tsunami, doctors reassured the parents of their unborn child’s well-being. But two days later Sudarshini was placed on a stretcher, rolled away, and induced into labour without any further explanation. She remembered that delivery as highly confusing and extremely shameful due to crowded conditions that impeded any privacy in the hospital. For instance, she mentioned her shame when her elder brother saw her naked when he came to the hospital with Rajan. The induced labour resulted in a date of birth that differed from what doctors had told Sudarshini to expect earlier in her pregnancy. While this difference may not have stirred any worries during more normal circumstances, it caused significant anxieties for Sudarshini in regard to Prashant’s health. Several moments of ill health or irritating behaviour in Prashant accentuated these anxieties. Examples of sicknesses included Prashant’s hospitalization for asthma when he was five months old. Later, at the age of 18 months, skin rashes and instances of angry screaming worried Sudarshini and her close kin. To treat the angry outbursts, Sudarshini went to temples to have rites performed necessary to relieve the child of effects of malicious spirits. Yet particularly whenever the treatment sought (either bio-medical or ritual, in nature) had little effect, Sudarshini questioned Prasanth’s date of birth. Indeed, one’s date of birth holds great significance in Batticaloa. It is considered important in regard to health, since the particular planetary constellations of the moment may affect a person’s susceptibility to diseases (see also Lüthi 2001, 16). It is furthermore directly related to what makes up a person’s talai eluttu (literally “head writing”).22 According to a frequently heard sigh among our friends, whatever 22 | Pfaffenberger (1982, 215) referred to the concept as talaiviti or fate among Jaffna Tamils. Daniel (1984, 4) rendered as “codes for action” what his informants called talai eruttu, “head writing”, which relates to the script that kadavul writes on an individual’s head at the time of birth. As with afterlife concepts, a variety of notions governing fate exist in Hindu thought (Bowen [1999] 2005, 81; Michaels [1998] 2006, 173; Pfaffenberger 1982, 214– 216). Among them is the more popularly known concept of karma/dharma,

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happened depended on one’s talai eluttu – a reference made mockingly or with resignation to one’s predestination already written out on one’s forehead. That sigh did not prevent people from engaging in ritual practices to achieve certain goals or avert specific dangers: whatever the gods may have pre-ordained, forms of self-responsibility and self-determination could be gained by making vows to the gods. In fact, it is vital to know about one’s horoscope as laid down at birth, because only based on such knowledge can a person try to fulfil its best destiny or prevent the worst omens.23 It was thus common among our acquaintances to consult an astrologer at the birth of a child.24 Hence it is no surprise that Sudarshini had worried about the advanced date of birth, compared to previous expectation. This was especially the case because she had been reassured of the child’s well-being and had not been informed of any medical need for induced labour. What may also have been of significance was the fact that the date of birth predicted by consulting doctors during pregnancy had been for January, the same month when Sudarshini’s very first son Prashant had been born. Coupled with Prashant’s ill health or behaviour, Sudarshini had every reason to suspect that intervention by hospital staff had resulted in an “incorrect” date of birth that interfered with the “good” or auspicious birth time for the baby. With this in mind, Prashant’s delivery appeared at a more precarious moment than is the case with any birth. These anxieties may also explain why Sudarshini emphasized the “normalcy” of the delivery during our first encounter in Central College camp. That emphasis had surprised me at the time, and I continued to note her emphasis on having given “normal birth” in other first encounters with strangers. I was then surprised during her lengthy night-time narrative to hear that the birth had been induced.25 While I initially suspected a possible wish to impress strangers (and potential according to which any action of a living being affects its next life. However, this concept is of little relevance among Tamils in Batticaloa (McGilvray 1982a, 92). In addition, there are many other factors of more tangible nature that influence the course of life and personal fortune. These other factors played an important role in the daily life of our friends, most of all magical practices with good or harmful effects (suniyam, vasiyam) and disturbances caused by malicious spirits or ghosts. 23 | For these and related points, see especially Daniel (1984). 24 | Depending on the parents’ means and interests, such consultations could provide them with basic information regarding a child’s health and risk of misfortune during its lifetime or with elaborate charts indicating whatever auspicious star, colour, or animal was associated with the child’s exact date of birth. Usually an assessment occurred also about how a baby’s birth would affect family life or a father’s business. Moreover, astrologers are consulted at any critical moment in life. 25 | It remained a “normal” birth in that it had not been a delivery by caesarean; these two forms of giving birth are usually contrasted. The most striking point was that Sudarshini placed such emphasis on the “normality” of the delivery.

Chapter Six: A New Beginning

donors) with some kind of miracle story, I later came to see Sudarshini’s emphasis as a protective measure: in order to avoid further potential harm, the specific circumstances of the birth needed to be concealed from outsiders. Besides Prashant’s birth, Sudarshini also questioned the name chosen for the little boy. To have given the baby the identical name of a brother who had met such a tragic death was considered inauspicious, as people had warned the couple. Indeed, other parents maintained a minor difference in the names given. So, what is the “power” in names? Anthropology has a tradition of exploring names and naming practices as social forms of establishing, maintaining, and expressing relationships among and between generations, and as ways that reflect varying concepts of personhood and self-identification (Geertz [1973] 2000b; Jackson 2005; Lévi-Strauss [1962] 1973; vom Bruck and Bodenhorn 2006a). Lévi-Strauss ([1962] 1973) placed personal names within classification systems and demonstrated how names identify an individual as a member of a social group and as a unique person. Geertz ([1973] 2000b, 363) argued that names can make unqualified “anybodies” into classified and adequately labelled “somebodies” against the backdrop of historically changing, socially maintained, and individually applied symbol systems. More recently, authors have become concerned with what names can actually “do” and what they can be (vom Bruck and Bodenhorn 2006b). The power of names, for instance, appears through the act of name-giving or denial of names. Yet names can be powerful themselves when connected to cosmic power or serve to protect the carrier from such power; this point can also be made for the context under review here. Likewise, Humphrey’s (2006, 158) remark about the “situational, creative, and playful” ways of name usage is well suited for the present purpose. Overall, proper names are just one way of referring to a person among a variety of other ways including kinship terms or simple eye contact, and the choice of names must be understood in light of these alternatives (Bloch 2006, 98). Among naming practices, the issue of name sharing is an attractive one for social anthropologists. Jackson (2005), for example, addressed the ambivalent and ambiguous relationship that often characterizes that of namesakes. In various societies joking or avoidance relationships are ways to deal with a puzzling situation between the sameness of names and difference of carriers (Jackson 2005, 78–79). At times, sharing names is linked to notions of reincarnation; in this case, “to carry a name is to carry forward a person” (vom Bruck and Bodenhorn 2006a, 10). Yet relationships between namesakes do not need to be as clear-cut. As Bodenhorn (2006, 150) argued for the context of Alaska’s Iñupiaq, where names and reincarnation express each other, the relationships implied depend on the carrier’s acknowledgement. Outside any context of reincarnation (but within that of bereavement), Layne (2006) noted a tendency among parents in the United

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States to name a newborn similarly to a previously lost baby.26 With reference to Jackson (2005, 85), one may see foremost a “potentiality” in names: a name may be a way to represent a more controllable reality, because it has been given a known name, but whether and in what ways implied relationships are “actualized” is never pre-determined. Resuming the local context of this research, a variety of name usages can be discerned. Among these figure that of using nicknames in daily life (with even close relatives at times unaware of a person’s proper name); considering direct use of personal names as rude; calling the youngest child in the family ‘baba’ until the birth of another baby, while women may be referred to as ‘eldest daughter’ (muuttaval) for a lifetime; deciding on a name within one month after birth; giving names that imply a relationship to a god; and consulting an astrologer who divines the initial on which a child’s proper name is chosen. Among our research contacts, and among many other Tamil families of Sri Lanka, it was also common to give similar-sounding names to some or all of the children of a couple. Thus, there could be a Kumari following a Kumar, or a Padmanathan after a Padmadevi. The parents explained such closely linked names simply in terms of “nice to have” and deemed it ‘beautiful’ to have similarly sounding names in the family. Asked about the matter, a Tamil friend observed that choosing similar names was perhaps linked to the way in which Hindu families tended to give their sons names with common initials divined by an astrologer (though this practice may be linked to caste and sub-caste affiliations). Speculating on other reasons, the similarity in names (and thus in sound or rhythm) may serve to carve out sets of siblings belonging to one household or family unit within an extended family.27 The similar names would then express ties between children of one couple as distinguished from their classificatory siblings within their wider kinship. In addition, it has become fashionable to “make up” names. Instead of using names such as Manjula, Sujatha, Kanthan, or Ravindran, that were trendy a generation ago, our friends took pleasure in coming up with unique names and ones which were considered particularly nice sounding. 26 | Layne (2006, 39) also refers to historical work showing that personal names were reused after the premature death of a child in the United States up until the end of the nineteenth century. Similar findings are revealed by a look into Swiss (or other European) family trees. 27 | The notion of a “set” of children is taken from Humphrey (2006, 169) and her study of naming practices in Mongolia. Some families there divide sons and daughters into name groups with similar meanings within but opposing meanings between the groups: for example, giving a set of heroic names to boys and a set of quite unflattering ones to the girls. I did not come across any such contrasting and qualitatively different name sets, either in terms of valuation or in terms of gender. In the cases where only a few (rather than all) of the children shared similar names in a family, that usually seemed to link the first few or last few children rather than distinguishing between boys and girls.

Chapter Six: A New Beginning

All of this shows that name-giving is a practice very much “in flow with” and receptive of larger societal trends. More precisely, the last two points are of direct interest in regard to naming babies born following the death of a child in the tsunami. Thus naming the newborn similarly to a deceased child continued a practice of bestowing similar names to siblings. However, in this special case of “post-tsunami babies”, the practice came to emphasize the sibling status of those alive and those dead. Put differently, the chosen name placed the newborn within a line of siblings that comprised the living and the dead. Coming up with such similar names, in turn, was facilitated by a current trend of improvising names. While Selvy simply figured out a combination of letters to produce a ‘nice’ sounding name for her daughter born in April 2005, others took care to consult a sastriyar to use the correct letters. For instance, Shanthi’s and Kumar’s two daughters born after the tsunami were named in a similar fashion to the name of their eldest daughter, who had drowned in the tsunami. At the same time, they based the names of these two subsequent daughters on an expert’s calculation of necessary elements according to the girls’ dates of birth: a choice of appropriate initials, an aspirated consonant of the Tamil syllabic script, and the sum of numbers which the name needed to add up to within a system of individual Latin letters numbered between one and nine.28 It was based upon these givens that the parents and close kin played with letters and their successive order to create beautifully sounding names – names that reminded them of the deceased child.29 The point of reminding and remembering needs to be emphasized. Explaining the naming of these babies merely in terms of an established practice of giving siblings similar names does not account for parents’ emphasis of chosen similarity – an emphasis not encountered when similar names of children in a family were mentioned outside any reference to the tsunami dead; indeed, resemblances in names were never a topic then. Neither does this explanation account for Sudarshini’s and Rajan’s choice of using identical names. It is here that the question of reincarnation surfaces. Without the naming practice and notions of rebirth necessarily linked, the similarity in names offered room to accommodate notions of reincarnation as discussed above. The significance of this particular naming practice seems to me to lie precisely in this ambiguity of possible rebirth and possible continuation of a line of siblings.

28  |  It is common to use Roman alphabetical letters for calculating numerological meanings of names and words among Tamils and Muslims today, though one is left wondering how this practice developed (McGilvray, email communication, 01 April 2012). 29 | The first daughter’s name had not been based on such a calculation but had instead been selected by her paternal grandmother. Yet names of the second and third children rested on calculations and toying with letters: Kumar’s sister came up with the name for the second daughter, while the parents, Kumar’s sister, and other relatives were still in the process of creating a name at the time of our last visit in March 2009.

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An additional question that arises from the context under review here is whether such practices of bestowing similar names find parallels in regard to other “untimely” and especially violent deaths. For example, are babies named after a young child or combatant killed due to war? None of the persons I asked regarding this could confirm such a practice and doubted it, precisely because it would be seen as “inauspicious” in the local context. However, one such example is found in Trawick’s (2007, 103–127) study on young LTTE combatants in Batticaloa, and it confirms the suspected inauspiciousness involved in using identical names. The example relates to a young couple who had given their baby the name of the mother’s friend, killed in battle. Hospital doctors later diagnosed this child with brain damage. According to rumours in the neighbourhood, though, it was inauspicious to have named the child after a dead combatant and advisable to change the name.30 Based on what I have outlined so far, it remains to be explored whether there existed a more general pattern of retaining names over generations and of naming children after a deceased in the local context. Regarding the retention of names, I was told that, in the past, it happened that a grandson had been named after a grandfather among Jaffna Tamils. It would be interesting to know if a similar practice existed in the Batticaloa region and, if yes, whether names were retained through the matriline.31 These are questions meriting further-going research indeed, though they go beyond the scope of the present thesis.

The ambivalence remains Parents and others involved in thinking of names for newborns thus clearly sought a resemblance in names, though they were cautious in reusing the exact names of their deceased children. The exceptional case of Sudarshini and Rajan revealed the anxieties when that caution was set aside. It must have been a heavy burden for Sudarshini to counter the inauspiciousness stemming from Prashant’s birth and name at every precarious moment in his life. With a minor difference in 30 | Besides the naming, civilian neighbours also formulated “karmic explanations” which suggested that the gods punished the child’s parents for the sin of having killed people (Trawick 2007, 105). 31 | I thank Prof. Peter Schalk for the information on Jaffna Tamils, gained from a friend and Tamil professor (email communication, April 2009). According to that source, the retention of names may have served to strengthen lineage continuity, since there are no surnames in Tamil societies, though it is a practice seldom pursued anymore. I am not familiar with a possible parallel practice among eastern Tamils (though among our research contacts, I know one family in which a daughter’s name corresponded to her grandmother’s name). As for the further-reaching question of a link between reincarnation and naming, Maloney (1975, 173) noted a tradition of naming a child after deceased grandparents in south India and speculated that Dravidian people believed in the rebirth of souls within families in prehistoric times (but dismissed the idea that contemporary Tamils believed in such rebirth).

Chapter Six: A New Beginning

names, however, continuities within a family could be stressed in daily life and the memory of the dead kept alive in the existence and name of their living siblings. When names were as close as Suvetha and Nuvetha, or as Kishanth and Kishan, the call for one could indeed suggest the presence of the other. This is not to say that newborns were seen as “replacing” the dead or that they represented children reborn in a somewhat different shape. While there is likely tension between those who died and those who came to live later, the notions of reincarnation as well as the names chosen paved the way for possibly establishing connections and for placement of hope in the continuation of life. Both notions of reincarnation and naming practices also suggest how concepts and practices of a former time could receive a transformed and specific relevance after the tsunami. What also clearly emerges in regard to these newborns is the fundamentally ambivalent endeavour that marked the care for them. While the presence of new babies was a source of great joy and happiness, they were also constant reminders of what had been and what was lost. Daily interaction aided the care-givers in dealing with their losses and in affirming their own survival. Yet those same moments also held the potential for painful memories. I now turn to review another relevant dimension in men’s and women’s wish to “regain” their children in the aftermath of the disaster. It relates to the forces of gender and kinship as well as the ways in which daily-life interactions informed parental grief and means of coping.

N egotiating R esponsibilities As noted above, Sudarshini began her night-time narrative of the tsunami day by accusing herself of her children’s death. According to her logic at that time, it was due to her wish to see the children during their holiday that they had come to Navalady and been exposed to the tsunami. By making use of the imagery of motherly care and nurturing, however, this wish somehow acquired legitimacy and qualified the painful accusation during the course of the narrative. In contrast, there seemed no such pardon for Rajan, despite his affection for the children, which so clearly emerged through her story. It seems instead that she blamed Rajan for having failed in a specifically fatherly responsibility: to protect the life of his children. Moreover, it was a responsibility he was deemed to have received the gods’ help to uphold – at least in regard to the life of their eldest son. The narrative was obviously a way for Sudarshini to rework her feelings of guilt in regard to her children’s death, the kind of guilt which accompanied the tsunami survivors at so many different occasions. She also revealed that she used to blame her husband – a fact that indicated another layer of shame once she came to see the detrimental effects her accusations had on Rajan. Importantly, however, she did not lose her faith in the power and good-will of the gods. She even defended them over Rajan by emphasizing the divine help and Rajan’s failure.

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Beyond that specific narrative, Sudarshini’s continued grappling with notions of guilt and shame was evident on many other occasions. This was also the case for Rajan. He suffered greatly from the death of his children and, indeed, from the memory of his last encounter with his son. His preferred response to his feelings and his memories was to get drunk (in contrast to other heavy drinkers who had a long history of alcohol dependence, Rajan turned to drinking only after the tsunami). That, for instance, was the case when he came home early one day some 18 months after the tsunami, having skipped a day of fishing after sharing a few drinks with an acquaintance in Navalady. Feeling ashamed to meet us while drunk, Rajan described the scene with his son as a memory that kept haunting him and which he said had made him turn to alcohol. By then, with regular excessive alcohol consumption taking its toll, it did not matter that Sudarshini said she had long ago ceased blaming him. These examples indicate what I referred to above: parental grief may further complicate what is generally known as “survivor’s guilt”.32 Surviving amidst the death of others can incur immense feelings of guilt and shame, as studies within a variety of social and historical contexts have shown. Bauman (1992, 32) refers to Canetti’s ([1960] 1994) work when he elaborates that a human’s primary achievement is to stay alive. However, remaining alive is always seen in relation to another’s death; survival is experienced as something wrought at the expense of other persons’ lives. With this, a survivor’s wish to survive becomes highly doubtful in its achievement. That is especially the case when it is the life of others that make one’s own life worth living. Survival is always a highly ambivalent matter, and survival can become self-destructive (Bauman 1992, 33–39). This ambivalence and the self-destructive potential of survival may reach a critical peak in regard to parental survival (specifically parental grief). As seen above, the death of a child frequently questions deeply-ingrained parental expectations and responsibilities. Thus the social categories of gender and generation come into play as far as a person’s identification as a parent is at stake. One of our older acquaintances, Kalidasan, for instance, expressed his grief over the death of his youngest daughter in the tsunami by remarking that it would have been a relief to him if only she had been married before her death. In other words, marriage would have granted his daughter what is considered a Tamil woman’s ultimate social goal, and he would have fulfilled his fatherly role of having provided this for her. In Sudarshini’s narrative we see some of the ways in which self-accusation and allegations against others related to such distinctively motherly and fatherly roles. According to what Sudarshini mentioned on other occasions, accusations 32 | See Das (1990b) in reference to Lifton (1967): survival implies by definition that one person dies ahead of another in time. That relates to “guilt over survival priority, along with the survivor’s unconscious sense of an organic social balance, which makes him feel that his survival was purchased at the cost of another’s” (Lifton 1967, 489 quoted in Das 1990b, 385).

Chapter Six: A New Beginning

did not stop at the parental couple. Instead, allegations of bearing responsibility for their children’s death included a wider circle of family members and became powerful weapons during daily moments of conflict. These episodes, discussed below, point out how accusations of parental failure were expressed, countered, negotiated, and likely archived over time in concrete, everyday relationships. In this way, allegations and their place in daily life come close to what Das (2007, 76) termed a “poisonous knowledge” (rather than traumatic memory) that becomes incorporated in social relationships as survivors continue to live and interact in the aftermath of massive violence. Sudarshini mentioned her mother’s involvement in placing the guilt for their eldest son’s death on Rajan’s shoulders in her night-time narrative. Conversely, we could observe Rajan hardly miss a chance to hint at what he considered the “wrongful” survival of his mother-in-law, Renuka. In forms of taunts or direct accusations, he suggested that an elderly, handicapped person like her ought to have died in the tsunami. For example, he joked that he wanted to bring her to the sea-side when a rumour about another tsunami circulated. Or he insisted that all she was good for was serving as a baby-sitter for little Prashant. Such words could get more vociferous when he was drunk and keen to quarrel (which motivated Renuka to stay in her other daughter’s household until conflicts reached a critical peak there too, though for different reasons). They demonstrated that if he carried blame as a father, the grandmother was also suspect for having survived while young children died. Following this reasoning, it should have been Renuka’s “time to die” rather than his children’s.33 Furthermore, accusations of parental failure were taken as effective instru­ ments in daily level conflicts within the wider family. This could happen during frequently occurring conflicts among members of extended families, which often erupted in relation to relief aid and compensation money. For instance, Sudarshini recalled her sister Lakshmi having called her ‘heartless’ to her face in July 2005 and insisted that Sudarshini had lost her children for this reason. If her own sister talked like that, Sudarshini observed at the time, what was the rest of society saying of her? Sudarshini had previously mentioned an allegation by that same sister’s husband, Shanmugam. He had accused her of living ‘happily’, free of any responsibilities for her children ever since they had died, particularly that of having to provide a dowry for their daughter. Sudarshini added that she had told Rajan about this particular reproach at the time; very often, however, she said she kept these things to herself in order to avoid further quarrels and violence. 33 | This is a likely reproach in many different cultural contexts, since it expresses the idea of children outliving their parents and even more so their grandparents. Some Hindu contexts also suggest that death takes a younger family member if an older one refuses to die (see Parry 1989, 503). Possibly, Rajan’s remarks also hinted at Renuka’s assumed power as an “inauspicious” widow, who, in a Hindu context, tends to be blamed for the death of her husband.

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What is more, she opined that it was due to such allegations that Rajan wished to have another three children. He wanted to demonstrate through them that they did care and that they were able to fulfil all the responsibilities of parenthood by providing a ‘good future’ for their children. The allegations thus struck the parents deeply, irrespective of a locally high tolerance for hot-headed quarrels and insulting language. That they occurred between close kin was typical for a set-up in which relatives interact closely with each other on a daily basis. Quarrels frequently revolved around borrowing cash and – in the post-tsunami context – a great many fights were fought over compensation money and other aid. This is also the background against which to view the example mentioned: Lakshmi and Shanmugam’s allegations were directed against a couple who, however sadly, had gained LKR 45,000, in a one-time transfer, when the official compensation for the funeral of dead family members was issued. That was a significant sum of money for families used to living on a few 100 rupees every other day. Such a large sum invited Shanmugam’s envy, while Sudarshini and Rajan were unwilling to share or lend it to him. In regard to a daughter’s dowry, the allegations need to be placed against the backdrop of Shanmugam’s eagerness to outwit other family members by claiming Renuka’s future home for his daughter, as seen in the preceding chapter. The accusations of heartlessness and dowry responsibilities mentioned are laden with gender symbolism, directly addressing the mother and father of a daughter and two sons. Gender can also be traced in Sudarshini’s reaction to having remained silent about many of the allegations in order to prevent additional fights between her husband and brother-in-law. As parents, both Sudarshini and Rajan hoped to provide a safer future for their children by relocating to Tiraimadu rather than returning to their former village and risking another tsunami. Both of them also sought to perform “better” as parents in this renewed family life. For Sudarshini this meant ‘never beating’ the children born after the tsunami, to state one example, as she felt sorry for any former harsh treatment of her deceased children. While Sudarshini’s statements express a motherly concern with care, Rajan’s statements followed notions of a father’s role as family provider. This role, Sudarshini assumed, underlay Rajan’s wish to demonstrate his capacity to shoulder the responsibilities and provide for their children. This same wish to live up to what was expected of a father and “head of household” was apparent in Rajan’s hope to provide his family a better economic position than he had been able to before the tsunami. This was the reason, for example, why he bought a TV for Sudarshini to enjoy while she was alone with the babies, even though the family could not afford one. It also contributed to his wish to obtain a boat of his own in the second half of 2005 and to the consequences discussed in Chapter Four. The examples of gendered responses can be traced further in their implica­ tions. For instance, Rajan’s purchases incurred significant debts for the couple – debts that ultimately became impossible to meet. Rajan’s alcohol consumption also contributed to these debts. It was left to Sudarshini to manage the family’s

Chapter Six: A New Beginning

situation in spite of all that. Among strategies she used in this regard figured those socially recommended for the sumangali, the auspicious wife who can influence her husband with her shakti (powers) and virtuousness. Thus, after the birth of her second post-tsunami child in January 2006, she regularly asked for godly assistance in bestowing marital harmony, family prosperity, and, quite basically, an end to Rajan’s drinking habits. Every Friday, she went to a little shrine for the god Pillaiyar (Ganesha), which had recently been discovered and which was conveniently located close to her shelter. At some point she made a vow by having her youngest baby’s hair shaved at the Kali temple in the Punnaichcholai neighbourhood. She also made several attempts at fasting, though regularly gave up these efforts, as she found it impossible to live up to the required high standard of ritual purity in her living condition. Overall, Sudarshini’s continued faith in the power of the divine proved a significant resource to her. This was the case despite her seemingly unorthodox practices. Sudarshini’s habit of going to the little Pillaiyar shrine but immediately afterwards cooking fish for lunch on a Friday was rather shocking to Vathany and others accustomed to vegetarian Fridays among Hindus, though it underscores the generally less restrained ways among the Karaiyar (and their expectation of a daily meal of fish) compared to the higher castes. Moreover, trusting the gods implied accepting a great deal of ambivalence. Sudarshini always showed a great interest in stories of gods and possible religious practices, but she also had moments when she thought all of that futile. Rather than an unconditional faith, as had appeared during her night-time narrative, the daily life realities proved unsurprisingly more complex and contradictory. Thus we observed Sudarshini hoping for a deity’s help and doing what she could to receive it; being aware of the limits her household’s poverty set on more elaborate (and expectedly more effective) religious practices; and questioning every now and then the ultimate benefit of such efforts. And yet it can be argued that Sudarshini was somehow able to relate her personal situation to wider, collectively shared, interpretative frameworks.

Remembering and forgetting This final observation is also significant in regard to Sudarshini’s grief for the death of her children. Das (1990b, 360–361) pointed out how important it is for victims to be able to “universalize” their personal suffering by relating it to an “overarching frame”. In other words, accepting a culturally shared meaning allows a victim to feel less solely responsible. A common form of such relating was evidenced in Rajan’s words, as told by Sudarshini at the end of her extensive survival narrative, and which he repeated to her ever so often when the sad memories overwhelmed her: ‘it happened to everyone in Navalady, not only to us’. As seen in Chapter Three, this same idiom had formed the way Shanthi too had ended her narrative of death. There we have seen its significance as a way of relating one’s own suffering to that of others. Here I take it to shed light on

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another common expression, one which our interlocutors frequently used in appreciation of an emotional relief they felt when talking about the past. In their words, talking about the past helped to ‘forget’ what had happened and made them ‘happy’. Hence Rajan expressed his ‘sandosham’ (happiness) after having recollected a particular episode in the life of his deceased daughter Neela in October 2005. “Forgetting” had everything to do with remembering or, to put it differently, reworking traumatic experiences. In a similar vein, the daily care of babies proved paramount in dealing with the death of previous children after the tsunami. Shanthi remarked upon this during one of our visits in September 2006. With her young daughter on her lap, Shanthi pointed to the golden bangle that the baby was wearing. It had been a gift from her mother-in-law (also dead due to the tsunami) to their deceased daughter and was only saved, because they had had it pawned during the tsunami. Now, it adorned the hands of the living baby, and caring for this child, Shanthi said, helped her to ‘forget’ their former daughter day by day. Both young families – Sudarshini and Rajan, Shanthi and Kumar – soon came to have more babies after the death of their previous children due to the tsunami. The care for these children helped the parents in their grief for the dead, and in going on with their own lives. As Rajan expressed it: they allowed for a new beginning as a family. Based on the situations of two other research contacts, the next chapter takes on an altogether less hopeful tone. It bespeaks the tenacity of traumatic memories and indicates gaps within biographies that may never be bridged.

C onclusion The discussion on “post-tsunami babies” reveals the ways in which these children helped integrate the dead into the daily lives of tsunami survivors. The babies aided bereaved parents and their close kin to connect with their former lives, to immerse themselves in reconstructing their social worlds after the tsunami, and to gradually think of a future again. I argue that the wish for babies went beyond that of “replacing” former children, however much resemblances were sought and actually identified. Notions of reincarnation allowed for emphasizing continuity and the naming practices bridged the absence of the dead felt in daily life: the very close similarity between and among names also evoked the dead whenever those living were called. Activated reincarnation concepts and naming did not necessarily need to be linked; both offered non-predetermined potential through which to create continuities. This chapter also points to how gendered kinship positions crucially impacted men’s and women’s bereavement and coping. As the daily care for children lay largely in the hands of their mothers, women in particular may have found them a source of life affirmation in dealing with losses incurred by the tsunami. Along

Chapter Six: A New Beginning

with this role of primary care-givers, other daily life practices, such as household chores and meal preparation were largely women’s work as well. All these tasks needed to be tended to relatively soon after the tsunami and thus enabled women to engage in activities that linked them to their former lives at a stage soon after the disaster. Men, for whom many months passed before the bases of their previous livelihood means were replaced in the form of post-tsunami donations, found these processes of gender self-identification more complicated. Not all men actively resumed fishing activities as early as Rajan did or pursued alternative forms of gaining a living after the tsunami. While the initial cash compensations may partly explain this, such reluctance did not support men to resume their idealized roles as a family’s main provider. Instead, the example of Rajan shows that starting a family life with young children anew could help men in this process. And yet Rajan’s example further illustrates how taxing this endeavour could be, especially when a primarily male way of coping could be found in consuming heavy liquor.34 The chapter also indicates a difference in the abilities of women and men to engage in lengthy moments of narrating memories. It was primarily Sudarshini rather than Rajan who told us her stories. He usually confined himself to recollections of memory fragments and glimpses of past experiences. Possibly, as discussed in Chapter Two, narratives were a way to remember that was socioculturally more accessible to women than to men. Nor was the frequent alcoholic state of many men conducive to coherent narratives. Moreover, the observation relates to the way in which Vathany and I, as female fieldworkers, had access to women’s lives rather than men’s (in these everyday worlds structured by gender divisions) and my explicit interest in precisely these female worlds from the very outset. Lastly, what this chapter demonstrates is a wish shared by many bereaved parents to create connections – links between individual and family lives. Indeed, the newborns allowed recreating specific kin-relationships so heavily disrupted by the tsunami. Through these babies, parenting and co-parenting, the roles of grandmothers and mother’s brothers, could be performed as relations reoccupied their kinship positions. A nexus of family ties was thus re-established and maintained that offered comfort of the known, allowed a sense of belonging and relatedness, and frequently entailed basic, practical support. Yet, as Sudarshini and Rajan’s example reveals, this same nexus was also the locus of conflict and mutually inflicted injuries. Moreover, knowing about the fragility of such networks did not merely date back to the disastrous tsunami experience: personal losses and social disruptions marked a great many of our friends’ biographies over the long term. 34 | For similar conclusions regarding gender roles and differing coping methods for Tamil women and men displaced due to the earlier phases of war in Sri Lanka, see Demusz (2000, 44–45) and Schrijvers (1999, 187).

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Fig. 6: Homes destroyed, a well remains; Navalady, July 2006 (© Katharina Thurnheer)

Chapter Seven: Paittiyam – Risking Madness

On the day the transitional shelters were officially “handed over” to their residents in late July 2005, Rasamma publicly disturbed a Tamil politician’s speech on the occasion. When this politician ventured to speak about the plight of tsunami victims, Rasamma rose to contradict her, pointing out that some areas mentioned had not even ‘seen the water’. A camp representative and co-organizer of the day’s festivities quickly intervened and apologized for Rasamma’s behaviour: she was said to have been overcome by paittiyam (madness) ever since losing her entire family in the tsunami. Indeed we frequently heard the apologetic phrase during fieldwork: ‘Don’t listen to her! She’s mad – she lost all her children in the tsunami.’1 Women’s or men’s disturbing behaviour was asked to be excused or ignored, because of their massive human losses due to the tsunami. The phrase implied an understanding that severe bereavement could entail madness. It also seemed to suggest that such a breach of manners should best be tolerated without notice and without taking offence. Moreover, Rasamma’s example demonstrated that the phrase came to serve as a convenient apology for what was considered embarrassing behaviour in others: as people who witnessed the scene knew well, Rasamma was actually among the lucky ones, having been spared the death of immediate family members. Yet her challenging attitude towards a person of respect brought the camp representative to the forefront to hush the outspoken protester. This chapter approaches the expression of paittiyam and how it relates to two of our friends, Prasanniya and Ramesh. Both witnessed massive violence and multiple losses of family members and property. Many residents of Batticaloa shared a great deal of what their biographies reveal: exposure to armed violence, direct threats against one’s own life and those of loved ones, periods of severe economic hardship followed by temporary relief during more stable times, and 1 | For instance Lakshmi was seen claiming in Chapter Two that the fight for Navalady women’s reputation following publication of a newspaper report could be solved by publishing an excuse that claimed the informant had been “mad” ever since she lost all her children in the tsunami.

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the recent struggle for survival and consequent grief for lost family members and property due to the tsunami. With all this in mind, their suffering was a socially shared one, and some of their actions mirrored other persons’ responses in this context. However, in describing the particular situations of Prasanniya and Ramesh, I wish to shed light on some specific forms that the consequences of such experiences could take in the lives of women and men. The question of which cause or trauma may underlie a particular behaviour or development is not of prime interest here. But it should be of interest to gain insight into possible ways in which the tsunami, coupled with that of other marking experiences, reverberated in daily-life situations and family relationships. I briefly situate the term paittiyam within local practices below and relate it further to that of trauma, as discussed in the social sciences. This precedes portraits of Prasanniya’s and Ramesh’s situations, which are largely left at an interpretative, descriptive level. I then address some similarities and differences in their struggles with the threat of “going mad”. This will reveal once again the parts kinship and gender play in coping.

C onte x tualizing Pait tiyam The word paittiyam was used frequently in daily-life situations. Like loos, it could denote anything or anyone considered crazy, mad, or simply quite stupid. The idea of applying a buffer zone only to parts of Navalady was deemed paittiyam, for instance, in that it created safety distinctions within a completely destroyed site.2 Often the etiquette of paittiyam was also used in mutual teasing among our friends. Yet paittiyam could also have a more serious meaning and relate what the example beginning this chapter indicates: that one risked going mad due to one’s tsunami experience. Thus madness related to one’s grief and seemed to affect bereaved parents in particular. It could show itself in different ways, including behaviour considered embarrassing, as noted above. ‘Too much thinking’ (yoosikka) and withdrawn attitudes were frequently seen as signs of people on the verge of (or having reached a state of) paittiyam. Such madness could also be the work of ghostly interference. Listlessness could be taken as a drifting mood that invited malicious spirits or represented a state of being possessed already by ghosts and demons. A more obvious form that spoke to the power of ghosts evinced falling into a trance. Whenever the doings of ghosts, malevolent spirits, or demons were suspected, experts such as a pusari (lower-caste Hindu priest) were called upon to perform the necessary ritual. For instance, a woman was said to have ‘stopped speaking’ to her husband ever since 2 | A remark by Raman (July 2005), whose wife and three of his children perished in the tsunami. See Chapter Five for a discussion of the buffer zone and its disputed application in the case of Navalady.

Chapter Seven: Paittiyam – Risking Madness

the tsunami. A pusari was called, and rituals were undertaken in order to cure her in November 2005. Ramesh underwent a similar treatment one year later, when a pusari reportedly took him to the forest fringes and slaughtered a hen in order to propitiate and ‘chase away’ the ghosts. Paittiyam could also result from sorcery, and a mantiravati would be called to recite relevant mantras to control the spirits. This occurred, for example, when a man living close to Kumari’s shelter fell into a trance, and an experienced woman from among residents of the temporary shelters was called to recite mantras to free the person.3 Besides the recourse to paittiyam, our acquaintances had other forms to express their distress related to experiences and losses due to the tsunami. For instance, Sharmala, one of Ramesh’s wife’s elder sisters, said that she felt as though she existed only as ‘jadam’ (literally ‘lifeless matter’) ever since she had lost several children and grandchildren in the massive waves. Another sister, Nallamma, complained that she had lost all her strength and courage in the tsunami, sensing herself as simply living without any active engagements ever since. Very commonly people also referred to physical pains that they suffered following the tsunami, indicating a way of somatising their efforts to deal with the experience and memories. For example, some frequent complaints were those of ‘chest pain’ and ‘wheezing’. Pain could also be felt in specific parts of the body that related to the survival experience. For example, Vasuki would feel a painful stiffness in her neck and arms every now and then, relating back to her clinging onto a tree during the tsunami. Other ways to express the difficult process of dealing with grief and memories included Selvy’s remark in April 2005 that she got a headache and turned dark in complexion whenever she returned to Navalady. People could also refer to someone as ‘upset’ or affected in their “heart/ mind” (manatu) following the disaster.4 These interpretations could be linked to a psychological discourse promoted primarily by external actors like NGOs among our research contacts. Various initiatives aiming to support people in coping with the disaster psychologically developed in the post-disaster context. While in March 2005 a representative of an organization offering psychological support complained that his group was alone in addressing the needs of people from Navalady, more than eight organizations offered psycho-social programmes among them just a few months later. Their approach was typically limited to counselling services for individual women, promote women’s groups, or involve children in play activities. Projects for children and women found acceptance 3 | A neighbour explained in passing that the person in the trance had danced regularly as a theyvam during Navalady’s main temple festival and was ‘feeling the power’ returning. 4 | Manatu invokes a concept known elsewhere in Asia that processes of thinking and feeling occur in the same place, located (for instance) in the chest. This implies an understanding of emotions as having cognitive dimensions and of thoughts as having affective ones (see Desjarlais and Wilce 2003, 1180). For instance, we saw Shivam referring to his manatu in Chapter Three, and Selvy had used the term to describe her father Ramesh.

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by many, though the actual impact may be questioned, especially in regard to individual counselling. A mental ward was also available at the general hospital. Yet the professional support was far too scarce to cover potential needs. Actively seeking help from the mental health sector, in any case was a step rarely taken. It seems that seeking psychiatric help invited social stigma to a degree that was not the case when paittiyam remained within the framework of local, ritual practice. Lastly, risking or having paittiyam was obviously not a post-tsunami develop­ ment. Our friends reported on the “mad” behaviour of relatives or others and subsequent rituals performed in previous times. The decades of war and terror reigning in Batticaloa acquire a special significance in that respect.

Massive violence, ritual practice, and trauma What is known as depression or other similar conditions in Western psychological thought are frequently referred to in terms of demonic possessions in other contexts (Desjarlais and Wilson 2003, 1185). Among Sinhala-speakers in Sri Lanka, Obeyesekere (1981) argued that pissu (madness), which denotes a person possessed by spirits and that can be taken as the counterpart of paittiyam in Sinhalese, corresponds to a “psychotic act” that expresses “inner turmoil” (Obeyeskere 1981, 102). According to Obeyesekere (1981, 104), given the religious idiom in which this expression takes place, the person is not seen as being “out of touch with reality”, as is the case from a psychological perspective. Instead, such a person is very much in line with a specific “cultural reality”. Furthermore, because the possessed person and the expert consulted share an understanding of the causes and redress of pissu, the condition can be ameliorated; consultation with a psychologist is likely to fail due to a failure to communicate (Obeyesekere 1981, 104). Other Sri Lanka accounts place cases of possessions and religious practices that address “madness” firmly within the context of human suffering, massive violence, and political disregard of victims. Lawrence’s (1997, 2000) work on Batticaloa during the 1990s provides evidence of war-related suffering resulting in paittiyam. In line with what has been depicted above, that author noted withdrawal and “lifelessness” (saktiyinmai) as the outward signs of madness, which could be caused by “thinking too much” (Lawrence 1997, 300; 2000, 195) or possession by pey (Lawrence 1997, 277; 2000, 183). People turned, in response, to advice of oracles – human mediums of an amman goddess – while the intensity of amman religious practices was observed as directly related to years of oppressive silencing of atrocities. In a similar vein, Perera (2001) traced stories of persons’ encounters with ghosts and narratives of spirit possessions. These took place among people who had experienced the terror of an insurgency and state counter insurgency in Sri Lanka’s Sinhalese-populated south of the late 1980s to early 1990s (see also Perera 1998; Samarasinghe 1998). These stories and narratives emerge as forms of dealing with the past and coping with trauma resulting from political violence. Perera (2001, 158) noted the relevance of such frameworks of possession and rituals, given the absence

Chapter Seven: Paittiyam – Risking Madness

of viable alternatives typical under a state of law and order, within which notions of justice could be attained in addition to qualified psychiatric support for the victims. A psychological and psychiatric framework for suffering resulting from trauma, more precisely Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), has gained wide popularity over recent decades. This is particularly the case for work regarding the psychological effects of war and disaster, in which the concept of PTSD has become the main focus (Gibbs and Montagnino 2006; Kleinman 1995). At the root of today’s popularity of the term lies the widening scope of the term trauma. Until the late nineteenth century, this term was used solely in reference to injury within an anatomical framework; only later was it applied to the soul and to psychopathology (Wicker 2005). Young (1995, 141) demonstrated that “traumatic memory is a man-made object” that originated at a specific historical point in time. Tracing the origins of PTSD, he concluded that in the past there was “unhappiness, despair, and disturbing recollections” but what we know as traumatic memory today developed from the practices of diagnosis and institutional interests of the nineteenth century (Young 1995, 141). Massive trauma as a psychiatric concern for a larger social group developed during World War I. It was after World War II and the Vietnam War that post-traumatic stress disorder gained significance in examinations and classifications. PTSD became a standard term in the 1980s, when it appeared in psychiatric manuals that defined it as a clearly identifiable complex of symptoms (Suárez-Orozco and Robben 2000, 13–21; Wicker 2005).5 As for its application in Sri Lanka, Somasunderan’s (1998) work dealt with occurrence of PTSD among its directly war-affected population, though it was cautious of the differing cultural interpretation of mental health among people concerned. Taking a more psycho-social perspective, Samaraweera (2003) granted value to a mental-health approach in the context of mental difficulties stigmatised as “madness”. Yet the author warned against therapeutic intervention focusing on the individual: where the existing local support system is located in the family, religion, and ritual practices, such an approach could undermine the very base of intended improvement (Samaraweera 2003, 210). The aftermath of the tsunami opened ample room for discussing a therapeutic approach that rests exclusively on the individual’s psyche and tends to transfer models developed in “the West” to other contexts. Psychological concern figured high in media coverage and appeals for aid, with psychologists and psychiatrists quoted as being in favour of immediate psychological support for survivors (Summerfield 2006). Experts flocked to the devastated shores to offer relief interventions and rapidly trained local staff in the basics of counselling. This was also the case for Sri Lanka, where these efforts far surpassed preceding interventions for those affected by war. As Galappatti (2005, 32) argued, these 5 | That is, PTSD made its first appearance in the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of 1980 (DSM-III), later modified in DSM-IV (Wicker 2005, 156).

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later interventions tended to ignore lessons learned from previous psychosocial work carried out among those affected by war. That is, there was haste in intervening therapeutically, even though experience shows that it was more effective and sustainable to address people’s material and social situations and to combine individual support with efforts to strengthen the community.6 Generally speaking, while psychological interventions aimed at addressing “posttraumatic stress” have become increasingly popular in the field of humanitarian and development aid, they give rise to criticism. It is based on issues of cultural inappropriateness, of valuing individuals over situations and inter-personal relationships, and of assuming a need to relieve the affected from their suffering. As Summerfield (1999, 2006) argued, the current need for trauma counselling remains questionable within the contexts of war and the post-tsunami situation. A major criticism in regard to PTSD is that it “medicalizes” as psychotic what in the past was, and in various local contexts is, described by social and religious terms (Kleinman 1995, 181; see also Desjarlais and Kleinman 1994). Kleinman (1995, 178–180) made three points in summarizing a critique of PTSD as a diagnosis that has become widely applied in war-torn areas. Firstly, a cultural reading of PTSD lays bare its underlying ethnocentrism in that traumatic experiences are said to be outside the realm of “usual” or “normal” experiences. This gives rise to the question of how such a term applies to contexts in which traumas produced by political violence and social suffering actually form dailylife experiences. Secondly, the focus on distress in individuals’ minds does little to address the fact that massive violence causes suffering that is “interpersonal, involving lost relationships, the brutal breaking of intimate bonds, collective fear, and an assault on loyalty and respect among family and friends” (Kleinman 1995, 180). Thirdly, the concept is based on an assumption that normal trauma response does not persist, and any continued complaint indicates a pathology that needs to be ended. Yet many daily-life realities across the globe demand endurance of suffering and continuation of social life despite ongoing disruptions and injuries. To return to Summerfield’s (2006, 256) argument: recovery, if at all, occurs as lives continue at family, economic, and socio-cultural levels. Moreover, as Langer (1997, 58) argued in regard to Holocaust survivors, there can be something seriously flawed in understanding trauma as something that can be healed. Another way of perceiving trauma and suffering goes beyond alleged failures of responding to shattering experiences. Instead, it looks at people’s current capacity to remain alive. Indeed, encounters with our research contacts attested more to their perseverance in achieving a “life beyond survival” than in their failure to 6 | However, as psycho-social actors in Batticaloa noted during a meeting in May 2005, there developed another side to “post-tsunami” counselling or “befriending” that caused concern: when people confided with the staff and began speaking about their (own or family members’) past or current persecution by armed personnel, staff members came to fear for their own safety.

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do so. Yet, as the situations of Prasanniya and Ramesh illustrate below, there was nothing to romanticize. There was resilience, but it took continued effort and considerable cost.7

P r asanniya : K eeping B usy Prasanniya used to say that she kept herself busy to keep the memories of her two deceased children away. Were she to find herself with leisure time on her hands, she was bound to ‘think too much’ and go mad. Hence, she busied herself with many chores offered by her household of four surviving children and a husband. She also ran a little shop, though it yielded no economic benefits. We met Prasanniya for the first time during a visit to Zaeera College camp in mid-April 2005. Vathany and I had been sitting with Padma and some other women close to Prasanniya’s shelter when she approached us. With a little boy and a baby girl clinging to her, she opened the conversation by telling us about her difficulties in raising these children and two more. She then continued to speak of the ritual that she and her husband had performed two days earlier for their two children who had died in the tsunami: on this occasion of Tamil New Year, the family had gone to Navalady to place a variety of snacks, sweets, and the deceased children’s favourite curries beside the remnants of their home. They had not stayed for long though, fearing another tsunami. Prasanniya also feared that malicious ghosts present in Navalady would harm her living children. At that first encounter, Prasanniya also showed us remaining pictures of her son and daughter, both of whom died due to the tsunami at the ages of ten and eight respectively. She mentioned her daughter’s beauty and then dwelled on memories of her son’s cleverness and good behaviour. Prasanniya continued to recount details of their tragic deaths while she had survived, though, in her words, ‘no one had helped’ her at the onset of the waves. Her husband Gunaratnam had left home several days before the tsunami to do fishing further north in the district. She said he had saved many persons there. She added that her eldest son would still have been alive if he had been allowed to join his father, as the boy had requested: The son wanted to accompany his father, but the parents would not allow it because he was to attend school in Navalady before Gunaratnam’s expected return home. Moreover, alone with the children at the time, Prasanniya thought she had ‘lost time’ by searching for her eldest daughter as the waves approached: in waiting for one child, she lost two. 7 | The term resilience has become popular over recent years, also in the field of humanitarian and development aid. It is being applied beyond its psychological meaning to stand for a concern with people’s strengths and capacities above their so-called weaknesses (Bernard Manyena 2006). While I share the concern, I am wary of an emphasis that may result in denial of actual suffering.

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Prasanniya thus reconsidered the events in a way typical for the survivors. This included pointing out how the tragedies could have been prevented. Our first encounter, which was clearly initiated by Prasanniya, indicated topics that remained the cornerstones of our later visits throughout fieldwork: memories of her two deceased children and her relationship with the four who remained. More precisely, the memories centred typically on fond recollections of the eldest son and Prasanniya’s interaction with her living children evidenced specifically fraught attitudes towards the surviving little boy. This is demonstrated below, coupled with a discussion of Prasanniya’s anger towards the gods and her fear of pey since the disaster. First, however, I offer a short account of Prasanniya’s life story that provides an important background against which we can see more clearly her subsequent difficulty in reengaging and reinvesting in the lives of her surviving children. I conclude the section on Prasanniya by pointing out her marginal social position during the time we knew her, while noting more relaxed relationships within Prasanniya’s immediate family and her in-laws several years after the tsunami.

A personal histor y of losses Prasanniya grew up in a village in Vaharai, an area that had undergone heavy military fighting and come to fall under direct control of the LTTE until 2007. Her parents had had nine children, six girls and three boys. Government forces killed her father, suspecting him of supporting the LTTE, and two of her siblings had also died in war. Another two adult siblings died in the tsunami, while one handicapped sister remained unmarried with their mother. The family experienced repeated displacement during the 1990s, and Prasanniya remembered the bombings and fighting that forced people to hide in the forests. They had camped at times in deserted schools, always afraid of leaving the premises. Prasanniya recalled that men had risked being killed, and women risked being raped. Only the old women would venture out to the homes to cook some rice and dhal, which was all they had had to eat. In later years, the family had fallen increasingly under LTTE pressure. One day Prasanniya had been detained and severely beaten by female cadres. Following that incident, she had left her village and come to stay with a mother’s sister in a government-controlled area. There she had met Gunaratnam, who is her maccaan, during a funeral of a common relative. After their marriage, she had followed him to live in his natal village, Navalady, where one of her sisters had also stayed since marrying. In the years preceding the tsunami, Prasanniya came to enjoy a life of comparative affluence there. But the tsunami destroyed all the comfort achieved, and it took the lives of their first-born son and second daughter. Prasanniya’s sister also died in the waves, leaving Prasanniya with no immediate female matrirelatives among the people of Navalady.

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Initially, Prasanniya stayed with her children at her mother’s sister’s house after the tsunami, while her husband had been in the camp from the beginning. Some three months later, Prasanniya and the children settled down in Zaeera College camp as well. She found that people threatened to deny her access to relief items at times, reproaching her for having lived outside the camp previously. Prasanniya remained focused on her own household, basically interacting only with Shanthi, her deceased sister’s daughter-in-law and next-door neighbour in the camp (see also Chapter Three). However, this relationship, broke down following family differences by mid-2005, leaving Prasanniya spending her days alone with her immediate family once our acquaintances moved to the site of their temporary shelters. Highlights were her mother and unmarried sister occasionally visiting, both of whom also stayed in post-tsunami relief camps in Vaharai. Yet resumption of armed conflict in Batticaloa district during 2006 put an end to these rare visits. As war escalated and came ever closer into Batticaloa town in 2007, Prasanniya was among those who said she was ready to run: a bag with essentials stood ready in anticipation.

‘Enna caami’: What kind of god is this? 8 At one of her mother’s rare visits in September 2005, Prasanniya had been glad to do the several tedious things she never found time to do otherwise. Along with her mother, she ground and packaged dried chillies that her husband had bought months ago. Doing so, she remembered the spices and rice that one of her sisters had sent her after the tsunami. It was assistance Prasanniya appreciated as typical among sisters. Then Prasanniya told us of a relative’s wedding in another part of the district, which her mother had come to attend. Many people had invited Prasanniya to stay with them rather than in the camp, she recalled, but she had refused all invitations. She thought that, with her four children, she would soon have proved to be a burden to these hosts. Prasanniya also spoke of her excitement in going to the wedding. This reminded her of an episode of anger towards her small son. The morning of the festivities, when they had all been ready to eat something quickly before leaving, the little boy had stepped into the pot of sothi (coconut milk gravy) prepared for their breakfast. This had made Prasanniya so angry that she had beaten him and had shouted that if only he had died, his brother would still have been alive. As she told us of this scene, her mother intervened to say that she had cautioned Prasanniya not to treat this child so harshly, who was too young to know what he was doing. This provoked a brief exchange between mother and daughter. Prasanniya complained that the boy was still unable to say any proper words, while her mother countered 8 | Caami is one of the common terms for a Hindu deity, equivalent to theyvam. Another frequently used term is kadavul (ultimately denoting the god Shiva for Hindu-Tamils of Batticaloa).

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that he was on the way to talking well. Yet, since it was important for boys to learn to speak well, as they grew into men and were expected to communicate with strangers, the grandmother recommended making a special paste to put under the boy’s tongue every morning. Prasanniya countered that she had already tried that method many times but without success. Hence, her mother recommended requesting kadavul for help. This piece of advice made Prasanniya really angry. She said she did not want to hear anything of that and that there was ‘no god in this world.’ Because she no longer believed in the gods, she could not ask for their assistance for her son. Prasanniya continued to say that, though she knew she should not cook meat on a Friday, she had done so every Friday since the tsunami. When I observed that she sounded as though she wished to punish the gods, she confirmed this was the case, and went on to state her reasons: as a family, they had always worshipped the gods, observed all the specific practices, and participated generously in local temple festivals. When her husband provided for a Friday puja at the Kadannaciyamman (sea goddess) temple or the Pillaiyar temple in Navalady, these were days well-known for having a lavish amount of “sweet rice” for anyone. And in whatever work required for a temple, it had always been their eldest son who had done most of it. He had helped with cooking, carrying food, and cleaning up. In fact, of all of them, he had been the one most involved in temple festivals, and had always brought home sweet rice to share with his siblings. Especially that last year, the boy had done everything required for the family’s Friday puja at the Pillaiyar temple, far more than merely supporting his mother. He had also observed all the religious days of fasting that year and gone to the temple every morning during that month of December 2004. Thus he did everything for the caami, Prasanniya concluded, but the caami did not help him. She heard from other people that they had seen him floating in the water during the tsunami. Thus the boy could have been saved – for instance, by having a piece of wood extended for him to cling to. Yet no godly help had been given. So Prasanniya then remarked angrily: ‘enna caami; what kind of a god is this?’ That episode bespeaks Prasanniya’s anger with gods that betrayed years of worship by failing to rescue the worshippers. It also illustrates the impact that the death of her eldest son had on Prasanniya. It apparently impacted her relationship with the living younger boy. I continue with her rejection of worship before elaborating on the relationship with her surviving children. Prasanniya was not alone in her explicit anger towards a god, or towards the deities generally, who had failed to prevent the disaster. A great many of our acquaintances shared similar sentiments, as noted in previous chapters. Suresh formulated it jokingly one day in March 2007: when the tsunami happened, the gods disappeared as well. It was also said that the Murugan statue of Navalady’s Murugan temple had survived the tsunami intact but that an angry survivor subsequently demolished its head (see Figure 7). While an expression of grief, rejecting the deities arguably complicated people’s bereavement further. It left no hope in a god that could assist in overcoming the challenges of living after

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survival. Hence Prasanniya saw no point in turning to kadavul, as there had been for Sudarshini, as seen in Chapter Six. Yet Prasanniya’s anger towards the gods did not suggest an atheistic point of view. Instead, it kept her and others with similar attitudes well placed within a religious outlook: there was somehow a god and deities that could be rejected angrily. Kadavul could also be insulted by purposefully disregarding such practices as adhering to vegetarianism on a Friday, going to temples for puja, or not consuming beef. Disregarding the rules for Friday, and emphasizing this neglect, was very common. Hence Prasanniya and Ramesh’s daughter Nanthini hardly missed a chance to state that they had not eaten fish on Fridays before the tsunami. Both also pointed out the vows that they had made with the gods – and contrasted that past with their present wish to indulge in non-vegetarian food every day and to put an end to worship. The idea of eating beef often remained at the level of verbal threats, as was the case with Nanthini. She liked to jokingly invoke her desire for beef and bacon, though we never actually saw her eating any of that.9 Interestingly, Thiruchandran (1999, 46–51) noted similar attitudes towards the gods and religious practices among Tamil war-widows whose stated resentments matched those of our friends. Based on these observations, Thiruchandran (1999, 47) deemed that some war widows were “in the category of becoming atheists”.10 This is a possible interpretation. However, as mentioned above, I doubt it in view of the people we spoke with, who clearly continued to believe in the supernatural. What emerges from these accounts instead is a great deal of arguing with the gods, a point I return to in Chapter Eight. Refusing to worship the gods does not mean to deny the existence of supernatural forces, as is obvious in regard to these same people’s relationships to 9 | However, there were also cases of beef consumption among our regular research contacts. I am of the impression that women prepared such meals occasionally at the request of their husbands. Though we did not pursue the question further at the time, the wives tended to be rather vague or even slightly embarrassed as to the underlying reason for consuming a kind of meat that Hindus consider polluting. These impressions are not surprising, since Hindu Tamils consider beef an especially “heating” food that is said to vitalize the body and libido (see McGilvray 2008, 323). In any case, these examples of actual beef consumption were not said to be motivated by a wish to be religiously offensive but appeared as something like a specific nutritional demand, as observed before the tsunami as well. 10 | Thiruchandran’s (1999, 46–51) findings are also interesting in the contrast between women whose husbands were killed and those whose husbands remained missing. Most women whose husbands had been killed expressed resentment against the gods and refrained from religious practice. That included one interviewee’s statement about eating fish on Friday ever since her son’s murder, while she had formerly observed vegetarianism. Conversely, many women, whose husbands had been “disappeared” and therefore might still live, engaged actively in religious life, such as going to temples, doing puja, and making vows.

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ghosts. Prasanniya was overly aware of the existence of ghosts. This made her alert to harmful doings of spirits suspected to surround their former home, as well as their present one. As seen in previous chapters, pey were said to abound in Navalady after the violent deaths of hundreds of people, including small children and the lack of proper mortuary rituals. Pey also populated the forest fringes surrounding the temporary shelters site as well as the suspected and known burial places of tsunami and war victims scattering the neighbourhood. Prasanniya recounted on several occasions that her husband had heard characteristic noises of ghosts, such as crying calls or rattling of bangles when out on dark nights. Besides illustrating the parents’ concern with the non-human realm, Prasanni­ ya’s and her husband’s fear of ghosts demonstrate their worries for their children’s safety. Both parents feared the influence of ghosts, particularly in regard to the well-being of their four remaining children.11 Hence they tried to control their children’s movement within temporary shelters to avoid possible encounters at margins of the settlement. Temple visits were also undertaken to protect the children. For instance, some six weeks after the conversation with Prasanniya and her mother depicted above, Prasanniya wished to place some vipuuti (consecrated ash) on her baby daughter’s forehead at a famous Pillaiyar temple located closer to town. This had been in reaction to the baby’s waking up screaming during the previous few nights, leaving Prasanniya worried that it may have ‘seen something’ that had startled it. In other words, she thought her child might have seen a ghost, got scared, and thus become easy prey to malevolent spirits (see also Pfaffenberger 1982, 101–106). Similarly Prasanniya never hesitated to rush her children to a hospital when they met an accident or fell sick. It is important to note this concern for the children’s well-being given her often harsh treatment of them. Indeed, Prasanniya’s relationship with her children, as we observed it during fieldwork, was fraught with the struggle to care for them despite her grief for the deceased. She took good care of the remaining children’s daily practical needs, cooking their meals and bathing them. Yet we hardly saw her engaging affectionately with her children as other parents did, instead often witnessing episodes suggesting neglect of the children’s emotional needs. Prasanniya herself seemed disturbed by her manners at times, indicated by the way she took our visits as an opportunity to tell us of such episodes. I further pursue this struggle in Prasanniya’s relationships with her surviving children below, especially that with her remaining son.12 11 | The question arises whether that fear was complicated by the possibility that their own two deceased children still roam as ghosts. Prasanniya, as so many other bereaved mothers, feared at times that her dead children might have met this fate. These thoughts indicate her grief for the children as well as a suspicion that whatever improvised mortuary rituals were undertaken to avert precisely that condition, proved futile at the end. 12 | My reading of the fieldwork observations emphasizes the ambivalence in Prasanniya’s attitudes to her children. Another more psychologically inclined reading would place

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Fig. 7: Destroyed Murugan statue, Navalady, April 2005 (© Katharina Thurnheer)

The struggle to attach again The fact that four of her six children had survived the tsunami seemed to offer Prasanniya little comfort at times. It appeared instead that she refused to care for the living in her grief for the dead, ‘Why should I think of them? They are alive’, she once stated in June 2005. On another occasion she explained that she and her husband had been so fond of ‘those children’ that they did not want to do anything special for ‘these children’ remaining with them. Thus Prasanniya remembered the birthdays of the dead but ignored those of the living children. Similarly it was only in response to external pressure that Prasanniya provided her children with the dresses and sweets expected for religious festivities such as the Sarasvathi puja held at school.13 And yet Prasanniya felt uneasy as her eldest daughter burst into tears when she did not receive a customary new dress for her birthday in October 2005.

greater emphasis on Prasanniya’s personality and on the possible harmful effects that her ways had on her children. 13 | Sarasvathi, the female consort of Brahma, is important for learning and thus for education (see Flood [1996] 2002, 178, 182). Yearly celebrations are held at schools in her honour.

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Prasanniya frequently complained about the difficulty in making her living children eat anything and, conversely, about their wish for rice and curry that entailed a great deal of work for her. The difficulty she found in providing meals for her children was one with which she confronted us as early as our first encounter, and it remained a prominent one in our conversations throughout fieldwork. A concern with food for the living (and the dead) reflected the general concern with nutrition of their children typical of mothers among our research contacts. In the case of Prasanniya, the topic of food also offered itself as an opportunity to contrast her dead children with her living ones by pointing out their habits and preferences. Invariably, the appetite of the deceased had been better, their habits healthier, and their preferences easier for their mother to handle. It also needs to be noted that it was fairly common for mothers to express their affection and responsibility towards children (and other family members) indirectly by emphasizing the efforts and work undertaken on their behalf. This ambiguity in expressing care by complaining took on a specific note with Prasanniya since she tended to praise the dead and scold the surviving children.14 I suggest that these points testify to her ambivalence in caring for the surviving children rather than merely demonstrating her neglect of them. The ambivalence was nurtured by her overwhelming grief for the death of the others. This was especially the case in regard to her two sons, where the living little boy seemed to bear the brunt of Prasanniya’s grief over the death of his elder brother. Prasanniya frequently conjured up memories of her eldest son. He was said to have been the best in class and winner of many educational competitions. At home, he used to help his mother a lot with her chores and was a perfect elder brother to his siblings, always sharing with them whatever he received or bought. Prasanniya also pointed out the great support he had been to her when she had returned home from hospital with her latest baby, a few months before the tsunami. With her own mother (the person who typically assists a woman after childbirth) far away, all the help that Prasanniya could count on was that of her eldest son. Encouraged by the boy’s brilliance, the parents had expected him to become an engineer and provide for them in old age. Their little son seemed unable to live up to these memories. He refused to speak well until he was three years old, walked unsteadily on bent legs, frequently burst out in angry and violent behaviour, and would only drink expensive milk formula, or eat sweets and spicy chips. He seemed unable to live up to the image of his brother. Notably, the expectations placed on the former son were not shifted to any of the daughters after his death. With expectations tied to gender roles, they remained with the son, who was not perceived as able to shoulder the 14 | The issue of praise versus scolding may be further related to a background of child rearing in which praise can endanger a child and motherly affection is restricted at times to protect the child from the attention of malicious spirits or the evil eye (see Trawick 1992, 93, 100–101, 255 on these points for Tamil Nadu).

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responsibilities of his brother.15 The accusation of being alive at the expense of his brother was voiced primarily against the little boy, hardly ever against any of the other children. Overall, the trust to help the family in the long-term that Prasanniya had seemed to place so firmly and hopefully in the former son was apparently not transferable to the younger boy without complications. Hence Prasanniya’s attitude towards her youngest son was thoroughly marked by her grief for the elder one and had little to do with any of the small boy’s alleged “short-comings”. Moreover, Prasanniya’s grief needs to be seen within the context of her previous story of human loss and dispossession. The difficult relationship with her surviving children, especially with her little son, testifies to her feelings of betrayal in continued emotional, social, and material investments. She felt similarly betrayed by the gods’ failure to offer help in this latest disaster. Prasanniya’s situation shows how difficult it is to “keep functioning”, even when that was all she aimed to do. Ultimately, this may have saved her from “going crazy” from the sorrow for her deceased children. It also affords an example of remaining children and family life being a burden on survivors and causing potentially harmful consequences for these family members. Prasanniya could not easily find solace and hope in her living children, the way Sudarshini managed to by orienting her own future around the care of and affection for her new baby. Compared to Sudarshini, Prasanniya, in fact, had no hope of starting anew with the birth of more children. Following the birth of her sixth child and fourth daughter, she had undergone sterilization to prevent further pregnancies some three months before the tsunami. Nevertheless, Prasanniya’s continued interaction with her children was likely a relevant factor in preventing her from committing suicide, though she said she thought of that option frequently.16 On this note, I turn briefly to summarize further developments that indicate some form of recovery in Prasanniya’s situation and family relationships.

New and renewed relationships Towards the end of 2005, Prasanniya complained increasingly of various physical pains. She took it as a joke, laughing that with every new day she was developing 15 | A son’s responsibility to help provide for the dowry of his sisters likely formed one such gendered expectation. With three remaining daughters and one son, a concern with dowry must have weighed significantly on the parents. The relationship between father and son seemed overall more balanced and affectionate than that between mother and son (though it was limited to those moments when the father was actually at home with his children). 16 | She also mentioned that a cinnamma of hers killed herself in July 2005 following the death of five children in the tsunami. There must have been a significant number of suicides or attempted suicides among tsunami survivors, given that several cases occurred between 2005 and 2009 just among people from Navalady.

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a new disease. For instance, she suffered severe joint pains in November 2005. She said this occurred after having thought of her deceased daughter. Such pains had arisen previously after the operation for sterilization mentioned. On the first anniversary of the tsunami (in December 2005) she fainted while taking her morning bath.17 Her neighbour Nirmala found her and brought her to hospital. Prasannya explained at the time that she had become too preoccupied with the death of her children. She also mentioned her neighbour’s advice to become more active in divert her from thinking of the dead too much. Moreover, Nirmala also urged Prasanniya to return to Navalady more frequently, since Prasanniya’s husband was repairing their former home there. The question of whether or not to spend time in Navalady had dominated Prasanniya’s mind ever since we met her. She shared the wish to return and the fear of doing so with all of our friends who longed for their former lives but found the thought of staying in Navalady terrifying. Different from the situation of others, however, Prasanniya’s former house had not been completely destroyed by the waves and could be repaired.18 Therefore, it was quite possible to imagine living in the house again. But it was unimaginable emotionally. Moreover, with her husband repairing the house, there was also the expectation of accompanying and supporting him during his work. She repeatedly stated during 2005 that if only there were other people living in their vicinity, she could stay in Navalady. Yet with no neighbours around, she was too afraid of the ghosts that she suspected of being there instead. Prasanniya eventually did visit Navalady more frequently during the following year, spending time there with her children as their house reached completion. In the meantime, a few other families came to settle down in Navalady, though most still chose to spend the night elsewhere, and the area remained very sparsely populated. Thus Prasanniya continued to stay most of the time in their temporary shelter, keeping busy. Ultimately, she developed more social contacts there. Along with Nirmala and several other women in neighbouring shelters, Prasanniya joined in a project for a women’s organization of Indian origin. She appreciated its activities – especially the loan offers – and did not object to singing Hindu songs, which began the project’s meetings. She also attended the sewing classes that another organization offered. The meticulous stitching helped her greatly, Prasanniya said. Concentrating fully on various kinds of stitches and a given 17 | Prasanniya told us about this latest incident in April 2006, when we resumed fieldwork. I had previously left Batticaloa in November 2005 and returned to Sri Lanka at the end of March 2006. 18 | Their house had been held on a deed basis and was located some 300–400 metres away from the sea, permitting its reconstruction according to governmental policies (see Chapter Five). In addition, the couple was enlisted to receive a house in the relocation area, where the family came to live towards the end of 2006, and which the parents thought to be the future dowry for their eldest daughter.

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pattern enabled her to keep her mind free of anything else: she could ‘forget everything’. By early 2007, though, the family’s move to their permanent house in the relocation site signified another change. They came to live among new neighbours again. Or rather they occupied an area within plots of land where the houses of future neighbours were being built, since their own house was among the first batch of permanent houses completed there. Prasanniya seemed quite isolated, staying within a home compound so much larger than the previously densely populated area of temporary shelter. She once again organized a little, unprofitable shop and tried to manage it as best she could. New relationships had not developed yet during the time of our visits in March and April 2007, while the previously established ones ended when the women left the neighbourhood. Notably Nirmala and her family stayed in the temporary shelter until the following year, but the distance between the two households impeded daily contact.19 A meal and an afternoon spent in the company of Prasanniya, her children, and husband during my brief return to the field in March 2009 suggested an overall improved situation at last. Not only was Prasanniya very cheerful that day, but though she had continued to spend most of her time alone with her children, she was obviously in contact again with her husband’s relatives who now lived in the new housing project too. She had finally given up running a shop, since it had never produced any profit. On the day of our visit, Prasanniya and her elder daughter had just returned from the Kali temple in neighbouring Punnaichcholai. The previous year the whole family had attended the Kadanacciyamman temple festival in Navalady. It had resumed its attraction among the survivors by then (see Chapter Eight). Hence Prasanniya seemed to have found at least a partial return to previous social and religious practices. What was most impressive during the visit was the children’s development and Prasanniya’s apparent ease with them. The little boy had grown into an active toddler who entertained all of us happily. His elder sister’s school performance had made their parents proud, and Prasanniya in particular hoped her eldest daughter’s first menstruation would occur soon, in order to be celebrated in a grand way. Concluding with a rather hopeful last impression of Prasanniya, I now turn to describe Ramesh’s situation.

R amesh : J ust S itting We first heard of Ramesh through his daughter Selvy who, during our initial visit to Central College camp, told us that her father had been highly upset since 19 | Half a kilometre could prove a decisive obstacle for women to visit each other. They were expected to stay at home with their children, especially if they were not directly related to one another.

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the tsunami and lived outside the camp in her eldest sister’s household. Ramesh had subsequently left that household in May 2005 to join his wife Indurani and their daughters Selvy and Nanthini. As we came to know him, he always greeted us warmly, was keen to offer hospitality, and became increasingly concerned about our safety, because we rode our bicycles while local armed hostilities were resuming. At times, he engaged us in lively conversations, but more often he sat silently close by while we talked with his wife and daughters and any occasional visiting relative. By 2006, Ramesh often sat for hours by himself, doing nothing but listening to his radio. The predominant impression he left was of him sitting on the family’s only plastic chair outside the shelter, dressed in a blue sarong, a small portable radio in his lap, staring into the air. As Tharshan commented jokingly: ‘mattum irundaar.’ He was simply sitting there. Yet there were many other kinds of moments too. There were moments when he enjoyed the presence of his two new grandchildren, born in 2006, one by his daughter Selvy and the other of his son Suresh, all of them living in temporary shelters at the time. Children bring happiness, he said, referring to a common Tamil idiom that a home without children is a sad one. Then there were moments of an obvious excess of alcohol. While often peaceful and asleep under its effects, angry outbursts and violent behaviour could also occur following alcohol consumption. Indeed, violent incidents increased over time, though not necessarily simply due to alcohol. Fortunately for his family and in contrast to many other men, including his own son and son-in-law, Ramesh’s violent behaviour was not usually directed against his wife or daughters but more typically against material objects. For instance, he demolished the furniture at his eldest daughter’s place during one moment of rage in 2007. This happened during a formal reception at the home, and the public nature of his outrage caused great embarrassment to his family as well as himself. Ramesh was disturbed by his behaviour whenever he realized what he had done, and he worried about what was happening to him. Ramesh never spoke about ghosts to us, but others related his behaviour to such a framework at times. ‘He took the neem tree branches and danced like a pey’, his wife and daughters told us the day after an incident in August 2006. Branches of the neem (margosa) tree decorated their shelter at the time, because Nanthini had the chicken-pox, and the “cooling” leaves are used in honour of the “hot” goddess that is said to visit a person when such sickness appears. The previous evening, Ramesh had plucked these branches and started dancing in the dark resembling a deity dancer in the eyes of the shocked on-looking family.20 20 | Chicken-pox (like small-pox) is seen as inflicted by the mother goddess (amman), who actually extends her grace upon the inflicted. Our friends usually referred to chickenpox simply as ammal (or: amman) or as ‘ammal vantu’ (“ammal came”). Neem or margosa leaves are generally associated with (Kali) amman and are used during the goddess’ visit. Theyvam aatukira, the trance medium dancing at amman temple festivals, also uses such

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While they explained away his behaviour as a result of drunkenness at the time, his dancing like a person possessed hinted at the possibility of him having come dangerously close to paittiyam. Even more a concern than his mental health, family members seemed preoccupied by the way Ramesh’s public performance had shamed them all. Meanwhile, Ramesh lived increasingly in a world of his own. During a visit in September 2007, he was concerned about unknown noises running below the earth, and he vehemently rejected any connection to vibration of a steamroller flattening the gravel road some 10 to 30 metres away. As time went on, he reportedly oscillated between troubled states, when he might swear at anyone, and more aware ones, when he would recognize everyone and speak openly about his previous displays of ill-tempered behaviour. His spells of withdrawn attitudes and agitated behaviour prompted his family to seek various treatments. A first step occurred five days before the first annual commemoration of the tsunami in 2005, when he was admitted to the local general hospital’s mental ward. He spoke only of dead people, I was told by phone, at the time in Switzerland. However, after about 10 days, he discharged himself and returned to his wife and daughters. Following that, he refused medical treatment. With his situation deteriorating, his family and relations hoped instead for improvements from local specialists. Yet neither consecrated temple water nor an elaborated exorcism ritual with a pusari brought relief. By February 2007, his wife complained that all these efforts had cost a great deal of money while no improvements had been achieved. The next year, she reportedly brought him to a Christian healer to relieve him from ‘evil’.21 There was no change for the better in Ramesh’s behaviour. In the meantime, some of Indurani’s relatives started to point out that Ramesh’s own father had behaved similarly in old age before he committed suicide. This contributed to the suspicion that his behaviour was a recurrent theme in the family. However, a further step was undertaken in 2009: family resources were pooled, and money was borrowed in order to have Ramesh taken to a private hospital in the capital Colombo. The basic diagnosis was high blood pressure, which could be treated medically. This finding relieved Ramesh and his family of suspected mental illness. Yet he was also diagnosed with some

branches of leaves, which are believed to possess cooling properties. Ramesh’s family referred to these dancers (rather than to ghosts) as our acquaintances frequently used the terms theyvam and pey interchangeably. On chicken- or small-pox and other skin diseases inflicted by a goddess, see Flood ([1996] 2002, 195–196); Lüthi (2001, 14); Masilmani-Meyer (2004, 55); McGilvray (1982b, 30); Trawick Egnor (1984). On amman temple practices and theyvam dancing, see Flood ([1996] 2002, 193–197, 220–221) and Lawrence (1997, 2000, 2003). 21 | Indurani joined an evangelical church after the tsunami, disappointed in the Hindu gods that she deemed had failed to rescue people during the high waves.

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damaged cerebral parts, likely related to one or several strokes. This piece of information was withheld from Ramesh in order not to upset him. I wish to avoid speculation about what the prime cause of Ramesh’s situation may have been: trauma, possession, alcohol, genetics, or indeed simply, ‘high pressure’. In any case it likely owes to a combination of reasons, while more factors will expectedly influence future developments. His family too will likely continue to seek redress from different sources rather than having Ramesh simply take medicine to reduce high blood pressure following the 2009 medical report. The concluding depiction illustrates Ramesh’s history of experienced hardships and humiliations. It centres on his narrative of surviving the tsunami and subsequent exposure to gruesome experiences and demeaning teasing. This narrative itself indicates a painful interaction of traumatic and denigrating experiences at different moments. I continue to represent this narrative in the form of a short summary, which obviously involves a series of interpretive steps. A brief discussion is presented in the next section, where Ramesh’s and Prasanniya’s situations are reconsidered in regard to coping practices.

Eking out a living amidst violence Ramesh was born in the 1950s and grew up in the vicinity of Navalady. He only went to school for one year; after his mother’s early death, he turned to fishing instead. He married Indurani as a young man and moved to her natal village, Navalady. They had three daughters and one son together. The boy was born as a second child, following the parents’ pilgrimage to Kataragama and their request to god for a son.22 A cyclone destroyed the whole village in 1978, and the family lost all its possessions. Yet, as Ramesh and many others liked to phrase it, quite unlike the tsunami, the cyclone destroyed everything without killing anyone. The government had warned people to leave the seaside in time. Moreover, after the cyclone, people rebuilt their premises themselves. Ramesh sometimes wished that this was the case for tsunami aid too: people should just receive a sum of money and be left to do their own work. Ramesh was a fisherman all his life. He used to own a variety of nets that, in local arrangements of the trade, was his basis for fishing with a partner who owned a thoni. Economically, life had always been harsh, yet the family managed through joint efforts. When their son reached his early 20s, Ramesh and his wife had him sent to the Middle East for work. That helped in providing dowries of 22 | The Kataragama temple site in southern Sri Lanka is a popular pilgrimage site for Hindus and Buddhists. There must be thousands of people from Batticaloa who join the annual pilgrimages to its Murugan temple; it is an event said to bring together people of different castes as well as Tamil Hindus and Sinhalese Buddhists. Several other couples among our research contacts said they had asked god Kataragama for a son or had undertaken the pilgrimage in hope of conceiving a child.

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their two eldest daughters and offered protection to this young man, who risked either being recruited by the LTTE or harassed by government forces. When armed incidents escalated in September 2005, Ramesh and Indurani remembered the particularly hard living conditions in 1990. A massive military campaign was mounted against the LTTE and any suspected sympathisers in the region. The government restricted fishing activities, and banned fishing altogether for some months. The family had nothing but plain sugarless tea and some bread to eat; anyone caught fishing was shot. In order to survive, Ramesh and his wife used to sneak out to the lagoon at night, crouching under bushes to catch some fish or prawns in the dark, unable even to cast out a net. If they did have some fish for sale, Ramesh quickly sold them for any ‘customer price’ and hastened to return to the safer environment of his home. That is, he had no bargaining power but depended on the clients’ price offered to avoid any possible danger when out in the streets. He was beaten up several times by army personnel and their collaborators during the day; at times he was forced to collaborate with the LTTE during the night.23 According to Ramesh and Indurani, the 1990s were years when no men left their homes without women: any Tamil man on the road risked being beaten and arrested by the armed forces. He depended on an accompanying woman to vouch for his innocence and plead for his life. The couple also specifically remembered the bodies of Tamils being burnt alive on tyres in the streets and the smoke rising from within army camps where the detained had been brought, thus sharing memories typically recalled by witnesses of that war period in Batticaloa. Indurani also mentioned that many women were raped in Navalady. There was also a moment in their own lives when a soldier had come to their hut one night and had asked Indurani to come out. This had provoked a fight. While Indurani and her eldest daughter screamed, the soldier beat Ramesh and their son-in-law before he finally left. While Ramesh and Indurani told us of these war experiences during a time of heightened tensions and insecurities, physical violence also marked the domestic lives of their adult children in the past and present. Their eldest daughter’s husband was notorious for having abused his wife for many years. Having to witness his son-in-law beat up his daughter had actually been a main reason for Ramesh’s move from that household to the camp some five months after the tsunami. It seemed impossible for the parents to do anything for their daughter, other than frequently hosting her children. Their son-in-law’s violence threatened the parents too, while they additionally feared his wider political connections.24 23 | Navalady reportedly served the LT TE as a transit place on their route between LT TEcontrolled areas across the lagoon in the interior and the open sea. 24 | Regarding a violent scene in May 2005, Ramesh explained that they were helpless against their son-in-law because of the latter’s contacts with both the LT TE as well as with the police. Later conversations pointed out their eldest daughter’s history of leaving

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Later, when they lived in a temporary shelter site where their son and daughterin-law also came to stay close-by, Ramesh and Indurani had to face the violence of their own son against his wife. These scenes enraged Ramesh, but his wife and daughter prevented him from intervening, lest his son knock him down (see Chapter Four). Marital disputes and violence were to be repeated against their youngest daughter Selvy once she had eloped. Watching their children suffer battering left the parents feeling helpless, while the women never failed to return to their husbands, no matter how often they left. A recurrent theme in our meetings during the first year after the tsunami was family’s anger that other people benefited so greatly from tsunami aid. Ramesh, his wife, daughters, and son complained to varying degrees about what others received. These included close relatives, while Ramesh’s family allegedly missed out. Though the son eventually benefited considerably from livelihood support, the elderly couple and the daughters fared poorly in comparison. They lacked the personal connections to influential people or authorities. Nor could they summon the necessary negotiation skills that enabled others to gain more than their minimal entitlements. Ramesh’s lapses in drunkenness and withdrawal further exacerbated the situation, while Indurani felt unable to act as the family’s head in all dealings. In fact, the couple depended largely on what Nanthini received in the form of post-tsunami aid for widows, and on what more confident, agile Selvy could achieve. Selvy’s unexpected and unyielding marriage in mid-2005 meant a further loss and burden for the aging parents, despite their joy at the presence of another grandchild.

Overlapping memories of suffering During a day in June 2006 spent with Indurani and Ramesh, Ramesh surprised us by recollecting his survival in the tsunami. It was a narrative that started off with fond memories of Navalady. It developed to encompass many details of the horrendous sights witnessed immediately after the disaster. It was also a story intertwined with memories of war-related violence, which ended with the death of his brother some 15 years before. The moment of recollection took Vathany and me by surprise, as had other notable survival narratives which used to occur unexpected. However, the specific moment loses some of its unexpectedness in retrospect. The family had been under distress at the time, because Nanthini, a widow since the tsunami, had been promised marriage by a relative who – having “consumated” marriage her husband and returning to him, often fearing for the lives of their three children should she leave him permanently. Her situation exemplifies how limited the protection that matrilocality is expected to offer women was in practice. Activists in the region also reported cases in which the husband attempts (sometimes successfully) to evict his wife from the home even though that house was given to the woman as dowry.

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to the knowledge of several people – was no longer seen around. Indurani and Nanthini deliberately kept these latest developments away from Ramesh; even when he asked Indurani why their daughter was crying, he was not informed. Furthermore, the days preceding the narrative had been filled with insecurity: grenade attacks, sounds of cross-fire, and land-mine explosions alternated with threatening security checks and civilian round-ups. The season of the karaivalai fishing method had also begun recently, which excited everyone dependent on daily labour opportunities. These themes resurfaced in Ramesh’s narrative that highlights his grappling with intrusive images and a sense of helplessness and loss of face. Ramesh started off with his narrative as he observed Vathany and me move to a shady place besides the family’s sheet-metal shelter in a series of futile attempts to escape the blasting heat. At that moment he commented that we would never experience such heat in Navalady: one could always sit in the shade there and enjoy a nice breeze. He would like to go back to Navalady and stay there, he told us, but his family did not want to return. ‘I’m not afraid’ he added, which had Indurani sneering with teasing contempt, since we all knew that the opposite was the case. Ramesh retorted by insisting that he did not fear returning, and that he wished to build a hut there where his son used to live. He wanted to live there and be ready for any possibility to help in the karaivalai. Ramesh explained that the season for that kind of fishing starts after the annual Kadanacciyamman temple festival, and he went on to describe the greatness of this main temple festival in Navalady. It used to attract people from far-away places, eager to participate in the festivities and witness the trance dancing. One of his (classificatory) brothers used to dance as possessed by the theyvam during this festival, Ramesh said, adding that this brother died in the tsunami, even though he had known how to swim well.25 During one of these temple festivals many years ago, Ramesh continued, a son of Indurani’s sister Jeeva was arrested by the army and was never seen again. The family entrusted a man, who claimed to know where this son was being held, with a lot of money for his release, but the man disappeared with the fortune. They were told later that the army had killed the son. Ramesh concluded excitedly that he was still very angry with the man who had cheated them and wished for his death by complaining about him to the iyakkam. Ramesh subsequently returned to talking about the current fishing season and his wish to stay in a hut in Navalady. Given such a hut, he could stay there permanently, rather than having to undertake the journey from the temporary shelters. He could also look after their land with the many coconut trees. He exclaimed that, if only he had such a hut, his friends would come over, and they could have a good time together. However, he added almost seamlessly, he did not want to stay in Navalady for any long period: he was too afraid of a next tsunami, 25 | Ramesh was referring to the son of his mother’s younger sister.

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he said – and too afraid of all the memories of death and destruction caused by the tsunami that would come back to him. With that, Ramesh came to speak of the day when the tsunami happened. He had been at Nanthini’s house, carrying Nanthini’s baby, but then had left to buy bread. Once outside, people had come running and called to him to run away because the ‘sea was coming’. He had thought they were quite mad and failed to believe them. But then he heard all the noises and saw seawater sweeping through the neighbourhoods. He returned to Nanthini’s, but his wife and daughters were no longer there. So he had gone next-door to his son’s home, only then remembering that Suresh had already left for fishing. That was when the next, more massive wave arrived. Ramesh managed to hold on to a Palmyrah tree, and went to search for his family when the wave had passed. He had not found them. However, he had seen Jeeva and Murali’s mother also searching for family members (both women subsequently died in the tsunami). Then he realized suddenly that the next wave, a giant one, was on the way. He ran back to the tree but with the wave crushing over his son’s house, let go of the trunk as he saw a piece of the building fall right onto him. He continued to see this image of housing parts falling on him, Ramesh added. A concrete pillar crashed against his leg. Finally Nesam, the young grandson of another of Indurani’s sisters, rescued him by heaving him into his thoni. Ramesh described that they had ridden past the big banyan tree with dozens of people on it, which was to collapse soon after, drowning most of the people who had sought refuge there.26 There had been two boats underneath the tree, and Ramesh commented that, if the people only taken the boats, they would still be alive. As he later came to know, Selvy had been on that tree too, and she had survived. Along with Nesam, Ramesh’s daughter-in-law Sasika, and another two female relatives, they reached the shore on the other side of the lagoon, all in one thoni.27 Ramesh said he told the soldiers present there to go over to Navalady and help the people. Then he was transported to hospital for treatment of his leg. On the way to the hospital he saw Nanthini crying in the street and was told that she was missing her baby and her husband. He later searched for that sonin-law at the mortuary of the hospital among other places. There were heaps of corpses there, lots of children’s bodies too – a terrifying sight.28 Yet he did not find Nanthini’s husband nor Jeeva’s body. She remained missing as well. He continued to search for his son-in-law, even though his eldest daughter advised him to stop doing so, due to all the gruesome scenes he encountered. He saw trucks full of 26 | It is the tree in which Sudarshini and Rajan’s eldest son had died (see previous Chapter Six). 27 | With them on the boat were Vasanthi and her daughter Gheeta. The survival narratives of Vasanthi and Ramesh differed interestingly, though perhaps not surprisingly, in that the narrator in each of their stories was the one actively rescuing the other. 28 | The body of Nanthini’s baby was found in that mortuary.

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dead bodies. At a cemetery in town he witnessed how the municipality arranged mass graves for the dead: 10 corpses at a time were dumped into one huge hole after another. Such scenes terrified him; he would always leave them quickly. The bodies were in an awful state, their stomachs swollen, water flowing out of their mouths, and eyes popping out of the faces. Ramesh exclaimed that that is what it means to die in water; it cannot be compared to a normal death. He added that these images of the dead kept haunting him, and that was why he did not want to stay in Navalady. Furthermore, he added, it was all right for him and his wife to live there, since they had lived their lives already. Yet, if they were to return, their children and grandchildren would follow them. And then the whole family would die in another tsunami. That was why he and Indurani did not return to Navalady. Ramesh continued to tell of further losses and humiliations. He used to have 16 nets before the tsunami, and he kept them in two big bags. All of them disappeared. Ramesh said he was sure that they had been far too heavy to have been washed away by the waves.29 They used to have so many things, Ramesh went on, and then everything was lost. Not even one rupee remained in their pockets. He had been wearing just a sarong at the time, and even that had been lost in the tsunami. Soon after the tsunami, some young men at a tea-shop teased him. They said that he and his fellow people from Navalady had proudly owned everything before the tsunami but were now roaming in the streets like beggars. Before the disaster, fishermen from Navalady would not have lowered the price of their fish, but now they no longer had anymore. Ramesh said that he had not replied at the time. However, after having drunk some arrack on another day, he went back to that shop and scolded the same men. He railed that he and his people had indeed lost everything, but had they ever asked for any tea or rice from them? The shop owner had sided with him, confirming that Ramesh always paid for his expenses on the spot. On yet another day, he walked along the road when his brother’s adult children passed by in an auto (three-wheeler taxi). They had stopped to give him LKR 500. He had not said anything, just given it to his eldest daughter. Ramesh went on to say that this brother’s children were educated and well-off, but they had not paid him a single visit when he had been in a hospital recently (referring to the time he was admitted to the mental ward one year after the tsunami). One of them worked for an NGO and came regularly to the temporary shelter site. She often invited Ramesh to come and visit her home, with his family, but he did not want to go there. Their father (hence his brother) was shot in 1990: ‘We don’t know by whom.’ When he had heard of the incident, Ramesh had immediately gone to the spot where his brother was killed. Lots of soldiers and lots of onlookers had been standing there without doing anything. Nobody had approached the body. It was 29 | This implied that the nets had been stolen. Stories abounded of thieves having robbed remaining and unattended items immediately after the tsunami.

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typical this time that ‘they’ (presumably the LTTE) used to place a grenade with the body after a person had been killed, and that was why even the soldiers did not dare go close. But Ramesh said he had not thought of anything and had gone straight to his brother. Obviously upset by this memory, Ramesh indicated on his own body where the five bullets had entered his brother. He continued to describe how he had pulled the dead body from the bicycle that his brother had been riding. Blood was everywhere. It had been impossible to carry the heavy corpse away. Some bystanders had helped at last, and together the body was heaved into a vehicle and brought to the general hospital. Ramesh added that he had supported his brother’s children in many ways after his death. And yet they had all ‘forgotten’ that help, and that was why he did not want to visit them at the time. The 1990s had been a very bad time, Ramesh concluded. Everyone used to finish whatever work lay unfinished before five in the evening, and no one had left home afterward: anyone out after dark risked being killed. The phrase with which he ended his narrative that day brings us back to his concern about Vathany and my own safety when still out in the streets after dusk, as stated at the beginning of this portrait. The narrative itself is indicative of repeated human and material losses and of the skills necessary to survive in a hostile environment. It bespeaks the suffering inflicted by witnessing the violent death of family members, the moment of one’s own near-death experience, and the humiliations endured in the aftermath of the tsunami. Within these dimensions, the narrative reveals a great deal of shared experiences among our research contacts and points out the traumatizing context in which they lived and survived. It also indicates how daily life was (and remained) structured by kin relationships before and after the tsunami, as well as the degree to which both war and the tsunami affected these relationships. I now turn to review some of topics raised in Prasanniya’s and Ramesh’s accounts in a more comparative form.

D e aling with Pait tiyam Prasanniya’s and Ramesh’s situations related differently to the expression of paittiyam as introduced at the beginning of this chapter. In the case of Prasanniya, it was a matter of minimizing the risk of “going mad” due to overwhelming memories of her deceased children. Her approach was one of busying herself and of continuing to “function” within her household. In Ramesh’s case, paittiyam seemed to be reached at times, given his withdrawal into long periods of silence and isolation before alternating outbreaks of raging violence and other forms of incomprehensible behaviour. It can be said in both cases that whatever paittiyam symptoms were risked or identified, their causes went beyond the trauma inflicted by the tsunami. This brings us to see the combined effects of war and tsunami experiences, sadly revealed in Ramesh’s narrative and in Prasanniya’s life situation.

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Moreover, their respective social situations point out the gender dimensions of the coping process. For instance, Prasanniya’s methods of coping mirrored what was expected of her socially: to “keep going” as a mother for the sake of her remaining children. Some possible consequences of that approach can be seen in her deteriorating health over the first year after the tsunami. Moreover, Prasanniya’s attitude towards her children raises questions about consequences that ensued for these children. Added to the dynamics was the fact that Prasanniya lived relatively isolated from others and far away from her own matri-relations. We see in Prasanniya that she missed the help typically expected from a mother or a sister in daily life. Nor were there grandparents around to intervene when she treated her children too harshly, besides the very sporadic visits from her mother.30 And yet, a great deal of resilience must be recognized in the reparation of her family relationships and development of her children, as seen some four years after the tsunami. As for Ramesh, a prominent way of dealing with intrusive memories was to get drunk. He shared the habit with many other men who turned to alcohol in response to suffering and hardship, both before and after the tsunami (see Chapter Four). One way of referring to this was to describe a man as having become ‘a sick person’ following tragic events. For instance, Renuka mentioned that her husband became a ‘sick person’ following the suicide of their eldest daughter; his state was aggravated further after losing the family’s karaivalai access to other people who had taken advantage of his drunken state. Indurani’s sister Pusparaji also described her husband as a ‘sick person’ after their eldest son’s forced disappearance and the later temporary abduction of their second son and the family’s final flight from Vaharai. Being “sick persons” meant that these men had turned to excessive drinking and were usually found at home asleep instead of out of the home supporting their families economically. This kind of response formed a way of coping that was tolerated among men but highly disapproved of in women. One female acquaintance commented on that gender difference one evening in June 2005 by asking me: ‘Men drink. What can women do?’ When I posed the question back in answer, she replied: ‘We can only cry.’31 When the situations considered are related to a trauma discourse, further questions arise as to the treatment made available after the tsunami. Both portraits reveal the failures of external psychological support extended at the time. Some underlying reasons reflect a general critique of “counselling” projects in a post-disaster context. For instance, by staying with family members outside the 30 | Grandparents and, as in the cases directly observed, perhaps more precisely grandmothers, typically took over the role of scolding and reigning in a parent who appeared to punish a child too frequently or too severely. 31 | The acquaintance was one of Kumari’s neighbours in Zaeera College camp. Her husband and daughter both died due to the tsunami, and a son previously lost his life as a LT TE fighter.

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post-tsunami relief camps initially (as most of the displaced did), Prasanniya and Ramesh missed out on psychological projects that typically targeted camp residents during the first few months after the tsunami. Furthermore, some methodology applied by outside actors has been confirmed as being culturally inappropriate, while their apparent acceptance can be interpreted as a cultural response. For example Kamala, who appreciated opportunities to talk about her experiences and memories, felt bad about the plight of an American psychologist who had come to their camp one evening in April 2005: that person was left sitting alone when the women, who had formed a circle around her, suddenly ran away to witness a quarrel within the camp and never bothered returning to ‘draw something’, as had been requested of them. Kamala remarked that it was a paavam (“a sin”) to have deserted that woman who ‘had not even been served a cup of tea.’ It often seemed that counsellors were received as guests rather than as anything else. Indeed, typical psycho-social projects over the longer term consisted of what resembled a very young counsellor having tea with a female survivor at her shelter and play activities for children. Prasanniya stated an explicit dislike of people who had ‘come to talk’ to her. She did not elaborate on the reasons for her dislike, but she obviously had never received any of the visiting field counsellors. Her case instead illustrates that a project with no explicit psychological aim (for instance, the sewing classes), was considered more helpful in dealing with memories. Conversely, Ramesh’s being a man did not initially fall into the common target groups of these psychological projects. Later attempts to involve men in counselling remained marginal and still later awareness-raising programmes on alcohol dependence met with little acceptance. Furthermore, psychiatric treatment remained largely inaccessible given the limited professional resources and considerable reluctance to seek such help locally. Thus Ramesh’s hospitalization in a mental ward was quite a unique move, but it did not last long. Nor did it result in improvement. Some relief was found instead in medical consultation he had more than three years later. By then, however, Ramesh could not truly be reassured by a simple diagnosis of high blood pressure. He suspected something more complicated, while his family refused to disclose further information to him. Setting aside the possible forms of ritual, social, or medical responses to trauma or “madness”, a crucial issue lay in the survivors’ relationship to Navalady. In both the depictions of Prasanniya and Ramesh, a great deal of nostalgia emerges for Navalady and a wish to return to life there. Yet both were simultaneously dismissed, due to the fear of returning memories and expectations of another tsunami. Especially in Prasanniya’s case, the fear of return was also related directly to fear of ghosts and their possible malicious acts against her family.32 However, she eventually started to return and managed to spend increasingly 32 | While Prasanniya frequently mentioned her fear of encounters with ghosts or of ghosts inflicting illnesses on her children, she never made explicit a fear of being possessed herself.

Chapter Seven: Paittiyam – Risking Madness

more time in their former area during the second year after the tsunami. This suggests that some form of gradual reconciliation with the place occurred over the longer term. Possibly some “healing” also involved her witnessing reconstruction of their former home and then reoccupying it. Conversely, Ramesh – too afraid of being overwhelmed by images – never spent any longer periods in Navalady. It remained an inherently traumatic place for him; a place that kept the events vehemently alive in a never-ending past.33 He refrained from accompanying his family members on their occasional returns, and they too preferred for him to stay away in order not to aggravate his situation. His wish to live in Navalady and be able to jump at any fishing opportunity was also one that soon became quite impossible, given his deteriorating physical health. The nostalgia for Navalady in both accounts appeared related to the rhythms of ritual practices and temple festivals. Images arose that testified to the way in which religious practices formed part of their daily lives in Navalady, structured the year, and contributed to social standing in different ways. Ramesh described the importance of the village’s main temple festival; the grandness of this annual event at the Kadanacciyamman temple reflected back on the residents who took pride in hosting it. Members of his extended family participated in practices implying closeness to the mother goddess, testified to as well in one of his (classificatory) brothers dancing as a medium. Prasanniya recalled how she used to observe diet rules on religiously important Fridays and how well the family participated in local temple festivals. This included the family’s generous food offerings to the whole neighbourhood on its specific temple days, indicative of the family’s relatively good economic position, which contributed to their social prestige. All evidence of this was strikingly absent in Prasanniya’s and Ramesh’s lives after the tsunami. Ramesh did not express anger with kadavul or disappointment in the futility of ritual worship; however, he did not engage in any religious practices either. Conversely, Prasanniya’s statement expressed many survivors’ dilemma with the gods who had not prevented the disaster – a dilemma that also needs to be seen against a popular interpretation model according to which the tsunami itself amounted to divine punishment provoked by people’s immoral behaviour over the years or ritual transgressions during temple festivals. Therein resonates what is commonly known as theodicy, the question of how to reconcile godly power and benevolence with human suffering, considerations taken up in Chapter Eight. The memories and associations of Navalady mentioned were also expressed along gender lines. For instance, status and the loss of it due to the tsunami, was 33 | I borrow the phrasing from Assmann ([1999] 2006, 329) who described the traumatic place as one that maintains the event virulently in a past that does not pass, that does not recede into a distant point (“Der traumatische Ort hält die Virulenz eines Ereignisses als Vergangenheit fest, die nicht vergeht, die nicht in die Distanz zurückzutreten vermag”).

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a more dominant concern among men compared to women. It was certainly a recurring theme with Ramesh, with many of his remarks during fieldwork contributing to this impression. For instance, he denounced the small fish they bought from a fish vendor cycling through the temporary shelter site as a kind of fish that they used to ‘throw away with their feet’ in their previous lives as proud fishermen. Conversely, Prasanniya’s way of conjuring up previously observed rules was typical for women and expressive of their daily tasks. As a family’s provider of cooked food, women were the ones who prepared vegetarian or non-vegetarian curries on specific days, undertook extra cleaning work on Friday mornings, and went to a temple, at least on that day. Contrasting depictions of a life before and after the tsunami served to do precisely that: to draw and emphasize clear boundaries between a pre- and post-tsunami time. A refusal to reengage in the practices mentioned was then also connected to a refusal to continue living “as if nothing happened”. In that respect, the importance of these statements can be seen in the symbolism used that underscores the experienced rupture between one’s previous life and the one that follows: of survival after the tsunami. The question of “truth” – of whether speakers had observed the practices previously or not – becomes secondary. Particularly for the case of non-vegetarian Fridays, it is rather to be expected that many of these Karaiyar families had consumed fish on a Friday, just as they did on any other day and without this being considered an insult to the gods.34 This emphasized distinction between a pre- and post-tsunami context gets blurred in regard to the continuity of losses, both human and material, and experiences of violence and social ruptures that mark the two biographies. Armed conflict left obvious traces in the lives of Prasanniya and Ramesh and in those of their families. Developments towards another phase of full-fledged war at the time of fieldwork further impinged on their daily-life circumstances, and we saw a great deal of apprehension in Prasanniya as well as Ramesh. As Walker (2010, 15) put it, while people in Batticaloa had to learn to live with past experiences of violence, they had to do so in an environment in which continuation of violence seemed inevitable. The experience of the tsunami had to be accommodated within this same context. Prasanniya’s life-story reveals her experience of multiple displacement – the same experience shared by thousands of other people in the area. Moreover, the experience relates particularly to the situations of Tamil women, who disproportionately bore the brunt of surviving in a hostile environment, in addition to finding the means to provide for their dependants. In turn, Ramesh’s war experiences revealed the greater risk Tamil men faced in regard to forced

34 | Moreover, it has not been common among our friends to refrain from eating fish after the tsunami, as other people reportedly did, disgusted by the idea that the fish may have fed off the corpses.

Chapter Seven: Paittiyam – Risking Madness

disappearance, recruitment, and murder.35 His memories also indicate the transformation of gender relationships during war when Tamil men depended on their wives, mothers, and sisters to protect them, to proclaim their innocence when confronted by government forces. Further reduction in the “manly” position was seen in Ramesh’s inability to provide economically for his family and in the threat of sexual violence against women that ultimately targeted the protective (and controlling) roles of husbands and fathers. This brings us back to how particularly shattering the tsunami and its aftermath could be to the survivors. The few years of comparative stability that preceded the tsunami and allowed Prasanniya, Ramesh, and others some social and economic gains are of significance. Prasanniya’s household was doing well, thanks not least to her husband’s ownership of a karaivalai. The family lived in a brick house built on deed-held land, had a TV, and was actively engaged in temple festivals. While Ramesh ultimately stayed in a hut with his wife and unmarried daughter, their two elder daughters had been given good houses on deed-held land for their dowry, and Ramesh went fishing regularly. The devastation caused by the tsunami nullified these gains, and economic losses went hand in hand with losses in social status. The survivors saw themselves reduced to ‘refugees’ and ‘beggars’. This meant a life in relief camps and dependency on aid from relatives and outside organizations. In this context, Prasanniya’s situation found relief in the fact that her husband continued fishing and, by and large, regained his assets. Moreover, he did not take to drinking, thus his income was fully available to the family. Yet Ramesh did not regain his life as the fisherman he had been, and he was unable to tackle daily life necessities. It fell on Indurani, for instance, to go to the market on Sundays, which had previously been his role (in line with the local gender division of labour). As he increasingly came to fail as the “head of household” and expected main-income provider, his wife and daughters had to face negotiations with family outsiders and ‘keep the rupee rolling’ on whatever income they could make. This consisted largely of what Nanthini received in aid as a “woman-headed household” and Selvy’s and her occasional involvement in cash-for-work programmes. Once posttsunami aid trickled out, parents depended on their married children for their daily curries, with only meagre state welfare support available as cash.36 Overall, the relevance of family and extended kin relationships in regard to coping was clearly revealed in both Prasanniya’s and Ramesh’s situations. In many ways, these formed the essential relationships and sources of support in daily life; their absence left significant gaps. At the same time, the portraits indicated the 35 | See Hyndman and de Alwis (2004), ICG (2011), Thiruchandran (1999), and UNIFEM (2004) for discussions of the gender impacts of war in Sri Lanka. See also Chapter One on this point. 36 | The monthly support granted by the Samurdhi plan amounted to only LKR 260 for the couple at the time.

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limits of kinship, especially within the context of poverty.37 Hence kin networks played a role in Prasanniya’s war-torn biography, as she found refuge at her mother’s sister’s home as a teenager and once more as a bereaved mother of four remaining children after the tsunami. Prasanniya’s situation also bespeaks the significance of close matri-kin for women, as she remained largely alone with her children after the tsunami that killed her sister (and thus her only direct relative in close vicinity). The limits of kinship were seen in the way Prasanniya mistrusted invitations extended by relatives to stay at their places: she suspected such help would end quickly once the relatives became aware of the cost involved in taking care of four children. It may be no coincidence that the help she eventually received from Nirmala, linked her to a neighbour and person who, like her, had originated from a village other than Navalady and also lived among her in-laws. However, that daily relationship lasted only as long as they remained neighbours. Displacement may have fostered new relationships among previous strangers, yet these relationships likely remained unstable as long as “displacement” lasted. Women in particular depended on contacts in close vicinity, given their typically home-based daily lives. Neighbours had the potential to counter the absence of close kin, but hardly to replace them. Conversely, Ramesh was firmly embedded within his immediate family and his wife’s relatives, among whom he had resided since marriage in line with local practice. His wife undertook a series of attempts to ameliorate his situation, with her extended family helping by pooling resources to meet the costs of the more expensive consultations and treatments. While a great deal of help was extended that could not be “paid back” in equal terms at a future point, Ramesh’s family’s expected inability to reciprocate (particularly financially) nevertheless limited the degree to which they could rely on their kin’s support. This constraint was illustrated in their mentioned relationship with the family of Ramesh’s murdered brother. It emerged clearly from conversations other than the depicted survival narrative that Ramesh, his wife, and daughters felt embarrassed to visit Ramesh’s extended family because they ‘had nothing to bring’. Without a gift for the host, a visit seemed inappropriate. Like other social networks, the maintenance and full potential of kin-based relationships also depended on investments including simple material ones. This chapter ends by reiterating the significance of gender and kinship when it comes to coping with crisis, seen in preceding chapters as well. The next chapter continues with the theme of tsunami survivors’ often fraught relationships to the gods that this chapter introduced. This final chapter additionally links to Chapter

37 | See von Benda-Beckmann and von Benda-Beckmann (1994) for the point of kinship forming the main source of social security and its limits among the economically poor in many contexts across the globe.

Chapter Seven: Paittiyam – Risking Madness

Five by elaborating on construction of the housing plan at the relocation site, and reviews this thesis’ core findings in regard to coping processes.

C onclusion This chapter introduces being mad (or having payittiam) as something frequently remarked upon in the tsunami’s aftermath. It was often associated with excessive grief, typically with parental bereavement, as indicated in Prasanniya’s situation. Moreover, it was commonly associated with the mischief of malevolent ghosts and spirits, as seen with Ramesh. However, these two personal situations make it clear that the possible causes of having payittiam went beyond the immediate timeframe to that of exposure to war. Prasanniya’s reviewed anger against the gods testifies to her sense of deep betrayal following the death of her children – especially that of her first-born son – and additional human, material, and social losses due to the tsunami. These latest losses gained devastating power because they occurred within a history of repeated and massive losses, displacement, violence, and suffering. Likewise, Ramesh’s tsunami experiences and their consequences overlapped with what he and those close to him had gone through during decades of armed hostilities. Furthermore, war was not something that could be delegated to the past, either mentally or in regard to real events of the time. Instead, the threat of war and of all that it signified had seeped back into daily life during the time of our conversations. There is thus a continuity of suffering and various kinds of violence that criss-crosses the rupture between former pre-tsunami lives and the post-tsunami present so clearly represented in our research contacts’ statements, practices, and living conditions. What has been discussed as the fears of risking madness or ghostly possession, relates to experiences of events and situations as extreme and extraordinary as they are part of what tragically makes up a great deal of daily life in the context described. Hence what is described here relates to wider-reaching questions of a society’s means of dealing with the impact that such experiences have on personal lives and social relationships. The portraits demonstrate how difficult it is to refer to “normal” deaths, “normal” bereavement, or “normal” responses to traumatic experiences in a context of such deep human and material loss over long and immediate terms. What remains is to state the obvious point that the “madness” reviewed here resides within the events and processes rather than within the individuals in question.

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Chapter Eight: Closing Words

Shortly before I left Batticaloa in November 2004, a great spectacle was beheld: thousands of snakes were spotted in the lagoon. Young and old gathered over bridges in town to see what supposedly had never happened before. A few observers cautioned that the snakes were probably eels, which gathered in exceptional numbers at the time. However, most were convinced they were snakes and speculated on related miracle stories. When I returned to the field early 2005, an interpretation had been found: the extraordinary snakes had become a foreboding of the tsunami. We came across many more stories during fieldwork about how the disaster could have been foreseen, and possibly prevented, if only people had paid attention to the signs. For example, Kumari told us a story one evening in June 2005. She knew of a female beggar who had walked through parts of Navalady on the day before the tsunami, foretelling the pending disaster. Yet the residents there had not believed her words and had chased her away. It was clear for Kumari that this beggar figure was a warning from god, specifically Navalady’s protective amman goddess Kadanacci.1 However, no one had given this sign much notice. Had the beggar walked through her neighbourhood, Kumari hinted, she and the people of that part of the village would have heeded the warning, and outcome would have been different. Kumari explained to us further during that conversation that the disaster was punishment for illegitimate sexual relationships that had taken place 1 | According to Lawrence (2010, 88), Kadanacciyamman receives her name from kadal (sea), atci (ruling), and amman (mother or goddess) and is therefore literally the “Queen of the Sea”. A likewise plausible etymology is based on the Tamil word naacci (a noble or refined “lady”) which then makes the amman the “Lady of the Sea” (McGilvray, email communication, 12 April 2012). The Kadanacciyamman temple is the main Hindu temple in Navalady (compare also the remarks by Prasanniya and Ramesh in the preceding Chapter Seven). See Lawrence (2010) for an account of this sea goddess and the Navalady people’s relationships to the amman after the tsunami, important for this chapter. Morever, the article by Lawrence (2010, 89) shares a story of Kadanacciyamman’s tsunami warning with more details related by another woman from Navalady.

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during the temple’s annual festival over recent years. This immoral behaviour had made the sea goddess ‘boil with anger’ that resulted in massive waves destroying all of Navalady, killing so many and tormenting the rest. Not all our friends agreed with this version of events. Many of them refused to believe that the gods or any other source had warned of a pending catastrophe. As seen in previous chapters, some people consequently turned away from previously worshipped gods, explicit in their anger with deities who had neither prevented the disaster nor rescued beloved family members. As I argue below, such anger fits well with Kumari’s explanatory model of the tsunami as something that resembled divine retribution for morally flawed humans: the deities themselves were not rejected after the tsunami. Nor was the possibility of their having played a role in the destruction necessarily rejected. Disputed among the explicitly angry ones was the implied “correctness” or adequacy of this role. To take it a step further, what was disputed was a tendency to perceive suffering death and bereavement as appropriate or somehow “deserved” in individual cases. Furthermore, during the first one or two years following the tsunami, Kumari often pointed to flocks of crows, saying these had also been observed immediately before the tsunami. The implication here is that crows, viewed locally as messengers and announcers of death, had tried and failed to warn people. This was another expression of Kumari’s belief in divine protection and the failure of humans. It also illustrates a widely-shared alertness to signs of another anticipated disaster.2 All natural phenomena were carefully observed and suspected to be evidence of a pending hazard. Hence Suresh and other fishermen skipped days of fishing when it looked as if it would rain or be stormy.3 They laughed at themselves for doing this. Having said often that there had not been the slightest warning of a tsunami on that calm and sunny 26 December 2004, they knew well that they were caught up in contradictions. I chose these depictions to introduce the aims of this book’s last chapter, because they indicate the multiplicity of losses and complex insecurities that our research contacts bore and shared in common while simultaneously pointing out notable differences in their ways of coping. Disasters across the globe during 2005 and 2006 seemed to prove them right and fuelled ever more rumours and prophecies of pending catastrophes and the “end of the world”.4 A steadily growing 2 | Similarly, Merli (2005, 2009) noted that survivors in southern Thailand tended to view any natural upheaval as a sign of supernatural agency in the aftermath of the disaster. 3 | Hastrup (2011, 61) related similar post-tsunami observations among fishermen in Tamil Nadu to their strategy of perceiving the danger of a tsunami as limited to specific seasons or weather conditions. 4 | The disasters during this period included another earthquake off the west coast of Sumatra and a later tsunami warning in March 2005, hurricane Katrina in southeastern parts of the United States in August 2005, the Kashmir earthquake in October 2005, and earthquakes in Java (Indonesia) during May and July 2006.

Chapter Eight: Closing Words

expectation of an imminent outbreak of war added another layer of fear to this sense of a looming existential threat. As seen in Chapter Five, people made their new homes in the meantime in temporary shelters and sometimes despaired over the possible prospect of having to remain in these shelters permanently, since the relocation plan did not go according to the expected schedule. Hence our friends needed to find ways to cope with the loss of their loved ones, the destruction of former homes and livelihoods, the shattering of previously held certitudes, and fractures in their relationship with the gods. They also had to deal with a militarized life of increasing dynamics, since another armed Tamil organization (the TMVP) rose to power, and the former authority, the LTTE, withered. I review and elaborate on these processes in this closing chapter. Firstly, I continue with the theme of how people interpreted the tsunami occurrence and what role the gods played in it. These considerations bring us back to the beginning of the “post-tsunami” fieldwork context, and they address a crucial form of dealing with the disaster’s aftermath. Secondly, I offer a rough overview on how the new settlement of Tiraimadu was finally established despite a difficult start and the outbreak of war. This gradual beginning of construction work and our research contacts’ subsequent move into their new homes also marks the closure of fieldwork periods that concentrated on people’s “transitional” stays in camps and shelters. Some thoughts on our acquaintances’ relationships to their new village and their former one end the second part of the chapter. The third and final part allows me to reconsider this research’s central findings in regard to social forms of coping and gender relationships. It covers both the aftermath of the tsunami and the wake of another period of war. In the process, I illustrate what coping meant within this context.

A rguing with the G ods af ter the Tsunami A sister of Kumari’s mother, Rasamma, accompanied Vathany and me on our first stroll through Navalady, still full of ruins and rubble then in April 2005. We paused at the damaged statue of Kadanacci that stood in the sandy soil where the goddess’s temple once stood. Rasamma sat down in the sand with tears in her eyes. She had pointed out a tree previously where small green parrots had flocked at the time of the tsunami. Attracted to this sight, people had gathered beneath it. Because people had left their houses to see the birds and had stood outside beneath the tree, as Rasamma put it, they became aware of the waves approaching and sought safety in time. These birds, Vathany explained, are associated with the goddess. This episode brings us back to Kumari’s conviction that the goddess had warned the people ahead of the disaster. Given her trust in kadavul, Vathany appreciated these stories and had even gotten into an argument one day with Indurani. Unlike Kumari and Rasamma, Indurani was convinced that the Hindu

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gods had done nothing to protect or rescue the people. In her disappointment and anger, Indurani had turned to an evangelical church after the tsunami and did not believe any stories of godly warnings that Vathany relayed to her.5 We see similar anger expressed by Prasanniya in Chapter Seven, who refused to worship the gods – at least during the first few years after the tsunami that killed two of her children. Many others among our research contacts reacted similarly, having broken with the gods after the disaster. Some, as exemplified by Indurani, fancied a conversion to Christianity. Yet, like Kumari and Rasamma, others continued their religious relationship, despite their ambivalent attitude towards these same gods and however much they wondered where the gods had been during and since the disaster. Both Sudarshini and Shanthi had lost their children in the tsunami but counted among this group and did not give up on praying to the gods. When thinking about how survivors explained the tsunami, grappling with what has happened, it is useful to consider how misfortune is generally perceived locally. It is important in this regard to note that the people we spoke with tended to associate accidents, losses, ill-health, and bad luck with supernatural forces. Incidents of harm and misfortune were usually explained as having been provoked by the affected person’s wrong-doings, moral faults, or heedlessness of the supernatural. Or it could be traced to effects of the evil eye or the malicious sorcery of others. Against this backdrop, explanations of the tsunami extended logically within a framework of moral or ritual transgressions. Hence the tsunami was frequently related to people’s alleged greed and selfishness. This was further coupled at times with the idea of an angry sea goddess: there was said to have been too much fishing, too much wealth robbed from the sea. It provoked the sea’s anger and caused the tsunami. Lenient observation of temple rituals was also said to have angered the gods. A range of stories circulated about such neglect, changes, or “mistakes” having occurred during rituals (often during temple festivals) along the east coast during the year preceding the tsunami. According to one such story, the recent introduction of “fire-walking” (devotees crossing barefooted a stretch of hot coals) during the Kadanacciyamman festival provoked the tsunami. Various people across Sri Lanka also tended to explain the tsunami within models of godly protection and divine retribution when pointing out places of worship that remained comparatively intact amidst destroyed houses.6

5 | Indurani turned to the church that one of her elder sisters, Pusparaji, had already joined following a severe illness several years earlier. Such “conversions” to Christian churches seemed quite popular among persons hoping for recovery from illness through participation in evangelical sermons. Evangelical churches achieved some popularity in Batticaloa over the recent war-tainted years – a development that gained further impetus following the tsunami. 6 | Use of better construction material for religious places as compared to private homes is another explanation for this difference (see also Simpson and de Alwis 2008, 10).

Chapter Eight: Closing Words

As Oliver-Smith (1996, 308) commented, extreme conditions like those resulting from a disaster confront people with serious existential questions. Survivors find themselves grappling with core concepts in regard to their belief systems, which involve negotiating concepts of justice, questions of causality and responsibility, and the existence of and relationship to the divine. Within the Judeo-Christian scholarly tradition, a catastrophe such as the tsunami is seen as bringing forth what is known as theodicy: how to reconcile the presence of “evil” and unjust suffering with god’s omnipotence and benevolence. The term relates back to Leibnitz in the early eighteenth century but the concept has been widely applied to a variety of “natural” and man-made disasters across different historical, geographical, and cultural contexts ever since the 1755 Lisbon earthquake (Merli 2009, 106–107). In regard to the 2004 tsunami, Merli’s studies (2005, 2009) made use of the theodicy concept and concluded that Buddhists and Muslims of southern Thailand interpreted the disaster as punishment for past “sins”, whether of an ecological, moral, or religious nature. In keeping with Michaels ([1998] 2006, 374), theodicy forms a basic question relevant to all religions: religions basically need to account for the question of why suffering occurs if god is present. Yet answers to this question differ from one religion to another. Variances arise partly from the way in which relationships are conceptualized between humans and god(s). Within Christianity, theodicy inevitably presents a dualism between god and mankind. This differs from Hinduism, where god(s) and humans can be said to form a dualistic unity. In this specific relationship, the gods are not released from their responsibility for suffering: God can cause suffering within Hindu religions, though through acts that relate to the god’s grace, neglect, or error rather than to harsh acts of a punitive god (Michaels [1998] 2006, 376–377). All of this brings me to discussing some of our friends’ observed and explicit anger with kadavul, following the tsunami. Clearly, forms of questioning or outright anger following the death of a loved one are hardly surprising in any sociocultural context. And yet the anger exhibited merits analysis within the specific local and religious context of a reciprocal bond between humans and gods: Hindu Tamils make vows to specific deities and perform certain practices – often highly demanding physically – in order to attain personal goals. These might include being granted good-health, conception of a child, or passing an important exam. This is particularly pronounced with local goddesses so important to social life in eastern Sri Lanka.7 It is very popular, for instance, for people in Batticaloa to undertake fire-walking or having their backs pierced with iron hooks in honour of these goddesses. The vow-taking entails something like a “spiritual contract” (McGilvray 2008, 348) by means of which the devotee fulfils her or his side of the 7 | Local (territorial) forms of the goddess Kali are particularly important as powerful mother goddesses in Batticaloa (Lawrence 2003). See also Kinsey (2003) for a general account on the “wild goddess” Kali.

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bargain when the deity fulfils hers. It is this specific context that I argue allowed for experiencing and expressing anger towards deities who fail to keep their part of the bargain. I also elaborate on these points by continuing with the Navalady people’s relationship to their main village goddess, Kadanacciyamman. Lawrence (2003) describes such local goddesses being venerated as powerful protectors of villages and villagers all along Sri Lanka’s eastern coast. However, these amman are characterized as being prone to “changing face”: they may shift moods from being pleasant and protective to angry and offended, at which point they withdraw their protective power (Lawrence 2003, 107–108). Hence devotees make sure not to provoke the goddesses through neglect but carefully maintain temples and observe proper rituals. Annual temple festivals that last at least one week are important in these efforts to propitiate the goddesses, and they typically happen during the “hot season”. This is viewed as appropriate to the “heat” associated with these goddesses (see McGilvray 1998). The relationship to Kadanacciyamman was particularly precarious in the tsunami’s aftermath. Literally the Queen or Lady of the Sea, Kadannacci was especially important to the fishermen families of Navalady, and the issue of her role in the tsunami was most pressing to many of them. As Lawrence (2010, 90) noted as well, practically everyone in Navalady used to participate in annual festivals for Kadanacciyamman, and all our friends held fond memories of these festivities.8 They liked to describe to us how several theyvam trance dancers used to start performing to a drum beat on these occasions. Some theyvam would remain immobile for as long as a spell cast on them prevented them from dancing or until someone with the power to ‘cut’ the spell figuratively “untied” them. Our acquaintances recalled with special fascination the theyvam who cut his forehead with a big knife without enduring lasting injuries (and who, as the man he was in daily life, had the power to detect and remove the effects of harmful magic inflicted by others). Rasamma’s daughter Padma also remembered how 8 | As for organization of the Kadanacciyamman temple festival overall and preparation of the temple puja with sweet rice during the seven-day festival, several specific families handled the necessities. Such a procedure is commonly linked to a village’s matriclans (kudis) who administer temple affairs in eastern Sri Lanka (McGilvray 1982a, 2008). Lawrence (2010, 89) indicated such kudi organizing for the Kadanacciyamman temple as well. However, as stated in Chapter Four, our research contacts did not practice the kudi system. The few we asked directly about how the temple festival was organized during my brief field visit in March 2009 were not aware of a possible kudi system underlying it. Instead, the opinion prevailed that some families (and one sports club) had been involved in these tasks over generations, but this owed to economic reasons (meaning that those families would refrain from the tasks once they lacked the resources). More precise and in-depth research would be needed to clarify contemporary operation of the Kadanacciyamman temple.

Chapter Eight: Closing Words

the medium possessed by a cobra goddess had been angered during the 2004 festival and had sworn that he would not return the next year. It was obvious to her that this oath was realized, since no festival took place in the year following the tsunami. It was no coincidence that Kumari told us of Kadanacci’s warnings when that amman’s temple festival was usually held in the former village, since memories of those days were particularly vivid in our acquaintances’ minds at that time. However, hardly anyone practiced even the most rudimentary rite for the goddess during the year following the tsunami. Kalidasan, Padma’s classificatory appappa (paternal grandfather), who had danced as a theyvam at this festival ever since he was 17 years old, was an exception. Despite some 35 years of annual trance-dancing and his closeness to the amman, she had sent him no warning of the tsunami, he told us one afternoon in Padma’s shelter in September 2005. The massive waves had killed his wife and several of his children and grandchildren. Yet he did not lose faith in Kadanacciyamman: during that festival time in June 2005, he went to the place where the temple had been and cooked sweet rice for the scant few who passed by to receive it. One is left wondering, as did Lawrence (2010, 90), how survivors maintained their faith in Kadanacci, though she had not saved their many beloved family members despite their commitment to harsh vows made in worshipping the goddess. In relation to the people we spoke with and the anger many of them expressed, I argue that what developed was less a matter of a loss of faith than a way to keep arguing with the gods. This is to say at a most basic level: as long as there was anger, the gods continued to exist. Moreover, interpretation of the tsunami as a divine act is important. As mentioned above: what was angrily rejected was not the possible role of gods in the disaster but the implication that what happened was an appropriate and adequate godly response. More precisely, god(s) may well have been involved in the disaster but as possibly flawed deities rather than “righteously punitive” ones. That is, the deities were blamed for having failed to keep their side of the bargain within a reciprocally agreed relationship between a devotee and the gods in the way described. This touches ultimately upon questions of what was considered “just” and “deserved”. I elaborate on this point by observing how survivors dealt with the differences in their losses. Among our research contacts, everyone directly endured human, material, and social losses due to the tsunami. However, the loss of immediate family members was generally acknowledged as the most severe blow. In adult lives, this meant that suffering was associated with the loss of spouses and children. Grief over the death of such intimate family members was seen potentially as inviting “madness”, as discussed in Chapter Seven. This view raises the question of why certain individuals or families had to bear such suffering, while others managed to escape this “worst possible scenario”. Subsequently, in perceiving the tsunami as divine retribution, the question arose as to why some people were “let down” or even “punished” more than others.

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Fig. 8: Kadanacciyamman temple, Navalady, April 2005 (© Katharina Thurnheer) This brings us back to Kumari’s statement at the chapter’s opening. She remarked that residents of a particular Navalady section failed to recognize the godly warning of a female beggar, whereas people of her neighbourhood would have known better.9 This implies self-righteousness, which Deepa formulated in more precise words one day in August 2005. That time she referred to an accident before the tsunami that risked killing her whole family: she had always maintained a “good life” that pleased the gods, and this was why she and her family survived unharmed then as well as during the tsunami (Deepa along with her husband felt especially close to the goddess Kali). Taking this interpretation a step further, a distinction emerges between families whose members lived virtuous lives and survived intact in contrast to those who behaved “badly” and were subsequently killed or faced deep bereavement. There was indeed a tendency to say in daily-life conversations that “bad” (greedy, selfish, immoral) people died, or should have died in the 2004 tsunami or are likely to die in the next one. While this was also simply a turn of daily-life speech, it indicates what would have been considered a more “correct” and possibly more “just” tsunami outcome. Which instead was 9 | This said section of the village formed the margins of Navalady. Many poor people lived in huts there that were totally wiped out by the tsunami (in fact, many of our other research contacts lived in this section, including Indurani, Nanthini, and Sudarshini). Given Kumari’s comparatively well-off situation, her remark also implies a great deal of “othering”.

Chapter Eight: Closing Words

frequently deplored for having killed all the “good” (generous, kind, morally acting) persons – in fact, one’s dear family members and friends. How does this relate to people’s relationship to the gods after the tsunami? It is tempting to draw a connection between these differences in current human losses and differing individual relationships to the gods. Kumari, Rasamma, Padma, and Deepa were all spared what was considered the gravest experience (that is, the loss of a spouse and especially of children due to the waves). All of them maintained a relationship of trust in gods in some way, specifically in Kadanacciyamman and Kali. Conversely, Nanthini lost her baby and been widowed, while Prasanniya lost two children due to the massive waves. Both were explicit in their anger with the gods, emphasizing that the failure to spare these family members caused their rejection of the gods. Many others were also angry with the Hindu gods due to deaths of family members and later refused to worship them. Thus, the death of family members seemingly encouraged such hostile attitudes towards the divine. Yet there are counter-examples, as seen with Sudarshini, Shanthi, and Padma’s appappa. As argued earlier, interpretation of the tsunami as a divine act tends to place blame on victims at the social group level, the family level, and the individual level. In the end, such “blame” may be accepted or not. In the case of Prasanniya and Nanthini, both refused to accept any failings of their own at the individual and family level. Both asserted that they (the mothers, children, and the family as a whole) had worshipped the gods and made extra vows in the preceding years, but the same gods had done nothing for them in return. Nanthini told of how she had walked the fire at Batticaloa’s famous Kali temple in Punnaichcholai for five years in a row and had even promised to continue the practice before the tsunami.10 She also said that she had prayed for her baby, who was sick at the time, at the Mamamgam Pillaiyar temple shortly before the tsunami, but then the waves ‘snatched’ the child away ‘like a pey’. Prasanniya, in turn, described her family’s special engagement at the Kadanacciyamman temple festival, its additional activities for the local Pillaiyar temple, and her son’s special commitment to all these activities. In other words, nothing in the attitudes and lives of Nanthini, Prasanniya, and those family members that perished in the waves would suggest such a lack of protective power by the gods – or even justify a godly act of destruction. Contrary to these two women, some of our friends accepted this interpretation, even at a personal level. This was the case with Sudarshini who believed at times that god had punished her with the death of her three children in the tsunami. This, for instance, was revealed when Sudarshini’s sister’s son had a serious accident some six months after the tsunami, and Sudarshini had wailed that god was now ‘punishing’ her sister as well, though her sister had 10 | Before the tsunami she had fulfilled this vow by walking barefooted across hot coals ever since being cured of a serious sickness (following her mother’s promise to the goddess that Nanthini would walk the fire if she recovered).

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been spared the death of her children in the tsunami. Yet, as seen in Chapter Six, Sudarshini did not “blame” and chosen not to reject the gods. Instead, she turned to them, hoping for their future assistance. Similarly, Shanthi did not contemplate renouncing the gods or changing her religion (see Chapter Three). Kalidasan was among the few who continued to honour Kadanacciyamman, even in 2005. Perhaps the position of these few exemplifies those who relate the tsunami to acts of incomprehensible or even moody gods. Perhaps they accepted punishment for something they had done unknowingly. Perhaps they managed to put aside such questions and find the means to carry on living by immersing themselves in the necessities of daily life. In the cases of those who were explicit in their anger towards the gods, it may well be that this anger complicated bereavement by preventing the bereaved from placing hope in the deities. This would have prohibited them from performing rites that, by their performance, would have aided in re-establishing notions of the familiar and “normal”. Yet, to reiterate the point made here, their anger was not only part of grieving but also of negotiation with the gods. And this negotiation was carried out within the bargaining relationship between the gods and a devotee. In the end, all of this means that the relationship is maintained with a specific god and the gods in general, however fraught it may be. Some of our friends’ anger towards the gods (and even their explicit refusal to worship kadavul after the tsunami) did not necessarily mean a final break with the supernatural. Instead, it represented an ongoing confrontation with the gods, even if it encompassed a temporary break in the relationship. As seen in Prasanniya’s case in the preceding chapter, refusals to worship appear as refusals to interact – not as an atheist statement on the absence of god(s). Ultimately, this allows for reparation of the relationship to the divine. This resembles ways in which people re-worked their relationships after the tsunami or how periods of katikka illai (that is, periods of not speaking to each other) resulted from conflicts between relatives and neighbours, usually leading to renewed contacts at some future point. Hence survivors re-positioned themselves towards the gods, and their relationships to the divine changed over time. This is seen later in this chapter when noting the growing attraction of Kadanacciyamman’s temple festival over the following years. Before resuming the topic of how the relocation project finally went ahead, while war had escalated, I wish to conclude my thoughts on people’s “posttsunami” relationships to the divine by linking up with the context of war that permeated all of this. Lawrence’s (1997, 2000, 2003) work demonstrated that rites in honour of amman and practices such as fire-walking significantly increased in popularity during the war years (see also McGilvray 2008, 347–349). During a time when close family members are sent to war, numerous people “disappear” or risk torture in custody, the power of these goddesses to protect life and to take it away are of special relevance. What is more, Lawrence (2003; 2010, 98) noted how some people resorted to taunting the amman and pleading with her when their children remained “missing”, due to war. This was seen to be in line with the way

Chapter Eight: Closing Words

people worship and treat the goddesses as family members and can thus get into actual arguments with them, especially when family members face difficulties. I have argued above that our friends’ responses after the tsunami fit into such a pattern of arguing. What is perhaps decisive in what has been reviewed here is that our acquaintances reacted to the premises of death among their family members rather than on the uncertainty of their fate. There was no longer hope for Prasanniya and Nanthini to achieve some form of protection for those lost by taking vows on their behalf.

A midst W ar , Tir aimadu at L ast The outbreak of full-fledged war was imminent upon my return to Sri Lanka in March 2006, and both sides of the conflict seemingly awaited any excuse to launch an attack. By then, anti-NGO sentiments had become more virulent with “tsunami” and “peace” work denounced by extreme nationalist rhetoric. In the east, part of this took form in threatening campaigns against female staff and accusations against international organizations of being involved in sex scandals, as mentioned in Chapter One. Open warfare finally broke out in the Trincomalee district north of Batticaloa at the end of April 2006. Distant shelling accompanied our nights in Batticaloa town as government forces went ahead to conquer Vaharai, the northern part of Batticaloa controlled until then by the LTTE. The sounds of war came ever closer until one day in late July 2006 when our friends’ shelters began rattling and the ground vibrated from explosions while jets passed overhead. ‘In Navalady the tsunami kills us; in Tiraimadu we get killed by bombs’, Sudarshini remarked that day. Fortunately, that did not happen. Yet insecurity reigned high, and almost all the numerous international post-tsunami aid workers left the region. The dreaded Special Task Force (STF), an elite military police unit, moved into Batticaloa town in early August. Its members went on house searches, armed motorbike units browsed through the streets, and check-points mushroomed at every possible spot. Abductions of Tamil youth continued to rise, as the LTTE and its splinter-group competed with each other in recruiting combatants. Members of both groups appeared at the housing site to intimidate or punish whomever they pursued, but only the TMVP could expose its rifles. Thus the unhindered armed movements of its members belied any governmental claims of not supporting that group. In addition, STF personnel regularly patrolled the lanes of our friends’ temporary homes.11 Young Tamil men especially faced humiliation and physical violence. Women were wary of the troops’ reputation for sexual violence. The military and 11 | Feared though the STF was, its members were also respected as being well-educated and courageous. Our young male friends mused jokingly over the difference between this elite unit, whose members dared to walk through the temporary shelter site in groups of

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police repeatedly conducted home-search operations and “round-ups” of the kind described in the Prologue. Occasionally this meant that men were herded to be intimidated in one place, while women remained at the side, watching and on the alert to follow should any of the men be taken away. These developments prompted our research contacts to more strongly reconsider their relationships in terms of potential threat and security. Examples of this include Gheeta and Sujatha in 2006 urging Murali to break off his friendship with a former LTTE combatant. And they include Suresh who started giving some fresh fish to soldiers from the army camp located on his way to and from the sea. He hoped that such gestures would assure his safe passage in expected future ‘troubles’. Social life in Batticaloa diminished with escalation of armed conflict, as people retreated to their homes. However, some remarked that even ‘walls have ears’, thus expressing the reigning mistrust and danger of discussing political developments outside an ever-shrinking circle of confidants. Whenever the temporary shelter site seemed to lull into silence, we could be sure that a serious incident had happened close-by – or even as far away as in the south of the island.12 Thus we spent many quiet days in the company of our female acquaintances and their children. Indeed, these days seemed to be particularly filled with maternal moments: by then, several “post-tsunami” babies had been born, and conversations about their care dominated our visits, while killings raged elsewhere. In contrast, “politics” were more typically addressed when husbands or male relatives joined us and shared rumours about the latest incidents or developments on the warfront. Yet this apparent dichotomy of maternal housewives and men in touch with the outside world reflected only one side of the coin. The trend within gender relationships noted during preceding periods of war in Sri Lanka’s was also evidenced in this time of increased piraccinai when men stayed home and women went out to manage necessities. Hence fishermen, fearing harassment by security forces, missed out on their catches during such times. As Suresh commented on one such day, when the LTTE attacked the government’s naval base in Galle in October 2006, there were ‘no curries’ that day. Upon news of the attack, he did not go fishing in anticipation of tight security measures on his way to the sea; therefore, there was nothing to cook for the family. Men also refrained from travelling to LTTE-controlled areas for fear of being held and forced to support the fight. Their wives and mothers went out to cross these borders instead, making use of their seemingly apolitical positions as “wives” and “mothers”, testifying to forms of women’s ambivalent empowerment in terms of increased mobility due to only two or three and regular soldiers who were deemed so afraid of a possible LT TE attack that they only showed up in large groups. 12 | Examples of such eerily quiet days when families remained largely at home included a time when more than 60 civilians were killed in a LT TE mine attack on a bus near Anuradhapura in June 2006 or when an LT TE suicide attack on a navy convoy killed almost 100 in Habarana in October 2006 (compare Map 1 for locations).

Chapter Eight: Closing Words

war developments. While the numbers of murder casualties clearly demonstrate the risk of Tamil men being killed, I was surprised by how little the risks were acknowledged for harassment and abuse of women during these times of political violence.13 Some examples of such border crossings by women among our acquaintances as wives and mothers provide anecdotal evidence of the conjunction between the effects of war and the tsunami. For instance, Gheeta went to Kokkadichcholai with her mother in May 2006, at the time the major town of LTTE-controlled parts of Batticaloa district. They went to pay the LTTE-imposed yearly “tax” of LKR 3,000 for Gheeta’s husband’s outboard motorboat. Gheeta’s husband, who originated from an area under LTTE control, could not escape such taxes. And though he often praised the LTTE, he certainly wished to refrain from further direct involvement with the movement and avoid any likely threats along the way. The taxes, in turn, were imposed on the boat he had received through post-tsunami aid, thanks only to some extra political help (which bolstered his entitlement to a new motorized boat, despite his having been a canoe-based lagoon fisherman). Another example included Padma’s sister whose husband had been abducted from a public bus on his way to Vaharai in September 2006, soon after its conquest by government forces in collaboration with the Karuna group (TMVP). The young woman went with her baby daughter in her arms to plead with Karuna group members for her husband’s release, emphasizing her situation as a wife and mother dependent on her husband and as “tsunami victim” who faced many hardships. Whether she was successful in her strategy or not, her husband was indeed set free several days later. Military offensives made thousands of people homeless who then sought refuge among their relatives and in camps throughout Batticaloa. Temporary shelters for those affected by the tsunami also came to accommodate some of their war-displaced relatives. Zaeera College camp, only recently vacated of its last “tsunami victims”, was re-established along with other camps in Batticaloa by September 2006. Once government forces deemed Vaharai “cleared” of the LTTE, they pressured former residents to return, often against their will. Early the following year, the military moved to conquer the district’s interior part, west of the lagoon. This resulted in attacks and counter-attacks directly affecting urban Batticaloa. The sounds of war soon became ear-deafening, due to the army’s frequent use of multi-barrel rocket launchers. More refugees streamed into town, particularly once the LTTE actually let civilians flee. Camps seemed to take over

13 | See Chapter Three for findings of human rights sources showing that predominantly Tamil men were murdered during this time. See ICG (2011) for a recent report on violence against women during the final round of war in Sri Lanka, which includes references to cases of sexual harassment, rape, and murder of Tamil women by security forces since 1990.

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more and more of whatever space remained. 14 This included erection of tents for the newly displaced along the margins of housing construction in Tiraimadu. Tents also arose in places within the temporary shelter site, where a limited number of families affected by the tsunami had moved out only recently in order to live in their new homes. Indeed (and perhaps surprisingly), construction of permanent houses within this post-tsunami relocation site had commenced in the meantime. The war actually helped get the process rolling for our friends.

Realizing Tiraimadu In fact, people from Navalady still waiting for new homes in Tiraimadu staged a three-day sit-in before offices of the district secretariat in October 2006. Their leading camp representative at the time organized the protest. All relocating families were commanded to participate in the event. While not all of them felt comfortable doing so (and some only attended for a short time), all seemed proud of it and the local publicity it achieved. Following this protest, an NGO, prevented from accessing its planned project sites areas controlled up to then by the LTTE, re-directed its resources in support of housing construction in Tiraimadu due to the fighting. Other organizations that still operated in Batticaloa but were confined to a stretch of government-controlled areas could also concentrate efforts on this relocation programme. In fact, the first 80 houses were established and occupied as early as October 2006. These houses were donated to former residents of Dutch Bar, a predominantly Burgher (Eurasian) village neighbouring Navalady. Two organizations had taken responsibility for its housing needs soon after the tsunami. Various other donors had shown less commitment in regard to their pledges. Ultimately, it took another year and a half until all of our acquaintances had moved into their new houses in Tiraimadu. A brief outline of that development follows below. As noted in Chapter Five, Navalady was initially declared a special zone with all its residents required to relocate. That status was soon challenged, and attempts were made to promote the return of those who lived beyond the generally applied buffer zone (the government prohibited permanent construction within 200 metres of the sea in eastern Sri Lanka). A period of uncertainty followed locally when it remained unclear whether or not all former residents beyond that zone were to return, while creation of a buffer zone itself was disputed nationally. A change in Sri Lankan central government brought new reconstruction guidelines by 2006. In the case of Navalady and neighbouring villages, the no-settlement demarcation line was revised downward to 125 metres from the sea. Households beyond that area could finally choose to either relocate to Tiraimadu or return 14 | By the end of March 2007, there were a total of 153,587 persons displaced in the Batticaloa district according to figures obtained from the local government agent’s office.

Chapter Eight: Closing Words

to their former homes. While some families opted in favour of establishing new houses in their former seaside home-sites, many more remained with the prospect of inland relocation. Tiraimadu was also deemed a special case within the reconstruction efforts in and beyond Batticaloa. From its inception, it had entailed a very ambitious plan: the relocation site was to provide new houses to some 1,600 families from the four coastal villages of Navalady, Dutch Bar, Thiruchendur, and Palameenmadu (see Map 2 in Chapter Two). It was envisaged as a semi-urban outskirt that was still close enough to the sea (at a distance of about four kilometres) to enable fishermen to continue their trade. However, in regard to processes that characterized the plan’s implementation, the project was less special. Instead it was largely realized among poorly coordinated top-down measures typical of post-tsunami reconstruction and rehabilitation efforts island-wide. The housing scheme was to be created jointly by governmental agencies and donors (mainly NGOs). As was the case in relocation projects generally, the state took charge of identifying suitable land and providing the basic infrastructure, such as roads and sanitation systems, while the NGOs assumed responsibility for actual housing construction. From its inception, the project of establishing Tiraimadu proved complicated. Initial problems included the difficulty of obtaining enough state land, and the state had to buy private land to ensure the required space. Furthermore, the land identified was found to be prone to flood during the monsoon season. This led several donors to withdraw from the project, while those remaining were forced to find solutions to proceed. Other problems lay in antagonism between a powerful central government and local actors with limited decision-making authority.15 Problems continued once construction work had commenced, and government agencies and donors blamed each other for ever increasing delays. Coordination failures became such an issue that NGO actors were reminded at 2007 meetings to please ‘have roads meet’ when donors proceeded to build sections of roads within the settlement. Despite donors’ previous expectation of a more participatory settlement planning process, a state agency produced the final design. It was characteristic of state-sponsored housing schemes all over Sri Lanka.16 Several sectors of neatly clustered plots made up the basic plan. Local government’s divisional secretary allocated these sectors to the various donors and provided them with a list of beneficiaries. Each beneficiary family was assigned a 15-perch compound (equivalent to 375 square metres) based largely on its former village affiliation 15 | For instance, important coordination meetings were held initially in far-away Colombo. Though this changed during 2005, the centre remained a powerful actor that easily and unpredictably overruled decisions taken at the local level. 16 | The design was said to result from governmental plans for a housing project in Tiraimadu predating the tsunami. See Brun and Lund (2010) for their discussion of “nucleated” housing plans in Sri Lanka in relocation projects before and after the tsunami.

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and marginally accounting for relatives to share neighbourhoods. Almost no consultations with the future house owners took place; almost all depended on government decisions or varying donors’ criteria. The overall process illustrated that “beneficiaries” at times amounted to little more than numbers in distribution routines. Plots were allocated before all final housing donors had been found. And while some donors focused on taking responsibility for housing needs of one of the relocating villages, others concentrated on specific criteria such as providing housing for the elderly or for women-headed households. Still others finally stepped in simply to supply the remaining homes required. Due to this combination of top-down, ad-hoc, and little coordinated measures, it seemed a lottery determined which plot of land our research contacts received and under which sponsorship they fell. This not only meant many months of uncertainty but many families also experienced having a plot of land given to them and then taken back – of having their names appear on a beneficiary’s list one day only to have it deleted the next day. The divisional secretariat, for example, drew up a list of beneficiaries that included numerous young people for an organization that supported only the elderly. While the people listed were informed, the organization intervened with the secretariat to request a revised list based on its support criteria. Thus a new list of names was produced. Some of our friends’ names appeared on at least two or three lists before they were finally “placed” on the final one. Eight donors had pledged initially to cover the number of houses required. In fact, a surplus of almost 1,000 houses were promised to be built at the outset, when NGOs planned to provide 2,500 units in March 2005. The list of organizations involved varied considerably over the course of time, as NGOs pulled out due to security reasons, financial reconsiderations, and the simple suspicion that the relocation plan was doomed to fail. The number of houses required changed as well, mainly due to the relaxation mentioned in the buffer zone. But it also owed to corrections made in the beneficiary lists when entitlements were cross-checked. A total of 11 donors finally completed construction of slightly fewer than 1,000 permanent family houses, several community buildings, a primary health care clinic, and a primary school.17 Another donor implemented the necessary drainage 17 | Helvetas, Lions Club, Oxfam Australia, Sri Lanka Shipping Tsunami Trust (SLST T), Sri Lanka Solidarity, Swiss Red Cross (SRC), TRO, and Worldvision formed the eight initial donors. Of them, the TRO had pledged 1,000 houses. But that organization had withdrawn by March 2006, along with SRC and Worldvision. Hence, only five organizations remained, leaving housing needs unmet. The following year another two of the initial organizations pulled out, while additional donors stated interest or made temporary pledges. Eleven donors committed themselves to build almost 900 of the 940 houses required as of March 2007: Care International, Help Age, Helvetas, Jesuit Refugee Service, Munich Municipality, Oxfam Australia, Samaritans Purse, SLST T, UNHabitat, Young Men Christian Association (YMCA), and Emergency Architects (UNHabitat and Emergency Architects later withdrew). In addition, Merlin set up a clinic and UNICEF a primary school.

Chapter Eight: Closing Words

system while others sponsored access to water in the form of hand-pumps or wells, and the government provided electricity and transport services. Thus Tiraimadu was born. The plan finally proceeded in a combination of socalled “donor-driven” and “owner-driven” approaches in housing construction, the two primary approaches in post-tsunami Sri Lanka.18 The donor-driven approach denoted a process often figuratively referred to as one in which future house owners were simply “handed over the keys” to their new homes by a donor that had fully constructed them. While these donors varied in regard to how far they consulted with the beneficiaries (if at all) as to the design, location within the compound, or ownership of the house, they usually managed the entire finance and construction of the buildings. The donor-driven approach was typically associated with relocation projects that compensated families with new houses who could not resettle in their former homes. Conversely, the owner-driven approach meant greater participation on behalf of the beneficiaries. They received money in several instalments and technical support in building the homes under their own supervision. This approach was primarily connected with reconstruction of homes in their previous location and received greater impetus when the change in buffer zone speeded up the return of a greater number of households. In the case of Tiraimadu most houses were completed and donated by specific donors. However among the involved organizations, two followed the owner-driven approach. These two organizations built houses exclusively (but not entirely) for people from Navalady. At the end, almost half of the families relocating from Navalady received houses via the owner-driven approach. But donors supplied houses to the remainder from Navalady as well as to residents of the other relocating villages. This difference in approach raised questions of equity, enhanced by the fact that decisions about which donors were responsible for which individual families lay largely outside the beneficiaries’ influence. The result was that some families were spared the hassles of construction work, forfeiting any say in the process, while others had to manage cash instalments and construction workers, but enjoyed a degree of autonomy in the process. Financial discrepancies, between the approaches but also within them, added to concerns over inequity. The ownerdriven approach was based on governmental compensation of LKR 250,000 for a fully damaged house. This sum proved insufficient to cover construction costs from the outset and entirely inadequate once the cost of material and labour rose with demand. Donors jumped in to “top up” this sum across the island with typically another LKR 250,000 per house, though the precise financial “topping up” varied between organizations implementing housing projects. Construction of donor-driven houses usually started off with at least this doubled sum and 18 | This corresponds to the basic and most-commonly used differentiation. However, other approaches represented a combination of the two. See Joint Report (2006, 15) for an overview of the four forms of housing assistance as outlined in the revised housing policy of 2006.

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would finally range between LKR 600,000 and LKR 750,000 in Tiraimadu. However, beyond financial differences and variances in participation, the houses corresponded to a similar standard model. It consisted of a living room or ‘hall’, two bedrooms, a kitchen, and toilet facilities. Our acquaintances who fell under the owner-driven approach resented the prospect of having to perform construction work, not least because this differed from their expectations in being granted completed houses. Some resentment also traced from suspicion that the money for housing would not suffice to cover real costs. The financial “top-ups” from donors proved reassuring. For some families, though, their suspicions were confirmed. Sudarshini and Rajan, for example, could not counter the exaggerated demands of construction workers and ended up with heavy debts. Theirs was also a case that illustrates the difficulties people ran into when unable to negotiate with labourers. Such difficulties were commonly predicted to arise in women-headed households, because it was thought almost impossible for women to gain the respect of an all-male construction team. Nanthini was among those who felt unable to shoulder all that construction entailed, and she dreaded having to face the labourers daily (however, she did receive some support in these matters from her brother Suresh and other male relatives as work progressed). Yet other families appreciated the independence they were afforded. One example, Vasuki, as seen below, was overjoyed with the floor tiles she and her husband chose for their new home. Another example was Nanthini’s brother Suresh, who went so far as to build an extra room in addition to the standard house model, though he did so with a loan. His decision indicates some of the competition evident among the new home owners. However, instead of aspiring for fancy floor marbles, Suresh planned to have a heap of fine sand placed inside their new ‘hall’: he hoped to relax on this nice sand after work and enjoy the sound sleep of former times when they used to sleep outside in Navalady. Partly due to their appreciation of being granted completed houses of significant financial value, those who benefitted from the donor-driven approach hardly complained about having virtually no say in regard to their construction. Consultation issues ranged from personal preferences to customary Tamil practices in regard to housing design (for instance, having the front door of a house face the east). While some people raised these concerns, for our research contacts it was most important of all to perform the ritual of laying the foundational stone and inaugurating the completed house.19 At the end, the differences in approach and outcome seemed to have been accepted as standard practice – the inevitable injustices of life. And yet, these inequities were largely recognized as being linked to differing socio-political positions and personal networks. During my last field visit in 2009, our acquaintances did not dwell on the inequalities mentioned between them based on differences between owner-driven or donor19 | For Tamil concepts relating to housing construction, see Daniel (1984, 105–141) and Pfaffenberger (1982, 124–134).

Chapter Eight: Closing Words

driven housing models. Instead, some spoke clearly and resentfully about how a few managed to benefit disproportionally from aid through deceit.20 The location of close relatives within the settlement had a greater impact on daily relationships among our acquaintances. This neighbourhood pattern was linked to the way in which the planners divided the settlement into sectors and allocated them to various organizations. As long as relatives fell under the same donor, the principle of kinship was largely – if not fully – respected, and the homes of parents and married adult children were kept in close vicinity. For instance, Padma’s family house was located close to that of her parents, Gheeta’s close to her sister Sujatha’s, and Nanthini’s house neighboured her brother’s. However, where relatives’ homes came under different donors, walking distances increased beyond what they spoke of as ‘within calling distance’. In this important respect, the criteria of two housing donors merit consideration. As mentioned above, one organization exclusively supported the elderly, and so a cluster of houses was reserved for occupancy solely by couples above the specified age. The other specifically supported women-headed households, resulting in an area of houses occupied solely by widows. Formation of such neighbourhoods seems highly questionable in the local context, since family support is vital to the social security of the elderly and ‘women without husbands’. Due to the little-coordinated, ill-communicated, and corrupt way that characterized handling of beneficiary lists and displaced people’s attempts to be amongst the first in what resembled a “first come, first served” procedure, the actual outcome rendered the underlying criteria as even more dubious. The example of Indurani and her sisters illustrates the issue: Ramesh and Indurani lived in homes donated by the NGO supporting the elderly. But because of this, they lived separately from Nanthini and Suresh, on whom they depended greatly for their daily meals. In turn, Indurani’s elder sisters as well as handicapped Renuka received new homes as acknowledged widows and lived separately in the section of houses for femaleheaded households. This was the case despite their advanced age and frailty, which would have made them more likely candidates for the project supporting the elderly with extra housing infrastructure. The final result of Tiraimadu, with its delays, complications, and the ad-hoc nature in which much of the project proceeded, scarcely resembled what some had imagined. A number of unused community buildings and uninhabited houses I saw during my last visit in March 2009 reflected the meagre consultation with future residents. Nevertheless, Tiraimadu was impressive as a newly functioning settlement with available primary health care facilities, a school, and shiny tarred roads within the settlement not seen in the area before tsunami aid (though outside access remained restricted to a dusty gravel and a heavily damaged old road). More to the point, a settlement had emerged where families lived permanently, had 20 | For instance, financing for a fancy, two-storey house that a former camp committee leader established for himself within Tiraimadu was said to stem from whatever he pocketed when acting as the contractor for houses built to benefit “women-headed households”.

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access to water and electricity, sometimes tended gardens, and travelled to and from work sites, shopping, and education. Thus Tiraimadu escaped the fate of other posttsunami relocation projects in Sri Lanka, which came to resemble ghost towns.21 A crucial question remains: how will the settlement develop over the long term? While it will likely acquire more features of a fishing village over time, Tiraimadu’s location far from direct access to the sea may ultimately discourage involvement in fishing. As stated previously, many among our research contacts hoped for a different future for their children, and relocation was indeed linked to hopes for a life free of the hardship and low social status related to fishing. Yet such development depends on available alternatives and economic opportunities for which there are few signs in eastern Sri Lanka at the time of writing.

Fig. 9: House under construction, Tiraimadu, March 2007 (© Katharina Thurnheer)

Places for the living, places for the dead One day after their move to temporary shelters on the relocation site in mid-2005, an exhausted Vasuki said she never wanted to plan anything again; all planning would be up to kadavul alone. When she had been pregnant with their third child, she explained, she and her husband had started building a house in Navalady. At 21 | Especially in southern Sri Lanka, where there was a notable over-supply of houses, several relocation plans remained unused (see also Chapter Five for discrepancies in the pace of housing reconstruction between Sri Lanka’s east and south).

Chapter Eight: Closing Words

the time, Vasuki was convinced that she would have a girl after two sons. Thus the couple began work on their house, which was to be their daughter’s future dowry. Vasuki recalled that people had warned the couple not to have such expectations lest the house be destroyed. Their warnings proved correct, Vasuki concluded: the tsunami destroyed the house even before it was fully finished. But less than two years later, in early 2007, Vasuki was thrilled about the beautiful floor ‘marbles’ that were to decorate their new house in Tiraimadu. After another two years, Vasuki became a role model in a project that supported women in running micro-businesses: she received a small grant to buy a little stove and successfully baked and sold home-made sweets and cakes for private parties. She earned good money and was happy to be able to give some to her husband. She said she felt tired from all the work brought on by her success and considered taking a break. However, after a break, she hoped to revive an old career dream she nourished while living in Navalady: that of becoming a stylist for girls and women, focussed on special occasions such as puberty ceremonies and weddings. This thesis has looked at specifics in many ways, relating stories about real women and men and their situations. In line with this, the depictions above show Vasuki’s initiative and the way she used the opportunities following earlier setbacks. But her example is not representative, and I do not suggest it to be. While a few among acquaintances shared some of Vasuki’s relative economic comfort and social ease at the time, others remained in very difficult situations. For instance, Sudarshini, Vasuki’s friend from the period when the two young mothers shared a room in Central College camp, could hardly make ends meet. She raised her two small children with another one on the way in early 2009, while her husband’s alcohol dependence drove the family into a socio-economically dire situation. They also received insufficient aid. As noted above, they incurred considerable debts building their new house in Tiraimadu. Moreover, Sudarshini was not involved in any supportive NGO project that could have helped her household gain a degree of economic stability. As the couple placed its hope in the birth of another three children, following the death of the previous three in the tsunami, no sign of any improvement in their living conditions appeared to relieve the harshness from which they had already sought escape before the tsunami. By contrast, her sister Lakshmi managed to do well by tapping into different sources of micro-business support. She managed to access loans from various organizations, actually using them for larger household expenditures rather than for small-scale businesses, and could repay them through her husband’s regular salary. These examples indicate once more that the available support did not necessarily benefit “the poorest”. They also show that family situations and personal skills of the so-called beneficiaries could be decisive when it came to actual benefit from aid. New houses formed the prime asset in post-tsunami aid. Our friends eagerly anticipated their new homes while fearing a return to their destroyed former village as well as hoping to provide their children with a more secure future in Tiraimadu. Their wish to relocate stemmed in part from their precarious economic

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and legal positions of the past, for which the post-tsunami housing plan offered a viable alternative. This expectation of permanent homes in the relocation site – a vision dismissed at times but fought for at others – marked roughly two years of life in transitory housing that comprised my fieldwork periods. When acquired at last, the houses were ritually inaugurated and typically included a room reserved for pictures of deities and deceased family members addressed in daily puja. Some of our research contacts had previously established a small shrine in their temporary shelter, but most refrained from this practice. However, even those families who used to emphasize their break with the gods, typically reserved one of the two standard bedrooms in their new houses as their “shrine room”. These developments indicate that some reconciliation with the gods had taken place by then. Yet there was also an aspect of competition and pride, as families could now show off their sometimes new status as owners of houses accommodating such specific rooms. Furthermore, there was pressure to “do as the neighbours” and to adhere to re-established social norms. Nanthini exemplified this, stating that she had established such a room for puja simply in response to people’s gossip. Tiraimadu had clearly become our acquaintances’ new village of residence, their kiramam, by the time of my last visit in 2009. It was where they lived, where most young children went to school, and it corresponded to their postal address. As for regular temple visits, the residents turned to temples in the surrounding neighbourhood. For example, the Punnaichcholai Kali amman temple was important to many, and it had been so even before the tsunami. In contrast to the relocated residents of Dutch Bar, who had constructed a church within their temporary shelter area, and to those from Thiruchendur, who established a small Hindu temple in their main section within the housing project, the former residents of Navalady did not erect a temple in their new neighbourhood. Instead, their famous temple in Navalady, the Kadanacciyamman temple, was rebuilt in its former place. The reconstruction allowed for an annual festival to be held as soon as 2007, though few chose to participate at the time (see also Lawrence 2010, 90, 103). However, more people returned for this festive occasion the following year, including many of our friends from Tiraimadu. Nirmala, who was closely connected to the temple through her husband’s family, reported proudly how well visited the festival was in 2008. She delighted in telling us more stories about the theyvam (trance) dancers. Some of the possessed had danced at the temple in previous years and some had come to the festival for the first time after the tsunami. The god Hanuman, favoured by childless couples beseeching conception, was present that year too. As noted in Chapter Seven, Prasanniya’s family also returned to participate in the festival. Given people’s continued connection to that temple, Navalady retained some of its force as an ur to those who had originated from Navalady, including the majority of our research contacts who resided in Tiraimadu by then. The annual mortuary rites provided another connection to Navalady. At its first anniversary, a memorial was erected and inscribed with the names of all those

Chapter Eight: Closing Words

from the village who had died in the tsunami. Similar memorials were established in neighbouring villages.22 Our research contacts all contributed to the cost of that memorial in their former village, though it bore little significance in their daily lives. In contrast to these monuments, other shrines that a few of the bereaved built at the places where deceased family members were found or where the family home had once stood must have been more meaningful. 23 The first anniversary of the tsunami disaster in Navalady resembled something of a spectacle with hundreds of curious onlookers witnessing rituals of the bereaved and receiving rice and curries offered by them. During the 2008 rituals the province’s new chief minister, and former leader of the armed LTTE splinter group Pillaiyan made an appearance with his security entourage. It kept everyone tense in anticipation of violence. That visit epitomized political actors’ manipulation of commemorative events.24 All such outside attention notwithstanding, Navalady remained an important place for the bereaved to address their dead and gather collectively for their remembrance at least once a year. The memorials, commemorative events, and purposeful returns of the bereaved turned Navalady into a “place of remembrance” for many of its surviving former residents.25 According to Assmann ([1999] 2006, 309), such a place is like a fragment of a lost or destroyed life. It is a place marked by discontinuity, which results from how the story of a place ended violently, contrasting with the sense of continuity that characterizes a place where families are linked through successive generations by birth and death. And yet the destruction and abandonment of the place does not mean that the story is over. Instead, relics become elements of narratives and thus reference points in a new collective memory.

22 | See also Simpson and de Alwis (2008, 10–11), who noted that tsunami memorials in Sri Lanka’s east were largely based on people’s associations, while in the south state agencies or organizations acted more often as sponsors. The authors also noted a resemblance between some of these tsunami memorials and LT TE war memorials in Batticaloa. 23 | Hastrup (2011, 118–127) makes a similar point for tsunami survivors of a fishing village in Tamil Nadu who cherished other relics rather than collective memorials. See also Lawrence’s (2010, 96–97) study that contains a description and pictures of one such family shrine in Navalady. 24 | Another example is the ceremony that TRO organized six months after the tsunami in which only a few of our friends participated. I was not in Sri Lanka during the annual ceremonies, and the few observations are based on what I was told later by Vathany and our acquaintances. 25 | I translate “place of remembrance” for what Assmann ([1999] 2006, 309) called “Gedenkort” in German and adopt Assmann’s ([1999] 2006, 301) delineation of such places that contrast with others inhabited over generations (“Generationenorte”), which represent long-term family histories.

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Occasional walks with our friends through what used to be their village invariably brought forth stories related to visible traces of violently ended lives and life stories. They entailed recollections of the moment of destruction itself – for example, when an electric pole was pointed out that people had climbed for safety, or memories of things past when a deserted sandy space was identified as the site of one’s former home. Those narratives continued over the years, even when all ruins and rubble had been removed and reconstruction had progressed in Navalady. The place still invited these recollections by survivors, but it depended on survivors to tell their stories in what appeared to be a peaceful, scarcely inhabited seaside. Meanwhile, a few of our acquaintances chose not to return to Navalady, except possibly for death anniversaries. Among them, Renuka’s elderly mother Nallamma and Ramesh, as previously discussed, strictly avoided the area. Their stance characterized how the tsunami experience inscribed itself bodily in the survivors. For some of them, Navalady continued to signify a place that could not be re-inhabited: it remained too much a place of intense trauma where the past did not pass.26

R e vie wing F orms of C oping What has this research revealed in regard to people’s social forms of coping with the disaster during a time marked by renewed escalation of armed conflict? A lasting image of fieldwork is that of women seeking the company of others in moments of particular turmoil. When memories of the tsunami event itself or those of the many who had died proved too overwhelming, women frequently went to see a relative or next-door neighbour. Such a visit did not necessarily mean a reworking of memories in the form of narrative and dialogue. Instead it was often a matter of seeking distraction, often continuing with household chores such as meal preparation. What counted was having company rather than being alone. Such moments of silent togetherness are a reminder of how important it can be for individuals to recognize their suffering to be a shared one and to relate one’s own situation to that of others. In this light, a way of carrying on with daily life issues does not appear as a flight from memories but as a way of integrating them within the present. As for the mutual support implied by seeking company at these moments, this resided in a kind of shared knowing of suffering that acknowledged a personal situation and simultaneously bestowed it with a social dimension. This is what we have seen as the importance for survivors to relate their suffering to that of others and finding a common, overarching frame of

26 | In reference to Assmann’s ([1999] 2006, 328–329, 264) notions of trauma and traumatic place (see also Chapter Seven).

Chapter Eight: Closing Words

reference within which to deal with their individual situations (see Das 1990b).27 In more concrete terms of the local context, contact with others helped to ward off the ghosts that cried out like lost babies or whatever else made one withdraw into “thinking too much” and risking going mad. It symbolized what was often stated as a consoling phrase: that ‘it happened to everyone’ (and not only to one) in Navalady and along the coast. Previous studies on Sri Lanka’s war-affected Tamil population revealed that the phrase “it happened to all” was as significant to the survivors of armed conflict as it was to the tsunami survivors.28 The phrase bespeaks the relevance for survivors of viewing their personal suffering within the framework of social and socially shared suffering. With its importance in both contexts, the phrase represents a form of coping that continued from war times to the tsunami aftermath. While the dramatic changes caused by the tsunami’s devastation justify delineating a “post-tsunami” context, this in itself is seen as being tightly interlinked with war developments: I address this conjunction as “a crisis within a crisis”. My research began from the premise that successfully establishing a sense of the everyday, of the familiar and ordinary, is itself an achievement in lives so heavily disrupted (Das and Kleinman 2001, 1–2). This book demonstrates that creating continuities between former and present lives produces such notions of normalcy that can, to varying degrees, bridge the ruptures experienced. These connections emerged essentially through people’s everyday life practices. In reference to the work of Das (1990b, 2007), survivors may not be primarily concerned with the deeper meaning of a disaster – they are concerned instead with engaging in whatever it takes to re-establish their shattered personal and social worlds. As Hastrup (2011) formulated it in her study on tsunami survivors in Tamil Nadu, what mattered was finding ways of “processing the ruptures of the tsunami by interlacing it with daily life” (Hastrup 2011, 5). Forms of recovery developed from how people repaired their relationships and social worlds in meticulous, everyday practices. Recovery itself is seen as an open-ended process that does not lend itself easily to answering the question of social change, commonly posed in regard to disasters (Hastrup 2011, 14; Hoffman 1999a). Moreover, the challenge of recovery was specifically complex for our research contacts, along with others affected by the war and tsunami to the extent that violence and armed incidents continued to impact upon their lives and thus form a continuity in the present that could not possibly be relegated to the past.

27 | Still following the work of Das (2000, 2007), what is suggested here also calls to mind what Nussbaum (1986, 46) has pointed out as a specific form of knowledge: “There is a kind of knowing that works by suffering because suffering is the appropriate acknowledgement of the way human life, in these cases, is.” (Nussbaum 1986, 46 quoted in Das 2000, 60 and Das 2007, 76) 28 | See Samaraweera (2003, 210), and Chapter Three.

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At the beginning of the chapter, we saw how survivors negotiated their relationship to the divine, which entailed a great deal of arguing with the gods and gradually allowed them to resume former religious practices and orientations. This resumption does not mean a return to past positions; the new relationship to the gods likely acquired added ambivalence after the profound human losses. Conversely, the processes also show the “work achieved” over time: explicit anger towards the gods, experienced as having betrayed years of worship, could eventually lead to more relaxed relationships. And yet it must also be acknowledged that some relationships may remain fractured and trust lost – even years later. We also saw earlier how recourse of a concept of angry gods could offer the affected an explanatory framework at the level of social groups. But the concept’s dailylife interpretations also reveal its ambiguity. In explaining the tsunami as a form of divine retribution, survivors risked inviting deeper allegations about who was more deserving of “being let down” or severe punishment than others. Hence the negotiation process created differences between survivors, and the relevance of “it happened to all of us” became additionally significant in countering such differentiation by emphasizing the “sameness” of victims’ experiences. The development of armed conflict summarized above also indicates what has been called the “productive” side of violence.29 Its disruptive power indisputably worked to fragment people’s ongoing efforts to recreate social relationships in the tsunami’s aftermath. Yet faced with violence and insecurity, people also invested in establishing new networks. While the waning of LTTE’s local authority brought anxiety to those who had benefitted under its umbrella, people showed great skill in shifting alliances and accurately timing their disengagement from one political nexus and possibly to engage in another. In respect to continuities of daily life, it can be said that the intimidating threat remained as power holders changed, but the change in authority did not prevent people from opportunistic engagements involving the newly powerful in personal conflicts when such involvement seemed promising to one’s vested interest. Indeed, the war as a context seemingly amounted to the only continuity in our friends’ lives. Against this chronic state, the tsunami signified a sudden rupture, though one that likewise impacted all the social, cultural, and economic dimensions of their existence. As Ravindran says in Chapter Three: even the seawater tasted different in the aftermath of the tsunami. Reiterating what is stated above, Das’ (2007, 218) invocation of the everyday as the eventful rather than the routine proved its relevance within the context under review here: where the “taken-for-granted” of the ordinary was so vehemently questioned, women’s and men’s ways of coping were tied to their immersion into daily-life relationships and their striving for something akin to the unspectacular.

29 | As Spencer (2007, 17) formulated it, violence is obviously destructive but “new or altered forms of subjectivity and solidarity” are frequently constructed along the way.

Chapter Eight: Closing Words

At the heart of people’s coping efforts lie relationships among survivors and between survivors and the dead. This thesis reveals various women’s and men’s efforts at creating and recreating binding relationships of trust and obligation among the living. It further documents a commonality in the way people grapple with finding a satisfying position vis-à-vis their dead, despite the lack of familiar mortuary rites due to the large-scale disaster. Gender relationships and more precisely people’s specific positions within Tamil kinship shaped these processes in important ways. The rivalries for and differentiations created by allocation of post-tsunami aid further influenced the coping processes. Chapters Four and Six in particular are dedicated to how people reformed their family relationships following massive human losses and social disruptions due to the tsunami. New marriages were sought and surviving unions re-negotiated. These processes were not free of conflict, and the fiercest of insults and injuries were carried out within families and among close relatives. Injuries sustained could indeed be of both a physical and an emotional nature in the lives of many women whose husbands turned against them violently during moments of tension. Thus women’s coping strategies also needed to accommodate men’s violent behaviour. This behaviour can be interpreted in part as an element of the coping process since it related to some men’s ways of dealing with grief, shame, loss of autonomy, and hardship within a social context where demonstrative physical power by men is expected. These situations reveal that the support expected from family and kin was limited and unstable at best, that dependency on family had its potentially harmful consequences. They also show that the kinship experience differed for women and men, while generational divides provided another factor that affected the allocation and receipt of kinship support. These considerations are significant, precisely because kin relationships amounted to the prime source of support in daily life. The importance of kinship was perhaps best seen in situations in which such relationships were lacking. The situations of women who had come to live apart from their matri-kin, often due to previous displacement because of war, illustrate this point. Given that women were expected to remain largely at home and that relationships between mothers and daughters or between sisters were particularly valued, the absence of matri-kin in daily life contributed to making these women’s situations more precarious. The birth of new babies illustrated very clearly the importance attached to recreation of families, and kinship ties in the aftermath of the tsunami. In particular, bereaved parents could renew hope through the birth of more children. This allowed them to re-envision a future based on caring and providing for these children. Beyond their immediate parents, children allowed survivors to regroup as family members and perform the specific roles attached to being mothers, fathers, siblings, aunts, uncles, or grandmothers. That is to say, reoccupying these positions allowed reengagement with familiar roles and thus confirmed the posttsunami significance of what had been important previously. Choosing names

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resembling those of deceased children for the newly born further strengthened the continuities sought and connected the dead to the living in the everyday world. The question of how to appease the dead figured prominently among our research contacts. Their “ritual sense” (Bell [1992] 2009, 80) enabled them to improvise on the limited opportunities for funeral rites, though doubts remained as to the efficacy of mortuary rituals that the survivors managed to offer their dead immediately after the tsunami. Getting as close as possible to the ideal of “proper” rites for the dead in this situation of massive sudden death was important. And so was the ability to retrieve the bodies of deceased loved ones. Governmental action for a swift disposal of corpses for hygienic reasons complicated such aspirations, while many bodies also simply never reappeared from the seawater. Fieldwork revealed that a prime way to relate to the dead lay in integrating their memory into the everyday worlds of the survivors. Mortuary rituals of daily life nurturing also proved especially significant to our friends. This significance even surpassed occasional large-scale religious ceremonies for the dead. In particular bereaved mothers often depicted in detail the food they had offered their deceased children on specific days after their death and in commemoration of their birthdays. The gesture continued their motherly role beyond their children’s death. These observations bring the gender dimension to the fore in coping. Immersion in care work and household chores corresponded typically to women’s roles and also to tasks that could be fulfilled almost immediately following the disaster. This allowed many women (especially mothers) to perform vital and familiar roles experienced as a relief from overwhelming memories and grief. Yet, as with Prasanniya in Chapter Seven, the same responsibilities could also burden women with dire consequences for their personal and family situations. While women’s lives often demonstrated their resilience and strength in resuming the “task of living” (Das and Kleinman 2001, 4), the strategy of “keeping busy” remained ambivalent at the very least. Positioned differently, women and men faced differing possibilities and constraints in dealing with their grief and organizing their survival. Hence the tsunami experience undermined men’s normative roles of household providers and protectors of women and children, while their access to former livelihood activities – such as sea fishing – remained severed for a long time. It may well be that the availability of monthly compensation money commonly paid to men during the first few months after the tsunami discouraged efforts to find alternative income and reinforced previously established patterns of male alcohol consumption at times of hardship. Besides their grief for their family members, men often suffered from loss of assets, and their perception of living a life of idleness. Their dependence on aid led to “loss of face”, which complicated men’s positions after the tsunami. In regard to the transformation of gender relationships, raised as a question in Chapter Three, my research indicates tendencies to invoke the culturally primordial rather than the revolutionary new. These observations confirm what

Chapter Eight: Closing Words

has been noted as emergence of the “traditional” in the face of disaster (Hoffman 1999b). Paradoxically, therefore, precisely those gender norms were appealing in the aftermath, which the tsunami experience had caused many to deeply question. These could entail men’s quests for bravery and for control over women, and women’s concerns with their moral spotlessness and a willingness to see their own priorities represented in those of other family members. Such behaviour formed dominant responses to the way in which the tsunami experience challenged gender relationships, though doubt and counter-positions surfaced as well. Post-tsunami aid generally contributed to and further strengthened these dominant orientations but did not build upon lingering doubts or promote alternatives. This was seen, for instance, by post-tsunami aid’s focus on male heads of households, with only economically marginal roles delegated to women. However, my research’s concern for people’s strategies rendered evident their capacity to “localize” what otherwise amounted to inappropriate outside interventions. Thus Chapter Five details our friends’ agendas of obtaining dowry houses for their daughters, despite official housing policies transferring new homes primarily to men; this pattern was also noted among both Tamils and Muslims in the adjacent Ampara District (McGilvray and Lawrence 2010). This availability of post-tsunami aid established an important framework with which people positioned themselves. At a general level, the availability of post-tsunami aid itself offered a way to cope with the losses endured if it allowed women and men to focus their attention on distribution and projects, placing hope in amelioration of their living conditions and therefore envisaging a better future (see also Das 1990b). At a more immediate level, Chapter Two demonstrates some ways in which social groups formed in response to aid and social differentiations that resulted from differing access to relief items. Other sections of the book also reveal that this external aid facilitated important economic and social gains, especially in comparison to those affected by war who did not benefit from a similar influx of donations. Yet there were obvious differences in how individuals actually benefitted from the wealth of aid resources delivered. Some persons, like “crisis managers”, accumulated considerable benefits, usually thanks to their political connections and personal skills in exploiting opportunities. Yet aid allocations were experienced as humiliating by others. Indeed, it remains questionable whether the potential to “build back better” after the tsunami was realized, despite all the valuable material reconstruction efforts undertaken. General criticism has rightly pointed out short-comings of humanitarian and development aid even when measured against donors’ own criteria (in regard to stakeholder participation, coordination, transparency, and accountability). Interventions tended to be carried out in a confusing manner and within asymmetrical power relationships that curtailed the affected people’s means of exerting influence. Yet this research also demonstrated the beneficiaries’ active involvement in shaping the final processes and outcomes. Outside aid donors did

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not meet with powerless victims but with people who processed these interventions in line with their own personal, social, economic, and political resources. Overall, the research exemplifies the relevance of ethnographic work in postdisaster and conflict-ridden contexts. Ethnographies can make a difference in studying such environments due to their strength in contextualization, their scepticism towards reductionist explanatory models, and their value of the “informal” method of seeking insight through conversation and longer-term interaction. But ethnographies are obviously always partial. Hence this research is primarily based on women’s rather than men’s perspectives, inviting further research into the way in which the tsunami specifically affected men as fishermen. Other interesting work remains to be done to shed more light on exactly how socio-political networks and aid allocations actually intertwined and operated at the daily-life level. Clearly, this research demonstrates that disaster-stricken people are serious actors in efforts towards rehabilitation of their life contexts. They are the ones who actually work towards recovery, pursuing a vital interest rather than merely a business. Such work is impressive for the tedious effort required to bridge human and material losses and mend social fractures that result from sudden disaster and the fragmenting effects of war. These restorative efforts have proven invariably to be ambiguous and contradictory, not least in respect to gender relationships. Moreover, they develop from different kinship positions and sites of social embeddedness. And they stem from processing different human losses and relate back to different experiences of violence and deprivation. This book demonstrates that interest in real life circumstances and in exploring what develops from particular post-disaster situations reveals a diversity of experiences within the particular shared context of tsunami recovery in the Tamil region of eastern Sri Lanka. Thus the look at life beyond survival discloses differences, commonalities, and the tension that results from the interplay of both, in and from this moment that “happened to all”.

Appendices A ppendix 1: F requently U sed A bbre viations DS GN IDP NGO LTTE SLMM STF TMVP TRO UNHCR WCDM-B

Divisional Secretariat; Divisional Secretary Grama Niladhari (village divisional headman); village-level administrative unit Internally Displaced People Non-governmental organization Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam Sri Lanka Monitoring Mission Special Task Force (elite special force unit of the Sri Lankan police) Tamil Makkal Viduthalai Puligal (colloquially also: Karuna or Pillaiyan group) Tamil Rehabilitation Organization United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees Women’s Coalition for Disaster-Management Batticaloa

A ppendix 2: G lossary This glossary provides explanations of the Tamil terms frequently used in this book. aatkal

People; as in Navalady aatkal: Navalady people

ahadi

Refugees

amman

Mother goddess; honorific term of address for all local Hindu goddesses

auto

Three-wheeler taxi

caami

God; common Tamil word for a Hindu deity

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cadjan

Inter-woven coco- or palmyrah-palm leaves (for thatching)

ciitanam viitu

Dowry house

cinnamma

Mother’s younger sister (“small mother”); Father’s younger brother’s wife

grama niladhari

Village divisional headman, lowest-level administrative officer

iyakkam

Movement; common Tamil expression for the LTTE

Kadanacciyamman

“Queen” or “Lady of the Sea”; the Kadanacciyamman temple is Navalady’s main amman temple

kadavul

God; common Tamil word for a Hindu deity; ultimately refers to god Shiva, the supreme god in the tradition of Shaivism

karpu

Chastity; especially virginity of a woman before marriage and sexual fidelity to her husband (produces shakti, benefical power, to her family)

karaivalai

Beach seine net fishing; a fishing method involving some 30 people on the beach dragging ashore a large net dropped off a boat near the coast

Karaiyar

Fishermen caste

kauravam

Respect/respectability, prestige, dignity

kiramam

Village

kudi

Exogamous, matrilineal descent unit (matriclan)

kudumbam

Family, household, domestic unit

maama

Mother’s brother; Father’s sister’s husband; Father-inlaw

maccaal

Female cross-cousin (Mother’s brother’s daughter or Father’s sister’s daughter); preferred marriage partner

maccaan

Male cross-cousin (Mother’s brother’s son or Father’s sister’s son); preferred marriage partner

muham

Refugee camp

Murugan

God Murugan (Sanskrit: Skanda)

paittiyam

Madness

Appendices

pey

Ghosts, spirits; also: demons

Pillaiyar

God Pillaiyar (god Ganesha)

piraccinai

Problem, trouble; a common Tamil expression for the armed conflict

poya day

Full-moon day

puja

Ritual to a deity, ceremony of worship

pusari

Hindu priest performing puja

sumangali

“Auspicious wife”; married woman with a living husband

thangam tsunami

“Golden tsunami”; refers to the excessive availability of post-tsunami aid

theyvam

God; common Tamil word for a deity (equivalent to caami)

thoni

Outrigger-canoe

ur

Natal village; also: “home”

Vellalar

(Paddy-field) land-owning caste

A ppendix 3: N ame L ist I here provide a list of frequently mentioned research contacts, by alphabetical order of pseudonyms and with basic indications to their family relationships and age-group (as per mid-2005). For a visual representation of some of the kinrelationships, see Chapter Two (Figures 2 and 3).

Name

Family relationship

Age group

Deepa

Renuka’s daughter-in-law. Married to Ketesh; mother of four children.

20 – 30

Gheeta

Vasanthi’s eldest daughter. Married mother of one daughter.

20 – 30

Gunaratnam

Prasanniya’s husband; younger brother of Kumar’s father. (Gunaratnam’s parental family is also related to Kamala’s parental family.)

30 – 40

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Indurani

Sister of Nallamma, Pusparaji, Sharmala, and others (including Murali’s father and Tharshan’s father). Married to Ramesh; mother of Nanthini, Selvy, Suresh and one other (married) daughter.

50 – 60

Jeeva

A sister of Nallamma, Indurani, etc. Jeeva died in the tsunami.

Jegan

One of Nallamma’s sons. Jegan lost his wife and two of his four daughters due to the tsunami. He remarried in early 2005.

30 – 40

Kalidasan

A classificatory paternal grandfather of Padma. He lost ten immediate family members in the tsunami.

50 – 60

Kamala

Sister of Rasamma (and other siblings). Mother of Kumari, Tharishini and two other adult daughters and sons. Kamala’s father, husband, one daughter and one granddaughter died in the tsunami. (Kamala’s father was also related to Renuka’s husband and Shivam’s/Priya’s mother.)

50 – 60

Kanthan

A son of one of Nallamma’s/Indurani’s brothers; brother of Tharshan. His parents and one sister died in the tsunami.

20 – 30

Ketesh

Renuka’s son (Sudarshini’s and Lakshmi’s brother); Deepa’s husband.

30 – 40

Kumar

Shanthi’s husband; son of Prasanniya’s sister and Gunaratnam’s brother.

20 – 30

Kumari

Kamala’s eldest daughter; married mother of three.

30 – 40

Lakshmi

Renuka’s second daughter (Sudarshini’s and Ketesh’s sister). Married to Shanmugam and mother of two children.

30 – 40

Manjula

Wife of Nallamma’s youngest son; their baby died in the tsunami.

20 – 30

Murali

Son of one of Nallamma’s/Indurani’s brothers. His mother and younger sister died in the tsunami.

20 – 30

Appendices

Nallamma

Eldest sister of Indurani, Pusparaji, Sharmala, and others; widowed mother of Renuka, Vasanthi, and six other (adult and married) children. (Two of her sons died due to the war, several immediate family members drowned in the tsunami.)

> 60

Nanthini

Second daughter of Indurani and Ramesh. Her husband and her baby died in the tsunami.

20 – 30

Neela

Sudarshini’s and Rajan’s daughter who died in the tsunami.

< 10

Neelam

A grandson of Sharmala; Pradeepan’s son. He lost his mother and two sisters in the tsunami.

< 20

Nesam

A grandson of Sharmala. Nesam lost both parents in the tsunami.

< 20

Nirmala

Married to Thangavel; mother of three living children. Their youngest son died in the tsunami.

40 – 50

Padma

Rasamma’s eldest daughter. Married to Prakash; mother of one daughter.

20 – 30

Panjali

A relative of Viji (Panjali’s mother is the sister of Viji’s father); her sister died in the tsunami. (Panjali is also related to Nallamma’s/ Indurani’s and to Thangavel’s parental families.)

20 – 30

Pradeepan

One of Sharmala’s son (Neelam’s father). He lost his wife and two of his six children in the tsunami. He remarried in early 2005.

30 – 40

Prakash

Padma’s husband (Rasamma’s son-in-law); father of a daughter.

30 – 40

Prasanniya

Married to Gunaratnam; mother of six children, two of whom died in the tsunami.

30 – 40

Prashant

Sudarshini’s and Rajan’s eldest son who died in the tsunami. Also the name of their eldest son born after the tsunami.

< 10 60

Rajan

Renuka’s son-in-law; Sudarshini’s husband. The couple lost its three children in the tsunami and had another baby soon after.

20 – 30

Raman

Pusparaji’s son. Raman lost his wife and three of his five daughters in the tsunami. He remarried in mid-2005.

40 – 50

Ramesh

Indurani’s husband; father of Nanthini, Selvy, Suresh, and one other daughter. (Ramesh is also a maccaan of Thangavel.)

50 – 60

Ravindran

Vasanthi’s son. His father died in the tsunami.

20 – 30

Rasamma

Younger sister of Kamala. Married mother of Padma and one other daughter and two sons. (Also related to Gunaratnam’s/Kumar’s family and to Gheeta’s husband’s family.)

40 – 50

Renuka

Nallamma’s eldest daughter; widowed mother of Ketesh, Lakshmi, Sudarshini, and one other daughter (who committed suicide long before the tsunami). (Her husband was a brother of Priya’s/ Shivam’s mother and related to Kamala’s/Rasamma’s father.)

50 – 60

Sasika

Indurani’s daughter-in-law; Suresh’s wife. The couple’s baby died in the tsunami.

20 – 30

Selvy

Indurani’s and Ramesh’s youngest daughter. She eloped and married in mid-2005.

20 – 30

Shankar

A grandson of Renuka. His mother committed suicide long before the tsunami; his youngest brother died in the tsunami.

< 20

Shanmugam

Renuka’s son-in-law; Lakshmi’s husband. The couple has two children.

30 – 40

Appendices

Shanthi

Married to Kumar (and daughter-in-law of Prasanniya’s deceased sister); the couple’s daughter died in the tsunami.

20 – 30

Sharmala

A sister of Nallamma, Indurani, etc.. Widowed mother of Pradeepan and five other children; grandmother of Neelam and Nesam. Several children, in-laws and grandchildren died in the tsunami. (Also related to Thangavel and Nirmala.)

50 – 60

Shivam

Priya’s younger brother; another elder sister drowned in the tsunami (and two brothers died due to the war). (His mother is the sister of Renuka’s deceased husband.)

20 – 30

Sudarshini

Renuka’s youngest daughter; married to Rajan. The couple’s three children died in the tsunami, a fourth child was born a few days later.

20 – 30

Sujatha

Vasanthi’s second daughter. Sujatha’s baby died in the tsunami.

20 – 30

Suresh

Indurani’s and Ramesh’s son; husband of Sasika. The couple’s baby died due to the tsunami.

20 – 30

Susil

One of Vasuki’s elder brothers. He lost his wife, two daughters, and one son in the tsunami. (He acted as a leading representative of Navalady people during 2005.)

40 – 50

Thangavel

Nirmala’s husband; their youngest son died in the tsunami. Thangavel’s paternal grandfather was a brother of Nallamma’s/Indurani’s father. (He is also related to Ramesh’s parental family.)

50 – 60

Tharshan

A son of one of Nallama’s/Indurani’s brothers. Married father of one daughter. Tharshan is Kanthan’s brother; their parents and one sister died in the tsunami.

20 – 30

Tharishini

Kamala’s youngest daughter.

< 20

313

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Vasanthi

Second daughter of Nallamma; mother of Gheeta, Sujatha, and Ravindran. Her husband and one granddaughter died in the tsunami.

40 – 50

Vasuki

Married mother of three children. Vasuki is Susil’s sister; their parents died in the tsunami.

20 – 30

Viji

A relative of Panjali’s and of Selvy’s parental families.

20 – 30

A ppendix 4: L ist of I llustr ations MAPS Map 1: Map 2:

Sri Lanka, p. 10 Batticaloa (Manmunai North), p. 64

FIGURES Figure 1: Figure 2: Figure 3: Figure 4: Figure 5: Figure 6: Figure 7: Figure 8: Figure 9:

The way to Navalady, February 2005, p. 43 Extended family 1 (extract), p. 77 Extended family 2 (extract), p. 78 Thoni, Navalady, October 2005, p. 134 A shelter-turned-home, Tiraimadu, September 2005, p. 203 Homes destroyed, a well remains; Navalady, July 2006, p. 242 Destroyed Murugan statue, Navalady, April 2005, p. 255 Kadanacciyamman temple, Navalady, April 2005, p. 284 House under construction, Tiraimadu, March 2007, p. 296

(All figures © Katharina Thurnheer)

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