Rohini Mohan's The Seasons of Trouble (2014): Sri Lanka's Tamil women in war and its aftermath

ABSTRACT

The protracted armed conflict in Sri Lanka (1983–2009) has had a significant impact on the social fabric of the country. The Tamil community – the women especially – bore the brunt of the traumatic spill-over of decades of warfare that brutalised all areas of life, especially in the North. With the belief that narrative literature on war captures the complex ways in which gender, war, and peace interact and impact configurations of the female gender in turbulent war-torn and post-war societies, this paper critically reads Rohini Mohan's The Seasons of Trouble (2014), a non-fiction narrative of the life stories of three individuals that lay claim to ‘truth’ and therefore is placed in a strong position in relation to collective memory, archive, and history. The critical content analysis from a feminist theoretical standpoint conveys how the trajectories of Tamil women caught in Sri Lanka's war shine a light on the ways in which dominant configurations of war and peace construct the female gender identity in specific ways and thereby shape the way women are framed in war-torn and post-war societies with tangible implications on the lived realities of Tamil women in Sri Lanka.

KEYWORDS:

• Sri Lanka
• war
• gender
• Tamil women
• life narrative

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The Eelam war or the Sri Lankan civil war was an armed conflict fought from 1983 to 2009, by the government of Sri Lanka and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) which aimed to create an independent Tamil state called Tamil Eelam in the north and the east of Sri Lanka. After 26 years of military campaign, the Sri Lankan army defeated the Tamil Tigers through heavy military measures in May, 2009.

2 The quotations hereafter with only a page number are drawn from the primary text unless specified otherwise.

3 Meegaswatta (2019) points to how in fiction ‘rape and the subsequent motive of revenge are plot devices that function as tools of narrative fidelity’ which make a woman's capacity for violence comprehensible and palatable in a patriarchal society (35). She further argues that situating rape as a logical explanation for a ‘perverse’ violent femininity in fiction resonate with rather short-sighted scholarly attempts to identify gendered ‘personal’ motives specific to women combatants even while recognising political, nationalist aspirations.

4 The LTTE had placed strict prohibitions on romantic and/or physical relationships among its cadre. Celibacy was mandatory at the beginning and was ruthlessly enforced, but was optional after the leader Prabakaran's own marriage.

5 The official Bureau of the Commissioner General of Rehabilitation (BCGR) website lists the vocational training courses for ex-combatants and courses specifically for ‘female rehabilitees’: cake icing, fabric painting (sarees), beauty culture, preschool and teacher training, etc. A BCGR report further crystallises the gendered perspectives that penetrate governing structures and inform decisions related to vocational training: ‘courses on bridal dressing, hairdressing and makeup were conducted extensively for the female ex-combatants who were really keen to learn these new subjects just like any other girls in society’ (2013, 33).

6 The records of the BCGR, as at June, 2014, show that out of 11,952 reintegrated cadre, 1,781 have received loans of Rs.25,000 from state banks for self-employment. The Red Cross has only been able to offer grants of Rs.50,000 to 523 rehabilitated cadres (Perera 2014). On the other hand, the activities of microfinance institutions that capitalised on lending to desperate people have now created a debt crisis in the north (Wijedasa 2014).

7 Here, I read Mugil's post-war trajectory as indicative of the plights of civilian Tamil women whose trials and tribulations she shares as an ex-combatant in hiding.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Thilini N. K. Meegaswatta

Thilini N. K. Meegaswatta is a lecturer at the Department of Language Studies, The Open University of Sri Lanka. She completed a BA (honours) degree in English at the University of Kelaniya, MA in English studies at the University of Colombo and is currently pursuing a PhD at TU Dresden, Germany. Her research interests include gender, war, and violence in South Asian context, conflict literature, and post-colonial literature.