Parvathi Ramanathan

Parvathi Ramanathan is a researcher, writer and arts manager working across disciplines, with a focus on the performing arts. She hails from Ravanasamudram village of Tenkasi district in Tamil Nadu. She did her MPhil in Theatre and Performance Studies from the School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. Parvathi is also a trained Bharatanatyam dancer and has been exploring other forms of movement as a means of expression and therapy. She is particularly interested in questions of identity pertaining to nations and borders and their manifestation in the body and in everyday life.  

This grant will enable her to trace the articulations of the Ilangai Tamil community - the Sri Lankan Tamil refugees - about their homeland through their cultural practices. It will explore how the community in its interactions with the Indian nation-state and the Tamil Nadu state machinery uses performances and performative acts to negotiate roles and identities in their present liminal status. Parvathi will also study how the state of Eelam by manifesting online through interactions and articulations of those who recall it, allows a new scattered virtual presence without an acknowledged geographical territory.

While the armed struggle for a separate state of Tamil Eelam has officially ceased, a large number of Sri Lankan Tamil refugees continue to be in a protracted state of statelessness. Most of them have been living in refugee camps for over thirty years and many were born there. Their day to day interactions with Indian Tamils with whom they share ethnic kinship, a distinct cultural identity and consciousness, is endured through an awareness of being separated from their homeland. These refugee camps become pockets of culture where the community cohabits, creates and perpetuates narratives of an imagined Tamil homeland in Sri Lanka. Distinct from the Indian Tamil culture, life in a camp looks identical to how refugees would have lived in their homeland. It manifests through performance practices such as collective singing of folk songs, Koothu dance, Naatukoothu songs, the musical storytelling forms Villupaatu and Bharatanatyam.

The community has an organised system of classes to teach Bharatanatyam, traditional folk songs that speak of the native land and their experiences, and ways of worship and behaviour they believe appropriate for an ideal Tamil person. As the camps themselves are partially porous spaces, the movement of the refugees in and out of the camp is accompanied by shifts in their performed identities which is visible in their choice of Tamil dialect, cuisine and clothes. Parvathi will seek to understand how expressions of affiliation and difference are marked out by the Ilangai Tamils while living among Indian Tamils in Tamil Nadu.

Parvathi will study the celebrations of different festivals such as Pongal and the Tamil new year, performance practices, oral traditions, rituals to understand different narratives and belief systems of the community. She will collaborate with young resource persons from the refugee camps to document these events. This will enable her to understand different subjectivities from her perspective as an outsider-researcher and that of the residents of the camp. She will also organise movement-based workshops with the collaborators on the elusive ideas of home, homeland and belonging.

The outcome of this project will be a series of essays. The Grantee’s deliverables to IFA with the final reports will be the essays and audiovisual documentation and interviews from two refugee camps in Tamil Nadu.