Research Summary

Home , Tamils, Tamil diaspora, Tamil Nadu

RESEARCH CCISC SUMMAR Y

Belonging and identity in the everyday lives of Tamil migrants in the UK

The research is the first to explore how Tamil migrants of different state origins come to identify with a ‘Tamil diaspora’ in the UK. The ability of Tamil migrants to connect with a common identity is particularly significant given that Tamils’ nominal ethnic kinship belies strikingly divergent experiences of ethnically-inflected politics at the point of origin. For South Indian Tamils, ethno- nationalism become largely symbolic in nature over the latter half of the twentieth century, while for Tamils in war-torn Sri Lanka it remained literally a matter of life and death as the island was savaged by ethnicised civil conflict between 1983 and 2009. These different contexts in the origin states have additionally led to Tamil migrants experiencing very different migration trajectories. Sri Lankan Tamils have tended to migrate as refugees (or though associated spousal or family reunion migration), while Tamils from India have been more likely to arrive in the UK as highly skilled workers or higher education students. Given this context, the research asks whether a shared Tamil language, participation in rituals and ceremonials, and transnational consumption of ethno- linguistically-orientated popular culture engenders ethnic or diasporic identification across boundaries of state origin? Or is identification limited, despite cultural commonalities, by divergent recent experience of politicised ethnicity? More broadly, the research challenges understandings of ‘diasporas’ or migrated ‘ethnic communities’ as homogenous groups sharing common identification and experience. Instead it establishes that the heterogeneity of the migration experience, as well as diverse, non-ethnic social positions such as gender, age, religion and socio-economic status, impact on the forms and degrees of identification within the diasporic or ethnic ‘community’.

Research Findings in Context

Tamils are an ethno-linguistic population whose historical homelands transcend contemporary state borders. Tamils form a local majority in the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu, as well as in the northern and eastern regions of the neighbouring island of Sri Lanka. Other sizable populations can be found in Malaysia, Singapore, the Mascarenes and South Africa – a consequence of colonial-era labour migration from South India.

Decades of violence in Sri Lanka have produced a huge exodus of refugees, and it has been estimated that by the mid-1990s one third of Sri Lanka’s pre-war Tamil population had fled the island to seek sanctuary in South India or further afield in Europe, North America and Australia. Tamils from India and from the sites of the Tamil ‘colonial diaspora’ have also migrated to the West (albeit in much smaller numbers), but as ‘voluntary’ migrants – as students, professionals, and through associated dependent migration.

Strong cultural similarities connect the historic Tamil homelands of southern India and Sri Lanka. Although dialectic differences are found, the common lingua-franca is Tamil; in both areas Saivite Hinduism is the predominant religion; while in the contemporary era a shared framework of popular cultural reference has emerged through the circulation and consumption of Tamil cinema. But alongside these similarities, Tamils in these two lands have experienced very different recent histories of politicised ethnicity. For Tamils in India, ethnic assertion has become largely symbolic in nature as the once strident separatism of the region’s Tamil nationalist parties has been tempered by entry into power-sharing coalitions within India’s central government. This contrasts with the long conflict between the separatist Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (the ‘Tamil Tigers’) and the Sri Lankan state, which reached its bloody conclusion in Spring 2009 with a ‘final offensive’ costing an estimated 40,000 Tamil civilian lives.

Key Findings

Tamils of different state origins identified with one another through shared consumption and appreciation of Tamil cinema and an accompanying shared aesthetic of cinema-influenced imagery and fashion particularly apparent in photograph albums commemorating weddings and girls’ puberty ceremonies. Similarly Tamils of different state origins mingled and worshipped together in many of the religious and ritualised spaces accessed in the research, suggesting that a shared understanding of the symbolism and ritual of Tamil Saivite Hinduism overcame differences of state origin. Despite this, Tamil migrants’ membership of community associations is largely split along state-based lines, with Sri Lankan and Indian Tamils forming distinct organised groups. However, this appeared to be due more to the differing migration and settlement contexts of these sub-sections of the Tamil population, rather than to vexed questions of statehood; Tamils from Sri Lanka tend to migrate as refugees (or through associated spousal or family reunion migration) and put down long- term roots in the UK, while those from India are more likely to migrate as skilled workers or higher education students and envisage a more temporary stay. These differing migratory experiences produced common reference points between some participants, but also a sense of alienation: limiting sociability, for example, between student or single young professional migrants and more established migrants with spouses and children.

However, within the sphere of political engagement - the ‘long-distance nationalism’ which characterises many diaspora groups - boundaries of belonging were subject to greater contestation. Sri Lankan Tamils who had direct or family experience of violent displacement evoked these experiences to identify themselves with others who had lived through similar traumas, as well as to differentiate themselves from those who had not – including Tamils of other state origins. Meanwhile though, some of these ‘others’ (some Indian and Malaysian Tamil participants) staked their own claim on membership of this community of suffering through evocations of a symbolic identity of Tamil victimhood or primordial ethnicity, despite their own lack of direct experience of comparative trauma – an important finding given the importance placed on migrants’ shared experience of trauma and exile in fostering connectedness and group identity in much of the diaspora literature. The fluid and context-dependent versions of identification with a Tamil diaspora which emerged amongst these diverse migrants in the different contexts of their everyday UK lives illustrate the value of an approach to studying diaspora which de-substantialises the concept and treats it as a permeable and non-static process, thereby allowing analytical space for the emergence of varying modes and intensities of identification amongst (nominally unitary) diaspora communities.

Methodology

This was a qualitative project, involving interviews with forty-six participants and observational research over a period of a year. As part of the observational aspect of the project I accompanied research participants to community association meetings, to temples and churches, to social gatherings, and into their homes – spaces in which processes of identification with diasporic Tamil- ness (or with other modalities of identification) were practiced in different ways and with varying levels of intensity.

Contact the researcher

Dr Demelza Jones [email protected] Webpage: https://research.aston.ac.uk/portal/en/persons/demelza-jones%282640a3de-e457-4e04- ab7e-822f3652037f%29.html Twitter: @melzi_j