Meena Kandasamy, Tamil Tigers & Rape

Back in the late Eighties and early Nineties, I struggled to compose a 'Sillapadikaram' poem. Why did that Tamil Epic obsess me? Perhaps it was because of the collapse of the type of Communism my maternal family had supported. Re-reading my 'The Mirror's Messiah' confirms that shite 'Humanist' availability cascades had sullied the purity of my LSE Leftism. But, I was ignorant and stupid. Even my novella 'Black tiger' (from 'Tigers of Wrath') is infantile in its Tamil Romanticism.

What enabled me to get out of that cul de sac of stupidity was the cultural, spiritual, and moral help of working class Tamil Sri Lankan women refugees from whom I'd buy food or rent videos or whatever. This was nothing out of the ordinary for them. They helped everybody they dealt with and their families have come up for that reason.

I am an unknown writer- probably for good reason. The subject of this post is acclaimed as a poet and writer. But, those who acclaimed her are now known to be worthless. This alters our reception of Kandasamy's oeuvre.

Had there been no Civil War in Sri Lanka, Dr. Meena Kandasamy might have either joined politics under a Dalit party banner- e.g. that of the VCK or may have gained fame as a Professor of a possibly utile subject who wrote popular articles or was a talking head for TV discussions on Feminist issues. She was clearly of the same class and type of elegance as female C.E.Os and Hi-Tech mavens. The truth is, the TV audience would feel, she would be more comfortable on an Ivy League campus. India's tiny upper middle class could not live up to her expectations. She should be teaching at Columbia or Berkeley.

In a lengthy essay for 'The White Review' Meena, now known as a survivor of marital rape, reveals a much darker side to her story. Her parents were involved with the struggle of the Tamil Tigers. She herself had researched the use of rape against 'Tigresses'. A roman a clef published by her suggests that after she failed to profit by a liaison with an older Dalit politician, her Leftist parents supported her marriage to a Communist Professor who, she suggests, got off on beating a Feminist 'tiger'. Yet, as a matter of Party discipline, he had the right to beat the fuck out of her higher caste bougie ass. Strangely, she resented this but thought the real blame attached not to Stalinism but them evil Brahmins and their Neo-liberalism and Patriarchy and general nastiness. Still, the fact remains she got the fuck out of that marriage and now lives in the Soviet Socialist Republic of London.

She writes-

A corpse in a wake is looked upon with more respect, the Tamil Tiger told me over coffee. A corpse is superior, to them, to a raped woman like me.

That was the cost of war, that women were paying.

When I first heard that from the militant’s mouth, I wished that I was not making any documentary. I wanted my teenage memories of Tigresses to live on: untouched by the external world, where they were valorous and magnificent, went around on speedboats, or did their target practice, or crawled on their stomachs with guns on their backs. To watch them live at other people’s mercy, to know that they were being condemned by the same people whose lives they had sought to defend and protect, was shocking.


It is six years since I first met these women. Both of them have now moved to advanced capitalist countries, and I reliably learn that they have managed to get their papers. Strangely, I too have lived for the last four years in a first-world country, and feel uncomfortable about not being on home ground, where my work can have more meaning.

Meeting a female Tiger in the flesh broke my own naïve carnivalisation of war. When I encountered these women personally, the image I had constructed of female militancy shattered. Nothing had prepared me to brace the reality that these powerful women would be so vulnerable.

Sri Lanka was economically and educationally much ahead of India. It got universal suffrage with strong minority protection in 1930- 20 years before India. Sri Lankan Tamils looked different from us because of better nutrition and, perhaps, their descent from 'higher' castes- the warrior aristocracy and wealthy mercantile mariners.

Sri Lanka ought to have been a paradise but romantic linguistic Sub-Nationalism as well as a crazy type of Maoism inflicted great pain on that Edenic island for decades. There was always only one possible outcome- Sinhalese majoritarianism modified by commercial considerations. This has nothing to do with 'Buddhist fundamentalism'. Everybody likes Buddhism. Tamil Dalit politics pioneered the notion that conversion to Buddhism to improve one's lot in life.

It was always obvious that both the Sinhala Communists and the Tamil Separatists were bound to lose. Unfortunately, elite 'populist' politicians distrusted the Army- supposedly dominated by the 'Burgher' officer caste- and so the country was ill-placed to deal with insurrections in a prompt and proper manner. Back in 1971, the Indians and Pakistani Armies cooperated to put down a Marxist insurrection of singular stupidity in that island. Its leader, Rohana Wijeweera, was not hanged. Thus he led another, costlier, insurrection from 1987 to 1989. This time, the authorities had the sense to shoot him in prison.

The leader of the Tamil Tigers- the handsome and charismatic Prabhakaran who was from a Christian family and who could project a Secular, Left friendly, image- became a much more serious threat to Sri Lanka. The Indian Army intervened because Rajiv Gandhi thought 'Cantonization' would solve the underlying linguistic problem. Incidentally, the Indian Army Chief was a Tamil Iyengar Brahmin. The Lankan fiasco counts against an otherwise courageous and smart officer.

Meena Kandasamy, however, believes the Indian Army spent all their time raping Sri Lankan women and that's why the peace process failed. The Sinhalas, on the other hand, felt India was favoring the Tamils because Tamils have a lot of votes in India. The truth is Rajiv Gandhi was out of his depth. He paid a terrible price. He was assassinated by 'Tigeresses'. At that time, many Indian Tamils, including myself, tried to blame the Sinhalese. The notion was that the whole thing was a 'false flag' operation of theirs. But, later, Prabhakaran took responsibility. I suppose, he thought it was water under the bridge. The problem was that Rajiv Gandhi was a Hindi speaking North Indian Brahmin. That caste  represents a bigger vote block than the Indian Tamils. No Indian Government could get chummy with Prabhakaran. Meanwhile there were splits within the Tiger high command. Moreover, the Tigers appeared to be using money from crime and extortion in places where their people had gained refuge. I don't know if this is true. What can't be denied is that there were 'boys' who claimed to be associated with the High Command who slaughtered each other with machetes in the backstreets of Western Capitals.  The long standing Sri Lankan Tamil community in the UK lost sympathy for the Tigers. The people were good, but they were being led in the wrong direction. This was not a political struggle- it was a carnival of cruelty, it was a theater of atrocity, worse- it was adolescent stupidity. What was the outcome? The minority was crushed by the majority. Women warriors were either killed or gang raped and then released as an awful warning of the consequences of stupidity and magical thinking.

Meena's own trajectory was not edifying. She had said ' "My poetry is naked, my poetry is in tears, my poetry screams in anger, my poetry writhes in pain. My poetry smells of blood, my poetry salutes sacrifice. My poetry speaks like my people, my poetry speaks for my people."
As Professor Vagina Dentata Choothopadhyaya pointed out at the time, what Meena should have said was 'My poetry is naked and has a turd protruding from its bum.' Failure to mention the protruding turd was nothing but petit bourgeois sentimentalism and the literary equivalent of Browderism.

The other thing was Meena, a Tamil, was not writing in Tamil. How the fuck could she speak for a people who speak Tamil not English?

The answer, of course, has to do with rape. Poetry to be truly naked and to have a turd protruding from its bum must be incessantly gang-raped otherwise Patriarchy will prettify and commodify its essence. Already we see the fashion industry appropriating the protruding turd of Third World naked Feminist empowerment and activism. Only by repeated beating and gangrape in prison and 'rehabilitation' camps can we challenge Patriarchy with a poetry which is naked, has turd protruding from its bum, and which has been covered with jizz. It is that last detail which disgusts the hegemonic, neo-liberal, Patriarchy of the High Castes. One Brahmin- Rajiv Gandhi- is blown up by some nice Tigresses and look what happens! Indian Government turns a blind eye to their continual gang-rape. Why? They think that women who are being gang-raped have less leisure to go blow up Brahmin politicians in a dignified and socially inclusive manner. This is a damning indictment of Brahminism.

Meena has said- 'Poetry is not caught up within larger structures that pressure you to adopt a certain set of practices while you present your ideas in the way that academic language is". This is certainly true of the sort of poetry that is naked and which has a turd protruding from its bum. But what if the poet is not gang-raped, or- at the very least- subjected to marital rape? Is it not the case that Brahminical Patriarchy coopts every turd protruding from every naked bum which is not actually dripping with jizz?

So what if you can say, with Kandasamy- 'My Kali kills.' ? The fact is, the Brahmin's worship Kali because her job is to kill the buffalo demon.
Brahmins have no problem if a Kshatriya, gambled away into slavery, or one who takes drugs and who ends up as a stripper or lapdancer, also gets so thoroughly gang-raped as to be continually dripping with jizz.

 Bearing this in mind, Meena's Draupati and Sita are actually quite retrograde.

'My Draupadi strips. My Sita climbs on a stranger’s lap'.

Sadly Hindutva does not have any such Draupati or Sita with her own Only Fans page. Indeed, Hindutva doesn't even have a Mia Khalifa.

In her article for the White Review, this dark skinned lady reveals what actually happened to 'her' women.
'All my women militate. They brave bombs, belittle kings, take on the sun, take after me.'
But then they get gangraped and go running for refugee, if not lunatic, asylum in White countries. One can sympathize with uneducated girls who got caught up in that madness just as one can sympathize with child soldiers who escaped the Lord's Resistance Army. But what about Meena? Can we sympathize with her?

Consider the following rant published in Elle-

Where do I look for an early example of what a woman’s anger can do? Being Tamil, Kannagi comes to mind—angered that her husband had been unjustly executed by the king—she burns down Madurai.

But first the Brahmins and Shramans and holy cows are evacuated. The author was a Jain monk. Kannagi is an orthodox woman and upholds the Caste System. Indeed, she is the incarnation of a Goddess. The notion is that her chastity gives her a supernatural power similar to that gained by ritually pure Brahmins or Monks purified by askesis.

The epic Silappatikaram speaks of how she plucked and flung her left breast, cursing that the city be reduced to ashes.

Which is fine, so long as the Brahmins get out safely. In future, the King will involve them in the judicial and penal process. Thus, they will gain countervailing power against the Executive. We are halfway to 'checks and balances' and the Rule of Law.

To me, this is a woman’s rage born out of her body.

Which can only hurt working people and the Kings who protect them but which spares, or has no power over, Brahman or Shramans- i.e. Buddhist or Jain monks.

Her body becomes a bomb, rage becomes a quest for justice that smashes an oppressive, unjust structure.

It smashes nothing. Instead, it causes the increased intermediation of hieratic castes or monastic orders. The thing is a booby-trap for boobies who like chopping off one or other of their boobs thinking it a bomb. Rage is not a quest for justice. It is just being very very angry. No doubt, you could get naked and let a turd protrude from your anus. That may be considered artistic. However, if you are dripping with jizz coz of incessant gang-rape, people think a turd protruding from your bum is the least of your worries. You need help dear.

Long before we started calling it #MeToo, women under military occupation were tapping into this collective rage to organize themselves. The mothers of Manipur marched naked to protest atrocity—with the banner ‘Indian Army Rape Us’, they are the earliest Kannagis in our midst.

But those Mums were not exhibiting turds proudly protruding from their bums! Nor were they dripping with jizz. So all you have is a publicity stunt. Apparently the State paid 10 lakhs to the family of a victim of extra-judicial killing (and gang-rape) but no one was arrested.

In cultures used to collective shaming, women becoming warriors is a historical inevitability. Tamil women of Eelam subjected to rape by Indian peacekeeping forces ended up weaponising their woes,

So, kids, what have we learnt today? Indian Army will kill the men and rape the women of any part of India who start 'raging' and thinking their breasts or turds are actually bombs. This is a very good thing. If weak people try to kill strong people, they get killed or have to run away.

Boys run away when they see Indian soldiers. Insurrections collapse quickly- unless it is politically convenient for them not to collapse- because boys run away. Girls may stick around to get gang-raped but when they try gaining fame as a result of their heroic encounters with big big bags full of dicks, they get shunned. Meanwhile Sunny Leone has become a super-star. It's all so unfair you feel you just have to chop off your left tit and chuck it at somebody.

as do Adivasi women hunted down by paramilitary in India’s infamous Red Corridor.

Actually, Adivasi women have found that joining the paras and getting paid to kill Naxals is a better option. Why? They get a pension and don't end up dying young, dripping with jizz.

The Western-adjacency of our societies

which the West spends a lot of money trying to decrease coz they don't want us turning up on their doorsteps chopping off our left titties to use as bombs

means that we do not recognise history until she makes an appearance wrapped up in hallowed hashtags.

Meena truly is a poet of the people. Emaciated Dalit women in India routinely speak of 'hallowed hashtags'.

Rage is the aftermath of the unspoken knowledge that the speaking out started long ago.

But if speaking out started long ago why the fuck is the knowledge unspoken? Is it coz it has a turd protruding from its bum? Or is it coz it is dripping with jizz?

The truth is Rage is a reaction to stuff that makes you angry. It isn't the aftermath of your talking some shite.

Perhaps it existed forever, but the listening came about only when it was women like us.

Whose poetry is naked and has turd protruding from bum bum.

So consumed are middle-class women in our bourgeois exceptionalism and painstakingly borrowed individualism that when we heard these voices, we followed them as human-interest stories, never turning the mirror towards ourselves. The mirror was the terror from which we learnt to hide.

Coz middle class ladies won't acknowledge that they have been gang-raped by Indian Army? Ask yourself, why are you dripping with jizz? The answer is, when you nodded off during the H.R Manager's Power Point presentation, Indian Army invaded and raped the fuck out of you. Shit like that goes down all the time but people are too terrorized, or too stupid, to notice and speak out about this.

Rage is also what remains after failure leaves us embittered.

Unless, we have done something sensible meanwhile and our lives are improving.

It’s the knowledge that our society recognises some stories, shoves others away.

This applies to boys as well. I have sent repeated emails to leaders of the British Labour Party detailing, in graphic terms, my own rape and sexual abuse by Mrs. Thatcher anytime she shows up on my TV screen. I have been ignored. Is it coz I is bleck?

Rage is what remains as we are betrayed, as we watch older, Brahmin feminists rally around for “due process” when a Dalit woman, Raya Sarkar, compiles a list of sexual harassers in Indian academia.

Instead of appealing to the law, these women should have sliced off their left titty while howling with rage. Incidentally, Sarkar studied in America at the UC Davis Law School. Those demanding 'due process' were Leftists, not Brahmins. Nivedita Menon is 'shudra' just like Kandasamy. Sarkar, too, is not Dalit.

Rage follows the scandalous shock of realising how scantily working class women’s issues are viewed

Coz working class Indian women attend JNU or UC Davis

—how under the rubric of the “larger” class struggle, leftists would have them subsume their bodily autonomy and their sexuality, and pretend that #MeToo is not a concern within the universe of the proletariat. Marxist comrades, any working-class woman would be outraged at how you infantilise them, rob them of their individuality and do the agenda setting on their behalf.

Unlike Dr. Kandasamy whose naked poetry protrudes a turd dripping with jizz coz Indian Army keeps gang-raping it in an invisible manner.

The women are coming, marching for bread and roses, marching against the rampant sexual harassment on shop floors and factories, and inside your hallowed trade union structures too.

Is this rage, or is this woman coming? I suppose she is picturing India's working class women gang-raping the Indian army. Fair play. After what I went through with Mrs. Thatcher, I can sympathize.

I rage against the left because I’m a Marxist, because I feel betrayed. The ferocious flash strike by female garment workers in Bengaluru single-handedly safeguarded the right to access employee provident funds.

There was nothing 'ferocious' about that strike. No H.R manager had his legs broken so he could not escape being burnt to death when his office was set on fire. Women worked with existing unions and gained their rights in a perfectly legal and sensible manner. This benefits industry. It can move up the value chain more securely.

Protests by female retail workers in Kerala led to changes in the law that put an end to the practice of women workers not being allowed to sit while they worked.

Some Union organizers are making headway even with rural origin women because they are going about things in a sensible manner. Others are not. But, rural women themselves are proving themselves smart and sensible.

The strikes by Pembilai Orumai—the all-woman union of tea plantation workers in Munnar— happened in a landscape where trade unions were an exclusively male bastion.

Here, politicized Unions were also more or less criminalized. Women organized themselves and were successful because they disintermediated the traditional Labor Movement.

I’m enraged because though the biggest workplace movements in my country in recent times have been led by women, the left still hasn’t got the guts to give a feminist face to the class struggle.

Much of the Indian Left is shite. Where it is meritocratic, then you have a Health Minister like Smt. Shailaja who wins international fame for her handling of COVID. But Shailaja was a High School Science teacher. She rose because of her work-product. 'To each according to his contribution' is what Marx actually said. Meanwhile in T.N, the Left is gerontocratic or histrionic. But what else could it be? The working class wants to rise up materially. The Left is an obstacle on their path. So is Dr. Kandasamy's stupid shite.

Ten years ago, we thought she could enter politics. Sooner or later there would be a caste based realignment within the Dravidian parties. Thol. Thirumavalavan was clearly going places. Meena could have been the spokesperson for the Southern segment of a Pan Indian Dalit caucus. Who cared if she wrote shite poetry? Lots of politicians do. Anyway, she was writing in English so, basically, we are speaking of a Kamala Das level retard. Nothing to get your knickers in a twist about. She could make plenty of money from political brokerage and end up with a venerable sinecure in Lutyen's Delhi as well as Visiting Professorships to Yurop Amrika.

Why didn't this happen? Perhaps the answer has to do with her research for a gang-rape documentary about Tigresses. The thing is dispiriting. One may pretend that it is 'empowering' to go around challenging Armies to gang-rape you but actually being raped, or beaten, or shot, or thrown in jail, or having to run far far away, is demoralizing. There is no romance or glamor to the thing. You look stupid if you say 'Boo to Patriarchal misogyny' in between gang-rape sessions which leave you dripping with jizz.

Continuing to sneer at #MeToo as a middle-class woman’s protest, and simultaneously ignoring working class women’s leadership at the workplace—there is a great urgency to call out the misogyny of the left and to call on it to change radically.

Since Meena is saying this in the context of the utter collapse of the Left, what great urgency could their actually be? Must gerontocrats make haste to just die already? But who will take their place? The fact is the older generation put in twenty of thirty years worth of work coaching Convent Educated kids to get into the IAS or get a chance to move abroad. Like Mother Theresa, they first served the middle class, before pretending to set up an alternative to its values. Meena's generation wanted immediate celebrity on the basis of 'rage'. They are like Rahul who wants a Mahatma Gandhi like salience on the basis of his 'vision'. But Meena mistakes a self-serving literary habit of savage indignation for an actual emotion. Rahul mistakes dimly glimpsing his own inward greatness for a plan for the country. Both looked promising a decade ago. But they preferred to live in a fantasy world where their rage or their vision had some magical transformational property which thus gave them political salience.

Meena, sensibly, appears to be resiling from this view. The times have moved on. Inviting Gang-rape is now seen, not as empowering women, but as a fucking nuisance which should be curbed in everybody's interests.

Hopefully, Meena will no longer write shite like this-

I rage as I write this, but it is not my condition alone, this seething awareness that the time we collectively spend in calling out the misogynists in our midst—is time that I, we, must be investing in creative practice.

Meena confuses creativity with cretinism. The truth is, she wasn't really raging at all. That's why she didn't chop off her left titty and hurl it at all them nasty misogynists.

Every cis and transwoman and marginalized artist will agree that time spent in this crusade is time spent away from the making of art.

Meena thinks all women want to 'make art'. Marginalized artists may wish to do so but may fail to make a livelihood thereby. But it is doubtful all women want to waste their time in this fashion.

Knowing that to keep silent is to dig our own graves,

while being gang-raped by Indian Army

and to speak out is to pay the price of ostracisation

coz people give us a wide berth if we ring up and say 'Guess what! Got gang raped by the Army again. Could I come over to take a shower? I am literally dripping with cum'.

—we need to channel our inward anger towards smashing the patriarchy and dismantling these structures of gatekeeping that demand our very flesh.

which is tough coz Indian Army just keeps giving us bigger and bigger bags of dicks to suck

Art will appear to suffer and be sacrificed, but ultimately, it is art that will emerge from our struggle.

But that Art will still be shitty coz you are a shitty artist

And blood-ridden like afterbirth, it will herald a new life.

Afterbirth does not 'herald' a new life. This is because what happens first is that baby- which is a new life- is delivered and then the afterbirth appears. Amniotic waters breaking, herald a new life. After-birth does not.

Meena's major cognitive malfunction lay in not understanding that the arrow of Causality moves from past to future. She thought people who dared the Army to gang-rape them were victorious because in their past they had not been raped. Then she discovered those women were losers. They got gang-raped. It didn't feel good. They had to run far away. People were not sympathetic to them. Having been an abject loser is a good predictor for remaining an abject loser. The safer course is to pretend you were a winner. You may have killed some soldiers. You did not end up repeatedly dripping from their jizz.

Meena seems to have been late coming to this realization. Perhaps she now regrets not sticking to Tamil, Dalit, politics. She writes of one of the subjects of her documentary-

Because she is a woman who has suffered sexual violence, she is seen as someone with compromised morals (being with more than one man is a judgment that condemns a woman to shame in the Tamil moral universe) and any man lending her a helping hand is construed as receiving sexual favours. Such gossip destroyed S.


Raped women who are not broken down by the experience are seen as continuing to exercise their sexual autonomy: they are condemned by a spectre of fear that they will wreck families.

Women raped as a weapon of war are potent tools for political mobilisation and grandstanding oratory, but in everyday life, they are viewed with derision, suspicion, shame.

Can good come out of bad? Perhaps. After the 'Rape of Berlin', German women decided they wanted no more Fuhrers or expanded 'Lebensraums'. After getting abortions, they began to thrive- even in Merkel's East, though after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the smart ones moved West so as not to have to marry Neo-Nazi shitheads and battle the expanding Wolf population.

Feminism- the scientific study of how technology and mechanism design, by making female lives better, make all lives better- will always be of the highest importance. Poets too may retain a place as 'unacknowledged legislators' for speakers of their language. It is certainly possible to write good Feminist Poetry. Meena Kandasamy failed to do so. But she is young and can easily change direction. Why not start with painstaking translations without any political masala? 'Me Too' is all very well, but only if you first rid yourself of an infantile 'Look at Me!' complex.

Meena may end up writing worthwhile things. Rahul may say something sensible one of these days. But in neither case should either Tamil Tigers or Rape feature. Both their lives have been maimed in one way or another by ignorant Indian fishing in troubled water. It is time for these two children of their times to grow up. Failing that they should run around naked with a turd protruding from their bums because, today more than ever, it is urgent we confront the Patriarchal Misogyny of the Gramscian Nomenklatura of the Osmosis of Neo-Liberal Chrematistics within a wider context of some shite or the other. But it is important that neither be covered with jizz. Give gang-rape a miss. The thing is a misfortune, not a magical trigger for any good outcome.