The Orders Were to Rape You: Tigresses in the Tamil Eelam Struggle
“Never have Tamil women burned so bright, never have they dazzled so much, as when they were Tigresses … but nothing had prepared me to brace for the reality that these powerful women would be so vulnerable.”
In 2009, the Sri Lankan state’s genocidal war against the Tamils ends. In 2012, Meena Kandasamy, who grew up with poster-size pictures of Tamil Tigers and Tigresses, sets out to make a documentary on the violence faced by the women fighters of the LTTE after the war. She meets women who survived the camps where the orders were to rape them — now refugees in distant lands, pale shadows of their blazing selves.
The documentary never gets made. Kandasamy exhumes old hard drives to piece their shattered lives together, and translates the poetry of three Tamil women combatants — poetry as op-ed, poetry as resistance, poetry as a call to arms, poetry as a call to poetry.
“A meaningful attempt to communicate the collective experience of trauma and enrich it with posterity, significance and dignity.” — Scroll
“Crisp and vivid.” — Meera Srinivasan, The Hindu
“A book not only about Tamil women and the sexual violence they experienced, but also about the author’s relationship with Tamil nationalism.” — The Wire
“One moment burning with a fire that could burn down empires and the other, agonising for their people and self.” — Feminism in India
Read reviews in The Hindu, Scroll and Feminism in India.