Dear Campus Community,
Please note that Professor William Harman is the fourth speaker in the fall segment of our UC Foundation-supported Asia speaker series. Harman, Professor and Head of the Philosophy and Religion Department, will speak with his student, Ajitkumar Chittambalam, on Thursday, October 27 from 12:15–1:15 in Grote Classroom 131. Their presentation is titled, "The Suicide Bomber Becomes a Goddess: Women, Theosis, and Sacrificial Violence in South Asia." A description of their presentation is below and attached. Please encourage interested faculty, staff, students, and community members to attend, and feel free to bring a brown bag lunch.
Cordially,
Andrea Green
Publications Coordinator
Education About Asia
Professor William Harman
Thursday, October 27, 12:15–1:15
Grote 131 Classroom
The Suicide Bomber Becomes a Goddess: Women, Theosis, and Sacrificial Violence in South Asia
A Talk by William Harman and Ajitkumar Chitambalam
Well before suicide bombing by females became a morally and religiously sanctioned strategy to respond to perceived oppression in Palestine, Israel, Iraq, and Chechnya, it had become a routine tool in the struggle of the Sri Lankan Tamil Tigers for independence from the Sinhalese-majority nation-state of Sri Lanka. The most internationally visible example of Tamil Sri-Lankan female suicide bombing involved the assassination of the Prime Minister of India, Rajiv Gandhi, in 1991. The increasingly frequent occurrence of deliberate and pre-meditated female bombing/suicide events primarily in Sri Lanka emerges out of a South Asian context juxtaposing some very powerful traditional notions about the nature of women. First is that culture’s understanding of the popular goddess Mariyamman, worshipped widely among Tamils both in Sri Lanka and in southern India. The mythologies about Mariyamman vary significantly, but a pattern is easily discernible. Mariyamman is a goddess who was once a woman, but as a human she was unjustly betrayed and abused, in most cases by the male establishment. In an explosive and passionate confrontation, she was killed and transformed into a goddess whose presence in the world serves to address the injustices and violence which women and the oppressed tend to suffer. Her transformed identity and the violence that accompany it serve to purify and cleanse the world of evil and injustice.
A second cultural element in South Asia that contributes to the notion that a woman’s self-destruction is necessary to triumph over the tragedy of loss and suffering is the ideology associated with the practice of Sati. When a woman willingly and violently destroys herself on the burning pyre of her deceased husband, she becomes a powerful goddess to whom a shrine is dedicated, whose memory is revered, and whose curses serve to purify the world of the evil and wrongdoing she chooses to denounce before she dies and then is reborn as a goddess.
The strategy of female suicide, though driven by a basic mythic core, has become—almost coincidentally—a powerful image among Tamils because it invites those who suffer oppression to offer themselves in the struggle for justice and to accept death, if necessary, as a laudable sacrifice leading to the conquest of injustice. In brief, we will focus on the growing trend among Sri Lankan Tamil women to commit suicide as an act of violent protest. We will argue that such acts derive significance, meaning, and inspiration from the mythic themes in Hinduism describing how a woman’s body has been destroyed, and thereby transformed, into an avenging goddess whose responsibility it is to insure justice and righteousness. At issue here is the notion that a woman’s body constitutes a metaphor for society, and that her self-sacrificial destruction creates conditions under which society may reconstitute and re-align itself.
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