Daniel Bass: Rumors about Reproduction and the Reproduction of Rumors in the Up-country of Sri Lanka
Numerous Up-country Tamil politicians, activists and NGO workers in Sri Lanka often let me know about pernicious birth control programs allegedly initiated by the government, tea estate management and the quasi-governmental Plantation Human Development Trust. These rumors allege that despite some recent progress, over-zealous family planning officials remain fundamentally anti-Tamil and are actively pursuing coercive birth control policies to limit the size of the Up-country Tamil population and thus decrease its power and rightful place in Sri Lankan society. The major problem about these repeated rumors was that I only heard them from men. Male Up-country Tamil leaders employ these rumors as ways to mask their own lack of agency, at the same time as they rhetorically deprive Up-country Tamil women of any power or choice. A continued male bias against birth control persists in the up-country, since it increases women’s agency regarding reproduction. Up-country Tamil women generally want some birth control, although not always the methods and timings desired by government representatives. While many Up-country Tamils sincerely believed these claims, they also served to Up-country Tamil elites’ political advantage, to show that Up-country Tamils were still under threat from the government and other institutions. Such paranoid threats and conspiracy theories are not invoked as part of a reasoned argument about the future of Up-country Tamils, but are cynically employed to show that change is extremely difficult and near impossible. Although framed as invitations to action to empower people, these rumors of “genocide” actually add up to a rationale for the continued misery of the up-country, since Up-country Tamils’ continued political and medical problems are mostly the result of official neglect and persistent poverty rather than active antagonism.
Biographical Statement:
Dr. Daniel Bass is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology & Religious Studies at Lynn University in Boca Raton, Florida. His research interests include Up-country Tamils in Sri Lanka, cultural and religious change in the South Asian diaspora, theories of agency and identity, popular culture, trade unions and more. He is awaiting the publication of his book manuscript, Of Tea and Tigers: Up-country Tamils in and beyond Sri Lanka. His publications include “Paper Tigers on the Prowl: Rumors, Violence and Agency in the Up-country of Sri Lanka” in Anthropological Quarterly 81:1 (2008), “Making Sense of the Census: Up-country Tamils and the Contours of Tamil Nationalism,” in Pathways of Dissent: Tamil Nationalism in Sri Lanka (2009), and “A Diaspora Next Door: Up-Country Tamils in Sri Lanka,” in Indentureship to Globalisation: New Perspectives on the Indian Diaspora (forthcoming).
