Motherhood as a space of protest: Women's political participation in contemporary Sri Lanka.

This paper was originally published in Appropriating Gender: Women's Activism and the Politicization of Religion in South Asia eds. Amrita Basu & Patricia Jeffrey. London/New York: Routledge, 1997.

The research on which this paper is based was made possible with grants from the MacArthur Foundation (administered by CASFIC), the Committee on Southern Asian Studies (University of Chicago), Class of 1905 Fellowship (Mount Holyoke College), and infrastructural support from the ICES, Colombo, for which I am most grateful. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Senior Research Colloquium on 'Violence, Suffering and Healing in South Asia' held at the Department of Sociology, Delhi University in August 1993 and at the conference on 'Appropriating Gender: Women's Activism and the Politicization of Religion in South Asia' held at the Bellagio Study and Conference Center in September 1994. The comments and suggestions that I received at both venues have been invaluable and I extend my sincere thanks to the participants and most specially to my discussants Patricia Uberoi and Tricia Jeffrey, the latter being a most sensitive and patient editor as well. My thanks also to Uma Chakravarty, Mary Hancock , Pradeep Jeganathan and David Scott for their critical comments on various versions of this paper, Man gala Samaraweera, SLFP MP for Matara who made time to speak with me on many occasions, and Sunila Abeysekere and Kumi Samuel of INFORM for sharing their confidential files and filling in many details of the early days of the Mothers' Front.

I am especially indebted to Dr. Manorani Saravanamuttu and many other women who wish to remain anonymous who willingly shared their tales of despair and anger and whose courage has been an inspiration to me. I dedicate this paper to them.

During the years 1987 to 1991, Sri Lanka witnessed an uprising by nationalist Sinhala youth (the JVP) and reprisals by the state that gripped the country in a stranglehold of terror. While the militants randomly terrorized or assassinated anyone who criticized them or supposedly collaborated with the state, the state similarly, but on a much larger scale, murdered or 'disappeared' anyone they suspected to be a 'subversive' which included thousands of young men, some young women and several left-wing activists, playwrights, lawyers and journalists who were either monitoring or protesting the violation of human rights by the state. Bodies, rotting on beaches, smoldering in grotesque heaps by the roadsides and floating down rivers, were a daily sight during the height of state repression from 1988 to 1990. It was in such a context that the Mothers' Front, a grassroots women's organization with an estimated membership of over 25,000 women was formed in July 1990 to protest the 'disappearance' of approximately 60 ,000 young and middleaged men. Their only demand was for 'a climate where we can raise our sons to manhood, have our husbands with us and lead normal women's lives' (Island, 9 February 1991). The seemingly unquestionable authenticity of their grief and espousal of 'traditional' family values provided the Mothers' Front with an important space for protest unavailable to other organizations critical of state practices.(1)

The Mothers' Front phrased their protest in a vocabulary that was most available to them through their primary positioning within a patriarchally structured society--that of motherhood--which I define here as encompassing women's biological reproduction as well as their interpellation as moral guardians, care-givers and nurturers. While I am fully in agreement with the argurnent that matemalist women's peace groups project essentialist views of women that re-enforce the notion of biology as destiny and legitimize a sex-role system that, in assigning responsibility for nurture and survival to women alone, encourages masculinized violence and destruction (Enloe, 1989; Hartsock, 1982; 1-louseman, 1982; Lloyd, 1986), I think we need to consider carefully the reasons why 'motherist movements' (Schirmer, 1993) adopt the strategies they do, and what effects they have. In light of such a project, I would like to consider here, the contingent usefulness of maternalized protest at a particular moment in Sri Lankan his tory. However, such an attempt at a positive reading cannot ignore the complex interplay of power within this space that also re-inscribed gender and class hierarchies and re-inforced majoritarian ethnic identities while those of minorities were erased.

Though the Mothers' Front's agenda remained very limited, its few, brief, and spectacular appearances on the Sri Lankan political stage nevertheless placed a government on the defensive, awoke a nation from a terrorized stupor and indelibly gendered the discourses of human rights and dissent. It also created a space in which a much larger, non-racist, and more radical movement of protest could be launched to overthrow an extremely repressive and corrupt government that had been in power for 17 years, at the General Elections of August 1994.

Due to spatial limitations, my article will only concentrate on exploring how the Mothers' Front created a space for themselves within a predominantly patriarchal political landscape by articulating their protest through an available, familiar and emotive discourse of motherhood. While this space was mediated by a powerful political party that was also predominantly male, Sinhala and middle class, I would like to suggest that the repertoire of protest employed by these women, albeit under the sign of the mother and mainly limited to tears and curses, were the most crucial components in an assault on a government that had until then held an entire nation to ransom on the pretext of safeguarding the lives of its citizens. It is in this sense that I assert the contingent value of the Mothers' Front's repertoire of protest.