The Art and Politics of Polyphony in Tamil Women Representation: A Reading of Meena Kandasamy’s Prose The Orders were to Rape You

Abstract

The Sri Lankan civil war (1983-2009) remains one of the most disputed, and destructive wars in recent history for power devolution between the state and LTTE. The LTTE women’s wing is renowned for its ferocious behaviour for the cause of Tamil self-determination. These empowered female cadres within militant organisation are defy the conventional gender construct of women as domestic, docile, and nurturing. However, once the LTTE was destroyed, they were ostracized and vulnerable in post-civil war society. The text under study, Meena Kandasamy’s prose The Orders were to Rape You (2020), is significant for its account of narratives of three Tamil women along with a collection of translated poems by female guerrillas. This paper sets out to examine two objectives. Firstly, the text under study is polyphonic in its form and content, following Bakhtin’s concept of polyphony. The second objective analyses this polyphony as a political tool to challenge the conventional gender construct for women endorsed by the patriarchal Tamil morality that shove misogynist judgements on their women survivors. Reading Kandasamy’s prose as polyphonic in its structure and content serves as an analogy that informs its readers on multiple realities of the facets of conflict, rather than from a single authoritative voice of truth.