Spatialities and Structures of Feelings of Burmese Tamils During the “Long March” of 1942: A Gendered Perspective

Abstract

Among the forgotten narratives of Tamil diaspora, the stories of the exodus of Tamil men and women from Burma during early 1940s are bristling with what Raymond Williams termed as “structures of feelings” (Williams in Marxism and literature. Oxford University Press, Oxford, pp. 131–132, 1977). The “impulse, tone and restraint” of these narratives live on in the spatial, filmic, literary and other traces of past and present lives of Burmese Tamils and their descendants in far flung geographical locations such as “Tiruchirappalli”, “Thanjavur”, “Moreh (Manipur)”, “Vyasarpadi” and across numerous places in Chennai where they live today. Tinker (J SE Asian Stud 6(1):1–15, 1975) calls the exodus “a forgotten Long March” and terms the event as one that teaches the historical lesson of human endurance. More often than not, diasporic narratives are about the struggles of entry by indentured people into treacherous, alien territories and the struggles of survival in such lands. Accounts of the struggles of people of Indian origin, especially Indian women, who were forced to relocate to the homeland are rarely part of the mainstream diasporic scholarship. Such accounts are almost absent in the case of “the forgotten Long March” back home of Burmese Tamils. This paper seeks to fill the gap in a small way by engaging with the spatialities of the journey back home as captured in the diary of journalist/writer, Sarma (March on foot through Burma. Valavan Publication, Chennai, 2006). As far as possible, a gendered perspective of the spatialities is unravelled from these writings with the application of Raymond Williams’ framework of “structures of feelings” and Lefebvre’s (Schmid in Space, difference and everyday life-reading Henri Lefebvre. Routlege, New york, p. 41, 2008) framework of production of space.