Reflections from the Tamil diaspora in a Time of genocide

“Where can we go and scream?”

A common refrain from my father after sharing a painful memory in our family history. I always understood it to mean, “Who will care about what happened to us?” 

My family, like so many Tamil people, migrated to Burma at the turn of the 20th century to escape the poverty and deprivation of their homeland due to colonial plundering. The largely British-made Madras Famine stole the lives of 5.5 million people from 1876-1877 and nearly 10 million from this particular famine in the years 1876 through 1878. As our people wasted away from colonial greed, the Viceroy of India, Lord Lytton, held a Delhi Durbar, a week-long extravagant celebration for 68,000 dignitaries in honor of Queen Victoria’s coronation as Empress of India in 1877. It was estimated that approximately 100,000 people starved to death in Madras (present-day Chennai) and Mysore during the celebrations for an Empress of a land she would never set foot upon. During the famine, the British Crown continued to export 320,000 tonnes of wheat out of the Madras Presidency to England with a policy against providing relief so as not to encourage entitlement and expectation amongst Indian subjects.

 The political and economic devastation of present-day Tamil Nadu drove many of its native population to migrate to outside colonies to survive. In Rangoon City, Burma, present-day Myanmar, my father was given the Biblical name “Gershom,” a stranger in a strange land. A son born in exile. During the occupation by the East India Company, Burma was part of the Indian Empire under the British Crown, and a substantial Tamil community made a life for themselves there. But in December 1941, the Japanese Imperial Army began an air raid on Rangoon City. My grandparents, with their two toddler sons, started the journey on foot back to India. Over half a million Indian migrants embarked on this journey through harsh jungle terrain, mountainous passages, and river crossings, leaving behind all that they could not carry with them. They were subjected to starvation, extreme weather conditions, and disease from the rotting corpses along the route. Many did not survive the journey. Miraculously, my family made it out when many family members did not. They were refugees on their own soil, having chosen the British Crown, the devil they knew, rather than take their chances with the Empire of Japan.  

Displaced and dispossessed again

Grateful to be alive yet faced with the same poverty and lack of opportunities that drove them out of India, my grandfather enlisted in the British-Indian army to provide for our family. He served until the end of WWII while my grandmother struggled to nourish and raise their young sons alone on military rations. After the war, they would once again face displacement in the years following independence and during partition. 

In the end, our elders had to carry on with their lives as if they had not suffered through cataclysmic life-altering events. When sudden massive heart attacks would rob them from our midst, genetics, diet, exercise regimen, and stress were named as the culprits per Western medicine. Blaming them for a shortened life, not the things choking the life out of them. Forgetting the stories of horror and injustice trapped inside of their bodies with nowhere to go, only burrowing deeper inside, wrecking them on a cellular and soul level. Who will care about what happened to us? I do.

Something ancestral is happening

As I bear witness to the genocide in Gaza, the land theft, the erasure, the extermination of bloodlines, and the utter devastation, I remember my family and their stories of colonization and legacy of resistance. There is a rage that lives inside of you for inequities buried in history and oral tradition, ones that are known but remain unaccounted for by the perpetrators. There is an entirely different kind of fury when you see it gleefully and mockingly happen before your very eyes with the co-sign of the Western World and fellow settler colonial projects.

“Where can we go and scream?”

As I hold the stories of my people in tension with the genocide of Gaza and the illegal occupation of Palestine, 

I. Will. Scream! 

For them, for us, because our liberation is indeed bound to one another.