Posts Categorized: Arts & Culture

By Nanthikadal Lagoon, Our Dreams Lie Rusting in the Mud

by Shash Trevett, PEN Transmissions, July 8, 2021 Shash Trevett on the poetry of Nillanthan All translations of the poems quoted here were done jointly by Shash Trevett and Geetha Sukumaran. * 18 May 2009 was a day of apocalypse. Fire rained from the air, from the water, across the land. It did not discriminate… Read more »

Review of ‘Methagu’ Film

by Arul MurugesaPandian, July 5, 2021 The most important factor about this movie is its timing. While a concerted effort is being made by nefarious forces to discredit the genuine liberation struggle of Eelam Tamils, this sincere effort to document the root causes of the armed struggle is a fitting reply.   The Family Man –… Read more »

Four International Tamil Actresses Shattering the Glass Ceiling

by Thamarai, July 1, 2021 Streaming platforms like Netflix and Amazon Prime have helped us discover emerging Tamil talent from across the globe. Here are four amazing international Tamil actresses to watch as they shatter the glass ceiling.   Geraldine Viswanathan Standup comedian, sketch writer and now actress, Australian newcomer Geraldine Viswanathan is no stranger… Read more »

‘Stateless’: Detention Camp Drama Floats Adrift

Despite agile performances, the Australian drama focuses on the wrong characters, giving its refugee stories short shrift Eelam Tamils have a small subplot in this series. Showing on Netflix — Editor by Maria Fontuora, Rolling Stone, USA, July 13, 2020 In 2004, an Australian citizen named Cornelia Rau was wrongly imprisoned in an immigrant detention… Read more »

‘Methagu’ Film

#மேதகு Tamil period action drama movie written and directed by Kittu.  The movie stars Kutti Mani, Eashwar Basha, Vijay, and Anandan in lead roles. The music was composed by Praveen Kumar.  The movie Methagu is about Velupillai Prabhakaran, a warrior, and the founder and leader of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam. Release  Methagu was… Read more »

Performance Practices of Diasporic Sri Lankan Tamil Communities in London

Embodied Migration by Ann R. David, Journal of Intercultural Studies, August 2012, 33:4, 375-394 Embodied_Migration_Performance_Practices This paper examines issues of embodied performativity and transmission of dance  practices amongst Sri Lankan Tamil Hindus in the suburbs of London, focusing on how the experience of migration has shaped the making of cultural and ethnic identities.Using data gathered from recent ethnographic work in British Tamil temples and in the Tamil community, it addresses the complex discourse between the religious and political sense of selfhood articulated… Read more »

Performing Politics

State Power, Ethnicity and Gender in Sri Lanka by Janet O’Shea, Dance Chronicle, 34:146–151, 2011 Review of Susan A. Reed’s 2009 book “Dance and the Nation: Performance, Ritual, and Politics in Sri Lanka” 288 pp. with DVD. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2009. $29.95 paper. ISBN – 13: 978-0-29923-164-4 Performing Politics O’Shea review 2011 Reed’s… Read more »

Bharatanatyam in Sri Lankan Sinhalese Films & in Sri Lanka

by Cinema Nrityagharana blog, June 24, 2014 While on a zealous search to see what kinds of dance could be found in the cinema of Sri Lanka, India’s island neighbor to the south, I was completely perplexed when I stumbled onto this Bharatanatyam-based dance in the 1965 Sinhala film Hathara Maha Nidhanaya: Starts :1:07 https://youtu.be/6RcYIYKk1AE My… Read more »

‘Jagame Thandhiram’ Movie Review #2

by Natalia Winkleman, The New York Times, June 21, 2021 ‘Jagame Thandhiram’ Review: Scheme, Slaughter, Repeat An intrepid gangster maneuvers between rival crime lords in the glossy drama “Jagame Thandhiram.” The movie (on Netflix) follows Suruli (Dhanush), whose merciless killing sprees earn him an invitation to serve under a wealthy British megalomaniac. Seduced by a… Read more »

‘Jagame Thandhiram’ Movie Review

Guns, warfare, a pressing issue and a ricochet bullet by Srivatsan S, The Hindu, Chennai, India, June 18, 2021 Karthik Subbaraj’s latest wants to have a bit of everything: a drama with an ultra-cool gangster (Dhanush) at the centre, a serious political film dealing with a global issue, and a stylishly-shot bubblegum film with a… Read more »

Power, Performance, and Ethnicity in Sri Lanka

When Time Won’t Tell by Ahalya Satkunaratnam and Venuri Perera, Dance Studies Association, Wisconsin, USA, 2019 | Volume XXXIX On October 26, 2018, there was a constitutional coup in Sri Lanka whent he Executive President, Maithripala Sirisena, attempted to appoint the former President, Mahinda Rajapaksa, as his Prime Minister,thus ousting the current Prime Minister, Ranil… Read more »

Tamil Memes

Masters Politics, social tensions, and comedy all found a home in Tamil cinema. The Tamil meme needs all four things to work. by Aditya Shrikrishna, FiftyTwo.in, March 25, 2021 Nesamani was a contractor. On 26 May 2019, the Bharatiya Janata Party was confirmed to have swept the seventeenth Lok Sabha elections. At some point on… Read more »

The Many Pongals of the Tamil People

by Anuradha Srinivasan, January 12, 2021 Jewel-coloured saris and spotless white “veshtis” mingle as people bustle about in the pale grey dawn, preparing for the sunrise. Young girls and boys dressed in their best pavadais [woman’s skirt] and shirts laugh and run around gleefully. Everyone is excited to prepare a feast and welcome their honoured guest, the… Read more »

The Voice of Music – S P Balasubramanyam

by Anuradha Srinivasan, Chennai, December 6, 2020  Ezhunthu Vaa Baalu, the harmonium player called out to his friend, who was catching up on the cricket score on his radio backstage. The jovial young man took the mic with a smile and sang breezily as his friends on the harmonium and guitar wove in and out… Read more »

‘Funny Boy’ and the Indian Tamil Gaze on Ilankai Tamils

by Sharanya Manivannan, Medium, November 15, 2020 I had first known that there was a film adaptation of Shyam Selvadurai’s iconic novel Funny Boy when I had heard about closed screenings of it in Colombo sometime in mid-2020. The story is a bildungsroman about a queer, upper-class Tamil teenager, culminating in the Black July riots of 1983 that… Read more »

U.K. Conservation Society Details Links to Colonialism and Slavery

The National Trust said a third of the properties it manages had direct links to colonialism or slavery. Some have a “hugely uncomfortable” history, it said. by Elian Peltier, The New York Times, September 22, 2020 LONDON — The country house of former Prime Minister Winston Churchill, an ardent imperialist; an estate in northern England… Read more »

New Meanings for Ravana

The focus of the fourth paper, ‘Ravana’s Sri Lanka: Redefining the Sinhala Nation?’, by Dileepa Witharana, focuses on the recent widespread surge of interest in Ravana within the Sinhala community. This interest has reached unprecedented levels, to the point of redefining the Sinhala nation in popular public space by discarding the theory of Aryan descent… Read more »