Abstract
Malathi de Alwis, Sri Lankan feminist anthropologist and peace activist, passed away in March of this year, taken far too soon. Malathi or Mala as she was known to most of us, was on the advisory board of the IJGS for several years, till ill health made her request to step down. She has been a friend to many feminists in India, constantly in conversation with scholarship and political developments across South Asian contexts from the perspective of her commitments on and in Sri Lanka.
Beginning with her doctoral research on the Mother’s Front in Sri Lanka, Mala forcefully conveyed a feminist perspective on the civil war in a way that feminists in India had yet to come to terms with—whether in the context of Kashmir or some of the states in the North East. While still completing her PhD (in the Anthropology Department at the University of Chicago), Mala co-edited the volume Embodied Violence: Conceptualising Women’s Sexuality in South Asia (with Kumari Jayawardena, a leading social science scholar in Colombo). Beyond any other book available then, this volume gave concrete meaning to ‘South Asia’ and it was surely significant that it was feminists in Sri Lanka who had opened the meaningfulness and indeed necessity of thinking of our space as South Asian.
More than anything else, Mala embodied a politics of location in its fullest sense. This phrase is about the politics of accountability—how to be accountable as third world academics to our own spaces under the hegemony of the first world, without falling prey to narrow nationalisms. Mala returned to Sri Lanka in order to be the kind of activist scholar that she was—answerable to people and to intellectual truth telling. She came back having spent her entire higher education from college onwards in the US, and without the kind of institutional home that Indian academia, despite its many problems, has provided most of us in this country, at least until very recently.
Mala’s work spanned a slew of interconnected themes—feminism and nationalism, sexuality and the female body, memory and trauma, the politics of humanitarian aid. A selection of her writings has been provided at the end of this message. It would not be possible to do justice to them here.
What needs special acknowledgement is the extent of her commitment to feminist politics in Sri Lanka, often at considerable cost. In particular, she took issue with the institutional shape that feminism came to take. Mala foregrounded the irony where the non-feminist maternalist politics of the Mother’s Front, one that insisted they were mere mothers seeking the return of their sons to the family fold, were nonetheless able to unsettle the state and therefore also unsettle the politics of the moment in a way that feminists had not been able to achieve. As she wrote in several contexts, what was most discomforting was a loss of political space on the part of women’s groups over the years, as feminist agendas came to be more and more shaped by the demands of international funding and the requirements of humanitarian aid. Again, this was not simply an old plaint on behalf of ‘autonomy’. In very finely researched comparative work in the wake of the tragedy of the Tsunami in two contexts— Sri Lanka and Aceh—Mala made distinctions between forms of humanitarian aid and policy assistance where local communities could and did play a more constructive role.
In her last years, Mala broadened the scope of her creativity to become a curator as much as an ethnographer. She worked with others to explore the manifold forms of grieving and memorialisation in the lives of so-called ordinary people, who have been living with death and destruction and who yet find meaning and purpose amidst ruins. It is now we who have to learn these very lessons from Mala as we mourn her untimely passing.