Michael Roberts on his Essays on this Theme within the Global Context ………… https://thuppahis.com/2017/07/21/sacrificial-devotion-how-i-entered-this-terrain/…. JULY 21, 2017 · …………..“Sacrificial Devotion” — How I Entered This Terrain
Tiger fighters relax in camp, late 1980s—Pic by Shyam Tekwani who was embedded with LTTE for a while.
With the benefit of a Teen Murti Fellowship I was collecting data on communal violence in India in 1995 when my readings of news archives indicated that the death of Mrs Indira Gandhi by assassination in Delhi induced a handful of individuals in southern India to commit sympathetic suicide. Since news reports did not indicate similar reactions in other parts of India, I began to reflect on the cultural foundations that promoted such expressions – acting, of course, in contexts that also could provide political and economic inspirations. This eventually led to my first essay on this topic: “Filial Devotion and the Tiger Cult of Suicide,” Contributions to Indian Sociology, 1996, 30: 245-72.