Category Archives: Tamil migration

A Tamil Saivite Temple in Australia: Sustaining Community Amidst Linguistic Diversity

A Notice re a NEW BOOK on the negotiation of language and identity in a Tamil Saivite Temple in Australia by NILRUKSHI PERERA

Diversity is a buzzword of our times and yet the extent of religious diversity in Western societies is generally misconceived. This ground-breaking research draws attention to the journey of one migrant religious institution in an era of religious superdiversity.

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From Ceylon to Australia: Migrant Journeys, 1860s-to-2010s

Earl Forbes, whose chosen title in The Ceylankan is “Ceylon/Sri Lanka to Australia: Arrivals and Survival”

Ceylonese/Sri Lankans have entered Australia for a variety of reasons during the past one and a half centuries.  The far greater number of these arrivals occurred in the second half of the twentieth century and first two decades of the 21st century.  Early arrivals go as far back as the last two decades of the nineteenth century.

Figure 3  Queensland sugarcane plantation workers. … [placed as frontispiece because of its striking character

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Thumbs Up for Sri Lankan Tamil Epic at Edinburgh Festival

Allan Radcliffe, a review essay … 10 August 2022 — with highlighting here imposed by The Editor, Thuppahi

A stage epic is a rare beast in Edinburgh, where audiences are accustomed to shows of one-hour tops in makeshift venues. Counting and Cracking is novelistic in its scope and ambition, featuring several storylines that sprawl over two continents and nearly half a century. Its three-and-a-half-hour running time goes by in a blink.

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Challenging the Tamil Genocide Education Week Act aka TGEWA

“TGEWA” refers to the Tamil Genocide Education Week Act and Professor Chandra Dharmawardena in Montreal has sent this Memo re the progress of a legal challenge mounted against it via funds collected publicly … with Scott Fairley and Nicolas Rouleau as  lead counsels. This is both a report and an appeal for monetary contributions toeards this process.

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Vaddas, Rodiyo and Ahikuntakayo: Some Bibliographcal Items

LC Arulpragasam 2019 “The Veddas in the east of Ceylon in the 1950s,” 13 Oct 2019,https://thuppahis.com/2019/10/13/the-veddas-in-the-east-of-ceylon-in-the-1950s/

Michael Roberts 2017 The First Settlers and Their Claim to Ownership of Terrain. A Comparative excursion,” 18 January 2017, https://thuppahis.com/2017/01/18/the-first-settlers-and-their-claim-to-ownership-of-terrainstate-a-comparative-excursion/

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Asylum Australia for Sri Lankans? THEN and NOW

Michael Roberts 

Through the first decade of the 21st century fishing trawlers attempted to breach the Australian borders with illegal migrants and this process continued even after Eelam War IV ended in May 2009 …. indeed, even receiving a boost because of the circumstances of considerable segments of the SL Tamil populace in Sri Lanka and in refugee camps in southern India.

In July 2012 I presented a BIBLIOGRAPHY on this topic in Thuppahi and I call attention to it here: …………. ………………………………………. http://thuppahi.wordpress.com/2012/07/30/a-flourishing-bibliographical-tree-tamil-migration-asylum-seekers-and-australia/

epa03396379 A young girl from a group of Sri Lankan asylum seekers as they arrive at Bungus port, near Padang, West Sumatra, Indonesia 13 September 2012. At least 40 asylum seekers from Sri Lanka were transferred from Mentawai Islands, West Sumatra to the Immigration Detention Pekan Baru, Riau. Total number of migrants for 2012 is close to 10,000, with many of them Afghans, Iraqis and Iranians who have paid people-smugglers to ferry them from Indonesia to Australia. EPA/STRINGER

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Horrendous Western Misreadings of Sri Lankan Situation in 2008-09

  Tony Donaldson’s Capsule Comment in Facebook A Few Years Back++
Michael, …. Two great articles in “Ambassador Blake in Never-Never Land…” and “The imperious interventions of David Miliband….” I am not surprised by any of this. US diplomats should study anthropology for a few years. It might teach them to recognize neo-colonialism in their own value system.
It reminds us that the US., its diplomats and think tanks which operate in the guise of academic institutions, do not present global or universal values as they pretend or claim, but a deeply entrenched relativist one that is tied to US interests (but in this instance, the sheer lack of understanding about what occurs in SL is mind-boggling).
Displaced Tamils on the movein the northern Vanni  — from west eastwards in mid-late 2008

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The Murugappans of Lanka and Biloela …. And Gross Australian Generalizations about Sri Lankan Situations

Nick Gibbs, in 7 News, 24 May 2022, where the title runs thus “Biloela ready to Welcome Home the Murugappans”

Supporters of the Tamil family held in immigration detention believe their plight changed votes in Qld as the town of Biloela prepares to welcome them home.

 

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The Political Travails of the Indian Tamils in the State Council Era 1931-48

Uditha Devapriya, in  The Island, 21 May 2022,  where the title runs thus “DS Senanayake and the Indian Tamil Question”

In his recent work on D. S. Senanayake, K. M. de Silva explores certain controversial aspects of Ceylon’s lurch into independent statehood. Among these is the issue of the fate of the country’s Indian Tamils. Brought to the island from South India amidst conditions of famine and mass starvation in the early part of the 19th century, Indian Tamil workers replaced Sinhalese and resident Tamil labour in the island. Governed by a semifeudal set-up that shut them out from the world outside, Indian Tamil labour grew up in a world of their own. It was their tragic fate that while the colonial government feigned little interest in their welfare, their lives lay in the hands of that government.

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Finale: Eelam War IV …. Recalling the Final Stages

Meera Srinivasan, in The Hindu, 18 May 2022, where the title is “Sri Lanka’s War Aniversary: Tamil Victims remembered in Colombo”

Scores of people on Wednesday gathered in Mullivaikkal village, in Sri Lanka’s northern Mullaitivu district, to remember the tens of thousands of Tamil civilians who were brutally killed in the final stages of the civil war in May 2009, when the armed forces crushed the LTTE.

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