Over 150 attendees including scholars, students, artists, and community members came together on May 13 & 14th, 2011 for the sixth annual Tamil Studies Conference, held at the University of Toronto, New College.
This is the largest annual International Tamil Studies Conference making Toronto the epicentre for Tamil Studies in North America, Toronto being home to the largest Tamil Diaspora in the world. This year’s conference theme “Parimaanam: Images, Embodiments and Contestations” explored how images and aesthetic representations have imagined, embodied and destabilized ways of being Tamil.
Presented in this year’s conference were 25 scholars, activist, community members and artists from the UK, USA, India, Sri Lanka and Australia whose cutting edge research included disciplines of history, politics, classical literature, arts and gender.
This year’s main theme was gender, an under explored area within Tamil Studies. Keynote speaker V. Geetha, a feminist theorist and activist from Chennai India successfully shed light on “being feminist the Tamil way”, effective and critically discussing woman’s contribution in Tamil Nadu politics. The question and answer period that followed engaged the audience. Professor Karen Pechilis’s paper explored Tamil womanhood in medieval Tamil texts investigating the creative space between a sixth-century female author of devotional poetry and her twelfth-century male biographer.
On Saturday plenary speaker and returning scholar professor Daud Ali presented his latest research on Male intimate relationships in the Chola dynasty focusing on two male pair bonds, he had utilized medieval inscriptions and texts to provide a unique perspective. The Sixth Annual Tamil Studies Conference culminated in an an unprecedented arts showcase, “Gender Performed and Disrupted”, featuring four productions created by Tamil female directors, dramatists and choreographers, all which were critically scrutinized cultural representations of womanhood. The aloud applause and standing ovation by the audience was a testament to the strength and empowerment showcased by the female performers. Present in the audience was the conference’s esteemed guest Rathika Sitsabaisesan, Canada’s first Tamil female MP, whose attendance validated the evening.
Higlights of the panel disucssions included the panel titled Politics, Ethics, and Aesthetics of the Tamil Film Image explored Tamil cinema and its role in constructing Chennai’s regional identity. Using a different lens was the panel on Destabilizing Tamilness in Sri Lanka, looked at various Tamils in Sri-Lanka that are left out in the larger Tamil nationalist discourse, namely the Tamil Muslim, Hill Country Tamils and East cost Tamils of Sri Lanka. Contemporary issues such as the Refugee on Canadian soil was discussed in the Risky Voyage: Tamil Refugees on a Boat panel featuring legal scholars and lawyers examined the historical arrivals of the Tamil refugees from 1986 to 2010 and the Canadian government responses to each of these arrivals. These discussions of immigration, multiculturalism, international relations, funding for arts and gender are at the foremost in the Canadian public realm.
For the past five years, the richness and diversity of the conference has never ceased to impress the attendees and presenters. Not surprisingly, the same could be said for this year, as attendees, scholars, community members and volunteers left enriched and enlightened by the diversity and depth of the papers presented and dialogues created.