“Saving” Tamils through child adoption: two films of the Sri Lankan civil war

Abstract

This paper examines two films, Somaratne Dissanayake’s Saroja (2000) and Mani Ratnam’s A Peck on the Cheek (2002), through the recurrent motif of adoption. Both films represent a Tamil child, whose parents have been “lost” to the war, in need of rescue. In the Sinhala film Saroja, the eponymous Tamil girl is saved by a Sinhala family when both her parents are killed by the Tamil Tigers and in the Tamil film A Peck on the Cheek, a Tamil girl named Amuda is adopted by a young Tamil couple in Madras when Amuda’s parents choose to join the militant movement in Sri Lanka. The two films’ preoccupation with adoption, I argue, sheds light on the ethnic and gender dynamics of the Sri Lankan armed conflict. More specifically, the two films ascribe the role of savior to the Sinhala community in Sri Lanka and the Tamils in Tamil Nadu. While the Sinhala film sees the Sinhala family as a safe alternative to a Tamil home, the (Indian) Tamil film views Tamil Nadu as an appropriate home for an orphaned Sri Lankan Tamil child. The two films’ preoccupation with Tamil children arguably renders the Tamil national question a child-like concern. Through the films’ uncannily similar portrayal of Sri Lankan Tamils, this comparative study suggests that both the Sinhala and the (Indian) Tamil visions of the conflict propose a solution that denies Tamils any agency and is symptomatic of the marginalization of Tamils during the conflict and in the post-conflict period where a sustainable, long-term solution has proven to be elusive.