by Chandre Dharmawardana
chandre.dharma@yahoo.ca
Shamindra Ferdinando, in The Island, 23 September 2026, in an article entitled “Thileepan’s fast unto death: An authentic narrative that many missed” has provided an excellent review of the recent political event associated with the attempt to commemorate Thileepan and install a bronze bust of the LTTE militant. Here I argue that Thileepan was sacrificed by Prabhakaran in 1987 to the war God Murugan. While Shamindra Ferdinando has succinctly analysed the political backdrop to the event, here I attempt to complement his article by delving into the socio-cultural and Hindu ritualistic background to the event.
Vedic texts describe a ritual called Purushamedha (literally “human sacrifice”). In the Shatapatha Brahmana (13.6.2), a vast list of 184 or 185 human “victims”—representing various professions, castes, and character types (e.g., lute players, actors, builders)—are bound to sacrificial posts. However, after hymns are chanted, a voice from heaven is said to instruct that they should not be killed and that they are to be spared. Some scholars, such as Asok Parpola, argue that certain older ritual texts, like the Shankhayana and Vitana Shrauta Sutras, mention details like “suffocation,” indicating that a literal version of the practice existed before the Brahmanas explicitly transitioned into a bloodless, symbolic rite.
Gandhi practised “hunger unto death” fasts as powerful political theatre but strictly observed the principle of Ahimsa (in not taking life). Gandhi’s fast-unto-death events always ended with his heeding to massive national protests for him to end his fast; he would ceremoniously take the glass of orange that ended his fasts. Mainstream political protests usually adopt the traditional Gandhian style (allowing water), whereas those seeking to directly replicate the intense “Thileepan style” of fasting unto death purposefully refuse both food and water to force an immediate crisis.
In the case of Thileepan, the “Thalivaar” fully intended to sacrifice him to the Six-Faced God Sanmukan or Kandasamy prior to direct hostilities against the IPKF.
The militant Tamil Eelamist movements were NOT rooted in Ahimsa but sharply broke away from it, especially after the 1972 Constitution, which hatched a pure mono-ethnic governance structure. Public Tamil separatist figures such as Kasi Anandan demanded the blood of traitors and named them after resigning in 1970 from his job as a translator in the state service to devote his time to propagate an extreme, violent form of Eelamist ideology that launched the ideology of the Tamil Student movement—the “boys” of the TULF.
Prabhakaran’s outfit was the most zealous “Tamil Liberation group” that heeded Kasi Anandan’s calls and began to kill moderate Tamils who backed reconciliation rather than stark separation. Kasi Anandan was a member of the central committee of the LTTE. The extent of Kasi Anandan’s role in the assassination of many distinguished Tamil leaders has never been examined by jurists or by the UNHRC.
Finally, the TULF opened the door for military action in its 1976 resolution at Vaddukoddai, a town whose name even in the 19th century was, ironically, “BataKotte”, i.e., the garrison town (fort = “kotte”) where soldiers (Bhata) were stationed, presumably to fight off Jaffna-based usurpers of local power.
Thileepan (Rasiah Partheepan), the political wing leader of the LTTE staged his 11-day fatal fast in front of the historic Nallur Kandaswamy Temple in Jaffna. Kandasamy (Murugan) is a God of War. By positioning a dying young fighter at the doorstep of Murugan’s most sacred shrine, the protest bypassed conventional political arena dynamics. It repositioned Thileepan’s hunger strike within the tradition of bhakti (sacrificial devotion) and religious martyrdom. Thileepan is an example of a HUMAN SACRIFICE in front of Murgan at the Nallur temple in the well-established tradition of sacrificial devotion entrenched in Hindu orthodoxy that Prabhakaran utilised to great theatrical effect.
In Hindu traditions, concepts of asceticism, self-mortification, and vows (vratams) are deeply understood forms of spiritual penance. The leader of the LTTE, Prabhakaran was highly adept at utilising martial history, local mythology, and symbols to build the cult of the Maaveerar (Great Heroes).
At the time, the Sri Lankan government virtually functioned under the Dicta of the Dixit-led Indian High Commission in Colombo for all matters concerning the LTTE. When the Indian government refused to capitulate and Thileepan passed away on September 26, 1987, the “theatrical” power of his death achieved its strategic goal. It broke any remaining Tamil faith in the Indian intervention, shifted public sympathy entirely to the LTTE, and primed the population for the bloody war against the Indian military that followed shortly after.
It was a political trap that ensnared the Indian effort at finding a reconciled solution; it ensured that the Sri Lankan government would fail to establish the Indo-Lanka agreement, rejected by Tamils and also by a large portion of Sinhalese, for devolution of power to the provinces.
While anthropologists should view the event as an astute manipulation of religious orthodoxy for political theater, Eelam Tamil ideologues view it very differently. To many of them Thileepan is a Thiyaga Theepam (the Light of Sacrifice). They see his fast as an act of absolute ahimsa (non-violence) and an ultimate personal sacrifice made out of genuine love and desperation for his people. In effect, violence is transformed into its opposite under the ideological lens of Eelamism. In the political vocabulary of the region, invoking Thileepan’s style of death means that an activist is signaling to the state that they have completely bypassed the path of negotiation and are fully prepared to die on camera to trigger a public uprising.
So, does the continued commemoration of Thileepan signal that many leading members of the Tamil community are not interested in any resolution short of separation, and even reject the existing 13th amendment framework of provincial councils?
In broad Vedic philosophy non-violence (Ahimsa) is praised, but as in the Brahma Sutras a loophole is left. Violence that is explicitly mandated by Vedic ritual logic is legally and considered purified. Medieval texts (like the Karika Purana) adapted these loopholes to outline instructions for human offerings to the Hindu Goddess Kali and male warrior Gods such as Murugan. The specific section of the Kalika Purana that outlines these rites is known as the Rudhiradhyaya (The Blood Chapter).
All this is presumably viewed as part of the Dharma-Yuddha that even Arjuna invoked. This continued symbolism based ultimately on a military confrontation of the majority is suicidal not just to followers of Thileepana, but to all members of the Tamil community and finally to the majority community as well. As I outlined in my article in The Island on 22 September (entitled, Illusion of Recovery), and as noted by other writers studying demographic trends, the total fertility rate (TFR) of females in Sri Lanka has dropped way below the 2.1 children per woman required to maintain its population at the current levels. Instead, all three populations, namely those of Tamils, Sinhalese and Muslims, are contracting rapidly, having peaked during the 2019-2022 period.
In the Jaffna peninsula, with a high level of female education, the TFR has dropped to 1.2 and the numbers of young people (who can be recruited to militant movements) are rapidly decreasing. Prabhakaran’s movement had scarified a whole generation of youth in recruiting even children as `child soldiers’, equipped even with a cyanide capsule for killing themselves. This too is an extension of the Thileepan sacrifice of life that Prabhakaran insisted and assiduously instilled even into women cadre by Adel Balasingham. In addition, there is a constant emigration out of the North and East into the diaspora at a rate greater than for the Sinhalese and Muslim communities.
While there is much emphasis on the violent rhetoric of the “Bodu Bala Sena” in the south, there is little mention of the “Siva Senai”, “Ravana Senai” and the “Rudra Senai” that have been violently active in their rhetoric in the North and in the Eastern province. The “Rudra Senai”, founded in 2016, has an openly anti-Muslim violent objectives that the Bodu Bala sena has also imitated.
Having sapped the Tamil demographic and given the average TFR of other communities, Tamils may run the risk of losing the limited political power that they hold today, a consequence of the disastrous political decisions they made in the 1970s.
Note: The 1977 elections overwhelmingly voted in the TULF, which became the leading opposition party. The TULF campaigned using the Vaddukoddai resolution. Its total vote was only 7% of the voting population of the country. It carried most of the votes in the North, but failed to capture a lead in the Eastern province. The Colombo Tamils did not support the LTTE at that time. A strong shift in favour of the LTTE occurred after the 1983 Black July pogrom.