Meena Kandasamy records the gruesome first-person experiences of two women of the Tamil Eelam struggle
The picture of a woman with cropped hair, attired in camouflage shirt and trousers, and wielding a gun, can symbolise the ultimate dream of empowerment. More so if the woman is part of an armed liberation struggle.
Often invoked in the depiction of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) in Sri Lanka, the image of a Tamil militant woman challenged some prevalent social norms, but could it overturn the entrenched biases in society?
Meena Kandasamy’s
The Orders Were to Rape You: Tigresses in the Tamil Eelam Struggle, is in part an essay, with narratives of three Tamil women the wife of an LTTE fighter, a female combatant from the LTTE, and the author herself. Its second part is a collection of resistance poems by female guerrillas and militants.