“Are We Going to Participate in the War on Food Production and Succeed?”

Soon after Sri Lanka’s independence from British rule, its government established a Buddhist state at the expense of its Tamil minority group. A long, brutal civil war was fought between the Tamil rebels, known as the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), and the Sinhala state from 1983 to 2009. This essay conceptualizes the publications of the LTTE as “food narratives for life” by applying the paradigm of “competing biopolitics” as proposed by Brenner and Tazzioli (2022: 2). The essay attempts to trace the biopolitical intervention of the LTTE in its publications on food provisioning. It explores armed groups as providers of nutrition, actors of food security, and developers of marginalized ecologies by analyzing the LTTE archives. In addition, the essay analyzes the construction of ethnic identity and food nationalism through the concept of thinai, the ancient Tamil knowledge of human geography. Finally, the essay explores the challenges in implementing resilient food practices in the conflict region of Vanni.