From political violence to financial crisis—examining the struggles of Sri Lanka’s working-class women through film, activism, and feminist policy critique

In the Sri Lankan film Rani – A Queen without Her Prince, director Asoka Handagama recounts through fictional dramatisation a dark period in the country’s political history. The 1980s were a period where women collectively bore the brunt of the political terror witnessed by the people.  It recounts how a mother, Manorani Sarvanamuttu, fronting the Mothers Front, fights for justice following the murder of her son during the political terror of the period.  The state and government were at the forefront of meting out violence against the JVP and other para-military groups in the North and East.  While no film critic, Kanchana uses the film (showcasing its trailer for this talk) as a point of departure to explore the shift from political terror to financial terror borne collectively again by working-class communities.  Using feminist activist accounts from the ground, she highlights how the debt crisis is felt most by working-class women.

She then turns to using auto-ethnography.  Her engagement with debt justice efforts at the policy level is used to highlight how the patriarchal presence in policy circles and think tanks also underlines possible reasons for this financial terror in the lives of working women.  Despite the presence of a feminist Prime Minister and her articulations of hope about ''a change of the way you think about government, the way (one) think(s) about power and authority” in the New York Times, the presence of 10% women in parliament does not guarantee feminist policy processes.  There needs to be a recognition that gender matters at every scale.  For this to be a grounded reality, feminists fronting media and policy engagement to institutional change are needed to deal with the harshness of the financial terror inflicted upon working-class women.  A feminist interpretive re-framing of power and authority becomes possible only then.