Rasaiah Parthipan, known widely as Thileepan, emerged as a revolutionary figure in the Tamil liberation struggle and a young man shaped by his era, his community, and the heavy weight of historical circumstances. Born on 29 November 1963, Thileepan grew up in northern Sri Lanka during a time of mounting ethnic tensions, personally witnessing the systematic marginalization of fellow Tamil people in education, employment, and government. Like many of his generation, he was drawn into political activism not through ideology alone, but through his direct experiences of injustice. In Brotherless Night, the character K serves as a stand-in for Thileepan, staging a hunger strike that mirrors Thileepan’s own. Like Thileepan, K is portrayed as both a medical student and a public symbol of resistance.
Nallur Kandwaswamy Temple in Jaffna where people gathered to hear Thileepan’s words and witness his starvation, image courtesy of Mythri Jegathesan, Associate Professor, Department of Anthropology, Santa Clara University
Memorial to Thileepan in Jaffna, image courtesy of Mythri Jegathesan, Associate Professor, Department of Anthropology, Santa Clara University
Before joining the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), Thileepan was a medical student, a fact that reveals the fundamental tension many young Tamils faced: balancing aspirations for peaceful, educated futures against the urgent demands of collective survival. His decision to abandon his medical education for the LTTE reflected a common trajectory among Tamil youth in the 1980s. As state violence intensified and a climate of impunity prevailed, many educated young Tamils reluctantly concluded that armed resistance represented their only remaining path forward.
“K began his hunger strike on a stage that the Tamil Tigers had built especially for him to do so. It was outside one of the temples of my childhood–one of our holiest and most loved places. The first day began with a press conference at Jaffna Fort: K would protest the Indo-Lanka Accord by committing himself to a fast. Through the Tigers, he made his demands for the Tamils of Sri Lanka” – p. 243
In September 1987, Thileepan staged a hunger strike in Nallur, Jaffna, as a form of nonviolent protest directed not at the Sri Lankan state but at the Indian government, whose peacekeeping forces had entered Sri Lanka under the Indo-Sri Lanka Accord. Thileepan and others believed India had failed to uphold promises made to the Tamil population—including ending state-sponsored Sinhalese colonization of Tamil areas and releasing political prisoners. Over 12 days, he refused food and medical treatment, even as his health deteriorated rapidly. Thileepan’s hunger strike was a quiet yet searing act of resistance, one that continues to resonate among many Tamils who view him as a martyr. The novel depicts the hunger strike as a carefully staged act of political theatre, part of the Tigers’ propaganda machine. He died on 26 September 1987, at the age of 23, in front of a large crowd, many of whom continued to visit his vigil site long after his death.
In Brotherless Night, Thileepan’s presence—though not central—is deeply felt. The novel portrays the layered complexity of life in Jaffna during this era: a place where young people like the protagonist Sashi, her brothers, and K are pulled in different directions—toward medicine, education, journalism, or armed resistance. K’s character represents a particular kind of moral conviction: a person who used his own body as a medium of protest. At the same time, like Thileepan, the novel also suggests that he was used by the Tigers as part of their propaganda machine. Ganeshananthan deliberately complicates Sashi’s feelings toward K by fictionalizing him as her love interest, even though the war prevents their relationship from ever actually being realized. Taking this literary license with the past is one technique she uses to humanize the historical figure of Thileepan and raise questions about his complicitness in acts of horrendous violence.
“K died at 8:37am, at the age of twenty-three, with a rebel’s name that was different from the one in which he had been born and with which I had loved him. It was a Saturday. Today Tiger supporters around the world mark this time as a holy hour, but I can tell you that at the moment of his death K was still an ordinary man–a grown-up version of the boy who had lived down the road from me in our village. His dying made him no more saintly than he had been in life, which is to say not very. This made it worse to mourn him. And while in many ways he did resemble the boy who had been my friend, in its hunger and thirst his body had travelled a great distance from its previous self. No act of violence we had committed had ever attracted as much support for a homeland as the act of violence K had committed on his own body” – p. 255
K’s death is not portrayed in the novel as redemptive or saintly. Like the novel itself, any portrayal of Thileepan or his fictional counterpart K has to resist the pull of simplistic heroism. His life, and the meaning of his death, invite difficult questions. Before his hunger strike, he had been a former combatant, actively involved in the armed struggle of the Tamil Tigers. His decision to turn to nonviolent protests, using his own body at the site of political resistance, did not erase his earlier participation in the violence. In the novel, Sashi is drawn to K’s idealism and the deeply personal nature of protests, but she cannot ignore the fact that he, like many others in the movement, was complicit in acts of brutality committed in the name of liberation by the Tigers. Discussing K, she is filled with ambivalence: grief, admiration, anger and moral doubt all coexist. K’s death becomes in Sashi’s eyes a reflection of how the Tigers used individual sacrifice in service of larger goals. In doing so, the novel challenges the notion that martyrdom can ever have an easy narrative arc.
By humanizing figures like Thileepan/K, students reading Brotherless Night can begin to grasp the emotional and ethical weight of the decisions made by resistance fighters like them.
Image: News coverage from The New York Times (Sept. 27, 1987) reporting the death of Thileepan following the 12-day hunger strike in Jaffna. [Source: The New York Times, TimesMachine archive].
Possible discussion questions for students:
- How do people come to see death as a form of political expression? What ideological mechanisms and representational strategies are used to render death not only acceptable, but desirable, as a form of political expression? What do you think about this?
- What toll does a conflict take when it compels students, poets, and dreamers to become militants? What happens if/when the movements they help build begin to mirror the violence they once rose against?
- In what ways do hunger strikes differ from other forms of resistance, both violent and non-violent? What unique moral authority might one convey (or not)?
- What tensions exist between individual sacrifice and collective responsibility in liberation movements? How does K’s story illuminate these tensions?
- In what ways does the novel illustrate the impossible choices facing young Tamils like K and Sashi during this period? Which of their responses to these choices did you find most relatable or compelling?
- If you were to write an additional chapter focusing on K’s perspective, what would you want to explore that the novel leaves unsaid?
