Poopathy amma transformed depressing, individual emotions into positive social action.
But grief and sadness, rather than weighing her down in perpetual morbidity, turned to rage and selflessness. Poopathy’s response to the death and pain of her children was grief and sadness. Again however, her eldest son by the second marriage was randomly shot dead by the Special Task Force.Īnother son, arrested during round up operations, was held in Boosa army camp and subjected to severe torture. She tried to remove her family from the area of military operations by shifting to Navatkerni near Batticaloa. Poopathy’s 28 year old son was shot dead by the Sri Lankan army. Eventually the horror and pain of military operations came to her doorstep. Indiscriminate killings, ‘disappearances’ and torture confronted the generation of her children. The young men of Poopathy’s children’s generation were targets of the military operations by the Sri Lankan armed forces.
Poopathy struggled to raise a family in the face of shrinking opportunities for Tamil and Muslim children and mounting Sinhala State oppression. Two more sons and two daughters resulted from this marriage and Poopathy became a mother of ten children. But Poopathy married again to Mr Kanapathipillai, a widower with two sons and a daughter. Married at twelve years of age, twice a mother and widowed all within a short span of life. Two sons were born from this union.Īt a very young age Poopathy soon developed the emotions of a matured woman. Thus Poopathy, with basic literacy skills, was withdrawn from school and married at the age of twelve. The best interests for a girl the family held was to fulfil the ideal type of life that prevailed at that time. She was one girl among three, with two brothers. Her biography reflects this history of her times. There is nothing extraordinary in Poopathy’s childhood. When Annamuthu and his wife Periyapillai from the ancient Tamil village of Kiran in Batticaloa looked down affectionately on their baby daughter Poopathy on 3rd November 1932 it would never have entered their minds that this child would grow up to become a legendary political figure, the first woman in political history to fast to death for a cause they did not know their daughter would be venerated by millions of people.
Mother Poopathy, as this extraordinary woman has come to be affectionately known, went without food and fluids for thirty days before her death on 19th April 1988. Into the history of great feats of courage and determination must go the struggle waged by a 56 year old mother of ten children and grandmother, Mrs Kanapathipillai Poopathy. Both Mahatma Gandhi and Bobby Sands went without food during their fast, whereas Thileepan refused both food and fluids. Thileepan, the senior LTTE cadre who fasted to death in 1987 demanding the fulfilment of promises made by the Indian government to the LTTE leadership, superseded such historical figures as Mahatma Gandhi and IRA activist Bobby Sands, in the use of fasting as a political weapon. The history of the Tamil struggle for national self-determination is a history of extraordinary examples of courage, determination and sacrifice. Velupillai Pirabaharan on Second Anniversary of Annai Poopathy’s death, April 1990Īnnai Poopathy’s Fast for Freedom – Adele Ann Balasingham As a woman, as a mother, as the maternal head of the family, Poopathi amma transcended her ordinary life and the bonds of existential attachment in sacrificing her life for the emancipation of her nation.” Mother Poopathi has earned our highest esteem as one of the noble martyrs who have become legends in the history of our liberation struggle. “Today, we cherish the memory of a great martyr and salute her supreme sacrifice.