This thesis examines masculinity in the Sri Lankan Tamil diaspora through two ritual practices, kavat&dotbelow;i and viratam. I argue that these practices are expressions of masculine identity and articulations of anxiety rooted in the refugee experience. Kavat&dotbelow;i, a ritual piercing and ecstatic dance, and viratam, a rigorous fast, reconstruct masculinities fragmented by expatriation and the ethnic conflict in Sri Lanka. Through ritual performance, men fashion themselves as the selfless heroes of traditional Tamil literature without negating their fluency as modern Tamil-Canadians. By voicing rupture and enacting reprieve, the men who perform these rites incur individual catharsis. New non-Brahmin masculine identities that draw their authority from renunciation and asceticism as opposed to social privilege emerge in this diasporic context. Employing analyses of literature, political propaganda, and ethnography this thesis demonstrates the powerful relationship between ritual performance and masculine identity. In kavat&dotbelow;i and viratam, the male body becomes the site of contested personal, political, and religious narratives.

Abstract not available. / Thesis (M.A.) - University of Durban-Westville, 2001.

Le processus de libéralisation initié en Inde à partir des années 1980 s’est accompagné d’une multitudede changements économiques, politiques et sociaux qui ont participé à modifier l’organisation et lastructure de l’emploi. Ces changements structurels ont par ailleurs redessiné les pratiques migratoiresau gré des besoins de main-d’oeuvre. L’objet de ces travaux de recherche est d’étudier comment lastructuration des marchés du travail en Inde a participé à modifier les flux de migrations internes, maiségalement de s’intéresser à l’évolution de ces pratiques migratoires. Pour cela, nous proposons uneapproche multi-scalaire des liens entre marchés de l’emploi et mouvements migratoires, menéeconjointement à des niveaux micro et macro. Ainsi, après avoir effectué une revue de littérature desthéories migratoires, nous traitons dans une première partie les liens entre marché du travail etmigration de travail au niveau macro-économique. Pour cela, nous avons identifié pour les différentesrégions de l’Inde une typologie des marchés du travail à partir de laquelle les flux de migrations ontété spatialisés. Dans une seconde partie, le niveau micro a été privilégié et les résultats présentéss’appuient sur un travail de terrain mené entre 2010 et 2014 dans le Sud de l’Inde (Tamil Nadu). Ils’agit, à partir d’une approche mixte combinant des méthodes quantitatives et qualitatives, d’étudier lacirculation du travail en milieu rural tamoul. Cette démarche nous a permis d’identifier une variété deformes de migrations de travail aux logiques singulières ; nous parlons alors de diversification depratiques migratoires. / The multiple economic, political and social changes that occurred in India since the liberalizationprocess initiated in the 1980’s altered the organization and the structure of labour. These structuralchanges reshaped migratory practices depending on workforce demand. This dissertation examineshow the labour market structuration in India has contributed to changing internal migration flows andhow migratory practices evolved. Therefore, to identify the links between labour markets andmigration flows, this study combines macro and micro levels of analysis. The dissertation is organizedas follows. The literature review synthetizes migration theories. Then, in the first part, we propose amacroeconomic analysis of the links between labour market and migration. Through a labour markettypology elaborated for different regions of India, we spatialize migration flows. In the second part,with a microeconomic focus and a mixed approach that combines both qualitative results from ourfieldwork conducted between 2010 and 2014 and quantitative results, we study the evolutions oflabour migration in rural Tamil Nadu. We identify migration patterns and establish the existence of adiversity of migratory practices.

Brahmā est introduit dans l’iconographie tamoule dès la fin du 6ème s. ou le tout début du 7ème s. par les Pallava, probablement originaires du sud de l’actuel Andhra-Pradesh : ils initient simultanément la sculpture sur pierre et le développement de la culture brahmanique dans l’extrême sud de l’Inde. La divinité apparait dans les fondations du Deccan à la même période : elle participe alors essentiellement de la triade qu’elle forme avec Viṣṇu et Śiva. La faveur que connait Brahmā par la suite, puisqu’il préside à la façade nord sur plusieurs temples shivaïtes de la fin de la période Pallava puis de la période Cola, est en revanche inédite dans d’autres traditions régionales : elle trouve sans aucun doute son origine dans la relation complexe de complémentarité et de rivalité qu’il noue avec Śiva - mais aussi Viṣṇu, même si elle est dans ce cas moins conflictuelle - dans l’idéologie royale développée par les rois Pallava, et plus particulièrement telle qu’elle est mise en scène dans l’iconographie narrative du temple Kailāsanātha à Kāñcipuram au début du 8ème s. Les interactions multiples entre les deux divinités s’articulent notamment autour de la confrontation ambiguë du brahmanisme orthodoxe avec une nouvelle forme d’expression du savoir śaiva d’une part, et, d’autre part, autour de la figure du roi, que peut représenter Śiva, et du brahmane, du purohita, incarné par Brahmā. Le contexte et la signification de ces représentations jusqu’au tournant du 10ème s. en regard de l’art contemporain du Deccan mettront en lumière les spécificités du sud tamoul mais aussi ce qui participe de concepts plus largement diffusés qu’il ne semblerait au premier abord. / Brahmā was introduced into Tamil iconography at the end of the 6th century or the very beginning of the 7th century by the Pallava, probably from the south of present-day Andhra-Pradesh: they simultaneously initiated stone carving and the development of Brahmanic culture in the far south of India. The divinity appears in the shrines of the Deccan at the same period: he then essentially participates in the triad he forms with Viṣṇu and Śiva. The favor that Brahmā knows thereafter, since he presides over the north facade on several Śaiva temples of the end of the Pallava period then of the Cola period, is by contrast unprecedented in other regional traditions: it undoubtedly finds its origin in the complex relationship of complementarity and rivalry that it establishes with Śiva - but also Viṣṇu, even if it is in this case less conflictual - in the royal ideology developed by the Pallava kings, and more particularly such as it is staged in the narrative iconography of the Kailāsanātha temple in Kāñcipuram at the beginning of the 8th century. The multiple interactions between the two divinities are articulated notably around the ambiguous confrontation of orthodox Brahmanism with a new form of expression of Śaiva knowledge on the one hand, and, on the other hand, around the figure of the king, which Śiva can represent, and of the Brahmin, the purohita, embodied by Brahmā. The context and meaning of these representations up to the turn of the 10th century in relation to the contemporary art of the Deccan will highlight the specificities of southern Tamil imagery but also its connexion to concepts more widely disseminated than it would seem at first sight.

No description available.

In this thesis, we address some of the challenges involved in developing a robust writer-independent, lexicon-free system to recognize online Tamil words. Tamil, being a Dravidian language, is morphologically rich and also agglutinative and thus does not have a finite lexicon. For example, a single verb root can easily lead to hundreds of words after morphological changes and agglutination. Further, adoption of a lexicon-free recognition approach can be applied to form-filling applications, wherein the lexicon can become cumbersome (if not impossible) to capture all possible names. Under such circumstances, one must necessarily explore the possibility of segmenting a Tamil word to its individual symbols. Modern day Tamil alphabet comprises 23 consonants and 11 vowels forming a total combination of 313 characters/aksharas. A minimal set of 155 distinct symbols have been derived to recognize these characters. A corpus of isolated Tamil symbols (IWFHR database) is used for deriving the various statistics proposed in this work. To address the challenges of segmentation and recognition (the primary focus of the thesis), Tamil words are collected using a custom application running on a tablet PC. A set of 10000 words (comprising 53246 symbols) have been collected from high school students and used for the experiments in this thesis. We refer to this database as the ‘MILE word database’. In the first part of the work, a feedback based word segmentation mechanism has been proposed. Initially, the Tamil word is segmented based on a bounding box overlap criterion. This dominant overlap criterion segmentation (DOCS) generates a set of candidate stroke groups. Thereafter, attention is paid to certain attributes from the resulting stroke groups for detecting any possible splits or under-segmentations. By relying on feedbacks provided by a priori knowledge of attributes such as number of dominant points and inter-stroke displacements the recognition label and likelihood of the primary SVM classifier linguistic knowledge on the detected stroke groups, a decision is taken to correct it or not. Accordingly, we call the proposed segmentation as ‘attention feedback segmentation’ (AFS). Across the words in the MILE word database, a segmentation rate of 99.7% is achieved at symbol level with AFS. The high segmentation rate (with feedback) in turn improves the symbol recognition rate of the primary SVM classifier from 83.9% (with DOCS alone) to 88.4%. For addressing the problem of segmentation, the SVM classifier fed with the x-y trace of the normalized and resampled online stroke groups is quite effective. However, the performance of the classifier is not robust to effectively distinguish between many sets of similar looking symbols. In order to improve the symbol recognition performance, we explore two approaches, namely reevaluation strategies and language models. The reevaluation techniques, in particular, resolve the ambiguities in base consonants, pure consonants and vowel modifiers to a considerable extent. For the frequently confused sets (derived from the confusion matrix), a dynamic time warping (DTW) approach is proposed to automatically extract their discriminative regions. Dedicated to each confusion set, novel localized cues are derived from the discriminative region for their disambiguation. The proposed features are quite promising in improving the symbol recognition performance of the confusion sets. Comparative experimental analysis of these features with x-y coordinates are performed for judging their discriminative power. The resolving of confusions is accomplished with expert networks, comprising discriminative region extractor, feature extractor and SVM. The proposed techniques improve the symbol recognition rate by 3.5% (from 88.4% to 91.9%) on the MILE word database over the primary SVM classifier. In the final part of the thesis, we integrate linguistic knowledge (derived from a text corpus) in the primary recognition system. The biclass, bigram and unigram language models at symbol level are compared in terms of recognition performance. Amongst the three models, the bigram model is shown to give the highest recognition accuracy. A class reduction approach for recognition is adopted by incorporating the language bigram model at the akshara level. Lastly, a judicious combination of reevaluation techniques with language models is proposed in this work. Overall, an improvement of up to 4.7% (from 88.4% to 93.1%) in symbol level accuracy is achieved. The writer-independent and lexicon-free segmentation-recognition approach developed in this thesis for online handwritten Tamil word recognition is promising. The best performance of 93.1% (achieved at symbol level) is comparable to the highest reported accuracy in the literature for Tamil symbols. However, the latter one is on a database of isolated symbols (IWFHR competition test dataset), whereas our accuracy is on a database of 10000 words and thus, a product of segmentation and classifier accuracies. The recognition performance obtained may be enhanced further by experimenting on and choosing the best set of features and classifiers. Also, the word recognition performance can be very significantly improved by using a lexicon. However, these are not the issues addressed by the thesis. We hope that the lexicon-free experiments reported in this work will serve as a benchmark for future efforts.

Le site archéologique de Senji se situe dans l’Etat du Tamil Nadu en Inde du Sud. Il est connu pour son ensemble fortifié qui se déploie sur trois impressionnantes collines de granit, qui a contribué à forger une partie de l’histoire de cette région du XVe siècle au XIXe siècle. Célébré pour son système défensif, l’architecture religieuse de Senji n’a jusqu’à présent jamais été étudiée dans son intégralité. Cette thèse se propose de faire une étude détaillée des temples et des lieux de cultes hindous de Senji et de sa région proche. Elle traite des édifices de pierres dédiés aux grandes divinités du panthéon hindous et analyse les relations idéologiques qu’elles entretiennent avec les divinités locales et de village, dont le culte ne s’exprime pas toujours par des structures pérennes. Les monuments sont replacés dans leur contexte historique, datant majoritairement du XVIe siècle pendant la période de domination Vijayanagara- Nāyaka. L’histoire de la dynastie Nāyaka de Senji est examinée afin de comprendre les motivations des commanditaires. A travers une étude architecturale détaillée et une analyse des thèmes iconographiques présents sur le site, on tente de déterminer les principes qui régissent la construction de ces temples à l’époque, ainsi que leur utilisation politique dans un contexte militaire et troublé, servant des besoins d’affirmation et de légitimité du pouvoir des souverains de Senji au XVIe siècle. Cette étude contribue également à considérer le site sous une vue plus patrimoniale et en terme de protection des monuments historiques et de l’héritage architectural indien. / The archaeological site of Senji (Gingee) stands in Tamil Nadu, in Southern India. Senji is famous for its fortified walls and castles built upon and between the three main granitic hills of the area, which contributed to change this part of the Tamil country History between the 15e and the 19e centuries. Known for its military aspects, the religious architecture of Senji had yet never been under proper and full study. This dissertation tries to make a detailed study of the Hindu stone temples and places of worship in Senji and its close area. The research focuses on the pan-Indian Hindu temples and analyses the existing relation between them and the local goddesses whom places of worship are not systematically built in long lasting materials. Monuments are situated in the original historical context, mainly in the 16e century during Vijayanagara-Nāyaka domination. The history of Senji’s Nāyaka dynasty is also analysed in order to understand the concepts that rules temples constructions à these times, and the use of religious architecture in this troubled and warfare context, serving the purpose of legitimacy of their power on the 16e century. This research also tries to consider Senji as the object of conservation and preservation, and in terms of Indian cultural and architectural heritage.

This thesis examines the production of Tamil youth in the state of Canada as threats, extremists, radicals, terrorists, and as subjects to be engaged in de-politicized humanitarian discourses of reconciliation and peace. By drawing attention to the exclusion of Tamils from rights in legal proceedings, the positioning of youth protesters as harbingers of a multicultural 'crisis,' and the role of education in securing Canada's response to the MV Sun Sea as a 'humanitarian' project, I argue that the targeting Tamils is not only integral to Sri Lanka's ongoing genocide, but is also crucial to the Canadian state's project of white settler colonialism. In examining the law, media and education as sites of racial management in the 'War on Terror' and its globalized counter-terrorism regime I identify the targeting of Tamil diaspora youth as a necessary racial logic for the legitimacy of the Canadian state in an era of official multiculturalism.

This thesis examines the production of Tamil youth in the state of Canada as threats, extremists, radicals, terrorists, and as subjects to be engaged in de-politicized humanitarian discourses of reconciliation and peace. By drawing attention to the exclusion of Tamils from rights in legal proceedings, the positioning of youth protesters as harbingers of a multicultural 'crisis,' and the role of education in securing Canada's response to the MV Sun Sea as a 'humanitarian' project, I argue that the targeting Tamils is not only integral to Sri Lanka's ongoing genocide, but is also crucial to the Canadian state's project of white settler colonialism. In examining the law, media and education as sites of racial management in the 'War on Terror' and its globalized counter-terrorism regime I identify the targeting of Tamil diaspora youth as a necessary racial logic for the legitimacy of the Canadian state in an era of official multiculturalism.

Dès 1975, les premières formes de préscolarisation sont présentes en Inde autour de deux fonctions principales : offrir un mode de garde gratuit pour tous, en zone rurale comme en zone urbaine, et lutter efficacement contre la malnutrition et le manque d’accès aux soins des jeunes enfants. Parallèlement à un important système de redistribution publique, ces centres apparaissent comme une des vitrines des actions sociales de l’Etat du Tamil Nadu et du territoire de Pondichéry. Depuis les années 2000, l’offre éducative est modifiée par l’émergence de nouvelles revendications par une partie de la société indienne ainsi que par l’implication dans le secteur d’acteurs privés, d’ONG ou de communautés religieuses. Les acteurs privés sont aujourd’hui incontournables et les familles sont nombreuses à solliciter leurs structures. Mes recherches montrent que la demande en faveur de la préscolarisation est conditionnée par les représentations et les nouvelles attentes des familles qui aspirent à appartenir aux classes moyennes. Cette thèse s’intéresse tout d’abord à la manière dont cette demande est prise en compte ou non par les institutions, quels sont les ressorts éventuels du changement et comment l’État négocie les relations entre public et privé et multiplie les partenariats, en s’engageant dans un processus de redéploiement de ses fonctions. Ensuite, le rôle des enseignantes est mis au premier plan pour comprendre les évolutions de la préscolarisation. La compréhension de leurs gestes pratiques montre de quelle manière elles développent des attitudes professionnelles qui mettent en valeur leur réflexivité, à la fois en tant que pourvoyeuses de care et enseignantes. L’analyse articule ainsi les échelles du territoire de la cour, de l’école, de l’Etat, du pays et des organisations internationales. Les intentions et les attentes des différents acteurs de la préscolarisation sont saisis par le biais d’observations et d’entretiens dans les structures et chez les familles, et à travers une double posture de chercheuse et d’enseignante. / The first types of preschool appeared in India as early as 1975 with two clear purposes: offering free day care for all both in rural and urban areas, and fighting against infant malnutrition and the lack of access to health care for young children. Together with an important system of public redistribution, these centers showcase the social measures implemented by the State of Tamil Nadu and the Territory of Pondicherry. Since 2000, educational opportunities have been modified by the emergence in Indian society of new demands and by the involvement of the private sector, NGOs and religious communities. The private sector is today a major actor and many families take advantage of their facilities. My research demonstrates that the demand in favour of preschool is conditioned by the representations and the new expectations of families who aspire to upward social mobility into the middle class. This thesis first describes how this demand is taken into account, or not, by institutions, then how these changes have taken place, and how the State negotiates relations between the public and private sectors and develops partnerships by committing itself to a reassessment of its tasks. Then the focus is put on the role of teachers in order to understand the evolution of preschool. The understanding of their everyday practice shows they have developed professional attitudes which highlight their reflexivity both as purveyors of care and as educators. The analysis articulates the different territorial levels of school ground, school, State, country and international organizations. The designs and expectations of the different actors of preschool are analysed through the prism of observations and interviews within the structures and within the households, acting both as a researcher and an educator.