Borderlines (co-produced with CREA) is a seven-part video series documenting how feminists work, intervene, and connect the dots across the region to create knowledge in South Asia.
Sarala Emmanuel is a feminist activist, teacher and researcher based in Batticaloa, in Eastern Sri Lanka. She works with local, national and international feminist institutions, networks and collective spaces.
In a quiet and layered way, Sarala walks us through what it meant to ‘become’ a feminist activist and work towards peace in times of conflict in Sri Lanka. Spanning the nineties and 2000s, through civil war, sexual violence, murder and abductions, Sarala worked with women and families struggling with loss, disappearances and the fear of armed state and non-state actors. Her work in ‘Suriya’, a women’s rights group in Batticaloa, gave meaning to ideas of care, support, and sustenance of peaceful struggle, in a militarised public.
In this interview, Sarala speaks about what it means to lead a feminist institution – with all its joys and tensions. How challenging is it to build or imagine institutional spaces that are different? How does equality and hierarchy play out in feminist organizations? How does the identity question figure and configure, and what does it mean to not belong to one ‘pure’ identity? And what does a feminist leader look like? Sarala’s honesty about how she brought these two together – feminist and leadership – forces us to revisit our own experiences and assumptions about both. It alas is not a fairy tale ending but carries lessons in various kinds of strengths needed to be invested in building institutions that promote peace, freedom, and equality.
