I began the I Am project in 2010. The war had ended, yet its violence continued. The project started with a question, shaped by an observation shared by an anthropologist: that ethnicity had not always been the primary mode through which people on the island described themselves. They spoke instead of their hometown, of kinship, labour, class, caste or faith. I began to ask: was there a time when Tamils, Sinhalese and Muslims did not speak first in ethnic terms?

When I returned to Sri Lanka in 2005, during the ceasefire years, ethnicity was often the first thing people used to describe themselves. “I am Tamil.” “I am a Sinhala Buddhist.” My own encounters with the island were shaped by this reality. At military checkpoints my passport, which listed my birthplace as Jaffna, was passed between policemen and soldiers. “Ah… Jaffna,” they would say, “a Tamil.” Their faces and manner would change. Those moments left a quiet mark of humiliation.

Yet my own memories of Jaffna were fragmentary: walking to my first school, the Murugan temple near our home with its moss-green water tank, the smell of peanuts and popcorn sold in twisted newspaper cones during festivals. Many of the relatives who filled those early memories now live scattered across the world, among the diaspora.

Between 2010 and 2013, I travelled across the island and was welcomed into homes, workplaces and places of worship. I met elders who had lived through colonial rule, independence, pogroms, insurrections, civil war, displacement and return.

What emerged was not proof of a thesis, but a series of lives that complicated it.

Sister Irene Bartelöt began with Batticaloa — with place, mixed heritage, and vocation across decades of conflict. Ethnicity was present, but it was not foregrounded.

Mohammed Yassin spoke first of Moor Street, of his father’s bakery and the kiln at the back of the house. Only later did expulsion force ethnicity and religion to the front.

Bala Tampoe, born in Jaffna, spoke first as a trade unionist. Sinhala workers once hailed him with a phrase drawn from Sinhala mythic language, even though he was Tamil. Ethnicity remained present, but class and solidarity often defined him more clearly.

When did ethnicity become the primary language through which people described themselves? What other forms of belonging existed alongside it? How did people describe themselves before conflict demanded singular clarity?

The I Am project is an oral history archive reflecting on identity through the lives of elders recorded in the early post-war period. Each portrait combines photography and recorded testimony. Many of the portraits are accompanied by field notes originally written at the time of meeting (2010–2013) and revised in February 2026. These notes reflect both the immediacy of encounter and the distance of hindsight. Together, they form a documentary record of memory, place and lived experience.

Kannan Arunasalam