Sri Lanka

History and the Roots of Conflict

Jonathan Spencer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• ISBN:
  9781134949793
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

In the past decade, Sri Lanka has been engulfed by political tragedy as successive governments have failed to settle the grievances of the Tamil minority in a way acceptable to the majority Sinhala population. The new Premadasa presidency faces huge economic and political problems with large sections of the island under the control of the Indian Peace-Keeping Force (IPKF) and militant separatist Tamil groups operating in the north and south.
This book is not a conventional political history of Sri Lanka. Instead, it attempts to shed fresh light on the historical roots of the ethnic crisis and uses a combination of historical and anthropologial evidence to challenge the widely-held belief that the conflict in Sri Lanka is simply the continuation of centuries of animosity between the Sinhalese and the Tamils. The authors show how modern ethnic identities have been made and re-made since the colonial period with the war between Tamils and the Sinhala-dominant government accompanied by rhetorical wars over archeological sites and place-name etymologies, and the political use of the national past. The book is also one of the first attempts to focus on local perceptions of the crisis and draws on a broad range of sources, from village fieldwork to newspaper controversies. Its interest extends beyond contemporary politics to history, anthropology and development studies.

Chapter one

Introduction: the power of the past¹

Jonathan Spencer

Many people—many nations—can find themselves holding, more or less wittingly, that ‘every stranger is an enemy’. For the most part this conviction lies deep down like some infection; it betrays itself only in random, disconnected acts, and does not lie at the base of a system of reason. But when this does come about, when the unspoken dogma becomes the major premiss in a syllogism, then, at the end of the chain, there is the Lager.

Primo Levi²

In 1948 the colony of Ceylon was granted independence by Britain. Forty years later the island (renamed Sri Lanka in 1972) lurches from political crisis to political crisis. Large sections of its territory in the north and east have been under the de facto control of troops of the Indian Peace Keeping Force (IPKF), although that control was still regularly threatened by the activities of various militant Tamil separatist groups. The Colombo government has remained in charge of the populous south and west, but here normal administration has been subject to constant violent disruption by a group of Sinhala militants known as the Janata Vimukti Peramuna (JVP or People’s Liberation Front). As a result of new elections in late 1988 and early 1989, the veteran President J. R.Jayewardene of the United National Party (UNP) was replaced by his former Prime Minister, Ranasinghe Premadasa. The new government, it is generally agreed, faces huge economic and political problems.

The single most obvious factor in the decline into political crisis has been the failure of successive governments to settle the grievances of the minority Tamil population in a way that is nevertheless acceptable to the majority Sinhala population.³ Historically, the Tamil heartland of the Jaffna peninsula has provided a steady stream of educated émigrés—lawyers, teachers, civil servants, doctors—who not only filled many posts in the bureaucracy of colonial Ceylon but also moved further afield to Malaysia, Singapore, and India, and, more recently, Britain, Canada and the USA. Since the 1950s the availability of government employment within Sri Lanka has gradually dried up. In 1956 the sitting government was defeated in a general election by a coalition of Sinhala-dominated parties, led by the charismatic S. W.R. D.Bandaranaike of the Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP). The new coalition was elected on a wave of Buddhist nationalism which demanded, amongst other things, that the Sinhala-Buddhist majority should receive its ‘rightful’ share of official employment. Within months of its election two things had happened: legislation was passed making Sinhala the sole official language; and communal rioting broke out between Sinhala and Tamil in the east of the country.⁴

Since 1956 there have been repeated attempts to achieve a political solution to the problem, none of them so far successful. These attempts were punctuated by occasional outbreaks of violence between the two groups. In the mid-1970s Tamil frustration at what was felt to be continued discrimination turned to militancy of a new kind. Talk of separatism and the founding of a new state of ‘Eelam’ in the ‘traditional homelands’ of the north and east became commonplace even amongst conservative Jaffna politicians and was adopted as official policy by the main Tamil political party, the Tamil United Liberation Front (TULF), which formed the official opposition to Jayewardene’s regime after the 1977 election. But the TULF found itself outflanked by the rise of new groups of young armed militants prepared to fight for their independence. From the mid-1970s these groups—of which the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE or the Tigers) have been most consistently threatening—embarked on a policy of terrorist attacks against any representative of the Sinhala-dominated government.⁵ The government responded with counter-terror of its own. The situation escalated until 1983, when thousands of Tamils were killed in rioting in the Sinhala-dominated south after a massacre of government soldiers in the north.⁶ Soon after, the militant groups started to operate in the Tamil areas of the east, and attacks on state personnel were replaced by massacres and counter-massacres of civilians in border areas between the two ethnic blocks.

In 1987 the government attempted a major military putsch in the Jaffna peninsula. The Indian government, which had harboured and covertly supported the Tamil militants in the past, made it clear that it would no longer tolerate the continued instability off its southern shore. In a bewildering volte-face, and under heavy pressure, the Colombo government signed an agreement with India, conceding a degree of political devolution to Tamil areas, and agreeing to the entry of Indian forces as guarantors of peace in the contested areas. The agreement was unpopular on both sides of the ethnic divide. Within months the Indian forces were embroiled in new fighting with their erstwhile protégés in the LITE, while Sinhala opposition became manifest in a series of assassinations and attacks attributed to the JVP.

This book is an attempt to shed fresh light on the sources of the political tragedy that has engulfed Sri Lanka in the past decade. The conflict between the majority Sinhala population and the minority Tamil population is often presented, not least by the antagonists themselves, as the inevitable outcome of centuries of hostility. Political rhetoric in Sri Lanka is dense with historical allusion, as many of the papers in this book illustrate. The Buddhists of the majority Sinhala population are usually represented as heirs to an ancient tradition of Sinhala-Buddhist nationalism, dormant during the colonial period, but aggressively rejuvenated in the era of mass politics; the Tamils are similarly presented as their ancient enemies.

The contributors to this book, while differing considerably in their individual interpretations of the sources of conflict, nevertheless share a common aim. This is to expose the inadequacy of explaining conflicts like those in Sri Lanka as the inevitable working out of immanent—‘primordial’—cultural forces. Rather, the historical arguments so often heard in Sri Lankan politics have themselves to be understood as products of their own peculiar history. In the light of Indian intervention and the continuing violence in the south it may seem that academic arguments about the past are of little relevance, but the demonstration that the crisis itself has been made by the actions of particular men and women, and is not the outcome of inherited destiny, can only encourage those who want to believe that because past mistakes were avoidable there is still hope for the future.

The most prominent view of the national past in modern Sri Lanka is that held by the majority Sinhala population, who have exercised ever tighter control over national government since Independence. According to this view, the Buddha himself entrusted the island’s destiny to the Sinhala people as guardians of his teaching. This view is now insistently proclaimed in the press, in the speeches of politicians, and in school-books and history lessons. In the face of these Sinhala-Buddhist claims on the national past, alternative Tamil histories have been put together and propagated in the Tamil-speaking north and east of the island. Both ‘official history’ and ‘opposition history’ agree on the basic terms of the argument: present conflicts can only be explained by reference to the past The war which has been fought between the armed Tamil separatists and the Sinhala-dominated government has been accompanied by rhetorical wars fought over archaeological sites, place-name etymologies, and the interpretation of ancient inscriptions.

There are several things which this book is not. It is not a conventional political history of the current conflict. A number of such accounts already exist, albeit of highly variable quality.⁷ Nor is its content quite as specialized as the discussion of history might imply. In looking at the sources of current versions of the national past, and the ways in which such versions are disseminated and contested, the contributors have assembled a remarkably broad account of the cultural politics of the ethnic crisis. The historians (Gunawardana, Rogers, Hellmann-Rajanayagam) have provided rich, detailed accounts of the making or remaking of modern ethnic identities during the colonial period. The anthropologists (Whitaker, Brow, Woost) have detailed the processes by which those identities are now being reproduced among Sri Lanka’s predominantly rural population. Other contributors, whose chapters escape easy disciplinary pigeon-holing, describe changes in the larger political structure (Nissan and Stirrat), the political use of the past (Kemper), and the effects of recent challenges to the hegemonic interpretation of the past (Tennekoon). In place of that kind of political history which is based almost entirely on English-language sources and seeks its explanations only within the actions of the English-speaking élite, the history in this volume employs local sources and attends to the voices of people many miles from the capital. These are the sort of people who have usually been in the front line of the conflict, and they are the people who will decide the fate of all attempts to find a peaceful settlement.

This book, most definitely, is not an attempt to rewrite Sri Lanka’s national past. The aim is not to disprove or discredit any particular view of the national past. Nor is there any intention to put forward the absurd argument that the categories ‘Sinhala’ and ‘Tamil’ are somehow colonial inventions, or that modern conflicts were created ex nihilo by Machiavellian colonialists in a spirit of divide and rule. Instead the book seeks to analyse the appeal and effect in the present of certain dominant interpretations of Sri Lankan history, and the way in which modern ethnic identities have themselves been shaped by political circumstances. The roots of present understandings of ethnic identity in Victorian Orientalist scholarship, described below by Rogers and Gunawardana, and the current self-consciousness about the distortions of Orientalist work in general,⁸ make any further attempt to rewrite the past from outside Sri Lanka especially inappropriate. The broad orientation of this volume is toward the asking of new and unfamiliar questions about past, present, and future in Sri Lanka, not the provision of fixed and definite answers.

The roots of ethnic identity

The opening chapter by Nissan and Stirrat provides an overview of the history of the present conflict which is at once analytic and yet remarkably comprehensive. Drawing on recent theories of nationalism and a wide range of comparative material, they argue that the present conflict, and the ethnic identities on which it is based, are radically different from earlier conflicts and identities. In particular, they point out that the pre-colonial states in Sri Lanka were based on kingship and a political structure which was indifferent to the cultural or linguistic constitution of the population. Even colonial conflict between different ethnic groups, as manifest in a spate of riots and disturbances in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, was markedly different from post-colonial conflict. Colonial disturbances were usually aligned on religious lines—Sinhala Buddhist attacking Sinhala Catholic; Tamil Hindu attacking Tamil Catholic; Buddhist, Catholic or Hindu attacking Muslim; and Muslims attacking all back in return. The first modern evidence of Tamil-Sinhala conflict, defined in terms of linguistic group, comes from 1956, the year when major national language reforms were introduced. In simple terms Sinhala-Tamil conflict is a product of modern politics. To interpret the history of the pre-colonial kingdoms in terms of ‘nationalism’—a distinctive ideology of the modern nationstate—is anachronistic and therefore misleading. But this has not prevented a host of earlier scholars from doing just that, and the question of how this came about is addressed in the next three papers, those of Gunawardana, Rogers, and Hellmann-Rajanayagam.

The understanding of the national past as a history of warring ‘communities’, ‘races’, or ‘ethnic groups’ is a product of colonial readings of the available sources on the Sri Lankan past The most important of these, the Buddhist chronicle the Mahavamsa, is a remarkable document which is alluded to throughout this volume. Usually referred to these days as Sri Lanka’s ‘national chronicle’, it is a work in Pali verse written by Buddhist monks from the sixth century AD onwards. It provides an unbroken chronicle of kings, monks, wars, rebellions, and acts of piety from the time of the Buddha in the fifth century BC to the fourth century AD. Subsequent additions (translated as the Culavamsa) brought the story up to the arrival of the British in the Kandyan kingdom in 1815. In the last decade, as Kemper describes below, the government has sponsored a further updating of the chronicle to bring it up to our own times, although not without new stylistic and intellectual problems.

Despite the miraculous nature of much of its content, the Mahavamsa has provided a sure chronological frame for historians working in both Sri Lanka and India. Rogers describes how, after initial scepticism from colonial historians, the Mahavamsa gradually became central to the colonial understanding of the Sri Lankan past, and then how this understanding was itself adapted by members of the Sri Lankan élite of the time. The process he describes is of great importance because the Mahavamsa, and specifically the colonial interpretation of its content, was a vital ingredient in the polemics of early cultural nationalists. As their understanding of Sinhala-Buddhist identity was appropriated and exploited by politicians from the 1930s onwards, the Mahavamsa provided both content and legitimation for an increasingly strident Sinhala nationalism.

The importance of the Mahavamsa in modern Sinhala nationalism is twofold. As an apparently authentic text it was especially well suited to colonial preconceptions about the relationship between...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Sri Lanka
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• 1. Introduction: the power of the past
• Part I: Colonialism, history and racism
• Part II: History at a moment of crisis
• Part III: The politics of the past
• Index