Page 1
Culture
Politics
OF Identity in
Viran TirUChe Va
Dattathreya C. S. ECOS
 

Sri Lanka

Page 2
The collection of essays in this volume arose out of a symposium held at the International Centre foT Ethnic Studies (ICES) Colombo, where researchers and scholars presented SOIlle of their recent research interests, Although these essays individually relate to an assortment of subjects, they find general unity in the questioning of cultural and political identity in Sri Lanka by focusing on the structural and ideological rubric that channels its expression and on the discursive space in which this identity is allowed to flourish

Page 3

Culture and Politics of Identity In Sri Lanka
Edited by Mithran Tiruchelvam
and
Dattathreya C. S.
International Centre for Ethnic Studies Colombo 1998

Page 4
International Centre for Ethnic Studies 2, Kynsey Terrace, Colombo 8, Sri Lanka.
Copyright (C) 1998 by International Centre for Ethnic Studies
ISBN 955-580-033-2
Printed by Unie Arts (Pvt) Ltd No.48 B, Bloemendhal Road Colombo 13

Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Chapter 1 Talk About the Passion
Patrick Anderson
Chapter2 Shifting Frames of Masculinity
Janide Silva
Chapter3 Understanding the Aryan Theory
Marisa Angel
Chapter4 From Victoria To Vihara Mahadevi
Michael Schaffer
Chapters The Other Victims
Sasanka Perera
Chapter6 Development NGOs and Ethnic Conflicts
Sunil Bastian
Chapter 7 Transformation of Muslim Political Identity
Shari Knoerzer
Chapter8 Biographies of a Decaying Nation-State
Jayadeva Uyangoda
The Contributors
VII
41
72
91
102
136
168
187

Page 5

Acknowledgments
The editors gratefully acknowledge the assistance that has made this book possible. We are grateful for support from Sasakawa Peace Foundation, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Denmark to this project. This support facilitated both the workshop that was held in March 1997 and the publication of this volume.
Special thanks go to Lavanya Ray who has read each of these chapters with meticulous care and made many invaluable suggestions to improve the text. Without her skills, dedication, and patience, this volume could not have been completed. P.Thambirajah, Chief Librarian of ICES and Radhika Coomaraswamy for their constant guidance and encouragement.
Mithran Tiruchelvam, Dattathreya C.S.

Page 6

Introduction
The present collection of essays arose out of a symposium held at the International Centre for Ethnic Studies (ICES), Colombo from 13-15 March 1997, where researchers and scholars presented some of their recent research interests. This volume seeks to gather the threads of a hybrid collection of essays and weave them together in their shared historical moment. An anthology of this nature seeks organizational cohesion based on the papers' common origins at the symposium, thereby sacrificing some degree of thematic or disciplinary unity. It is intended that such a collection make available to the general reader and to the scholar alike, a sense of the variety of social science pursuits being undertaken in Sri Lanka today. As such its purpose is to flavour as much as to nourish the reader's palate, providing a sampling of the eclectic diversity of topics, methodologies and critical perspectives engaging the social scientist today.
Nonetheless, the essays in this volume do find general unity in the questioning of cultural and political identity in Sri Lanka. This is neither a fortuitous or accidental unity, but rather a reflection of socialscientific discourse in the country and its particular normative concerns. The distinctive character of social science inquiry has fostered, and indeed demanded, this unity of purpose. This character has, in turn, been one that has at once been shaped and conditioned by a history chequered by virulent ethnic strife and a frayed and fragmented political identity. It is under such conditions that the social scientist has conceived her purpose as essentially reactive and dialectic to the politics of myth and the ideologies of the state. We do not choose our fields of engagement fitfully or capriciously; rather our interests are often reflexive to the structures and environments that surround us.
vii

Page 7
The notion of a critical social science is inseparable from its manifest or unsaid objective of de-mystifying (or in the fashionable parlance, "deconstructing') essentialized tropes of identity. The task set by the social scientist as such is not dissimilar to that envisaged of the "geneologist' by Michel Foucault who writes that "where the soul pretends unification or the self fabricates a coherent identity, the geneologist sets out to study the beginning-numberless beginnings, whose faint traces and hints of colour are readily seen by a historical eye'. Today the social scientist is deeply wary and distrustful of modern expressions of political community and social organization in Sri Lanka, and its presumptions of being seamless and self-evident. It is the appearance of historical and sociological self-evidence that the social scientist seeks to challenge. The construction of identity as unity is troubling simply because it chooses to ignore or silence voices of disquiet and opposition, and to ignore the significance of multiple allegiances, communities and experiences, in exchange for its own coherence and consistency. Groups and communities are typically imagined as if they were natural, real, stable and static units. They seem to be always already in existence. The essays in this volume closely examine the rough contours of political and cultural identity in Sri Lanka and trace out the subtle deviations and multiple, overlapping and often competing connections that subvert an assumed homogeneity.
Moreover, the experience of Sri Lanka can be considered in light of the deep-seated structural movements that have guided the course of its history. These movements transverse the economic and social changes that have significantly inscribed the past, as well as strategies of understanding the past. These broader structures find expression and embodiment in many of the essays in this volume. For instance, Michael Schaeffer demonstrates how symbolic conceptions of the public sphere' (ingrained in the body of a park) convey the movement of broader social and economic structures. Similarly, Jani De Silva reflects on how the symbolic construction of Sinhala male identity gravitates on the social pressures of kinship and land tenure. In both cases, the visions, metaphors and institutions of the cultural landscape convey and embody a society's image of reality and of its place within it.
Patrick Anderson's paper "Talk About the Passion' regards an evolving conception of mentalite through the social and paradigmatic
V11

shifts in Christian evangelical meanings of inter-faith "dialogue' (primarily between Christians and Buddhists). An esoteric theological discourse is seen as being closely intertwined with changing frames of identity, imaginings of community and senses of being (the cluster of Social, religious and moral personhood). Anderson is also interested in how the 'academic discourse of inter-faith dialogue acts in service of religious and ideological efforts for emancipatory social change (the alleviation of poverty and so on).
Buttressed by her own field-research, Jani De Silva's paper Shifting Frames of Masculinity examines the projections of 'social personhood amongst JVP male activists during the period of the insurrection of the late 1980s, its aftermath and prevailing consequences. De Silva argues that the collapsing of traditional practices of kinship and land tenure led to the distorting and distending of hierarchical categories of identity. She investigates a kind of 'cognitive dissonance' of group formation, embodied in the distance between ideal personhood and social reality. De Silva discovers how the symbolic orientation of language to reality exposes the ascriptive, hierarchical and fraternal bonds of young Sinhalese males.
In "Understanding the Aryan Theory', Marisa Angell critiques the assumptions of nineteenth-century European "positivist' historiography, and its inquiry into "pre-existent' social and "racial' formations in Sri Lanka. Angell is noteworthy for her tunnel vision approach, considering the virtues of European colonial historiography in light of its consequences towards the crystallization of race and cultural universals. Her method is characteristically future-oriented and her critique of the past is often considered in the grain of its present manifestations and consequences. She provokes the fashionable theoretical syllogism of strategies of knowledge and its conceptual leash of power (which begs the question as to whether all post-colonial forms of knowledge suffer this same fate).
Michael Schaffer's, paper "From Victoria to Vihara Mahadevi', follows in the general direction indicated by New History, the Annales School and their Indian counterpart, the Subaltern Studies school. Drawing on a variety of sources, Schaffer creates a linear narrative of the vicissitudes of Victoria (later Vihara Mahadevi) Park in central Colombo. Rather than elaborate on the transformation of socio-political
ix

Page 8
forces and structures themselves, Schaffer seeks to portray the urban public space that is the park as a site of impact of those forces and structures and their associated symbolic articulations. What also characterizes Schaffer's narrative is a certain lightness, a slightly flippant touch, which perhaps warrants some scrutiny. This light touch reminds one of Edward Said's celebration of the gradual disappearance of narrative history' and his emphasis on irony as the desirable historiographic mode ("narrative is replaced by irony’) and more generally, of post-structuralist writing fashions.
In sharp contrast to Schaffer's paper, Sasanka Perera's paper "The Other Victims,’ dealing with women's experiences (more specifically, the experiences of women who headed households as a consequence of the loss of husbands or male partners) in the JVP insurrection of the late 1980s, adopts an appropriately sombre approach. The objectives of Perera's paper are professedly preliminary in nature in that the emphasis in the paper is on locating the inadequacies of available studies in this area and, further, to outline a possible agenda for further research and analysis. Stressing the importance of the objectives of such studies, Perera avers that "(the study) was undertaken with the expectation that their experiences would be taken into account in any attempt to deal with our collective painful past and in building a framework for the future of Sri Lanka's society. Such anthropological approaches to the understanding of these phenomena, Perera feels, will help us fully understand the reasons behind the kind of political violence experienced in the late 1980s and ensure that there is no repetition of the horror.
Sunil Bastian's paper Development NGOs and Ethnic Conflict attempts to locate the political, ideological and structural contexts (and subtexts) of development NGOs operating against the backdrop of the ethnic conflict in Sri Lanka. After initially clarifying the conceptual and definitional aspects relating to NGOs and to the notion of civil society, Bastian subjects development NGOs and their responses to the ethnic conflict to rigorous analysis in a broadly Marxist paradigmatic and theoretical framework. By turns objectively analytical and polemical, Bastian, inter alia, problematizes notions of “neutrality” pursued by NGOs in the context of such a conflict.
Χ

Shari Knoerzer's paper “Transformation of Muslim Political Identity works on a defined and explicit hypothesis, which is: Muslim political representation is moving from a wealthy, Colombo-based, business elite to a unified and more grassroots body representing a greater proportion of Muslim interests across the island. Her paper revolves for the most part around the formation and emergence of the Sri Lanka Muslim Congress (SLMC) as a major political force in the country. Drawing on both primary and secondary sources, Knoerzer's paper is in the conventional political history mould; top-down (as opposed to subaltern) and with grand narratives of mobilizations, fissures, continuities and discontinuities. The paper highlights the difficulties and dilemmas confronting the SLMC (a classic example of a political organization trying to draw simultaneously on religious, ethnic, class and regional constituencies) in its task and function of providing political representation.
In his paper, Biographies of a Decaying Nation-State', Jayadeva Uyangoda is distressed by the absence of 'a political theory concerning the nation-state and its historical consequences' within the scholarly milieu on Sri Lanka. He seeks to interrogate the nation-state, through a combination of episodic personal narrative, a Survey of current literature and rounded theoretical sophistication. The paper argues that the nationstate and its characteristic attributes ("fixed sovereignty, fixed territorial borders and fixed demands of political loyalty and obligations from its citizenry') inflicts sustained and broad-scale violence on its citizens. The characteristic or 'totemic' attributes of the nation-state have themselves become sacrosanct values and it is Uyangoda's desire to see them de-legitimized or profaned'.
In sum, the essays in this volume focus on the structural and ideological rubric that channels expressions of political and cultural identity in Sri Lanka, and the discursive space in which this identity is allowed to flourish. If Patrick Anderson does this in relation to theological discourse, and Janide Silva in terms of the ascriptive orientations among Sinhala youth, Marisa Angell does it in relation to European colonial historiography and its consequences towards the construction of racial categories. Michael Schaeffer's paper works on an understanding of the ways in which discourse tends to mediate the fortunes of urban public space (and consequently, the uses to which it is put). Sunil
xi

Page 9
Bastian's problematization techniques are also clearly derived from an understanding of discursive strands and formations inputatively neutral' settings. Thus in different ways, and in relation to different subjects, each of these authors is laying bare the structural and ideological roots of these discursive formations. Uyangoda's paper then utilizes a general understanding of the maintainability or otherwise of these (and other) structural and ideological sites and throws up teasers with far-reaching implications.
The variety of subjects under review in this volume is matched by the variety of methodological approaches that have been adopted by the different writers; some essays are preliminary, some full blown research findings, and yet others critical surveys. The lack of a coherent theoretical thrust or framework is amply compensated for by the sheer diversity of this collection. It is perhaps appropriate that Jayadeva Uyangoda's paper should conclude this volume as it (in effect) calls for a fresh constitution of subjects which are in future to form the foci for exertion of critical energy in political science (and by convenient extension, social science) research in this country. One might add that this call from Uyangoda has come about as a result of an exercise in the best traditions of reflexive social science.
Mithran Tiruchelvam
One would take pain not to suggest that such critical hermeneutics are either paradigmatic or dominant of social science scholarship in the country. Rather, as Jayadeva Uyangoda suggests in his most prescient contribution, the critique of traditional identity politics is engaged in a vigorous debate with its proponents. And often, at least at the level of popular media, it is the antithesis of the critique, or the essentialists, who predominate.
2 Michel Foucault, "Nietzche, Ideology, History' in Paul Rabinow, ed., The
Foucalt Reader, Pantheon
Edward Said, "Third World Intellectuals and Metropolitan Culture' quoted in Aijaz Ahmed, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, Verso, London, 1992, p.325.
xii

Chapter 1
Talk About the Passion
Patrick Anderson
Introduction: The Basis for Dialogue
Fields of discourse, especially the discourse of anything as politically charged as religion in twentieth-century Sri Lanka, cannot be separated from other aspects of social belief and behaviour. Inter-religious dialogue includes not only discussions concerning doctrinal differences, but also the negotiation of personal and community identity within larger social and political frameworks including the family, the village, the city and the state. Likewise, religion and the work of theologians and religious dialogians, are not exempt from issues which affect the daily lives of their followers (for example, discrimination against women, ethnic and racial bigotry, and the widening gap between the affluent and the impoverished). In order to be socially relevant, in other words, the religious must tend to the mundane as directly and as passionately as it tends to the sacred.
Nowhere else in the world is this social relevance for dialogue as imperative as it is in so-called Third World or 'developing countries, especially those as ethnically rich and as religiously pluralist as Sri Lanka. Here, as Aloysius Pieris has pointed out, religious dialogue is not the same "academic luxury' as it may be in the West, but is a modus vivendi, a way of living. In a country where people of Hindu,

Page 10
2 Talk About the Passion
Buddhist, Muslim, Protestant and Catholic faith live among one another and interact daily, dialogue takes on a wholly different meaning than it may in the highly academicized circles of religious experts in Europe and North America. Perhaps the most apparent trend in the BuddhistCatholic dialogical trends in Sri Lanka is this move from the theoretical to the practical in discourses on Buddhist-Catholic interaction.
Ironically, Christianity - founded by early Asians - is largely considered to be a Western religion, as tied to capitalistic democracy as it is to its founder, that carpenter who wandered the streets of Jerusalem and Nazareth associating with fishermen, lepers and prostitutes. Likewise, Roman Catholicism as an institution is as concerned with maintaining its tightly structured hierarchy as it is with reevaluating the social relevance of the sacraments, the rosary, and other aspects of its treasured tradition. And in true Cartesian style, Christianity and Catholicism need an Other, an opposite, an "I am not that', just as early missionaries needed malaria-ridden jungles and nose-ringed 'savages' to provoke them with the danger they needed for martyrdom. It is easy for the Westerner, for whom religion is a form of social behaviour often isolated to a periodic service, ritual or vigil, to imagine dialogue as a coming together of opposites, abutting of heads. But in much of the so-called Third World, and certainly in Sri Lanka, dialogue can hardly be isolated to the evangelistic comparison of dogma which may be internally or externally conflicting; and if it is so isolated, it inevitably fails in its pursuit of harmonious coexistence between people of different faiths.
Inter-religious dialogue is a field often situated in the halls of Mother University or Father Seminary rather than "on the level of the sociologically smothered working and rural classes. In Sri Lanka, however, where moments of contestation and compromise between certain religious groups can be located historically and ideologically, attention has in many ways turned from high-brow discourse to grassroots liberationist politics. Such a trend can be seen especially in dialogical efforts between Catholic and Buddhist groups. In this paper, I will begin by reviewing briefly the recent (since 1873) history of Buddhist-Catholic interaction, paying special attention to a few key issues. Having set the context for the last century, I will focus on some trends in interfaith dialogue among Buddhists and Catholics,

Culture and Politics of Identity in Sri Lanka 3
focusing on the work of Fr Aloysius Pieris, Fr Tissa Balasuriya and the late Fr Michael Rodrigo. In doing so, I will also investigate how the concepts of dialogue, conversion, evangelism and theology have been situated within the contexts of religious pluralism and sociopolitical inequality.
There is a tendency among scholars writing on inter-religious dialogue to gild the frame by commenting extensively on - and often neglecting to apply critical theory to - interfaith prayers for peace, unity vigils and the like. While I am only in the beginning stages of my research on the topic of interfaith dialogue, and certainly not yet comfortable constructing theories about the dialogue particular to Sri Lankan Catholics and Buddhists, I do not, either, intend merely to glorify the efforts of a few key dialogians. This paper is intended as a first effort to locate and trace the trends in Catholic-Buddhist dialogue, within the context of contemporary political and social issues, as well as to highlight and gently to critique the responses of current dialogians to present-day and historical fields of controversy and contention.
History of Interfaith Dialogue from 1873 to the President
The range of written material documenting the history of the Catholic Church, so-called Protestant Buddhism and Christian-Buddhist dialogue, is both wide and excellent. In this section, I am not attempting to define the Catholic experience in Sri Lanka history, nor to trace the resurgence of Theravada Buddhism on the island, or attempt to present a complete picture of recent Buddhist-Christian or Buddhist-Catholic interactions. Rather, I want to highlight a few moments in Sri Lankan, Catholic and Buddhist histories which I believe to be significant in the development of contemporary, unique-to-Sri Lanka theologies, epistemologies and practices of interfaith dialogue.
The end of the nineteenth century was, to borrow a phrase from Fr Aloysius Pieris, a period of “bitterness and suspicion' between Christians and Buddhists. The tide of Buddhist resurgence had begun to wax; and Buddhists were restoring their pride in Sri Lanka as a safeguard for the Theravada tradition. Religious fervour was common on the island, and ranged from Protestant conversion attempts (directed at both Buddhists and Catholics) to Buddhist revivalism, evidenced

Page 11
4 Talk About the Passion
materially by the formation of a Society for the Propagation of Buddhism in Kotahena and the Lankapahara Press Foundation in Galle. As with other sidelights of colonialism, Catholic privilege and the missionary harvest of Souls' was called into question, rightfully, by the Buddhist majority. Christian-Buddhist tensions came to a head at two events which would define the fields of interaction between the two groups for the first few decades of the twentieth century: a series of five debates, the final and most famous of which was held at Panadura in 1873; and the Kotahena riot of 1883.
The meeting at Panadura was more debate than discourse. Meeting before a group of several thousand Sri Lankans - most of whom, it appears, were of the Buddhist persuasion - Wesleyen Reverend David Silva and Buddhist monk-Scholar Mohotiwatte Gunananda carried on a fairly heated argument concerning the finer points of their respective faiths, challenging, in the meanwhile, one another's Scholarly and oratorical aptitude. Following the debate, victory was declared for the Buddhists, which in retrospect seems to have been due to the Venenerable Gunananda's ability to speak on the level of his crowd, as opposed to Reverend Silva, who "addressed the audience as if each of his hearers was a Max Muller' (Peebles, 1994:36). The Panadura debate, in any case, is seen historically as the predecessor of other academic dialogical journals, centres and conferences; and the Buddhist willingness to - and apparent victory in - debate has been noted as an early Buddhist challenge to Christianity and a move to put Christians on the defensive (Pieris, 1975a:1, et al.).
At Kotahena, on the other hand, the confrontation between Catholics and Buddhists was visceral. The riots, rooted in disputes concerning the spatial (the streets in front of a cathedral) and temporal (Easter weekend), territories shared by a mass and a perahera, set the stage for at best a rough beginning to the new century. After months of correspondence between the local clergy and local authorities, a procession of Buddhists (beating tom-toms and burning incense) during the Catholic Easter weekend sparked an incident which left many injured and at least one dead over a period of a few days. In the end, blame was laid on the local police (who were ambiguous in their granting of perahera licenses) and the Catholic clergy (who

Culture and Politics of Identity in Sri Lanka 5
seemed to have incited local Catholics to riot). The Kotahena riot was perhaps the largest early clash between Buddhists and Catholics, and stood as evidence that some other, more "real' than academic, dialogue was needed.
In the first few decades of the twentieth century, the Catholic Church in Sri Lanka was working towards further indigenization of its clergy, a project which met with more than a little reservation:
There was a strong missionary prejudice against the formation of a local clergy. Doubts were expressed as to the intellectual capabilities of the Sri Lankans, over their commitment to celibacy, and their ability to overcome ties of caste and family or their involvement in local affairs...The indigenisation of the priesthood had the effect of progressively involving it in more mundane matters. Whilst missionary priests were insulated from such tensions, their social world looking inward to the religious order and outward to Europe, the indigenous priests were not nearly so well insulated from the pressures of local society. Indeed, they were caught in an impossible position. If, in imitation of the missionaries, they denied all ties with family, caste or friends, they exposed themselves to the criticism that they denied their moral obligations. If, on the other hand, they retained such links they were open to the criticism that they were too involved in the world and were not true priests. (Stirrat, 1992:35-6)
The move towards local clergy, backed by Pope Benedict XV, suggests that early twentieth-century Catholics were struggling to forge a sense of identity among themselves and alongside the rising Buddhist nationalistic urge which was taking hold of pre-Independence Ceylon. Pilgrimages to Madhu and Talawila were, correspondingly, on the increase, as were the cults of Mary and other local Catholic saints. The struggle to maintain, simultaneously, Catholic belief within Sinhalese or Tamil cultural orientation, directly confronted the thenpopular attempt to tie the Buddhist religion indefinitely to Sinhalese culture and "rightful' Sri Lankan heritage.

Page 12
6 Talk About the Passion
When Independence was finally won in 1948, the rise to power of the United National Party (UNP) - pro-Western, pro-capitalist, pro-democracy - was hardly devastating for Sri Lankan Catholics, so accustomed were they to the privileges afforded them by the colonial state. Stirrat (1992) argues that Independence had less of an impact on the Church in Sri Lankathan the 1956 landslide Sri Lankan Freedom Party (SLFP) victory. The SLFP, having harnessed the political power of Buddhist revivalists, made good on its promises to the SinhalaBuddhist majority by declaring Sinhala the only "official language' and Buddhism the "official religion' of the state: two moves which would have severe repercussions in the years to come among a number of minority groups.
In the 1950s and 60s the Buddhist clash with Christianity was fuelled further by a socialist trend supported by Marxist groups on the island and resulting in the conception of the pancha-mahabala-vegaya, the Great Five-Fold Wave of Power, which focused on the potential political power of Buddhist monks, ayurvedic doctors, vernacular teachers, farmers and workers (Pieris, 1995b: 107). During this era, several occurrences of Sri Lankan political history were crucial in determining the future of Catholicism and Catholic-Buddhist relations on the island. The publication of the All-Ceylon Buddhist Congress's 1957 report, "The Betrayal of Buddhism' located Buddhist animosity towards Christianity especially in attacks on Christian control of educational systems and the "foreign cultural mores brought to the island by early missionaries. This was followed, in 1957, by a restriction placed on Roman Catholic workers in social services (including the nuns who acted as nurses in local hospitals) and rights of the Church in buying land. The biggest blow, however, came in 1960, with the nationalization of schools without compensation to the Church, a tragedy for Catholics; in Caspersz's words, "It was felt that with the schools would go the last bulwarks of identity of Christians in the nation' (1974: 108). The potential for dialogue was hindered further by the various activities of anti-nationalist Catholic groups such as the Catholic Militants and the Catholic Action.
Luckily for hopeful dialogians, the Second Vatican Council met in Rome during the years 1962-65. Remarkably, the Church, long thought to be distanced from and blind to the post-colonial twentieth

Culture and Politics of Identity in Sri Lanka 7
century world, reconsidered its place within societies and cultures outside of Europe and North America. As Stirrat points out, there were three major effects of Vatican II on the Catholic Church in Sri Lanka: “the change in the official attitude of the Church to other religions...to the view that other religions enshrined different ways of approaching God'; 'major changes in the liturgy of the Church, increasing its relevance for and accessibility to the laity'; and “redefin[ing] the nature of the priesthood and the character of the good Catholic life...implying that Grace comes not through sacramental channels but rather through individual action' (1992:434). Emphasis was thus laid not only on the relationship between the Church and the social world of which it was produced and in which it was functioning, but also on the role of the priest both in religious and secular affairs. A similar debate had been, and is still, brewing about the role of the Buddhist monk in secular and political life. The result was that both "keepers of the faith', priests and monks, were involving themselves more and more in the political life of the state, setting the stage for a dialogue more socially and politically relevant than the high-brow academic discourses which had dominated the field in the past.
The first Janatha Vimukti Peramuna (JVP) insurgency further contextualized inter-religious dialogue within the specific social and cultural arena of the economically and sociologically polarized postcolonialSri Lanka. Motivated by their frustrations concerning the elitist education system still in place after the nationalization of schools, Sinhala village youth mounted an insurrection in 1971, drawing the attention of the country and the Church to the plight of the rural poor. From this point on, dialogians realized that "authentic Buddhist-Christian dialogue...ought to take in the social realities of the country, as viewed from the point of view of the rural Buddhist youth (and) that dialogue is not in itself an end nor a comfortable pastime of intellectuals, but a by-product of a Buddhist-Christian engagement in the spiritually charged social reconstruction of the country from the vantage point of the marginalized and the excluded ones' (Pieris, 1995b:111).
In the 1970s, some attention was given by the official Church to the importance of inter-faith dialogue, especially with the foundation of the Federation of Asian Bishops' Council and the encouragement

Page 13
8 Talk About the Passion
for dialogue efforts from the Vatican's Secretariat for Non-Christians. But in 1977, with the advent of the Jayewardena government and its open market policy, Protestant fundamentalist sects began flooding the island. Proselytization was thus re-established as a focal point for the work of Christians in Sri Lanka; and the Catholic Church followed the trend with the popular "New Evangelism' ideal, 'a stress on the need for converting the Buddhists to the Church' (Pieris, 1995b:118).
The latest major controversy surrounding Buddhist-Catholic dialogue was the 1994 publication by Pope John Paul II of Crossing the Threshold of Hope, which contained a chapter on Buddhism considered by many Buddhists and Catholics to be insensitive, shortsighted and, in short, incorrect. The book was especially ill-timed, as it predated by a few months the Pope's visit to Sri Lanka for the beatification of Fr Joseph Vaz, a priest often noted as an early example of a Catholic dialogian. Reaction to the book in Sri Lanka was wide and varied. Many Catholics, in "blindadoration of papal infallibility, denied that the chapter was misleading or offensive; Catholic dialogians, on the other hand, wrote responses to (criticisms of) the chapter, in many cases thoroughly discounting almost all of the Pope's assumptions. The Buddhist reaction, on the hand, ranged from spontaneous reaction of protest and indignation' to "calm refutation of the Pope's misconceptions with a view to drawing the readers towards the true teachings of the Buddha’ to "a critique...directed not only towards the Pope's chapter...but also towards contemporary Buddhism' (Pieris, 1995a:88). But though the reaction was at times hostile, the various articles and newspaper columns responding to the chapter (and questioning the legitimacy of the Pope's upcoming visit to beatify Fr Joseph Vaz) suggest that dialogue in Sri Lanka had been successful, at the very least, in educating Catholics about Buddhism and vice versa.
Key Catholic Dialogians
A number of key dialogians and dialogical centres of study emerged in the late twentieth century which have helped to define the current trends in Buddhist-Catholic dialogue and encounter. Included among these key dialogians are Fr Aloysius Pieris and his Tulana Centre; Fr

Culture and Politics of Identity in Sri Lanka 9
Tissa Balasuriya and his Centre for Society and Religion; Fr Michael Rodrigo and his Suba Seth Gedera; Fr Paul Caspersz and his Satyodaya; Fr Mervyn Fernando and his Subodhi; and Fr Oscar Abeyratne and the Pubuduwa movement. In this section, I will outline the general trends in late twentieth-century dialogue efforts by highlighting especially the academic and political work of Pieris, Balasuriya and Rodrigo.
Perhaps the most prolific journal for inter-religious communication in Sri Lanka is Dialogue, published once to three times a year since 1963. In 1973, when the New Series was initiated, the editors ruminated on the mission of the journal and of dialogue at large, and concluded that dialogue was best not undertaken from behind “veils of dogma' or in pursuit of a "lowest common denominator or one world religion' (De Silva, 1974a:2). Rather, they write,
The purpose of dialogue must be seen in the context of the common human search for community-local community, national community and world community...to affirm the unity of mankind, understandour responsibility to one another and harness all resources for living together in community...Dialogue seeks to remove tensions, suspicions, prejudices and hostilities for the promotion of racial and social harmony, for the generation of a universal consciousness so essential for the unity of mankind and for the creation of an atmosphere in which people of different religious convictions can live together in openness and mutual respect working together for the building up of world community. (De Silva, pp.2-3.)
Such abroad and rhetorically savvy statement might seem vague and ironically high-browed. But in the context of the dialogue initiated and discussed in the journal from which this statement was taken, this paragraph of high aspirations is apropos. Among the various forms of discourse, Dialogue has played host to academic ruminations on the natures of Buddhism and Christianity, historical reevaluations of the particular doctrines and theologies, politically charged (often Marxist) tracts calling for the liberation of the poor, and various other dialogical

Page 14
10 Talk About the Passion
exercises. I have relied heavily on many issues of Dialogue for articles written by and about specific dialogians and, from the editors, explicit discussions of the multifarious meanings and goals of inter-religious dialogue.
Pieris. One of the most prolific of the Catholic dialogians, involved not only in political but also academic circles of dialogue, is Fr Aloysius Pieris the founder of the Tulana Centre of Dialogue and Encounter and an editor of the journal Dialogue. Pieris has followed, with meticulous regularity, political occurrences relevant to the Sri Lankan Buddhist-Catholic experience and academic trends in BuddhistCatholic interaction. In many ways he has defined those academic trends not only on the island but also internationally. His studies of the history of Catholic (and Christian) understandings of and experiences with Buddhism, especially, have led him critically to reevaluate the doctrinal and institutional eccentricities of the international and local Catholic community which define and direct contemporary dialogical efforts; and it is his reevaluation which has helped better to elucidate the relevance of dialogue for contemporary Sri Lankan society and culture.
For Pieris, even current interactions between religious groups are inextricably tied to the (mis)understanding of Buddhism by Christians, and vice versa, in the nineteenth century and before. He relates those perceptions to colonialism and the missionary enterprise; the resurgent trend in so-called "Protestant Buddhism; and the nationalism which became popular especially just after Independence. His argument, essentially, is that those (mis)understandings both transformed Buddhist and Catholic identities in Sri Lanka and caused each group hesitantly to approach dialogue. He writes, "The BuddhistChristian encounter has been a matter of a deformed Christianity colliding with a misapprehended Buddhism. The idea of an "Euroecclesiastic expansionism', which masqueraded as the religion of Christ, was not good news but a serious threat to Buddhism. In fact, it was this initial Christian offensive that compelled Buddhists to wear a defensive mask when facing Christians' (1988b:83).
From these estimations of the history of religious contact, Pieris conceives of religions as both dynamic (internally and externally)

Culture and Politics of Identity in Sri Lanka 11
and complementary, fitting together within the context of a given society with some harmony and some discord. For Christianity and Buddhism, specifically, he develops a theology of interrelatedness based on theoretical, epistemological and soteriological oppositions between the two religions. In fact, European (and North American) Christians, in Pieris's eyes, have a long history of using the proselytization ethicantithetical to 'true' Christianity- to achieve their own colonialist urges. In many ways, this expansionism may have been due (especially in the nineteenth century) to the Church's insecurity with the rationalism and secularization common during this era in Europe and North America. In any case, Pieris argues, Buddhism responded by presenting itself as a "religion-less' philosophy having a scientific and rationalist basis' as an "export Buddhism', reviving itself as a 'Protestant Buddhism' in the face of overwhelmingly aggressive Christian mission workers, and adopting an apologetic tone in an attempt to become a "modern Buddhism'. The effect on the potential for dialogue, still apparent in contemporary dialogical attempts, is that this nineteenth-century response to Christianity and increasing 'Western influence...still continues to hinder Christians from detecting what is truly challenging in Buddhism' (1988b:83-4).
The implication of these ideas for dialogue can be seen in Pieris's insistence that positive dialogue can only arise when one's own religion is understood independently of and contrary to other religions. Dialogue occurs when conviction (in one's own religion) is assured, differences (though perhaps not fully understood) are accepted, and education (better to understand other faiths) is undertaken by means of discourse: "The academic approach, guided by intellectual honesty, consists in affirming both an evangelical zeal for one's religious commitment and a certain amount of dialogical accommodation to a given pluralism' (1988b:7).
In his own academic study, Pieris develops what is essentially a binary divide between Buddhism and Christianity, drawing attention to the "gnostic' orientation of Buddhism and the 'agapeic' orientation of Christianity. Though he concedes that "both Buddhism and Christianity have both aspects' (of gnosis and agape), his fundamental contention is that Christianity is a religion which may be understood through its focus on "redemptive love; and Buddhism, conversely, is a

Page 15
12 Talk About the Passion
religion which may be understood through its focus on "liberating knowledge'. Thus, according to Pieris's theory, true dialogue between Buddhists and Christians cannot precede the understanding of each religion as based on a soteriology diametrically opposed to, though possibly including some aspects of, the other.
Pieris's argument that a commitment to (or 'evangelical zeal for) one's own beliefs is essential to true dialogue, and his sharp distinction between the 'cores' of Christianity and Buddhism, are at odds with popular perceptions of dialogue as the pursuit of some world religion', a conglomeration of all religions (their barriers dissolved, their particulars ignored, their differences obliterated). For Pieris, dialogue is essentially evangelistic-that is, necessarily grounded in a coming together of people who are committed both to the Truth of their own convictions and to the mutual understanding of people of other, orno, religious faith. His notion of 'evangelico-dialogical tension' is motivated not by the proselytizing urge of early missionaries but by the potential of strengthening one's own commitment to one's particular faith. Dialogue in this sense is aimed at conversion, but an internal conversion, as opposed to the conversion of others idealized by dialogians concerned with jump-starting membership tallies in the Church.
Beyond Pieris's concern for the academic or theological side of dialogue is his attention to the social liberation potential in true, committed dialogue. Once a Christian or a Buddhist has honestly attempted to understand the religious proclivities of the other (the method of dialogue), she/he can and should focus on the true aim of dialogue: to affect social change in favour of the oppressed. In this sense, Pieris argues that dialogue is not merely for the benefit of those who have the luxury of spending time studying other religions, but, ultimately, for the benefit of the poor. His definition of "the poor', based on a study of what was meant by the word in Biblical scripture, includes three axioms:
(1) God, or the Liberative Agent, is irrevocably opposed to
Mammon (or deified wealth) which enslaves.
(2) The same God has made a defence pact, a covenant with the poor against the agents of Mammon, so that the struggle of the

Culture and Politics of Identity in Sri Lanka 3
poor for their own liberation coincides with God's own salvific action. (3) Because of the messianic role of the masses, the poor are those through whom God shapes our own salvation. There are three traits of the poor in the Bible: (i) They are a sociological group: actual poverty, not stoic
detachment from material things. (ii) They are a dynamic group: not passive victims of history
but makers, shapers of history. (iii) They are a dialectical group: their situation is determined by other groups in conflict, antagonistic to them (in Rodrigo, 1987:76-7).
Pieris's focus on the sociological and soteriological significance of the poor redirects his (thus far highly academic) sense of dialogue to the realm of social justice. It is within this framework of "social liberation theology' that Pieris bases his criticism of the distinction between ideology and religion. He claims that, although some ideologies 'end up being not merely secular or non-religious but also positively anti-religious', all religions inherently and invariably include 'an ideology at work' (1983:35).
The danger of ignoring the potential of the social ideology inherently 'at work in a given religion, says Pieris, is that "some religionists believe that if the individuals of a given society attain interior purity the whole society would automatically become just...This theory presupposes, falsely, that a society is simply the sum total of individuals. The truth is that if individual conversion is not accompanied by a corresponding structural change, the counter-forces that operate in society overpower individuals in their efforts to attain the desired perfection' (1983:37). Hence, for Pieris, to achieve social justice religion must employ some ideological framework in its mundane concerns. And in locating a concern for the liberation of the poor in both Christian and Buddhist doctrines, Pieris presents not only another imperative for interfaith dialogue, but another arena as well: social/ political ideology.

Page 16
14 Talk About the Passion
Balasuriya. Fr. Tissa Balasuriya's theories of interfaith dialogue originate in his revisionist evaluation of Catholicism and its doctrines of original sin and the Virgin Mary. Linking "Mariology' to the hermeneutics of Catholicism and the associated problems of interand extra-Christian dialogue, he attempts in his Mary and Human Liberation both to distinguish between the aspects of the actual personhood of the Virgin (and her place in Catholic mythology) and the implications of using Mary in contemporary, institutionalized Catholic theology; and to reconsider the importance of the concept of original sin within Catholic hegemony. Where Pieris investigates Buddhist-Catholic dialogue within the framework of his agape-gnosis divide, then, Balasuriya revisits and revises the doctrines of Mary and original sin in an effort to uncover their anterior meanings. His intention is to deconstruct what he calls the "elaboration of Marian theology' in order to "reflect on the meaning of Mary specially for our times and in the circumstances of an unjust world' (1990:iv) and to rethink the 'assumption or hypothesis of original sin'. The two doctrines are linked, for Balasuriya, in the relationship between humanity, sin, sexuality, and the identity and teachings of Jesus Christ. In this paper, I will focus briefly on Balasuriya's rethought Mariology and its implications for his theories of social liberation and interfaith dialogue.
The foundation of Balasuriya's exercise is his belief that the European North American Church has altered certain doctrines of Christianity and Catholicism to serve the purpose of protecting Western, Anglo-Saxon, male, heterosexual, Judeo-Christian power and privilege. He writes, "We are questioning the traditional dogmas as a whole construct that held together, because piecemeal adjustments as and when the Euro-American Church establishment or theologians need them are inadequate' (1990:121). His chapters on Marian devotion and theology are rooted in his discussion of the potential significance of Mariology for Catholicism in the liberation of women, social liberation, political liberation, the liberation of men, the Third World, and world justice and peace. Unfortunately for the Catholic Church, his radical (for Catholics) theological work, paired with his criticism of the present Pope's openness to theological and spiritual revisionism, resulted in his recent excommunication.

Culture and Politics of Identity in Sri Lanka 5
Envisioning Mary as a political activist rather than as a passive vessel for Holy Insemination, Balasuriya reconfigures the personhood of Mary as one of "full humanity', while using the idea of Mary to motivate his own set of goals for current political and social liberation theology. Figuring that the traditional identity of Mary was made to fit into the stereotype of the dominant, patient woman...foster[ing] a concept of holiness linked to the subordination of women to men, he argues that the personhood of Mary as a dynamic, sexual, maternal and liberationist woman of her time "can be an inspiration for the liberation of women, particularly through women's consciousness of their rights and dignity’ (pp.96-8). The result of his reconstructed Mary necessitates a rethinking of the place of women in the Church, in the family, and in society at large. As the "liberation and selfrealization of women and men are inter-related and inter-dependent', Balasuriya's rethinking of Mary's personhood also has implications for the liberation of men. He writes, "Males can and need to free themselves from being dominating towards women. This requires that they cure themselves of the pride that results from) their masculinity. being considered superior in a society long conditioned by male domination. This means an acknowledgement of the equality of the sexes and of their mutuality and partnership in the common enterprises of life' (p. 106).
Balasuriya uses the idea of Mary, on the other hand, to argue for contemporary social liberation. He contends that the traditionally accepted model of Mary's personhood is also linked to the subordination "of the poor and weak to the wealthy and strong' (p. 96). As a representative of an exiled people (attempting to escape Herod's order to obliterate all male children under the age of two), and with her experience of property being for all', the Mary of Balasuriya's theology was keenly aware of structures of political, economic and social domination used to oppress the majority. She was, moreover, aware of Jesus's teaching "concerning political power and its legitimacy only as a service to the people and was deeply involved in politics) in a liberative...non-violent manner' (p. 105). The implications of such a message, says Balasuriya, can transform the involvement of contemporary theologians and dialogians in social and political revolution.

Page 17
16 Talk About the Passion
Balasuriya's attempt to deconstruct the evolution of his Catholic faith from the original teaching of its founder(s) to its current bastardized state is fundamental to his conception of dialogue: "In the longer term, and at a deeper level, people are beginning to ask more serious questions concerning the conflicting views of the religions on the ultimate realities and on their perceptions concerning each other. There is bound to be a questioning of each other's presuppositions and of the theologies deduced from them' (p.127). But far from being a purely academic exercise, Balasuriya's intention is to find the aspects of different religions (in particular Christianity and Buddhism) which have in common social liberation ideology which he pinpoints as crucial to any religion in modern so-called Third World countries. He cites the concerns of those Christians living in non-European/North American countries as specifically centred on the transformation of political and social inequality. Balasuriya's argument for Christian/ Catholic dialogians is "to investigate critically the content of theology, precisely in order to discern the core of the faith from its less essential elements' (p. 130). Such critical investigation, carefully undertaken, is the cornerstone of his own theological and dialogical pursuits.
Rodrigo. Fr Michael Rodrigo, in his particular approach to interfaith dialogue, departed from the academic and political ruminations of Pieris and Balasuriya, literally, en route to a Buddhistmajority village in the heart of the island. While he was alive, he strove not to argue the finer points of Catholic theology and dialogical theories, but to leave the sanctuary of the university or the seminary and experience for himself, as a human being more than as a student and vessel of his Catholicism, the differences between Buddhism and Christianity. In this sense, Rodrigo's dialogical work was ethnographic and radical. For him, dialogue, theology, religion, ideology were all pointless unless interfaced with action; his contribution to contemporary Buddhist-Christian dialogue was personal, selfless, risky and, ultimately, fatal.
The premise underlying all of Rodrigo's work was that "Life in the community is the distinctive form of human experience' (1977:18). It is precisely this sentiment that encouraged Rodrigo, moreover, to make dialogue something that is lived rather than something that is done. For him, dialogue was a process of 'self

Culture and Politics of Identity in Sri Lanka 7
emptying, a rejection of the academic and theological institutions for whom religions are opposing and opposite aspects of cultural and social life. In a memorial issue dedicated posthumously to the work of Rodrigo, Dialogue summarized a few of his major contributions to the field of Buddhist-Catholic dialogue:
(1) The incorporation of the philosophy and the methodology of "conscientization' into the process of dialogue...He himself strongly criticized what he saw as 'dialogue' in many places. But his final criticism was a very practical one, a practice he developed together with his community and the people.
(2) The recognition of the historical process of exploitation with the victim...This theme in all his utterances in the last period of his life...Leaving colonial arrogance is an essential element of becoming a part of the real people of this country.
(3) By the problems he faced in engaging in dialogue and by his death, he contributed to the understanding of the real Sri Lanka...What he forced all thinking people to look at was a very sinister and explosive political situation that exists in the country (Fernando, 1988:9-10).
In addition to these contributions, Rodrigo also prompted theologians and dialogians to rethink the concepts of poverty' and 'religion, which he perceived as dynamic aspects of people's lives rather than static descriptives. Referring to religion, he wrote, "From the viewpoint of dialogue, it is more important to ask "Who is a Muslim?' 'Who is a Buddhist?' 'Who is a Hindu' 'Who is a Christian?' (rather than “What is Islam?” “What is Buddhism? etc.) because then we get down to the bedrock of our basic humanity...The person fosters the relationship, the nature does not (1977:20). In this postmodern focus on the inherent subjectivity and changeability of religion, Rodrigo abandoned the "core-to-core' debates of his colleagues. His intention seems not to have been to gather enough knowledge about the similarities and differences in religions to be able to explain them, but to find those aspects of all religions (and ideologies, for that matter) which have utility in everyday life and currency in the language of politics. His goal, rather than to study or

Page 18
18 Talk About the Passion
"encounter other faiths, was to live among people of other faiths; and, for Rodrigo, the idiomatic differences between Catholicism and Buddhism were never as important as the sociological differences between Rich and Poor.
In his work with rural villagers, and his concurrent studies of Biblical scripture, Rodrigo discovered that poverty in the Bible is primarily sociological and not to be defined in purely economic terms, much less in Marxist terms of non-ownership of the means of production. Biblical poverty has a religious meaning. The poor are an oppressed group in conflict, not necessarily a class struggle. The poor in the Bible aspire to free, fraternal, non-exploitative community' (1988:77). For Rodrigo, inter-religious dialogue between Buddhists and Christians is only ever valuable if it attempts to uncover and deploy the political and social systems of oppression against which the founders of each of those religions was also fighting. In his estimation, dialogue is truly that: the dynamic interface of people, never merely ideas, within a specific political and social context. Dialogue, for Rodrigo, always does something.
Conclusion
Inter-religious dialogue, in any setting, is difficult, fraught with centuries of corruption, oppression and injustice. In post-colonial Sri Lanka, inter-religious dialogue is inseparable from the political, social, communitarian and ethical issues which have transformed the island from a territory in the British Commonwealth to a country struggling with nationalism, ethnic discrimination, polarized communities of wealth and poverty, and war. Perhaps it is inevitable that dialogue between Christians (the historic oppressors) and Buddhists (the historically oppressed) has turned, theoretically and (in some cases) in practice, to the liberation of those groups who currently suffer, to the RichPoor divide which has taken the place of the more religion-based domination of the past.
In the first edition of Dialogue's "New Series', the editors write that "dialogue seeks to remove tensions, suspicions, prejudices and hostilities for the promotion of racial and social harmony, for the generation of a universal consciousness so essential for the unity of

Culture and Politics of Identity in Sri Lanka 19
mankind' (quoted earlier, De Silva 1974a:2-3). As Rodrigo and others have learned, however, tensions are necessary. Dialogians can neither forge too readily into conflict nor maintain a puritanical reserve against them. In order to obliterate suspicions, prejudices and hostilities, dialogians cannot simply ignore them, apologize for what caused them, or explain them away. As dialogians in Sri Lanka have discovered, a more direct approach is necessary. For Pieris, that approach is to reevaluate the history of religious interaction and attempt to uncover the specific and causal relationship between certain oppressive behaviours and inter-religious resentment. For Balasuriya, that approach is to revisit certain of one's own religious doctrines in an effort to deconstruct the effects of centuries of political interpretations and manipulations, and to revise the doctrines in search of their validity in and relevance to modern life. For Rodrigo, that approach is to leave the study centre and experience the particulars of religions oneself, to discover those points of conflict and overlap which make inter-religious dialogue dynamic and politically potent. For all three, the ultimate aim of Buddhist-Christian dialogue is not merely to understand those opposing, but in many ways similar, structures, but the use of them to change those aspects of contemporary politics which maintain structures of power and oppression
As Rodrigo implied, in dialogue, pinpointing Catholicism or Buddhism without referencing individuals is pointless. Likewise, Buddhist-Catholic dialogue is most liberating when it leaves the hallowed halls of learning and re-enters the social arenas where the effects of tension, suspicion, prejudice and hostility are truly felt. Academic enlightenment is important; but social action is the key:
Though religions have, on the whole, played a negative role in Third World history, it is no longer possible to write them off as merely the ideological legitimation of oppressive systems, nor to limit their liberative potential to that of a supposedly prophetic religion like Christianity. All religions...are in various ways and to various degrees, both oppressive and liberative...Third World theology needs to develop a form of inter-religious dialogue which is concerned not so much with the doctrinal insights or

Page 19
20 Talk About the Passion
the spiritual experiences that different religions can offer
one another, as with the contribution to human liberation that each can make (EATWOT 1988:21-4)
Bibliography
Abeyasinghe, N. "Liberation: A Theme for Theology and Praxis.' Logos
26(1). Colombo: Centre for Society and Religion.
Ariarajah, S. W. 1976. "Towards a Theology of Dialogue. Dialogue 3(3).
Colombo: Ecumenical Institute for Study and Dialogue.
Balasuriya, T. 1990. "Mary and Human Liberation." Logos 29(1-2). Colombo:
Centre for Society and Religion.
Caspersz, P. 1974. "The Role of Sri Lankan Christians in a Buddhist Majority System. The Ceylon Journal of Historical and Social Studies 4.
De Silva, L.A. 1974a. Editorial. Dialogue 1(1). Colombo: Ecumenical Institute
for Study and Dialogue.
SSSSLSCCLSLCSSSLLLLLSSLLLSSSLLLSLLLSLCCSLSSSLSSLLSSLLSSLLLLLSSLLLLSLSS 1974b. Buddhist-Christian Encounter 2: A Marxist Appreciation of the Role of Buddhism and Christianity in Ceylonese Society Until Now. Dialogue 1 (1). Colombo: Ecumenical Institute for Study and Dialogue.
----------------- 1977a. Points to Ponder.' Dialogue 4(1-2). Colombo: Ecumenical
Institute for Study and Dialogue.
SLCCCSSSSLLLLSSSLLLSLLCLLSSSSLLLLSLSL LSL LSL LS SLLSSLLSCLSLCSLSCSLSrS 1977b. "The Turn to "Community” as the Focus for Dialogue." Dialogue 4(1-2). Colombo: Ecumenical Institute for Study and Dialogue.
qSLLCSSSSLLLLSLLLLLSLLLLLSLLLSLSLSLLSLLSLrSSLLLLSSSLLLSLSSLSSSSSSLSSSSSCSSSSLSSSSSS 1977c. "The Understanding and Goal of Dialogue. Dialogue
4(1-2). Colombo: Ecumenical Institute for Study and Dialogue.
LSSSCSSSLSLSLSSSLLSSLSSSSSLL SSSLL SSSLLSL LSSLLSSLLSSLLSSLLSSLLSSLLS 1981. "Dialogue-Creative Transformation.' Dialogue 8(1-3).
Colombo: Ecumenical Institute for Study and Dialogue.

Culture and Politics of Identity in Sri Lanka 21
SLLLLLSSLLLLSL SLSSSLSSSSSSLSSSSSS S LLSLSSS 1982. "Buddhism and Christianity Relativized. Dialogue 9
(1-3). Colombo: Ecumenical Institute for Study and Dialogue.
EATWOT Consultation. 1988. Religion and Liberation.' Dialogue 15(1-3).
Colombo: Ecumenical Institute for Study and Dialogue.
Fernando, B. 1988. "Michael Rodrigo-A Controversial Priest." Dialogue
15(1-3). Colombo: Ecumenical Institute for Study and Dialogue.
Fernando, K. 1988. "Opting for the Poor: The Challenge to the Universal Religions." Dialogue 15(1-3). Colombo: Ecumenical Institute for Study and Dialogue.
Harris, E. 1994. "A Case of Distortion: The Evangelical Missionary Interpretation of Buddhism in Nineteenth Century Sri Lanka. Dialogue 21. Colombo: Ecumenical Institute for Study and Dialogue.
Ingram, P.O. 1981. "Interfaith Dialogue as a Source of Christian-Buddhist Renewal (Creative Transformation).' Dialogue 8(1-3). Colombo: Ecumenical Institute for Study and Dialogue.
Los Angeles Inter-Religious Group. 1991. “Buddhist-Catholic Dialogue: An Early Journey. Dialogue 18(1-3). Colombo: Ecumenical Institute for Study and Dialogue.
May, J. 1980. "Buddhist and Christian Responses to Social and Technical Revolutions.' Dialogue 7(1). Colombo: Ecumenical Institute for Study and Dialogue.
----------------- 1994. 'What do Socially Engaged Buddhists and Christian Liberation Theologians Have to Say to One Another?" Dialogue 21. Colombo: Ecumenical Institute for Study and Dialogue.
O'Walsh, M. O’C. 1982. Buddhism and Christianity: A Positive Approach.' Dialogue 9(1-3). Colombo: Ecumenical Institute for Study and Dialogue.
Peebles, J. M. 1994. The Great Debate: Buddhism and Christianity Face to
Face. Dehiwala: Sridevi Printers.

Page 20
22 Talk About the Passion
Pieris, A. 1974. "The Legitimacy and the Limitations of the Academic Approach to Inter-Faith Dialogue.’ Dialogue 1 (2). Colombo: Ecumenical Institute for Study and Dialogue.
SLLLLSLSSLSSSSSSS SS SSLS LSL SS 1975a. "ABuddhist Critique and a Christian Response." Dialogue
2(3). Colombo: Ecumenical Institute for Study and Dialogue.
SSSSSLSLS SS SSSSSLSSSSSSLSSSBSSSLSSS 1975b. "Buddhist-Christian-Encounter 7: A Buddhist Critique of the Christian Concept of God.' Dialogue 203). Colombo: Ecumenical Institute for Study and Dialogue.
SqS kkSkSLLSL0SLLSLL0LLSLLSSLLSLLLLL LSGSSLSLLLLS 1976. “World Buddhism and Dialogue. Dialogue 3(3). Colombo:
Ecumenical Institute for Study and Dialogue.
SLLLLSSSLLSSLLSSLLSLLLLLSLLLSLSLSSLLSSLLSSLLSSLLSSLLS 1982. "Conversion, Controversy and Conversation.' Dialogue
9(1-3). Colombo: Ecumenical Institute for Study and Dialogue.
LSSLLLLS0SSLSLSLSSSLSSLLSLSSLSSLSLSSLSLLLSLSLSS 1983. "Ideology and Religion: Some Debatable Points." Dialogue 10 (2-3). Colombo: Ecumenical Institute for Study and Dialogue.
----------------- 1987a. "Christianity in a Core-To-Core Dialogue with Buddhism.' Paper read at Funfte Religionstheologische Studientagung, reprinted in Dialogue 8 and 9. Colombo: Ecumenical Institute for Study and Dialogue.
SLLSLLL0SSSSSLSSSSSSLSSSSSSLSSLSLSSLSLSLLLLLSLLLLLSLLLLSLSS 1987b. The One Path of Liberation and the Many Religions.' Dialogue 8 and 9. Colombo: Ecumenical Institute for Study and Dialogue.
SLSLSSLSLSSSLSSLLSLS0SSSSSLSLSSLSLSS 1988a. The Reverand Father Michael Rodrigo." Dialogue 15
(1-3). Colombo: Ecumenical Institute for Study and Dialogue.
SLLSLSLLSLLSLSLLSLLSLLLLLSLLLLLSLLLLLSLLLLSLLSSLLSSLLSSLSLLS 1988b. Love Meets Wisdom: A Christian Experience of Buddhism.
New York: Orbis Books.

Culture and Politics of Identity in Sri Lanka 23
----------------- 1994. "Contrastin Harmony. Dialogue21. Colombo: Ecumenical
Institute for Study and Dialogue.
SLS LS LSSSSSSLSSSSSSLSSSSSSLSSSSSSLSSSSSSLSSSSSSLLLSSS 1995a. The Christian and Buddhist Responses to the Pope's Chapter on Buddhism." Dialogue 22. Colombo: Ecumenical Institute for Study and Dialogue.
SSLSLLLSLSLLLSLSLSSS SSSLSS SLS LS 1995b."Dialogue and Distrust Between Buddhists and Christians: A Report on the Catholic Church's Experience in Sri Lanka. Dialogue 22. Colombo: Ecumenical Institute for Study and Dialogue.
Rodrigo, M. 1977. "A Basis for Dialogue in Community.' Dialogue 4 (1-2).
Colombo: Ecumenical Institute for Study and Dialogue.
----------------- 1987a. "Buddhism and Christianity: Toward the Human Future (An example of village dialogue of life). Dialogue 8 and 9. Colombo: Ecumenical Institute for Study and Dialogue.
SSLLSSLLSSLSSSSSSLSSSSSSLSSSSSSLSSSSSSLSLSSLSLSSS 1987b. "Towards a More Intensive Dialogue with Buddhists.
Logos 26(1). Colombo: Centre for Society and Religion.
SSLLSSLLSSLLSSLLSSLLSSLLSSLSS SLLLSSSLLLSLLLSLLSSS 1988. "The Bible and the Liberation of the Poor. Dialogue 15
(1-3). Colombo: Ecumenical Institute for Study and Dialogue.
Rothermunde, G. H. 1974. "An Evaluation of "Dialogue.” “Dialogue 1 (3).
Colombo: Ecumenical Institute for Study and Dialogue.
Samartha, S.J. 1975. "Reflections on a Multilateral Dialogue.’ Dialogue 201).
Colombo: Ecumenical Institute for Study and Dialogue.
Stirrat, R. L. 1992. Power and Religiosity in a Post-Colonial Setting.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Page 21
24 Talk About the Passion
Swearer, D. K. 1981. "Dialogue: Spiritual Transformation.' Dialogue 8(1-3).
Colombo: Ecumenical Institute for Study and Dialogue.
Vidyasagara, V. 1983. "The Marxist Movement and the Buddhist-Christian Dialogue in Sri Lanka.' Dialogue 10(2-3). Colombo: Ecumenical Institute for Study and Dialogue.
Wickremesinghe, L. 1980. "Togetherness and Uniqueness: Living Faiths in Interrelation. Dialogue 7(1). Colombo: Ecumenical Institute for Study and Dialogue.

Chapter 2
Shifting Frames of Masculinity
Jani de Silva
The final decades of the twentieth century have been a period of escalating political violence in Sri Lanka. Such an environment holds profound social consequences for those generations born and Socialized during these years. Further, it has at the same time been a period of hightened re-negotiation of collective identities among the range of groups that come together to make Sri Lankan society.
This paper will confine itself to a discussion of the social and political implications of these developments for young Sinhala-speaking men in southern Sri Lanka. It will focus on one of the most recurrent conceptual issues confronted in fifteen months of fieldwork conducted in this region in 1991-92 and 1996-97: ie. shifting frames of identity. It will outline some preliminary ideas on the construction of self-identity among young males in these regions.
The Sri Lankan south saw the rise of social militancy in the form of the July Uprising of the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP) during 1987-90. Social movements such as the JVP then would appear be concerned essentially with collective identities, whether based on class, caste, religion, ethnicity, gender, or even a mix of all these which still, inexplicably, cohere more firmly rather than fragment such identities. They become an outburst of self-expression by some segments within the group who see themselves as having oeen consigned to the margins, as it were, by history.

Page 22
26 Shifting Frames of Masculinity
Thus while afflicted by the same anxieties, not all members of the collectivity may wish to take up arms. Conversly, all collective identities clearly sustain culturally specific notions of social personhood. Social personhood in this context would imply an appropriate location across a range of categories such as kinship, caste, class, gender, etc., which confer upon the social actor moral and juridical legitimacy within the community. In order to capture more clearly the social processes at work then, it is perhaps useful to explore more fully Sinhala cultural notions of personhood.
The main features that define social personhood within Sinhala society are of course, gender, caste, kinship, class and education." Except for the last, all such institutions control access to land. It is only in the absence of land that educational qualifications become an alternative channel of social legitimation. For in a context which even in contemporary times gives enormous symbolic weight to agricultural production, or more specifically, the cultivation of rice, land is obviously the most significant resource. Traditional land-tenure patterns, as elsewhere in South Asia are built on these institutions. If caste defines access to land, or more specifically the symbolic right to engage in rice production, kinship defines how this land is redistributed within the family/kin unit, Gender in tu defines land inheritance patterns. In the late- and post-colonial phases, social class provided and continues to provide the resources to compete in the burgeoning land market, almost irrespective of limitations of caste, kinship or gender. Finally, for those bereft of land, educational qualifications acquire increased significance. The literature on personhood in South Asia, while interesting, seems to offer frames which are static over time; the various elements that constitute personhood in a given cultural context are seen to be fixed across historical time. This study will, on the contrary, argue that while the constituent elements of personhood did remain stable, the weightage acquired by each factor underwent change over time. This paper will look at how caste and kinship relations have been affected by profound changes in land tenure patterns, which in turn have been impacted on by shifts in marriage and inheritance patterns. It will also look at how social class has consequently created new cleavages, and the way in which education has emerged as an alternative means of social validation.

Culture and Politics of Identity in Sri Lanka 27
Land tenure patterns among the Sinhalas have received excessive scholarly attention over the years, beginning with Knox's Historical Relation of Ceylon (1681), followed by Sawers (1826), Armour (1860), Panabokke and Le Mesurier (1880), D'Oyly (1929) and Hayley (1923) in the colonial period, Pieris (1956), Leach (1961), Yalman (1967), Obeysekere (1967) and H.W. Thambiah (1968) in the 1950-60 period, and De Silva in 1979 and Bandarage in 1982, as well as large numbers of contemporary studies of land reforms and resettlement policies in the Dry Zone.
Caste and Access to Land
Like elsewhere in South Asia, the formal right to engage in paddy cultivation as against artisan or 'service' occupations is of course contingent upon caste background. In contrast to the Indian situation, what is interesting in the Sinhala context is the numerical predominance of the agricultural castes goigama and the marked absence of the brahminic and kshatriya strata. The main social cleavages are consequently between the goi and the non-agricultural service' castes (who nonetheless also engage in agriculture). All caste groups were traditionally linked to the king through the performance of rajakariya or service to the king. The rajakariya of each caste or sub-caste differed according to its ritual/symbolic function and social status.
The community is thus viewed as a harmonious whole where each plays his/her accustomed role as directed by the king. In this role of the king, the Sinhala caste system again diverges radically from the classical Indian model. For, as Ryan points out in his study (1953:45), the former stresses the relationship between each group and the state (king). In direct contrast, the Indian concept focuses on social relations between castes. In the latter, then, caste status is intimately linked to occupation, which was in turn hierarchically ordered. Such a situation has traditionally given rise to strong codes of interaction between groups within society. In the Indian model, the State occupies a marginal role.
Against this the Sinhala system connotes the strong presence of the state (king) or a centralized authority. Ritual identity was focused on the nature of rajakariya performed rather than modes of

Page 23
28 Shifting Frames of Masculinity
interaction with other caste groupings. In other words the king/state provided a public arena where in situations of collective ritual, i.e the annual procession of the Temple of the Tooth, harvest festivals, coronations, etc. caste roles were formally enacted. Alternatively, in everyday life, caste differences revealed themselves in modes of address rather than codes of behaviour. This had implications for behavioural codes assumed; extremities of marginalization such as notions of "untouchability had no place in the Sinhala caste system:
The numerical predominance of the goigama as a group with high symbolic status" also had implications for the social forms assumed. Unlike other parts of South Asia, the very range and diversity of land tenure patterns in fact succeeded in realizing a relatively egalitarian diffusion of land rights, until the advent of European colonialism (Bandarage, 1982).
Kinship and Patterns of Land Tenure
Traditional ideas concerning land tenure, as pointed out by most commentators, were predicated on the assumption of free availability of land; an assumption which is however, totally invalid for contemporary Sri Lankan Society. In theory, a hamlet gama would come into being when on leaving his village of origin, a founding ancestor, with the permission of some traditional authority, demarcated a space of forest or waste as his gama. A part of this area would then be cleared and converted into paddy lands mada idam and the rest into highlands or goda idam. The homes of the founder and his descendents would be built in the goda (Bandarage, 1982;21). Ideally then, the original 'owner' of any village gama would be its founding ancestor. At his death his sons would inherit the patrimonial estate or praveni rights equally, but no physical partitioning of the estate would actually take place. On the contrary, all sons would have equal share or pangu of the estate.
The special characteristics of a pangu is that it is not 'fixed' in the European legal sense to a particular geographical area, but is rather a "floating concept. A son who works a share does not cultivate a specific area of the estate; but works on a rotation basis, so that

Culture and Politics of Identity in Sri Lanka 29
every year he moves to a new area, until the whole length of the field is covered. The system is based on an egalitarian ideology with reference to the concept of shares or pangu: one has shares in the gama as an entirety. This connotes access through a period of years to the total area of land, ensuring a distribution of both fertile and infertile land among the various shareholders (Obeyesekere, 1967: 17-18).
It follows however that with the increasing number of heirs with every succeeding generation the number of shareholders in the gama would increase, resulting in the increasing fractioning of the estate. Thus, according to the traditional ideal, there should be a fixed upper limit on the number of shares. When this limit is reached, immigration to new areas is indicated. Land then would traditionally remain with the agnatic descendents of a common ancestor and would be collectively owned. This patrimony would become the vasagama, membership of which would be is based on kinship.
Inheritance patterns are governed by two apparently contradictory norms. Firstly, there is the concept of equal divisions for all offspring (Hayley, 1927: 330-1), and secondly the notion that the property concerned should finally revert to the "ancestral line' or the vasagarna. This contradiction has been resolved by the notion of two kinds of rights; "temporary' rights (women married patrilocally) and permanent' rights (men and women married virilocally) in praveni.
Marriage Patterns
Consequently, marriage among the Sinhala takes two forms: diga and binna. Diga is patrilocal while in binna the man takes up residence with his wife's family. According to traditional Sinhala law, a sister married indiga does not own permanent shares in the native village, whereas brothers do. Sisters married in diga are therefore not in competition with their brothers for the paternal estate. Thus the relationship between brother and sister is expected to be an amicable one; the relationship between the woman's husband and her brother is seen to be one of friendliness and cooperation.

Page 24
30 Shifting Frames of Masculinity
The purpose of the binna marriage on the other hand, is to raise heirs artificially in the absence of males to perpetuate the line. Typically such an arrangement would be the resort of a wealthy man for his daughter (Sawers, 1826:34), but may also occur through a decision to disinherit a son in disfavour. Through a binna marriage sisters become structurally analogous to male siblings, and their husbands have an inferior role in the household. The issue of a binna marriage is entitled to the maternal grandfather's estate, but not the paternal grandfather's (Hayley, 1923: 169).
Since the system is based on the concept of equal shares to all offspring, a daughter married indiga receives a dowry davadda; which as Leach points out, is an advance on her inheritance, or a conversion into cash of her interest in the property in terms of jewellery, money, etc. (1961; 136). As Obeyesekere comments, the dowry thus legally and symbolically gives validity to the marriage as diga, and restricts the issue from such marriages rights in the mother's paternal estate in the presence of certain types of patrilineal heirs.
Impact of the Colonial Encounter
Traditional Sinhala law in areas such as land tenure, marriage and inheritance patterns has been subject to shifts in the modern period. To understand the reasons for this it is helpful to study the history of European colonialism in Sri Lanka. While the low country or maritime kingdoms succumbed to Portuguese and Dutch colonialism from 1505 onwards, the hill country or Kandyan regions only fell to the British in 1815. This 300-year gap is of tremendous importance. While the Dutch and British did make serious attempts to codify the customary laws, by the early nineteenth century the initially captured Sinhala-speaking maritime areas came under the aegies of the Roman-Dutch law which became the General Law of the British. After the fall of the equally Sinhala-speaking Kandyan kingdom, there was an attempt to codify Kandyan law (Panabokkes' Niti Niganduwa). This resulted in a curious anomaly - one segment of the Sinhalas, that is the Kandyans, were granted the dubious distinction of a 'codified’ customary law, while the rest, that is residents of the maritime areas, were considered part of the colonial mainstream'

Culture and Politics of Identity in Sri Lanka 31
The British achieved full hegemony over the island only in 1815; and from 1840s onwards took steps to pass legislation on what were perceived as 'encroachments' on Crown land. The assumption was of course that all uncultivated land was by definition Crown land and therefore British land. Such notions differed qualitatively from that of the traditional gabadagam or lands of the king' which along with similar categories of land were lands that were reserved for the reproduction of the institution of monarchy.
In practice, however, while the actual peasant-cultivators occupying land in service tenure held complex tenurial relationships with their "landlords', they had access to equally tradition-sanctioned economic options in the form of slash-and-burn agricultural practices or hen cultivation. A cultivator could clear a stretch of forest or wasteland and grow crops such as maize, fruit and vegetables as a source of supplementary income and food, while each village had particular areas where traditionally hen cultivation was collectively carried out. For the small-holding peasant for whom rice cultivation was of symbolic rather than economic profit, hen cultivation was an important outlet.
The Bounding In of the Gama
The sociological implications of the land ordinances were perhaps two-fold. On the one hand, vast tracts of the highly fertile hill country in the Wet Zone were taken over for the British plantation enterprise, thus physically bounding the villages in, and more importantly, radically limiting slash and burn activities. Secondly, a process of land settlement occurred whereby specially appointed officers drew up a register categorizing village lands as private, or as belonging to the Crown and therefore available for public purchase. Such administrative categorizing sometimes created a village out of a few scattered hamlets.
The most important change was perhaps the formal delineation of physical and geographical boundaries of the gama, and the investing of a monetary value on land outside this newly-defined 'boundary',

Page 25
32 Shifting Frames of Masculinity
so that in the event of land shortage, new gamas could not be easily founded without massive capital investment.
Implications for Inter-Sibling Relations
The monetization of the land economy impacted adversely on intersibling relations. Under the Partition Ordinance of 1863, any co-owner could institute partition proceedings for his/her share in praveni. This development set in motion a process which ended with the chronic indebtedness of the small cultivator; in time even the colonial adminstration was to complain bitterly of the incorrigible' litigiousness of the Sinhalas.
But the enthusiasm with which the peasant cultivator took to litigation was unmatched by the benefits actually provided by the court system: small fractionalized shares were likely to be sold on Court orders, due to their negligible size and the problems faced in further partitioning them. Moreover, initiating court proceedings required liquid monetary resources, acquiring of which brought about long-term indebtedness. It was the larger landowners as well as outsiders to the gama who benefited from the new laws. The selling of shares to outsiders in turn narrowed the range of land available to other shareholders, and thereby diminished the prestige of ownership this increased friction among male siblings.
Further, Roman-Dutch law was excessively preoccupied with the need to register marriages and maintain registrars of marriages for the residents of the maritime provinces. From 1822 onwards, there were a series of ordinances and enactments. In sociological terms, such legislative enactments, in particular the practice of registering marriages and the highly inflexible laws of divorce, totally transformed traditional inheritance patterns. In Sinhala law, while registration does provide legal validity to the marriage, the absence of registration does not prove the absence of legal rights (Obeyesekere 1967; 140). Kandyan law for instance draws no distinction between legitimate or illegitimate children in terms of succession to property (H.T.Thambiah, 1968; 251).
The immediate problem of course was that, for rights in praveni, heirs of registered marriages could evoke the legality of

Culture and Politics of Identity in Sri Lanka 33
their parentage against that of subsequent unions. Such imputations of illegitimacy and consequent exclusion from praveni rights could not, for obvious reasons be contested in the courts. By the midtwentieth century, therefore, registration of marriage became almost a universal practice, and legal registration more a problem for the issue of marriages that had taken place in the first part of the twentieth century (Obeyesekere, 1967: 141). Kin relations were however disrupted in the countryside at a crucial phase of socio-economic transformation.
A further problem arose with the difficulty of divorce in Roman-Dutch law. Traditionally, if a woman left her husband, her act could be construed as tantamount to divorce since it involved her moving back to her parental home. Under Roman-Dutch Law, if the man concerned married again the offspring of his second union were termed "illegitimate' and therefore not entitled to land rights (Obeyesekere, 1967: 142). However, under Sinhala law such "desertions' as returning to the natal home or eloping with another man constituted divorce, giving the subsequent union legal validity.
Moreover, under Roman-Dutch marriage laws and unlike Sinhala law, there is a notion of the community of property upon marriage. Such a community of goods may end only upon the death
of one spouse or with divorce. At the death of either spouse community
of property ceases and it is divided into two parts, one half of which goes to the surviving spouse and the other to the rest of the heirs. Nonetheless the female spouse is considered to be a jural minor in respect of the community of goods. The husband has absolute power in disposing of the property concerned, with or without her consent (Pereira 1913:240-8). Thus ineffect in Roman-Dutch law the property of the woman passes entirely into the hands of her husband upon marriage. The economic position and status of the woman is significantly weakened.
Finally, the notion of bilateral inheritance patterns also impacted on existing kinship norms, and consequently on gender relations. In Sinhala law, as argued above, this problem was resolved by the notion of permanent' and "temporary' shares in praveni. Bilateral inheritance had two major implications forkinship behavioural

Page 26
34 Shifting Frames of Masculinity
norms, both in terms of the changes in the structural position of sisters, and therefore brothers-in-law massina, and in terms of open conflict between brothers.
With bilateral inheritance becoming the norm, sisters, who traditionally inherited permanent rights in praveni only if they were given in binna, now inherited equally with brothers. This not only introduced new tensions in the conventionally "serene' relationship between brothers and sisters, but also changed the structural position of the brother-in-law. Unlike the traditional binna husband, he now obtained managerial control of his wife's property (Obeyesekere, 1968: 254). Obeyesekere further comments that in the village studied by him, there were many instances in which the husband was directly instrumental in inducing the wife to sell herpraveni shares to outsiders for a market price rather than to her brothers (1968:250).
Consequently, in terms of kinship relations, the position of the brother-in-law became analogous to that of a male sibling. Significantly, Obeyesekere comments that the very reserve and formality that were features of male sibling relations now mark those between male siblings-in-law. Moreover, kinship terminology also appears to have undergone changes: brothers-in-law who were traditionally addressed as massina came to be addressed as ayya/malli (elder brother/ . younger brother). Such changes are part of perhaps an even more generalized syndrome today: in contemporary urban usage, it is now customary to address all males of one's own generation and perceived status as ayya or malli; similarly all females are addressed as akka or nangi.
Construction of Male Personhood or Masculinities
The implications for the construction of masculinities is important. The two main outlines on which masculinities are socially constructed are of course the inter-male sibling relationship which is hierarchical; and that of the brother-in-law which as Leach (1971) points out is a typical joking one.
The conventional perception of Sinhala inter-male sibling relations has been at best one of formality and at worst one of acute conflict over land (Obeyesekere, 1967; Leach, 1961). Such a

Culture and Politics of Identity in Sri Lanka 35
perception does not capture the inherent ambiguity of sibling relations. On the one hand, the ideology of inheritance is highly egalitarian, while on the other, as Leach points out, in real terms inter-sibling relations are finely stratified according to the degree of seniority. Within the familial unit then, older males have much authority and status, and the onus of adroitly negotiating the complex tenurial obligations demanded by the pangal system rests most naturally on their shoulders.
In her discussion of the north Indian family, Vatuk argues that it is forms of address that serve to fix hierarchical relations (1992:57). In the Rajput context, for instance, the basic principle is that someone senior should never be addressed by his or her personal name, but only by the kin name. To name someone is to assume seniority for oneself or to place oneself on an equal footing. Such a principle is equally valid for behavioural norms within the Sinhala family. In fact, the tendency to focus on kin names is such a pervasive feature that Obeyesekere is moved to complain that his field informants sometimes forgot the names of their own children! (1967: 63). However, as Leach points out, Sinhala inter-sibling etiquette differs from that in the rest of South Asia in that it is intricately cleaved according to degrees of seniority. An eldest son, for instance, may easily reach adulthood being addressed quite universally as loku ayya (literally, "big elder brother'), the next in line being deveni ayya (second elder brother') and so on down the line. The elder male sibling is thus in a position of symbolic authority not commensurate with his stake in the patrimony, which is equal to that of all other male siblings. Such symbolic authority devoid of economic control could perhaps lead to conditions conducive to the use of violence to extract compliance in, for instance, tenurial obligations. This is compounded by the Sinhala cultural notion of status, which, as argued by Obeyesekere is inextricably bound up with the notion of 'shame', in particular, with the fear of ridicule and the subsequent loss of status involved (1981: 76–83; 1984: 501-8). Here, shame' is a sentiment which acquires collective rather than personal connotations."
The status of the family is closely tied with access to land and the virtue of its womenfolk. At the same time, in a situation where the collective resources available to the familial unit depends on both sisters and younger brothers complying with matrimonial arrangements

Page 27
36 Shifting Frames of Masculinity
made on their behalf by the family, any contravention of these arrangements becomes an increasingly more serious problem in a situation of land fragmentation. Elder male siblings thus become the "natural guardians of the "honour of the familial unit or its status, which is at stake if ridiculed in any way by outsiders. Such a role of structural authority unmediated by sentiment does not preclude a practice of excessive violence in the pursuance of this goal.
On the other hand the incidence of sibling relationships where such antagonism is absent is equally revealing. Leach argues that in the case of half-siblings, one of whom is not an heir of the mutual mother/father, a relationship of "considerable affection is "very commonly revealed (1971: 108-9). He speaks of many instances when the heir to the parental property has connived with the parent concerned to acquire a share for the non-heir sibling. Quite remarkably, he found that the relationship between half-brothers not in competition for the same inheritance was never hostile.
Despite the painful empirical reality of acute land fragmentation, the ideotypical notion of personhood among the Sinhalas perhaps remains that of the gamarala, or small-holding peasantcultivator as frequently depicted in popular poetry or the oral pal kavi tradition. Such a semi-autonomous figure is however a legal fiction, as it were, the closest approximation being that of the sharecropping (goi) peasant-cultivator with permanent rights in praveni, married indiga. The binna husband becomes the mirror image. It is therefore a construction of a particular kind of masculinity which is valorized, but the mirror-image is seen as another acceptable frame of masculinity, indeed as a necessary counterpart.
Thus social transformation in the modern period has impacted significantly on traditional kinship mores; as Obeyesekere implies, brothers-in-law who were traditionally addressed as massina, are now addressed as ayya/malli. Yet, almost paradoxically, both the ayya/malli and machan" metaphors are reproduced with surprising tenacity in the idiom of every-day interpersonal interaction every where: in the secondary school system, on the university campus on the factory floor among

Culture and Politics of Identity in Sri Lanka 37
public sector clerical workers, in the media, etc. - all outside the realm of formal kinship.
Education
Kinship mores were not the only aspect of social life affected by the colonial encounter and post-colonial developments. Another area that was greatly influenced was that of education. Built on a long tradition of temple-based or pirivena learning, education in Sinhala culture has traditionally been the ultimate status symbol. Colonial society, of course, reinforced this trend. It was education which enabled aspiring young natives to insinuate themselves into the colonial hierarchy, albeit at the bottom rung.
Two particular developments in the early post-colonial decades were of special significance. Firstly, Sinhala was made the official language in 1957, thereby opening up public sector employment to those educated in the Sinhala medium. Secondly, in the early 1960s the university sector was "opened up' by the introduction of Sinhala and Tamil as the media of instruction. Enrolment increased tremendously as secondary school leavers educated in the native languages aimed at capturing high status employment in the state sector. Thus employment in the state sector began to be looked upon as a viable alternative to land in terms of social legitimation for the individual.
Throughout this process however, another primary relationship was rearticulated: that of the guru-gola or master-pupil, which once again pervades a number of arena. It is possible to find gola relationships replicated not only in the school or university, but in the workplace or on the union floor, where an "old hand may surround himself with newcomers who become his golayas.
The single important development in the modern period then is the shift from caste-based forms of address in the pre-colonial public arena to kin-based forms of address". This development has been accompanied by the emergence of multiplicity of such public arenas as the factory, the school, the office, etc, a scenario which has produced the trappings of modern nationalism a la Anderson (1983). In a situation where the material base of both caste and kinship relations

Page 28
38 Shifting Frames of Masculinity
has been undermined, why have kinship metaphors survived while caste-based forms of address have not? Kinship terminology transcends caste boundaries and is therefore a unifying factor within Sinhala culture, whereas caste cleaves. Kinship idioms provide a basis upon which to construct new collective identities and to overcome caste cleavages.
A parallel development which accompanied the systematic pauperization of a range of strata in the countryside was perhaps the interest in education as a counter to such trends. The dramatic growth of this sector also re-articulated existing social idioms such as the guru-gola relationship.
Many social and political groupings in post-colonial Sri Lanka have struggled to evolve new organizational idioms and strategies to address the new identities that have emerged with social differentiation, and with the multiplicity of public arenas. Confronted by compatriots of unknown caste/origin in a socially neutral setting, the tendency is to situate oneself initially as an elder/younger brother, and over time, perhaps as a friend/brother-in-law. At the same time, many young persons from the countryside thrust into a cold urban environment appear to find security in situating themselves in a patron-client or gola relationship with someone seemingly more entrenched in the environment.
Frames of masculinity then, are not static, but would appear to be constantly shifting between such idioms of male-male interaction.
Concluding Remarks
It has been argued that the JVP was the voice of the educated unemployed. The phasing out of permanent rights in praveni, not countered by other qualifications such as employment in the state sector for instance, tended to radically devalue any claim to legitimate social personhood among such groups. The distance between ideal personhood and the social reality has widened dramatically in the space of two or three generations. In such contexts, it is possible to argue that notions of social personhood that are hegemonic at a given moment, over time become an important aspect of the status quo against which such movements tend to project themselves.

Culture and Politics of Identity in Sri Lanka 39
Could contemporary idioms of kinship that offered new frames for organization strategies be deployed? It has been suggested that the massive organizational success of the JVP vis-a-vis the Old Left lay in its ability to capture the ayya/maliidiom of the countryside, as opposed to the more impartial sahodharaya (comrade) approach of the latter. As discussed above, the former connotes strong fraternal obligations within a hierarchical frame. For as Leach's material on half-sibling relations illustrates, male-male sibling relations when not constrained by competition for scarce resources may display considerable affection, but remain hierarchical.
While not much is known about the internal organization of the JVP movement, clearly the extreme hierarchy and authoritarianism of its command structures sets it apart from groups operating within the Old Left. The discription of the 'good revolutionary' (who is by impliction, male) that appears in the literature of 1987-90 speaks of his unquestioning, almost unreasoning obedience to the leadership, and extreme stoicism under conditions of torture. Many pamphlets also describe the leadership's commitment to senior cadres taken captive by the armed forces, and outrageous rescue missions staged on their behalf. By implication, the leadership takes responsibility for its own.
Further, the commitment of lower-level cadres both to the movement and to colleagues cannot be questioned. Such commitment suggest strong lateral machan relations within the group. Here machan becomes a metaphor of ascriptive male-male friendship; one that springs more from the mutual emotional supportive needs of the protagonists concerned, than the personal characteristics of either.
Notes
I do not address religion, since the overwhelming majority of Sinhalas are Buddhists. While a large proportion of the 6% Catholic community is also Sinhala-speaking, I have not specially included them in this analysis. Suffice it to say then, that I am here approaching 'Sinhala' and “Buddhist” as co-terminal categories for purposes of analysis.

Page 29
40
()
Shifting Frames of Masculinity
See Carrithersetal(eds): 1985; and Ostor, Barnettet al: 1992; and Marriot: 1976.
See Kapferer (1988: 10) for a discussion on the differences between the Indian and Sri Lankan models. Alternatively, Dirks (1987) makes the same case for India.
While there are no reliable published statistics on caste distribution in Sri Lanka, the goigana perhaps account for roughly 55% of the Sinhalaspeaking population. If the low-country castes of the karava, durawa and salagama, which acquired much economic prominance in the period of western colonialism were to comprise another 30%, this leaves only approximately 15% for all of the non-govi 'service' castes.
In particular the Crown Lands Ordinance No. 12 of 1840, and the Waste Lands Ordinance No. 1 of 1897, amended by No. 1 of 1899, No.5 of 1900 and No.6 of 1903; and the Forest Ordinance No. 16 of 1907.
That is, nindagam which were reserved for the nobility, viharagam which were for the Sangha, and devalegam, for the shrines of the deities, were aspects of the feudal system which demarcated land for state/ ritual functionaries. Other than the category of nindagan, all other traditional categories of land still survive today; nindagam have been mostly absorbed by land reforms.
Regulation No. 9 of 1922, Ordinance No.6 of 1847, No. 13 of 1863, No.2 of 1895, No. 19 of 1907, etc.
In contemporary Sinhala society, 'shame' is increasingly beginning to acquire individual connotations: the agent now is responsible for his/ her own share.
Machan is a dimunitive of the more formal massina.
In everyday Sinhala usage, caste-based forms of address evidences itself in the way the second person pronoun is deployed; as in many other South Asian languages, Sinhala provides seven or eight different second-person pronouns. The tendency in the '80-'90s is towards the relatively neutral and (mostly) mutually reciprocal oya which perhaps corresponds most closely to the English 'you'.

Chapter3
Understanding the Aryan Theory
Marisa Angeli
What we want here, as everywhere else, is the truth, and the whole truth.
I can answer for myself and for those who have worked with me, that our translations are truthful, that we have suppressed nothing, that we have varnished nothing...
-Max Muller, Preface to The Upanishads
Whether a memory or funny hideous scandal, we will return to it an hour later and retell the story with additions and this time a few judgements thrown in. In this way history is organized.
-Michael Ondaatje, Running in the Family
1. Introduction
Mention the Aryan theory to anyone, and the first mental connection that is made is between that complex area of scholarship - spanning two hundred years and disciplines which we today divide into philology,

Page 30
42 Understanding the Aryan Theory
anthropology, and, sometimes, political polemics - and the ideology of anti-Semitism refined by Hitler and the Third Reich in twentiethcentury Germany. It was, in fact, Hitler who wrote, "If we divide mankind into three categories-founders of culture, bearers of culture, and destroyers of culture - the Aryan alone can be considered as representing the first category.' We are all familiar with the result of this ideology, as our century has witnessed atrocities great enough to cause Elie Wiesel, a little boy in Auschwitz in the 1940s, to declare God dead.
Understanding the Aryan theory is therefore important for the insight into a defining event in our century and into the process of manipulating a seemingly obscure and highly intricate philological argument into a political ideology. Understanding the history of the Aryan theory - from its genesis as a thesis aboutlinguistic origins, to its metamorphosis into a racial theory - tells us about the way in which the separate streams of politics and scholarship can be made to intersect, and to sometimes become part of the same river. Most 'stories' about the Aryan theory interpret it as either a product of eighteenth-century universalism (the "basic oneness of human nature' crosses all cultural boundaries) or the by-product of nineteenth-century racial philosophy, driven by anti-Semitism to create a new genealogy for humanity. This telling then jumps from nineteenth-century "racethinking (Hannnah Arendt's phrase) to Hitler's use of the theory in the twentieth century. In this paper, I argue that the place of the Aryan theory in the structure of empire has been overlooked, and that our understanding of the history of the theory must also include attention to its place as an edifice which supported the colonial structure. This paper therefore looks at the history of the Aryan theory in colonial Ceylon in the context of the British empire, the theory's inescapable political reality in the nineteenth century.
In the following section, I discuss the history of the Aryantheory from 1780 to 1880, its roots in late eighteenth-century European orientalist scholarship and its subsequent growth as an area of research and debate in colonial Ceylon. I make the distinction between the Aryan theory of languages, which posits that there is a "common origin' - the Indo-European or Aryan language - from which the European and Indian languages descend, and the Aryan theory of races, which argues that there is additionally one common race from

Culture and Politics of Identity in Sri Lanka 43
which both civilizations descend. This is an important distinction because, while the earlier theory argues that Sinhalese was a linguistic descendent of the ancient Aryan language, the latter posited a Sinhalese race', descended from the Aryan race'.
After 1880 this distinction became especially important in that the later racial theory was the subject of heated and highly emotional debate in orientalist circles. The third section of my paper therefore discusses the way in which this debate was played out in the pages of the longest-running orientalist publication of the time: the Journal of the RASCB. I argue that the Journal - and, therefore, the Society itself-skewed the terms of debate by taking a clear stance in favour of the Aryan theories of language and race.Voices that did not agree with the linguistic or racial claims of the Aryan theory were either ignored (the Journal chose not to publish a single article arguing that Sinhalese belonged to the Dravidian language family), or were indignantly shouted down. My conclusion is that the Society's members, mostly English and Christian in the mid-1880s, conceived of the Sinhalese as distant relatives in the large Aryan family, and therefore chose to publish articles and support arguments that painted a flattering portrait of the Sinhalese race'.
Edward Said, in Culture and Imperialism, argues that the literature of nineteenth-century Europe participated in Europe's overseas empire' through the representation of its British colonies as a mute outlet for adventurers and treasure-chasers, the result of which was to 'support, elaborate, and consolidate the practice of empire'. In a similar vein, I argue that the Aryan theory, while not produced solely by the ideology of empire, participated in it by lending itself to British political aims of legitimation in Ceylon in the late nineteenth century. The final section of the paper analyses the ways in which three different branches of oriental scholarship - anthropology, historiography and archaeology - were linked to both the Aryan theory and the structure of empire, in order to better understand the Aryan theory within its dynamic of colonial knowledge-gathering, power, and issues of political legitimacy.

Page 31
44 Understanding the Aryan Theory
2. From the Aryan Theory of Languages to the Aryan Theory
of Race: Ceylon and Abroad, 1780-1880
A civil service judge in Calcutta in the 1780s, Sir William Jones is considered to be the father of the Aryan theory of languages. At a 1788 meeting of the Royal Asiatic Society of Bengal (which he had founded in 1784), Jones stated his intent to "demonstrate the connection or diversity between the Indian, Chinese, Tartar, Arab and Persian races), and solve the great problem, whether they had any common origin, and whether that origin was the same...' Now, this attempt to understand how it is that the different races developed was not uncommon-throughout the eighteenth century debate had raged as to whether all of mankind shared a common progenitor in Adam. Monogenesists argued that they did, and that any cultural differences were due to the environment, while polygenesists believed that the different civilizations had developed separately, and were thus as different from each other as various species of animals."
What distinguished Jones in this debate was his methodical analysis of language in order to understand the extent to which different cultures had a common origin. Prior to Jones, an Italian traveller, Filipo Sassetti, had remarked in 1587 on the similarities between European and Asiatic words, and in 1767, a Jesuit, Pere Coeurdoux, had written a treatise on the affinities between Sanskrit on the one hand, and Greek and Latin on the other.5 While Jones was probably aware of these vague suggestions, his discourse of 1788 made the case for a common origin through an in-depth analysis of the structural similarities between European and Indian languages:
The Sanscrit language, whatever be its antiquity, is of a wonderful structure, more perfect than the Greek, more copious than the Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either, yet bearing to both of them a stronger affinity, both in the roots of verbs and in the forms of grammar, than could possibly have been produced by accident; so strong indeed, that no philologer could examine them all three, without believing them to have sprung from

Culture and Politics of Identity in Sri Lanka 45
some common source, which, perhaps, no longer exists."
The idea that the languages of the European and Indian civilizations shared a common origin gradually gained ground in Sri Lankan scholarship, where it was argued as early as 1821 - by B.C. Clough, the compiler of the first Sinhalese-English dictionary - that Sinhalese derived from Sanskrit, and was thus a direct descendent of this 'common source', the Indo-European, or Aryan, language."
Thirty years later, in James de Alwis's introduction to his Sinhalese grammar, Sinhalese was defined as a combination of Pali, Sanskrit and Aryan, while Sir Emmerson Tennent argued that it had borrowed some terms from Pali and Sanskrit, but shared structural affinities with Tamil. It is during this period, from the start to roughly the middle of the nineteenth century, that the Aryan theory of language was slowly refined by scholars working in philology: it was not until 1856, for example, that the term 'Dravidian' was used for the first time, by Robert Caldwell in his grammar of the South Indian languages.” Caldwell's theory, which argued that there was no real affinity between Sinhala and Tamil, acted as "both a counter and a complement to the Aryan theory'.
Until roughly the middle of the nineteenth century, the level of debate and general interest in resolving the genealogy of the Sinhalese language in particular was quite mild." While philology would become a central area of research for the RASCBB in later years, the opening address at the first meeting of the Society in 1845 makes no mention of this area of scholarship, stating only that the Society would focus its attention on the "history, religion, literature, arts and social condition of the present and former inhabitants of this Island, with its geology and minerology, its climate and meteorology, its botany and Zoology. In addition, a look at the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society (Ceylon branch), reveals that the first article published on the subject of language, by the Reverend Robert Spence Hardy, is both vague and equivocal. Hardy first states that Sinhalese is supposed to have nine-tenths of the vocables from the Sanskrit', but then declares it highly unlikely that Vijaya and his followers passed along a version of Sanskrit to the inhabitants of Sri Lanka.' Without

Page 32
46 Understanding the Aryan Theory
addressing the acknowledged similarities between Sanskrit and Sinhalese, Hardy takes a new path and declares Sinhalese to be a probable descendent of the aboriginal language of Sri Lanka. Unlike later articles in the same journal, Hardy seems to be more interested in his missionizing agenda than in debating the origins of the Sinhalese language: he hopes the language will one day be consecrated to the noble purpose of teaching the sublimestlessons of Christianity...'
Hardy's aim becomes clear if it is read alongside an earlier article in the same issue of the Journal. In a more blatant example of Christian apologetics, the Reverend J.G.MacVicar argues that Sinhalese should switch to using the roman alphabet, "the alphabet of Christian civilization and discovery since it "cannot but diffuse itself in the same proportion as Christian civilization and discovery advance. MacVicar even goes so far as to attach the Lord's Prayer in a romanized Sinhalese script.'
The importance of these two articles is twofold. It is apparent from this first issue of the Journal that the Aryan theory of languages had not yet become mainstream enough for scholars in Sri Lanka to say much about it. Also, it becomes clear that from very early days of British empire and of British scholarship in Sri Lanka, language was looked upon as a tool that could be manipulated to gain greaterpower.
A sort of turning point in the debate was reached in 1861, however, when Max Muller definitively declared the unimpeachability of the Aryan theory: in his Lectures on the Science of Language, he stated that he "classified the idioms spoken in Iceland and Ceylon as cognate dialects of the Aryan family of languages'." By 1866, James de Alwis had revised his earlier theory on Sinhalese; in an essay that according to Gunawardene "reflects the new climate of opinion that had set in', de Alwis cited both Caldwell and Muller to argue that Sinhala belonged squarely to the Aryan family, while Tamil was Dravidian in origin." This line demarcating the Sinhalese from the Tamil language would become thicker through the 1870s and 1880s, as classifications of language came to be tied up with classifications of race.

Culture and Politics of Identity in Sri Lanka 47
In 1808, nearly thirty years after Sir William Jones's famous discourse on the "common origin' of the European and Indian languages, Friedrich Schlegel, a German Romantic philosopher, added a new ingredient to the Aryan theory of languages by "deducing from the relationship of language a relationship of race'. In his Essay on the Language and Wisdom of the Indians, Schlegel credited India with having founded empires that had succeeded in civilizing the West - by doing so, he turned the linguistic connection posited by Jones into a cultural and racial connection.
Although Schlegel's thesis was written at the beginning of the nineteenth century, it was not incorporated into mainstream scholarship in Sri Lanka until Max Muller also began to conflate linguistic and racial affinities. In his writings of the 1870s Muller used the term "Aryan race' often, and wrote that some of his research was guided by an attempt to find the cradle of our race'.' While it is easy to gloss over the substitution of the word "race' for language', the equation of one with the other was strikingly important as it laid the groundwork for much of the race-based physical anthropology in Sri Lanka towards the end of the nineteenth century:Jones's thesis - with the aid of Muller and other (mainly British and German) scholars in nineteenth-century colonial Sri Lanka - was evolved from a rather obscure philological argument to a mainstream, racially divisive statement. It is because of Muller's involvement in the development of this idea that R.A.L.H.Gunawardene labelled the German scholar the Aryan racial theory's "most effective propagandist: his career spanned more than half a century, and his standing as one of the foremost scholars in Oriental languages added authority to his views.' While Muller attempted to retract his stand on the issue in 1872, his statements passed almost unheeded', not only because the theory had taken on a life of its own, but also because Muller himself continued to refer to the "Aryan race' in many of his writings and lectures.’

Page 33
48 Understanding the Aryan Theory
It was not solely Muller who had taken up the mantle of Schlegel's argument, however. By 1860 the division between Aryans and Semites in European thought had become widely accepted, "a part of the intellectual baggage of all cultivated Europeans' to the extent that Darwin, in the Descent of Man (1871) had referred to the two as separate races, and the Anthropological Society of London had accepted the distinction.' The Aryan language family - made up of a variety of different languages that had evolved to an extent that their commonalities were barely visible - had given birth to the Aryan racial family, which would come to be defined as a discrete race with physically identifiable features.
3. The Royal Asiatic Society of Ceylon: a Voice for the Aryan
Theory of Race, 1880-1895
I have chosen to concentrate much of my attention on the Royal Asiatic Society and its Journal of the period for many reasons. Firstly, while other self-styled orientalist journals appeared sporadically, the Journal was the only outlet for scholarly discourse published almost uninterruptedly from 1845 through to the present day. Scholars chose to publish in the Journal with the knowledge that their reading audience would be substantially larger than with other journals. Secondly, the RASCB was involved in a wide variety of aspects of scholarship besides publishing a journal, such as providing for an Archaeology Exploration Fund (started in 1884), which evolved into the Department of Archaeology in 1890; and the opening of a museum in 1877 which still exists as the Colombo Museum. Because of this, the RASCB is the best place to look for an understanding of the ways in which British scholars related to Ceylon. Thirdly, the RASCB was considered the club of the intelligentsia’’ the place where one could find the most informed scholarship of the nineteenth century. This important position was attested to by the Governor's historical position as Patron of the Society. While this may have blurred the lines between government research and private scholarship (a subject to which I return in Section. IV), I think that the high level of respect accorded

Culture and Politics of Identity in Sri Lanka 49
the Society makes it a critical source for anyone attempting to make sense of nineteenth-century scholarship in Sri Lanka.
However, it is clear from reading many of the articles, and the minutes of meetings at which the articles were discussed, that the RASCB did not take a neutral stance on what would become a debate over the Aryan theory - both in relation to language and to race. In the most partisan of the journals, volume IX of 1885-1886, all the articles that touch on language, race and culture in Ceylon argue that the Sinhalese are both linguistically and racially Aryan; that Tamils are Dravidian; and that the Sinhalese/Aryan race is superior both racially and (therefore) culturally. While these arguments - racially tinged and strongly apologetic - can be shrugged off as a sign of the times in European racial and anthropological thinking, they are more than just artifacts of a happily bygone era.The vehemence with which these articles are presented and defended from counter-attacks betrays a personal involvement in the Aryan issue that goes beyond neutral scholarship.
Nira Wickramasinghe, along with others who have studied British scholarship in Ceylon in the nineteenth century, has acknowledged the role of the burgeoning discipline of anthropology in abetting racial thinking:
Developments in physical anthropology and linguistics at the turn of the twentieth century were responsible for the definition of essentially linguistic groups such as Tamil and Sinhalese in Ceylon in terms of physical characteristics which were supposed to be specific to those groups.'
Two articles, in particular, in the Journal (1885-86) lend credence to this statement, and highlight both the increasing importance of the newly-created discipline of physical anthropology, as well as the partisan uses to which that new 'science could be applied.
The first article, by Drs C.F. and P.B.Sarasin, sets for itself the object of divining whether the anatomical differences between the Sinhalese, Tamils and Veddas were great enough to classify them as distinct races.'" Using the 'scientific' procedures of their time, the

Page 34
50 Understanding the Aryan Theory
Sarasins wrote that the only way in which they could come to a clear conclusion on the subject was to 'collect as large a number of skulls as possible, and take measurements of numerous specimens of each race to compile averages.' The Sinhalese, results showed, had the largest heads, and this fact is in accordance with the higher intellect of the latter, the former being the Tamil skulls that were measured.* The height of the face (measured from nose to chin) was the Sarasins' next group of data: the Veddas, they wrote, measure 105 mm, the Tamils 111 mm, and the Sinhalese 115 mm, and, they felt, this difference gives to the whole face a different appearance'.' The nose measurements taken also lent themselves as proof to the anthropologists that the Sinhalese were the more pleasing (?) race: the Vedda nose measured 40 mm, the Sinhalese was "only' 39 mm, and the Tamil nose 38 mm.
While the methods used in researching this article were unquestionably not what we today would define as scientific, the importance of this article lies not in its shaky data collection, but in its partisanship. Although the differentials in nose measurements were slight, for example, and the Sinhalese nose did not have the smallest measurement, it was still made to seem the smallest through the Sarasins' record - it was "only 39 mm. They added, as if to compensate for their length, Sinhalese noses were well-formed and "eagle-shaped'. This piece of physical anthropology, like many others that the Journal would publish, is most interesting for the way in which it skews all "data returns in favour of the Sinhalese.
A second article in the same Journal is interesting for what it omits, rather than for what it includes. Professor Virchow, a German anthropologist, conducted a similar study on six skulls that were loaned to him by the Colombo Museum. Although his findings were not conclusive, Virchow confidently stated, after having inspected the skulls and compared them with each other, that "the Sinhalese face is an importation from the Aryan province of the Indian continent.' This was not a new argument; nor were his research methods. What is striking here, however, is that the Royal Asiatic Society in Ceylon went to the trouble of having this article translated from its original German by the Royal Academy of Science in Berlin (where, it is assumed, Virchow presented this article). This is especially intriguing

Culture and Politics of Identity in Sri Lanka 51
since it was the second such article by Virchow that was translated - the first was translated in Ceylon - while the Society never chose to translate and publish articles arguing that Sinhalese was in fact a Dravidian language - an omission which could not have been due to a lack of knowledge, since Virchow himself refers to the Dravidian theories of Rask (1821), Lassen, and F.Muller (1879).'
Both articles beg the question: why did the articles published in 1885, specifically, by the Royal Asiatic Society in Ceylon display such a clear bias in favour of the Sinhalese race'? I do not here seek the reasons behind the arguments of the Drs Sarasin and Professor Virchow. I limit the question to why the Society chose to publish these particular articles rather than others. A small part of the answer, I think, is Bishop Copleston. As President of the Society from 1884 to 1892 he would have had a say in what the Society chose to print in its journal. Bishop of Colombo from 1876 to 1902, Copleston was considered a hardliner in his attitudes towards Buddhism. In reference to Rhys-Davids, Copleston had warned an Anglican Missionary Conference in England that the Church should oppose that false liberality, disloyal to our religion, by which Buddhism is flattered, its deadly character glossed over, and its supposed resemblances to Christianity monstrously exaggerated.''By taking this position, and as a result of his later tracts attacking aspects of Buddhism, Copleston betrayed "an inability to recognize an integrity within Buddhism apart from Christianity."
While Copleston's position on Buddhism may not shed light on why the Society seemed to be pro-Sinhalese during his reign as President, it does reveal his inability to accept a culture outside of his own European, Christian identity. In answer to the apparent inconsistency, it is important to keep in mind the connection that had been made in mainstream scholarship between the Aryan and Sinhalese "races'. Both Copleston and others within the Society at that time conceived of the Sinhalese as distant Aryan cousins; by valuing Sinhalese culture, they were valuing their own, also of Aryan origin. Minutes of themeetings of the Society in 1885 reveal the extent to which members of the society identified with the Sinhalese.
At a general meeting of the RASCB on 22 September 1885, Mr S.M.Burrows, at that time the Assistant Government Agent in

Page 35
52 Understanding the Aryan Theory
Kandy, read an anonymous manuscriptentitled 'Jottings from a Jungle Diary.The thesis of the text was that the archaeological finds at Anuradhapura were produced by Tamil craftsmen and artists, a theory with which Burrows "knew that our President would not agree'. The argument of 'Jottings', as Burrows interpreted it, was that the striking similarity between the ruins of Anuradhapura and ruins in Madras were proof that the cities of Anuradhapura and Polonnaruwa were more or less replicas of the Seven Pagodas and similar Indian shrines’. While this thesis could have been disputed on the grounds that there was little proof-save one anonymous person's impressions - that the ancient cities were an artistic legacy of south Indian civilization, this was not the way in which the meeting unfolded. Burrows had already introduced the thesis with the slightly melancholy Statement,
Of course one would like to believe that these delicate and chaste designs were the spontaneous outcome of the artistic Aryan mind, and spread from the cities of the Aryan invaders in Ceylon to the dark Dravidian continent, its neighbour in the north.'
In the discussion which followed the reading of this paper, however, he would find that there were others present with more partisan feelings than he. When a Mr Cull challenged the thesis, Copleston stated that he was glad someone had objected, since "they would all be very much disappointed if the credit of that great work should be lost to the Aryan family, to which most of them (the members of the RASCBB) had the honour to belong.' Who were the members at that time? Copleston offered a different theory for the similarities between the architecture of South India and that of Ceylon: the shrines of south India were similar to the ancient cities of Ceylon because both of them were descendents of north Indian (Aryan) architecture. In any case, he finally stated, the thesis of 'Jottings' may be correct, but he thought they would find that our architecture and all that is beautiful in the country is of Aryan origin.'

Culture and Politics of Identity in Sri Lanka 53
The controversy did not end there. When, three months later, the Annual General Meeting of the Society reviewed the work accomplished in the preceeding year, the 'Jottings' incident was also reported: Burrows, it stated, had challenged prevailing opinions by having 'diverged into ingenious speculations as to the origin of all that art and civilization, and shocked the Aryan sensibilities of some of us by suggesting in reality that it was Dravidian.' Burrows had stepped into a hornet's nest by reading aloud someone else's thesis that the ancient cities of Ceylon had been built by Tamil craftsmen- and the resulting buzzsheds light on the Sinhalese bias in articles published by the RASCB during the 1880s.
In addition, an 1892 issue of the Journal betrays a continuing doctrinaire position on the racial issue. In "The Ethnology of Ceylon', Nell criticized language analysis in Ceylon for overlooking the fact that, in many cases, the language spoken in an area told not of the inhabitants' race, but of previous settlements of people.' The fact that Sinhalese was spoken in Ceylon was not necessarily a clue to the racial makeup of the Sinhalese; just as the Scotch, Irish, Welsh and Cornwall Celts would not be considered descendents of the AngloSaxons simply because they spoke English.
The discussion that followed his paper was reminiscent of the Burrows incident. Various members attacked the theory, insisting that the Sinhalese were descendents of the ancient Aryans. Discussion had to be adjourned for the day due to the large number of responses. When the Society did gather again to discuss Nell's thesis, the President (Copleston) had to make a special point that though "discussion' did not normally entail the presentation of new papers, he would make an exception at this meeting. He allowed members to read the written responses they had prepared. Although most of the responses centred around attempts to establish the fact that Vijaya had been Aryan, it is important to note the very emotional reaction engendered by Nell's argument. Never before had so many members of the society written papers refuting another's thesis.
The Burrows and the Nell incidents, clearly reveal that members of the Society identified racially with the Sinhalese, a result of the late-nineteenth century conflation of linguistic with racial

Page 36
54 Understanding the Aryan Theory
affinities. In addition, they also show that departure from this party line was an affront to members with "Aryan sensibilities' and to be branded as either wild speculation or a great 'disappointment'..Clearly, then, the Society's original aims to "institute and promote enquiries' into Ceylonese culture was not met in the articles published on the Aryan theory. Anthropological articles, such as the one written by the Sarasins, presented data in a way which claimed racial superiority for the Sinhalese, while the opposite view - represented in the papers presented by Burrows and Nell - was vehemently attacked. The stakes now were evidently much higher than when the scope of the Aryan theory did not extend beyond language.
4. Understanding the Aryan Theory: Colonial Knowledge
Gathering and Political Legitimacy
The Aryan theory has been characterized as either a well-intentioned product of eighteenth-century universalist thinking -part of a larger attempt to prove the overarching unity of humankind, or as a creation of nineteenth century race-thinking' and its underlying antiSemitism. While both these readings of the Aryan theory are valid, it is also important to stress the fact that the theory was first introduced by the culture of colonialism, as a theory of language, and then at its zenith, was a product of the culture of imperialism as a racial theory. In this section, I first discuss the area of orientalist scholarship most closely associated with the structure of colonialism - anthropology.This area of study closely linked to the Aryan theory and was used by the British to increase their political power in Ceylon. I then look at British historiogrpahy in nineteenth-century Ceylon in order to assess the extent to which the Aryan theory of races influenced the writing of history during this time. Finally, with this understanding of the strong link between orientalist scholarship in Ceylon and colonial power, I turn specifically to the deeply entwined relationship between archaeology, the Aryan theory and political legitimation which secured the structure of empire for the British.

Culture and Politics of Identity in Sri Lanka 55
Anthropology, the Aryan Theory and Empire
Of all fields of research in which nineteenth-century British orientalists were engaged, anthropology and the related field of philology were probably most closely connected to the colonial state's attempt to secure political position in Ceylon. As such, Ceylon was no different to many other colonies. Edward Said has written that anthropology has historically had a close connection with colonialism:
Of all the modern social sciences, anthropology is the one historically most closely tied to colonialism, since it was often the case that anthropologists and ethnologists advised colonial rulers on the manners and mores of the native people.'
In fact, it was Levi-Strauss who first referred to his field as "the handmaiden of colonialism'. This strong connection between scholarship and political power had been made explicitly clear at the fiftieth anniversary of the original Royal Asiatic Society, founded by Sri William Jones in Bengal, when W.C.Taylor applauded British success in opening up the cultural treasures of Hindustan to Europe: . when he got around to appealing for more funds so that the Society could continue its research efforts, he unequivocally stated, 'Knowledge is power.' That is, donations would buy increased political power for the British in the form of knowledge about their Subject population - a connection which Max Muller also made at this time in the preface to The Upanishads:
Apart from the interest which the Sacred Books of all religions possess in the eyes of the theologian, and, more particularly, of the missionary, to whom an accurate knowledge of them is as indispensable as a knowledge of the enemy's country is to a general, these works have of late assumed a new importance."
But scholars such as Max Muller and his colleagues in the Royal Asiatic Society of Bengal were not the only ones to recognize

Page 37
56 Understanding the Aryan Theory
the importance of gaining some knowledge about "the enemy's country'. In Ceylon in July of 1880, Governor James Longden forwarded two papers to the Secretary of the Colonies on "the inhabitants of Ceylon, their race, character and language and on the history of Ceylon.The documents were marked "confidential and sent straight to the Intelligence Department of the War Office, the reason for which soon becomes apparent."
One document, written by the Assistant Colonial Secretary, begins with simple population numbers from the 1871 census, but has already moved onto its central point by page three: the Sinhalese, it is reported, "as a rule are a very unwarlike race'. They are mainly landholders and "it would be very difficult to induce them in any number to engage in military operations whether fighting or in transport.' The Tamils, the report states, are also “unwarlike' but "would assist in transporting stores for troops who sheltered them since they are less wealthy and therefore less independent than the Sinhalese.' The Moors and Malays, finally, are listed as "the most warlike of the Asiatics in Ceylon'. In June of 1882 a confidential reply from the Secretary to the Governor, stated that the document had been "of special interest to the War Department'.
With this in mind, the anthropological articles published in the Journal of the RASCB should be approached with caution, especially since the Society had close links with the state - its patron was always the Governor of Ceylon. It was responsible for beginning the Colombo Museum (opened 1877); and its archaeological exploration fund quickly became the state's Department of Archaeology (in 1890). Since knowledge was very clearly recognized as power at that time, and in those circles, one wonders about the relationship between the anthropological articles in the Journal and the state's far-reaching attempt to consolidate its political position in Ceylon, especially after reading the confidential cultural reports that passed between the Governor's office and the War Department in 1880.
Bernard Cohn, in studying colonial formsofknowledge about India in the nineteenth century, noted that the British attempt to learn and codify the Indian languages into grammars was "a crucial component in their construction of the system of rule'.' Language study, closely related to (and at times subsumed by) anthropology,

Culture and Politics of Identity in Sri Lanka 57
was important to the structure of empire because it provided the British with the knowledge necessary to access local elites:
Elites had to be found within Indian society who could be made to see that they had an interest in the maintenance of British rule. Political strategies and tactics had to be created and codified into diplomacy through which the country powers could be converted into allied dependencies.
However, if one takes this idea a step further, would the most successful way to gaining the loyalty and support of local elites be to claimkinship with them? Rather than simply learning the language of the enemy country', would it not be more effective to emphasize common bloodliness with the population of that country? The difference is comparable to, on the one hand, a thief's assumption that if addressed in his language, the victim would readily part with his television set, and on the other, a sophisticated argument for a grandfather's estate, based on the claim of direct descent.
Nira Wickramasinghe has observed that the Aryan theory was used in India to provide legitimacy to upper castes, but did not feature more closely than that in the state's attempt to consolidate its political position. M.Banton, she notes, "shows that in India, the Aryan theory pointed to common ties between the British and the native people, but British officialdom made almost no use of this theory to prove the providential nature of British rule in India.' I, too, would not go so far as to say that British 'offialdom' in colonial Ceylon openly espoused the Aryan theory in order to gain political power. However, if one looks at the articles that touch upon the Aryan theory in the Journal of the R.A.S.C.B. and concurrent political goings-on in the 1880s, there is a marked confluence of identities - in orientalist scholarship, between Sinhalese Aryans and British Aryans; and in politics, between the Sinhalese Kandyan elite and the British. R.A.L.H.Gunawardene has noted that the Aryan theory in colonial Ceylon was embraced not only by British orientalists, but also by swathes of the Sinhalese community. The theory "provided a section of the colonial peoples of South Asia with a prestigious "pedigree": it

Page 38
58 Understanding the Aryan Theory
elevated them to the rank of the kinsmen of their rulers, even though
the relationship was a distant and tenuous one.'
Simultaneously, K.M. de Silva wrote that, in the period between
the 1880s and the attainment of independence in the twentieth century,
the Kandyans mostly took satisfaction in a new role -- that of associates of the British and a counterweight to the reform and nationalist movements dominated by the emerging elite of the maritime districts. The leaders of Kandyan opinion seldom showed much sympathy for the political aspirations of these movements; when not positively hostile, they stood aloof and suspicious.
Perhaps, then, it is no accident that during the very years that the Journal of the RASCB. put its full support behind the Aryan theory, the Kandyan elites became more closely linked to the British power structure - not necessarily because the Journal had that much sway over complicated questions of political and cultural identities, but because the Journal was both a creator of and, more importantly, a reflection of opinion in the nineteenth century.
Historiography, the Aryan Theory and Empire
Anthropology was not the only field of research closely tied to the structure of empire.The way in which history was written and understood was another area that at times served as a second "handmaiden' to the colonial effort. In an 1886 RASCB report on the progress made in translating the Mahavamsa, we read that the text stands as proof that the Tamil "invaders' had done nothing but plunder and ransack Ceylon throughout ancient history. This report is also used as an opportunity to further criticize Burrows.The Mahavamsa, note 20, chapter 78, relates the building of a huge stupa by both Sinhalese and Tamil labourers.The report concludes that the fact that Tamil labour was noted shows that the event was "an uncommon instance'. Most striking of all, however, is the claim that ancient history displays the 'abhorrance shown to the too frequent Tamil invader' who "desecrated the holy places and demolished the

Culture and Politics of Identity in Sri Lanka 59
shrines of the land'. The Tamils had built nothing in Ceylon, but had destroyed what others had built - clear proof that Burrows's thesis was Wrong.
The one main theme of this reading of history was that the Tamils were categorized as "invaders' who plundered Ceylon. What is interesting is that the British, too, were invaders of Ceylon. First they fought the Dutch for control of the island to use it in the military defence of the Indian Empire, but later as a Crown Colony in 1802, it slowly became another exploitable commercial property. By the 1880s Ceylon's economy had been transformed into a plantation economy that was dominated by three products. As one editorial in the Edinburgh Review stated, the colonies were
the principal and the surest channels for commerce which we felt to be the lifeblood of the nation...We compelled them to trade with us exclusively, to take from us exclusively all the articles which we could suppply then, and to send us exclusively all the produce of their soil...our colonies were customers who could not escape us, and vendors who could sell to us alone."
Material for comparison between Tamil and British "invaders' existed therefore and in abundance. If Tamils were painted as plunderers, one would think that the British would be seen in the same dim light. English historians of the nineteenth century, however, would not be the ones to make this connection. Rather, in all the stories that they tell of the history of colonial Ceylon, there is one unifying theme - the British brought progress to the colony, Yasmine Gooneratne has noted that many of these histories presented the British in the role of "deliverer and preserver. In one history of Ceylon, written in 1887, we find chapters such as "Legislative and General Improvements Under the Rule of Successive British Governors', and "What the Plantation Industry has Done for Ceylon'."
However, in Bishop Copleston's report on the research undertaken in 1885 by the RASCB we read that there is little hope that anything new will be found at ancient sites not yet opened, since the Tamils had so thoroughly "ransacked' so many of the country's

Page 39
60 Understanding the Aryan Theory
treasures." If the British version of Ceylon's history in which Tamils are characterized as "plunderers' and the British as bringers of prosperity, is read with an understanding of the ways in which anthropology - a sister social science - and the Aryan theory had been put to work for the state, it can be interpreted as a complement to the aims of the Aryan argument. That is, the historian's portrayal of the Tamils as having 'ransacked' the ancient (Aryan) monuments serves to distance the invading British from the invading Tamils - the Tamils destroyed, while the British built and improved. This reading of ancient and modern history would have emphasized the difference between the two groups of interlopers', as Benedict Anderson terms the colonial powers. This simultaneously would stress yet again the commonalities between the British and the Sinhalese elites.
The Problem of Political Legitimacy: Archaeological Exploration and the Aryan Theory
Eric Hobsbawm, in an influential study of the growth of nationalism as a modern ideology, has argued that the period in European history between roughly 1830 and 1880 can be characterized as the Age of Revolutions. It is in this period that forms of government through elected representation took hold in Europe. Combined with the state's loss of a religious or secular-ideological hold over its people (for example, loyalty to a king), this led the state into a new and tenuous position, which in turn led it to propound the ideology of nationalism:
For rulers the problem was thus not simply that of acquiring a new legitimacy, though where states were new or novel this had also to be solved, and identification with a people' or "nation', however defined, was a convenient and fashionable way of solving it, and in states which insisted on poplular sovereignty, by definition the only way. What else could legitimize the monarchies of states which had never previously existed as such, like Greece, Italy or Belgium, or whose existence broke with all historical precedents, like the German empire of
871765

Culture and Politics of Identity in Sri Lanka 61
This is not to say that governments simply stepped in and filled an ideological power vacuum with arbitrary definitions of a people' or "nation. Rather, Hobsbawm notes that states were most Successful when they 'borrowed and fostered' sentiments that already existed." Britain did not experience the same wave of revolutions that swept through much of Europe during this period, but it did share a problem with the new European states in relation to its colonies: the legitimization of a new political order. While the idea behind the 'white man's burden', as Kipling phrased it - that Britain had a responsibility to bring progress to all corners of the globe - may have legitimized the empire for the general public at home, it was simply not good enough for the civil servants who actually lived and worked in the colonies."
Benedict Anderson has noted the significance of this problem, and stated that, "fully aware of their interloper status',European colonial powers 'attempted to legitimize the spread of their power by quasilegal methods. The most popular method was to claim inheritance from local leaders that had been either eliminated or subjected. In addition to this political claim, however, Anderson has also argued persuasively for a direct relationship between the colonial state's Support for archaeological exploration and political legitimacy:
It is noticeable how heavily concentrated archaeological efforts were on the restoration of imposing monuments...No doubt this emphasis reflected general Orientalist fashions. But the substantial funds invested allow us to suspect that the state had its own, nonscientific reasons.o
Anderson gives three "non-scientific reasons' for the colonial state's great interest in archaeology: firstly, archaeological restoration and state-sponsored publication of local literary texts were part of a conservative educational programme whose goal was to reinforce local culture; secondly, restoration "always placed the builders of the monuments and the colonial natives in a certain hierarchy' - the builders, of course, held a higher cultural rank; and thirdly, the sites were researched and cared for so that "their ancient prestige (which

Page 40
62 Understanding the Aryan Theory
if this had disappeared, as it often had, the state would attempt to revive) draped around the mappers'." The state's willingness to fund archaeological exploration should therefore be understood as an attempt to create 'alternative legitimacies' for holding power in the colonies - they were repositioned as regalia for a secular colonial state'."
One can see the same dynamic at work in the archaeological explorations in Ceylon during the late nineteenth century. In the discussion that followed H.C.P. Bell's "Report on Sigiriya', published in the Journal of the RASCB in 1895, Mr Burrows and Mr Murray (the artist whose job it was to reproduce the frescos on paper) reported that they had thought to leave something in the shape of a momento' after having mapped the site.72 The two men found a bottle, which they filled with some papers of the day and some coins. As they were leaving, however, the men reported that a Buddhist and a Sivite priest asked if they could pray for the preservation of the bottle (here the minutes of the meeting report that laughter rang out amongst the members). Mr Murray notes that permission was given, and he and Mr Burrows, wondering what they could do in the way of dedication and sentiment, sang "God Save the Queen'.' Later, in the same meeting, as Bell complained of vandalism at the site, a Mr R.W.Levers admitted that, during a visit to the site, he had placed his obscure name on the wall of Sigiriya, so that he was, "alas a vandal'.'
This incident shows that the attitude towards archaeological exploration in colonial Ceylon matched up with Anderson's characterization of the effort as an inescapably political one. I do not argue that all archaeological efforts in Ceylon were characterized by irreverance, but certainly issues of colonial power were tied up in what, like archaeology, should have been purely scholarly areas. The writing of Lever's name and the singing of the British anthem together with the flippant manner in which the incidents were related, speak of a proprietorial attitude - the British had researched and mapped this site, and therefore could claim it as their own.
The Aryantheory in Ceylon gave the British added legitimacy in claiming ancient archaeological sites as their own. Articles written on the the Aryan theory bear striking resemblances to Anderson's characterization of archaeological exploration at the time. Ancient sites, Anderson writes, were museumized so that their ancient prestige

Culture and Politics of Identity in Sri Lanka 63
was "draped around the mappers', and "alternative legitimacies' were created for colonial rule. Proof of the argument is in the outrage which greeted Burrows's report of a thesis arguing that Anuradhapura and Polonnaruwa had been built by Tamil craftsmen: the members of the Society wanted the considerable artistic credit to go to the "Aryan family, to which most of them had the honour to belong, and it was later reported that the members' 'Aryan sensibilities' had been 'shocked' by Burrows's argument.” An acknowledgement that the site had in fact been built by a group not considered part of the Aryan fold would have questioned the British members' own claims to involvement with the site. If attributed to Aryan artistry, the British treatment of these sites as their own property was somewhat legitimized, in that they could conceive of themselves as the latest in a series of Aryan presences in Ceylon. While the ancient Aryans had painted the frescos that adorned Sigiriya, the British would leave bottles filled with papers of the day' and a signature on the wall as a symbol of this inheritance.
4. The After-Life of the Aryan Theory in Sri Lanka
Sections II and III of this paper have traced the history of the Aryan theory in Sri Lankan scholarship, both in its linguistic and racial forms, and discussed the ways in which the most influential outlet for rientalist scholarship in the late nineteenth century, the Journal of the RASCB, was a clear proponent and mouthpiece for the theory. The section contextualizes the Aryan theory in the inescapable political reality of which it was a part - the British effort in Ceylon.
As R.A.L.H.Gunawardana has noted, the Aryan theory took its place as part of Sri Lankan intellectual baggage' by the turn of the century. In December 1897, The Buddhist published an article on "The Aryan Sinhalese'; in 1899 a booklet appeared listing Aryan Sinhalese names; in 1910 a journal titled The Aryan was founded; and in 1931 A.E.Blaze's A History of Ceylon for Schools was revised in order to make Vijaya the founder of the 'Aryan race' rather than the Sinhalese kingdom, as it had previously stated." -

Page 41
64 Understanding the Aryan Theory
However, K.M. de Silva, one of Sri Lanka's foremost historians, has written that “We have at present no archaeological evidence with regard to the early Indo-Aryan settlers...In particular we have no archaeological finds that could be traced back to either the west or east coasts of Northern India.'" The Aryan theory, then, still remains what it was at the end of the eighteenth century: an explanation for the linguistic similarities which were first definitively noted by Sir William Jones.
Notes
' Hitler, Mein Kampf quoted in Leon Poliakov. The Aryan Myth.p.2.
Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism, (New York: Vintage Books, 1993) p. 14.
William Jones quoted in Garland Cannon, The Life and Mind of Oriental Jones (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), p.242.
* See Richard H.Popkin, Isaac la Peyrere, His Life, Work and Influence
(Leiden, New York, Kobenhavn and Koln: E.J.Brill, 1987).
Cannon, p.242.
Cannon, p.245.
R.A.L.H. Gunawardana, "The People of the Lion', Sri Lanka Journal of the Humanities, vol.V., nos. 1 and 2, 1979, p.28.
* In 1852 de Alwis claimed that Pali had lent Sinhalese terms connected with the "national religion' of the Sinhalese, while Sanskrit had provided terms associated with the arts and sciences, and Aryan was responsible for 'native terms expressive of the common wants of mankind before
the refined organization of society.' (James de Alwis, Introduction to The Sidath Sangarawa (Colombo: William Skeen, Government Printer of Ceylon, 1965), p. xlviii.) In 1859Tennet agreed with de Alwis in regard to Pali and Sanskrit influences, but wrote of no Aryan influence
(Gunawardana, p.29).

20
2
Culture and Politics of Identity in Sri Lanka 65
R. A. L. H. Gunawardana, p.29
As I discuss in the next section, many of the outlets for scholarly debate in areas such as philology - for example, the Royal Asiatic Society, Ceylon Branch - concentrated their attention on Sinhalelse, rather than Tamil. The founding of The Taprobanian journal in 1885 attempted to redress this imbalance, but publication was stopped shortly after the first issues came out.
Address by Justice Stark at the first general meeting, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, vol.I, 1845, pp. 1-5.
Prince Vijaya is commonly believed to have founded the Sinhalese race when he came from India with five hundred of his followers.
Reverend Robert Spence Hardy, "On the Language and Literature of the Singhalese.' Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society (Ceylon Branch), vol.I, 1845, pp.99, 101.
Hardy, p. 104.
Reverend J.G.MacVicar, "On the Elements of the Voice, Viewed in Reference to the Roman and Singhalese Alphabets, Commending the Writing of Singhalese in Roman Letters'. Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, vol.I., 1845, pp.38-58.
Muller, quoted in Gunawardana, p.29.
Gunawardana, p.29.
Leon Poliakov, The Aryan Myth, p. 190.
Muller, quoted in Gunawardene, p.27.
Gunawardana, p.27.
Poliakov, p.214. At the University for Strasbourg inaugural lecture in May 1872, Muller stated, "How many misunderstandings and how many controversies are due to what is deducted by arguing from language to blood-relationship or from blood-relationship to language. Aryan and Semitic languages exist but it is antiscientific, unless one realizes the

Page 42
66
22
23
24
25
26
27
Understanding the Aryan Theory
degree of license one is employing, to speak of an Aryan race, Aryan blood, or Aryan skulls.'
Poliakov, p.255.
I have divided my discussion of the history of the Aryan theories in Ceylon into sections demarcated by dates. The writings that I encountered after 1880 display a familiarity with the terms of debate, a result of the gradual process of refinement of the theory's central ideas that took place during the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth centuries. In addition, the writings after 1880 betray a high degree of emotional involvement in the debate, which earlier had been comparatively dry and academic. A possible explanation is that the period of 1874 to 1914 represents "the great imperial phase of British history', when the "scramble for Africa' took place. It was in the middle of this period, during the years 1884 to 1890, that the British Empire gained 37 million square miles and acquired 57 million more people. While the relationship of these external events to contemporary orientalist scholarship in Ceylon is by no means evident, the political legitimacy that I argue the British attempted to gain through the Aryan racial theory may explain the curiously exact overlap in the dates of these two phenomena.
Ceylon in Our Times, 1894 to 1969 (The Colombo Apothecaries Co., Ltd., 1969), p. 14. In addition, Yasmine Gooneratne writes that the RASCB is an important part of the literary history of the period, for it gathered the outstanding talent of colonial society into its fold, and provided a forum for the exchange of ideas and a Journal for the publication of original research. (Yasmine Gooneratne, English Literature in Ceylon, 1815-1878 Colombo: Tisara Prakasakayo, 1968), pp.59-60).
Nira Wickremasinghe, Ethnic Politics in Colonial Sri Lanka, New Delhi, Vikas Publishers, 1995. p.9. R.A.L.H. Gunawardanamakes the same point in "People', p.31.
Drs C.F. and S.B.Sarasin, "Outline of Two Years' Scientific Researches in Ceylon', Journal, vol.IX, 1885-86, p.292.
Ibid., p.292. Besides the fact that their research methods show that they had made their conclusions prior to comparing the skulls (they already

2燃
29
30
3.
32
33
34
Culture and Politics of Identity in Sri Lanka 67
refer to the specimens as representative of each race'), the method used also speaks of liberties taken in Ceylon that may not have been used in Europe - the Sarasins write that they dug up the skulls themselves, and therefore were 'sure that no confusion has arisen' (Ibid., p.292).
Ibid., p.293.
Ibid., p.293.
Ibid., p.294.
Professor R.Virchow, "The Veddas of Ceylon, and their Relation to the Neighbouring Tribes', p.490.
See "Professor Virchow's Ethnological Studies of the Sinhalese Race." Translated by W.R. Kynsey and J.D.MacDonald, pp. 267-88.
Virchow, "The Veddas', p.380. The only outlet for opinions that went against the RASCB grain was a journal titled The Taprobanian, which touted itself as "a Dravidian Journal of Oriental Studies in and around Ceylon in Natural History, Archaeology, Philology, History, &c." Unlike the Journal of the RASCB, The Taprobanian had an extremely short life, as it was only published between October 1885 and June 1888. Although it did accept articles, for the most part it acted as a mouthpiece for its editor, Hugh Nevill, a member of the Ceylon Civil Service for more than twenty years, the bulk of this time spent as the Assistant Government Agent in Trincomalee. The argument to which Nevill returned again and again in The Taprobarian was that the Sinhalese language was 'of Dravidian structure and an Aryan glossary'. While this theory would be picked up later and expanded upon by Ceylonese scholars, such as W.F. Gunawardhana in the 1920, Nevill's journal stood alone in the mid- to late- 1880s. (See Hugh Nevill, "Notes and Queries'. The Taprobanian, April 1886, p. 103.)
Copleston quoted in Elizabeth Harris, Crisis, Competition and Conversion. The British Encounter with Buddhism in Nineteenth

Page 43
68
35
36
37
38
39
40
4.
42
43
Understanding the Aryan Theory
Century Sri Lanka, Ph.D.Dissertation, Post-Graduate Institute of Pali and Buddhist Studies, University of Kelaniya, p.277.
Harris, p.317.
Proceedings of 1885, Journal of the RASCBB vol.IX, 1885-86, p. cxxxiii.
Ibid., p. cxxxiv.
Ibid., p. cxxxiii.
Ibid., p.cxxxv.
Ibid., p.cxxxvi.
Ibid., p.xcviii.
Louis Nell, “The Ethnology of Ceylon', Journal ofthe RASCB, vol.XII, no.42, 1892, pp.242-50.
Strikingly, it is Hannah Arendt, in The Origins of Totalitarianism, who most unequivocally makes the case that the Aryan theory should be understood within the context of the universalizing instincts of the eighteenth century. In a long footnote, written into a chapter in which she discusses the origins of "race-thinking', Arendt vehemently takes the blame for "race-thinking' away from the shoulders of the philologists responsible for the Aryan theory: "As for the philologists of the early nineteenth century, whose concept of "Aryanism' has seduced almost every student of racism to count them among the propagandists or even inventors of race-thinking, they are as innocent as innocent can be. When they overstepped the limits of pure research it was because they wanted to include in the same cultural brotherhood as many nations as possible. In the words of Ernest Seilliere... "There was a kind of intoxication: modern civilization believed it had recovered its pedigree...and an organism was born which embraced in one and the same fraternity all nations whose language showed some affinity with Sanskrit.' In other words, these men were still in the humanistic tradition of the eighteenth century and shared its enthusiasm about strange people and exotic cultures." (Hannah Arendt, Imperialism. Part II of The Origins of Totalitarianism, San Diego, New York and London:

44
45
46
47
48
49
so
s
52
53
Culture and Politics of Identity in Sri Lanka 69
Harcourt Brace and Co., 1968. p.40.) For an opposing interpretation of the Aryan theory which stresses its anti-Semitism, see Leon Poliakov, The Aryan Myth, in which it is argued that the Romantics' obsession with India was due to 'a desire to discover in the ancient Orient a rival society to that of the Hebrew” (p.185). Poliakov points to late nineteenthcentury philosophers, such as Ernest Renan, as responsible for the anti-Semitic slant that was given the theory once it came to include race. For example, he quotes Renan as having written, that the Aryans were the newly chosen people: "Once this mission monotheism) was accomplished, the Semitic race rapidly declined and left it to the Aryan race alone to lead the march of human destiny.' (Ernest Renan, L'Avenir religieux des societes modernes, 1860, quoted in Poliakov, p.207.) In addition, see Martin Bernal's Black Athena for the further argument that ancient Greek civilization was refashioined as "Aryan' by nineteenthcentury philologists in order to create a "pure privileged genealogically useful past' free of Egyptian, Semitic and other cultural influences (Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism, p. 15).
Said, Culture and Imperialism, p. 152.
Ibid., p.152.
Cohn, p.45
Max Muller, Preface to The Upanishads, p.xl. Italics mine.
C9: Lot 5/21 - 25 July 1880.
Ibid., p.4.
Ibid., p.5.
Cohn, p.21.
Cohn, p.21.
Wickramasinghe, pp.9-10.M.Banton, The Idea of Race (1982).

Page 44
70
54
55
56
57
5ጸ
59
O
61
62
63
4.
s
66
አ7
6ጸ
69
70
7
Understanding the Aryan Theory
Gunawardana, p.30.
De Silva, p.317.
Proceedings of 1885 in Journal, p. cxxxiv
Ibid., p. cxxxiv.
Ibid., p. cxxxiii.
De Silva, p.292.
Edinburgh Review (1851) quoted in Eldridge, p.31.
Gooneratne, p.75.
John Ferguson, Ceylon in the Jubilee Year (London: John Haddon and Co., 1887).
Proceedings, 1885, Journal, vol. IX, p.ixxxiv.
Eric Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), p.80.
Ibid., p.84.
Ibid., p.92.
Joseph Chamberlain, Colonial Secretary between 1895 and 1903, summed up the attitude of the 'white man's burden' well: "In carrying out this work of civilization we are fulfilling what I believe to be our national mission." (Eldridge, p. 194)
Ibid., p. 174.
Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, p. 180.
Ibid., pp. 180-2.
Ibid., p.182.

72
73
74
75
76
77
Culture and Politics of Identity in Sri Lanka 71
H.C.P.Bell, “Report on Sigiriya' in Journal, vol.XIV, 1895, p.57.
Ibid., p.57.
Ibid., p.58.
Journal, 1885, p. cxxxiii.
Gunawardana, p.31.
K.M. de Silva, A History of Sri Lanka (Delhi: Oxford University Press 1891), p.9.

Page 45
Chapter 4
From Victoria To Vihara Mahadevi
Michael Schaffer
How does one "complete' a park? - Gore Vidal, 1876
It is said that city people are the same wherever you go. This is not to say that all cities are alike; only that the series of stimuli with which their residents must deal - urbanism - is an international phenomenon. It is, in fact, an historically specific phenomenon of the past hundred and fifty years. As capitalism swept the world, the modern urban metropolis followed. And just as capitalism revolutionized the economic order of every society it touched, so too did the modern city introduce new ways of managing space, community and leisure. Though this redefinition varies between industrial societies and developing ones, between high-tech metropolises and shanty-heavy sprawl towns populated by urban villages, in each case the city in the age of capitalism is a departure from what preceded it. Not least among these departures was a new definition of and dichotomy between public and private. Indeed, in many ways the history of urban society can be told by examining the changing shape and meaning of the public domain - whether economic, political, or geographic.
The urban park, too, is generally only as old as the modern city. Premodern cities, of course, often had spectacular parks.

Culture and Politics of Identity in Sri Lanka 73
European kings reserved hunting grounds and gardens for themselves. Anuradhapura, Polonnaruwa and Sigiriya all contained landscaped royal pleasure gardens. Unlike the modern urban park, however, these spaces tended to be not only private, but also geographically distant from the patterns of ordinary people's lives. The urban park, even when (as with London's Hyde Park) it was originally private property of the crown, tends to be fundamentally a part of the city's geography. As such, in its design, its ornamentation, and its leisure potential, the nature of this quintessentially public space can - by inclusion or by exclusion - say a great deal about the lives of a city's residents.
In recent years, a great deal of work in fields such as social and cultural history has focused on parks and public space. Kenneth Jackson and Camilo Jose Vergara's book on cemeteries’ traced the history of the American cemetery from its origins as a place where the wealthy were buried and others picnicked, drawing from this history the society's changing views on and needs in death, reverence and leisure. Elizabeth Blackmar and Roy Rozenweig's monumental history of Central Park examines how an ongoing struggle between political power, financial power, design aesthetics and popular behaviour has shaped the use and meanings of New York's only true open space. That parks may be read on so many levels helps to explain their scholarly appeal. The amount of land a society is willing to remove from commercial use and the distance from commerce to which it is removed say a great deal about the nature of that society. Likewise, which statues or monuments a society displays in its public areas is indicative of its cultural, political or leisure priorities. What a community allows people to do for public leisure-and who is given a chance to partake - is another major question. Finally, just who shapes the answers to these questions, and how they do so, is in itself an issue as important as any of these other three.
In this paper I try to use these questions as a guide to exploring the history of Colombo's Vihara Mahadevi Park. The park was the first public park of the Colombo Municipality, and today remains the centrepiece of the city's park system. Yet in many ways it is an otherwise unrecognizable mutation of its 1866 original. In fits and starts, and never completely, the park was transformed from a formal

Page 46
74 From Victoria To Vihara Mahadevi
urban garden for the city's elite, to a more romantic green space in a town nervous about its growth, and then into a somewhat decaying democratic space with rides and amenities aimed squarely at the urban middle class. How this happened, when, and why, traces the history of a city and a country which over the years since the park first opened has seen economic growth, evolving colonial rule, independence and political strife.
Early Colombo never really needed parks. At the end of Dutch rule, the city scarcely extended beyond the Fort area, with Suburbs at Slave Island, Pettah and Kollupitya. Indeed, its early boosters sang the praises of Colombo's proximity to outdoor leisure." The English Reverend James Cordimer wrote in 1807 that "there is a great variety of hill and dale in the vicinity of Colombo, and an equal number of delightful rides is probably not to be found within so small a compass in any other part of the world. The Fort contained outdoor public space in the form of markets and (now very crowded) larger public Squares, but was without parkland perse, Slave Island had a parade ground." But early in the British period, the Galle Face Green, area began to be used, emerging as a marine parade for Ladies and Gentlemen of the city. Proving the old adage that no two Englishmen can meet anywhere in the world without forming a club, the first occupants of Galle Face were private clubs. The area featured a race course and regular athletic matches. The private nature of much of the activity on the Green seemed to be at odds with the space's official purpose, as defined by an 1850s plaque stating that Galle Face was for the use of all the ladies and children of Colombo, in whose interests it was recommended to the care of successive governors.' This contradiction would reappear in later years as well.
Galle Face was not the only public leisure area in early nineteenth century Colombo. Beira Lake was apparently a popular place for recreation.” The government's authority also came over the maintenance of cemeteries, which in the nineteenth century far more than today were considered acceptable places for strolling." But none of these areas was exclusively meant for leisure or ornament. Cemeteries, of course, have a better-known purpose than as grounds for strolling. As a generally Christian institution, a cemetery also imposed its own limit - formal or, probably, informal - on who would

Culture and Politics of Identity in Sri Lanka 75
use it. While the lake was in those days far less murky than it is today, it would be only a few years before commerce began to exert its eventually pollution-spewing influence. In any event, the lake was also inherently less open to the majority of residents who were nonswimmers and non-boaters. Finally, Galle Face also had other uses: the Greenhoused the whipping post for Colombo's military garrison. The irony of this juxtaposition of pleasure and pain were apparently lost on contemporary observers. But of course the juxtaposition could be said, in a sense, to symbolize a greater trend in the colonial capital: the growth of Colombo's organized public leisure, as well as of the city's commerce, coincided with the consolidation of British political power over Colombo and Ceylon.
Colombo grew rapidly in the nineteenth century, in population, economic activity and physical territory. In the early years of British dominance, the city had been administered directly by the Governor. But by 1865, this situation could no longer hold, and the Colombo Municipal Corporation was established to administer services for the growing city, with a Colombo Municipal Council to guide it.' The Council was made up of eighteen members plus a Mayor. Nine members and the Mayor were appointed by the Governor; the other nine members were elected from the city's wards. Property and wealth regulations limited eligibility to the very wealthy.' At the same time, the city annexed the former plantation cinnamon land that would eventually become the Cinnamon Gardens neighbourhood, and set about clearing it for housing and other use. Most of the green on a contemporary map of Colombo - the race course, the golf links, and what would eventually be known as Vihara Mahadevi Park - were carved out from this land.'
The Circular Park, as it was initially known, was set up in the CMC's very first year of business. Taking advantage of the novel street scheme for the new area, planners created a 100-acre park on what are now the grounds of the park, plus the current Town Hall's land and the semicircle below Green Path (Ananda Coomaraswamy Mawatha) that now encompasses buildings such as the Art Gallery, bounded by what are now Dharmapala Mawatha, Marcus Fernando Mawatha, Albert Crescent, C.W.W. Kannangara Mawatha and F.R. Senanayake Mawatha. The CMC voted to establish "a pleasure

Page 47
76 From Victoria To Vihara Mahadevi
ground for the residents of Slave Island, Kolpetty and Maradana',' the colonial Government agreed to cede the "land to be retained so long as maintained in a creditable state.' While the colonial government had administered earlier public spaces used for leisure, the new park was to be built and run by the municipality. Considering the value that land in that neighbourhood was to soon attain, taking such a large amount of it out of commercial use must have been some sacrifice. Just why they did so - in a city still considered to be breezy and open - remains unclear. Ultimately, the nineteenth century was the age of the urban design monument. Until colonial times, Colombo had never really been the capital of anything. Kandy and the ancient capitals had ceremonial space, including space for leisure. But like port cities everywhere, Colombo had been about one thing only: making money. With the sense of grandeur that accompanied its nineteenth century economic spurt and the growth of British administrative operations, erecting showpiece public amenities like parks seemed only logical. Colombo's city leaders, like civic boosters anywhere, may have felt that a proper and prosperous municipality simply ought to have a park.
The park's planners faced several early choices. The first one, of course, must have been a location for the park. In a sense there was no choice here: the land on which the park was placed was at the time out of use, and was ceded gratis by the government. But at the same time, that the city's only park, said to be for residents of three rather mixed urban neighbourhoods, was placed amidst what was to quickly become the wealthiest area of town, can't help but raise suspicions about an all-wealthy Municipal Council inacity already accustomed to having its public playgrounds be the domains of the rich.
A more interesting question was how to design the park. Unfortunately, surviving documents shed little light on what, if any, debates there were over the shape and look of the Circular. The two basic models for urban parks of the era must have presented themselves to designers. The first model is what one might call the 'classical park, which flourished on the European continent. Seeking to replicate country gardens for an urban bourgeoisie, such parks feature fountains, benches, carefully sculpted plants, and a rigid

Culture and Politics of Identity in Sri Lanka 77
ordering of space. This park represents humans placing their imprint on the landscape. The romantic park, a generally British variation, arose out of similarbourgeois fears about urbanism, and related fears about the new, working-class urbanites. Instead of replicating the horticultural graces of country gentry, this design replicated the apparently lost world of nature: the park as a sort of forest primeval, where people could experience the rugged environment. This model represented humans trying to erase their impact from the urban landscape. Though utterly different in appearance, the differing models shared two central assumptions. The first was that parks are built by cities in order to improve the people, either by exposing them to the refinements of horticulture or to untamed nature and its supposed spiritual benefits. The second was that the parks were not supposed to be shaped by their users. Visitors were to stick to paths, walking and observing the landscape around them, which, the logic goes, was organized by better minds than their own - either celestial or human. With a hundred acres to play with, park planners did not, of course, have to choose either model exclusively. Yet contemporary descriptions suggest that the main area of the park conformed more to the formal European model than the romantic English one. In a sense, this is strange. The British had few qualms about imposing their tastes and aesthetics in other areas of Sri Lankan life. But the notion of a romantic park itself- rather than a formal one or, like the botanical gardens at Peradeniya, a colonial scholarship-style encyclopaedic cataloguing of the local plant life - may have ran counter to the environmental relations of imperialism, which, it has been argued, involved a need to demonstrate and imprint the imperial regime's control over even the landscape." Thus recreating the premodern landscape may have been one thing in Britain but something entirely different in colonial Ceylon. Design followed function - and, in the eyes of some, the Circular's function may have been as much to provide a respite from Sri Lanka as to provide a respite from thr more general hassles of urban life.
The implications of design choices aside, people made the park, and in the early years of the Circular, they seem to have made it something exclusive, elitist, and hardly befitting the altruistic public intentions cited by the original founding statements. With cinnamon

Page 48
78 From Victoria To Vihara Mahadevi
and jungle cleared, and ornamental shrubs planted, the well-sculpted park became one of the city's most fashionable spots. A European band played several times per week at the park's central bandstand; the park was a place to see and be seen. While the 1978 commemorative volume points out that two public tennis courts charged only forty cents, and maintains that the musical performances drew people from all walks of life into the park'," I suspect contemporary observers were more accurate. "The pride and the beauty of the town dally playfully with each other and the band plays while fashionable Colombo watches as interested spectators, gushed one city guidebook.' With such pomp, it was perhaps inevitable that a more magnificent name would soon replace the Circular's geometric title. Queen Victoria's diamond jubilee, celebrated throughout the British Empire, provided the opportunity. The Circular became Victoria Park in 1887.
There was another reason a name like "the Circular no longer fit. By the 1880s, so much park land had been let out to private clubs that the public area was no longer anything resembling a circle. Late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century maps show chunks of territory carved out by the Lawn Club, Nott's C & AC, the Municipal Sports Club cricket ground, the Garden Club, and the Sinhalese Sports Club. How Colombo's boosters could continue to celebrate the city's great ornamental public space even as more than half of it was under the occupation of limited-access clubs probably says as much about the city's propagandists as it says about the nature of public space and the opportunities for leisure in the city. Outdoor leisure was for the wealthy. When athletic, it was organized into private clubs; when less active, it involved benches, paths, and endless formal or informal rules.
Colombo in these years had changed rapidly. Where the Circular had been carved from a former plantation at the edge of town, Victoria Park was by the turn of the century surrounded by city, if not actually at the centre of an urban area. Municipal government headquarters were shifted from Pettah to Cinnamon Gardens in 1927, with the new Town Hall facing the park from the north. The early years of the twentieth century featured considerable anxiety over overcrowding in Colombo, both because of its attendant

Culture and Politics of Identity in Sri Lanka 79
health hazards and because of its aesthetic unpleasantness. From the turn of the century, CMC annual reports regularly called for more park space in the city, to no avail." This was the age of the garden city, and Colombo's planners were proud of their green reputation and eager to maintain it. The resulting change in the urban space priorities of the municipal government was to have considerable effect on the shape and nature of Victoria Park. Where the park had earlier been simply a playground and an urban ornament, it quickly became something approaching a public utility: in the overused cliche of the time, the park was to serve as 'lungs' to ventilate the allegedly congested city.
The major actor in this change of urban priorities was Patrick Geddes, who composed an early plan for the city of Colombo. An urban planner who had earlier done work on Jerusalem, Geddes was brought in by the CMC in 1920 to devise a plan for the growing metropolis. On paper, Geddes appears as imperious as the stereotypical urban planner. "The task of town planning, he writes at the beginning of his report on Colombo, “may thus be viewed as the development of a magnificent estate, albeit one temporarily embarrassed.' From Geddes's pro-ventilation standpoint, the estate he was to manage had much to recommend it, but needed none-theless to be vigilant:
Here in Colombo people seem to preserve their rural spirit and to express this in a love of gardens and of flowers. Colombo cannot be too carefully guarded as "the Garden City of the East so that the ever-dominating influence of the capital may here, better than elsewhere, preserve the rural spirit instead of as elsewhere too often destroy it.'
As for the city's main public garden, Geddes quite plainly loathed Victoria Park. His chief complaint, unsurprisingly, was that the park featured so little "nature'.
But if anyone be so dulled by habit not to see how. disappointing this park really is, let him go round and

Page 49
80 From Victoria To Vihara Mahadevi
through it with any friend who has a camera and he will soon see how few pleasing photographs it yields. Some fine trees, of course, there are; but even these not well shown or grouped, but largely concealed by poor and careless planting of others. This whole effect- or rather want of effect-belongs to a time when the old tradition of English landscape gardening had lapsed well nigh altogetherloo
Like most town-planning dreams, few of Geddes's major proposals saw the light of day. In the name of ventilation, he suggested extending Victoria Park in four directions, so as to connect it to Beira Lake, to the coast at Kollupitya, and to the Ladies' and Victoria Golf Links, an unworkable idea that would have created what amounted to an enormous green belt ringing part of Colombo. But the green city planners' overall impact on Victoria Park was considerable. A great irony of park planning is that the most dictatorial planners often do the most to open up urban space. A decade later Cliford Holliday Geddes's successor as the town planning hired gun, advocated reclaiming the park's land from the private sports clubs. Ultimately, thanks to the fear of urban congestion and pollution, Geddes, Holliday and others in the century's first decades went a way towards naturalizing Victoria Park, arriving by the backdoor at the old romantic model of a British park.
Unfortunately, the pace of public works being what it was, few actual changes were carried out before World War II took the park out of commission. Victoria Park housed a mini-zoo for a period in the 1920s. Trees in the park were given plaques bearing their botanical and indigenous names.' Groups like the Ceylon Agricultural Society began to stage their annual shows in the park. There is no way of saying how these design changes influenced who used the park, or vice versa. However, given the apparently broader array of public entertainments the area now offered - shows, the petting Zoo, and so on- and given the greater crowding of Colombo, Victoria Park must have become a somewhat more widely enjoyed place; planners, in turn, were obliged to respond to a greater popular use of the park. On Geddes's heels, a 1927 CMC report suggested adding a

Culture and Politics of Identity in Sri Lanka 81
botanical garden, a deer park, and a motor drive through the park; also on Geddes's heels, none of these schemes were implemented.” There is certainly a change, however, in the way tourist literature came to talk about Victoria Park. Whereas guidebooks had once touted the high society and organized activities of the park, they now tended to cite its qualities as a place of escape from activity of any sort, a natural space out of which people could make what they wanted. After the din of the marketplace, you may seek the peace of Victoria Park, for quiet rest amid the gentle shrubs or umbrageous trees, wrote the Government Tourist Bureau.' Another guide called it the "pleasantest spot in the city', and urged visitors to relax there after a hard day of looking at the native sectors.'
World War II imposed itself on the daily lives of Britain's colonies in ways large and small. Public areas of Colombo were closed off under defence regulations. These included both Galle Face Green and Victoria Park. When the park reopened after the war, it provided an opportunity to carry out some major changes in its look and its mission. The private sports clubs were finally banished; only the Municipal Sports Club, whose fields are today still used by schools, remained. The War Memorial, which had been taken down during the war for security reasons, was moved from Galle Face to the south-west corner of the park.
Furthermore, a major redesign was carried out in 1951. Amenities such as rides and games for children were added, as was a public amphitheatre and a new series of fountains towards the park's current gate facing the Town Hall. An open-air amphitheatre soon followed. All in all, the period around Ceylon's 1948 independence featured what might be termed a gradual democratization of Victoria Park. Where there had once been a formal high-society park and then an attempt at a Woodsy urban escape, there was now a public space meant to cater to the needs of an urban middle class. The park, for instance, never regained its initial hundred acres. But the incursions on to public land now came from open public institutions. Former sports clubs became the grounds for such institutions as the Art Gallery and the Aesthetic Institute (or, in an example of an admittedly less public leisure-oriented organization, the Public Health Department's Health Education Unit, which took over the former Nott's Cricket Club area). The new Colombo Public Library followed in 1979.

Page 50
82 From Victoria To Vihara Mahadevi
This relative democratization of park amenities was one thing. Democratization of its symbolism was much more problematic. To this end, the major change came in 1956, the 2500th anniversary year of Buddhism and also the year of Sinhala nationalist political triumph. Inevitably, with a name like Victoria, the park was ripe for a change of titles. In a rare example of convenient renaming, the new name retained the park's initials: Victoria Park became Vihara Mahadevi Park. But while Queen Victoria had been imposed on all Ceylonese, only some identified with Vihara Mahadevi. As if to underscore this, a statue in honour of the Sinhalese heroine was erected near the old bandstand: in Sinhala and English, but not in Tamil, the statue's plaque fetes the great queen. Later that decade, a statue of Anagarika Dharmapala was also erected in the park. Finally, providing what is now Vihara Mahadevi's major architectural distinction, a large, goldcoloured Buddha statue was erected between 1965 and 1972, facing the Town Hall. Meanwhile, innocuous items like a Boy Scout monument (1962) as well as statues of the island's secular saints also popped up around the park.
In terms of sheer emotional impact, however, it was the icons of Sinhala nationalism which gave the park a certain political impact. Mrs Bandaranaike began her January 1966 campaign against the Tamil Language Bill with a march from the statue of Vihara Mahadevi. Playing the role of a Sinhalese heroine, Bandaranaike overtly sought to associate herself in the public mind with the great ancient Sinhalese queen, offering flowers to the statue as she pledged to protect the Sinhalese. But it was modern blood, more than ancient history, which consecrated the park for the nationalist right. As the day's protest wound its way back from Kollupitya, police opened fire and a Buddhist monk was killed. Though the park's location abutting Town Hallthe city government ultimately has little power over the issues that fire the island's politically aware population-probably lessened the amount of political activity, Vihara Mahadevi's statue has since then periodically served as a rallying point for the nationalist right. On the other hand, apart from the occasional commemorative garlanding of F.R. Senanayake, F.D. Bandaranaike or (more recently added) Gamani Dissanayake, the secular statues have much less resonance.

Culture and Politics of Identity in Sri Lanka 83
More recently, however, Vihara Mahadevi Park's space, if not its symbolism, has been used by others besides those attracted to the images of nationalism. In the 1970s and 1980s, groups of all stripes used the park as a place for political meetings and protests. Particularly noteworthy were peace groups and labour unions. Two changes in Colombo's layout and political character may have influenced this. In the 1980s, Parliament was removed to suburban Sri Jayawardanapura. Thus the Galle Face area no longer had the political value of facing the seat of power. Secondly, Hyde Park, a major site of labour and leftist meetings, shrunk in size - partly, again, due to a general decline of some urban park space during those years, and partly by specific political intent: Hyde Park was turned into a children's playground not long after the UNP government broke up the July 1980 strike. For lack of other options, and because of its continuing centrality and visibility, Vihara Mahadevi Park, just down Union Place from Hyde Park, took up the slack, continuing to provide that increasing Colombo rarity: open space. Thus the urban planning of Colombo as national capital once again influenced and transformed the use of Colombo as home town.
Colombo extended its park system after independence, but Vihara Mahadevi remained the system's centrepiece. Yet as a place to play, relax or breathe in or to look at, its modern history seems to have been a cyclic one of decay and renewal. Governments would periodically fix up the park, populistically promising great things and blaming inept predecessors for its decay. The signal example of this came in 1978, when the park's renewal was celebrated under the auspices of the then Prime Minister, Ranasinghe Premadasa, who had, not coincidentally, risen through Colombo's urban political system. In his comment in the souvenir volume, Premadasa goes on about the importance of parks, citing their necessity for the happiness of urbanites rather than as crown jewels or environmental tools. But in recent years (that is, under the government prior to his own, which had taken office a year earlier) parks were in disrepair, "overgrown with weeds and shrub jungle'.
One such place, the Vihara Mahadevi Park, was the happy hunting ground of all vagrants, petty thieves, and other undesirable elements in society. From being a sought

Page 51
84 From Victoria To Vihara Mahadevi
after public recreation centre, it became, in recent years, a great public nuisance.'
Premadasa's answer to this disrepair says a great deal about contemporary ideas about what the park should do. In the discourse, the park was, once again, feminized, though this time amenities were actually provided to back up the rhetoric: the needs of children and families were given centrestage in the celebrations of the park, and the advertisements for it. Premadasa's wife, likewise, was given a big role: the appeal to the needs (and the eventual votes) of urban families is quite clear. Women and children had always been cited as the reasons why parks were built, both at Galle Face and when the Circular first opened. But this time, instead of developing such things as race courses, park planners seem to have designed amenities, as well as publicity, with the fabled long-suffering middle-class mother in mind. Again and again, security and ease were stressed, both in park design and in description. Fountains were restored. Children's toys and rides were improved and significantly extended. A cafeteria was added to the park, to be stocked with ice cream and cool drinks. Likewise, a police post was added, so there is maximum security, and the visitors can use the amenities without fear'. Premadasa promised "a wonderland for children'. His wife asserted that "the provision for good recreational facilities was a far-felt need and somewhat a neglected aspect in our social welfare structure', but now Vihara Mahadevi would be a lollipop to the kids and a place of relaxation to the accompanying adults.' Park recreation was now a part of the social contract.
The identities of the signatories to this contract, however, say something about the changing nature of Sri Lankan society. The government had convened a special committee of concerned-and, most likely, wealthy-private citizens to report on and make suggestions for the restoration of the park. Today, signs in the park announce the assistance of various private groups, such as the Lions Club, in maintaining the park. Though the park had indeed become far more democratic in its appeal and its amenities, Vihara Mahadevi was no longer a deal only between citizens and their government.

Culture and Politics of Identity in Sri Lanka 85
And like all social contracts, this one frayed. Nearly twenty
years after the ceremonial improvement of the park space, the new rides for children are rusted and the improved fountains are dry. Vihara Mahadevi remains a popular spot for school festivals and fairs. Changes in urban society at large continue to make themselves felt in the way the park's non-park areas are used. The most recent incursions have been from a regular weekend plant sale, and from a car park, showing that at least some people now ferry themselves to and from the park in Sri Lanka's burgeoning fleet of private automobiles. Gardeners in the park claim that the fountains are being restored (after being ignored, predictably, under the previous government) and will work again in the following year.
Vihara Mahadevi Park's modern trend towards relative democratization and cyclical decay points to a trend in modern societies: inpublic amenities such as parks, democratization has tended to equal plebianization. Though some of the bourgeoisie who live in the neighbourhoods around the park do indeed come and stroll during sunset, for the most part the wealthy have abandoned the park as an everyday facility. In the age of VCRs, of course, the wealthy now have access to whole slews of other distractions. Yet even as they seem to ignore Vihara Mahadevi, Colombo's elite have not abandoned outdoor recreation altogether." These days, the square around the Independance Memorial serves as a popular jogging spot for the wealthy. And private clubs (whose land is always known as grounds, rather than the less fancy word park) remain popular. Vihara Mahadevi remains linked in many people's minds to lower class vices, something that may have as much to do withbourgeois prejudices as the park's actual crime statistics. Nonetheless, with the most vocal and influential citizens now absenting themselves from the city's showpiece public space, it is likely that the cycles of decay will continue.
Decay for some is opportunity for others.What might be called vernacular uses of the park - that is, what people will do with public space when left to their own devices - continue to conflict with the park designers' and the authorities' intent. In recent years, particularly since the 1979 Public Library brought more young people into the park, ViharaMahadevi has become known as a theatre for the evolving

Page 52
86 From Victoria To Vihara Mahadevi
and still tense sexual politics of a changing urban society. The space became a major rendezvous point for young lovers, who in Colombo lack private space free of disapproving families. Matters between the police and the lovers came to a head several years ago when the government, answering popular outrage at this apparent public transgression of sexual mores, turned water cannons on the young couples. Even today, letters to newspapers regularly express fury at Vihara Mahadevi Park's alleged licentiousness. But as people tend to do, those who use the park have worked out a middle-ground solution. According to one park gardener, the couples are allowed to stay in the park until 4 p.m. at which point they are ejected in preparation for the families who stroll during the dusk hours.
Newspapers decompose and archival records languish. But architecture, which stays in full public view, tends to display and proclaim the ironies of history. Watching young Colombo boys with nowhere else to play improvize a cricket match along paths built for parasol-carrying colonial-era promenaders, you can almost see the history working in front of you. In a hundred and thirty years, Vihara Mahadevi Park has changed numerous times, in numerous ways. Likewise, the forces for change have been numerous. In over public displays of affection notwithstanding, by and large the park has not aroused the kind of emotion that characterizes relations between the public and public space in some other cities. Yet shrewd politicians and sensitive planners have at times responded to the articulated or non-articulated tastes and desires of several publics, including the mass population for whom the park was ostensibly originally built. The park's changes have reflected some of society's own changes, from reacting to urbanization to carrying the marks of divisive nationalism to exhibiting an imperfect democracy and a frayed welfare state. How the park, and, more broadly, Colombo's styles of leisure, have shaped society is a more difficult question. Its answer, of course, changes every day, and is intimately tied up with the meaning of public' in an inegalitarian, capitalist society. As such, the future of the park, in its small way, will continue to say something about that state of Sri Lanka's public culture at large.

Culture and Politics of Identity in Sri Lanka 87
Notes
s
The author is a Fulbright Scholar attached to the Department of Sociology, Colombo University. He wishes to thank the United States Educational Foundation in Sri Lanka for their help and support.
Kenneth Jackson and Camilo Jose Vergara, Silent Cities. (Princeton: 1990).
Elizabeth Blackmar and Roy Rozenweig, The Park and the People. (New York: 1994).
This leisure, like the boosters, was limited to the upper class. The great frustration of researching this paper has been that little information is available documenting leisure among the non-leisure class. It is worth noting, however, that one group of non-elites did get to partake - after a fashion - in early-nineteenth century Colombo's vogue of country rides: the servants and drivers who came along. The switch to urban parks often within walking distance of homes also meant that some went about outdoor leisure without their servants helping them.
H.A.J. Hulugalle, Centenary Volume of the Colombo Municipal Council (Colombo: 1965) p. 203.
Ibid., p. 28.
Radha De Silva, Outdoor Recreational Needs in the Colombo Municipal Council A reas (Unpublished Msc. dissertation, University of
Moratuwa, 1995) p. 18.
R.L. Brohier, Changing Face of Colombo, 1805-1972 (Colombo: 1983) p.53.
Ibid.

Page 53
88
()
20
From Victoria To Vihara Mahadevi
Arnold Wright (ed.), 20th Century Glimpses of Ceylon (London: 1907) p. 404.
Hulugalle, 1965. pp.36-8. Municipal councils for Colombo and Kandy had first been proposed in 1848.
Wright (1907) p. 404.
Hulugalle (1965) p. 203.
S. Grenadier, CMC Secretary, to Sir James Swan, Colonial Secretary, 16 March 1866. (CMCSurveyor's Office, Victoria Park folder.)
Sir James Swan, Colonial Secretary, to S. Grenadier, CMC Secretary, 5, April 1866. (CMCSurveyor's Office, Victoria Park folder.)
Neeladri Bhattachaya, 'Pastoralists in Colonial World,' in Arnold and Guha (eds.), Nature Culture Imperialism: Essays in the Environmental History of South Asia. (Delhi: 1995), pp. 49,85. For a discussion of space and the mind of Empire, see also part XII, "Space', in Bill Ashcroft et al (ed.) The Post Colonial Studies Reader (New York: 1995). Paul Carter's 'Spatial History' in the same volume, is also worth reading. While it does not address the design choices for public spaces, Carter's essay examines the evocation of "the spatial forms and fantasies through which a culture declares its presence'. Literature projected onto the landscape (Carter's subject) could be one of these; another, conceivably could be landscape fantasies projected on to the landscape.
Ishrani Corea, "A Brief Sketch of the Park' in Vihara Mahadevi Park 112th Anniversary Souvenir (Colombo: 1978). Today, a single cinnamon tree remains in the park, situated close by the park manager's office.
Ibid.
Plate's Guide to Colombo. (Colombo: 1990).
Wright(1907) p. 407.

2
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
Culture and Politics of Identity in Sri Lanka 89
Patrick Geddes, "Town Planning in Colombo: A Preliminary Report' (Colombo; 1921) p. 5. Ibid., p. 15
Ibid.
Clifford Holliday, City of Colombo Memorandum on Town Planning. (Colombo: 1940)
Corea (1978)
Wright: 1907. p.398.
Corea(1978)
Government Tourist and Publications Bureau, Ceylon Day by Day Tours. (Colombo: 1939).
E.F. Van Dort, Guide to Colombo. (Colombo: 1928).
Corea (1978).
Ibid.
In design terms, the park's nationalism involved changes that were occasionally literally superficial. Though the pipe system for the preindependance fountain system was kept in place, the old fountain near the bandstand was simply replaced with a new shape - the indigenous lotus design- when the Vihara Mahadevi statue was erected.
Even more interesting, in terms of Vihara Mahadevi Park as part of the city around it, is the history of labour protest around the park. Though Colombo's wealthiest neighbourhoods sit to the west of the park, on the east side, between the Town Hall and Slave Island, lies Union Place, the traditional industrial hub of Colombo, headquarters to the British teafirms who had dominated the colonial economy and to their nominally Sri Lankan heirs. The traditional route for labour protests thus would be down Union Place and around in front of the Town Hall and the park, and ultimately to the traditional labour site at Hyde Park. This juxtaposition of protest and leisure, inside and outside the park, serves as a reminder that though the park area has been opened up a great

Page 54
90
34
35
36
37
From Victoria To Vihara Mahadevi
deal, democratization is a relative term, and is linked, fundamentally, to the democratization of Sri Lankan society at large.
Vihara Mahadevi Park 112th Anniversary Souvenir (Colombo: 1978).
Ibid.
But their children may have. One of the English-language pop music radio stations popular with the young beneficiaries of the open economy held a contest to name the ten most romantic spots in Sri Lanka. Though several parks made the cut, numbers one and two in the finishing lineup were Majestic City and Liberty Plaza, Colombo's two air-conditioned shopping malls. The disturbing global trend towards conflating consumerism with leisure and entertainment is amply evident in Sri Lanka. Those who equate buying and being an also associate themselves with the new, something particularly the young. Thus an indoor arcade with few benches, no trees, no weather, changes or grass and moreover with no one poor within it, but with ample opportunity for expression through consumption, is blessed to the youthful eye with an aura of modernity, while a public park seems to be consigned to the dustbin of history.
It is unclear exactly how much euphemism is involved in the popular use of the word "lovers'. In my limited observations, I have never seen anything more than couples snuggling under trees. This in itself is, of course, unusual in Sri Lankan society, but given the explicitness of things like popular film advertisements, would hardly constitute mass pornography.

Chapter 5
The Other Victims
Sasanka Perera
We didn't see the mountains ahead and so we didn't sense the upheavals to come, upheavals that were in fact already in our midst, waiting to burst into flames. We didn't see the chaos growing; and when its advancing waves found us we were unprepared for its feverish narratives and wild manifestations. We were unprepared for an era twisted out of natural proportions, unprepared when our road began to speak in the bizarre language of violence and transformations. The world broke up into unimaginable forms, and only the circling spirits of the age saw what was happening with any clarity, - (Ben Okri, 1993)
Introduction
I thought that it would make sense to begin this brief essay with the words above from Ben Okri's Songs of Enchantment. Like Okri's fictional narrative suggests, we as a people were ill prepared for the violence that swept the southern parts of the country in the late 1980s even though in the north-east political violence and terror had become a serious life-threatening existential dilemma for the people living in those areas. Even then, in the south, we failed to see where we were

Page 55
92 The Other Victims
headed. Barely seven years after that physical wave of violence subsided, we - particularly those located in cities where economic and political power is still concentrated - once again seem to be suffering from a strange case of amnesia. It appears that we do not want to deal with the reality of the consequences of that violence as well as the reason which led to the violence in the first place. This essay is a restricted attempt to place in context a certain spectrum of experience directly linked to that violence.
What follows is a brief presentation of the preliminary indicators of a study conducted in 1996. In the study I was interested in ascertaining, to some extent, the social, political and economic contexts of female-headed households in two selected districts in southern Sri Lanka. These districts are Monaragala in the Uva Province and the Hambantota in the Southern Province. In the context of Sinhala society and its general patriarchal cultural bias, households are usually headed by men except under exceptional circumstances. However, beyond this cultural logic and convention, which until recently was also protected by law, there have always been women who in practical terms have headed their households. This is certainly true for the domestic sphere. In most cases, however, women would be officially and socially recognized as heads of their households in situations where their spouses have died or live elsewhere.
In this study I was not merely interested in women who are heads of households. The focus was specifically on women who have become heads of households after their husbands or male partners dissappeared or were killed in the political violence that swept the southern parts of Sri Lanka between 1987 and 1991. Both Monaragala and Hambantota districts were severely affected by political violence. The culprits of political violence in both areas have been the insurrectionary group, Janata Vimukti Peramuna (JVP), and various agents of the state ranging from units of the Sri Lankan armed forces, the police, and the Special Task Force to numerous paramilitary groups operating with state sponsorship and protection.
In other words, this is an attempt to place in context the position and experiences of these women whose husbands or partners and in some cases other male kin have been killed or have disappeared. In doing so I would be outlining the political, economic and social

Culture and Politics of Identity in Sri Lanka 93
consequences of violence and terror as they have impacted upon these families.
In a 1994 study focused on ten coloured women in Cape Town who had to deal with the consequences of their husbands', sons' or lovers long-term detention on Robben Island, White and Reynolds make the following observation, which I would suggest also applies to the Sri Lankan context:
...these women's experience is invaluable to our collective knowledge of ourselves as a society in conflict: that this experience has in the past been denied the authority that it warrants; that if no concerted effort to record it is made it may be irretrievably lost to our future (White & Reynolds, 1994:2).
However, the present study was not undertaken merely to document the experiences of these women for the sake of posterity. More importantly, it was undertaken with the expectation that their experiences would be taken into account in any attempt to deal with our collective painful past and in building a framework for the future of Sri Lanka's society. Only if we come to grips with our social and political history can we fully understand the reasons behind the kind of political violence experienced in the late 1980s and ensure that there is no repetition of the horror.
There is an important theoretical and methodological question that also needs to be briefly clarified at this point in time. Issues of gender in general and women's status and role in Society in particular, have entered the agenda of social Science research today at an international level. Even so, much of contemporary anthropological and sociological investigations into Sri Lankan society and culture are specifically marked by their continued disinterest in these issues as primary foci of investigation. Apart from a few exceptional cases, such issues usually end up as footnotes or at best, merely as chapters in selected ethnographies or papers. Consider for a moment the following observations by Moore in a recent essay:

Page 56
94 The Other Victims
The gross brutality of the methods of murder, torture and mutilation and display of corpses employed by both the JVP and their opponents is something that requires mention but no elaboration. The story of the creation of anti-JVP 'vigilantes’ is of more analytic interest (Moore, 1993).
One accepts that there is no need to be enthralled by the acts of violence themselves transforming them into what Stirrat calls a pornography of violence (Stirrat, 1995). But the nature of that violence, and the manner in which normal modes of mourning were suspended during the period of terror has much to do with its consequences (Perera, 1995a). This is particularly the case with regard to the survivors, most of whom were women. Many of them saw the brutal murder of their husbands and other male kin and had to endure the repression of the normal modes of mourning as per the demands of either the JVP or the agents of the state. Moreover, since then they have lived with their horrifying memories and coped with the consequences of their loss. So, disregarding the nature of violence would also mean disregarding an entire spectrum of experiences directly linked to that violence. Similarly, the over-emphasis on vigilantes or death squads and the JVP also overshaodws the experiences of others in the realm of terror, particularly women and children. Experiences of women and children are seemingly less violent and perhaps not exciting enough to deserve the attention of academics such as Moore.
In such a context marked by problematic exclusions, it is hardly surprising that the status of women, during as well as consequent to the terror in Sri Lanka, has hardly attracted any scholarly attention. As far as I know only one paper, by Therese Onderdenwijngaard titled 'Hema's Story: A Narrative Without Plot', attempts to make some sense out of women's experiences with violence. Referring to women's stories from the period of terror she correctly notes that "testimonies, however, generally disappear in the margins of the political history of the insurrection. They make up an account which appears to be fortuitously rather than inherently linked to this history' (Onderdenwijngaard, 1995: 187).

Culture and Politics of Identity in Sri Lanka 95
Activist interventions of NGOs or other concerned institutions or individuals lack any sustained and serious scholarly rigour in investigation as well as analysis. In most cases they amount to compiling statistics and basic documentation. The present study, then, also has to be located in the context of this very specific and clearly problematic lack of knowledge. Further, this study does not concern itself with statistics. It is primarily based on extended narratives provided mostly by women who have been directly affected by political violence.
Experience of Female-Headed Households: The Parameters of a Problem
The context in which the violence which affected the women in this study has to be located is the national context of violence and terror between 1987 and 1991 marked by the conflict between the JVP and agents of the state. The worst of the violence was between 1980, when the JVP significantly increased its reign of terror by including its decision to kill family members of security forces personnel, and 1989, by which time most of the top level leaders of the JVP had been captured and eliminated by government forces. The upsurge of violence in this period is clearly visible in the narratives of the women interviewed. For the survivors of that violence the period of terror, or beeshanaya as it is referred to, continues to be part of their recent memory. As Warren has documented for Guatemala, the period of terror was used as a temporal marker (Warren, 1993). Similarly in Sri Lanka references to beeshanaya were formulated within a temporal idiom: before beeshanaya, during beeshanaya, beeshanaya may happen again (Perera, 1995b).
While these women do make attempts, sometimes successfully, to frame their futures and carry on with their lives, the past still continues to be a significant factor in the routine of their present lives. This is not because of the mere death or disappearance of a close member of the family, but more significantly because of how it affects in real terms their present lives. In this context, a number

Page 57
96 The Other Victims
of preliminary areas of concern can be identified based on partial analysis of the extended interviews in our possession. At this point in time I would merely outline these areas of concern with very little elaboration. A detailed analysis would be available only after the information collected thus far has been studied more carefully.
Disruption of Inter-and Intra-Family Relationships and Problems of Marriage
As the interviews clearly indicate, relationships with the husband's relatives (including his mother and father) deteriorated in many instances after the death or disappearance of the husband. Thus, one section of the extended family that ideally should have been available as Supportin a time of crisis ceased to exist. In fact, on many occasions, the cessation of interaction was sudden, leaving the bereaved family in serious financial and social crisis. On one occasion, after the husband was killed by the JVP, his family took over his grocery store, removed all the goods to their own home, and denied the woman or her children any access to the property. Rather than being the exception, such problems with the husband's family over property occur frequently. There have been attempts by members of the husband's family to seize land as well as the homes occupied by the dependents of the deceased.
A great majority of the women have had to seek help from their own parents. But even such networks were not as effective as one would have expected, mostly as a result of poverty. Given the inherent poverty of the two districts many of the families concerned were unable to help daughters whose husbands had either been killed or had disappeared.
Problems have also cropped up within families. Many of these problems are linked to notions of justice and revenge on the part of children, particularly sons, and their mothers' efforts to pacify them. Sons who were very young at the time of their father's murder or abduction have grown up with a certain amount of hatred precipitated

Culture and Politics of Identity in Sri Lanka 97
also by the fact that justice in the conventional legal sense does not appear to be forthcoming. For many of them revenge seems to have become a primary pre-occupation, disrupting the families efforts to rebuild their lives by forcibly raking up the memories of a painful past. Remarriage was not considered as an option by the majority of the women, most of whom thought that it would disrupt the lives of their children. Also, there was serious social pressure not to remarry. On the other hand, there is also a certain degree of ostracization of widows. Some women have opted to remarry or simply to seek a male partner without going through the legal procedures both for economic reasons as well as for purposes of companionship. But, given the fact that many of these women received compensation for the death or disappearance of their husbands, some men entered such relationships only to gain access to the money. On many occasions they moved out after the money ran out.
Concerns about Sexual Harassment
Our study indicates that sexual harassment prevails in many parts of the country, as a direct result of the women being rendered single. These women face sexual harassment from both the common villagers and from officials at village and regional levels. As one woman observed:
Eternally at night men bang on the door demanding that I open it. There is no point in talking about those things. Then I go to my parents' place because of fear. I would die of shivering with fear. We can’t discuss these things. There is no end to these men's perversion.
In an instance of sexual harassment from the bureaucracy, a young widow went to the registrar of deaths with her mother to get her husband's death certificate. The registrar demanded that the mother leave the daughter at his house and come back in the evening. After repeated demands the two women left without the certificate although it was necessary for obtaining compensation for the death. Similarly, an assistant governmentagent responsible for disbursing compensation

Page 58
98 The Other Victims
insisted that the recipient widow come on a Sunday evening to collect the compensation for the death of her husband. Knowing that offices are closed on Sundays she complained to an NGO field worker who accompanied the woman to the bureaucrat's office on a number of occasions until the money was paid.
Problems of Dealing with Trauma
Trauma and its associated manifestations constitute another serious problem facing these families. Interviews have clearly indicated that, consequent to experiences of political violence, disruption of family life has occurred due to trauma-related conditions of family members. These include cases of severe depression, violent flashbacks, and the onset of physical ailments apparently linked to the experience of violence. For instance, in one incident a woman's husband was abducted by unknown persons who had flashed a torch on a her face to make sure she did not recognize them. She said,
Iscreamed, and I could not see anything during that time. They had the torch focused on my face all the time. After that for ever two weeks I lost my sight.
In her case the physical ailments were temporary while in the case of many others the resulting physical as well as mental conditions have been more long-lasting. What is even more problematic is the fact that such people are unlikely to get the kind of treatment they need. The state still has to recognize the existence of serious mental health problems in this country resulting from the experience of terror in the late 1980s. Nine years after such experiences, there is still no state mental health policy specifically aimed at dealing with the problem.
In this context we need to pose the question as to how such a situation can be remedied or whether such remedies are even possible. Part of the problem is with the mental health professionals themselves. While Sri Lanka has only a small community of properly trained psychologists and psychiatrists, most of whom operate in Colombo or other regional towns, a lot more under-trained and dubiously qualified 'shrinks' operate on a much wider scale. On the

Culture and Politics of Identity in Sri Lanka 99
other hand, even the properly trained professionals are usually not easily accesible to the people in the rural sector. Moreover, the notion of mental illness has negative cultural value in Sinhala society and this discourages people from seeking treatment even if it is available (Perera, 1995b). As such, they have resorted to locally available remedies, such as specific rituals, in a limited attempt to come to grips with their problem (Perera, 1995b). In a 1995 essay Marcus and Rosenberg have also suggested that religion be used as a mechanism of coping in extreme situations (Marcus and Rosenberg, 1995).
It is also clear that many people whose kin and friends perished as a result of violence, also have a problem with guilt - the guilt of surviving while their dear ones died or disappeared. This situation has also led to the psychological problem referred to above. However, such manifestations of guilt are not peculiar to the Sri Lankan situation. Suarez-Orozco also points out that many of the Central American refugees who escaped to the United States expressed a sense of "terror and guilt over selective survival in the face of often inexplicable death and suffering in their Central American homelands' (SuarezOrozco, 1990: 355, 357). Similarly, researchers working on posttraumatic stress disorders have documented that many veterans of combat 'experience guilt over surviving the war, and the loss of buddies who died' (Johnson, Feldman, Lubin and Southwick, 1995:293). In this context it seems to me that the problems resulting from trauma should be a matter of priority in any state policy attempting to rehabilitate victims of violence.
Concluding Comments
What I have attempted do, in the preceding discussion, albeit in a minimally coherent manner is to merely outline the concerns and the parameters of a recently concluded study, and present some of the themes that emerge from apartial first analysis of available information.
It should be obvious that any attempt to understand the political violence of the 1980s and its continuing legacy would be incomplete without taking into account the experience of women and femaleheaded households. As things are, it appears that certain themes need to be emphasized to place that period of terror in context and come to

Page 59
100 The Other Victims
terms with its continuing legacy. These would include lingering issues of justice and revenge, the problems of disintegration of the family structure, the cultural restrictions governing remarriage of women, the attitue of the state bureaucracy, and the issues of trauma.
Notes
Janata Vimukti Peramuna (JVP) can be literally translated as People's Liberation Front
Bibliography
Johnson, David Read, Susan C. Feldman, Hadar Lubin, and Steven M.Southwick. 1995. "The Therapeutic Use of Ritual and Ceremony in the Treatment of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.' In Journal of Traumatic Studies, vol.8, no.2.
Marcus, Paul and Alan Rosenberg 1995. "The Value of Religion in Sustaining the Self in Extreme Situations'. In Psychoanalytic Review, 82 (1), February 1995.
Moore, M. 1993. "Thoroughly Modern Revolutionaries: The JVP in Sri Lanka'.
In Modern Asian Studies, p.27.
Okri, Ben. 1993. The Songs of Enchantment. London: Vintage. p.3
Onderdenwijngaard, Therese. 1995. "Hema's Story: A Narrative Without Plot'. In Paul E.Baak ed., Casa Nova: Aspects of Asian Societies I. Amsterdam: CASA.
Perera, Sasanka. 1995a. Living with Tortures and other Essays of Intervention: Sri Lankan Society, Politics and Culture in Perspective. Colombo: ICES. −
SLLLSSLSLSLSLSLS SSLSSSMSSSLSSLLSLSLSLMSSSLSLSSSLSSLSSSS 1995b. Spirit Possessions and Avenging Ghosts: Stories of Supernatural Activity as Narratives of Terror and Mechanisms of

Culture and Politics of Identity in Sri Lanka O
Coping and Remembering. Paper presented at a conference on 'Social Suffering' organized by the Social Science Research Council (New York) at the University of Cape Town, South Africa.
Stirrat, R.L. 1995. "Engaging with Causes and Consequences of Violence'.
In Tamil Times, 15 May 1995, Surrey.
Suarez-Orozco, Marcello M. 1990. "Speaking of the Unspeakable: Towards a Psychological Understanding of Responses to Terror.' In Ethos, 8(3).
Warren, Kay B. 1993. "Interpreting La Violencia in Guatemala: The Shapes of Mayan Silence and Resistance. In Kay B. Warren ed., The Violence Within: Cultural and Political Opposition in Divided Nations. Boulder: Westview Press.
White, Hylkton and Pamela Reynbolds. 1994. In the Shadow of the Island. Women's Experience of their Kinsmen's Political Imprisonment, 1987. 1991. Pretoria: Human Sciences Research Council.

Page 60
Chapter 6
Development NGOs and Ethnic Conflicts
Sunil Bastian
This paper is concerned with the politics of development NGOs in the context of a protracted struggle in Sri Lanka for self governance by the Sri Lankan Tamil minority. This is what is meant whenever the term "ethnic conflict is used in this paper. By 'development NGOs’ we mean those organizations of the fast-growing NGO sector whose primary concern has been production and distribution of resources and social development. Generally these organizations have the objective of improving the lot of the poorer sections of the population through their projects.
Before we begin the substantial discussion it is necessary to say a few words about how we understand the term "NGOs’ and point out the limitations in the perspectives dominant at present. Basically organizations that are identified by the term "NGOs’ form a section of the voluntary action in society. In Sri Lanka there is a long history for this type of activity. Some of the organizations that are today identified by the term "NGOs originated in the last century. What is new about the usage of the term "NGOs’ is the recent tendency among governments and international aid agencies to look towards some of these organizations as a possible means of achieving

Culture and Politics of Identity in Sri Lanka 03
various objectives. Initially these objectives were very much related to production and distribution of resources and social development. In recent times political objectives such as democracy and good governance' have been put on the agenda.
The prominence given to NGOs has expanded several-fold since the demise of the Soviet bloc and subsequent dominance of liberalism in politics as well as economics. Neoliberalism has spearheaded an attack on the state in various spheres. In the areas of production and distribution of resources there is now an emphasis on markets and private capital. NGOs are also being promoted to further the causes of social development, human rights, equal opportunities for women, etc. As stated in a recent study on NGOs, "Much of the interest in NGOs has been generated by disappointment in the past performance of the state. This poor performance has had economic and political dimensions. There have been economic concerns about the inefficiencies created by the state's interventions in the economy, including its implementation in development programmes. Equally, there have been political concerns that many states have not been accountable to society, and indeed have been more interested in controlling and moulding society to suit their own interests, than in responding to the needs of that society. Thus the present emphasis on NGOs is not simply a continuation of older traditions of voluntary social action. A section of this voluntary action has been given a new meaning in a new phase of capitalist development dominated by neoliberalism.
The importance given to NGOs has developed to the extent of it becoming a principal element in what can be called a new consensus in development assistance together with other elements of the liberal package such as liberal democracy, market forces and promotion of the private sector. Parallel to this role given to NGOs in the new policy agenda of donors is the increase in the amount of official development assistance channelled to these organizations nationally as well as internationally. "The proportion of total aid from OECD countries channelled through NGOs increased from 0.7 per cent in 1975 to 3.6 per cent in 1985, and at least 5 per cent in 19921994 (some US$2.3 billion in absolute terms). This figure is certainly an underestimate since it omits multilateral agency funding to NGOs

Page 61
104 Development NGOs and Ethnic Conflicts
and NGO funding from the US Government, which represented over half the DAC total in all previous years.' In the near future funding that will be channelled through NGOs is bound to rise even further. For example, “US Aid intends to channel 40% of its bilateral resources through NGOs by the end of the century, up from 34% in 1994.'
These average figures hide the significant variations among donors as well as the recipients. In 1995, for example official bilateral aid channelled through NGOs varied from 1 per cent for Japan to 30 per cent for Sweden. When it comes to recipients, NGOs from developed countries absorb the bulk. The number of development NGOs registered in the OECD countries of the industrialized "North” has grown from 1600 in 1980 to 2970 in 1993 and over the same period the total spending of these NGOs has risen from US$ 2.8 billion to US$5.7 billion in current prices.’” In 1994, northern NGOs as a whole transferred over US$7 billion to the developing world, collectively making them the fourth largest donor in the world.'
Nationally the donor funding channelled to local NGOs has also increased. But due to the absence of any central point which collects data on funding to these organizations it is difficult to give an accurate figure of the amount of donor funding absorbed by them. But the sheer expansion of the number of organizations which call themselves NGOs and the emergence of several large organizations (there are NGOs in Sri Lanka which employ more than 5000 people) point to their expanding role in Sri Lankan society. The emphasis given to these organzations by various donors including the World Bank points in the direction of further growth in the future. The very fact that all Sri Lankan governments routinely welcome their role in the implementation of various programmes also points to the fact that NGOs have become a part of the mainstream Sri Lanka society.
The role of NGOs in various international fora has expanded to such an extent that some writers assert that there is an emergence of an international civil society. In recent times the importance of NGOs based in developed countries has expanded in several ways due to the critical role assigned to them by the donors in civil war situations. NGOs together with multilateral agencies like UNHCR, UNICEF and ICRC, have become the key relief operations supported by donors. This has expanded the budgets and scale of operations of

Culture and Politics of Identity in Sri Lanka 105
these organisations.” Secondly, due to the new role in situations of civil war, international NGOs have become influential in shaping opinion about these conflicts among international organizations, donor countries, the mass media and the public of developed countries. In other words, they have increasingly become key actors in resolving political questions of developing Societies.
The increased donor funding to NGOs has also meant increased donor dependency. "The World Bank judges that whereas in the early 1970s about 1.5% of total NGO income came from donor sources, by the mid-1990s this share has risen to about 30%.'''NGOs which are not dependent on official aid for the majority of their budgets are now the exception rather than the rule.'''
Thus when we talk of NGOs today we are concerned with a major force that is bound to become even stronger in the near future. The increased link of NGOs with foreign funding in general and official development assistance in particular makes them an important element in the role of foreign aid in developing countries. It also becomes difficult to ignore these organizations when the relationship between official donors and recipient states is analysed. Their activities have also become much more closely linked to politics and political issues of developing countries.
Proliferation of NGOs equals strengthening of civil society?
Writings that look at the emergence of NGOs as a significant political phenomenon equate it with a process of strengthening the civil society. On the one hand there is a strategy to reform the state in order to make it more transparent and accountable. On the other, the emergence of NGOs is seen as a means of strengthening the civil society. At the level of donor policies this has been articulated sharply in the search for good governance'. In the case of development NGOs it is hoped that if they are strengthened by channelling funds through them and by increasing their control over development programmes, so too will civil Society be strengthened as a whole.

Page 62
106 Development NGOs and Ethnic Conflicts
Similarly, projects which aim to create decision making-processes in which NGOs have a presence allow thereby new means through which civil society can influence public decisions, and open that public process to more scrutiny.'
Although this article does not go into an extensive discussion on the concept of civil society, one of its main objectives is to show the contradictions of an historical notion of a civil society which does not unravel social forces and political trends in its constituent organizations. To question the earlier hopes of the state as a vehicle of economic growth and progressive social transformation is certainly valid. This calls for rethinking of earlier strategies of social transformation which concentrated on the state. Generally the demise of the Soviet experience demands a critical review of state-centric ideologies. However moving from this to a notion of a civil society without looking into the specificity of the political forces represented in it and their role is bound to lead to disappointment. An ahistorical perspective on civil society runs the risk of leading to the same disappointment as the earlier belief in the state, propagated in part by the 'dependency theorists' of the seventies, who did not take into account various interests and ideologies represented within the state. In a society such as Sri Lanka's, where ethnic contradictions have played such as dominant role, it is difficult to hope that a mere strengthening of civil society will contribute towards progressive social transformation. Contradictions such as ethnicity have a way of demonstrating the diversity in civil society much more sharply. In Sri Lanka, the barriers that have inhibited a resolution to the ethnic conflict are found not only in the structures of the state but in civil society as well. The prejudices and dominant nationalist ideologies of various groups in society, have been as much areason for the present situation as the centralized state structure. There are organizations in the civil society that represent extreme forms of nationalism. Those within the Sinhala ethnic formation believe that the ethnic conflict is an unjust attempt to divide Sri Lanka and argue that it should be handled primarily as a law and order problem. At the other nationalist extreme

Culture and Politics of Identity in Sri Lanka 107
are those who believe that a solution cannot be found within a united Sri Lanka. They do not have a perspective of Sri Lanka as a plural society, and are ready to condone the cause of a separatist demand. Thus if we are to have hope in civil society, democratizing civil Society is just as important as the question of democratizing state structures.' Much as we need a more differentiated analysis of civil society based on historical realities, organizations termed as NGOs and which form a part of civil society need to be scrutinized in the same manner. The term NGOs’ emerged first within the UN language to describe non-state actors who needed accredited status in some of the specialized agencies of the UN system. It is a descriptive term that puts together a variety of organizations that play very different and contradictory roles in society and history. It is quite obvious that if we are to get a grasp of these organizations there is a need to differentiate them.
One of the main reasons for the continuation of the trend to look at NGOs as a homogenous unit is the very popularity of these organizations among foreign funders. As already stated, foreign funding tends to look at them as a means of achieving various objectives. A recent study which looked at NGOs in three continents, stated that there are many reasons for the interest in NGOs “but it is clear that much of the motivation is pragmatic, and the role perceived for them is instrumental'.' This perspective sees them as neutral actors in society who can be used to achieve various objectives. In the process they are treated as a uniform category. The common term used is partners' which also hides the dependency relationship between these organizations and donors. Whatever differentiation and categorization is carried out is motivated by instrumentalist objectives. On this basis organizations are categorized by legal status, content of activities, membership/non membership, etc.
The instrumental perspective is dominant even in the literature that has begun to question the performance of NGOs. This rapidly expanding body of literature has definitely managed to dismantle the halo around NGOs by bringing out empirical data on their performance. Some of these studies have shown that the performance of NGOs is far from what they claim it to be. The writings also throw critical light on some of the holy cows of NGO discourse

Page 63
108 Development NGOs and Ethnic Conflicts
such as their being flexible organizations and closer to the poor, etc. The writings have also raised questions about the levels of accountability of these organizations. Nevertheless the basic framework of these studies looks at NGOs as a set of neutral actors in society which can be used for various objectives. The question then is how far have NGOs been successful in achieving the intended objectives.
Far from being neutral actors, NGOs are products of the historical development of various societies. They have various histories and social bases, represent diverse ideologies and interests and are linked to many other actors in society, including the state. They represent a variety of socio-political forces in society. Their historical role is determined by what they do and do not do in the context of various developments in society.
Similarly, it is difficult to analyse NGOs and the state machinery as if they are in two separate isolated compartments. There are many links between state and NGOs at policy, operational and personnel levels. The linkages at the personnel level have expanded so much that a standing joke is that the setting up of NGOs has become a part and parcel of the retirement plans of some members of the state bureaucracy.
There are linkages even at the level of party politics'. The very existence and expansion of some non-governmental organizations has been closely linked with a network of political patronage. Many of them participate in programmes which have a bearing on competition at the level of party politics.
All these developments within the NGO sector make it extremely important to promote an analysis of these organizations placing them in the context of the historical development of individual societies. To be of use it would need to analyse the historical origins of these organizations, their social and ideological bases, the structures that help to sustain them, their linkages with various forces in society, political economy, etc. Such an analysis is needed to understand the role NGOs play in the historical evolution of societies.
To understand the kind of analysis needed to study the NGO phenomenon, it would be useful to compare two published analyses of Sarvodaya, the well-known Sri Lankan “development NGO”. The

Culture and Politics of Identity in Sri Lanka 109
first is titled Valuing Organization, The Case of Sarvodaya. In this account the starting point and the focus of analysis is Sarvodaya, the organization itself. The study is located within the tradition of organizational analysis. The authors have tried to link the organizational form of Sarvodaya with the values of its development philosophy. The account shows how Sarvodaya has had to change its organizational structure with its expansion, and especially with the large-scale infusion of funds from donors. Each stage of this organizational change brought "new values to bear on the organization'," which the analysis suggests were thrust upon the organization by external donors. The contradiction between the new values and Sarvodaya's own philosophy is the key to understanding some of the present problems of the organization, and is central to their resolution.
The second analysis of Sarvodaya is in a publication titled Buddhism Transformed - Religious Change in Sri Lanka. As the title indicates, it looks at some modern transformations in the interpretation and practice of Buddhism in Sri Lanka. In contrast to the earlier account, the starting point of the analysis is Sri Lankan society. Sarvodaya is viewed as a part of a series of changes in Sri Lankan Buddhism in the course of modernization and the emergence of a Sinhala-Buddhist middle class. The authors term this process as the emergence of Protestant Buddhism'. Sarvodaya is seen as a modern organization that attempted to carve out a model of development in keeping with Buddhist doctrine and ethics, and it is based on a populist notion of Sri Lankan villages. This notion idealizes certain features of village life that are believed to have once existed. The authors show us the origins, substance and contradictions of what the earlier analysis called 'values'. But in contrast to the former, these 'values' are explained by placing them in the process that Sri Lankan society has gone through, with all its contradictions.
The most important contribution of the second type of analysis is its capacity to place Sarvodaya in the historical transformation of Sri Lankan society. The discussion focuses on the changes in SinhalaBuddhist social formation from the late nineteenth century to the modern period. The role of Sarvodaya in Sri Lankan society is interpreted within this context. It is possible to carry out a similar

Page 64
1 10 Development NGOs and Ethnic Conflicts
exercise placing Sarvodaya in the context of the politico-economic changes of Sri Lankan society.
It is this form of analysis, whichunravels the role of organizations called NGOs in the context of historical changes of specific societies, that is needed to get a better grasp of NGOs and what we could expect from them. This is in contrast to the projectbased or organization-based discussions of NGOs which abound in the consultancy world, where the transformations of Sri Lankan society are never considered.
In this type of an understanding of the NGO phenomenon it is extremely difficult to generalize on a global scale. Sweeping generalizations are very common among those who look at NGOs from an instrumentalist perspective, motivated not only by the interests of funders who persist in making generalizations about the so-called "Third World', but also perpetuated by consultants who fly around the world without a serious understanding of the histories of developing countries. Unfortunately, even in initiatives on what can be termed as "laudable causes', such as concern about the poor, the environment and women, issues are introduced without a serious look at the specific historical process of each country. With the emerging differentiation of the so-called Third World countries, such as approach is questionable, specially in regard to economics. As argued above the very term NGOs’ includes very different kinds of actors even in one country. It would be mind-boggling to attempt global generalizations about the historical role of NGOs.'
The objective of this is paper is to contribute to a discussion on Development NGOs and to look at their politics by placing their role in the context of what is popularly called the ethnic conflict of Sri Lanka. In our view this conflict has brought forward several key contradictions that Sri Lanka society has to resolve. The primary issue is the debate over the type of political structure that could manage ethnic relations. The debate has been between a centralized form of state structure that safeguards the rights of minorities with checks and balances, versus a form of devolution that will give regional units a substantial degree of autonomy to manage their own affairs. With the aggravation of the conflict, the answer to this question has decisively moved in the direction of regional autonomy. The ethnic conflict also

Culture and Politics of Identity in Sri Lanka 1
poses questions about the overall identity of the Sri Lankan state and the influence of Sinhalese nationalism within the policy making bodies of the state. The conflict faced by Sri Lankan society demands reforms on all these fronts.
The conflict also poses questions about ethnic relations in society. The society has been so polarized on an ethnic basis that it is virtually a divided country at the societal level. Past Suspicions and prejudices have been exaggerated and sharpened due to the protracted civil war. Much needs to be done at the societal level if Sri Lanka is to remain a single country.
The conflict has generated a variety of responses from a section of NGOs who have accepted that Sri Lanka has a serious problem in managing her ethnic relations. These groups have rejected the notion that the ethnic conflict is a mere "law and order issue or a terrorist problem that can be resolved purely through military means. They see the need to find a political solution to the conflict. They have also been sympathetic to the plight of the minorities and have worked in different ways to highlight their problems and to ameliorate their conditions.
The next section surveys these positive responses, and is followed by a section that highlights the specificity and limitations of development NGOs and the politics implied in these limitations. Then follow some critical comments on discussions amongst international NGOs who have tried to face the dilemmas posed by conflict situations. Finally, we look at the limitations of some of the fundamental concepts underlining the work of development NGOs, concepts which must be reviewed if these organizations are to play a positive political role in conflict situations.
NGO responses to the ethnic conflict
NGOs who have accepted that Sri Lanka's ethnic conflict is not a mere law and order problem have responded in several ways. As we have mentioned above a primary issue in resolving the ethnic conflict of Sri Lanka is a restructuring of the centralized state so that the minority Tamil community can enjoy a degree of self governance in the area where it predominates. Many NGOs played key roles in first

Page 65
1 12 Development NGOs and Ethnic Conflicts
articulating this demand in Sri Lankan society. They carried out activities to elaborate the concept of regional autonomy, clarifying and propagating it in Sri Lankan society. They contributed significantly to the process of making the idea of regional autonomy an accepted position in the Sri Lankan polity. Today both major political parties in the country accept the concept of regional autonomy as an answer to the ethnic conflict. The extremist Sinhala opinion often argues that the proposals of the incumbent government to set up a virtual federal system of government is a part of "a conspiracy of foreign funded NGOs’ to support the cause of division of the country. This at least confirms the degree of influence that the work of some NGOs have had in promoting this idea.
NGOs have also responded by attempting to question the hegemonic Sinhala-Buddhist ideology regarding the character of the Sri Lankan state and society. Their critique has focused on the dominant notion that Sri Lanka is a Sinhala-Buddhist country. This notion is enshrined in the Sri Lankan constitution, and the ideology is widely accepted among the majority community. It also gets concrete expression in state structures, policies, and in various activities of organizations in society, including some in the NGO sector. Many groups have questioned this interpretation and have carried out activities to promote notions of pluralism that stress the multi-ethnic/ multi-religious character of Sri Lankan society. This has been done through research activities, various forms of publications, audio-visual productions, seminars, discussions, etc.
The third response of NGOs has been to concentrate on violations of human rights that have taken place in the context of the conflict. These violations are monitored, documented, and information about them is disseminated with the objective of putting pressure on the government. In recent times, these groups have also focused on violations carried out by armed militant groups.
Human rights work has been carried out both at the national and international level. Activities at the international level have had several focal points: agencies of the UN system, especially the UN Human Rights Commission; the World Bank and the Aid Group sponsored by the World Bank; and various bilateral donors.

Culture and Politics of Identity in Sri Lanka 13
Conflict resolution is the fourth form of NGO response and a
more recent activity. Conflict resolution can be attempted at various levels, ranging from working with armed actors to working with the different groups in society. The latter seems to be the dominant intervention in Sri Lanka. Activities are based on a notion that the primary issue is for different identity groups in society to understand each other, and to resolve conflicts amicably or through peaceful means. But such activities can be carried out without addressing issues such as the transformation of the state structure or the questioning of hegemonic identities. It is because of this tendency that conflict resolution is considered as a separate category.
The principal response of development NGOs has been to take care of the social costs of the ethnic conflict. The activities of "development NGOs’ in the conflict situation of Sri Lanka falls broadly into three main categories-emergency relief, including the provision of food and medicines; meeting basic needs in the areas of health, education, water and housing; and income-generating activities. While relief aid is always given as an outright grant, basic needs and incomegenerating assistance varies between gifts or grants and repayable loans. International NGOs play a significant role in these activities. Some donors carry out their support for relief and rehabilitation activities principally through international NGOs. Some of this work has become established on a more long-term basis due to the persistence of the conflict.
The NGOs’ responses continued through the years of violence and struggle. The turning point of NGO activism was the anti-Tamil pogrom of July 1983. This event activated many dormant organizations, brought in new ones, and also prompted some to work together on various issues posed by the ethnic conflict of Sri Lanka. The entry of international NGOs into areas of work concerning ethnic issues was a significant development.
These positive responses of NGOs developed very slowly and with uneven effectiveness. Some groups have had to work under severe pressure and threat from champions of hegemonic ideology. Sometimes state institutions viewed their activities as detrimental to national security. They were also threatened by non-state actors, who violently opposed concessions to minorities. Among the non

Page 66
114 Development NGOs and Ethnic Conflicts
state actors who opposed these activities either directly or indirectly, were other NGOs with different ideologies and different interests. In some instances, the questioning of the hegemonic Sinhala-Buddhist ideology resulted in reactions with elements of extreme racism. Threats have also come from the Tamil side of the ethnic divide, from forces intolerant of any opposition to Tamil chauvinism and a settlement short of separation.
Under such difficult circumstances NGOs have made a significant contribution to promoting the idea that Sri Lanka has a serious problem of ethnic relations, and that there is a need to find a political answer to it. They have also made some progress in achieving acceptance of the notion that Sri Lanka is a plural society and that the identities and rights of various ethnic and religious groups have to be recognized and given space if Sri Lanka is to resolve the ethnic conflict. It is also important to note that there is participation of people from different ethnic and religious groups in these NGOs. The conflict itself has generated a process that has a multi-ethnic character among the progressive sections of civil society.
Politics of development NGOs
It is very clear from the above description of the responses of NGOs to the ethnic conflict, that the strategies of development NGOs who are involved in relief and rehabilitation stand out from the others by not tackling any of the fundamental issues of the ethnic conflict. The fundamental problems of the ethnic conflict revolve around the need to reform a highly centralized state, question the hegemony of the Sinhala-Buddhist ideology, and develop methods and institutions that would resolve identity-based conflicts through peaceful means. But what the development NGOs do is to simply transfer their activities based on distribution of resources to a situation of protracted ethnic conflict. In other words, the work in peaceful areas concerned with issues of poverty and social development is extended to areas where there is an on-going civil war in order to take care of the social costs of the conflict. The only difference is that the so-called "target group' that receives this assistance includes a new category called the 'victims

Culture and Politics of Identity in Sri Lanka 115
of conflict. The fundamental issues associated with the ethnic conflict are missing from this perspective. Some of the project descriptions of this strategy do not even mention the term ethnicity.
This approach leads to many political difficulties in the long term. Development NGOs often argue that they are non-political'. This statement ignores the fact that development is a very political act. Development NGOs intervene in societal relationships marked by struggles for resources and forms of power. This is a political act. In addition, development NGOs have now become powerful independent actors influencing these relationships. It places them on various sides of political struggles, and therefore their actions are extremely political. As we shall elaborate in the last section, development NGOs work on the basis of an extremely apolitical discourse even in areas where there is no overt conflict. This hides the political role they play. The problem gets compounded when they enter areas where political issues have taken the form of armed struggle and civil War.
Accepting then that the actions of development NGOs do play a political role, what interests us here is the nature of their politics when they enter into a situation of protracted ethnic conflict purely through the strategy of taking care of social costs. Their political role depends on the relationships they build up with other actors in the conflict. There are several dimensions to this profoundly political question.
The first dimension is the relationship between development NGOs and the Sri Lankan state. The reform of this state is a basic issue in the ethnic conflict. It is also a fundamental issue in expanding the democratic space of civil society in general. The state is also a party to the conflict. It has undergone significant changes in the area where the conflict prevails. The military arm of the state plays an important role in these areas. The state sets the basic parameters in the conflict.
Development NGOs working in the conflict area do not seem to have a perspective of reforming the state with which they come into contact in various ways. The relationship of development NGOs with the state is conceptualized in the Code of Ethics developed recently by some of these organizations in Sri Lanka.' Interestingly

Page 67
1 16 Development NGOs and Ethnic Conflicts
the section that tries to develop the code for dealing with the state is entitled "Consolidating the identity of the non-governmental organizations'. It states that "the recognition of the Democratic Socialist Republic of Sri Lanka is essential in order to strengthen and make fruitful and effective in a greater degree their NGOs) services within the national framework of a sovereign state.' Apart from the strange emphasis of highlighting sovereignty in a context where it has been questioned, what needs to be noted is how the relationship with the state is conceptualized. It seems that NGOs need recognition of the state' in order to be effective. The text that follows lists various legislations which could be used to get this recognition. The signatories to the document "solemnly' and "dutifully pledge to follow and fulfil the code of ethics.
Compare this with the discourse of human rights organizations, who looked at this very same legislation not as a means of getting recognition from the state, but to ensure their freedom of association.' It is not that human rights organizations do not deal with the state, but their perspective of relating to the state is not for recognition from the state, but through the notion of the right of organizations to exist without interference from the state. Some organizations have gone so far as to say that no form of registration is necessary in order to exercise this right.
What is more alarming is how this Code of Ethics links the question of consolidating the identity of NGOs and the so-called recognition by the state. It states that it is this recognition which helps to consolidate the identity of NGOs. The same section says that "the process of community development should not assume the character of an isolated secretive and unpopular performance'. This presumably means that if the state does not recognize these organizations they would be isolated, secretive and unpopular.
The ideology reflected in the Code of Ethics accepts the state as it is. It neither questions the state, nor has aspects within it which will help to transform the state. On the contrary, the objective seems to be to find a language to deal with the state in order to carry out their projects. This leads to a highly subservient attitude towards the State,

Culture and Politics of Identity in Sri Lanka 117
As we shall argue below, the absence of a framework to tackle
the state is a lacuna in the work of development NGOs in general. Even in non-conflict areas these organizations do not tackle the question of state reforms. Within such an ideological framework, development NGOs are very much involved in supporting and strengthening a state which is an important actor in the conflict. This happens through several specific acts, like filling the gaps and taking over some of the functions of the state especially in the area of welfare services.
The other important political role of these organizations is to give legitimacy to the Sri Lankan state, which is a party to the conflict, nationally as well as internationally. The Sri Lankan state has used the presence of development NGOs as an indicator of their commitment to look after civilians. In this regard the presence of international NGOs is specially highlighted. In a period where recognition and working with NGOs has become a part of the orthodoxy, this legitimizing role of development NGOs is extremely important for the Sri Lankan state.
The above criticism of the politics of development NGOs vis-a-vis the state should not be mistaken to represent that these organizations should have no dealings with the state nor come to a working relationship with it. Neither does the criticism mean that we should ignore the humanitarian task of taking care of the social costs of the conflict. What it does mean is that if there was a closer analysis of the underlying causes of the ethnic conflict, these organizations could have carried out the same functions and simultaneously contributed to reforms of the state. This would have been a different form of politics.
Development NGOs have also become partners of the politics of international donors who provide emergency aid to deal with internal conflicts of recipient countries. For these donors emergency relief has become the principal form of response to an essentially political problem. As we have mentioned, the amount of funding channelled for emergencies has increased and, in keeping with the general trend to move away from states as principal mechanisms for implementing foreign funded programmes, implementation of relief programmes has also been privatized through NGOs. In a way the funding market on

Page 68
1 18 Development NGOs and Ethnic Conflicts
emergencies has been deregulated. There are large numbers of NGOs, both local and foreign, who now bid in this deregulated funding market for work in a context of protracted conflict. With the trend among funding agencies of promoting NGOs to replace the state in development activities, development NGOs could be the main conduit of this conservative politics of donor governments.
The ultimate outcome of their limited practices is the creation of an enormous gap between the population's major need and the focus of most development NGOs. What people want is a political resolution of the conflict and the restoration of normalcy. These are not only far removed from the present agenda of the development NGOs, but there is little hope that they will ever be included in their agenda unless their notions of development are revised.
Finally, what could be more serious is the danger of activities of organizations working with these perspectives becoming structurally linked to the conflict itself. Experience in other parts of the world suggest this to be a distinct possibility. In a paper discussing dilemmas facing relief operations in times of conflict, the Africa Rights Group demonstrates how relief has entered into processes of violence and oppression in countries such as Ethiopia, Southern Sudan, Angola, Somalia, Bosnia, and Rwanda. In some of these situations it has contributed to a prolongation of the conflict.**
Debates among the international NGOs
Debate over the facing of "dilemmas' posed by conflicts is current among NGOs engaged in relief and rehabilitation work in such situations. Comments in this section are based on a report titled "Beyond “Working in Conflict': Understanding Conflict and Building Peace' published by the Conflict, Development and Peace Network (CODEP) in UK. The report is published through the Relief and Rehabilitation Network of ODI. It is a product of a three day workshop which brought together not only a large number of international NGOs active in conflict situations, but also representatives of UN agencies and academics. This was the second workshop of this network, and gives an insight into the conceptual basis of these discussions.

Culture and Politics of Identity in Sri Lanka 119
The first workshop of the CODEP network was held in November 1994 and was focused more narrowly. It was concerned primarily with operational aspects of NGO projects in a conflict situation. The discussion was strongly influenced by the need for the NGOs staff to adjust to what they called "complex emergencies', and to find ways and means to adjust to the conflict. No serious attempt was made to understand the conflicts themselves. Some NGO discussions are still at this level. The September 1996 workshop went beyond this narrow focus and gave us an opportunity to comment on the fundamental conceptual basis of these discussions. In our view the deliberations of the workshops reflect some of the basic flaws of the NGOs' debates concerning situations of political instability.
First of all, the entire discussion of the workshop was based on "conflicts,' a terror which brought together a variety of political phenomena across the world. For example, it was common to hear Bosnia, Rwanda and Sri Lanka mentioned in the same breath, an attitude worse than the concept of "Third World poverty' used by many organisations to tackle development issues. The single term 'conflict cannot characterize what is going on from Bosnia to Sri Lanka and smacks of the discredited practice of generalizing and totalizing which ignores the specificities extremely important to an understanding of internal conflicts. In recent times, criticisms of orientalist scholarship on developing countries has revealed the extent to which such generalizations limit the understanding of these societies. This could be a new form of orientalism with dangerous political consequences."
When conflicts are abstracted in this fashion it is also possible to treat them as independent of their linkages with society. Instead of understanding the linkages between internal conflicts and development, and identifying areas of intervention that could deal with the underlying problems within mainstream development activities, what is happening is the creation of an epiphenomenon called 'conflicts’.
Following closely on the construction of this new category called "conflicts', was the notion of something new in the nature of

Page 69
120 Development NGOs and Ethnic Conflicts
current internal conflicts. This assertion was linked to two interrelated factors, the first being the end of the Cold War. It was widely assumed that during the cold war period internal conflicts of many countries were linked to superpower rivalry and determined by it. Secondly, it was asserted that in the new situation 'conflicts are no longer directed within a framework of accepted rules of engagement and are likely to involve mass social trauma. Civilians are targeted, communities are set against each other and often the hierarchy of respect between young and old is lost to the authority of the gun.'" In short we are seeing a more “barbaric” form of conflicts now.
There is no doubt that internal conflicts of some countries had direct links with Cold War politics, but it would be wrong to generalize as that would ignore the specific histories of different countries and subsume them in the politics of the Superpowers. A close look at many of the societies where there are internal conflicts shows continuities before and after the Cold War. Some of the conflicts that we see in these countries have long histories based on social processes internal to these countries. Generally, the use of the cold war to periodize conflicts of developing societies not only strengthens a Eurocentric view that downplays the weight of the relative autonomy of politics of developing societies, but also plays into the hands of political forces in these countries who always assert that these conflicts are a result of conspiracies of outside forces.
There is an alarming notion that 'new' conflicts are characterized by a greater degree of civilian casualties. It is astonishing to see how some NGOs come to developing countries with basic humanitarian concerns but forget long histories of colonialism, national liberation struggles and Cold War counterinsurgency strategies. Counterinsurgency strategies always had civilians as an active component with ensuing costs to these people. In fact the counterinsurgency strategy of the British against the communist insurgency in Malaya is often quoted as a classic example. At least the history of the Vietnam war should remind us of the US government's attempts to bomb this nation into the Stone Age with enormous cost to the civilian population. Are we to believe that there were some sort of "accepted rules of engagement' in these wars where western powers were the dominant players, but that now what

Culture and Politics of Identity in Sri Lanka 21
we see is the “barbarism” of the “Third World”? Surely if international NGOs are to be of use to societies there is a need to get over these prejudices.
The third limitation of the conceptual framework of the report is the absence of an analysis of NGOs themselves as active political players in societies with on-going conflicts. Although at one point the report points out the need for such an analysis, the underlying subtext of the report suggests that NGOs are outsiders who come into conflicting societies. It is also not clear whether an analysis can be done if the above mentioned shortcomings are to dominate in the overall framework.
The most promising aspect of the discussions of CODEP is the dilemma faced by NGOs when they try to deal with situations in a neutral manner. Tensions in the attempt to deal with highly charged political situations through notions of neutrality are seen throughout the document. In fact the discussions were motivated by the dilemma faced by NGOs in countries such as Rwanda where they were accused of supporting the perpetrators of the genocide.
The debates in the workshop show the limitations in notions of neutrality utilized by relief agencies when working in the context of highly charged political situations. Intervention in a conflict situation through notions of "emergency' and "neutral humanitarianism' becomes a political problem when the conflict is of a protracted nature, making humanitarian organizations a part and parcel of the overall context.
The first casualty in such a situation is the notion of "emergency'. The underlying assumption of the notion of "emergency' is to consider conflicts as isolated "events' in society which occur from time to time making emergency responses the norm. These constitute mostly post hoc responses, providing assistance with relief, rehabilitation and reconstruction after a conflict has occurred. The aim is to restore the situation to what it was before the conflict. But what happens to these assumptions when the conflict is a protracted one? Protracted conflicts make evident the structural conflicts that have existed in the Society all along. In such a context it is extremely difficult to deal with the situation through a notion of emergency.
Similarly how far can one stretch the idea of neutrality' in the context of a conflict with direct political overtones when the

Page 70
122 Development NGOs and Ethnic Conflicts
humanitarian organizations become apart of the overall context within which the conflict occurs? For example, is it possible to maintain that relief agencies who followed the troops of Western powers into northern Iraq in order to carry out relief activities were engaged in a politically neutral act in the context of a conflict that was extremely political? The intentions of the individual actors do not determine their political role. The determinant is the context defined by a combination of acts of all the other actors in the scene. Such an analysis show us the hollowness of the argument of "neutrality' in a context of a protracted political conflict. This is all the more true when some of the political actors with vested interests in the conflict become the funders and backers of humanitarian agencies.
Anyhow it is difficult for development NGOs rooted in traditions of social justice, which itself involves taking a stand on the side of the underprivileged and oppressed, to hide behind notions of "neutrality'. This is all the more true when structural inequalities explode into violent conflicts and the lives of the poor people which legitimized the very existence of these organizations are in danger.
In our view in order to unravel the political problems faced by development NGOs working in a context of protracted political conflicts, we have to abandon the superficial discussion of "conflicts' or the attempt to hide behind notions of "neutrality'. These pose questions about the very notions of development that these organizations work with even when there is peace. As we shall argue below, the commonly held NGO concept of development has resulted in the notion of it being an extremely apolitical process.This makes it very difficult for these organizations to deal with situations of overt conflict.
Limitations of the concepts of development
The economic project of capitalism is dominated today by the attempt to expand the resource base of the country by making use of market forces. Within this context, there are interventions by various development NGOs in order to increase the share of disadvantaged groups in this economic development. Some of them now couple this objective with specific concerns such as gender and environment.

Culture and Politics of Identity in Sri Lanka 123
By and large the historical origins of many of these interventions can be traced back to counter-reactions against the idea which equated development with economic growth and also hoped that once growth is achieved there would be trickle down to poorer sections of the population. The counter-reaction was to expand the idea of development to include many aspects that came under the rubric of social development, and also to argue that in order to improve the conditions of the poor it was necessary to target them specially and to intervene directly through various projects. In other words, development includes much more than mere growth, and the trickle down process does not occur automatically unless the poor' are targeted. Within these perspectives we have seen the proliferation of projects which have tried to identify target groups' and their needs and to improve their lot. Associated with these activities is the proliferation of terms such as participation', 'group formation', networking, identification of real needs of people', etc. These are basically concepts that have tried to define the relationship between projects and beneficiaries. The principal aim has been to try to make the beneficiaries active participants and owners of these interventions.
Various criticisms can be made of these counter-reactions to the growth-oriented notions of development. For example, in expanding the notion of development from simple growth, what are the important areas that should be included? Citing her achievements in education and health, Sri Lanka is still quoted as an example of a better Third World model of development where there have been achievements in social development despite low levels of economic growth. But how does one reconcile this positive picture with Sri Lanka's inability to resolve the problem of ethnic relations which has almost divided the society into two? It is a society which has seen extreme degrees of violence, its suicide rates are among the highest in the world, etc., etc. The point we want to make is that as soon as we include these aspects, characterizing Sri Lanka's development as some sort of a model becomes highly questionable. In other words it is debatable what should be included, in addition to economic growth, to measure levels of development of a society.
The principal defect of counter-reactions to growth-oriented notions of development that interests us here is the absence of a

Page 71
124 Development NGOs and Ethnic Conflicts
discussion on the role of various institutional relationships in understanding the conditions of the poor. Underlying the conditions in which poor people live is a set of relationships into which they enter in the course of the various activities which constitute their struggle for survival. For example, in the context of a farmer engaged in cultivation he or she is locked into a set of institutionalized relationships that determine the following:
the structure of ownership and control of productive assets arrangement for credit and irrigation arrangements for use of productive assets (e.g., tenancy, renting. of equipment and livestock) arrangements for hiring labour (nature of employment contracts methods of wage payments interlinking of labour hiring, tenancy and credit’ effectiveness of organized action by farmers.
In the day-to-day struggle of a peasant farmer to obtain what mainstream economics calls factors of production', he/she has to struggle within these relationships with a variety of actors. It is outside the capacity of the farmer to alter the "rules of the game' underlying these relationships in his/her own favour when it comes to the question of survival. For the well-being of the poor farmer, interested organizations have to devise ways to alter this pattern of relationships. Thus a fundamental objective of development strategy that hopes to shape capitalism to give the disadvantaged a stake, is to change these relationships so as to enhance the capacity of the less powerful to determine their own living conditions and control resources.
An approach to development which believes that it is possible to demarcate the poor from the rest of the population for intervention purposes refuses to analyse these institutional relationships into which the poor are locked. This also means that it does not have as part of its agenda the objective of challenging these relationships and the entrenched institutions which maintain them. The overall effect of this approach is an uncritical attitude towards the structures of capitalism within which many of these target group-oriented projects operate. It also ignores the impact on the poor of the growth process

Culture and Politics of Identity in Sri Lanka 125
within capitalism. In practical terms these projects find it difficult to achieve the objective of uplifting the poor because their fate is intimately linked to the nature of the growth process."
A perspective on development that does not analyse the institutional relationships into which the poor are locked does not deal with questions of power in general and issues related to politics of development in particular. On the contrary an analysis that focuses on institutional relationships invariably has to deal with structures of power. This in turn brings out the importance of focusing on politics even when the issues seem purely economic. The dominant discourse of development NGOs treats politics' as some kind of an externality. This has given rise to a development ideology which is extremely apolitical.
The emphasis on looking at institutional relationships, power and politics in development becomes extremely important even to achieve practical results from development projects in a context where the logic of the market has come to dominate. Very often, so-called project evaluations do not even acknowledge this fact. The often publicized successes have either to do with projects reaching a section that has enough endowments to fight the market, or projects that have successfully obtained support from the political processes in order to deal with questions of power.
An ideology of development that does not deal with issues of power cannot deal with conflicts. Historically conflicts in society are struggles for power. Some social theories look at conflicts as reflections of the fundamental structural problems of society. In a further elaboration of this notion conflicts can be seen as the principal motor of history, as a central point of analysis and a fundamental issue of development.
On the other hand, there is the opinion that conflicts are an aberration in society. In the fifties the main focus of the social theories was the issue of adaptation and integration in societies. Structural fissures and divisive conflicts in society received less attention. Conflict was reduced to a peripheral issue of 'strains' and "tensions'. Pushing conflicts that challenged the status quo to the periphery suited the conservative political climate that prevailed at that time. An ideology

Page 72
126 Development NGOs and Ethnic Conflicts
of development that cannot deal with power and conflict invariably begins to treat conflict in this conservative fashion,and leads to bizarre practices.
When conflicts are treated as aberrations in the normal path of development, it is easy to consider them an isolated events in society. The link between conflict and what happens in so-called normal society is rarely analysed. The emphasis is always on the event. This is what underlies the relief activities in which many of the development NGOs are involved. Social disruptions that create refugees are isolated events, and relief is the answer.
Treating conflicts as events also allows development NGOs to work as if conflicts have nothing to do with areas where there is overt peace. Some development NGOs working in the north and east of Sri Lanka have projects in the rest of the country as well. However there is hardly any link between the activities carried out in the different areas of the country. The underlying message is: conflict is an "aberration' in the north/east and has to be tackled there. The presence of ethnic structures in the rest of the country and their linkages to development are not recognized. Thus activities in the rest of the country can continue without reference to the ethnic conflict.
Often development NGOs working in conflict areas either stop or limit their development projects when the conflict escalates and re-start them in the same way as before once the crisis is over. Often reports from such organizations give the escalation of the conflict as the reason for shortcomings in implementing their projects, a practice usually legitimized from a practical' point of view. But what is important to note is that this practice has the underlying assumption of development having nothing to do with the conflict. That is why it can be curtailed when conflict escalates and resumed unchanged once the crisis passes. In other words, these aberrations in the normal development process are to be ignored. A recently concluded conflict does not enter into conceptualisation of projects.
Within this perspective there is no room for conflict mitigation through development activities, or for action before the event. Acceptance of the possibility of mitigation requires a recognition of the relationships between conflicts and 'normal' conditions in society, and so demands a focus on issues of power.Instead what has happened is the creation of a new sector called conflicts' for funding purposes.

Culture and Politics of Identity in Sri Lanka 127
The most important contribution made by recent debates on
power is the importance laid on categories other than those based on resource-distribution, such as class, in determining power. We see, for example, how important gender relationships are in the issue of power, and also the importance of power struggles based on ethnic identity as has been amply demonstrated in Sri Lanka.
The operation of categories such as ethnicity and gender shows us how power cannot be reduced to control of resources alone. There are many other institutions in society such as socialization practices and ideological structures which reproduce gender and ethnic relations dominant in Society. These cannot be reduced to a question of distribution of resources. On the contrary, the recognition of the importance of these categories shows us the need to supplement class categories with ethnicity and gender even to understand the relationships linked to the production and distribution of resources. For example, the nature of the production relations into which a tea plucker on a Sri Lankan tea estate is locked is determined not only by the fact that she has to sell labour power for a living, but also by her gender and the ethnic minority to which she belongs. It is not enough to look at her only as a worker. It is also not enough to addgender and ethnicity as some kind of external addition to the class. It is necessary to blend class, ethnicity and gender in order to get the full picture of the nature of the labour process.
The development ideology unable to tackle institutionalized relationships of power has inadequate concepts to tackle ethnicity and its relationship to development. The starting point of dealing with ethnicity in the perspective of development promoted by development NGOs is to equate it with cultural attributes. Here 'ethnicity' means given ascriptive cultural characteristics associated with ethnic groups. This is very much in keeping with primodialist interpretations of ethnicity in contrast to an instrumentlist perspective. While the former looks at ethnicity as a given cultural attribute that can be traced way back into history in a continuous unilinear fashion, the latter treats ethnicity as a socially constructed category. The processes accompanying development form an important contributor to this social construction.

Page 73
128 Development NGOs and Ethnic Conflicts
Two simple conclusions have followed these primodialist interpretations of ethnicity especially in development literature. First, these cultural identities will get assimilated into something larger such as a "national identity with modernization and economic development. "Given the definition of ethnic groups as cultural groups, it followed inevitably that a concept like assimilation should develop as a central tool of analysis of ethnic change.'
This view does not take ethnicity seriously because it expects such phenomena to disappear in the course of historical development of societies. This belief has taken different forms in various development theories. In the social theories that link development with modernization, it was expected that with development and modernization, ascriptive characteristics such as ethnic identity would become less important. They would be replaced by acquired characteristics, such as identities arising from occupations, income levels, etc. Societal processes would be governed more by these acquired identities and "rational criteria. Getting rid of such traditional features as ethnicity was important for development and for progress. When ethnic phenomena persist they are dismissed as "manifestations of irrational passions of traditional societies'. The South Asian term for this is 'communalism' and has always been considered bad and negative.
There are parallels between the modernization approach and the orthodox Marxist view at this level. As with the modernization approach, Marxism relegates ethnicity to the past. It expects ethnicity to be replaced by the concept of class. This is expected to take place with the development of capitalist relations. The same economism in certain Marxist traditions even expects some nations' to be "nonhistoric'. The dynamism of the economic system is expected to absorb these nations into larger entities, and make their individual identities disappear. When ethnicity persists orthodox Marxists explain it away as a "manipulation of the ruling class', or a "false consciousness'. Such analysis often falls to the level of conspiracy theories or reflects a certain form of fundamentalism. The refusal to view ethnicity and ethnic phenomena as categories that shape societies and history has had very damaging results.

Culture and Politics of Identity in Sri Lanka 129
The second conclusion that accompanied primodialist interpretations of ethnicity in development literature is that problems of ethnic relations can be taken care of by a "more just' distribution of resources between ethnic groups. The simplistic message in this conclusion is that ethnicity and issues associated with it are features of traditional society. The real question now is the issue of poverty and resource distribution. We can deal with the problems of ethnicity by having enough material wealth to go around. If this impact is kept at areasonably just level' (usually resources distributed according to ethnic proportions) between ethnic groups, one could deal with ethnicity and ethnic phenomena. Often, writings with such a conceptual base reduce the phenomenon of ethnicity to an exercise in arithmetic. The prominence of ethnic conflicts at the end of the twentieth century signifies the breakdown of these unilinear, teleological social theories which expect all countries in the world to move in a unilinear direction of "modernization' and nationhood. Identities arising out of language and religion are considered to be things of the past to be replaced by 'modern' symbols. There is no longer any justification for clinging to the belief that the array of processes commonly called "modernisation' (expanding networks and media communication, urbanization, rising educational and literacy levels, increasing complexity of economic activity and social structures) leads ineluctably to deepening levels of attachment to the "nation' defined by the state of residence, or the erosion of cultural solidarities of ethnos, race or religion separate from the nation state unit.'
Many would argue today that modernization processes create greater space for the reconstruction of ethnic identities. Ethnic phenomena have come to dominate the central stage of politics and social transformation in many societies. As we have argued above, understanding the operation of ethnicity is an important element in unravelling the process of production and distribution of resources. Asserting ethnic identities has also become a principal means of countering the power of the global marketplace and the destruction its penetration entails. In some instances this has led to overt conflicts. Despite this presence of ethnicity, a large number of interventions carried out under the rubric of development still shows the persistence of the untenable ways of dealing with ethnicity

Page 74
130 Development NGOs and Ethnic Conflicts
discussed above. Much of the conceptual baggage of development NGOs is characterized by such notions of ethnicity. In some instances they even lead to extremely prejudicial (ethnic conflicts regarded as "irrational) attitudes.
Concluding remarks
This paper has tried to point out some of the fundamental flaws in the notions of development utilized by development NGOs. The perspective of development that dominates these organizations does not tackle issues of the institutional relationships in society into which the poor are locked. Instead the attempt is to delink the poor from these relationships and target them directly through various interventions in the hope of improving their lot. This approach is true even when these organizations work in peaceful situations.
Apart from the limitations of this approach even in relation to the practical impact of these organizations, what interests us here most is the extremely apolitical discourse of development constructed by this ideology of development. This arises principally because an ideology of development that does not tackle the institutional relationships into which the poor are locked does not also deal with issues of power. Institutional relationships in society are a reflection of the power structure and it is not possible to deal with one without tackling the other.
A number of other drawbacks follow as a result of the inability of the development perspectives of these NGOs to tackle institutional relationships and power. The two that have been relevant for this paper are conflict and ethnicity. The absence of a framework that deals with power makes development NGOs treat conflicts as 'isolated events' or "an aberration in the normal path of development. With such notions one can only take care of the social costs without tackling any of the underlying reasons for the conflict. When it comes to ethnicity, at worst it is dealt with as a traditional hangover of Third World societies. At best it is looked upon as something that can be tackled purely through resource distribution..
The political difficulties faced by development NGOs when working in conflict situations can be traced to the limitations of this

Culture and Politics of Identity in Sri Lanka 131
overall perspective on development. Conflicts are situations where the contradictions of some of the relationships in society have led to violence and sometimes the use of arms. Sri Lanka's ethnic conflict, based on the struggle of the Sri Lankan Tamil minority for autonomy is such a situation. This struggle involves fundamental issues like reforming the relationship between the Tamil minority and the state. This is a context where political struggle is overt. When development NGOs enter into such a context they begin to play apolitical role. The paper has analysed this political role vis-a-vis the national state and international donors. The apolitical discourse of development NGOs does not give these organizations a framework for the reform of the state which is a critical element in the ethnic conflict. By working without such a perspective, development NGOs complement the activities of the state and also legitimize it. They become carriers of the conservative politics of donor governments who respond to situations of conflict through emergency assistance.
Development NGOs need to tackle these questions seriously if they are to become a positive force in situations of conflict. This is all the more important because of the dominant role that they have begun to play in the present context of neoliberalism due to the prominence given to them by the donors. It is not possible to hide behind notions of neutrality in such a context. NGOs are the products of societies playing various political roles. There is a special need to discuss the functions of international NGOs which enter highly charged political situations supported by funds from donor governments. Otherwise we will have a proliferation of development organizations .... in the NGO sector that claim to be concerned with injustices in society but which shy away from dealing with issues of power and conflict in a serious fashion. Does this signify the emergence of another powerful conservative sector which is unwilling to tackle questions related to fundamental social and political transformations in our societies? Are we seeing the entrenchment of organizations who will support the status quo, and who hope that the "aberration of these conflicts will not disturb their business and projects? Will they be a hindrance to the resolution of conflicts in our societies by creating structures and an illusion of normalcy even in the middle of a conflict?

Page 75
132 Development NGOs and Ethnic Conflicts
Notes
This paper is a revised version of a chapter in a forthcoming publication under the title, "The Politics of Development and Ethnic Conflict. A. Bebbington and J. Farrington et al, Reluctant Partners? NonGovernmental Organizations, the State and Sustainable Agricultural Development, Routledge, 1993.
See Participatory Development and Good Governance, Development
Co-operation Guideline Series, Development Assistance Committee, OECD, 1995 for summary of this new consensus on development assistance.
Michael Edwards and David Hulme, 'NGO Performance and Accountability: Introduction and Overview', in Non Governmental Organizations - Performance and Accountability, Beyond the Magic Bullet, Michael Edwards and David Hulme (eds.) Save the Children, Earthscan Publications, 1995.
Overseas Development Institute, Briefing Paper, 1995 (4) August,
Ibid.
Michael Edwards and David Hulme, op.cit.
Jon Bennett and Mary Kayetisi-Blewitte, "Beyond "Working in Conflict": Understanding Conflict and Building Peace', CODEP, Relief and Rehabilitation Network, Network Paper 18, November 1996.
An increasing percentage of development aid from both government and non-government sources is spent on emergency responses to conflict. The proportion of ODA (Overseas Development Assistance) allocated to relief by OECD countries rose from US$500 million in 1980 to over US$3500 million in 1993.(J. Macrae, "Aid Under Fire: Redefining Relief and Development Assistance in Unstable Situations', Background Paper, Wiston House, Wilton Park, Sussex, UK, 7-9 April 1995).
ODI, Briefing Paper, op.cit.
Michael Edwards and David Hulme, op.cit.

Culture and Politics of Identity in Sri Lanka 133
Perhaps the best approach in using the idea of civil society as a means of social transformation comes from Gramsci. Making use of the concept of "hegemony, which identifies structures of domination outside production relations, he pointed to a variety of mechanisms that permeate civil society such as trade unions, schools, churches and an entire system of values, attitudes, beliefs, morality, etc., that are in one way or other supportive of the established order and class interests that dominate (Carl Boggs, Gramsci’s Marxism, Pluto Press, 1976). Thus for Gramsci civil society was an important arena for political interventions, in addition to capturing state power, which he thought traditional Marxist analysis had ignored. The dominance of the Catholic Church in Italian society would have been an obvious reason why the attention to civil society became important for Gramsci. The important point is that Gramsci’s rendering of civil society was coloured by underlining political objectives. There was no belief in an abstract civil society as such. This leads to more concrete historical analysis of the civil society.
John Farrington et al., Reluctant Partners, op.cit.
Edwards and Hulme, NGOs - Performance and Accountability, Earthscan, 1995; and Ian Smillie, The Alms Bazaar, IT Pubs, 1995 are two recent contributions looking critically at the performance of NGOs. Rogger C. Riddell, Anthony Bebbington and Lennart Peck, Promoting Development by Proxy, The Development Impact of Government Support to Swedish NGOs, ODI, London, February 1995, is a similar study focusing on the experience of a particular funding agency.
S.Zadek, and S.Szabo, Valuing Organization, The Case of Sarvodaya, The New Economics Foundation, February 1994.
Ibid.
R.Gombrich and G.Obeysekere, Buddhism Transformed - Religious Change in Sri Lanka, Princeton University Press, 1988.
See J-F. Bayart, "Finishing with the Idea of the Third World: The Concept of the Political Trajectory', in J.Manor (ed.) Rethinking Third World

Page 76
34
2)
21
22
23
24
25
26
Development NGOs and Ethnic Conflicts
Politics, Longman, 1991, for a critical discussion of the use of the concept of Third World in political analysis.
This is not of course to argue that one cannot generalize beyond a specific society. For example, there are many similarities in South Asia which make it possible to make general statements across the countries. This is primarily because of a shared colonial experience which has resulted in commonalities in the recent histories of South Asian countries.
NGO National Action Front, Code of Ethics for NGOs involved in Social Development, made public on 12 September 1995.
NGONational Action Front, op. cit. Section 20.
See S.J.Neff, "The activities of the Presidential Commission of Inquiry in respect of non-governmental organizations (NGOs), Report of a mission to Sri Lanka in May-June 1991 on behalf of the International Commission of Jurists. This report was published by the ICJ with the support of the human rights organizations of Sri Lanka when the government appointed a Presidential Commission in 1989 to investigate NGOs. The report is critical of the Commission and puts forward a case for autonomy of NGOs without state interference on the basis of the fundamental right of freedom of association.
"Humanitarianism Unbound?'', Discussion Paper no.5, Africa Rights, November 1994.
Jon Bennet and Mary Kayetisi-Blewitt, op.cit.
Because capitalism operates as a global phenomenon there can be similarities in poverty situations across the globe. However the differentiation that capitalism it self has brought about in the world makes it difficult to use terms such as "Third World poverty', in the present context.
Most discussion of development NGOs are based on sweeping generalisations about societies of developing countries. See R.L.Stirrat,

27
28
29
30
32
Culture and Politics of Identity in Sri Lanka 135
"The New Orthodoxy and Old Truths; Participation, Empowerment and Other Buzz Words', in Assessing Participation: A Debate from South Asia, Konark/Duriyog Nivaran, 1996, for an account of how this happens in rural development practices.
Jon Bennett and Mary Kayetisi-Blewitt, "Beyond"Working in Conflict” op.cit.
This is not to deny the need for emergency assistance. Emergency assistance is necessary when there is large scale social disruption. It has value in itself. But we need to see its limitations. Our problem is its dominance.
Rizwanul Islam, "Rural institutions and poverty in Asia', in The Poverty Agenda: Trends and Policy Options, Gerry Rogers and Rolph van der Hoeven (eds.), a contribution to the World Summit on Social Development, ILO, 1995.
Development NGOs can use the counter-argument of the currently fashionable participatory strategies. Some might argue that strategies which attempt to involve beneficiaries in projects can strengthen the poor to challenge existing relationships. In our view, at least in Sri Lanka, these participatory projects are concerned more with implementing NGO projects rather than with seriously tackling questions of power and the institutionalized relationships that maintain power. The objective is to get the participation of people in their projects rather than themselves participating in the ongoing struggles of the people. Very often these participatory strategies are trapped in projects and are outside the ongoing struggles of the population. See Assessing Participation, A Debate from South Asia Sunil Bastian and Nicola Bastian (eds.), Konark, 1996, for a criticial review of participatory approaches which demonstrates their inability to tackle issues of power.
A.L.Epstein, Ethnos and Identity, Three Studies in Ethnicity, Tavistock, London, 1978.
C.Young, "Ethnic Diversity and Public Policy: An Overview', Occasional Paper no.8, World Summit for Social Development, UNRISD, Geneva, 1994.

Page 77
Chapter 7
Transformation of Muslim Political Identity
Shari Knoerzer
Two-thirds of the Muslim community is living outside the Eastern Province. Therefore that two-thirds is like tons of salt being thrown into the mighty sea. Thus the political strength of the Eastern Province Muslims is and will be the political strength of the entire Muslim community of Sri Lanka. - M. H. M. Ashraff
The formation of the Sri Lanka Muslim Congress (SLMC) marks the transformation and Islamicization of Muslim politics in Sri Lanka. In the past, Sri Lanka's Muslim community, due to its geographically scattered population and minority status, found its political interests best met through participation and integration with the majority Sinhalese parties - the United National Party (UNP) and the Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP). Several small, short-lived, and inconsequential Muslim parties were formed on and off throughout Sri Lanka's political history; however, in the mid-1980s Sri Lanka witnessed the formation of an eastern-based Muslim party that in less than a decade became the nation's third largest vote collector and earned a position of leadership in the present government. The SLMC was able to offer the Muslim community better representation

Culture and Politics of Identity in Sri Lanka 137
than the majority Sinhalese parties because the SLMC was a party which adhered to Islamic ideology. The SLMC changed conventional Muslim politics by creating an assertive Muslim voice and agenda that previously had not been expressed. The Muslim community would no longer only be tolerated; through the SLMC, Muslims would now be represented.
Not only did the formation of the SLMC bring a change to Muslim politics, but it was a direct indicator of the concurrent transformation of Muslim political identity taking place in Sri Lanka. Increased economic and educational opportunities for the Muslim community, along with its mobilization caused by the worldwide Islamic revivalist trend, brought Muslims out of the political periphery. On a more regional level, with the rise of the ethnic conflict, northern and eastern Muslims were facing a threat to their personal security and ethnic existence, as they feared subordination under the Tamil minority. In a fight to assert and retain their own ethnic identity, the SLMC emerged as a possible alternative. As S.K. Hennayake described the Muslim situation, "The problem...is not so much whether they constitute a distinctive ethnic group...but the relationship between their ethnicity and politics' (1995:177). It was when Muslim ethnic identity became threatened that the Muslim community made the clear connection between ethnicity and politics; the result was a new Muslim political party.
This research project has been designed to test the hypothesis that Muslim political representation is moving from a wealthy, Colombobased, business elite to a unified and more grassroots body representing a greater proportion of Muslim interests across the island. In this paper I argue that even though the SLMC has organized and amplified the Muslim voice, it has not successfully unified the Muslim community, and in fact, functions most effectively as a regional party for eastern Muslims. The party's platform today is struggling between a national, regional, and ethnic identity for the Muslim community; and as the party gains a larger role in the political spotlight, it seems to be withdrawing into the quarters of conventional "opportunist' Muslim politics. Consequently the party is also changing its image to become a national party for all ethnic communities, not just aparty for Muslims. I also argue that the party will only weaken its cause rather than

Page 78
138 Transformation of Muslim Political Identity
strengthen it by trying to build its position from a regional party to one of national unity.
This paper presents a brief overview of conventional Muslim politics in Sri Lanka and the formation of the SLMC. It then examines the causal factors on the local, national, and international levels that have led to a heightened Muslim identity and the need for a Muslim political party. The final section of this paper consists of an analysis of my hypothesis and how the SLMC has transformed Muslim politics in Sri Lanka. The data collection for this research project has not yet been fully completed, and thus the conclusions reached in this paper at this point stand as tentative. The data were collected through historical literature and census reports as well as a series of interviews conducted over a period of two months. A majority of my contacts consisted of Muslim MPs, party leaders, candidates, and community leaders living in the Colombo and Kandy areas. A crucial component of my data collection consists of interviews conducted with Muslim citizens and political leaders currently living in the Eastern Province, which at this point has not yet been completed.
The transformation of Muslim politics in Sri Lanka is a central issue concerning Sri Lanka's political future, as the ethnic conflict has moved from being exclusively a Sinhalese-Tamil issue to becoming a Sinhalese-Tamil-Muslim issue (Hasbullah, 1991). The body of research on the Muslim minority in Sri Lanka is slight despite the increasing prevalence of the issue concerning Sri Lanka's political future. This research project attempts to examine the prevailing Muslim political situation and more importantly to begin to delve into the issues of salience for Muslim political transformation. In addition to the need for research on contemporary Muslim politics, there is especially a need to examine the area of eastern Muslim politics which is the focal point of the recent political transformation.
Political History of Muslims in Sri Lanka
Today the Muslim community accounts for approximately 7.3 per cent of the population in Sri Lanka and is the country's second largest minority (Government Department of Census and Statistics, 1981). Muslim settlement on the island began in the seventh century (with

Culture and Politics of Identity in Sri Lanka 139
the advent of Islam) by Arab merchants who dominated the Indian Ocean trade (Azeez, 1986:24). Muslim settlement on the island dispersed to coastal trading areas and with the arrival of Portuguese and Dutch colonial powers (who saw the Muslims as a threat to the European monopoly of overseas trade) the Muslims were driven further into the interior. Many Muslims found refuge in the Kandyan Kingdom; and in 1626 King Senerat of Kandy resettled around 4000 Muslims on the eastern coast, a region which today composes one of the largest concentrations of Muslims in Sri Lanka (Dewaraja, 1990:5). In the island's administrative districts today, the Muslims constitute more than ten percent of the district's population in only five administrative districts, with Ampara district hosting the largest percentage of Muslims at 41.5 per cent’ (Government Department of Census and Statistics, 1981).
The Muslim population today consists primarily of two ethnic groups, the Moors and Malays. The Moors, who claim descent from Arab merchants and traders, comprise about 95 percent of the Muslim community. The other small percentage of Muslims consists chiefly of Malays who were brought to Sri Lanka as mercenaries by the Dutch, and Indian Muslims who migrated from South India as traders and later as plantation workers (Phadnis, 1979:29). The Malays compose a distinct ethnic group who have retained their own language (Bahasa Melayu) and culture. The Moors also persistently promoted their distinct ethnicity, but assimilated into Sri Lankan society by associating closely with the Tamil community through trade, and many married Tamil women, which resulted in the Muslims adopting Tamil as their native tongue (Mohan, 1987:13).
Conventional Muslim Politics
Conventional Muslim politics have been commonly categorized as being "opportunist', 'instrumentalist', or 'accommodationist', as the Muslim political leadership has a notorious history of party-switching and manipulation of political gains under the majority Sinhalese parties. By conceding its minority status the Muslim leadership has integrated into the majority parties and wins political favours in return for its support. The leaders themselves have descended from Colombo's

Page 79
140 Transformation of Muslim Political Identity
affluent elite and for the most part have remained the unchallenged representatives of Muslim interests. However, Muslim interests everywhere on the island do not correspond with those of the Colombo elite, as Muslims are not economically, geographically, or even ethnically a homogeneous group. Muslims of the Northern and Eastern (N-E) Provinces are primarily cultivators and poor farmers living with the Tamil community; Muslims of the Western and Central (W-Cen) provinces tend to be a wealthier and more educated group living with the Sinhalese community and involved in trade and commerce. Not only are the poorer, rural Muslims in the N-E distanced from Muslim leadership in the W-Cen provinces geographically, but they are also separated culturally and socially from the urban, political centres of the W-Cen areas. The accommodationist politics of the elite with the majority Sinhalese parties has produced not only a position of subordination of rural and lower-class Muslims, but also the loss of a strong political ethnic identity (Ismail, 1995:64).
The political leaders elected by the poor farmers and peasantry of the east coast have tended to be "back-bench MPs, while the more affluent and well-connected Colombo politicians have been more likely to receive influential appointments within the government (McGilvray, 1991:16). For example, every Cabinet since 1947 has had a Muslim representative, and the current Cabinet has two. Despite the practice of frequent party-switching by Muslim leaders, the Muslim community has always been most closely associated to the UNP This alliance can be traced back to two Muslim organizations active in the 1920s and 1930s-the All Ceylon Moors' Association and the All Ceylon Muslim League. At the time of independence these groups stopped seeking minority representation under the new constitution and aligned with the leading national party, the UNP. Since 1947 the UNP has put up a greater number of Muslim candidates than the SLFP, and Muslim candidates contesting under the UNP have tended to be more successful. However, when displeased with both majority parties, many Muslims have preferred to contest as independents. Statistics show, however, that Muslim candidates fare better when associated with one of the majority parties (Phadnis, 1979:37-44).

Culture and Politics of Identity in Sri Lanka 141
Often in districts where Muslims constitute a small minority of the electorate, Muslims have been elected. M.H. Mohamed, a former UNP Cabinet Minister, won in an urban Colombo constituency with less than five per cent Muslim voters, and on all occasions faced Sinhalese opponents (de Silva, 1986a:230). However, in order to win over the Sinhalese electorate, these Muslim leaders did not campaign on the platform of Islam or their ability to represent the Mlim community. If elected by the Sinhalese, then it would be their duty to also represent them. Due to this subservience to the Sinhalese majority, the interests of all Muslim communities are not being met regardless of the number of Muslim representatives. The political motives for the urban Muslim elite have largely been economical, benefiting the minority of Muslims in the wealthy trading community; and by satisfying the Muslim leadership, the majority parties all stand to make political and economic gains.
The Muslim community, though more strongly associated with the UNP, tends to have an ambiguous relationship with political parties. Jupp reports that on the eastern coast party loyalty is secondary to individual interests and that it is only in Colombo that party allegiance has a strong appeal (1978:55). At the local level, patron-client relationships play an important function in mobilizing political support and in gathering Muslim votes for a member of the wealthy elite. For any member to enter national politics, a strong grassroots level of support must first be accrued, as the Muslim leader must be able to persuade the local electorate to Support their political alliance. Despite the Muslim community's Socio-economic diversity, at the polling booth they behave as members of the middle class voting for wealthy and urban leaders (Hennayake, 1995:189).
The Muslim community, especially in the east where party loyalty is less important, is known to look to individual leadership which, fuelled by patron-client relationships, creates a system of personality politics'. Several of the small Muslim political parties formed throughout Sri Lanka's history have centred around personalities to which the Muslim community develops a loyal following. The Muslim League and Moors' Association centred around the two strong leadership personalities of Sir Razik Fareed and T.B. Jayah. Mudaliar M.S. Kariapper was voted into office as an eastern MP in the first

Page 80
142 Transformation of Muslim Political Identity
general election running as an independent. However, in the 1960s he formed a political party called the All-Ceylon Islamic United Front and lost a subsequent election. The party went no further (Phadnis, 1979:44). The same is true for the former Education Minister Badiuddin Mahmud, extremely popular for the education reforms he created for the Muslim community, and his short-lived Islamic Socialist Front. Kariapper and Mahmud were both successful in forming Muslim parties because of their strong personalities, but despite Muslim support both parties quickly died down. Examining their past responses, the Muslim community has been found to be wary of extending all of its Support to small, communal parties and has felt it can benefit more from its support of the majority Sinhalese parties. For this reason, the success of the SLMC has become more of an anomaly.
Formation of the Sri Lanka Muslim Congress
At a meeting in 1981 held in Kattankudi of the Batticaloa district of a small study group of local Eastern Province political leaders a new political party was formed - the Sri Lanka Muslim Congress. One member of this group was M.H.M. Ashraff, the current leader of the SLMC. During the formative years of the party, Ashraff was a key mobilizer of support, organizing Town Hall meetings and question and answer sessions with the Muslim youth, where he began to get people to think critically and question their representation by Muslim leaders under the majority Sinhalese parties. Ashraff, an attorney known for his charisma and impressive oratorical skills, soon had people forming new political aspirations for Muslims of the east. However, Ashraff was widely opposed by both Tamils and Muslims, and was finally forced to flee his home in Kalmunai (Ampara district) as it was burnt to the ground (Ferial Ashraff, 1997). In many ways this humble background strengthened Ashraff's leadership: not only was he from the rural east, unlike the majority of Muslim political leaders, but he was also forced to leave his home like many Muslim citizens of the north and east whose lives were threatened by the escalating ethnic conflict. His background made him an accountable leader to the Muslims of the north and east.

Culture and Politics of Identity in Sri Lanka 143
It is important to mention the formation of another eastern based Muslim party which preceded the SLMC called the East Sri Lanka Muslim Front and later the Muslim United Liberation Front (MULF). The MULF was formed in 1977 by a businessman from Akkaraipattu, also in Amparadistrict, and Ashraff served as this party's legal advisor. The MULF formed an alliance with the Tamil United Liberation Front (TULF) for the 1977 general election, in which Ashraff first contested; but the entire party was defeated, not winning even one seat. It was after this loss that Ashraff pulled away from the MULF and formed his own party (Halaldeen, 1997).
It is interesting that the MULF has not succeeded in the same manner as the SLMC although they share a very similar background. Both parties were formed in the east, around the same time (late 1970s and early 1980s), and in response to Tamil militancy for the protection of Muslim rights and ethnic identity. However, Ashraff's strong personality (which the SLMC was centred around) is one difference that cannot be overlooked; even though he was not a wellknown politician, he was the grandson of M.M.S. Kariapper, one of the most notable political leaders from the east coast since independence (Dissanayake, 1994:91). Not only did the SLMC have the advantage of Ashraff's personality, but it did not contest in elections until 1988 - eleven years after the MULF. It may have been the special circumstances underlying this election that gave the SLMC an added boost. The MULF remained an independent party until 1996 when it gave its support to Ashraff and joined the SLMC.
In 1986 the SLMC declared itself a national party but was unable to gain recognition from the election commissioner because it lacked organization and the questions raised against its strong proIslamic philosophy. In February 1988 the SLMC was finally granted recognition by the election commissioner as a national party in time to contest in the 1988 provincial council elections." In its first election the SLMC won twelve seats in the W-Cen provinces, and seventeen seats in the N-E provinces and thus became the leading opposition force of the N-E provinces (Election Commissioner Report, 1991). This election was unique in that it was the first provincial council election, and the SLFP had boycotted the election in protest of the Indo-Lanka Accord. In the N-E province this allowed the SLMC to

Page 81
144 Transformation of Muslim Political Identity
receive 100 per cent of the Muslim vote. The voting results in the N-E provinces looked similar to an ethnic census with only the SLMC, Eelam People’s Revolutionary Liberation Front (EPRLF), and the UNP contesting in this province. The 1988 provincial council election was a strong boost for preparing the SLMC for the 1989 general election, in which the SLMC contested 110 candidates and won four seats (see Table 1 for a listing of district-wise results). More importantly the SLMC had become the third largest overall collector of votes and in the eastern Batticaloa and Ampara districts, the SLMC received close to 70 per cent of the votes cast for Muslim candidates (Oberst, 1994:21).
During the 1989 election, the SLMC held a very strong regional Muslim campaign claiming it would fight for a separate province for N-E Muslims. At this time, the SLMC functioned primarily by promoting N-E Muslim interests rather than trying to unify and representall Muslim communities around the island. The SLMC also held a very strong pro-Islamic stance during its first elections claiming that a vote for the SLMC was "a vote for the Koran.' The SLMC has since abandoned such a stringent religious approach, as it was polarizing their party; and even today some party leaders deny that the party ever campaigned on such a strong Islamic platform. The SLMC does not make its adherence to Islamic philosophy a secret, but the party today makes it clear that it has stayed clear from any form of religious fanaticism.
In addition to the party's independent campaign platform, the SLMC was forming alliances with the majority Sinhalese parties. The SLMC maintained an alliance with the SLFP up until the week before the presidential nominations were due, when it broke the alliance and joined the UNP. The SLMC claimed they couldn't reach an agreement with the SLFP on the number of seats the SLMC would be given or the symbol they would campaign under. It was clear the SLMC could pull the Muslim vote, especially in the N-E, and both majority parties were ready to have those votes on their side. It was the UNP who won the majority that year by a large margin; thus the SLMC was criticized for playing "opportunist Muslim politics and switching to the winning party at the last minute. The SLMC also damaged its image of being a ethnic Muslim party by aligning itself so closely to

Culture and Politics of Identity in Sri Lanka , 145
Table 1
Votes received by the Sri Lanka Muslim Congress in Parliamentary Elections
District % of Votes No. of Seats
1989 1994 1989 1994
Ampara 28.69 33.3 2
Batticaloa 23.73 4.9
Vanni 1840 15.9
Trincomalee 7.6 21.8
Kandy 4.43
Colombo 4.04
Kalutara 4.04 -- AWA
Jaffna 3.52 32.7
Puttalam 2.8
Galle 10
Nuwara Eliya 0.99
Moneragala 0.51
Hambantota 0.25 -
Total ** 3.6 1.8
Other results:
UNP 50.7 44.04
SLFP 3.9
PA 48.94
National List 3
PA 2
SLMC l
* Percentages in 1994 are not known for those SLMC candidates who
contested under the PA symbol outside of the Northern and Eastern
Provinces.
** In both elections the SLMC was the third largest vote collector.
Sources: (1989) Dissanayaka, T.S.D.A. 1994. The Politics of Sri Lanka. Colombo: Swastika Press. (1994) Goonerathne, W.G. and R.S. Karunaratne
(eds.), 1996. Tenth Parliament of Sri Lanka. Colombo: Associated Papers of Ceylon.

Page 82
146 Transformation of Muslim Political Identity
the majority Sinhalese parties in the beginning (Hennayake, 1995:194). The 1993 provincial council election showed a drastic drop in the party's support with the SLMC only winning two seats.
Sure that the support for the SLMC was strong in the 1994 local elections, Ashraff made a campaign pledge that if the SLMC did not win all six predominately Muslim Pradesha Sabhas(village councils) in the Ampara district he would resign from Parliament. Unfortunately for Ashraff, the SLMC won only four seats. To show his loyalty to the people and his party, he resigned. However, this resignation was not the end of Ashraff's political career, as later in 1994 he was appointed Minister of Shipping, Ports, Rehabilitation and Reconstruction by the current President, Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumarantunga.
In the 1994 general elections the SLMC formed an alliance with the SLFP under the People's Alliance (PA) with the conditions that it could in the N-E provinces contest under the SLMC symbol, that the SLFP would not nominate any Muslims in the N-E provinces, and that the SLMC would be given two seats under the PA's national list (Dissanayaka, 1994: 101). The SLMC had offered those same terms to the UNP, who being the stronger of the two majority parties in the Eastern Province rejected the SLMC's offer. The SLFP was ready to accept the terms laid down by the SLMC because it needed the Muslim support in the N-E. The election results in Table 1 show the SLMC won eight seats and remained the third largest collector of votes. However, despite an increase in the number of parliament seats won by the SLMC, the support for the party was lower than it had been in 1989. It received about 60 percent of the Muslim vote in the Batticaloa and Ampara districts (Oberst, 1994:22). Regardless of numbers, the SLMC had proven it was a political force to be reckoned with, and its success had placed the party in an influential position in the government within a very short time of its formation.
Transformation of Muslim Political Identity: an Examination of Causal Factors
Muslim political identity in Sri Lanka has been transforming over the past twenty years. An inter-related Series of changes, opportunities

Culture and Politics of Identity in Sri Lanka 47
and reforms - local, national and international-compounded with the turn of political events and the rise of the ethnic conflict, combined a heightened Muslim ethnic identity with a need for political expression. The right timing of the formation of the SLMC helped it to become the first highly influential Muslim party. The success of the SLMC illustrates the strength and determination of the Muslim community of the time to enter the political sphere. An examination of the various causal factors of this transformation will illustrate the difficulties faced by the Muslim community in its struggle to retain its own ethnic identity and protect its political rights.
Local Level - Increased Economic and Educational Opportunities
One of the greatest misperceptions about the Muslim community in Sri Lanka is that all Muslims are rich traders and gem dealers. In actuality, the Muslim community has an average per capita income slightly lower than the low country Sinhalese" (Junaid, 1990:55). A large percentage of the Muslim community are poor farmers and agriculturists in the Eastern Province or they include groups of urban poor, such as the Muslim community of Colombo's Slave Island. It is estimated that 35 per cent of Sri Lankan Muslims are employed in agriculture compared to the 18 percent in trade; however, the majority of Muslims is involved in services and sales (45%). More importantly, the Muslim political elite comes from the community's five percent involved in the business sector, a group which has little in common with the poor eastern Muslim farmers (Ismail, 1985).
In the late 1950s economic reforms were brought to the Eastern Province by way of projects such as the Paddy Lands Act, designed to alleviate landlessness in Hambantota and Batticaloa districts. At the time, 72 per cent of the agriculturists in these areas were landless or owned on average half an acre. The act gave to tenant cultivators the land owned by rich, absentee landlords living in other parts of the island, and the Muslim farmers in these districts benefited greatly from the increased profits they could produce from paddy cultivation. It was economic reforms such as this act that directly affected rural eastern Muslims and became a turning point in their lives (Taraki, 1989).

Page 83
148 Transformation of Muslim Political Identity
Most economic reforms did not affect eastern Muslims. For example, the economic liberalization reforms instituted by the Jayawardene government in the late 1970s benefited only the urban Muslims outside the N-E provinces involved in the business and trading sectors. While economic mobility was improving for the Muslim community as a whole, the community in the east still remained more deprived from these benefits than urban Muslims in the W-Cen provinces (Warnapala, 1994:76). This growing economic disparity only added to the disenchantment N-E Muslims had with the Muslim elite leadership of the 1980s and 1990s.
Increased economic levels led to a subsequent rise in the educational opportunities for Muslims. The Muslim community has always been considered educationally "backward'. Their lower educational status stems from their resistance to educational reforms and English educational opportunities introduced by the European colonists, which many Muslim viewed as proselytization. They kept their children in traditional Islamic schools. The Muslims in the east were also an inward-looking group influenced by their religious leaders who considered advanced education unnecessary for their occupational interests in agriculture and trade; and the Islamic schooling they did receive included religious study and Arabic (McGilvray, 1991:12). This traditional Islamic education made the Muslim community less competitive in the larger working sector, and very few Muslims entered the professional sector. In 1881, university enrolments showed that there was not one Muslim law or medical student, and even in 1997 the percentage of Muslim students entering the professional fields was far below their ethnic ratio (Marga, 1986: 142).
In the 1960s educational opportunities for Muslims dramatically expanded at the secondary school level. In 1956 a law. was passed categorizing all government schools with 50 per cent Muslim enrolment as Muslim schools. Muslim children were also given the option of pursuing their studies in Sinhala, Tamil or English, an option given to no other community and, in fact, violating the law of non-sectarian state education passed in 1960 (de Silva, 1986b;448). The government also created a Muslim teachers' training college and paid Muslim moulavis (religious scholars) to teach in the schools (Mohan, 1987:41-2). Educational reforms for Muslims were largely

Culture and Politics of Identity in Sri Lanka 149
accredited to Badiuddin Mahmud, who was Minister of Education during 1960-63 and 1970-77.
Better secondary schooling resulted in a subsequent increase in the number of Muslims entering the university system. It was also in the late 1960s and early 1970s (during the education campaign initiated by Badiuddin Mahmud) that the Muslim awareness for education increased along with the need for a more competitive approach and a knowledge of modern techniques to compete in the employment sector. From the late 1970s, the major percentage of Muslims entering the university system has been from the Eastern Province (Phadnis, 1979:31; Ismail, 1985). In the 1970s and 1980s a new importance was placed on the education of Muslim women (the group that was lowering the literacy rate for the whole community). Religious leaders began to realize that in order for the Muslim community to prosper, Muslim women needed to receive a better education; and for the first time, they were allowed to attend universities. One of the problems today is that, despite an increase in the number of Muslims attending universities, most of them choose to major in Arabic or Islamic Civilization rather than in professional fields. In 1987 the government passed the University Entrance Examination Standardization Scheme which created ethnic quotas for remote or under-privileged areas and increased Muslim university admissions from 5.5 per cent in 1983 to 8. 17 per cent in 1987, surpassing their ethnic ratio for the first time in history (Junaid, 1990:45). In scienceoriented fields at university, statistics show that of all ethnic groups, the Muslim community has the largest percentage of students from "under-privileged' districts. This illustrates the direct benefits eastern and northern Muslim students have received from the university admissions reform (Gunawardena, 1990:110).
Despite these educational reforms and gains, the Muslim community still faces challenges. The quality of the government Muslim schools and facilities is inferior to the Sinhalese schools, and the Muslim schools are primarily Tamil-medium schools. Even outside the N-E provinces, the teaching in 99 per cent of the Muslim schools is in Tamil, putting Muslims at a disadvantage when competing for university admissions and employment opportunities compared with those fluent in Sinhala and English (Ashraff, 1990). The formation of

Page 84
150 Transformation of Muslim Political Identity
separate Muslim schools has also created a generation of Muslims very conscious of their ethnic identity. When these Muslim students enter university with other ethnic groups, ethnic divisions are already clearly defined, and for Muslim students language is one of the most divisive factors.
The increased educational opportunities and awareness produced a new, educated Muslim generation in the Eastern Province. This generation also produced the SLMC. In 1989 Mohammed Hisbullah, an SLMC MP from the Batticaloa district, was elected to Parliament at the age of 26. Ashraff, the party's leader, is around 50. Not only are its leaders young, but it is the young, educated Muslim crowd to which the SLMC appeals, a crowd that thinks critically and questions conventional Muslim leadership. The emergence of an educated generation of Muslims will challenge the wealthy elite for its hold on Muslim leadership. As stated by Qadri Ismail.(1985):
This younger generation has a crying need for leadership and unity. They have now realized the Colombo leaders have brought them nothing, and they will no longer compromise. The Muslims of Sri Lanka have come of age.
National Level: Ethnic Conflict and the Need for Eastern Muslim Security
On the national level there are several factors which have contributed to a heightened Muslim identity, the main one being the threat to Muslim ethnic identity. A combination of pro-nationalist government policies and the rise of the ethnic conflict jeopardized the well-being of the Muslim community, especially in the N-E provinces. The end result was the need for Muslims to speak out for the sake of their own protection, and it was for this primary reason that the SLMC came into existence.
The most influential factor affecting Muslim political identity was the ethnic conflict; without the ethnic conflict there would be no

Culture and Politics of Identity in Sri Lanka 151
SLMC. The ethnic conflict introduced a new fear, a fear concerning the physical security of N-E Muslims. In the beginning, the ethnic conflict was considered to be a problem between the Sinhalese and Tamils. As the conflict progressed, Tamil-Muslim violence evolved over disagreement on the issues of Tamil Eelam and the future of the N-E provinces. N-E Muslims were terrorized by the LTTE, killed in their sleep, massacred in mosques, and forced to leave their homes. It was the disparities faced by the N-E Muslims that increased their political importance (Ismail, 1985). When the Tamils Tigers realized that they could not get the Muslims to join their forces, they introduced a campaign to 'ethnically cleanse' the N-E provinces of all Muslims. In 1990 in Jaffna, the LTTE gave Muslims a two-hour warning to evacuate the area and abandon their homes, and thereby created 75,000 Muslim refugees. In the Eastern Province, 160 Haj pilgrims were taken into the jungle and killed on their way home to Kattankudi (Hansard, 1992). The 'ethnic cleansing performed by the LTTE threatened the physical security of N-E Muslims, and of the government that had failed to protect them. When both northern and eastern Muslims were the victims of Tamil violence, it created a commonality between the two groups. They joined forces to present a challenge to the LTTE and make their needs heard by the government.
With the rise of violence in the north and east, Muslims of the N-E provinces began to question who would represent them in the government and ensure that security measures would be taken. In the past it had not been uncommon for an MP from one of the other ethnic communities to speak on behalf of the Muslim population on issues concerning the Muslim religion and community interests. It was a Sinhalese MP who raised the question of granting Muslims two important religious holidays; and in 1976 when twelve Muslims were killed in a Muslim-Sinhalese clash in Puttalam, the issue was brought to the floor of Parliament by the Tamil leader S.J.V. Chelvanayagam (Mohan, 1987:64). The Muslim representatives in Parliament restrained their Muslim voices to maintain good relations with the Sinhalese majority and win political favours within the majority parties. It was this type of leadership, obsequious to the Sinhalese majority, that the Muslims had to look to when they found themselves

Page 85
152 Transformation of Muslim Political Identity
being drawn into the ethnic conflict. It was no longer an issue of having Muslim representatives in Parliament, but rather the need for N-E Muslim representation. It was for this reason the SLMC was formed. When asked to identify the greatest gain the SLMC had brought the Muslim people, the overwhelming response was "a voice'. Along with the ethnic conflict came the discussion for devolution. The N-E merger under the 1987 Indo-Lanka Accord (which has since been revoked and deemed temporary) would have diluted the strength of the Muslim population in the Eastern province from 33 per cent to 17 per cent (Ahamed, 1990: 22). The greatest Muslim fear concerning devolution issued from the fact that Muslims were not consulted. The Indo-Lanka Accord contained no safeguards for the interests of the N-E Muslims, and at this time there were two Muslim Cabinet Ministers and five Muslim MPs from the Eastern Province (Hasbullah, 1991:22). The Muslim community also feared they would be completely subsumed by the Tamil minority, as the Tamils were trying to pull the Muslims into their camp under the title of Tamil-Speaking People'. Muslims feared they would next be referred to as 'Muslim Tamils', and therefore felt a greater need to separate themselves from the Tamil community. One of the most important political decisions made by Muslims was to set themselves apart from Tamils (de Silva, 1986a:8). The debate over Muslims and their links to Tamil ethnicity dates back to an argument made by the Tamil leader Sir Ponnambalam Ramanathan in 1888 to the Royal Asiatic Society (Ceylon Branch) claiming Muslims were indeed Tamil in "nationality' and Mohammedans' in religion (de Silva, 1986a:117). Ramanathan's argument is still one the N-E Muslims are fighting against today: the LTTE justified the mass expulsion of Muslims from the Northern Province as punishment for not having properly identified themselves as Tamils.
At the same time, the Sinhalese tried to use the Muslim community as a counterweight against the Tamils, by making close alliances with Muslims to further disintegrate Tamil-Muslim relations. It became difficult for the Muslims to differentiate between the government's pro-Muslim and anti-Tamil motives. The main objective of Muslims was to assert their own ethnic identity; and due to positions taken by the Sinhalese government, on such issues as Sinhalese

Culture and Politics of Identity in Sri Lanka 153
colonization and land settlement in the east, Muslims, especially N-E Muslims, knew they could not rely on the majority for fair representation. One final causal factor on the national level was the 1956 'Sinhala Only Act, introduced and passed by Prime Minister S.W.R.D. Bandaranaike. This act replaced English with Sinhala as the "official language' of Sri Lanka. Later in 1958 the "Tamil Language Act' was passed providing for the "reasonable use of Tamil in education and prescribed administrative purposes in the N-E provinces (Mohan, 1979:115). However, the language problem for those living in the NE was far from solved. The official use of Sinhala was not fairly introduced around the island: the N-E provinces have received fewer Sinhala teachers than needed, official government correspondence to Tamil-speaking people is still in Sinhala, and the police in predominately Tamil-speaking areas are not fluent in Tamil. The threat to Muslim personal security was heightened due to the fact that Muslims could not issue complaints to the police.
The frustrations produced by the language acts passed in the late 1950s are still felt by Muslims today. The Muslims are commonly labelled as the people with "no language'. Some scholars have said that Muslims have "no great emotional commitment to the Tamil language and they have demonstrated little reluctance to adopting Sinhalese as the language in which their children shall be educated (de Silva, 1986b:444). Despite the fact that the teaching in most Muslim schools is in Tamil, urban Muslims have had greater educational opportunities for their children and thus more W-Cen Muslims have learned Sinhala and English. According to Mohan, when Sinhala was declared the official language the Muslims accepted the language policy without as much as a murmur' (1979:107). However, the fact that no one spoke out was just the problem. The Muslim political leaders who supported the language act did not come from the predominately Tamil-speaking rural Muslim communities. Today's younger Muslim community living in the W-Cenprovinces has lost its Tamil roots, but few N-E Muslims are fluent in Sinhala. As a result of these geographic language differences, the Muslim community has become divided (Ameer Ali, 1992). The disadvantages Muslims faced under the Sinhala Only Act compounded with other national factors to necessitate the formation of political representation for N-EMuslims.

Page 86
154 Transformation of Muslim Political Identity
International Level: Islamic Revivalism
While the larger global Islamic trend is not a primary factor leading to the transformation of Muslim political identity in Sri Lanka, it is an evident and underlying force. The resurgence of the Islamic religion is a phenomenon that started in the 1970s for the most part as a "response to globalization, (Watt, 1996:137) and also as a religious trend instigated by the Iranian revolution in 1979. Islamic revivalism is a movement to nurture Islamic culture and apply Islamic ideology to the modern world, in order to purify its beliefs and practices from the detrimental effects of western culture and practices.
Today Islamic revivalism is found at various levels of activism throughout the island. It is primarily associated with the heightened visibility of Muslim politics in Islamic states such as Iran, Pakistan and Bangladesh. Currently, a significant proportion of Muslims is arguing that it is time to end the divorce of Islam and Muslim politics in Sri Lanka (Hennayake, 1995:192). Adherence to the philosophy of Islamic revivalism has resulted in a new and purified form of Muslim politics, exemplified by the SLMC, a party with guidelines based on the Holy Koran and the traditions of the Holy Prophet. Jezima Ismail stated that it is not surprising that Islamic revivalism has taken hold in Sri Lanka, because Sri Lankan society is as decadent and bereft of values as society was during pre-Islamic times' (1997). Comparisons are being made with pre-Islamic times to show that even today Islam is as much the solution to Society's ills as it was in dissolute and Sordid seventh-century Arabia. The SLMC's party ideology is not so much to Islamicize Sri Lankan society as it is to apply Islamic values to the society's problems.
The emergence of young college women wearing the hijab (Islamic headscarf) is a clear manifestation of the revivalist trend in Sri Lanka. Wearing of the hijab is a trend that has emerged in Sri Lanka only in the past fifteen years. As Islamic revivalism increased awareness of the importance of education, a subsequent move was made for the improvement of women's education. However, in order to make this transition into the public sector and also retain Islamic values, women were encouraged to wear hijab when attending the university. Hijab in Sri Lanka has close relations with the outside

Culture and Politics of Identity in Sri Lanka 155
revivalist movement, as the material for the headscarves is provided in Sri Lanka by the Embassy of Iran, and now even older women completing the Hajreturn from the Middle East wearing hijab (Ismail, 1997). Hijab also functions politically as a visible means of asserting a more clearly defined Muslim identity.
Islamic revivalism has also played an important role in the N-E where Muslims share not only language, but many other cultural traditions with the Tamil community. In the last few years Muslims living on the eastern coast have deliberately banned some of their traditional customs which seemed too closely connected with the Tamil Hindu culture (McGilvray, 1991:27). Islamic revivalism has resulted in a purification of Muslim culture, and therefore, on the east coast, increasing the chasm between the Tamil and the Muslim communities.
Analysis of the Hypothesis
In the beginning of this research project I hypothesized that the formation of the SLMC marked the transformation away from a wealthy, Colombo-based, business elite to a unified and more grassroots body representing a greater proportion of Muslim interests across the island. It is true that the SLMC has introduced a new form of Muslim leadership. The SLMC is a younger, educated generation and its roots, for the most part, are not in rich, urban backgrounds. Ashraff's Ampara district background also makes him a more acceptable leader to the Muslims of the N-E than someone from the Colombo elite. The SLMC has changed Muslim politics by creating a challenge for conventional Muslim politicians. Several UNP MPs say the SLMC is doing nothing more than jeopardizing their good relations with the Sinhalese and depriving them of their right to serve Muslims in Sinhalese areas. Ali Zahir Seyed Moulana of the UNP from Batticaloa district has claimed that SLMC candidates have struck at him publicly by proclaiming that he is not to be trusted as his wife is Tamil; he is not a true Muslim (1997). The SLMC has damaged the reputation of conventional Muslim leaders among the Muslim community, especially in the N-E; and now to regain their votes conventional politicians will have to be more responsive to the Muslim community.

Page 87
156 Transformation of Muslim Political Identity
The SLMC has especially weakened Muslim support for the UNP in the east. The leaders of the SLMC can more directly represent eastern Muslim interests than UNP leaders integrated into the value system of the urban Muslim elite. The SLMC consists of representatives with their roots in the N-E who understand the grievances of the N-E Muslim communities. As an independent party, the SLMC is also able to produce a more assertive Muslim voice than Muslim representatives under the majority Sinhalese parties. The question now looming is whether the UNP will change its strategy to represent eastern Muslims. In the Eastern Province in 1994 the UNP won 16.3 per cent less votes than in 1977 (Oberst, 1995: 14).
The SLMC has created a position to more clearly represent the Muslim community, but the actual gains they have earned for Muslims have been limited and also dependent on an alliance with one of the majority parties. Most of the achievements of the SLMC for Muslims have been made possible through Ashraff's Cabinet position of Rehabilitation and Reconstruction. The gains consist of development projects to improve housing, roads and infrastructure in the east. Ashraff also played a key role in the formation of the Southeastern University in Ampara district, to provide a university for those students displaced from the Jaffna and eastern universities by the war. The SLMC has also been a strong voice in promoting Muslim interests concerning refugee conditions, Islamic interest-free banks, and minority representation under the PR system.
Under the Sinhalese majority parties the Muslim community was given a significant number of benefits in addition to the educational reforms mentioned previously. Muslims have also been given separate recognition for their personal laws and in 1980 a separate government department was created for Muslim Religious and Cultural Affairs (Mohan, 1987:56). It is true that many of these gains for Muslims were nothing more than political favours from the majority parties, but according to one Muslim UNP MP, there is no alternative for Muslims. He stated that because of the Muslims' minority status their best option is to work under the majority parties. It could also be argued that Ashraff's Cabinet position would not have been granted unless the SLMC had joined the People's Alliance.

Culture and Politics of Identity in Sri Lanka 157
The SLMC does recognize the influence a small party can exert. The SLMC, in "opportunist Muslim political style, realizes that the majority needs its minority support and thus it can win substantial gains through alliances with the majority. The SLMC vote bank consists of 250,000 voters, which is about one-fourth of the Muslim population (M.H.M. Ashraff, 1997). Without the SLMC creating a one member majority for the PA, the PA would not have been able to form a government. Ashraff takes advantage of this position by threatening to quit the government if the PA does not listen to the requests of the SLMC. Ashraff feels confident the government will meet his demands, because if he were to resign the government would lose the SLMC's minority support. The SLMC has redefined the opportunist politics of party-switching as the right of a minority party. SLMC party leaders say they have modelled their behaviour on great Muslim leaders such as Sir Razik Fareed who frequently changed parties. Indeed, it is no different from the frequent party-switching carried out by Muslims in the majority parties. The SLMC has most importantly created a new form of political representation for Muslims by taking advantage of the influential role a small party can play.
While the SLMC does make it a point to provide a more "true' form of political representation for the Muslims, it has not used its position to push through a more Islamic agenda. In Parliament the SLMC has spoken out against casinos and the government's reinstatement of relations with Israel in 1995, but it has made it a point to stay away from any form of religious fanaticism. The SLMC realized that campaigning on the Koran and Islam was only going to polarize their party rather than win it support. In this light, it appears that the SLMC is playing a watered-down game of conventional politics, or perhaps it realizes the limits within which a Muslim minority must function in a non-Muslim majority. The SLMC has learned how to be what Akbar Ahmed calls a "good Muslim' (1993:175):
Someone who is prepared to abandon Muslim customs and indeed faith...In contrast anyone wishing to assert their culture and identity is seen as a fanatic or a fundamentalist - in the terms of the state, a troublemaker, a separatist, a communal creature.

Page 88
158 Transformation of Muslim Political Identity
The SLMC has been called a troubiemaker not unly by the majority community but also by other Muslims, especially the Colombo elite. The SLMC is now learning the art of how to balance its image between being a 'good Muslim' and a "troublemaker' and still represent the Muslim community.
As the SLMC has been able to offer a more true form of Muslim representation for the Muslim community, it would be assumed that they would emerge as a strong unifying force for all Muslims. However, my findings at this point rather suggest that the SLMC has succeeded in unifying only the Muslims in the N-E provinces. Apart from SLMC politicians and party members, I found little support for the SLMC, even among university students from the Eastern Province. The leaders of the Muslim Student Majlis organization at the University of Peradeniya claimed that the SLMC has only been good foreconomic and physical developments in the east, but it has not succeeded in changing Muslim representation and thus has not fulfilled its goal or won Muslims rights. These students feel the SLMC still acts under the confines of conventional Muslim politics (Muslim Student Majlis, 1997). The SLMC perhaps finds it is difficult to meet the expectations of both eastern and western Muslims.
The SLMC realizes that it will not be possible to completely unify the Muslim community, and at this point it has only managed to unify N-E Muslims. A significant portion of Muslims and non-Muslims believes there is no need for a Muslim party; religion and politics should remain separate. K.M. de Silva states that a party formed on Islamic principles is a pursuit "fraught with perils for the Muslims. There is nothing that they cannot do as members of national political parties. And above all else advocates of such a Muslim political party tend to ignore the very substantial gains that have accrued to the Muslims since independence' (1986a:231). Even though the UNP and SLFP have Muslim members, it is clear that these parties function to protect and represent the rights of the Sinhalese majority. Gains for the Muslim community have surfaced out of intentions to appease the Muslim minority rather than represent its political interests. Among the Sinhalese, Tamils, Indian Tamils, and Muslims, the Muslims are the only ethnic group without their own political party.

Culture and Politics of Identity in Sri Lanka 159
Despite the original aspirations of the SLMC, the leadership and platform of the SLMC has changed since its first election in 1988. The party began by promoting N-E Muslim interests and its adherence to Islamic philosophy, but by the 1994 general election it was taking a less stringent Islamic stance and beginning to promote national unity. Even when the party was formed, the SLMC wanted to create the image that it was a party for all people. To do so the party nominated twenty eight non-Muslim candidates in the 1989 general election.” In 1994 the SLMC was given two seats on the PA national list and one seat for its own party. The SLMC seat was given to Asitha Perera, a Sinhalese member of the Liberal Party (LP); this seat was promised in an alliance the SLMC made with the LP, but it has also helped the SLMC promote its image as a national party.
Ashraff has said that his vision is for the SLMC to form a national party, and he is currently working on constitutional reforms to develop an affiliated body of the SLMC called the National Unity Congress (M.H.M. Ashraff, 1997). It appears that Ashraff is transforming the SLMC into a conventional body of Muslim representation. By focusing on an image of national unity, the party removes all of the characteristics that made it a uniquely Muslim party. In 1994 the SLMC did face some internal factionalism with one of its members, Mahamed Farook, switching to the UNP, and a founding member, Segu Issadeen, breaking off to form a separate party - the Sri Lanka Muslim Party. At this time three other party members also left the SLMC. Farook claimed he left because of the autocratic manner in which Ashraff ignored the views as well as the rank and file of the SLMC members. It was also reported that most SLMC members opposed the alliance with the PA, and as a result Ashraff has created divisions within the SLMC - eastern Muslims and Colombo Muslims (Island, 11 July, 1994). SLMC MPs tend to differ on explanations of the party's purpose, depending on their regional background. There are differences of opinion even among MPs of the north and of the east, and support for the SLMC in the north is considerably less than it is in the east. In the 1997 local election, several SLMC candidates from Puttalam ran as independents in protest against the SLMC-PA alliance (Ilyas, 1997).

Page 89
160 Transformation of Muslim Political Identity
If the SLMC takes the platform of "national unity' and abandons the strong support base of eastern Muslims that brought the party into existence, there may come about an undesirable turn of events. The transformation of Muslim political identity took place without the instigation of the SLMC; rather the SLMC was a product of that transformation. The SLMC was (and for the most part still is) fulfilling its initial role as a Muslim party, representing Muslim interests. However, if the SLMC does not meet the expectations of the young, educated eastern Muslims it has attracted in the past, they may leave the SLMC and form a more radical and perhaps militant group. It is on these same grounds that the LTTE came into existence. It is known that several underground Muslim militant groups are functioning today (Hasbullah, 1991: 29), although the SLMC claims that Muslims have not taken up arms partly because the party has provided them with an outlet to express their concerns.
One final important facet of Muslim political representation centres around the discussion of devolution. Since the formation of the SLMC and their campaign for a separate province for Muslims, those paranoid about the ambitions of this new rising Muslim political force have been worried that the Muslims would also now claim rights to a "homeland', Warnapala goes as far as labelling the new assertiveness of the Muslim community as "fundamentalism', stating that "Islamic fundamentalism has done nothing but contribute to the long term detriment of the Muslim community' (1994: 77). As an example of their extremism, he cites their move to claim a "Muslim homeland'. However, the SLMC today clearly states that it is not a "Muslim homeland' or even a "Muslim unit' that they want, but rather a regional, south-eastern unit solely for the relief of the communities there although this unit would have a Muslim majority. The stance of the SLMC does become contradictory, however, when it states that it also plan to include in this unit the pockets of Muslims living in the Northern Province. They reason that it would be unfair for the northern Muslim community to become subordinate to the Tamil minority (M.H.M. Ashraff, 1997). According to that platform, it is indeed a "Muslim unit' they seek, more precisely stated a "north-eastern Muslim

Culture and Politics of Identity in Sri Lanka 161
unit'. Their proposal is criticized primarily for not being practical. (Adding the Muslim pockets from the north creates an incontiguous administrative body.) The other critique, largely applied by the western and central Muslim population, is that two-thirds of all Sri Lankan Muslims live outside the N-E provinces, and therefore this unit cannot properly be labelled as suitable for the Muslim community. Not only do the W-Cen Muslims not support the proposal for a south-eastern Muslim unit, but several Muslims in the north also reject the idea, and support rather a N-Emerger containing a smaller Muslim unit (Ilyas, 1997).
On the subject of devolution it appears the SLMC is still looking out for the interests of eastern Muslims. Mohammed Hisbullah, an SLMC MP, claimed that a south-eastern unit is needed as a Muslim unit'. He stated that this was only fair to the Muslim community there because the Muslims of the W-Cen provinces have not had to face the terrorism or the loss of family or homes in the ethnic conflict and thus have no need for a separate unit of devolution (1997). The SLMC's stance on devolution, whether it calls for a "Muslim unit' or a 'south-eastern unit, illustrates the close connection the party still has with the interests of N-E Muslims. However, the next question is whether the SLMC will maintain this stance once the ethnic conflict is resolved.
Conclusion
The SLMC has created a new definition of Muslim politics. It has not kept a low profile winning political favours from the majority parties, but, rather, has asserted Muslim interests via an independent Muslim party. As Ashraff stated, "The SLMC has shown Muslims the difference between rights and privileges', (1997). The SLMC did not instigate a new political or ethnic movement, rather it was the product of an already existing change in identity. The SLMC was created as a political vehicle to voice the agenda of a transformed community. The movement was a combination of increased socio-economic mobility, threatened personal and ethnic security, and the rise in an international campaign to purify and protect the Muslim identity.

Page 90
162 Transformation of Muslim Political Identity
The SLMC has succeeded in its original intentions to the extent that it has drawn northern and eastern Muslims into the political picture for the first time. However, the SLMC has not yet succeeded in unifying the Muslim community throughout Sri Lanka. In terms of WCen and N-EMuslim differences, the SLMC has only highlighted this dichotomy. As described by Ameer Ali, "The appearance of the SLMC on the political horizon exposed for the first time that the so-called unity of the Muslims under the religious banner is only a superficial image and beneath that banner there are real issues which encourage centrifugalism' (1992).
The issues dividing the Muslim community are region-based, and for this reason the SLMC functions most effectively as a regional party. The party, however, will be the cause of its own demise if it persists in changing its platform from a regional, Muslim ethnic party to a party of national prospect. The more the SLMC reverts to the conventional means of Muslim representation, the more the SLMC loses its ability to transform Muslim politics. The SLMC has proven it has the ability to combine Muslim ethnicity and politics as it has successfully raised the visibility of the entire Muslim community; but due to the national direction the party is taking, it appears that the SLMC has not realized its potential to serve under-represented, regional Muslim interests.
Notes
Ashraff, M.H.M. 'Muslims Will Re-write Their Destiny.' Economic Review, March 1990 p.11.
* The other four districts include Trincomalee (29.3%), Mannar (26.6%), Batticaloa (23.9%), and Kandy (10.1%) (Government Department of Census and Statistics, 1981).

Culture and Politics of Identity in Sri Lanka 163
The term Moor (Mouro, Moroccan) was used by the Portuguese, referring to all Muslims living in the Portuguese colonies of Asia and Africa (Abeyasinghe, 1986).
The provincial council system was created with the passage of the Indo-Lanka Accord of 1978.
The provincial council elections were not held in the N-E provinces and thus the support of the SLMC in its "home' district is not known for that election. However, in the W-Cen provinces, the SLMC was reduced from twelve seats to two. Votes received in the Colombo district alone dropped from 37,598 to 4,854 (Election Commissioner Report, 1991 and 1994).
Per capita income distribution for all ethnic groups ranks as follows (rupees/month): low country Sinhalese: 159; Muslims: 157; Kandyan Sinhalese: 145; Sri Lankan Tamils: 110; total average: 148. Central Bank of Ceylon, Consumer Finances and Socio-Economic Survey, 1978-79 (Junaid, 1990:55). Even though Muslim per capita income is higher than the average for all ethnic communities, it is important to note that the income variation is high with rural Muslims earning considerably less than urban Muslims (Samarasinghe and Davood, 1986:269).
The on-going Sinhalese colonization programme in the east which began in the late 1950s, has led to a disproportionate allocation of land. In Ampara district, where Muslims constitute 41.5 per cent of the population, they own only 15 percent of the land; the Sinhalese own 76 percent of the land (Ahamed, 1990:20). The Jayawardene government also proposed merging a Sinhalese dominated section of the Uva province with Ampara district, the only Muslim district with a Muslim majority, thereby creating a Sinhalese majority there (Mohideen, 1984).
The SLMC was an active force in canvassing for the change in the "cutoff point' for party eligibility in elections from 12.5 per cent of the electoral vote to five per cent.
The number of non-Muslim candidates nominated by the SLMC in 1994 is not known because those candidates ran under the PA symbol.

Page 91
164 Transformation of Muslim Political Identity
Bibliography
Abeyasinghe, T.B.H. 1986. Muslims in Sri Lanka in the Sixteenth and
Seventeenth Centuries.” In M.A.M. Shukri, ed., Muslims of Sri Lanka: Avenues to Antiquity. Beruwala: Jamiah Naleemia Institute.
Ahamed, S.A.M. Azhar. 1990. Historical Analysis of Land Settlement and its Impact on Muslims." In Challenge for Change: Profile of a Community. Colombo: Muslim Women's Research and Action Front.
Ahmed, Akbar S. 1993. Living Islam from Samarkand to Stornoway.
London: Penguin Book and BBC Books.
Ameer, Ali. 15 November, 1992. 'The Sri Lanka Ethnic War: the Muslim
Dimension.' Tamil Times, pp. 13-14.
Ashraff, Ferial. 22 February, 1997. Personal interview. Colombo.
Ashraff, M.H.M. March 1990. "Muslims will Re-write Their Destiny.'
Economic Review, pp. 10-11.
SSLSLSLSSLLSLSLLSSLSLLSLSSSLSLSSLSLSSLSSL0SBS SLSSL LS 22 February, 1997. Personal Interview. Colombo.
Azeez, Marina. 1986. "Early Muslim Settlements.” In M.M.M. Mahroof, Marina Azeez, M.M. Uwise, H.M.Z. Farouque and M.J.A. Rahim, An Ethnological Survey of the Muslims of Sri Lanka from Earliest Times to Independence. Colombo: Sir Razik Fareed Foundation.
Department of Census and Statistics. 1981. Census of Population and
Housing: General Report vol. 3. Colombo: Department of Government Printing.
De Silva, K.M. 1986a. Managing Ethnic Tensions in Multi-Ethnic Societies: Sri Lanka 1880-1985. Lanham, Maryland: University Press of America
SLLLLLSLLLLSLLSSLSLSLLLLLSLLLLLS0LLSS SLLSSLLSSLLSSLLSSLSLSLSSS 1986b. The Muslim Minority in a Democratic Polity: the Case of Sri Lanka Reflection on a Theme.' In M.A.M. Shukri, ed., Muslims of Sri Lanka Avenues to Antiquity. Beruwela: Jamiah Naleemia Institute.

Culture and Politics of Identity in Sri Lanka 165
Dewaraja, Lorna. 1990. "The Muslims in Sri Lanka 1800-1815: a Historical Perspective. In Challenge for Change: Profile of a Community. Colombo: Muslim Women's Research and Action Front.
Dissanayaka, T.D.S.A. 1994. The Politics of Sri Lanka. Colombo: Swastika
Press.
Election Commissioner, 1991. Report of the Commissioner of Elections on the First Elections to the Provincial Councils of Sri Lanka Held in 1988: Sessional Paper II. Colombo: Department of Government Printing.
LLLLSLLLLLSLLLLrSLLSLSLLSLSSLSSC LSLSSCSSCSSLSSSLSSLLSSLLSSLLLSCrSCCSSLLLSSLSSL SLLSS 1994. Administrative Report of the Commissioner of Elections for the Year 1993: Part I Civil (Y). Colombo: Department of Government Printing.
Goonerathne, W.G. and R.S. Karunaratne, eds. 1996. Tenth Parliament of
Sri Lanka. Colombo: Associated Newspaper
Gunawardena, Chandra. 1990. "Education and the Future of Muslims with Special Reference to Higher Education. In Challenge for Change: Profile of a Community. Colombo: Muslim Women's Research and Action Front.
Halaldeen, S.B.C. 19 February, 1997. Personal interview. Colombo.
Hansard Parliamentary Debates. July 23, 1992. vol.79, no. 14. Sri Lanka.
Hasbullah, S.H. 1991. "Muslims and the Ethnic Conflict: Dynamics of Muslim Politics with Special Reference to the Indo-Lanka Accord. Presented at the International Conference on Ethnic Peace Accords sponsored by the International Centre for Ethnic Studies, Colombo.
Hennayake, Shantha K. 1995. "The Muslims in the Ethno-Nationalist Conflict in Sri Lanka. In the Mahinda Werake and P.V.J.Jayasekera, ed., Security Dilemma of a Small State, Part Two: Internal Crisis and External Intervention in Sri Lanka. New Delhi: South Asian Publishers.
Hisbullah, M.L.A.M. 21 February, 1997. Personal interview. Colombo.
Ilyas, I.M. 19 February, 1997. Personal interview. Colombo.

Page 92
166 Transformation of Muslim Political Identity
Ismail, Jezima. 18 February, 1997. Personal interview. Colombo.
Ismail, Qadri. 2 June, 1985. “Move Over Big Brother: the Muslims from the
east are quietly taking over. The Island, p. 11.
LSSLLSSLLSCLSSLLSSLLSSLCSSS LSL LSLSSSLLSSLLS 1995. "Unmooring Identities. In Pradeep Jeganathan and Qadri Ismail, ed., Unmaking the Nation: the Politics of Identity and History in Modern Sri Lanka. Colombo: Social Scientists Association.
Junaid, M.N. 1990. "Employment Opportunities for Muslims with Special Emphasis on Agriculture and the Public Sector. In Challenge for Change: Profile of a Community. Colombo: Muslim Women's Research and Action Front.
Jupp, James. 1978. Sri Lanka. Third World Democracy. Bournemouth,
Great Britian: Frank Cass.
Marga. 1986. The Muslim Community of Sri Lanka. Colombo: Marga
Institute.
McGilvray, Dennis B. 1991. "Arabs, Moors and Muslims: the Mobilization
of Muslim Identity in Sri Lanka. Presented at the Third International Sri Lanka Conference, Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam, The Netherlands.
Mohan, Vasurdara. 1979. "The Language Pragmatism of Sri Lankan Muslims.'
South Asian Studies, 14: 106-20.
------------------ 1987. Identity Crisis of Sri Lankan Muslims. New Delhi:
Mittal.
Mohideen, M.I.M. 1984. Ethnic Problems in Amparai District.' Colombo:
All Ceylon Muslim League.
Moulana, Ali Zahir Seyed. 18 February, 1997. Personal interview. Colombo.
Muslim Student Majlis. 30 January, 1997. Personal interview. Peradeniya.
Oberst, Robert C. 1994. The Political and Social Impact of War on the
Eastern Province of Sri Lanka. Presented at the 23rd Annual Conference on South Asia, Madison, Wisconsin.

Culture and Politics of Identity in Sri Lanka 167
LLSL LLLLS LLSLLCLLSSSSSS SS SkkSBS SBSB LSLSLrLLS LLLLLSLL LLSLL LSLLMS 1995. "The 1994 Elections and the Transformation of the Sri Lanka Party System.' Presented at the Fifth Sri Lanka Conference, Durham, New Hampshire.
Phadnis, Urmila. 1979. “Political Profile of the Muslim Minority of Sri Lanka.'
International Studies, 18:27-48.
Samarasinghe, S.W.R. de A. and Fazal Dawood. 1986. “The Muslim Minority of Sri Lanka: A Business Community in Transition." In M.A.M. Shukri, ed., Muslims of Sri Lanka: Avenues to Antiquity. Beruwela: Jamiah Naleemia Institute.
Taraki. 19 November, 1989. "Muslim Involvement in the TNA. The Island,
pp. 12.
Warnapala, W.A. Wiswa. 1994. Ethnic Strife and Politics In Sri Lanka: An
Investigation into Demands and Responses. New Delhi: Navrang.
Watt, William Montgomery. 1996. A Short History of Islam. Oxford: Oneworld
Publications.

Page 93
Chapter 8
Biographies of a Decaying Nation-State
Jayadeva Uyangoda
The assignment given to me by the International Centre for Ethnic Studies was to make my presentation in the form of a review of five books on the general theme of Sri Lanka's ethnic question. A review of a particular book or a set of books on this theme is no easy exercise. When people publish books, write articles, or present seminar papers on the ethnic question of a particular state, they quite consciously take part in events of biography of the state. Texts on the ethnic question of Sri Lanka, in this sense, are representations of the nationstate in general and its Sri Lankan form in particular.
Instead of reviewing a particular set of books in the conventional manner, I have chosen a different path: that is, to present to you some ideas that have been haunting my mind for some time, ideas that are usually difficult to accommodate in book reviews. Perhaps I want to make the implicit argument: let ideas review books and let not books review ideas. By making this point, I do not want at all to claim any novelty for what I will be presenting as ideas. Rather, what I will be engaging in is a cathartic workout. Since ICES has quite imaginatively called the event we are inaugurating today a festival', a research festival, I thought I could indulge in a minor exercise in exorcism. I have a few thoughts which, like little malformed

Culture and Politics of Identity in Sri Lanka 169
demons, have been disturbing me, even in my sleep. Although brought up in a culture which provided a fine set of childhood companions, yakku, perethayo and holman (inappropriately called in English demons, ghosts and greedy malevolent beings,) I now feel that I can't hold these yak petawu (baby demons) prisoners of my imagination any more. Let them jump out of my skull and be free at last. Actually, ideas are demons, even in the Christian sense of the term; their immediate function, as Bruce Kapferer would testify, is to disturb, and not to sedate or give an ordered form to, the human universe.’
A striking feature that one may encounter in a general review of the literature on contemporary Sri Lanka is how anthropological inquiry has made the first sustained attempt at examining Sri Lanka's contemporary manifestations of violence, practised in the service of the nation-state. These anthropologists, as the very titles of their work suggest (ethnic fratricide, a village in times of trouble, roots of the conflict, celebration of demons, etc.) appear to be a community deeply disturbed by ethnic and other forms of generalized and often morally justified violence practised in Sri Lanka. Perhaps they were also disturbed professionally, because no anthropological field worker had encountered, before 1983, any signs of the trouble to come. But, the fact of their being the first community of academics to inquire into Sri Lanka's contemporary troubles has also made the practitioners of anthropology vulnerable to sharp rebuttals, denunciations and demonization. The main lacuna I find in anthropological inquiry into Sri Lanka's ethnic question and culture-grounded identity politics is the absence of a political theory concerning the nation-state and its historical consequences.
That gap in scholarship should ideally have been filled by political scientists. But political science, being a manifestly underdeveloped discipline in Sri Lanka and without a focus of inquiry sensitive to the phenomenology of everyday predicaments of human beings, has not done much by way of widening our knowledge on the question of violence. A partial explanation of this would perhaps lie in the choices of political location made by the political scientists themselves. A major problem associated with all leading Sri Lankan political science practitioners is that they have also been practitioners of politics, having closely aligned themselves with the state at some phase of its recent formation, although under different regimes and

Page 94
170 Biographies of a Decaying Nation-State
leaders. A lesson I have learned recently is that for reflective political science practice, existential distancing from the state is not only appropriate, but also necessary.
However, when historians and professors of literaturejoined the discussion on the ethnic question, identity politics and violence, the degree to which Sri Lanka's (more accurately Sinhalese) intellectual formation had become so sharply statist and ethnicized, appeared astonishingly real. History and Sinhalese literary studies are still the sites into which critical scholarship is struggling to enter. Hence their privileged position of being conscious and active agents of Sri Lanka's post-colonial, majoritarian nation-state. Actually, no other academic discipline in Sri Lanka has been so successfully, so comprehensively appropriated, disciplined and colonized by the ethnic majoritarian state as are Sri Lankan history and Sinhalese literature taught in schools and universities. •
At this point, I want to return to Sri Lankan anthropology and history to make a positive comment, and to pay a belated tribute to two Sri Lankan scholars, one an anthropologistand the other a historian who, long before 1983, had produced three texts that in retrospect can be described as seminal contributions to the deconstructive scholarship of post-colonial Sri Lankan politics, although they did not directly address issues political. I am here referring to Gananath Obeysekere's two essays, "The Great Tradition and the Little in the Perspectives of Sinhalese Buddhism' (1963) and "Religious Symbolism and Political Change in Ceylon (1970), and Leslie Gunawardana's book The Robe and the Plough (1979). In a review of the scholarship on post-colonial Sri Lanka, these three texts are seminal in a specific sense; they together constitute the ideational core of what one may call the critical social science hermeneutics on Sri Lankan Society, history, ideology in the Sinhalese society and the phenomenology of identity-making. Actually, all subsequent inquiries into the Sinhala nationalist ideology of the modern Sri Lankan state and its socioinstitutional bases continue to be conducted in the shadow of these three path breaking texts."
When recent feminist, anthropological and literary scholarship, developed by a generation conditioned by the post-colonial Sri Lankan state, is juxtaposed with historical, political and sociological

Culture and Politics of Identity in Sri Lanka 171
inquiry into the state's political practices and the counter-state agents of violence, the latter's theoretical poverty becomes all the more evident. (However, sociological enquiry has one noteworthy exception, as commented on elsewhere in this paper.9) The recent scholars have made a significant effort to address the questions of violence that have defined human fate in contemporary Sri Lanka. The generation that has nourished this specific stream of critical Social science hermeneutics defies imprisonment in academic disciplinary boundaries. The post-1983 practices, phenomenologies and representations of violence have been documented and commented on by them with remarkable courage as well as in a refreshingly interventionist spirit."o
Intermeshed Biographies of the Self and the State
When I look back at what I have so far discussed in this paper, I notice that quite unconsciously I have drifted towards the question of ethnic violence. Actually, my conscious attempt was to discuss the Sri Lankan post-colonial nation-state, but it is quite interesting to note how my discussion has been constantly moving in the direction of violence. The transition of this text's focus to violence perhaps demonstrates the extent to which, to use Raymond Williams's phrase, our own structures of consciousness are shaped, conditioned and disciplined by the experiences of violence.
Transition to violence is, in a way, an integral part of the growing-up experience of my entire generation. And incidentally, the biography of my generation is also the biography of Sri Lanka's postcolonial nation state. I remember how, as an eight year old boy in an exclusively Sinhalese-Buddhist milieu, I was initiated to a totally new experience which was later to envelop my entire adult life. This was the ethnic violence of 1958. Accounts - or rumours, as anthropologists would say - of how some Sinhalese shopkeepers and women were burnt alive in Tamil areas and how the Sinhalese retaliated against Tamils spread in my village, bringing an entirely new level of political knowledge to that predominantly peasant society which had not yet been closely integrated with the agenda of the post-colonial Sri Lankan State.

Page 95
172 Biographies of a Decaying Nation-State
A man from my village who had joined the volunteer army
came back with "exciting stories of how he and his colleagues shot, killed and chased away Tamils in Kantalai and Anuradhapura. While listening to the soldier, as I still remember, the past in my imagination met with the present. The childhood stories of great heroic episodes in Sinhalese history found a new space to re-enact themselves. Looking back, I realize that this was my generation's first real encounter with that horrible invention of political modernity, the Sri Lankan nationState.
Another villager, a worker at the Colombo Port and a member of Philip Gunawardana's trade union, narrated to us stories of how the army somewhere in Colombo went from house to house searching for Tamils. As it was for the little boy in Martin Wickremasinghe's novel, Madolduwa, and for Huckleberry Finn in Mark Twain's novel, these were our agents of outside knowledge, outside realities, a universe outside childhood innocence; and they were unconscious agents who all of a sudden shaped our consciousness, belief systems and world-view in accordance with the post-colonial nation-state. I suspect that the experience of a Tamil child living in a remote village in the Jaffna peninsula would have been terribly different from my own. The reality of the nation-state would have reached him or her through different agents, in different anecdotes, and evoked a different stream of collective consciousness.'
Incidentally, by 1958 I had come into contact with four "Tamils: the English-speaking barber shop owner in my little town, who had migrated from Madras; the tobacco shop owner who had come from Jaffna; and the destitute and blind Karupayya, an ex-plantation worker, and his young son, who occasionally came to see my father and joined in long conversations in Tamil. I had my first conversation in English -just one sentence - with the Tamil barber, and that day, to my utter delight, he refused to accept his fee of twenty-five cents; the tobacco shop owner always fascinated me because he smoked black cigars which exuded that wonderful aroma of Jaffna tobacco; and Karupayya's mischievous son taught me my first few words in Tamil, which to my horror I soon realized were four-letter words.

Culture and Politics of Identity in Sri Lanka 173
The point I want to make through these childhood memories is that a particular set of state-society relations had taken shape in Sri Lanka in a particular fashion, just within ten years of its formation. To use the contemporary academic language, it had by then come to maturity as a Sinhala majoritarian state when my generation were still teenagers. The post-colonial Sri Lankan state and my generation came into being together, yet the state grew up faster than us, determining how my generation should grow up. And the appeal of state violence, disseminated through the stories of heroic deeds of the state agencies, could easily ignite the ethnic imagination of my village folk who did not have much to do with other ethnic groups, except in the form of perfectly harmless economic or personal interactions. What is most astounding in this episode is the manner in which all the cultural defences that the village had against ethnic exclusivity gave way to the romantic appeal of state violence in far distant locations, which came to the village as new folklore, as the new poetry of the collective self versus the other. The year 1958 thus marked a rupture in the collective consciousness of the village. The barber, who had portraits of Gandhi and Nehru hung on the walls of the shop, went back to India, Karupayya died of starvation inside the ambalama of Kamburupitiya, and for the parliamentary election of 1960, the UNP distributed in my village posters warning the Sinhalese that if Mrs Bandaranaike's SLFP came into power supported by the Federal Party, no Sinhalese could go on pilgrimage to Anuradhapura, Seruwawila or Nagadeepa.
I want to suggest here the crucial importance of 1958 in the history of the post-colonial Sri Lanka state - the moment of its coming of age. As long as the Sri Lankan state did not begin to practise large-scale physical violence against its own citizenry, it remained, something of an aberration of the modern state. The formation of the modern state, contrary to the utopian liberal-humanistanticipation of a non-violent state, has in every case been a dreadfully violent process." As one may find in some school textbooks, Sri Lanka obtained independence without shedding a single drop of blood. To translate the same euphoric expression into my own language in this paper, the initial phase of the formation of the nation-state of Sri Lanka

Page 96
174 Biographies of a Decaying Nation-State
in the twentieth century was essentially a non-violent one. Then, 1958 proved itself to be crucial because it brought to an effective end this Sri Lankan exceptionalism. In other words, 1958 made the postcolonial Sri Lankan State a normal and modern one.
It is this modernity of the Sri Lankan state, reached symbolically in 1958, that became the defining moment of life for all citizens and communities. Nineteen eighty-three was in a way formed in 1958. And 1983, as a future historian may discover, marked the beginning of the end of the majoritarian nation-state in Sri Lanka. After 1983, Sri Lanka's state could not remain in its old form and with its old content any longer. It had to either reform itself or face a future of disintegration. But the contemporary paradox in Sri Lankan politics is that both reformist and disintegrationist forces are at work simultaneously.
State or Nation-State?
Marxist social and political theory tells us that, except under communism where the state logically does not exist, the state by definition is a violent entity, because the state is the instrument which the propertied classes deploy to Suppress dispossessed and labouring social classes in all modes of production. Echoing Marx, Weber noted that the state is the state because it commands the legitimate authority to monopolize coercive violence. A little demon tells me that the modern nation-state, as opposed to the state in general of the Marxist or Weberian sense, is by definition violent. The nation-state inheres violence because of the fundamental attributes on which it is built: fixed sovereignty, fixed territorial borders and fixed demands of political loyalty and obligations from its citizenry. It is aparticular characteristic that warrants a somewhat mechanical analogy. The process of creating the modern-nation state is such an immensely arbitrary exercise that it is like brick-making. When a craftsperson places a wooden mould on a pile of clay, only that amount of clay can fill the mould that would ultimately make a brick. The modern form of political association is moulded as the nation-state, and communities are the clay utilized in making the brick of the nation-state. The excess clay, as a matter of

Culture and Politics of Identity in Sri Lanka 75
practice, is thrown away. As Allen Buchanan in a recent book discusses quite extensively, 'out-migration, refugee status, Secessionist attempts and war are all embedded in the very logic of the formation of the nation-state, which I have described here as a brick-making exercise.
The problem that bothers me has nothing to do with the fact that this brick-making analogy can easily be rejected by you as an untenable exercise in nation-state bashing. What really bothers me concerns the scholarly fetishism of those attributes that continue to make violence - Violence against its own citizens - a generic necessity of the modern nation-state. Nation-state fetishism has been so naturalized in scholarly thinking that some kind of eternal life is granted to this history-specific form of political association. It is treated as a trans-historical entity, only the past of which is subjected to study, analysis and debate. Its history-specific future hardly constitutes a reflective point of departure.
Actually, it is only when one goes back to the very foundational categories of it that one can see the immensely criminalizing potential of the modern nation-state.' Take, for example, the question offixed territoriality. The creation of India and Pakistan in 1947, appropriately called the Partition', is perhaps one of the most horrendous examples of the irrationality of well-demarcated territorial borders, so rigidly associated with the nation-state. The utter criminality of the whole exercise manifested itself in a variety of ways. First, it put, quite arbitrarily, masses of communities into two macroprison-houses called India and Pakistan. Then, the brick-making exercise was so gruesome that the clay of the people was just thrown out of the two moulds in a manner that should never allow the states of India and Pakistan to claim any moral grounds of legitimacy in representing human associations. But even the great human exodus and butchery that occurred in 1947-48 could not settle the modern nation-state's fixation with strictly defined territorial borders. It continues to haunt all the living beings in South Asia, with the nuclear option being considered as the most effective means to defend the borders of a nation under threat.
All forms of state brutalize human beings but the wonder of the brutalizing capacity of the nation-state is that, unlike other forms of the state, it surrounds itself with two powerful and universally

Page 97
176 Biographies of a Decaying Nation-State
shared foundation myths: centralized sovereignty and fixed-bordered territory.' Borrowing a term from anthropology, we may now say that fetishism of the nation-state is as horrendous a practice as the nation-state itself. The majoritarian nationalist discourse is primarily a discourse constituted by these two attributes of the nation-state. And these are attributes that have no South Asian social or historical roots; they are enduring legacies of our encounter with Europe and its modern political forms.'
Foundation Myths, Signifiers and Totemic Beliefs of the Nation-State
At this point, I wish to turn to Emile Durkheim's penetrating discussion of totemic beliefs, in his celebrated work on primitive religions, written in 1915.' His project was to understand the meaning of religious experience by examining the "most primitive and simple forms of religious beliefs and practices. While studying totemic beliefs among Arunta tribes in central Australia, he noticed that totemic objects called "churinga, pieces of wood orbits of polished stone used in clan rituals, had engraved in each a design representing the totem of the group (Durkheim, 1965:140). Durkheim offers a fascinating discussion of the clan rituals of totemism, but the theme I find quite relevant to my point has a remarkably post-modernistring. Let me quote Durkheim:
Now in themselves, the churinga are objects of wood and stone like all others; they are distinguished from profane things of the same sort by only one particularity: this is that the totemic mark is drawn or engraved upon them. So it is this mark and this alone which gives them their sacred character. (p. 144)
The totemic animals and plants live in the profane world and are mixed up with the common everyday life. Since the number and importance of the interdictions which isolate a sacred thing, and keep it apart, correspond to the degree of sacredness with which it is invested, we arrive at the remarkable conclusion that the images of

Culture and Politics of Identity in Sri Lanka 177
totemic beings are more sacred than the beings themselves... The representations of the totem are therefore more actively powerful than the totem itself. (p. 156; emphasis in the original)
There are two key sentences in the paragraphs quoted above: (i) “It is this mark and this mark alone that gives totemic objects) their sacred character'; and (ii) “The images of totemic beings are more sacred than the beings themselves.'
Durkheim's metaphorical language concerning elementary religious beliefs is useful forus to understand how a universal form of totemism, the nation-state, with the remarkable characteristic that he has identified, dominates all forms of modern civilization. In this Durkheimean reading, we can see how the images of the nation-state have become more sacred and powerful than the nation and the state themselves.
The modern state — the original totemic object, the signified - is marked by a set of signifiers that have become eminently sacred in our intellectual beliefs, discourses and practices: territory, territorial unity and integrity, Sovereignty, loyalty to the nation, citizenship, and national identity. These are the markers that give the modern state its sacred character. The modern nation-state cannot be conceived without or outside them. This set of signifiers is so powerful that it is the emblem of the rationalizing as well as delegitimizing practices concerning the modern nation-state, for which, as Benedict Anderson notes, countless numbers of men and women are not only prepared to go to war and kill their nation's enemies, but are also ready to die themselves.
A question I want to pose now is: What are the genres of academic writing on the ethnic question that have consciously and wilfully refused to share, reinforce and legitimize these totemic attributes of the nation-state. The search for such a refusal is the best starting point of a literature review such as this. In the parallel text of footnotes to this paper, I have suggested my own response to the
question posed above. My only concern is that there is a lot more to do.

Page 98
178 Biographies of a Decaying Nation-State
Treating the Nation-State as an Autonomous Island
Now I come to another of my basic criticisms of the literature on the Sri Lankan ethnic question treating the Sri Lankan case in isolation from the rest of South Asia. When I read texts written by scholars well-trained in archival research-texts which, for example, debunk the Tamil homeland theory or express the horror at fratricidal practices between the Sinhalese and Tamil communities - I begin to wonder why there is such a faithful commitment to this belief in Sri Lankan exceptionalism even among intellectual antagonists. My suggestion is that we have come to an end of the phase of Sri Lankan exceptionalism in our political realities as well as intellectual inquiries. To put it in different terms, Sri Lanka's is a South Asian problem, equally experienced by all post-colonial South Asian states-India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh. A South Asian problem requires South Asian alternatives. South Asian alternatives need a South Asian, and not single-state specific, political imagination."
When it comes to the question of understanding the nationstate and its political malcontents, there is nothing unique about Sri Lanka; everything that was believed unique has already been inquired into, documented and debated. Any more inquiries into the past of the Sri Lankan nation-state can now produce a lot of polemics and little illumination. If I may dramatize my point a little, the best it can evoke in academic communities is the excitement among book reviewers about bad proof reading, irregular footnotes, incomplete bibliographies or disappointment amongst the reviewers themselves that they have been left out from the list of cited authorities. A cover or the title of a book may also excite some academics to write painstakingly unresearched rebuttals - a symptom of the crisis to which I have already alluded.’ All these indicate the extent to which many of us are obsessed with matters epiphenomenal to the central concerns of the historical process.
The simple reason for this state of affairs is that we have reached the end of a particular intellectual era, because we have also arrived at the end of that grand historical period of the old nation

Culture and Politics of Identity in Sri Lanka 79
state in South Asia. Continuing production of texts that soon join the ranks of ideological tracts is in a way symptomatic of the nation-state totemism which I mentioned a few moments ago. A sober and collected look at the historical path of the state and society formation in South Asia - particularly in the post-colonial region of South Asia - would lead one to the serene observation that the nation-state, as a form of political association, is in its final historical reckoning. The cunning of history is that it hides its movements even from university professors who may occupy endowed chairs.
In this dying phase of the nation-state in South Asia, it is perhaps now easy to rid ourselves of nation-state totemism, to once again critically look at the representations as well as the essence of the nation-state. It would not be surprising if a new critical historiography of the nation-state reveals that the nation-state itself has been no less cruel or destructive than the colonial state.
The realization that the nation-state is a dying form of political association should enable us to think new political alternatives for South Asia. This is where I have begun to believe that some of our energies should be devoted to imagining fresh forms of political association which would enable - for example, in the present period of globalization - free movement of capital and all forms of labour. I, for one, would love to see a South Asia which will no longer be a prison house of nations. In my thinking, de-centring of state sovereignty and democratization of state borders would lay the basis for a multiplicity of South Asian republics which should ideally replace the existing system of majoritarian nation-states. But this is only a marginally subversive form of political imagination.
Conclusion
Now I have let my teenage demonic creatures out. I have exorcized my inner tormentors. They are now with you, above as well as below the footnote lines. You may hit them, break their limbs apart or chase them away. As Foucault may have said, they are now yours and not mine any longer. And I am relieved.

Page 99
180 Biographies of a Decaying Nation-State
Notes
The formulation "nation-state' is used throughout this paper not in its literal, but in a post-colonial, ironic sense.
* As usually happens, books on Sri Lanka do not get much response from the Sri Lankan intelligentsia. Kapferer's two books, (1983) Celebration of Demons (Bloomington. Indian University Press) and (1988) Legends of People, Myths of State (Washington: Smithsonian Institution) received only very little attention from Sri Lankans at home and abroad. In these two books, Kapferer suggested in a very interesting manner how the focus of anthropological inquiry should not abandon the agrarian exotica while dealing with the question of the state.
Some major publications in a long list of work by anthropologists on Sri Lanka's political violence and ethnic identity are Kapferer (1988 and 1989); Gananath Obeysekere's numerous writings on Sinhalese Buddhism and the cultural-intellectual, social formations of SinhaleseBuddhist society; Jonathan Spencer (1990) A Sinhala Village in a Time of Trouble, Stanley Tambiah (1986) Sri Lanka. Ethnic Fratricide and the Dismantling of Democracy, and (1992) Buddhism Betrayed? Religion, Politics and Violence in Sri Lanka (Chicago: Chicago University Press). Meanwhile, to get a sense of symbolic fratricidal practices among anthropologists working on Sri Lanka, see the symposium on 'writing within' in American Anthropology, vol.31, 1994. Incidentally, violence generated and legitimized in the Sri Lankan Tamil social formation has not yet been the subject of abiding interest among anthropologists. The best work-detailed documentation and comment - comes from a group of Tamil academics who have had no formal social science training. I am here referring to the exceptionally courageous writings of the group, University Teachers for Human Rights - Jaffna. Meanwhile, Radhika Coomaraswamy stands out as a scholar who has constantly engaged the contradictions of Tamil social and cultural formations of Sri Lanka from a feminist perspective. Coomaraswamy's latest essay on this specific problematic is Tiger Women and the Question of Women's Emancipation' in Pravada, vol. 4, no. 9.
4. Take, for example, the case of Professor A.J.Wilson, whose quite useful work, The Break-Up of Sri Lanka, can be seen as a self-exculpatory

Culture and Politics of Identity in Sri Lanka 18
narrative. Wilson worked closely with President Jayewardene after the 1977 UNP victory. His trust in Jayewardene as a modern, pragmatic leader was dashed after 1983 when Jayewardene demonstrated his majoritarianist intransigence and rigidity. Wilson, quite naturally, felt betrayed and quit in anger Jayewardene's intellectual encourage. The Break-Up of Sri Lanka, as in a work of fiction, has a main character, Jayewardene, and a narrator who, in retrospect, sees everything in "correct' perspective. The narrator in this case is the author himself. Actually, the cases of Wilson and of his generational juniors raise fundamental question about political engagement of academics with regimes, a problem that requires a great deal of critical thinking and reflection.
With regard to my own predicament, I will prefer silence for the moment.
There are some recent interventionist writings - in terms of political imagination, they are hardly paralleled by the English writing - by a few intellectual activists who write exclusively in Sinhalese on the literary and cultural texts and practices of the Sinhala society. Initiated by the journal Mawatha, this vernacular critical scholarship on Sinhalese literature and culture is presently represented, among others, by Ranjith Perera, Deeptha Kumara Gunaratne, Rohan Perera, Nirmal Ranjith and Nishantha de Alwis. Their most recent work has appeared in a journal with limited circulation, Pravada.
Obeysekere (1963) in Journal of Asian Studies vol. XXII, no. 2, and (1970) in Modern Ceylon Studies, vol. I, no. 1. One may note that Obeysekere wrote these two essays long before Ceylon entered its Sri Lanka phase.
Leslie Gunawardana's work, Robe and the Plough, has, however, failed to lay the foundation for critical historical scholarship in Sri Lanka, a fact which requires some reflection on the status of the discipline of history in Sri Lankan universities. Because of its theoretical privation, the practice of historical scholarship still remains at the level of a protodiscipline. Not even the very vibrant historical scholarship in India has so far been able to make an impact on the vast majority of Sri Lankan historians. The narrowly empiricist tradition of the conventional British

Page 100
182 Biographies of a Decaying Nation-State
()
historical scholarship continues to define the epistemology of teaching, research and writing in the field of history in Sri Lankan universities.
Even in a brief note, the sheer capacity of the feminist scholarship to out-categorize the discourse of the nation-state needs to be acknowledged. As the feminist scholarship has demonstrated, gendered practices of state power and counter-state power, domination and counter-domination, and making and re-making of national/ethnic identities have no nation-state boundaries. See especially the introduction to Kumari Jayawardena and Malathi de Alwis, (1996) Embodied Violence, Conmunalizing Women's Sexuality in South Asia, New Delhi: Kali for Women.
In the sociological inquiry, the only exception is the work of Newton Gunasinghe who deployed a variety of Marxist theoretical categories to unraved the processes that led to 1983 and its aftermath. His writings, theoretically dense and intellectually provocative, constitute an immediate theoretical response to 1983. They are now available in the volume, Sasanka Perera ed., (1996) Newton Gunasinghe, Selected Essays, Colombo: Social Scientists' Association. While I was working on the text of this presentation, Kumari Jayawardena brought to my attention the latest work of Stanley Tambiah (1996), Leveling Crowds: Ethno-Nationalist Conflicts and Collective Violence in South Asia, Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press. The salutary feature the reader will immediately notice in this work is the broadly South Asian perspective it offers on the outbreak of acts of collective violence.
My own personal acquaintance with most of these scholars makes it somewhat difficult for me to make any extensive comment on their work apart from some general remarks on the genre. Actually, I have tried in this paper to minimize references to publications by institutions with which I am professionally associated. A few notable texts are Rajan Hoole, Daya Somasundaram, K. Sritharan and Rajini Thiranagama (1992) The Broken Palmyra; the essays in Pradeep Jeganathan and Quadri Ismail (1994) Unmaking the Nation; Sasanka Perera (1995) Living with Torturers; Neloufer de Mel (1996) "Metaphors of Women: Sri Lankan War Poetry in Kumari Jayawardena and Malathi de Alwis (eds.), Embodied Violence: Communalizing Women's Sexuality in South Asia; Darini Rajasingham (1995) “Homelands, Border Zones and Refugees:
 
 

Culture and Politics of Identity in Sri Lanka 183
Facts, Fictions and Displacements', Pravada, vol. 4, no. 2; the numerous writings of Radhika Coomaraswamy; and, of course the poetry and stories of Jean Arasanayagam. A body of quite original ideas on Sri Lanka's pre-history has come from Sudharshan Seneviratne, but Seneviratne's work is seldom mentioned even in footnotes to historical writings in Sri Lanka. Another scholar whose work can be forgotten only at the risk of losing the thread of Sri Lanka's post-1983 intellectual history is the late Serena Tennakoon. Tennekoon's two essays, 'Symbolic Refractions of the Ethnic Crisis' (1987) and "Rituals of Development: The Accelerated Mahaweli Development Program of Sri Lanka' (1988), represent the strength of the enormous theoretical impetus provided for post-1983 Sri Lankan social science scholarship, yet not adequately utilized by many.
I have borrowed this idea of "agents of knowledge in the village' from Jonathan Spencer's representation of the school teacher in his work, (1990) A Sinhala Village in a Time of Trouble: Politics and Change in Rural Sri Lanka, Madras: Oxford University Press.
It took Sri Lanka twenty-five years after independence to match the violence that erupted at the formation of, to take three cxamples from South Asia, India, Pakistan and Bangladesh.
Weber, Max, "Politics as a Vocation' in H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (eds.), 1946, For Max Weber; Essays in Sociology, New York: Oxford University Press.
Buchanan, Allen, (1991) Secession, The Morality of Political Divorce from Fort Sumter to Lithuania and Quebec, Boulder: Westview Press.
In a footnote though, I must mention here that I have yet to encounter a single work on the Sri Lankan ethnic crisis written from the perspectives of political philosophy. There is a monograph which evokes philosophical reflection, but is not necessarily a work in political philosophy: Ram Manikkalingam (1995) Prudently Negotiating a Moral Peace, Colombo: Social Scientists' Association.
As much as in scholarly literature, in South Asian fiction and poetry too, the horror and rational absurdity of the creation of India and Pakistan as modern nations in the vast subcontinental South Asia is effectively

Page 101
184 Biographies of a Decaying Nation-State
20
2
depicted. A few examples are Khushwant Singh's Train to Pakistan, Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children, Shashi Tharoor's The Great Indian Novel, and the poetry of Faiz Ahmed Faiz.
Ithank Dr Nira Wickramasinghe of Colombo University for drawing my attention, in a conversation, to the useful concept of foundation myths.
One of the most imaginative metaphors invented by a Sri Lankan scholar to describe the pre-colonial and pre-centralized South and South-east Asian state is Stanley Tambiah's "galactic state', found in his major, yet largely neglected, work, (1976) World Conqueror, World Renouncer, A Study of Buddhism and Polity in Thailand Against a Historical Background, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ironically, Tambiah is known - too well known, at that - in Sri Lanka for his lesser works, Ethnic Fratricide and Buddhism Betrayed?
Emile Durkheim (1965) The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, New York: The Free Press. I am indebted to Michael Taussig whose essay, (1996) "Maleficium: State Fetishism' in Emily Apter and William Pietz (eds.), Fetishism as a Cultural Discourse, pp. 217-47, enabled me to discover Durkheim's post-modernist insights.
The first Sri Lankan scholar to argue against Sri Lankan exceptionalism - so ingrained in Sri Lankan scholarship - is the late Newton Gunasinghe in his imaginative theoretical essay, "Towards a Structural Perspective on South Asia’, Lanka Guardian, October 1988.
Academics, including myself, are heirs to a grand tradition of university academia. It is the habit of checking the bibliography for one's name, whenever one places hands on a new publication on Sri Lanka. If one undertakes to review the book, the review is very likely to be determined by this first encounter of the subjective kind.
About bibliographies, I wish to make a different point. A book I was once asked to comment on is K. M. de Silva's interesting work of 1995, Regional Powers and Small State Security, India and Sri Lanka, 1977-90, Washington DC: The Woodrow Wilson Center Press. Part III of this book is on some themes of Sri Lanka's ethnic conflict during 1987-90. I was struck by the absence of a single Tamil or Sinhalese source cited in the bibliography. Instead, such obscure journals as American Political Science Review () are cited. I am eagerly awaiting

22
23
24
Culture and Politics of Identity in Sri Lanka 185
the day when Sri Lankan scholars writing in English on the ethnic question will findsome use in vernacular material. After all one is writing
on the 'ethnic' question. It is also quite interesting that in the list of people interviewed by the author for the book, there is not a single Sri
Lankan Tamil; nor is there the name of a single Sinhalese other than
those who held political or bureaucratic office in 1987-90. Of course,
when one writes an official biography of the nation-state one should
not go beyond its office-holders.
Professor Stanley Tambiah deserves acknowledgement for igniting one of the most vibrant debates, unintentionally though, on ethnic politics in Sri Lanka, a debate which gave a wonderful opportunity for quite a few Sri Lankan intellectuals to enmesh their own intellectual biographies with the biography of a dying nation-state. During the heated debate on his book, Professor Tambiah apologized for the cover picture of the book, Buddhism Betrayed? Little did Tambiah, Anthropology Professor at Harvard, realize that in the Sinhalese culture, both popular and intellectual, apologizing for a mistake is an admission of absolute guilt and the apology itself demands that the culprit be subjected to severe and ruthless punishment.
For such a fresh perspective on "reinventing the state' in South Asia, see Imtiaz Ahmed, "Post-Nationalist South Asia, Himal South Asia, May 1996, pp. 10-14.
The reality of the prison house metaphor of South Asia can be vividly experienced if one tries to cross any of the State borders, even armed with a valid entry visa and a return air ticket. All immigration and customs officials are trained by the state to treat fellow South Asian citizens who come before them except political office-holders who are euphemistically called VIPs - as Smugglers, gun runners, foreign intelligence agents, illegal immigrants or potential law breakers. The nation-state's fixation with borders has criminalized the genuine movement of people and capital, which has had, if I may appropriate the language of Sinhala nationalism for a better purpose, a long and unbroken historical tradition running through a few millennia. Airports as well as in migration and customs check-points on land routes arc sites where the criminality of the bordered state is enacted in infinitely absurd proportions. A countless number of South Asians may have expericnced the utter irrationality and the anti-people essence of the

Page 102
186 Biographies of a Decaying Nation-State
South Asian nation-state system at airports and border check-points. But no political scientist, no anthropologist nor any international relationist has, to my knowledge, so far looked at the counter-human phenomenology of the South Asian nation-state through this genre of experiences and narratives.

The contributors
Patrick Anderson is an anthropology graduate from Northwestern University. He was a U.S. Fulbright scholar during 1996-97 attached to the U.S. Educational Foundation in Sri Lanka
Jani de Silva Department of Anthropology at the London School of
Economics
Marisa Angell graduate in religion from Princeton University. She was a U.S. Fulbright scholar during 1996-97 attached to the U.S. Educational Foundation in Sri Lanka
Michael Schaeffer history graduate from Columbia University. He was a U.S. Fulbright scholar during 1996-97 attached to the U.S. Educational Foundation in Sri Lanka
Sasanka Perera is an anthropologist and senior lecturer at the
Department of Sociology, University of Colombo
Sunil Bastian is a researcher attached to the International Centre for
Ethnic Studies, Colombo
Shari Knoerzer a political science graduate from Nebraska Wesleyan University. She was a U.S. Fulbright scholar during 1996-97 attached to the U.S. Educational Foundation in Sri Lanka
Jayadeva Uyangoda is Senior Lecturer in Political Science at the
University of Colombo

Page 103


Page 104


Page 105
COL
Printed by Unie Arts (Pvt
 

ISBN 955-580-033-2
) Ltd. Colombo 13. Sri anka