Sri Lankan Identity Will Prevail

First published in two parts in The Island on 21^st and 22^nd July 2008

What impelled me to write this essay was Mr RMB Senanayake’s article entitled ‘Sri Lankan identity is dead – a response to Anne Abeysekera’, in The Island of Saturday 5^th July, 2008 where the opening paragraph concludes thus:

“In the past in the social environment she and I grew up, the social environment was not dominated by the Sinhala Buddhist ethos. It was a more humanist tradition inherited from the West.”

I had a feeling of respect for Mr Senanayake on the basis of the quality of his numerous articles in The Island which let me believe him to be an ethical, rational, and broadminded person. So it was painful for me to read the words quoted above coming from his pen; many other readers sharing my attitude towards the subject in question may have been similarly affected by the implications of those words.

In fact, Mr Senanayake was only responding to Ms Anne Abayasekara’s contribution under the title ‘Am I a Sinhalese first, and a Sri Lankan afterwards’carried in the same paper on Monday 30th June, 2008, which in turn was a reaction to an even earlier article entitled ‘How does one BECOME Sinhalese or Tamil in Sentiments’ by Dr Michael Roberts in The Island of 30th April, 2008. Following Ms Abayasekera’s essay Dr Roberts had another short piece, which was on the subject of “Debating and quantifying the label ‘secular’” in The Island of 3^rd July, 2008.

I reread all those three articles before sitting down to write the following, which will contain my personal views apropos of the points raised, for whatever they are worth.

First of all I wish to add a caveat: I felt rather diffident at the beginning about the task I must address myself to on this occasion, because I am neither a historian nor a political scientist, not even a politician (the least intellectually demanding vocation in our country at the present time!). I am someone Dr Roberts could justifiably include in the ETDH (Every Tom Dick and Harry) category, and I hope I am not trespassing too much on his academic preserve; mine are humble views based on commonsense; I don’t want to make a fool of myself by challenging Dr Michael Roberts whose scholarship and fame I very sincerely admire. However, with the realization that history is not at issue here and that Dr Roberts’ enlightened liberal views regarding the limited value of history (whether ancient or most recent) for the resolution of the current conflict situation in our country are essentially identical with mine, I feel I have managed by this point to shed some of my initial inhibitions.

But I do not share his convictions about the existence and significance of what is usually condemned as ‘Sinhala Buddhist chauvinism’ ( or of a Tamil version of the same sort of chauvinism for that matter) among the ordinary people of this country. These charges of chauvinism relate especially to the Sinhalese Buddhists’ agitation prior to Independence aimed at regaining what they believed was their due status as the majority race of this island with a well established history along with the other communities, and to certain political and legislative measures attempted since in order to eliminate longstanding anomalies.

To my mind both Dr Roberts and Mr Senanayake take ‘Sinhala Buddhist chauvinism’ for granted, of course, with different degrees of tolerance or disapproval of the same between them. (Ms Abayasekara is apparently free from such an attitude.) In addition to this, all three stand socially and culturally more or less at the same distance from the ordinary Sinhala Buddhists whom they are implicitly passing judgement on. Dr Roberts’ purportedly cold scientific approach contrasts with Ms Abayasekara’s empathetic attitude of a certain fellow feeling, understanding and tolerance. Mr Senanayake provides a foil to both in his downright condemnation of ‘the Sinhala Buddhist ethos’ as lacking in humanism (whatever he means by the last term).

Since it was Ms Abayasekara’s attempt to answer a riddle in the form of a number of questions formulated by Dr Michael Roberts towards the end of his article and offered to the Sinhalese (and as a second thought to the Tamil) readers for their own education through reflection that has triggered this colloquy, and since in my view his barrage of questions presumes the existence of a certain morbid state of mind that impels the Sinhalese to think fanatically of themselves as a race, let me start with those questions.

What makes you FEEL that you are a Sinhalese?

How did you become Sinhalese?

What made your parents think and feel themselves Sinhalese?

And are you at the same time a Sri Lankan in sentiment?

Or is the last question redundant in that Sinhalese is equivalent to ‘Sri Lankan’?

Dr Roberts deletes the last question for the Tamils, as he maintains, because of their recent experiences (presumably their sufferings at the hands of fanatical Sinhalese Buddhist nationalists as often alleged).

Kan Butani feels in his article ‘Make money not war: A recipe for peace’ ( The Island, Tuesday 8^th July, 2008) that Dr Roberts’ question is ‘the most absurd question and every answer will be confronted by an unanswerable why.’ I would not call it absurd; I would say that , though apparently silly, it is well-meaning, its purpose being to stimulate rational analysis of a certain undesirable sentiment – fanatical emotional attachment to one’s race- which will result in the analyst being cured of that illness. The practical intellectual exercise that Dr Roberts recommends for those readers who FEEL and have BECOME Sinhalese ( the capitalizing foregrounds the notion that ethnic identity is more a subjective emotional construct than a scientifically provable fact) is meant to pave the way for some sort of communal rapprochement between the Sinhalese, Tamils and Muslims, who, in his perception, are engaged at present in ‘the competitive jostling-cum-conflicts’ that determines ‘…the present impasse in the politics of Sri Lanka’.

In fact, Dr Roberts’ article appeared on the web on April 23^rd (before it did so in The Island a week after). It has attracted a number of comments (some commending, some disparaging his views) from bloggers. Acknowledging their comments Dr Roberts says on the same website: “My intention… was to underline the complex process (really processes) through which we become Sinhalese, Tamil, Scottish, Japanese, etc”. He illustrates this by referring to the case of Greek migrants to Australia. According to him some of them identify themselves as Australian, some as Greek-Australians, and some as Greek, the last being positively anti-Aussie in sentiment! He further adds: “ Arguably some of the most rabid Sinhala and Tamil chauvinists can be found among elements living abroad”.

In his reply to an individual blogger Dr Roberts acidly comments: “Since he also asserts that HOME of Tamils is Tamil Nadu his contention in effect suggests that the Tamils of Sri Lanka can bugger off to that country. I have it on good authority that some politicians of the present regime occasionally voice the same idea which is PLAIN WRONG…It is only the paranoid attitude of the Sinhala Buddhists or Sinhala extremists that render them into a threatening force and a looming ally of the LTTE..”. (Such extremist claims as those made by the reader who said that the home f the Tamils is Tamil Nadu are often provoked by similarly PLAIN WRONG assertions by Tamil extremists. But we must realize the fact that extremists, in spite of their notoriety and loud noise, are only a handful on both sides.)

Dr Roberts’ questions were meant for the “introspective examination” of such morbid notions as those that give rise to extremism..

Later, however, he qualifies this apparently totally damning assessment, for he admits that “There are always a few, maybe even more, with whom – and WITHIN whom – collective identity sits lightly”. My own contention is, as it has always been, that despite all appearances to the contrary, with the vast majority of ordinary ‘Sinhala Buddhists’, especially ‘within’ Sinhala Buddhists, ‘collective identity sits lightly’ to an extent generally unusual among many other communities (I am risking a charge of the popularly condemned ‘We Vs Them’ syndrome here). Consider, for example, a very obvious cultural trait of the Sinhalese Buddhists: their names and their manner of dress do not reveal their racial or religious identity; the absence of painted marks on the body that distinguish them from others reinforces this anonymity. (This may be due to the influence of the Buddhist teaching that emphasizes the harmfulness of obsession with one’s self and advocates its effacement.) Only close association and familiarity with the Sinhalese Buddhists will reveal how non-racist most of them are in their social outlook despite their awareness of their identity as Sinhalese Buddhists in a world where racial, religious, cultural, social and other numerous kinds of divisions are normal. The unfortunate thing is that foreigners and the equally alien representatives of the elite who wish to sit in judgement over them are usually unable to get near enough to them to understand and assess them properly. They arrive at their damning conclusions only by looking at a handful of really rabid chauvinists doing politics among the Sinhalese who claim to represent the Sinhalese Buddhist masses (but such extremists among the Sinhalese are far outnumbered by similar elements in the opposite camps). Which community is free of such elements?

Dr Roberts summarizes his questions thus: ‘how did each of you become Sinhalese or Tamil and develop attachments to that entity?’ If I had any objections to such a poser, it would be because it begs the question in that it takes for granted the ‘rabid chauvinism’ the admission or denial of which should form part of the answer; for example, one cannot respond ‘I don’t FEEL Sinhalese, and didn’t BECOME Sinhalese either, I AM Sinhalese because I was born to Sinhalese parents, I speak Sinhalese, I follow the cultural traditions generally associated with the Sinhalese, etc, etc, just as you would say, if pressed for an answer to the question ‘What’s your race or ethnicity?’ that you ARE a Burgher or some version of it such as Ceylonese Burgher, Sinhalese-Burgher, or whatever, for similar reasons; but such an answer would amount to a rejection of the question; in other words, only those who admit to have made such a big deal of their Sinhaleseness as to be discriminatory towards other communities could take the question up as part of some sort of a psychological counseling process, and hopefully benefit from it. And if there are any Sinhalese who have really made themselves Sinhalese, and who do feel themselves Sinhalese in the judgement of these counselors, but refuse to accept the fact, they will simply scoff at the questions as nonsense.

I flatter myself that as an ordinary citizen I too share the same liberal values that I believe Dr Roberts subscribes to. We don’t set much store by our ethnic identity or other identity that serves to isolate us from the rest of humanity. And that, surprisingly for their detractors, is the attitude of most Sinhalese Buddhists. By writing what might look like a defence of the majority of ordinary Sinhalese Buddhists against charges of extremism I am not trying to defend the indefensible. What I am attempting to show is that Sinhalese Buddhist chauvinism is itself a chimerical creation of vested political interests especially over the past one hundred years or so.

An ordinary citizen like me could easily realize it if the Sinhalese Buddhists who form the majority of the population discriminated against the minorities at every turn, and behaved in ways that would amount to a deliberate violation of their rights as free and equal citizens living in a democracy. There is no evidence of such chauvinism among the Sinhalese Buddhists.

Chauvinism is the fanatical adherence to one’s race, religion, language, morals, and political and military power, based on the belief that these are superior to anyone else’s. The majority of the Sinhalese Buddhists are the ordinary people you see wherever you go in the country – peasant cultivators, pavement hawkers, mechanics, clerks, teachers, shop assistants, health workers, and the rest in all walks of life. There is no tradition of lording it over the members other communities by these people in any way.

Recently I got a ‘paint baas’ (a painter) to paint the wall in front of our house which faces a main road. I knew he was a Sinhalese and a Buddhist, a member of the much maligned majority. On seeing the logo ‘May Budungay daysayayi’ (This is the Land of the Buddha) painted on the rear windscreen of a bus that passed, he said with a wry smile, ‘Munta pissu!’ (They are crazy). Though I understood perfectly well that he was expressing his contempt for those extremist elements who thought up that slogan, I asked him,’Why?’ The answer was: ‘How can any person say that? Isn’t this country the land of Muslims, Christians, Hindus, and other religionists, as well?’

To understand and appreciate the attitude of ordinary Buddhists towards intercommunal coexistence analysts must interact closely with those people. It is not right to judge them entirely by what politicians say, or by what one speculates.

More than half a century of anti-Sinhala-Buddhist propaganda has demonized the Sinhalese majority in the eyes of the world, and this I see as a mere gratuitous development, principally due to our (Sri Lankans’) failure to emerge whole out of the stranglehold of British colonialism. This failure was the net result of the discriminatory treatment by the imperialists of the subject majority as against the minorities. When the time came for the rectification of the historical wrongs perpetrated on the majority Sinhalese Buddhists, disagreements and rivalries between the different communities gave rise to centrifugal, instead of centripetal, tendencies in the national struggle towards independence.

Apparently Mr Senanayake is not unaware of this history of ‘Sinhala Buddhist nationalism’ because he says:

‘The national cake is of fixed size and if the Tamils got a disproportionate share of it then the Sinhala Buddhists would inevitably get less…’ There is a gap in his logic here for he then implies that the Sinhala Buddhists should have taken this lying down, but that they didn’t, as a result of which the ‘manufacture of Sinhala Buddhist nationalism’ came about. Then he asserts that this Sinhala Buddhist nationalism ‘led to a similar Tamil nationalism’.

When he compares the ‘Sinhala Buddhist ethos’ unfavouably with ‘Western humanism’ Mr Senanayake’s logic snaps again. He himself gives a few examples of Western humanism such as the case of the 14-year old black boy Emmet Till who “could be hunted down and murdered by a Mississippi gang simply because he had supposedly made suggestive remarks to a white woman”. Therefore I need not say anything about his denunciation of the ‘Sinhala Buddhist ethos’.

The Right Honourable D.S.Senanayake, acting as a true patriotic Sinhalese Buddhist leader without publicly assuming that name to gain narrow political advantage, managed to achieve a degree of national unity sufficient to inaugurate a progressive march towards the establishment of a single, multiethnic, multicultural, and multilinguistic nation amidst much opposition from extremist elements from both sides. But this march was cut short with the untimely death of D.S. in 1952 just three years into his tenure of office as the first Prime Minister of independent Ceylon (Sri Lanka).

It is not right to apportion blame exclusively to the so-called Sinhala Buddhist nationalists for ‘the present impasse’. One could argue that the members of the Tamil elite pampered under the British provoked a naturally hostile reaction from their Sinhalese counterparts by opposing the accommodation by the colonial rulers of the latter’s demand for the fulfillment of their legitimate aspirations.

However, if we look back over the past century occupied successively by the final fifty or so years of colonial rule of our country, and six decades of independence we can realize that communal harmony has broadly held, and with it a sense of Sri Lankan identity in spite of some serious setbacks; but these setbacks were not due to any real Sinhala Buddhist chauvinism.

National unity was seen at two levels of society inherently hostile to each other: 1)at the level of the pampered minuscule elite, the comprador class – the native collaborators of foreign imperialism – for whom their original ethnic identity and culture were of little import in the face of the power and prestige they gained through Christianity and English, and 2)at the level of the vast majority of the oppressed masses of the native population consisting of the poor of all the Lankan communities. Naturally it took different things to unite each class within itself. Imperial patronage and privileges united the one, while the misery attendant upon imperial exploitation, being the common lot of the dispossessed, united the other. This is a theme I alluded to in passing in an artcle entitled ‘Language for Peace and Progress’ in The Island (Midweek Review) on Wednesday 3^rd November 1999:

In the past there were situations in our country in which Sinhalese,
Tamils, Muslims and Burghers lived and worked together in complete peace
and harmony in spite of their divergent ethnic backgrounds. Even now,
ordinary Sinhalese and Tamils realise such peaceful co-existence. From
history, we know that the English-educated, mostly westernised elite of our
country under the British formed a close-knit community despite their
varied racial backgrounds. In such harmonious situations, what is important
is not race or language, but the community of interests and the opportunity
to promote those interests without hindrance. Of course social elitism,
which depends on a system of exploitation of the majority by a privileged
minority, cannot be a model for us to follow. I merely alluded to it here
as an illustration of my belief that shared goals and mutually beneficial
means of reaching them are a more potent factor in generating communal
harmony, than language.

Readers who wish to view this article in full may go to (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/act/message/263)

Both Ms Abayasekara and Mr Senanayake grieve over the alleged disappearance of the Ceylonese/Sri Lankan identity or national unity enjoyed at the brown sahib level (the former perhaps with some reservations, the latter without any).

I had reached this point in my essay when Dr Mahes Ladduwahetty’s article ‘Is Sri Lankan identity dead?’ appeared in The Island of Monday 14^th July, 2008, which is a patient and fair-minded response to ‘Those who condemn Sri Lankan nationalism/patriotism while extolling a theoretical “Western humanism” and post nationalism…”, and is certainly better than what I am attempting here.

By a happy coincidence I find myself able to bring my discourse to an end by quoting, in confirmation of my thesis, the concluding sentences of an article by Dr Dayan Jayatilleke under the title “The coordinates of national consciousness” in The Island of Tuesday 15^th July, 2008. Dr Jayatilleke’s article is a reaction to a critique by a local writer in The Sunday Leader of 13^th July, 2008 of a new nationwide public “Peace poll” published last month by the Institute of Irish Studies at the University of Liverpool in the UK and commissioned by The Centre for Policy Alternatives, Colombo.

Summarizing the general implications of the statistical findings of the said survey Dr Jayatilleke winds up his essay with these sentences:

“…Taken together, the totality of the Sinhala views, on national priorities, the war, the Tigers, devolution and discrimination, present a picture not of a fanatical, chauvinist community but of middle-of-the road mass sentiment; of a majority on the Middle Path. Running against the collective wisdom of the current crop of Cassandras, the scenario turns still more optimistic when one recalls just how reasonable Tamil opinion is on many issues, revealing that there is no unbridgeable chasm between the communities.”

As for Mr Senanayake’s presumed near-realization in the West of ‘post identity’ ideals – ‘post nationalism, postmodernism and multiculturalism’ (from Mr S’s article)- which prompts him to say, “Obama’s candidacy is thrilling because it carries with it the notion that the gap between the races may be beginning to close”, he may find little confirmation of his view in the news item ‘Former President Clinton warns of polarization of electorate’ on page 7 of the same issue of The Island. According to this news dispatch Mr Clinton opines that “Underneath the apparent accommodation to our diversity, we are in fact hunkering down in communities of like-mindedness, and it affects our ability to manage difference”.

Contrary to Mr Senanayake’s totally pessimistic assessment of the chance of an Obama type of “accommodation to diversity” (Clinton’s phrase) being achieved in our country, it has been proved more than once that persons from the minorities are acceptable to the Sinhala Buddhists as their political leaders when they are perceived to champion the national interest rather than their individual communal agendas. It is also my own hunch that a young generation of Sri Lankans are emerging both in the embattled north and east and in the relatively calm south, who, by education or instinct, due most probably to the combined influence of the tolerant humanist traditions of Hindu and Buddhist cultures which predate the Western ‘humanist’ culture at least by half a millennium, seem to embrace more meaningful ideals such as shared prosperity, good jobs, and a peaceful life of personal and social happiness than self-destructive sectarian goals. No more proof of this would be necessary than the case of the former LTTE child soldier Sivanesathurai Chandrakanthan (Pillayan) who has been elected the Chief Minister of the Eastern Provincial Council. Our fervent hope should be that the present old guard labouring under various fanaticisms may not scuttle this epochal trend which is steadily gaining ground.

Rohana R Wasala