John Rogers to Michael Roberts, date uncertain, maybe circa 2018 … responding to items in this website, maybe circa 2018, which retailed debates in the early 1970s within Peradeniya University and Lanka in circles associated with — and against — the activities of the CEYLON STUDIES SEMINAR.
Some lecturers aligned with the United Front government of Mrs Bandaranaike voiced strong protests against some seminars organised by the CSS cabal — including a conference on the “Sinhala-Tamil problem” held in Colombo.
John’s reflections on the challenges and the work of the CSS provide us with stimulating ideas on the character of political contestation in general. His academic background and items pertinent to the CSS will be listed at the end of this item.
“Where have all the flowers gone,
Long time passing,
….
Michael,
I think I had read this essay before, but went through it again. I think that these attitudes at Peradeniya and in the country in general in the late 1960s and early 1970s need to be seen not only in the SL context, but through global intellectual trends. The same definitions of “nationalism” and “communalism”, and then the search for new terms such as “cultural nationalism” or “sub-nationalisms” or “collective identity” to deal with movements that didn’t seem to fit the older conventional notions of “nationalism” was marked in India (and scholarship on India) and (with variations) in many other parts of the world. (Yugoslavia was often cited by the left as the model for dealing with sub-nationalisms.). When I was at SOAS from 1978 to 1984, it wasn’t that different from what you describe. The phrase “Sinhala nationalism” and especially “Sinhala-Buddhist nationalism” did not exist at that time. People did not speak of “Hindu nationalism” — “nationalism” was reserved for the Nehruvian approach. I remember, in a paper in the US in the mid 1980s, when the events of 1983 were making a huge impact on scholarship on Sri Lanka, using the term “cultural nationalism” (It may have been “Sinhalese cultural nationalism”) — which Kingsley commented on favorably because the other panelist was using the term “Sinhalese chauvinism” instead. This was maybe three decades after 1956, but people were only beginning to abandon the older idea of nationalism (and its inevitable ability to overcome most regional and cultural differences so long as the politics got the economic policy right). But the point I’m making is that it wasn’t only a Sri Lankan phenomenon. This type of thinking prevailed generally, all over the world. No doubt there are things we think today, which 30 years from now will also be seen as “ideological blindness”.
John
TWO
I think Siriweera’s attitudes and others’ connected to the UF were common on the left globally, or at least on the British left — it mirrors attitudes I often heard in the UK when living there 1978-84. But I think the assumption that “history” was proceeding towards a collection of stable nation-states was also found outside left circles, e.g. the very influential theories of “political development” in political science (which more or less imploded in the late 1970s and early 1980s). Samuel Huntington, a conservative, was one such thinker. There may not have been much of an explicit parallel to this in Sri Lanka, but if you look at Kingsley’s discussion of nationalism in the UCHC vol. 3, it reflects mainstream (non-Marxist) global views not inconsistent with this stream of thought.
I think the CSS organizers’ views also had parallels globally, in that there were everywhere scholars who were starting to take these other types of “nationalism” or “internal national conflict” seriously, but in the 1970s and into the early 1980s it was not always easy to do so because ingrained earlier paradigms about nationalism were hard to displace. You used the term “collective identities” for the Marga volume, but that type of approach wasn’t particularly common then (was it?). The books by Gellner and Anderson in 1983 started to deconstruct nationalism as “natural” in global scholarship, but the two books themselves still tended to see (secular) nationalism as the end of history. It wasn’t until later in the 1980s that the intellectual tide started to turn, globally, and this trend continued strongly afterwards.
I hope this clarifies my thoughts, which are largely random. My main observation was that these debates were connected to global debates.
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SOME PERTINENT REFERENCES
John Rogers to speak on National History in a Transnational World | Thuppahi’s Blog
A History of Sri Lanka by John D. Rogers | Open Library
John D.Rogers: “Caste as a Social Category and Identity in Colonial Lanka,” The Indian Economic and Social History Review, 2014, …Caste as a social category and identity in colonial Lanka – John D. Rogers, 2004
Nationalist Studies and the Ceylon Studies Seminar at Peradeniya, 1968-1970s | Thuppahi’s Blog
