Jane Russell was a postgraduate student at the History Department, Peradeniya University, in the early 1970s and stayed on in Sri Lanka for two decades after completing her dissertation;[i] and left only because she was deported. I had lost touch with her till she popped up as a blogger adding some useful information about her interaction with Handy Perinpanayagam, the architect of the Jaffna Youth League in the 1930s, in response to Rajan Philips’s article on the JYL.[ii]
She also chose to add an informative comment in my masthead essay on “The Sinhala Mindset.” This comment is far too important to be buried in that arena, so it is given the spotlight here.
I also took the opportunity to ask Jane for more information on a critical piece of data she had supplied me then, circa 1973/74, an item that contributed to my conclusion THEN that Sri Lanka would probably ‘progress’ towards a severe conflict of the type seen in Cyprus, Lebanon and Northern Ireland. She responded by email so these two items are also tacked on here: namely, (A) the WHY and WHEREFORE of my query; and (B) Jane Russell’s detailed information. Michael Roberts.
JANE RUSSELL: Comment on The Sinhala Mindset
Thanks for your thoughtful and reasoned comments on the Sinhala mind-set with which I totally agree. However, it takes two to tango… the Jaffna (and to a lesser extent East coast) Tamils also have a similar mind-set. At their back they feel the power of 60 million or so south Indian Tamils who give them assurance that they too can turn a part of Sri Lanka (the north-east) into a whole — a Tamil whole. Thus we had the claims of 50-50 before independence (which many Sinhalese and Tamils understood to be 50% of Sri Lanka for Tamils and 50% for Sinhalese — it was not this at all but the slogan carried the idea that it might be). Continue reading
