Michael Roberts, here repeating a set of perspectives voiced initially on 19 June 2009 after the LTTE had been vanquished,in the News Magazine FRONTLINE that was printed every fortnight from Chennai.++
“One can win the War, but lose the Peace.” Cliché this may be, but it also a hoary truism that looms over the post-war scenario in Sri Lanka. The triumphant Sri Lankan government now has to address the human terrain rather than the fields of battle.
Filed under accountability, anti-racism, British colonialism, centre-periphery relations, communal relations, cultural transmission, education, ethnicity, governance, hatan kavi, historical interpretation, language policies, legal issues, life stories, modernity & modernization, nationalism, patriotism, politIcal discourse, power politics, racism, racist thinking, Rajapaksa regime, reconciliation, self-reflexivity, Sinhala-Tamil Relations, sri lankan society, tolerance, truth as casualty of war, unusual people, world events & processes
Michael Roberts, reproduing here an article that appeared initially in 1989 with the same title in Ethnos, 55: 1-2:69-82. … and also in Swedish in Lanka. Tidskrift om Lankesisk Kultur (Uppsala), No. 2, March 1989. I regret that the presentation here has not been able to incoroporate diacritica for indigenous words.
ABSTRACT: This essay decodes a sixteenth century folktale which records the Sinhalese reaction to the arrival of the first Portuguese. Where the historiography has interpreted this tale as benign wonderment in the face of exotica, a piecemeal deconstruction of the allegorical clues in the ‘story is utilised to reveal how the Sinhalese linked the Portuguese with demons and with Vasavarti Maraya; the arch enemy of the Buddha. In this fashion the Portuguese and the Christian sacrament of communion were represented as dangerous, disordering forces. The piecemeal reinterpretation of this short text, however, must be overlaid by a holistic perspective and the realisation that its rendering in oral form enabled its purveyors to lace the story with a satirical flavour: so that the Portuguese and Catholicism are, like demons, rendered both disordering and comic, dangerous and inferior – thus ultimately controllable. In contending in this manner that the folktale is an act of nationalist opposition, the article is designed as an attack on the positivist empiricism which pervades the island’s historiography and shuts out imaginative reconstructions which are worked out by penetrating the subjective world of the ancient texts.
Filed under Aboriginality, accountability, ancient civilisations, art & allure bewitching, cultural transmission, disparagement, economic processes, ethnicity, hatan kavi, heritage, historical interpretation, landscape wondrous, life stories, patriotism, politIcal discourse, Portuguese imperialism, Portuguese in Indian Ocean, power politics, racism, self-reflexivity, sri lankan society, the imaginary and the real, world events & processes, zealotry
Firdose Moonda
The array of gestures before the game against Australia that probably drove CSA to mandate the whole team taking the knee ICC via Getty Continue reading
thuppahi
