Category Archives: sri lankan society

Michael Roberts 

This review article was drafted in 1991 and should therefore be assessed in the light of the literature available then. In those days it took at least two years for an article to be refereed and published. The essay  discusses the following three books: Jonathan Spencer, A Sinhala Village in a Time of Trouble.  Politics and Change in Rural Sri Lanka, Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1990, 285pp; Jonathan Spencer (ed.), Sri Lanka.  History and the Roots of Conflict, London: Routledge, 1990, 253pp; Manning Nash, The Cauldron of Ethnicity in the Modern World, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1989, 142pp. It was origianally printed in Ethnic and Racial Studies, 1993, 16: 133-161.

The ongoing ethnic conflict in Sri Lanka has aroused interest in both the reasons for the breakdown of its polity and the roots of Tamil and Sinhala identities. The resurgence of nationalism in Eastern Europe will encourage studies in the broader implications of the Sri Lankan data for social science theory.

As a result of the excesses of the Nazi upsurge, Western scholars have tended to regard nationalism as retrograde and potentially patho­logical (e.g. Kedourie 1960) or reprehensibly atavistic.  In South Asia, in contrast, ever since the decolonization process got under way, nationalism has been viewed positively—as long as its goals were framed in terms of the existing (colonial) political boundaries. The recent upsurge of violence has encouraged Asian scholars to question this perspective.  Such questioning is sometimes embodied in the term ‘chauvinism’ (e.g. Coomaraswamy 1987: 74-81). This term is not a novel addition to the Asian English lexicon. It was used in British Ceylon in the 1920s and 1930s to describe those who pressed for Tamil and Sinhalese sectional interests: these spokesmen were reviled as “communalists”, “chauvinists” and “tribalists” by both the moderates and radicals who espoused a Ceylonese nationalism.[1] Continue reading →