Ethnicity and Violence in Sri Lanka: An Ethnohistorical Narrative

Abstract

The ethnicity and violence in Sri Lanka have many root causes and consequences that are closely interconnected. Given the nature and the complexity of root causes and consequences of these highly contested concepts, it should not be treated as a part of linear historical processes where one event led to another. Sri Lanka presents case of how intersecting not only ethnicity and violence but also religion, caste, class, linguistic, and cultural mosaics have been and might be billeted within the borders of a nation-state. However, state building in Sri Lanka has been riddled with paradoxes. The curious notion of numerically dominant ethnic group, Sinhala manifesting a "minority complex" or anxieties about minority groups, Tamil and Muslims, is evident in the rise of Sinhala Buddhist nationalism during the nineteenth and the twentieth century of the country. Since state building has often meant

Ethnic empowering policies and postcolonial political exclusion in the British empire: An analysis of ethnic police recruitment and communal legislative representation

“…For example, the political marginalisation and exclusion of Tamils in Sri Lanka did not occur immediately in 1946 when Sri Lanka gained formal independence from Britain but gradually with the rise of Sinhala majoritarianism in the years that ensued, most notably in 1953–1956 after the death of the first prime minister D.S. Senanayake (de Silva et al, 2019; DeVotta, 2017). Looking at the first two decades after independence, around 19% of ethnic groups in our sample had their excluded/nonexcluded status reversed at least once.…”

“…However, it was the historically and demographically dominant Bamars that took control of the state after independence, and the Karens became engulfed in a decades‐long civil war against the Bamar‐dominated state. In Ceylon, the Tamils were for a long time a privileged ethnic group both in terms of participation in the colonial administration and socioeconomic capital and, despite the rising power of the Sinhalese in the decades closer to independence, retained a high level of political and economic capital (de Silva et al, 2019; Gunasekara, 2016). The history of political, economic, and educational empowerment under colonial rule notwithstanding, Sri Lankan Tamils became politically marginalised shortly after independence amidst the rapid rise of Sinhalese majoritarian politics in early 1950s (Aruliah & Aruliah, 1993).…”