Extending from the Enlightenment Project, reforms pushed by both colonial administrators and politicians dominated the political debates on the island between 1912 and 1919 and provided social and economic incentives through which viable forms of
! $'!
“representation” took hold. As mentioned earlier, the Legislative Council provided the means by which British colonial administrators were able to maintain centralized control over the economic development of a territorially unified colony. Its creator—the Colebrooke-Cameron Reforms of 1833—also included repeated reconfigurations of provincial boundaries, improved modes of communication within the island’s territory, and economic expansion vis à vis the growth of the plantation industries, imperial trade, and commercial activity. The structure of the Council, however, left the desire for an elective principle of representation for Ceylonese nationals unfulfilled. Within this body, regulated gubernatorial nomination, practices of political patronage, and communal forms of recognition had restricted the forms of representation among the Council’s Unofficial Members. This tactic of colonial governmentality was, as K.M. de Silva contends, a “representative legislature in embryo,” (1981: 262); but this was only to the extent that its imperialist nature nurtured the agitation for further constitutional reform and a self- representative government on behalf of Ceylon’s colonized subjects. As David Scott claims, the Council also introduced Ceylon nationals to a “new game of politics,” through which they could be recognized and considered as “political” subjects” (Scott 1999:45). Compelling are the ways in which Ceylonese colonial subjects engaged in self-making practices and the consequences they presented for the debates on representation, self- government, and the exclusion of minorities.
To British colonial administrators, only those colonized subjects who actively welcomed and engaged the conceived benefits of the Enlightenment project—reason, education, and progress—could be capable of being represented; furthermore, they had to
! $(!
simultaneously support and maintain the founding principles of the imperialist scheme. This colonial strategy particularly informed the emerging concept of minority representation in Ceylon and later minority politics to ensue following independence. First, colonial administrators all too quickly assumed that the conceptual transition from communal to territorial representation, as reinforced by the linearity of the Enlightenment project, would hold in the minds of Ceylon’s colonized residents. Second, territorial representation had been located within the interests of an emerging elite class that had land and wealth-acquiring interests and access to education. The concept of territory dominated debates on representation and was slowly becoming the desired end for Ceylonese nationals as colonial administrators had hoped. In this sense, desires for representations were as Partha Chatterjee contended: “community would be banished from the kingdom of capital” (1993: 236), and territorial delineation would be emplaced firmly into the minds of the colonized by normative forms of colonial regimentation. But where the strategy faltered was in its inability to predict the continual and ever-growing strength of communal allegiances between and among distinct corporate entities
alongside claims for territorial representation. This backfire of imperialist logic provided
a moment in which minorities in Ceylon could potentially recognize that the constructions established to maintain the colony’s political economy could provide “subterranean, potentially subversive” (Chatterjee 1993:236) forms of representation. This tactic would make its way into the normative modes of political discourse in the 1920s and through the 1940s as Ceylonese politicians anticipated the formation of an independent state.
! $)!
As hinted at by the Churchill memo, the question of minority representation became even more prominent in the debates of the CNC during the 1920s. Professing ideals of national unity and ethnic harmony in the name of economic and social reform, the CNC’s main goal was to agitate for constitutional change in opposition to Governor Manning’s push for communal electorates that would potentially support the safeguarding of minorities’ interests. Though representatives from minority groups of Ceylon were present at the CNC’s founding in 1919, they found that its elitist composition and opposition to protecting their rights provided little flexibility for the recognition of group interests, and they soon defected.19
In 1920, however, Legislative Council member and Ceylon Tamil, P. Ramanathan, sent Governor Manning a secret “Minority Memorial,” which would prove interesting for minority debates in the years to follow. In the Memorial, Ramanathan claimed that minority groups across Ceylon had joined in solidarity in order to discount the CNC as a true representational body. Furthermore, the Memorial stated that the “Sinhalese Members of the Council . . . have no claim to speak for anybody but themselves” and that “communities differing from each other in race, religion, and social structure cannot justly be ‘shoved’ into a general electorate” (Bandaranaike 1928: 430, 437). Following the Memorial’s publication in the Ceylon Daily News, the CNC vilified
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
19 The exception was Sir Ponnambalam Arunachalam, Ceylonese Tamil elite and CNC founder. However,
! $*!
Ramanathan for daring to speak on behalf of all minorities, and most of the leaders20 that
were implicated as signatories to the Memorial later refuted their alleged affiliations. Regardless of their refutations, Ramanathan’s Memorial directly addressed the growing fear among Tamils and other minorities that a Sinhala majority could and would determine a minority’s respective representation and ultimately consider the group’s contributions negligible and ancillary to the social and economic concerns of a Sinhala- dominated polity. At the same time, his claim to represent the opinions of all minorities and the return to communal representation were viewed as setbacks to the political and economic progress of the unified Ceylon territory. Even Vaithialingam Duraiswamy, a Jaffna Tamil and founder of the Hindu Board for Education who would later support the Jaffna Youth League’s boycott of the 1931 minority-inimical Donoughmore-reformed elections, made the following statement as first Speaker of the Council: “If we have to hand the guidance of our political matters to the Minorities what is our political worth? . . . I will never support any scheme of that kind that commits the Tamils to the back-waters of political uselessness” (Bandaranaike 1928:445). What social and economic factors had convinced Duraiswamy and other politicians that the minorities of Ceylon21 did not—or
rather, should not have any “separate interests” from the interests of the general country? For Ceylon nationalists, the colonial regime had already established such norms of !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
20 Although the CNC Handbook notes that the Minority Memorial was a joint memorandum of “European,
Burgher (Mr. Arthur Alvis), Tamil (P. Ramanathan), Mohammedan (Mr. Kamer Cassim), and Indian Members of the [Legislative Council]” the Tamil representative from the Eastern Council (Mr. E.R. Tambimuttu), all minorities excepting Ramanathan and Alvis denied their affiliation with the document in a drawn-out print media debate (Bandaranaike 1928:443-57).
21 It is important to note that Duraiswamy would not allow himself to consider the Minorities to be
! %+!
representation. These norms were conveyed through state reforms and were based on liberal ideals of progress and elitist privileges such as patronage, education, and profession. Communal representation, giving preference to the corporate entity rather than the individual, would not support the political economy and progress of the polity; thus, minorities, in having potentially communal and distinct interests, were interpreted as being relegated to the “back-waters of political uselessness.” The ideology of
representativeness—as enacted in the colonial enumeration and reconfiguration of
historical communities had deemed territorial representation most suitable to maintaining an efficient level of economic control and colonial prosperity. Thus, to concede to the minorities along lines of communal representation would mean abandoning territorial representation as the economic and political end of the soon-to-be self-governing Ceylon polity.
The push by minorities for communal representation did not lose its enchantment; rather it lost the ability to sustain itself within political debates in Ceylon during the 1930s and 1940s. This was particularly evident in the aftermath of the 1931 Donoughmore Constitution and its introduction of concepts of territoriality such as “universal franchise,” “domicile,” and “abiding interest” (Peebles 2001:152). These statistical concepts, when enacted and put into motion, produced a series of commitments and entitlements that enabled forms of social stratification along lines of caste, class, gender, and residence. In the case of communities of lesser numbers who were vying for representation, these terms became the grounds upon which a politics of minoritization developed more emphatically and meaningfully in Ceylon.
! %"!
Immediately following the Donoughmore Constitution’s establishment of the Sinhala elite-dominated State Council in 1931, restrictive measures were placed upon Plantation Tamil franchise, and minorities had come to realize that representation was not only a marker of status and roles but also of difference and inequality. The concept of minority representation in Ceylon was in desperate need of reform, and G.G. Ponnambalam, a Ceylon Tamil politician and founder of the All Ceylon Tamil Congress (ACTC), made a unique and far-reaching demand for Fifty-Fifty majority-minority representation, which provided the first revolutionary yet engaging attempt to rupture the normative distinction of the majority and minority binary. To replace the binary, he favored the notion of equal communities and balanced representation between majority and minority groups of a unified polity; this single unit, furthermore, was at once aware of their privileges, separate interests, and differences, but willing to break away from the rationalization of representativeness that had dominated the last twenty years of Ceylon politics. The campaign, despite its initial momentum and support from politicians in the Tamil-dominated Northern and Eastern Provinces, did not take with the larger Ceylon polity and was rejected by Governor Caldecott in 1937. Its failure confirmed the difficulty to create sustainable forms of solidarity among minorities and would later surface in the postcolonial politics of Sri Lanka with regards to Malaiyaha Tamil political development amidst the emergence of Tamil nationalism and desires for a separatist state. Even after presenting Fifty-Fifty within the representation scheme of the ACTC, Ponnambalam was forced into compromise, and the concept of minority representation again became bound to the disciplined rationality of numbers.
! %#!
The failures to break away from the majority-minority distinction and sustain solidarity among the minorities were further exacerbated by the Soulbury Commission’s arrival to the island in 1944. During this commission, the debate over Plantation Tamil franchise turned decidedly communalistic. Although the Head of the Board of Ministers, D.S. Senanayake, claimed to be above the so-called divisive throes of communalism, he found himself entrenched in the nationalistic practices of political exclusion. In a 1940 address to the Jaffna Youth Congress he said, “I am totally unconcerned as to which community an elected representative may belong so long as he is a member of the indigenous population. The Indian Tamils are not members of the indigenous population.” (Russell 1982:248). Some scholars, such as Kodikara, attribute the push for disenfranchisement to the fact that Plantation Tamils, as defined by the terminology of “abiding interests,” “domicile,” and “permanent settlement,” were, in fact, “an unassimilated minority” with strong communal allegiances and affiliations with India (1971:213). Other scholars, such as Nawaz Dawood, claim that Plantation Tamils had a “temporary interest in the land [that] was much less” (Dawood 1980: 59-60). But as, Patrick Peebles (2001) contends, these claims of transience and disinterest fail to represent the realities and dispositions of Plantation Tamils who were actively seeking citizenship and felt strongly about their residence and belonging in Ceylon. Furthermore, alienating forms of representations such as these (“unassimilated” and “non-Ceylonese”) contributed to the further exclusion of minorities22 and resulted in the loss of citizenship
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
22 See Uyangoda’s discussion in Question of Minority Rights regarding the Tamil minority problem as
! %$!
and disenfranchisement of Plantation Tamils by the Ceylon Citizenship Act and Ceylon (Parliamentary Elections) Amendment Act in 1948 and 1949 respectively.
During this pre-independence period, the social history of “minority representation” in Ceylon’s political economy revealed the ways in which Ceylon’s politicians engaged in a “politics of statistics” that was never fully in their reach or control due to the economic and political circumstances upholding the colonial administration. The code of representativeness and the promise of progress, as reinforced by an imagined framework of dichotomies in Ceylon, forced politicians to categorize, negotiate, and judge corporate entities and their representations as either fit and unfit for the general wellbeing and prosperity of the future Ceylon state. Integral to the development of Sri Lanka’s postcolonial minority politics are the moments that sought to rupture these very binaries and break away from the normalized processes of minoritization within colonial Ceylon political discourse. In the next section, I will discuss the key historical debates in which politicians and leaders re-enunciated the terms of minoritization after independence and focus specifically on the placement of Malaiyaha Tamils and their vying for status and citizenship rights as a minority community amidst the escalation of postcolonial ethnic conflict.