MIGRACION DE EQUIPOS PARA LA SOLUCIÓN DE GESTION DE ANCHO DE BANDA Y CONTROL DE CONSUMO

Moving from general theories of nations and nationalism, the remainder of this chapter focuses on the specific case of Sinhalese nationalism, locating it within ‘the colonial and postcolonial situations of the emergence of the modern nation- state’ (Kapferer 2012: 91). The following sections highlight the main features of Sinhalese nationalist ideology and provide its historical trajectory from its pre- modern roots through the transformations during the colonial period and its role in the institutional decay of the post-colonial state, to the resurgence of nationalist politics under Rajapaksa.

We begin by first outlining the structural and ideological changes of the colonial period and how ethnic identities became institutionalised as part of the British state-building project. Then we provide a brief overview of the symbolic resources that were mobilised into distinct myth-symbol complexes during this period, highlighting the core features of Sinhalese Buddhist nationalist cosmology.

The Colonial Intervention: Becoming ‘Sinhalese’ and ‘Tamil’

Nearly four centuries of colonialism transformed the social, economic and political landscapes of Sri Lanka.3 The late colonial period under the British has been particularly consequential as it introduced far-reaching structural and social changes that were to have devastating consequences in the post-independence period. Two major transformations are discussed. First, the structural changes following the unification of the island and second, the impact of European racial ideas. Together these processes fixed ethnic identities and made them politically salient, providing form and content to increasing communal divisions and conflict within the emerging modern state.

Unification, centralisation and enumeration

Much of the ancient, pre-colonial history of Sri Lanka is clouded in mystery and controversy, where the boundaries between myths, legends and historical fact have become blurred. A clearer image begins to emerge from the sixteenth

3 _{The country’s official name was Ceylon until 1972, but it is here referred to as Sri Lanka through}

century onwards, following the arrival of the first European colonisers in 1505. The Portuguese, and the Dutch who followed them in the seventeenth century, ruled large parts of the island, especially the coastal regions. Their main interests in Sri Lanka were its strategic location in the Indian Ocean and the cinnamon produced there. Neither the Portuguese nor Dutch were able to capture the Kingdom of Kandy in the Sri Lankan heartland and only introduced limited administrative changes (Guillebaud 1968: 517).4

In the late eighteenth century the British took over the coastal regions from the Dutch and in 1815 they were able to annex the interior Kingdom of Kandy, uniting the island under one political authority and opening it up for economic and political development (Id.: 523). Unlike their predecessors, the British colonial rulers envisaged a homogenous nation and uniform system of administration (Wilson 1988: 3), attempting ‘to unify the island of Sri Lanka by creating a single bounded territorial space out of the multiple political and sociocultural polities and communities that existed’ (Rampton 2012: 277). In the following decades the British enacted far-reaching administrative, economic and social reforms and had completed the unification of the island by the second half of the nineteenth century (Wilson 1988: 3). The result was a centralised unitary form of government along the lines of Western democracies, based on the Westminster model with universal suffrage and territorial representation.

In addition to extensive administrative changes, the British colonial period also changed the island’s population structure. It saw the influx of Europeans and Indian Tamils5 into the country and extensive infrastructure projects linking the pre-existing but geographically separated groups. These communities, however, continued to be self-conscious about their group identities due to the linguistic and religious differences (Manogaran 1987: 4) and ethnic categories gained political significance as they became formally instituted in administrative procedures, codification, political representation, and so on (Nissan and Stirrat 1990: 27). Individuals began to be counted, and count themselves, as part of increasingly

4 _{Maps illustrating the expansion of the different colonial periods can be found in Appendix A.} 5 _{The descendents of Indian labourers, also referred to as estate or plantation Tamils, are located}

mainly in the central highlands and have remained separate from the Sri Lankan Tamils in the north and east, who trace their origins on the island back to the Jaffna Kingdom.

fixed and exclusive communal categories. Previously unimportant ethnic differences were institutionalised through censuses and surveys, leading to the fragmentation of society through enumeration (Krishna 1999: 50). Educational and cultural colonial policies further buttressed the politicisation of ethnic identities, reinforcing divisive tendencies (Warnapala 1994: 28). Structural changes determined by the development of a modern, bureaucratic state were crucial to the formation and institutionalisation of separate identities, but their content needs to be understood within the Western ideological background within which they emerged.

The making of national minds

British colonialism in Sri Lanka was deeply influenced by the dominant ideas about race and nationalism that spilled over from Europe. The belief that race, particularly linked to language, is the foremost determinant of social identity and a group’s worth became the basic premise guiding the modern formation of group identities (Little 1994: 15). Cultural and biological differences were conflated by the Western colonisers, interpreting the communities who displayed different languages, customs and religions as racially distinct (Brow 1990: 11). Subsequently the ‘Aryan Myth’ became the basis of the racial classification of Sinhalese as superior Aryans and Tamils as inferior Dravidians (Little 1994: 16; Nissan and Stirrat 1990: 29f.). The British state-building project was guided by this ideological context, emphasising ‘the ideal congruence of race, language, religion and political territory’ (Nissan and Stirrat 1990: 22).

Separate Sinhalese and Tamil communities existed before the colonisation of Sri Lanka, divided by geographic, linguistic and religious cleavages. Yet, these groups were rather fluid and often other divides like caste or class differences cut across them (Rogers 1994; Tambiah 1986). During the British colonial period commonalities and differences were subsumed into the dominant ethnic divide of ‘Sinhalese-ness’ and ‘Tamil-ness’ (Warnapala 1994) as loose group identities were transformed and consolidated into fixed ethnic categories. The traditional religious and linguistic groups of the island were being given a racial dimension (Gunawardana 1990: 74), and the belief in a shared biological nature (race), common language, common religion and attachment to a certain territory became

exclusive rallying points for the respective communities (Nissan and Stirrat 1990: 30).

The rediscovery of the past during this period played a major role in providing form and content to modern Sinhalese and Tamil identities. Traditionally, history in Sri Lanka had been transmitted through oral and written sources, but modern historiography, the process of writing history, significantly transformed how the past was approached. Colonial historians introduced a new understanding of history, one that sought ‘a monopoly on interpretations of the past’ unknown to traditional ideas about history in South Asia (Nandy 1997: 228). Thus, when constructing local histories, foreign and local historians used European categories and concerns to frame them (Nandy 2009: 8). Rogers (1990) and Gunawardana (1990) similarly point out how the translation of historical writings and the (re)discovery of archaeological sites in Sri Lanka was influenced by contemporary theories of race and nationalism. The result was a historical framework based on two assumptions. First, they believed that a great Sinhalese civilisation existed in ancient times that later went into decline. Second, they assumed the existence of two distinct, often antagonistic ethnic groups throughout the island’s long history. These beliefs were not challenged by Sri Lankan writers who joined in the process of writing the country’s history in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century (Rogers 1990: 87).

By the late nineteenth century writers had ‘fashioned a version of history to conform with the dominant [racial] ideology of their society’ (Gunawardana 1990: 78), presenting the people of Sri Lanka as historically distinct and largely antagonistic ethnic groups naturally divided along racial lines (Little 1994: 15). These historical narratives traced modern ethnic groups and their relationships back to ancient times, providing them with meaning in the colonial present as they gained further importance in the emerging bureaucratic and bounded state (de Silva Wijeyeratne 2014: 87). The Mahāvamsa became the ultimate source of an authentic, positivist history6 and significantly shaped the content of the emerging Sinhalese nationalism (Kemper 1991, cited in Rogers 1994: 12). The dual history it sets out for the Sinhalese people, to conquer and unite the island of Sri Lanka

6 _{By positivism we mean the ‘belief that history can provide a definitive and objective account of}

for the preservation of Buddhism and the necessary expulsion of Tamil invaders from South India (Tambiah 1986: 70), received new vigour in the light of cultural revivalism of the early twentieth century.

The gradual transformation of the island into a modern, bureaucratic state and the importation of Western ideologies and historiography were key to the formation of modern national identities in Sri Lanka. The role of the colonial rulers, however, should not be overemphasised. After all, it was Sri Lankans who participated in and readapted colonial discourses and processes to bolster the national movement (Rogers 1994: 20). British colonial rule did not impose nationalism upon the country and its people, it was rather the result of the convergence of interactions between colonisers and colonised, foreign and indigenous material, and the unintended consequences of the state-building process initiated by the colonial rulers (Nissan and Stirrat 1990: 39). Western ideologies of race and nationalism offered new frames of references and boundaries for group identities within the centralised state, but it was historiography, cultural revivalist movements and local elites that provided the content for these new categories. As a result of these processes, the colonial period saw the ‘transmutation of pre-existing but fluid differences into a harder, more discrete and rigidified form’ (Rampton 2012: 278) ready to be mobilised into national movements. The following sections thus look at the indigenous symbolic resources that became integral to modern Sinhalese nationhood and nationalism.

The Buddhist Core of Sinhalese Nationalism

Contemporary Sinhalese national identity cannot be understood detached from its ethnic heritage, the popular traditions and sentiments that ethno-symbolism draws attention to as the basis of modern nations. Buddhism, in particular, is a key element of Sinhalese identity and its link to contemporary Sinhalese nationalism is well established in the literature (de Silva Wijeyeratne 2014; Kapferer 2012; Roberts 1994). The following sections first provide an overview of Buddhist ontology, its origins in Sri Lanka, the main elements of its cosmic order and how they are linked to pre-modern polities, traditions and historical writings. They then outline how these traditional symbolic resources were transformed into a

coherent nationalist ideology based on an inseparable link between nation, state and religion in the late colonial period.

The cosmology of Buddhism

Unlike Sinhalese nationalism, Buddhism is not a phenomenon of the twentieth century, but has existed in Sri Lanka for well over two thousand years. The literary and archaeological evidence suggests that Buddhism had been firmly established in the main areas of settlement by the first century BCE (de Silva 2005: 9).7 The Mahāvamsa traces its origins back another one hundred and fifty years to the rule of Asoka in India. After his conversion to Buddhism, Asoka reportedly sent a mission to Sri Lanka that converted Devanampiya Tissa, an influential ruler in Anuradhapura, whose patronage accelerated the spread of Buddhism among the people (Id.: 9-12). Whatever the historical accuracy of this account, it is clear that links with India played a central role in the development of Buddhism in Sri Lanka. Yet, while the position of Buddhism in India has declined over the course of history, in Sri Lanka it flourished over the coming centuries.

Given the importance of Buddhism for Sinhalese identity and the respective nationalist ideology, a brief overview of the core elements of the Buddhist cosmic order and their relationship with modern Sinhalese nationalism is in order. While continuities in content and form between pre-modern and modern Buddhism exist, they are not the same. De Silva Wijeyeratne argues that pre-modern Buddhism was not a religion, but rather ‘a complex and diverse ontological ground that generated a diversity of meaning ... within the social’ (2014: 119). Buddhism was reimagined during the late colonial period, fixed into the structures of a religion with propositional statements and moral claims about what constitutes Buddhism (Abeysekara 2002, cited in de Silva Wijeyeratne 2014: 119). For many nations the world religions have served as a source of values for ‘us’ and value differentiation from ‘them’ (Armstrong 1982, cited in Smith 1998: 185). In Sri Lanka, the role of Buddhism and the Mahāvamsa is comparable to that of Christianity and the Bible in that they have provided a source for nations’ claims ‘to be a chosen people, a holy nation, with some special divine mission to fulfil’ (Hastings 1997: 196).

7 _{It was mainly settlers from northern India who had settled on the island during that time and it is}

The following sections focus specifically on the themes of Therāvada Buddhism8 that have become incorporated into Sinhalese nationalist ideology and their contemporary connotations. For, as Kapferer highlights, ‘Sinhalese nationalism selects within the many possibilities of Buddhism in practice and realizes a particular logic, a logic made integral to Sinhalese nationalism and forceful to its process’ (2012: 6). The following overview of the main features of Buddhist ontology and its relationship to modern Sinhalese nationalism is based mainly on the seminal works of Kapferer (2012) and Roberts (1994), who have studied this link in depth, and the more recent work of de Silva Wijeyeratne (2014), who has expanded on their accounts.

Kapferer in particular provides a detailed analysis of the ontological grounding of Sinhalese nationalism.9 He describes a Buddhist cosmic order that is characterised by a dualistic nature, where the boundaries of existence are jointly defined by the Buddha, reason, and the demonic, non-reason (Kapferer 2012: 11). In this order the Buddha serves as an ‘all-knowing fountainhead’, occupying an overarching position at the apex, followed by the guardian deities of Sri Lanka and then the regional, lesser deities (Roberts 1994: 63f.). Roberts terms this order a ‘polytheistic centripetality’, wherein the worship of several gods can be divisive, threatening the break-up of the whole. These ‘fissiparous potentialities’ are counteracted by the holistic framework within which the order is understood, namely the attributes and teachings of the Buddha (Id.: 62).

The Buddhist cosmic order is characterised by a hierarchical structure that is constantly in flux, moving between its hierarchical unifying aspect, fragmentation and reordering (de Silva Wijeyeratne 2007: 162). Forces may arise and challenge the ordering power of the Buddha (de Silva Wijeyeratne 2014: 24), but ultimately these are encompassed by the ordering power of the Buddha that incorporates the fragmenting logic of the demonic, ensuring unity and the integrity of the parts in a hierarchical order (Kapferer 2012: 11; de Silva Wijeyeratne 2007: 162). This hierarchical logic of the cosmic order conditions Sinhalese Buddhist practices,

8 _{Therāvada is a school or branch of Buddhism based on the doctrines of the Pāli Canon}

originating in India.

9 _{For Kapferer the cosmic logic depicted constitutes an ontology (2012: 79), thus these terms are}

rituals and myths of state, especially those relating to kingship (de Silva Wijeyeratne 2014: 24f.).

As the Buddha has achieved nibbana10 and cannot mediate affairs in this world (Roberts 1994: 59), kingship serves as the functional link between the cosmological order and this world, wielding the dhamma11 and ensuring order (Tambiah 1976, cited in de Silva Wijeyeratne 2007: 164). The cakkavatti, the ideal world ruler, replicates attributes of the Buddha’s encompassing power and should serve as ‘a model of Buddhist righteousness, etiquette and self-control’ (Roberts 1994: 60-64). Kapferer similarly points to the righteous Buddhist king as servant of the people (2012: 70). By acting in accordance with Buddhist principles his acts have positive karmic consequences for the welfare of every individual within the polity (de Silva Wijeyeratne 2014: 19) and help to preserve unity and hierarchy in the face of the demonic threat of fragmentation. Thus, through its cosmic order Buddhism is inseparably linked to rightful rule in Sri Lanka, joining pre-colonial monarchies and the post-independent modern state through their shared ontology.

The Asokan Persona

The symbiosis of dhamma and cakkavatti is exemplified in the figure of Asoka, a Maurya king (274-232 BCE), and the representations of his reign in the Therāvada Buddhist tradition (Roberts 1994: 60). His story, like those of Vijaya and Dutugemunu, illustrates the core themes of transformation and hierarchy of Buddhist ontology (de Silva Wijeyeratne 2014: 30). Asoka’s reign also saw the development of a set of cultural practices that became closely linked to the Buddhist polities in Sri Lanka and other parts of South Asia. These are signified by the Asokan Persona, an analytical construct that describes relationships in a hierarchical context. According to Roberts, the Asokan Persona

seeks to delineate the images and conceptions of authority which inform and underlie hierarchical relationships in Sinhala society. It argues that such conceptions were (are) called forth in mundane activities because they were (are) embodied, in the symbols (verbal and kinesic) of status and power, and in the mechanisms of social distancing. In other words, these conceptions can be regarded as a means of inter-personal communication and a language of negotiation. (Roberts 1994: 58)

10 _{Nibbana, or nirvana, describes the attainment of enlightenment or transcendence, the ultimate}

goal of Buddhists.

Informed by Buddhist ontology its rituals and practices constitute hierarchical relationships between superiors and subordinates, the dhamma and kingship, and kingship and laity (de Silva Wijeyeratne 2007: 158).

This can best be understood when we look at the nature of pre-modern polities in the region. The Asokan empire was not a centralised state and its inherently fissiparous tendency could only be contained within the omnipotence and encompassing righteousness of Buddhism. Thus, ‘[o]utgoing Asokan Buddhism was not only a pacification policy, it was an ideological cement and a validation of the monarchical state’ (Roberts 1994: 62). At the same time relic worship emerged among Buddhists and rites, such as the cult of stupas12 or the veneration of relics of the Buddha in specific shrines, began to flourish under Asoka (Tambiah 1976, cited in Roberts 1994: 62). Rituals and practices of the Asokan Persona such as those provided a ‘symbolic glue’ for virtual unity and sovereignty in a highly decentralised state (de Silva Wijeyeratne 2014: 59). One such action was the distribution of Buddha’s relics in 84,000 stupas across India. It represented a performance of virtual rather than actual control over the empire, illustrating how Asoka governed through ritual hegemony rather than actual political control of all aspects of the periphery (de Silva Wijeyeratne 2014: 61).

De Silva Wijeyeratne (2014; 2007) highlights that the ways in which the Asokan notions of hierarchical power and ritual practices linked the cosmic order and this-worldly politics also deeply affected the kingdoms of Anuradhapura, Polonnaruwa and Kandy in Sri Lanka. Like Asoka’s empire, the totalising claims of Buddhist kingship in pre-colonial Sri Lanka were virtual rather than actual as kings lacked the capacity to rule the whole island. Instead, Buddhist sovereignty was administratively devolved and the state resembled a ‘galactic polity’.13 The lack of actual sovereignty was masked by the public rites of the Asokan Persona, for instance forms of tributary overlordship or rituals of royal legitimation such as

12 _{A stupa is a Buddhist place of worship.}

13 _{The concept of ‘galactic polity’ is used to describe traditional kingdoms in South Asia that were}

arranged according to a galactic scheme, ‘wherein central domains were surrounded by satellite provinces, which were actually smaller replications of the former’ (Tambiah 1986: 96). These