Political Buddhsim is a recent phenomenon and, in the case of Ceylon, probably a Western invention. It is likely that the British wished to keep Ceylon independent of India, so that regardless of what happened in India, they would be able to keep naval and air bases in Ceylon, and thus dominate the vast expanse of ocean between Madagascar and Singapore. The Defence Agreement of 1947, which preceded the grant of independence in 1948, was therefore a
sine qua non for Britain.
Our view is that Don Stephen Senanayake, Britain's favourite conservative leader to whom power was transferred, was made to understand that the offer of a defence agreement would facilitate and speed up the grant of independence. However, a likely obstacle to such an agreement was the Sinhalese Buddhist-oriented S.W.R.D. Bandaranaike. Oliver Goonetileke, the wily emissary of Don Stephen Senanayake, was requested to reassure Bandaranaike on this score. In the event, Goonetileke did the obvious thing, telling Bandaranaike that once independence had been granted, a sovereign Ceylon could do as it pleased with the defence agreement -- in effect, tear it up. But Bandaranaike was not told the other side of the equation: that if he proved recalcitrant in the cabinet of a sovereign Ceylon, he could be dismissed by its prime minister. So in a sense Senanayake and Goonetileke had it both ways.
If Ceylon had been associated with India in the struggle for independence, it would automatically have fallen within the Indian sphere of influence, and India would have insisted on a `Finlandised' Ceylon. {By Finlandised, the author means having limited manoeuvrability in foreign policy, in the same way that Finland cannot act contrarily to Soviet interests.} In fact Sir Ponnambalam Arunachalam in 1918 had suggested, as a strategy to facilitate Ceylon's goal of independence, a federation with india. But Arunachalam's proposal did not meet with the approval of the Sinhalese `constitutionalist' leaders, which was still another reason why Whitehall had to ensure that Ceylon did not lag behind India in its progress toward further constitutional reform.
If there is any parallel to the case of Ceylon, it is probably to be found in the West Indies. Delay in the granting of self-government there could have resulted in the various Caribbean islands looking to the United States for moral succour. Instead, Britain steered their course to independence.
How best could Ceylon be kept independent of India? To this end a racial myth had to be devised --- though it is not our view that the racial myth and distinctness from Dravidian India were consciously manipulated for the objective in hand. There were the historically-established invasions of Ceylon from the Dravidian kingdoms of South India. What was significant was not that these were wars between Aryan and Dravidian peoples. Rival dynasties quarrelled with each other while they ruled the same people though in different kingdoms.
However, one of those quirks of history widened the rift. When Dravidian South India reconverted from Buddhism to Hinduism, such Tamil writings (religious commentaries) as the
Tiruvatavurar Puranam and the
Periya Puranam expressed strong hostility to Buddhism, as did the religious devotees and writers Tirunanacampantar (of the seventh century) and Manikkavacakar (of the ninth century). Thus R.A.L.H. Gunawardene, in his article `People of the Lion', a path-breaking investigation of the Sinhalese Buddhist identity, says this:
While the Buddhist identity was one which linked the Buddhists of Sri Lanka with co-religionists in South India and other parts of the Indian subcontinent, it is only after about the seventh century that prerequisite conditions matured making it possible to link Sinhala identity with Buddhism and to present Tamils as opponents of Buddhism.
Gunawardena in this study raises important questions which are relevant to our understanding of present-day Sinhalese-Tamil relations. The idea of `race' --- of Prince Vijaya (the legendary founder of the Sinhalese kingdom in Ceylon) finding a queen `of his own Aryan race' -- is, in Gunawardena's words, the presentation of `a view of the past moulded by contemporary ideology.' In particular L.D. Barnett in his chapter, `The Early History of Ceylon', in the first volume of the
Cambrigde History of India (1921) and G.C. Mendis in
Our Heritage (1943) are held to have given currency to these views. Although in an earlier work,
The Early History of Ceylon (1935), Mendis stated that `Aryan and Dravidian were not racial categories but merely groups of languages', others had blown a loud blast on the Aryan trumpet. Previously, L.E. Blaze in the 1931 revised edition of his
A History of Ceylon for Schools, mentioned that the mythical founder of the Sinhalese, Vijaya, was `believed to be of Aryan race', while H.W. Codrington, in his
Short History of Ceylon (1926), `accepted the Aryan origin of the Sinhalese, but ventured to suggest that their original Aryan blood had been very much diluted through intermarriage ...'
A second feature of significance in Gunawardena's study is his account of the way in which two foreign scholars divided the two communities into Dravidian and Aryan. Robert Caldwell, in his
A Comparative Grammar of the Dravidian South Indian Family of Languages (1856), argued that there was `no direct affinity' between the Sinhalese and Tamil languages, while the German Max Mueller, in his
Lectures on the Science of Language (1861), declared that `careful and minute comparison' had led him to `class the idioms spoken in Iceland and Ceylon as cognate dialects of the Aryan family of languages.'
The Aryanisation of the Sinhalese language and people were thus scholastically accomplished. However, Gunawardena's cautionary note that all this controversy occurred during the reign of Queen Victoria, when a different intellectual ethos prevailed, raises doubts as to the objectivity adn accuracy of these conclusions. A reputed Sinhalese scholar, James D'Alwis, in his essay `On the Origin of the Sinhalese Language' written in 1866, seized on the fact that both Caldwell and Max Mueller sought to establish that Sinhalese belonged to the `the Aryan or Northern family, as contradistinguished from Dravidian or the Southern class of languages.' But Gunawardena's imprimatur on this argument should be noted:
No Sinhalese kings have been referred to as Aryan and, interestingly enough, it was the dynasty that ruled over the Tamil kingdom in Jaffna who called themselves Arya Cakravarti or Arya emperors. It is an irony of history that in later times it was the Sinhalese who came to be associated with the term Arya and were, as such, distinguised from the Tamil speakers.
Nonetheless, but for Caldwell and Max Mueller, the view of Christian lassen, who in
Indisches Altherthumskunde (1847) listed the Sinhalese language with those of South Indians, might have held. James Emerson Tennent lent support to Lassen's thinking that there was `unequivocal proof' of the affinity of Sinhalese with South Indian languages, although the Sinhalese language had also borrowed from Sanskrit. But by the end of the nineteenth century, the works of R.C. Childers (1874-6), Paul Goldschmidt (1875), Ernst Kuhn (1885), M. M. Kunte (lecture delivered in Ceylon in 1879), C.F. and P.B. Sarasin (1886) and Rudolph Virchow (1885, 1886) had had their positive impact on Sinhalese consciousness. As Gunawardena noted:
Linguistic groups were being given new definitions in terms of physical characteristics which were supposed to be specific to those groups. The Sinhala and Tamil identities acquired thereby a racial dimension.
This generous sprinkling of imported British and German racism would doubtless have the local Buddhist revival a considerable boost. And a further shot in the arm was administered with the arrival in 1880 of the theosophist Colonel H.S. Olcott and the controversial `mystic' Madame Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, as well as the educationist C.W. Leadbeater in 1886. Olcott was the founder of the Theosophical Society in 1875 and a U.S. citizen. Leadbeater, an Englishman, founded Ananda College, a Buddhist denominational school in Colombo.
All this foreign interest in Sinhalese Buddhism gave it a racist tinge, especially the Aryanising aspect. However, the French Asianist Eric Meyer observed in 1984: `Sinhalese-Tamil integration ended with the arrival in Sri Lanka of the British, from whom the Sinhalese borrowed the idea of race.' The impact, however, did not come exclusively from the British. It is likely that German scholars had a more compelling case in looking for the `cradle' of the Indo-European (which really meant Aryan) `race'. Max Mueller had led the way when he stated in 1883: `Greece and India are indeed the two opposite poles in the historical development of the Aryan man.' and `The Indians are our nearest intellectual relatives.' The greatest of all students of Sinhalese culture was Wilhelm Geiger, whose German edition and translation of the great Sinhalese historical chronicle, the
Mahavamsa, was completed in 1908; an English translation was completed in 1912. The dates are significant because they coincide and overlap with the Sinhalese nationalist Temperance Movement and the nationalism of Aryan-oriented Sinhalese Buddhist monks of the genre of Migettuwatte Gunananda and Hikkaduwe Sri Sumangala as well as of Sinhalese laymen such as Anagarika Dharmapala, Piyadasa Sirisena and Walisinghe Harischandra. The dates also coincide with the height of imperial Germany's expansionist phase, and its quest for `a place in the sun' in competition with Britain.
When he arrived in Ceylon in December 1895, Wilhelm Geiger, in an interview with the
Ceylon Independent, stated that `the purpose of his visit was to study Sinhala for scientific purposes in order to see if the language came under the Aryan category, because in Europe there was controversy on this point.' For Geiger this mission had something of the nature of a search for the holy grail. In 1960, in Sirima Kiribamune's words, Geiger wrote his own epitaph:
In the course of a long life I even more become a sincere friend of the wider Indian world and its people and an admirer of its fascinating history. Now I can say that it is my mental home as it were, and my second fatherland.
The fact that the Germans were involved in Sinhalese historical research led Sir Ponnambalam Ramanathan to allege:
The civilians [i.e. civil servants] who flourished in 1927, including Gov. Clifford, the Members of the Executive Council, and the agents of the Government who knew little or nothing of the measures of uplift which had been organized from the days of Lord Torrington, believed that the revival of Buddhism was mainly for political purposes and was hatched by emissaries from Germany [emphasis added].
No wonder, therefore, the Sinhalese Buddhist militants such as Anagarika Dharmapala interspersed pro-Aryan opinions in their writings. Dharmapala wrote of the `sweet, tender, gentle, Aryan children of an ancient historic race' (meaning the Sinhalese). Another publication, D.C. Wijewardena's
The Revolt in the Temple: Composed to Commemorate 2500 Years of the Land, the Race and the Faith (1953), is in the same vein; if anything, it is even more enthusiastically militant. These were attempts to provide an identity to the Sinhalese as distinct from the Dravidian Tamils. The term `Aryan' also had a connotation of superiority.
Gunawardena's `The People of the Lion' finally raises questions on the origins of the Sinhalese, their consciousness and identity, and the equation of the people with Buddhism. Gunawardena questions whether `the social group brought together by the Sinhala consciousness' coincides `with a linguistic grouping in the island' or whether it even `represented a single physical type'. He gives his opinion that only after about the seventh century could the social group `have been linked with a religious grouping' and it was only in about the twelfth century that `the Sinhala grouping could have been considered identical with the linguistic grouping.' Furthermore Gunawardena, while agreeing that a `unified realm' would have been the ambition of a potentate, pointed out that the objective was achieved only comparatively late, in the reign of Parakramabahu VI (1412-67). Despite his aim to bring the whole island under a `unified realm' (Gunawardena has avoided modern terms such as `sovereignty' or `an all-island polity'), Parakramabau VI, after his capture of the Jaffna Tamil kingdom in the middle of the fifteenth century, did not attempt to make Jaffna a part of his own territories. Instead he maintained a suzerainty and installed an adopted son on the throne of Jaffna, thus enabling it to continue its separate existence. And when Parakramabahu VI died, the new Sinhalese ruler of Jaffna decided to move to the Sinhalese kingdom of Kotte in the south-west of the island. Thereupon the Tamils re-established their kingdom and, according to the (Sinhalese) historian K.M. de Silva, developed a `more distinct and confident Hindu culture.'
Thus in the sixteenth century, at the time of arrival of the Portuguese, Ceylon was divided into three major kingdoms, those of the Tamils of Jaffna, of the lowland Sinhalese in Kotte and of the highland Sinhalese in Kandy. In 1619, the Portuguese subjugated the kingdom of Jaffna in the same way as they took control of the lowland Sinhalese kingdom of Kotte. There is therefore a tradition at times, of a separate kingdom of the Tamils in Ceylon.
However, a school of Sinhalese historians sought to establish that the island was the haven of the Sinhalese and nothing else, the Tamils and Muslims being interlopers. It is this motivation that drives the major competing Sinhalese political parties of the post-independence period to insist on the untenable concept of a unitary state.
The Revolt in the Temple is full of references to the `2500 [sic] Years of the Land, the Race and the Faith'. More fancifully, the same book states, without historical evidence:
In less than four generations, barren wastes were turned into fruitfulness by thousands of immigrants from Northern India ..... Most of these people were Sinhalese in heart and mind before they left their motherland .... And Aryan culture was bodily transported to create and enrich the virgin soil of Lanka. These Aryans dotted the country with settlements of farmers...
K.M. de Silva follows this pseudo-tradition, although he has attempted to use modern terminology. He refers to King Dutthagamani (161-137BC) as engaged in a `relentless quest for domination' of the whole island, and that `he accomplished what he set out to do, to establish control of the whole island.' He adds: `It was, in fact, the first significant success of centripetalism over centrifugalism in the island's history.' We question the application of these modern concepts here; it could well be that Dutthagamani sought `overlordship' of the island, and sought to bring it, in Gunawardena's well-chosen words, `under one realm.'
Gunawardena argues in `The People of the Lion', more persuasively that of the various petty rulers, those at Anuradhapura acquired a certain pre-eminence. The conversion of King Tissa (of Anuradhapura) to Buddhism enabled him to claim the titles of
devanampiya and
maharaja. More pertinent is the observation that `there is no evidence .... to show that the other rulers acknowledged his [i.e. Devanampiyatissa's] suzerainty or that he was more than a mere aspirant to overlordship over the whole island.' Nor is Gunawardena impressed by the feats of King Dutthagamani; he does not accept the view that his campaigns represented a Sinhalese-Tamil confrontation.
The historical view of an all-island polity or sovereignty and of 2500 years of `the land, the race and the faith' is therefore open to question. What is interesting is the legend and the myth. These have sustained the Sinhalese as an identity distinct from the South Indian mainland. The myth has encouraged the linking together of the Sinhalese people (`the race'), the religion of Buddhism and the Sinhalese language. However, propagandists, publicists and zealots, some in academic guise, have used the evidence to claim that the island in its entirety belongs to the Sinhalese people. Nevertheless their leading historian to the present day, K.M. de Silva, states that by the middle of the fourteenth century, `the Jaffna i.e. Tamil kingdom had effective control over the north-west coast up to Puttalam'; between 1353 and 1373 Tamil naval forces had been dispatched to the west coast `as far south as Panadura', and the Tamils `seemed poised for the establishment of Tamil supremacy over Sri Lanka'. About the same time, a Sinhalese anthropologist, G. Obeyesekere, raised fundamental questions as to whether the two communities --- the Sinhalese and the Tamils --- were really separate:
Underlying the linguistic and religious differences .... are strong cultural and racial similarities. Physically the Sinhalese and Tamils cannot be differentiated. Though the initial Sinhalese migrants were probably Indo-European language speakers who arrived over 2500 years ago, practially all later arrivals were South Indians (mostly Tamil speakers) who were assimilated into the Sinhalese Buddhist community.
And W.F. Gunawardhana, a distinguished Sinhalese scholar with a profound knowledge of the Sinhalese language, pronounced that there were affinities between the Sinhalese and Tamil languages. In a lecture at Ananda College on 28 September 1918, he stated that `in grammatical structure Sinhalese was Dravidian, though its vocabulary was mainly Aryan'; he reiterated his views in a paper published in 1921, `the Aryan Question in Relation to India.'
The fact is that in modern Ceylon a strong Sinhalese Buddhist nationalistic identity has been established. That identity seeks to lay the largest claim to all that is available in the state coffers. The claim is sustained by the Westminster-style, democratic system given to the island by Britain. This system, in the final instance, depends on the counting of numbers. The Sinhalese constitute the numerical majority.
The Sinhalese elites justify their claims on the national treasury by arguing that they were persecuted by foreign rulers over several centuries. The argument, therefore, is that they must now have it good. The surest way of obtaining access to the coffers is by tight, well-knit centralised government, and an internal colonialism which permits no alternative centres of power.
The view that the creation of autonomy and autonomous regions marks the first steps leading to disintegration of a national polity are, from our point of view, excuses. It enables the Sinhalese elites, both westernised and indigenous, to run a national polity on the supposedly democratic value that the will of the numerical majority must prevail. Seen from this angle, the Westminster model, in the decades ending in the 1960s, ensured the concentration of power in the capital city, Colombo. In 1978 Ceylon passed from the Anglo-Saxon, Westminstertype unitary state to an adaptation of the French Fifth Republic's centralised presidentialism. We examine some of the problems in the following chapter. Our caveat is that those who tter the slogan about `the land, the race and the faith' do not see that history has passed them by. Devolution has received serious consideration in Britain, and even in France, the home of the centralised state, regional government is being gradually introduced.
, yes you got fed from the same well that SL textbooks are written of. Wiped out, like as in the way your prez Jayewardene gave excuses for why Sinhalese should be THE ONLY national language 
. There is a saying in Tamil, wherein an insecure person sees a ghost anywhere he turns. 
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