The days when it was claimed that there
was an ethnic problem in Sri Lanka are over. It appears that India is of the
opinion that the problem in Sri Lanka is linguistic and not ethnic. There were
others who said that there was a conspiracy (kumanthranaya) by the west and it
was the work of Uncle Sam. Though USA is in the forefront of the activities
against Sri Lanka it is not that country that initiated the problem in Sri
Lanka. The conspiracy theorists, they are not theorists in any sense of the
word as used in western knowledge as these people are not capable of creating
any new abstract theories on anything, have no explanation of a phenomenon, and
just come out with the word conspiracy, without analyzing and offering some appropriate
explanation. These people should be called conspiracy dreamers but often they
are considered to be the cream of intellectuals in Sri Lanka by vociferous politicians
who have no future in politics involving people (people politics) but continue
to be in media politics thanks to proliferation of electronic TV channels and
FM radio.
It is clear that India under the BJP is
attempting to think fresh on the problem in Sri Lanka hitherto known as the
ethnic problem. It is the duty of Sri Lankans who can think to help India to
understand the problem. In this regard I have made my humble contribution in
the form a booklet published with the
title “Prabhakaran Ohuge Seeyala, Baappala ha Massinala” (Prabhakaran, his
granduncles, uncles and cousins) . It was translated into English as “An
introduction to Tamil racism in Sri Lanka”, but is unfortunately out of print.
The Sinhala original was first published in 1995, and it is in the fourth
edition at present, though as usual was ignored by the so called intellectuals
and the media of the country.
The general opinion among the
“intellectuals”, opinion leaders, and most politicians especially of the TNA,
and other Tamil racist parties and UNP is that the problem started with the
Official Language Act or the Sinhala only Act. The Sri Lankan “intellectuals”
and opinion leaders have been made to say so by the English intellectuals who
are entrusted with maintaining the hegemony of the Judaic Christian culture and
Greek Judaic Christian Chinthanaya, undermining the Sinhala Buddhist culture
and the relevant Chinthanaya. The Sri Lankan “intellectuals” who cannot think,
and who have been discouraged to think by the western education they receive at
schools (the so called Buddhist schools are worse in this respect) and the
universities, repeat what the western masters and mistresses have taught them.
SWRD Bandaranaike and the SLFP are blamed for the Sinhala only policy together
with of course the Bhikkus, and lay people (Upasaka Upasika) who are branded as
extremists.
It is not difficult to argue why Sinhala
should be the only official language of the country. In fact it is easily
justified, especially in view of the facilities granted to the usage of Tamil
in official activities, and it has to be emphasized that it is only in Sri
Lanka that a postgraduate degree could be obtained in Tamil medium in many
subjects. In fact research could be conducted in that language leading up to a
Ph. D. There may be pundits both Sinhala
and Tamil who would say that research leading to a Ph. D. or any other postgraduate
degree should be conducted only in an “international” language such as English,
but we ignore the opinions of those who cannot think and who have been trained
to repeat empty utterances including the sentence “Shakespeare never repeats”.
No wonder that there is nothing new in the postgraduate theses produced by
these “intellectuals”.
It is not my intention to say that if
Hindi that is spoken by less than fifty percent of the Indians could be the
official language of India (together with of course English until the
government decides otherwise) then why not Sinhala, the language of about
seventy five percent of the population, and the language understood by about
ninety percent of the people of Sri Lanka, be the official language of Sri
Lanka. The concept of official language may not had been there in the ancient
days but Sinhala had been the language of “raja sabha” and from thousands of
inscriptions that can be found all over the island it can be easily concluded
that the official announcements by the kings had been made in Sinhala. The late
Mr. Gamini Iriyagolla who has been unfortunately forgotten by modern day “patriotic”
politicians had evidence to say that the pact between the Arya Chakravartins
and the Portuguese in the seventeenth century
was made in Portuguese and Sinhala and not in Tamil, indicating that
Arya Chakravartins who paid obedience to the Sinhala kings at Gampola and Kotte
considered Sinhala to be the official language.
There was a poor attempt by some Tamil
racists to show that Tamil was also an official language of Sri Lanka based on
the “trilingual” inscription found in Galle. The reason for this inscription to
be in Chinese, Persian and Tamil is obvious. The inscription was meant for
foreign traders who came to Sri Lanka, especially on the silk route, and that
is why it was written in the above three languages. If the trilingual
inscription “proves” anything it is that the Tamil traders were foreign and
occupied the same status as the Persian and Chinese traders. Nobody would claim
that Persian and Chinese were also official languages of Sri Lanka at that time
and Sinhala was not used for communication in the country based on the
trilingual inscription.
Anybody who wants to understand the
Tamil problem in Sri Lanka has to answer number of questions some of which are mentioned
in “Prabhakaran, ohuge Seeyala Baappala ha Massinala”. If the Tamil problem
commenced with the Official Language Act in 1956, why did Chelvanayakam
establish the Thamil Illnakai Arasu Kachchi (Lanka Tamil State Party) way back
in 1948 to campaign for a separate state? Why did Naganathan in the debate on
the vote of thanks to the “Throne Speech” in the first sessions of the first
Parliament state that the Sinhala people have got their independence, now it is
time for the Tamils to win their independence from the Sinhalas or words to
that effect? SWRD Bandaranaike was in the UNP then and an SLFP had not been in
the dreams of anybody during that period. SLFP was established only in 1951,
and adopted the Sinhala only policy only in 1952 prior to the Minneriya
elections.
The so called students of the Tamil
problem also have to answer why there were communal politics not only in the
State Assembly as documented by many “researchers” but also in the Legislative
Assembly established in the early nineteenth century. Why did Ponnambalam
Ramanathan emphatically state that the Muslims were ethnically Tamil though he
could not prove it convincingly? Why did the Muslims on the other hand state
that they had come from Arab and settled down in Sri Lanka after getting
married to Sinhala women? However, that hypothesis or story did not explain why
the Muslims spoke Tamil. If the Muslims are descendants of Arab fathers and
Sinhala mothers they should have spoken either Arabic or Sinhala and not
Tamil?
Apart from those questions one has to
answer why the English appointed only one Sinhala to the Legislative Assembly
with one Tamil and one Burgher member completely disregarding the percentage of
Sinhala people in the country, and their history. A good hypothesis or story should not only be
consistent with “facts” which are also very often dependent on the story but
answer as many as questions relevant to the problem. The Sinhala only Act story
does not answer any of the above
questions but the story that the English did not want to give the proper
recognition to the Sinhala Buddhists their culture and their history would
answer them and is consistent with the “facts”. It is the English who created
the problem, and it is they who maintain the problem using the dispersed
Tamils, the western governmental organizations, the Tamil racist parties and of
course the UNP their agent in Sri Lanka with assistance from USA.
Nalin De Silva
22-08-2014