This lecture was delivered at the annual History for Peace conference on the 'Idea of Belonging' held in Calcutta, 2024.

History as a discipline has a very paradoxical position in Sri Lanka. On the one hand, when I tell people I’m a historian or I do history, very often their first response is ‘Why?’ Or ‘how boring’. And that’s not an entirely ignorant view––the way history is taught in public schools in Sri Lanka is really poor, you simply memorize and regurgitate facts so it’s no wonder that students find it dull. But on the other hand, history, with a big H, is very often so central to people’s sense of identity, belonging and even hierarchy or authenticity as citizens in Sri Lanka. And a historical narrative that is contrary to their received beliefs is often seen as an attack on their dignity and their very sense of being. So where exactly do these narratives come from? Are they legacies of our experience of colonialism, or are they post-colonial constructs? During my talk I’m going to refer to some of the larger ethnic and religious communities in Sri Lanka, and I can’t assume that everyone here will be familiar with them. So let me begin with a quick introduction to the communities we are going to be discussing for the next hour or so.

The total population of Sri Lanka is around 22 million. The majority of the population, around 75 per cent are known by their ethnic identity––Sinhalese. Typically, Sinhalese are Buddhist by faith, around 70 per cent of the country, while a smaller number are Christian (and predominantly Catholic). The next largest ethnic group are the Tamils, representing around 15 per cent of the population. Tamils are typically Hindu but, like the Sinhalese Christians, there is a small number of Tamil Christians too. In Sri Lanka, Tamils are further divided into two subethnic groups­­––the larger group are known as the Ceylon Tamils, closely associated with the North and the East of the island, and occasionally referred to by their place of origin, such as Jaffna Tamils. The other significant subethnic group are the Malaiyaha Tamils or Upcountry Tamils, who I will speak about further in this discussion. Around 9 per cent of the population is Muslim, and these Muslims are primarily made up of the ethnic group called the Moors. There are smaller Muslim ethnic groups such as the Malays, Bohras, and Memons who number in the low thousands. I think the breakdown of those three broad groups, Sinhalese, Tamils and Muslims should be sufficient to get us started.

As in India, we in Sri Lanka are dealing with problems associated with majoritarianism. Majoritarianism in Sri Lanka is typically repackaged as a form of nationalism. This nationalism, or ultranationalism is associated with ideas of ownership and authenticity, claims to space and often the superiority of a particular culture, religion, or language. And a lot of the Sinhala-Buddhist nationalist discourse we see online, carries tropes around the idea that the Sinhalese ‘got here first’, that minorities should assimilate or accept Sinhalese dominance, and if they don’t, they should ‘go back to where they came from’. There is this assumption that minorities––whether ethnic or religious minorities––have ‘other’ homelands to return to, whereas the Sinhalese only have Sri Lanka. This is then a form of territorial nationalism. There is also cultural nationalism, which has taken the form of attacking the attire of religious minorities, or the language rights of ethno-linguistic minorities. And then there is economic nationalism––the idea that certain groups, as the Muslims have been accused of doing, are taking a disproportionate share of the markets. Such economic nationalism has resulted in calls for economic marginalization or exclusion, as well as boycotts of Muslim-owned shops and restaurants for example. These are harmful positions that are commonly seen plastered all over Facebook, X and other social media platforms, and they are crudely and shamelessly proliferated on state- and privately owned-TV stations.

While the platforms or the mediums might be relatively new, the message is not. These sentiments are not a response to the thirty-year civil war Sri Lanka had, they aren’t even something that first emerged with receiving independence in 1948. Instead, they have their roots in a period of colonial occupation and control, of religious revival and enormous socio-economic change. So, let us go back in time and see how things developed.

It was in the nineteenth century that Sri Lanka’s anti-colonial movement started emerging, despite having been under colonial rule for much longer than India was. In fact, before the British arrived, Sri Lanka was under Portuguese and Dutch control for several centuries. Sri Lanka or Ceylon as it was referred to by the British, was often viewed in colonial and post-colonial discourse as a ‘model colony’, relatively peaceful and easy to govern, especially compared to our larger neighbour India. But that erases a lot of the revolts and rebellions that took place, especially against late Dutch and early British rule. Nevertheless, as anti-colonial movements gained steamed elsewhere, including in the subcontinent by the turn of the twentieth century, so too did Sri Lanka’s nascent Independence movement. But it did not take the same secular form that much of India’s movement did. Instead, it was closely anchored to ethno-religious and nationalist language. What was it about the nineteenth century in Ceylon that allowed an ‘us’ versus ‘them’ or indigenous versus alien dichotomy to emerge? There were of course, multiple reasons. Religious revival, which was taking place elsewhere across Asia saw various religious groups in Ceylon increasingly assert their distinct religious identities, in terms of a ‘Buddhist revival’, a Hindu revival and an Islamic revival. These revivals developed in large part in response to colonial missionary activity, and the continued spread of Christianity (which had its roots back under Portuguese occupation), yet they never joined forces with each other against the common colonial foe. Instead, they operated within silos of their own, hardening religious identities that were reconstructed as being at odds with other religious groups.

If religious revival was one factor driving ethno-religious assertion, migration and changes to demography and the economy was another. The nineteenth century saw an incredible rise in immigration, as first the seasonal coffee plantations were established, and later, the all-year round tea plantations, which required masses of labourers to pluck the leaves and the bud of tea bushes, to fuel a hungry export economy. Significantly, slavery had been abolished in both Britain and Ceylon by 1832. So the gap in labour was filled by importing hundreds of thousands of indentured labourers from all over India, and South India in particular. In an act of artificial community formation, these labourers of disparate origin were known as ‘Indian Tamils’ by the British, and eventually came to self-identify as a separate or distinct ethnic community called the Malaiyaha Tamils. These are examples that speak to what Professor Parasher-Sen discussed yesterday––naming as social processes that give new understandings of belonging. These Malaiyaha Tamils are distinguished from the Ceylon Tamils, who have been on the island for over 2000 years. Importantly, the legacy of the Malaiyaha Tamils’ migration is still visible today, with especially women from the Malaiyaha Tamil community still underpaid and overrepresented in the labour that goes into producing the world-renowned Ceylon tea.

Now, at the same time these indentured labourers arrived from India to work on plantations, there was a less well-known inflow of Indian Muslim traders––both merchant capitalists who dominated the export-import business as well as petty retailers, wholesale traders and itinerant hawkers. The South Indian Muslims, who tended to be petty traders and wholesale retailers, came to be known as Indian Moors––once again an artificial construction of an ethnic category to describe a group of Muslims from various parts of the Coromandel and Malabar Coasts in India. They too were differentiated from the ‘native’ Ceylon Moors. These titles, constructed in English at the turn of the twentieth century, were a means of creating belonging and unbelonging, distinguishing foreigner or outsider from the indigenous or authentic.

In now all too familiar tropes of ‘migrants stealing jobs from locals’, some of the earliest post-Independence pieces of legislation passed by an ethnically Sinhalese government were ones that could rapidly exclude migrants from claiming citizenship in Ceylon. The Ceylon Citizenship Act of 1948 and the Indian and Pakistani Registration Act of 1949 served to render stateless over 800,000 migrants of Indian origin. The 1948 Citizenship Act for instance withheld citizenship from the Malaiyaha Tamil community as most of them could not prove they were eligible for citizenship through the ‘right of descent’ or by ‘virtue of registration’. Crucially, the Sinhalese received the support of Ceylon Tamils and Ceylon Moors in parliament during the passage of these Acts. These three groups who saw themselves as authentically connected with the island for over a thousand years saw it as pragmatic to exclude the relative newcomers to the island, for reasons largely connected to the growth of ethnicized electoral politics.

A lot of the Indian Muslims returned to India, while the remainder assimilated into the broader Moor population. Up until 1961 the census distinguished between Ceylon Moors and Indian Moors. That category was erased in the 60s, and replaced with the term Muslims, and today it is very difficult to find many Muslims who would identify as Indian Moors. To belong, a lot of them had to ‘become’ Sri Lankan Muslims.

By contrast, most of the Malaiyaha Tamils stayed on in Sri Lanka despite being rendered stateless. A number of agreements and acts, some after much negotiation with the Indian government followed in the next decades. Between 1964 and 2009, the Sri Lankan government made piecemeal attempts to address the issue of ‘statelessness’ that the Malaiyaha Tamils faced, ultimately granting citizenship to those had been permanent residents of Sri Lanka since October 1964, or to were descendants of such a person.

The Indian Moor and Indian Tamil identities might be of modern construct that are somewhat possible to date and deconstruct––I’d like to add that scholars have much more heated debates around the construction of the Sinhalese identity, which looks to Lanka’s ancient past for legitimacy––and to North India to claim a shared Aryan origin, to distinguish themselves from ‘Dravidian Tamils’.

But at this point, let’s travel back to the nineteenth century. During this period, Sinhalese resentment towards minority communities including Muslims and Tamils in Sri Lanka was primarily framed in economic and religio-cultural terms. In this period, the Muslims as opposed to the Tamils represented the primary ‘other’ vis-à-vis the Sinhalese. This shifts in the post-colonial period, after Sri Lanka received Independence in 1948 when Tamil demands for equal rights in terms language and representation were met with discriminatory legislation and violence at the hands of Sinhalese politicians and mobs. But at the turn of the twentieth century, it appears that Muslims were viewed as representing the most significant threat to the Sinhalese, especially in terms of competition in the market place.

How did the majority population, the Sinhalese, respond to whom they saw as recent immigrants or outsiders who were taking a share of profits from an increasingly monetized and consumerist economy? Of course, it’s difficult to judge public sentiment so far back in the past, when much of the records we are left with tend to preserve elite perceptions. However, an analysis of vernacular media sources – in this case newspapers published in Sinhalese at the turn of the twentieth century – offer useful insights into popular perceptions on who belonged in Sri Lanka and who was considered an outsider.

The several collections of Sinhala newspapers held at the National Archives in Colombo offer a glimpse into the preoccupations and debates about minorities, both longstanding communities those and of more recent arrival, and demonstrate how they were portrayed as outsiders who undermined the ‘indigenous’ community in the marketplace and beyond. For example, a poem called ‘The Decline of the Sinhalese’ published in Sinhala Bauddhaya on October 14, 1911 by Anagarika Dharmapala is an emblematic example of a xenophobic discourse on foreignness, migration, trade, and competition. Dharmapala was a prominent Sinhalese nationalist leader in Sri Lanka, the son of a wealthy merchant, a Buddhist revivalist figure and the founder-editor of the Sinhala Bauddhaya newspaper. In fact, he must be quite well known in Calcutta, as he set up the Maha Bodhi Society in Calcutta in 1892––to further his objective of restoring the Maha Bodhi temple in Bodh Gaya, one of the most important Buddhist sites which at that time was under the control of Brahmin priests.

In his poem, Dharmapala targeted a spectrum of non-Sinhalese groups. These groups included: Nattu Kottai Chettiars; Catholic priests; the White man; Bohras and Parsis; Ceylon Moors; Tamils; Indian Moors; the Bombay man; Afghans; and, set apart, the Sinhalese.

It is a long and ranting poem using vitriolic language to target groups considered foreign. These non-Sinhalese groups were, by virtue of being foreign, portrayed as extractive aliens in Sri Lanka, who used trade and other economic means to undermine the hapless Sinhalese.  In the last three lines of the poem, Dharmapala directly addresses the Sinhalese, the key audience of his writing. He says:

Sinhala brothers, during these times when various nationals arrive in our Lanka to destroy the Sinhala nation, rise up from your slumber and act!

Dharmapala accordingly stoked a sense of victimization among the Sinhalese, and urged them to awaken themselves to the threats presented by outside elements.

I’m afraid to say that today in Sri Lanka, these sentiments persist. And the media continues to be used to delegitimize and discriminate against minority communities, and even instigate violence against them. Anti-Muslim violence in June 2014, November 2017, February and March 2018 and May 2019 were fuelled by social media disinformation, with platforms like Facebook and WhatsApp creating space for the rallying cries of ultranationalist mobs and militant monks.

It is clear then we cannot blame the medium––or the social media platforms––for the spread of hate speech and disinformation against minorities in Sri Lanka if history shows us that these insecurities and grievances held by the majority community go back at least 150 years. Instead, we might have to partially blame our understanding of history itself for creating divisions in society, and instilling them in our children from a young age. I want to spend the rest of my time speaking a little about history education in Sri Lanka, the deficiencies with public school syllabi, and what is being doing as an alternative in the non-state history education space.

For years, the state has controlled how history is taught, memorialized, and commemorated. A primary vehicle for shaping the dominant narrative is the public/state school history syllabus. Unsurprisingly, the post-colonial, Sinhala-Buddhist dominated state has been able to seriously influence the content of the public school history syllabus. This has resulted in the overinclusion of certain narratives––such as those highlighting a largely Sinhala-Buddhist narrative of ownership and authenticity of the island, and omission of others––by which I mean an inadequate coverage of minorities, except as ‘outsiders’ or ‘invaders’. Now, importantly, it’s not just that there are substantive deficiencies in the syllabus; there are major pedagogical shortcomings too. In a context where examination results count for 100 per cent of the student’s performance, and the fact that schools seem to think that anyone can teach history––so for instance we hear of Maths or English teachers who have free periods being brought in as history teachers because the assumption is that you just read off the textbook, classrooms are not spaces for intellectual curiosity and growth. As I said, both students and teachers feel there is insufficient space to do much else than read, memorize, regurgitate, and pass an exam.

In 2022, I started a non-profit organisation called Itihas. The name is a combination of the words ithihaasa in Sinhala, Sanskrit (and also Bengali), and Ithihaasam in Tamil, with the Sinhala word for ideas, ‘adahas’ – as a space for new ideas about history. While it’s something I’ve worked on unofficially for much longer, the timing of setting it up was connected with the enormous public protest and struggle against the incumbent government in 2022, known as the Aragalaya, when Sri Lanka saw a new wave of civic and political consciousness among Sri Lanka’s youth. I won’t go into it in too much detail, but during the Aragalaya, there were several public history related events and spaces emerging. I, among several others, tried to add context to what was taking place, doing things like teach-outs on historical protests and issues, while historians like Samal Hemachandra, were intrinsic in setting up a People’s University at the largest protest site during the Aragalaya, to create an egalitarian space for free discussions without the need to self-censor.

So that’s the context in which Itihas was set up. Now, it’s important to acknowledge the years of labour by others that have gone into this space for decades before, and so I see Itihas as a relatively new entrant into a dynamic space of non-state alternative history education. In terms of who this alternative space served, I think it’s useful to think of its audiences as both generalist and specialist. By generalists I mean a broader public audience, that includes the youth. By specialists, I mean history professionals, researchers and history educators like university lecturers and teachers. Several public history initiatives aimed at generalist audiences include things like exhibitions, like the one supported by the Collective for Historical Dialogue and Memory on 200 years of the Malaiyaha Tamil community in Sri Lanka, or the Virtual Museum on Religious Freedom in Sri Lanka. Such spaces attempt to complement incomplete state-run museum spaces that tend to exclude certain communities and their histories.

Itihas by contrast tends to focus on specialist audiences––and so our two major interventions have been working with school history teachers and junior or probationary history lecturers from the Sri Lankan universities that offer history as an undergraduate subject. And in these projects I worked very closely with the history department at the University of Colombo, who have been fantastic, and as I said, doing hugely important community history outreach work for years.

So what do these interventions look like? For example, unlike the opportunities we get as postdocs in the UK and elsewhere in the West, and even here in India, to meet our peers and others working on similar research topics in other universities, these junior lecturers in particular tend to work in silos and are not aware of who else is in a similar space beyond their own university. For instance, two excellent junior lecturers at Colombo University acknowledged the fact that they didn’t know any other junior history lecturers outside their university. So in a workshop series last September, we brought down around sixteen junior lecturers from six different universities, from the north, south, east and centre of the island, from the universities that accepted our invitations. We used the theme of contested heritage––at that time a hugely contentious issue between Sinhalese and Tamil communities in the North and East––to explore the divergences in the way they taught the topic of early settlement, and created a toolkit for teaching a more inclusive narrative of such topics. Substantively, it was important for each of them to hear about the starkly different histories being taught across the length of the island. Yet at the heart of this intervention, which we aim to sustain, is to create a network or alliance among junior lecturers who will one day be senior lecturers or heads of departments at their respective universities.

With the school teachers, we took them to state-run spaces like the national museum and the national archives in Colombo and encouraged them to think about the silences or the omissions in these spaces, and the way they could use field visits to such places to talk about gaps in the school syllabus and ways to fill them. So as you can see, Itihas tries to work with educators at various levels – from school teachers, to lecturers, who in turn teach those who go on to become history teachers, to create a multiplier effect. I think this approach is worth exploring in the absence of political and bureaucratic will to change public school history syllabi, which would be a far more effective method of reaching the key audience at the heart of the matter – the youth.

To end, I’d say that there are several challenges that have been experienced and that are on the horizon but I will focus on one for now. A lot of public history takes place online – the virtual museum on the history of religious freedom is an example but also online teaching content such as YouTube videos, short form articles and citizen journalistic writing on historical issues and debates. Earlier this year, the Sri Lankan government established an ‘Online Safety Act’ with the aim of criminalizing a variety of so-called ‘prohibited’ and ‘false’ statements’. An Online Safety Commission that is to be vested under the Act will preside over what is true or false and order individuals to stop the communication of ‘false statements’. Failure to comply would result in criminal liability. When it comes to the discipline of history, what is seen as ‘false’ today may, through academic rigour, be accepted as accurate tomorrow. Yet as part of that process, ethnic and religious sentiments––or sentimentalities––will invariably be offended, and allegations that the writing of alternative history produces ‘ill-will’ or ‘hostility’ will inevitably emerge. My own lived experience as a Sri Lankan historian speaks to my fear of what the Online Safety Act represents and how historians may be accused of spreading falsehoods that cause ‘ill-will’ and ‘hostility’. My doctoral research focused on the 1915 Anti-Moor (or Muslim) pogrom, which in popular history has been recast as the brutal suppression of the Sinhalese by the British colonizer. While this narrative is not incorrect, it is incomplete, and I analysed the violence by the Sinhalese against the Muslim minority that triggered a disproportionate British response. In response to my online publications on this topic, I was accused of spreading ‘disgusting and distorted lies’, and of being a ‘liberal cat’s paw’ based at a university in the West, ‘trying to change the real history of Sri Lanka’. Of course, encountering such resistance is part of the role of the historian and confronting absurd accusations with restraint comes with the job. However, in the changed context that comes with criminal liability, I fear that the new legal regime for policing ‘false statements’ online would have an enormous effect on how history is studied, taught, written and indeed contested in online spaces in Sri Lanka.

2024 is the year of South Asian elections and Sri Lanka is due to follow suit on September 21^st. In our last elections, a Presidential Election in 2019 and a Parliamentary Election in 2020, alongside economic prosperity, the now deposed President Gotabaya Rajapaksa and his cabal of politicians promised a Sri Lanka for the Sinhala Buddhists. It was the first election after decades when a political party––the Sri Lanka Podujana Peramuna––came out and said they did NOT need the minority vote – and they ran a campaign of division and distortion. They succeeded, only for the president to be ousted by an unprecedented political protest in 2022 following a major economic crisis. The date of our election was announced just last Friday, and since then a whole host of men, unsurprisingly men, have submitted their candidature before the Election Commission. However, as these elections have been expected for some time, the campaigns have been underway for several months already. I want to end on a somewhat hopeful note, to dilute some of the doom and gloom I’ve been reflecting on with you today, and so I shall leave you with this. One of the more hopeful legacies of the People’s Uprising was that some portions of the majority community came out during the protests and acknowledged the manipulation of race and religion by political actors for nothing but political gain. And so thus far, in the past few months as we have approached our elections, what has been largely absent is the hateful rhetoric of ethnicity and religion. Of course, it emerges every now and then, on political podiums and corners of social media. But the focus of the campaigns so far have been on sorting out the economy and anti-corruption. My hope then is that something might have changed, and that a return to ethno-nationalist and religiously divisive politics is considered by politicians a strategy of the past that lacks currency in the present and future. Thank you.

Question and Answer Session

 Audience Member 1: Thank you for your insightful presentation and for shedding light on the background. Your explanation has certainly clarified some aspects from me. I want to delve into a topic discussed in yesterday’s session: the concept of shared history and the ongoing debate about its accuracy.

While dealing with history education, as what was historically accurate at one point is then perceived as inaccurate and there are constant discrepancies, how do you think history education should navigate that?

Shamara Wettimuny: Thank you for your question. The current lack of emphasis on shared histories is a pressing issue that we cannot afford to ignore.

As I mentioned, right now, it is very much a Sinhala Buddhist narrative and people who've analysed sentiment say that Singhalese children seem to get prouder and happier about what they're learning the higher up the grades they go. Meanwhile, Tamil students get increasingly frustrated because they’re not mentioned, and when they are, these communicate negative connotations. At the same time, we don't teach post-independence history at all. We've had two Marxist insurrections and a 30-year civil war, all in the last 50 years and none of it is covered.

Children today have absolutely no idea how or why we were at war and what the Tamil grievances are. We need to go back to and find some sort of shared history. It hasn't been done yet, but again, this critiquing of the ancient source is necessary because right now, one of the most important sources school textbooks are based on is the Mahavamsha, the equivalent of the Ramayana or the Mahabharata in India. And it's not taught as a literary or religio-political document that a group of monks wrote in a particular kingly court at a specific time. Instead, it's treated as the authoritative narrative of Sri Lankan history, which remains in place, and this is where the problems lie.

In today's context, criticizing Buddhism is probably the most dangerous thing. Short story fiction writers and comedians who make jokes about Buddhism have been arrested in the last few years. There is just no political will within the National Institute of Education, the department that writes the school textbooks, to change anything. They don't see a problem with it, particularly because most of the country has no issue with it. As far as they're concerned, it's great. That's why, in a sense, we're currently turning to alternative mechanisms.

I don't have a correct answer for what shared history is, but that is the way forward. If not to come up with new origin myths, we need to find points in history where we overcame together. The colonial experience indeed is a valuable one, however, as I mentioned, there were multiple missed opportunities. When we had religious revivals, rather than coming together, they developed in silos. When it could have been a time for solidarity, it wasn't. Do we have more questions?

Audience Member 2: As children, we studied about Sirimavo Bandaranaike, and there was this understanding that Sri Lanka is one of the most progressive countries in the world. Later we realised that the prime minister had her own challenges, and that it was destiny that led her to that state position. Now, in India, assumptions on Sri Lanka form, deform and then reform again.

It is undeniable that India and Sri Lanka are neighbours and that Sri Lanka has been an integral part of our mythology. In the twenty-first century, both countries are undergoing similar pressures and situations. However, do you think, by acting like an elder brother or sister, that India can help Sri Lanka in any way to improve as a nation?

SW: That's a fascinating question. I don't know how familiar you are with the Indo-Lanka Accords that were signed in 1987 when the war escalated in the north. India intervened to try and support the Tamil people. A lot of the north was under the de facto control of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, the LTTE. What happened was India sent peacekeeping forces, which led to the one-time coalition between the LTTE and the Sri Lankan government to get rid of the Indian Peace Keeping Force, IPKF. Particularly in the north, which has a closer political connections with Tamil Nadu, the Indian intervention left the population unhappy. As a result, people are very touchy about the idea of closer relations. That said, Sri Lanka has turned multiple times to India for money, particularly during the economic crisis. However, that might have to do with geopolitics and the fact that India doesn't want Sri Lanka taking too much money from China.

Again, the school textbooks should discuss our close connections regarding population exchanges and migration. Still, more information about the Malaiyaha Tamil community's existence needs to be in the history textbook. Therefore, there's certainly room for improvement in how we reimagine our connections with India.

Romila Thapar: It's a comment more than a question. One has to give a certain amount of historiographical attention to this question. I was the one who talked about shared history because I feel very strongly about that and historiography.

I'm very struck by the fact that the world has witnessed varieties of colonialism. The Latin American historians, for example, are constantly criticizing us, Asianists, and saying you have only one concept of colonialism. The Latin Iberian colonialism was very different. We pay no attention to the varieties of colonialism.

The first layer is to understand the reading of our histories, pasts, and identities through colonial vision. This is absolutely essential. We don't do it. In India, for example, the colonial vision is that of the two nations, the Hindu and the Muslim. Nowhere in school, high school, and college does this subject of what the colonial historians did to our history come up.

The second layer is in a post-colonial situation, whether it's Iberian colonialism or Anglo-French colonialism. What takes the place of what you are opposing? The nationalistic, anti-colony movement was against the colonial power. Now that power is gone. What are you against? Because nationalism demands that you be against something. Up till now, it's become religion. You are against a particular religion, whatever it may be. That has to be changed. You have to argue, historically, that nationalism does not demand that you attack another religion, belief or language. But think in terms of inclusive history and an inclusive culture, which is where your shared history comes in.

And the third level, which is absolutely crucial and which we seldom talk about, is the nature of the explanation given by history. We are still hanging on to explaining things by religious identities. Once we break that, we start looking at history and the past, and the data we have, and the evidence in terms of how reliable it is, the Hindutva version of history is fantasy. They fantasize history. And we are attacked as being people who don't understand the Hindu past. But the point is that what is a Hindu past based on, or the Muslim past, or the Christian past? That fantasization that comes through a religious necessity is something that history has to expose. So you have to have a critical history, a history that demands reliable evidence. Prove the reliability of your evidence before you quote it. A history that demands causality based on logic and rationality. Until that historiographical change doesn't occur in how we understand history, I'm afraid a lot of these problems will continue.

SW: Thank you for the comments, Professor Thapar. I agree entirely with what you said in the second and third points. However, I’d like to respond to your first point on colonial historiography and knowledge formation.

Orientalist scholarship actually served the Sinhala Buddhist project. There was a prioritization of Sinhala Buddhist narratives. In fact, you have the census superintendent saying the Singhalese race is the only one that can call Ceylon their home. As a result, colonial historiography and nationalist historiography appear to be two sides of the same coin. So there is no attempt to question the knowledge and the narratives that came out of that period.

Audience Member 3: Textbooks often refer to the role Scandinavian countries played in ending the civil war. Why were the Scandinavian countries involved? Was it because they had businesses set up in Sri Lanka that were getting affected?

SW: I am curious to hear that your textbooks talk about the war. Ours certainly don't.

The Norwegians were very involved in the peace processes, which ultimately failed. One of the main reasons Norway was involved was that there is a significant Tamil diaspora in Norway. It was well-intentioned, and peace held for a few years in the early 2000s. However, once Mahindra Rajapaksa came into power in 2005, he decided he would end the war by any means necessary. And so, in 2009, there was a brutal military solution to the war. We still have no political solution. The grievances lie unaddressed. But what the government did was that they crushed the LTTE at a huge civilian cost, which was then denied. So, I wouldn't necessarily associate the Norwegian peace process with the end of the war.

Audience Member 4: I've recently observed a consolidation of majoritarian groups between India and Sri Lanka. The RSS and its affiliates are quite active within radical groups conversing with the Buddhist radical groups in Sri Lanka and Myanmar. Has that impacted the present narrative in Sri Lanka? Or do you still feel that it's only origins that came up during colonial times?

SW: You've raised an extremely important issue that we in Sri Lanka must be more aware of. Yes, we know that RSS groups are making connections with groups, particularly in the north and east of the country. However, there is also an unholy alliance between ultra-nationalist Buddhist groups and Hindu groups due to a convenient common enemy,  the Muslim and the Christian, going on. Therefore, this is another issue that we must keep an eye on going forward, as there is a recalibration of who the new other is.

The Sinhalese, much like Lord Palmerston once said about the British, have no permanent enemies or allies. They have permanent interests. And the enemy changes depending on what's going on. It was the Tamil in the post-independence period. It's currently the Muslims. India, being in a similar situation over the last ten years, is convenient for Sri Lankan politicians and Buddhist ultra-nationalist groups because it has provided political cover.

Audience Member 5: Thank you for your presentation. I was particularly intrigued by how you seamlessly integrated your scholarly work and civil society engagement. I’m keen to learn more about the workshop you conduct with junior lecturers of history.

How do you find them? How do they find you? Is this something you do underground? Or is it something that you can get backing from senior lecturers or institutions?

For how long have you been running Itihas? Do you see a progression of this network building? Can you already point to something new coming out of it? Though the long-term strategy seems obvious and very well thought through, can you take us through some of these steps?

SW: It was piloted for the first time last year, so it's relatively recent. I worked with an organization called the International Center for Ethnic Studies, which has been doing essential work since the 80s. A German organization was also involved with the funding. These are the things that we have to take into consideration. Who's going to help with logistics? Who's going to fund it? Because the state is not involved at all.

You asked, is it underground? Yes, we didn't advertise publicly. It was through networks. As a result, we know there's probably a self-selecting process for the people who choose to come. We can't go through the schools yet. But it was well-received, and we were encouraged to approach principals.

We want to work through the National Colleges of Education, which are teacher training institutes. There's only nineteen in Sri Lanka. In a sense, these numbers are definitely doable compared to the scale of Indian education. We want to work with the master educators of history, meaning they are the people who will train history teachers. Again, there are only 15,000 history teachers in Sri Lanka. It's a lot for an individual organization to think of, but it would be infinitely more doable if we had any support from the Ministry of Education. Right now, it's not. But there's always the hope of government change in the next month and a half.

Audience Member 6: There are a lot of very good filmmakers in Sri Lanka who are trying to address these issues. Prasanna Vidhanage has done some fantastic work on how to start thinking about building a bridge between these communities. How are the film or artistic communities tackling the issues in Sri Lanka? Thank you.

SW: What we've been learning from history teachers and anecdotally from students is that, as I mentioned, a lot of teachers aren't actually qualified to teach the subject. They're subbed in from other subjects.

As a result, they pull knowledge from pop culture and from poorly made movies that compare Mahindra Rajapaksa to a king from the Mahavamsha. We are aware that the arts and pop culture is where people's understandings of history erroneously comes from. The work that people like Prasanna Vidhanage are doing, which is trying to write back a slightly more well-researched historical narrative that contests dominant ideologies is essential. And we have other artists involved, but I suppose I'm cynical, even about my work, to some extent, because we just don't have reach without state support.

Audience Member 7: Due to the numerous nineteenth century sources you cited, I had a question about intricate implications of the Western episteme on the question of identity. How has it impacted the concept of ethnicization and belonging?

SW: My response concerns the colonial project introduced in the nineteenth century, where ethnicity was foregrounded. In contrast to what was done in India, representation in our first legislative body, the Ceylon Legislative Council, was along ethnic lines and again, the census prioritised ethnicity. This has erased a lot of the diversity, and of course caste is one aspect. Caste in Sri Lanka is very different from caste in India. There was a lot of South Indian migration between the thirteenth and the eighteenth centuries, and the once Indian castes then became Sinhalese. Before the nineteenth century, when everyone suddenly was told they were Sinhalese, these caste and occupational identities had significant social importance.

At the same time, the early twentieth century saw a growth in regional identities. Something less well-known in Sri Lanka is that the Kandyans were some of the first advocates of federalism. Today, federalism is a bad word in Sri Lanka, associated with separatism and the ethnic conflict. However, we, as scholars, need to rethink how we define communities. Why is it that we prioritise ethnicity? Why did the British choose to focus on that? Unfortunately, it goes back to some of these older chronicles and origin myths. The idea that the Sinhala people came from a lion developed into this massive debate, called the People of the Lion debate, and it's a major dispute about where the Sinhala identity came from. Ultimately, there are two scholars debating whether it goes back to the tenth century or the thirteenth century. Still, it's not this continuous identity that has existed for 2,500 years when Prince Vijaya landed on the shores of Ceylon, and we're struggling to contest that.

Audience Member 8: My understanding of Sri Lankan history is largely influenced by Shyam Selvadurai's Cinnamon Gardens centred around the Donomore Commission. I’m curious to know if the contemporary Sri Lankan history school curriculum places significant emphasis on this pivotal event, which was instrumental in advocating for the rights of the Tamils over than the Sinhalese?

SW: As I said, we don't teach post-independence history, which was in 1948. However, we mention that two new constitutions were introduced in 1972 and 1978, which is the extent of the foray into the post-independence period.

There is a misunderstanding that in the ’20s and ’30s, the Sinhalese started talking about favouritism of the minorities, but actually happened is that in the ’30s and the ’40s; the British basically stepped back from the promises of the Donomore Commission. Whatever legacies there were from the submissions before that commission are erased. Moreover, the Solberry Constitution, adopted in 1946 (so just before independence) had stripped away most of the promises under the Donomore Commission, and only one article was left for minority protection. It stated that if anything would upset the status quo, you would need a referendum.

Sorry, I'm not a constitutional lawyer, so I shouldn't try to comment too much on this but by the time we got independence, much of what was promised under the Donomore Commission was already stripped away.

AM 8: Is there any talk of that in the curriculum?

SW: There is a reference to the fact that a couple of British MPs came down and received submissions, and in popular history, the legacy of Donomore is Universal Franchise; we got Universal Franchise in 1931. That's about it.

AM 8: Thank you.

Audience Member 9: My question relates to India's role in the LTTE movement. Is that something studied and discussed at all? Is the creation of the movement or the later part discussed?

SW: No, there's zero mention. It's appalling, absolutely appalling.

Audience Member 10: With regard to historiography, should history be truthful or healing? Healing, because in our talks, shared history is also an attempt to create shared memories which are more relatable and connected, as if trying to make a bond.

History can be violent and extremely separatist, for that matter. So that is why I asked the question. Again, is the search for shared history an attempt to find truth, or is it an attempt to find healing somehow?

SW: Let me respond to that with an anecdote. I met the head of the history department at the National Institute of Education, and I asked this question, when are we going to start talking about the war? Why aren't we already talking about it? Her answer about when was utterly ludicrous. She said the history begins 25 years ago, so it's too soon to talk about the war, although, of course, the roots of the war go back so much further. But she told me we mustn't, we don't want to upset anyone. That was her reason for not talking about the war, that it would cause upset. And we can accept that but you can't erase people's experiences, we can't deny what happened. There is a lot of denial about what happened.

In the search for shared histories, yes, we should be looking for something which shows our ability to co-exist and embrace diversity and pluralism. It probably existed best in Sri Lanka while we had something called the Kandyan Kingdom, which was a refuge for various communities under the Portuguese and the Dutch. However, there always is a need to have something to fight against. That’s why when the European colonizers were in the country, we were able to do something together, at least before the British arrived, and now that there's no external foe, we're fighting amongst ourselves.

AM 10: We always need an ‘other’.

SW: This is the problem, so how do we move beyond needing another? I don't actually have an answer for that. Still, perhaps it lies in shared histories, so this then speaks to your question: do we need to be truthful, or do we need to reimagine or imagine new stories and origin myths? But then, that's not history, right? Maybe for children, we may need new nursery stories of fantasy tales to tell them we haven't always been fighting with each other.

Audience Member 11: In the search for shared histories, could one look for narratives from within the Buddhist tradition the majority community claims that, or would all those narratives only be exclusionary?

SW: The sad thing is, that's what they look to, the pre-colonial and the Mahavamsha narratives, which had, essentially, tribal leaders fighting against each other. Still, these are recast as being essentially a Sinhalese versus Tamil conflict.

Stanley Tambiah has written about this host-guest dynamic, and the Sinhalese see themselves as gracious hosts willing to have all these other guests come and coexist. Still, when they start to misbehave, it becomes a host-intruder dynamic, they're suddenly seen as unwelcome because they're trying to change the way things are.

My concern is that if we go along the route of finding a shared history within the Buddhist, what is acceptable? You're almost forcing assimilation, or you're expecting compromise.

Zoya Hasan: I want to move the discussion from history to politics. Therefore, what is your assessment of the Aragalaya movement of 2022? It seemed as though it had been ignored and set aside, but given what you said in the concluding statement of your presentation, it seems that the Aragalaya protest has had an impact in bringing about political change.

SW: There's a lot of debate about how successful it was. To assess how successful anything is, you need to look at what the objectives were. Ultimately, the Aragalaya brought to the streets people who had never protested before, so not just the usual civil society, trade unions, and student unions, but it also brought the middle class out onto the streets.

There were many reasons to be out––we didn't have power for ten hours a day, we didn't have fuel, people were queuing up around the city to get kerosene or fuel. There were shortages of goods and we had no money. People went out onto the streets for reasons primarily of economic distress but also to demand an end to corruption because they blamed the corruption of the government for the fact that we'd squandered our wealth. One of my demands is the abolition of the executive presidency because the figure of the executive president is too powerful. It is a corrupting force. All of us had these different demands.

There was one core demand at the centre of the Aragalaya, and that was a hashtag––#GoHomeGota. The core aim was for the president to resign, which succeeded because it was the first time a sitting president left the country with minimal bloodshed. We did lose people, but it was about three people who died, which is kind of shocking for an island-wide protest that, in a sense, the military somewhat restrained. Gotabaya Rajapaksa seemed to be in a bit of a quandary because he saw himself as popularly elected and, therefore, didn't want to be too violent.

However, nothing else was achieved because, ultimately, the Rajapaksas still control things. They appointed the prime minister, who then became president. Almost everything else was left unmet, so there's a lot of dissatisfaction with what the Aragalaya actually achieved. Once the power came back on and there was fuel, the middle class went home, and that's when the government started using more force and repression. People got arrested when the protest sites were cleared,  and essentially, the Aragalaya came to an end shortly after that. The middle class protection was probably why we weren't being shot at. That said, there was an awakening of consciousness that we, as citizens, can do more than just cast our vote. Our civic responsibility does not end with marking an X on the ballot paper. We can demand answers and hold our elected representatives accountable. That is my hope for what I think has changed and what we'll hopefully see in the polling booths in another month and a half.

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Shamara Wettimuny is a Junior Research Fellow in History at The Queen's College, University of Oxford. Her research focuses on ethno-religious violence and identity in Sri Lanka, both historically and in the present day. Shamara was a Visiting Lecturer at the University of Colombo, and is the founder of Itihas, an organisation that works on history education reform.