| Colonial
and Post-Colonial Power at Kataragama:
Government Intervention and Religious Change
Ira
P Nichols-Barrer
Abstract
The
sacred town of Kataragama, in southeast Sri Lanka, hosts one
of the most important, and most diverse, multiethnic religious
pilgrimages in the nation. The popularity of the site endures
despite heavy government interference especially in Colonial
times. Contemporary scholarship concerning the site has focused
on the political legitimisation of Sinhalese- Buddhist worshippers
at the expense of other religious and ethnic groups. Such
government interventions have a clear precedent in the British
colonial period. Imperial power was imposed at the shrine
in two stages. In the first, lasting from 1815-18, British
forces demolished the shrine and its environs to repress anti-colonial
military resistance associated with Kataragama worship in
the Kandyan Kingdom. In the second stage, lasting from 1874-1919,
colonial administrators imposed a highly restrictive ticket
system to discourage South Indian plantation labourers from
leaving their posts to attend the annual festival. Both measures
had severe effects on the demographics and overall popularity
of Kataragama worship. In this context, including post-colonial
government interference at the shrine, the continued survival
of this diverse religious community is even more remarkable.
Religion,
Secularism and the State in Sri Lanka: A Historical Survey
K
M de Silva
Abstract
Sri
Lanka’s coastal areas were the scene of a long and complex
interaction and confrontation between the national religion,
Buddhism, and the intrusive western culture and civilization
and Christian religion, an interaction which continues to
the present day. The problem of relations between state and
religion became more complicated once the British gained control
over the whole island between 1815 and 1818 with the conquest
of the last of the independent Sinhalese kingdoms. Under the
terms of the Kandyan Convention of 1815, the British undertook
to maintain and protect Buddhism as successors of the Kandyan
kings.
The
link between the British government and Buddhism emerging
from the obligations undertaken under the terms of the Kandyan
Convention of 1815 was severed in the 1840s under pressure
from missionaries in the island, and their links with the
powerful Evangelical movement in Britain. The importance of
this decision could scarcely be exaggerated, for it marked
the dissolution of the traditional bond between the state
and the national religion that had lasted almost without interruption
from the earliest days of the ancient Sinhalese kingdom, which
is to say for over 2,000 years. The withdrawal of the traditional
patronage accorded to Buddhism left Buddhists nursing a grievance
at the unilateral revocation of this solemn undertaking. Their
spokesmen regularly urged a reconsideration of this decision
and pressed the need for the re-establishment of some sort
of formal link between Buddhism and the state.
The
establishment and maintenance of a secular state were treated
as a central feature of the transfer of negotiations which
took place between 1943 and 1947.
The
confrontation between the advocates of a secular state and
those who sought to underline the primacy of Buddhism and
the Sinhalese burst to the surface in the 1950s and has been
renewed in the period 2000 to 2004.
The
position of Buddhism and Buddhists had improved quite substantially
at independence and in the first decade after independence,
but these advances only served to give an exaggerated salience
to the narrowing gap between aspiration and achievement.
By
the late 1970s Buddhist activism was but a shadow of the vibrant
force it had been in the previous seventy years. Partly, this
was because many of the issues which Buddhist activists had
agitated about had been settled very much in their favour.
But there is no mistaking the fact that the euphoria and the
idealism of the early post-independence era had worn thin
over the years. This is as true of Sri Lanka as it is of Ne
Win’s Burma until we come to the events of 2003-04 in
Sri Lanka.
The Sri Lankan Tamil Diaspora: Three Tamil Family
Narratives
Mark
P Whitaker
Abstract
Studies
of diasporic communities frequently presuppose something called
the “diasporic family” in their discussions of
diasporic “subjectivity”—a rather surprising
thing for frequently post-modern, often professedly ant-essentialist,
studies to do. This article tries to perspicuously highlight
this will o’ the wisp entity, the diasporic family,
by describing three Sri Lankan Tamil diasporic families whose
familial dramas collectively span the history of Sri Lanka
from independence to the near present. It does so using some
of the post-Schneiderian narrative techniques that feminist
scholars have developed to deal with the kinds of post-modern
families that do not easily fit the static models of classic
kinship analysis. Torn by a waning colonialism and Sri Lanka’s
long civil war, and scattered about multiple continents, these
three families would seem to be just such entities. This modest
exercise reveals not only the extreme tenacity with which
these families remained, come what may, families, but the
chaotic tangle of public terrors, private motives, personal
strategies, intimate passions, and complete accidents that
somehow constituted their continued unity.
Volumes
XV to XIX of the Ethnic Studies Report are currently available
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|
Ethnic
Studies Report Abstracts: Vol XXI No. 1