Ethnicity and Violence in Sri Lanka: An Ethnohistorical Narrative

The ethnicity and violence in Sri Lanka have many root causes and consequences that are closely interconnected. Given the nature and the complexity of root causes and consequences of these highly contested concepts, it should not be treated as a part of linear historical processes where one event led to another. Sri Lanka presents case of how intersecting not only ethnicity and violence but also religion, caste, class, linguistic, and cultural mosaics have been and might be billeted within the borders of a nation-state. However, state building in Sri Lanka has been riddled with paradoxes. The curious notion of numerically dominant ethnic group, Sinhala manifesting a “minority complex” or anxieties about minority groups, Tamil and Muslims, is evident in the rise of Sinhala Buddhist nationalism during the nineteenth and the twentieth century of the country. Since state building has often meant centralization and a single ethnic group dominating the symbolic framework of the nation, there has been the tendency by minority groups such as Tamil and Muslims who have felt marginalized by the process to reinvent new collective ethnic identities. Moreover, cultural-religious minorities have responded to such hegemonic state-building process through mobilization of both non-violence and violent means. A complicated coming together of anti-minority sentiment at the level of the state, permissive politics that made violence a possibility, and the utilizing of this permissive violent politics for working out various class and caste enmities resulted in an extremely difficult political time for Sri Lanka in the 1980s. However, the central narrative through which the prevalence of violence was understood was the ethnic conflict. This paper too shall lay out the important historical moments where disadvantages toward minorities were institutionalized at state level while calling attention to ways in which ethnic politics were utilized for a multiplicity of ends.