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Today we are witnessing mass protests across the island, in a way we haven’t seen before. Some of you here tonight may be participating in your first series of protests, and that’s exciting and important. Others here are seasoned activists who’ve taken to protest by getting on the street, and organising grassroots level resistance to various issues, or by advocating for change — whether in courtrooms, classrooms or on social media. Generations before us have taken to the streets, and spoken truth to power, often in the face of police brutality, including assault, intimidation and torture. Protest in Sri Lanka, then, is nothing new. Yet something in the air feels different this time. And before we can unpack what that change might be, it is worth looking back at some of the different protests that have taken place in Sri Lanka. What or who were the underlying drivers of those protests? What modes or forms did those protests take? And how did the state respond to such dissent? I cannot and won’t attempt to give you a comprehensive history of protest in Sri Lanka — it’s simply not possible to do in 15 minutes and for those protests I leave out, I ask your forgiveness. Instead, I’m going to try and paint a general impression of some of the different types of protests we have seen in the colonial, post-Independence and post-War periods, and reflect on what may be different in this present moment.

To begin with, let’s talk about drivers or factors underlying protests. When we each think about why we might be out on the streets, we will have our own personal reasons. Different issues move us to take action, while we remain indifferent to those that may not concern us. There are several reasons that people protest, but I am going to focus on three recurrent drivers of protest: identity, ideology, and interest-groups.

By identity I mean for example ethnic or religious identities, as well as gender identities. Think of the many Tamil protests to end militarisation and land grabs in the North and East, protests by Christian churches for justice following the Easter Sunday attacks, protests to reverse the ban on burials during COVID-19 that really harmed the Muslim community, and the untiring protests by Tamil mothers of the disappeared in the North. Today marks the 1,875th day of this protest in the North.

By ideology, I’m thinking of Marxism, socialism, nationalism or pacifism. Often, in a place like Sri Lanka, class-based or nationality-based ideologies often overlap with ethnic identities. The JVP in the 70s and 80s for instance were a Marxist, anti-elite, youth-based Sinhalese group. You can see the presence of more than one underlying driver in a protest.

And by interest-group, I’m referring mostly to unions — whether the GMOA, for medical officers, Inter-University Students Federation, plantation workers’ unions, railway unions, and so on. It’s worth noting that some of these interest groups or unions are often associated with political parties albeit to varying degrees. Once again, we see overlap between the drivers of protest in Sri Lanka.

So then we have identity, ideology, and interest groups that are three significant drivers of protest. Let’s talk about the forms these protests have taken, across the last century.

During the British colonial period, in 1905, the Supreme Court banned Muslims from wearing the fez cap in court, an item of religious attire that was considered part of the Muslims national identity. In response, the community organised a mass protest in the grounds of the Maradana mosque and an economic hartal in Pettah, where they closed down all their shops. The protest meeting at the mosque was attended by 30,000 people, which at the time constituted more than 10% of the entire Muslim population in Sri Lanka. They organised speeches and interventions from Sri Lankan and Indian Muslim communities leaders, and wrote a memorial of appeal to the King to reverse this policy. They eventually succeeded in their peaceful protest, and were within a year allowed to wear their fez cap in the courts. Now, some historians have criticised this form of protest as it remained limited to this particular Muslim issue — it never transformed into a national, anti-colonial campaign. It was the largest mass meeting up until that point but it was certainly not the last.

Another protest that coalesced along religious lines was temperance. Among Buddhists and Christians in particular, temperance was a growing issue in the early 20th century. The temperance movement advocated for abstinence from alcohol — specifically arrack and toddy, which was seen as a corrupting, Western influence, that also gave the colonial government huge revenues from production licenses and taxation. Campaigns called for boycotts of toddy taverns, and punishments in the form of fines for those who broke their pledges to abstain from alcohol. Temperance societies (amadyapana samagam) sprang up across the Southern part of the island first in 1904, and later in 1912, and attracted the leadership of future national-level actors such as D.B. Jayathilaka, and W.A. De Silva. Although some Tamil Hindus such as Ponnambalam Ramanathan chaired an important temperance rally in Colombo, and Burgher educators and councillors joined temperance committees, these campaigns, remained a largely Sinhalese protest.

In the post-Independence period, following the chauvinist Sinhala-Only language policy of the SWRD Bandaranaike government in 1956, a wave of peaceful Tamil protests began in opposition. One form of protest was the satyagraha, a form of non-violent direct action, like the sort espoused by Mahatma Gandhi in India, and Martin Luther King Jr in America (albeit called sit-ins in English). A key example of such a satyagraha was the Tamil satyagraha in February 1961 that began in Jaffna before spreading throughout the Northern and Eastern Provinces, to protest Mrs. Bandaranaike’s attempts at Sinhalisation of the judiciary and administrative services in Sri Lanka.

What did Sinhalisation mean in practice? Sinhala would be the sole Official Language in all areas of administration and in the courts. Tamil speakers stood to lose access to justice, employment, and basic government services. So the protest in response in February 1961 involved volunteers sitting in front of entrances to Kachcheris or district secretariats to prevent Govt employees from working by blocking their entrance — an effective form of non-violent direct action. The police forcefully removed them, carrying them by their hands and legs and dumping them on the ground some distance away. The satyagrahis then picked themselves up, and hurried back to their places to resume their sit-in. Soon the police began dragging them away, kicking or rolling those lying flat on the ground. Eventually batons were used against the protestors. One satyagrahi, Francis Pereira — a Bharatha Tamil from Chilaw — was removed forcefully and returned to his position 15 times, despite his clothes being torn to rags, and his body bruised. These efforts and police violence only attracted more crowds, as observing bystanders quickly joined as bodies in the protests. And incredibly, the police ceased their attempts just under 2 hours after arriving.

In the satyagraha campaigns that followed, police brutality increased, and more and more Tamils joined these protests. However, such protests never managed to gain nation-wide appeal, and remained largely confined to the North and the East. The Sinhalese South, by the late 1960s and early 70s, were preoccupied with their own inequalities, and demanded land reform, and better access to education and employment. For those of you who want to know about left-wing dissent and civil society protests from the 1960s onwards, the Archive on Dissidents and Activists in Sri Lanka, 1960s to 1990s, compiled by the American Institute for Lankan Studies is a fantastic, online archive that is accessible to the public.

Let me skip ahead now to the 1980s, when we really start to see the emergence of feminist groups, or women’s groups that protested against growing state-led violence, against JVP insurrectionists or ethnic minorities, and pioneered awareness raising programmes on women’s rights. Mothers’ Fronts groups are inspiring examples of dissent that saw women in the North and South protest the arrests and disappearances of their sons, brothers, husbands, and fathers during the youth insurrections and the ethnic conflict. Groups that are doing such important work today, such as the Women and Media Collective, INFORM, and the Mannar Women’s Development Forum, were established in this period between the 80s and 90s. In the words of academic-activist Malathi de Alwis, who is no longer with us, these feminist groups documented human rights violations by the State and militant groups, established peace education programs in schools, and organized demonstrations, and vigils for peace. Despite threats to their safety, these women protested against both the state and militant groups, and some paid for their activism with their lives. Rajani Thiranagama, for example, an academic and activist in Jaffna was ruthlessly murdered by the LTTE in her pursuit of truth and justice.

Following the end of the War, protests for accountability continue. And we can add a fourth ‘I’ to my list of underlying drivers of protest — in addition, to identity, ideology and interest groups. Let’s call them issue-based protests. Activists seek answers for disappearances, and murders, such as those of Lasantha Wickremetunga, Prageeth Eknaligoda, Wasim Thajudeen, and countless more. People demand justice for the Easter Sunday bombings, Justice for Hejaaz Hisbullah, answerability for the Bond Scam. They call for the end to cronyism, and other forms of corruption. Malaiyaha Tamil plantation workers continue to advocate for a 1000 rupee daily wage and land ownership. The LGBTIQ+ community has protested the demonization of same-sex relations by the state in general and the police in particular. Farmers protested the introduction of a poorly thought through and ultimately disastrous fertiliser ban. Lawyers and activists call for the repeal or reform of laws, ranging from the Prevention of Terrorism Act, to the Muslim Marriage and Divorce Act, to the abolition of the Executive presidency. Protest is part and parcel of life for many Sri Lankans.

So, what is different today? What is it about this moment that leaves us feeling hopeful, that something may change? So far, the government has not listened to protestors’ demands. Yet here we are, in Colombo and Kandy, Batticaloa and Jaffna, Tangalle and Oluvil, Anuradhapura and Vavuniya, unrelenting, on the streets. I’m a historian and it’s not quite my business to predict the future. In fact, telling the future hasn’t worked out so well for those who claim to be in that business either. I don’t know yet where this is going but perhaps, just perhaps, for the first time in our living history, all these drivers of protests are present in the current moment: we see identity, ideology, interest groups and issues represented in the fight for change today. Men, women, Sinhalese, Tamils, Muslims, Burghers, nurses, daily wage earners, tech bros, free trade zone workers, environmentalists, privileged, deprived, able, disabled: we are all here and THAT is what is special. No one political party could have convened us, despite however much credit Johnston Fernando tries to give the JVP.

When I compare the current moment with the colonial period, which I’m most familiar with, it’s clear that those protests remained confined to those immediately affected or aggrieved by a particular issue. They had structure, leadership, and organisation. Yet those protests failed to resonate with the broader population, and remained confined to ethnic, religious, class, caste, or gender-based lines. Today we seem to have overcome those divisions and have a stab at unity. The demands GoHomeGota or GoHomeRajapaksas are about more than just resignations. We cannot romanticise this too much, but we can be hopeful. We need to remember that this may not be a fight for survival for all of us, but it is a very real fight for survival for some of us. The spiralling economic crisis is an emergency and needs to be solved now. Longer-term grievances should not be forgotten in the aftermath. There are calls for investigations into an incident involving military personnel who entered a protest area. This may be new to some of us, but it is something very familiar for those in the North and the East. These longer-term grievances cannot be forgotten.

Empathy and courage can sustain this moment, and on that note, thank you for your attention.

Original Article:

https://shamara-wettimuny.medium.com/protests-in-sri-lanka-a-historical-perspective-289e58908c5a

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Further Reading

Archive on Dissidents and Activists in Sri Lanka, 1960s to 1990s

Fez protest meeting — Shamara Wettimuny, ‘Imagining a National Headgear: Islamic Revival and Muslim Identity in Ceylon’

Temperance campaigns: John D. Rogers, ‘Cultural nationalism and social reform: The 1904 Temperance Movement in Sri Lanka’, i. Lanka’, The Indian Economic and Social History Review, 26(3) (1989), pp. 319–341.

1961 Tamil Satyagraha — D.B.S. Jeyaraj, ‘Feb 20th 1961 Launch of Tamil ‘Satyagraha’ Encounters Baptism of fire on First Day’.

JVP: Mick Moore, ‘Thoroughly Modern Revolutionaries: The JVP in Sri Lanka’, Modern Asian Studies 27/3 (1993)

Women’s protests: Malathi de Alwis, ‘The Changing Role of Women in Sri Lankan Society’, Social Research 69/3 (2002); Remembering Rajani (2009), accessible at: https://www.noolaham.net/project/68/6741/6741.pdf.; Wenona Giles, ‘The Women’s Movement in Sri Lanka: An Interview with Kumari Jayawardena’, accessible at: https://btlbooks.com/chapters/feminists_underfire/xhtml/c15.html; Kumudini Samuel, ‘Building Transversal Solidarities: Women’s Search for Peace in Sri Lanka’ in Rita Manchanda (ed.), Women and Politics of Peace: South Asia Narratives on Militarization, Power, and Justice (2017); Malathi de Alwis, ‘Motherhood as a space of protest: Women’s political participation in contemporary Sri Lanka’, Nivedini 9/1 (2001).

The post Protests in Sri Lanka: A Historical Perspective appeared first on Itihas.

The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries witnessed the growth of national, political and ethno-religious consciousness among various groups across the island. These groups had historically identified themselves at different times with different labels. For instance, at certain times groups saw themselves as Sinhalese, Tamils, Moors and Burghers, but at other times they identified through religious identity markers: Buddhists, Hindus, Christians and Muslims for example. In the preceding centuries and millennia, these identities were not fixed or unchanging. However, certain changes took place in the nineteenth century that appeared to solidify these identities in some way. What changes occurred in the nineteenth century to consolidate identities within and between different ethno-religious groups on the island? What was different about the period of British colonial rule, particularly when compared with the colonial rule of the Dutch and Portuguese before them? And how were labels such as ‘race’, ‘ethnicity’ and ‘nationality’ used in this period?

Following the total occupation of the island in 1815, the first modern attempts at classifying or categorizing the population took place. And here, groups were first separated by color and level of freedom: ‘whites’, ‘slaves’, ‘free blacks’ — which referred to Sinhalese, Tamils, and Muslims who were not enslaved.

For more on slavery in Sri Lanka, read Nira Wickramasinghe’s Slave in a Palanquin: Colonial Servitude and Resistance in Sri Lanka (2020). Sri Lanka is not a region that is not typically associated with slavery — and understandably so given the lower numbers of enslaved — even though it was a key port through which slaves were transported across the Indian Ocean. Slave in a Palanquin centers the island of Sri Lanka in the trans-Indian Ocean movement of slaves and pulls back the cobwebs on previously obscured narratives of enslaved men and women.

But about the rest of the population, including Europeans, and local groups? Historian John Rogers has convincingly argued that social classification during early British rule was used as a tool to establish a more centralized, unified, and self-consciously modern framework of government. As the British began experimenting with more sophisticated Census making, they decided to use ‘race’ as the identity marker that would categorize people or order the populations they had subjected under their rule. So, people were categorized as either Sinhalese, Tamils, or Moors for example. The use of ethnic labels as the primary mode of classification in Sri Lanka can be contrasted with religious identity labels that the British gave more prominence to in neighboring India. For an insight into the process of census making and the rationale behind the specific labels used, see John Rogers, ‘Early British Rule and Social Classification in Lanka’, Modern Asian Studies 38(4), (2004), pp. 625–647.

In the first representative body established in 1833, the Ceylon Legislative Council, ‘native’ groups were represented by three Members in Council, a Sinhalese member, a Tamil member, and a Burgher member. You can have a look at the original discussions and documents that formed the first attempt at constitutional reform in Sri Lankan history in the compilation by G.C. Mendis (ed.) ‘The Colebrooke-Cameron Papers: Documents on British Colonial Policy in Ceylon 1796–1833, I & II’ (1956: Oxford).

Muslims were not given separate representation until 1889 because they typically spoke the same language as the Tamils, and although they were of different ethnicity, it didn’t bother the British too much because it was ‘close enough’! For an exploration of the process through which a separate seat for a Muslim Member in the Legislative Council was created, see Shamara Wettimuny, The Origins of Muslim Political Representation and the Shaping of a Ceylon Moor Identity.

In addition to official, state-driven processes of identity formation such as constitutional reform, other changes taking place in the nineteenth century shaped ethno-religious consciousness across the various population groups in Sri Lanka. The religious revival was one such broad feature of the nineteenth century. Importantly, the British colonial state was officially ‘neutral’ in religious affairs, while it offered to Buddhism a greater degree of protection, as per the Kandyan Convention of 1815. To understand the complex, changing relationship between religion and the colonial state, explore the Virtual Museum of Religious Freedom in Sri Lanka, where you can look at key moments or episodes in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that advanced or challenged the state of religious freedom in the island.

But let’s return to the topic of religious revival. Anne Blackburn (Buddhist Learning and Textual Practice in Eighteenth-Century Lankan Monastic Culture, 2001) traces Buddhist revival back to the mid-eighteenth century with the reform of the Sangha, and heightened intellectual exchanges with Buddhist clergy in places like Siam. By the mid-nineteenth century, Buddhist revival took the form of confrontations with Christian missionaries, including the watershed Panadura Debate between monks and Christian actors. Meanwhile, a renewed sense of pride and organisation around a distinct (ethno-) religious identity also manifested through the growth of societies like the Young Men’s Buddhist Association, schools like the Buddhist English School (later Ananda College), and the proliferation of newspapers like Sarasavi Sandaresa and Sinhala Bauddhya. Revival by the turn of the twentieth century was embodied by Buddhist nationalist figures, such as Anagarika Dharmapala and Sinhalese writers/playwrights like Piyadasa Sirisena and John De Silva.

The many facets of Buddhist revival are discussed in the historiography, including in:

Kithsiri Malalgoda, ‘Buddhism in Sinhalese Society 1750–1900: A study of religious revival and change’ (1976: Berkeley)

David Scott, ‘Religion in Colonial Civil Society: Buddhism and Modernity in 19th Century Sri Lanka’ Cultural Dynamics 8(1) (1996), pp.7–23.

Tessa J. Bartholomeusz and C.R. De Silva, ‘Buddhist Fundamentalism and Identity in Sri Lanka’, in Tessa J. Bartholomeusz and C.R. De Silva (eds.), Buddhist Fundamentalism and Minority Identities in Sri Lanka (1998: Albany)

Richard Gombrich and Gananath Obeyesekere, Buddhism Transformed: Religious Change in Sri Lanka (1988: New Jersey).

K.M. de Silva, ‘Religion and Nationalism in 19th Century Sri Lanka: Christian Missionaries and their Critics’ Ethnic Studies Report XVI(1) (January 1998), pp. 112–117.

L.A. Wickremeratne, Religion, Nationalism, and Social Change in Ceylon, 1865–1885 (1993: Colombo).

Kumari Jayawardena, Labour, Feminism and Ethnicity in Sri Lanka: Selected Essays (2017: Colombo).

Harshana Rambukwella, The Politics and Poetics of Authenticity, (London, 2018)

The nineteenth century was not just a period of religious revival for Buddhists, but also for Hindus and Muslims. The period of Hindu revival was largely limited to the North of the island and was driven by actors such as Arumuga Navalar. Hindus in Jaffna invested significant resources in establishing Hindu schools that provided education in English, to counter the influence of Christian missionaries who ran the largest number of English-language schools across the island. Similar to the Buddhist revival, the Hindu revivalists saw a need to establish their own printing presses to counter missionary pamphlets and leaflets that sought to delegitimise Hindu beliefs among its adherents. Despite the similarities in the Buddhist and Hindu revivals and the fact that they were taking place during much of the same period, I haven’t yet come across any evidence that revivalists coordinated their efforts, or organised across religious lines. So, I often wonder why that is: did it (coordination) simply not happen or has the research not been done yet? If there was no effort to ‘join forces’, was it because of a lack of awareness of what the other religious revivalists were doing, or because of a concerted decision to maintain distinct trajectories?

For some further reading on the Hindu revival, see:

D. Dennis Hudson, “Arumuga Navalar and the Hindu Renaissance among the Tamils” in Kenneth W. Jones (ed.) Religious Controversy in British India: Dialogues in South Asian Languages (1992)

P K Balachandran, How Jaffna Hindus met the Challenge of European Missionaries (2019)

T. Sabaratnam, Sri Lankan Tamil Struggle: Religious Revival (2010)

GPV Somaratna, American Missionary Contribution to the enhancement higher quality of life in Jaffna Tamils in the first half of the nineteenth century (Web, undated).

The Islamic revival started relatively later than the Buddhist and Hindu revivals, in around the 1880s. The Islamic revival, too, contained parallels to the Buddhist and Hindu revivals that preceded it, with the growth of an indigenous press, and the establishment of schools for Muslim boys (and to a lesser degree, girls). Curiously, one of the symbols or figureheads of this revival was not a local Islamic leader but a foreign, nationalist exile from Egypt, Arabi Pasha. Arabi Pasha, together with the lawyer and educationist M.C. Siddi Lebbe, and the construction magnate Wapiche Marikkar, spearheaded the establishment of Islamic schools that provided English-language education in Sri Lanka, beginning with what is known today as Zahira College. This revival, and the emergence of a Ceylon Moor identity, was largely confined to elite Ceylon Moors, who were typically Southern, bourgeois traders who, according to Qadri Ismail, dominated the ‘Muslim social formation’. It is, thus, perhaps a misnomer to refer to it as the ‘Muslim revival’ as it is often known as, because it did not necessarily include non-Ceylon Moors (i.e. perhaps the term ‘Ceylon Moor revival’ is more accurate).

For an analysis of the construction of this Ceylon Moor identity against the backdrop of religious revival, see:

Lorna Dewaraja, ‘The Muslims of Sri Lanka: One thousand years of ethnic harmony, 900–1915’ (1994: Colombo).

M.A. Nuhman, ‘Sri Lankan Muslims: Ethnic Identity within Cultural Diversity’, (2007: Colombo).

Ramla Wahab-Salman, ‘A History of the “Ceylon Moor” Press (1882–1889)’, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Sri Lanka 61(2) (2016), 55–79.

Ameer Ali, ‘Muslims in harmony and conflict in plural Sri Lanka: A historical summary from a religio-economic and political perspective’, Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs, 34(3) (2014), pp. 227–242.

Vijaya Samaraweera, ‘The Muslim Revivalist Movement, 1880–1915’ in Roberts M. (ed.), Sri Lanka: Collective Identities Revisited, Vol. 1. (1997: Colombo). Marga Institute, 293–322.

Qadri Ismail, ‘Unmooring identity: the antinomies of elite Muslim self-representation in modern Sri Lanka’, in P. Jeganathan and Q. Ismail (eds.) ‘Unmaking the Nation: The politics of identity and history in modern Sri Lanka’ (1995: Colombo). Social Scientist’s Association. pp. 55–105.

Shamara Wettimuny, Imagining a ‘National Headgear’: Islamic Revival and Muslim Identity in Ceylon (Web, 2021).

For discussions on the identity and group consciousness of non-Moor Muslim communities, such as the Malays, see:

Ronit Ricci, Banishment and Belonging: Exile and Diaspora in Sarandib, Lanka and Ceylon (Asian Connections (Series): Cambridge, 2019).

B.A. Hussainmiya, ‘Baba Ounus Saldin: An Account of a Malay Literary Savant of Sri Lanka (b. 1832- d. 1906), Journal of the Malaysian Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society 64/2 (261) (1991), pp. 103–134.

Dennis B. McGilvray, ‘Arabs, Moors and Muslims: Sri Lankan Muslim ethnicity in regional perspective’, Contributions to Indian Sociology, 32(2) (1998), pp. 433–483.

Mahroof, M.M.M. ‘The Sub-Communities of the Muslims of Sri Lanka: a Classificatory Narrative’ in Cader, M. L.A., editor. Exploring Sri Lankan Muslims: Selected Writings of M.M.M. Mahroof, South Eastern University of Sri Lanka, 2015, pp. 1–13.

Asiff Hussein, Sarandib: An Ethnological Study of the Muslims of Sri Lanka (Colombo, 2011).

These revivals have typically been discussed from a national, or local perspective. However, as the study of history has expanded to include transnational connections, comparisons, and exchanges, it is useful to ask how religious identities in particular were affected by global revivals or movements taking place beyond Sri Lanka’s borders. Such research has been done on figures like Anagarika Dharmapala, to ‘rescue’ him from the nation, and position him within broader, global histories in Asia and America.

This approach to history is known as global history. Here’s a short, 3-minute clip that discusses what global history is, why it is a useful approach to thinking about a local issue, and how it can change the way we understand our own histories. You can stop watching after 2 minutes as I think it turns into a university-specific discussion thereon!

Now, this brings us to a fundamental question — why study identity formation in the nineteenth century? If we want to tackle current problems, we need to understand what lies at the root or source of those problems. And often, we can find those answers in history. For instance, some of the nationalist identities that are held in Sri Lanka today can trace their origins back not 2500 years ago but just over 150 years ago, during this period of religious revival. History is important then, not just for understanding the past, but also the present. Some may even say, it can help us to chart the future. To end, this clip with sufficiently dramatic music tries to illustrate why history is important, and not just from an academic point of view, but for anyone.

About the Curator — Shamara Wettimuny

Shamara Wettimuny is a Beit Scholar in History at the University of Oxford. Her doctoral thesis is on identity formation and religious conflict in British colonial Sri Lanka. She is also a Tutor in Global and Imperial History at Worcester College, University of Oxford. Before beginning her DPhil, she was Team Leader of the Politics Research practice at Verité Research, where she focused on contemporary religious violence. She has a Masters and Bachelors in International Relations and History, both from the London School of Economics and Political Science.

Original Article – https://everystorysrilanka.medium.com/exploring-ethno-religious-identity-formation-in-the-late-nineteenth-and-early-twentieth-century-f4ea6aafa20d

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The Report on the Administration of the Affairs of Ceylon, 1896 to 1903 reveals some fascinating insights. It appears that the WNPS has a long record of environmental advocacy, and substantial success in lobbying various governments to protect and promote wildlife and nature in Sri Lanka.

In present-day Sri Lanka, some of the greatest risks to the environment come from deforestation, often to build reservoirs, roads, and hotels. In British colonial Sri Lanka, hunting was an additional, major threat to the survival of wildlife. It was both a sport for aristocratic foreigners and a means of affirming ‘the power, legitimacy and scope of the colonizing project’.[1]

When the WNPS was established in 1894, it was originally known as the ‘Game Protection Society’. Shortly after its establishment, it pressured the colonial government to impose restrictions on the shooting of wildlife, ‘not only in the interest of science, to save from extinction the best specimens of our Island fauna, but also to preserve an important source of food supply’ for villages in the areas surrounding the forests.[2]

In the years prior to the establishment of the Game Protection Society, the government had already addressed certain limitations in the existing legislation on wildlife protection. For example, in 1891, the government enacted an Ordinance to prohibit the shooting or capture ‘of any elephant, buffalo or game without a licence, game being defined as including sambur, spotted deer, red deer, barking deer and peafowl’. Previously, legislation to protect wildlife in Sri Lanka was limited to only elephant and buffalo. In that context, sambur and deer were slaughtered by villagers for food, but also ‘at the instigation of traders in hides and horns’. Although the shooting of elephants without a license was banned, the capture and export of elephants continued under the British even during this period. The cruel method of capture known as the ‘kraal’ (originally introduced by the Portuguese but continued under the Dutch and British) continued until the post-Independence period in 1950.

In the same year this new Ordinance was enacted, the Executive Council of Ceylon (the highest governing council in the land) was vested with the power to levy an export duty on hides and horns of spotted deer and sambur (and if necessary, to ban such export altogether). Four years later, in 1895, the Game Protection Society successfully advocated for a ten-year ban on such exports. By 1903, the export of deer and sambur horns was totally banned.

F.C. Fisher, a former Assistant Government Agent of Tangalle led one of the Society’s most crucial early efforts. Fisher suggested that game sanctuaries should be ‘declared by demarcating and prohibiting entry into limited areas of forest.’ In 1900, a large area in Hambantota district consisting 96,000 acres — between the Kumbukkan and Menik rivers — was specially reserved and established as a wildlife sanctuary.[3] Within two years, the government reported a ‘remarkable’ increase of wildlife in this tract of land. The population of elephants, it appeared, had shown no signs of decrease in this time.

The Government had another responsibility alongside the preservation of the environment: ensuring a constant food supply for the people. To manage the need to protect the environment and to enable a constant food supply, powers were vested in the Government Agent of each Province to issue villagers a license to shoot game free of duty. This system was likely to have been imperfect. Yet, such historical experiences confirm that the protection of the environment and development goals are not mutually exclusive. They are one and the same and can be pursued together.

[1] Tariq Jazeel, “Nature”, nationhood and the poetics of meaning in Ruhuna (Yala) National Park, Sri Lanka’, Cultural Geographies 12 (2005), p.201.

[2] Administration of the Affairs of Ceylon, 1896 to 1903 (Colombo, 1903), p.123.

[3] Ibid., p.124.

Original Article:
https://shamara-wettimuny.medium.com/the-game-protection-society-est-1894-83101e0895

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Read the full article:

https://www.academia.edu/45031674/The_Restriction_of_Religious_Rites_An_Obstacle_to_Lasting_Peace

The post The Restriction of Religious Rites: An Obstacle to Lasting Peace appeared first on Itihas.

Read the full article:
https://www.academia.edu/73310735/The_Origins_of_Muslim_Political_Representation_and_the_Shaping_of_a_Ceylon_Moor_Identity

The post The Origins of Muslim Political Representation and the Shaping of a Ceylon Moor Identity appeared first on Itihas.

shamara.wettimuny@bnc.ox.ac.uk

Sri Lanka in 2019 and 2020 was characterised by Islamist violence and its aftermath, a presidential and general election, and COVID-19. This article traces the internal, economic and foreign policies of Sri Lanka chronologically and thematically across the two years under examination. These policies were deeply interconnected during two of the most tumultuous years in Sri Lanka’s recent history. The impact of the tragic Easter Sunday bombings, the presidential and general elections, and the pandemic had a significant bearing on Sri Lanka’s economic well-being and its foreign policy trajectory. Following the general election in August 2020, the new government passed the Twentieth Amendment to the Constitution, which removed democratic checks and balances on the powers of the executive president. Meanwhile, restrictions on religious freedoms in response to COVID-19 triggered widespread protests, and anti-minority hostility and discrimination.

The economy, which was stagnant at the beginning of 2019 went into decline after successive internal and external shocks. Foreign policy was adjusted with changes in government, and in response to great power competition in South Asia. Sri Lanka, at the end of 2020, was in a more precarious situation than it was before 2019, in terms of the state of its democracy, economic stability, public health, and inter-communal relations.

Read the full article:

https://www.academia.edu/84525322/Sri_Lanka_2019_2020_Extremism_elections_and_economic_uncertainty_at_the_time_of_COVID_19

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https://www.academia.edu/44767398/Imagining_a_National_Headgear_Islamic_Revival_and_Muslim_Identity_in_Ceylon

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Sri Lanka is a multi-ethnic, multi-faith island. Yet despite centuries of physical coexistence, ethnic, religious and linguistic differences continue to bring communities into conflict. Muslims in Sri Lanka (comprising around 9.7% of the population) are often vilified by both the Sinhalese majority (who are either Buddhist or Christian) and Tamil minority (either Hindu or Christian) for their religious beliefs, practices, and dress. Following the Easter Sunday suicide attacks in April 2019 – carried out by a group of extremists linked to the Islamist group, the National Thowheed Jamaat – the wider Muslim community faced a discriminatory and sometimes violent backlash. In 2020, as COVID-19 spread in Sri Lanka, Muslims were blamed for ‘spreading the disease’, and for wanting to bury their dead in line with traditional Islamic burial practices (as opposed to cremation as stipulated by the Sri Lankan government).

Prejudice against Muslims in Sri Lanka is underscored by the casual use of racial slurs. The Islamophobic nature of terms such as ‘thambiya’ and ‘hambaya’ has long been emphasized in academic writing and civil society awareness campaigns. Nevertheless, prolific use persists, as evidenced by Facebook memes and Twitter posts. For example, a post on the popular Facebook page ‘Samonim’ criticised the alleged behaviour of Muslims in response to COVID-19. Paraphrased to remove expletives, the post stated: ‘after hiding infected people, almost shutting down two hospitals, flouting curfew to practice their religion, they are asking to be buried too? Where are the thambis’ brains?’ The use of slurs is not restricted to social media. These racial slurs are also used in jest or mundane conversation.

Although the racialised and Islamophobic terms ‘thambiya’ and ‘hambaya’ enjoy contemporary currency, they are not of recent origin. Instead, they can be traced back to the period of British colonial rule in the late nineteenth century and the emergence of racialised colonial identities for Muslims, which continue to haunt Muslims in Sri Lanka today.

Britain colonised the island of Sri Lanka in 1815. Once it had crushed the remnants of resistance to its rule, the colonial state set about identifying the differences among their subjects. The British categorised groups in Sri Lanka, including Muslims, by ‘race’, and used this category in periodic censuses. The largest Muslim population in Sri Lanka were known as the ‘Moors’; a term inherited from Portuguese colonial occupation of Sri Lanka and also used by the Dutch from the mid-seventeenth century onwards. There were also a number of other Muslim groups identified during this period, such as the Malays, Bohras, Memons, and Afghans. The Moors remain the largest ethnic group within the Muslim religious community in Sri Lanka today.

In addition to the use of racial and ethnic labels, the British adapted a Tamil word to describe itinerant traders who were typically Muslim: ‘thambi’. The word ‘thambi’ means ‘younger brother’ in Tamil. Pejorative terms were used by the coloniser to describe certain types of labourers. The derogatory use of the term ‘thambi’ could be compared, for example, with the term ‘coolie’ to describe Indian Tamil labourers imported to work on Sri Lankan plantations. The British increasingly adopted it, however, to refer to Muslims in general. Commenting on the fez cap that many Muslims wore in Ceylon in 1903, John Ferguson wrote that ‘there is no mistaking our old friend “Tamby”… in the corner’. The image of a Moor is captioned ‘A Tamby’ in Arnold Wright’s Twentieth Century Impressions of Ceylon (1907), a popular reference book in Ceylon at the time.

The decision to describe Muslims as ‘younger brothers’ should be understood in the context of a British preoccupation with organising racial groups – for instance, by categorising the population according to ‘race’ in the official census – and with establishing hierarchies between them. Scholar M.A Nuhman argues that ‘thambila’ (the plural of ‘thambiya’), since the early 20^th century, has been an essentially ‘abusive’ term. Although it is not possible to speculate on the precise motivations behind the British adoption of the term ‘thambi’, it is clear that its effect was to diminish the status of Muslims. It stood as a casual reminder that they were, at best, ‘junior’ within the island’s polity. Racial hierarchies were constructed by the coloniser to reflect the colonial distribution of political power in Sri Lanka. The Ceylon Legislative Council, established in 1833, included three seats to represent the ‘natives’: the Sinhalese, the Tamils and the Burghers (of mixed European descent). Muslims were not given separate representation but were inaccurately subsumed within the ethnic category ‘Tamil’. This was only corrected in 1889 with the establishment of a separate seat for Muslims. 

The Moors were not a monolithic group, although the British categorised them as such throughout the 19^th century. In 1911, however, for the first time, the British enumerated two separate groups of Moors in the census: ‘Ceylon Moors’ and ‘Indian Moors’. The Ceylon Moors traced their roots back to Arab traders who arrived in Lanka in around the eighth century. The second group – labelled Indian Moors– were recent immigrants from South India in the eighteenth century. The terminology of Indian Moors highlighted their ‘otherness’ or ‘foreignness’ based on geographical origins, suggesting that they did not share the ‘indigeneity’ or ‘authenticity’ the Ceylon Moors had in Sri Lanka.

This differentiation between the Moors was also reflected in the Tamil and Sinhala terms to describe the two groups. In Tamil, the Ceylon Moors were known as Sonahar and the Indian Moors were called Sammankarar. In Sinhala, Ceylon Moors were referred to as ‘Marakkalayo’ and Indian Moors as ‘Hambaya’. ‘Marakkalayo’ is a term that, Nuhman notes, has ‘a derogatory connotation’, used to describe the perceived ‘trickishness’ of the Moors (mahat kallakan) in trade. This sentiment was widely reflected in Sinhala newspapers between 1885 and 1920, as Moorish traders were the biggest rivals of Sinhalese traders in this period, and the latter often depicted the Moors as using their ‘cunning’ to get ahead in trade. Meanwhile, colloquial terms such as ‘hambaya’, Vijaya Samaraweera has observed, were wielded by the Sinhalese  to highlight the ‘foreignness’ of the Indian Moors. Lorna Dewaraja suggests that the term ‘Hambaya’ or ‘Hambankaarayo’ comes from the Malay word ‘Champan’, which means ‘boat’, while ‘kaarayo’ indicates men or people. The term suggests that the people of the boat came from ‘outside’, denoting a sense of ‘otherness’.

The British, when creating separate ‘racial’ categories for ‘Indian’ and ‘Ceylon’ Moors in the 1911 census, appeared to be responding to distinctions between Moorish groups as perceived and maintained within local discourses. Curiously, the British do not appear to have made a distinction between Ceylon Moors and Indian Moors to further entrench their own position. This is because both the Ceylon Moor and Indian Moor populations were so negligible in size that they remained largely insignificant political actors (despite the significant role Muslims played in the economy in general). Instead, the Census Report for 1911 appears to categorise the Indian Moors alongside the Indian Tamils and Europeans as ‘immigrant races’, placing emphasis on their ‘foreignness’. The Ceylon Moors, in fact, attempted to distance themselves from their ‘Indian’ counterparts. For instance, I. L. M. Abdul Azeez, a leading Ceylon Moor, maintained that ‘South Indian Mohammedans are partly the descendants of Arabs – traders and missionaries – and partly the progenies of the Tamil converts to Islam’. He thus sought to position Indian Moors in contrast to the Ceylon Moors, who had ‘purer’ Arab roots. One of the material consequences of the construction of ‘otherness’ for these Indian Moors was that they were not given political representation at this time. The seat for the Muslim member in the Legislative Council was typically occupied by a Ceylon Moor. 

Michael Roberts contends that, in the early twentieth century, ‘Hambaya’ was applied not only to Indian Moors but to Moors in general, arguing that ‘hamba’ ‘operate as a synecdoche, a trope by which a part denotes the whole.’ While the Sinhala press treated the ‘marakkalayo’ and ‘hambayo’ as two distinct groups in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, today there is no longer a discernible distinction between the two. Ceylon Moors and Indian Moors are known collectively by the religious identity marker ‘Muslim’ and the word ‘hambaya’ is used today to insult Muslims in general.

In the colonial period, the terms ‘thambi(ya)’ and ‘hambaya’ were used by a variety of actors in Sri Lanka to diminish the position of Muslims and to highlight their status as outsiders, implying that they did not necessarily belong in Sri Lanka. Today, ‘thambiya’ and ‘hambaya’ are unambiguously derogatory racial slurs, which continue to other and diminish. Their colonial origins may shed light on the roots of the harm they continue to perpetuate against Muslims in Sri Lanka: historically and today, they remind Muslims in Sri Lanka that they do not quite belong.

Original Article: https://www.historyworkshop.org.uk/colonial-history-islamophobia/

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Read Article: https://shamara-wettimuny.medium.com/pre-independence-demands-for-federalism-in-sri-lanka-17dfad63861a

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By Shamara Wettimuny

The recent Easter Attacks targeting a number of churches and hotels devastated Sri Lanka. Over 250 people were killed, and many more were injured. Within days of the attack, it emerged that the perpetrators of the attack were affiliated to radical Islamist groups in Sri Lanka. However, the identification of the perpetrators as ostensibly adherents of the Islamic faith opened the floodgates of discrimination and violence against the broader Muslim community in Sri Lanka. Three weeks after the Easter Attacks, mobs looted and burned mosques and madrasas as well as Muslim-owned homes and businesses in more than one district. Despite declaring curfews, the state was unable to prevent large-scale violence against members of the Muslim community. Government actors conservatively estimate the damage in May 2019 to include the destruction of 14 mosques, 86 houses, and 96 shops.

Ethno-linguistic violence featuring the state and Tamil nationalists has dominated the conflict landscape in Sri Lanka over the last half century. This essay discusses a different angle in the complex milieu of ethno-nationalism and violence in the island. Although the Easter Attacks were unprecedented, the reprisal violence targeting Muslims was not.

Similar patterns of violence were visible in the anti-Muslim attacks in the towns of Digana/Teldeniya in March 2018, Ampara in February 2018, Gintota in November 2017, and Aluthgama in June 2014. While the trigger events tend to differ – such as traffic accidents, the alleged contamination of food, and terrorist attacks carried out by certain groups – the violent responses to such events are directed at the broader Muslim community. Widespread perception suggests that such violence targeting Muslims is a new, post-civil war phenomenon. However, widespread violence against Muslims took place during the early twentieth century in Sri Lanka (known then as Ceylon). The anti-Muslim pogrom of 1915 marked the deadliest violence targeting the Muslim community to date. It spanned five provinces, and resulted in at least 25 deaths, four rapes, and attacks on over 4,000 Muslim properties. This episode, largely forgotten in public memory, remains the most devastating episode of violence against Muslims. Similar to the events mentioned above, the 1915 pogrom was sparked by a unique trigger. However, there are similarities in the underlying long-term causes of anti-Muslim violence in colonial and contemporary Sri Lanka that are worth highlighting.

The 1915 anti-Muslim pogrom was a series of attacks carried out largely by members of the Sinhala-Buddhist population, against sections of the Muslim Moor population in Ceylon. The Sinhala-Buddhist population, then as now, formed the majority of the island, whereas the Muslim Moor population at the time represented around 6.5% of the population. The Moors in Ceylon were formed of two groups: Ceylon Moors (5.7%), and Coast Moors (0.8%).

The trigger event for the 1915 pogrom involved a Buddhist procession, an annual perahera that traditionally took a route past the Castle Hill Street mosque in Kandy. A group of Coast Moors associated with the mosque relied on a colonial piece of legislation that ordered the silencing of musical instruments within 100 yards of any place of worship. They claimed that the noise from the Buddhist procession disturbed those worshiping in the mosque. A decision by the colonial police to divert the Buddhist procession away from the Castle Hill Street mosque in Kandy triggered the outbreak of violence.

The Sinhala-Buddhists saw this decision to shield the mosque from Buddhist ‘noise worship’ as the British giving preferential treatment to Muslims. In the early hours of 29^th May, persons participating in the Buddhist procession attacked the mosque and its worshippers. Rather than remaining an isolated incident, this initial attack was followed by island-wide riots that grew in intensity and lasted nine days. By the seventh day of rioting, the violence against the Muslim Moor community had spread across 165 miles. Although the death toll is lower compared to pogroms elsewhere in the world, the nature of the targets of the violence – namely Muslim-owned commercial establishments – suggest that Sinhala-Buddhist antagonism was directed primarily at symbols of Muslims’ economic livelihoods and success.

Various explanations have been offered for the 1915 pogrom. The Governor of Ceylon at the time of the riots, Robert Chalmers, perhaps put it most succinctly as being a ‘combination of creed and purse’ The most important factors underlying the violence were arguably economic and religious.

From the late nineteenth century, resentment against the Coast Moors, who competed against Sinhalese traders in urban areas, had been growing. Moreover, the First World War had contributed to rising prices of essential goods – the sale of which was largely controlled by Muslim traders. In this context, the Moors were perceived as profiteering during the war, by taking advantage of goods shortages.

Furthermore, divergent religious practices, such as the use of ‘noise worship’ by Buddhists during their processions, and the observance of silence during Muslim worship at mosques had brought Sinhala-Buddhists and Muslims into conflict since the early twentieth century. Therefore, the dispute on 29^th May 1915 was not new but rather a continuation in a series of flashpoints over similar issues. However, British colonial policies on law and order also contributed to friction between Sinhala-Buddhists and Muslim Moors. In February 1915, the Supreme Court reversed the decision of a district court with respect to the right of another Buddhist perahera to go past the Ambagamuwa street mosque in Gampola. By the time of the perahera in May 1915, the issue of the procession’s route had become a highly politicised one. The colonial state failed to anticipate an escalation of tensions in May 1915 despite tensions emerging from the February 1915 verdict, which was perceived to favour the Muslim minority over the Sinhala-Buddhists.

This potent combination of economic and religious grievances reacted in May 1915 over the route of a Buddhist procession to produce large-scale violence targeting the broader Muslim Moor community. In May 1915 as in May 2019, March 2018 and June 2014, the trigger event did not reflect the deeper underlying grievances between the Sinhala-Buddhists and the Muslim Moors. Violence in present-day Sri Lanka does not derive merely from post-war tensions nor is it necessarily a response to global, Islamist terrorism. Thus, mechanisms for preventing future anti-Muslim violence will need to consider longer-term, and often deeply entrenched antagonisms between majority and minority communities, as opposed to focusing on surface-level symptoms.

Original Article: https://www.historyworkshop.org.uk/a-brief-history-of-anti-muslim-violence-in-sri-lanka/

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