A Post-National, Post-Colonial History of Early Sri Lanka and South India

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Notes

I would like to thank S. Sivasegaram, H. Heller, S. Perundevi and M. Jeyanth for going through the draft version of this essay and for their helpful comments.¹The most recent and blatant examples of these ‘commonsense’ notions were especially evident during the final offensive against the Tamil Tigers. In a candid conversation with a Canadian journalist, the highly-decorated Sri Lankan army general, Sarath Fonseka, observed: ‘I strongly believe that this country belongs to the Sinhalese but there are minority communities and we treat them like our people….’ The interview appeared in the Canadian newspaper National Post. See Stewart Bell, ‘Inside Sri Lanka: A Life Given to War’, National Post (23 Sept. 2008).

²Indrapala had added this as an endnote in his introductory chapter (p.343, note 9), quoting from E. Nissan and R.L. Stirrat, ‘The Generation of Communal Identities’, in Jonathan Spencer (ed.), Sri Lanka: History and the Roots of Conflict (London: Routledge, 1990), pp.29–30.

³N. Sanmugathasan, A Marxist Looks at the History of Ceylon (Colombo: Sarasavi Printers, 1972), pp.2–3. The book was written during his time in ‘detention’ in Sri Lanka during the first JVP uprising in 1972. Sanmugathasan does not offer the book or article where Dr. Paranavitana's quote came from.

⁴ Ibid., p.10.

⁵See in this regard my work on the Sri Lankan Left and particularly Sanmugathasan's writings on the national question in Sri Lanka. Ravi Vaitheespara, ‘Sanmugathasan, the Unrepentent Left and the Ethnic Crisis in Sri Lanka’, in Economic and Political Weekly, Vol.42, no.43 (27 Oct.–2 Nov. 2007), pp.58–65.

⁶It is indeed difficult to speculate why Indrapala had to ‘wait so long’ to write this work and to do so only after his retirement and move to Australia. His account of how the ‘founding race’ narrative came to be entrenched with its strong warning to historians not to be swayed by ‘passions of identity politics’ and reference to the role of ‘charlatans and pseudo-scholars’ certainly raises troubling questions.