Sri Lanka's Ethnic And Language Issues As Seen By Historians

It was not a surprise that Sri Lanka’s ethnic/language issue was raised on the very first sitting of the 9th Sri Lankan parliament on August 20 by C.V. Wigneswaran, the lone member of the radical Tamil Makkal Thesiya Koottani (TMTK). The issue was his stock in trade. And as expected, his speech kicked up a controversy. In his brief speech, he asserted the Tamils’ right to “self-determination” as per an international convention. He gave a grim warning about the consequences of following Sinhala majoritarian policies, and to top it all asserted that Tamil is the original language of Sri Lanka.“I start my felicitations, Honourable Speaker, hailing you in my mother tongue (Tamil), the oldest living language of this world and the language of the first indigenous inhabitants of this country, and proceed in the link language,” said Wigneswaran in the opening para. The Samagi Jana Balawegaya (SJB) MP, Manusha Nanayakkara, demanded that Wigneswaran’s speech be expunged from the Hansard, and the Minister of Energy Udaya Gammanpila challenged Wigneswaran’s claim about Tamil’s antiquity. The ruling coalition’s MP claimed that the Tamils themselves believed that the Tamil language was born around the 3rd century BC and that according to linguists, Greek, Arabic, Chinese and Basque languages were the oldest languages in the world.

-  P.K. Balachandran

HISTORIANS NOT SO CUT AND DRY

However, historians and archaeologists do not have such cut and dry views. Renowned Sri Lankan historians and archaeologists like K.Indrapala, Shiran Deraniyagala, Leslie Gunawardena and Sudarshan Seneviratne contend that Sri Lanka has been multi-ethnic and multi-cultural from prehistoric times. They say that the Sinhalese and Tamils are from the same “South Indian-Sri Lankan (SISL) gene pool.”They reject the “mass migration” or “invasion theory” so popular among colonial and post-colonial historians. Invasions have not been the dominant mode of movement, they say. According to these scholars, people, cultures, languages, religions, artifacts and technologies moved in small ways from place to place over long periods of time. And these movements were not always been in one direction as ethnoreligious extremists think.

In his seminal work, The Evolution of an Ethnic Identity: The Tamils of Sri Lanka: C 300 BCE to C 1200 BCE (The South Asian Studies Centre, Sydney 2005, Prof K Indrapala says that the present-day territories of Sri Lanka and South India comprised a single region in which the pre-historic ancestors of Sri Lankans and South Indians roamed freely. At that time, the sea was not a divider but was a unifier.

The Tamils have been in the island of Sri Lanka since long, Indrapala says.”The earliest inscriptions and the early Pali chronicles attest to the presence of the Tamils (Damedas/Damelas) in the EIA (Early Iron Age). The Demedas in Sri Lanka in the centuries BCE (Before Common Era or AD) need not, therefore, be considered as outsiders,” he asserts.