Blindness Of Sinhala Demagogues And Tamil Liberators
by H. L. Seneviratne
In his laudable and forward looking article , Bhikkhu Walpola Piyananda reports the story of a Sinhalese boy who in a previous birth was a Tamil girl. Bhikkhu Piyananda is, quite rightly, trying to show how meaningless, and perhaps, in Buddhist sense, how ephemeral, labels like Sinhala and Tamil are.
While in no way detracting from the nobility of Bhikkhu Piyananda’s intentions, we can say the same thing more empirically, without venturing to invoke the ultra-mundane dimension of Samsaric rebirth. For example, a significant proportion of the inhabitants of the southwestern seaboard are descendents of Tamil Hindus who arrived in the island during the Dutch era. Within a generation they became Sinhala Buddhists, and as new settlers in an alien territory commonly do, over-identified with the host ethnic group, becoming some of the most virulent bearers of Sinhala Buddhist extremism.
We can see this in varied expressions, some broad and general and others more circumscribed. In the broad perspective, one look at the ethno-demographic spread of peoples in the subcontinent makes it quite obvious that the Sinhalese are a variety of Tamils, as are other ethnic and linguistic groups of South India. It is because of the twentieth century Sinhala-Tamil rivalries that this fact is forgotten or explicitly denied. In particular, it is striking that the Sinhala Buddhists have forgotten the fact that it is in South India that Buddhism survived centuries after its disappearance from the north. It is very likely that the great Buddhist commentator Buddhaghosa was a Tamil monk, although Sinhala monastic tradition is keen to place him in North India.
In his autobiography, the great mid twentieth century scholar monk and social worker Hendiyagala Silaratana mentions a village, Kohombana, in the Vavgam Pattuva of the Eastern Province, in which the inhabitants speak Tamil, but their names, like Ratnayaka Mudiyanselage and Disanayaka Mudiyanselage reveal that they are Sinhalese, representing a creative mixture, and perhaps a journey towards Tamilisation. There is a fishing community in the Negambo area which speaks Tamil at night and Sinhalese in broad daylight. Many of us have personal experiences of people who have changed their identity from Sinhala to Tamil or vice versa, that is, in this birth itself.
Dr. Sarath Amunugama once mentioned to me of two villages in what might be called the border between the areas occupied by the Sinhalese and Tamils respectively where the one village was formerly Tamil and now Sinhalese, and the other exactly the opposite. During riots each fought the other tragiccomically, imagining itself to be the other.
Most of what goes as Buddhist ritual is actually derived from the Hindu rituals particularly of Tamil South India. This is true of the rituals both of the “Great” and “Little” traditions. And the Sinhala language, considered “Aryan”, is Tamil in its grammatical and syntactic structure, with a vocabulary of about twenty or more percent Tamil.
It is common knowledge that about half the Sinhala aristocracy signed the Kandyan Convention in Tamil. Not so well known is the fact that some signatures combine Sinhala and Tamil characters about fifty fifty, a remarkably creative synthesis to which both the Sinhala demagogue murderers and Tamil liberator murderers are blind.
22 comments January 13th, 2008