Author: A. Jeyaratnam Wilson
Publisher: UBC Press
ISBN: 9780774807593
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 222
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Book Description
Through a succession of key stages since Sri Lanka (formerly Ceylon) became independent in 1948, its Tamil minority, historically concentrated in the north and east but with an important segment in Colombo, became alienated from the Sinhalese majority and, after peaceful opposition failed to secure its rights, resorted to an armed struggle. The Tamil Tigers (LTTE) today appear to hold the key to their people’s future. While they have suffered setbacks, including the loss of the Tamil capital, Jaffna, they remain a potent guerrilla force, able to strike with impunity at both military and civilian targets. The Tigers’ grip on the Tamil population seems secure, as does their overseas support and funding from Tamil exiles in Britain, Canada, and Australia. This book offers a concise history of the Sri Lankan Tamil nation, its culture, social make-up, and political evolution. In a final chapter, A. J. V. Chandrakanthan gives a first-hand account of life and attitudes inside the embattled Tamil areas today. A. Jeyaratnam Wilson teaches in the Department of Political Science at the University of New Brunswick. He is the author of The Break-Up of Sri Lanka and S. J. V. Chelvanayakam and the Crisis of Sri Lankan Tamil Nationalism. A. J. V. Chandrakanthan teaches in the Department of Theology at Concordia University, Montreal.
Author: A. Jeyaratnam Wilson
Publisher: UBC Press
ISBN: 9780774807609
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 203
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Book Description
The militarisation of the Sinhala-Tamil conflict in Sri Lanka began in the 1970s when attempts to reconcile by peaceful means the Tamils' claim for basic individual and collective rights with the Sinhalese need to allay their chronic sense of insecurity finally failed. Since then the struggle has intensified, erupting successively in the burning of the Jaffna Public Library in 1981, the anti-Tamil pogrom in 1983, and the army's assault on Jaffna in 1995. The mainly Hindu Sri Lankan Tamils have always been separated by language, religion, and history from the Buddhist Sinhalese although the minority community in the island vastly outnumbers the Sinhalese when the 40 million Tamils in South India are taken into account. The author's analysis is informed by first-hand knowledge and personal contact with many of the actors involved.
Author: A. Jeyaratnam Wilson
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 176
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Book Description
Then in 1947, on the eve of Ceylon becoming independent under a Sinhala-dominated government, he entered Parliament with the aim of protecting the threatened interests of the Tamil minority.
Author: Murugar Gunasingam
Publisher: Createspace Independent Pub
ISBN: 9781500464110
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 260
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Book Description
Dr. Murugar Gunasingam has completed a pathbreaking and pioneering study of the Eelam Tamil quest for self-determination under the able guidance of my good friend and one-time colleague, the late Dr. Sinnappah Arasaratnam. This study in my view will receive the plaudits of all students of Sri Lanka's politics and modern history. For this meticulous work of scholarship, Dr. Gunasingam was justly awarded the degree of Ph.D by the University of Sydney. In undertaking this study, Dr. Gunasingam has left no stone unturned in his search for bibliographic material. Not only has he focused on almost every available source but he has also brought an analytical mind to bear on their veracity. His critical bibliography will be most welcomed by the world of Sri Lanka scholars and we are all in his debt for his untiring efforts. Some of his sources are highly original and they see the light of day for the first time. Nationalism is a many faceted phenomenon in our present world of bloody ethnic strife, a fact of life which was not foreseen by any of the great social scientists or thinkers of the past. What effects such self-destructive and internecine ethnic strife will have on global equilibrium is fearful to contemplate. The examples of Kosovo and Rwanda, leave alone other uncared for and lonely outposts on the globe, are still to unfold themselves in the final reckoning. For ethnicity is global and infectious reaching almost epidemic proportions in countries where minority groups strive for a fair share of the ever-shrinking national pie and feel neglected, if not adequately cared for, and are not endowed with equal rights with an independent judiciary and enlightened forward-looking political leadership, especially from the majority ethnic group. Dr. Gunasingam has raised these questions with all their ramifications in his comprehensive thesis.
Author: Rajesh Venugopal
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108428797
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 243
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Book Description
Examines the relationship between the ethnic conflict and economic development in modern Sri Lanka.
Author: Madurika Rasaratnam
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 9780190498320
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Book Description
Why are relations between politically mobilised ethnic identities and the nation-state sometimes peaceful and at other times fraught and violent? Madurika Rasaratnam's book sets out a novel answer to this key puzzle in world politics through a detailed comparative study of the starkly divergent trajectories of the 'Tamil question' in India and Sri Lanka from the colonial era to the present day. Whilst Tamil and national identities have peaceably harmonised in India, in Sri Lanka these have come into escalating and violent contradiction, leading to three decades of armed conflict and simmering antagonism since the war's brutal end in 2009. Tracing these differing outcomes to distinct and contingent patterns of political contestation and mobilisation in the two states, Rasaratnam shows how, whilst emerging from comparable conditions and similar historical experiences, these have produced very different interactions between evolving Tamil and national identities, constituting in India a nation-state inclusive of the Tamils, and in Sri Lanka a hierarchical Sinhala-Buddhist national and state order hostile to Tamils' political claims. Locating these dynamics within changing international contexts, she also shows how these once largely separate patterns of national-Tamil politics, and Tamil diaspora mobilisation, are increasingly interwoven in the post-war internationalisation of Sri Lanka's ethnic crisis.
Author: Sidharthan Maunaguru
Publisher: University of Washington Press
ISBN: 0295745428
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 204
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Book Description
The civil war between the Sri Lankan state and Tamil militants, which ended in 2009, lasted more than three decades and led to mass migration, mainly to India, Canada, England, and continental Europe. In Marrying for a Future, Sidharthan Maunaguru argues that the social institution of marriage has emerged as a critical means of building alliances between dispersed segments of Tamil communities, allowing scattered groups to reunite across national borders. Maunaguru explores how these fragmented communities were rekindled by connections fostered by key participants in and elements of the marriage process, such as wedding photographers, marriage brokers, legal documents, and transit places. Marrying for a Future contributes to transnational and diaspora marriage studies by looking at the temporary spaces through which migrants and refugees travel in addition to their home and host countries. It provides a new conceptual framework for studies on kinship and marriage and addresses a community that has been separated across borders as a result of war.
Author: Nimanthi Perera-Rajasingham
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
ISBN: 0810140764
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 308
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Book Description
Assembling Ethnicities in Neoliberal Times: Ethnographic Fictions and Sri Lanka’s War argues that the bloody war fought between the Sri Lankan state and the separatist Tamil Tigers from 1983 to 2009 should be understood as structured and animated by the forces of global capitalism. Using Aihwa Ong’s theorization of neoliberalism as a mobile technology and assemblage, this book explores how contemporary globalization has exacerbated forces of nationalism and racism. Nimanthi Perera-Rajasingham finds that ethnographic fictions have both internalized certain colonial Orientalist impulses and critically engaged with categories of objective gazing, empiricism, and temporal distancing. She demonstrates that such fictions take seriously the task of bearing witness and documenting the complex productions of ethnic identities and the devastations wrought by warfare. To this end, Assembling Ethnicities explores colonial-era travel writing by Robert Knox (1681) and Leonard Woolf (1913); contemporary works by Michael Ondaatje, Romesh Gunesekera, Shobasakthi, Dharmasiri Bandaranayake, and Thamotharampillai Shanaathanan; and cultural festivals and theater, including vernacular performances of Euripides’s The Trojan Women and women workers’ theater. The book interprets contemporary fictions to unpack neoliberalism’s entanglements with nationalism and racism, engaging current issues such as human rights, the pastoral, Tamil militancy, immigrant lives, feminism and nationalism, and postwar developmentalism.
Author: Peter Reeves
Publisher: Editions Didier Millet
ISBN: 9814260835
Category : Reference
Languages : en
Pages : 202
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Book Description
Well over a million people of Sri Lankan origin live outside South Asia. The Encyclopedia of the Sri Lanka Diaspora is the first comprehensive study of the lives, culture, beliefs and attitudes of immigrants and refugees from this island. The volume is a joint publication between the Institute of South Asian Studies, NUS, and Editions Didier Millet. It focuses on the relationship between culture and economy in the Sri Lanka diaspora in the context of globalisation, increased transnational culture flows and new communication technologies. In addition to the geographic mapping of the Sri Lanka diaspora in the various continents, thematic chapters include topics on “long distance nationalism”, citizenship, Sinhala, Tamil and Burgher disapora identities, religion and the spread of Buddhism, as well as the Sri Lankan cultural impact on other nations.
Author: Neil DeVotta
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 9780804749244
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 308
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Book Description
In the mid-1950s, Sri Lanka’s majority Sinhalese politicians began outbidding one another on who could provide the greatest advantages for their community, using the Sinhala language as their instrument. The appeal to Sinhalese linguistic nationalism precipitated a situation in which the movement to replace English as the country’s official language with Sinhala and Tamil (the language of Sri Lanka’s principal minority) was abandoned and Sinhala alone became the official language in 1956. The Tamils’ subsequent protests led to anti-Tamil riots and institutional decay, which meant that supposedly representative agencies of government catered to Sinhalese preferences and blatantly disregarded minority interests. This in turn led to the Tamils’ mobilizing, first politically then militarily, and by the mid-1970s Tamil youth were bent on creating a separate state.
