Crossroads in Sri Lankan history

Histories of Sri Lanka have often concurred with nationalist sentiments which favour the majority ethno-linguistic group of the island, the Sinhalese Buddhists. The oft-cited A History of Sri Lanka (first published in 1981) by historian K M de Silva, for instance, begins by establishing "colonisers and settlers" of the island. Referencing the Mahavamsa – a fifth-century Pali chronicle which recounts a Buddhist monastic version of Sri Lankan history – the author concludes that existing sources "tend strongly to support the conclusion that Indo-Aryan settlement and colonisation preceded the arrival of Dravidian settlers by a few centuries". Uncritical adoption of such narrative has been used by some to position Sinhalese Buddhists as the protagonists and victims of history, projecting minority groups such as Tamils and Muslims as outsiders to the island. The country's popular culture has also been used to further this discourse of division, as was seen during the three-decade long civil war, which was often misconstrued as the continuation of a primordial Sinhala-Tamil conflict. A new multi-author volume titled Sri Lanka at the Crossroads of History, edited by historians Zoltan Biedermann and Alan Strathern, challenges this view by examining the island's vast history of connections and disconnections.

In this context, Biedermann and Strathern warn of the "danger of Sri Lanka being idealised as a neatly delimited realm of organically grown, unbroken ethnic and religious identity coinciding with Sinhalaness and Theravāda Buddhism – a community that sees itself as having survived precisely because it has repelled the forces of the foreign." However, Sri Lanka at the Crossroads of History, is not a story of a 'Sri Lanka of yore', where tolerance and harmony reigned. The editors are careful to note that there is a danger of, "reinvent[ing] the premodern past as the perfect reverse of modern discontents: cosmopolitanism instead of nationalism, tolerance instead of bigotry, religious fluidity instead of boundary insistence." They caution that cosmopolitanism was the same process which "brought the awful categories of race, ethnicity and nation, [but] also brought with it melting pots, global communications and expanded horizons."