Nira Wickramasinghe

Democracy and entitlements in Sri Lanka: The 1970s crisis over university admission

Affirmative action policies came into effect in Sri Lanka in the 1970s with the left-of-centre United Front government headed by Sirimavo Bandaranaike. Her government introduced changes in the criteria for university admission, initially designed to benefit the majority Sinhalese students. These policies were later transformed into a regional quota system cutting across ethnic and religious identities. The schemes were condemned for straying away from principles of merit and fairness, failing to guarantee social mobility through education and limiting the number of Tamil students in the science and medical faculties. The perceived unequal distribution of educational entitlements was a central issue in the Southern leftist insurrection and the Tamil insurrection in the North and East in the 1970s. While issues of unemployment led the Sinhala rural educated youth to rebel in 1971, the early Tamil militancy was energized by the issue of standardization in the university admission of students. Affirmative action policies can be usefully read as linked to an understanding of democracy that originates in the late colonial period founded on the premise that the democratic state has a responsibility to correct imbalances that exist in society between communities and classes and to distribute entitlements in the fairest manner. The politics of university admissions can also be traced back to the practice of Ceylonization of the public service that began in the 1930s and to the commitment to welfarism that was borne out of the Fabian inclinations of the men who drafted the Donoughmore Constitution of 1931.

Many Little Revolts or One Rebellion? The Maritime Provinces of Ceylon/Sri Lanka between 1796 and 1800

Abstract Contemporaries and later historians have recorded that between 1796 and 1800, when the island of Ceylon was ruled from Madras by the English East India Company, a number of violent protests directed against the new rulers took place. These are generally read as a single rebellion ‘caused’ by the imposition of a tax on owners of coconut gardens, a reading that justifies the often violent counterinsurgency methods practised by the British military and the difficulties met by the British in quelling sporadic occurrences of protest. A critical reading of petitions and other testimonies suggests a more complex and uneven picture, however. It shows especially that the root cause lay mainly in the power vacuum that appeared at the village level after changes to the administration and taxation system. The shift in authority from local headmen to renters meant that peasants could not anymore bring forward their complaints to the government through the official channels. Their anger and frustration led to resistances of different sorts, sometimes peaceful and at other times violent.

Forcing the archive: involuntary migrants ‘of Ceylon’ in the Indian Ocean World of the 18–19th centuries

ABSTRACT This article examines some marginal stories of subaltern individuals shipped and trans-shipped between the Dutch and British colonial territories of Ceylon, Mauritius and the Cape in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. After addressing the difficulties in retrieving traces of their lives and the ambiguities of categories of classification, the article offers insights into everyday cultural ties forged among diverse groups and looks into acts of resistance of individuals ‘of Ceylon’. The experience of Ceylonese or individuals described as ‘of Ceylon’ not only gives insights into the various forms of mobility that shaped the making of societies in the Indian Ocean world, it also helps us capture the remarkable capacity of some of these involuntary migrants to forge fragile communities, preserve practices of meaning and resist the predations of slave owners. The snapshots we offer of people ‘of Ceylon’ can refine our understanding of the way imperial designs affected the lives of dominated people across territories in the Indian Ocean. They also make more explicit the link between the global and the local and how larger processes such as slavery are broken down and lived at the local level.