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SINHALA BUDDHIST ETHNO nationalism
- Masquerading as Sri Lankan 'Civic Nationalism'
'National Ideology' in a Buddhist Country
Kanishka Goonewardena,
Himal, October - November, 2007
As
neoliberalism emerged globally triumphant during the 1980s,
socialism in general ceased to be a popular alternative for
whatever was left of the left. Into that political space
stepped fundamentalist nationalisms devoid of any memory of
Marxism or anti-imperialism.
It is therefore no accident that the leading ideologues of
Jathika Chinthanaya ['national ideology' in Sinhala] in Sri
Lanka are ex-socialist anti-Marxists...
The consequent search for a radical indigenous alternative
to both capitalism and socialism aligns this
cultural-political movement very much with contemporary
Hindutva discourses in India, while also recalling the
ideological backdrop of National Socialism of Germany...
In this way, both Jathika Chinthanaya and Hindutva claim to
be respectful of minority cultures – but only insofar as
those minority cultures accept the norms of the dominant
culture as their own...
These groups desperately needed a community with which to
identify, as well as an enemy to identify against, both of
which were powerfully forged in these cases – as the fates
of Sri Lankan Tamils, Indian Muslims and German Jews
demonstrate.
From a special issue on fundamentalism...
Despite its emphasis on national ‘harmony’, Sinhala-Buddhist
nationalism, as with other fundamentalist ideologies in
Southasia, is incapable of mitigating the oppressive social
structures still rampant in the region today.
Globalisation – the universal codeword for the latest stage
in the uneven development of capitalism at the planetary
scale – points neither to a ‘global village’ nor to a ‘flat
earth’. Indeed, popular metaphors of vanishing space and
virtual networks represent only a misleadingly limited view
of this eminently dialectical and contradictory historical
process, the very internationalism of which has given rise
to a potent wave of postcolonial – but hardly
anti-imperialist – nationalism.
The latter, in contrast to the anti-colonial struggles of
the 20th century, today typically assume cultural-political
agendas focused on ethno-religious matters, rather than
political-economic projects promoting social democracy.
These days, the fundamentalism of cultural identity,
particularly in the garb of Southasian nationalisms, stands
in inverse proportion to its inability to muster opposition
to the globalisation of neoliberalism. Yet the relentless
colonisation of this region by the logic of capital,
following the last salute of Lord Mountbatten, has much to
do with the current successes and excesses of communalist
politics within it.
The recent resurgence in Sri Lanka of Jathika Chinthanaya,
which translates from Sinhala as ‘National Ideology’ or
‘National Consciousness’, offers an instructive case in this
regard. This discourse refers primarily to a set of
influential ideas concerning the cultural identity and
historical trajectory of the country. In the context of
neoliberal globalisation and ethnic conflict, it assumes an
urgently prescriptive tone, by drawing on the island’s
traditional cultural-historical virtues to formulate an
authentic model of ‘development’. Invariably, the ‘national’
aspect of it centres, in ethno-religious terms, on the
dominant Sinhala-Buddhist community.
All major Sri Lankan political parties, except those
specifically representing Tamils and Muslims, draw on
Jathika Chinthanaya’s ‘common sense’ to various extents.
While Jathika Hela Urumaya (the JHU or National Heritage
Party), which is controversially led by Buddhist monks,
espouses the most aggressively Sinhala-Buddhist version of
it, only a negligible fraction of the Buddhist clergy
actually belong to this small but vociferous party. The
popularity of this ideological formation owes less to party
politics than to the dispersion of Buddhist sentiments
throughout civil society. Thanks to the literary efforts of
its organic intellectuals in the Sri Lankan public sphere
and in cultural life more generally, Jathika Chinthanaya has
become the discursive ether through which cultural-political
debate now necessarily moves in Sinhala-Buddhist milieus.
The historical origins of Jathika Chinthanaya can be traced
back to the ‘revival’ of Buddhism that took place during the
late 19th and early 20th centuries. At the time, this was
less an anti-colonial consciousness than an ideology of
Sinhala elites engaged in competition with their Tamil
counterparts and other upper-class representatives of
minority communities for wealth and privilege within the
colonial dispensation. As such, the type of Sinhala Buddhism
popularised by such proselytising religious ideologues as
Anagarika Dharmapala (whose role in the propagation of
Jathika Chinthanaya is comparable to that of V D Savarkar’s
in India’s Hindutva) amounted to a joint production of Sri
Lankan elites and British divide-and-rule policies.
Cultural revolution
This
dynamic of elite competition continued even after
independence in 1948. The Sinhala-Buddhist ‘cultural
revolution’ of 1956 thus involved a combination of the
battle of the upper classes with a populist attack on the
hegemony of the English-speaking ‘class’. The latter was
orchestrated by the Oxford-educated founder of the newly
formed Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP), S W R D
Bandaranayake, whose prospects of becoming prime minister
had seemed slim within the nepotistic United National Party
(UNP). Following a landslide electoral victory,
Bandaranayake’s opportunistic Official Language Act of 1956,
which decreed Sinhala as the country’s only official
language, appealed to the aspirations of the Sinhala middle
and lower classes, while delivering a painful political blow
to the island’s Tamil-speaking communities.
While sowing the seeds of Tamil separatism, the 1956
‘revolution’ also brought forth a cultural renaissance of
sorts. There was an unprecedented proliferation of Sinhala
literature in various print media, including newspapers,
magazines, historical-cultural journals and novels. While
certainly some of this popular discourse espoused a
Sinhala-Buddhist nationalism in line with the chauvinistic
style of Dharmapala, not all of it did so. In fact, the best
literature of this period was much more nuanced and liberal,
even socialist. Leading Sinhala writers of the time, with
due respect to Buddhist values and local traditions, also
engaged other cultures, including Western. Martin
Wickramasinghe, the most accomplished and erudite Sinhala
writer, whose life spanned both colonial and post-colonial
times, remains particularly exemplary in this regard for his
cosmopolitan humanism, nourished by sympathies not only
Buddhist but also socialist.
In spite of its Sinhala-Buddhist tendencies, the more or
less social-democratic character of the Sri Lankan
‘developmentalist’ state from 1956 until 1977 provided the
minimal material conditions for cultural expressions that
were at once indigenous and modernist. This was best
represented in the literary realm by Wickramasinghe, though
a similar cultural-political orientation can be seen in the
contemporaneous cinema of Lester James Peiris, and in the
pioneering drama of Ediriweera Sarachchandra. A comparably
sophisticated attempt to mediate between Sri Lankan and
western influences, although without any trace of the
socialism found in Wickramasinghe, also became evident in
the distinct architectural idioms practised by Valentine
Gunasekara and Geoffrey Bawa.
Everything changed after the ‘open economy’ landed in Sri
Lanka in 1977. The steady erosion of the welfare state, in
tandem with the penetration of neoliberalism into the
island, inaugurated by J R Jayewardene’s UNP regime, forced
the middle and lower classes suddenly to confront the
disorienting vagaries of the free market. These classes,
along with the Sinhala big businesses that had benefited
most from the favours of the post-1956 state, were the
hardest hit by this process, even as the pressures placed by
local and global agents of neoliberalism on free education,
healthcare, housing and social services adversely affected
most of the rest of the population.
This new reign of laissez-faire economics was accompanied by
rapid ‘Westernisation’ in everyday life, especially in a
spectacular culture of technological consumption made
possible by the relaxation of import controls on all manner
of consumer goods. As colour television was introduced in
1979, a phantasmagoria of commodities quickly spread over
Colombo and other growing cities. The gap between
socio-economic reality and consumerist fantasy – between the
food people ate and what they tasted on TV – became
painfully palpable. The twin experiences of economic
insecurity and cultural angst, compounded by the violent
turn of Tamil separatist nationalism and an unprecedented
militarisation of the Sri Lankan state from 1983 onwards,
provided the necessary conditions for the present stage of
Sinhala-Buddhist nationalism.
Nationalism or National Socialism
Yet
another vital enabling factor of Jathika Chinthanaya, which
often presents itself as a resistance to the West, must be
seen against a global-historical perspective. The Marxist
historian Perry Anderson has noted how, from the French
Revolution until the end of the Second World War,
nationalism has been a prerogative of the bourgeoisie, while
socialist opposition to capitalism remained (in principle,
at least) internationalist in scope. But an inversion of
this alignment of political forces – right nationalism, left
internationalism – has taken place since the middle of the
last century. The institutions of Bretton Woods were able,
for the first time, to internationalise the right,
effectively globalising the bourgeoisie. These same
organisations also initially restricted left forces into
nationalist frames, notably during the era of decolonisation
in the Third World. As neoliberalism emerged globally
triumphant during the 1980s, socialism in general ceased to
be a popular alternative for whatever was left of the left.
Into that political space stepped fundamentalist
nationalisms devoid of any memory of Marxism or
anti-imperialism.
It is therefore no accident that the leading ideologues of
Jathika Chinthanaya in Sri Lanka are ex-socialist
anti-Marxists. Nalin de Silva, a professor of mathematics at
the University of Colombo and perhaps the most prolific
writer espousing a hardline Sinhala-Buddhist nationalist
ideology, was a hardcore Trotskyite as late as the early
1980s. Champika Ranawaka, a leader of the virulently
Sinhala-Buddhist JHU and currently Minister of Environment
and Natural Resources, was prominent in Marxist-inspired
politics as a university student activist during the
mid-1980s, a pivotal time for Jathika Chinthanaya. Gunadasa
Amarasekara, the leading Sinhala novelist today and organic
intellectual of the Jathika Chinthanaya, likewise harboured
profound sympathies for Marxism during the 1980s. In fact, a
recurrent motif of Amarasekara’s fiction and literary
criticism had been the need for a rapprochement between
Marxism and Buddhism – until this idea was fully disavowed,
by the early 1990s, as a youthful indiscretion.
Jathika Chinthanaya came to regard socialism as yet another
nefarious manifestation of pernicious Western thought,
rather like a bickering brother of capitalism. The
consequent search for a radical indigenous alternative to
both capitalism and socialism aligns this cultural-political
movement very much with contemporary Hindutva discourses in
India, while also recalling the ideological backdrop of
National Socialism of Germany, which was contributed to by
such influential intellectuals as Oswald Spengler, Ernest
Junger, Carl Schmitt and Martin Heidegger. Echoes of the
latter’s powerful critique of Western metaphysics and
‘technology’ can be heard in the musings of the Amarasekaras
and de Silvas of present-day Sri Lanka – as among the
followers of Savarkar and M S Golwalkar in India – as they
outline the ‘harmonious’ character of a national state.
According to Amarasekara, the search for an alternative to
the Western path of development for Sri Lanka constitutes
the prime rationale for Jathika Chinthanaya. “Before
choosing a path of development,” he writes, “we must have a
clear understanding of its objectives and goals.” He then
asks: “What is the knowledge that gives us this
understanding?” The answer is clear: “This knowledge is
contained within nothing else but our national culture,”
that is to say, “within the Jathika Chinthanaya, which can
be considered as both the expression and the vehicle of that
culture.” Nalin de Silva agrees with Amarasekara when he
says that “there is a common culture in this country” and
that “we must seek solutions to our problems within the
framework of that common culture.”
Little is left for doubt concerning the content of this
‘common culture’. For Amarasekara, “Our national ideology is
the Sinhala Buddhist ideology that has evolved through a
period of about two thousand years.” Again, de Silva
complements: “The inherent common culture in this country is
… to live in harmony with nature, the Middle Path, lack of
greed,” all of which “is best described in Buddhism.” He is
prudent enough to acknowledge the eclectic and dynamic
nature of this common culture: “No one says that this
culture was pure and perfect,” because “various things were
borrowed from various countries.” Of course, “culture
changes”, but “there remains a certain tradition in spite of
such change,” and “it was within the context of this
tradition that everything was borrowed.” The implication is
clear: “What we must do is to understand the essence of the
… traditions we had and to borrow anything, including
knowledge, in accordance with that essence.”
Amarasekara elaborates further on the meaning of this
‘common culture’. For him, “The main assumption behind
Jathika Chinthanaya is that, although there are many ethnic
groups in this country such as the Sinhalese, the Tamils and
the Muslims, all of them belong to the basically same
culture; as such, they must be referred to as one nation.”
In other words, all the people of Sri Lanka, in spite of
ethno-cultural differences, are “heirs to the same Jathika
Chinthanaya”. He goes on to confidently raise a rhetorical
question: “What is racist about that?” Nothing, if you
follow his painstaking reasoning, which draws on such
diverse sources as the Buddha and Samuel Huntington to make
the case for a persuasive cultural essentialism. In this
way, both Jathika Chinthanaya and Hindutva claim to be
respectful of minority cultures – but only insofar as those
minority cultures accept the norms of the dominant culture
as their own.
A new internationalism?
In
spite of obvious historical and cultural differences, there
exist some remarkable parallels between the ideological
forms and epistemological claims of Jathika Chinthanaya,
Hindutva and National Socialism: their emphases on harmony,
community and nature; and their critiques of materialism,
modernity and socialism. Above all, these derive from the
distinct yet comparable social formations that gave birth to
them, all of which were marked by rapid economic development
and cultural change, which led to heightened experiences of
alienation and anomie, especially for the lower and middle
classes. These groups desperately needed a community with
which to identify, as well as an enemy to identify against,
both of which were powerfully forged in these cases – as the
fates of Sri Lankan Tamils, Indian Muslims and German Jews
demonstrate.
In no case, however, were the social bases of such
existential anxieties adequately addressed. After all, the
very form of these nationalist ideologies, predicated as
they are on conceptions of social harmony, militates against
the recognition of exploitative class, caste or gender
relations. Herein lies the greatest political weakness of
the fundamentalist nationalisms of Southasia today: their
inability to acknowledge and redress oppressive structures
of social relations. So long as this is the case, the
cultural-political resolutions that they concoct will remain
in the realm of the imagination alone, leaving intact the
real contradictions of everyday life. The latter, meanwhile,
offer a reservoir of resources for a renewed radical
opposition to fundamentalist nationalism on the part of left
forces – socialist, feminist and internationalist
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