Caged Independence

By Thamil Venthan Ananthavinayagan –February 4, 2018

Introduction

The cherished Maya Angelou wrote once in her famous poem ‘Caged Bird’:

[T]he caged bird sings   

 

with a fearful trill   

of things unknown   

but longed for still   

and his tune is heard   

on the distant hill   

 

for the caged bird   

sings of freedom.

Freedom. That is what one associates with independence. Freedom from alien subjugation, domination and exploitation. Christian List and Laura Valentini write in a recent paper that freedom must be understood as ‘[i]ndependence. Like republican freedom, it demands the robust absence of relevant constraints on action. Unlike republican, and like liberal freedom, it is not moralized’.

My beloved father remembered very well that he, born in 1943, had to observe the flag ceremony in his early childhood when he went to nursery. He had to sing ‘God Bless the King’ and salute the Union Jack. Sri Lankans sang the British national anthem even after ‘independence’, until it was replaced by a Sinhala text in the 1950s. My father, however, never understood the concept of paying respect to a foreign flag and an old white man who warmed the throne in a distant palace – only then being replaced by a flag that shows a lion holding the sword towards the green and orange stripes (which represent the Tamil and Muslim) minorities and a Sinhala national anthem. Early moments in his childhood and youth determined his fate to become Vannai Ananthan.

I, as his son, gaze at this island now. As Sri Lanka celebrates its 70^th Independence Day today, on the 4^th of February 2018, I wonder: did the country and its people, however, really attain independence on that day and ever after? Did all the people living in Sri Lanka become truly independent, empowered and sovereign citizens? I will explore and explain here that Sri Lanka gained formalised independence in 1948, only to be the eventual springboard for the elaboration of a Sinhala nation state. The Soulbury Constitution, the country’s first post-colonial constitution with poor human rights protection, was a document drafted by the British to suit the country’s elite.  Dr. Harshan Kumarasingham ascertains:

[I]n contrast to the fissiparous tensions that characterised the colonial experience in India, the small island of Sri Lanka seemed to gently and courteously accomplish its own independence with the minimum of fuss on 4 February 1948. (…) In fact many ‘dignified’ elements of British culture remained. ‘God Save the King’ was retained as the National Anthem, the Union Jack flew next to the Lion flag on public buildings, Imperial Honours were still bestowed, Sri Lankan debutantes were still presented at Buckingham Palace – and there were also key personnel who stayed in their posts and thus ensured a smooth and reassuring transition.

The 4^th of February is the enabling moment of Sinhala majoritaranism

D.B.S. Jeyaraj writes that ‘[T]he modern Ceylonese nation itself was a colonial construct. It was the British who integrated different territories under their control into a single entity and set up a unified administration for the country.’ This is indeed true. The Kandyan Convention 1815 laid the groundwork for the country as we know it today. The 4^th of February 1948 and the transition of power to the privileged few, however, was an early chapter in the Sinhala nation state creation. D.S. Senanayake became the chosen one to lead the country. He, I argue, is unfairly attributed by Sir Charles Jeffries to be the incomparable statesman and navigator. He wrote in his book ‘Ceylon – the Path to Independence’ that it was the trust the British put in Senanayake to craft a common nation, home to all. This was a naïve, if not a reckless assumption. It was the same the D.S. Senanayake who oversaw the Gal Oya Scheme that initiated the colonization of Tamil lands and it was the same D.S. Senayake who was part of the country’s first inter-ethnic riots between the Sinhala and Muslims in 1915. Dr. Harshan Kumarasingham explains further that:

[S]ri Lanka’s elite operated British institutions in an anachronistic eighteenth-century manner such as in having a patronage based Cabinet dominated by its prime ministerial leader/patron rather than by collegial attitudes or values. The weakness of party institutionalisation and the ambiguity in the constitutional arrangements laid the foundations for future political conflict and marginalisation of segments of society.

However, I argue that the 4^th of February was only the springboard to build a Sinhala-Buddhist ethnocratic nation state order. Sri Lanka’s process of becoming a Sinhala nation state was a process in the making, starting with the Citzenship Act 1948, rendering Indian Tamils stateless. The previous constitutions of the country, in particular the Colebrooke-Cameron Commission and the Donoughmore Constitution (despite all their progressive facets) formalised identities and entrenched suspicion among communal lines. Sinhala-Buddhism ideology was exploited for the furtherance and entrenchment of political power. As Kumari Jayawardena asserts:

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