From: vigneswa@ecs.umass.edu
Newsgroups: soc.culture.sri-lanka
Subject: Sinhalese-Tamils-Arabs-Malays-and.....
Date: 23 Jan 93 18:37:20 GMT

The following was Kirsty MacLeod's commentary in The Daily Telegraph
(January  21, 1993, Thursday).  The title of it was:  "Whisky with a
tropical cocktail"

	Some nights ago I was invited round for a drink with some
friends from my childhood.  Our host was - is - an  amiable eccen-
tric who, under  his  supercilious-sounding  public  school drawl,
hides a susceptible heart.  On offer  was his best  Scottish malt.
On view all around us  were the trappings - hunting  prints, well-
thumbed angling volumes - of English sporting life.  On the table
in front of me lay the newspaper with its Tennysonian message for
the new year:  "Ring out  the old, ring in  the new.  Ring, happy
bells, across the snow . . . "  Yet outside, the Sri Lankan night
was falling as swiftly as a blindfold.  From the open verandah we
could smell cinnamon and frangipani petals.  Our host  leaned for-
ward politely to  inquire after  my "mater and pater", and deftly
adjusted his sarong. Had we asked him what nationality he was, he
surely  could not have  told us.  In his blood  runs a mixture of
British, Sinhalese, Tamil, Portuguese and Dutch "Burgher" - origi-
nally meaning "town-dweller", now the term for Sri Lanka's equiva-
lent to  Anglo-Indians.  A  British  governor  who  once  asked a
Burgher  what nationality  he was, received  the wry  reply: "God
alone knows,  Your  Excellency".  It is  this attitude  which has
always summed up  Sri Lanka, the most civilised and easy-going of
countries.  The island is a tropical cocktail, and although it is
always described as the  teardrop falling  off the cheek of India,
has its own richly diverse identity.

	Around 2,000 years ago Tamils came from India to join the
Sinhalese.  In the 8th century came Arab traders.  Malays arrived
with the Dutch  colonialists; more (lower-caste) Tamils  with the
British tea-planters.  In the jungle still live some  descendants
of a prehistoric hunting  people, the  aboriginal  Veddhas.  With
such a mix of peoples, the island  was ripe  for inter-racial con-
flict. Yet, unlike the widescale urban  conflagration  which last
week  affected  thousands in  Bombay, not to  mention the England
cricket team's tour-stop Ahmedabad, the violence in Sri Lanka has
been more  sporadic  and contained.  The Tamil  Tiger  extremists,
with their pipe-dream of an  independent  state, have been pushed
back.  They pose no  immediate  threat, except in the north - cer-
tainly not to the tourists basking on  the southern beaches.  The
JVP (People's Liberation Army), a radical grouping of disaffected
youth  feared by  Sinhalese  and Tamils alike, was  unpopular and
quickly defeated.  That things  are not  worse must surely  be be-
cause  of the  Sinhalese  themselves, who  are  a  relaxed,  warm-
hearted  people, fond  of cricket and holidays.  Moreover, 70 per
cent of them are Buddhist, and Buddhism is the most accommodating
of religions.  Nowhere did Buddha claim that his way was the only
way.  Indeed, Buddhism holds that in the end all beings will find
a path, since in the end the goal is the same for all."All things
are one.  The One is all things . . . " 

	Nevertheless, the  educated  Sri Lankans I  talked to are
nervous.  They see an ominous  portent in the  fundamentalist vio-
lence in India - the razing of mosques, the arson, the looting by
Hindus of Muslim shops. In SriLanka, the Muslims are the nation's
shopkeepers.  Behind the  turmoil, my  friends  believe, lies not
just political orchestration but something less sinister yet more
potent - a television soap opera in 93  episodes, which tells the
story of the Mahabharata - the longest poem in the world- a Hindu
epic about the  gods.  Throughout  the Indian sub-continent, when-
ever this  was shown, the  masses  huddled round  television sets.
One episode alone was watched by 600 million people. What made it
so inflammatory, a Tamil lawyer  told me, was  that "it glorified
the doings of Rama - always  the most  dangerous god in the Hindu
pantheon because he is the only one to mix politics with religion".
This is one potential tinderbox. But even among SriLanka's gentle
Buddhists, extreme  nationalism is on the rise, fuelled, some say,
by the new university  history courses which have moved away from
westernised history to study the ancient Lankan dynasties. As yet,
none of this  is apparent to  tourists, who  come and go in their
tens of thousands, a record  350,000 in the past 12 months, up on
the 300,000 who came in 1982 before  the troubles.  And in  March
the English cricket team is due in  Colombo to tour this  cricket-
loving nation. They will be counting on the traditional SriLankan
preference for religious tolerance to hold the peace.

===

Vicky:
UMass, Jan 23
Newsgroups: soc.culture.sri-lanka