Plus

Plus

A Sri Lankan identity - some observations
By Stanley Jayaweera
"Do we have a Sri Lankan identity?" was an issue on which different views were expressed in The Sunday Times on February 1. What follows is a personal reflection on the subject.

In psychology, personal identity is the continuous existence of the personality despite physiological and psychological changes - a condition or fact that a person or thing is itself and not something else. By this yardstick, at a national level, a Sri Lankan identity in any person would mean a sense of belonging to or a oneness with the island called Sri Lanka, despite different cultural, religious, caste, racial and other differences among the people. It implies a capacity to transcend or rise above ourselves and give our loyalty to and express our oneness with a bigger unit called Sri Lanka. A Sri Lankan identity is born when one shares with others who have made his country their home, common values, common traditions, common cultural practices, common festive occasions, common political and social institutions, etc. which differentiates them from those who live in other lands. An internalisation of all these factors in a person gives him a collective identity, and breeds in him a loyalty to a unit much wider than himself. This is called a nation.

What I have observed from my schoolboy days is that we are unable to rise above our small insignificant selves and give our loyalty to that wider unit. Giving up our small egos and sharing with others what we hold in common is beyond us. We have diseased psyches. Sharing is alien to and beyond us.

A foreigner who has lived in this country for many years once told me that the Sinhala people can never work together. Each man is for himself only, he said. They are so individualistic, interested only in power, position, status, prestige and so on. And this in a country where the doctrine of one of the greatest of the world's teachers, the Buddha, is said to have taken deep root, he added.

Language is one thing that brings people together in any given territory and creates a sense of oneness among themselves and with the territory they inherit. In Sri Lanka, Sinhala and Tamil are the indigenous languages which help to create a common identity and inspire a loyalty to the country. English, the mother tongue of a minority is not indigenous. It is alien and cannot (unless one also knows Sinhala or Tamil) create in a person a lasting emotive link with Sri Lanka's cultural heritage, which more than any other factor, gives Sri Lankans their separate national identity.

Without the emotive link there is no substance in identity because the identification with the nation is purely intellectual. They would be at sea, as has been the case with many of our 'national ' leaders, if one were to ask them to recite a verse from the Lovadasangarawa or Buddhagadya, or Namashtasathakaya. It would be difficult to locate a Tamil leader who is not acquainted with the Silappadikaran or Manimekhala.

Thus it was that it was left to the Jaffna Tamil Youth League to ask for Purna Swaraj when the Donoughmore Commission came here, whereas our leaders in this part of the country were content with internal self-government and that too via constitutional reforms and not through a mass movement involving the common people.

This was the achievement of Gandhi and the other Indian leaders in the neighbouring sub-continent, forging in the process an Indian national identity which was not limited to a common interest in cricket!

To forge a national identity, two basic steps have to be taken. Every child must learn all three languages - Sinhala, Tamil and English. The history of the country must be taught, in addition to world history. In the school which I attended in the mid-thirties, only world history was taught. I knew much about Babylon and precious little about Anuradhapura. That cradle of Sri Lankan civilisation came alive to me only after I read H.W. Cave's Ruined Cities of Ceylon which my father brought for me from the library of the Post and Telegraphs Department where he worked. When I wanted to offer Sinhala as a subject for the University examinations entrance I was literally told to 'go to hell' and was advised to continue with Latin and Greek which I had offered for the Matriculation! Fortunately, I got myself admitted to Ananda College where the foundation for a Sri Lankan identity was laid.

However that a Sri Lankan identity alone is inadequate was brought home to me when my parents sent me to a nearby Buddhist Sunday School and a Buddhist Temple to study Buddhism and Pali. There I learnt that identity, national or individual, has no basis in Reality. Identity is an illusion in the ultimate analysis. One has to learn to live harmoniously and at peace with all living beings in whatever part of the world they exist because the world belongs to all of them.

That was the message which Arahath Mahinda gave King Devanampiyatissa over 2000 years ago. And Arahath Mahinda himself had evidently learnt the lesson at the feet of the Buddha who himself, as Prince Siddhartha had awakened one glorious full moon night over 2500 years ago to the nature of things as they actually are. Namely that nothing has permanent identity.

Back to Plus