Forget the past, start again

In social, political and religious terms, the world is bedevilled by traditions and by rival, competing traditions that can literally set people at each other's throats. 

Those artists in the Turner Prized show are all saying. 'Forget the past, start again.' In a way, that's what David Tremble and Gerry Adams and the other Irish politicians involved in the peace process are saying too. And it's absolutely necessary that they should say so. These thoughts have been much in my mind recently, after conversations I have had with Professor Anuradha Seneviratna who is currently at SOAS as a Visiting Fellow in Sinhala, Pali and Theravada Buddhism. 

Professor Seneviratna has been an exceptionally valuable addition to the School. An outstanding scholar with more than 40 books to his name in Sinhala and English, he is also an inspiring teacher with an electric personality. I find it enormously stimulating and instructive to talk with him, especially on the subject of Sri Lanka's own deep-seated ethnic conflict.

On November 24, Professor Seneviratna gave a daring lecture in the weekly seminar series put on by SOAS's Centre of South Asian Studies. Entitled, 'The Lions and the Tigers'. The main purpose of his lecture was to show-through a mass of historical detail - how intricately bound up with each other the Sinhalese and Tamils have been in the history of Sri Lanka, how the culture of the island has drawn from both traditions, and how absurd and impossible it is to separate those traditions through the political partition of the island. 

Really, the same could be said of Ireland and it is Professor Seneviratna's profound hope that the lessons of Ireland can he applied to Sri Lanka, avoiding the partisan that has had such tragic consequences there, and pointing the way to the better integration of Sri Lanka's two main communities.

Professor Senevirantna's ideas seem to go down well with both Tamils and Sinhalese. The Tamils admire his grasp of Tamil history (he himself speaks fluent Tamil), and approves of the way he has urged the Sri Lankan governments to (1) talk to the terrorists (2) grant a degree of autonomy to the Tamils, without partitioning it and (3) bring in third-party negotiators.

Professor Seneviratna agreed, however, when I said that ultimately the resolution of the conflict would depend on the forgetting of rival traditions, as is beginning to happen in Ireland. He also agreed when I said that ultimately there would have to be tolerance of intermarriage between Sinhalese and Tamils. He has used his knowledge of history to understand the conflict better, but in the end, history must be forgotten.

A Review by Dr. William Radice, Head-Dept.of South and South East Asia SOAS, University of London.

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