Playing with history
Answering a published reply to his own column, Victor Ivan sets out what the record actually shows about the decline of the Raja Rata, the British period and the uses to which Sri Lankan history is put.
ජාතියේ හා ආගමේ නාමයෙන් රට රැගෙන යන්නේ කොයිබටද?
Ivan warns that the anti-Muslim campaign now being led by groups of monks mirrors the climate before 1915, 1958 and 1983. He retells the 1915 Sinhala–Muslim riots, rooted in Dharmapala’s revival and Sinhala traders’ envy of Muslim commerce, and traces the Muslims’ long history in the island. Such a riot now, he argues, would be ruinous, and its premise betrays Buddhism itself: from the Kalama Sutta and the parable of the raft to Asoka’s edicts and Walpola Rahula, the Buddha’s teaching is one of free inquiry and tolerance.
වරද කාගේද?
Ivan traces Sri Lanka’s three constitutions to argue that each was made by whichever party held the numbers, without the consensus a constitution demands. The Soulbury order, flawed but workable, let governments fall; Colvin R. de Silva’s 1972 constitution stripped away its safeguards and ignored the Tamil language question; J.R. Jayewardene’s 1978 system put all power in one unaccountable man. Yet the fault, he concludes, is not J.R.’s alone but a society given independence as a gift, democratic on the surface and feudal at the core.
දෙමළ ප්රශ්නය හා වියළි කලාපීය ගොවි ජනපද ව්යාපාර
Following his column on the homeland concept, Ivan examines the Tamil leaders’ charge that dry-zone colonisation schemes were designed to change the ethnic make-up of the North-East. He traces the real causes: malaria’s depopulation of the ancient heartland; the Crown Lands Encroachment Ordinance of 1840, which let the state sell 1.8 million acres to planters; the import of South Indian labour, which changed the composition of the hill country; and the resulting land hunger among wet-zone Sinhala peasants — 44% landless in the districts Das Gupta surveyed — as well as in Jaffna. The 1927 Land Commission and the 1935 Land Development Ordinance made the state a trustee of land for the landless, and DDT opened the dry zone after 1946. Colonisation, he concludes, served a national purpose and gave priority to local landless people.
අභ්යන්තර තුවාල හඳුනාගැනීම
Writing after a workshop in Austria led by conflict-resolution scholar Johan Galtung, Ivan takes up Galtung’s point that history and myth feed Sri Lanka’s conflict. Drawing on B.H. Farmer’s ‘Ceylon: A Divided Nation’, he traces how the Mahavamsa’s stories of Vijaya, Mahinda and Dutugemunu shaped a Sinhala sense of special origin and of the Tamil as historic enemy, a potential tapped from Dharmapala and S.W.R.D. Bandaranaike to the JVP, and argues that these inner wounds must be treated along with the outer ones.
ලැබූ නිදහසේ ඇති නොගැලපුම
On the anniversary of Independence, Ivan argues that because Ceylon won freedom without struggle, its communities never forged a real national unity. Citing Lord Soulbury’s foreword to B.H. Farmer’s Ceylon: A Divided Nation, he notes that Section 29 did not stop the citizenship laws or the Sinhala Only Act, and that minority representation fell short of expectations. A new constitution alone will not solve the ethnic problem; Sinhala and Tamil democratic aspirations must be joined in a common movement.
වඩා භයානක මදුරුවා ද ? ත්රස්තවාදියා ද?
Ivan contrasts the billions spent on fighting terrorism with the neglect of mosquito control. About 60,000 died in the 1989–90 insurrection and fewer than 100,000 in 16 years of war, while the 1934–35 malaria epidemic alone killed about 100,000. He recounts how malaria relief carried the Sama Samaja movement to Sabaragamuwa, where N.M. Perera defeated Adeline Molamure in 1936 and became ‘Parippu Mahatthaya’, cites B.H. Farmer on malaria and the dry zone, and warns that since state control was abandoned in the 1980s the disease is returning.