SPEAKING TO SRI LANKA

I

We witness the advent of the number. It

comes along with democracy.

(Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Every-

day Life)

If we argue in a liberal way we must

say: the majority decides, the minority

submits.

(Lenin, The Socialist Revolution and the

Renegade Kautsky)

Writing Sri Lanka recently, at least in thathyperreal west (Chakrabarty 1992), has meantworking with the ‘gate-keeping concepts’(Appadurai 1989) of anthropology. StanleyTambiah, an exemplary specimen of the sanc-tioned anthropological argument, representsthe country, which he understands through theevent, by the phrases ‘Buddhism betrayed’ and‘ethno-nationalist fratricide’ (Tambiah 1986).

To the sanctioned, Sri Lanka is easily clari�ed,classi�ed, under another heading: as some con-coction of European things – ethnicity and/ornationalism and/or religion – turned non-European, extreme, violent. To anthropology,in other words, Sri Lanka is a problem for atheory of difference. Such is the disciplinaryforce of this position that even an unconven-tional practitioner like Valentine Daniel,aware that writing Sri Lanka is not a matter ofaccurately capturing the event but of telling astory, cannot think beyond horror and vio-lence as explanatory categories (Daniel 1996).Indeed, Daniel’s prose achieves almost Conra-dian fervour on the incomprehensibility of SriLankan savagery. To him, in 1989, ‘KelaniGanga and Kalu Ganga, Sri Lankan rivers ofexquisite beauty . . . were clogged with bodiesand foamed with blood’. Given this and otheranalogous happenings, Daniel �nds ‘the{general} �ow of events in Sri Lanka . . . un-predictable’, and he shakes his head over ‘the

situations

interventions Vol. 3(2) 296–308 (ISSN 1369-801X print/1469-929X online)Copyright © 2001 Taylor & Francis Ltd DOI: 1080/13698010120059663

SPEAKING TO SRI LANKA

Qadri Ismai lUniversity of Minnesota

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magnitude of its meaninglessness’ (Daniel1996: 6).

Quite apart from my conviction that theintellectual vocation should do its best toavoid astrology, it could be argued that manySri Lankans – if letters to the editors of news-papers can serve as evidence – do not havemuch dif�culty in making sense of things in thecountry. (Which is not to suggest that I amusually in agreement with this breed of scribe,or that meaning is what I seek myself.) It isusually the westerner – journalist, diplomat,academic – who throws up his hands indismay. However, the more important point tonotice, as Pradeep Jeganathan has demon-strated, is that ‘violence’ is not something thatjust happens; not, to be precise, something thatidenti�es itself as such: only a few events thatmight qualify actually get classi�ed under thesign. For instance, in the current disciplinarymoment, it is the native – Sri Lankan,Rwandan, etc. – that is so categorized. TheNorth American, producer of much more dev-astation in the Gulf, is not considered violent;he is simply the producer of collateral damage.Likewise, Jeganathan reminds us, the VietnamWar – understood as politics (US imperialismor the spread of communism, depending onone’s leaning). Violence, he argues persua-sively, ‘is an analytical name for events ofpolitical incomprehensibility’ (Jeganathan1999: 46).

Which raises the question: Is a betterdescription or account of Sri Lanka possible?If violence and/or culture are inadequatedescriptors, can more plausible ones be found?No doubt; but to argue thus (and Jeganathandoes not) is to stay within the empiricisthermeneutic: to situate the object outside arelation to the knowing subject; to assumedifference, rather than interrogate its produc-tion. The alternative I prefer is to radicallyadjust our view of the object, Sri Lanka. This

‘intervention’ – by de�nition contingent –explores the (dif�cult) possibility of so doing;of shifting our focus; of relating to Sri Lankafrom closer by rather than from afar; of nolonger treating the country as the object of rep-resentation or a problem for difference. Iattempt this by ‘speaking to’ the question ofpeace in Sri Lanka; not from nowhere but –and this must be emphasized – from a positionthat conceives of itself as leftist; from a pos-ition that can no longer take what ‘left’ meansfor granted; one that tries to articulate what aleftist response to the question of peace mightentail; from a leftist position that conceivesitself as a part of the debate – as opposed toone offering diagnosis, prescription and curefrom outside.

However, this article begins, as it must, bytaking a step back and looking at the rep-resentation (and objecti�cation) of Sri Lankaby the disciplines. To do so is to rehearse acritique (of representation) inevitably familiarto those conversant with postcoloniality, butnecessary for the development of my argu-ment. The second section discusses what itmight mean to ‘speak to’ Sri Lanka and takesa brief look at some key positions in thedebate. We will discover – learn is perhaps abetter word – that so doing will move the argu-ment, our attention and our intellectual ener-gies from violence and/or culture, from theterms of difference, to minority and democ-racy, terms ignored by anthropology. In theconcluding section, following from this lesson,I take an even briefer look, through the workof David Scott, at what the project of speakingto Sri Lanka might have to offer the leftistcritique of democracy. 1

S P EA K I NG T O S R I L A NK A

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1 The reader will appreciate that, given the texture of thisintervention, many of its contentions, which in anothervenue would have to be fully elaborated and accounted for,are presented as preliminary forays; that close readings ofmany texts cited here are not possible. My thanks to Ruvani

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In the remarks that follow, I try to keep in thefront of my mind Gayatri Spivak’s (1999)injunction of the dangers, for the postcolonial-ist scholar, of assuming the position of thenative informant (collaborator of anthro-pology). This caution should be axiomaticwithin postcolonial studies, but is so radicallyincommensurate with the logic of the �eld’sinstitutionalisation in the western academy,which demands that it restrict its yield to theprovision of information about the natives(Hartoonian 1999) that it only be some kindof supplement to anthropology, that the con-tention – unlike Spivak’s many other provoca-tive formulations – is rarely acknowledged, letalone addressed. So this article contains no hotnews about the situation in Sri Lanka that I, asa native in the know, want to pass on. What Ihave to say concerns the situation of Sri Lanka.This raises other, prior questions: What is thisthing, this object Sri Lanka? Do we know it?How do we know it? Do we know it other thanan object of anthropology (a place of culturaldifference and violence)? Or cartography (aminiature on a map)? Is it doomed to beforever object? Could it be conceived assubject? And, as an even more cardinal pri-ority: Is it a task of postcoloniality to makeobjects subject? 2 Is this necessary or even poss-ible in a post-Hegelian conjuncture?

If we take Dipesh Chakrabarty as implyingthat a subject of knowledge (he speaks only of

the subject of history) means having distinctcategories, which do not recoil from the termsindigenous/autochthonous, through which toproduce this understanding, then Sri Lanka inthe contemporary conjuncture cannot be thesubject of disciplinary knowledge: becausesuch knowledge is always a ‘variation’ on thestory of (hyperreal) Europe, as Chakrabartycontends, making Europe the theoreticalsubject of any account of Sri Lanka; andbecause the epistemic violence of colonialism –disciplinarity is a crucial part of this story –destroyed or transformed indigenous cat-egories. Chakrabarty’s is a powerful argument.Sri Lanka has been the object of eurocentricknowledge; that continues to be, even in thework of Tambiah and Daniel, its place: signi-fying violence, horror, non-Europe. Neverthe-less, another way of thinking Sri Lanka assubject – or, more exactly, as simultaneouslysubject and object – is possible; it does notconcern the categories of knowledge produc-tion so much as their consequences; its projectis not empiricist, not about better description– though it cannot evade description, either;and it does not seek to declare a retrospectiveand nostalgic victory over colonialism andeurocentrism. Rather, it insists upon the(special) responsibility of postcolonial scholar-ship not to continue to address the west exclu-sively; to insist upon the distinction betweenaddressing the west and interrogating euro-centrism; and in so doing to ‘�nish’ (Mowitt1992) the critique of anthropology.

But �rst it is necessary to notice how thecountry has been produced by the disciplines.Before anthropology, political science pro-duced sanctioned knowledge of Sri Lanka. Itsaw the place – like every other Third Worldcountry – as an object of study, a matter of factand �gure. The �gures are the usual suspects,by no means indigenous: per capita income,literacy rate, fertility rate, ratio of hospital

in terv ent ions – 3 :2

Ranasinha for all her help with making this publicationpossible; and to Pradeep Jeganathan, Mary John, JeanLangford, John Mowitt, Sonali Perera, Rita Raley, JaniScandura, Adam Sitze and Ajay Skaria for their comments onearlier drafts. 2 This is the avowed project of anti-colonial nationalism; inPartha Chatterjee’s terms, this involves inverting theproblematic of eurocentrism. I have argued elsewhere thatpostcoloniality is the name of the claim that nationalism is aninadequate response to colonialism (Ismail 1999).

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beds to DVD-players. In the rest of the ThirdWorld, the actual numbers ‘proved’ back-wardness. But, from the 1950s, the Sri Lankanfigures added up to a peculiar fact: anomalouslysuccessful welfarist Third World democracy.Polisci in the 1960s and 1970s represented SriLanka as actually becoming modern (Wriggins1960). But, after that pivotal event whichtook the name July 1983, reality intervened.Sinhala Buddhist nationalism went berserk inthe space of a few days in mid-year. SriLanka, according to the New York Times,reacquainted itself with the script, resembledthe rest of the Third World: it was now a matterof fury, frenzy, fratricide. Political science, tosummarize Jeganathan’s careful exegesis ofthis disciplinary moment, could no longermake sense of the place (‘situate’ Sri Lanka); itscategories were inadequate. Anthropology�lled the breach: it explained ‘violent’ Sin-halese Buddhist nationalism by ignoring andexcluding politics, and blaming culture(Tambiah 1986).

To postcoloniality, of course, anthropologyhas never been an innocent discipline. EdwardSaid once contended that anthropology ‘ispredicated on the fact of otherness and {cul-tural} difference . . . {and so} cannot be easilydistinguished from the process of empire’ (Said1989: 211). Said’s, as we know, was not theonly such argument; the discipline producedan autocritique of its colonial genealogy. Thecombination should have been damning: onewould have thought that no responsiblescholarship today would want to be con-sidered colonialist. Nevertheless, conventionalanthropology still others, produces nativeinformants, ignores postcoloniality, representsthe rest of the world to the west. But thenthis is only to be expected. Disciplines do notsimply fade away when confronted withcensure, however cogent or convincing. Theyhave remarkable stamina, as John Mowitt has

persuasively demonstrated in the case of litera-ture. They are, after all, to be characterized notby the quality of their scholarship or the coher-ence of their objects or the necessity of thework they do, but by their relation to power,to institutionalized intellectual authority.Indeed, part of the work of disciplinarity is toimpose its categories and conventions uponthe world; to pass, if not authorize, a partial(eurocentric) knowledge as universal truth.

Mainstream anthropology is also predicatedon the possibility, if not the ethicality, of rep-resentation – in the sense of ‘speaking for’ (theother). The problem here is that speaking forsomeone or something else, a practice by nomeans unique to this discipline, is effectively toreplace, even suppress, that other one or thing.Politically correct anthropology, having totake these critiques into account, informs usthat it has solved the problem of replacing theother: by purchasing a cassette-recorder,making itself transparent and no longer beinga proxy for the native, but ‘listening to’ her; or,by passing the ethnographer as in a ‘demo-cratic’ dialogue with the native (now trans-formed into an active participant in knowledgeproduction, no longer a passive informant).But it cannot tell us why, as Partha Chatterjeeputs it, there would never be a ‘Kalabarianthropology of the white man’ (Chatterjee1993: 17). In any event, as Spivak cautions,both ‘speaking for’ and ‘listening to’ are aboutinformation retrieval: both want to take stuff– whether coded as culture, custom or concept– from one location, and retell or retail it inanother. Anthropology cannot conceive itsobject other than object. Meaning, if the objectof the exercise is to let the native speak – orrepresent – herself, surely the best, if not theonly ethical way to enable this, is to give her acomputer, get her a contract and invite her tocompose. (This assumes that the native is liter-ate; if not, the exercise would have to begin,


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patiently, with the establishment of schools.)But even this position begs many questions.

My point is that Said’s Orientalism – whichis to postcolonial studies what Saussure’sCourse is to structuralism – can be read notjust as a critique of the representation of theeast by the west during colonialism and after,but more generally as one of any project thatseeks to represent (replace) the other. Theimplicit challenge of his work to postcolonial-ity is to get beyond this ‘problematic’; thus thesigni�cance of its epigraph. Spivak’s celebratedand much misunderstood contribution to thisdebate is to exhort, by way of reading TheEighteenth Brumaire, that we pay attention tothe two distinct senses of ‘represent’: onebeing analogous to proxy (‘vertreten’ in theGerman), the other to portrait (‘darstellen’).Her most general argument, to put it simply, isthat while representation, whether in anthro-pology or elsewhere, might depict itself asengaged in the innocent activity of description,retransmission, or portrait, it often becomesproxy, a substitute for the other: who is thenreplaced, effectively suppressed, ‘cannotspeak’. Consequently, Spivak must reject rep-resentation of the proxy kind. She does �ndportrait unavoidable for politics: you cannotrespond to a situation without some under-standing or description of it, she says; butwarns us to be constantly alert to its tendencyto slide into its other sense.

Spivak’s essay (1988) also suggests analternative to the problematic of represen-tation: ‘speaking to’. (This is to be distin-guished, by the way, from Donna Haraway’simportant argument for ‘situated knowledges’,or ‘speaking from’ a place (1991). Haraway’sis an allied notion, especially given its empha-sis on the communal character of politics; Iam, in Haraway’s sense, trying to speak fromthe left; though, of course, without makingany claim on objectivity. What Spivak, in

contrast, enables is not so much conceptualiz-ing a place or standpoint of beginning, butidentifying a problem to be addressed.) I takethis to mean an intellectual practice that isinitially, if not primarily, not about listening butlearning. The �rst is a largely passive pastimethat can be accomplished by that recorderalone. The second requires engagement, goingto school as it were: learning about a place andits questions, concerns, conundrums; under-standing place not through the clichés ofcartography or the gate-keepings of anthro-pology (which reinforce each other, since thegeographical notion of place is moored to ananthropological notion of culture). Place, here,is not de�ned by difference, but contoured (andproduced) by its questions, concerns, contests.The questions include its relation to the west,and disciplinary knowledge, but are notexhausted by them; the concerns include thoseproduced by ‘theory’ and cannot be reduced tothe merely empirical.

I I I

I begin illustrating ‘speaking to’ by way of aportrait (unavoidable!) of the country’s recenttravails (according to the leftist or peaceful his-torian): since independence, the Ceylonese/SriLankan state has been captured by an uncom-promising Sinhala nationalism, which hasoppressed, often brutally, and in the multi-tudinous ways available to the state, the‘minorities’, particularly the Tamils (Jaya-wardena 1985). This oppression, which hasantecedents before 1948, could even be calledgenocidal in intent. The armed Tamil national-ist resistance, in its current mode in the Liber-ation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), has alsobeen uncompromising: the LTTE suffers nodissent, has militarily eliminated the othermilitant Tamil groups, whether organized –


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including avowedly Marxist out�ts – or indi-vidual – including its own commanders whodisagreed with its leader, and women’s andhuman rights activists. Indeed, the LTTE mighteven be termed fascist (Manikkalingam 1995).Given the vehemence of these two nation-alisms, which dominate (though do notexhaust) Sri Lankan politics today; given theirincompatibility and unwillingness to compro-mise; given their refusal to acknowledgeother social groups – notably Muslims andup-country Tamils – as necessary and equalparticipants in any conversation about peace;given the weakness of the anti-nationalist con-stituency, peace in our time looks dif�cult, ifnot impossible, in the country Sri Lanka.3

Sinhala nationalism, as might be expected,denies this reading of Sri Lankan history; deniesthat it is oppressive: it sees itself as behaving justlike any majority anywhere; it identi�es SriLanka’s current woes as initially caused by theTamil demand for privileges inapplicable to aminority – by the Tamil inability to remain in itsplace – and now by LTTE terrorism. If theTamils knew their place, it contends, Sri Lankawould be at peace. From the hundreds ofcitations possible, Shantha Hennanayake:

In real politic {sic} of any state, majority minor-ity divisions are a fact of life. Unacceptance ofthis is bound to create problems as has beenclearly evident by the unwillingness of Tamilpolitical leaders to accept the political ethnicminority status in Sri Lanka. . .{But the Muslims,by} conceding political minority status . . . havechosen to support the majority Sinhalese viewof the Sri Lankan state thus winning their

reciprocal support. (Hennanayake 1992: 188;emphasis added)

The leftist would contest this reading ofMuslim politics by citing the recent emergenceand popularity of the Muslim Congress, whichcontests Sinhala hegemony; she would opposethe majoritarian perspective sanctioned herewithout blush – where the Tamils are blamedfor their oppression (coded here as ‘prob-lems’). But she should also notice that major-ity emerges in this passage as a political andethical term, not as a simple fact of number;that quantity to Hennanayake is also quality;that majority is not just about number but isan encoding of value; that, therefore, theburden of peace is placed upon the (Tamil)minority: which must concede, submit to themajority in order to institute peace.

The LTTE rebuts the leftist portrait too, andpresents itself as representing not a minoritybut a nation with the inalienable right to self-determination: ‘The island formerly calledCeylon is the traditional homeland of twonations, Tamil Eelam and Sri Lanka, two dis-tinct social formations with distinct culturesand languages having their own unique his-torical past’ (Balasingham 1983: 5). The claimhere is to equality: the Tamils and Sinhalese areto be compared not on the basis of number,or quantity, but quality – culture, languageand other such criteria; which make themboth different and the same (equal in value);which do not make one superior to the other.(Hennanayake’s predictable response to this isto fall back upon quantity, to indicate what heconsiders the facts of number: to him, theTamils are indisputably an ethnic minority,and cannot be a nation.) The LTTE also, ofcourse, denies that it is oppressive or fascist: itspolitics are patriotic, resistant, liberationary;its targets only enemies and traitors. It con-tends that, as a nation, it has the inalienable


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3 It might clarify my argument somewhat if I point out herethat I see a distinction between the terms nation and country.Nation is most usefully understood as a form of communityoffered by nationalism. How I understand country iselaborated later in this article. On this question, see alsoIsmail (2000).

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right to self-determination; that, if the Tamilnation was granted a separate state, thecountry would be at peace.

To the leftist, however, peace cannot anddoes not signify the mere end of war. If beingleft generally can be hastily characterized asunderwritten by optimism of the intellect, by abelief in the possibility of ‘creating something{a polity} that has never yet existed’, in Marx’sfelicitous phrase (Marx 1994: 15), then peaceto her – that is, being left in the contemporarySri Lankan conjuncture – must signal an endnot just to war, but, arguably, to domination(including forms of domination we are yet tonotice). Peace, therefore, might be conceptual-ized through a formulation of Adorno, as ‘thestate of distinctness without domination, withthe distinct participating in each other’(Adorno 1993: 500). This is perhaps imposs-ible to realize; but, refusing to turn pessimist, Iwould rather see it as usefully characterizingthe horizon of our hopes and hungers. So theleftist will �nd unacceptable the solutionoffered by Sinhala nationalism to the problemof war: exterminate all the Tigers, terroristsanyway, and continue dominating the Tamils,a minority by de�nition not entitled to equal-ity – this being a ‘fact of life’. She would also�nd inadequate the liberal suggestion: consti-tutional tinkering which grants ‘concessions’to the LTTE in north-eastern Sri Lanka butenables continued Sinhala nationalist domi-nation of the state and the ‘minorities’ else-where. Likewise, she would reject the LTTEdemand: an arrangement that could foresee,consequent to the establishment of a new statein the northeast, Tamil nationalist dominationof ‘minorities’ (Muslims, Sinhalese) there. InAdornian terms, these solutions would main-tain distinctness, but not without domination;because to be minor is to submit, be domi-nated.

This can be seen in the work of Kingsley

Muthumani De Silva, Sri Lanka’s pre-eminentconservative historian and subtlest championof Sinhala hegemony. He wrote on the conse-quences of the political changes after 1956, inwhich year our peaceful historian might saythat Sinhala nationalism signalled its desire forhegemony over the Sri Lankan state, by amongother things making Sinhala the sole of�ciallanguage of the country:

Firstly, the concept of a multi-ethnic polityceased to be politically viable {after 1956}. . . .The emphasis on Sri Lanka as a Sinhalese-Bud-dhist polity carried an emotional popular appeal,compared with which a multi-ethnic polity wasno more than a sterile abstraction. Secondly,the justi�cation for this . . . laid stress on ademocratic sanction deriving its validity from theclear numerical superiority of the Sinhala-speak-ing group. . . . The minorities, and in particularthe Sri Lankan Tamils, refused to endorse theassumption that Sinhalese nationalism was inter-changeable with the larger Sri Lankan national-ism. As a result, 1956 saw the beginning ofalmost a decade of ethnic and linguistic tensions.(De Silva 1998: 25; emphasis added)

Several things must be noticed in this passage.Most obviously: unlike Daniel, De Silva doesnot �nd Sri Lanka incomprehensible or mean-ingless. He refuses to even consider the possi-bility that a ‘multi-ethnic polity’ might havebeen something other than a sterile abstractionto the minorities – they clearly do not count.Note also that, like Hennanayake, De Silvablames the Tamils for their oppression (codedhere using the sterile term ‘tensions’). But DeSilva takes the argument one step further: toHennanayake, the Tamils refuse to be realistic;De Silva implies that the Tamil response to1956, the protests against Sinhala Only, thedemand for Tamil to be made an of�cial lan-guage too, were actually anti-democratic. The


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Sinhala actions of that year were not justpopular, or quantitative, but democratic,qualitative, ethical – deriving their ‘validityfrom the clear numerical superiority of theSinhala-speaking group’. De Silva �nds signi�-cance in number; democracy to him is synony-mous with majority rule; it is understood asmaking quantity quality. We have to investi-gate this spin on democracy – it soundscounter-intuitive; and we will do so later. Themore immediate point to notice is that, to DeSilva, Sinhala nationalist dominance of the SriLankan state should not be opposed; indeed, itcannot be opposed on ethical grounds: theminorities must submit to Sinhala rule as ademand of democracy. Not surprisingly, DeSilva sees no necessity for constitutionalchanges that would alter the character andfunctioning of the Sri Lankan state.

Sri Lankan liberalism has responded to thisposition. Neelan Tiruchelvam, a courageousand tireless counsel of peace, asserted in his lastspeech before he was killed – by the LTTE – that:

Protection of minorities must form a funda-mental component of any {constitution}. . . .Such protection should primarily be directedtowards insulating minorities from any activitythreatening their . . . existence. . . . States need toalso be mandated to actively foster and protect

the linguistic, cultural and educational rights ofminorities. (Tiruchelvam 1999: 33; emphasisadded)

Contending that ‘the Westminster model hascontributed to an adversarial form of democ-racy’, Tiruchelvam advocated a constitutionalsystem inspired by what political science calls‘consociationalism’, which he says emphasizescooperation and consensus. ‘Where there is anemphasis on compromise through pluralitiesof decision making, notions of majority andminority become less signi�cant’ (p. 21).

Consociationalism – a political arrangementwhich can be characterized as enabling aminority to veto decisions of a majority, or thedistinct to participate in each other – might,perhaps should, provide the inspiration forrestructuring the Sri Lankan state. Indeed, notonly have others argued for it before Tiruchel-vam (Uyangoda 1993); one might even readAdorno as implying it. That is the strength ofTiruchelvam’s argument – in not being afraidof the radically new. Its limitation is that, whilehe refuses to admit the right of majority todominate, while he insists that minority mustnot submit, he still thinks in terms of themajority–minority distinction; he merely wantsto make it ‘less signi�cant’. He cannot con-ceive of the social outside these terms: in hisvision, minority will always remain minor,always require protection. The problem here isthat the conceptualization of a sociopoliticalcondition as requiring protection is to concedethat it is powerless, secondary, unequal.

In other words, any acceptance of themajority–minority distinction is a concession –in form if not in substance – to the Sinhalanationalist argument that the minority, againby de�nition, cannot aspire to equality. That isto say, Tiruchelvam’s position lacks a strongtheoretical ground from which to respond toarguments like those of De Silva and Hen-nanayake because it accepts their division ofthe Sri Lankan social into major and minorgroups; it differs only in the signi�cance itattaches to them. This position also cannotrebut Sinhala nationalism in its crudest expres-sion. Herewith the wisdom of one B. Guner-atne, in a letter to the editor of The SundayLeader. Speaking of the politics of the MuslimCongress, Guneratne declared: it has ‘theaudacity to claim equal rights {for Muslims}when they are in a minority’.4 Guneratne was


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4 The Sunday Leader, 2nd January 2000.

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addressing the Muslim political party, but hismessage has a wider resonance: minoritiesmust know their place; they are not equal (tothe majority); to contend that they are is to beaudacious, arrogant and insolent.

Guneratne is absolutely certain about themeaning of minority. Tiruchelvam, in con-trast, is not; he would dissent, and contest itssigni�cance (albeit after conceding its differ-ence from majority). But my larger point isthat to speak to Sri Lanka is to familiarizeoneself with the likes of Guneratne – whomay never appear on the worldwide web; todo the hard work of learning about thisdebate; to know the concerns of the positionsI have represented here through the argu-ments of Balasingham, De Silva, Hen-nanayake and Tiruchelvam – positions whichby no means exhaust the debate – and then toaddress them. To learn and respond to theirquestions, and where they come from; tounderstand the terms, their genealogy and thestakes involved. To notice, for instance, thatthe contentions of De Silva, made on thegrounds of democracy, justify the oppressionof the minorities. Which will lead the‘speaker’ to ask, as a matter of some urgency:Is this based on a misapprehension of democ-racy? Surely democracy, predicated as it isupon equality, cannot enable oppression? Ifso, she will also have to wonder why liberal-ism has been unable to offer a persuasivecritique of De Silva’s position – and the con-sequences thereof for peace. That is to say, shemust be attentive to the stakes of argumentscarefully, responsibly; to take sides unambigu-ously but not dogmatically or imperially orwithout reservation. In such a mode of under-standing, the intervener – who reads, ratherthan leads – conceives of herself – or, to beprecise, her arguments – not as subject but asobject, as a part of a debate or network; shedoes not see herself as standing imperially

outside it and representing it to others. Herproject is not only to understand but also tointervene; to acknowledge the poststructural-ist truism that knowledge is always producedwithin a �eld of power. This, in the contem-porary conjuncture, is how to think Sri Lankaas subject (of knowledge); to do which is toalso acknowledge that it is object (of inter-vention). So thinking, or doing, will not leadto the collapse, Berlin Wall-style, of euro-centrism. But, I suggest, doing so addressesone of the cardinal tasks facing postcolonial-ity: not to make the object subject, but to takethe study of place outside the contours ofanthropology (and cartography); to, as I said,�nish the critique of that discipline.

From which it follows that Sri Lanka, thecountry, is to be understood as this debate:between Tamil and Sinhala nationalism,liberalism and the left; and containing a multi-plicity of other positions. To put this differ-ently: as place, Sri Lanka is best understood asa text in the strict Barthesian sense. Indeed, theabove might be clari�ed by turning to Barthesand his conceptualization of text as a ‘produc-tivity’, as the meeting place of reader andwritten. Sri Lanka, to the post-empiricist, is areading; it emerges when reader (Ismail)responds to written (De Silva, Hennanayake,Jeganathan, Scott, Tiruchelvam). From whichit follows that, since De Silva and others arealso readers, they too will produce thecountry; thus no single Sri Lanka can, by de�-nition, succeed in capturing or encompassingthe in�nitude of its signi�cance; thus no twoSri Lankas are likely to coincide, though somewill certainly overlap. This relation, betweenreader and written, is in one sense reciprocal:to read textually is to deny the written auth-ority, primacy or priority over the reader. Thisis why Sri Lanka, as productivity, can bethought of as subject. But this is not to assertthat the Sri Lankan as reader and the reader as


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Sri Lankan can easily avoid the power of thewritten, of the written-before. Interrupting theproject of De Silva and Guneratne inevitablytakes the postcolonial Sri Lankan reader(‘readers are travellers: they move across landsbelonging to someone else’, de Certeau mightremind us here) to the founding texts ofmodern democracy – Madison, Mill, de Toc-queville – in relation to which she is inevitablyobject, even while she makes those texts herobject. For John Stuart Mill (1991) will alwaysremind her – always, that is, as long as ourcurrent conjuncture can be termed post-colonial – that she is indeed post, that shecomes after; that democracy is not native, butsomething the native must aspire to, musteducate herself into before being able topractise.

Consequently, those who intervene in thedebate called Sri Lanka do not necessarily haveto inhabit its territory physically – thoughmost of them do; or only to publish in SriLanka – though, again, most of them do. (Itfollows from this that this piece speaks to SriLanka from Sri Lanka; from the left.) Whatcharacterizes contributions to this debate isthat they seek to shift its terms in favour of oneor another (Sri Lankan) political position, andthat they do not seek to inform the west aboutthe country. Daniel is an exemplary instance ofthe latter; as can be seen in his introduction toCharred Lullabies:

I took upon myself the responsibility of telling awider world stories {of victims of 1983} that theytold me . . . only because they believed there wasa wider world that cared about the differencebetween good and evil. The charge . . . alsobetrays these victims’ despair over their ownnarrow world that has lost its capacity to tell thedifference between good and evil and their hopein a wider world that has not. (Daniel 1996: 5;emphasis added)

This is a strange alibi for anthropology (oranthropography): it is the native informantthat demands it, with Daniel himself no morethan its faithful servant, not very differentfrom that recorder. But, of course, the inform-ant here, too, is objecti�ed, written about, rep-resented, theorized – to the west, the only placethat counts. Sri Lanka is not spoken to; thepassage implies – the attempt to distance theanthropologist from this position is uncon-vincing, since he identi�es with his informants– that doing so would be purposeless. Thecountry is narrow, cramped, con�ned; it haslost the capacity to tell right from wrong.

Unlike Daniel (and Tambiah), what must benoticed about those who ‘speak to’ Sri Lankais that the terms culture and violence do notsaturate their analyses. This is not to say thattheir positions betray an indifference to thebombs, bullets and burials; rather, that thatargument, or debate, turns around differentcategories. To Sinhala nationalism, democracyenables, authorizes and justi�es majority hege-mony over the minorities. Tamil nationalismresists the very idea of being minoritized – butonly from another majoritarian position. Bothnationalisms, therefore, share a structuralsimilarity: they hold that majority has the rightto dominate; the difference lies in that Tamilseparatism sees itself as major and not minor.Liberalism, found here in classic compromisemode, tries to negotiate a middle position;and, inevitably, fails – because it, too, seessocial groups as ultimately describable, if notde�nable, by number. The left, I contend, mustthink radically, must not be afraid to think interms of something that has never yet existed,in its response to this impasse. But it is centralto my argument to notice now that thedebate I term ‘Sri Lankan’ does not turnaround culture or violence, but the termsnation, majority, minority and democracy.(Indeed, the debate could be summarily


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caricatured as pivoting around the signi�cance– value – of one word: majority.) To speak tothe question of peace in Sri Lanka in thecurrent conjuncture is to address their relation.

IV

This is not the venue for such an examination;but it must be mentioned here that the recentwork of David Scott has been door-openingin this regard. He rejects De Silva and theSinhala nationalist argument, their con-clusions and, most crucially, their intellectualbases because ‘this seeming democratic pri-ority of abstract number masks the operationsof an ethnic dominance’. He does not �nd theliberal critique of this position enabling either– because it cannot think outside number, andbecause, he argues, not just powerfully butpersuasively, liberalism can only ‘protect’ thecultural rights of minorities, and thus can ‘onlybe negative; it cannot offer the prospect of apositive re-imagining of the ground of politicalpossibilities in contemporary Sri Lanka’ (Scott1999: 176). To Scott, this constitutes ‘a funda-mental indictment of the liberal project assuch’ (p. 163). His alternative – a version ofcommunitarianism – I cannot discuss here. Hiscritique of liberalism, indeed of democracyitself, as enabling the subordination of minor-ity by majority, is daring; and I want, by wayof concluding this article, simply to stand by it.To insist that it is time the question of democ-racy is put back on the table. To urge that weask, as a matter of some gravity, whether it cancontinue to be the de�nition of our dreams anddesires.

Scott’s arguments are based upon readingcontemporary political theorists (Kymlicka,Rawls) whom he contends, since they ulti-mately understand the social as constituted byindividuals, do not address the minority ques-

tion in any enabling way. Stepping back, revis-iting the earliest modern advocates of democ-racy, makes the case against it even easier toestablish. To de Tocqueville, followingMadison, the ‘absolute sovereignty of the willof the majority is the essence of democraticgovernment’ (de Tocqueville 1988: 246). Towhich statement he adds: ‘The moral authorityof the majority is also founded on the principlethat the interest of the greatest number shouldbe preferred to that of those who are fewer’(p. 247). Majority rule – or signi�cance innumber – is not just the essence of democracy,but moral; the interest of majority has greatervalue than that of minority; such, so to speak,is the magnitude of its meaningfulness.Kingsley De Silva, one begins to suspect, worry,scratch one’s head, maybe correct.

Citing de Tocqueville, of course, does notprove anything. But it might suggest, I hope,that placing democracy under scrutiny is also– and once again – in order, and not only forthose interested in the minority question orthat of peace in Sri Lanka. If De Silva is right,if democracy enables the ‘tyranny’ of Sinhalanationalism – and if, as Lani Guinier (1994)has persuasively demonstrated in the African-American context, it enables the tyranny of thewhite American majority in the United States –then we must be prepared, at the very least, tore-examine it. Among others, this will involverereading Lenin – not the vanguardist, but theadvocate of the commune as a criticism of therepresentative principle; if we do so, we couldalso recollect Lenin’s contention that democ-racy enables class rule. If we shift our attentionto Madison in The Federalist Papers we will�nd Lenin echoed – this time, incrediblyenough, as a part of the case for the defence.We might then be shocked to discover that rep-resentative democracy, to Madison andcompany, is a good thing because it enables themost effective protection of property. Indeed,


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having read them – these very dead, very live,very white, men – I feel compelled to tell awider world that their arguments are not madeon the grounds that representation (proxy)will establish an organic bind between rulerand ruled, as we might be inclined to believe,but, astonishingly enough, a distance.Madison prompts the postcolonial – who isalmost by de�nition suspicious of represen-tation – to wonder whether democracy worksby passing a metaphor, or relation of substitu-tion (representatives take the place of thepeople) for a metonym, or relation of continu-ity (the people and their representatives areone).

Two �nal thoughts: if the above holds, ifScott resonates with Guinier, if these two textsare ‘connected’ (Gupta and Ferguson 1997),then Sri Lanka is not usefully conceived as aproblem for a theory of difference; and ifdemocracy enables – or at the very least cannotprevent – the domination of minority bymajority, then surely the postcolonial leftistmust be prepared to consider the possibility,repeat consider the possibility, preparatory tothe conceptualization of modes of being-in-common, of something that has never yetexisted, that democracy, too, must be put in itsplace: which might not turn out to be thatalways already over�owing trashcan ofhistory, but that ultimate shrine to objecti�ca-tion and the proper, �nal resting place ofanthropology – the museum.

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Documents

SPEAKING TO SRI LANKA