Transforming from ‘Ethnicity’ to ‘Common Humanity’: The long march necessary
By Laksiri Fernando-April 25, 2016
"How is an antagonism to be resolved? By making it impossible."- Karl Marx
There is no mystery about ethnicity. Ethnicity is a product of social history and there is no eternity about it. Evolution of a language, sometimes a religion or religious beliefs, living together in a geographical proximity, development of a close customs and traditions, and political formations, if not states, are the forces that create ethnicities or ethnic communities. There are over 5,000 identifiable ethnic communities in the world, but all are not in conflict.
Most of the above attributes or forces have been present in the formation of the Sinhalese, the Tamil sor the Muslims in Sri Lanka. The formation of the Sinhalese ethnicity has primarily been within the confines of the island while the Tamil ethnicity in its formation has been overlapping with the developments in the adjacent subcontinent. Even the Sinhala formation cannot deny the influences of the subcontinent. The key factor in the Muslim ethnic formation undoubtedly is the religion, while migrant communities initiating the process.
None of these communities can claim complete homogeneity, while the differentiations with the others also being relative and overlapping. They all have evolved interacting with each other in their separate as well as combined developments.
Similarities and Differences
It may be true that the Sinhalese formation absorbed or assimilated more from the Tamil formation than the other way round. The reasons perhaps being (1) the predominance of the Tamil culture in the closest areas of the subcontinent, making inroads within the island since historical times, and (2) the Sinhala formation primarily being a ‘hybrid’ nature, based on proto-‘Aryan’ as well as proto-‘Dravidian’ groups in the initial or even latter stages. The ‘Aryan’ influence also cannot be denied in the formation of the vast Tamilian ethnicity/ethnicities in the subcontinent particularly in the case of religion and culture. The ‘Aryan’ and ‘Dravidian’ distinction here is made primarily based on language, however not without other attributes including ‘relatively racial’ characteristics.
