Preliminary Considerations for a Speculative Critique of Sinhala Nationalism
VANGEESA SUMANASEKARA on 06/20/2016
The name Nalin de Silva helps us to determine a certain ambiguity in – what remains of – the Sri Lankan academic discourse. On the one hand, he is often identified as a figure of undisputed significance in the rise of contemporary Sinahala nationalism, and, in this regard, he is considered as an important point of reference in any attempt to understand the developments of Southern nationalist discourse and its impact on the political fate of our collective life. On the other hand, there is very little direct acknowledgement of the necessity of confronting his works in order to identify the problems and limits of the Idea of the Nation propagated by contemporary Sinhala Nationalism. It is as if there is a silent agreement that criticizing the works of Nalin de Silva is not worth the effort of a serious academic labour – it is always pushed aside as the duty of the Other. In this respect, it can be taken as an exemplary form of what Robert Pfaller calls interpassivity, as a dominant mode of the way desire functions in contemporary societies[i]: duty of carrying the difficult engagement with a somewhat embarrassing issue is always transferred to the Other so that one can continue to go on living in his/her comfort zones believing that the Other would somehow do the necessary dirty work. Let me be that Other.
The basic strategy of my investigation is the following. Instead of focusing on the particular arguments raised by Nalin de Silva, apropos a wide array of issues, ranging from the Tamil nationalism to modern science, I will take out what I consider to be the core insight of de Silva’s thinking which is fully elaborated in his influential 1985 work “මගේ ලෝකය” (“My World”). It is this crucial argument, I contest, that lies as the ultimate backdrop of de Silva’s thinking with regard to all the other issues from politics to philosophy of science. I will first place this argument in a broader historical context and briefly analyze the consequences of this historicity. Then I will expose a blind-spot in de Silva’s reasoning that had gone unnoticed heretofore by the author as well as his critics, but something that matches perfectly with the historical consequences of his approach that I have discussed in the preceding section. In the process, I shall attempt to present a persuasive case for the need to renew and reconsider the terms of our critical thinking as well as the conceptual apparatuses of our political analyses.
Let us begin by focusing on a passage by de Silva where one can clearly discern the underlying logic of his thinking and also see why it can be considered as the worst kind of fundamentalist backlash not worthy of critical responses:
“Every set of ideas [මතවාදයක්] is political in the last instance. Buddhism does not fall into that category because it is not a set of ideas. Sinhala Buddhism, however, became a set of ideas from the time of King Dewanampiya Tissa. If not for this transformation, Buddhism, just as it did in India, may have disappeared from this country and thereby would have disappeared from the world. It is an active force in politics of this country today. Every religion is political by virtue of that fact that it is a set of ideas. Catholic and Christian churches as well as Islamic mosques, thereby, become political institutions.”[ii]
