The Politics of English in Sri Lanka: Perspectives from Postcolonial Anglophone
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The Politics of English in Sri Lanka: Perspectives from Postcolonial Anglophone Literature Gazala Anver A thesis submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts (Research) Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences The University of Sydney 2019 Statement of Originality This is to certify that to the best of my knowledge the content of this thesis is my own work and has not been submitted for any degree or other purpose. I certify that the intellectual content of this thesis is the product of my own work and that all sources and assistance received in preparing this thesis have been acknowledged. Gazala Anver 30 June 2019 i The Politics of English in Sri Lanka: Perspectives from Postcolonial Anglophone Literature Abstract ............................................................................................................................................... ii Acknowledgements ........................................................................................................................... iv Introduction ........................................................................................................................................ 1 Part I – Postcolonial Literary Criticism and the English language ................................................ 3 Part II – English and the Language Politics of Sri Lanka ............................................................. 11 Phase One: Cementing the Power of English ............................................................................ 12 Phase Two: The Divisive ‘Link’ ................................................................................................. 24 Using Literature to Analyse Language ...................................................................................... 33 Chapter One ..................................................................................................................................... 36 Cricket, Ethno-Nationalism and the Language of Power in Shehan Karunatilaka’s Chinaman: The Legend of Pradeep Mathew ....................................................................................................... 36 Part I – The Master’s Tools: Appropriated .................................................................................... 38 No Longer “Trans-ethnic” ......................................................................................................... 42 Part II – The Chinaman Dreams of Cricket ................................................................................... 47 The Language of Power in Cricket ............................................................................................ 52 Cricket as an ethno-racial battlefield ........................................................................................ 57 A Man’s Game ............................................................................................................................ 64 Chapter Two ..................................................................................................................................... 71 “False Maps”: The Rupture of Essentialist Identities in Michael Ondaatje’s Running in the Family ................................................................................................................................................ 71 Part I – “Not Really One of Us” ................................................................................................... 72 Part II – Mapping Identity ............................................................................................................. 84 Mapping the Past ....................................................................................................................... 94 Conclusion ...................................................................................................................................... 105 Notes ................................................................................................................................................ 108 Works Cited .................................................................................................................................... 109 ii Abstract Anglophone literature by writers from former British colonies has been viewed by literary critics as an act of writing back to the colonial centre. Such a view presents these writers as located in the margins, where they re-appropriate and re-fashion the language of the coloniser in service of those it once oppressed, to paraphrase Salman Rushdie and Ashcroft et al. However, in framing postcolonial Anglophone literature within this centre-periphery binary, this mode of reading presents the writer as resisting the colonial metropole but fails to address the status of English in relation to racial, ethno-linguistic and class conflicts in postcolonial countries like Sri Lanka. English in Sri Lanka is constitutionally recognised as a “link language” under the presumption that it mitigates linguistic conflicts that have erupted between the country’s various ethnic groups, notably between the Sinhalese and Tamils. This contributes to English functioning as a “vanishing mediator”, as Aamir Mufti calls it, where in acting as a mediator it assumes an aura of transparency which obscures its function as a vehicle for generating “elite cultural capital” in Sarah Brouillette’s words. Departing from the centre-periphery model, this thesis examines two Sri Lankan Anglophone literary texts, Shehan Karunatilaka’s Chinaman (2010) and Michael Ondaatje’s Running in the Family (1982) to understand the status of English in relation to the politics of ethnicity, race, class and language in Sri Lanka. A novel about cricket, I read Karunatilaka’s depiction of the imperial cultural product, which has been appropriated by the former colony, as an analogy for the English language, one that allows for an interrogation of the assumptions that English and cricket can unite and “link” the nation amidst competing Sinhala-Tamil nationalisms. An exploration of his Anglophone Burgher cultural heritage, Ondaatje’s text brings to the fore the complicity of this ethnically privileged minority subject, which I read as challenging the assumptions about ethnicity, race and language boundaries in Sri Lanka. My analyses of these texts interrogate the assumptions of “link language” implied in the country’s constitution, while revealing that English in Sri Lanka both exposes the fault lines of Sri Lankan society while disrupting notions iii of ethno-linguistic purity that have come to define the Sinhala-Tamil conflict and post-colonial race relations in the country. iv Acknowledgements My thanks to Mr. Nimal Premasiri, librarian at the Parliament of Sri Lanka Library, for helping me source parliamentary debates relevant to this thesis. Special thanks are also due to Sidra Zaheer, Maryam Azwer, Lauren Webber, Ryland Engels and Bingying Deng. I owe a debt of gratitude to my supervisor, Dr. Fiona Lee, who was unfailingly constructive, patient and encouraging every step of the journey. Without her guidance, this thesis and my own personal development would perhaps have never taken place. Special thanks also to my auxiliary supervisor, Dr. Isabelle Hesse. I also wish to thank my family, and especially Praveen, who never stopped believing and to whom I dedicate this work. Anver 1 Introduction In an article published in The Times in 1982, Salman Rushdie appropriates a phrase from the sci-fi movie Star Wars Chapter V: Empire Strikes Back, a phrase which then became popularly associated with postcolonial Anglophone literature. In Star Wars, the Empire—Darth Vader et al.— hatches a sinister plot to strike back at a band of rebels fighting for freedom from the tyranny of the Empire. In Rushdie’s appropriation, the Empire “writes back” to the former colonial metropole. This act of writing back, he states, takes place in an English language scourged of its “old imperial attitudes . [that] still lie, just below the surface, in British culture and even in ‘English’ English”. The former “instrument of subservience”, i.e. the English language, has now become “a weapon of liberation” and this can be seen in the appropriation of the language by those who are “carving out large territories within the language for themselves”. For Rushdie, these writers are reshaping and reconfiguring the Empire’s weapon, the English language, thus, striking back “with a vengeance” (8). Rushdie’s optimism is infectious: a few years after the publication of his article a band of theorists published The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures. The clue is in the title, borrowed from Rushdie. It refers to a literary rebellion written by formerly colonised subjects responding to imperial discourse and rhetoric by “seizing the language of the centre and re-placing it in a discourse fully adapted to the colonized space”, thereby writing back (Ashcroft et al. 37). Often, but not exclusively, this rebellion has taken place in English, but an English re-fashioned to reflect the “peculiar experience” of the writer (Achebe 347). No longer the exclusive provenance of the British, English now has many roots (Rushdie 8). This literature by writers from former British colonies or the peripheries of the Empire is thus engaged in resisting the totalising, hegemonic narrative of the erstwhile centre, while the function of English in this literature is framed in terms of re-appropriating the Empire’s or the centre’s