part 1. framing fieldwork in the batticaloa region Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/books/book/chapter-pdf/633593/9780822389187-001.pdf by guest on 30 September 2021 introduction ri Lanka has been a remarkably fertile site for Sresearch in social and cultural anthropology, starting with C. G. and Brenda Z. Seligmann’s colo- nial monograph on the Veddas (1911) and continuing to this day with important ethnographic studies by Edmund R. Leach (1961), Nur Yalman (1967), Stanley J. Tambiah (1958), Gananath Obeyesekere (1967, 1981, 1984), James Brow (1978), Michael Roberts (1982), Bruce Kapferer (1983), Jonathan Spencer (1990a), R. L. Stirrat (1992), E. Valentine Daniel (1996), Rohan Bastin (2002), and many others. Despite “postcolo- nial and postempiricist” objections to anthropology in Sri Lanka (Ismail 2005), my intention was always to produce a book in the same scholarly tradition, a study that would extend understanding of the island’s remarkable sociological complexity through long- term, community-based fieldwork, as well as through critical engagement with anthropological writing on South Asia more generally. Now, however, given the brutal ethnic conflict which has consumed Sri Lan- kan society since the 1980s, this study also helps to illuminate what has become the most critical and divided conflict zone of the Eelam War—the island’s Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/books/book/chapter-pdf/633593/9780822389187-001.pdf by guest on 30 September 2021 Map 1. Sri Lanka and South India eastern coastal region—and the two Tamil-speaking minority communities who have lived there side by side for centuries—the Tamils and the Muslims (or Sri Lankan Moors). The strife between Sri Lanka’s Sinhala-speaking, mainly Buddhist ethnic majority and its Tamil-speaking, mainly Hindu minority was simmering long before the island (formerly known as Ceylon) achieved independence from the British Empire in 1948. Some argue that the antipathy dates back to Tamil invasions from South India one or two millennia ago, while others see it as a modern postcolonial rivalry resulting from British colonial divide-and-rule policies that set up invidious communal distinctions and a system of inequi- table rewards between the Tamils and the Sinhalese (Spencer 1990b; Stanley J. Tambiah 1992: chap. 13; Gunawardana 1995; Dharmadasa 1996; Sabaratnam 2001). Efforts to legislate Sinhala as the national language after 1956 caused the Tamils to riot, and subsequent ethnic quotas for university seats and civil- service jobs engendered deep resentments and insecurities among members of the educated urban Tamil middle class. For the rural, rice-cultivating Tamils and Muslims on the east coast of the island, however, it was above all else the 4 | INTRODUCTION Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/books/book/chapter-pdf/633593/9780822389187-001.pdf by guest on 30 September 2021 Map 2. Sri Lanka massive post-independence resettlement of Sinhala farmers on internation- ally funded irrigation projects adjacent to older Tamil-speaking districts that steadily deepened their sense of marginalization and political disempower- ment. The Accelerated Mahaweli Development Scheme, a massive hydroelec- tric and peasant-resettlement project, launched in 1977, that invoked nation- alist visions of the ancient Sinhala Buddhist hydraulic civilization, further exacerbated Tamil anxieties on a national scale (Kemper 1991; Herring 2001). Although such projects of development-oriented demographic engineering have undeniably enhanced Sri Lanka’s rice production, they have profoundly altered the political map on the northern and eastern sides of the island, a region that is now identified by militant separatists of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTe) as Tamil Eelam, the historic homeland of Sri Lanka’s INTRODUCTION | Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/books/book/chapter-pdf/633593/9780822389187-001.pdf by guest on 30 September 2021 Map 3. Provinces of proposed Tamil Eelam Tamil-speaking peoples (Peebles 1990; Shastri 1990; Manogaran 1994; DeVotta 2004).1 However, it is much easier to grasp Tamil Eelam as a nationalist abstraction than as a concrete geographical reality, stretched as it is around a relatively thin arc of Sri Lanka’s northern and eastern coastline (map 3). While the densely populated Jaffna Peninsula and the adjacent districts of the Vanni, the north- ernmost part of the island’s Dry Zone, remain overwhelmingly Tamil in popu- lation and culture, and thus the cynosure of any future Tamil homeland, the culturally Balkanized eastern coastal regions south of Trincomalee, including the fertile, lagoon-laced agricultural districts of Batticaloa and Ampara, are up for grabs in Sri Lanka’s ethnic tug-of-war. Jaffna will always remain a monocul- tural Tamil bastion, but the east coast is a site of complex multicultural contes- tation and deep ethnic division. One of the reasons is that Sinhala resettlement 6 | INTRODUCTION Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/books/book/chapter-pdf/633593/9780822389187-001.pdf by guest on 30 September 2021 and irrigation schemes here have steadily impinged on older, Tamil-speaking Hindu and Muslim villages, sometimes exercising an upstream advantage in irrigation and often radically altering electoral demographics at the district level. The other reason is that the eastern coastal belt itself is interspersed with two distinct, rivalrous, but historically interlinked ethnic communities, both of them Tamil-speaking minorities within the larger Sri Lankan polity. On top of all this, the 26 December 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami struck the east coast of the island with unsurpassed ferocity, resulting in massive destruc- tion and the loss of over 13,000 Tamil and Muslim lives—43 percent of Sri Lanka’s tsunami death toll—in Batticaloa and Ampara Districts alone (map 4). In many beachfront towns and villages the destruction was complete, leaving intact only deeply embedded concrete well-casings and resilient coconut trees, while settlements located only a short distance inland from the beach survived unscathed. Research being undertaken as this book goes to press may reveal whether the distinctive features of regional culture on the east coast, such as matrilineal dowry and matrilocal household structure, have helped or hin- dered the post-tsunami recovery process (McGilvray 2006).2 However, there can be little doubt that the grassroots competition between Tamil and Muslim communities for post-tsunami relief resources and political favors will fur- ther exacerbate their preexisting ethnic tensions and rivalries. It is these prior sources of history and cultural identity, and the shared patterns of caste and matrilineal social structure, that I seek to explore. The easT: sri Lanka’s Ethnic crucibLe A brief review of Sri Lanka’s majority and minority communities will help to place the Tamils and Muslims of the east coast in political perspective. Three- quarters (74 percent) of the island’s population—those who live in the lushly tropical central and southwestern regions—identify themselves as Sinhalas (people of the lion, sinha), speak Sinhala (an Indo-European language with north Indian roots), and are predominantly Theravada Buddhist in religion. Since independence, the two major political parties—the United National Party (uNp) and the Sri Lanka Freedom Party (sLFp)—have represented this Sinhalese majority voting bloc, although some minority candidates (especially Muslims) have also been elected on a mainstream party ticket. The largest ethnic minority in Sri Lanka are the Tamils (18 percent), whose language belongs to the Dravidian family of South India, and who are them- selves divided along several historical and geographical lines. The historically oldest group is designated as Sri Lankan Tamils (12 percent), who have full INTRODUCTION | Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/books/book/chapter-pdf/633593/9780822389187-001.pdf by guest on 30 September 2021 Map 4. Tsunami deaths in Sri Lanka by district citizenship and live mainly in the northern and eastern regions, as well as re- siding as professionals (and, more recently, as civil-war refugees and tsunami victims) in major urban centers in the south, such as Colombo and Kandy. Members of a smaller Tamil group, variously known as Indian Tamils, Estate Tamils, or Upcountry Tamils, account for 6 percent of the island’s popula- tion. They are the descendants of Tamil laborers imported from Tamilnadu by British planters in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth to work on 8 | INTRODUCTION Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/books/book/chapter-pdf/633593/9780822389187-001.pdf by guest on 30 September 2021 tea estates in the central Kandyan Hills, and until recent decades they were deprived of Sri Lankan citizenship (Hollup 1994; Bass 2001; Peebles 2001). The Muslims, or Sri Lankan Moors, who constitute 7 percent of the population, are the third-largest minority group in Sri Lanka. Although they speak Tamil (and in some cases are bilingual in Sinhala), they do not accept the designation “Muslim Tamil,” which is the common term for Muslims in Tamilnadu. The acknowledged center of Sri Lankan Tamil literary culture and educa- tion has always been the arid but densely populated Jaffna Peninsula in the far north of the island, seat of a late medieval Tamil kingdom that was con- quered by the Portuguese in 1619. Under Portuguese, Dutch, and finally British colonial rule, Jaffna developed some of the earliest western educational in- stitutions on