ABSTRACT
This chapter deals with a very significant phase in the long-drawn out encounter between Sri Lanka's once powerful Christian minority and its Buddhist majority. The Buddhist activists, bhikkhus as well as laymen, were unwilling to countenance the continuance of Christian privilege, and were intent on effecting a further substantial reduction of the, if not their total eradication. The Buddhists' campaign was spearheaded in the 1940s by the bhikkhus of the Vidyalankara pirivena, which at that time became the centre of an unusual religious ferment: unorthodox and essentially political in outlook, anti-colonial, and socialist if not Marxist. Language and Buddhist religion were the major issues in the election, and the main demands from the Sinhalese Buddhist interests were the adoption of Sinhala as the sole official language and the 'restoration of the rightful status' of Buddhism. Buddhist institutional reform was an altogether more difficult proposition.
