ABSTRACT
The Sri Lanka Tamils are the descendants of racially "Dravidian" migrants from south India. They are predominantly Saivite Hindus, and speakers of the Tamil tongue of the Dravidian family, so widely spoken in the south Indian state of Tamil Nadu. Far from isolated in precolonial times, the Tamil and Sinhalese peoples of Sri Lanka were in sufficiently close communication to have deeply influenced the sentence structure of each other's languages, the minutiae of their strikingly similar kinship classification systems, the structure and organization of their caste systems, and the details of village rituals. Perhaps the crudest irony of the Sri Lanka conflict is that, at the hands of Sinhalese hegemony, Sri Lankan Tamils are well on the way to transforming their ethnic identity so that it mirrors the modem Sinhala identity in its equation of race, religion, language, and territory. The chapter also presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in this book.
