ABSTRACT
War is physically more brutal than colonialism. The way the Sri Lankan separatist war (1983-2009) was perceived, conceived, and executed by politicians and journalists constructed a totalizing view of Sri Lanka defined by two opposing ethnic groups and an “ethnic conflict” between them. The descriptions and analyses of the war as represented in political statements, newspaper reports, and scholarly work were built around Tamil-Sinhala, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE)– government forces, and Colombo-Jaffna binary oppositions. This is partly due to the lack of cognitive tools that help pinpoint the actors or actor-groups and partly deliberate politics. Nonetheless, this discourse privileged the war and the warring parties as the agents capable of making peace. This chapter focuses on (third) spaces between and outside these dualities. It attempts to bring to light how ordinary people, subjects of the war-zone, lived and constructed their own spaces. The chapter contextualizes what it perceives as a separatist-sovereignist war within postcolonial state-making. It is one among many processes through which the postcolonial nation-state, particularly the positions of ethnic groups within it, is socially and spatially restructured. Sri Lanka has radically transformed since the 1970s from a state largely defined by its colonial past to a nation-state of its “own” creation, but influenced by colonial and “traditional” pasts and global and regional processes. The trope of the “ethnic conflict” reifies the nation with regard to ethnicity, making the ethnicity-based classification of people common sense. This leads to the “unmixing” of mixed and hybrid populations into Sinhalese and Tamil (see Rajasingham-Senanayake 2002). This classification also marginalizes other people, groups and politics, including income, ethnic, religion, gender, and class-based politics that the signs of “ethnic” and Sinhala-Tamil fail to register. This chapter draws attention to other narratives and their corresponding spaces that lie beyond and within the interstices of this hegemonic ethnic duality.
