ABSTRACT
In the early 1920s, Christian groups on the island began, at last, to confront the implications of the changes brought about by the rise of nationalism and the renewed opposition to the prominence of Sri Lanka's powerful Christian minority in the island's public life. The minorities, and in particular the Tamils of Sri Lanka, refused to endorse the assumption that Sinhalese nationalism was interchangeable with the larger Sri Lanka nationalism. Linguistic nationalism had an appeal which cut across class interests, and it evoked as deep a response from the Sinhalese working class as it did from the peasantry and the Sinhalese-educated elite. Thus linguistic nationalism has exalted the state, contributed powerfully to state control over the dominant sectors of the economy, and acted as a brake on all attempts to deviate from the excessively centralised structure inherited from the British.
