ABSTRACT
The antecedents of the war that ruptured the country for nearly three decades has its origins in a complex series of social, political and economic events that reach back into its colonial past. Among researchers seeking to identify the root causes of the conflict in Sri Lanka, emphasis has been located across three central domains: the effects of colonialism, the questioning of supposed ancient historical truths, and modernist preoccupations that challenge concepts of the nation state. These interlinked factors – colonisation, historical misrepresentation and nation building – have resulted in the creation and identification of an indigenised ‘other’ and contributed to the rise of violent militancy as a response to perceived threats of dissonance. It was only with the arrival of the British that aspects of colonialist culture hitherto unknown in Sri Lanka came to the surface, especially its forms of governance: by the 1830s, the whole of Ceylon was under one administrative structure controlled out of Colombo and London, thereby establishing through its imperialist aims an enterprise that would contribute to the expansion of capitalism (Hobsbawm 1987). It was also the effects of its religious (Bate 2006) and class structures that came to redefine identity along ethnic lines and was a way of defining and differentiating communities.
