The origin of the problem

“The Dutch wanted a history according to which the Sinhala king in Kandy was not the ruler of the entire country. Their agent in Jaffna got the help of the Vellalas and one of them came out with a "history" of Tamils in Sri Lanka going back to the Vijaya period. The book called Yalpana Vaipava Malai was the "history book" that was the precursor to Devanampiya Theesam stories and later so called traditional homeland concept.”
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by Prof. Nalin de Silva

(March 12, Washington, Sri Lanka Guardian) As we said last week the so-called national problem cannot be solved as we have not formulated the problem correctly. The problem, whatever it may be called, began in the eighteenth century with the Dutch importing agricultural labourers from South India for work in their tobacco cultivation. These people found "home" not only in Jaffna but in places such as Natal in South Africa. They were called Vellalas in Jaffna as well as in Natal and were agricultural labourers as shown by the records in Natal. Though there were some Tamils in the Arya Chakravarthi kingdom in Jaffna the Tamil Vellalas imported from India soon became the majority bypassing not only the Tamils who were living in Jaffna after the twelfth century but the Sinhalas and the Malayalam speaking Velakkaras who had been living there.

The Vellalas though were not happy with Jaffna and went back to their places of origin in India after the harvest. In 1707 the Dutch in order to prevent this exodus codified the Thesavalamai Law, which happens to be a Muslim Law in South India as shown by late Mr. Gamini Iriyagolle, which encouraged the Vellalas to stay or to keep their land among the relatives. However those who remained in Jaffna soon formed into a so called high cast relegating the inhabitants who were there into the so called low casts. As we mentioned last week the imported agricultural labourers became the farmers, under the auspicious of the Dutch while the farmers (govias) who were there became low cast "koviars".

The Dutch were interested in occupying the land that was given on lease by the Sinhala king living in Kandy or Mahanuwara under the treaty of 1689. It has to be emphasized that the Vadugas were Sinhala kings. The king would have belonged to the Vaduga clan that lived originally in Telugu speaking Andhra Pradesh before coming to Sri Lanka through matrimonial links from Madurai. They were referred to as Malabars and spoke Telugu or a language that was close to Telugu but probably with a flavor of Tamil. The language spoken by the Vadugas was referred to by the Sinhalas as Andara Demala (or Andhra Demala as pronounced by the ordinary Sinhalas who had no liking for the mahaprana) that describes the essential characteristics of the language. Though the king belonged to the Vaduga clan he was the king of the Sinhalas and he reined over the Sinhala nation state that was established by the king Pandukabhaya. There may be pundits who would like to think that nation states were formed for the first time in Europe but what happened during the period of the king Pandukabhaya was not precedential in the history and I would like to come back to this point sometime later.

What I am interested here is to show that a kingdom is not determined by the ethnicity or the religion or the cast of the king or the queen but by the character of the kingdom. The Sinhala kingdom did not change in character after it was established by King Pandukabhaya though there were kings from Maurya and Lambhakarna clans (Vanshas) who ruled the country. They were all referred to as Sinhala kings and there is no reason why the Vaduga kings should not be called Sinhala kings though the Vadugas belonged to a different clan. The English throne is referred to as such irrespective of the ethnicity of the king or the queen. Tudor, Stuart and Hanover kings have ruled or pretended to rule the English (British) kingdom but the throne continued to be referred to as the English throne. Some Pundits keep on repeating that Vaduga kings ruled over a Tamil kingdom even after pointing out these facts, as either they do not have the capacity to learn or they want to mislead the entire world with the connivance of the British who should be more familiar with the origins of Ms. Elizabeth Windsor and Mr. Philip Mountbatten, who currently pretend to rule Britain. The Sinhala nation state was different from the kingdoms in Dambadiva or Bharat which could be called clannish states or vanshika rajya. We refer to Chera, Pallava, Chola, Maurya, Pallawa, Kosala, Liccavi states or kingdoms but not to Tamil state or any other state based on ethnicity. It is nothing but the arrogance of some Tamils and the ignorance of some Sinhalas (so called open minded balanced gang often funded by the NGOs and INGOs who want to pretend that they are intellectuals) that is revealed when they refer to the Vaduga kings as Tamil kings.

The Dutch wanted a history according to which the Sinhala king in Kandy was not the ruler of the entire country. Their agent in Jaffna got the help of the Vellalas and one of them came out with a "history" of Tamils in Sri Lanka going back to the Vijaya period. The book called Yalpana Vaipava Malai was the "history book" that was the precursor to Devanampiya Theesam stories and later so called traditional homeland concept. It is none other than Prof. Karthigesu Indrapala who described the above mentioned book as mere poetry without any historical truth. However, the Jaffna Vellalas have been armed with this type of history from the beginning and behaved as if there were two nations (or two ethnic groups in two different areas) in the country. To add fuel to this speculation the Dutch divided the maritime provinces under their control (including the areas leased out to them by the Sinhala king) into six administrative districts and three judicial districts along the coast of Sri Lanka. It is ironical that it is one of the three administrative districts and not even an administrative district, expanded into the interiors of the country that was identified by the Tamils as their homeland.

By the time Cleghorn arrived in Colombo the Vellalas had the upper hand not only in Jaffna but in Colombo as well. To Cleghorn there were two ethnic groups (nations) in the island with distinct identities in two different areas. Though it has been proved that the so called Cleghorn minute was factually incorrect the Tamil Vellalas clung to it to "prove" that there were two kingdoms with definite areas demarcated.

The British divide and rule policy not only favoured the minorities against the majorities in the colonies but used the "minorities" against the majorities to their advantage, so that they could first weaken if not destroy the cultures of the majorities and spread and establish the hegemony of the western Judaic Christian culture . In Sri Lanka in order to do that the British are still using the Tamil and Muslim cultures though in essence they are against those cultures. The westerners though against the Muslim culture would support the ethnic Albanian Muslims in Serbia and help them to form a separate state against the Greek Orthodox Serbians. Obama’s Muslim connections, not to mention his sister’s Buddhist connections, are bound to come up and it is clear that he has support in the caucuses where the party organizers are dominant but not in the primaries where the more "down to earth" (meaning down to American soil) Democratic Americans could be found. The Republicans supporters and the so called "independents" would be even more "down to earth" and Obama would have an uphill task in the coming months.

It is clear that the British wanted to promote Ponnambalam Ramanathan as the leading citizen of the country with his brother Arunachalam as the second in command. The Tamil leaders were encouraged to believe that they were the "heir to the throne" and the Sinhalas whose indigenous leaders had been destroyed in the 1817-18 and 1848 freedom struggles against the British were supplied with subservient leaders. The Tamil Vellala elite who had dreams of becoming the rulers of the country following their success in Jaffna under both Dutch and British, after the British, never wanted to give the due share to the Sinhalas. The origin of the problem lies there and not in the Citizenship Act or the Official Language Act.

- Sri Lanka Guardian