33 – Beyond the Island: The Categorization of Ethnicity in Colonial Lanka in the Indian Ocean Context
For much of the 20th century, ethnic conflict has shaped the history of Lanka, finally resulting in the civil war of 1983-2009. Central to these conflicts was the recognition and political exploitation of several officially recognized ethnic categories, especially those of the ‘Sinhalese’, ‘Sri Lankan Tamils’, and ‘Sri Lankan Moors’. The genealogy of these categories has often been traced back to the British colonial period, when political representation became linked to recognition of the ‘racial’ difference of a specific group. Deconstructing such colonial categories and the tensions produced by their reification has been an important contribution of scholarship against the often-violent effects of ethnic categorization in Lanka. Yet the history of ethnic categorization and ethnogenesis on the island cannot simply be reduced to a moment of colonial restructuring of social relations. The genealogies of the various categories that went into the making of the officially recognized ethnic groups of Sri Lanka can be traced deeper into the past and far beyond the island’s shores. This panel aims at bringing together scholars studying ethnic categorization in Lanka in the longue durée across different European empires – Portuguese, Dutch, British – and local polities, connecting ethnic categories and imaginaires with specific administrative practices, labor and property regimes, gender relations, or experiences of violence. We particularly invite contributions that work against the ‘islanding’ (Sykes 2018) of Lankan history by considering the island’s location in the wider Indian Ocean world.
