SOAS, University of London (The School of Oriental and African Studies)

The slow partitioning of Sri Lanka and India

This paper pluralises the histories of partition in South Asia by considering how the advent of British rule to Sri Lanka – under the authority of the Crown -- reconfigured the island's relationship to the mainland. At the start of the nineteenth century, the British had as their aim the creation of a separate state in the island. This intent seeded the structural and ideological forms which in the long run gave rise to Sri Lanka. The argument here emphasises 'partitioning' rather than 'partition' to highlight that what happened to the island's relationship to the mainland was a process. Partitioning might be conceived of in at least three different senses for this period: the policing of the flows of peoples, the connections of lands and the exchange of commodities. It is important to emphasise that this partitioning was not a radical dislocation of past patterns. There is evidence that what it meant to be 'Sinhala' was hardening in the eighteenth century prior to the arrival of British colonisation and its restatement of 'Sinhala', and British policy with respect to the separable status of the island followed the Dutch. At the start of British rule, and briefly, there was an experiment with Company rule from Madras and so not a knee-jerk reaction against all things Indian. Further, this partitioning certainly did not leave fully formed nations, or even stable colonies. But the sense of partition that is utilised here is not one indicating a singular event or cause, rather the contemporary legacy of British colonisation in South Asia lies in the limited and yet disruptive attempts to reorganise identity, land and trade. In this sense this paper presents an argument about the capacity of the British colonial state and the structural and discursive traditions that were accelerated by it.