The history debate: Which history?

IT took almost four decades and tens of thousands of deaths for Sri Lanka to adopt a language policy matching national and international realities.

- BY TISARANEE GUNASEKARA

Sinhala and Tamil are official languages, English the link language. There's political and societal consensus that the Sinhala Only policy of 1956, which relegated Tamil to secondary status and turned English into the preserve of a privileged few, was a pivotal error.

Only a miniscule minority on the Sinhala-Buddhist extremist fringe oppose this broad consensus. Yet it is their version of history that is being taught to Lankan students as History in the Grade 11 textbook.

Take the section dealing with the Government of SWRD Bandaranaike, titled 1956 Election and the Social Change: “It is believed that a social revolution was made by that government because several new forces were rallied round Mr Bandaranaike to follow a policy of valuing the native language, religion, and culture... Even after obtaining independence, English language held a special position and it became problematic for the vernacular scholars. Because of that, those who rallied round the Mahajana Eksath Peramuna had already accepted Sinhala naming (sic) as the state language as a policy (sic)... During his administration, the policy that valued the nationality (sic) and the attempt to solve the unsolved problems of the general public were significant landmarks” (https://govdoc.lk/view?id=7119&fid=6417fc32c433c—emphasis mine).

In this version of history, native (desheeya in the original Sinhala text) is a synonym for Sinhala; native language is Sinhala, native religion is Buddhism, and native culture is Sinhala-Buddhist culture. Vernacular (swabhasha) is also Sinhala, so is nationality (desheeyatvaya). Since Sinhala is the only native language, Sinhala Only was the right policy. Tamil, like English, is nonnative and thus deserving of secondary status or none.