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The Vijayan colonization and the archaeology of identity in Sri Lanka

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 January 2015

Robin Coningham  and
Nick Lewer
Robin Coningham
Affiliation:
Department of Archaeological Sciences, University of Bradford, Bradford BD7 1DP, England. [email protected]
Nick Lewer
Affiliation:
Department of Peace Studies, University of Bradford, Bradford BD7 1DP, England. [email protected]
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Extract

In my tours throughout the interior, I found ancient monuments, apparently defying decay, of which no one could tell the date or the founder; and temples and cities in ruins, whose destroyers were equally unknown. SIR JAMES EMERSON TENNANT(1859: xxv).

There are competing, yet interlinked, identities in Sri Lanka through which people ‘establish, maintain, and protect a sense of self-meaning, predictability, and purpose’ (Northrup 1989: 55). These have become established over hundreds of years, and communities are attributed labels including Sinhala, Tamil, Vadda, Buddhist and Hindu (Coningham & Lewer 1999: 857). Sri Lanka is now experiencing what Azar (1990) has called a ‘protracted social conflict’, wherein a section of the Tamil communities led by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) are engaged in a struggle to establish a Tamil honieland or Eelam. International links, especially with south India, have had important implications on the formation of identities in Sri Lanka. Here we will focus on a key influence which has deep archaeological and political implications, whose interpretation has informed and distorted the present understanding of the concept and evolution of identities. This theme, the Vijayan colonization of the island, illustrates the formulation of identities, especially as derived from a historical chronicle, the Mahavamsa, which was ‘rediscovered’ by colonial officials in AD 1826 and has played a major role in determining the dynamics of this conflict.

Keywords

Sri LankaidentityVijayaMahavamsaTamilsSinhaleseAryanscolonial ideology
Type
Special section
Information
Antiquity , Volume 74 , Issue 285 , September 2000 , pp. 707 - 712
Copyright
Copyright © Antiquity Publications Ltd. 2000

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