Neil DeVotta, Blowback: Linguistic nationalism, institutional decay, and ethnic conflict in Sri Lanka

Extract

Neil DeVotta, Blowback: Linguistic nationalism, institutional decay, and ethnic conflict in Sri Lanka. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004. Pp. 204. Hb $55.00, Pb $22.95.

In this well-argued analysis of linguistic nationalism and ethnic conflict, Neil DeVotta places more weight on language than do most other accounts of conflict and civil war in Sri Lanka. DeVotta's main argument is that language politics informed by linguistic nationalism was not just one among several forces leading to the breakdown of peaceful coexistence of the Sinhalese and Tamil communities of the island, but indeed the single most important cause of the conflict and its later violent manifestations. Accordingly, the 1956 decision by the Colombo government to declare Sinhala the sole national language of Sri Lanka represents the crucial turning point in the relationship between ethnic Sinhalese and Tamils on the island. DeVotta argues that the 1956 Official Language Act was motivated by a desire among leaders of the Sinhalese majority to facilitate socioeconomic mobility among their ethnic constituency, and that it subsequently prompted further ethnocentric legislation openly favoring the interests of the ethnic majority at the expense of the Tamil minority. This inability of Sinhalese leaders to compromise in turn led to a severe loss of confidence in the government and other state institutions among Tamils, who began to experience the Sri Lankan state as an alien entity. Finally, this process of “institutional decay” set off by the 1956 imposition of Sinhala as sole official language in state institutions and education then provoked separatist Tamil nationalism and a spiral of violence culminating in a devastating civil war.