Fractured tongues
Saturday, January 24th, 2009
Photo credit: Dushyanthini K.
With the capture of LTTE’s makeshift capital Killinocchi, and the group in retreat in Sri Lanka, the sectarian war in Sri Lanka seems to be coming to a head.
The conflict between the majority Sinhalese and minority Tamils is a complex, worrying one, and looking back, language has played a substantial part in it. Its always been difficult to build peace when a country has multiple ethnic populations who speak different tongues. There were many former British colonies that faced this challenge after independence - Sri Lanka, Singapore and of course, India.
Language is a pretty natural fracture for communities. India had come face to face with this reality early on, when the post-independence government proposed making Hindi the official language. The Delhi government only retreated and accepted both English and Hindi as official languages when massive protests erupted in the South (especially in Tamil Nadu, where riots broke out and students burnt effigies of the ‘Hindi demonness’). Singapore also chose English, a neutral tongue, as the official language over the local Malay, Chinese, and Tamil tongues.
Sri Lanka however, took a very different tack. The government replaced English with the majority language Sinhalese as the official tongue, and marginalised Tamil. Of course, this wasn’t the sole reason for the conflict, but it only intensified it. Language after all, seems to be a core part of our identity - we only need to look to Ireland’s attempts to revive the Irish tongue, the resurrection of Hebrew in Israel, and in India, the early (and successful) fights to have our state borders drawn according to language.