James D'Alwis

The government has announced that 2012 will be the year of trilinguality; a key plank of the platform of Mano Ganeshan who placed third in the preference vote tally in the recent Colombo Municipal council elections, was equality of language. It is rare for a government and opposition to agree on anything, but in relation to the this vexed question that has fissured and broken apart this country for so long, there seems to be agreement. But still, even though the equality of Sinhala and Tamil has been constitutional since the 13^th amendment of 1987, the reports of the Official Language Commission tell us, we have not made much progress in this regard. Why? Will we ever? What really at bottom holds back language equality?

The way the story is commonly told, it simply goes back 1956, S.W.R.D Bandaranaike’s MEP government, and the Sinhala Only Act. I think we need to dig deeper, if we are to find out why language divides Sri Lankans, we need to go back another 100 years, to 1866, and consider one of Bandaranaike’s great kinsmen, James d’Alwis’ classic paper, “the Origins of the Sinhalese Language,” which was pubished in that year, and becomes the authoritative paper on the subject in later years.

As I pointed out in a previous column, by 1833, the British who ruled Ceylon, had settled on a logic of racial political representation in the legislative council, with European, Burger, Sinhala and Tamil representatives. In the received wisdom of the day, Sinhalese and Tamils were thought to be distinct races, and and their languages different, of course. But philologically, that is to say technically, the languages were thought to be quite similar. Sir James Emerson Tennant, who while he was colonial secretary of the colony had researched and then written, when he was sent back to England a massive two volume of study of the island, which was, beyond any doubt at the time, the authority on everything to do with Ceylon had written: “Sinhalese, as it is spoken at the present day, and still more strikingly as it exists as a written language in the literature of the Island, presents unequivocal proof of an affinity with the group languages still in use in the Dakken;- Tamil, Telingu and Malayalim (sic).”

It is this very line that D’Alwis sets out to disprove in his paper, the first part of which was presented to the Royal Asiatic Society of Ceylon in 1863. In laying the foundation for his argument, D’Alwis make a profound claim that has haunted us sometimes explicitly, sometimes implicitly until today. Sinhalese he claims is radically different from Tamil because the Sinhalese are radically racially different from the people of south India. What counts as ‘racial’ features here are ‘complexion,’ ‘the shape of the head,’ and ‘peculiarity of features,’ that are the most permanent. A ‘copper color’ prevails in Sinhalese complexion he says, and more, “the features of the inhabitants of the Dekkan are certainly distinguishable from those of the Sinhalese even by a casual observer.” And then in an even more striking racialization of linguistic ability, he says, “European teachers have frequently observed the facility with which the Sinhalese pronounce European tongues, presenting in this respect a quality distinguishable from every other South-Indian people.”

Thus, the languages of Ceylon were racilized. This of course, was also a politicization since a seat of the legislative Council was reserved for the Sinhalese. Not only was James D’Alwis an erudite linguist and scholar, he together with his kinsmen, Obeyesekere and Solomon Bandaranaike(senior), held in turn that very seat for the Sinhalese member of the legislative council in later years.

His views presented here, were amplified, hardened, and rearticulated, throughout the decades; by the 1940s, after the introduction of free education in Sinhala and Tamil, the question of language became central to the economic life of the lower middle classes. That we know. What we may have forgotten is how racilized that centrality was. Accepting that this idea of race, based on bad science, has to be dismantled, should be part of any effort, oppositional or governmental, to build a trilingual nation.

Roles which seem to be reversed in the present day, Greece it seems has come under the will of a new Europe, than is really run by finance capital. At first pass, the matter seems to one of unpayable and mounting debt: Greek debt is more than 150% of its GDP. Pay cuts for civil servants, tax increases and the like do not seem to be able to get the state to breakeven point, debts keep mounting, even as protests against the already server austerities have rocked the streets of that country.
While debt in many European countries, Spain, Italy, Ireland and Portugal among them is massive, as is debt in the United States (nearly 100% of GDP) and deserves a separate discussion, debt alone is not the reason for what seems to be an intractable crisis. Rather, it is the question of sovereignty.

Policies
To understand this, we need to understand the policy issues at stake here. Most sovereign states have two policy strands in their economic management, monetary policy and fiscal policy. Monetary policy, in short has to do with the issuing of money, that is to say currency, and is usually handled by a ‘central bank.’ This is supposed to be an institution quite independent of government and politics, yet part of a sovereign state apparatus. Fiscal policy, on the other hand, is made by a government through its ministry of finance or treasury, and it has to do with how it collects money and spends it. Now, as I said, these are two different functions, and should be independent of each other, but usually this mutual independence is over shadowed by the over arching sovereignty of the state.

Argentina, nearly a decade ago in December 2001 faced a debt crisis like Greece. They did not have the revenue to pay their loans. Yet, they were able to default; stop interest payments on their international bonds and devalue their currency, and while there have been some hard times since, there have been positive results also. Paul Krugman, a noted and Nobel prize winning economist says in his blog: “Argentina suffered terribly from 1998 through 2001, as it tried to be orthodox and do the right thing. After it defaulted at the end of 2001, it went through a brief severe downturn, but soon began a rapid recovery that continued for a long time.”

Euro zone
Greece can’t simply do this, because it doesn’t control its monetary policy. Europe does. And it isn’t Europa anymore, and Zeus seems to be dead. To be more precise and serious, euro zone monetary policy is governed by a European Central bank, since Greece, unlike Britain, Denmark and Sweden, has joined both the super-state European union, and the euro zone. It can’t devalue its currency, because it doesn’t control it. If it could, it might have been able to try the Argentinean route. So what can it do, since the prescription of austerity is not solving the problem?

Indeed, it can attempt to leave the Euro Zone, and this was the question to be asked at the referendum proposed by the Greek Prime Minister. First it seemed the question was going to turn on the acceptance of the austerity package, which 60% of Greeks naturally oppose because it would mean huge reductions in their incomes. Financial markets swooned, and emergency aid was cut off by the EU. Then it turned out that was not to be the question, but rather, as one high powered financial news service, Bloomberg, put it, the question was to be, do you wish to, “stay with the euro, or return to the drachma as an orphan state”? According a prior poll cited by editors at Bloomberg, 70% of Greeks don’t want to leave the Euro zone, so the question, put this way, would preserve the monetary union.

Yet it is by no means clear that George Papandreou, whose father and grandfather were also prime ministers, would have equated sovereignty to orphan-hood. Indeed, even though he has now, under pressure from his own finance minister backed away from the whole idea of any referendum at all, it must surely have been this equation that crossed his mind, and must cross the mind of his fellow citizens. What is the worth of ceding ones sovereignty for the sake of domineering parents?
Or perhaps roles have been reversed fully; and it is Europa who now pulls Zeus on to her back, and carries him off to Brussels?

(Published in print and on the web, in the Nation on Sunday, on 6th Nov., 2011)