Culture and Economy in the Sri Lankan Diaspora

 

Dr Darini Rajasingham Senanayake
Visiting Research Fellow
Institute of South Asian Studies

 

The Sri Lankan (formally Ceylonese) diaspora has assumed increasing self-consciousness and importance with successive waves of migration from the Indian Ocean island to almost every continent over the last two hundred years. While the Sri Lankan diaspora is relatively small compared to other Asian diasporas such as the overseas Indian or Chinese communities, it is fairly significant, with over a million people living outside the country. However, the import of this diaspora may not be its size but rather, the influence that individuals and communities that originated in the island have had in host or receiving countries and communities overseas, sometimes over several generations.

 

It is possible to map various historical phases in the formation of a Sri Lankan diaspora. In recent times, accelerated globalisation and new information and communication technologies have enabled development of transnational communities and diaspora-consciousness among immigrants and refugees from the island. Members of the Sri Lankan diaspora are present today in Southeast Asia, Europe, North America, Australia, the Middle East and South Africa, with implications for the economy, the culture, the politics and the future development of the island. Of course, the Sri Lankan diaspora is culturally and economically diverse. The differences are contoured by the history and generation of migration, the social capital of the immigrants, host society policies vis-à-vis immigrants and related identity politics, multiculturalism, and patterns of cultural accommodation in receiving communities.

Although we are most familiar with the scenes of protesting youths of the Sri Lankan Tamil diaspora in recent months, the achievements and contribution of people of Sri Lankan origin in their host counties over time has been remarkable. For instance, in “One Hundred Years of the Ceylonese in Malaysia and Singapore: 1867-1967”, the author, a Malaysian Ceylonese, Durai Rajasingham, provides a historical account of the diversity of migrants from Ceylon during the British colonial period to East Asia. The book documents and pays tribute to the contributions of Ceylonese professionals to nation-building, economy, business and arts and letters in the host society.

 

Historical Mapping of the Sri Lankan Diaspora

 

Sri Lanka is an island of many migrations, constituted by people from many diasporas – Indian, Arab, Chinese and European. Strategically located at the intersection of major trade routes linking the east and the west, the island’s ports provided sanctuary to travellers and trading communities plying back and forth from China to the subcontinent to Europe, the Middle East and Africa, for centuries before the arrival of the modern nation-state or the dawn of the information age in the region. As a result of its strategic location in the Indian Ocean, from the early 1500s, Sri Lanka was colonised by competing European empires, starting with the Portuguese, followed by the Dutch, and finally the British, for about 150 years apiece, until independence in 1948. In turn, the island sent out travellers, traders, professionals, migrant labour and, more recently, refugees. Collectively, these migrants have come to constitute a modern Sri Lankan diaspora, which sometimes overlaps with, and yet remains distinct from, a larger Indian diaspora.

 

Given its size and strategic location, Sri Lanka has been more open to the world and international culture flows of goods, people and ideas than some of its larger and more land-locked neighbours. While from ancient times to the present, Theravadh Buddhism was carried by monks from Sri Lanka along the ‘Sea Silk route”, the travellers, visitors and colonisers were to leave behind an island of hybrid histories and ambivalent legacies. The island’s people and cultures were romanticised in the colonial anthropological literature that dwelt extensively on the cultural diversity of its inhabitants and their harmonious coexistence − until the pogrom of July 1983, which sharply divided the island’s two dominant communities and precipitated an unprecedented outflow of refugees. The post-1983 mass migration gave rise to the most clearly articulated Sri Lankan Tamil diaspora identity.

 

Recent studies of the Sri Lankan diaspora have focused primarily on the out-migrations during the past 30 years of conflict between the state and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), which resulted in a large flow of refugees to all parts of the world. Some families have been divided and live in multiple continents. However, prior to this conflict-induced displacement and out-migration, there were earlier generations of migration from the island during the colonial and early post-colonial period. The rise of post-colonial majoritarian nationalism meant that, in the early 1970s, there was an out-migration of the Eurasian or Burger community to Australia and Europe. Generations of students and professionals from the country also served in British colonies in Africa and East Asia, intermarried and settled in these places. During the conflict between the Marxist-Maoist Janatha Vimukthi Peremuna in 1970s and 1980s, there was a refugee exodus from southern Sri Lanka, particularly to London.

 

More recently, a large number of women and men have found employment in the Middle East and constitute transnational communities. The notion of “diaspora” may be broadly defined to signify not only the “scattering of people” due to political persecution (as in the original use of the term in the Jewish tradition), but also the emergence of transnational communities and the economic and socio-cultural dynamics of out-migration. Conflict-induced migration and economic migration has often merged and blurred the distinction between economic migrants and refugees. In recent times, the Sri Lankan diaspora has grown and been engaged with post-colonial conflicts and, increasingly, reconstruction and development in the homeland.

 

Reclaiming a Multicultural Diaspora for Peace and Reconciliation

 

In the aftermath of almost 30 years of armed conflict between the state and  the LTTE, which has generated and accelerated waves of migration from Sri Lanka and fractured a multicultural social fabric that was once famed for the peaceful coexistence of diverse faiths and cultures, the diaspora metaphor may be ‘good to think with’. Diaspora also connotes the mixing and mingling of cultures, people, histories and the plurality of identity. It signals multiculturalism and hybridity while connoting cultural, religious and historical ties to Sri Lanka, Ceylon, Taprobane and Serendip (from which the English word serendipity originates), as the island has been known at different times to different trading communities that settled there. The study and understanding of the Sri Lankan diaspora may serve to pluralise history and identity and, indeed, the history of identity in Sri Lanka beyond the confrontational ethno-nationalist identity politics that was consolidated in the recent armed conflict. It may provide a conceptual frame for the accommodation of cultural diversity and pluralism and reclaiming Lanka’s multicultural past.