Next steps in confronting Sinhala Buddhist nationalism

 Divisive rhetoric is a strategy that works precisely because the basic hegemony of Sinhala Buddhist nationalism has yet to be seriously challenged

• I believe it is necessary to distinguish a politics that derives from a progressive understanding of the national question versus one that is downright hostile to such an approach. In this regard, it is not enough to say we on the Left are critical of liberal civil society. We must specify our point of departure. Otherwise, we risk appropriation by nationalists

I appreciate Uditha Devapriya’s response to my article (“Critiquing Sinhala Buddhist Nationalism: A Response to Devaka Gunawardena” in Ceylon Today). There is a sincerity in his approach that is commendable, even if I have my own interpretations of the arguments. By initiating a debate on the issues in an open-ended way, we can hopefully advance some points, even if we hold onto our own perspectives. To start, that means clarifying the initial purpose of my essay, to which Devapriya alludes at the end of his article. 

My original goal was to try and advance a theorisation of Sinhala Buddhist nationalism. Through previous conversations with others, I realised that in my own work, I had neglected explanation while pursuing critique. But my objective was never to say that our interpretation of Sinhala Buddhist nationalism was or should be the limit of the political imagination of the Left.

I do, however, see a running thread in Devapriya’s arguments. Both in this column and in previous pieces, he has raised the limitations of liberal civil society’s framing of Sri Lanka’s problems. I along with others have also advanced a critique of these ideological blind spots, including the neglect of class and imperialism. But I want to clarify a difference. I believe it is necessary to distinguish a politics that derives from a progressive understanding of the national question versus one that is downright hostile to such an approach. In this regard, it is not enough to say we on the Left are critical of liberal civil society. We must specify our point of departure. Otherwise, we risk appropriation by nationalists. That includes the danger in employing “NGOs” as a catch-all label, without specifying the neoliberal capture of knowledge production as our real target.

I made a related point in a recent piece on the Polity blog, “Don’t Use Class as a Weapon to Dismiss Social Struggles.” Since Newton Gunasinghe’s theoretical intervention in the aftermath of the July 1983 riots against Tamils, a progressive stance on the national question has become a necessary, if not a not a sufficient condition, for Left politics. Of course, Gunasinghe had his own critique of the then-emerging tendency within progressive circles to marginalise class critique. Kumudu Kusum Kumara has rightly pointed this out in his article in Sinhala, “navaliberalvadayata erehiva ‘sabhyathva rajyaya’?” (“A Civilisational State Against Neoliberalism?”). But the need to highlight the national question stands.

In this regard, I would push back against Devapriya’s implication that resistance to Sinhala Buddhist nationalism is secondary to a critique of liberal civil society. Sinhala Buddhist nationalist organisations may not have the foreign funds flowing into their coffers to the extent of more visible organisations within liberal civil society (though who’s to say, given shadowy networks of political patronage?). Nevertheless, nationalist actors clearly reinforce the dominant social order, and in a far more coercive, violent way. How else can we explain recent actions, from thugs and police shutting down a Mullivaikal commemoration in Colombo to the recent arrests of a comedian and a leading Tamil political figure? No doubt the current Government led by Ranil Wickremesinghe is playing with fire. But divisive rhetoric is a strategy that works precisely because the basic hegemony of Sinhala Buddhist nationalism has yet to be seriously challenged.

Nevertheless, Devapriya also questions my use of the term Sinhala Buddhist nationalism. I retain the concept for several reasons. It is employed by nationalism’s own ideologues, such as Gunadasa Amarasekara, to justify a “civilisational state.” Moreover, it indicates the relationship between the sangha and the state. To apply the point made by Louis Althusser, that dynamic reflects the reciprocal interaction between the Repressive State Apparatus and Ideological State Apparatuses, including schools and religious institutions. The latter solidify the hegemony of the ruling class over society and guarantee the reproduction of class domination. Though Sinhala and Buddhist do not entirely overlap, the point is that as an ideology, Sinhala Buddhist nationalism implies the conflation of both for specific political ends.

Distinguishing approaches to nationalism

Devapriya asks whether I have nevertheless been too hasty in my critique, without engaging the texts produced by Sinhala Buddhist nationalists such as Amarasekara. No doubt, as much as he feels humbled by theory, I too feel the weight of the work that I must do to study and translate the original texts in Sinhala! Nevertheless, from what I glean from writers such as Kanishka Goonewardene and Newton Gunasinghe, these texts can be interpreted in terms of the class perspectives they reveal. Goonewardene along with others, such as Sumanasiri Liyanage, have sought a dialectical critique through which nationalist concepts such as the civilisational state might be recovered for progressive ends.

But Gunasinghe had a difference in emphasis that is worth highlighting. He prioritised the class implications of Sinhala Buddhist nationalism, as opposed to asking whether the Left can appropriate its concepts. Or, as he put it in his classic essay, “A Sociological Comment on the Political Transformations in Sri Lanka in 1956 and the Resultant Socio-Political Processes”: “Here, the Sinhala folk term that ‘one cannot expect lice to lift stones’ may appropriately apply to their ideological efforts, which are merely a reflection of ‘false consciousness’ on the part of the Sinhala petty bourgeoisie at a period of profound social and political crisis.” (‘Newton Gunasinghe: Selected Essays’, ed. by Sasanka Perera, p.231)

Perhaps Gunasinghe’s judgment was too summary, especially his dismissal of the versatility of nationalist ideological production. I am inclined to take ideas and even “common sense” (in the Gramscian sense) very seriously, insofar as they reveal the character of the dominant social order. But I sympathise with the thrust of Gunasinghe’s argument: we need a much stronger class critique of ideas produced by nationalists. That is especially true now that because of the existential impact of the economic crisis, even fascism could rear its head in Sri Lanka. Accordingly, we must tread very cautiously. We must not overlook the persistent need to defend the principle of representative democracy and power-sharing between communities, even if, after the people’s movement that emerged last year, it is more urgent than ever to deepen it with radical democracy.

There is another level to the argument as well. Further along in “A Sociological Comment…”, Gunasinghe challenges the Jathika Chinthanaya (JC) critique of Marxism, insofar as JC claimed that the Old Left failed to develop roots in rural society. Kanishka Goonewardene takes the point in a different direction in his essay “Populism, Nationalism and Marxism in Sri Lanka: From Anti-Colonial struggle to Authoritarian Neoliberalism,” which Devapriya cites. He is more interested in the way in which Amarasekera valorises the rural over the urban. The implication is that such an ideological move may contain elements that perhaps could be critically reproduced through the Left’s dialectical critique. But to put a different spin on it—through my own reading of a point that Ahilan Kadirgamar and I made in our essay, “Crisis and Self Sufficiency: The Left and Its Approach During the Long 1960s in Sri Lanka”—I would re-emphasise that any efforts to recover a critical understanding of self-sufficiency from the Left’s efforts must resist a romanticised, nationalist understanding of the rural.

Instead, we focused on the periphery, both social and geographical, that had been neglected even in the Old Left’s attempts to engage the agrarian question. It is in that spirit that I wrote my essay that has sparked the current debate, both to critique Sinhala Buddhist nationalism and to put forward an alternative explanation of the way in which we map the rural onto the past. Devapriya sympathises with my point. But I would further stress that this is precisely where we must now focus our efforts. To what extent were Sri Lanka’s precolonial social formations differentiated in both spatial and historical terms? How might our reading of that process subvert the nationalists’ attitude towards the past, especially their class project, which relies on a conservative understanding of rural society?

To answer these questions, I propose that we must go beyond the literary critique of the past that became in vogue with the poststructuralist turn of the 1980s and 1990s. Instead, I argue that we must once again adopt a rigorous historical materialist approach pioneered by the likes of people such as Perry Anderson, Jairus Banaji, Janet Abu-Lughod, and others. I find myself wanting to read more about the precolonial period, using whatever analytical tools that I have. But I believe that the upshot is that by returning to the past—which has been endlessly homogenised and mythologised by nationalists such as Amarasekera—we may also be able to comprehend the specific form of uneven development that was created through the colonial encounter. That would further reveal the inherently comprador character of the nationalist response. Tackling these issues, however, means starting from the premise that Sinhala Buddhist nationalism has yet to be sufficiently challenged. And that requires outlining the tasks needed to confront it.