Critiquing Sinhala Buddhist nationalism: A response to Devaka Gunawardena

By Uditha Devapriya

In a recent piece to the DailyFT (“What is Sinhala Buddhist nationalism and where is it headed?” June 6) Devaka Gunawardena ponders on Sinhala Buddhist nationalism and its relevance to Sri Lanka’s efforts at escaping its subordination to the “capitalist imperialist world system.” Gunawardena mentions my exchanges with him and with Dayan Jayatilleka, the latter of whom has commented on my essays, in this paper, on the tenuous relationship between nationalism and left-wing politics in Sri Lanka.

Gunawardena theorises a great deal, and given my woefully inadequate knowledge of the theories he invokes I will leave any debate over them to another person and for another day. His essay does, however, raise some provocative questions, not least of which is whether Sinhala Buddhist nationalism, in its current form, is relevant to anti-imperialist politics in Sri Lanka. I think Kanishka Goonewardena (“Populism, nationalism and Marxism in Sri Lanka: from anti-colonial struggle to authoritarian neoliberalism”, Geografiska Annaler: Series B, Human Geography, November 2020) has addressed this issue well, because he considers the nationalist perspective, that of Jathika Chintanaya, instead of excluding it.

Indeed, it is his consideration of the nationalist perspective which reinforces his critique of nationalist politics. Goonewardena’s (the seond named) conclusion is the same as Gunawardena’s: for all its ostensibly anti-imperialist potential, nationalism, specifically Sinhala Buddhist nationalism, can never be a substitute for anti-imperialist politics. Gunawardena argues further in his critique: he argues that the current understanding of terms like Sinhala and nationalism are at odds with how they were framed during the country’s medieval period. More pertinently, he argues that the meanings of these terms were determined by the social landscape of their time, and with each passing era, they underwent vigorous transformations. I agree. That is, and has always been, the basis for my criticism of Sinhala nationalists today: their dismissal or ignorance of the historicity of ethnic and religious labels.

My argument in my two-part essay on nationalism and left-wing politics in Sri Lanka was basically that the one cannot ignore the other. Since I am more aware of the undercurrents of Sinhala Buddhist nationalism than of its Tamil counterpart, I can only comment on the former with any degree of certainty. I think the first point I would have to raise in response to Gunawardena’s piece is semantic: he talks of Sinhala Buddhist nationalism, but I think it would be better if we focus more broadly on Sinhala nationalism, since the politics of Sinhala nationalism extends beyond its Theravada Buddhist framing. My understanding of Sinhala nationalism thus includes not just the usual figures – not just Anagarika Dharmapala – but also a vast cohort of non-Buddhist nationalist figures, like those involved with the formation of the precursor to the Jathika Hela Urumaya, the Sihala Urumaya.

My second point would be that while I agree with Gunawardena’s assertion that Sinhala nationalism – Buddhist or otherwise – has never challenged the social order on which the capitalist imperialist system is based, I would add that Sinhala nationalism’s embrace of the status quo, the establishment, has but only mirrored a shift within sections of the Left to a vague and altogether amorphous – one would call postmodernist – liberal position. This has been ongoing since the 1980s, and it has resulted in a vast cohort of the Left – minus, I would say, the JVP-NPP and the FSP, which perhaps owing to their links with student and rural communities have been able to steer clear of such tendencies – entering a thoroughly NGO-fied civil society. This is not to demean NGOs, still less censure them: it is merely to suggest that this defection of the Sri Lankan Left has never attracted the kind of critique that Sinhala nationalists parading themselves as anti-imperialists have.

This is hardly unique to Sri Lanka, of course. Writing to Himal Southasian in 2017, Vivek Chibber notes a “decline of class analysis” in South Asian studies that he traces to the NGO-fication of civil society and the domestication of the New Left into mainstream academia, which in turn he traces the spate of economic liberalisation in the 1980s that, in his view, has “led to an increased conservatism on the part of the urban middle class.” Decades earlier, in a penetrating piece on Orientalism, Aijaz Ahmad wrote of the migration of Third World elite intellectuals from a Left to a post-Left post-Marxist space. I would add that since the collapse of the Soviet Union – which did more to harm the credibility of the Left in the Third World than any other historical event – these intellectuals have allowed themselves to be absorbed into a civil society permeated by donor-funded, donor-dependent NGOs. Such a culture is, to the best of my knowledge, hardly conducive to a left-wing radical project.

My point here is simple. Gunawardena argues, correctly, that Sinhala Buddhist nationalism is a poor substitute for anti-imperialist politics, and that it “cannot challenge the country’s intrinsic subordination” to “the capitalist imperialist world system.” He advocates instead “an actual framework of self-sufficiency that links technical innovation to ideological struggle by engaging the pluralistic politics of working people.”

There is nothing to disagree with here. I would advocate the same as well. But if we accept that Sinhala Buddhist nationalism is too weak to pose a challenge to the capitalist imperialist framework, we must accept that it can easily be critiqued, dismissed, and thrown aside, as it is. We must then accept that the bigger challenge is that capitalist imperialist framework before which the most avowedly anti-imperialist nationalist eventually bends. And so, we must accept that the bigger challenge will come, not from nationalism, but from the many civil society outfits which have a vested interest in promoting the very capitalist imperialist framework Gunawardena critiques.

My question here is hence simple. These outfits have the money, the dollars and the cents. Nationalist outfits do not. As I noted in my column last week on the Marga Institute Forum on the IMF and social protection, civil society outfits working on the ground, with the poor, feel constantly threatened by Colombo-based civil society outfits, which have the funding. An effective Left counter-strategy against the current social order must address such concerns. But has such a counter-strategy been laid out and followed through? Or has it been postponed and delayed, needlessly? Critiquing nationalist politics is necessary. Yet is it the be-all and end-all of the Left? I think not.

The writer is an international relations analyst, researcher, and columnist who can be reached at udakdev1@gmail.com.