The history debate: Which history?

If our future is to be different from that bloody past, one obvious starting point is how that past is interpreted and narrated

“The story you tell eventually, as a professional historian, is not just what you find in the documents. It is not just the facts. It has a lot to do with your moral positions, your ideological orientation, the time in which you write, and your personality. They are all factors that influence the story you finally tell.”

Ilan Pappé (History is relevant: The Israeli New History and its legacy)

By Tisaranee Gunasekara

It took almost four decades and tens of thousands of deaths for Sri Lanka to adopt a language policy matching national and international realities. Sinhala and Tamil are official languages, English the link language. There’s political and societal consensus that the Sinhala Only policy of 1956, which relegated Tamil to secondary status and turned English into the preserve of a privileged few, was a pivotal error.

Only a miniscule minority on the Sinhala-Buddhist extremist fringe oppose this broad consensus. Yet it is their version of history that is being taught to Lankan students as History in the Grade 11 textbook.

Take the section dealing with the Government of SWRD Bandaranaike, titled 1956 Election and the Social Change: “It is believed that a social revolution was made by that government because several new forces were rallied round Mr Bandaranaike to follow a policy of valuing the native language, religion, and culture… Even after obtaining independence, English language held a special position and it became problematic for the vernacular scholars. Because of that, those who rallied round the Mahajana Eksath Peramuna had already accepted Sinhala naming (sic) as the state language as a policy (sic)… During his administration, the policy that valued the nationality (sic) and the attempt to solve the unsolved problems of the general public were significant landmarks” (https://govdoc.lk/view?id=7119&fid=6417fc32c433c – emphasis mine).

In this version of history, native (desheeya in the original Sinhala text) is a synonym for Sinhala; native language is Sinhala, native religion is Buddhism, and native culture is Sinhala-Buddhist culture. Vernacular (swabhasha) is also Sinhala, so is nationality (desheeyatvaya). Since Sinhala is the only native language, Sinhala Only was the right policy. Tamil, like English, is non-native and thus deserving of secondary status or none.

In 1956, another path had been possible: making Sinhala and Tamil official languages and keeping English as an essential link language. That path would have created generations of trilingual Lankans able to understand and engage with each other and the world. After all, linguistic parity was accepted by all major political parties and leaders, including SWRD Bandaranaike and his SLFP, until 1953.

Sinhala Only was bitterly opposed not just by the Tamils but also by the left. The most prescient warning about the future awaiting us along this path of linguistic discrimination was made by Dr. Colvin R. de Silva during the 1956 parliamentary debate on Official Language (Sinhala Only) Bill. “Do we want an independent Ceylon or two bleeding halves of Ceylon…? One language, two nations; two languages, one nation.”

None of this feature in the history taught to Grade 11 students. Instead, they are told that vernacular scholars wanted Sinhala Only; SWRD Bandaranaike enacted it. End of story. There was no opposition to Sinhala Only, no demand for language parity, no Bandaranaike-Chelvanayagam Pact, no 1958 riots, no language issue let alone an ethnic problem.

This conflation of Sinhala-Buddhist with national (desheeya) in the Grade 11 history textbook is not incidental or accidental; it is the framework within which history is interpreted and narrated. Take, for example, this section: “Because of the establishment of Buddhist schools and pirivenas, a religious younger generation that understood the value of culture emerged. Among those youths, there were true sons of the motherland and a group of national writers who highlighted the greatness of indigenous culture. Leaders like Anagarika Dharmapala, Walisinghe Harischandra, Piyadasa Sirisena, and John de Silva…used different types of media to arouse patriotism and nationalism among the natives. As a result…a movement to kindle patriotism among the natives emerged…” (ibid).

Here too, national, native, nationalism, and indigenous are coterminous with Sinhala-Buddhist. ‘The national writers’ hailed as ‘true sons of motherland’ were all Sinhala-Buddhists, and their ‘nationalism’ was more anti-minority than anti-British. Their patria was not a pluralist Lanka but a Sinhala-Buddhist land where minorities were not co-owners with inalienable rights but guests here on sufferance. The patriotism they sought to kindle was fidelity to that Sinhala-Buddhist land, its religion and culture. That exclusionary patriotism would be used by opportunistic politicians from SWRD Bandaranaike to the Rajapaksas, to our common peril.

Frogs in the well

‘Sinhala Only’ sowed the first seeds of the long Eelam War. It also deprived many Sinhalese of an opportunity of learning an international language, miring them in ignorance and parochialism. This paucity of knowledge and narrowness of vision are evident in the content and composition of the Grade 11 history textbook.

The textbook devotes considerable space to attempts by British rulers to disseminate Christianity in Lanka. “Several foreign organisations that came to Sri Lanka during the British reign started spreading Catholicism in the country. They are called as (sic) missionary organisations.” This is followed by a list of the missionary organisations.

The problem is that none of the missionary organisations so listed were Catholic ones. All of them belonged to various Protestant denominations. None of them spread Catholicism; they spread various types of Protestantism starting with the Church of England version.

Two of the names on the list should have clued the writers, editors, and overseers of the textbook to this vital mistake: Baptists and Wesleyans. Surely the names would have indicated that these missionary societies were not Catholic but Protestant? 

Surely the writers, editors, and overseers of the textbook know enough history to figure out that imperial Britain was not a Catholic country but a staunchly Protestant one? After all, Catholics in Britain were legally discriminated against (including being banned from serving in parliament) until the Catholic Emancipation Act of 1829. Until 2013, British monarchs and their heirs were barred from marrying Catholics. Even today, a Catholic cannot become king or queen of UK.

So what made the compilers of Grade 11 history textbook conclude that the British colonial rulers tried to spread Catholicism in Lanka? The equivalent error would have been to say that Buddhist monks from Sri Lanka are spreading Mahayana in the West.

The charitable explanation for this ludicrous error is mistranslation. The original Sinhala version uses the word kithunu; in the English version, kithunu has been turned into Catholic. But, then, if the translator made a mistake, it should have been noticed by the Commissioner General and other top officials of the Educational Publications Department, the panel of editors, the panel of writers or the language editor. Since none of them did, and the error has persisted through three editions, the conclusion is inescapable – none of these ladies and gentlemen know the difference between Catholicism and Protestantism. Don’t know and don’t care to find out. Ignorance and parochialism. And they guide future generations.

Such ignorance of the world can have practical consequences, often deadly ones.

In December 2023, Gangodawila Soma thero went to Russia without winter clothes and died of cold. After being defeated by Muslim Congress leader MHM Ashraff in their widely-watched TNL debate on Buddhism, Soma thero exchanged his anti-Muslim campaign for an anti-Christian one. When he died in Russia, his disciples called it murder and accused fundamentalist Christians of the crime. The allegations reached such hysterical levels, a presidential commission was appointed to investigate the death.

Had Lankans been a little more aware of the world, they might have known that in Russia, the majority religion is the Russian Orthodox Church. Catholics comprise only 0.1% of the population and non-Catholic Christians only 0.3%. There are more Buddhists, Pagans, and Muslims in Russia than Christian fundamentalists. If the Christian fundamentalists wanted to murder the monk, they would have invited him to the US or some other country where they are numerous and powerful and not Russia where they have neither numbers nor power.

Unfortunately, ignorance and parochialism ruled. Anti-Christian hysteria spread like wildfire, fuelled in the main by Sihala Urumaya of Champaka Ranawaka and Udaya Gammanpila. Two months after the death of Soma thero, at a gathering of the Jathika Sangha Sammelanaya, Omalpe Sobhita thero identified Tiger terrorism and missionary terrorism as the two main and coeval challenges facing Sri Lanka. He also claimed that the LTTE was a Christian movement. A series of attacks on churches followed. Since the mobs were unaware of the vital difference between Catholicism and Protestantism and mainstream Protestant churches and Charismatic churches, any church became fair game. For example, one of the targets was the Our Lady of Lourdes Church in Pannipitya, a Catholic church.

When ignorance is king, such lethal errors become the norm. The lessons taught by history depends on what history is being taught.

Some of the errors in the Grade 11 history textbook are less dangerous but equally revealing. The section on the setting up of Buddhist schools does not mention a single girls’ school. The list of founders of Buddhist schools contains Henry Steel Olcott but not Marie Musaeus Higgins, the founder of Musaeus College. The list also changes the gender of Jeramias Dias from female to male, possibly to fit in with the all-male nature of the list. Those writing, editing, and overseeing the textbook didn’t know that Jeramias Dias who set up Visakha Vidyalaya was not a Mr but a Mrs: Mrs Celestina Rodrigo Dias, relict of Jeramias Dias, and the mother of Arthur V Dias known as kos mama for his promotion of jak fruits. A simple internet search could have prevented this embarrassing mistake, but why bother?

Maybe these unpardonable errors stem from the male-centric perspective of the history textbook which claims, for example, that the leaders of Buddhist renaissance wanted to “create countrymen who love their country by encouraging them to value the indigenous culture…” Countrymen, not women. In this worldview, girls’ schools and their founders are as unimportant as the difference between Catholics and non-Catholic Christians or the rights of Tamils and Muslims. Sinhala-Buddhist supremacist and male-centric, this is the history that is being taught to students who will become voters and citizens in a couple of years. With such a reinterpretation and depiction of the past, what kind of future are we heading towards?

From history to future

In 1953, Unit 101 of the Israeli Defence Forces entered the Palestinian village of Qibya and massacred more than 69 Palestinian civilians, two-thirds of them women and children.

Yeshayahu Leibowitz, an Israeli-Jewish historian and philosopher, was appalled by the carnage. “We have to ask ourselves where this youth of ours emerged from; young people who have no mental inhibitions about committing this atrocity?” he wrote (Judaism, Human Values and the Jewish State). If the occupation of Palestinian lands continues, he warned, Israeli Jews will turn into Judeo-Nazis. The ongoing genocide in Gaza proves how prophetic he was.

The question he raised, about how such killers are formed, is a question that some of the best Israeli-Jewish minds have grappled with over the years. The consensus is education. Textbooks, how history is taught.

In 1922, 78% of people in Palestine were Palestinian Muslims and 9.5% were Palestinian Christians. Jews constituted only 11% of the population. Even in 1942, 61% were Palestinian Muslims, 8% were Palestinian Christians and Jews constituted only 30%. This was the country Zionists would forcibly take over in 1948 to create the state of Israel, reframing it as a land without people for a people without a land.

This is the history Israeli-Jewish students are being taught, from the first grade through university. As Israeli-Jewish historian Ilan Pappé states, during the third year of his undergraduate studies, “I became aware of a kind of contradiction in the way that history was taught. There was on the one hand the sense that Palestine throughout the centuries was an empty place… And yet when we arrived at the end of the BA and we came to the events of 1948, we were taught that the Palestinians left voluntarily in 1948 and that was how the Palestinian refugee problem was created. And I remember asking one of my professors, if these people left, who were they when the country was empty. His answer was something about students who are troublemakers who should know better” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SuvUo3Ub1aY).

Palestinians as aliens who become enemies, non-humans who become sub-humans, a wholly terroristic people where even babies are terror machines; teach that to generation after generation, and genocide becomes not just possible, not just acceptable, but even pleasurable.

We in Sri Lanka are living through the 42nd anniversary of Black July. Chenmani mass grave continues to haunt us, the last resting place of so many Tamils, from young student Krishanthi Kumarswami to the unknown child who owned the toy found buried there. Since 1956, innumerable Sinhalese, Tamils, and Muslims have been killed by Sinhala mobs, Lankan forces and the JVP, the LTTE and other Tamil armed groups, the IPKF and Islamic fanatics. If our future is to be different from that bloody past, one obvious starting point is how that past is interpreted and narrated. A history textbook which validates Sinhala-Buddhist supremacism and hails its many errors as achievement cannot but lead to a future worse than the past.

So, teach history? Yes. Make it a compulsory subject for O Levels? Why not?

But another question must come first? Which history? History which glorifies past errors and provide justification for their reproduction? Or history which can lead us, someday perhaps, to a future less destructive, less bloody?