I rarely encounter the Sri Lankan flag in England, but recently, while in Mauritius, in an entirely innocent social setting I found myself in proximity to it. The host organization was well-meaning: they wanted to capture the diversity of their cultural event. Ironically, there were no Sri Lankans from Sri Lanka present but only some Tamil diaspora. The hosts were seeking to ‘honour’ their guests by acknowledging what they (wrongly) thought was our cultural origin. Seeing and reflecting on the flag, only months after the 5 year anniversary of Sri Lanka’s Killing Fields, and days ahead of the anniversary of Black July, brought home the full horror of its symbolism. A horror that has lain sublimated for decades, because it is subsumed by far greater horrors – images of the aftermath of cluster bombs on densely packed civilians, one in four of whom were children under twelve, painfully drawn out accounts of individual and mass instances of gang rape, the targeting of hospitals, and food lines, all images from 2009, and also other images from Black July 1983, of vehicles burning with their occupants amid dancing mobs, a boy being set upon by a mob because he was Tamil, the photograph capturing him moments before death, an unending sequence of horrific images. Why should symbols matter given the hideousness of real life. Yet man is a creature of imagination, of myth and symbols. The shape of manifested reality is conceived first in the human imagination. And Sri Lanka’s post-indepenedence history is intimately intertwined with its mythology, symbols and culture. Thus long before the assault of artillery, cluster bombs and phosphorous, before the assault of rape and land-grabs and pogroms, there was, at the very conception of the fledgling state, at the very heart of its self-image an assault on the existence of ‘the ethnic and religious other’. And it is a measure of how de-sensitized and tainted the human rights community within Sri Lanka has become that it has been deafeningly silent on the ugliness of Sri Lanka’s symbols of state. So I want to be clear on what are these symbols of state: the Lion on Sri Lanka’s flag is a symbol of race. It represents one ethnicity holding a sword against two stripes that represent ‘the other’. ‘Sinha’ in Sinhala and Singam in Tamil mean Lion. Through the flag, modern Sri lanka propagates the Sinhala self-identification as the ‘people of the Lion’ based on its founding myth of Prince Vijaya as the grandson of an Indian princess, abducted & raped by a beast, a lion; a prince banished to Sri Lanka to found the ‘lion race’. In this imagination of Sri Lankan identity, the other, confronting whom the Sinhala Lion stands, are the Tamil Hindus and Christians and Tamil speaking Muslims. Flag-apologists sometimes claim the sword is ‘protecting’ the ‘minorities’, but its positioning opposing them, rather than in front or to the side, belies this. And, in any event, protecting from what? This is no archaic and forgotten origination myth. It is entrenched in a foundational text of Sri Lankan (Theravada) Buddhism, the Mahavamsa, which underlies the post-independence State’s political vision and constitution. The flag is a visual representation of Mahavamsa content: the lion with the sword was the flag of Dutugemunu, mentioned in the Mahavamsa as a killer of millions of Tamils (Only one and a half human beings have been slain here by thee, O lord of men. ... Unbelievers and men of evil life were the rest, not more to be esteemed than beasts ) . It is the Mahavamsa that entrenches the myth of Vijaya’s origin, the concept of Sri Lanka as the ‘Sinhala Deepa’ meaning the Island of the people of the Lion and entrenches the obligation of the state to install Buddhism across the island. It is the Mahavamsa that says the lives of non-Buddhists are worth far less than those of a Buddhist and may be sacrificed in the millions in pursuit of Buddhist supremacy. It is in this context that the ethnically pure Srilankan (Sinhala) army planted the Lion flag on the site of the massacre of a 100,000+ Tamil civilians in 2009. The Lion flag that is closely associated both with war crimes and post-independence, state backed violence against the ethnic other. So completely aside from the views of Tamil pro-independence campaigners who have little interest in Sri Lanka’s flag since they want a separate flag for Tamil Eelam in any case, I would question people who self-identify as Sri Lankans. How are apparently ‘liberal Sri Lankans’ so accepting of these symbols. And what of these ‘Sri Lankan unity’ groups – those domestically or in the diaspora who hold out promises of a multi-ethnic Sri Lanka how do they live with their ethno-supremacist symbolism. Lets suppose Tamil Eelam did some day get independence, the people remaining in Sri lanka will still have to put up with these ethno-supremacist public symbols. Like my hosts in Mauritius, many of the people who engage with the Sri Lankan flag have not thought much about what it stands for and why it is so offensive. And this is our fault too – for not raising the discussion. So here I do.
Posted on: Sun, 27 Jul 2014 21:26:28 +0000
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