In this well-argued analysis of linguistic nationalism and ethnic conflict, Neil DeVotta places more weight on language than do most other accounts of conflict and civil war in Sri Lanka. DeVotta's main argument is that language politics informed by linguistic nationalism was not just one among several forces leading to the breakdown of peaceful coexistence of the Sinhalese and Tamil communities of the island, but indeed the single most important cause of the conflict and its later violent manifestations. Accordingly, the 1956 decision by the Colombo government to declare Sinhala the sole national language of Sri Lanka represents the crucial turning point in the relationship between ethnic Sinhalese and Tamils on the island. DeVotta argues that the 1956 Official Language Act was motivated by a desire among leaders of the Sinhalese majority to facilitate socioeconomic mobility among their ethnic constituency, and that it subsequently prompted further ethnocentric legislation openly favoring the interests of the ethnic majority at the expense of the Tamil minority. This inability of Sinhalese leaders to compromise in turn led to a severe loss of confidence in the government and other state institutions among Tamils, who began to experience the Sri Lankan state as an alien entity. Finally, this process of “institutional decay” set off by the 1956 imposition of Sinhala as sole official language in state institutions and education then provoked separatist Tamil nationalism and a spiral of violence culminating in a devastating civil war.
In the introduction, the author outlines the conceptual framework of the study, situating it within an institutionalist approach. Political and state institutions provide the framework for shaping actors' goals and decisions, most prominently the use of linguistic nationalism by Sinhalese elites in order to achieve their preferences, while the ensuing loss of confidence in state institutions among the island's Tamil minority crucially conditioned their separatist response. Chap. 2 introduces the ethnic diversity of Sri Lanka and the history of the late colonial period, with an emphasis on the “Buddhist revival” among the Sinhalese population. Chap. 3 examines linguistic nationalism among users of Sinhala and Tamil and describes the political shift toward a rejection of official recognition of both Sinhala and Tamil in favor of a Sinhala-only policy. The fourth chapter details the events leading to the 1956 Official Language Act, in particular parliamentary debates, early warnings and predictions with regard to the likely consequences of a Sinhala-only policy, and the first Sinhalese-Tamil riots. Chap. 5 examines the first two decades after the passing of the 1956 Official Language Act, showing how the 1956 decision led to further anti-Tamil discriminatory measures, setting off a process of “institutional decay” which in turn provoked an extremist Tamil reaction. Chap. 6 describes the further intensifying instances of anti-Tamil violence, the final stages of “institutional decay,” and the internationalization of the conflict, now turning into civil war. The seventh chapter examines the Tamil guerrilla organization Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), while seeking to explain why a peaceful resolution of ethnic conflict became increasingly difficult. The final chapter recapitulates the general argument about how discriminatory language policy led to institutional decay and finally civil war, concluding with a number of lessons drawn from the Sri Lankan scenario for the resolution and prevention of ethnic conflict elsewhere.
DeVotta considers the emergence of linguistic nationalism and ethnic conflict as illustrative of the difficulties of a transition from a predominantly agrarian society to a modern, complex one with greater possibilities and expectations of social mobility. In this, especially when accounting for the rise of separatist Tamil ethnolinguistic nationalism in Sri Lanka, DeVotta's approach resembles Inglehart & Woodward's (1972 [1967]) analysis of the origins of linguistic nationalism in the 19th-century Austro-Hungarian Empire. Linguistic nationalism is explained as a reaction among members of an ethnic minority or otherwise subordinate population in a modernizing state in which they face blockage of socioeconomic mobility and political exclusion owing to the imposition of a language of state other than the vernacular language they share. Since effective access to state-sponsored education and employment in state institutions is denied by the imposition of a language different from their own vernacular, members of such a minority then begin agitating for a nation-state of their own. The institutions of this new state would presumably function in a standard form of their vernacular, thus providing the opportunities for socioeconomic mobility denied by the state under whose rule the population in question has lived so far.
As an anthropologist reading DeVotta's lucid historical narrative, I could not help but be reminded of the enduring disciplinary differences between political scientists and anthropologists in their approaches to linguistic nationalism. DeVotta, like other political scientists, tends to approach language and linguistic practice emphasizing their role in regulating access to state power and state institutions. Such modalities of access and exclusion are conditioned by linguistic diversity, which establishes communicative boundaries. Thus, language plays above all the role of a communicative medium, which is politically manipulated in controlling access to resources, and linguistic nationalism is explained as the possible end product of such processes in situations of linguistic diversity. Anthropologists, in contrast, have tended to resist understanding linguistic nationalism as a reflection of other political and social processes not immediately concerned with language. Instead, they have emphasized language as a cultural site in which nationhood and national subjects are often originally produced and shaped, and then inform processes of political exclusion.
What makes Blowback a rich and interesting study is that DeVotta provides ample evidence for both perspectives. Nevertheless, the analysis clearly places more emphasis on the first view. But the historical narrative of chap. 3 can also be read as a demonstration of how the imagined boundaries of the Sinhalese nation were at least partly produced by politically charged ideas about language. This is evident, for example, in the characterization of Sinhala as an Indo-European language, adopted from the work of Orientalists. The image of Sinhalese as an “Aryan race,” constructed on the basis of such reasoning about linguistic difference, then contributed to a process of hierarchical boundary making vis-à-vis perceived others, in particular Tamils. Chap. 3 also illustrates a similarly language-focused dynamic for Tamil nationalism. Some more explicit recognition of the productive role of linguistic nationalism as a mode of regulating social life, in particular the fashioning of national subjects and senses of symbolic citizenship, would have strengthened the author's case for the centrality of language in ethnic conflict in Sri Lanka. It appears from his own historical account that Sinhalese linguistic nationalism has actively shaped a sense of Sri Lankan nationhood in which Tamils appear as foreigners, both motivating and legitimizing exclusion and violence. At the same time, Tamil linguistic nationalism has made the demand for a separate state seem naturally justified, and as others have shown, language has played a similarly constitutive role in the formation of Tamil nationalism in the Indian context (Ramaswamy 1997). The significance of linguistic nationalism lies not only in a reaction to processes of exclusion in institutions, or in a strategy of monopolizing access to social mobility, but also in the motivating and legitimizing of such exclusion, in making an ethnically pure nation imaginable in the first place, which then informs political decision making.
My only genuine concern about this insightful study is the lack of a more sustained treatment of multilingualism, as it cannot be assumed that ethnic Sinhalese and ethnic Tamils are in every instance monolingual users of Sinhala and Tamil, respectively. An account of multilingualism in Sri Lanka would have strengthened the author's argument, which relies to some degree on the assumption that ethnic Tamils in post-1956 Sri Lanka experienced discrimination and exclusion because they had insufficient command of and literacy skills in Sinhala. From a comparative perspective, studies of separatist linguistic nationalism have sometimes found that it is precisely those multilingual urban intellectuals among a disaffected minority or subordinate population with a full command of the dominant language of state who initiate separatist linguistic nationalism, and not the monolingual rural masses often imagined to be “typical” members of the new nation claiming a separate state (e.g., Urla 1993:822). Thus, those not actually facing any form of linguistic exclusion in state institutions under the political status quo may turn into separatist linguistic nationalists. This attests to the importance of nationalist ideologies centered on images of language in creating boundaries between people. The power of such nationalized visions of linguistic differentiation often exceeds the significance of language as a communicative medium providing or denying access to crucial socioeconomic resources. This point notwithstanding, Blowback is impressive testimony to the centrality of language in processes of ethnonational identification.
