Postsecular_b2.pdf

Postcolonial Nativism? Exploring the Postsecularist Critique of History on Sri Lanka

Harshana Rambukwella Introduction Sri Lanka was once considered a model liberal democracy and a success story in the colonial project of bequeathing modernity to the non-­ Western world. But its postindependence history of intractable ethnonationalist polarization leading to decades of violence and an illiberal majoritarian democratic ethos has shattered this sanguine narrative. Instead, Sri Lanka now increasingly appears in relation to meditations on the crisis of liberal I would like to acknowledge the intellectual generosity of John D. Rogers, US Director, American Institute for Sri Lankan Studies, who read and commented on a number of different versions of this essay and for the encouragement and support he has given me over the years in shaping my intellectual career. Alan Strathern, Oxford University, pushed me to write this essay and gave me the opportunity to present it at a unique event on Sri Lankan historiography at Cambridge University. Liyanage Amarakeerthi, University of Perdaeniya, read an earlier draft of the essay and has constantly challenged me to critically reflect on literature, culture, and society. I would also like to thank Aamir Mufti of the boundary 2 editorial collective for his insightful comments that honed the conceptual and analytical clarity of the essay. Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own. boundary 2 45:4 (2018) DOI 10.1215/01903659-­7142741 © 2018 by Duke University Press

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democracy and the failure of the nation-­state model. Postwar Sri Lanka has seen an upsurge in populist nationalism, and in the absence of meaningful sociopolitical change, social justice remains elusive. Several recent critical studies on the problem of nation and nationalism in Sri Lanka show the effect of the emerging global discourse of postsecularism. The relationship between postsecularism in general and the Sri Lankan scholarship discussed in this essay is not direct. But the pervasive influence of postsecular thought can be discerned even when the struggle is not explicitly between secular values and religion. This is especially apparent in postsecularism’s all-­encompassing nature and in its modality of attempting to shed all that is seen as derived from Europe and the Enlightenment. It is often elegiac in its pronouncements about the fate of secular Enlightenment values. This melancholia, I believe, relates to a deeper and abiding sense of nostalgia concerning the loss of authenticity emerging from the colonial encounter. It is the same sense of powerful loss that often drove/drives anti- and postcolonial nationalisms. It is also a sense of loss that much of postcolonial and postsecular thought will unhesitatingly repudiate as uncritical romantic longing. But when critically examined, the postsecular trajectory can be seen as ultimately shaped by the quest for an obscure position outside “Europe,” Eurocentrism, and the Enlightenment. This modality and the underlying sense of a binary East-­West divide are striking in the Sri Lankan postsecular scholarship, which portrays the nation as an example of the failure of the global secular-­liberal project. Secularist ideals, representative democracy, and the empiricist historical traditions of the Enlightenment are interrogated as obstacles to peace. History—understood as a positivist discourse that is closely tied to claims of authenticity, national legitimacy, and the formation of the nation-­state— occupies a central place in this critical project. The discipline of academic history and the positivist historical consciousness it generates are seen as having contributed to the incessant reproduction of essentialist and polarized ethnic identities that trap the discourse in a Cartesian self/other dichotomy. The ultimate aim of this critique is to find postsecular alternatives that transcend the empiricism of history, the numerical instrumentality of representative democracy, and the religio-­cultural neutrality on which the secular nation-­state model is premised. The abiding sense of loss arising from the colonial encounter, which has been a powerful inspiration in anticolonial and decolonizing thought, is something I share. For those located in postcolonial societies, this is a fundamental existential problem. Benedict Anderson (1998) identifies this

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as a comparativist urge in anticolonial nationalist thinking. The nationalist consciousness is haunted by its keen awareness of its belatedness in relation to Europe—attempting to emulate a modernity that appears just out of reach and painfully conscious that cultural recovery can never be a complete process. It is the same sense of inauthenticity that partly drives Partha Chatterjee’s response to Anderson when he critiques the latter’s concept of modular nationalism as Eurocentric and argues that such a view implies that “even our imaginations must remain forever colonized” (Chatterjee 1993: 5). Chatterjee is simultaneously aware of how authenticity can damagingly figure in cultural nationalist thinking and theorizes this in terms of the “thematic” and “problematic” of anticolonial nationalism (1986: 36–39). If anticolonial nationalism successfully confronts the “problematic” by wresting control of the structures of the colonial state from the colonizer, it fails at the level of the “thematic” because it ultimately sees the world in binary terms—divided between East and West. Chatterjee (1986) sees this as both the crucial strategic innovation and the critical dilemma of the Bengali nationalist elite. They construct the private familial domain as the site of authentic Indian identity, outside the purview of the colonial state, and therefore as an inner cultural core from which resistance to colonialism can emerge. But Chatterjee also critically explores the essentialist premises of this move and its destructive implications for postindependence nationalism in India.1 The postsecular approach shares certain similarities with Chatterjee, such as the desire to contest Eurocentrism and the desire to press for the autonomy and agency of formerly colonized peoples. But in its search for a position outside “Europe,” postsecularist thinking often ends up reaffirming an absolute East-­West binary. In the Sri Lankan case, postsecularist thought has sought to thwart the nationalist recourse to history by attempting to disconnect the politics of the present from the past. At the same time, some variants of this critique strive to understand identity outside protocols of modernity like history. But the radically dehistoricized nature of the present, and the quasi-­utopian conception of identity divorced from history it imagines as alternatives, seriously undermines the possibilities of accountability and justice. By looking at the influential cultural-­nationalist 1. There appears to be some ambiguity in Chatterjee’s own position because it is not sufficiently clarified whether Chatterjee himself sees the private/familial domain as “authentic” or whether he is suggesting that this is how the nationalist elite conceptualized it. However, in overall terms, the theoretical distinction he makes between the problematic and the thematic is critically significant.

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discourse of ජාතික චින්තනය (Jathika Chintanaya) in Sri Lanka and the ironic ways in which it selectively mirrors what I have glossed as the postsecular tendencies in Sri Lankan scholarship, I argue that attempting to get beyond history undermines the ultimate goal of equitable social justice sought by these critics. This ambiguity is visible in how Jathika Chinthanaya deploys a putatively anti-­Eurocentric discourse only to insert and validate an exclusivist, majoritarian historical narrative into the space cleared by its critical labors. The essay concludes by looking at the idea of secular criticism in the work of the late Edward W. Said. In tandem with the idea of secular criticism, I also explore the notion of a minoritarian position that guided Said’s critical interventions and the ethically enabling space it provides to critique the excesses of nationalism. Said’s secular historicist position, I believe, offers a critical vantage from which one can address the sense of melancholia that drives nationalist thinking but at the same time maintain a critical distance from its essentialist premises. The current postwar configuration in Sri Lanka clearly indicates the limitations of the antihistoricist trajectory of Sri Lankan scholarship. To meaningfully engage and reconfigure the debate in Sri Lanka, one cannot look to a utopian politics outside history. Secularism, Its Discontents, and the Problem of History Secularism as a sociopolitical doctrine, and the attendant process of secularization, has come under intense academic scrutiny over the past two decades (Asad 1999; 2004; Bruce 2002; Devji 1992; van der Veer and Lehmann 1999). Even scholars who are sympathetic to secularist values are revising the complacent assumption of secularization as a progressive evolutionary process. The specifically postcolonial critique of secularism, which, as Vincent Pecora suggests (2010), is increasingly morphing into a postsecular position, takes several forms. For van der Veer and Lehmann (1999), secularist discourse is problematic because of the way it often positions as deviant non-­Western societies where religion plays an overtly political role. They relate this to the Hegelian model of evolutionary history that underwrites the academic understanding of nationalism among influential critics such as Ernest Gellner, Eric Hobsbawm, and Benedict Anderson. European nation-­states are seen as the normative site where the separation of various spheres of life and the rationalization of society were achieved, leading to the possibility of a properly secularist orientation

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to life associated with an autonomous and rational individual consciousness. As will become evident later in this discussion, it is also the legacy of this historically conscious national subject that the Sri Lankan critics discussed here seek to critique and displace along with the quasi-­Hegelian progressivism that undergirds much of nationalist thought. As Prasenjit Duara (1995) has explained, historical consciousness in modern society is “overwhelmingly framed by the nation-­state,” and within the nation-­state, those whose histories are marginalized struggle to gain legitimacy. It is this centrality of historical consciousness in nationalism and the contest for history it can generate that drives the antihistoricism of those engaged in the Sri Lankan variant of the postsecular discourse. Talal Asad, one of the foremost critics of secularism, argues that the secularization thesis does not sufficiently recognize how the secular and the religious codetermine each other. In Asad’s view, informed significantly by Islam’s claim for political legitimacy, religion can rarely be confined to the space accorded to it by the nation-­state. Asad claims that given the coercive reach of the nation-­state, no discourse that has ambitions beyond “mere belief or inconsequential talk in public can remain indifferent to state power in a secular world” (1999: 191). The arguments here also stem from a view that certain religious formations, like strands of Protestant Christianity, are perceived as “rational” and may have a public role, while Islam, for instance, may not be seen so: “Only religions that have accepted the assumptions of liberal moral and political discourse are being commended” (180). Asad’s position is shaped by a binary worldview of a secularized West and a religious non-­West. As Pecora points out, Asad, in his earlier work Genealogies of Religion, posits an idea of “discrepant experience” by contrasting static Islamic societies with their secular and changing Western counterparts (Pecora 2006: 25–42). Pecora maintains that Asad’s position is very close to the absolute East-­West difference that haunts the work of Samuel Huntington and Ashis Nandy (43). Sindre Bangstad (2009) has also explored the implications of the East-­West binary in Asad’s work and asserts that it generates a static, historically transcendental view of Islam that stands as an authentic embodiment of alterity against an equally monolithic West. The difference between East and West in these perspectives often appears unbridgeable. Some versions of postsecular critique also operate on such a conception of East-­West difference. For instance, David Scott (1999), whose work is foundational for introducing a postsecular approach to Sri Lankan scholarship, sees secularism/modernity as a

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failed “Western”/Eurocentric project and appears to imply the possibility of a more authentically local politics. Ashis Nandy (1990), who has long held the view that secularism is an inhuman Western imposition on Indian society, has proposed a traditional notion of religious faith, which he sees as inherently tolerant, as an alternative. But as both Aamir Mufti (1998) and Pecora (2006) argue, even if one were to accept Nandy’s romantic view of premodern faith, his solution fails to consider how religio-­cultural identity in modernity is institutionalized and organized within the nation-­state. In both Nandy and Scott, history is central to this problem because it is modern historical consciousness that is seen to disrupt the organic order of life. The cultural nationalist and postcolonial or postsecular critiques of secularism run in parallel here. For many cultural nationalists, secular ideals are flawed due to their Western origins. The cultural nationalist call to a return to an indigenous way of life is often informed by a majoritarian nationalist script, as opposed to the postsecular position, which desires some form of multicultural coexistence. But both positions are shaped by the thematic of nationalist thought. They hold a binary worldview that posits an essential difference between East and West. Historicity and “Postsecular” Tendencies in Sri Lankan Scholarship A critical dialogue that has certain procedural and structural similarities to the postsecular critique outlined above has been developing in relation to Sri Lanka. With the exception of Ananda Abeysekara, a religious studies scholar, the three critics considered below do not frame their work as an explicit response to secularism. What they have in common is a view that secularism, representative democracy, and the idea that the nation-­ state and history are interlinked domains of an Enlightenment legacy that need rigorous scrutiny and that abandoning them might be a prerequisite for a true postcolonial politics and society to emerge. The two other significant voices in this critique are David Scott (an anthropologist) and Qadri Ismail (a literary critic). All three are employed by American universities. When Scott first initiated his critique (1995), postsecularism had not coalesced into its currently recognizable form. At the time, Scott’s contribution was received primarily as a critique of empiricist historical traditions in Sri Lanka. However, his work also carried some implications for the notion of “historicism”—or the idea that historical accountability was central to justice in the present. He critiques historiography as an empirically bound

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discipline that has exhausted its relevance to social justice in Sri Lanka because its findings are open to potentially endless squabbling. He illustrates this by citing the example of a debate between historian R. A. L. H. Gunawardena and literary scholar K. N. O. Dharmadasa over the origins of Sinhala identity. Scott points out that Gunawardena’s revisionist historiography makes an implicit wager that disproving the seemingly ancient and uninterrupted lineage of Sinhala identity will challenge the legitimacy of contemporary Sinhala nationalism (Scott 1995). But this wager fails when Gunawardena’s findings are challenged by Dharmadasa, who cites new evidence. Dharmadasa’s critique raises a whole new set of questions: Did Gunawardena get his argument wrong? Did he use adequate sources? And if Gunawardena is wrong about the historical lineage of the Sinhala people, does that mean exclusivist Sinhala nationalism is legitimate? What Scott attempts to demonstrate here is the fallibility of staking a contemporary political argument on the basis of history. Scott later integrated this critique in Refashioning Futures: Criticism After Postcoloniality (1999). Here, the critique of history becomes an integral part of a much larger project that evinces a postsecular trajectory. It is not only history that is seen as an obstacle in the search for social justice. Representative democracy is also critiqued for its numerical instrumentality and its legitimization of majoritarianism as a “natural” outcome of the working out of the seemingly abstract and neutral principle of number. Scott’s ultimate contention here is that the Enlightenment project of secular modernity, which includes historiography and representative democracy, has failed in Sri Lanka. As an alternative, he suggests that “we ought to . . . systematically explor[e] in Sri Lanka . . . ways and means of inventing, cultivating and institutionalizing cultural-­political spaces in which groups . . . can formulate and articulate their moral-­political concerns and their self-­ governing claims in the (natural and conceptual) languages of their respective historical traditions” (Scott 1999: 185). It appears that Scott’s “groups” are the conventional ethnic categories, such as Sinhala, Tamil, and Muslim, within which Sri Lankan sociopolitical discourse has been increasingly framed over the course of the twentieth century. His naturalization of these identities is at least partly due to his refusal to engage with history—critical historical studies have contributed immensely to our understanding of the contingent and shifting formation of these identities and what can be called their modern reconfigurations. We are never told what these “natural and conceptual languages” or “historical traditions” are. Are they somehow different and more tolerant

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and inclusive than the divisive ethnoreligious self-­understandings prevalent in modern Sri Lanka? From where do they derive? It seems counterintuitive to invoke the idea of “historical traditions” here because it is precisely such historical traditions and the notion that the Sinhalese have an a priori claim to the land that has led to much of Sri Lanka’s postcolonial suffering. This is where the postsecular trajectory of Scott’s work becomes critically debilitating. In attempting to displace what he sees as the failed project of secular modernity, Scott ends up opening a space that is at best ambiguous and at worst enables the very kind of cultural nationalist thinking his critique is attempting to displace. Ismail’s work builds on Scott’s critique, but with some important divergences. While Ismail also critiques history and representative democracy, he does not make the same kind of quasi-­utopian appeal to indigenousness. Ismail’s critique is trenchant in its insistence on “[dismantling] the category of Europe” and in that sense is very much within the postsecular trend, but he avoids affirming the existence of local authenticity (2005: 30). Instead, he argues for what he calls “postempiricism.” This implies a worldview that can potentially transcend historically constituted notions of self/other and lead to a situation where the “distinct . . . participate[s] in the other” (221). Two significant axes in this critical project are similar to Scott’s. Empirically bound historiography and numerically determined representative democracy are seen as obstacles preventing the imagining of peace. His main focus is the writing of K. M. de Silva, a historian, and A. J. Wilson, a political scientist. He points out that their contrasting accounts of twentieth-­century Sri Lankan history are evidence of the unsustainability of historiography’s truth claims. In addition, he points out how both academics late in their careers revise their ideological positions and how this in turn inflects their interpretation of the past—with the obvious implication that the empiricist truth claims of history are problematic. While the basic structure of Ismail’s argument may seem to echo Scott’s, Ismail appears to recognize the contradiction in Scott’s position, which rejects history but at the same time affirms its need. Ismail explains that this is because Scott remains ultimately historicist and by extension empirical. While Scott critiques secular modernity, he maintains that historically constituted identities are important for a yet-­to-­be-­realized quasi-­ utopian social space that does not demand the religio-­cultural neutrality of secularism. Ismail, on the other hand, dismisses history entirely. His claim is that history as an empiricist discourse cannot help but reproduce mutually antagonistic ethnic identities (Ismail 2005: 236).

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However, even as Ismail rejects history, his own understanding of Sri Lankan sociopolitical discourse relies on history. While contesting de Silva’s and Wilson’s accounts of Sri Lankan history, Ismail’s own position of a politics that does not succumb to the logic of number or historical primacy emerges in relation to the very history that he is contesting. The identification of a minority position in opposition to the majoritarian logic of dominance that characterizes Sinhala and Tamil nationalisms is only available through history. What is problematic is how “bad history”—trapped in a positivist, empiricist tradition—becomes extrapolated into a rejection of the entire notion of history itself. A similar move is also made in relation to representative democracy, where the particular failure of democracy in the Sri Lankan context due to its majoritarian nature leads to a wholesale rejection of democracy. Ismail’s critique does not sufficiently clarify whether democracy as a concept is problematic or whether representative democracy as a mechanism is the problem because it can serve to perpetuate majoritarianism through the dominance of number. While Ismail’s own analysis reveals that even literature can be historicist and empiricist, one can raise the question as to whether history cannot narrate or depict identity in ways that are not essentialist. There have been attempts to write histories that are contingent and multivalent in perspective. But the key issue here again is whether this calls for a complete rejection of history and historical consciousness simply because it is seen as a legacy of the Enlightenment. As indicated earlier, an important implication of Ismail’s text is the value of a minoritarian perspective, which can unsettle what Darini Rajasingham-­Senanayake (1999) has called the “bi-­polar” configuration in Sri Lankan sociopolitical discourse. Organized along the dominant Sinhala-­ Tamil fault line, the bipolar discourse marginalizes the political and social relevance of other minorities while also homogenizing the Sinhala and Tamil communities. Ismail attests that Tamil nationalism’s ethical failure is that it seeks a majoritarian place within the nation. In opposition to Sinhala claims, Tamil nationalism attempts to “prove,” as it were, its own ancient lineage in the island and its numerical strength as the largest minority, which is why it prefers the term “Tamil speaking peoples,” which allows it to strategically co-­opt Muslims into its project. Tamil nationalism desires two nations, Sinhala and Tamil, sharing the island and relegating other communities to the margins. The postempiricist position Ismail proposes seeks to imagine a system of social justice that is not determined by number (representative democracy) or claims for authenticity through history. While I find the attempt to rethink Sri Lankan sociopolitics in terms of a position that

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does not privilege one community over another insightful, it is difficult to see why the dismissal of history is a prerequisite for such a critical task. Though not explicitly acknowledged, Ismail’s critique of majoritarianism and the implicit minoritarian position from which he makes this observation is clearly influenced by Said and his interventions in the Israeli-­ Palestinian conflict.2 As I argue later, Said’s thought is instructive of how a minoritarian perspective can help disrupt the settled, hegemonic nature of majoritarian discourses. History, however, is an integral part of Saidian critique, and abandoning it may lead to critically debilitating quasi-­messianic outcomes, consistent with what Said might term “religious” criticism, which he often associated with deconstructionist critique and its potential for ahistoricity.3 In the work of Scott and Ismail, historicism is understood as the genetic understanding of identity and the stubborn insistence that problems in the present are understood and addressed through history. But the failure of this critical approach is that it lumps together an obdurate historical consciousness with a simplistically generalized account of historiography as a discipline—critical historiography does not necessarily need to produce the kind of historical consciousness that Scott or Ismail associates with it. Abeysekara takes the trajectory of moving from critique to the ultimate abandonment of history to its logical end. He is the most explicitly postsecular of these three scholars, and it is in his work that the global postsecular critique becomes most closely allied to the Sri Lankan case. This is perhaps unsurprising since Abeysekara’s work engages with the anthropology of religion, a field in which postsecular thought has had a strong impact. He invokes Scott’s original critique of the Sri Lankan nationalist historical debate as a landmark theoretical intervention, but he seeks to move beyond it because he sees Scott’s position as ultimately historicist. He does so by introducing the Nietzschean notion of “active forgetting” (Abeysekara 2008: 178–94). In opposition to the liberal promise of a better tomorrow, which is seen as premised on a quasi-­Hegelian teleology of the unfolding of History and the triumph of Reason, he proposes a present that is divorced from the past as well as the future. Abeysekara explored the same theme in a little-­known article in the 2. In fact, this becomes apparent in Ismail’s response to a review symposium on Abiding by Sri Lanka published in the journal Religion. Ismail ends his response by invoking Said and his contributions to the Israeli-­Palestinian conflict (Ismail 2008). 3. See, for instance, Said’s indictment of deconstructionist literary criticism in The World, the Text, and the Critic (1983: 4).

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inaugural issue of Domains (2004)—a short-­lived journal published by the International Centre for Ethnic Studies. There, as in his 2008 text, Abeysekara makes use of the 1983 anti-­Tamil riots to suggest the burdens history places upon the present. He explains that post-­1983, it becomes almost axiomatic that any subsequent event in the conflict between the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) and the Sri Lankan state is narrated by making a causal link to the violence of 1983—despite the fact that the violence of 1983 was never repeated. Abeysekara’s contention is that the invocation of this history (or any history per se) implicitly draws the Sri Lankan conflict into a discourse of essentialized Sinhala versus Tamil identities. Abeysekara’s position raises troubling issues in relation to a charged ethnonationalist context like Sri Lanka. While the constant recycling of the memory of a traumatic event like 1983 can be an obstacle to progressive discussion, the suggestion that 1983 can be forgotten is similar to suggesting that modern Jewish identity can be understood outside the Holocaust. The Holocaust memory can be, and often is, exploited to project Jews as victims in situations where they are in fact oppressors—but the issue is not so much with this memory but how it is used or exploited. Denying or suppressing 1983 can easily become a strategy for denying Tamil victimhood. Abeysekara invokes Sri Lanka as part of a larger argument about the impossibility of secular notions of justice because they are premised on the notion of historical precedent. He traces this in the failure of American secularists’ attempts to employ the American tradition of separation between church and state to remove the “In God We Trust” motto from US currency. The use of the precedent, however, fails when the US Supreme Court rules that the motto can no longer be considered religious due to its “normalization” over a long period of time. Abeysekara therefore notes that such an approach is always vulnerable because it involves, as Scott and Ismail would also argue, “[the] messy business of sorting through empiricist-­historicist questions” (Abeysekara 2008: 45). What is unclear here is how the kind of politics Abeysekara imagines would apply to a situation like Sri Lanka. As in the case of Talal Asad, who looks at the challenge “political” Islam poses to “secular” Europe, Abeysekara uses Sri Lanka as an example because the Sinhala Buddhist claim to the nation—a potent amalgam of race, religion, and nation—challenges the very notion of a secular nation-­state. Sri Lanka’s 1972 republican constitution provides a special position to Buddhism, and Sri Lankan postindependence regimes since 1948 have also largely tended to favor the Sinhala community and the Buddhist religion while maintaining a façade of multicul-

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tural and multireligious rhetoric. Nonetheless, while secularism has never had the kind of public visibility it has had in neighboring India, the idea that the Sri Lankan state is secular and at least theoretically should not be favoring one particular ethnic or religious community has been an important assumption, though this position has been consistently eroded since the 1950s. It is on this assumption that public intellectuals and civil society organizations have been able to critique the state’s treatment of religious and ethnic minorities. In The Politics of Postsecular Religion (2008), Abeysekara never clarifies how religious identity will operate in a postsecular society. The implication seems to be that through “active forgetting,” identities become separated from their conflictual histories and thereby presumably become fundamentally altered. Pecora argues, in a perceptive review of Abeysekara’s text, that this is in essence a not so innovative attempt at deconstructing historicism. As he points out, Abeysekara’s desire to disengage history from the present is procedurally similar to the liberal proposition of a “veil of ignorance” that John Rawls proposes (Pecora 2010: 861). What Rawls imagines here is a situation where people willingly consent to leave their ethnic and cultural allegiances behind and encounter each other as equals when moving from the private to the public sphere. Given the level to which history (both popular and academic) saturates the Sri Lankan conflict, the desire to get beyond history is understandable. Coming in the wake of what seems to be the failure of the secular nation-­state model and the veritable global explosion of religio‑cultural fundamentalisms, all three critics seek alternative frames of reference that attempt to move away from what are seen as stifling epistemological categories inherited from the Enlightenment. While cognizant of the postcolonial impulse that drives this critique, there is a need to rigorously scrutinize what is conceptually and politically at stake here. In the next section, I focus on how a certain strand of Sinhala cultural nationalist discourse bears an uncanny resemblance to what I have identified as postsecular trends in Sri Lankan scholarship. I believe this cultural nationalist argument brings into relief the limits of secularism while simultaneously highlighting the ambiguities of the postsecularist argument. Jathika Chintanaya and Postcolonial Nativism Nalin de Silva and Gunadasa Amarasekara are two names familiar to anyone following Sinhala nationalist discourse. The two are considered

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the intellectual architects of the influential Jathika Chintanaya (national consciousness) movement, which can be traced to the early 1980s. Initially aimed at reclaiming an authentic national cultural ideal, it has had a significant political impact through a younger generation of politicians and political activists.4 Early in their careers, both Amarasekara and de Silva were sympathetic to the Sri Lankan Marxist/Left movement. Amarasekara in particular attempted to articulate a nativized Marxist framework that could address the need for social justice in tandem with a “postcolonial” desire for the authentically local.5 But both de Silva and Amarasekara gradually moved from a position of seeking dialogue with larger internationalist discourses such as Marxism to a position that is putatively nativist. Presumably influenced by the threat posed to national sovereignty by the LTTE-­led separatist struggle and the perceived Western sympathy for this cause, de Silva’s and Amarasekara’s ideological positions have become staunchly Sinhala nationalist. In their current ideological dispensation, they occupy a position that is seemingly dismissive of all Western culture and thought. In a series of articles contributed to the Sri Lanka Guardian, a web-­ based news and current affairs publication, de Silva explores what he sees as a crisis in Western knowledge and society. These articles cover diverse topics and do not form a coherent whole. They range from critiques of postmodernism and the notion of objectivity, to the concept of secularism and the persistence of cultural colonialism. Taken as a whole, this cluster of articles suggests a conceptual orientation that is broadly consonant with the postsecular trends identified above. For instance, in a two-­part article entitled “On Knowledge,” de Silva (2001), a theoretical physicist by training, explores the impossibility of objectivity. He traces the differing explanations offered by physics over time for planetary motion and gravity and notes that at each stage, from Copernicus through Galileo to Einstein, previously held “objective knowledge” has been problematized. Therefore, he poses the philosophical question of whether “objective knowledge” independent of the observing subject is possible. Another article, titled “Postmodernism as a Simulation,” discusses the concept of the simulacrum proposed by Jean Baudrillard and explores its implications for the notion of metanarratives with reference to Jean-­ 4. For instance, a cabinet minister in the current regime, Champika Ranawaka of the Jathika Hela Urumaya (JHU), identifies his political philosophy as being deeply influenced by Jathika Chinthanaya. 5. See, for instance, Amarasekara 1980.

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François Lyotard (de Silva 2003). De Silva contends that the problems of comprehending reality in postmodernism not only question objectivity but the very possibility of observation—an issue that quantum physics, for instance, grapples with. But de Silva pushes the argument further to suggest that in the final analysis Western systems of knowledge cannot dispense with notions such as truth and objectivity because their very conceptual foundations rest on them. Postmodernism for all its radical questioning of reality ultimately holds on to a notion of an objective world outside the observer, though the possibility of our accessing it is problematized. Similarly, quantum physics, though unable to define what a particle is, retains the notion of a particle. De Silva suggests that abandoning the notion of an external objective world will “[make] the whole system collapse . . . like a pack of cards,” and he further maintains that this is so because “[t]he Western systems of knowledge are finally based on Western Greek Judaic [sic] Christian Chinthanaya with God at its center” (de Silva 2003). What he implies is that logocentrism is indispensable to Western thought. The questioning of objectivity, the assertion that only subjective knowledge is possible, and the implication that all Western knowledge is part of a “Greek Judaic [sic] Christian” tradition, resembles postcolonial and postsecular critiques of Eurocentric metanarratives. Dipesh Chakrabarty’s work, for instance, posits the idea of a “hyperreal Europe”—the notion that Europe forms the universal referent of History and the notion that European epistemologies deeply structure the ways in which the contemporary world is understood and represented. Chakrabarty suggests that “political modernity” is a concept “impossible to think of anywhere in the world without invoking categories and concepts, the genealogies of which go deep into the intellectual and even theological traditions of Europe” (Chakrabarty 2000: 4). While Chakrabarty’s ideological intent here is different from de Silva’s—his attempt is to “provincialize Europe,” or to think through the ways in which European thought has morphed and melded in non-­Western contexts—the two writers share a similar conceptual basis. For de Silva, the logical end of such criticism is to invalidate Western scholarship and to argue that what he calls Greek Judaic [sic] Christian chintanaya (or thinking/thought) needs to be replaced by a non-­Western epistemology. This is seen as part of an ongoing project without which “the non western world cannot think of freeing themselves of western Christian colonization” (de Silva 2008a). This is not a particularly novel line of argument in cultural nationalist thinking. Amarasekara, for instance, has long challenged the validity of Western systems of knowledge that have sought

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to understand and represent Sri Lankan culture—one of his favorite targets being the discipline of anthropology and Sri Lankan anthropologists working in Western academia.6 But de Silva’s innovation is the selective adoption of the conceptual vocabulary of what can be glossed as postmodernist or postsecularist thought. In an article titled the “Myth of Secularism,” de Silva (2008b) criticizes the idea of secularism as an abstract ideal that has no lived reality. He looks at the history, society, and politics of a number of Western countries and concludes that they are all “Christian” cultures, in the broad sense of the cultural ethos he describes as Greek Judeo Christianity. The implications of this for Sri Lanka are made explicit. De Silva holds, in common with most Sinhala Buddhist nationalists, that Sri Lanka is essentially a Sinhala Buddhist country and that colonialism was a temporary interruption to this sociopolitical order. The introduction of a Buddhist clause in the 1972 republican constitution is therefore seen as a return to the natural order of things. The postindependence majoritarian trajectory of the nation-­ state is therefore simply a redressing of colonial injustices—setting right the organic order of things disrupted by the colonial intrusion. Set against the larger context of de Silva’s argument that all nation-­states, despite their apparent secularity, are culturally marked, the identification of Sri Lanka with Sinhala Buddhism becomes natural. This is in essence a return to the habitual narrative of Sinhala nationalism. The questioning of objectivity and the foregrounding of the subjective nature of knowledge is not seen as contradictory to the assertion of a homogeneous Sinhala national narrative. Within the logic of cultural nationalism, a perspective that adopts a Sinhala Buddhist orientation, or chintanaya, is able to discern the true nature of Sri Lankan society. Here the Sinhala Buddhist attempt to monopolize the local is dependent not on empirical history per se but on a notion of culturally marked knowledge that is consistent with the postsecular approach of attempting to find local alternatives to Enlightenment thought. Intellectuals like de Silva and Amarasekara can live happily with the contradictions involved in both relying on and rejecting traditional history. Scott’s, Ismail’s, and Abeysekara’s works display similar contradictions. Although they reject empiricism, in practice they make historical assumptions about the nature of Sri Lankan society. The quasi-­messianic or quasi-­utopian alternative of a politics of identity unmarked by historical claims becomes problematic when confronted 6. See, for instance, Amarasekara 1980; 1992.

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with the materiality of situations like Sri Lanka, where binaries such as victim/aggressor and minority/majority may need to be seen as part of the solution as well as part of the problem. While resisting the normalization of such binaries and understanding them as historically contingent, it might be necessary to critically mobilize them to achieve social justice. Ideas of history that use these binaries are too important to ignore in postwar Sri Lanka. The glut of postwar films that invokes a timeless Sinhala‑dominated nation or the pseudo-­archeological search for Sinhala heritage in the Tamil‑ and Muslim-­dominated north and east of the country are just two indications of the strength of populist discourses of history. A much needed political solution based on some form of power sharing between the communities, for instance, also has to confront history. In such an endeavor, critical historiography, which resists nationalist prejudices and helps in the formation of a better appreciation of the complex and mutually constitutive history of the island’s communities, can play a critical role. Secular Criticism, Historicity, Minority: The Critical Practice of Edward W. Said The significance of history and historical consciousness is evident in the influence of Edward W. Said on politically engaged scholarship in Israel—another ethnonationalist context in which minority-­majority politics and history dominate. Historicity and minority consciousness can be identified as two cardinal points of reference in Saidian scholarship. Though Said’s Orientalism (1978) is often invoked as a founding text of postcolonial studies, Said himself never fully identified with the term postcolonial. As Aamir Mufti reminds us, “Edward Said has never left any doubt as to the significance he attaches to what he calls secular criticism. It is by this term, not postcolonial criticism, that he identifies his critical practice as a whole” oriented, exilic consciousness that Mufti (Mufti 1998: 95). The minority-­ and David Hawkes (2007) identify in Saidian criticism can, I propose, offer potential ways in which the question of majoritarianism in Sri Lanka can be rethought. Through Said, it is possible to critically appraise the “postsecularist” trajectory in scholarship on Sri Lanka and to suggest an alternative that does not look for messianic solutions outside the materiality of history. Ilan Pappe, a leading Israeli historian and scholar, has argued that the critical framework deployed by Said in Orientalism (1978), and later in Culture and Imperialism (1993), was crucial for Israeli social scientists and historians to interrogate the Orientalist nature of Israeli academic produc-

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tion with regard to Arabs, Palestinians, and Jews. He also claims that it enabled them to develop the scholarly discourse he calls “post-­Zionism,” which helped interrogate the role played by the academic establishment in the Zionist nation building process (Pappe 1997; 2010). But recent Israeli scholarship has shown an antihistoricist tendency blunting the critical edge of the earlier post-­Zionist approach. Ella Shohat has suggested that this is based on a selective adoption/adaption of Homi Bhabha’s work and a stagist approach to postcolonial studies, which sees Said’s work being succeeded by what is thought to be a more sophisticated and complex paradigm developed by Bhabha and others (Shohat 2010: 345). Both Shohat and Pappe maintain that concepts such as “hybridity” and the psychoanalytic emphasis in this new criticism have tended to blur the materiality of the Israeli-­Palestinian context subordinating issues of justice and accountability and blurring the distinction between victim and aggressor (Shohat 2010; Pappe 2010). Pappe notes that Said, in contrast, consistently appealed for a position that required historical accountability (Pappe 2010: 328). Attempting to understand Said’s commitment to history and what he defined as “secular criticism,” I propose, may provide an alternative to the radical antihistoricism proposed by postsecularism. Said was supportive of Palestinian nationalism but steadfastly opposed a two-­state solution to the Israeli-­ Palestinian problem. Hawkes explains that this opposition can be best understood as a rejection of the essentialist premises by which Palestinian nationalism demanded separation and by which it failed to recognize the mutually constitutive nature and history of Israeli and Palestinian identity (Hawkes 2007). One may note here that the rejection of a two-­state solution by Said compares closely with Ismail’s rejection of such a solution in Sri Lanka—partly due to its reduction of Sri Lanka’s multicultural reality to two dominant ethnicities, but partly also because it operates on an essentialized self/other dichotomy.7 Said’s critical vantage, as Mufti stresses, is also significantly shaped by an exilic, minoritarian consciousness. Discussing the seminal importance of the figure of Eric Auerbach in Said’s thought, Mufti points out how Said invokes the exilic conditions in Istanbul during the Second World War, 7. I am aware that Said has been critiqued, much like Talal Asad, for positing an East-­ West binary worldview. But Said’s oeuvre stands in contrast to such an assessment. His work largely seeks to explore the mutually constitutive nature of cultures, and his concept of “worldliness” allows for the location of texts within a rich and complex cultural, political, and economic history.

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under which Auerbach composed his magisterial study of realism in the Western literary tradition to delineate how such displacement enables criticism. As Mufti writes, “We have in Auerbach an instance both of filiation with his natal culture and because of exile, affiliation with it through critical consciousness and scholarly work” (Mufti 1998: 105). It is the productive tension between these two poles—filiation signifying an inherited uncritical relationship and affiliation signifying a critical relationship of choice—that Said, Mufti suggests, locates his secular critical practice. It is therefore a position that does not deny history but is equally conscious of how a filial relation to one’s history can turn into “idolatry” or an uncritical and settled sense of self. Mufti identifies the historicist influence in Said—historicism here not relating to the kind of progressivist Hegelian vision of history that postcolonialism takes as its target—as stemming from the humanist tradition of Giambattista Vico (Mufti 1998). In Vico’s New Science, the Florentine scholar makes a distinction between human and divine worlds and their relative histories. Said finds this distinction intellectually liberating “because historians, or new scientists, are human and can know history on the grounds that it was made by men and women . . . that is, the historical, social, and secular. As for sacred history, it is made by God and hence cannot really be known” (Said 1983: 291). The secular criticism that Said defines here is about human constructs—contingent, open to critique, and part of a verifiable human history. The problematic outcomes of attempting to step beyond this secular history are clearly visible in Mufti’s (1998) critique of Ashis Nandy’s attempts to invoke a putatively precolonial notion of pluralistic “faith” in opposition to secularism. Nandy contends that secularism is a Western import that displaces the religious tolerance of traditional Indian society. Mufti critiques the nostalgic romanticism of this position and argues that such seemingly pluralistic practices of religion do not translate into pluralistic politics and, more importantly, that a precolonial notion of religious identity cannot resolve the modern political problem of minority identity. All such an attempt will achieve is to subsume minority identity within a supposedly syncretic Hindu tradition. It will also reproduce, as Mufti (1998) shows in the Indian context, the essentialist gesture of cultural nationalism which critiques secularism as an elite discourse so that cultural nationalism can present itself as an authentic subaltern movement. In contrast to the ahistoricism of postsecularism or the essentialist historicism of cultural nationalism, Said’s minority-­oriented critical practice stands as a testament to the possibilities of a postcolonial politics that does

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not abandon history. Unlike essentialist Palestinian nationalist discourses or Arab critiques of Zionism, Said never denied the Holocaust or the Jewish history of suffering and displacement. But the tragic historical irony that he keenly discerned was how the Palestinians had become “the victims of victims”—in resolving the millennia-­old question of Jewish statelessness, another set of victims were created (Shlaim 2010: 282). Resisting the Postsecular: Sri Lanka and Beyond In 2009, upon the conclusion of the destructive thirty-­year war, the executive president of Sri Lanka made the controversial and provocative declaration that minorities no longer existed in the country. He meant that both majority and minority identities would be supplanted by one overarching Sri Lankan identity. Yet as postwar developments have clearly demonstrated, this assimilationist position is empty rhetoric. Though this particular president was unseated in January 2015 and a more moderate successor has taken his place, the majoritarian nature of the Sri Lankan state and the Sinhala polity remains unchanged. Moreover, the remaining Tamil leadership, both in the island and the diaspora, continues to evince a lingering desire for separation or at least representation on the basis of ethnicity. I would argue that within this context, the antihistoricist strategy proposed by the Sri Lankan critics discussed in this essay will produce results that are procedurally similar to the state’s desire to forget. As Ernest Renan ([1882] 1990) reminds us, nationalism is built on historical forgetting as much as on remembering. The national community can only come into being by suppressing historical injustices and violence against the very communities that constitute it. If sociopolitical discourse in Sri Lanka is to be ethically reconfigured from a minoritarian perspective, such a task will by definition need to be historicist. Scott’s attempt to appeal to authenticity, in opposition to history, is in essence the same romantic gesture that Ashis Nandy makes in relation to India and is at heart an appeal shaped by the very structure of nationalism that Scott seeks to repudiate. It is the same romanticism that guides Nandy’s rejection of secularism as a Western import, which is similar to how nationalists like Amarasekara depict Sinhala nationalism as a subaltern movement positioned against elite, Westernized political discourse (Amarasekara 1980; 2001). This is also a popular strategy used to discredit Sri Lankan intellectuals and nongovernmental organizations promoting democratic values, minority rights, and a political solution that moves away from the unitary nature of the nation-­

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state. A culture of mourning and a desire to recover a lost authenticity has been a pervasive feature in anticolonial and decolonizing nationalisms. But this “aura of authenticity,” as Mufti calls it, can be incapacitating to the critical consciousness (Mufti 2000). The entire destructive course of Sinhala nationalism in Sri Lanka, one can claim, has been shaped by this desire for authenticity. Therefore, attempting to recover some kind of hazily defined postcolonial authenticity, I would argue, will only lead to feeding modes of thinking that are culturally essentialist. Abeysekera’s position of “active forgetting” is problematic because such a radically dehistoricized consciousness requires the forgetting of the violence and structures of inclusion and exclusion that have characterized and continue to characterize the postcolonial nation-­state. It is the historicity of this experience that allows us to shape a critical stance that can resist the majoritarianism implicit in the structure of the nation-­state. At the same time, Abeysekara’s critique seems hesitant to clarify the implications of its own dehistoricizing trajectory. What will such a radically dehistoricized identity look like? Will it not be an identity shorn of the very history that makes it human? One of Abeysekara’s central criticisms of liberal secular values is the notion of promise deferred, or the utopian teleology of the idea that there is a better future. But how is Abeysekara’s radical dehistoricization any less utopian? In the case of Ismail, I see a strange disconnect between the important intervention he makes by proposing minority consciousness as a means of critiquing the entrenched majoritarianism of Sri Lankan sociopolitical discourse and the denial of history. I believe this partly arises from confusion between history as a conceptual and epistemological category and certain modes of positivist historiography Ismail wishes to critique. What is self-­evident in Abiding by Sri Lanka is that it is heavily reliant on history to make and sustain the arguments it deploys. Without a historical vantage that allows the identification of the majoritarian trajectories taken by Sinhala and Tamil nationalisms, the ethical value of this minority position is not discernible. But I would also argue that what drives this desire to get beyond history, as it were, is the grand gesture of the postsecular need to dismiss all that is thought to be derived from Europe and the Enlightenment. Ismail asserts, as does Scott and Abeysekara in their own ways, that the post in postcolonialism is about “getting beyond the thematic (and problematic) of Eurocentrism,” and that it entails “the critique of the Enlightenment, the epistemological ground of Eurocentrism,” and that the ultimate

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goal of this project is “finishing the critique of Eurocentrism—concept by concept, thought by thought” (Ismail 2005: 32–33). Haunting this critical trajectory is the ghost of an East-­West binary that was very much the creation of colonial history. At an earlier moment, critical thinking, dominated by postcolonial modes of criticism, could be seen as engaged in a dialectical encounter where European thought was critiqued for its colonial legacies but also seen as a resource for the broad process of emancipation sought in decolonization. But today the postsecular critical trend seems to replicate the gesture of essentialist cultural nationalism that seeks to reject absolutely the putatively Western. I see postsecularist thinking as a sophisticated expression of this basic and fundamentally flawed premise. While the stated claim is to move beyond the thematic of nationalist thought, the postsecular position fails to escape it. It refuses to take into cognizance the mutually constitutive nature of the predicament of postcolonial societies—if European forms of thought fundamentally shaped the oppressive experience of nation and nationalism in the colonies, then emancipation lies not in rejection but in a critical engagement with these very forms of thought. It is the search for some kind of chimerical outside position, a position untainted by Eurocentrism or Enlightenment thought, that leads postsecular scholarship to either a critically debilitating aporia or to a quasi-­religious messianism infused with notions of authenticity. Mufti makes a cogent argument in Enlightenment in the Colony (2007) that minoritization is a fundamental aspect of nation-­state formation—that some cultural, religious, or ethnic fragment becomes minoritized as the nation-­state comes into being. But, if the nation-­state is the prototypical example of an oppressive European legacy that defines the predicament of Enlightenment thinking, the very experience of minority consciousness emerges from within it. Said’s critical practice was similar. To many, Said’s avowed sympathy to the secular humanist tradition appeared an anomaly that cut against the “postcolonial” thrust of his work. But it was a critical secular humanism that was situated in the dialectic between filiation and affiliation—a position that could simultaneously draw from the rich humanist traditions of European thought with which he was intimately familiar but at the same time maintain a critical distance from them. If, as Dipesh Chakrabarty has suggested, the critical task of the present moment is to “provincialize Europe,” such a task can only be undertaken by engaging rather than rejecting “Europe” in its “hyperreal” and figurative sense.

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