The Politics of English in Sri Lanka: Perspectives from Postcolonial Anglophone Literature

Abstract

Anglophone literature by writers from former British colonies has been viewed by literary critics as an act of writing back to the colonial centre. Such a view presents these writers as located in the margins, where they re-appropriate and re-fashion the language of the coloniser in service of those it once oppressed, to paraphrase Salman Rushdie and Ashcroft et al. However, in framing postcolonial Anglophone literature within this centre-periphery binary, this mode of reading presents the writer as resisting the colonial metropole but fails to address the status of English in relation to racial, ethno-linguistic and class conflicts in postcolonial countries like Sri Lanka. English in Sri Lanka is constitutionally recognised as a “link language” under the presumption that it mitigates linguistic conflicts that have erupted between the country’s various ethnic groups, notably between the Sinhalese and Tamils. This contributes to English functioning as a “vanishing mediator”, as Aamir Mufti calls it, where in acting as a mediator it assumes an aura of transparency which obscures its function as a vehicle for generating “elite cultural capital” in Sarah Brouillette’s words. Departing from the centre-periphery model, this thesis examines two Sri Lankan Anglophone literary texts, Shehan Karunatilaka’s Chinaman (2010) and Michael Ondaatje’s Running in the Family (1982) to understand the status of English in relation to the politics of ethnicity, race, class and language in Sri Lanka. A novel about cricket, I read Karunatilaka’s depiction of the imperial cultural product, which has been appropriated by the former colony, as an analogy for the English language, one that allows for an interrogation of the assumptions that English and cricket can unite and “link” the nation amidst competing Sinhala-Tamil nationalisms. An exploration of his Anglophone Burgher cultural heritage, Ondaatje’s text brings to the fore the complicity of this ethnically privileged minority subject, which I read as challenging the assumptions about ethnicity, race and language boundaries in Sri Lanka. My analyses of these texts interrogate the assumptions of “link language” implied in the country’s constitution, while revealing that English in Sri Lanka both exposes the fault lines of Sri Lankan society while disrupting notions of ethno-linguistic purity that have come to define the Sinhala-Tamil conflict and post-colonial race relations in the country.