From sovereignty to modernity: revisiting the Colebrooke-Cameron Reforms – transforming the Buddhist and colonial imaginary in nineteenth century Ceylon

The Colebrooke-Cameron Reforms (1831) have been characterised by David Scott (1995) as marking the transformation of colonial Sri Lanka from one kind of political rationality – that of mercantile sovereignty – to another – that of colonial governmentality. Whilst consonant with the view that the Commission marked a moment when the colonial administration moved away from a strategic reliance on Asokan or Buddhist forms of authority in the earliest phase of British rule, we argue that there is a more nuanced genealogy to this transition. The Reforms, while directed to the administration, judicial and political institutions of the colony, also contemplated extensive commercial restructuring that inculcated a self improvement mode into ‘everyday life’. Drawing on colonial archives, we show how elements of a logic of governmentality, such as educational, land, and fiscal reform, were utilised at different times by the colonial administration to commence the modernisation of the colony well before 1832. It is also evident that the transformation was partial, and at points strongly resisted by local Buddhist communities. Instead of marking a clear point of transformation, the Colebrooke-Cameron Reforms gave legibility and a national imprimatur to a process already in train, while providing further impetus to a socio-political rationality that had begun to shift decades prior. The secular logic of the colonial State, however, was later to unleash a movement of Sinhalese Buddhist reform and cultural revaluation that generated, ‘a more modernised Sinhalese Buddhist nationalism to create expanding areas of social, cultural and religious life for the nationalist cause.

States of Mind and States of History:The Future in Sri Lanka Can Be Decentered

The argument I wish to suggest here is that the potential solution to Sri Lanka's post-colonial State crisis resides within Hindu-Buddhist resources indigenous to Sri Lanka and South and South East Asia. The Hindu-Buddhist tradition of the Ashokan period as well as the history of the precolonial polities in Sri Lanka and South East Asia offers a conceptual frame that legitimized a plural religious order as well as a highly devolved State structure.Arts, Education & Law Group, School of LawNo Full Tex

Galactic Polities and the Decentralisation of Administration in Sri Lanka:The Buddha Does Not Always Have to Return to the Centre

The postcolonial ethnic crisis in Sri Lanka is a crisis of the postcolonial state, a state which has been unable to break away from the mirror of the centralised British colonial state. Like most postcolonial polities in South and Southeast Asia, a dominant feature of the Sri Lankan state is its highly personalised patron-clientalist nature. Far from been neutral and restricted in its performative capacity by the liberal restrictions of the rule of law, the postcolonial state in Sri Lanka has characterised itself by its capacity to capture and transform the social and cultural domain. Consequently, the dynamics of the state have become thoroughly embedded in the social and cultural life of the Sinhala, predominantly Buddhist, majority. Given the hierarchical nature of these practices, which are very much cosmologically ordained by the form of Buddhism that has come to dominate Sinhala life, the state too, in its everyday practices - be they legal, economic or social - has become motivated by this hierarchical logic. It is this hierarchical dynamic which has inhibited the state from devising administrative techniques which would answer the desire from the minority communities for a devolution of power from the centre. While the state articulates at an ontological level the hierarchical and encompassing dynamic of the Buddhist cosmos, the precolonial galactic polities of Sri Lanka encapsulated, in terms of both their geographical and administrative organisation, the non-hierarchical and diffusive dynamic of the Buddhist cosmos. This dynamic has been consistently repressed in the discourse of Sinhala Buddhist nationalism.Arts, Education & Law Group, School of LawNo Full Tex

Modernism and the Grounds of Law

Arts, Education & Law Group, School of LawNo Full Tex

The <i>Mandala</i> State in pre-British Sri Lanka:The cosmographical terrain of contested sovereignty in the Theravada Buddhism tradition

Arts, Education & Law Group, School of LawNo Full Tex

Buddhism, the asokan persona, and the galactic polity:Rethinking Sri Lanka's constitutional present

Sri Lanka's civil war between the majority Sinhalese and the minority Tamil communities has now raged for nearly half a century. The Sri Lankan cum Sinhalese Buddhist state has since independence resisted all significant attempts by the Tamil political leadership at power sharing. Most constitutional lawyers and progressive Sri Lankan opinion (Sinhalese, Tamil, Muslim, Burgher, etc.) hold that short of a separate state, administrative power should be devolved in the form of a federal state, so as to give autonomy to the northeast of Sri Lanka, while the forces of Sinhalese Buddhist nationalism have sought to justify the centralized state by recourse to the history of Buddhism and the Sinhalese on the island. Such arguments have drawn on the ontological potential of the cosmic order of Sinhalese Buddhism, which is fundamentally hierarchical in intent. Here I argue that the diffused nature of this cosmic order provides the ontological grounding for a decentralized state structure that can accommodate ethnic difference in a non-hierarchical relation. Thus, the legacy of Sinhalese Buddhism can be rescued from the forces of Sinhalese Buddhist nationalism.Arts, Education & Law Group, School of LawNo Full Tex