Aborted Identity: The Commission and Omission of a Monument to the Nation, Sri Lanka, circa 1989

Sri Lanka in Crisis

The doomed competition organized in 1989 to design a monument to the nation in Sri Lanka coincided--hardly accidentally--with a grave crisis of this postcolonial state, a former colony (called Ceylon) of the Portuguese (1505-1658), the Dutch (1658-1796), and, most recently and influentially, the British (1796-1948). A terse account of this uniquely overdetermined crisis comes, oddly and appropriately enough, from a hagiography of a politician who helped precipitate it: Dayan Jayatilleke's tribute to the late President Ranasinghe Premadasa in book form. There he argues forcefully that "the [Sri] Lankan state [then] faced all three major categories of threats that any state could [ever] face." ¹ First and foremost--indeed still the most intractable--was the threat to its "territorial integrity," presented by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Ealam (LTTE, or the Tigers), who had been fighting militarily for an independent Tamil state in the Northern and Eastern Provinces of Sri Lanka for almost two decades. Second, as a direct consequence of the first, was the "threat to national independence and sovereignty" posed by the Indian Peace Keeping Force (IPKF), whose presence in the northern and eastern provinces of the country was meant to enforce the terms of the Indo-Lanka Peace Accord signed in July 1987. The latter, though presented and even possibly intended by the two signatory states as a negotiated political solution to the increasingly militant Tamil-Sinhala ethnic conflict fought between the LTTE and the Sri Lankan armed forces, was nonetheless perceived by Sinhala-Buddhist nationalists as a fundamental violation of their country's independence by an alien force somehow sympathetic to the minority Tamils. As if these two threats to the Sri Lankan state were not difficult enough, there was a third, orchestrated by the ex-Maoist, anti-Indian, Sinhala-nationalist militant group, the People's Liberation Front (JVP). Armed with T-56 machine guns (stolen from the armed forces) and led by the charismatic Rohana Wijeweera (with dedicated rank-and-file support from alienated rural youth and university students), the JVP was often misunderstood, especially by foreign commentators, as Marxist. By 1989, this three-pronged attack--by the LTTE, the IPKF, and the JVP--on the Sri Lankan state was so formidable that Jayatilleke's adaptation of a famous phrase from Lenin to characterize that tense situation is more revealing than hyperbolic: "Sri Lanka, in 1989, was the weakest link in the chain of Third World democracies." What difference, then, could a national monument have made?

The "Postcolonial" Nation: Burdens of Representation

Modern nations, as Benedict Anderson has influentially demonstrated, are "imagined communities." In order to be imagined, of course, they must be represented. The more precarious or contrived the national community being imagined, moreover, the greater the need for and burden of representation. But even in uncontested times, such imaginary representations are always called upon to perform the well-nigh impossible task of eradicating any sense of the nation as a historical entity or ideological fiction, while presenting it as something eternal. Indeed, what distinguishes the nation from so many other imagined communities for Anderson lies precisely in the manner of its "transformation of fatality into continuity, contingency into meaning." ² The immortality of the nation so projected points to the affinity of this nationalist imagination with religious worldviews about man-in-the-cosmos and explains why so many symbols of nationalism are "cenotaphs and tombs of Unknown Soldiers." ³ Successfully imagined nations, then, "always loom out of an immemorial past, and, still more important, glide into a limitless future." ⁴ It is this magic of nationalism, its ability to turn "chance into destiny," that enabled Régis Debray to say: "Yes, it is quite accidental that I am born French; but after all, France is eternal." ⁵ But what if you were accidentally born Sri Lankan?

Then...