POLITICAL GEOGRAPHY QUARTERLY, Vol. 9, No. 2, .4pril 1990, 203-207

Book reviews

Ethnic Conflict and Reconciliation in Sri Lanka, Chelvadurai Manogaran, University of Hawaii Press, Honolulu, 1987.

Agnew (1987) has argued that nationalists make poor students of nationalism and Manogaran’s book is a case in point. Academics, contrary to the positivist claim of being objective observers, are sometimes committed and influential nationalists. I have never been more convinced of this than when I read Manogaran’s book. In the preface he tells us that he ‘has attempted to look at all sides of the issue and make as disinterested a judgment as possible.’ Yet, I was unable to find any side other than that of Sri Lankan Tamil nationalism represented anywhere throughout this work. The purpose of the book, Manogaran tells us, is to ‘document accurately and fairly the historical perspective of SinhaleselTamil relation- ship in Sri Lanka’. However, I would argue that it documents accurately and fairly the Sri Lankan Tamil nationalist perspective on Sri Lankan history. In this sense it should be considered as a source of primary data by those studying Tamil nationalism, rather than as a scholarly overview of the Sinhalese-Tamil conflict. Manogaran has been very selective in using only those data that support the allegations and claims of Sri Lankan Tamil nationalists.

His analysis suggests that the post-inde pendence politics of Sri Lanka have been essen- tially a conspiracy against Sri Lankan Tamils. He paints a picture of the latter as merely passive reactors within Sinhalesedominated Sri Lanka. This is hardly the case; Sri Lankan Tamils have been co-participants, equally active in the evolution of the ethnic conflict in Sri Lanka. Manogaran’s is a black-and-white view of Sri Lankan political history, consistently pro- Sinhalese and anti-Tamil. He is writing com- mitted history, that of an unrestrained national- ist. Consequently, I find his claim that it is ‘the first comprehensive study by a geographer of the ethnic conflict in Sri Lanka’ unsatisfactory, because it is neither comprehensive nor is it an overview of the ethnic conflict.

Another purpose of the book, Manogaran

claims, is to show the alteration of ethnic composition in the ‘Tamil Districts’ during the post-independence era and how it has adversely

affected Sri Lankan Tamils. To this end, Mano- garan advances a poorly developed, controversial argument based on the concept of a ‘Tamil home land’, and most of the discussion in the book follows from this premise. Manogaran un- critically accepts that the entire northern and eastern provinces constitute the ‘(Sri Iankan) Tamil homeland’. His main arguments for this are based on population distribution and political history. It should be noted that these provinces were created only in the late 19th century by the British colonial rulers. Provincial boundaries were drawn by imperial cartographers in Colombo mostly for administrative convenience, not to demarcate a Tamil homeland. Second, early historical records, and later, the ‘Returns of the Government Agents and Assistant Govern- ment Agents’ (found in Blue Books published in the late 19th and early 20th centuries) show that many areas of the present-day eastern province were actually populated by large numbers of Sin- halese and Muslims, as well as by Sri Lankan Tam&, although each community lived in separate, largely isolated, sparsely distributed settlements.

As for the political history, the entire island, including the present northern and eastern provinces, constituted the Sinhalese kingdom. During the period between the 13th and 16th centuries, a separate Tamil kingdom existed in Jaffna, but its boundaries did not extend very far south of the peninsula. During the colonial period, the political and economic treaties signed between the Kandyan rulers and the Dutch and Portuguese prove that Kandyan kings had sovereignty over much of the eastern seaboard. I can appreciate Jaffna peninsula being considered a Tamil homeland, as all the criteria Manogaran employs fit that particular case perfectly. The incorporation of the eastern province as a part of the Tamil homeland has been one of the strongest political demands of the Sri Iankan Tamil nationalists, although I would argue that the way

204 Book reviews

in which Manogaran has attempted to legitimize these demands is weak.

Another misleading assumption is his rigid separation of Tamil and Sinhalese areas. Mano-

garan conveniently omits the fact that 40 percent of all Sri Lankan Tamils live outside the northern and eastern provinces. Ironically, the largest Sri Lankan Tamil center in Sri Lanka is not Jaffna, but Colombo. The majority of the Muslims and Indian Tamils have always lived in so-called ‘Sinhalese areas’. This distribution pattern undermines the validity of Manogaran’s argument that spatial inequality has a clear ethnic dimension.

Manogaran often and deliberately conflates the Tamil language with Sri Lankan Tamil ethnicity. Tamil language is spoken by three ethnic groups-Sri Lankan Tamils, Indian Tamils and a fairly large percentage of Muslims -while the separatist movement is exclusively a Sri Lankan Tamil phenomenon. At no time in Sri Lankan history have all three Tam&speaking ethnic groups united for any reason. Thus to talk of a Tam&speaking people as a separate politico- linguistic group is inaccurate. However, Mano- garan strategically uses whichever meaning of Tamil (ethnic or linguistic) supports his argument best. For example, he uses Tamil language in the discussion of higher education, but Sri Lankan Tamil ethnicity in his discussion of political evolution.

Manogaran treats the Sri Lankan Tamil and Sinhalese ethnic groups as monolithic entities. This conceptualization can be considered a political act in nationalist writing, as it under- mines politically-significant internal differences and also ignores place-specificity in the expres- sion of nationalism. For example, Manogaran never talks about the political differences between Colombo, Jaffna and Batticaloa Tamils. Such an oversimplification undermines the very ‘geo- graphy’ that Manogaran claims to be studying. It is evident that Manogaran has not critically examined many of the politico-geographical concepts (e.g. ethnic area, homeland, national- ism), employed in his book. The lack of theo- retical discussion about these concepts has made their use ambiguous and often contradictory.

Some of Manogaran’s solutions are alarming. Throughout the book, he has argued against Sinhalese dominance due to its negative effects on Sri Lankan Tamils. However, when he argues for a Tamil province, he states that ‘it is irrelevant

whether Tamils constitute the dominant com- munity’ (p. 179). He also argues in favor of the complete spatial segregation of Sri Lankan Tamils and Sinhalese (pp. 17%180), although one wonders how he thinks this can be achieved.

1 cannot help but compare this book with those of Ponnambalam (1983) and Tambiah (1986), as they are the only other recent works by Tamils on the ethnic problem in Sri Lanka. Ponnam- balam is an ardent supporter of Sri Lankan Tamil separatism and his book openly reflects his position. Tambiah, in spite of his ethnocentric title, provides a much more realistic and balanced account of the issue. It is ironic, however, that despite an impartial title and introductory claim of objectivity, Manogaran’s approach reveals him to be a more committed nationalist than Ponnambalam. Without a doubt this is the clearest statement of Sri Lankan Tamil national- ism 1 have read so far, but only as such would I recommend it to geographers studying con- temporary ethno-nationalism in Sri Lanka.

Shantha K. Hennayake Department of Geography Syracuse University

References

AGNEW, J. A. (1987). Is there a geography of national-

ism? The case of place and nationalism in Scotland. In National&m and the State (E. Kofman and C. Williams eds). London: Croom

Helm.

PONNAMBALAM, S. (1983). Sri Lanka: National

Conjict and the Tamil Liberation Struggh.

Thornton Heath, Surrey: The Tamil Information

Centre.

TAMBIAH, S. J. (1986). Sri Lanka: Ethnic Fratricide

and the Dirnumth~ o/Democracy. Chicago and

London: University of Chicago Press.

Women in Cities: Gender and the Urban Environment, Jo Little, Linda Peake and Pat Richardson (eds), MacMillan, London, 1988, 154 pp.

No more than a decade ago, the idea of a feminist geography was virtually unknown; now, although still ignored by many and ridiculed by a few, it has become a recognized approach within the discipline, and substantive theoretical and empirical contributions to feminist geographical research have been made. There has also been significant change and growth in the theoretical