Caste-based culture is the key obstacle to SL’s development

2023-07-24

Over a long period, many erudite scholars and critics have engaged with the issue of the extent to which caste remained a relevant factor in understanding social development in Sri Lanka. One could sum up broadly the overwhelming view among such writers as being that while caste influences still remain in some way or the other, the predominant factor relating to changes in Sri Lanka is not caste but class. 

The starting point of this article is that while purely on theoretical considerations about the new economic relationships that were introduced in Sri Lanka, particularly since the occupation of the coastal areas by the Dutch, and then, particularly during the period of British rule, this assessment about class becoming a more important factor than caste may seem possible, yet, in actual fact, caste still plays a far more predominant role in all the affairs of Sri Lanka than the class factor. To clarify the differences of views it may be useful to re-state what in most previous writings was considered as caste. The general approach to caste has been the classification of people into various caste groupings which were mostly named in terms of occupations. For example, the following two tables give the classification of caste amongst the Sinhala community and the Tamil community:-

 

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