Cancerous caste beneath skin deep liberalism

2023-09-21

he debate on how important caste consciousness is in Sri Lanka today and whether class consciousness has replaced caste consciousness requires that we briefly examine the beginnings of capitalism in Sri Lanka, as well as the introduction of certain liberal approaches to the administration of the country during the Western colonial period, in particular, during the time of the British colonial administration.

Fortunately, there is a now available vast body of literature about the emergence of a class of persons who took the opportunities opened up during the colonial period to acquire various amounts of wealth and become not only an influential economic group but also a prominent social class in Sri Lanka. Books such as Nobodies to Somebodies: The Rise of the Colonial Bourgeoisie in Sri Lanka by Kumari Jayawardena and Sri Lankan Subordinates of the British: English Educated Ceylonese in Official Life 1865-1883 by W.M.D.D. Andradi are two examples of the many other books and articles that document the emergence of this new class. There are now even YouTube presentations about this class of persons. These presentations have resulted in creating a rather lively debate about the background and development of the families who became members of that relatively rich economic class and influential social group. These families, at a later time, i.e. particularly after Independence in 1948, also played a prominent role in political developments. Our interest here is on the wealth of information that is now available on these developments, which throw light on issues related to the development of a social consciousness, not only among those newly emergent political elites but in the country as a whole.

The argument that is often used to stress the importance of class over caste is that among those who became part of this newly rich and socially significant group, there was a significant group of persons who were earlier considered as belonging to the lower castes. For example, a small section of persons from the Karawa caste (fisher folk), due to opportunities that opened up for trade in liquor, were able to amass a substantial amount of wealth that enabled them to gain some sort of social prominence. They acted as if they had acquired the same class interest as the other groups that had found ways to make substantial sums of money.

However, before the British established their rule over Sri Lanka in 1815, for over 10 centuries, there had been a continuous period of caste based social organisation in Sri Lanka. The two basic principles on which that social organisation was based on was the prohibition against social mobility and uneven and disproportionate punishment. The entire social order and the social consciousness of the caste based society during this period were founded on these two draconian principles. The questions regarding to what degree the newly emergent “capitalist” class abandoned these two principles and whether any new social consciousness emerged out of these principles, are the measures to assess whether caste consciousness was erased or weakened and to what extent it was replaced by class consciousness. A further question is: what kind of class consciousness did this newly formed power group bring to the country?

These issues are not merely of academic interest. Today, when the country is in the midst of its worst economic downturn in history, the question that is often asked in almost all debates is how did Sri Lanka get into this enormous abyss that resulted in extreme wide scale poverty and disorder. What invariably comes up during such discussions is the link between the newly emergent “capitalist” class in Sri Lanka and its responsibility for the present catastrophic situation. There is almost unanimous agreement that this capitalist class has played a very visible role in causing those conditions which have brought the country to the present impasse to develop. However, what also needs to be discussed is why this “new capitalist class” was unable to play a dynamic role to transform the country into an economy that has vitality. These days, there are comparisons with countries in the neighbourhood in Asia and elsewhere which in 1948 were in many ways in relatively worse conditions than Sri Lanka was at the time of independence, but which today are in a much better position from the point of view of both economic development and also in regard to the improvement of the people’s lives. At the time of independence, Sri Lanka ranked quite high in its social index and was even considered by some as having the possibility of providing an example of a country that could become a model economically, as well as politically, from the point of view of the achievements in terms of democracy, the rule of law, and the well-being of the people. The key questions that remain at large are as to whether “the new capitalist class” was responsible for this failure and if so, why did they choose to go in that direction.