Why did Dr. Jehan Perera lie to Dr.Michael Roberts? A Sri Lankan horror story

Also published in Sri Lanka Guardian and Lanka Web

“When a highly educated Sinhalese scholar like Jehan Perera, one who is a genuine grassroots worker for multi-cultural accommodation, is unaware (personal comment in late Jan. 2000) that the eastern coast of Sri Lanka

was an integral part of the Kingdom of Kandy from the late sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, the gaps in information—and the success of Tamil propaganda—are starkly manifest.”

-ESSAY

Narrating Tamil Nationalism: Subjectivities and

Issues Michael Roberts April 2004- (Footnote 57)

By 2000 however a number of books and papers were in print which could have bridged the gaps in Dr. Jehan Perera’s information. By 2000, Prof. K.M. De Silva’s Separatist Ideology in Sri Lanka: A historical Appraisal had been in existence for 13 years and gone through two editions and two reprints. Professor G.H. Pieris’ path breaking work; ‘An Appraisal Of the Concept Of a Traditional Homeland’ had been around for 15 years, first as a mimeographed paper then as a published article in a 1991 volume of Ethnic Studies Report and finally as an easily- accessible-to-any-Tom-Dick-and-Harry serialized article in The Island of March 1999.

A number of channels then, were open to the highly educated Sinhalese scholar to replenish any gaps in his knowledge of matters that fell squarely within his professional expertise. Even a basic reading list of the Conflict would have sufficed to cover these gaps of information. Truth is a lack of awareness as late as the year 2000 would not be compatible with even the baseline level of competence and intellectual acuity required of the Research and Media Director of the National Peace Council.

So what was starkly manifest to me reading the above footnote in Narrating Tamil Nationalism: Subjectivities and Issues Michael Roberts was not ‘the gaps in information—and the success of Tamil propaganda’ but the incredible naivete and innocence of Dr. Michael Roberts.

When Dr. Jehan Perera confessed to Dr. Michael Roberts in late Jan 2000 that he was unaware, that he was historio intacta, Dr Jehan Perera was lying. This revelation came to me while going through an article which I first saw in the Tamil Canadian Website and later at http://nakkeran.com/Wijedasa.htm. The relevant part is

“ I would like to quote a paragraph here, from Dr. Jehan Perera's (Media Director, National Peace Council) article entitled, "Balanced compromise on the north-east unit" published in "The Island" Sunday issue in late 1990s.

"The fact is that in the census of 1920 only 4 percent of the population of the Eastern Province was Sinhalese. The Sinhalese settlements in the east were small and scattered, even though there is historical evidence that most of the east came under the umbrella of the Kandyan Kingdom. But while the ultimate rulers were in the Sinhalese Kingdom of Kandy, the people of the east were mostly Tamils and Muslims. It is only in the past fifty years that there has been a substantial influx of Sinhalese settlements through state intervention."

Mr. Wijayadasa, do you need anything more than this living testimony of Dr. Jehan Perera, to prove that what you have said is a blatant lie?”

Even reading the above living testimony of Dr. Jehan Perera given in The Island, Sunday issue in late 1990s, certain things become starkly manifest to me. The way Dr. Jehan Perera seems to believe that the demographic patterns of the area corresponding to the present Eastern province stayed static from the Kandyan times to 1920s and his easy assumption that the 1920 census data would give us a reasonably good idea about the demographic situation when the ultimate rulers were in the Sinhalese kingdom of Kandy.

This easy assumption, though a natural one for a Tom, Dick or Harry does not sit well with a highly educated Sinhalese scholar who is also the Research and Media Director of the National Peace Council, because even as far back as the 80's people like Gamini Iriyagolla had started to inundate the public domain with information from British administrators’ reports relating to Eastern demographic trends such as the following.

‘In 1833 the population under Gantale Tank had been Sinhala but this had disappeared by 1855. They had been replaced in the intervening period by some "Malabars". A report by three British engineers submitted in 1855 states that a Malabar population had superseded the Sinhalese under Gantale and the tradition relating to the Yoda Ela from Minneriya which was known to the Sinhalese, who were there in 1833 was totally unknown to the Malabars in 1855.’

‘What happened generally in the east has been recorded in the famous report on Forest Administration of Ceylon by F.D'A Vincent which is published as Sessional paper XL11 of 1882:

"the gradual spread of the Tamils down the coasts, especially the eastern, and the fact that no where except in the northern province and Tamankaduwa, do they form more that coast settlements, are both striking. Where ever the Tamil or the Mahommedan comes to settle, the Sinhalese is driven back to the forest, where he earns a precarious existence by chena cultivation and by hunting."

"Of this nature are matters concerning the group of Sinhalese villages in the north-west of the (Trincomalee) district lying in the western division of the Kaddukulam pattu.

This part of the district is inhabited by Sinhalese villagers of Kandyan descent forming an outlying community which is, I fear, rapidly dying out or becoming effaced. The district is most interesting, being dotted over by numerous village tanks, some of which are restored and others abandoned. The villagers retain many of the primitive customs of the Kandyans , but they are rapidly becoming Tamilized, which is a great pity. They intermarry with Tamils, and many of them speak Tamil as well as they speak Sinhalese. Even the Government schoolmaster is Tamil, and only that language is taught in the only school, and unfortunately in some cases the Sinhalese villagers have been bought out by Tamils, who now own all the paddy lands of some villages. The Sinhalese have even given up their patronymics and have adopted the Tamil custom of prefixing the father's name instead of the usual patronymic, and even the names of the villagers are assuming a Tamil dress. This is perhaps not to be wondered at when the interpreters of the court and the Kachcheri, the petition-drawers, and all through whom the villagers have access to government officials can speak nothing but Tamil. I must say I regard this as a great misfortune. I should like to see a strong Sinhalese headman acquainted with English appointed as Chief Headman of the district, and I should like to see the Tamil school abolished. However, the most important assistance which can, and ought to, be rendered to these villagers would be the restoration of their village tanks. This would render them independent of the Tamils, and make them less likely to abandon their villages or to sell their lands to Tamils” (Administration Report on Trincomalee District for 1898 p. F18).

‘Most of the Muslims in these coastal areas in the east were (and still are ) descendants of refugees who had been settled there in 1626 by the Sinhalese King Senerat of Kandy, when they were expelled by the Portuguese from the south west littoral. "The Candiot …… received many of them into his ports….. and in Batecalou alone the Idolatrous King placed a garrison of 4000 of them…." ( de Queroz, Vol II, p.745 ).

‘British policy as well as administrative action throughout the nineteenth century was to colonise Trincomalee and Batticaloa Districts with immigrants from Jaffnapatnam and south India. The administration Report for 1867 of the AGA Trincomalee District states that " I should like to form a large Jaffna colony and if liberal terms are offered, might succeed." In the report for 1868 he confessed that '' The Government Agent Jaffna was not successful in his attempt to send people to Gantalawa tank to colonize it ….I have every reason to believe that we may set up a coast settlement there, and I shall have hopes of seeing the cultivation extend under this splendid tank." In the parlance of the time "coast" meant the Coromandel Coast of South India

‘Tampalakamam Pattuwa (Tambalagamuwa Tamilised) had density of slightly less than 2 persons per square mile in its 450 square miles. Gantale (incorrectly called Kantalay) Tank was in this division but the village of that name had only 20 persons, all presumably Sinhalese according to Captain Aitcheson's report of 1833.’

The CliffsNotes then on the Eastern Province that any reasonably competent secretary or assistant could have given Dr. Jehan Perera were;

From Professor G.H. Peiris’ ‘An appraisal of the concept of a traditional Tamil homeland in Sri Lanka’ The Island- 27^th March 1999 installment

‘For the issues with which the present study is concerned, the feature of crucial relevance borne out by our maps is that, in the Eastern Province as a whole, in 1921, almost all Tamil settlements were confined to a coastal strip barely extending even 10 miles to the interior. The Sinhalese settlements, on the other hand, though comparatively few in number, were scattered over extensive areas of the interior, covering the entirety of the administrative Divisions of Bintenna Pattu; Uda Palatha, Yati Palatha and Meda Palatha of Wevagam Pattu (these were partly in the Divisions of Akkarai Pattu and Sammanturai Pattu of that time); and almost the whole of Panawa Pattu. In the northern parts of the then Batticaloa District and in the Trincomalee District, extensive tracts of territory in the interior were either uninhabited or were the venues of scattered Sinhalese settlements. This must be taken in the context of the fact that the Sinhalese names of numerous abandoned village tanks marked on our source maps in the uninhabited tracts bear testimony to earlier processes of de-population. Our maps show, further, that the only non-Sinhalese population clusters that were located (in 1921) even a few miles to the interior of the seaboard were those associated with the irrigation works restored in the preceding decades…’

‘This pattern of settlement distribution assumes significance from several points of view. In the first pace, considered in the light of our earlier observations on the trends of demographic change in the preceding centuries, the pattern as it prevailed in 1921 represents what may be regarded as the culmination of a long drawn out historical process featured, on the one hand, by territorial advances of the Tamil population and, on the other, retreat and recession of the Sinhalese population. This in turn implies that the process of ‘Tamilization’ in the eastern lowlads of Sri Lanka had not penetrated significantly into the interior even at its most extensive territorial spread.’

From Professor K.M. De Silva’s A Separatist Ideology in Sri Lanka: A Historical Appraisal-Second Edition

‘Indeed not only was the eastern seaboard part of the Kandyan Kingdom, but also for much of the 19^th and the early 20^th century, the Tamil population there was concentrated in and around Tricomalee and the Batticaloa lagoon. These littoral settlements were –as in the 18^th century-in the nature of a thin strip of habitation confronting two powerful forces of nature, the sea on the one side, and the forbidding wilderness of the almost impenetrable forests of the dry zone on the other. The overwhelming difficulties of access by land intensified the isolation of this region; land communications improved only in the late 19^th century, and the early 20^th century. More important, it also had a large Muslim population.

The interior was sparsely populated and contained Sinhalese settlements in purana (i.e., traditional) villages with its people eking out a hard existence in this forested region. These Sinhalese settlements, although smaller in terms of population than either the Tamil or Muslim ones, and few and far between, were distributed throughout the Trincomalee and Batticaloa districts. (The present Amparai district of the Eastern Province was created only in 1960). Writing in 1921 Canagaratnam observes that:

“One of the saddest features in the history of the [Batticaloa] District is the decay of the Sinhalese population in the West and South. At one time there were flourishing and populous Sinhalese villages here, as is evidenced by the ruins and remains dotted about this part of the country.”

It is precisely in this part of the present Eastern Province that the massive multi-purpose Gal-Oya project-which the Federal Party pointedly refers to in its political resolutions of the 1950’s as a prime example of state sponsored settlement of Tamil homelands-was established. This was the first new major scheme since the days of the Polonnaruva kings. C.W Nicholas’s path-breaking monograph on the Historical Topography of Ancient and Medieval Ceylon makes specific reference to the Gal-Oya scheme, and shows it as occupying for the greater part the ancient and important territorial division called Digavapi-Mandala or Dighavapi-rata. Professor Gerald Peiris whose researches on land settlement policies and their impact on the demography of the Trincomalee and Batticaloa districts are the first to critically examine these policies in the light of the theory of the “traditional homelands” of the Tamils as propounded by the FP and the TULF, points out that Gal-Oya and most of the other major colonization schemes of the Eastern Province are located in areas which in 1921- and at the time of the census of that year-were either the sites of remnant Sinhalese villages or were under the jungle tide. Indeed these settlements had survived several centuries of war and invasion, of pestilence and privation, and the ravages of nature in the forms of droughts, floods and cyclones, till they were revitalized in the years after independence as peasant “colonies”, that is to say village settlements of Gal-Oya scheme. The second point he makes is just as important as this: that contrary to claims made by the TULF, colonization schemes such as the Gal-Oya have had little effect on the then existing Tamil settlements of the Eastern Provinces-or the areas in which such settlements are located. Nor are the Sinhalese the sole beneficiaries of this scheme. Despite the large number of Sinhalese peasants who were settled in the ‘colonies’ established under the Gal-Oya project, the then existing Muslim and Tamil village settlements of the Eastern Provinces more than held their own in regard to population growth and agricultural productivity. Indeed, thirty years after the Gal-Oya project was initiated, the Sinhalese are very much a minority of the population there, as the official census of 1981 would show.

…The present Eastern Province is the home of over a third of Sri Lanka’s Muslims. Some of them are descended from immigrants from the coasts of South India, but a substantial number, perhaps the large majority, are descended from Muslim refugees from Sri Lanka’s own west coast fleeing the persecution of the Portuguese and afforded a safe haven on the east coast-and elsewhere- by Sinhalese kings of the period.’

One of the saddest features characterizing Sri Lanka's Peace process was the widespread infestation of blight and decay afflicting its front guard. The key symptoms were downright lying, shoddy, almost illiterate nature of the construct building and the inability to display enough intellectual vigor and research ability to support a B gradable school project report, let alone communications worthy of National change agents and opinion leaders.

Embarrassing bits in Professor Nalin De Silva’s public proclamations

Was I responsible for the crashing of the http://www.kalaya.org/forum? I will never know. All I did was to post the above topic on it somewhere around 22^nd September 2010. If I was responsible, it is not a sense of accomplishment I feel but sadness that a forum dedicated to knowledge generation has proved to be so fragile, so lacking in resilience and tactical resources as to be felled by such a post as the following;

I just noticed that Prof. Nalin De Silva has said the following in the August 17, 2010 Island article, ‘KP and the new Tamil politics’;

“Tamil had never been an official language in any part of the country and, as late Mr. Gamini Iriyagolle has shown,the pact between the Portuguese and the Arya Chakravarthi King in Jaffna had been drafted in Sinhala and Portuguese and not in Tamil!”

(Note the exclamation mark)

Actually this is not the first time. This is a favourite trump card of Prof NdeS which he produces everywhere. He went on Derana 360 and said the same thing.

However this is not the trump he imagines it to be. For one it’s not something Mr. Gamini Iriyagolla has ‘shown’. It’s what Fernão de Queiros’ has written in his Temporal and Spiritual conquest of Ceylon. It’s in page 371

“These terms [written] in the Portuguese and the Chingala languages, were signed and authenticated and the Prince was handed over and sent in a ship with the Modeliar in good custody…..”

Mr. Gamini Iriyagolla has just quoted Queiros. He has not shown that the pact was in Sinhalese and Portuguese through original research. In fact Queiros’ is the only source which refers to this pact. According to Temporal and Spiritual conquest of Ceylon, the King of Jaffna promises under this pact to pay the Portuguese a tribute.

“That the King of Jafanapatao shall remain in his Kingdom as before, swearing according to his rites, vassalage to the King of Portugal with a tribute of 12’ tuskers and 1,200 patacas:…”

- page 371

According to the dateline of Temporal and Spiritual Conquest of Ceylon, this pact was signed a goodish while before 1571, because 1571 was the year in which, according to the same, the King’s son who was handed over to the Portuguese as hostage for fulfilling Jaffna’s part of the pact, died in Goa.

Professor Tikiri Abeyasinghe in his ‘Jaffna under the Portuguese’ has clearly shown that Jaffna only began to pay a regular tribute to Portugal at some point between 1574 and 1582. Let me quote the relevant part.

“Jaffna becomes tributary.

With increasing awareness of the importance of Jaffna, the Portuguese sought to bring that kingdom under their authority. This they succeeded in doing, in stages. First they made that kingdom a tributary. Exactly when this happened is not clear, but it is certain that by 1582, the year in which the first standing orders (regimentos) for the Portuguese fort of Mannar were issued, the ruler of Jaffna had begun to pay a regular, annual tribute of ten elephants or their money-value to the Portuguese at Mannar.”

In the footnote below that paragraph Prof. Abeyasinghe says;

“Note that when Antonio de Abreu prepared his Orcamento (Financial Statement) of the Portuguese possession in the East in 1574, he did not record any tribute against Jaffna, Studia (Lisboa 1959) vol. 4 ff. 169-281.

Clearly no regular tribute was due from Jaffna in the year 1574.”

Even if you disregard the above data, after all a pact may have existed and not honoured, Prof Abeyasinghe simply categorises the

“These terms [written] in the Portuguese and the Chingala languages, …..”

on page 371 of Temporal and Spiritual conquest of Ceylon as an error on Queiros’ part.

It is in pages 24, 25, 26, 27 that Prof Abeyasinghe categorises the frequent references in Queiros’ work to Chingalas in Jaffna as errors (Which they must be because the way Queiros tells it, there are Chingalas under every bush and in every culvert in 16^th Century Jaffna, which simply could not have been. Queiros does indeed seem to be calling the native Jaffnese, Sinhalese. )

The build up to the relevant portions of Jaffna under the Portuguese which I am going to now quote is this; Lancarote de Seixas suggests in 1630 that Portuguese casados should be settled in Jaffna on a large scale and the lands there be distributed among them. Goa refers this proposal to Lisbon. Lisbon consults two old Asia hands on them, one of them with a decade of experience as a captain in many parts of the island.

Then Lisbon makes its decision and that decision …is

"found on natural justice and ....also on misintelligence"

“A principal factor they took into consideration in arriving at their decision was the possibility that the implementation of the two proposals would lead to rebellion. This is clear from a statement in their letter of 15^th march 1634 “…se nāo deve fazer novidade….porque de outro modo escandalizar junta tanta gente e de animos tāo inquietos e pouco fieis…” (no innovation ought to be tried…because otherwise people of such restless spirit and little faith will be scandalized…) But in referring to people of restless spirit and little faith, the Lisbon authorities were thinking of the Sinhalese of the Kotte Lands and not of the Tamils of Jaffna, as the phrase “como sāo os chingalas” (as are the Sinhalese) which follows the extract quoted above makes clear. Three decades of rebellion in the Kotte lands had implanted among the Lisbon authorities a wholesome fear of attempting anything likely to cause unrest among the Sinhalese. To that fear and to the misintelligence among the Lisbon authorities that Jaffna was inhabited by the Sinhalese, the Jaffna mudaliyars owed their survival.”

And in a footnote Prof. Tikiri Abeyasinghe says

“Such misintelligence was not confined to Lisbon. The Count of Vidigueira, after serving as viceroy at Goa for 7 years (in two terms) and after a term as President of the India Council in Lisbon, still believed in 1626 that the inhabitants of Jaffna were Sinhalese. ANTT Doc. Rem. Livro 24 doc 18 (no folio numbers) Even Fernão de Queiros’ work was not free from this error. See pp. 357, 361, 366, 371 etc.”

So you see Prof NdeS is just making an embarrassing exhibition of his lack of awareness about our historiography when he plays this card.

The cached screen shot of the post as it appeared on 22^nd September 2010 can be found at

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:l6wDO8bJ7aoJ:www.kalaya.org/forum/viewtopic.php%3Ff%3D1%26t%3D646+site:kalaya.org+kalaya+forum&cd=5&hl=en&ct=clnk

Futury instead of History

Ethnic Identity in Sri Lanka’s Pre-capitalist Past: Shanie, Darshanie and Roberts drew a comment (Go to comments in that site). This is in response

Futury instead of history! How progressive. But with this talk of banning and silencing aren’t we actually going backwards in time, to a less enlightened era, which saw knowledge as dangerous needing to be contained, restricted, and even suppressed? Aren’t we retracing our steps along a trail strewn with such dismal landmarks as the banning of the teaching of Evolutionary Biology in schools, only teaching it along with Intelligent Design, poisoning of Socrates, sentencing of Galileo, witch burnings and etc? Both the Vatican and the Church of England have gone forward now haven’t they, expressing regret about Galileo, apologizing to Darwin, decreeing that only human error created the impression of incompatibility.
Everyone has gone forward everywhere in the world. Do you think we have?


In 1919 Australian Prime Minister Billy Hughes said

“The White Australia is yours. You may do with it what you please, but at any rate, the soldiers have achieved the victory and my colleagues and I have brought that great principle back to you from the conference, as safe as it was on the day when it was first adopted.”

He said this in a spirit of achievement after successfully blocking at the 1919 Paris Peace Conference, a move which would have threatened the White Australia Policy.

In 1957 S J V Chelvanayakam said

“State-aided Sinhalese colonization of the Northern and Eastern Provinces will be effectively stopped forthwith.”

He too said this in a spirit of achievement and hope after negotiating and signing the Bandaranaike -Chelvanayakam pact.

Prof K. M de Silva in his ‘Separatist Ideology In Sri Lanka A Historical Appraisal’ says about this statement by Mr. Chelvanayakam;

‘This last was aimed at reassuring its adherents, and was at the same time an expression of hope at the possibility of achieving this objective through a pact which the then Prime Minister, S.W.R.D Bandaranaike, had negotiated with the Federal Party leader, S J V Chelvanayakam, and signed only two days earlier. There
“…It was agreed that in the matter of colonization schemes the powers of the regional councils shall include the power to select allotees to whom lands within their area of authority shall be alienated and also power to select personnel to be employed for work on such schemes. The position regarding the area at present administered by the Gal-Oya Board in this matter requires consideration.”

This pact was not implemented, but in compelling the then government to confront this issue, and to do so on terms satisfactory to the FP the latter had won a major victory. A theory of dubious historicity had been elevated to the level of a fundamentally important principle that should guide relations between the two disputants in the ethnic conflicts of post-independence Sri Lanka. In less than a decade of its first enunciation this theory, now refined as “the traditional homeland of the Tamils” had become an indispensable and integral part of the political ideology of the Tamil advocates of regional autonomy and separatism.’

Australia moved on from ‘White Australia’.

“The policy was dismantled in stages by successive governments after the conclusion of World War II, with the encouragement of first non-British and later non-white immigration. From 1973 on, the White Australia policy was for all practical purposes defunct, and in 1975 the Australian government passed the Racial Discrimination Act, which made racially-based selection criteria illegal.”

– Wikipedia/White Australia Policy

But have we moved on? No after the B/C pact came the D/C pact which contained the proviso that in distributing State land in the North and the East preference should be given first to people living inside the District, second to people living within the Province and third to people of the Tamil ethnicity living outside the Province.
An International Crisis Group report SRI LANKA’S EASTERN PROVINCE: LAND, DEVELOPMENT, CONFLICT Asia Report N°159 – 15 October 2008 (that can be found at http://tinyurl.com/kpyb4g) makes the following recommendation to the SL Government;

“Ensure economic development in the East is equitable and inclusive and perceived as such by all communities by ….”

Wait for it Perin

“…making a public commitment not to allow development to alter significantly the existing ethnic balance of the province”

Now it’s next to impossible not to allow development to alter significantly the existing ethnic balance of anywhere. See what happened to Colombo, to London, France….unless one adopted measures as the International Crisis Group suggests. Just imagine this conversation Perin

GOSL – “Oh measures?”

International Crisis Group (says with decisive and grave finality) – “Yes measures”

And in an ideal world someone would be smart enough to say
“You mean measures like the USA Immigration Act of 1924, which introduced the National Origins Formula?
(The National Origins Formula was an American system of immigration quotas, between 1921 and 1965, which restricted immigration on the basis of existing proportions of the population. The goal was to maintain the existing ethnic composition of the United States – Wikipedia)
-
End of conversation. Because systems that sanctify the ethnic and religious status quo at a point of time most attractive to the proponents of the system and seek to preserve it are past their expiry date. That expiry date was officially reached on October 3, 1965 when USA President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the legislation which eliminated National Origins as a consideration for immigration into law saying

“This [old] system violates the basic principle of American democracy, the principle that values and rewards each man on the basis of his merit as a man. It has been un-American in the highest sense, because it has been untrue to the faith that brought thousands to these shores even before we were a country.”

Do you think we have reached that level of human progression yet? Have we managed to outgrow the tendency to look at a human being and only see a statistic in the demography chart?

History then Perin is not without its lessons. World history teaches us that sanctifying a demographic status quo at a point of time is ludicrous but it is to the HISTORY OF THIS COUNTRY we have to turn to learn exactly how monstrous such a concept would be when applied in our context.
What’s also monstrous is to think that you have to have a racial or cultural link to a history of a land in a particular period to empathize, appreciate and feel proud of it.

Even though you say that historians should be silenced I think our historians have done a good job in an atmosphere where reality has been hopelessly dislocated ever since the Goebbels’ big lie technique of propaganda was successfully introduced to Sri Lanka around 1949- 1951 by the Federal Party gentlemen.

Big Lie- A propaganda technique, the expression was coined by Adolf Hitler, when he dictated his 1925 book Mein Kampf, for a lie so “colossal” that no one would believe that someone “could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously.”

Dr. Paul Joseph Goebbels Third Reich propaganda minister perfected the “Big Lie” technique of propaganda, which is based on the principle that a lie, if audacious enough and repeated enough times, will be believed by the masses.

Around 1984 Dr Gamini Iriyagolla said

“K. M. de Silva, a professor of history is the chairman of a limited liability company styled “International Centre for Ethnic Studies”. It is a recipient of foreign funds and promotes the idea of regional autonomy for minorities.”

Yet in ‘Separatist Ideology In Sri Lanka A Historical Appraisal’ first published in 1987 he was more effective than any ranting nationalist.

Also in his essay ‘Narrating Tamil Nationalism: Subjectivities and Issues’ (http://dh-web.org/place.names/posts/rob-ajwilson.pdf ) you can see even Dr. Michael Roberts acting like a text book illustration of Professor Leonard Thompson’s dictum that

“‘Historians have a responsibility to discredit false and noxious myths and, with vigorous regard for the truth, to respond to the general public’s doubts about the utility of their specialized skills and knowledge”

Of course historians can and do have agendas and visions and ideologies. But objective truth is like ideals or stars isn’t it? You may never attain but you have to keep reaching and there’s enough evidence that our historians have conscientiously kept on reaching, consistently gone on trying to proclaim objective truth to a hostile, indifferent and unappreciative world.