Britain’s constitutional exit from Ceylon in 1948 proceeded from a fundamental historical misreading of the island. The Tamil people are among the island’s most ancient and continuous inhabitants, with documented political, cultural and civilisational presence long predating colonial rule. This continuity is reflected across archaeological findings, classical Tamil literary sources, epigraphic records and early foreign accounts of the island. Yet British administrators failed to engage seriously with this history. Instead, they accepted and institutionalised a modern Sinhala national identity that had emerged through layered historical processes involving Yaksha traditions, Nagar communities, North Indian influences and South Indian trading populations. By collapsing this complexity into a single majoritarian national framework, Britain disregarded the island’s plural political inheritance and shaped a constitution detached from historical reality.
This is not an exercise in nostalgia or blame-shifting. It is a constitutional reckoning.
Scholarly research has demonstrated that ethnicity in Sri Lanka was not simply inherited from ancient history but was administratively produced and consolidated under colonial governance, particularly through census practices, electoral design and early twentieth-century constitutional reforms. Colonial debates over whether Ceylon consisted of multiple political communities or a single dominant nation were never resolved democratically. Instead, they were settled administratively in favour of a single national framework.
This legacy must be assessed in light of evolving international law. In 1960, the United Nations General Assembly adopted Resolution 1514 (XV), the Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples, affirming self-determination as a universal right and rejecting political arrangements that perpetuate domination under new forms. While Sri Lanka’s independence preceded this declaration, the principles it codified became the global benchmark for evaluating decolonization outcomes. Yet no meaningful effort was made to review or remedy constitutional settlements—such as Sri Lanka’s—that entrenched majoritarian rule and denied equal political status to distinct peoples.
Britain’s decolonisation process prioritised administrative continuity and short-term stability over constitutional justice. Minority concerns were acknowledged rhetorically but were not secured structurally. There were no binding power-sharing guarantees, no entrenched protections against demographic domination and no sustained international oversight after independence.
The consequences are well documented - disenfranchisement, constitutional breakdowns, civil war, mass displacement and unresolved accountability for grave human rights violations. These outcomes are inseparable from the terms of exit chosen by the departing colonial power.
Decolonisation is not finished when a flag is lowered. It is finished only when the political architecture left behind does not produce permanent inequality.
Source - Editor, Tamil Diaspor News