Critical Juncture I: 1948 Independence and the Disenfranchisement of the Plantation Tamils

Abstract

As noted in the Chapter 3, Sri Lanka’s transition from the status of colony to independent state was conspicuously untraumatic when compared with the decolonization experience of India. The transfer of political power to the ‘Model Colony of Ceylon’ was technically challenging, but free of the political turmoil or social catharsis evident in other cases of decolonization (de Silva 1982). Academic accounts of the transition illustrate the elite character of the process, that is, political power was passed from the British to an Anglicized indigenous elite (de Silva 1982, 1986; Manor 1989). As the next chapter illustrates more fully, the ascendant post-colonial political elite strikingly resembled the departing colonial elite — in political form and content (Oberst 1985).