6: Globalization and the Restructuring of Sri Lanka

6 Beyond the Post-Colonial: New World Regions and the Restructuring of Sri Lanka in the 1980s If Sri Lankan society and space between 1948 and the 1970s can be perceived as “post-colonial,� it has been radically changed since then. From the 1970s, the society and space of Sri Lanka were subjected to profound changes and challenges.

The challenges include the Janata Vimukti Peramuna (JVP)-led insurrection of 1971, its activism in the 1980s, and the Tamil-based separatist struggles, also from the 1970s. These struggles displaced the primary focus of the post-colonial polity on social and economic issues, with those concerning conflicting ethnicities, and to a lesser degree, the rural population and youth, both destabilizing the national society and space and shifting the locus of political negotiation from Colombo to remote rural areas. At the same time, the policies of the United National Party governments between 1977 and 1994, particularly those of export promotion, the relocation of the seat of government, and the massive development program radically transformed Sri Lanka. These transformations, which also include the relocation of Sri Lanka within new world regions, are intimately related to the demise of the Cold W ar and its bi-polar political structure and the reorganization of world geopolitical structures. Following these themes, I begin my inquiry by exploring the changes in the world-space.

The Demise of Euro-US Domination and theEmergence of M ultiple World-Regions On a world scale, the late 1960s was when the post-W ar political and economic order organized under US hegemony began disintegrating. Although the Marshall Plan may have prevented possible communist revolutions in western Europe in the aftermath of W orld W ar II, the developing economies of west European states and Japan turned into economic competitors of the United States. Revolutions in, for example, China, Cuba, Algeria, and what became specifically Islamic states, defied 155

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the US-USSR bi-polar political arrangement and the places assigned to them in the Yalta agreement. From the 1960s, protests against the status quo were not only geographically widespread--from the “May of France” to the “Prague Spring” and the Naxallite rebellion in India--the formation of protest movements and their political objectives also became diversified. What W allerstein calls the “world revolution of 1968” not only undermined US hegemony and domination, but also the Soviet model of communism as the sole alternative to the US model of capitalism.1 By the 1950s, communist revolutions and the postwar independence of a large number of colonies had given rise to new political, religious, and other centers.

W ith the surge of new political movements including Islamic fundamentalism and ethnicity-based separatism this diversification of urban structures had further intensified, particularly from the 1970s. Furthermore, the “unruliness” within states also undermined these states’ control over civil societies. In short, the control of populations through controlling the space they and their relations with one another occupy--as citizenry, as communities, as individuals--is in the process of being fundamentally undermined in two key directions formed by the modern world-system’s spatial jurisdictions; within states and between states.2 Parallel to political changes, the post-W ar economic order had also been overturned by the 1970s. The Marshall Aid Plan and the consequent “Eurodollar market” helped west European states to overcome the obstacle of a lack of convertible currency, 3 more or less materializing the idea of an international monetary order projected in the Bretton W oods agreement of 1944. The same processes, however, created a balance-of-payments problem for the United States in the 1970s, 4 leading to the collapse of the Bretton W oods system without a comparable alternative. Here the Nixon administration unilaterally abrogated the Bretton W oods system by twice devaluing the dollar, abandoning the gold standard, and converting to a floating exchange rate.5 The rising power of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, the growing impact of the Newly Industrializing Countries of east Asia, and increasing budget deficits of the USA and many other industrially advanced countries, had largely altered the configuration of the worldeconomy by the late 1970s. For the first time in the history of the capitalist worldeconomy, major centers of capital accumulation were also established outside Europe and North America.

Most societies in the periphery have also become suspicious about the prospects of both political independence and economic “development,” two principal goals of the post-W orld War II period. On the one hand, there still remain in every ocean and on every continent a considerable number of European and U S colonies and dependent territories, independence for which is not an issue. 6 These include the Falklands, New Caledonia, Bermuda, Diego Garcia, Samoa, and Guam. Most of these are small island territories, but they have enormous strategic value for their metropoles. On the other hand, the populations in most of these colonies are less

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optimistic about what independence would bring. For example, the highest standard of living in the Caribbean is found in the French colonies of Martinique and Guadeloupe, whereas Haiti, which gained independence in the 1790s, is the poorest country in the western hemisphere. In the referendum of 1994, Puerto Rican voters overwhelmingly favored so-called commonwealth status over independence.7 Hence, the independence of Namibia in 1990, and the return of Hong Kong and Macao to China in the late 1990s appear to be postscripts to decolonization rather than part of a continuing decolonization process.

In regard to “development,” most states in the periphery have accumulated debt instead of capital. Even one year before the famous default of Mexico in 1982, Poland and Romania informed W estern banks about their inability to meet payment requirements.8 The total debt of Africa has quadrupled over the decade of the 1980s, and their debt service ratios are higher than those of Latin American states. 9 Yet the weakening of the core power’s hold on the world-economy from the 1970s has provided an opportunity for “economic development” in the periphery, illustrated in the industrialization of states from Japan to Mauritius, including Sri Lanka. This is perhaps another instance of what Frank has argued as the development of some peripheral states when their ties with the core were at their weakest.10 W ithin this changing geography, the intervention of Sri Lankan agencies, not least the state, have transformed the post-colonial society and space of Sri Lanka.

The demise of US hegemony, and political and economic orders constructed under its leadership, and the weakening of the core states’ capacity for international political and economic intervention have, however, expanded the capacity of other agencies in economic competition, political bargaining, and cultural expression.

One major reaction to the decentralization and dispersal of what appeared to be UScentric economic activities has been the corporate attempt to centralize their management and control functions in so-called global cities, especially in Tokyo, London, and New York.11 In brief, along with the collapse of the post-W ar world political and economic order from the late 1960s, not only have the world-regions multiplied, but also the intra-state conflicts. The world-economy itself has been restructured as three core regions centered upon Tokyo, London, and New York, and regional economic blocs such as the Association of South East Asian Nations and South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation have gained more currency. Most crucial for Sri Lanka is the expansion of the east Asian economic bloc towards south Asia, and the formation of a south Asian region. T he Newly Industrialized Countries of Asia have provided new models for peripheral states in the region to emulate in their quest for the old national goal, “development.”

Challenges to the Post-Colonial Social and Spatial Order of Sri Lanka Unlike the religious movements that led Buddhist and Hindu revivals of the late nineteenth century, and ethno-political parties of the 1920s, the Janata Vimukti

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Peramuna-led rebellions and Tamil separatist struggles challenged the so-called integrity of Ceylon, Colombo’s centrality in it, and the rules governing the political negotiations. In this section, I explore the spatial constitution of these struggles.

The changes these challenges brought about in the society and space of Sri Lanka were primarily fivefold. First, Sri Lankan youth became a significant political force. Second, the primacy of social and economic questions in the national political agenda was replaced by ethnic and other cultural issues. Third, the locus of political negotiations moved away from Colombo. Fourth, the primary mode of political negotiations shifted from Parliamentary debates to military confrontations. And finally, the “national integrity” of Sri Lanka was both questioned and destabilized. Important to note is the fact that these movements do not have direct colonial British influence, not least when compared to the political elite of Ceylon as well as those who initially contested this elite.12 The context in which these shifts have taken place was largely provided by the inefficacy of the hegemony constructed for itself by the post-independence political establishment, and the changing national and global political and economic conditions discussed above. As in Western democracies, Sri Lankan political parties, dominant classes, and the mass media were able not only to establish the idea that elections are the acceptable means of changing governments, but also to marginalize any subversive movement contesting the political establishment. Yet the strength of the subversive movements addressed here have highlighted the incompleteness of such a political establishment dominated by two main political parties. By capitalizing on the concerns of youth and ethnic groups these subversive political movements arguably defied this post-colonial political establishment and diversified the means and modes of political negotiations.

Both the JVP and Tamil separatist groups consist primarily of militant youth.13 These distrusted the leadership of the conventional left, especially Sama Samaja and Communist Parties, which they branded as mahalu nayakatvaya (feeble leadership), and the leadership of post-colonial Tamil political parties in regard to Tamil separatists. The JVP notion of the “old left” appears to have been inspired by the Cuban revolution of 1959 which was led by a group of young militants defying the Cuban Communist Party’s claim to it, and the Chinese cultural revolution of the late 1960s, in which many “old leaders” were replaced by younger ones.

These viewpoints suggest that youth--or at least that generation from the 1970s-became a significant social and political agency. The role that youth played in uprisings of the late 1960s in Europe, in communist revolutions, and in nationalist struggles is well known. Yet the study of youth as a social group has been limited to concepts of, for example, “generation” and “cohort” 14 which are no where so powerful as concepts such as “class” or “ethnic group.” According to Simon Firth, “Youth” is not a term of sociological jargon.15 The treatment of youth as a theme in social history is also recent. 16 As in most struggles from the 1960s, the uprising of 1971 was unprecedented. According to Charles Blackton, the insurgency of armed youths against an adult system is the first instance when tensions between generations have led to a military conflict on a national scale. 17 As they were

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unable to grasp the meaning of this event through their own frameworks, and were interested in reproducing the state’s monopoly on violence, all “national” political parties, both Super Powers, and the regional powers, supported the government’s effort in crushing the rebellion.

The prelude to these struggles was the politicization of the university. The boycotting of classes and conflicts in the universities, led by left wing student unions, were common in the late 1960s. Rising unemployment during this period, and insecurity about the future caused by this, is arguably the main cause for increasing student willingness to risk their immediate goal of graduation for longer term political objectives. By the early 1970s, JVP activism had expanded this locus of youth political struggles to include the state-run high school system. Although universities acted as nodes, the most intense JVP uprising took place in the coastal areas between Ambalangoda and Tangalla, and in Kalutara and Kegalla Districts, all of which were rural. (figure 6.1) Tamil separatist movements also moved their base further away from the university to the larger and more rural Jaffna peninsular.

These struggles were more dispersed and territorial-based, but waged against a power source centralized in cities. Up to the 1970s, it was the SLFP that largely represented the rural masses and Sinhalese nationalist sentiments. Despite the politicization of rural areas after independence, and the mass participation of rural voters in elections, villagers were not able to use their electoral power to place on the national political agenda issues which directly and deeply influenced their material welfare.18 Nor did the main political parties, which gained their votes, attempt to mobilize these masses or organize them behind a common set of “agrarian” demands. This is evident in the rural base that the JVP was able to construct for itself.

Although the JVP itself was not victorious, the 1971 uprising rocked the entire political establishment; it also drew them to the rural areas to negotiate power relations which were supposedly centered upon Colombo. First, it destablized the integrity of the state, making the government in Colombo send troops to negotiate the conflict. This was a crucial turning point in the socialization of violence, once monopolized by the colonial state and later disguised by the post-colonial propagation of the idea that there can be no revolution in a Buddhist country where people are inherently non-violent. Secondly, the uprise drew the attention of the central government to rural areas. The acceleration of rural transformations, particularly land reforms of the 1970s, was largely the government’s reaction to this situation. These, however, did not address the concerns of rural youth, expressed in these uprisings, which was largely the incapacity to leave the poverty of the village, a knowledge and aspiration diffused by W estern, urban-centric education.

The struggle was, therefore, not over a land problem, and, despite its rural base, the JVP had no “agrarian program.” 19 The JVP itself had no objective in transforming the national society and space, but creating a place for the youth within it. This was more evident in JVP activism in the 1980s, in which isolated attacks were primarily targeted on regional and local rural leaders of the ruling UNP, instead of on the central state. Their principal

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targets in 1971 were local police stations. Moreover, the JVP was not antagonistic to the creation of Export Processing Zones, the employees of which were younger than 24 years, and mainly female. Instead of expanding the extant society and space, creating more space for newcomers, the JVP adopted the strategy of replacing personnel within it.

Ethno-Politics and Separatism Ethno-political conflicts that led to the struggle for a separate Tamil state had been developing from the 1950s. The nationalism that this study focusses on is a modern phenomenon, a significant outcome of the socio-spatial anatomy of the modern state. The early ethno-political organizations which had emerged in the 1920s had been confined to a broadly defined group of the elite which had operated along with other social differences such as caste. Their political bargaining took place within the confines of the constitutional framework. Crossing the boundaries of this structure in the late 1940s, the Federal Party took its version of the ethnic issue and the federal policy to the Tamil people.

Nationalism has become an important subject in recent scholarly work. Yet for the most part, the attempts have been to capture the phenomenon of what scholars call nationalism in a simple “objective,” “scientific” manner. For example, Jonathan Spencer notes that “Each nationalism is based upon the assumption that people are naturally divisible into different kinds--known as nations--and ideally each kind should have the responsibility for its own governance.” 20 Although this may be valid at a particular level, nationalisms are much more complex than this suggests, not least Tamil separatism in Sri Lanka. It is, therefore, more useful to see how these political positions are constructed. For Kemper, the strength of nationalism, or any other political movement, is its ability to draw on sentiments-language, religion, family, culture--that appear to be natural and autochthonous. 21 As Sahlins argues, whether the past is continuous or discontinuous with the present is an irrelevant issue; “every reproduction of culture is an alteration, insofar as in action the categories by which the present world is orchestrated pick up some novel empirical content.” 22 Despite its horrors, nationalism may well be viewed as a mechanism of reproduction of cultures, histories, and identities within particular power structures.

It was the Mahajana Eksath Peramuna that advanced ethno-politics to a national political issue through its “Sinhala only” policy, implementing some measures to this end after it came to power in 1956. The pre-election pact of the leader of this SLFP-led government with that of the Federal Party politicized Sinhalese and Tamil ethnic concerns as a duality between these two parties. The polarization of the polity into two camps based on social and political issues, as commonly identified as the Left and the Right, however, provided the hegemony for these over ethnic and other concerns in the national political agenda until the late 1970s.

Yet differences are expressed in a variety of contexts using multiple identities.

It is, therefore, important to ask how much of the politics of one cultural group is

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comprehensible to the other cultural group. The Federal Party, which proposed a federal policy in the Sri Lankan polity, was, in its Tamil designation, Ilankai Thamil Arasu Kadchi, meaning the Ceylon Tamil State Party. 23 Moreover, it is only when these political and other cultural dimensions such as caste divisions are added that the separatist struggle can be seen as the complexity it actually represents. Jupp observes that within the Tamil and Christian communities, differences of caste are as important as among Buddhists. “Tamil Kariars at Point Pedro do not behave politically like Tamil Vellalas [high castes], while Tamil minority castes seem susceptible to extreme left-wing appeals.” 24 There is, therefore, no single variable --ethnicity, language, religion, or caste--that is generally applicable across any of these groups. Yet this nationalism holds that the political and national unit should be congruent.25 Responding to the Sinhala-biased politics of post-colonial governments and the need to secure their votes, in 1972 the Federal Party and the Tamil Congress banded together to form a Tamil United Front (Tamil United Liberation Front from 1976).

In M ay 1976, it raised the demand for a separate Tamil state in the north and east of Sri Lanka named “Tamil Eelam.” 26 Instead of there being a leftist or a right-wing government and a corresponding opposition, once the TULF became the second largest group in the 1977 elections, the Parliament polarized into a Sinhala-Tamil duality. In this context, ethnic issues concerning the Tamils were prioritized in the national political agenda, and any issue that came up in the Parliament was debated for its implications on Tamils until the TULF boycotted the Parliament in 1986.

Spatially, what the T ULF proposed was two states on the island, and with an international boundary between them and two capitals, Jaffna and Colombo. The Sri Lankan Tamils, in general, and the political parties based on them, did not identify themselves with the Tamils in the plantation areas, nor with those in the south Indian state of Tamil Nadu. Still, Tamil Nadu was part of their strategies, including as a place of escape and military training.27 Although the TULF, as the principal opposition, was in the best ever position to bargain for the rights of the Tamil people, the heavy imbalance of forces (a mere 18 TULF seats in a 168-member Parliament) was insufficient to win a separate state through the parliamentary process. As Heath and M cLaughlin suggest, politicians thrive on problems to solve,28 and the Parliament could go on debating this issue.

Yet the youth were discontented by the distance between the rhetoric and the deeds of their political leaders.

After the Pakistani crisis of 1971 and the establishment of Bangladesh, some Tamil youth leaders were inspired with the idea that if they would be able to free an area from the control of the central government and claim a separate state, then India would intervene, in the same way as it did with the separation of Bangladesh from Pakistan. Although the decades of Indo-Pakistani conflicts might have been influential in the Bangladeshi case, the Indian government did not welcome the idea of Tamil separatism, which would have inspired the separatist movements in its own country. India also feared that a divided country would attract the “superpowers,” particularly the US which was searching for a new place in the Indian Ocean for a

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naval base after the Diego Garcia crisis.

Although the objectives did not differ from that of the TULF, the separatists’ means of achieving these and their commitment to doing so were in contrast. The huge imbalance of forces, especially in the Parliament, and the state’s carrying out of law and order which is biased towards those who hold this apparatus, were compensated for by the growing militancy among the Tamil youth that had improved their capacity to negotiate. These were not merely extra parliamentary struggles. These groups contested the very validity of the Parliament itself, disrupting and boycotting elections after 1982 and threatening to kill whoever participated in them, whether as voters or candidates.

Like the JVP, the LTTE too was ambiguous about territorial space but accepted the hegemonic notion of the inter-state system and colonial provinces. Firstly, what the LTTE, other separatist groups, and the TULF demanded and strove for, was to produce a new state within the inter-state system. This state is, however, an ethnic one--a T amil one. Modern states, however, have not just been constructed to contain or constitute ethnic groups, but so-called “nations.” Past experiences of the modern state, from sixteenth century Europe onwards, demonstrate that the process of states homogenizing their subjects into nations was more prominent than homogenous cultural groups forming states. “Nations” thus largely consist of multiple cultural groups dominated by one or several of them, partly assimilating and suppressing the rest. It is precisely this situation that makes those groups which do not want to be part of a particular state want to construct a new state, hence, separatism and violence.

Paradoxically, the conception of Tamil Eelam confronts the problem of its “Tamilness.” The problem of the Muslims of Sri Lanka is telling here. The population of one of the two provinces which the separatists claim, Eastern Province, consists of about 30% Muslims and 30% Sinhalese. How the Tigers have attempted to handle this problem is by frightening away the non-Tamils from the province by the use of terror.29 This leads to the second ambiguity, that of the territory perceived as Tamil Eelam. W hat the LTTE strives to liberate are largely the Northern and Eastern Provinces, the two farthest from Colombo, out of a total of nine Provinces. As discussed in Chapter Two, these Provinces were created by the British, not only disregarding cultural differences among the Lankans, but also to obscure them. If there was ever a clear territorial division between the Tamils and Sinhalese in history, such a division has radically changed during the last five hundred years. 30 Today, Tamils live in almost all provinces, with a large proportion in Colombo.

The context within which such a boundary existed has also changed by the colonial abandonment of ancient irrigation works, the main source of life in the low rainfall areas, and the production of a Colombo-centric territory. Among the Tamils themselves, the ethnoscape has become more complex; historic cultural differences such as castes have been overlain by new religious and class categories, such as Christians, administrators, capitalists, merchants, and landowners, particularly during the colonial period. In this context, the provinces do not have the same

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meaning beyond the colonial administration for which purpose they were produced.

The post-colonial state of Sri Lanka has only adopted these divisions for the administrative convenience and due to cultural ignorance. Yet, the politicohistorical solutions offered so far by governments, and all party conferences, have also been based on the same administrative divisions. For example, the Indo-Sri Lanka Peace Accord of 1987 offered a degree of devolution of power to all nine Provinces, represented by Provincial Councils. Directly responding to the territorial demand of the separatists, the conference also made the temporary provision of a unified North-Eastern Provincial Council.

In the meantime, both LTTE and JVP-led struggles have shifted the locus of political negotiations to the rural areas. Both these movements have refused to participate in the parliamentary process and recognize Colombo as the political center. The JVP and the LTTE are not only not represented in the national Parliament, they also actively hinder the election process. Instead of negotiating in Colombo, representatives of both movements have invited the representatives of the state to their territory to negotiate on their terms, but with arms. Despite sporadic bomb attacks on targets in Colombo, the separatists have been waging their struggle in the Northern and Eastern provinces while the JVP have primarily been active in the southern, central, and north-central areas of Sri Lanka. Hence, the government has been compelled to send troops to negotiate and regain control over those areas.

As far as the major political negotiations are concerned, Colombo has, therefore, lost the consensus it once had as the locus of political negotiations for three decades after independence. The constant proposal to devolve power indicate the impasse the system based on centralized power has reached.

The Restructuring of National Space In addition to assuming the leadership against “terrorism” and “separatism,” and reproducing Colombo’s centrality, therefore, the government also undertook the task of rebuilding capitalist structures destroyed by the previous nationalist-socialist regimes. The crushing of the general strike of 1980 by the government of 1977 was a direct blow not only to the proletariat but also to the capitalist-proletariat politicoideological duality that had characterized the post-colonial political arena. Spatially significant state sponsored projects and programs of the three consecutive UNP governments (1977-1994) include, first, the shifting of the seat of the government from the former colonial Fort area of Colombo, to a new parliament complex, built on the outskirts of the city at Sri Jayawardhanapura. Second, the Fort area was transformed into a central business district by relocating its former occupants and replacing them with banks and private businesses. Third, export-processing zones were introduced within what is called Greater Colombo in order to attract foreign investment. Fourth, the compression of the major construction and resettlement component of the Mahaweli Development Project into six years. Finally, a program to build one hundred thousand houses in six years was followed by a One Million Houses Program, largely based on the provision of state support for self-builders.

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Over and above these and many other smaller scale projects which it carried out, the state also stimulated private investment through the removal of legal and administrative constraints, the provision of fiscal incentives, and the privatization of state corporations. This transition, undertaken by Sri Lankan governments since the late 1970s as part of a larger program of planned privatization, generated the most profound building boom since independence, and one which changed the whole national landscape. The heightened construction activity transformed the colonial landscape in Colombo and its immediate environs which, till then, had largely survived for three decades.

The Accelerated Mahaweli Project, the largest single development project undertaken by a Sri Lankan government, comprised the construction of five major dams, irrigating 320,000 acres of new land, and reinforcing the irrigation system in an area of 32,000 acres. This was anticipated to provide farm employment for 500,000 and off-farm employment for another 50,000 people. 31 The primary focus can be explained as the drive to build an infrastructure, which is expressed through the selection of capital intensive dam and canal construction projects in formulating the accelerated program. (figure 6.2)

FIGURE 6.2 Massive projects: The Mahaweli Project area.

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The Acceleration added its own share of problems to others inherent to this long-term, large-scale program, discussed in Chapter Five. As does any dam project, this too uprooted people from fertile basins which were turned into reservoir beds. Although on many occasions there had been discussions about these evacuees, there was very little the Mahaweli Authority officials could do because of its fast pace. Despite the fact that the negative effects of this have often been noted, massive clearance of trees became natural to the project. It was only with the intervention of the Mahaweli Architectural Unit in 1984, through the proposal of a tree policy, that saving some of the trees became important. (figure 6.3) Highlighting its focus on the expansion of communication and irrigation infrastructure, and incorporating the development area into national space, the project gave only marginal importance to the settlers. Despite enormous spending on infrastructure building, each settler was given a plot of land and Rs. 1500. 32 The concern for settlers was therefore much less than in early colonization schemes where the government attempted to provide core-houses. (figure 4.1) Jaap Jan Speelman and G.M. van der Top sum up, The Mahaweli Programme gives the impression of being mainly directed towards construction rather than actual settler development. The greater part of foreign aid is pumped into the hardware of the downstream works; and although plans for social infrastructure in all its aspects exist the real software of financial and agricultural extension and guidance seems to be mainly in the planning stage.33 The huge size of the program also created space for negotiation. Architects and planners were major groups that made use of this opportunity between 1983 and 1989. Earlier, planning had been approached from a master plan perspective where a whole large town was planned and laid out and then gradually filled in with buildings. Since what would be built depended on the annual budgetary allocations of the Authority, the towns tended to consist of a number of buildings and patches of vegetation, a landscape of uncertainty. From 1983, however, the Mahaweli Architectural (and Planning) Unit took a new approach, designing and building only a dense core and leaving the bulk of the land reserved for the township in its original state to be utilized when the town expands. The towns, therefore, began to function from the outset without having to wait until they fully developed according to a master plan over a couple of decades.

In the area of housing, the large-scale state intervention can partly be understood as a reaction to the previous government’s emphasis on housing. The transition from the Hundred Thousand Houses Program to the Million Houses Program in 1983 meant a transition from providing state-built housing, largely in the cities, to the provision of more limited support for self-builders in the whole national territory. The magnitude of the Million Houses Program (1983-1987) can be contrasted with the total housing stock of Sri Lanka, which was under three million

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FIGURE 6.3 Transforming the rural landscape: Mahaweli Townships.

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housing units in 1981. Inevitably the largeness of the program and the extensive publicity surrounding it was instrumental in creating a housing problem.

The huge scale, a hundred thousand and one million, represents a particular quantification of housing programs. Arguably this was to make those programs politically appealing and easily understandable for the general public. Although setting quantified targets for programs is not uncommon, those carried out under the guidance of the popular UNP leader, Premadasa, were strikingly so. For example, in 1993, he undertook the task of opening 200 garment factories in 200 days at an average of one per day. The need to quantify for the public consumption and the project of high degree states that housing had become a significant political issue by the late 1970s.

The shift to the Million Houses Program was largely due to the failure of the Hundred-Thousand Houses Program (1978-1982). Although 85% of these dwelling units were for low-income groups, these ended up being too costly for this income bracket. Yet the apartments constructed for working households were inadequate, both in area and quality, for the middle income groups who could afford them.

Arguably that housing program reached an impasse with incomplete projects incurring large subsidies, unacceptable for the state as well as aid agencies. The number of housing units constructed under this program was also far less than what was originally planned. 34 In this context, the Million Houses Program was designed to reach one million families without the state having to construct housing for them, and touch the hearts of every family that became eligible to participate.

The most significant aspects of the Million Houses Program was the idea of supporting those who build their own housing, instead of the state building housing for distribution among a selected group of beneficiaries, and the politicization of the housing question. The policy to support “self-builders” arose from the adoption of broader critiques of Third W orld housing policies by W illiam Mangin and John Turner in the 1970s, 35 particularly, the failure of state-built housing projects to address the housing needs of the urban poor.

According to Turner’s argument, the policies of state provision of built housing have not been successful in reaching the poor. Second, in regard to Peru in the 1970s, Turner identified that what he called the “self-building activity” was not an urban problem but was rather, a solution to the housing problem, and no better solution has been found. That is, “self builders” are the people who know what they need, and not the state. Turner considered the main issue to be “who decides what and for whom?” Hence, the problem was one of lack of access to basic resources to fulfill their needs. Instead of the state’s “prescription” of housing through the provision of built housing units, therefore, Turner called for the support of their housing efforts. The proviso of “external support” for this activity was, ironically, identified as the state; 36 the state should ensure the users’ access to basic local resources, as well as secure the autonomy of the self-building activity.

In arguing that users would be able to decide what support the state (sponsor) should provide, 37 however, the concept of “support systems” seriously underestimated the power and the regulatory functions of the state. W hat is ignored

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here is that even support coming from the state implies a part of its regulatory function. In practice, the state had decided what was meant by housing, who needs access to what resources, and most crucially, what need makes such state intervention necessary, or desirable, and how to balance its account books.

The state’s extension of support to self-builders was, therefore, a means of coopting and institutionalizing the housing activity at a national scale. Firstly, the program decided who needs support, i.e. the lower middle income group (Rs 300 1000 per month). Second, what the Authority undertook to deliver was “low standards for many rather than high standards for a few.” 38 The housing authority assumed that “nature would supply practically all their material needs” and “family labor goes a long way in meeting their house building needs,” 39 and the problem was defined as one of a cash gap, principally to hire skilled labor and transport certain building materials. Thus, the support system was based on the provision of small loans, which was justified as “support for those who are helping themselves,” and organized as loan packages, the amounts of which were also decided by the state, with several different options. The state thus regulated and institutionalized a large proportion of the self-building activity.

The mismatch between the problem and needs, which operated at the level of housing, now operated at the level of support. The consultants for the program questioned whether the government would tolerate the principles of “progressive development” as an inherent consequence of the facilitating role and accept the prolongation of the construction time. Ruwanpathirana and Tilakaratna observed that “the officials appeared to have been more concerned with the technical aspects, speedy construction, implementation and reaching physical targets of the projects, and less with the human processes at work and the participatory aspects of the project.” 40 According to James Brow’s study of a new development, the process produced a settlement but destroyed a community.41 For the state, however, the Million Houses Program was one of many development projects that produced a low wage labor force and promoted the hope among them of getting better housing. Portes and W alton have argued that the poor access to resources among Third W orld people is caused by the need of multinational capital to maintain low levels of reproduction of labor power as close as possible to the subsistence level in the periphery. 42 Castells has argued that housing is one of the main expenses in reproducing labor power and thus, keeping housing out of the remuneration package (wages) has been desired by representatives of capital. 43 If these were not primary concerns of post-colonial Sri Lankan governments, it certainly was for the government of 1977 which invited international capital to invest in Sri Lanka. Self-built housing is cheaper than any other comparable form of housing, including low-cost government housing projects, because there is a large input of labor by the worker him/herself, kin, and friends. 44 Such methods of housing therefore absorb most of the costs of reproduction of labor power enabling high profits or surplus extraction from the periphery for multinational capital.

Theoretically, therefore, the Program’s significance is that it solves a crucial

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problem for foreign and local capital, through the in-situ production of a low wage labor force.

W hile the JVP and the LTTE were undermining Colombo’s centrality, the government was reproducing it in a grand scale. This process of centralization culminated at the level of government. The establishment of an Executive Presidency in 1978, concentrating political power in the President’s office, strongly demonstrated the government’s drive to centralize political command functions.

Moreover, the replacement of the former Prime Minister, directly responsible to the legislature, with a Presidency that stands above all social, political, and economic institutions of the country, indicates the government’s desire to organize a supreme command center. Nationally, this was accompanied by the centralizing and reinforcing of colonial districts.

The UNP’s main criticism of the electoral system was that the number of seats it won in the 1970 election was disproportionately low to the overall number of votes it received nationally. 45 According to the constitution of 1978, which created an executive Presidency, the President was to be elected by an island-wide vote.

This hypothetically guaranteed the Presidency to the ruling UNP, since it was only in 1956 that another single party had polled more votes than the UNP. In this way, a single national electorate was superimposed over the diversifying electoral system of Sri Lanka.

At the same time, the whole electoral organization of Sri Lanka was also transformed. The 1977 government eliminated former electorates, 150 in all, and replaced them with twenty-two administrative districts. Instead of a single Member of Parliament, each district elects a number of them proportionate to its population.

Similarly, local governments too were transformed into single electorates. The election of five or more representatives, sometimes twenty, from a large electorate, however, abolished the relationship between the electorate and their representative, developed from the 1930s, along with the identity of former electorates. This was the construction of a centralized single national political system, undermining “local” identities. If the electoral system provided room for people to express their local concerns, and if the popularization of elections in the 1950s incorporated the village into the national system in the 1960s, this change stifled the localized concerns and marginalized small political parties and former local independent candidates.

Centralizing industrial production, the government established industrial enclaves, called Export Processing Zones, in the vicinity of Colombo. Beginning in Ireland in 1959, these were established in countries such as Taiwan, Malaysia, and the Philippines. The emphasis of this policy was on the rapid expansion of exports, free international trade, and the provision of an “open door” environment for foreign companies.46 The objective was to produce competitive exports relying on direct foreign investment.

In Sri Lanka, government policies after 1977 focussed on “export promotion” in place of previous economic policies of “import substitution and industrialization.” Special benefits provided for industries included quick customs

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clearance, an uninterrupted supply of electricity, and also the ability to obtain loans from off-shore banking at cheaper rates. 47 The government also removed dual exchange rates and, in effect, devalued the currency. Other incentives to Zone investors included a full tax holiday for up to ten years, no limit on the equity holdings of foreign investors, the free transfer of shares within and outside Sri Lanka, no tax or exchange controls on such transfers, unrestricted remittance of capital and proceeds of liquidation, and the exemption of dividends to non-resident shareholders tax and exchange controls, also of import duty and regular controls on machinery, equipment, construction and raw materials.48 Guarantees were also provided against nationalization, and labor unions were also kept out of bounds.49 This privileged treatment of investments in the EPZ, however, disadvantaged extant private industries and discouraged new investments outside this.50 Despite the failure of EPZs in south Asia (beginning from the first one, Kadla Free Trade Zone of India, opened in 1956 51), and the fading away of the hope of attracting electronics (bluechip) industry, the garment industry provided the backbone of the EPZ at Katunayake. Garments became the main export earner of Sri Lanka in 1988.52 Despite high capital expenditure, profits earned by foreign firms, the labor intensive garment industry provided a considerable proportion of the employment. Of the 17,813 workers employed in the Zone by the end of 1981, 15,689 were employed in the garment industry. 53 The previously dominating position of plantations in the Sri Lankan economy have thereby been replaced by export-oriented light industry. EPZs were not only constructed as legally exclusive safe havens for private investments, but were also physically separated by fences and walls providing only limited access from outside. These enterprize zones have reintroduced foreign enclaves in the form of compounds. These compounds are, however, not plantations but industrial areas, not British-owned but South Korean and Taiwanese-owned, not in the central highlands but near Colombo International Airport. As compared to the distributionary location of factories by the previous governments, the location of factories in the vicinity of Colombo represents a centralization of industrial production activity.

In regard to the cultural arena, former President R. Premadasa (1988-1993), who was also the Prime Minister between 1977 and 1988, attempted to organize a central religious role for Colombo. Although his intentions were not made explicit, President Premadasa’s patronage and effort to promote the Buddhist temple at Gangaramaya, Colombo, to a “national” level is well known in Sri Lanka. (figure 6.4) Most strikingly, the temple holds an annual procession resembling that held at Kandy by the Temple of the Tooth Relic, both in regard to its size and quality.

It is important to recall that the construction of Colombo as a significant place for the Sinhalese and Buddhists was a continuation of the “Ceylonizing” of Colombo.

This politico-ideological coalition involved “the invention of tradition,” and the evoking of history and tradition has been carried out by the leaders of the UNP government at a high level. One main campaign promise of its leader, Jayawardene, was to create a dharmishta (righteous) society, that recalled the rule of Emperor

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FIGURE 6.4 Reinforcing Colombo’s cultural centrality: Gangarmaya Temple, Colombo.

Asoka of India. In inaugurating one of the major dams of the Mahaweli Project, the Kotmale Dam, the Mahaweli Minister, Gamini Dissanayake, evoked Kotmale’s “unique” relationship to one of the greatest kings in Lankan history, Dutugemunu, a link which was a construction of his own. Moreover, during his first visit to the United States as President in 1984, Jayawardene proudly claimed that he was the 205th head of state of Sri Lanka in its 2,500-year long history. 54 Yet, in contrast to evoking history and tradition, and locating oneself and new rituals within these, President Premadasa invented a “new” tradition, appropriating traditional rituals, putting these together, but also locating them in Colombo.

The advancement of Colombo from its previous colonial and secular state into a nationally significant ethno-religious center, however, has not been limited to Sinhalese-Buddhists, but can also be seen among the Hindu-Tamil elite and middle classes of Colombo. Despite Tamil separatism in areas furthest from Colombo, the Hindu temple at W ellawatta, Colombo, has also acquired a significantly increased importance among Hindu temples of the island. It is, therefore, the elite of Colombo--the power elites, 55 capitalists, and the upper middle class--of perhaps all ethno-religious groups, that have striven to construct a more central cultural role for Colombo. Such a drive has certainly produced tensions between the desire of the capitalist classes to incorporate a cultural dimension into its political economy centered upon Colombo, and the determination of more ardent ethno-religious groups to preserve their historic centers, located far outside Colombo, and to reconstruct and replenish their identities in such a context.56 The acceleration of the Mahaweli Development Project and the launching of massive housing programs in the late 1970s, the creation of large scale electorates, and the location of an industrial zone near Colombo constitute a strategy of both decentralization and recentralization of national space. The expansion of government programs to support activities such as irrigation and housing would, at

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the same time, stretch the national social and spatial infrastructure, closely integrating the “marginal” areas into it.

The Restructuring of Colom bo Changes within Colombo were the result of a massive restructuring carried out through a series of government policies and projects, including the relocation of the seat of government and the main site of production for export, and the construction of a new Parliamentary complex deploying critical vernacular architecture of Sri Lanka and a Central Business District in the so-called “international modern” style.

The restructuring of Colombo was carried out first by the separate location of political and administrative functions in Kotte and economic command functions in the Fort, economic production in the EPZs, and warehousing at Peliyagoda, outside the northern boundary of the municipal council. Then these distributed functions were reincorporated into Colombo by expanding its perceptual boundary.

The shifting of the seat of government to Kotte and the development of the Fort area into a central business district, together represent a particular separation of the national government and the economy. Although the state’s involvement in the economy continued, the objectives of the government were dominated by the privatization of state institutions. The construction of this particular relationship between the economy and the polity, and the centralization of Colombo within the national space, is constituted in the moving of the seat of government, but by only about five miles, and not to a distant place such as a historic capital of the Raja Rata period.

Although it can also be considered as part of Colombo, Kotte was a historic Sinhalese metropolitical center, and a principal kingdom when the Portuguese arrived in 1505. Kotte, however, has multiple meanings in Lankan history. W hile King Parakramabahu VI (1411-66) re-established a single authority over the whole island, Kotte was also the first Lankan kingdom to be pulled into a Portuguese “client-state” in the sixteenth century.

The dominant discourse of Sri Jayawardhanapura, however, was not produced around the disgraceful narrative of King Dharmapala embracing Catholicism and making the King of Portugal heir to his throne after his death, but rather the greatness of Parakramabahu VI who established a unified rule over the island from Kotte.57 Hence, the construction of the new capital not only involved the physical construction of the parliamentary complex, but also a whole new discourse, including the evoking of the name (Sri Jayawardhanapura) relating to that of the President, and relating his intentions in defeating Tamil separatists, re-unifying the country from Kotte. This royal discourse is also represented in the master plan for Kotte as well as in the layout of the parliament complex. All government departments were either moved or encouraged to move to Kotte, making it also the locus of administration.

The moving of the government to Kotte was part of the larger plan of action

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which included the reorganization of the Fort area for the attraction and unrestricted consumption of private capital. Relocating the government, administration, military, and warehouse functions from it, the Fort area was designated as the central business district of Colombo. Since foreign capital was invited to occupy this central space, economic command functions were also transferred from the state to foreign banks and corporations. The introduction of a central business district in the late 1970s transformed the Fort into a “capitalist/commercial” space represented by a modern highrise skyline.

Promoting its growth, planners turned the southern end of the Fort, where the former military barracks (designed in “echelon” form) were located, into a special project area named Echelon Square. Here, the Urban Development Authority adopted a pro-growth approach instead of applying so-called development controls.

This is evident in its employment of, for example, floor area ratios--allowable total floor area of a building as a multiple of the area of the site--and maximum plot coverage in place of former regulations, such as light angles--controlling heights of buildings by a hypothetical line drawn at a particular angle drawn from the rear boundary of the plot or the opposite side of the access road. Moreover, the UDA increased the floor area ratio for the Echelon Square, primarily to promote buildings between fifteen and twenty-five floors, and anticipated the construction of over two million square feet of built space.58 Compared to the restructuring of US cities, for example, New York, where capital no longer has to seek state-directed redevelopment,59 in Sri Lanka, state intervention was needed to create profitable arenas for capital investment, for which Colombo was a prime site.

Linking Colombo to the club of cities in the world-economy, the UDA emulated designs and construction methods of other internationally successful business districts, in the Fort. Colombo’s built environment was principally colonial and its spaces were largely occupied by state institutions. The practical initiative was made when the UDA approved the thirty-two story (state-run) Bank of Ceylon headquarters. The award of the contract to design and build this to a Singaporean turnkey firm suggests that Singapore was the model followed by the government during this time. This is also evident in the building of pedestrian crossings over Colombo’s streets, following the model of Singapore.

The UDA’s intentions in the Fort have, however, been negotiated by various agencies. Although some tall buildings have been constructed, there has not been a race to construct tall buildings as is the case with many leading banking and financial centers of the world. The largest buildings erected in the Fort area were, however, not multinational corporation headquarters or regional offices, but hotels that largely serve international business travellers and tourists. Many internationally operating banks, such as the Bank of America, have opened branch offices in the Fort area either in rented spaces in old colonial buildings or buildings that were remodeled. The Bank of Ceylon, therefore, stands out as the state’s image of what the business district should look like.

Nonetheless, the landscape of the Fort area and its surroundings has been modernizing in the 1980s, but not at the pace or in the way the state or the UDA

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desired. Although not so tall, multi-story buildings have been constructed. The modernization of the Fort area has spread towards the south, incorporating formerly isolated developments, such as the People’s Bank headquarters, the other state-run bank, into a larger and spreading modern fabric, displaying the new dominance of businesses in the Echelon Square area. This development dwarfed the former Parliament, which is now a restored remnant of colonial architecture. (figure 6.5) In developing the central business district, the UDA privileged foreign designers and contractors, subordinating the national construction industry. 60 The post-1977 UNP governments’ collaboration with selected foreign elements was part of much broader phenomena and was not limited to the Fort area. Nonetheless, the government did not exclude Sri Lankan private architectural firms from reaping the benefits of the construction boom. These were given a large number of commissions that would, under previous governments, have been carried out by state agencies. Yet the awards were selective, and the development was organized by allocating them particular niches, such as Colombo’s large housing projects.

The allocation of such niches protected them from the competition from large international firms which bid for large-scale projects. Sri Lankan architectural firms were, therefore, playing a significant role in the transformation of Colombo’s built environment.

Finally, it is important to explore why there were such grand programs to reorganize Sri Lanka. Nationalist-socialist governments had sufficiently ruined the capitalist structures of the state that the resurrection of a central role for capitalist activity, which the 1977 government required, demanded the reversal of the

FIGURE 6.5 Modernizing the Fort area: Postcard image of the new new developments in the Fort area dwarfing the old Parliament building.

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measures taken by the previous governments and the building of a new social and spatial order. The magnitude of such a need and the government’s use of this opportunity to enhance the prospects for capital are expressed in the pretentious programs of the 1980s, discussed above, that transformed the whole post-colonial landscape. Internationally, the state’s policies constituted a response to the downturn in the world-economy from the 1970s, which had also brought stagnation to the Sri Lankan economy. The desire to move quickly and fill in significant gaps made them invite in foreign capital and produce enclaves where the above constraints did not apply, hence the special project areas, for example, EPZs and the Fort. The deployment of a strategy of “special project areas” thus staked out particular nodes in the national landscape from which such programs could be initiated, which would gradually spread out transforming the larger society and space.

Relocating Sri Lanka within New World Regions Massive programs of state intervention to develop the Sri Lankan economy within a policy of “export promotion” also demonstrate the state making use of the expansion of the “room for maneuvering” for individual states brought about by the changing political and economic order, particularly with the demise of the global political and economic systems constructed under US hegemony. The same condition has, however, increased the capacity of various international and intranational groups to bargain without powerful “external” interventions. The state’s initiative has therefore not gone uncontested, but has been negotiated by various agencies at both intranational and supranational levels.

Negotiations with international agencies have, however, transformed the whole orientation of Sri Lankan society and space within a larger world spatial organization. The Sri Lankan political and economic elite, who largely maintained a British orientation, were disoriented by the acts of the 1970 government which made Sri Lanka a republic, severing the last vestiges of colonial authority in 1972, and nationalizing British-owned plantations in 1976. Hence, the international orientation of the elite-based UNP had become ambiguous in the late 1970s.

Changing its British orientation, the UNP government of 1977 therefore looked towards the United States for help in reconstructing favorable conditions for capital in Sri Lanka. Here, the government anticipated a US and west European interest in the EPZs and continued to depend on the W orld Bank and the IM F for loans to support necessary adjustments. The M ahaweli Project and the housing programs, for example, were largely funded by European and US sources,61 and in 1980, eight out of eighteen companies engaged in commercial production in the EPZ were west European and US.62 W estern capital, especially from the US and European companies and banks, has been reluctant to invest in a country with strong socialist and nationalist movements and governments. Despite the 1977 government weakening those radical movements, the former image of Sri Lanka among “western” transnational

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corporations and banks has not been completely transformed. Instead of supporting the “brave” move of the government of 1977, and those following, to create conditions conducive to foreign investment, therefore, multinational lending agencies have attempted to capture this opportunity in order to dictate their conditions and incorporate state programs into their own. For example, although the government has privatized a large proportion of state corporations and agencies, 63 the International Monetary Fund continued to demand further privatization, the devaluation of the currency, and the curtailing of welfare as conditions for the granting of loans.

In the meantime, the changes in the basic orientation of the UNP as well as world regions has drawn their attention to east Asia. Even before the elections, Jayawardene indicated that, if elected, he would bring Sri Lanka the economic expansion and prosperity that Singapore has been enjoying for decades. 64 Nonetheless, it was larger changes such as the new British focus on Europe, the weakening of US economy and power worldwide, the inflow of capital from South Korea and Taiwan, the importation of commodities from Japan, and the entry of banks from the Middle East and M alaysia that have done much to reorient Sri Lanka towards east Asia.65 In regard to the immediate region, although Sri Lanka and India have maintained good political and economic relations, south Asian cooperation has been limited.

One major constraint has been the role of Pakistan as a US ally and its rivalry with India. Rizvi observes, “The prospect of external powers extricating themselves from South Asia following their detente has opened up new opportunities for improved relations between India and Pakistan, and in the region generally.” 66 From the late 1980s, however, not only is the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation functioning, but those countries have become closer. Shifts in the orientation of Sri Lanka demonstrate as well as constitute new east Asian and south Asian world-regions. Although the exports of south Asia still go to the United States and Europe, increasingly what they export are industrial products, and not plantation products.

The Diversification of Architecture and National Representation Sri Lankan architecture and built forms have also been diversified in the post1977 period, but within a particular unity. Instead of a single source, such as the state-run departments, the agencies involved in architectural production began to diversify, as did their approaches. The role of both Sri Lankan and foreign private architectural firms was expanded. Increasingly, diversity was introduced into the built environment, the new buildings of the central business district, the Parliament complex, the Mahaweli Development Project, and the housing programs all exhibiting a variety of designs and styles. They all, however, were united within the objectives of the government.

In regard to the built forms employed, the most glaring contrast can be seen between the central business district and the seat of government. As discussed

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FIGURE 6.6 A new national identity: The new Parliament complex at Sri Jayawardhanapura Kotte. above, emulating the dominant global and regional capitalist centers, the Urban Development Authority opted to develop the new central business district in the Fort area in so-called “International Style” architecture. Yet at the same time, in building a monument for himself and an architectural identity for the nation, the President employed the critical vernacular architecture of Sri Lanka, discussed in Chapter Five. W ithin the transformation of the built environment between 1977 and 1994, here I examine the construction of the national Parliamentary complex. (figure 6.6) Although the critical vernacularists of Sri Lanka have not claimed their architecture to be national, the government’s appropriation of its architecture by commissioning Bawa to design the Parliament complex portrays it as national. The parliamentary complex is not, however, inherently national, nor is it the only possible national representation. A building is a signifier and does not carry meaning in itself, but depends on the construction of a discourse and its reiteration.

The potential of multiple interpretations of architecture is, therefore, fundamental to the construction of an architectural representation of the nation. On the one hand, the critical vernacularists could have chosen different sources to draw on and devised a different architectural vocabulary. They could have also produced a different composition of the same spatial and architectural elements they have used, creating a different language. Vale’s observation that Bawa’s Parliament complex is more a summary of a complex architectural history of Sri Lanka than a critical synthesis suggests that it is just one possible approach to national representation among many others. 67 On the other hand, the state might have employed a different language, such as the direct replication of historic building forms as the British did In constructing an independence hall, or another discourse such as architectural modernism, as in the case of Brasilia and Chandigarh. 68 It was, therefore, an arbitrary but calculated decision of the government not to employ modernist or proto-Public W orks Department types of architecture but critical vernacularism.

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The project of constructing an architectural representation of the nation presupposes that it can stand as a trope for the nation. It has not only to create a distinctiveness for itself in the international arena and provide accommodation for diverse social and cultural representations within the “nation,” but also to articulate itself in the dimension of time. Although not constructed as a national architecture, critical vernaculars had already negotiated these conflicts above and below the national level. Rejecting the colonialist rupture of local histories, post-colonial societies have often attempted to reconstruct a historical continuity, and an identity within it, referring to a conception of national or proto-national history for their symbols and ichnography. This symbolism is certainly one of those “invented traditions.” According to Hobsbawm, “<Invented tradition’ is taken to mean a set of practices, normally governed by overtly or tacitly accepted rules and of a ritual or symbolic nature, which seek to inculcate certain values and norms of behaviour by repetition, which automatically implies continuity with the past.” 69 It is in this context that the 1977 government appropriation of critical vernaculars can be explained.

Such representation also depends on the construction of a narrative around what is signified in the architectural symbolism and the reiteration of this narrative. This is precisely what was undertaken in President Premadasa’s Gam Udawa exhibition, held annually in different parts of the country to popularize his Ministry’s housing program, which included a domestic-scale replica of the Parliament. In a country where watching television is not so widespread as in a “developed” country and where television does not constantly promote the image of the Parliament but of the President himself, bringing the Parliament and the message to its inhabitants for their visual consumption constitutes the construction of a nationalist discourse around this architectural symbol of government and nation.

It is pertinent to ask, why a national representation in the late 1970s and not immediately after independence?

The institution of aspects of national representation such as the national flag, the national anthem and the national emblem, 70 with independence illustrates the significance of these and the relative insignificance of an architectural representation during that period. As discussed above, post-independent nation-builders were more concerned about their own identity, position, and the future of the state, particularly its development and modernization, but not with tradition or history in any significant way. Even in the states that consciously attempted to construct a nation, and therefore an identity, the architects did not make any conscious attempt to produce an architectural representation of the nation. This is evident in the employment of imported ideologies and forms to represent nations, such as in Brasilia and Chandigarh, and national leaders inviting leading “Modernist” architects of the W est, such as Le Corbusier, Louis Kahn, and Jorn Utzon, to design nationally significant cities in India, Pakistan (Bangladesh), and Kuwait.

W right notes that the stylistic issues are by no means minor considerations today, and throughout the world, questions of “appropriate style” have recently come to the fore. 71 This phenomenon is, however, much more than a style, and in

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the case of post-colonial states, an issue of identity and representation. The urge to produce society-specific architecture, apparent from the 1970s, can be explained by the increasing consciousness of the world becoming “a single place” and the need to establish differences in order to construct an identity. Moreover, the failure of the developmentalist discourse has undermined the hegemony that modernization had achieved, opening up a space for difference. The different approaches adopted in building the central business district and the parliamentary complex demonstrates the Sri Lankan desire to keep political, economic, and cultural goals and their representations separate.

The Parliament complex is only one group among many elements that constitute the national capital. Others include the location, the master plan, and the narratives built around it. Since the post-1977 governments were fighting a war against separatism, the selection of Kotte would inevitably raise the issue of its relationship to anti-separatism, and the desire of the government and the President to govern a unified state. The master plan also demonstrates a conscious attempt to depict the capital as a Sinhalese Buddhist center, locating Buddhist stupas around the lake on which the island Parliament was created. 72 Constructing a monument for himself, and elevating him to royalty, within a royal discourse that he was constructing, President Jayawardene also talked about moving the Tooth Relic to Jayawardhanapura. 73 The construction of a discourse of the new capital within a Sinhalese-Tamil conflict not only makes the Tamils oppositional, but also other ethnic groups such as the Muslims are marginalized. If the critical vernacular architecture of the Parliament constructed an equivalence across various cultural groups in Sri Lanka, the master plan and the politics of its discourses have the potential of defeating this.

The appropriation of the critical vernacular language to represent the nation entails its institutionalization, the implications of which are yet to be seen. For example, the (top-down) recirculation of a discourse of national architecture may well privilege a particular type of architecture and exclude and marginalize other architectural practices and languages from their claims to be national. However, we have yet to witness how the national discourse will be reformulated in a way suitable to deploy this proto-national architecture for political purposes by the state, and how various ethnic (particularly Tamil), religious, and other cultural groups, and also architects, negotiate such conflicts.

The period between 1977 and 1994 was, therefore, marked by a transformation in both the fabric and the meaning of Sri Lanka’s society and space and Colombo’s landscape. Responding to the transformations caused by previous nationalistsocialist regimes as well as the challenges of the JVP and Tamil separatists, the governments transformed the country, constructing a national identity, locating it within new zones in east and south Asia, industrializing it, and turning Colombo into a regional economic center. All in all, this has pushed Sri Lanka beyond the post-colonial period. Although the influence of British colonialism is still central to the understanding of the society and space of Sri Lanka, it is being overshadowed by contemporary transformations. These are making Sri Lanka a part of completely

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different world regions, laying another layer of influence on the already complex history of society and space.

Notes 1. See Giovanni Arrighi, Terence K. Hopkins, and Immanuel Wallerstein, Anti-Systemic Movements (London: Verso, 1989), 97-115.

2. Ibid, 114.

3. See Block, The Origins of International Economic Disorder, 62, 109, 115.

4. Susan Strange, Casino Capitalism (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986), 22. See also Andrew Glyn, Alan Hughes, Alain Lipietz, and Ajit Singh, “The Rise and Fall of the Golden Age,” in The Golden Age of Capitalism. Reinterpreting the Postwar Experience, ed., Stephen A. Marglin and Juliet B. Schor (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), 99, 101; Frieden, 84.

5. John Walton, “Urban Protest and the Global Political Economy: The IMF Riots,” in Michael Peter Smith and Joe R. Feagin, eds., The Capitalist City (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987), 366.

6. See John Connell and Robert Aldrich, “The Last Colonies: Failures of Decolonization?” in Chris Dixon and Michael J. Heffernan, eds., Colonialism and Development in the Contemporary World (London: Mansell, 1991), 183.

7. See “What Do People Want?” Hispanic Business (May 1993): 28.

8. Iliana Zloch-Christy, Debt Problems of Eastern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University press, 1987), 29.

9. Robert Wood, “Making Sense of the Debt Crisis,” Socialist Review (May-June 1985): 11.

10. André Gunder Frank, Dependent Accumulation and Underdevelopment (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1979), 113-133.

11. Sassen, The Global City, 324.

12. See Jupp, Sri Lanka, 297.

13. Seventy-seven percent of the JVP suspects arrested in 1971 were between the age of 17 and 26 years. (A.C. Alles, The JVP 1969-1989 (Colombo: Lake House, 1990), 250) 14. See Michael Mitterauer, A History of Youth (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1992), 235.

15. Simon Frith, The Sociology of Youth (Lancashire: Casueway Books, 1984), 1.

16. Mitterauer, vii. See also, Shirley Brice Heath and Milbrey W. McLaughlin ed., Identity and Inner-City Youth: Beyond Ethnicity and Gender (New York: Teachers College Press, 1993).

17. Charles Blackton, in Alles, 245. See also, Paul Casperz, Towards a Sociological Analysis of the Youth Struggle in Sri Lanka, 1971: A critique of Educational Effectiveness in a Developing Area (Thesis: Oxford University, 1973), vi, 113; Tissa Balasuriya, “Democracy in Sri Lanka,” Lagos 2 (1987).

18. Moore, The State and Peasant Policies in Sri Lanka, 2, 27, 164.

19. Ibid, 224.

20. Jonathan Spencer, “Writing Within: Anthropology, Nationalism, and Culture in Sri Lanka” Current Anthropology 31 (1990): 283. See also Gananath Obeyesekere’s comment on this article in the same volume pp. 295-6.

21. Here Kemper (The Presence of the Past, 224) draws on Clifford Geertz, “The Integrative Revolution: Primordial Sentiments and Civil Politics in the New States,” chapter in The Interpretation of Culture (New York, Basic Books, 1973), 255-310.

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22. Marshall Sahlins, Islands of History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 144, quoted in Kemper, 224.

23. A. Jeyaratnam Wilson, The Break-Up of Sri Lanka: The Singhalese-Tamil Conflict (London: C. Hurst and Company, 1988), xii.

24. Jupp, 157.

25. See Gellner, 1. For what the Federal Party claimed, see Illankai Tamil Arasu Kadchi, The Case for a Federal Constitution for Ceylon, (Colombo: Illankai Tamil Arasu Kadchi, 1951) 26. V. Suriyanarayan, “Ethnic Conflict in Sri Lanka,” in Urmila Phandis et al., eds., Domestic Conflicts in South Asia (New Delhi: South Asian Publishers, 1986), 132; Robert N. Kearney, “Politics and Modernization,” in Tissa Fernando and Robert N. Kearney, eds., Modern Sri Lanka; A Society in Transition (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1979), 78; Mohan Ram, Sri Lanka: The Fractured Island (New Delhi: Penguin Books, 1989), 48.

27. See Rajan Hoole, Daya Somasundaram, K. Sritharan, and Rajani Thiranagama, The Broken Palmyra (Claremont, CA: The Sri Lankan Studies Institute, 1990), 199.

28. Shirley Brice Heath and Milbrey W. McLaughlin, “Identity and Inner-City Youth,” in Heath and McLaughlin, eds., Identity and Inner-City Youth, 1.

29. See University Teachers for Human Rights, 11.

30. See K. Indrapala, Chola Inscriptions of Ceylon (Jaffna: University of Jaffna.); University Teachers for Human Rights, 11: 6-7.

31. H.N.S. Karunaratna, The Accelerated Mahaweli Programme and its Impact (Colombo: Center for Demographic and Socio-Economic Studies, 1988), 31.

32. Jaap Jan Speelman and G.M. van der Top, “Down Stream Development in the Accelerated Mahaweli Development Programme.” Economic Review 11 (1985): 37.

33. Speelman and van der Top, 37.

34. Marga, 152, 166.

35. J.F.C. Turner and R. Fichter, Freedom to Build (New York: Macmillan, 1972); J.F.C. Turner, Housing by People (London: Marion Boyars Publishers limited, 1976); “Issues in self-help and self-managed housing,” in Self-Help Housing. A Critique, ed., P.M. Ward (London: Mansell, 1982) “From central provision to local enablement” Open House International 8 (1983): 99-114.

36. In regard to Sri Lanka policy, see, Nabeel Hamdi et. al., Housing Options for Sri Lanka: A Programme of Opportunities for Settlement Design (Cambridge, MA/Colombo: MIT/NHDA, 1983); Susil Sirivardana, Reflections on the Implementation of the Million Houses Program (Colombo: National Housing Development Authority, 1986).

37. Turner, Housing by People.

38. Susil Sirivardana, A Small Housing Loan - Ingenuity and Method: An Inquiry Into a Sri Lankan Implementation Experience (Colombo: National Housing Development Authority, 1984).

39. Sirivardana, A Small Housing Loan.

40. Monica Ruwanpathirana and S. Tilakaratne, Study of the Nawa-Gamgoda Housing Scheme Survey Report Prepared for the NHDA (Colombo: Unpublished, 1985), 10.

41. In Edward Robbins, “Culture, Policy, and Production: Making Low-Cost Housing in Sri Lanka,” in Low and Chambers, eds., 60.

42. A. Portes and J. Walton, Labour, Class and the International System (New York: Academic Press, 1981), 90.

43. Manuel Castells, The Informational City: Information, Technology, Economic Restructuring, and the Urban-Regional Process (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989)

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183

44. Portes and Walton, 1981. See also, Joan Smith, “Non-Wage Labor and Subsistence,” in Joan Smith et al., eds., Households and the World-Economy (Beverly Hills, CA: Sage, 1984), 65; Kathie Friedman, “Income-Pooling Units,” in Ibid, 44.

45. Robert N. Kearney, The Politics of Ceylon (Sri Lanka) (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1973), 136-7.

46. Dennis Shoesmith ed., Export Processing Zones in Five Countries: The Economic and Human Consequences (Hong Kong: Asia Partnership for Human Development, [1986]), 22.

47. “K.C. Vignarajah, Secretary of the Sri Lanka Garments Manufacturers Association, in an interview with T.B. Karunaratna of the Peoples Bank, Research Department” Economic Review 8 (June 1982): 24.

48. Shoesmith, 49.

49. Ibid, 237.

50. “K.C. Vignarajah”: 24.

51. Shoesmith, 25.

52. Shoesmith, 24; Michael Davenport and Sheila Page, Europe: 1992 and the Developing World (London: Overseas Development Institute, 1991), 95-6.

53. Shoesmith, 50.

54. Kemper 24, 127-8; James T. Rutnam, “A Legacy of Tambi Mudliyar,” Tamil Times (June 1985) 12-15, in Kemper, 129.

55. See Charles Wright Mills, Power, Politics, and People: The Collected Essays of C. Wright Mills (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1963).

56. See Perera, “Exploring Colombo.”

57. See Senarat Panawatta, “A Glimpse Into the History of Sri Jayawardenapura,” The Sunday Observer (Colombo) (March April, 1982); Vale, 203.

58. “Some Major Projects in Colombo,” Economic Review 6 (1980): 8; Steinberg, 538.

59. See Norman I. Fainstein and Susan Fainstein, “Regime Strategies, Communal Resistance, and Ethnic Forces,” in Fainstein et al. eds., Restructuring the City, 259.

60. P.G.K. Fernando, “The Foreign Element in Construction: A Review 1978-1988” Economic Review 14 (1988): 18, 19. Unhappy about the award of design and construction commissions for large projects to foreign firms, Sri Lankan architects bitterly complained and lobbied the government. (See Ibid, 18) 61. See Karunatilake, The Accelerated Mahaweli Project.

62. Shoesmith, 49.

63. See United Nations, Economic and Social Survey of Asia and the Pacific 1992 Part I: Recent Economic and Social Developments (New York: United Nations, 1993), 44.

64. Kemper, 166.

65. See Perera, “Exploring Colombo.”

66. Gowher Rizvi, South Asia in a Changing International Order (New Delhi: Sage, 1993), 166.

67. Vale, 283.

68. See Holston, The Modernist City; Ravi Kalia, Chandigarh.

69. E.J. Hobsbawm, “Introduction: Inventing Traditions,” in E.J. Hobsbawm and T.O. Ranger, eds., The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 1.

70. See Hobsbawm, “Introduction,” 6.

71. Wright, The Politics of Design, 311.

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72. New Capital Project Division UDA, Master Plan for Sri Jayawardenapura (Colombo: Urban Development Authority, nd); Vale 203; Karel Roberts, Wilfred M. Gunasekara, â&#x20AC;&#x153;The Glory that was -and is- Sri Jayawardenapuraâ&#x20AC;? Sunday Observer (Colombo) (25 April 1982).

73. Kemper, 6.