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and in government services and this in turn exacerbated existing rivalries within the elite” (de Silva 1986,
93).
Although these factors point towards a structural exigency for Sinhalese support for a Sinhala-
only language policy, the growing literacy of the Sinhalese elements of the educated Sri Lankan
population could be contained up to 1946 within the given educational institutions: “expansion of the
public service and the higher bureaucracy in particular kept pace with the number of recruits available
through the University of Ceylon, and the expanding network of secondary schools, both of which were
including a higher percentage of Sinhalese students” (de Silva 1986, 94). In effect, the timing of the
initiation of Sinhalese demands for a Sinhala-only language policy had more to do with the demands of
organized collective action and the need to allocate benefits and resources to one’s political supporters.
As a Tamil senator stated, in regards to the controversy that the language policy issue had generated in the
1943-46 period, it was the “university graduates and people like that [who] are the cause of the trouble –
not the vast mass of the Sinhalese people. It is these men, these middle-class unemployed seeking
employment, who are jealous of the fact that a few Tamils occupy seats of office in the Government –
these are the people who have gone round the country-side, rousing the masses and creating this problem”
(Kearney 1967, 71).
What the language policy debate in the late 1940’s illustrated the distinct possibility that without
an “independent” administrative state apparatus (like the one in the British colonial era), the Sinhalese
could use their overwhelming electoral power to implement policy changes that would adversely affect
the other minorities, and especially the Tamils. In this sense, the immediate pre-independence period had
ended with the beginnings of mass participation political system where the incentives for majoritarian
nationalism had been picked up by Sinhalese politicians and where the institutional reforms of the
Donoughmore Commission had failed to provide stable and credible enough safeguards for the protection
of minority rights. In effect, the pre-independence era had effected both key assumptions of this
argument: it had created an ethnic division of labor and it was providing incentives for political leaders to
mobilize their constituencies along increasingly exclusionary lines.
Part III (1948-1970): The 1956 Sinhala-only and the beginning of the Sinhalization of the
Sri Lankan civil service
Sri Lanka gained its independence from the United Kingdom in 1948 in rather peaceful and
pacted manner. Yet, this period was characterized by the beginning of an electoral system that provided
incentives to the Sinhalese politicians to promise and implement majoritarian policies in order to capture
the populist sentiments of the new mass-based democracy. Unlike the elite-level politics that had
characterized the Donoughmore Commission era, the post-colonial politics were characterized by the
entrance of a huge number of new voters with distinctly different political aims and goals. These new
Convention