MEMORIES OF ETHNIC VIOLENCE IN SRI LANKA AMONG IMMIGRANT TAMILS IN THE UK

Keywords: Tamil, Identity, Memory, Violence, Diaspora Sri Lanka, Tamil, identity, memory, violence, diaspora

This article contributes to recent studies on the relationship between ethnicity and memory in the formation of transnational communities. The focus of the article is migrant Tamils' memories of violence in Sri Lanka in 1958, in the aftermath of an act declaring Sinhala to be the sole language of administration in the country. The ways in which past violence is remembered by this overlooked older generation helps in understanding the particular impetus of the contemporary Tamil diaspora, which continues to play a key role in shaping the image of Sri Lanka abroad. Research on the formation of the diaspora must therefore be situated within a more concrete history of relations between Sinhalese and Tamils in post-independence Sri Lanka.

Liberation Front, TULF). In the context of a contemporary political landscape in which the Sri Lankan government had decisively defeated the Tamil Tigers (LTTE), the writer of the editorial was perhaps also trying to redeem former parliamentary methods in winning political rights and representation for the Tamils in Sri Lanka. By contrast, a Tamil political activist who had left Ceylon for the UK after the riots of 1958 mocked the same insertion of the word 'liberation' in the re-naming of the TUF.

For him, writing at the beginning of the LTTE's war with the Sri Lankan government in the 1980s, the act was a cynical ploy of the older Tamil politicians to get on terms with the increasingly militant Tamil youth (Sivanandan 1984, p. 24). While for the editor of the Tamil Guardian the memory of the word's addition signified reconciliation between the past and the present, for the old Tamil activist it instead recalled aversion for an era of shameful concession and compromise (Thiruchelvam 1984, p. 197-9). Exploring the relationship between these contrasting interpretations of a historical event provides a way of understanding generational memory among Sri Lankan Tamils, which is the theme of this essay.

In recent years, the influence and demands of Tamils living overseas has become a focus of research (Sriskandarajah 2005). In order to find out what this group wants, however, it is important to understand its self-perception by studying Tamils' thinking about themselves in relation to nationalism. Present day hopes and fears are often rooted in unresolved attitudes toward one's collective history (Mack 1983). For example, the oft-noted Tamil sense of victimhood, giving rise to a 'politics of loss and 3 guilt', contains the hallmarks of a mythic comprehension of the past (Spencer 2000, p. 135;Daniel 1996, p. 26). While such interpretations provide useful insights into the psychology of migrant or diaspora Tamils, they can be considerably enriched by paying attention to the contribution of specific events in the formation and revision of these views (Nagata 1998, pp. 433-4;Rosenthal 1989). The present essay seeks to admit recent Sri Lankan history into this analytical framework to show how individuals can either acquiesce in or resist national and collective memories.

The context of this essay is London Tamil migrants' experiences of and responses to the violence they witnessed in Ceylon between 22 May and 3 June 1958.

The violence, which has been remembered as both a communal riot and as a pogrom, involved the killing of hundreds of Tamils by Sinhalese, and further injury, arson, looting and destruction of Tamil property, as well as largely retaliatory violence by Tamils resulting in the killing of many Sinhalese and the displacement of thousands more [START_REF] Vittachi | The Governor-General and the State of Emergency, May 1958[END_REF]Manor 1989;[START_REF] Sivanandan | Sri Lanka: Racism and the Politics of Underdevelopment[END_REF]. The violence has been attributed to different factors. On the one hand, the Ceylon government was criticized for its inability to handle the pressure of a growing national polity, and misjudgements by senior political figures were held to have spoiled the genuine opportunities for compromise between Sinhalese and Tamils over the issue of the official use of their respective languages. In addition to short-term political causes, some also pointed to the general climate of economic insecurity in post-independence Ceylon, the prevalent state of lawlessness in the country during the late 1950s, and even the policy of clearing northern jungles that was held to have reawakened a centuries-old territorial conflict between Tamils and Sinhalese [START_REF] Vittachi | The Governor-General and the State of Emergency, May 1958[END_REF][START_REF] Wriggins | Ceylon's Time of Troubles, 1956-1958[END_REF]. there are obviously sound reasons for this approach, it often fails to grasp the practical world-view of participants and the particular meaning that they attribute to the facts they convey. Where research has been concerned with subjectivity and bias in the reporting of events, the psychology of the witness and the uneven role of memory have themselves hardly been taken into consideration (an exception is Kanapathipillai 1992). The importance of attending to subjectivity is in its location of the culturallyspecific forms through which individuals express themselves historically (Portelli 1991, pp. 1-26).

Interviews were conducted with seven Tamil men in their homes in suburban London between 2002 and 2004. Male accounts should not of course be normalized, and this sample reflects the views of those then available for interview, that had lived in Ceylon through the riots of 1958 and subsequently, within the following decade, moved to London. Almost all of the interviewees were therefore over sixty and most were in their seventies. These men may be characterized as belonging within the first and second 'Phases' of Tamil immigrants to London, although, as will be seen from their accounts, it is difficult to maintain these categories given both the constructed nature of memories and also their mutability (Portelli 1991;[START_REF] Daniel | Forms, Formations, and Transformations of the Tamil Refugee[END_REF]McDowell 1996). Although it is a small sample, its paucity reflects the relatively small number of Tamils living in London during the early 1960s, probably no more than a few thousand compared with today's estimated population of 180,000 (Siddhisena and White 1999, p. 516;[START_REF] Spence | DMAG Briefing 2008-05: A Profile of Londoners by Country of Birth[END_REF], International Crisis Group 2010).

London is a suitable place to conduct this study because the majority of the Sri Lankan Tamil migrants to the UK from the late 1950s and 1960s settled in the city and continue to live in its suburbs today (Siddhisena and White 1999, pp. 520-3). The oral historical method for obtaining this data aims to show the advantages of validity over reliability in helping to reveal what has been described elsewhere as the 'interpretative power' of the individual account (Grele 1985, pp. 45-6;Thompson 2000, p. 151). The names of the interviewees have been altered in accordance with the wishes of the majority. While they are no longer in the mainstream of London Tamil social life, many remained active either as political campaigners or as organisers of Tamil cultural and religious practices. The perspective of this generation is important, since one of the principal markers of difference and understanding within a migrant community is generational (Nora 1989, p.19;Thomson 1999, pp. 31-2). An ageing population also provides us with an opportunity to look at a group which, because of changing social discourses, will also have changed their individual narratives of the past many times [START_REF] Schuman | Generations and Collective Memories[END_REF]Hunt and McHale 2008, p. 51).

Interpretations of violence

One of the leading historians of post-independence Sri Lanka summarized the tumultuous events that took place in Ceylon from the elections of 1956 to the end of the 1958 riots by claiming that although the overall death toll from the riots was relatively small 'by South Asian standards', 'the shock felt by the Sri Lankan polity was very great', since it brought to an end 'over four decades of orderly, if unexciting, political evolution'. Furthermore, 'there was also a recognition that this violent encounter between the Sinhalese and Tamils, the first in Sri Lanka's modern history, was an avoidable, self-inflicted wound' (de Silva 1998, pp. 121-2). Other commentators writing at the time hoped that the riots would shock political leaders to 7 their senses so that they would begin to live up to the responsibilities of governing a mass polity in the wake of the British exit in 1948 (Wriggins 1959, pp. 38-9). All of the contemporary accounts observed the riots as a challenge to Ceylon's political modernity (Jeganathan 1998). British newspapers commented on the breakdown of the government and expressed admiration at the 'detachment' and calm of the Governor-General, appointed by the Queen, who took control of the country for a period after a state of emergency was declared by the Prime Minister on 27 May, restoring it to order (Wilson 1959, p. 165).

In the aftermath of the riots, many Tamils felt subordinated by the majority Sinhalese, who to their minds were being solely represented by the government. With the change of government in 1956 to the more populist Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP) upon their promise to make Sinhala the sole official language of the country there was a concurrent drop in Tamil entry to public sector jobs in Colombo, on which many aspiring Tamils from the north had relied since colonial times. Tamils also felt aggrieved at the government policy of reclaiming land for agricultural development in the Tamil concentrated north and east provinces and bringing in Sinhalese settlers.

Although favourable impressions of the armed forces were in some ways strengthened by their effectiveness and impartiality during the riots, Tamils in many areas also noted delays and hesitation by the police to help them. The most assured interpretations of 1958 were those provided by Tamils in favour of separating the two linguistic groups, who observed that the riots would not have happened had the island been divided 'into two ethno-linguistic areas', since 'the safest and most peaceful areas were those with unmixed populations' (Arasaratnam,.

The interviewees' and other Tamil writers' accounts that follow are sometimes developments of these well-known interpretations and at other times quite personal and distinctive reflections on the violence they witnessed or encountered. While there are undoubtedly large areas of fact in the accounts, the analysis adheres to the principle that the value of a fact can only be understood from the meaning imputed to it by the narrator. Several broad sets of responses were conceived within the individual memories of violence, and the accounts will be described according to these responses.

Anti-Tamil discrimination

One series of reflections on violence consisted of expressions of the unjust treatment meted out to Tamils at the hands of the Sinhalese. For example, Nathan remembered that Before '58, there were certain Sinhalese districts [where we were welcome]…labourers were Sinhalese…we didn't have any problems…The root of the problems was the language policy, that changed overnight with the Sinhalese. Then of course every peon, everybody said "now we are the masters." They started talking Sinhalese and everything and we are out The number of Tamils in professional jobs in Ceylon fell during the 1960s as the number of Tamils departing to the UK for higher education correspondingly rose (Taylor 1994, pp. 91-92). According to the historian K M de Silva, the popular campaign for the more prominent use of Sinhala lost enthusiasm after the desired legislation was brought into effect in the mid-1950s (de Silva 1998). Yet the memory of the change remained sharp among educated Tamils of that era and was felt more broadly across society than within the political classes alone. Rasan indicated one reason why this may have been so, referring to the Official Language Act of 1956:

What happened in 1956 was suddenly what was in fact happening in day-today life, somebody was trying to make it a law, you see. That is where it became irksome. There was somebody, sort of saying "from now on, Sinhalese is the official language." There I think it is more pride than anything else that Tamils decided that this is, sort of, to some extent marginalized them.

It wasn't the dawning necessity of linguistic change that repelled many Tamils, but the fact that it was made legislative and thus a command to be obeyed. Another Tamil from this generation, the anthropologist Stanley Jeyarajah Tambiah, observed that the upper class Tamils of Jaffna staked their reputation of being a tight-knit minority, at least in the eyes of the Sinhalese, on their pride and the 'experience of social dominance in their own region' (Tambiah 1986, p. 106). all our organization, so that it can spread there. And also [we kept] in touch with the important people'. Tambiah noted that those Tamils 'forced abroad' remembered 'their homeland' through the formation of overseas associations, the collection and distribution of information, and the airing of grievances to host governments (Tambiah 1986, p. 112). The expression of a common grievance and the sense of being unjustly treated at the hands of the Sinhalese unified many Tamils who went overseas and helped them to define their goals, providing them with a sense of belonging to a wider collective that maintained links with the 'homeland'. The existential nature of this act lies in the identification with a global Tamil nation and its humiliations, which provides a vehicle and justification through which passivity may be converted into self-assertion and even aggression. Personal and collective wounds can be healed and injustice addressed (Mack 1983, p. 68).

A further aspect of this response to violence in collective social action is in fighting against discrimination elsewhere. Ambalavanar Sivanandan, the former director of the Institute of Race Relations in London, left Ceylon with his family after 1958. In a published interview he stated that under his leadership 'The Institute became far more than a professional organization or a research body; it was rather a servicer of movements.' He claimed to be at home in his struggle, which was not just for Tamils, but also for 'blacks' and 'Third world' peoples (Sivanandan 1990, pp The primary motive for me [in coming to Britain] was to tell the world: if we don't do that then we would have been kept completely covered from international attention…I thought that it was the British who put us at the mercy of a majority; they were not bothered about the Tamils, they had their own agenda.

Wanting to get to the heart of the interview, as he saw it, he explained how the British needed to be informed about the Sinhalese, who were 'doing what they normally do, kill.' He drew a distinction between himself and other Tamil migrants of that period, who were simply in the UK to make a living. His own perception of events was sharper, as he explained: 'In 1958, [Tamil] people did not feel that they are displaced.

Only intellectually they must have felt [this way]. I felt very strongly...What I thought was, "Get out. Don't be a fool. This is not the place to fight."' His visceral understanding of the violence led him to what he believed was a more radical response than that of his fellow Tamils in Ceylon: to leave the country rather than to stay and oppose discrimination there. During the course of the interview, his view of Sinhalese people became softer, but his determination 'to fight oppression' from the UK hardened. He also explained that he 'learned the English grammar and the reading more powerfully than the others, because I wanted to polish the language. I thought:

"this is a weapon."' Acquiring a better grasp of English, the language most affected in practice by the 1956 legislation, would better equip him to respond to the violence he had suffered. This displacement of the rhetoric of war to a different sphere denotes a certain acceptance of oppression, even in its defiance (Samuel and Thompson 1990, p. 19).

Feelings of rejection

The individual accounts all testify to the general sense of loss felt by Tamils after 1958, which finds its mirror image in the Sinhala cry of 'apey anduwa': 'the government is ours' (Manor 1989, pp. 287-292). In the mythical memory of events there is an almost magical feeling attached to the authority of the State, so that Tamils While some Tamils achieved a kind of symbolic closure through the substitution of memory, Sivanandan's unmitigated grief at the turn of events in 1958 could rely on no such possibility. In his novel of Twentieth Century Sri Lanka, intriguingly titled When Memory Dies, Sivanandan's Tamil narrator describes the sense of utter confusion and incomprehension at the events that were unfolding in 1958:

None of this could be happening, I said to myself from time to time, closing my eyes. It had never happened before, not in 2,000 years of history, not like this; the Sinhalese were my friends, I had married one, my son was a Sinhalese; none of this could be happening (Sivanandan 1998, p. 228).

Sivanandan's narrator gives voice to the confusion felt by the author himself, whose incomprehension grows out of a distressing experience with the state in which basic questions about the causes of violence and the future of the Tamil people in Ceylon are left unanswered (Hamber and Wilson 2003, p. 150) a small island of many people whose political machinery is running down in an environment of increasing fragmentation and factionalism.' He claimed some measure of redress by turning the sequence of political failure on its head to acknowledge Tamil expatriates for their role in the 'erosion of the credibility of Sri Lanka as a democratic polity' (Tambiah 1986, pp. 2-3, 112).

Shock of first encounter

The forms of explanation that support the gradual erasure from memory of the events of 1958 are often in tension with the lasting immediacy of witnessed violence and disruption. Rasan's first experience of the effects of the riot were when he went by bus and suddenly realized there was something going on and found that all the refugees had been brought into Royal and that it was a refugee camp.

A sudden shock, a jolt to his everyday experience, initially alerted him to a bigger change that was gradually unfolding. The association of the memory of physical violence with somebody familiar to the witness is common. Rasan also remembered the death of his principal at Royal College, 'a Sinhalese man', during the riots, when 'driving through the streets of Colombo somebody threw a stone at the car and he lost his life.' Sivanandan described how 'my parents' house was attacked by a Sinhalese mob, my nephew had petrol thrown on him and burnt alive, and friends and relatives disappeared into refugee camps' (Sivanandan 2000, p. 59). On another occasion he explained how 'his father's house was attacked and I had to go disguised as a cop with an empty rifle in my hand to get my parents away from a screaming mob' (Sivanandan 1990, p. 9). Appu also shared a personal memory: 'In the '58 riots, [my daughter was shocked] and she became deaf'. In a reassuring voice he added: 'I brought her here. She lives on her own, very independent and very helpful to me'. Nathan did not witness these events himself but nevertheless remembered them clearly and in a form that distinguished the safety of Matale (a Sinhalese district) from the danger of Kantale (containing a mixed population). Indeed, the story is filled with markers of ethnic identification: Catholic Sinhalese, asked to recite a Buddhist prayer, burned alive, Tamils advised to leave for the north, by a Tamil inspector named Sanders (see also Vittachi 1958, p. 49;Sivanandan 1984, p. 14;Tambiah 1992, pp. 59-60).

The cultural particularity of ethnic violence has been noted by other writers.

For example, Vittachi writing of the violence in Colombo described how Tamils were singled out by their attackers by their wearing shirts over their vertis, having earring holes in their ears (from parents' studding them during infancy), and having to read were Tamil; people being burnt alive' (Sivanandan 1990, p.9). The memories indicate that Tamils were not only attacked but also humiliated, as if put in their place by their attackers. In this way, the riots could be said to have helped establish value norms and certainties amid the social and economic insecurities of post-independence Ceylon [START_REF] Appadurai | Dead Certainty: Ethnic Violence in the Era of Globalization[END_REF].

Appu remembered in Colombo during the riots how 'I was going in the bus…the ordinary fisherwomen and the market women, they thought that I am a Sinhalese…they were all so happy, elated. I thought, "There is going to be trouble."'

On the bus amid the Sinhalese women he was able to pass as Sinhalese, a fact that was disturbing to him. While Tamil self-understanding as a minority became more coherent in the aftermath of the riots, there are instances such as these, and in Sivanandan's dressing up as a police officer to come to the aid of his parents, as well

as other examples such as the one of the Sinhalese man who could not write the very language on behalf of which he was agitating against Tamils (Vittachi 1958, p. 25), which throw quite a different light on the meaning of these events. Generic figures of the Tamil and the Sinhalese were undoubtedly created out of individuals with names and biographies (Spencer 1990), but these cases also point to the emergence of deeper psychological structures of guilt and uncertainty in a time of crisis. The whole decadence and degradation of our people stank in my nostrils. I couldn't take it anymore. I just wanted to get away from my country. So I chucked in my job, sold whatever belongings I had and just pushed off to England (Sivanandan 1990, p. 9).

With a wife and children in tow, he could not have left without prior thought and consultation, but the sense of being left alienated and feeling compelled to leave is positively articulated in this reminiscence.

For those slightly older Tamils who had already begun to make a living in Ceylon by 1958, the riots are remembered in terms of their singularity and divisiveness, even at a personal level. Indeed, the whole period is the axis on which their identity as exiles, as Tamils, and even as men seems to turn. Sivanandan had to leave because, as his interviewers reminded him, 'you had people to support' (Sivanandan 1990, p. 9). Appu 'lived in Colombo and I hated the job. My brain cells were decaying...For me, in a way, this attack on the Tamils came as a blessing in disguise, so I thought I must get out.' Rajah, like a few of the other interviewees, remembered having to leave purely for economic reasons. Asked if he felt any antagonism in the country after the riots, he replied: The return to normality There were some members of the interviewed group, particularly the younger men, for whom the riots were not such an exceptional event. Nathan had to leave his place of work for a short period, but was able to cope with the disruption: 'At that time we were all exempt because of problems…we were asked to return when everything was ...this didn't start in 1983: 1958, 1967, 1972, 1977, 1983 so it was gradually building. (Rasan)

Conclusion

Rasan remembered the 1958 riots as an early flashpoint within a growing conflict. As with the other interviewees, his encounter with the past is associative and continuous (Antze and Lambek 1996, p. xxv). Furthermore it is an encounter that, while deeply felt in the being of the individual, also has a collective aspect that proves useful to For those who actually lived through the violence of late May-June 1958 the riots presented a shock to the normal order of things and as such it quickly became mythologized. Authority that was vested with the responsibility to ensure Tamils' safety as citizens appeared to be either powerless to act or unwilling to intervene at the crucial moment. Of greater impact than the physical and emotional memory of violence, which was often remembered through the experience of others, was the altered image of the state in its response, or more precisely in the lack of an adequate response. Some Tamils tried to make sense of perceived state intransigence by providing constructive responses through the discourse of discrimination. Their suffering included injuries and losses imposed by violence and deprivation but also psychological forms such as non-recognition of their language (Horowitz 2000, pp. 220, 222). They achieved a form of symbolic closure by writing and campaigning in English on behalf of the Tamils in Sri Lanka and other oppressed minorities.

The meaning of the 1958 riots among Tamils living in the UK also belongs to the deeper understanding of Tamils' sense of having lost out in Sri Lanka after independence, as today after the war, and yet having to live on, to make do in some way (Wilson 1994, p.21;BBC News 2010). While this is not to offer a reified collective memory, as if were able to determine unstable individual memories, it is nevertheless to state a common perception that is maintained alongside other, often contradictory, perceptions, such as that of Tamil 'success' wherever they settle (Steen 1993, p. 200;Thompson 2000, p. 133)

  VIOLENCE IN SRI LANKA AMONG IMMIGRANT TAMILS IN THE UKIntroductionA recent editorial in the Tamil Guardian newspaper described the Tamils of Sri Lankan origin living outside of the country as constituting a diaspora (Tamil Guardian 2010). (1) This 'transnational community', which was 'a direct produce of Sinhala oppression', had during the 1960s and 1970s 'near-universally' supported the Tamil FP) and its successor the Tamil United Front (TUF). As a way of relating the non-violent methods of protest practised by the earlier generation to the more forceful later demands for an autonomous Tamil state, the editorial emphasized the word 'liberation' in the 1976 renaming of the TUF (to become the Tamil United

  have been debated over time, the sense of defeat and humiliation felt by many Tamils in the aftermath of the riots is a common aspect of minority myths and also in some ways resembles the emotional state of many Tamils living overseas today(Samuel and Thompson 1990, p. 19; Sivanandan 2010, p. 59; Jayawickreme 2010). Both groups feel victimized, deprived of justice, discriminated against, and in need of redress. Whereas events in Sri Lanka especially since the stateled violence of 1983 have been well documented, however, the 1958 riots are underexplored despite their broad impact on a generation of Ceylon Tamils (Jeganathan 1998). Indeed, '1958' has neither been addressed in detail by academic research nor memorialized in the popular consciousness as July 1983 has. Such circumstances lead to problems in remembrance when this is necessary for the healing of wounds(Kirmayer 1996). Not only has the violence of 1958 been under-researched, furthermore, but there are also significant gaps in historical knowledge about Tamil migrants from this earlier generation. The focus of this paper will be to study the ways in which ideas of belonging to a nation or ethnic group are affected by experiences of traumatic violence and their remembrance within specific social and historical contexts[START_REF] Hunt | Memory and Meaning: Individual and Social Aspects of Memory Narratives[END_REF].The present essay will first look at conventional interpretations of the violence of 1958 and then consider accounts of the same given by interviewees and also by other Tamils who have written about the subject. The oral testimonies of Tamils who arrived to the UK to study, work, or simply to get away from Ceylon in the late-1950s and 1960s will therefore be read in parallel with published accounts by Sri Lankan Tamil émigrés from the same generation. Besides cross-checking the sources against each other, histories of the period will also be used to corroborate them where possible. The use of oral testimony in studies of Sri Lankan Tamils living overseas positivistic and concerned with establishing details of fact. While

[

  laughs].Rasan remembered it with a different perspective, however, stating that Acquiring knowledge of Sinhalese was a very practical thing. If you had to deal as a doctor working in a Sinhalese area, you would be foolish not to know Sinhalese, because you can't do your job. [The problem was when the Sinhalese language] was becoming conditional to your advancement in your career.

  in response to fight against perceived discrimination. Appu, who worked for the Ceylon railway company in 1958, spoke of how he opposed unequal legislation 'on a political basis' through membership in a trade union.'When they passed [the Official Languages Act] I refused to accept it, I refused to learn Sinhalese'. After he settled in London from 1962, Appu established Tamil political and cultural societies, claiming that 'whatever we did, we sent it to Colombo,

  hearing 'apey anduwa' on the streets of Colombo and in other parts of Ceylon must have felt as if the keys to the castle were being jangled in front of a beaten enemy. Appu remembered 'extremists and Bhikkhus' (ordained Buddhist monks) making Sinhalese youths dress up as [the ancient Sinhala King] Dutthagamani's soldiers' and parading up and down the road. When they saw this, 'The middle class Sinhalese laughed, they were happy. So when '58 came, I didn't see any educated Sinhalese raise their voice against what happened in those days. The story of the ancient King Dutthagamani had begun to appear in nationalist Tamil histories of the 1920s and 1930s to serve as an example of Sinhalese duplicity and could have been associated in this way by the narrator (Hellman-Rajanayagam 1996).

  connected the events of 1958 with the growth of tolerance for more aggressive displays of ethnic assertion.While some of the interviewees remembered the passivity of the educated, others told of their experience of state indifference. Ambalavanar Sivanandan was particularly upset with Prime Minister SWRD Bandaranaike's radio broadcast after the first few days of violence.When the Prime Minister came on the radio -four days after the 'riots' began -ostensibly to heal the communal breach, he pointed to the unexplained death of a Sinhala businessman and ex-mayor (of Nuwara Eliya) in the Tamil District of Batticaloa on 25 May as the cause of 'the various acts of violence and lawlessness' that had begun three days earlier! The death of one Sinhalese man seemed to weigh more heavily on the Prime Minister's conscience than the hundreds of Tamils burnt, mutilated, raped and hacked to death(Sivanandan 1990, p. 220).Although the pattern of anti-Tamil violence had already been established by the time of the broadcast, Bandaranaike's words were registered with confusion and even anger by Tamils waiting around their radio sets at home in 1958 for a reassuring word from the Prime Minister. The absence of an official inquiry following the riots added to the sense of a permanent breach having developed between Tamils and the state (de Silva 1998, p. 123).Interestingly, Rasan recalled the violence of 1958 through the radio broadcast itself: if I can remember the sequence of events, one man was killed in Kalkuda, a Sinhalese man was killed by a Tamil man, and that was clearly a domestic thing. And Bandaranaike came on the radio and actually mentioned the fact that a Sinhalese man was killed by a Tamil man and then straight to the next village and so on and then of course, everybody in Colombo.By shifting the origin of the violence to a later point in time in which there is a concrete object of blame (the Prime Minister's radio broadcast), memory makes a healing intervention. Rasan is then able to hang the outbreak of the riots entirely upon the authority and misjudgement of the Prime Minister, who takes the form of the idealistic politician incapable of dealing with the realities of governing the newly enfranchised masses. By contrast, the armed forces, which Rasan admiringly noted contained 'British trained officers', 'were there in full multitude [during the riots] and it was brought under control irrespective of what the ministers were saying at the time'.Rasan expressed regret that Bandaranaike's 'stature as a leader' was diminished by the riots, since he was 'one of the most intelligent politicians Sri Lanka ever had, and in another time under different circumstances he might have been a more outstanding prime minister'. The politically moderate Tamils of this generation viewed the events of the 1950s within the context of later hopelessness and despair, particularly in light of state collusion in the devastating riots of 1983(DeVotta 2000, pp. 64-5). The 1958 riots then became for this group of Tamils a sign of the failure of Ceylon's political leadership amid the self-evident hostility of Sinhalese chauvinists.The leaders' missed opportunity to intervene and to avert the course of violence in 1958 was at the same time an important contributing factor towards subsequent ethnic Rasan, this is expressed through regret for the fortunes of Bandaranaike, who was assassinated by a Buddhist monk in 1959. Nathan reflected that a more gradually effected change in the language of the country would have created fewer problems, but, he said, 'it was the politicians, you see, not only the people who turned.' Tambiah also regretted the 'lack of generosity' among the Sinhalese Buddhist activists that had mobilized the masses during the 1950s, whose positive influence could have averted much damage and loss(Tambiah 1986, p. 72).

  piece from a Sinhalese newspaper(Vittachi 1958, p. 54). Appu compared the beating of some Tamil politicians outside parliament in 1956 with the treatment of African-Americans by whites in the pre-Civil Rights era: it was 'not only discrimination, [but they were] completely ridiculed.' Nathan remembers in 1958 'Sinhalese trying to hit the Tamils anywhere they find [them]...for me there was no reason at all'. Sivanandan 'saw people being killed just by virtue of the fact that they

  to leave Some Tamils assume control of their narrative by expressing the need to leave the country in the wake of what they had seen and heard. Sivanandan explained to his interviewers that,

  I can notice that it was going to be difficult for the Tamils to live anywhere in Sri Lanka, because the language is most important for communication between both communities, but they [the Sinhalese] preferred to have all the dealings in their own language. They didn't want to know about us and they didn't want to give any instructions in English so I found it very difficult at the time to work in tea plantation, because all the government correspondence was in Sinhalese. Same thing in Colombo.The main pattern of reasons given for leaving is a mixed one, however. For example, Thambi ...had a large family and my pay, my remuneration at the British Council was not sufficient to give them, my six children a good education. I thought they would get a better education in England. In any case, I was fed up, with the Sri Lankan attitude, to the Tamil people, the discrimination against the Tamils. So I thought I'd get out, and I was happy, living here now forty, three years and, I don't regret, having come here...I sometimes feel sorry that I left Jaffna. But of course in retrospect, I couldn't have done all these things [he lists the organizations he helped to set up in the UK] and so many other small, projects.When an individual remembers their past in this binding way, bringing together many elements within the ambit of a pivotal earlier decision, they are constructing a mythology of themselves. The memory of the aftermath of 1958 affords an opportunity to justify the individual life.

  normal. After one month we returned.' He explained that he only left Ceylon later to seek further education. Ananthan went to Colombo to study in 1959. He remembered that 'this was the year after the riots…It was all right.' Although things returned to normal quite quickly he remembered his visit to study in Colombo as the year 'after the riots'. Even when the actuality of violence does not impinge on memory, the event still orders biographical details. When asked about the year of his marriage, Nathan replied, 'Actually we married in '58. Just after the riots I married [laughs].' He also remembered being 'pushed into the South jungle' to work for the Ceylon Irrigation Department: 'I was in Hambantota, Ambalangoda…past Galle, near Kataragama...Then we moved to Kantale. That was the riots, '58.' There are differences between the perceptions of Tamils who were working in Ceylon in 1958 and the younger Tamils. The latter were students who observed things deteriorating much later, in the 1960s and early 1970s, especially in relation to their educational and professional opportunities. Ratnam, one of the younger Tamils from the interviewed group, who went to London to study in 1963, remembered: 'I was in Badulla during the '58 riots, I didn't feel much because I was in the Bank of Ceylon so I was well looked after…when I looked back [it was clearer].' The older Tamilswere more deeply moved by the loss signified by the riots than the younger ones, for whom the event was remembered as a momentary blip amid the essential continuity Ceylon. Only in the light of later events did it assume for them the character of a sign of things to come.

  remembering. The memory of violence in 1958 entered a cycle of explanation that gained momentum over time, subsisting in political polarization along ethnic lines and increasingly organized forms of violence(Nissan and Stirrat 1990).Memories of the 1958 riots vary in the context of what is remembered of the more destructive riots of 1983 (Kanapathipillai 1992). For example, some interviewees compared the two events by recalling that in 1958 at least the army has been on their side, whereas in 1983 the army had sometimes colluded with anti-Tamil rioters. Younger generations of immigrant Tamils in the UK, having experienced both the 1983 riots as well as the conflict and division of the recent war, regard earlier Sri Lankan conflicts as having occurred in a different world to the one they know, in which the differences between Tamils and Sinhalese appear to be far more fixed and certain.

  Appu showed a similarly broad outlook in his desire to seek justice by coming to the UK to better understand the roots of the Tamil 'genocide' in the land of the 'elusive oppressor'. Quickly brushing aside a question about his children, he explained that

	16).
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  during the riots…the Catholic Sinhalese, the particular day I was to meet them I was…when I went to meet them my big brother told me "you can't go on any further, they are beating, you know." See there's a connection between Matale and Kantale: Matale is a Sinhalese district; Kantale is more or less Tamil and Sinhalese. They were stopping all the buses coming in to Kantale and then beating them… [My two colleagues] were asked to recite a Kavi in Sinhalese -like our Thevaram in Tamil -they couldn't, they were Catholic. They were burnt alive! These Sinhalese colleagues of mine. I heard only when I returned back home, three, four days after that, although Kantale police station was inspected by an inspector…Sanders, his name is Sanders but he's a Tamil chap, and he advised us quietly to get away. All Tamils from the department came to Trincomalee and by boat to Jaffna. That was the '58 famous riots.

	In 1958,
	F o r
	P
	e
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	R
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	v i e
	w
	These examples also show how narrators sometimes assume control of their memories, either by claiming to have taken direct action ('I had to go disguised as a cop') or by O n l claiming immediate understanding of what was going on at the time ('I brought her y
	here').
	Some Tamils experienced not only physical violence but also ethnic separation
	and categorization as distinct from the Sinhalese majority. Nathan described how
	18

  . So, for example, in 2002, when most of the interviews in this study took place, in the midst of the conflict between the LTTE and the Sri Lankan government, Tamil interviewees who had supported or acquiesced in parliamentary politics during the 1950s and 60s tried to bridge the gap between their earlier choices and the widespread contemporary Tamil (and international) support for They could look back to an era of Tamil negotiation and compromise, backed by non-violent protest, as a legitimate form of political action. When political violence erupted in Sri Lanka from the late 1970s, however, this older generation were left in a difficult position. Looking back on those changes during their interview, each tried to affirm that at least their own struggle had been righteous in its way. Fear and Humiliation: The Psychological Legacy of Sri Lanka's Civil War', Dynamics of Asymmetric Conflict, vol. 3, no. 3, pp. 208-222 JEGANATHAN, PRADEEP 1998 '"Violence" as an Analytical Problem: Sri Lankanist Anthropology after July, '83', Nethra, vol. 2, no. 4, pp. 7-47 KANAPATHIPILLAI, VALLI 1992 'July 1983: The Survivor's Experience', in Veena Das (ed.), Mirrors of Violence: Communities, Riots and Survivors in South Asia, Delhi: Oxford University Press, pp. 321-44 KIRMAYER, LAURENCE J. 1996 'Landscapes of Memory: Trauma, Narrative, and Dissociation', in Paul Antze and Michael Lambek (eds), Tense Past: Cultural Essays in Trauma, London: Routledge, pp. 173-98 MACK, JOHN 1983 'Nationalism and the Self', Psychohistory Review, vol. 11, pp. DONNA K. 1998 'Internment and Intergenerational Relations', in Lee C. Lee and Nolan W. S. Zane (eds), Handbook of Asian American Psychology, London: Sage Publications, pp. 433-456 NISSAN, ELIZABETH AND STIRRAT, R. L. 1990 'The Generation of Communal Identities', in Jonathan Spencer (ed.), Sri Lanka: History and the Roots of Conflict, London: Routledge, pp. 19-44 NORA, PIERRE 1989 'Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Memoire', Representations, vol. 26, pp. 7-24 PORTELLI, ALESSANDRO 1990 'Uchronic Dreams: Working-Class Memory and Possible Worlds', in Raphael Samuel and Paul Thompson (eds), The Myths We Live By, London: Routledge, pp. 143-160 --1991 The Death of Luigi Trastulli and Other Stories: Form and Meaning in Oral History, Albany: SUNY Press ROSENTHAL, GABRIELE 1989 'May 8 th , 1945: The Biographical Meaning of a Historical Event', International Journal of OralHistory, vol. 10, no. 3, pp. 183-193 SAMUEL, RAPHAEL AND THOMPSON, PAUL 1990 'Introduction', in Raphael Samuel and Paul Thompson (eds), The Myths We Live By, London: Routledge, pp. 1-22 DHANANJAYAN 2005 'Tamil Diaspora Politics' in C. Ember, M. Ember and I. Skoggard (eds), Encyclopaedia of Diasporas: Immigrant and Refugee Cultures Around the World, New York: Springer Science and Business Media, 492-500 STEEN, ANN-BELINDA 1993 Varieties of the Tamil Refugee Experience in Denmark and England, Copenhagen: University of Copenhagen and Danish Centre for Human Rights TAMBIAH, STANLEY J. 1986 Sri Lanka: Ethnic Fratricide and the Dismantling of Democracy, London: I B Tauris --1992 Buddhism Betrayed? Religion, Politics, and Violence in Sri Lanka, London: University of Chicago Press TAMIL GUARDIAN 2010 'Editorial: The Diaspora', 10 March, http://www.tamilguardian.com/article.asp?articleid=2715 accessed on 07/12/10 TAYLOR, DONALD ALASTAIR 1994 'The Symbolic Construction of the Sri Lankan Hindu Tamil Community in Britain', PhD dissertation, Department of Anthropology, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London THIRUCHELVAM, NEELAN 1984 'Decentralisation and Devolution: Competing Conceptions of District Development Councils in Sri Lanka', in R. B. Goldmann and RATNAPALAN is affiliated scholar with the Centre of South Asian Studies at the University of Cambridge. ADDRESS: Centre of South Asian Studies, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, CB2 1SD, UK. Email: laavmichael@gmail.com

	armed conflict. Page 25 of 34 JAYAWICKREME, ERANDA, NUWA JAYAWICKREME AND ELISE MILLER Ethnic and Racial Studies NAGATA, Page 30 of 34 Ethnic and Racial Studies SRISKANDARAJAH, Page 32 of 34 Ethnic and Racial Studies LAAVANYAN M. Page 34 of 34
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	O n l y O n l y O n l y O n l y O n l y MANOR, JAMES 1989 The Expedient Utopian: Bandaranaike and Ceylon, O n l O n l O n l O n l O n l Cambridge: Cambridge University Press y y y y y
	MCDOWELL, CHRISTOPHER 1996 A Tamil Asylum Diaspora: Sri Lankan
	Migration, Settlement and Politics in Switzerland, Oxford: Berghahn Books
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