The 1868 Caste Controversy in Sri Lanka in Comparative Perspective

The caste controversy of 1868, carried out in the pages of the Ceylon Examiner, was one of the earliest debates on “identity” carried out in Sri Lanka’s “modern” public sphere.  In India, scholars have often interpreted analogous debates as responses to official efforts to categorize and control colonial subjects.  However, in Sri Lanka after 1833 the state did not publicly acknowledge caste distinctions.  How then did caste become the subject of controversy?  In some respects the debate reflected elite competition over status that had changed little since the early modern period.   But some arguments also reflected new and modern assumptions about culture and history.  My comments will focus on one prominent feature of the debate – the ways in which the protagonists positioned Sri Lanka in relation to both India and to a “universal” notion of progress.  I will argue that the tension found in the debate between the desire to define the local social order and concern about the place of the colony within a broader Imperial hierarchy was characteristic of the more general process that produced colonial Ceylon’s distinctive nineteenth-century sociology.