Sri Lanka’s conflict landscape was dominated by its three-decade long civil war, which absorbed scholarly and popular attention from the 1980s onwards. The island’s longer history of ethno-religious violence has received less attention, allowing historical narratives such as those on the ‘1915 Sinhala-Muslim Riots’ to be captured and distorted by nationalist and statist interpretations. How, then, do you write back into history an event in which the victims have been forgotten, the aggressors remembered as ‘victims’, and the state a key purveyor of a distorted narrative?
By using the historiography on communalism as a starting point, I begin this seminar by exploring the divergences in India and Sri Lanka’s experience of colonialism and religious violence despite overlapping histories, shared cultures and significant levels of contact through migration, trade and religious exchange. Second, I will introduce my research on the 1915 Anti-Moor Pogrom against a backdrop of recurring violence, religious revival, economic competition, and the First World War. In the final part of the seminar, I will discuss the difficulties of conceptualising the events of 1915, which means different things to different communities and actors, while sharing my experience of writing violence in the emotionally-charged context of post-conflict Sri Lanka.
Dr. Shamara Wettimuny is the Junior Research Fellow in History at The Queen’s College, University of Oxford. Prior to beginning her postdoctoral fellowship, she was a Beit Scholar at the Faculty of History, Oxford, where she did her doctorate. She is currently working on a book on the history of ethno-religious violence in Sri Lanka, which is to be published by Oxford University Press’s Historical Monographs series. Shamara’s recent publications include “The Jews of Ceylon”: Anti-Semitism, Prejudice, and the Moors of Ceylon’ (Modern Asian Studies, 2024) and Centring Conflict: Contemporary Sri Lanka in Perspective (Routledge, 2024). Shamara is the founder of Itihas, an organisation that promotes history education reform in Sri Lanka.
