Nation, Constitutionalism and Buddhism in Sri Lanka

This book offers a new perspective on contemporary debates about nationalism in South Asia in general and Sri Lanka in particular. The price of that nationalism in Sri Lanka is the current agonizing split between Sinhalese and Tamil. The central focus here is the capture of Buddhism by militant Sinhalese nationalism in the colonial and postcolonial periods and the framing of subsequent key constitutional legal moments.This is the first study that combines the dynamics of...
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This book offers a new perspective on contemporary debates about nationalism in South Asia in general and Sri Lanka in particular. The price of that nationalism in Sri Lanka is the current agonizing split between Sinhalese and Tamil. The central focus here is the capture of Buddhism by militant Sinhalese nationalism in the colonial and postcolonial periods and the framing of subsequent key constitutional legal moments.This is the first study that combines the dynamics of constitutionalism with the orbit of historical, political and anthropological scholarship on the cosmology of Sinhalese Buddhism and its relation to Sinhalese Buddhist nationalism. It explores four cases of legal-constitutional moments and offers a unique contribution to the politics and history of devolution in Sri Lanka. A timely and scholarly intervention given the intensification of Sri Lankas civil war since the election in 2005 of President Mahinda Rajapakse on an overtly ultra nationalist Sinhalese Buddhist platform, this book will be of interest to scholars of South Asian Studies, anthropology, sociology, ethnicity and political science.