Neil DeVotta, Blowback: Linguistic nationalism,
institutional decay, and ethnic conflict in Sri Lanka. Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 2004. Pp. 204. Hb $55.00, Pb $22.95.
In this well-argued analysis of linguistic nationalism and ethnic
conflict, Neil DeVotta places more weight on language than do most other
accounts of conflict and civil war in Sri Lanka. DeVotta's main
argument is that language politics informed by linguistic nationalism was
not just one among several forces leading to the breakdown of peaceful
coexistence of the Sinhalese and Tamil communities of the island, but
indeed the single most important cause of the conflict and its later
violent manifestations. Accordingly, the 1956 decision by the Colombo
government to declare Sinhala the sole national language of Sri Lanka
represents the crucial turning point in the relationship between ethnic
Sinhalese and Tamils on the island. DeVotta argues that the 1956 Official
Language Act was motivated by a desire among leaders of the Sinhalese
majority to facilitate socioeconomic mobility among their ethnic
constituency, and that it subsequently prompted further ethnocentric
legislation openly favoring the interests of the ethnic majority at the
expense of the Tamil minority. This inability of Sinhalese leaders to
compromise in turn led to a severe loss of confidence in the government
and other state institutions among Tamils, who began to experience the Sri
Lankan state as an alien entity. Finally, this process of
“institutional decay” set off by the 1956 imposition of
Sinhala as sole official language in state institutions and education then
provoked separatist Tamil nationalism and a spiral of violence culminating
in a devastating civil war.