மொழியும் தரப்படுத்தலும்Language and Standardisation
What began as a campaign slogan in 1956 became, by 1972, a constitutional fact. In between, a generation of Tamil schoolchildren learned that the language of the state was no longer the language of their classroom.
In 1956 the Sri Lanka Freedom Party, led by S. W. R. D. Bandaranaike, won a sweeping electoral victory on a single-sentence promise: Sinhala only. The Official Language Act was passed within months. It declared Sinhala the sole official language of the state. Tamil — spoken as a first language by roughly a quarter of the population — was, in administrative life, demoted overnight.[official-language-amendment-1958]
What followed in the streets, almost immediately, was the 1958 anti-Tamil pogrom. What followed in slower time was the steady departure of Tamil professionals from the civil service, the courts, the universities and the state corporations as their working language was withdrawn from them.[1958-pogrom]
In 1972 the architecture changed shape again. A new republican constitution, drafted by the United Front government, abolished the Soulbury safeguards. Section 29(2) was simply removed. The Buddhist religion was given 'the foremost place', and Sinhala was reaffirmed as the official language with Tamil consigned to a subordinate position. Standardisation of university entrance — a system that adjusted the marks required for entry by language of instruction — was introduced in the same period.[1972-constitution][standardisation-1972]
The arithmetic of standardisation was technical. Its effect on a Tamil sixth-form student in Jaffna was not. Where, in the late 1960s, a Tamil student needed roughly the same mark as a Sinhalese student to enter medicine or engineering, by 1973 the required mark was substantially higher. The proportion of Tamil students in science faculties fell year on year. A generation of young Tamils who had been raised, in the discipline of their schools, to believe that hard work in mathematics and the sciences was the route to citizenship through the civil professions discovered that the route had been narrowed at the very moment they reached it.
It is here, in this exact narrowing, that the political claim made in 1976 at Vaddukoddai — that the Tamil-speaking peoples of the north and east had become a nation entitled to self-determination — begins to make sense not as a slogan but as a description. The architecture had taught the Tamils, by withdrawal of the language and the franchise and the route to public service, what it could not be made to teach itself by argument.
"The state did not say to the Tamils, you do not belong. It said, the language in which you speak is not the language in which the state will hear you."