The Evolution of an Ethnic Identity: The Tamils in Sri Lanka c. 300 BCE to c. 1200 CE

Indrapala's monograph is the single most influential peer-reviewed academic treatment of the formation of Sri Lankan Tamil identity in the long pre-modern period. Indrapala — himself originally a defender of a unilineal South-Indian-migration model — substantially revised his position in this 2005 work, arguing for a layered, multi-stream formation process drawing on indigenous communities (Naga, Yakkha), South-Indian migration, maritime trade networks, and the bilingual Tamil-Sinhala religious-cultural environment of early medieval Lanka. Cited on /research/formation-question as the canonical statement of the layered-formation view, explicitly labelled an open academic field, not a TLTE position.