The letter to the editor, ‘Sinhalese and Dravidians’ published sometime ago in your paper contained some inaccuracies and misconceptions which should not be allowed to go unchallenged.

The author of this article, M.S. of Ratnapura appreciates and agrees with a previous article wherein it had been suggested " ... we have to live in peace and harmony sharing everything smoothly in ethnic ratio as in Malaysia".

If MS is aware of the nature of harmony in Malaysia he would not have referred to the 1956 Sinhala Only Language Act as a cause of disharmony in Sri Lanka.

It is an accepted fact that the Malays are "more than equal". Bhasha Malaysia is the official language and Chinese which is the language of 40% of the population does not enjoy the position that the language of the 17% of the population (Tamil) is accorded in Sri Lanka. Tamils in Malaysia prefer to be identified as Malaysians.

This is different to the situation here as the Tamils in Sri Lanka call themselves the ‘Tamil nation’ although the Dudley-Chelvanayakam agreement mention them as a national minority.

M.S. points out that "logically Sinhalese are much Dravidian as the Tamils themselves". So far I’ve not come across any data which establish that the Sinhalese and the Dravidians have a common ethnic strain.

Giving the benefit of doubt to M.S. I quote a sentence that has a bearing on the issue. "Englishness is an effect of unity won from the effacement of actual differences: no one is purely English, not even the queen." Similarly the Sinhalese can be an admixture of many peoples.

In the first part of the twentieth century some scholars put forward the view that Sinhala owed its origins to the South Indian family of languages. But later research on the lithic records of Sri Lanka gave a true insight into the development of the Sinhala language.

Now it is an established fact that Sinhala belongs to the Indo-Aryan family of languages and had an independent growth of its own despite the Dravidian tract separating it from other Indo-Aryan languages.

The work on Sinhala grammar ‘Sidath sangarawa’ was not written by a South Indian Tamil. It was the work of a Buddhist monk called Anawamdassi in the thirteenth century. Although the Tamil grammar book Virasoliyam preceded Sidath sangarawa there is no evidence that the latter drew from Virasoliyam.

The Tamil book on grammar was the work of a Buddhist author viz. Buddhamitra of South India. Further Sidath sangarawa was meant more for students of Sinhala poetry, although it is considered a work on grammar.

There is a reference to Dravidian Buddhist priests who "spearheaded spread of Buddhism here". In fact Buddhism went to South India from Sri Lanka.

Although Emperor Asoka made attempts to spread Buddhism in South India, there is no testimony to his success. The inscriptions on the caves where the Buddhist monks took their meals, found in Madura are in Brahmi script. The Udankal cave inscription (in Madura) contains the word "ANDI" or "ANTAI" used in the sense of a ‘bed’ (derived from a Sinhala word). In some of the inscriptions the word ‘ela’ appears meaning related to Sri Lanka. Historians safely conclude "Sri Lankan missionaries played a greater and direct role in spreading the message of Buddhism in South India than the missionaries of the mainland".

It is true that the Jaffna man invited the Christian missionaries because they gained by it and they did not mind the conversions. They went along with the British for gain. It was the Sinhalese who put up the national struggle because they were a nation and had a national identity.

C. W.
Moratuwa.