One frequent thought that people drop in response to friendships is that there is just no time. The pace of life, commuting, demands of work and family all have added to a situation where there is no time remaining for keeping in touch with friends. Hence, some relationships get dropped by the wayside. This is often the story of several women who when asked how many school or college friends they kept in touch with, many would not be able to count even one among them. The reason given is once they leave the educational system they get married and all attention, time and energies gets focused on the newer unit that they are part of after marriage. This is obviously no one’s fault but the social structures that men and women are part of, say marriage, elicit such responses from them.

But I am still left with a nagging feeling. It is not all about time is it? One of the factors that I have often heard is that friends whose social status or economic strata changes over a period of time lose touch faster than anything else. A newer unsaid dimension even if they don’t speak about it has entered the picture. The relative difference that has emerged in the material existence of the two friends who have grown together causes some tension. This perceived difference in status tends to diminish the frequency of contact between those who were earlier friends if not root out the relationship completely. Interestingly, factors like caste or race or language or religion or ethnicity tend to be overridden in the early days of the friendship and remain overwhelmed in relationships but class can be an intruder.

What next? We have noted time, gender and class as variables that affect friendships. Workplace/collegiate relations sometimes metamorphose into healthy friendships. This is a larger debate by itself but like class there is a need for caution if the levels of hierarchy of the friends are different. Whether we like it not, hierarchy in organizational contexts does play a role. Likewise can men and women be just friends as epitomized in the classic film ‘When Harry met Sally’? Again, there are ground rules for such relationships and they are very much possible.

Why is friendship important? What is hot about people being just friends? Clearly, these are the only ties that are not bound by blood or primordial sentiments like caste or race or ethnicity or religion or nationality, kinds of compartments within which we work in for most part of our lives. A friend is family indeed but just that s/he is not connected to you through blood ties. Our children are taught in their proverb/phrase books ‘A friend in need is a friend indeed.’ Whenever we are stuck with some issue or problem that we are unable to resolve by ourselves, we immediately think of a friend who can address this for us. Such is the supporting function of friends. But as stated at the very outset, it neither begins nor stops there.

Friendship is about another human presence. It is about the no-holds barred space which we long for in life but find it is all divided up in silos. One can speak one’s heart and mind to a friend and be accepted for who you are as you are. It is commonplace to hear people say in a marital context, “Ah, at last, you have found your SOUL-MATE.” Why the connectivity between ‘souls’ gets confined to marriage or they are only a prerogative of marriage is anyone’s guess? This could possibly be because of a social anxiety that marriage should be accorded the highest form of friendship. This is true but yet presents an incomplete picture because individuals define social spaces as they deem fit. In the process of evolving as a person, the insight of our friends about us are a source of nurture and criticism.

One pre-condition to friendship is that there are synergies between the two people or mutuality of perception and association. Several efforts are wasted when there is a complete difference between the perceptions of the two people regarding what constitutes their friendship and people are then forced to move on in life. Regardless of the type of friendship, trust is a critical factor which affects whether the friendship would last a lifetime or just one of those passing episodes of life.

Among the most important concerns is the deployment or claims or use of the term ‘friend’ in conversations. Numerous are the cross-cultural examples of pub-mates where one of them does not get invited to say the other’s wedding and is shocked, “ I thought that I was his friend.” Sure but did the latter take the trouble to decipher in what sense the term ‘friend’ was used? Don’t we all work with at least three gradations of social interaction? These are acquaintances, colleagues and friends. Acquaintences are those whom you meet on the street or in the corridor at work place; colleagues whom you spend the most part of 8 to 10 hours every week day and friends are those whom we have been talking about.

Popular media and history are replete with examples and references to friendships. Who can forget the mid-1970s classic Hindi film Sholay that celebrated friendship with the famous song ‘Yeh dosti !’ However, in the final analysis, friendship is an aesthetic almost spiritual principle. It is about the divine, sacred and beautiful in earthen human relationships. It is about the lived experience of bonding between people on the principle of common humanity. It is an idea that challenges the narrow-minded spaces that caste or race or religion or ethnicity or even class breed often in society.

May friendships win!

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If and when the parent warns the child in the following terms: “I told you not to play with this those dark-skinned fellows (sic)” can go in for a lifetime of a sense of clear-cut difference, if not bias against those who look black. This point is globally valid. Apart from parents and teachers, the next source of learning could be the peer group. Being teased by a peer-group for belonging to a particular community or hearing the peer group extolling the strengths of a community or perhaps downplaying them could also be a contributory factor.

While all of the above are manageable factors because people unlearn or relearn what they have picked up in their early years so long as the weightage of these values or biases is not too strong. Among the most dangerous form of socialization is that which is performed on  innocent young minds by a socio-political organization or movements.  A brilliant imagery of how mindsets can be modified by groups is demonstrated by the 1997 film . Another major source of prejudice, to state the point briefly, is of course. repeated media coverage of social groups with certain slants/steretypes  which engenders stereotypes of its own.

About a decade or two back it was not uncommon to hear the unselected candidates who emerge out of public service commission interviews complaining that people of certain castes/communities alone were selected. The private sector was largely held free from such problems as it rewarded merit and talent alone, regardless of the cultural background. A large part of the grouse regarding these issues or the hurt felt used to be swept under the carpet. At the highest levels of governance, citizens of various countries are reminded that they ought to think of their nations first rather than the regions or other parochial units among them.

It is here that commonsense understanding militates against social science perspectives of the issue. First and foremost, the primary unit of existence or what is considered as the parochial or the region or even case or community for that matter cannot be denied at all. It is a reality and people very much relate to it on a day to day basis. In social science language we call this the relationship between the UNIVERSAL and the PARTICULAR. There are several particulars and one cannot deny them. There are several primordial sympathies if not affiliations such as caste, community, religion, region, race and so on. So, what then is the UNIVERSAL. The managers of a large country such as ours would consider the NATION as the universal. We then have to draft the equation between the Universal and the Particular within the nation. The moment the individual moves into the globalization process as a member of an MNC, then even the nation becomes a particular in the economic sense and the globe itself becomes the universal with national economies becoming interlocking units into the globalization experience. So, when what unit becomes a ‘universal’ and a ‘particular’ remains a question mark?

It is therefore important that we respect all the so-called ‘parochial’ units or ‘particulars’ as I have redesignated them. It is not the rejection of the particular that is the solution at any level but the transcendence of the particular for a higher goal. The idea of denying the specific or parochial is a polemical method or dominant discourse that seeks to mandatorily define the universal as a certain set category as for example either the region or the nation. In a globalised word, identities are always in a state of flux and so to typecast and straitjacket various levels is a really loss for understanding social, political and economic relations in the globe.

A very old and classic tension is related among Gen-X several of whom opted to learn western pop music. Immediately, among their elders was a hue and cry about how Indian classical music was being abandoned. While there have been real interventions in the form of movements from the 1980s which have taken this perception seriously and tried to popularize Indian classical music, what is important is to notice that right afterwards western music too or its local strains like Indi-pop became very popular. Why is it necessary to think one in exclusion or opposition to the other?

Jawaharlal Nehru spoke about Indian culture or heritage being a palimpsest in which the older strains don’t get wiped away. Rabindranath Tagore whom both Mahatma Gandhi and Nehru hailed as ‘Gurudev’ was among the most cosmopolitan personalities that India nay the world had at the beginning of this century. He had the passion for art and literature both European and Indian, the cultural travels and synthesis both Indian, European and East Asian. Most Indians associate Tagore with barely the national anthem but I would consider his name as synonymous with cosmopolitanism. So was Mahatma Gandhi who argued that if we were all “true believers” of our respective faiths, we would never even speak ill of other religions. Nehru with his agnosticism and mighty international statesmanship directed us to look for oneness beyond the immediate boundaries.

We don’t need to look further than these three heroes for the relationship between the universal and particular and transcending all of them to build that sense of togetherness which is what cosmopolitanism is all about.

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FTOTW

We restarted this series in my previous post.  First, Nancy Dixon, a top expert in Organizational Learning has a brilliant post on the history of KM.  Hal Sperlich will be proud of this – 619,284.5 Miles on a 1971 Mustang and still going strong. Sean Platt has a great post on Creative Inspiration. SP Rajeshwaran has a great post on being a Code Monkey .  Brilliant article on what goes on inside a baby’s brain by Jonah Lehrer in the Boston Globe.

Prolog

I have been on Twitter for the past 1.5 years and I have been smitten. Given my interest in social technologies, i have been thinking about why Twitter is an important development. There have been several rah rah posts about Twitter recently, but i am not satisfied with the inferences.  Like all series starter posts i have done in the past, this post has some thoughts from me to get the community started. I promise to analyze and publish the wisdom of the community, as always.

History

To really understand the power of something, i believe that we should delve into the history a bit. There have been several perspectives of the Web including the highly popular 1.0/2.0 view.  In my view, that classification does not help us understand the Twitter phenomenon adequately.

Therefore, i decided to categorize the web into 3 eras as captured by the diagram below:

In the first Algorithmic Era, most of the focus was on using algorithms to tame the web, Google’s brilliant citations-based (or incoming links-based) algorithm being the chief amongst them.

Then came the Crowd Era, which saw the launch of several crowd platforms like Digg, Flickr, Youtube etc. which allowed us to use the crowds to make sense of the web content as well as to add fresh content.  I included Blogs also in this era because it is very difficult to tame the massive base of 40+ million blogs.  Though bloggers do have an identity, the massive size of the blogosphere reduced bloggers to a crowd [Inside the firewall, we have managed to create a powerful community using blogs  which is difficult to do on the internet due to the crowd effect].  Even the highly popular Wikipedia is a crowd phenomenon – you still don’t have an easy means to understand who the top contributors are, their reputation etc.

In the next era, which i decided to call the Community Era, we have 2 major categories – Facebook, Linkedin, Orkut  etc in what i would term a closed category and Twitter in an entirely new open category. The open category i think models the real world better and that is why it is very powerful.

Three Real World Parallels

1. Asynchronous Friending

If you look at Facebook or Orkut (i use both of them), you need to friend someone first and only then can you exchange anything.  In fact, Facebook won’t even allow you to look at someone’s profile before friending them.  Whereas on Twitter, you can follow anyone and if they like they can follow you back  and if they don’t like you at all, they can block you.  The twitter model is more akin to what we do in the real world.

2. Fine-grained Relationships Dominate

In the real world, all of us participate in many communities  – our neighborhood, our relatives, our coworkers etc.  We have relationships in these communities of varying degrees of strength.  Most relationships are built over time based on a number of fine-grained interactions (low amount of time per interaction) over time – meetings, get-togethers, parties, games, religious/social gatherings etc.  We also have coarse-grained (high amount of time per interaction)  interactions with a few people like our immediate coworkers, supervisors, immediate family/close friends  & close relatives. But most of our network growth comes from the fine-grained relationships. You can analogize a tweet to a fine-grained interaction with your followers.  Additionally, a tweet is very simple and consumes little effort. This is why using blogs or youtube or flickr to build networks is harder because to produce a good blog post or a good photo or a good video takes significantly more effort.  Additionally, the followers also need more effort to appreciate a blog post or a photo or a video.  The problem with Facebook or Orkut or Linkedin is the lack of a tweet-like simple fine-grained interaction mode (although lately Facebook has been copying twitter heavily).

2. Asymmetric relationships

In the real world also, we have asymmetric relationships – the strength of the relationship with someone that we perceive maybe different from the strength of the relationship perceived by that someone.

To make some sense of a large number of relationships – Orkut allows you to grade the relationships. But that is not how we do it in the real world -  our perception of the strength of the relationship is subconscious and is based on perceived quality of  interactions and the frequency of interactions we have.

In Twitter, you can do the same thing, the Twitterers you interact with subconsciously grow on you over time, which could lead to a mutually rewarding relationship. In most

Are there other ways in which Twitter resembles real world community-building?

Epilog

Do you agree that Twitter marks a fundamental tectonic shift? If  so, what impact is it going to have on the web?  That is what i am trying to contemplate. I have some thoughts. Look forward to yours. I would also like your views on Facebook, Linkedin, Orkut etc.

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• The North Indian immigrants were not the 1st inhabitants of Srilanka. That credit goes to the cave dwelling Balangodas: their remains are at least 34,000 years old.

• The present-day aborigines of Srilanka, the Veddas – or Wanniyala Etto as they call themselves – may have called the island their home from 18,000 BC.

• The Burghers are the descendants of European settlers that married locals. Yet another community in Srilanka has an equally eclectic mix of genes – the Colombo Chetties. Both these groups are neither Sinhala nor Tamil.

This post is not about any of them.

Immigrants Galore

When the new nation was established, many villages were founded as more land became arable. Sinhala kings needed people to perform certain specialized caste based jobs, such as weaving, jaggery making or toddy tapping. Further, they recruited mercenaries for their army. The fledgling nation had occupations that no one could neatly fit into – such as peeling cinnamon trees, native to the island. Migrant groups moved to Srilanka to fit into these niches.

Where did the kings turn to for such skilled & unskilled workers? The Eastern Seaboard of India, the Coromandel Coast, is an easy boat ride away from Srilanka. Why go elsewhere, when you could hire from the 4 Southern states? And that’s exactly what the kings did.

Enter the South Indians

It should be noted here that the Sinhala caste system is closer to the Jati system, than the Sanskrit Varna system. Quiet a few Sinhala castes are composed of South Indians & their descendants, who came over several centuries – sometimes for trade or as the soldiers of the presiding Sinhala, Pandya or Chola kings.

Continued Marriage alliances of Sinhala kings with their South Indian counterparts could only have bolstered migrations further. As late as the 18th century CE, the Sinhala rulers of Kandy preferred to marry women from the Telugu Nayaks ruling Tamil Nadu. This led to an interesting situation: the last rulers of Srilanka were Nayaks from the Balija/Kapu community. Of course, they converted to Buddhism & played an important role in the religious revivals in Srilanka.

In this post, let’s see how 3 important, influential & upwardly mobile communities in Srilanka, known as the voices of strident Sinhala Buddhist Nationalism, can trace their ancestry to South India.

Sinhalisation

Sinhalisation is the slow but sure process of assimilation, of migrant, minority communities into the Sinhala Buddhist fabric. In a sense, this means that a particular language, ethnicity & religion are deemed superior to all others, that other groups relinquish their identity to become more acceptable to the majority.

Salagama, Durava & Karava: these 3 castes were originally accorded a low status. But, they became prosperous during the colonial period. Many of them shed their caste-based jobs & occupied high positions – thus recalibrating themselves only just below the Govigamas, the most dominant caste in Srilanka.

Salagamas

Salagama (AKA Chaliya) is a caste of cinnamon peelers in the Southern coastal areas of Sri Lanka. They were also associated with cinnamon cultivation & in Kandy, with weaving. Noted cricketer Lasith Malinga is a Salagama.

Chaliya or Saliya is a caste of weavers in Northern Kerala & Southern Karnataka. It seems possible that the Sinhala kings sought skilled weavers to setup shop at various periods. Saliyas from Kerala & Karnataka moved in waves. And some of them moved onto cinnamon peeling.

Duravas

Durava or Chanda is a toddy tapping caste, that initially moved to the Southern Coast of Srilanka. Their hereditary role is coconut or palm tree climbing. It is believed that they descended from the Nadars of Tamil Nadu & the Ezhavas of Kerala. Many of them also functioned as mercenaries & soldiers for the Sinhala kings.

Its worth noting that the term “Chanda” is very similar to “Sanar”, another name for the Nadar community in Tamil Nadu. The Duravas take great pains to deny their connections with South India & with toddy tapping, which in their eyes is a demeaning profession.

According to the Durava revisionists, their ancestors took up toddy tapping only because they owned the land themselves. Or, they did it for their Durava brethren that owned large coconut groves. Toddy tappers, them – Oh, sacrilege! They also claim that they are a community devoted to martial arts, which was well connected with the aristocracy. Their role as soldiers for the Sinhala kings probably explains their contacts with the royals.

Karavas – The Negombo Story

Along the Eastern sea-board of India, predominantly in the states of Tamil Nadu & Andhra Pradesh, a community of fisher-folks called “Karayar” live. A long time back, they moved to the South-Western coast of Srilanka.

In due course of time, their caste name morphed to “Karava”. Most of them are either Christians or Buddhists & consider themselves ethnic Sinhalas. Traditionally associated with fishing & boat-building, they also performed the roles of mercenaries to local kings.

Let’s focus on 2 districts in Srilanka: Gampaha & Puttalam, that abuts it. The Tamils – fishermen included – in Puttalam are known as Negombo Tamils. But the fishermen in Gampaha are Sinhala. Interestingly enough, the Karava in Gampaha are bilingual. While they speak Sinhala with the fluency of natives, they also speak an unusual dialect of Tamil – the “Negombo Fishermen’s Tamil”. This dialect is an admixture of Tamil & Colloquial Sinhala.

Elsewhere in Srilanka, the Karavas to the South of Colombo speak only Sinhala, though.

So, with the Karava caste, one can see Sinhalisation – akin to the coalescing of matter after the big bang – in progress, right before our eyes. In due course of time, one can expect the Negombo Tamil dialect to disappear, cutting the umbilical cord forever between the Karava & South India.

The Dance of Ingratiation

For their Sinhalisation to be complete, these 3 communities had to either forge an “Aryan” identity for their group, trace their ancestry to the pre-Indian aborigines of the island or claim royal or high-caste roots. They had to relinquish their “plain” South Indian roots, to ingratiate themselves to the Sinhala majority.

♣♣♣ The Salagamas are keen to establish their upper caste Aryan roots. To strengthen their claims, their surnames use the “Muni” suffix which – surprise, surprise – is the Sinhala word for Brahmins. Or, they go all out & use the family name “Nanedri”: a possible corruption of “Namboodiri”, the most common surname of Kerala Brahmins.

Here are a couple of legends, supposedly historical, to bolster the claims of the Salagamas.

King Bhuvaneka Bahu II ran into a small hitch while crowning his son, Prince Wathimi. The Prince’s mother was rumored to be a Muslim. This incensed the monks & they refused to perform the Coronation. The King flexed his royal muscles & imported Namboodiri Brahmins from Kerala to perform the ceremony. Their descendants mixed with weavers & soldiers from Kerala – and formed the “Salagama” caste.

Alternately, some claim that King Vijayabahu I implored the Saligrama Brahmins to manage his cinnamon plantations.

♣♣♣ Instead of claiming “Pure Aryan” ancestors, Duravas have declared they are the descendants of the elusive Nagas – who are mentioned in legends as one of the original inhabitants of Srilanka.

Some claim that since the word “Durava” has no meaning in Sinhala, it must have originated from “Durai” – which means “Headman” in Tamil. Some colonial records have noted that the Durava were “Palanquin Bearers” from Tamil Nadu & the Malabar coast. How & when Headmen started toting palanquins is left rather vague

♣♣♣ In an attempt to assimilate further with the majority Sinhalas, the Karava have Aryanized their caste name to “Kuru Kulam”. They even claim that the Coromandel Coast is the Anglicized version of Sanskrit “Kuru Mandalam” – Land of the Kurus. This helps them deny their South Indian origins & to claim North Indian Kshatriya roots.

Summing Up

The aim of this post is to question the wisdom of assuming that the Sinhalas are a product of inter-marriage between North Indians & the aborigines of Srilanka. It is ridiculous to assume that batches of people from Orissa, Bengal & Gujarat moved to Srilanka – while those from the much closer 4 Southern states did not. The migration history of Indians to Srilanka – and vice versa – is considerably more complex than that.

What then is the Sinhala identity? Is it correct to assume that they are a mono-ethnic community? If the present day Srilankans have measurable doses of Vedda, North Indian & South Indian blood – what about the ethnic mix of South Indians? Or for that matter, Srilankan Tamils?

It would be interesting to see what a scientific genetic study of these 3 groups would find. After 2500 years of shared history & intermingling, we will find that – there are too many genetic variations within each group. Would we also find that there are little or no appreciable differences between these groups?

That would make the Srilankan ethnic conflict the South Asian equivalent of the Hutu – Tutsi rebellion in Rwanda. What a terrible revelation that would be.

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This was an excruciatingly difficult topic to write about. I had to look beyond many lies, propaganda & over-simplification. The more I read about it, the more I felt that I was merely scratching the surface of a complex, multi-layered problem.

I’m greatly indebted to Professor K.M. de Silva, former Vice-Chairman of Srilanka’s University Grants Commission (UGC) for his unbiased analysis of the issue. His report helped me make sense of the many disparate nuggets of information that I unearthed in this research.

Background

In the Colonial epoch, most of the modern schools in Srilanka were run by missionaries. They offered free English Medium education – but since these schools were predominantly in urban area like Colombo or the Jaffna peninsula, access to these schools was well nigh impossible for the masses that lived in rural areas.

Huge swathes of the Srilankan population were illiterate, or semi-literate. In villages, Buddhist monks taught the upper strata of the society in local temples – but the curriculum was limited to the Sinhala alphabets & simpler works from  Buddhist literature, such as stories from Buddha’s life. The monks were literate, but even their education was mostly centered on learning Pali scriptures by rote at the Pirivena (Buddhist University).

The Battle for Civil Service Jobs

Even 15 years after independence, the biggest employer remained the government & Civil Service jobs were much sought after. Students vied for a B.A. Degree (Liberal Arts) to get a shot at these jobs. Srilankan Tamils dominated enrollment for B.A. Degrees & ergo, had a strangle-hold on government jobs.

Once the balance of power tilted in favor of the Sinhala Buddhists after the “Sinhala Only” Bill, Tamils found it exceedingly difficult to land Civil Service jobs. They turned their attention, hard-work & enviable coaching skills  towards Engineering, Medicine & Science streams. By the mid 1960s, Tamil students were the top-dogs in these streams.

Concurrently, education became free in Srilanka. Enrollment in schools soared & in the early 1960s, literacy rates touched 90%. Many Sinhala students graduated with a B.A. In liberal arts – only to find that neither the government nor the private companies had enough open positions to absorb them. They realized painfully that Liberal Arts degrees had become irrelevant. They turned their sights towards Engineering, Medicine & Science streams – only to find that the Tamils were fairly entrenched in those fields.

Pressure on Universities

In the 1960s, after Sinhala & Tamil medium schools ousted English in the secondary schools, the number of available university seats became woefully inadequate. The universities increased the number of seats very often to accommodate more students. Meanwhile, efforts were on to create new universities for the growing nation. Even 2 Buddhist Pirivenas in Colombo were converted into universities.

But, such expansion was very slow, because of paucity of funds & resources. Many aspiring candidates were bitterly disappointed when they couldn’t secure an admission. University education was, very simply stated, their meal ticket. This resulted in heated competition for the scarce seats in prestigious institutions like the University of Ceylon.

Around the same time, intense political pressure was applied on the selection criteria used by the universities. The Viva-Voce method had already been abandoned & Entrance Exams were the main criteria for admissions. But, this became unmanageable in the late 1960s, because of the sheer number of students passing out of schools. So, they were dispensed with & Srilanka started using the scores from the GCE A/Level (+2 or High School Senior Year) Exams.

But, none of these steps appeased students from backward districts, as most of them failed to qualify for seats. They struggled to compete with the urban elite on pure merit. The universities started feeling the heat – and intense political pressure from the United Front Coalition, which made it an issue during the elections.

Flash Point

After the introduction of the “Sinhala Only Bill” & students were educated in their mother-tongue, universities had to contend with students educated in 3 different languages: Sinhala, Tamil & English. The Burghers & students that attended International Schools had an English Medium education. Only they & the Muslims were permitted to take their exams in English.

Srilankan Tamils who formed at mere 11% of the population occupied 35% of the seats in the Science streams & 45% of the seats in Engineering & Medicine. Such superlative performance led to allegations of general bias & deliberate grade tampering by the Tamil examiners.  Thus, the clamor for seats dyed itself in vulgar ethnic colors & plunged the nation into a sordid communal conflict.

In a Nutshell

At its core, the “Policy of Standardization” started out as a program aimed to help disadvantaged Sinhalas, especially those living in geographically backward areas, that did not have access to quality education during the European rule. It was an Affirmative Action Program. As a side effect, it decreased the number of Tamils enrolling in universities.

This policy made it increasingly difficult for the Tamils to secure a seat in the Scientific & Technical streams. As a result, it aggravated race relations in the country. The Tamil youth in the North-East saw this as a discriminatory policy, aimed at hobbling their high status. This led to their alienation from mainstream Srilanka.

A Word of Caution: It is very easy to trivialize Affirmative Action as an anti-Tamil policy, driven by Sinhala Buddhist Nationalists. In reality, it was much more than that. The entire country was seized with the disease of creating a “Level Playing Field”.

To illustrate, Practical Exams for Science subjects at the GCE/A Level were abolished – catch your breath – because rural schools didn’t have the infrastructure for well-appointed labs. To this day, even schools with labs seldom use them. Students ace exams solely on rote learning & enroll in Medical school without even touching a pipette.

Policy of Standardization

In 1970, Srilanka under the stewardship of the United Front Coalition implemented the “Policy of Standardization”. Its main aim was to increase the number of Sinhalas graduating from universities & to simultaneously deter Tamils from hogging a huge part of the much sought after streams of higher education.

Thus far, entrance to universities was solely based on merit. But, after the introduction of the policy – All the raw marks received by the students were normalized to a uniform scale, so that the the number of students qualifying in each medium was proportional to the number of students taking that exam in that medium. The ostensible reasons for introducing standardization was to level the playing field, to make up for the differences in the facilities, teachers & grading standards that the Sinhalas & Tamils had at their disposal.

Later that year, the qualifying marks were lowered for students from the Sinhala medium.  So, the Tamils had to get a higher score than the Sinhalas to secure an admission to the Professional & Science streams. These steps ensured that more Sinhala students qualified for admission.

But this policy did not change the fortunes of the Tamils much. For e.g., their share of admissions dropped from 35.3% to 33.6% in the 1st year. The actual threat to the Tamils was more symbolic – the rise of the Sinhala bureaucrats & their diplomatic will to swing the system to uplift the majority.

Standardization, RIP

In August 1977, the new United National Party government of Julius Jayawardhene summarily abolished the Standardization of marks. This was a bold move & was seen as a step in the right direction.

But when the exam papers were evaluated, Tamils scored significantly higher than the Sinhalas for the hotly contested professional courses. It was feared with reason that Tamils would once again vastly outnumber the majority in qualifying for these seats. When this news leaked to the Sinhala Nationalist parties,  allegations of rampant favoritism among the Tamil examiners were thrown again & mud-slinging ensued.

The new government made a clever move: It stood by its decision to jettison standardization. But for 1977 alone, it also allowed students who would have benefited from standardization, to enroll in universities. This move increased the number of seats, as well as the number of Tamils, Sinhalas & rural students enrolling in the universities. Thus, it made all sections of the society happy.

Machinations of Minister Mathew

Many Sinhala nationalists couldn’t digest the demise of standardization. In 1978, they reignited communal feelings by claiming that the Tamils could only occupy 35%-40% of the university seats consistently by colluding with the examiners that graded the tests. Their mouth-piece was none other than Cyril Mathew, the Cabinet Minister for Industries & Scientific Affairs.

Minister Mathew was a bitter critic of TULF & a rabid nationalist that pushed the interests of Sinhala Buddhists. When the Parliament was in session, he brandished some exam papers from the 1977 Science stream, which the examiner had graded generously. While this did not prove any widespread bias on the part of the examiners, it was enough to reaffirm the opinions of those Sinhalas that thought the worst of Tamils & Tamil examiners.

Such orchestrations were towards achieving a bigger objective: Quotas for various ethnic groups, based on their population %. Interestingly, the Indian Tamils supported this: they felt that they would benefit by proportional quotas. But, the government was steadfast. The Policy of Standardization was dead & they had no plans to resuscitate it. They were not interested in quotas for ethnic groups either.

Summing Up

So, ethnic preferences ceased to play a role  – but something far more insidious took its place. That’s the subject of a later post.

Meanwhile in Tamil Nadu, clarion calls for a separate quota for Tamil Medium students are becoming increasingly vociferous. At least in Srilanka, standardization is buried & lies rotting. Once started, such programs never end in India – Political will is severely lacking & shameless vote bank politics are par for course. Its a good thing we are too benumbed to care.

Here is the next post in this series – Do check it out.

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