Aborted Identity: The Commission and Omission of a Monument to the Nation, Sri Lanka, circa 1989

Abstract

The doomed competition organized in 1989 to design a monument to the nation in Sri Lanka coincided—hardly accidentally—with a grave crisis of this postcolonial state, a former colony (called Ceylon) of the Portuguese (1505–1658), the Dutch (1658–1796), and, most recently and influentially, the British (1796–1948). A terse account of this uniquely overdetermined crisis comes, oddly and appropriately enough, from a hagiography of a politician who helped precipitate it: Dayan Jayatilleke’s tribute to the late President Ranasinghe Premadasa in book form. There he argues forcefully that “the [Sri] Lankan state [then] faced all three major categories of threats that any state could [ever] face.”1 First and foremost—indeed still the most intractable—was the threat to its “territorial integrity,” presented by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Ealam (LTTE, or the Tigers), who had been fighting militarily for an independent Tamil state in the Northern and Eastern Provinces of Sri Lanka for almost two decades. Second, as a direct consequence of the first, was the “threat to national independence and sovereignty” posed by the Indian Peace Keeping Force (IPKF), whose presence in the northern and eastern provinces of the country was meant to enforce the terms of the Indo-Lanka Peace Accord signed in July 1987. The latter, though presented and even possibly intended by the two sig-