Ethnic entanglements: The BBC Tamil and Sinhala services amidst the civil war in Sri Lanka

Abstract

The BBC has a major presence within the Sri Lankan media landscape and is a critical commentator on its long-standing ethnic conflict. In this article, the BBC’s two regional language services in Sri Lanka, BBC Tamil and BBC Sinhala, are examined. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in BBC Tamil and Sinhala Services at Bush House in London, and archival research at the BBC’s Written Archives Centre (WAC) in Caversham, UK, the article suggests that the BBC, far from being a global dispassionate observer, is imbricated in Sri Lanka’s fractured ethnic landscape. It argues that the two services became both ethnicized and also ethnicizing ‘love objects’. The two audiences, and the exchange of confidences between diasporic journalists and audiences, are analysed as constituting separate ‘knowable communities’, in Raymond Williams’ terms. Through an analysis of a mutual mirroring — or the ways in which BBC journalists imagine Sri Lanka, and how Sri Lanka’s ethnically segmented audiences imagine the BBC — I explore how the BBC World Service both mediates and is structured by local cultural and ethnic identities.