George Bernard Shaw visited Ceylon in 1948, skipping India altogether. So much for the ego of the island’s massive neighbour. But that was not all. In a letter to India’s Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, the unpredictable playwright wrote: “I was convinced that Ceylon is the cradle of the human race because everybody there looks an original. All other nations are obviously mass produced.” Anthropology was as far from Shaw’s brain as the razor from his beard. But in this observation he had hit upon both a human truth and a Lankan verity.
The emerald isle’s people have traditionally been seen in terms of ethnic groups. The categorisation has its uses, as, for instance, in understanding the demographic weight of sections of its population such as given in this latest figure (Census of 2012): Sinhalese 74.9%; Sri Lankan Tamil 11.2%; Sri Lankan Moors 9.2%; Indian Tamil 4.2%; others 0.5% (‘Moors’ being a quaint Lankan way of describing, a la Shakespeare and Othello, the island’s Islamic population).
But identity-clustering can be very self-depriving for a nation.
