The Arrogation of Being Tamil and Other Campaigns Against Caste Discrimination in Jaffna, 1927–1957
Bibliographic record
Abstract
For decades, scholars have interpreted twentieth-century Sri Lankan Tamil history through the prism of sovereignty. From calls for communal representation in the early decades of the century, to the attempt to establish Tamil Eelam at its close, the Sri Lankan Tamil effort to chart a self-directed political destiny is often considered a defining feature of the community’s twentieth century story. Less discussed is another question that consumed Ceylon Tamil politicians, activists, and the island’s reading public between the 1920s and the 1950s: should the so-called “depressed classes,” or roughly a quarter of Tamil-speakers in the island’s north and east, enjoy the same rights and privileges of their neighbors? Focusing on four campaigns that shaped these debates—equality of Tamil identity, equality in schools, equality in death, and equality in political representation—I argue that a multi-faceted and, at times, internally divided movement against caste discrimination operated over the four decades preceding the well-known Marxist-led temple and cafe entry protests of the late 1960s. Based on the family archives of key activists, police and other colonial records, and both oral and published accounts in Tamil and English, this article considers the larger circumstances that made landmark civil rights accomplishments possible, including the appointment of the island’s first Minority Tamil legislator in 1947 and the passing of anti-caste discrimination legislation in 1957. Drawing insights from new work in Critical Caste Studies, the article reveals how a diverse, multi-caste, and multi-national coalition of Hindus, Christians, and Buddhists united to disrupt widespread discrimination decades before the rise of Tamil militancy. In so doing, this article suggests the addition of a second century-defining theme in twentieth-century Sri Lankan Tamil history: caste struggle.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.017 | 0.010 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".