Scripted Divisions

This chapter develops the concept of retrospective nationhood to explain how nationalism in postcolonial states emerges through the projection of a singular group identity back onto a plural past, a process that frames one ethnic, religious, tribal, or linguistic community as the sole historical actor, rendering all others invisible. Colonial rule enabled this by distorting precolonial history, disseminating that version through education systems, freezing and institutionalizing fluid identities through rigid census categories, and anchoring political representation in communal affiliation. In Sri Lanka, these dynamics gave rise to competing projects of linguistic nationalism that reimagined a plural political history as the exclusive inheritance of distinct ethnolinguistic communities.