Settlers

I found it interesting to learn how the district I living in Ampara came to be. If you look at it on a map it’s a clump of divisions along the Eastern coast of Sri Lanka with a few other divisions snaking into the center of the country that look to have been tacked on as an afterthought.




I learned this is gerrymandering-Sri Lankan style. The interior provinces were tacked on to beef up the percentage of Sinhalese voters.

Sri Lanka’s Eastern region historically has been mostly Tamil-speaking Hindus and Muslims. But following independence, the Sinhalese majority adopted a policy of encouraging settlers from poor communities to branch out around the country, combined with a massive system of irrigation system to encourage farming.



So communities like mine, Ampara, are little Sinhalese settler outposts. Now the interior rice-farming communities are mostly Sinhalese and the coastal, often trading based communities are either Tamil or Muslim (both Hindus and Muslims speak Tamil, but Muslims don’t refer to themselves as ‘Tamil’).