*Sri Lanka: The National Question and the Tamil Liberation Struggle by Satchi Ponnambalam- published jointly by the Tamil Information Centre and Zed Books Ltd, London- 1983

from the back cover to the first edition... Sri Lanka: The National Question and the Tamil Liberation Struggle is the first book by a Sri Lankan on a conflict that has now escalated into wide ranging violence and become the dominant issue facing the country. Its author, Satchi Ponnambalam, has written a scholarly but committed history of relations between the island's two distinct nations- Sinhalese. and Tamils- which goes back over 2,000 years. He concentrates on the post-independence period, and provides a detailed record of the discriminatory measures successive governments have taken against the Tamil population. This hostility on the part of a section of the Sinhalese has arisen, he argues, not because of any inevitable antagonism. Rather, its roots lie in the determination of the Sinhalese ruling class to divert the struggle common to both the Sinhalese and Tamil oppressed classes, a struggle inherent in the nature of Sri Lanka's neo-colonial, capitalist economy (an economy which benefits only the ruling class itself). These upper-class Sinhalese politicians, the author argues, are manipulating a myth of Sinhalese Aryan supremacy- at the cost of abandoning true Buddhism- so as to keep powe