A tale of two maps: Territorial anxieties, political cartography and the impossibility of boundary demarcation in Sri Lanka

In this study, we argue that at the heart of Sri Lanka’s ethnic conflict that has ravaged the country for several decades is a “territorial anxiety”. This anxiety continues to haunt Sri Lanka’s politics even since the civil war ended. To illustrate the multiple ills this anxiety produces, we provide an ethnographic case study of the politics of boundary demarcations of local administrative units in eastern Sri Lanka, more specifically the controversy around Koralai Pattu Central Divisional Secretariat (D.S.) division (known as KPC) in Batticaloa District. Our study will trace the history of the evolution of KPC, neighboring divisional secretariats (D.S.) and the Pradeshiya Sabha (P.S.) system from the late 1980s to illustrate how administrative boundary demarcation and ethnic segregation became increasingly entangled. If administrative boundary demarcations are used as an attempt to purify administrative (and political) entities into ethnically homogenous territorial containers, this will likely result in unsolvable contradictions. Indeed, our ethnographic material rather points to the impossibility of a politics of purification, understood as the attempt to confine administrative and political entities into ethnically homogenous territorial containers. The case of KPC reveals lessons not only for Batticaloa’s politics but for boundary demarcation politics for administrative or electoral purposes in Sri Lanka and South Asia more broadly