IMAGINING THE NATION: A Critical Overview of Sinhala Nationalism and Its Cultural Coordinates

This chapter traces the central role culture has played in the formation and propagation of Sinhala nationalist discourse over the course of the 20th century. It critically explores the scholarly literature on ‘culturalist’ explorations of nationalism in Sri Lanka and maps the dominant trends within this literature while connecting it to global debates on nationalism. The chapter demonstrates that ‘culture’ remains an important site of nationalist reproduction but cautions against taking culture or the nation as self-evident categories and advocates an approach that treats both culture and nation as categories of practice rather than ontological realities.