Sri Lanka’s Buddhists belong to the Therevada branch of the religion, which is the dominant sect in Southeast Asia. The Buddhist community in Sri Lanka is one of the oldest in the world, going back more than 2,000 years. As of the 2012 Census, Sri Lanka was 70.2% Buddhist, 12.6% Hindu, 9.7% Muslim, and 7.5% Christian. I’ll start with the least relevant, but in some ways most interesting, factor– religion. A Detailed Look At Sri Lanka’s Demographics
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If you aren’t interested in the nitty-gritty details of Sri Lankan religious, linguistic, and ethnic groups, or you already know the basics, feel free to skip this part, and go straight to my analysis of how these demographic factors played a role in shaping the Sri Lankan Civil War. I will go into these characteristics of Sri Lanka’s demographics, and more, in the next section of the post. Sinhala-speakers are mostly Buddhist, but look closer to see the Christian minority on the east coast that emerges on the religion map. The Tamil-speakers belong to three different ethnic groups. Note, for example, how the Hindus on the religious map are divided in two on the ethnic map. Below are maps of Sri Lanka by ethnicity, language, and religion.īroadly, these three maps are similar, but, as is often the case, the devil is in the details.
Using data from the 2012 Census, I will analyze all three of Sri Lanka’s fault-lines in this post, especially in the context of the Sri Lankan Civil War, which ran from 1983 to 2009. Even famously diverse Lebanon, which I jokingly referenced in the title of this post, is only divided by religion. In fact, I can’t think of another society in which all three of these variables are in play.
In Sri Lanka, religion, ethnicity, and language each play a role in creating the fractured demographic picture of the island. In the cases of Punjab and Bengal, religion was the only factor. Sri Lanka, unlike Punjab and Bengal, is divided along a number of fault-lines. In this post, I’m going to look at a deeply divided country that was never partitioned.
So far on this blog, I have focused on the effect of partitions on Punjab, Bengal, and Kashmir.
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