Recasting the Brahmin: Martin Wickramasinghe and the Epistemic Critique of Caste

The dominant public perception is that caste is a matter of minor and diminishing significance in Sri Lanka, especially for the Sinhalese, who form the island’s ethnic majority. Although sociological and anthropological studies have pushed back against this perception, its pervasiveness and importance for modern Sinhala identity formation have resulted in questions of caste seldom being raised in the field of modern Sinhala literature. It is surprising, therefore, that the oeuvre of perhaps the most prolific Sinhala writer and public intellectual of the twentieth century, Martin Wickramasinghe, is checkered with references to caste; particularly, polemics against a “brahmin caste” that he claims is responsible for the maintenance of epistemic hierarchy in Sri Lanka and beyond. This essay distills Wickramasinghe’s caste-text through two illustrative moments, the Buddha-biographical novel Bava Taraṇaya (1973) and the essay “Bamuṇukulaya Bin̆da Væṭīma” (1956), suggesting that it advances a critique of epistemic stratification and the coloniality of knowledge through the idea of caste, while also contesting the givenness of caste as a category. Wickramasinghe’s work is a productive starting point through which an archive of anti-caste thought situated in the Sinhala literary sphere yet addressed to a wider humanity might be imagined, since his caste-text illustrates how thinking about caste in and from Sri Lanka is of value not only for its inhabitants, but also for transnational forms of politics that use caste as a nodal point for the articulation of structural inequalities and injustices that are not vestiges of antiquity but features of colonial modernity.