Origins of the 'Sinhala' race still remains an unresolved national issue. In primary school as students when we learned History, we were taught that we, Sinhalese, are descendants of a 'so-called' Vijaya who is said to have been deported from India for acts of grave crimes and aggression against the people and government of that country some 2550 years ago.

The origins of the Sinhala race, it is believed, traces far beyond even King Rawana era and the Sinhala Royalty far beyond even King Pandukabhaya era. This little country, in the ancient past, was known as 'Helaya' or 'Heladiva'. There were at the time four tribes of people known as 'Yaksha', 'Raksha', 'Naga' and 'Deva' who lived on this land. Though named such, probably due to their behavioural patterns, their habits, their thinking and their way of livelihood etc., they were only human and no animals or mammals at all. Due to the existence of these four tribes Helaya, later became to be known as "Sivu-Helaya" which later turned out to be called "Sinhale". When the country was invaded by foreign traders and powers, it was known as "Sinhale".

The Sinhalese are the major ethnic group in the country, officially comprising 11 million people or 74 percent of the population in 1981. They are distinguished primarily by their language, Sinhala, which is a member of the Indo-European linguistic group that includes Hindi and other north Indian tongues as well as most of the languages of Europe. It is likely that groups from north India introduced an early form of Sinhala when they migrated to the island around 500 B.C., bringing with them the agricultural economy that has remained dominant to the twentieth century. From early times, however, Sinhala has included a large number of words borrowed and from Tamil dialect and modern speech which includes many expressions from European languages, especially English.

The Sinhalese, according to chronicles claim to be descendants of Prince Vijaya and his band of immigrants from northern India, but it is possible that the original group of Sinhalese immigrants intermarried with indigenous inhabitants. The Sinhalese gradually absorbed a wide variety of castes or tribal groups from the island and from southern India during the last 2,500 years.

The Buddhist religion reinforces the solidarity of the Sinhalese as an ethnic community. In 1988 approximately 93 percent of the Sinhala speaking folk were Buddhists, and 99.5 percent of the Buddhists in Sri Lanka spoke Sinhala. The most popular Sinhalese folklore, literature, and rituals teach children from an early age the uniqueness of Buddhism in Sri Lanka, the long relationship between Buddhism and the culture and politics of the island, and the importance of preserving this fragile cultural inheritance. Buddhist monks are accorded great respect and participated in services at the notable events in people's lives. To become a monk is a highly valued career goal for many young men. The neighboring Buddhist monastery or shrine is the center of cultural life for Sinhalese villagers.

Their shared language and religion unite all ethnic Sinhalese, but there is a clear difference between the "Kandyan" and the "low-country" Sinhalese. Because the Kingdom of Kandy in the hill countr; fy remained independent until 1818, conservative cultural and social forms remained in force there. English education was less respected, and traditional Buddhist education remained a vital force in the preservation of Sinhalese culture. The former Kandyan nobility retained their social prestige, and caste divisions linked to occupational roles changed slowly. For an example a man who washes clothes for nobility was called a ‘Dhoby’ and was relegated or looked down by the society as low caste. He and his descendents were known by the caste name which evolved from his occupation. The plains and the coast of Sri Lanka, on the other hand, experienced great change under 400 years of European rule. Substantial numbers of coastal people, especially among the Karava caste, converted to Christianity through determined missionary efforts of the Portuguese, Dutch, and British; 66 percent of the Roman Catholics and 43 percent of the Protestants in the early 1880s were Sinhalese. Social mobility based on economic opportunity or service to the colonial governments allowed entire caste or kin groups to move up in the social hierarchy. The old conceptions of noble or civil status declined, and a new elite developed on the basis of its members' knowledge of European languages and civil administration. The Dutch legal system changed traditional family law. A wider, more cosmopolitan outlook differentiated the low-country Sinhalese from the more "old fashioned" inhabitants of the Hill country.

The Tamils are known to be the descendents of people that migrated from south Indian Cholan and Pandayan dynasties. It is not yet established if the Naga tribe were in fact early Tamils who has lived in Srilanka since pre-history era. They are predominantly Hindu.Senan and Guttakan were the first Tamil rulers (2nd century BC). They left no evidence except for the allusion in the Mahavamsa. The intermingling of Tamil and Sinhala people, especially after the 12th century is evidenced by the Sinhalization of many Tamil place names and the tamilization of Sinhala toponyms. Although the Mahavamsa only mentions the name Sinhala after the 12th Century. It could also be said that the Sinhalese language is a diluted form of pali.

The people collectively known as the Tamils, comprising 2,700,000 persons or approximately 18 percent of the population in 1981, use the Tamil language as their native tongue. Tamil is one of the Dravidian languages found almost exclusively in peninsular India. It existed in South Asia before the arrival of people speaking Indo-European languages in about 1500 B.C. Tamil literature of a high quality has survived for at least 2,000 years in southern India, and although the Tamil language absorbed many words from northern Indian languages, in the late twentieth century it retained many forms of a purely Dravidian speech--a fact that is of considerable pride to its speakers. Tamil is spoken by at least 40 million people in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu (the "land of the Tamils"), and by millions more in neighboring states of southern India and among Tamil emigrants throughout the world.

There was a constant stream of migration from all over the civilized world. A dispersion of a people from their original homeland and it was happening from Southern India to Sri Lanka from prehistoric times such movements also known as Diaspora which is synonymous with the dispersion of Jews.

Once the Sinhalese controlled Sri Lanka, however, they viewed their own language and culture as native to the island, and in their eyes Tamil-speaking immigrants constituted a foreign ethnic community. Some of these immigrants appear to have abandoned Tamil for Sinhala and become part of the Sinhalese caste system. Most however, continued to speak Tamil and looked towards Southern India as their cultural homeland. Their connections with Tamil Nadu received periodic reinforcement during struggles between the kings of Sri Lanka and Southern India that peaked in the wars with the Chola. It is probable that the ancestors of many Tamil speakers entered the country as a result of the Chola conquest, for some personal names and some constructions used in Sri Lankan Tamil are reminiscent of the Chola period.

The Tamil speakers in Sri Lanka are divided into two groups that have quite different origins and relationships to the country. The Sri Lankan Tamils trace their immigration in the distant past and are effectively a native minority. In 1981 they numbered 1,886,872, or 12.7 percent of the population. The Indian Tamils are either immigrants or the descendants of immigrants who came under British sponsorship to Sri Lanka to work on plantations in the Hill country. In 1981 they numbered 818,656, or 5.5 percent of the population. Because they lived on plantation settlements, separate from other groups, including the Sri Lankan Tamils, the Indian Tamils have not become an integral part of society and indeed have been viewed by the Sinhalese as foreigners. The population of Indian Tamils has been shrinking through programs repatriating them to Tamil Nadu.

Ethnic Tamils are united to each other by their common religions beliefs, and the Tamil language and culture. Some 80 percent of the Sri Lankan Tamils and 90 percent of the Indian Tamils are Hindus. They have little contact with Buddhism, and they worship the Hindu pantheon of gods. Their religious myths, stories of saints, literature, and rituals are distinct from the cultural sources of the Sinhalese. The caste groups of the Tamils are also different from those of the Sinhalese, and they have their rationale in religious ideologies that the Sinhalese do not share. Religion and caste do, however, create divisions within the Tamil community. Most of the Indian Tamils are members of low Indian castes that are not respected by the upper- and middle-level castes of the Sri Lankan Tamils. Furthermore, a minority of the Tamils--4.3 percent of the Sri Lankan Tamils and 7.6 percent of the Indian Tamils--are converts to Christianity, with their own places of worship and separate cultural lives. In this way, the large Tamil minority in Sri Lanka is effectively alienated from the mainstream Sinhalese culture and is fragmented into two major groups with their own Christian minorities.

There have been Muslims in Sri Lanka for well over a thousand years Ceylon Moors /Muslims are of Arab descent. Although from the earliest times, Arabs from the Gulf had been coming straight to the island for trade, the really significant migration for settlement came via the Malabar Coast in what is now Kerala. This brings to our mind the stories of the legendary Sinbad. The first Muslim merchants and sailors may have landed on Sri Lankan shores during the Prophet Muhammad's life time. By the 10th century this predominantly Arab community had grown influential enough to control the trade of the south-western ports, whilst the Sinhalese kings generally employed Muslim ministers to direct the state's commercial affairs. In 1157 the king of the neighboring Maldive Islands was converted to Islam, and in 1238 an embassy to Egypt sent by King Bhuvaneka Bahu I was headed by Sri Lankan Muslims.

The origins of the Sri Lankan Moors are a matter that has aroused much controversy in academic circles. While it is generally believed that the Moors are descended from Arabian merchants who espoused local women, there are those historians who continue to argue that the Moors originally hailed from South India, mainly on the basis of their spoken language - Tamil.

Moors who mixed well with the Tamils and Sinhalese were living quite peacefully with the different communities until the riots in 1983 . Then in 1989 the moors living in Jaffna were forced to evacuate from Jaffna which raised important issues - not the least bothered are those Tamils who were committed to the Tamil struggle for self determination. The forced evacuation of thousands of Muslims from where they had lived for many decades was a humanitarian crisis. On the other hand, the military compulsions that the Tamil resistance faced, led to the decision that was taken.

Thousands of Muslims in northern Sri Lanka were ordered to leave their properties by the LTTE in 1989. They were only allowed to take minimum of their possessions and limited amount of cash. Everything else was confiscated by the Tamil Tigers. This act is described by some as ethnically cleansing the North. Tamil Tigers later apologized to Muslims after it was heavily criticized by human rights activists. 'Tigers say Tamils are discriminated against by Sinhalese. But they did the same thing against Muslims,' said a senior peace envoy from Norway to the BBC Sinhala service.

Muslims, who make up approximately 7 percent of the population, comprise a group of minorities practicing the religion of Islam. As in the case of the other ethnic groups, the Muslims have their own separate sites of worship, religious and cultural heroes, social circles, and even languages. The Muslim community is divided into three main sections--the Sri Lankan Moors, the Indian Moors, and the Malays, each with its own history and traditions.

The Sri Lankan Moors make up 93 percent of the Muslim population and 7 percent of the total population of the country (1,046,926 people in 1981). They trace their ancestry to Arab traders who moved to southern India and Sri Lanka some time between the eighth and fifteenth centuries, adopted the Tamil language that was the common language of Indian Ocean trade, and settled permanently in Sri Lanka. The Sri Lankan Moors lived primarily in coastal trading and agricultural communities, preserving their Islamic cultural heritage while adopting many southern Asian customs. During the period of Portuguese colonization, the Moors suffered from persecution, and many moved to the Central Highlands, where their descendants remain. The language of the Sri Lankan Moors is Tamil, or a type of "Arabic Tamil" that contains a large number of Arabic words. On the east coast, their family lines are traced through women, as in kinship systems of the southwest Indian state of Kerala, but they govern themselves through Islamic law.

The Indian Moors are Muslims who trace their origins to immigrants searching for business opportunities during the colonial period. Some of these people came to the country as far back as Portuguese times; others arrived during the British period from various parts of India. The Memon, originally from Sind (in modern Pakistan), first arrived in 1870; in the 1980s they numbered only about 3,000. The Bohra and the Khoja came from northwestern India (Gujarat State) after 1880; in the 1980s they collectively numbered fewer than 2,000. These groups tended to retain their own places of worship and the languages of their ancestral homelands.

The Malays originated in Southeast Asia. Their ancestors came to the country when both Sri Lanka and Indonesia were colonies of the Dutch. Most of the early Malay immigrants were soldiers, posted by the Dutch colonial administration to Sri Lanka, who decided to settle on the island. Other immigrants were convicts or members of noble houses from Indonesia who were exiled to Sri Lanka and who never left. The main source of a continuing Malay identity is their common Malay language (bahasa melayu), which includes numerous words absorbed from Sinhalese and Tamil, and is spoken at home. In the 1980s, the Malays comprised about 5 percent of the Muslim population in Sri Lanka.

Sri Lanka's Malays are largely descendants from political exiles including chiefs and nobles, soldiers, convicts and freed slaves from the Indonesian archipelago and the Malayan peninsula who were brought over to the island by the Dutch during the 17th and 18th centuries.

In 1813 more than 400 Madurese men and women and children came over from Surabaya to join the Ceylon Malay Regiment, In 1818 a shipment of about 228 Javanese Soldiers and their families, mostly recruited from North-Coast cities of Semarang and Gresik in Java-SLMA 7/118- Brownrigg to John Kendall, 8th August, 1818.

Malayu Bahasa, the Malay language traditionally spoken by the country's 60,000 - strong Malay community is under threat. It is today only in areas such as Kandy, Badulla, Gampaha, Kirinda, Hambantota and Slave Island where sizeable concentrations of Malays are found, that the younger generations speak Malay. In the other areas, it is largely restricted to the older folk who freely converse with one another in Malay.

Malayu Bahasa, the Malay language traditionally spoken by the country's 60,000. Names of places such as Jawatte, Kartel (Slave Island) in Colombo, Jaela in the suburbs, Jayakachcheri (Chavakachcheri) in the North and names of streets such as Malay Street, Java Lane, Jalan Padang point to the fact that Malays have been living in the various parts of the country.

When the Portuguese arrived in Sri Lanka in 1505 they brought soldiers and other supporting staff. Those who settled down got married to local women and a new ethnic group was born. Soon, the Dutch and the British followed. The descendants of the union between the colonizers and the locals came to be known as Burghers.

The term Burgher was defined by Chief Justice of Ceylon, Sir Richard Ottley, in an authoritative pronouncement, when he gave evidence before the Commission which was appointed in connection with the establishment of a Legislative Council in Ceylon in 1883. He stated that, "The name Burgher belongs to the descendants of the Dutch, Portuguese and other Europeans born in Ceylon, and the right to distinction must not be decided by the Country from which their father or paternal ancestor came. So whatever the number of generations through which the family has passed in this Island, if the male ancestors were Dutch, Portuguese and or other Europeans, whoever may have been the female parents, if the parents were married, the offspring would be Burgher. If the parents were not married, the country of the mother would decide the nationality of her offspring. If the right to be denominated Burgher be once lost by the legitimate father being a Singhalese or other Indian, it cannot be recovered."

The term "burgher" is of Dutch origin and is used in Sri Lanka to identify the ethnic group comprising the descendants of the Dutch who settled down in the island after the British took over the administration of its littoral

In a census carried out in 1946 there were 42,000 Ceylonese who classified themselves as Burghers or Eurasians and they were 0.6% of a population of 8.1 million. More than half of the 1946 Burghers, their children and their grandchildren are no longer in Sri Lanka.

The term Burgher was applied during the period of Dutch rule to European nationals living in Sri Lanka. By extension it came to signify any permanent resident of the country who could trace ancestry back to Europe. Eventually it included both Dutch Burghers and Portuguese Burghers. Always proud of their racial origins, the Burghers further distanced themselves from the mass of Sri Lankan citizens by immersing themselves in European culture, speaking the language of the current European colonial government, and dominating the best colonial educational and administrative positions. They have generally remained Christians and live in urban locations. Since independence, however, the Burgher community has lost influence and in turn has been shrinking in size because of emigration. In 1981 the Burghers made up .3 percent (39,374 people) of the population.

The arrival of the Colombo Chetty community from Nagapatnam, India is well documented from 1663 during the reign of King Rajasingha 11 of Kandy, and the governorship of the Dutch Ryckloff Van Goens. With the arrival of the westerners in search of riches to the east, the Chetties of India used the opportunity to further their trade.

Chetty merchants were visiting Ceylon in their own sailing vessels carrying diamonds from Golconda, emeralds from Rajasthan, rubies from Burma and so on from various states of India from pre-Buddhist times. Their arrival here is documented in our history during the time of King Rajasinghe II and the governorship of the Dutch. Once they settled in Ceylon, these traders and money-lenders dropped out of the money-lending livelihood as it was considered disgusting and switched to the learned professions where they rose to great heights of fame.