The maoist era of egalitarian collectivism has decidedly come to an end. Although some villages persist in developing cooperative enterprises, the collective is being transformed from a dominant organizational form to one that plays a subsidiary role to the private household sector. In effect, the collective has been relegated to the position formerly held by the private sector. Everywhere the emphasis is on economic growth based on household production and marketlike forces. What is the relationship between these institutional changes and economic growth?

Sri lanka's inability to contain ethnic violence as it escalated from sporadic terrorism to mob violence to civil war in recent years has disheartened observers who had looked to the nation as a success story of social and political development. In retrospect, Sri Lanka lacked effective local institutions to integrate the society, and the Sinhalese elite relied on welfare and preferential policies for the Sinhalese majority to maintain power. These alienated the minorities and resulted in Tamil demands for a separate state. This article documents one of the more intractable areas in which ethnic conflict has arisen, land “colonization.” Both major parties competed for the votes of the Sinhalese, but the creation of agricultural settlements in the undeveloped interior of the island, or colonization, is associated primarily with the United National Party (UNP). During the UNP government of recently retired President Junius Richard Jayewardene (1977–88), both the level of violence and the pace of colonization in the Dry Zone between the Sinhalese and Tamil majority areas increased.

The Ethnic conflict in Sri Lanka has aroused increasing international attention. The demands of the Sri Lankan Tamil ethnoregional movement for greater independence from the Sinhalese-dominated center developed through various stages into a call for a separate state in the mid-1970s. This was followed by an increase in the use of organized violence by both sides in the conflict. Most recently, the continued resistance of core Tamil militants to Indian attempts to institute a solution within a united SriLanka has emphasized the independent indigenous roots and powerful motivating vision of the call for a separate state.

In the same year (1968) that students blockaded the streets of Paris, the formerly somnolent Jaffna Peninsula—the center of Tamil culture in Sri Lanka—was rocked by its own version of civil unrest. Led by an activist affiliated with the “Peking wing” of the Ceylon Communist party, several hundred “Minority Tamils” (mainly of the traditionally “untouchable” Paḷḷar and Naḻavar castes) sat in nonviolent protest (satyagrãha) before the gates of Jaffna's most orthodox Hindu temple, the temple of Lord Kandacami (Skanda) in the village called Maviddapuram. Hindus believe this large and beautiful structure represents the very ideal of the reformed Śaivite temple advocated by Arumuka Navalar (1822–79), Jaffna's champion Hindu reformer. Traditionally closed to untouchables, the Brahman-owned temple provided the setting for a two-week campaign to gain admittance that was timed to coincide with the temple's summer festival. After days of tense but peaceful confrontation, the demonstration turned violent as dozens of self-styled “Defenders of Saivism,” Hindus of high-caste rank (Veḷḷāḷars and their domestic servants, the Kōviyars), beat back the Minority Tamils with iron rods and sand-filled bottles. Feelings ran very high throughout the peninsula, and there were many incidents of violence, some lethal. To many Tamils and outside observers, it seemed as though Jaffna was poised on the brink of an all-out war between the castes (see, for example, Fontgalland 1968). Yet the conflict abated, and although there were temple-entry skirmishes in Jaffna as late as 1978, the Maviddapuram fracas was followed by a process of political unification as the Tamil community—Veḷḷāḷars and Minority Tamils alike—joined hands to contest the declining fortunes of Tamils in a country dominated by Sinhalese.