The Cultural Substructure of Eelam
Ruben Nagesparan Chandrakumar, BS
Every country has a history and a culture which forms out of that history. The environment, the experiences within that environment, and the accompanying stories, symbols, arts, and values which arise all form the essence of the culture. Certain countries and peoples have been more isolated than others, while many have engaged heavily in cultural exchange, ethnic intermixing, and globalizing processes for thousands of years.
As Jung brilliantly noted in his analysis of the individual and the collective, the psychological structure involves a conscious and an unconscious. Each nation has a unique collective unconscious particular to its culture, in the same manner that an individual has a unique unconscious particular to their personality; in many ways, culture can be viewed as a macro-personality.
As Jordan Peterson has described, the deepest sense of the psyche is the religious; underneath the religious lie the psychological, philosophical, and political. Thus, at the crux of the culture lies the religious substructure; traditionally, within the West, this has taken the form of the Judeo-Christian ethos. Within the East, there are multiple interpretations; yet, the Dharmic religions have remained dominant in much of the Indian subcontinent. While there has been an influx of Christian and Islamic influence due to invasions, European colonialism, and other factors, still the majority of the subcontinent—namely India, Nepal, Bhutan, Eelam, and Sri Lanka—adhere to Dharmic religions.
Within Eelam, the Christian influences were largely the result of European colonialism, and the Islamic influences are disputed—with some believing they were due to Arab traders intermarrying with the local population and others believing the ancestors were of Indian origin. The demographics of Eelam are largely comprised of the traditions of Hinduism, Buddhism, Christianity, and Islam. Within this demographic, several opportunities and potential problems arise.
The majority Hindu culture still has issues to undergo with eradicating the caste system as it exists and transforming the social hierarchies to be more flexible—allowing for individual and familial fluctuations in status. The Buddhist culture also must reckon with its past roles in the violence of the country—potentially adapting to something more akin to the Mahayana tradition. The Christian and Islamic cultures must realize the potential for tyrannical interpretations to take hold and fundamentalism to rise, given the emphasis on the two sacred texts—the Bible and the Quran. Yet, within this collection of diverse traditions, the potential for serving as a model that merges the Dharmic and Abrahamic worldviews arises—which recognizes the commonalities of morality that emerge from the collective unconscious while maintaining a healthy respect for varying interpretations, within limit. While utopia is a futile goal, Eelam could become a nation that serves as a beacon to the globe, demonstrating an enlightened overarching philosophy that could reconcile the seemingly impossible incompatibilities of the traditions. This reconciliation would be akin to the a priori philosophical framework which was, both unconsciously and consciously, adopted by much of the globe in the aftermath of World War II and the Holocaust, forming international laws and human rights that recognized actions such as genocide as morally indefensible.
Hinduism’s majority culture would combine historic literature, arts, cultures, stories, and leaders to create this architecture. However, the need to integrate the articulated Enlightenment ideals of the West—which have also appeared in the Dharmic tradition and the subcontinent thousands of years ago—is a necessity to undertake this task. The only way Eelam can achieve a status of respectability in its philosophical and practical orientation is by allowing the freedom to speak and disagree—embracing secular principles while not abandoning the religious worldview. By doing so, the nuances and truth of history and reality can be sought. With limitless multiculturalism, there is no uniting essence which binds together the nation. This is, in fact, both the critique of Postmodernism and subjectivism: the claim that a wholly individualistic culture would fragment as everyone would “become their own church,” as Peterson remarked about the Catholic criticism of Protestantism. The bounded diversity of thought would need a unitary legal system, which has no separate laws dependent upon religion, reflecting the philosophical framework underlying the creation of international human rights law—yet particular to the culture of Eelam.