My Top 3 Off Campus Adventures
There are a ton of reasons why I chose Tufts (amazing students and professors, a collaborative atmosphere, a beautiful campus to name a few) and…
Growing up in post-colonial Sri Lanka was, in many ways, a confusing experience.
It was only recently that our little nation gained independence from a colonial regime that lasted well over 300 years. Sri Lanka’s prime location at a crossroads between sea-routes joining the East to the West made it an ideal trading port, and as such, our country came under Portuguese, Dutch, and most notably, British rule.
Even decades after our independence, Sri Lankan society is still trapped in a colonial mindset. Despite years of revolution against the British rule fueled by nationalistic pride, we are still guilty of idealizing Western culture. There is a distinct class of Lankan society that has an overtly sympathetic view of our time as a colony and embraces Western culture, sometimes even going to the extreme of shunning our local language, customs, and traditions. On the other hand, there is also a class that is bitterly against all past and future Western influence, holding on to our religion, our language, our culture with fierce nationalistic pride and deriding all Western sympathizers.
Having been born and raised in a very traditional Sri Lankan family but having been educated among this class of westernized society, I always found myself awkwardly straddling this subtle class divide.
As a child, I didn’t understand why we didn’t converse in English at home like my friends from school did, why we didn’t read the Sunday Observer on weekends instead of the local Sinhalese newspaper, or why my father wore sarongs instead of shirts and trousers and mother wore saris instead of dresses. I hated how my name was painfully traditional, instead of an easy-to-pronounce anglicized moniker. With time, I came to grudgingly accept the fact that I will never be one of them.
Ever since coming to the United States, this grudging acceptance has become something akin to full-blown pride.
Because here I am, in the heart of the Western culture that our people aspire to, and what do I observe? Chinese-Americans, ruing how they never grew up speaking their language and striving to master it; South Asian-Americans, celebrating traditional festivals with pride and holding fast to their customs and religions; African-Americans, fiercely proud of their history and their origins.
Here are people born and raised in American soil, with every right to embrace the culture of their adopted country but still holding fast to their own roots. I think back to our people, trying to live out a facsimile of the lives of our colonial masters and losing the richness of our indigenous culture, our heritage of a proud history spanning two millennia, our unique language. I am equally culpable, having grown up chasing a false ideal and taking what I already had for granted.
I realize now that I will never truly relate to this country or its culture, or that of any other my path may lead to, as much as I do to the one I grew up in. No, I don’t carry around mementos of my home country, I don’t surround myself with pictures of its scenic beauty. I no longer write in my native tongue and hardly chance to speak it. I don’t wear national pride on my sleeve or my social media. But I know that I am never more welcome elsewhere than on its soft sands and familiar tropical heat. I treasure the fact that I will always have a home to which I can return, confident that I will always be accepted.
And I am only beginning to understand how much of a privilege that is.
There are a ton of reasons why I chose Tufts (amazing students and professors, a collaborative atmosphere, a beautiful campus to name a few) and…