In approaching Martin Luther King Jr., Day, I inevitably think about the politics of figures and the generation of King and Malcolm X. That generation and the Black politics they engendered had a lasting impact on the US and the World more broadly. Coming with decolonisation in Africa and elsewhere, King, Malcolm X, the radical youth they inspired and their contemporaries such as Frantz Fanon and C.L.R. James transformed our conceptions of race and class, advancing anti-imperialist and anti-colonial visions to engage formidable questions of Black politics in the West. In a piece written with Jinee Lokaneeta as part of the monthly column ‘Beyond Boundaries’ of the South Asia Solidarity Initiative (SASI), in the South Asian Magazine for Action and Reflection (SAMAR), we began with Manning Marable and C.L.R. James, and the importance of a turn towards critical solidarity engaging questions of race and class.

Here, I want to think about the contributions of South Asian intellectuals, or more specifically Lankan intellectuals in the context of Black and Third World politics. In fact, there are two major Lankan intellectuals belonging to that generation of King and Malcolm X, who are increasingly not known to the younger generations of Lankans. A. Sivanandan, the editor of Race and Class and Director of the Institute of Race Relations  in London and the late Archie W. Singham, long-time intellectual and professor based in New York are two such figures who have made a major mark in Black politics. Indeed, they can give us a sense of the possibilities of political struggle and the historical and philosophical potential of Black politics. It is my contention that engaging the politics of Sivanandan and Singham is all the more important at the current moment, as South Asians in the Diaspora are increasingly becoming agents of Western power despite the shifting terrain of politics in the West with the global economic crisis.

There is a long tradition of Left politics in Lanka influenced by internationalist solidarity. The leaders of the first major Left political party, the Lanka Sama Samaja Party (LSSP), which had an anti-colonial and anti-imperialist stand, were greatly influenced by early twentieth century Left politics in the West. While Philip Gunawardena was educated in the US, N.M. Perera and Colvin R. de Silva were educated in Britain, and they brought Left politics with a Trotskyite bent to colonial Ceylon. However, that was also a time when the Left movements in the West had problematic positions on the question of race. And perhaps that added to the limited vision of the LSSP on issues of social exclusion, particularly that of caste and gender. It would take the next generation in the Communist Party to engage caste struggles, particularly in the caste-ridden Tamil community in Jaffna. It was in the 1970s into the 1980s, that the Feminist movement would make some considerable interventions in the context of insurrections and civil war, where women increasingly bore the devastating effects of armed conflict.

In the 1970s, sections of the Tamil militant movement were influenced by the politics in Palestine and other national liberation movements in the Third World. However, for those militants, the priorities of militarisation and seeing the West as only a place to collect funds for arms at home, led to disengagement with internationalist politics, internecine conflict and the eventual turn of the LTTE towards a fascist political culture resulting in the disastrous situation for Tamil politics.

The current generation of Lankans and South Asian Diaspora activists, unless directly engaged with the issues of race and class in the West are facing the prospects of being appropriated by the Western establishment. They are enticed by the problematic claim that Western pressure can create progressive change in South Asia. This to me is a dangerous trend, and all the more reason to engage the politics of Sivanandan and Singham.

I was fortunate during the summer of 2002 to interview Sivanandan and Nirmala Rajasingam for lines magazine  while visiting London. Nirmala  belonged to that militant movement generation, and was educated in the US in the early 1970s and was greatly influenced by Feminist and Black politics. After returning to Jaffna, she shook Jaffna society, spent two long years in prison and was eventually exiled where she put forward a powerful critique of Tamil nationalism and the LTTE. Over the last decade, my own activism has been greatly influenced by working closely with Nirmala in the Sri Lanka Democracy Forum (SLDF).

Sivanandan’s major contribution was in the UK, where over the last fifty years he has become an important figure in Black politics. Here is a sense of Sivanandan’s framing of Black as a political colour, the legacy of colonialism and the challenges facing working class immigrants, from when I spoke to him a decade ago:

If you are to be historically specific then of course the colonial period is very important in understanding the genesis of a Black-qua-Black politics in Britain. This is unique. Nowhere else in the world has Black become a political colour. I am asked why I am here, and I reply that I am here because you were there. That is the circuit of capitalism. The labor was there and the capital was in Britain. Most of the workers who came to Britain were from the ex-colonies. Secondly, we came in as citizens of the Commonwealth and, therefore, of Britain. And because we were citizens they could not deport us. Unlike in Germany, where the Turkish immigrants are not citizens but “guest workers”, we fought because we were able to fight. The whole range of immigration acts that came into being after 1962, was a way of de-citizenizing the commonwealth. With the racist immigration acts came the end of citizenship. Thirdly, we all had a common language in English. Of course some of the working class who came from India did not speak fluent English, but we had enough to communicate with each other. That is what we had in common—citizenship and language. But what separated us was the colonial division of labour. The Indians went to the steel mills and textile mills, the Afro-Caribbeans to the service sector as transport workers, nurses etc. In the early post war years the discrimination was undifferentiated, whether we were Asians, Afro-Caribbeans or Africans. We couldn’t find housing so we all lived in the inner city ghettos. So, although we could not fraternize with each other on the factory floor, we fraternized with each other in the community. We had our own little shops, self help groups. The churches and Temples were important places of education and organization. And, even though the trade unions were very racist, Black workers were able to set up their own Unions and help each other. That brought the Asians and West Indians together. As a people and a class. And as a people for a class and that was the birth of Black! And Black became the color of our politics. We were influenced by the post-colonial struggles taking place in Africa. And culture became important. Culture not as multi-culturalism, (i.e. custom, habit) but culture as a site of struggle. The state tried to break up Black, into its constituent parts because it became threatening. In 1981 the Black youth burned down the inner cities, because of racism and the impossibility of their living conditions. And multiculturalism came to be institutionalized as government policy—to alleviate the disadvantages of the second generation. The thinking was that there was really no racism in our society, it is only that we don’t understand each other’s culture. Multiculturalism began with the schools and, funded by local authorities and government, it spread to housing, employment and so on. And that is how Black was broken into its constituent parts. So, the Asians said we are Asians and the Afro-Caribbeans said, we are not Africans we are Caribbeans and the official terminology now referred to them as Asians and Blacks.

Sivanandan’s reflections on Black politics in the 1980s in the UK parallel similar challenges in the US. In the 1980s prior to his death in 1991 at the age of 58, Singham taught in New York and was on the editorial board of the The Nation. And even now, I hear about Singham and his intellectual presence few decades back at the City University of New York. However, I have yet to find an adequate biographical and political sketch of Singham and his intellectual contribution. Regardless, he is no doubt a significant and committed Lankan intellectual.

After Singham’s move to the US for education in the 1950s, he eventually made a major mark with his solidarity work in support of decolonisation and non-alignment, and particularly with post-colonial politics in the Caribbean, where he found comrades among many political leaders and intellectuals including Michael Manley and C.L.R. James. He had a ten year long teaching stint at the University of West Indies, he introduced Caribbean Studies into that famous school which produced generations of African American intellectuals, Howard University and then eventually taught at Brooklyn College, City University of New York. Such a teaching career paralleled his important writings on decolonisation and non-alignment, not to mention the decades of political activism struggling for Third World solidarity in the context of US imperialist interventions.

I want to end this short piece introducing the intellectual contributions of Lankans in Black politics by providing a sense of Singham’s intellectual thinking. He received the Distinguished Service Award of the West Indies Guild of Graduates, an award also given earlier to C.L.R. James. In the address, on the occasion of the award given on 21st October 1989 titled, ‘James and the Creation of a Caribbean Intellectual Tradition’, Singham reiterated the intellectual commitment towards engaging the conflicts of the day and a conscious philosophy of history:

By any intellectual standards, the Caribbean has been a region that has made a considerable contribution to the making of the modern world. One of its most distinguished sons, C.L.R. James, gave us some reasons for the region’s uniqueness when he insisted that the Caribbean was the first “modern” society created by Europe outside of Europe. Furthermore, the Caribbean is not simply a by product of European society, but one populated by fragments of Africa, Asia, the Americas and, incidentally, Europe. The brown gold – sugar – of the Indies provided the material base for the modern Caribbean, and contributed to the enrichment of Europe after colonization. As James lamented later, the pillage of the colonies in Africa, Asia and the Americas resulted in the destruction of the indigenous intellectual tradition and left the settler societies within the Caribbean with little to pursue. I argued in my earlier work (The Hero and the Crowd in a Colonial Polity) that the Caribbean was the first totalitarian society in the modern world. The plantation system along with slavery, racism, and indentured labour, did not provide the foundations for a rich intellectual life. Yet this small region with these repressive institutions has given the world a C.L.R. James, an Arthur Lewis, a Nicolas Guillen, and an Aime Cesaire. James had also noted that “the first fact about the matter is that the future of the Caribbean depends upon the future of the world in which we live. The Caribbean does not shape the world, it is the world that shapes the Caribbean.” In the characteristic fashion of the great teacher that James was, he advises the next generation of Caribbean intellectuals that they have to do something more than write doctoral theses that no one reads. He says “following Heidegger, the current day intellectuals get their PhDs, but what they have written is of no value whatsoever. Unless their writers and teachers are taking part in the great philosophical conflicts of the day, they are unable to understand the problems and solutions attempted by Socrates, Aristotle, Ibn Kaldoun, etc.” He then closes his statement by insisting that “furthermore one must not only be involved in the conflicts of the day, one must have a quite conscious philosophy of history.”