The Composition of Sri Lanka Island

Sri Lanka, is an island country in South Asia, located southeast of India and northeast of the Maldives. Located near the southern tip of India, the tropical island of Sri Lanka has attracted visitors for centuries with its natural beauty. It is home to many cultures, languages and diverse ethnicities. The majority of the population is from the Sinhalese ethnicity, while a large minority of Tamils have also played an influential role in the island’s intriguing history. But it has been scarred by a long and bitter civil war arising out of ethnic tensions between the majority Sinhalese and the Tamil minority in the northeast. After more than 25 years of violence the war ended in May 2009, when government forces seized the last area controlled by Tamil Tiger rebels.

The island fell under Portuguese and Dutch influence after the 16th century. It gained its independence in 1948, after nearly 150 years of the British rule. Sri Lanka’s documented history lasts 3,000 years, with evidence of prehistoric human settlements recorded back to at least 125,000 years. It has a rich cultural heritage and the first known Buddhist writings of Sri Lanka, the Pali Canon, date back to the Fourth Buddhist council in 29 BC. Its geographic location and deep harbours made it of great strategic importance from the time of the ancient Silk Road through to the modern Maritime Silk Road. The Indo-Aryan emigration from India in the 5th century B.C. came to form the largest ethnic group on Sri Lanka today, the Sinhalese. Tamils, the second-largest ethnic group on the island, were originally from the Tamil region of India and emigrated between the 3rd century B.C. and A.D. 1200. Until colonial powers controlled Ceylon (the country’s name until 1972), Sinhalese and Tamil rulers fought for dominance over the island. The Tamils, primarily Hindus, claimed the northern section of the island and the Sinhalese, who are predominantly Buddhist, controlled the south. In 1505 the Portuguese took possession of Ceylon until the Dutch India Company usurped control (1658–1796).

The British took over in 1796, and Ceylon became an English Crown colony in 1802. The British developed coffee, tea, and rubber plantations. On Feb. 4, 1948, after pressure from Ceylonese nationalist leaders (which briefly unified the Tamil and Sinhalese), Ceylon became a self-governing dominion of the Commonwealth of Nations. Maithripala Sirisena, born 3 September 1951) is a Sri Lankan politician who is the 7th and current President of Sri Lanka, since 2015. Although born in the Western Province, Sirisena hails from the North Central Province of the country and is the first president from that province. He is an agriculturist and does not belong to the Sri Lankan political elite. Sirisena joined mainstream politics in 1989 as a member of the Parliament of Sri Lanka and has held several ministries since 1994. He was the general-secretary of the Sri Lanka Freedom Party and was Minister of Health until November 2014 when he announced his candidacy for the 2015 presidential election as the opposition coalition’s “common candidate”.