Brothers of the Pure Sinhala Fraternity

“By my reading, anticolonial nationalism creates its own domain of sovereignty within colonial society well before it begins its political battle with the imperial power,” writes Partha Chatterjee inThe Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories. Before persons form anticolonial political movements, native intellectuals carve out unique spaces that Chatterjee designates the “inner domain.” The inner domain is a realm of authentic culture that native intellectuals imagine to remain untouched by colonialism.¹ One of the main contributions of Chatterjee’s theory is the way it assigns a new starting place—cultural reform—for conventional histories of colonial-era nationalism, histories