There is no such thing as 'the Sri Lankan diaspora'. Sri Lankan communities exist in the plural. And yet, nearly thirty years of conflict have rendered a nation with multiple minority communities and religions as though it has only two groups. If you generalise about what you read at all (and most people do), you are likely to believe that Sri Lanka's Sinhalese majority and Tamil minority are pitted against each other, not only inside the country but in diasporas all over the world.
While conflict and geographic dispersal present real challenges to Sri Lankan diasporas, this image of Sinhalese versus Tamil is far from the whole truth. Although the war ended with a decisive victory by government security forces over the LTTE in 2009, the reductive image remains: Sri Lanka, a nation with Sinhalese, Tamil, Muslim and Burgher communities, rarely appears that way. The media is not the only culprit. In the wake of that resounding military victory, both the Sri Lankan government and its critics have failed to engage Sri Lankan diasporas and to understand their complexity. Indeed, their collective actions have excluded diasporic populations.
Lankan diaspora histories often begin with 1983, when anti-Tamil violence and the rise of Tamil militancy led to the civil war that displaced hundreds of thousands of Tamils from the island. In fact, a longer and more complicated history of migration is responsible for today's Lankan diasporas. During the 1930s and 1940s, English-speaking upper-caste Ceylonese who worked in the British Empire's civil service formed diasporic settlements from Burma to Malaya.
After independence in 1948, new legislation disenfranchised Tamils of Indian origin, who had been brought in to work on colonial plantations during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Many members of that community were subsequently repatriated to India. An attempt to nationalise government administration with the 1956 Official Language Act ' popularly dubbed 'Sinhala Only' ' led to the migration of Ceylonese professionals of all communities who were not proficient in Sinhala. Large numbers of Burghers, the community of mixed Sri Lankan and European descent, migrated to Britain, Canada and Australia; Sinhalese, Tamil and Muslim professionals followed, accompanied by their families.