Sri Lanka, Feb. 15 -- The first part of this article published last week briefly outlined the history of Sri Lanka's national anthem being sung in Tamil. In this second and final part, the focus would be on the regress and progress of the national anthem rendition in Tamil over the years. As stated earlier the Tamil national anthem issue is in a sense symptomatic of the escalating ethnic crisis in Sri Lanka.
All things changed utterly in Sri Lanka as the ethnic conflict escalated and the Sinhala and Tamil communities slowly drifted apart. Before 1956 almost every major school in Jaffna had Sinhala teachers (many of them Buddhist priests) to teach
The lyrics of the tamil version of the national anthem, namely 'Sri Lanka Thaayae'
Sinhala ...