98 SOCIAL SCIENTIST Born in 1864 and subjected during his English education to a strong dose of Christian proselytizing, he acquired a deep hostility to cultural Westernization and political subjugation. He came under the influence of expatriates like Olcott and, resigning his government job as a clerk, plunged into religious, cultural and welfare activities. As a Buddhist evangelist he travelled and lectured widely in America, Europe and Asia. He became a constant critic of the Western presence;l produced a strongly nationalist newspaper (which was banned at times); and extolled the past greatness of the Sri Lankan people, whilst lamenting their modern state of "poverty, misery, indolence and subservience". He wrote: "The Sinhalese must wake up from their slumber. Blessed island is Ceylon. I will go from town to town declaring the greatness of our ancestors... we were a great people".2 Nationalists and Marxists Dharmapala attacked the Western-educated and Western-oriented Sri Lankans as a "useless entity^. His aggressive nationalist ideology was taken up by many journalists, pamphleteers, playwrights and novelists and helped to form a strongly nationalist conciousness among, in particular, the Sri Lankan-educated lower middle class, which included school teachers, traditional physicians, small landowners and traders. On the whole, these nationalist vie\vs did not make a deep impact on the anglicized upper classes, the classes to whom the British handed power at the time of independence in 1948. Another important counter-view was provided by the Marxist parties in Sri Lanka. The first, the Lanka Sama Samaja Party (LSSP), formed in 1935 by intellectuals returning from the West, pioneered Marxism in Sri Lanka, becoming Trotskyite in the late 1930s as a protest against the Moscow trials. In time, the LSSP gave way to a process of splintering, resulting, for example, in 1943 in the Communist Party, and in 1950 the Viplavakari Lanka Sama Samaja Party (revolutionary LSSP). This splintering factionalism continued within the general Marxist fold in the following decades and more small parties emerged. Although professing different versions of Marxism and in spite of disunity, the Marxists were an important and powerful group that shaped the ideology of the Sri Lankan masses, especially those in urban areas. In the first general election, held in 1947 prior to independence, the Marxist parties won eighteen of the fifty-one seats that they contested, out of a total of ninety-five parliamentary seats. The Marxist counter-view is well known and does not require repetition here. I need only say that the Marxist party provided an important and crucial counter-ideology of increasing relevance to that put forward by the ruling colonial ideology. When Sri Lanka obtained independence in 1948, power was not handed over to any of the strata that provided counter-views to the ruling colonial ideology, but to that group represented by the United National Party (UNP), which was the most Westernized and which represented the