Sirimavo Bandaranaike, First Woman Elected as Head of Government (ep. 16.20)

Sri Lanka is an island country off the southeast coast of India.

Its position made it valuable across the millennia for anyone who was interested in a trade route around the Indian Ocean.

Sri Lanka had many monarchies, and I'm skipping over a lot before we get to the early modern period when they attracted the interest of the Portuguese, and then the Dutch, and then the British.

As a British colony, the island was known as Ceylon.

By 1931, they had universal adult voting rights, including for women.

By 1948, they had independence from the British, but they were still called Ceylon.

In 1956, a man named Solomon West Ridgeway Dias Bandaranaike was elected as Ceylon's fourth prime minister.

His name is a mouthful, which is why he is often referred to as SWRD Bandaranaike.

You may have guessed from the name that he was a pretty westernized Sri Lankan.

He came from a wealthy family, had a private English tutor, and attended Oxford University in England.

During his campaign, he promised to remove English as the official language within 24 hours, and he did.

For many people, this was an assertion of independence and identity.

It was proof that they were no longer a British colony, though actually they had not been a colony for a while now.

The problem was that SWRD replaced English with Sinhala as the sole official language.

Sinhala is spoken by the majority of Sri Lankans, but there is a sizable minority of Tamil speakers, not to mention some other smaller ethnic groups as well.

The Tamil were not at all impressed with the idea of Sinhala as the only official language, and the stage was set for further tensions.

The Sinhala tended to be Buddhist and the Tamil tended to be Hindu, though after centuries of foreign influence, there were a fair number of Christians and Muslims mixed in with both ethnicities.

The Christians included the Bandaranaike family, so that was complicated, too.

SWRD also instituted a number of socialist reforms intended to swing away from the capitalist English systems that had been imposed during the colonial period.

There is no knowing how any of this would have turned out for Sri Lanka because on Friday, September 25th, 1959, a Buddhist monk waited for his turn to present a petition to the prime minister, and when SWRD appeared, the monk pulled out a revolver from under his robes and shot the prime minister dead.