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It appears that until 1824 Sinhalese and Tamils were perceived not as clear-cut ethnic groups but first and foremost as members of a number of caste groups of various sizes. At the same time, categorical confusion and indeterminacy in the pre-1871 censuses also reflect the absence of a modern scientific, race-based system of classification. When juxtaposed with the later scientific censuses, they tell a story of how the [colonial racial
imagination] was developed and articulated with local categories. For, by the 1881 census, there was a clear consolidation of race-based communal differences.
There were only seven `races` left, namely, Europeans, Sinhalese, Tamils, Moormen, Malays, Veddas, and Others. From then on `races` rather than castes became the main category of classification, and identity was more or less fixed territorially as well. As I have argued elsewhere (Rajasingham-Senanayake 1992), race conceptions of ethnic difference functioned as a deep and invisible time-line for positing internal or genotypal sameness in the face of phenotypal changes, mixing or miscegenation or hybridity.
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