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Nira Wickramasinghe, historian and Professor at Leiden; her interests and output

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nira wickramasinghe 1 Nira Wickramasinghe nee Samarasinghe was educated in France, and Oxford University and taught at the Dept of History, Colombo University before she snared the prestigious post of Professor of Modern South Asian Studies at the Leiden University Institute for Area Studies — a new position facilitated in part by the Leiden University Fund (LUF) and designed to provide a contribution to this field for a period of five years in the form of the LUF Chair.

For her profile NIRA says : “My primary interests are identity politics, everyday life under colonialism and the relationship between state and society in modern South Asia. I have pursued these interests through investigation into such diverse themes as politics of dress, civil society, citizens and migrants, and objects of consumption. Trained as a historian, I have written on late colonial and modern Sri Lanka, using a variety of archives. In the last few years, my work has moved from a focus on national history albeit from a non-state perspective to an approach that contests the nation as a frame and attempts to capture other dimensions of belonging which might be best encapsulated in the term ‘‘post-national’’. I am currently working on a book on ordinary peoples’ encounter with the ‘‘modern’’ using as a lens machines such as the sewing machine, gramophone, tram and bicycle. In addition to my research and teaching I intervene regularly in public debates and contribute essays and op.eds to Opendemocracy and the Wall Street Journal.”

Local sources: For most of her 25-year academic career, historian Nira Wickramasinghe has been interested in the politics of non-elite groups. The focus of her work has been South Asia, and in particular Sri Lanka, in the late British Colonial period (late 19th and early 20th century). In the process, she has moved somewhat away from her classical training and concentrated on studying less well-known archival sources: ‘Documents written in local languages, such as petitions to the Colonial Government, reveal the concerns and grievances of ordinary people.’ This provides a counter-balance to the mainstream view of Sri Lankan late-Colonial politics as very peaceful, especially by comparison with the situation in India, for instance. The petitions show that there were tensions, even if these were not so apparent in official state documents. Nira Wickramasinghe: ‘These sources, often less used in mainstream historiography, allow us to consider the nature of identity politics, and the reason why political identity evolves in the way it does.’

The voice of the majority: In her inaugural lecture, spanning the border between history and politics, Prof. Wickramasinghe discussed what she refers to as the political imaginaries of the people in South Asia. ‘In particular of those groups who often form the majority, but who have not sufficiently been represented in the larger historical narrative, because their contribution to the process of transformation was not made visible enough.’ Once democracy enters the picture, these groups, being the majority, are suddenly given a voice, at which point, understanding the historical context of their issues and concerns becomes an invaluable tool for a deeper insight into current politics.

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