K. M . de Silva reviewing Gerald H. Peiris: Political Conflict in South Asia, University of Peradeniya Press, Kandy, Sri Lanka, 2013, pp. i-vi; 1-251

Professor G. H. Peiris has grappled with several difficult themes and in working the essence of these, as he saw them into an outstanding monograph, he has made an important contribution to scholarship.  In writing on political conflict in South Asia he has produced, a study of a political system that has evolved mostly under British rule from the eighteenth century to the middle of the twentieth century when the transfer of power from the British to indigenous hands took place.  Naturally this monograph includes a survey of territories that formed what was called the Raj or the British Raj: there are also parts of the British empire located in South Asia, like Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), and other even smaller states such as the Maldives that were not part of the Raj, but were linked to formally or informally.  There were other territories close to the Raj, for example, the Kingdom of Nepal (now the Republic of Nepal).  The last time a Sri Lankan, indeed a South Asian, scholar attempted a survey of a range of territories in South Asia as varied as those in Professor Peiris’s monograph was the late Stanley J. Tambiah with his Leveling Crowds: Ethnonationalist Conflicts and Collective Violence in South Asia, published by the University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles in 1996. Continue reading →