Category Archives: commoditification

April 24, 2023 · 7:35 pm

Sinhala Village Roots and Jungle Lore at Discerning Depth

Sugath Kulatunga, 

responding to an Invitation from The Editor, Thuppahi after the latter had seen an extract of this detailed and invaluable autobiography in Facebook in 2023 **

1/10/2014: Written for the reading pleasure of my grandchildren.

As a child and in school:

I am very fortunate to have been brought up as a small child in a rural village in the Kalutara District of Sri Lanka, in a setting under relatively comfortable and caring conditions. I was the number two of three brothers and two younger sisters. Two more brothers were added to the family later on. We were the masters of our time and life was totally carefree. Our parents had an abundance of time for us. In addition, most of the time during the early childhood we had my mother’s sisters, who adored us, staying with the family. We also had the loving but respectful attention of the senior schoolgirls.

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April 2, 2023 · 1:13 am

British Ceylon Deciphered by Stress on the Deep Structures of Social Togetherness

Uditha Devapriya, in The Island on 24 March 2023, with this title “Sri Lanka under British rule: Neither Gemeinschaft nor Gesellschaft”

Since at least Marx and Malinowski, anthropologists have been fascinated by, and focused on, the links between “primitive-tribal” and “modern-secular” societies. I use these terms with a pinch of salt – hence the asterisks – for the simple reason that no society can be said to fit one case or the other. In its initial phase the social sciences did, admittedly, distinguish between the two, and took the teleological position that the one would lead to another: hence Ferdinand Tönnies’s idea of a progression from Gemeinschaft to Gesellschaft. Such progressions were depicted as long, eventual, but inevitable, and were accepted widely at a time when Europe, the harbinger of industrialisation and colonialism, had consolidated its position as the main, if not sole, locomotive of world history.

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March 31, 2023 · 3:29 am

The Origins of Burgher & Malay Surnames in Colonial Ceylon

Author Unknown … sent to Thuppahi by Kodi Kodituwakku of Chandos St, Fort, Galle

The Ceylon Burgher Community is the finest exponent of this European onoma-tology in Sri Lanka, as the members of the community carry some of the world’s rarest surnames which at present verge on extinction. The ancestors of the Dutch Burghers were not necessaril.y Dutch by ethnic origin as the Dutch East India Company [recruited] hundreds of mercenaries from all parts of Europe who later reached the shores of Lanka to strengthen the Dutch garrisons on the Island. These Europeans later espoused local women and paved the way for the Lankan Eurasian Community, which later came to be known as ‘Dutch Burghers’ meaning ‘Town Dwellers’.

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March 18, 2023 · 9:29 pm

People Inbetween: Ethnic & Class Prejudices in British Ceylon

Michael Roberts … Content of His Talk on this topic at the National Trust in Colombo in June 2018 

The National Trust’s brief was for me to present motifs from the book People Inbetween. The Burghers and the Middle Class in the Transformations within Sri Lanka, 1790-1960s, (Ratmalana, Sarvodaya Book Publishing Services, 1989) and more specifically its first chapter viz. “Pejorative Phrases: the Anti-colonial Response and Sinhala Perceptions of the Self through Images of the Burghers” 

Many think People Inbetween is a history of the Burghers. Not so. It is multi-faceted. It describes (a) the rise of the middle class in British times, an influential force within which the Burghers were a critical element and a vanguard in the questioning of British rule; (b) the initial strands in the development of Ceylonese nationalism and (c) the development of Colombo into a metropolitan hub that became the island’s hegemonic centre.

 

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January 12, 2023 · 10:41 pm

Female Attire in Sri Lanka and AK Coomaraswamy

Laleen Jayamanne, in The Island, 28 December 2022, reviewing Ayesha Wickramasinghe’s ‘The Dress of Women in Sri Lanka’

Dr. Ayesha Wickramasinghe, a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Textile and Apparel Engineering, at the University of Moratuwa, has recently published her doctoral research on sartorial styles, The Dress of Women in Sri Lanka (2021), in a handsomely designed hardcover book. The historical information, which spans the colonial and the postcolonial periods, with glances at the ancient past, is presented as a cultural survey, in an engaging manner, with a large number of photographs embedded, in the text, as illustrations. It has been published by The National Science Foundation and has recently received a national award as well.

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December 29, 2022 · 11:29 pm

Rukmani Devi aka Daisy Rasammah Daniels: A Stellar Career

Wikipedia on Daisy Rasammah Daniels or Rukmani Devi … at … https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rukmani_Devi

 Daisy Rasammah Daniels, known popularly as Rukmani Devi (15 January 1923–28 October 1978: Sinhala: රුක්මණී දේවී) was a Sri Lankan film actress and singer, who was often acclaimed as “The Nightingale of Sri Lanka“.[1]

She made it to the silver screen via the stage and had acted in close to 100 films at the time of her death. Having an equal passion for singing as well as a melodious voice, she was Sri Lanka’s foremost female singer in the gramophone era.[2] After her death, she was awarded the Sarasaviya ‘Rana Thisara’- Life Time Achievement Award at the 1979 Sarasaviya Awards Festival.[3]

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December 27, 2022 · 12:22 am

Fraternal Polyandry in Ceylon in Dutch Times

Jan Kok, Luc Bulten and Bente M. de Leede:

“Persecuted or permitted? Fraternal Polyandry in a Calvinist colony, Sri Lanka (Ceylon), seventeenth and eighteenth centuries,” a work published by Cambridge University Press, 2022 … presented here in Thuppahi in synopsis

Abstract: Several studies assume that Calvinist Christianity severely undermined or even persecuted the practice of polyandry in the Sri Lankan areas under Dutch control. We analyze Dutch colonial policy and Church activities toward polyandry by combining ecclesiastical and legal sources. Moreover, we use the Dutch colonial administration of the Sinhalese population to estimate the prevalence of polyandry. We conclude that polyandry was far from extinct by the end of the Dutch period and we argue that the colonial government was simply not knowledgeable, interested and effective enough to persecute the practice in the rural areas under its control.

 

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December 11, 2022 · 7:03 pm

Glenquarry Farm: In The Steps of Don Bradman

If so motivated and financially capable, one can rent out Glenquarry Farm at 117 Sheok Rd, Crafers West, off Adelaide, for only (!@#!) …. and bask in the imaginary footsteps of the one and only Don Bradman.

 

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December 4, 2022 · 12:01 pm

Caste in Jaffna

Prashanth Kuganathan** whose title runs thus: “Social Stratification in Jaffna: A Survey of Recent Research on Caste”

A SYNOPSIS: Since 1983, war has dominated the perception of Sri Lanka. This has affected scholarship on the country, such that the subjects of an overwhelming number of research proposals and publications have been on the war and the prospects and prescriptions for peace. This survey paper is an attempt to locate the system of caste in transition in the Jaffna Peninsula by reviewing recent literature written after the commencement of the war. While detailed ethnographies of caste in Jaffna may have temporarily come to a halt, caste practices have not and remain a salient part of everyday life among the Tamils in Sri Lanka. As the war ended in 2009, it is therefore important that social scientists on Sri Lanka revisit the topic of caste, that is an integral part of not just Tamil culture or society, but being Tamil itself. As the study of caste is dominated by research in India, a microanalysis of Jaffna and Sri Lanka, particularly the nuances of this system in transition due to war and militancy, could contribute to the macro-study of caste at a sub-continental perspective.

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December 3, 2022 · 6:26 pm

The Story of a Masterpiece … and Its Painter Donald Friend

Dr Srilal Fernando, in The CEYLANKAN. Journal No, 100, November 2022, pp. 41-43

In 1969 James Gleeson, a well-respected authority on Australian painting, wrote a book called the Masterpieces of Australian Painting. It covered a full range of Australian painting from the colonial period up to the 1960’s. Of the nearly 75 artists selected, one was Donald Friend, who as most of the readers know spent 5 years in Ceylon, as a guest of Bevis Bawa. Of all the paintings by Friend he selected one which was titled The Puppets.

 

The painting done in 1965 in Australia after returning from Ceylon by Donald Friend, but before he settled down in Bali.

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