Amateur Camerawork by Michael Roberts, in Early April 2023
I was fortunate to benefit from the hospitality of Moninna and Gamini Goonewardena of Parawa Street and took the opportunity to record some of the work with autistic teenagers & children that was conducted at ECSAT in Wakwella Rd on the Friday (easily the most vital event during my stay).
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Shamara Wettimuny in Financial Times, 12 April 2023 … with highlighting added by The Editor, Thuppahi
On a muggy Friday afternoon, the auditorium of the National Library of Sri Lanka slowly filled with an eager audience from Colombo, the Hill Country and beyond. It was the launch of a book by Associate Professor of Anthropology, Dr. Mythri Jegathesan, of Santa Clara University.
Mythri Jegathesan
Her book, a work on and of solidarity with the Hill Country Tamils of Sri Lanka, ‘Tea and Solidarity: Tamil Women and Work in Post-war Sri Lanka’ was originally published by the University of Washington Press in 2019 to widespread acclaim. It was awarded the 2020 Diane Forsyth Prize for the best book featuring feminist anthropology research and in 2021, it won the Michelle Z. Rosaldo Book Prize for its significant contribution to feminist anthropology.
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TULANA is a Sri Lanka Jesuit Province Apostolate mandated by the Superiors and founded in 1974 by its current Director, the Asian Jesuit Theologian, Indologist and Buddhist Scholar, Fr. Aloysius Pieris, s.j.
“The name TULANA has its roots in Sanskrit and means four things taken together: elevation, weighing, comparing and deciding for the weightier things – in short DISCERNMENT.”
Revd Aloysius Peiris, s.j.
Its primary founding motivation was as a response to two challenges – the challenge of the spirituality and philosophy of Sri Lanka’s major religion, Buddhism, and the challenge of the socio-political aspirations of the highly educated but marginalised rural youth.
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Michael Roberts
In presenting a Zoom Lecture relating to the Easter Sunday attacks in Sri Lanka in April 2021 for Dr. Geethika Dharmasinghe’s class at Colgate University in USA a month or so back, I deployed the work that went into one of books: that entitled FIRE & STORM.
I now atempt to shock people around the world with pictorial illustrations of some — note “Some” (with all its partialities) — photographs of the political and Eelam War scenarios in Sri Lanka displayed in Fire & Storm.
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David Jansze, in Email Letter to Michael Roberts, April 2023 **
Dear Michael,
Malcolm and I were the only members of our branch of the Janszé family of our generation (and those previous) left behind in Sri Lanka at the time of his death. My son has yet to beget an heir.
Our grandfather, who had his secondary education at Trinity College, Kandy, was a Lawyer. All five of his sons also attended Trinity College and, in turn, so did the males of the next generation, with the exception of my father’s two sons (my elder brother and I), who had their secondary education at S. Thomas’ College, Mt. Lavinia. My dad, too, qualified as a Lawyer at the Colombo Law College and remained in Colombo.
News Item in The ISLAND newspaper, 7 April 2023**
There has always been a massive void in Colombo for anyone, local or foreign, to savour a regularly held authentic Sri Lankan cultural show that reflects the diverse dance and drums of Sri Lanka. The Colombo Cultural Show has filled that void with a sleek, professional and highly engaging cultural show encompassing a repertoire of ten dance and drum items that takes the audience on a journey of upcountry, low country, Sabaragamuwa and folk dances.
Gagno’s Searing Camerawork
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Hugh Karunanayake : “Collecting Antiquarian Ceylon Books,” .… Victor Melder Lexture …. Sunday 30 April 3pm-4pm ……Clayton Hall, 264 Clayton Road
Sri Lankan-born Hugh Karunanyake is a collector of unique antiquarian books about Sri Lanka, and has established an extensive personal library that extends to maps, prints and old postcards. For Hugh, the collecting of knowledge and ephemera has never been purely about acquisition, but also about the sharing of knowledge.
With a B.A. in Sociology from Peradeniya University in Sri Lanka, Hugh has worked across both public and private sectors. He was the founding president of the Ceylon Society of Australia and is a prolific writer about all things Ceylon and Sri Lanka.
The Victor Melder Lecture honours the work of Victor Melder and the extensive library of books, journals and magazines relating to Sri Lanka that he established in 1968.
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USA’s AUKUS programme today[i] in the midst of the war raging in the Ukraine demands reflections upon the death-toll and horrors of trench warfare during World War One.
“Every nation was profligate of its manpower and conducted the war as if there were no limit to the number of men who were fit to be thrown into the furnace to feed the flames of war.” …. David Lloyd George, British Prime Minister on the First World War
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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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thuppahi
