Category Archives: female empowerment

June 10, 2022 · 2:37 pm

Sumana Saparamadu: An Appreciative Vale from 2016

Lalitha Karalliadde Witanachchi, in the Sunday Observer, 8 May 2016, with this title “Epitome of Generosity, Kindness and Loyalty” **

The death occurred on April 15 [2016] of well-known journalist Sumana Saparamadu at the age of 92. She was born in Havelock Road, Wellawatte in the home of her parents Mr and Mrs. D.C. Saparamadu. Her father was a well-known apothecary who worked for several years in Kadugannawa, where Sumana spent her childhood “in the beautiful hill country with mist-laden hills and the train winding its way upcountry”, as she was wont to tell me when recalling her happy childhood.

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April 24, 2022 · 8:07 pm

BAREFOOT tells us Barbara is AWAY

In typically spartan style BAREFOOT told the world that its imaginative founder and artist Barbara Sansoni nee Daniel had just passed away…… Barefoot founder

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April 14, 2022 · 7:24 pm

Female Leaders at the Grassroots in a COVID-19 World

Samanthi Gunawardana & Nedha De Silva, at https://lens.monash.edu/@celebrating-influential-women/2021/03/08/1382925/listening-to-women-in-grassroots-leadership-in-a-covid-19-world  …………. “It is a virus, we can get it anywhere, [but] we have a responsibility, and if we let go of workers now when they need us the most, what is the point?” – Chandra Devanarayana, Revolutionary Existence for Human Development, Sri Lanka

Long before COVID-19 hit Sri Lanka’s shores, grassroots women’s organisations fought poverty pay, long hours, and unsafe working conditions in the country’s garment manufacturing districts.

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April 5, 2022 · 12:57 am

A Kilted Scottish Lady who confronted the Fascists in spain in the 1930s

Item in Glasgow Live 20:41, 3 April 2022, bearing this title “Remembering Fernanda Jacobsen: The kilted woman who left Glasgow to fight fascism”

Barely 20 years after women got the vote, Glasgow secretary Fernanda Jacobsen became the unexpected leader of Glasgow’s ambulance unit that travelled to Spain in 1936

By Glasgow Live 20:41, 3 APR 2022

A Glaswegian woman in a kilt with a ‘big bottom’ hardly sounds like your typical war hero. But that’s exactly how Fernanda Jacobsen was described by those that met her when she was sent to Madrid – the beating heart of the social revolution – to help the wounded as the Republican government faced off rebel armies in 1936.

17th January 1937: Members of a Scottish ambulance unit in Glasgow before their second visit to the Spanish Civil War

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February 25, 2022 · 11:59 pm

Remembering Mervyn De Silva and His Reach

Bradman Weerakoon, writng in the year 2000  …

When Mervyn de Silva passed away, many tributes were paid to his contribution to critical writing, to journalism, to literature and the arts, to his scholarly weekly radio commentaries on world affairs, his lone editorship of the Lanka Guardian and the stimulation he provided to popular discussion by his constant and thoughtful, intellectual engagement with whatever was current in the public debate.

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December 26, 2021 · 5:57 pm

An Indian Scholar’s Griefstricken VALE for Malathi De Alwis

Nivedita Menon, in Colombo Telegraph, 22 January 2021, where the title is  “Malathi De Alwis (1963-2021) – Beloved Friend, Feminist Comrade”

This is my Mala.

Every person touched by her friendship felt this sense of unique connection to Mala. To receive the gift of her attention was to forever feel the tug of a thread that attached you to a part of her heart. She would remember you at some point or the other even if you were not constantly in touch, with that fine-tuned sensitivity that brought to you the exact poem or thought or photograph or  experience that linked the two of you.

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November 23, 2021 · 11:22 pm

Dutch Burghers and Portuguese Mechanics: Eurasian Ethnicity in Sri Lanka

Dennis B. McGilvray, reproducing an essay presented in April 1982 within Comparative Studies in Society and History 24 (2): 235-263 –– an article that is wide-ranging and draws on ethnographic work as well as historical manuscripts. Note that the highlighting and pictorial insertions are the work of The Editor, Thuppahi.

 

 

 

 

 

I: PROLOGUE

Historians and anthropologists in Sri Lanka have tended to migrate in opposite directions, but away from the multiethnic confusion of the port cities. Typically, the heterogeneous, semi-Westernized, postcolonial urban society of Colombo and the larger towns has been only a transit point on intellectual journeys outbound to European archives or inbound to “traditional culture.” This was certainly my viewpoint as I arrived “inbound” in Sri Lanka for my first anthropological fieldwork. I took only passing notice of the clerks of mixed European and Sri Lankan descent who sold me stationery supplies at Cargill’s and mosquito nets at Carvalho’s. These people are given the official designation of Burghers in the government census: they are the racially mixed descendants of the Portuguese, Dutch, and British personnel who occupied the island during four and a half centuries of colonial rule.

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November 19, 2021 · 5:06 pm

Imaginative Explorations of Sri Lanka’s History on the Cards

ISLAND newspaper News Item, 18 November 2021

In a brand new initiative, under the working title ‘Project 72’, Roar Media and author Sarah Kabir are set to take a deep dive into Sri Lanka’s past since gaining Independence in 1948, entertainingly and educationally covering some of the most defining years in the nation’s history.

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November 19, 2021 · 12:22 pm

The Unspoken Injustice in Sports: Are Some Coaches the Unmasked Wolves in Sheep Clothing?

Nicholle Collom, University of Kelaniya

Expressing opinions on the unspoken side of the coin, taking any circumstance of life in to consideration, is always a risk that a writer may encounter. The truth be spoken, the opinion and perspective that you and I may share can be contrastingly distinct depending on the circumstance and experiences that one may have encountered. There may be some of us who have courageously fought for ourselves conquering against the injustice. Yet, amidst the presence of these brave warriors, how many voices may have been overpowered, unable to voice out the injustice that they may have encountered in sport? How many of you may have silently suffered and engaged in silent battles for the fear of being penalized, degraded or being considered an outcast?  Therefore, my motive here is to be the voice for the ones that fear to speak out loud. I wish to pen this thought down so that you may be educated and that courage may find itself, for you to be your own voice and fight for yourself and for your children someday against injustice of prejudiced coaches in the field of sports.

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November 18, 2021 · 11:56 pm

Kokkadicholai: An Outpost in Wartime Batticaloa

This Item appeared in Dilshy Banu’s Facebook post and I have borrowed it and its photographs for circulation via Thuppahi – in part because it marks a little “outpost activity” in the course of the war and largely because I have met Dilshy and respect her courageous career choices and her lines of philanthropic endeavour….. Michael Roberts, 18 November 2021

Dilshy Banu: “Kokkadicholai in Batticaloa: Traversing Tension during Eelam War IV”

 

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