SSC PAMPHLET PROJECT
Some of you may remember this project in Sri Lanka in the 1990s directed towards making selected academic articles on the history & politics of Sri Lanka available to the English-reading public at affordable rates. My unreliable memory indicates that the personnel behind this enterprise were myself, Ananda Chittampalam, Willa Wickramasinghe and our engine, so to speak, was the press operated by Haris Hulugalla.
Filed under accountability, anti-racism, British colonialism, caste issues, centre-periphery relations, chauvinism, communal relations, democratic measures, economic processes, education policy, ethnicity, fundamentalism, governance, heritage, historical interpretation, Indian Ocean politics, island economy, JVP, landscape wondrous, language policies, Left politics, life stories, modernity & modernization, nationalism, parliamentary elections, patriotism, photography, plantations, political demonstrations, politIcal discourse, press freedom & censorship, racist thinking, religious nationalism, Sinhala-Tamil Relations, sri lankan society, Tamil civilians, terrorism, violence of language, world events & processes, zealotry
Michael Roberts
The academic world and its scholarship is marked by cooperative work as well as animosities and rivalry – whether personal or based on political affiliations. The Sri Lankan scenario was/is no different. As I participated in this environment as a lecturer in History at Peradeniya University,[1] I was extremely fortunate in: (A) benefitting from a salubrious physical setting and a favourable arrangement of buildings and a super library; and (B) a bunch of dons who were as inspiring as amiable –so that the “Senior Common Room’ in the Faculty of Arts was not only a spot for invigorating tea, but also a site for the exchange of ideas.
Filed under accountability, British colonialism, centre-periphery relations, communal relations, cultural transmission, education, ethnicity, historical interpretation, island economy, land policies, language policies, Left politics, life stories, modernity & modernization, nationalism, plantations, plural society, politIcal discourse, power politics, self-reflexivity, Sinhala-Tamil Relations, sri lankan society, teaching profession, transport and communications
Dr. Mahim Mendis, in Daily FT, 26 April 2024 …. where the title runs thus: “Revivial of Premadasism the Way Forward for Sri Lanka,”
…in DailyFT, 26 April 
Truly cultured men and women have the capacity to be thankful for the progressive measures taken by Ranasinghe Premadasa. He was a true embodiment of Social Democracy, governing the entire social, political, cultural, and moral order. He was not a mere propagator of a Social Market Economy, when he took over leadership from a right wing, J.R. Jayewardene led UNP that tried to dislodge Deputy Leader Premadasa from his well-earned Presidential candidature in 1989. The same right-wing forces in the UNP, tried to impeach him together with Feudalist sympathisers, who lost all their social status due to Premadasaism
Filed under accountability, centre-periphery relations, democratic measures, economic processes, education, governance, historical interpretation, language policies, life stories, parliamentary elections, patriotism, performance, politIcal discourse, power politics, reconciliation, self-reflexivity, Sinhala-Tamil Relations, slanted reportage, sri lankan society, unusual people, welfare & philanthophy, working class conditions
Patrick Peebles in a refereed article in The Journal of Asian Studies, Vol. 49, No. 1 (Feb., 1990), pp. 30-55 …. which John De Silva in Melbourne, my Aloysian sporting mate, has worked on to make it feasible for me to present it in the Thuppahi format-style. The supporting Maps & Diagrams are presented via web-references, while the web-reference to the article as a whole is placed herein in pdf format.
Sri LANKA’S INABILITY to contain ethnic violence as it escalated from sporadic terrorism to mob violence to civil war in recent years has disheartened observers who had looked to the nation as a success story of social and political development. In retrospect, Sri Lanka lacked effective local institutions to integrate the society, and the Sinhalese elite relied on welfare and preferential policies for the Sinhalese majority to maintain power. These alienated the minorities and resulted in Tamil demands for a separate state. 1
Filed under authoritarian regimes, British colonialism, centre-periphery relations, chauvinism, colonisation schemes, cultural transmission, demography, economic processes, ethnicity, governance, heritage, island economy, land policies, landscape wondrous, language policies, Left politics, life stories, plural society, politIcal discourse, power politics, racism, self-reflexivity, Sinhala-Tamil Relations, sri lankan society, Tamil civilians, transport and communications, working class conditions, world events & processes
Item in Tamil Nation ……………………………………… https://tamilnation.org/books/eelam/buddhismbetrayed
Given Budd
hism’s presumed non-violent philosophy, how can committed Buddhist monks and laypersons in Sri Lanka today actively take part in the fierce political violence of the Sinhalese against the Tamils?
Stanley Jeyaraja Tambiah’s Buddhism Betrayed? seeks to answer this question by looking closely at the past century of Sri Lankan history and tracing the development of Buddhism’s participation in such ethnic conflict and collective violence. Tambiah analyses the ways in which this participation has, over time come to alter the very meaning of Buddhism itself as a lived reality.
Filed under anti-racism, British colonialism, centre-periphery relations, communal relations, cultural transmission, demography, discrimination, disparagement, economic processes, education policy, electoral structures, ethnicity, fundamentalism, governance, heritage, historical interpretation, language policies, legal issues, life stories, nationalism, parliamentary elections, political demonstrations, politIcal discourse, power politics, racist thinking, riots and pogroms, self-reflexivity, Sinhala-Tamil Relations, sri lankan society, Tamil civilians, trauma, truth as casualty of war, vengeance, working class conditions, world events & processes, zealotry
Goolbai Gunasekara in The ISLAND Newspaper, 17 March 2024 … entitled “My time at Hindu Ladies College”
Following in her mother, Clara Gunaskara nee Motwani’s footsteps, principal and teacher Goolbai Gunasekara revolutionised the sphere of English education in Sri Lanka …. & this account is her trip down memory lane.
Mrs. Visaladhy Sivagurunathan, a philanthropic Hindu lady, had gifted the property of Hindu Ladies’ College to the school in 1943. [My] Mother […. of the Motwani lineage] …. was the school’s fifth Principal. Under her, the first Past Pupils’ Association was formed, with Mrs. Jeevaratnam Rasiah as its first President. Miss Thambu (Mother’s long suffering Tamil tutor) was its Secretary. Just recently, I was invited to speak to the Colombo branch of the HLC alumni.
I met a former HLC teacher there — Mrs Navaratna, formerly Leela Ponniah — along with many old friends. The reverence in which Mother was held was very heartwarming, and it was a moving experience to hear the stories they related of instances in which Mother had touched — and sometimes directed — their lives.
Filed under Aboriginality, anti-racism, centre-periphery relations, charitable outreach, cultural transmission, education, education policy, ethnicity, female empowerment, heritage, historical interpretation, island economy, language policies, life stories, patriotism, performance, politIcal discourse, self-reflexivity, Sinhala-Tamil Relations, sri lankan society, Tamil civilians, teaching profession, travelogue, unusual people, welfare & philanthophy, women in ethnic conflcits
Vindhya Buthpitiya: “How to Capture Birds of Freedom: Picturing Tamil Women at War,” Trans Asia Photography (2023) 13 (1) … derived from ………………………………………… https://doi.org/10.1215/21582025-10365016 … with the aid of my Aloysian mate KK De Silva; whilr the highlighting is my imposition.
Abstract: This article examines the uses of images of women fighters of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam during and after the Sri Lankan civil war (1983–2009) to explore the contrasting mobilizations of visual representations of Tamil women cadres, focusing on the cultivation and framing of contradictory nationalist imaginaries by competing ethnic and state actors. In northern Sri Lanka, portraits of gun-bearing women fighters were wielded to signal revolutionary possibilities for the future of the Tamil nation-state as well as to inform the political socialization of its hopeful citizens. Meanwhile, images of Tamil women cadres were cast as gendered and ethnicized threats by the Sri Lankan state in what constituted a calculated form of visual ethno-political othering and weaponization. This article reflects on the ways in which such appropriations exacerbated the political precarity of and the denial of victimhood to Tamil women.
Malathy was the First Tamil Tigress to face death for the Tamiil for the Tamil Cause
Filed under accountability, anti-racism, asylum-seekers, authoritarian regimes, caste issues, centre-periphery relations, chauvinism, communal relations, cultural transmission, discrimination, disparagement, doctoring evidence, Eelam, ethnicity, governance, heritage, historical interpretation, human rights, language policies, legal issues, life stories, military strategy, nationalism, news fabrication, NGOs, patriotism, photography, politIcal discourse, racist thinking, Rajapaksa regime, refugees, rehabilitation, self-reflexivity, Sinhala-Tamil Relations, slanted reportage, social justice, sri lankan society, Tamil civilians, Tamil migration, tamil refugees, Tamil Tiger fighters, terrorism, the imaginary and the real, trauma, truth as casualty of war, vengeance, war crimes, war reportage, world events & processes, zealotry
Anjum Hasan: “Even As A Ghost” in The New York Review of Books, 18 January 2024 … reaching me via a tennis-mate Ralph Schlomowitz who is a ‘religious’ adherent of the NYRB and matters highbrow;while Amaasiiri De Silva in New York sent me the whole text in Worsd File –thereby ‘undermining’ the NYR’s effing barriers.
Hasan reviews two new books relating to Sri Lanka in this essay: Brotherless Night by V.V. Ganeshananthan, Random House, 348 pp., $28.00; $18.00 (paper) …. & The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida by Shehan Karunatilaka, Norton, 388 pp., $18.95 (paper)
In their new novels, V. V. Ganeshananthan and Shehan Karunatilaka use the “distance of time” to dramatize large chunks, if not the whole, of Sri Lanka’s recent past.
Filed under anti-racism, art & allure bewitching, authoritarian regimes, centre-periphery relations, citizen journalism, cultural transmission, education, ethnicity, governance, heritage, historical interpretation, historical novel, Indian Ocean politics, insurrections, language policies, life stories, LTTE, nationalism, politIcal discourse, self-reflexivity, Sinhala-Tamil Relations, sri lankan society, Tamil civilians, Tamil migration, tamil refugees, Tamil Tiger fighters, terrorism, the imaginary and the real, travelogue, truth as casualty of war, unusual people, vengeance, war crimes
Michael Roberts …. presenting a talk which he delivered at the National Trust in Colombo in June 2018 following a brief to the effect that he should 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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Uditha Devapriya & Uthpala Wijesuriya, … with highlights imposed by The Editor, Thuppahi
Background: In Sri Lanka, social science research witnessed an expansion in the 1950s. Various scholars, including Stanley Tambiah and Gananath Obeyesekere, found their calling in anthropology, and went on to introduce and popularise the subject in local universities. This period also witnessed an increasing interest in Sri Lankan and specifically Sinhala society from Western scholars, including Edmund Leach, James Brow, and Richard Gombrich. While many local scholars active in that period have commented on how social science research evolved at Sri Lankan universities, no proper study of this has been done yet.
Filed under architects & architecture, British colonialism, Buddhism, centre-periphery relations, Colombo and Its Spaces, commoditification, communal relations, cultural transmission, demography, economic processes, education policy, Eelam, electoral structures, ethnicity, female empowerment, fundamentalism, governance, historical interpretation, immigration, Indian Ocean politics, insurrections, Islamic fundamentalism, island economy, landscape wondrous, language policies, Left politics, legal issues, life stories, literary achievements, modernity & modernization, Muslims in Lanka, nationalism, NGOs, parliamentary elections, patriotism, photography & its history, plantations, plural society, political demonstrations, politIcal discourse, power politics, Presidential elections, press freedom & censorship, Rajapaksa regime, religiosity, riots and pogroms, self-reflexivity, Sinhala-Tamil Relations, sri lankan society, suicide bombing, Tamil migration, tamil refugees, Tamil Tiger fighters, tourism, transport and communications, truth as casualty of war, unusual people, vengeance, war reportage, welfare & philanthophy, women in ethnic conflcits, working class conditions, world events & processes, zealotry
thuppahi
