ADELAIDE UNIVERSITY New Item
Emeritus Professor Purnendra Jain (School of Social Sciences) was awarded the Order of the Rising Sun, Gold Rays With Neck Ribbon by the Consul-General of Japan, Mr. Junji Shimada , in a ceremony on 26 March 2021.
Category Archives: literary achievements
Songs and Music from Auschwitz and Other Concentration Camps
Meagan Flynn, in Washington Post, 17 April 2018, where the title runs thus: “How thousands of songs composed in concentration camps are finding new life”
Ilse Weber 1903-1944
Ilse Weber, a Jewish poet, was imprisoned at the concentration camp at Terezin in German-occupied Czechoslovakia when she wrote a song called “When I Was Lying Down in Terezin’s Children’s Clinic.” The song was about caring for sick children at the camp where Weber worked as a nurse. She had little-to-no medicine available. But she had her poetry and her music — some of which her husband managed to salvage by hiding the written verses in a garden shed after her death at Auschwitz in 1944.
Auschwitz Concentration Camp
Filed under accountability, authoritarian regimes, ethnicity, Fascism, governance, heritage, historical interpretation, Hitler, human rights, landscape wondrous, life stories, literary achievements, martyrdom, meditations, politIcal discourse, self-reflexivity, sri lankan society, trauma, travelogue, unusual people, war crimes, war reportage, world events & processes, World War II
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Shihan De Silva Jayasuriya’s Wide-ranging Work on Portuguese Creole and the Kaffir
Shihan de Silva Jayasuriya of the University of London has been researching the Portuguese in the East for over twenty years and has generated a significant number of studies on Portuguese Creole peoples, their life-style ad languages in Sri Lanka and elsewhere. Her output of work has been as varied as commendable and I begin with a summary of one article dealing with “a nineteenth-century manuscript in Sri Lankan Portuguese Creole” because i am presently fashioning an article that refers to the work of Hugh Nevill on the Kāberi Hatana in order to ‘educate’ those who have touched on African slave labour at Galle without possessing any background information on the topic. This essay is in process and will appear soon….. Michael Roberts
Filed under ancient civilisations, British colonialism, centre-periphery relations, colonisation schemes, communal relations, cultural transmission, disparagement, education, ethnicity, heritage, historical interpretation, Indian Ocean politics, landscape wondrous, life stories, literary achievements, performance, photography, politIcal discourse, Portuguese in Indian Ocean, power politics, religiosity, self-reflexivity, sri lankan society, travelogue, unusual people, world events & processes
In Appreciation of Malathi de Alwis: Such An Untimely Death
ONE — A Letter in Sadness from Professor Veena Das to Pradeep Jeganathan, January 2021
First of all, I want to convey my sadness and my gratefulness and to some extent my rage that this has happened and that I will never see that radiant smile and that integrity and brilliance anymore. Any such death at my stage of life makes me angry and sorrowful as to why the young are being taken. The war undid so many of us in so many ways and why would it not do that? So what kind of miracle is it that Malathi let herself be deeply affected by the war but not be undone by it? You must know that I loved her work and her personality just as I love your work and know what struggles you have been through.
Filed under cultural transmission, education, female empowerment, heritage, historical interpretation, Indian Ocean politics, language policies, Left politics, life stories, literary achievements, politIcal discourse, power politics, self-reflexivity, sri lankan society, tolerance, unusual people, welfare & philanthophy, women in ethnic conflcits, world events & processes
Lessons from Shukra Munawwar
Sarath Gamani De Silva
Our whole nation has been enchanted by the mesmerizing performance of a young girl from Galle hitting the jackpot at the Sirasa Lakshapathi quiz programme. No doubt Shukra is a very gifted and intelligent girl with a superb photographic memory, who has made the best use of the very limited resources available to her. Her all-encompassing knowledge of Sri Lankan history, literature and Buddhism as well as in international affairs, world history and matters of science was really amazing. She has been reading books of every kind and could remember many facts in those books. What impressed me most was her determination, keeping her cool at times of much stress while answering difficult questions, characteristics rarely seen in a 17-year old schoolgirl.
…. shades of Malal Yousafsai
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The 43 Group in Ceylon: Their Story
Rohan de Soysa, copy of a PowerPoint Presentation made to the National Trust of Sri Lanka on September 29, 2016 by Rohan de Soysa transcribed into text format …. with coloured underlining [as distinct from that in black] being emphasis imposed by The Editor, Thuppahi
The Origins: The `43 Group was the first modern art movement in Sri Lanka. It arose because a group of artists felt that the art being practiced and taught at the time was too academic and rigid; nor did it attempt to follow new developments in European art since the early 20th Century. They therefore decided to form a group more open to these new developments but with a distinct Ceylonese stamp and flavour.
Filed under architects & architecture, art & allure bewitching, British colonialism, centre-periphery relations, charitable outreach, cultural transmission, democratic measures, economic processes, education, heritage, historical interpretation, Indian religions, Indian traditions, landscape wondrous, life stories, literary achievements, paintings, patriotism, performance, photography, politIcal discourse, religiosity, self-reflexivity, sri lankan society, teaching profession, the imaginary and the real, unusual people, world events & processes
The Dutch Burghers in Sri Lanka Today
Prabath De Silva, in Daily Mirror, 21 January 2021, with this title “The Dutch Burghers in Sri Lanka”
“We are a vanishing tribe in Sri Lanka. The first paternal ancestor of my father’s family who arrived in Sri Lanka in 1774 was Pieter Scharenguivel. He was a Quarter Master in the service of the United Dutch East India Company which ruled the maritime provinces of Sri Lanka from the middle of the 17th century to 1796. The Dutch Burgher identity and consciousness within the family I grew up in was extremely significant. It played a role in the conversations, traditions, customs, food, perceptions and social interactions. During the British colonial rule, our community produced eminent surgeons, doctors, legal luminaries, judges, engineers, sportsmen, musicians , historians and artists etc.” , said Anne-Marie Scharenguivel (65), a management accountant and a member of Sri Lanka’s tiny Dutch Burgher community of less than 30000 people.
Mrs. Anne-Marie Scharenguivel
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Aubrey Collette’s Satirical Work — An Appreciation
Neville Weeraratne, being Chapter IX in his opus, entitled “Collette’s Cullings. The satirist’s fine line”
COLLETTE: Cartoon comment in the Observer following a ‘43 Group exhibition.
Everybody enjoyed Aubrey Collette’s work though he would not have satisfied every political aspiration. You turned to him for your reading of the day, originally in the Times of Ceylon, later in the Observer, and then as ‘Spur’ in a series he did for the Daily News as well. He gave a sharp edge to his drawing which, indeed, was capable of cutting deeply but never maliciously. Collette had the rare and splendid gift of observation: to remember a foible, to swiftly size up a characteristic, and enjoy having summed up the hapless one who had fortuitously wandered into his sights. To have been noticed by Collette was itself honour enough, and those who had been so distinguished by a portrait, as in Collette’s 1954 FACES – a collection of seventy-three pastel studies – soon bought them up, more for the immortality it conferred on them than for the fear of what their enemies might make of the caricatures. Collette very simply had the gift of showing some how others saw them, bestowing upon them the poet’s wish. You might have rejected these insights as subjective had you not yourself been drawn inevitably into the process of assessing the subject.
Filed under accountability, art & allure bewitching, citizen journalism, cultural transmission, disparagement, education, heritage, historical interpretation, landscape wondrous, life stories, literary achievements, patriotism, performance, press freedom, self-reflexivity, slanted reportage, sri lankan society, taking the piss, the imaginary and the real, unusual people, world events & processes
Charting Anagarika Dharmapala’s Many Pursuits
Nandasiri Jasentuliyana, reviewing Bhadrajee S. Hewage’s book “A NAME FOR EVERY CHAPTER: Anagarika Dharmapala and Ceylonese Buddhist Revivalism”
‘The unexamined life is not worth living.’ – Socrates.
Rarely has so much been written both in the West and in the East about the work of a ‘revivalist,’ that one would conclude there is nothing left to be revealed of the man or his work. That is until you read Bhadrajee Hewage’s “Anagarika Dharmapala and Ceylonese Buddhist Revivalism.”
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