Godfrey Gunatilleke…… Three poems from Time’s Confluence and other poems (Colombo, Unie Arts, 2014 … ISBN 978 -955-41102-0-5)
BURNING ……(Elegy on a body seen burning by the roadside during the violence in 1989)
There was no one, none at all to weep for him
Dead, lying by the roadside, quietly burning;
No friend, no brother, just some strangers, fearful
And silent. No love was left for mourning. Continue reading
Filed under accountability, atrocities, cultural transmission, ethnicity, fundamentalism, JVP, literary achievements, nationalism, political demonstrations, politIcal discourse, Sinhala-Tamil Relations, sri lankan society, terrorism, the imaginary and the real, tolerance, unusual people, vengeance, world events & processes, zealotry
Courtesy of The Daily News, May 2014 …. Also see Asian Mirror video: Interview With Gratiaen Prize Winner Malinda Seneviratne
Forty nine year old Malinda Seneviratne is the winner of this year’s most coveted award for creative writing [in Sri Lanka] – The Gratiaen Award. Down- to–earth, practical Malinda writes intense poems for pleasure. One of those collections of poems over the twelve months of 2013, published as The Edge has won this year’s Gratiaen Award (Rs200,000) for its outstanding literary attitude and sensitivity to human emotion. We had a quick chat with him.
Q: How does it feel to have at last won the Gratiaen Prize?
A: Winning any prize feels good. The Gratiaen is special because it is the most prestigious prize for creative writing in English in Sri Lanka. It is extra special to me, naturally, because I had been shortlisted on four other occasions. Continue reading
Jane Russell and Ruth Allaun** … Foreword to their essay on Leonard Woolf
“When I’m in the Strand or 42nd Street, or at NASA Headquarters or the Beverley Hills Hotel, my surroundings are liable to give a sudden tremor and I see through the insubstantial fabric to the reality beneath…” These words by Arthur C. Clarke, the sci-fi writer, are quoted at the end of Roloff Beny’s photographic chronicle Island Ceylon. But where does Clark’s reality reside? He writes, “No other place is so convincing as Sri Lanka.” As he spent almost fifty years there, we are tempted to believe him. Continue reading
Amarakeerthi Liyanage’s Open Letter to Mahinda Rajapaksa
His Excellency President Mahinda Rajapaksa, The President Socialist Democratic Republic of Sri Lanka, Office of the President, Temple Trees, 150 Galle Road, Colombo 3, Sri Lanka.
Dear Mr. President,
My name is Liyanage Amarakeerthi, a Fulbright Scholar (1998-2000) and a university lecturer.
I am also a fiction writer of some fame and acclaim. More importantly, I am a Sri Lankan citizen who imagines a peaceful and prosperous Sri Lanka where all its citizens can live without any form of discrimination regardless of their ethnicity, caste, gender and so on. Usually I do not write letters to political authorities or any person wielding power. As an intellectual I keep a critical distance from all centers of power. I will certainly not write any letter to such authorities to gain personal favors of any sort. However, I often write in order to draw the attention of people like you, Mr. President, towards the important issues of our country. I publish such letters in the press, which is one of the important spaces for freethinking citizens to express their views on matters of national and international significance. In some of my recent articles to the press I have argued that state funding for education in our country has dramatically dwindled under your presidency. Yes sir. It has gone down. I hope you have read some of those articles. Continue reading
I. “DAVID KALUPAHANA AND THE FIELD OF EARLY BUDDHISM” — Wimal Dissanayake**
I had known Professor David Kalupahana for over fifty years. David, his wife Indrani, my wife and I were undergraduates at the same time at the University of Ceylon, Peradeniya. He was, of course, senior to us. David and I lived in the same hall of residence and used to meet frequently at breakfast and dinner. Even as an undergraduate David evinced a great interest in Buddhism and philosophy. I recall one of his earliest articles that he sent to the students’ magazine was on the idea of causality in Buddhism an idea which was to be comprehensively explored in his magnum opus. Many of us knew instinctively that he would end up as a university professor; what we did not know then is that he would emerge as a foremost scholar in the world of early Buddhism. He initially studied Pali, Sanskrit and Philosophy and later specialized in Pali. This prepared him well for his subsequent work in Buddhist philosophy. Continue reading
Asoka Randeniye, in Daily News, 26 March 20i4
Pix by Roshan Pilipana
No theatre- lover worth his salt would need an introduction to the great actor/director Dharmasiri Bandaranayaka. Ever the voice who questions the accepted, the safe and the prescribed, Dharmasiri Bandaranayaka is the director of five thought- provoking, discussion- inducing political plays: Ekadipathi (The Dictator) in 1976, Makarakshaya (The Dragon) in 1985, Dhawala Beeshana (Men Without Shadows) in 1988, Yakshagamanaya (Resistible Rise of Arturo) in 1994 and Trojan Kanthavo (Trojan Women) in 1999.
In January, Dharmasiri Bandaranayaka and the cast and crew of Trojan Kanthavo participated in the Bharat Rang Mahotsav (International Theatre Festival) in New Delhi for the third year running. Previously, he applied for and was selected by the festival committee to perform Makarakshaya in 2012 and Dhawala Beeshana in 2013. This year, he was among the six countries which were represented at the festival. Daily News caught up with the maestro at the Trikone Cultural Foundation in Rajagiriya, which documents for posterity the Sinhala and Tamil dramas and other art forms hidden within our country.
Michael Roberts
This review article was drafted in 1991 and should therefore be assessed in the light of the literature available then. In those days it took at least two years for an article to be refereed and published. The essay discusses the following three books: Jonathan Spencer, A Sinhala Village in a Time of Trouble. Politics and Change in Rural Sri Lanka, Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1990, 285pp; Jonathan Spencer (ed.), Sri Lanka. History and the Roots of Conflict, London: Routledge, 1990, 253pp; Manning Nash, The Cauldron of Ethnicity in the Modern World, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1989, 142pp. It was origianally printed in Ethnic and Racial Studies, 1993, 16: 133-161.
The ongoing ethnic conflict in Sri Lanka has aroused interest in both the reasons for the breakdown of its polity and the roots of Tamil and Sinhala identities. The resurgence of nationalism in Eastern Europe will encourage studies in the broader implications of the Sri Lankan data for social science theory.
As a result of the excesses of the Nazi upsurge, Western scholars have tended to regard nationalism as retrograde and potentially pathological (e.g. Kedourie 1960) or reprehensibly atavistic. In South Asia, in contrast, ever since the decolonization process got under way, nationalism has been viewed positively—as long as its goals were framed in terms of the existing (colonial) political boundaries. The recent upsurge of violence has encouraged Asian scholars to question this perspective. Such questioning is sometimes embodied in the term ‘chauvinism’ (e.g. Coomaraswamy 1987: 74-81). This term is not a novel addition to the Asian English lexicon. It was used in British Ceylon in the 1920s and 1930s to describe those who pressed for Tamil and Sinhalese sectional interests: these spokesmen were reviled as “communalists”, “chauvinists” and “tribalists” by both the moderates and radicals who espoused a Ceylonese nationalism.[1] Continue reading
Filed under authoritarian regimes, British colonialism, caste issues, centre-periphery relations, cultural transmission, heritage, historical interpretation, literary achievements, nationalism, population, power politics, religiosity, sri lankan society, Tamil migration, violence of language, world events & processes
Carl Fernando in The Aloysian, December 2013 hwere the ttile is “Fr. Thomas Chingamparampil Kuriacose S.J.”
S
Son of C. T and Elizabeth Kuriacose, Thomas was born in Quilon, Kerala on the 20th of December 1920 to a devout Catholic family. His father, a teacher of mathematics, came to Ceylon in 1927 in search of better prospects and joined St. Servatius’ College, Matara. In 1928, he brought his family, – wife Elizabeth and Children, Anna (later, Sr. Felicitas of the Holy Cross Sisters and worked in Sri Lanka), Mariam (later, Sr. Mary Agnes of the Sisters of St. Joseph of Chambery and worked in India), Theresa (later Mrs. Theresa Chandy of Vaniamparampil, Alleppey, Kerala), Thomas, Cherian (died in 1930), Two members Joseph and Mary Agnes (later Mrs. Mary Agnes Kuriacose of Pathupally, Kerala) were born in Ceylon. Continue reading
thuppahi
