Category Archives: sri lankan society

June 9, 2014 · 3:51 am

Cricket as Salve in Limbo Situation for some Tamil Asylum-Seekers in Australia

Phil Mercer, for BBC News in Australia, where the title reads “Australia asylum seekers find refuge in cricket”

a-seekers -Reuters Pic from Reuters

Ocean 12 are sporting warriors like no other. Padded up and steeled for action in a suburban league in Sydney, the team is made up of Tamil asylum seekers competing for a place in the finals of a global cricket competition. The young men arrived in Australia by boat. They have been released from immigration detention on temporary visas and are waiting anxiously to hear if their refugee claims have been successful. Some bear the marks of conflict. Uthayakumar, a promising fast bowler, was hit by gunfire when his school was attacked and lives with vivid scars on his elbow. As well as the physical reminders of a troubled past, for others the psychological wounds also persist. Continue reading →

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June 8, 2014 · 3:31 pm

Multi-Ethnic Young Cricket team introduced to England by Foundation of Goodness

Murali Harmony Cup Unity tour to UK

The Foundation of Goodness confirmed last Friday that it is organising a Murali Harmony Cup Unity tour to the United Kingdom. The Unity squad includes exceptionally talented U-19 cricketers from 14 different schools island-wide, including seven from the previously war affected areas in the North and East.

AA--UNITY TEAM click Pic for enlargement

The young cricketers were invited to participate in the tour after their outstanding performances during the 2013 Murali Harmony Cup, initiated by Sir Ian Botham. The Unity Tour, designed to showcase Sri Lanka’s cultural diversity, while promoting nation building and reconciliation, will depart for the UK on Monday (tomorrow), and play three matches against top English schools. The 50-over limited overs matches will be played against Emanuel School (11 June), Eton College (12 June) and Oundle College (15 June). Continue reading →

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June 7, 2014 · 10:12 am

Bile, Obfuscation & Censorship on Display in the Boxing Bout between GV and CT, Sanjana and Uvindu

PADRAIG COLMAN

Padraig Colman courtesy of  Asian Mirror where the title is ““The Wacky World of Citizen Journalism – An Eyewitness Account”

There is a priceless article on Groundviews by Sanjana Hattotuwa. At the time I am writing this, there have only been four comments. I would like to raise the profile of Sanjana’s article and thereby add to the gaiety of nations. ….  http://groundviews.org/2014/06/03/response-to-article-in-colombo-telegraph/ Sanjana is the scourge of corruption, triumphalism, Buddhist thugs and Sinhala Buddhist chauvinism in general. So, what new crime is he exposing in this article?

sanjana_h  Sanjana H

The article is about a meal at the Gallery Café in 2009, the cost of which Sanjana allegedly claimed from the Centre for Policy Alternatives. Colombo Telegraph sees this as indulgence in lavish living. “Certain prominent Colombo-based ‘human rights professionals’ are making merry, wining and dining in upmarket restaurants, hoodwinking donors by filing expenses under ‘safe’ cost columns.” Our intrepid muckraker, Sanjana, is miffed because that other intrepid muckraker, Uvindu Kurukulasuriya, is turning his muckraking laser on Sanjana himself. This will not stand! Continue reading →

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June 5, 2014 · 1:41 pm

The Carpenter-Prēta: An Eighteenth-Century Sinhala-Buddhist Folktale about Jesus

Richard F. Young, courtesy of Meiji Gakuin University in Japan and where it appeared in print in 1995

Abstract: A Sri Lankan folktale presenting Jesus as a delusory emanation of Mara is discussed here for its significance in understanding how Christianity was seen by the early-modern Sinhalese. By depicting Jesus as demonic and his teachings as inimical to Buddhism, Sri Lankans situated Christianity in the context of the cosmic rivalry between the Dhamma and the disordering forces of Mara. The Hindu background of certain motifs in the folktale is considered, as are its probable origins in the religio-political milieu of the eighteenth-century Kandyan kingdom and its relevance to later Buddhist revivalists. This study also questions empiricist approaches to Sri Lankan historiography, and pro­poses that folklore provides scholars with an invaluable supplement to Western docu­mentary materials and the island’s official chronicles when attempting to reconstruct the indigenous perception of European Christianity.

Keywords: Buddhism and Christianity — Jātaka— Jesus — Māra — Milinda —Rājāvaliya

SEE https://nirc.nanzan-u.ac.jp/nfile/140 Continue reading →

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June 4, 2014 · 1:20 pm

Leonard Woolf’s forgotten Sri Lankan novel

BBC and Nick Rankin

The Bloomsbury Group and Sri Lanka are rarely spoken of in the same breath, but that is partly because Leonard Woolf’s groundbreaking first novel, The Village in the Jungle, is unjustly ignored, argues writer and broadcaster Nick Rankin.

WOOLF AT HOME--_getty624She was born Virginia Stephen, daughter of the Victorian bookman Sir Leslie Stephen, but when she married in 1912, her name changed to Virginia Woolf, and she went on to become the best-known woman writer of the 20th Century. Her lesser-known husband, Leonard Woolf, however, wrote and published a novel first. That almost forgotten book, first published in 1913, is called The Village in the Jungle and it is a remarkable work because it is the first novel in English literature to be written from the indigenous point of view rather than the coloniser’s. It’s not a book about the white chaps at the club who run the show, but about those at the very bottom of the imperial heap, the black and brown fellows who don’t even know they’re part of an Empire, but who just survive day by day, hand to mouth, as slash-and-burn agriculturalists. Continue reading →

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June 4, 2014 · 4:10 am

Poetic Reflections against Violence: Burning, Nightmare, Trauma

Godfrey Gunatilleke…… Three poems from Time’s Confluence and other poems (Colombo, Unie Arts, 2014 … ISBN 978 -955-41102-0-5)

GODFREY G 22

            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 →

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June 3, 2014 · 5:06 am

FIVE YEARS AFTER: Reviewing Sri Lanka after the end of War, May 2009-May 2014 … in Groundviews

SEE http://groundviews.org/category/issues/end-of-war/

Articles published in the Special Edition, in order of appearance,

First week

  1. Launch of Special Edition: The end of war in Sri Lanka, five years on, Sanjana Hattotuwa
  2. PLATO’S CAVE IN THE INDIAN OCEAN: ELITE FAILURE IN SRI LANKA, Dr. Dayan Jayatilleka
  3. Is reconciliation achievable without separation in Sri Lanka?, Lionel Bopage
  4. Sri Lanka’s Quiet Heroes, Gibson Bateman
  5. Badiou’s Event and the defeat of the Tigers: A Brief Response to Dayan Jayatilleka, Vangeesa Sumanasekara
  6. Five years on, where we are now: Reconciliation, the Rule of Law and governance, Ravindra
  7. Opened letter to His Majesty Mahinda Rajapakse the Lord of Sri Lanka and the Universe also (translated into Sinhala by Vikalpa here), The Silva
  8. The Silly Idealist, Marisa de Silva
  9. A new phase of mediation to get from post-war to post-conflict Sri Lanka, Jehan Perera
  10. Political settlement or regime change!, Kumar David
  11. THE WAR, PHILOSOPHY, POLITICS, Dr. Dayan Jayatilleka
  12. Kasturi’s Progress, Nalaka Gunewardene
  13. Five Years Later, Indran Amirthanayagam
  14. A Brief History of the United Peoples Freedom Alliance from 2004 to 2014: Statistics and Real Politics, Khana
  15. Keep Off the Grass, Subha Wijesiriwardena
  16. The failure of the media, civil society and the ‘moderates’, Heejaz Hizbullah
  17. Re-visiting the Rajapaksa Hegemonic Project, Dayapala Thiranagama
  18. 5 years after: Reflections as a mother, women and a citizen of Sri Lanka, Visakha Dharmadasa

Continue reading →

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June 2, 2014 · 9:03 am

Ethnicity after Edward Said: Post-Orientalist Failures in comprehending the Kandyan Period of Lankan History

Michael Roberts, reprinting an article that appeared initially in Ethnic Studies Report, July 2001, pp. 69-98 and has also been presented in Roberts: Confrontations in Sri Lanka: Sinhalese, LTTE and Others, Colombo: Vijitha Yapa Publications, 2009

foucault Michel Foucault

 In the past two decades the writings on nationalism and ethnicity in the corridors of Western academia have been coloured by disenchantment with the excesses that have been attached to their expressions in most parts of the world. The responses are also informed by the decentred and anti-structuralist position popularised by Michel Foucault. The latter perspective encourages a view of society that highlights its disordered fragmentation. The spirit that directs such readings, nevertheless, remains within the time-honoured paradigm that has dominated Western intellectualism for centuries, that of secular rationalism. This has encouraged several writers on ethnic politics in the colonial and post-colonial eras to adopt a self-righteous position of political correctness and epistemological superiority.[1] Continue reading →

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June 2, 2014 · 3:40 am

The Idea of Justice and the Importance of Democracy: A Journey with Amartya Sen … for Sri Lanka

Nishan de Mel, a re-print of a review essay from Nethra [an ICES journal now defunct] … the book reviewed being The Idea of Justice, by Amartya Sen  (Allen Lane, 496 pp., £25.00)

Amartya-Sen 11The Bhagavad Gīta section of the Mahābhārata records a timeless debate between two epic heroes: the great warrior Arjuna and his Chariot driver – who is none other than Krishna. The occasion is the battle of Kurukshetra.

Arjuna does not doubt that their’s is the right cause, and that they will definitely win the battle. But he is concerned that so many people will die in the battle. He wonders if it might not be the lesser evil to concede rather than fight. Arjuna is disturbed that these deaths will also become his doing (as he leads the army), and he is also moved by the fact that many of those killed, on both sides, are persons with whom he has some affinitive connection. Krishna counters, and eventually prevails, with the certain conviction that justice is on their side and Arjuna must simply do his duty, no matter what the consequences. The epic is certainly a great tussle about the demands of right action and the concerns of justice. Continue reading →

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June 1, 2014 · 4:08 am

Talking Literature and the Gratiaen Award with Malinda Seneviratne

Courtesy of The Daily News, May 2014 …. Also see Asian Mirror video: Interview With Gratiaen Prize Winner Malinda Seneviratne

MALINGA SENEVIRATNEForty 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 →

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