Juliet Coombe, in Daily News, 28 January 2022, where the title reads thus “Santa Cruz – The Portuguese Black Fort Of Galle”
Walking along the ancient walls it is easy to distinguish the black smoke covered walls of the Portuguese from the lower walls with the cannon positions built by the Dutch and later added to by the English.
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Jayantha Somasundaram in The Island, 29 January 2022, where the title runs thus: ” The Sixty-Two Coup. How the Plot would unfold” …. http://epaper.island.lk/
A group of senior Police and Military officers attempted to overthrow the Sirimavo Bandaranaike Government. They were driven by three critical events in the years leading up to January 1962. The coup participants belonged to the Westernised urban middle class who were alarmed at the undermining of the secular plural state and government.
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Maani Truu, in ABC News, 29 January 2022, where the title runs thus: “After the peak: What’s in store for Australia now that the Omicron wave has turned?“
Uditha Devapriya, in The Island, 29 January 2022, where the title is “Socialist revolution or bourgeois compromise?” …. with highlighting being the imposition of The Editor, Thuppahi
For the oppressed masses of the Third World, the establishment of UNCTAD and the proposal for a New International Economic Order marked the high point of 20th century multilateralism. These coincided with the longest spell of decolonisation recorded in history, in turn fuelled by a spate of bourgeois democratic and Marxist Left alliances in almost every corner of the developing world [in the middle decaades of the twentieth century]. Though such alliances did not bring about emancipation for the masses, the experience of the 1960s suggested that radical transformations, for the Global South and the world in general, were in the offing.
Mrs Bandaranaike
NM Perera Continue reading
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Padma Edirisinghe, in Sunday Observer, 2016, where the title runs “That wanderer among the Kandyan hills”.… see note below **
Thirteen miles off Gampola, past sprawling tea estates nestling in the lap of luxuriantly foliaged mountains, lies Legundeniya. Here, the carpet of Lanka’s histRory rolls back and reveals a page of the history of Kande Uda Pas Rata, as it was 300 years ago.
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Dishan Joseph, in Daily News, 20 February 2021, with this title “A slice of Africa in Puttalam”
Most Sri Lankans in Colombo city would have caught a glimpse of robust women, of African descent dancing to pulsating drumbeats. We have applauded the performances of the African Manja group. But have we truly understood their origins, displacement and hardships hidden behind their smiles. I firmly believe that after their generations have lived here for 500 years, they too are very much Sri Lankan.
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Nira Wickramasinghe: reviewing Sarojini Jayawickrama’s Writing that conquers. Re-reading Knox’s Historical Relation of the Island Ceylon, (Social Scientists Association, Colombo 2004)
Among academic historians in many parts of the world there exists an almost pathological fear of contamination by literary studies via the linguistic turn which manifests itself in the display of fierce criticism of authors of postmodern or cultural studies especially those interested in ‘discourse’ or textual analysis. This is an indication of how centred professional historians still are in the historicist and implicitly empiricist models which are responsible for their material and political hegemony in academia as well as in the public sphere.
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Nishan De Mel,
Dear Friends and Colleagues, As we approach the end of the year, there is much to look back on and reflect upon. I am glad to share with you some of the highlights of the recent month in this Verité Bulletin.
We have long felt that democracy is not meaningful when citizens are not critically cognizant of the information in relation to public finance. This is why Verité Research strategically expanded its work on Public Finance. The platform that we built, PublicFinance.lk, is probably the pre-eminent locus for information and analysis on the state of Sri Lanka’s public finance.
Osman Faruqi, in The Age, 27 January 2022, with this title ‘Yahoos’ have as much right to be at tennis as cucumber sandwich set”
Australia loves telling myths about itself. One of my favourites is the idea that Australians are laid-back and distrustful of authority, with an abiding fondness for larrikinism. It’s a favourite because of how stubbornly it continues to persist, even in the face of regular evidence to the contrary.
An Editorial Note from Michael Roberts, 27 January 2022
Recent items on the Senanayake family and on DS Senanayake (Sri Lanka’s first Prime Minister) in Thuppahi touched on his work in promoting peasant agriculture . One of Sri Lanka’s foremost researchers in this field is my friend and colleague from undergraduate days in Ramanathan Hall and Peradeniya University in the late 1950s, namely, Gerald H Peiris. As it would be of wider benefit, I asked him to present Thuppahi with a list of his research work on agriculture and the island economy.
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thuppahi
