The Forgotten People: Malaiyaha Tamils of the Plantations and Hill-Country
Meera Srinivasan, from The Hindu, 18 May 2017, where the title runs “The long journey of a forgotten people”
“Sri Lanka’s hill-country Tamils want to be seen as rightful citizens, not passive beneficiaries”
Estate workers in late 19th century
Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s public rally on May 12 with Sri Lanka’s hill-country Tamils, on the second day of his two-day visit to the country, was a success, if you went by conventional markers such as the crowd he drew or the cheers that arose from it. But its real outcome is rather limited compared to the wide-ranging needs of the historically neglected community. That an estimated 35,000 people from in and around the central highlands converged on the small town of Norwood – many walking over 5 km since buses clogged the narrow roads — partly reflects the affinity the Tamils feel for India, from where their ancestors moved to Sri Lanka about 200 years ago. Moreover, hill-country politicians put in their might to mobilise workers, campaigning widely across the tea estates that employ a fourth of the over one million-strong community.
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Honouring Sri Lanka’s Dead Servicemen
Pramod De Silva, from Daily News, 19 May 2017, where the title is “They still live on” … Note Queries at the end from Editor, Thuppahi
A soldier never really dies. He lives on in our hearts. A soldier’s mission never ends, not even in death. One of my favourite war anecdotes has a 10-year-old boy asking a World War II veteran “how does it feel to be a hero?”. His reply: “Oh, son, I am not a hero. We buried all the heroes, I am just a survivor”. No surviving soldier can ever forget his or her comrades in arms who perhaps died right next to them. Their devotion to friends and colleagues who made the Supreme Sacrifice is simply indescribable. Yet, soldiers fall in every battle. Others make sure that their sacrifice is not in vain. They charge ahead and win the battle. They do not seek glory, nor do they seek fame.
Poles Apart on May 19th: Tamil and Sinhala Voices of Power
Lamentation vs Pleased Affirmation …. The Power of Polarity! That is in capsule form the story of Sri Lanka from the 1940s to the present day. No better illustration can be provided today than the reading of the May 18/19th anniversary of the LTTE’s defeat and the death of talaivar Pirapaharan by intellectuals on both sides of the divide.
A family member of one of those who disappeared during the civil war with the LTTE, mourns in Colombo–AFP
“A Day of Grief” said Chief Minister Wigneswaran on 18th May.
“Lest we Forget” said a Sinhala Australian in evoking the sacrifices and the victory of Sri Lanka’s armed forces in the vocabulary of Australian patriotism
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Obeyesekere’s Study of Sri Vikrama Rajasinha and His Downfall
Jolly Somasundram, in The Island, 16 May 2017, where the title is “Regime Change in Ceylon: 1815″
“The West won the world, not by the superiority of its ideas, values or religion but, rather, by its superiority in applying organised violence. Westerners often forget this fact, non-westerners never do” = Quote from Samuel R Huntington
History matters. Obeyesekere relates events, two centuries after they had occurred and a century after the Russian Revolution. Yet they are all so contemporary! Confused by memories, living in a very unpredictable past and troubled by Fukuyama’s statement that all had ended, Obeyesekere has given a fillip to re-interrogating the relevance of history. Both Hegel and Marx considered History to be teleology, moving to a purpose. The impact of Portugal and Holland on Sri Lanka was akin to the placid non-movement in a cemetery: 1815 regime change, headed by the leading country of the Industrial Revolution, promised traction to a stalled Hegel and Marx.
Appreciating Galle in Its Quietness and Its Pastness
Joe Simpson, in a review of GALLE AS QUIET AS ASLEEP penned in 2006
Never to be confused with the American best-selling romance novelist of the same name, Norah Roberts, who survived well into her nineties, was born near Colombo in 1907, one of fourteen children from several marriages of T. W. Roberts, an Anglo-Barbadian Ceylon Civil Servant, Oxford scholar and cricketer par excellence who became District Judge in Galle. After severe hearing loss in her late twenties drove her from teaching, Norah ran the Galle Fort Library (est. 1871) for four decades until she retired in 1982. I clearly remember first meeting Norah, then in her late sixties, one hot and humid morning in September 1973 when, as a newly-arrived V.S.O. English teacher at Richmond College, I paid my dues to become a member of the quaint old library on Church Street, next to the Fort Post Office. (Judge Roberts, then still alive in his nineties, had long migrated to England). It was only a couple of years before she finally “retired” in her mid-seventies that the tireless Norah (who never married) began her self-appointed Herculean task, never before attempted, of writing the “compleat” history of Galle from its earliest days. It would dominate the next ten years of her life.
Galle in the 1890s — a rare image in the Australian National Gallery Collection, Canberra
Book on Ceylon Railway Heritage sponsored by The National Trust
Scene from http://www.elakiri.com/forum/showthread.php?t=1432549&page=2 .. and not in the book as far as i know
Launch of The National Trust Book CEYLON RAILWAY HERITAGE By K.A.D. Nandasena & Vinodh Wickremeratne will be held on the 25th May 2017 at 6.15 pm followed by our Monthly Lecture No.95 at 6.30 pm at the HNB Auditorium
Engaging the Vijaya Fable Once Again
Michael Roberts
Perinbanayagam 
Peiris 
Gunatilleke
ONE
In coming across one of my old essays on the Vijaya myth reproduced and questioned within my website Thuppahi recently, I circulated it (ITEM TWO below) once again by email – perhaps too hastily. Both responses to this email and the original commentary signal sharp reactions. Besides they involve eminent Sri Lankan scholars in the person of Professor Robert S. Perinbanayagam of Hunter College in New York and Professor Gerald H. Peiris of Peradeniya University, besides enabling me to bring in the incisive intervention of Godfrey Gunatilleka and to hark back to a ‘line’ from the economist VK Wickremasinghe (son of the noted author Martin Wickremasinghe). Continue reading
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At Kandy in 1954: Queen Elizabeth and Her Duke in Their Prime
Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth and the Duke of Edinburgh greet and are greeted by the Diyawadana Nilame of the Dalada Maligawa
A day or so before or after this event, the Duke of Edinburgh declared the University of Peradeniya to be “more open than usual”
Enmasse: Lankan Catholic Migrants Celebrate Mass at Padova in Italy
Fr. Sheron Dias, Oourtesy of Asian Tribune, Rome 11/5/17 with title as “20th Annual National Rally Of The Sri Lankan Catholic Migrants At Padova In Italy”
For the 20th consecutive year the Sri-Lankan Catholic migrants living in Italy gathered at the hallowed Shrine of St. Anthony of Padova on the 1st of May 2017. Thousands of Srilankans took part in the Festive High Mass followed by the Solemn Procession and the Blessing with relic of St. Anthony of Padova. This Annual National Rally of the Sri-Lankan Catholic migrants was organized under the guidance of Rev. Monsignor Neville Joe Perera, the National Coordinator to the Sri-Lankan Catholic migrants in Italy in collaboration with the Chaplain Priests.
