August 21, 2013 · 3:35 pm

Jean Arasanayagam: Poet, Author, Activist

Sarah Hannan, in the Sunday Leader, 7 July 2013

arasanayagam-4co copy “We’ll all become spinners of endless sagas which we read in the silence of our eternal loneliness. We inhabit the world of exile, which lies within the Babylon of ourselves” – Jean Arasanayagam.  Dr. Jean Arasanayagam – is a renowned poet and author who has contributed immensely towards the English Literature circuit in Sri Lanka for over four decades. Having written poetry, prose and short stories in English she is celebrated by literati around the world and was recently honoured with a doctorate in letters by the Bowdoin College, USA. Joining In Conversation Dr. Arasanayagam shares her life as a person of letters and art. Having been a voice for the people who silently suffered the hardships of war, the writer asked her, what changes she sees in the society three years into peace and reconciliation under one flag. Continue reading →

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August 21, 2013 · 3:23 pm

Loudes Melorin Vincent: an example to us all and in service of AUSLMAT

Quintus de Zylva

MeloDr. (Mrs). Loudes Melorin Vincent is a proud product of the Batticaloa District. Her father was a mechanic and she struggled financially to complete her school education and then went to Peradeniya University to do a degree in dentistry. Her education was supported by the Burgher Union of Batticaloa. In June 2006 she graduated with a Bachelor of Dental Surgery. Her story is one of great effort in the face of severe financial stresses and one that should serve as a source of encouragement to all those students who want to study and rise up out of the vicious cycle of poverty that drags some children down. Continue reading →

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August 21, 2013 · 3:08 pm

Living costs today in Sri Lanka

Harold Gunatillake

The rich, newly or otherwise, will be rich always; will never feel the hunger pains of the suffering masses. They live, most of them in architect designed homes, one or two luxury vehicles in the double garages, eating rich food, obvious from the visible obesity problems they carry. That class of achievers is essential in a capitalistic society to keep the economy viable and a necessary asset. This brief article focuses on the non-achievers, battlers and the unfortunates who are deprived of the basics in life, and the numbers seem to increase day by day. This could be assessed from the number of people begging on the roadsides near traffic lights, when you wait for the green light.

One year ago a good size papaw in the Wellawatte market was approximately Rs. 60 and today the same size papaw is Rs 200. Within a period of one year the prices have doubled and over. These fruits are locally grown without any care, or fertilizing with no cost to the producer. But why have the prices doubled within one year? Your guess would be as good as mine. Continue reading →

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August 21, 2013 · 3:03 pm

A Mass of Oil in South Australia?

Michael Snyder in ?? with title “The Biggest Oil Discovery in 50 Years?”

In a virtually uninhabitable section of South Australia, a discovery has been made which could rock the world. Some are calling it the biggest discovery of oil in 50 years. Earlier this year, a company called Linc Energy announced that tests had revealed that there was a minimum of 3.5 billion barrels of oil equivalent sitting under more than 65,000 square kilometres of land that it owns in the Arckaringa Basin. But that is the minimum number. It has been projected that there could ultimately be up to 233 billion barrels of recoverable oil in the area. If that turns out to be accurate, the oil sitting under that land is worth approximately 20 trillion dollars, and it would be roughly equivalent to the total amount of oil sitting under the sands of Saudi Arabia. In essence, it would be a massive game changer. Continue reading →

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August 20, 2013 · 1:25 pm

“The Beginnings of Civilization in South India” by Clarence Maloney

Clarance Maloney:  “The Beginnings of Civilization in South India,” Journal of Asian Studies, Vol XXIX, No 3, May 1970. Read the entire article by clicking here

This article was based on Clarence Maloney’s University of Pennsylvania PHD dissertation from 1968, “The Effect of Early Coastal Sea Traffic on the Beginning of Civilization in South India.” It is, alas, little known and has not been sufficiently deployed and/or engaged with in the studies of ancient Sri Lankan and Indian history.

Clarence Maloney has spent much of his life in South Asia, has a PhD in South Asian Studies from the University of Pennsylvania, and has written 9 books on the peoples and cultures of this world area. Among these books are The Peoples of South Asia  (584 pages, published by Holt, Rinehart and Winston in 1974) and People of the Maldive Islands.

maloney pic maloney book -maldives Continue reading →

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August 18, 2013 · 4:05 am

Confronting Charlie Ponnadurai: Clarifying the Context of Disparaging Ethnic Epithets in Sri Lanka over the last 180 years

Michael Roberts

Charlie and I go back a long way – to Ramanathan Hall at Peradeniya University where we were freshers together in 1957 and thus were ragged together.[1] Charlie was known then as Charlies Ponnadurai, but he is now a “Sarvan” and resides in Germany with his German wife after years of work in Zambia and the Middle East. He has done me a singular honour in basing an essay on “Para Dhemalā” purely on my work. The reference is to “Pejorative Phases: the Anti-Colonial Response and Sinhala Perceptions of the Self through Images of the Burghers.”

Readers may have been misled into thinking this was either a book or an independent article. Not so. The title is that of a chapter, “Pejorative Phrases….,” which is the first chapter in the book People Inbetween. The Burghers and the Middle Class in the Transformations within Sri Lanka, 1790s-1960s,” – a large tome published in Sri Lanka in 1989 by Sarvodaya Book Publishing Services. This book was one part of a longer projected series involving myself, Percy Colin-Thomé and Ismeth Raheem. That venture was inspired in part by our discovery of a treasure trove, namely, the Lorenz Collection at the library of the Royal Asiatic Society in Colombo. It has not seen the fullest fruition; but the first step was People Inbetween which was almost wholly my work, albeit aided by citation-aid and other inputs from Colin-Thomé and Raheem.[2] Continue reading →

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August 17, 2013 · 5:23 am

Shulman’s Exploration of the Imagination in the South Indian Cultural World

Steven P. Hopkins, … a longer version of a review in South Asian History and Culture, vol. 3, no. 4, July 2013, pp. 424-26 (see below)

Coming away from a close reading of this remarkable book one cannot help feeling much like the bemused lover in Ativīrarāmaṉ’s 16th century Tenkasi Tamil poem on the tale of Nala and Damayantī.  The goose messenger has just described in vivid imaginative detail the body of Nala’s beloved, almost placing her “before his very eyes,” when he wonders aloud: “Seeing through the mind [thought, imagination] of a true friend is really seeing (mēyt tuṇaiyār karunttiṉāṟ kāndale kāṇṭa)” (186). Seeing the histories of South Indian literatures through the singularly perceptive and creative mind of David Shulman is, indeed, “really seeing.”  And what we have before our eyes in Shulman’s seeing is an exhaustive and deeply nuanced work of scholarship on the nature of the “imagination” in India.

david_shulman_na_web David Shulman Continue reading →

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August 17, 2013 · 4:47 am

Meeting Michelle de Kretser and her QUESTIONS OF TRAVEL, 2012

Susan Wyndham, in Sydney Morning Herald, 6 October 2012 … “The Interview: Michelle de Kretser”

michelle-de-kretser_20121005123354987325-620x349- steven stewart Pic by Steven Stewart

Michelle de Kretser has made two geographical leaps in her life: at 14, with her family from Sri Lanka to Australia, and three years ago, with her partner and dogs from Melbourne to Sydney. Both gave de Kretser new perspectives on the world and both underpin her new novel, Questions of Travel. Sitting in a cafe in inner-west Newtown, she seems to be a slightly exotic local: her refined accent hints at elsewhere; an atlas fragment of the Pacific Ocean is aptly pinned to her jumper. She says, ”Moving up to Sydney, I was suddenly a stranger. I always had the intention of setting this book in Sydney, the hubris of which now astonishes me.”

De Kretser compares Sydneysiders’ complaints about the city – traffic, public transport, pollution, overcrowding – with Melburnians’ civic pride. ”Yes, there are all those things,” she says, ”but this is also one of the most beautiful places on Earth: the vegetation struck me as very lush, so it reminded me of childhood. The diversity of people. It has the buzz of a big, modern city and the problems.” Continue reading →

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August 16, 2013 · 2:36 pm

Para Dhemalā

Charles Sarvan

Charles-Sarvan-150x150“…an alien Tamil speaking group with little or no history in the island” (Sunday Island, Colombo. 25 January, 2004, p. 7),  … quoted in my essay, ‘Reign of Anomy’.

I don’t remember hearing Sinhala spoken in the Jaffna of my childhood, but I’m over 75 and no longer trust my memory: perhaps, Sinhala was spoken here and there.    Be that as it may, it’s not relevant to what follows. We shifted to Colombo when I was 14, and I was almost immediately sent to St Thomas’, Gurutalawa (see, “Recollections of Gurutalawa”, Sunday Island, 5 July 2009). The context in which the word para was used at boarding-school, in Colombo and elsewhere; the accompanying tone of voice and facial expression, all indicated contempt, dismissal and rejection. Para was linked to Parayā (low caste) and that sufficed to convey meaning to me. The first time this particular linguistic stone was thrown at me was at Gurutalawa. Continue reading →

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August 16, 2013 · 2:23 pm

A Tropical Romance Extraordinary: Sam Popham and his Trees

Ranjit Mulleriyawa, in the Island, 9 August 2013, here the title is “Popham Arboretum in Dambulla :A Sanctuary of Tropical Trees A ” Summer Romance with trees– with a Dowry of an Ecosystem Restored”

POPHAM 33 Beside the Dambulla-Kandalama road, is a unique Arboretum representing the flora of the semi-evergreen, monsoon dry forest of Sri Lanka. Its creator is an Englishman – Francis Home Popham, known only as Sam . Sam Popham was born on the 29th of February, 1923.He was educated at Eaton and Magdalene College Cambridge, where he graduated in History. He first came to Sri Lanka (then ‘Ceylon’) as a young British Naval Officer during the second world war. Based in Trincomalee, he would often travel through Dambulla admiring the forest vegetation on either side of the Dambulla-Kandy road. Back home in England after the war, Sam became a schoolmaster for a while, before returning to Sri Lanka a few years later as a Tea Planter. His love for trees, made him give up planting tea and assume responsibility as the Smithsonian Institute’s Principal Field Officer in the ‘Flora of Ceylon ‘ project. In 1963, he bought seven and a half acres of scrub jungle (abandoned ‘Chena’ land) in Kandalama, Dambulla and commenced his life’s most important work- Returning wasteland to nature- conserving the unique biological diversity of the ‘dry zone’ of Sri Lanka. Continue reading →

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