By Uditha Devapriya

Last year, the Open Society Foundations (OSF) launched the Seven Cities Fellowship, focusing on public intellectuals from seven countries: Argentina, Indonesia, Lebanon, Nigeria, Sri Lanka, Taiwan, and Tanzania. In March 2025, the OSF unveiled its first cohort of Fellows. Among them were filmmakers, novelists, anthropologists, and artists. Among them was a law student from Sri Lanka, Uthpala Wijesuriya.

Uthpala is an interesting character. The best way to describe him would be that he is a boy of many talents and ideas. He happens to be a friend of mine. I first came across him at the height of Covid-19 in 2020. It has been six years since then. I have spent much of that time seeing him grow into a thinker whose ideas lie far, far ahead of his peers.

Interventions

His project, details of which he has already divulged to the local press already, delves into how history is reconstructed to suit the thinking of a specific period. It focuses on five historical sites in two provinces in Sri Lanka and uses them as a basis for unearthing a different history, or historiography. Among other things, I think the project will provoke us into questioning how our past is taught, at school and outside.

A Traditional Upbringing

Part of what makes the project resonate so much is the story of its author. In Sri Lanka, a country steeped in a social democratic system and comprehensive public infrastructure, extending to education, healthcare, and social welfare, young people chart unique and interesting journeys of self-discovery through schools and universities. Uthpala’s journey is no different. Ultimately, it is what helped shape his project.

Although much of his education was in Colombo, Sri Lanka’s commercial capital, where the country’s leading businesses and institutions are based, Uthpala was raised hundreds of miles away, in Kurunegala, in the north-western province. His parents were public servants: his father was a public health inspector and his mother a nurse.

Uthpala was born in the village of Mataluwawa in 2003. Mataluwawa is located at the periphery of Kurunegala, and it lies close to Anuradhapura, an agrarian heartland which is strongly associated with Sri Lanka’s nearly 2,500-year written history. With his parents, he would visit Anuradhapura whenever they had time, during weekends or holidays. His visits there slowly sparked an interest in Sri Lankan culture and history.

Like most of his peers, Uthpala entered Sri Lanka’s education system at an early age. Brought up and raised in a largely traditional setting, he was exposed to this system.

Though completely free and accessible, for the most government schools in Sri Lanka taught subjects like language, religion, and history in circumscribed ways. Uthpala studied these subjects under this rather restrictive setup. Despite such limitations, however, he developed a love for these subjects. In 2013 he sat for a special exam and secured admission to a school in Colombo. By now, his passion for history had grown considerably.

Uthpala moved to his new school, Royal College, the following year. There, he explored his interests more widely. Colombo brought him into contact with the English language and a Westernized culture. He found this new environment daunting at first. Eventually, he began pursuing his favorite subjects. He soon found his way to leading research institutions in the city, including the National Museum, National Library, and National Archives. At these places, he discovered new ways of looking at history, culture, and society.

A New, Different World

One of the biggest problems Uthpala faced was the English language. Back at his first school in Mataluwawa, English had been taught as a subject for a few periods a week. In Colombo, by contrast, he came across it every day, indeed almost every hour. Complicating matters further, his new school had students from diverse backgrounds. For many of these students, English was a first language. Among them were Uthpala’s classmates.

Not surprisingly, he found it difficult to speak, write, read, and comprehend the language. His first few attempts proved discouraging. Yet he realized, early on, that English provided a pathway to obtaining knowledge and it could help him understand his preferred subjects. With much determination and difficulty, he tried to master the language. He did this partly by getting involved in sports and other school activities.

By the time he did his Advanced Level exams in 2022, he had progressed far. While speaking in English remained a challenge, he was confident enough to read and write. He wrote his exams in his language, Sinhala, but compensated for this by reading as much as possible in English. Moreover, at the time of his final exams, he had accomplished much as a student leader. He had become a member, chairman, or secretary of numerous clubs and societies. Among these, not surprisingly, was the College history club. In 2022 he had also served as the Head Prefect of his school’s hostel, putting together events in record time and ensuring the welfare of the boarders during a severe economic crisis.

A Young Researcher

Uthpala finished his exams in January 2023. By then he had applied for the seniormost leadership position at school, that of senior prefect. A month later his application was approved and he was appointed, together with several of his friends.

In many ways, Uthpala felt like a fish out of water. Many of his peers were from privileged, Westernized, and highly sophisticated backgrounds. He was a product of a very different environment. Though he had reached the top, there was still a gulf between his world and theirs. Perhaps it was this which caught my eye. Whatever the reason, in 2023, when I began my research career, it was Uthpala who became my first assistant.

In his interview with a local newspaper, published after he received his Fellowship, Uthpala recollects how he worked in those first few months, balancing the demands of prefectship and research work. From January 2023 to October 2024, almost two years, the two of us worked together on three projects: an upcoming historical publication on the Anglican Church in Sri Lanka, a collection of essays by a renowned political thinker, and an official publication on an educational institution. Starting out as an assistant, very soon he became a colleague and a fellow researcher and writer.

Whenever we were free, the two of us would discuss our future and debate history, art, culture, society, politics, and other topics. By now he had enrolled at an international relations diploma program and was studying for his entrance exams at the Sri Lanka Law College. By February the next year, he had finished part of the international relations program and joined Law College. He had also qualified for a government university, the University of Peradeniya, which lay several hundred miles from Colombo.

Law student – Peradeniya

It was during these conversations that he began to think about a research project of his own. Though he was focused on a career in law, he remained interested in culture and history. In January 2025, he collected his thoughts and put them together for his application to the OSF. Two months later, he was confirmed as a Fellow.

Rethinking and Reframing the Past

Born and raised in a village and educated in a city, Uthpala confronted multiple worlds and immersed himself in them all. This gave him a foundation for his thinking. Though diligent, he began to question what he was studying.

It is this which ultimately informed his project, which is simply titled Five Sacred Sites. As the title makes clear, it explores the history of five sites. Two of these are in Kurunegala, in the northwestern province, while three are in the north.

When pondering his choices, Uthpala notes that he wanted to focus on sites far away from locations that scholars of Sri Lankan history usually focus on.

Understandably, at this stage he is reluctant to divulge too many details about the project. But he is clear about what he wants to accomplish. As a student of history, growing up in Kurunegala and Colombo, serving as chairman of the history club at his second school, he always felt that the past was laden with multiple claims and contestations. “Sri Lanka lies at a crossroads in the Global South,” he argues. “Yet much of our history and historiography is rooted in colonial assumptions about identity and nationhood.”

This is a point which resonates deeply with my own work. As renowned historians like Sujit Sivasunderam and Nira Wickramasinghe have written, Sri Lanka’s past tends to be framed in line with colonial notions of history. In the early 20th century, for instance, Sri Lanka, then a British colony, witnessed numerous cultural revivals. These led to a consolidation of ethnic identity that, in the longer term, fueled tensions between certain communities. Reflecting on this, Uthpala says, “The result is that even ‘value-neutral’ subjects like history have been weaponized in the service of exclusivist ideologies.”

What interests me more than these ideas, however, is Uthpala’s own transformation. While in Kurunegala and even in Colombo, he says he subscribed to certain interpretations of history “because they were inscribed in stone and we were supposed to accept them.” What is true of Sri Lanka in this respect is, I think, true of many other countries in South Asia, indeed the Global South. The tendency to associate a country or a society with one group, to the exclusion of others, starts in the classroom and with the textbook.

With increasing access to knowledge, particularly on the web, one would assume that these notions of nationhood and identity would fade away. But this has not been so. Far from subjecting anachronistic, exclusivist narratives to scrutiny, the internet has in fact helped amplify them. Sri Lanka has been no stranger to this: one of the first global case studies of social media accelerating hate crime was the spate of anti-Muslim riots, which cropped up in Digana, near Kandy, Sri Lanka, in 2018.

In many respects, of course, things have improved since then. Sri Lanka is now in the hands of a government which has, at least on paper, put tolerance and pluralism at the center of its mandate. The country’s prime minister, in particular, is an anthropologist whose work coincides with some of Uthpala’s own research. Yet as Uthpala cautions me as he wraps up our conversation, “our interventions as researchers never end.”

This is an important point. It is what has informed his work and what has transformed him. On the verge of completing his higher education, Uthpala has made many journeys and crossed many paths. Seeing him grow, I have no doubt that he will continue to evolve. His project, in that sense, may well prove groundbreaking.

Uditha Devapriya is an independent researcher, author, columnist, and analyst whose work spans international relations, history, anthropology, and politics. He holds an LL.B. from the University of London and a Postgraduate Diploma in International Relations from the Bandaranaike Centre for International Studies (BCIS). In 2024 he was a participant in the International Visitor Leadership Program (IVLP) conducted by the US State Department. From 2022 to 2025 he served as Chief International Relations Analyst at Factum, an Asia-Pacific focused foreign policy think-tank. In 2025 he did two lecture stints in India, one as a Resident Fellow at the Kautilya School of Public Policy in Hyderabad and another on art and culture at the India International Centre in New Delhi. Since 2023, he has authored books on Sri Lankan institutions and public figures while pursuing research projects spanning art, culture, history, and geopolitics. He can be reached at udakdev1@gmail.com.