Features

New Peradeniya pays tribute to old Peradeniya

Published

2 years ago

2023/08/20

by Liyanage Amarakeerthi

Text of Speech made at at a function held on August 9, 2023 to celebrate the handing over to Professor Gananath Obyesekere’s personal library, the Obeyesekere Collection, to the library of University of Peradeniya.

When I was invited to speak on Professor Gananath Obeyesekere’s work, I said, ‘even though I am more than happy to speak and I am quite familiar with his work,’ I asked, ‘wouldn’t it be better if someone younger, such as Dhammika Herath speaks representing the department of Sociology.’ Here we are, representing the New Peradeniya in appreciating, paying tribute to the old Peradeniya.

My background is literature, and my training is in comparative literature, literary theory, postcolonial studies, Cultural Studies, and so on being the components of that training. In my speech, I will highlight what Professor Gananath Obeyesekere’s work has been to me as a scholar in above subjects teaching in Sri Lanka.

Prof. Gananath Obeyesekere

Let me begin with a short anecdote. In 1993, I was a third-year student at the university of Colombo. On one July day, the inter faculty drama competition was taking place. For the competition, I had written and directed a play. When my play was about to be staged, I peeked through the curtains to take a last look at the panel of judges to make sure they were ready to see the greatest short play in the world. The chairperson of the panel was an elegantly dressed lady, a beautiful madam, who spoke mostly in English.

After many hours, the competition was over but not the intense discussion of the panel. After a while, however, it also ended; my play won all major awards the best play, best script, best actor and so on. Soon after the awards were given away, professor Sarath Wijesooriya, then a lecturer, came to me and said, ‘Anna Ranjini Madam enna kiwwa.’ I went into that special room hoping very much that she would not speak to me in English. Ranjini Madam was that elegant lady, the chairperson of the panel of judges. She talked to me in Sinhala and appreciated the play, and asked me to meet her at Lauries Rd, Bambalapitya.

Gananath and Ranjini Obeyesekere at the book gifting event at Peradeniya

There we met not only in that summer, but nearly every summer after that, when Obeyesekeres were on vacation. In one of those conversations, I heard ‘Fulbright fellowship’ for the first time. In 1997 I won it; after winning the scholarship, I had to send out applications to universities. In that summer too, Obeyesekeres were in Sri Lanka. Professor Gananath Obeyesekere mentioned ‘the University of Wisconsin.’ In those were pre-internet days, and such little pieces of information mattered a lot. Now, it is 2023, and during the last 30 years, Professor Ranjini Obeyesekere has been my mentor, friend, and an inspiration for working tirelessly in my field. Though history is not always the best judge, let’s hope madam, that your mentee will be judged fairly.

Professor Obeyesekere’s work has been inspirational for me in many ways. Primarily, he has been one of the role models for me and some others in Sri Lankan academia, especially in the faculties of arts, where such role models are extremely rare. He has been an inspiration in speaking truth to power, in keeping a critical distance from all centers of power, and in feeling at home in the loneliness that often comes to you when you keep that distance.

Let me explain briefly, how I have worked some Obeyesekere thoughts into the curricular that I teach at the department of Sinhala here at Peradeniya. Last semester I taught a part of a course, recently introduced to our curriculum, and it deals with the European/colonial representations of Sri Lanka. Edward Said is, of course, an essential thinker there. Our own Obeyesekere is equally important, if not even more relevant. None of my students read scholarly books in English, but when I used Professor Obeyesekere’s Cannibal Talk, and The Apotheosis of Captain Cook translating some sections and explaining some more, my students could see a great thinker at work.

They are intelligent enough to see the main point. Cannibalism has been a conceptual tool of colonialism, the European colonizers representing certain groups of human beings as cannibals. Even more than Sati in India, cannibalistic practices, which were extremely rare, were over emphasized by the colonizers when representing certain groups of people. We have learned from Said’s Orientalism that representation of other people, Asian, African, American, and so on, in colonial discourses is mediated by power, and that power to represent overlaps with power to govern, power to punish, and power to murder.

In there, ‘knowledge’, the knowledge of ‘other’ constructed with the aim of subjugating the other, is a form of power. Foucault may have shown that knowledge is power. Obeyesekere’s work, especially the works mentioned above, shows a much more complex picture of that ‘knowledge/power’ axis. Once a discourse is constructed around a subject and a knowledge is produced within that discourse, many people contribute to sustaining it and giving it a life of its own, as ‘The Doomed King’ amply demonstrates.

Professor Obeyesekere has taught us, how to challenge the received knowledge in a field of study. In Medusa’s Hair, he challenges Edmand Leach, an intellectual giant of the field of anthropology, and one of his teachers. Such debates are now almost nonexistent in our faculty. Some of the debates created by Obeyesekere are of a global scale. His famous book, Apotheosis of Captain Cook, generated a lasting debate with the famous anthropologist Martin Sahlins. Two great anthropologists of our times responded to each other by writing book-length responses.

That debate generated some other debates; other famous anthropologists such as Clifford Geerts, Stanley Thambiah, and so on dedicating special conference panels to the Obeyesekere-Sahlins debate. As I understood it, the thrust of Obeyesekere’s argument was that Hawaiian natives were not epistemologically naïve to accept colonizing Captain Cook as a powerful deity of a new order which was too powerful to resist. Sahlins did have extremely interesting points about what happened when the Old-world colonizers met the New World, the American continent. But my postcolonial Sri Lankan mind tend to agree with Obeyesekere.

Professor Obeyesekere is the most important theoretically oriented scholar in recent times. His psychoanalytic approaches and extremely agile and fluid readings of classical historical narratives and historical characters have rendered them much richer than they had been represented in some colonial, nationalist, or postcolonial readings.

His book, The Work of Culture, one of my favorite Obeyesekere masterpieces, is an extraordinary work beautifully demonstrating a great mind of our times at work. One of the greatest prose writers to be produced by Peradeniya and its department of English, Obeyesekere uses the paradigm of Oedipus to reexamine historical Buddhist characters such as Asoka, Dutugemunu, Kashyapa, and so on.

Given as a series of lectures in 1982, under the general title of “Psychoanalytic Anthropology and some problems of Interpretation,” the book, The Work of Culture, is a rich summary of the author’s previous work, and a demonstration of how a great thinker can work with already familiar materials and yet come up with new insights with surprise, delight, and wisdom. The book, as the case with Obeyesekere scholarship, is an exhibition of putting English language at work to make rich scholarly arguments in beautifully crafted prose, that is not threateningly difficult but yet deep and complex in thought.

In this book, Obeyesekere revisits his famous argument on the Dutugamunu’s conscience, and shows us once more that Gamani was a complex character with a complex personal history. Estranged from his father, under the shadow of a strong mother, married to a woman of whom the dominant historical narratives prefer to be silent, having a brother with whom his relationship is a ‘typical case of sibling rivalry,’ and then, and finally as a king who is forced by contemporary politics to kill a virtuous king. For Obeyesekere, the troubled conscience of Gamini as a son, brother, husband, father, and a ruler, can be used as a metaphor of reminding us of the need for a society conducive to have much more peaceful conscience not only for rulers for all of us.

Not surprisingly, this rich reading of historical events and characters was misunderstood, Obeyesekere was turned into a national villain in extremely one-dimensional nationalist/racist by the Sinhala press. Peradeniya university that produced Obeyesekere was to produce scholars who argue that Dutugemunu, by extension Sinhala people, has no sense of guilt in their conscience! No wonder that Sri Lanka has descended into the political, ethical, cultural abyss that it is in right now.

Obeyesekere has been a leading critic of European enlightenment rationalism. In ‘Medusa’s Hair’ he uses the theories of personal symbols and psychoanalysis to understand mythic-religious experience at the level of religious magic. His critique of Western rationalism finds its best expression in the ‘Awakened Ones: Phenomenology of Visionary Experience,’ a stunning book close to my heart since I have been a writer and scholar looking for all possible alternatives to naturalist realism.

The critique of Western rationalism has been something fashionable in our country, with extreme cultural relativists getting themselves lost in the domain of Natha deviyo. Obeyesekere’s critique of rationalism is the kind that would not end up producing or promoting the racists such as Channa Jayasumana.

Professor Obeyesekere critically defends the enlightenment tradition, supplementing Cartesian rational cogito with all kinds of other forms of insight, intuition, or vision articulated within the European enlightenment tradition itself and beyond. Descartes famously said, ‘I think therefore I am.’ There, ‘to think’ means rational thought.

But meditative insight, vision, the sudden vision or the epiphany of poets, or what Freud calls, ‘lucid dreaming’ have been ‘forms of knowledge’ in nearly all traditions. Obeyesekere’s study is the only book-length treatment of these phenomena in recent years.

That brings me to another point I want to make: ‘comparative nature of Obeyesekere scholarship.’ Some of his books are large, intimidatingly so. But written in elegant and unpretentious prose, they are invitingly readable, and once you get in, you would not come out of them without a feeling of remarkable expansion in your consciousness and awareness. Take for example, ‘Imagining Karma: Ethical Transformation in Amerindian, Buddhist, and Greek Rebirth.’ Before I encountered this book, I did not know that the idea of Karma as a form of ethical rationality and as a form of causality explaining human life beyond our mundane world or this life, can be used as a theoretical category for intercultural understanding.

Karma, not necessarily in the Buddhist sense of the word, has existed in many other cultures. Deep, reflective thinking, and philosophical formations on life after death have not been unique to a single culture. This book, as several other Obeyesekere books and essays, demonstrates that serious big questions about life such as the meaning of life have been raised everywhere.

Sometimes, human beings have learned from each other the art of asking those questions. Sometimes, similar questions have been asked independent of each other. In many ways and on many times, Obeyesekere scholarship has shown us our shared humanity. I have tried to pass on that message to my students hoping to get them out of parochial nationalisms they have been brought up in for decades in our country.

Speaking of parochialism, let me touch on Professor Obeyesekere’s recent book, a lovely little book, ‘The Many Faces of the Kandyan Kingdom’, that invites us to reconsider the cosmopolitan nature of Kandyan kingdom through the 16th and 18th centuries. Several Kandyan kings such as Rajasingha II, enjoyed having foreigners in Kandy. While those foreigners were useful as servants, interpreters, craftsmen, soldiers, mechanics, gunners and so on, it was not for instrumental reasons, the king liked having international visitors around.

The king enjoyed seeing the many faces of humanity in his domain. With such cosmopolitan outlooks, the king and the elites were not threatened by the presence of cultural difference. There is no wonder that the subtitle of the book is ‘lessons for our time.’ In ‘our time, even when we beg for more tourism dollars and foreign support, those very nationalist forces that brought the country down, can be seen promoting extreme chauvinism and xenophobia.

Social theory has been something fashionable in Sri Lanka for decades. But many theory persons are insanely pretentious and esoteric. Some theoreticians are just name-droppers whose pretensions do no more than dulling the epistemological cutting edges of those theories. Obeyesekere, in contrast, demonstrates how theories can be applied in analyzing texts and rituals in a way the theories themselves are better honed. ‘Medusa’s Hair’ is a beautiful example of that fact. Even when one does not agree with Obeyesekere’s theories, one can still admire the way theories are used.

In Medusa’s Hair, the main theoretical approach was Jungian and Freudian psychoanalysis. The book deals with folk priests and priestess who perform magical religious acts. Abdin is one of them. He uses religious trance to bury himself in a grave for hours and come back unharmed. Obeyesekere spends years observing him. At one point, he asks Abdin if he ever had ejaculation while in the coffin, and Abdin answers, ‘Yes. Every time.’ Perhaps Freud is right in arguing that many of such religious-mythical heroics can be sublimations of unfulfilled sexual desires. We really do not know if Abdin lied. Obeyesekere was able to ask that question because he had a good grounding in psychoanalytic theory. All Obeyesekere books are full of such examples.

As a scholar in literature, let me wind up highlighting another hallmark of Obeyesekere scholarship, which is dear to my heart. Professor Obeyesekere has a rich literary mind. In fact, it runs in the family, Obeyesekere family. Gananath and Ranjini are the most celebrated literary couple in the country. In addition to Ranjini translating Sinhala literature into English, Gananath constantly uses literary works in his research. In using literature, especially narratives, for research Obeyesekere does not reduce them to mere facts but attends to the richness of narrative literature by paying attention to layered-meanings, connotations, sub-texts, the meanings of narrative structures and so on.

That requires a deeper understanding of how literature works. The younger generation of sociologists of this country must pay attention to the way Obeyesekere reads, interprets, and engages with literary works. It was clear from the early work of Obeyesekere that the taste for good literature was a hallmark of his work, and his early essays in Sinhala and English attest to the fact that he could have become the literary giant of this country in the generation after Sarachchandra and Ludowyke, had he stayed in the field of English or Sinhala. Nearly all his work contains constant reference to literature both European and South Asian, especially Sinhala.

I said earlier that Professor Gananath Obeyesekere has been one of my role models. Let me now qualify that statement a bit. We have a group of younger academics here at the faculty of Arts, who constantly speak of the ways of waking up from the nightmare of mediocrity we are trapped in. When mediocrity is the majority, the nightmare is, for them, their sweetest dream ever. A group of us regularly meet, informally, to discuss this issue.

The name Obeyesekere, both Gananath and Ranjini, constantly appear in those discussions. Both of them are role models for all of us. But here comes the qualification: I wish Professor Gananth wrote more in Sinhala. If he did so through 1980s through 1990s, the parochialisms that led to the nightmare mentioned above would not have engulfed all of us. I also wish that the group of excellent scholars made of Ganananth, Michael Roberts, Stanley Thambiah, Siri Gunasinghe, Sugathapala de Silva, Kithsiri Malalgoda, C.R. de Silva, H. L. Seneviratne, and so on did not leave the country. For example, the vacuum created by Siri Gunasinghe by leaving the country and not writing enough in Sinhala, was filled by extremely one-dimensionally nationalist ideologues.

Yet again, if professor Obeyesekere did not leave country, when he did, and if he did not write in English until he became a leading anthropologist in the world, he would not have been able to build up the rich personal library donated to us today, and, perhaps, he would not have been able to write the great books, I mentioned above. I invite younger scholars in our faculty, and the brightest of our students, to learn your English well and come of your parochial worlds, here we have now the biography of Obeyesekere and, his library, a road map of his intellectual journey, and make them your own.

I own twelve of his books, I can be the only one to own a copy of the Pattini book in my generation, because it is so rare now. But I don’t have time to touch on all of them here. Let’s organize ourselves into a group, and collectively read Obeyesekere books, and the Obeyesekere collection.

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Features

The hollow recovery: A stagnant industry – Part I

Published

12 hours ago

2026/02/4

Sahan Weerasooriya

The headlines are seductive: 2.36 million tourists in 2025, a new “record.” Ministers queue for photo opportunities. SLTDA releases triumphant press statements. The narrative is simple: tourism is “back.”

But scratch beneath the surface and what emerges is not a success story but a cautionary tale of an industry that has mistaken survival for transformation, volume for value, and resilience for strategy.

Problem Diagnosis: The Mirage of Recovery

Yes, Sri Lanka welcomed 2.36 million tourists in 2025, marginally above the 2.33 million recorded in 2018. This marks a full recovery from the consecutive disasters of the Easter attacks (2019), COVID-19 (2020-21), and the economic collapse (2022). The year-on-year growth looks impressive: 15.1% above 2024’s 2.05 million arrivals.

But context matters. Between 2018 and 2023, arrivals collapsed by 36.3%, bottoming out at 1.49 million. The subsequent “rebound” is simply a return to where we were seven years ago, before COVID, before the economic crisis, even before the Easter attacks. We have spent six years clawing back to 2018 levels while competitors have leaped ahead.

Consider the monthly data. In 2023, January arrivals were just 102,545, down 57% from January 2018’s 238,924. By January 2025, arrivals reached 252,761, a dramatic 103% jump over 2023, but only 5.8% above the 2018 baseline. This is not growth; it is recovery from an artificially depressed base. Every month in 2025 shows the same pattern: strong percentage gains over the crisis years, but marginal or negative movement compared to 2018.

The problem is not just the numbers, but the narrative wrapped around them. SLTDA’s “Year in Review 2025” celebrates the 15.6% first-half increase without once acknowledging that this merely restores pre-crisis levels. The “Growth Scenarios 2025” report projects arrivals between 2.4 and 3.0 million but offers no analysis of what kind of tourism is being targeted, what yield is expected, or how market composition will shift. This is volume-chasing for its own sake, dressed up as strategic planning.

Comparative Analysis: Three Decades of Standing Still

The stagnation becomes stark when placed against Sri Lanka’s closest island competitors. In the mid-1990s, Sri Lanka, the Maldives, started from roughly the same base, around 300,000 annual arrivals each. Three decades later:

Sri Lanka: From 302,000 arrivals (1996) to 2.36 million (2025), with $3.2 billion

Maldives: From 315,000 arrivals (1995) to 2.25 million (2025), with $5.6 billion

The raw numbers obscure the qualitative difference. The Maldives deliberately crafted a luxury, high-yield model: one-island-one-resort zoning, strict environmental controls, integrated resorts layered with sustainability credentials. Today, Maldivian tourism generates approximately $5.6 billion from 2 million tourists, an average of $2,800 per visitor. The sector represents 21% of GDP and generates nearly half of government revenue.

Sri Lanka, by contrast, has oscillated between slogans, “Wonder of Asia,” “So Sri Lanka”, without embedding them in coherent policy. We have no settled model, no consensus on what kind of tourism we want, and no institutional memory because personnel and priorities change with every government. So, we match or slightly exceed competitors in arrivals, but dramatically underperform in revenue, yield, and structural resilience.

Root Causes: Governance Deficit and Policy Failure

The stagnation is not accidental; it is manufactured by systemic governance failures that successive governments have refused to confront.

1. Policy Inconsistency as Institutional Culture

Sri Lanka has rewritten its Tourism Act and produced multiple master plans since 2005. The problem is not the absence of strategy documents but their systematic non-implementation. The National Tourism Policy approved in February 2024 acknowledges that “policies and directions have not addressed several critical issues in the sector” and that there was “no commonly agreed and accepted tourism policy direction among diverse stakeholders.”

This is remarkable candor, and a damning indictment. After 58 years of organised tourism development, we still lack policy consensus. Why? Because tourism policy is treated as political property, not national infrastructure. Changes in government trigger wholesale personnel changes at SLTDA, Tourism Ministry, and SLTPB. Institutional knowledge evaporates. Priorities shift with ministerial whims. Therefore, operators cannot plan, investors cannot commit, and the industry lurches from crisis response to crisis response without building structural resilience.

2. Fragmented Institutional Architecture

Tourism responsibilities are scattered across the Ministry of Tourism, Sri Lanka Tourism Development Authority (SLTDA), Sri Lanka Tourism Promotion Bureau (SLTPB), provincial authorities, and an ever-expanding roster of ad hoc committees. The ADB’s 2024 Tourism Sector Diagnostics bluntly notes that “governance and public infrastructure development of tourism in Sri Lanka is fragmented and hampered.”

No single institution owns yield. No one is accountable for net foreign exchange contribution after leakages. Quality standards are unenforced. The tourism development fund, 1% of the tourism levy plus embarkation taxes, is theoretically allocated 70% to SLTPB for global promotion, but “lengthy procurement and approval processes” render it ineffective.

Critically, the current government has reportedly scrapped sophisticated data analytics programmes that were finally giving SLTDA visibility into spending patterns, high-yield segments, and tourist movement. According to industry reports in late 2025, partnerships with entities like Mastercard and telecom data analytics have been halted, forcing the sector to fly blind precisely when data-driven decision-making is essential.

3. Infrastructure Deficit and Resource Misallocation

The Bandaranaike International Airport Development Project, essential for handling projected tourist volumes, has been repeatedly delayed. Originally scheduled for completion years ago, it is now re-tendered for 2027 delivery after debt restructuring. Meanwhile, tourists in late 2025 faced severe congestion at BIA, with reports of near-miss flights due to immigration and check-in bottlenecks.

At cultural sites, basic facilities are inadequate. Sigiriya, which generates approximately 25% of cultural tourist traffic and charges $36 per visitor, lacks adequate lighting, safety measures, and emergency infrastructure. Tourism associations report instances of tourists being attacked by wild elephants with no effective safety protocols.

SLTDA Chairman statements acknowledge “many restrictions placed on incurring capital expenditure” and “embargoes placed not only on tourism but all Government institutions.” The frank admission: we lack funds to maintain the assets that generate revenue. This is governance failure in its purest form, allowing revenue-generating infrastructure to decay while chasing arrival targets.

The Stop-Go Trap: Volatility as Business Model

What truly differentiates Sri Lanka from competitors is not arrival levels but the pattern: extreme stop-go volatility driven by crisis and short-term stimulus rather than steady, strategic growth.

After each shock, the industry is told to “bounce back” without being given the tools to build resilience. The rebound mechanism is consistent: currency depreciation makes Sri Lanka “affordable,” operators discount aggressively to fill rooms, and visa concessions attract price-sensitive segments. Arrivals recover, until the next shock.

This is not how a strategic export industry operates. It is how a shock-absorber behaves, used to plug forex and fiscal holes after each policy failure, then left exposed again.

The monthly 2023-2025 data illustrate the cycle perfectly. Between January 2018 and January 2023, arrivals fell 57%. The “recovery” to January 2025 shows a 103% jump over 2023, but this is bounce-back from an artificially depressed base, not structural transformation. By September 2025, growth rates normalize into the teens and twenties, catch-up to a benchmark set six years earlier.

Why the Boom Feels Like Stagnation

Industry operators report a disconnect between headline numbers and ground reality. Occupancy rates have improved to the high-60% range, but margins remain below 2018 levels. Why?

Because input costs, energy, food, debt servicing, have risen faster than room rates. The rupee’s collapse makes Sri Lanka look “affordable” to foreigners, but it quietly transfers value from domestic suppliers and workers to foreign visitors and lenders. Hotels fill rooms at prices that barely cover costs once translated into hard currency and adjusted for inflation.

Growth is fragile and concentrated. Europe and Asia-Pacific account for over 92% of arrivals. India alone provides 20.7% of visitors in H1 2025, and as later articles in this series will show, this is a low-yield, short-stay segment. We have built recovery on market concentration and price competition, not on product differentiation or yield optimization.

There is no credible long-term roadmap. SLTDA’s projections focus almost entirely on volumes. There is no public discussion of receipts-per-visitor targets, market composition strategies, or institutional reforms required to shift from volume to value.

The Way Forward: From Arrivals Theater to Strategic Transformation

The path out of stagnation requires uncomfortable honesty and political courage that has been systematically absent.

First, abandon arrivals as the primary success metric. Tourism contribution to economic recovery should be measured by net foreign exchange contribution after leakages, employment quality (wages, stability), and yield per visitor, not by how many planes land.

Second, establish institutional continuity. Depoliticize relevant leaderships. Implement fixed terms for key personnel insulated from political cycles. Tourism is a 30-year investment horizon; it cannot be managed on five-year electoral cycles.

Third, restore data infrastructure. Reinstate the analytics programs that track spending patterns and identify high-yield segments. Without data, we are flying blind, and no amount of ministerial optimism changes that.

Fourth, allocate resources to infrastructure. The tourism development fund exists, use it. Online promotions, BIA expansion, cultural site upgrades, last-mile connectivity cannot wait for “better fiscal conditions.” These assets generate the revenue that funds their own maintenance.

Resilience without strategy is stagnation with momentum. And stagnation, however energetically celebrated, remains stagnation.

If policymakers continue to mistake arrivals for achievement, Sri Lanka will remain trapped in a cycle: crash, discount, recover, repeat. Meanwhile, competitors will consolidate high-yield models, and we will wonder why our tourism “boom” generates less cash, less jobs, and less development than it should.

(The writer, a senior Chartered Accountant and professional banker, is Professor at SLIIT, Malabe. The views and opinions expressed in this article are personal.)

Features

The call for review of reforms in education: discussion continues …

Published

1 day ago

2026/02/3

Sahan Weerasooriya

PM Harini Amarasuriya

The hype around educational reforms has abated slightly, but the scandal of the reforms persists. And in saying scandal, I don’t mean the error of judgement surrounding a misprinted link of an online dating site in a Grade 6 English language text book. While that fiasco took on a nasty, undeserved attack on the Minister of Education and Prime Minister Harini Amarasuriya, fundamental concerns with the reforms have surfaced since then and need urgent discussion and a mechanism for further analysis and action. Members of Kuppi have been writing on the reforms the past few months, drawing attention to the deeply troubling aspects of the reforms. Just last week, a statement, initiated by Kuppi, and signed by 94 state university teachers, was released to the public, drawing attention to the fundamental problems underlining the reforms https://island.lk/general-educational-reforms-to-what-purpose-a-statement-by-state-university-teachers/. While the furore over the misspelled and misplaced reference and online link raged in the public domain, there were also many who welcomed the reforms, seeing in the package, a way out of the bottle neck that exists today in our educational system, as regards how achievement is measured and the way the highly competitive system has not helped to serve a population divided by social class, gendered functions and diversities in talent and inclinations. However, the reforms need to be scrutinised as to whether they truly address these concerns or move education in a progressive direction aimed at access and equity, as claimed by the state machinery and the Minister… And the answer is a resounding No.

The statement by 94 university teachers deplores the high handed manner in which the reforms were hastily formulated, and without public consultation. It underlines the problems with the substance of the reforms, particularly in the areas of the structure of education, and the content of the text books. The problem lies at the very outset of the reforms, with the conceptual framework. While the stated conceptualisation sounds fancifully democratic, inclusive, grounded and, simultaneously, sensitive, the detail of the reforms-structure itself shows up a scandalous disconnect between the concept and the structural features of the reforms. This disconnect is most glaring in the way the secondary school programme, in the main, the junior and senior secondary school Phase I, is structured; secondly, the disconnect is also apparent in the pedagogic areas, particularly in the content of the text books. The key players of the “Reforms” have weaponised certain seemingly progressive catch phrases like learner- or student-centred education, digital learning systems, and ideas like moving away from exams and text-heavy education, in popularising it in a bid to win the consent of the public. Launching the reforms at a school recently, Dr. Amarasuriya says, and I cite the state-owned broadside Daily News here, “The reforms focus on a student-centered, practical learning approach to replace the current heavily exam-oriented system, beginning with Grade One in 2026 (https://www.facebook.com/reel/1866339250940490). In an address to the public on September 29, 2025, Dr. Amarasuriya sings the praises of digital transformation and the use of AI-platforms in facilitating education (https://www.facebook.com/share/v/14UvTrkbkwW/), and more recently in a slightly modified tone (https://www.dailymirror.lk/breaking-news/PM-pledges-safe-tech-driven-digital-education-for-Sri-Lankan-children/108-331699).

The idea of learner- or student-centric education has been there for long. It comes from the thinking of Paulo Freire, Ivan Illyich and many other educational reformers, globally. Freire, in particular, talks of learner-centred education (he does not use the term), as transformative, transformative of the learner’s and teacher’s thinking: an active and situated learning process that transforms the relations inhering in the situation itself. Lev Vygotsky, the well-known linguist and educator, is a fore runner in promoting collaborative work. But in his thought, collaborative work, which he termed the Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD) is processual and not goal-oriented, the way teamwork is understood in our pedagogical frameworks; marks, assignments and projects. In his pedagogy, a well-trained teacher, who has substantial knowledge of the subject, is a must. Good text books are important. But I have seen Vygotsky’s idea of ZPD being appropriated to mean teamwork where students sit around and carry out a task already determined for them in quantifying terms. For Vygotsky, the classroom is a transformative, collaborative place.

But in our neo liberal times, learner-centredness has become quick fix to address the ills of a (still existing) hierarchical classroom. What it has actually achieved is reduce teachers to the status of being mere cogs in a machine designed elsewhere: imitative, non-thinking followers of some empty words and guide lines. Over the years, this learner-centred approach has served to destroy teachers’ independence and agency in designing and trying out different pedagogical methods for themselves and their classrooms, make input in the formulation of the curriculum, and create a space for critical thinking in the classroom.

Thus, when Dr. Amarasuriya says that our system should not be over reliant on text books, I have to disagree with her (https://www.newsfirst.lk/2026/01/29/education-reform-to-end-textbook-tyranny ). The issue is not with over reliance, but with the inability to produce well formulated text books. And we are now privy to what this easy dismissal of text books has led us into – the rabbit hole of badly formulated, misinformed content. I quote from the statement of the 94 university teachers to illustrate my point.

“The textbooks for the Grade 6 modules . . . . contain rampant typographical errors and include (some undeclared) AI-generated content, including images that seem distant from the student experience. Some textbooks contain incorrect or misleading information. The Global Studies textbook associates specific facial features, hair colour, and skin colour, with particular countries and regions, and refers to Indigenous peoples in offensive terms long rejected by these communities (e.g. “Pygmies”, “Eskimos”). Nigerians are portrayed as poor/agricultural and with no electricity. The Entrepreneurship and Financial Literacy textbook introduces students to “world famous entrepreneurs”, mostly men, and equates success with business acumen. Such content contradicts the policy’s stated commitment to “values of equity, inclusivity and social justice” (p. 9). Is this the kind of content we want in our textbooks?”

Where structure is concerned, it is astounding to note that the number of subjects has increased from the previous number, while the duration of a single period has considerably reduced. This is markedly noticeable in the fact that only 30 hours are allocated for mathematics and first language at the junior secondary level, per term. The reduced emphasis on social sciences and humanities is another matter of grave concern. We have seen how TV channels and YouTube videos are churning out questionable and unsubstantiated material on the humanities. In my experience, when humanities and social sciences are not properly taught, and not taught by trained teachers, students, who will have no other recourse for related knowledge, will rely on material from controversial and substandard outlets. These will be their only source. So, instruction in history will be increasingly turned over to questionable YouTube channels and other internet sites. Popular media have an enormous influence on the public and shapes thinking, but a well formulated policy in humanities and social science teaching could counter that with researched material and critical thought. Another deplorable feature of the reforms lies in provisions encouraging students to move toward a career path too early in their student life.

The National Institute of Education has received quite a lot of flak in the fall out of the uproar over the controversial Grade 6 module. This is highlighted in a statement, different from the one already mentioned, released by influential members of the academic and activist public, which delivered a sharp critique of the NIE, even while welcoming the reforms (https://ceylontoday.lk/2026/01/16/academics-urge-govt-safeguard-integrity-of-education-reforms). The government itself suspended key players of the NIE in the reform process, following the mishap. The critique of NIE has been more or less uniform in our own discussions with interested members of the university community. It is interesting to note that both statements mentioned here have called for a review of the NIE and the setting up of a mechanism that will guide it in its activities at least in the interim period. The NIE is an educational arm of the state, and it is, ultimately, the responsibility of the government to oversee its function. It has to be equipped with qualified staff, provided with the capacity to initiate consultative mechanisms and involve panels of educators from various different fields and disciplines in policy and curriculum making.

In conclusion, I call upon the government to have courage and patience and to rethink some of the fundamental features of the reform. I reiterate the call for postponing the implementation of the reforms and, in the words of the statement of the 94 university teachers, “holistically review the new curriculum, including at primary level.”

(Sivamohan Sumathy was formerly attached to the University of Peradeniya)

Kuppi is a politics and pedagogy happening on the margins of the lecture hall that parodies, subverts, and simultaneously reaffirms social hierarchies.

By Sivamohan Sumathy

Features

Constitutional Council and the President’s Mandate

Published

1 day ago

2026/02/3

Sahan Weerasooriya

A file photo of a Constitutional Council meeting

The Constitutional Council stands out as one of Sri Lanka’s most important governance mechanisms particularly at a time when even long‑established democracies are struggling with the dangers of executive overreach. Sri Lanka’s attempt to balance democratic mandate with independent oversight places it within a small but important group of constitutional arrangements that seek to protect the integrity of key state institutions without paralysing elected governments. Democratic power must be exercised, but it must also be restrained by institutions that command broad confidence. In each case, performance has been uneven, but the underlying principle is shared.

Comparable mechanisms exist in a number of democracies. In the United Kingdom, independent appointments commissions for the judiciary and civil service operate alongside ministerial authority, constraining but not eliminating political discretion. In Canada, parliamentary committees scrutinise appointments to oversight institutions such as the Auditor General, whose independence is regarded as essential to democratic accountability. In India, the collegium system for judicial appointments, in which senior judges of the Supreme Court play the decisive role in recommending appointments, emerged from a similar concern to insulate the judiciary from excessive political influence.

The Constitutional Council in Sri Lanka was developed to ensure that the highest level appointments to the most important institutions of the state would be the best possible under the circumstances. The objective was not to deny the executive its authority, but to ensure that those appointed would be independent, suitably qualified and not politically partisan. The Council is entrusted with oversight of appointments in seven critical areas of governance. These include the judiciary, through appointments to the Supreme Court and Court of Appeal, the independent commissions overseeing elections, public service, police, human rights, bribery and corruption, and the office of the Auditor General.

JVP Advocacy

The most outstanding feature of the Constitutional Council is its composition. Its ten members are drawn from the ranks of the government, the main opposition party, smaller parties and civil society. This plural composition was designed to reflect the diversity of political opinion in Parliament while also bringing in voices that are not directly tied to electoral competition. It reflects a belief that legitimacy in sensitive appointments comes not only from legal authority but also from inclusion and balance.

The idea of the Constitutional Council was strongly promoted around the year 2000, during a period of intense debate about the concentration of power in the executive presidency. Civil society organisations, professional bodies and sections of the legal community championed the position that unchecked executive authority had led to abuse of power and declining public trust. The JVP, which is today the core part of the NPP government, was among the political advocates in making the argument and joined the government of President Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunga on this platform.

The first version of the Constitutional Council came into being in 2001 with the 17th Amendment to the Constitution during the presidency of Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunga. The Constitutional Council functioned with varying degrees of effectiveness. There were moments of cooperation and also moments of tension. On several occasions President Kumaratunga disagreed with the views of the Constitutional Council, leading to deadlock and delays in appointments. These experiences revealed both the strengths and weaknesses of the model.

Since its inception in 2001, the Constitutional Council has had its ups and downs. Successive constitutional amendments have alternately weakened and strengthened it. The 18th Amendment significantly reduced its authority, restoring much of the appointment power to the executive. The 19th Amendment reversed this trend and re-established the Council with enhanced powers. The 20th Amendment again curtailed its role, while the 21st Amendment restored a measure of balance. At present, the Constitutional Council operates under the framework of the 21st Amendment, which reflects a renewed commitment to shared decision making in key appointments.

Undermining Confidence

The particular issue that has now come to the fore concerns the appointment of the Auditor General. This is a constitutionally protected position, reflecting the central role played by the Auditor General’s Department in monitoring public spending and safeguarding public resources. Without a credible and fearless audit institution, parliamentary oversight can become superficial and corruption flourishes unchecked. The role of the Auditor General’s Department is especially important in the present circumstances, when rooting out corruption is a stated priority of the government and a central element of the mandate it received from the electorate at the presidential and parliamentary elections held in 2024.

So far, the government has taken hitherto unprecedented actions to investigate past corruption involving former government leaders. These actions have caused considerable discomfort among politicians now in the opposition and out of power. However, a serious lacuna in the government’s anti-corruption arsenal is that the post of Auditor General has been vacant for over six months. No agreement has been reached between the government and the Constitutional Council on the nominations made by the President. On each of the four previous occasions, the nominees of the President have failed to obtain its concurrence.

The President has once again nominated a senior officer of the Auditor General’s Department whose appointment was earlier declined by the Constitutional Council. The key difference on this occasion is that the composition of the Constitutional Council has changed. The three representatives from civil society are new appointees and may take a different view from their predecessors. The person appointed needs to be someone who is not compromised by long years of association with entrenched interests in the public service and politics. The task ahead for the new Auditor General is formidable. What is required is professional competence combined with moral courage and institutional independence.

New Opportunity

By submitting the same nominee to the Constitutional Council, the President is signaling a clear preference and calling it to reconsider its earlier decision in the light of changed circumstances. If the President’s nominee possesses the required professional qualifications, relevant experience, and no substantiated allegations against her, the presumption should lean toward approving the appointment. The Constitutional Council is intended to moderate the President’s authority and not nullify it.

A consensual, collegial decision would be the best outcome. Confrontational postures may yield temporary political advantage, but they harm public institutions and erode trust. The President and the government carry the democratic mandate of the people; this mandate brings both authority and responsibility. The Constitutional Council plays a vital oversight role, but it does not possess an independent democratic mandate of its own and its legitimacy lies in balanced, principled decision making.

Sri Lanka’s experience, like that of many democracies, shows that institutions function best when guided by restraint, mutual respect, and a shared commitment to the public good. The erosion of these values elsewhere in the world demonstrates their importance. At this critical moment, reaching a consensus that respects both the President’s mandate and the Constitutional Council’s oversight role would send a powerful message that constitutional governance in Sri Lanka can work as intended.

by Jehan Perera