Professor Gananath Obeyesekere

We first encountered Gananath in our first year at Peradeniya where he was a lecturer in English. He spoke and read out texts with an accent, a twang, I have not heard in anybody else. He held our attention with ease. He had a way of looikng at us in the eye, so to speak, that seemed to drill his thoughts into our wavering consciousness.

The last time I savoured that experience was around twenty years ago when in the course of his Ludowyk Memorial lecture he read out Thomas Hardy’s lines on his departed friend George Meredith: they were both somewhere near the pinnacle among English novelists.

The terms of the part university entrance scholarship I had received more or less which required me to read for a degree in English but Gananath had so impressed me that when he moved across to sociology in the following year, I decided to follow suit. That inclination was fortified by Ralph Pieris, perhaps the most vigorous intellect in that field, was Professor of Sociology. He was out of the island when I presented myself with my request to S J Tambiah, who was standing in for Ralph, but, perhaps forewarned by my Professor (of English), Tambi told me that sociology was a new department yet in the process of developing a curriculum, assured me that English was the best department in the University and told me that I could take up sociology later.

Well, Gananath made that kind of transition and, after singularly distinguished career in the field, remains, at well over 90, Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at Princeton. Over the years he has covered many areas of scholarship, not always altogether related in that particular universe, some of which I spell out here:

Medusa’s Hair (1981), The Cult of the Goddess Pattini (1984) and The Apotheosis of Captain Cook / European Myth-making in the Pacific (1992). In the last he debunks one of the most enduring myths of imperialism, civilisation, and conquest: the notion that the Western civilizer is a god to savages. That led to a hot challenge by one of the most prominent of those mythmakers, Marshall Salins who held a similar position at the University of Chicago. An open debate between them was arranged but Salins had failed to turn up. Gananath’s book the Prize of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, 1993 as well as, if I remember it right, the 1993 Award for Best Professional/Scholarly Book by the consortium of American Publishers.

His more mind-spinning works, or so I found are, The Work of Culture 1990, and “Imagining Karma”: Ethical Transformation in Amerindian, Buddhist and Greek Rebirth, 2002 in which he embarks on the very first comparison of rebirth concepts across a wide range of cultures.

Gananath did not neglect his homeland in his studies. His published works related to Sri Lanka include:

Land Tenure in Village Ceylon, 1964, (which I reviewed at the time)

The Doomed King; A Requiem, 2017, and The Many Faces of the Kandyan Kingdom (2020).

All of that – not too bad to go into the nineties with.

 Gamini Seneviratne