Features

Reflecting on Jathika Chintanaya

Published

2 years ago

2024/01/12

Thilina Walpola

Geoffrey Bawa

By Uditha Devapriya

Shanti Jayewardene’s fascinating study of Geoffrey Bawa discusses how art, culture, and knowledge have long been dominated by Western narratives and discourses. She charts Bawa’s evolution from colonial scion to national icon and questions his conceptions of art and architecture. She notes these as having been both hegemonic and anti-hegemonic.

Assessing Kandalama, for instance, she reflects on how it incorporated the aesthetics of Sigiriya and Buddhist giri monasteries while at the same time opening itself to allegations of disrupting and intruding on rural communities.

Jayewardene’s account is lucid, critical, and for the most, accurate. Most importantly, she undergirds her critique of Western paradigms of art and development with an equally fair critique of nativist responses to such paradigms.

In her introduction, for instance, she mentions several “modern intellectuals” in the early 20th century, who contributed in diverse ways to the formation of independent Sri Lanka. She distinguishes between those who led a revival through predominantly urban art forms such as theatre, and those who went inward to a Sinhala and Buddhist rural culture. Though the rural-urban binary can be crude and simplistic, she suggests that in Sri Lanka, both these strands were represented, if not dominated, by an urban intelligentsia.

In that sense, there is little in terms of social class and background that separates John de Silva from Anagarika Dharmapala, or from Gunadasa Amarasekara. But their visions for the country were hardly complementary. Amarasekara’s critique of S. W. R. D. Bandaranaike – that he imbibed Western liberal ideas too much to give impetus to a national movement– for instance, constitutes the Sinhala nationalist critique of modernity in Sri Lanka. I would even say it constitutes an alternative reading of cultural modernity, in contrast to the visions of nationhood and nationality offered by Bawa or Lionel Wendt.

These contrasting visions of nationhood and national development surfaced in the protests against Kandalama, the campaigns against multinational companies like Coca-Cola, and, in the early 2000s, the backlash against Valentine’s Day.

Many of these were spearheaded by Jathika Chintanaya, arguably the most influential nationalist intellectual group in Sri Lanka. It is important, at the outset, not to generalise on such movements, to distinguish between different phases, to trace their lineage and chart their evolution. Doing so would help us understand not just why they came to be, but also, controversial as it may seem, why they are still relevant.

In Sri Lanka, as pretty much everywhere else, nationalist groups were born of and from the conditions of their time. Almost all of them were formed in the 1980s, when the Left had decayed and lost its credibility across much of the Global South. Many of the earliest members of these groups themselves hailed from the Left. Their renunciation of the old faith constituted an intellectual rupture.

Lionel Wendt

From their class-centrism they turned to a culture-centric vision. As Dayan Jayatilleka has noted, this owed to the failure of the Old Left to adopt the rhetoric of anticolonial struggles like the Matale Uprising. Once the Left lost mass appeal, it was only inevitable that the nationalist right would step in.

Paradoxical as it may seem, these groups were founded and initially led by intellectuals who had benefitted from the same cultural modernism and cosmopolitanism they critiqued in their work. Gunadasa Amarasekara, who was felicitated at a grand ceremony last November at the BMICH – a venue Jayewardene describes as “a Sino-Lanka version of 1950s American modernism” – epitomised this tradition better than anyone else.

A product of Peradeniya, a student of dentistry who read and was influenced by Lawrence and Proust, he nevertheless renounced that tradition, in effect disowning it.

Ironically, it was this lineage which helped Amarasekara to mould Jathika Chintanaya into something more than just the crude nationalist outfit it is viewed as, and in many ways actually is, today. It is Amarasekara, more so than Nalin de Silva, who is the author of the modern Sinhala nationalist manifesto. At various times this manifesto has been borrowed and rewritten by different actors and groups: the Sihala Urumaya in the 1990s, the Jathika Hela Urumaya in the 2000s, the Bodu Bala Sena in the 2010s.

I notice a regression from the one to the other. While I remain critical of Jathika Chintanaya in general, I admit that, at its inception, it contained a clear intellectual undercurrent. Perhaps inevitably, that has now given way to a rabid irrationality, marked by a tendency to confront rather than engage with rivals. How so?

Gunadasa Amarasekara

Whatever one may say of it, in its first few years Jathika Chintanaya was determined by Amarasekara’s vision. His vision was different to not just Geoffrey Bawa’s or Lionel Wendt’s, but also Martin Wickramasinghe’s. In his preface to Gamanaka Mula, for instance, he critiqued Wickramasinghe for having focused on the colonial elite rather than the Sinhalese rural middle-classes: the petty bourgeoisie, in Marx’s formulation.

While Marx would have disparaged this class as symbols of “rural idiocy”, Amarasekara saw them as crucial to the nation’s development. There is much to disagree with this thesis. Today, the Sinhala middle-class he valorises have become culturally nationalist and socially compradorist. They are no longer bearers of the future, or sons of the soil.

But such ideas stood out in a way that most contemporary nationalist discourses do not. The reason is not that hard to find. In Sinhala nationalism as in national politics, there has been and continues to be an intellectual decline. The nationalist movement no longer produces authentic, creative thinkers. It has instead become trapped in its echo chambers, incapable of summoning any firepower. Put simply, it no longer has an Amarasekara capable of taking it forward; it is now going downhill all the way.

What is most ironic about this is that it is the very developments that nationalists champion as having emancipated Sri Lanka – the discontinuation of English and the enthronement of Sinhala – that have prevented the nationalists themselves from fully realising their potential. Amarasekara’s interventions in the 1980s were so relevant and profound not because he shied away from contemporary intellectual discourses, but rather because he was willing and able to engage with them. From Eric Fromm to Martin Jacques, from Huntington to Fukuyama, Amarasekara chose to reflect on the writings on Western intellectuals, trying to understand the frontiers, and limits, of their work.

It is the lack of willingness to engage, the lack of capacity to absorb what is called “modern knowledge”, that has stunted the growth of the nationalist movement. The independence struggles of other countries and societies flowered so well because they had intellectuals who engaged with their rivals. Sri Lanka did not reach this potential, still less achieve it: it produced no Frantz Fanons, because its elites were too subservient or, as bad, because they searched too much inward. We refused to stick to a golden mean, the so-called middle path, and in doing so ruptured from within, becoming intellectually sterile.

This, in a nutshell, is our national tragedy.

Jayewardene ends her study of Bawa by imploring artists and intellectuals to not just think, but act: to do, and not merely be. She argues that we must subvert Eurocentric knowledge, not by critiquing it and leaving it at that, but by recognising that “local forms of modernity” were never overwhelmed or “submerged” by the West: in effect, that we possessed a form of modernity of our own, moulded by our past.

Despite my disagreement with and critique of Jathika Chintanaya, I believe that during their early years, they tried to do just that. This is no longer the case.

In that sense, I think Shanti Jayewardene should follow up her work on Bawa with one on Amarasekara. Amarasekara’s vision, to be sure, could not have been more different to Bawa’s. Yet it compels us to think radically about the country, its heritage, and its future, just as Bawa did – and just as nationalists today do not.

The writer is an international relations analyst, independent researcher, and freelance columnist who can be reached at udakdev1@gmail.com.

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Features

Proactive peacemaking becomes a paramount need

Published

11 hours ago

2026/06/4

Sahan Weerasooriya

Wasting wars: Some war-displaced people in Lebanon. BBC

It may be some time before the full impact of food inflation is felt in the West. Until such time the world would continue to keep itself in suspense over whether the Trump administration is in earnest when it seeks to convey the impression that it is backing a negotiated solution in West Asia.

As is usually the case, consumer stress would be one of the final determinants of political change. To the degree to which the average US consumer somehow ‘muddles through’ and puts the food on the table, to the same extent would the Republican sections of the US public in particular be tolerant of the Trump administration’s inconsistent handling of the West Asian war and the main issues stemming from it. That is, there would be no grave popular disaffection and a demand for political change in the short term.

However, the indications are that the Trump administration’s support base is suffering some erosion in the wake of the current economic crisis. While reports indicate that Democratic sections are firming-up their opposition to the political centre, Republican support for Trump is also showing signs of waning, we are given to understand.

The above developments are probably why Trump is on record as having given Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu a ‘dressing down’ recently on his seeming intransigence on the question of giving negotiations a chance in West Asia. The show of displeasure could be really aimed by Trump at containing the impatience of the American public.

However, the current ground situation in the Middle East, particularly the uncontained bloodshed, is likely to impress on the thinking sections of the world that more than temporary political change is needed in West Asia and the US.

A well thought out political solution that addresses all the contentious issues at the heart of the Middle East conflict is what enlightened opinion would demand, and very rightly. Right now, the ‘peace efforts’ initiated by the Trump administration give the impression of being piecemeal solutions at best.

There have been, of course, numerous initiatives in the past aimed at bringing permanent peace to the Middle East. These failed mainly because they did not address in full the root causes of the conflict.

At bottom the Middle East conflict is mainly about race and religious hate bred by socio-economic and material inequalities. For instance, if the Palestinian people were not displaced and deprived of land occupied by them at the time of the founding of the Israeli state, ethnic enmities would not have grown to the current unmanageable proportions.

When addressing the above questions, though, it must be remembered that the Israelis too were a displaced people who were entitled to land and a state of their own in the Middle East. Basically, out of these seemingly irreconcilable and conflicting demands have grown the Middle East imbroglio.

Middle East peace is considerably about reconciling these demands and arriving at a solution that would ensure the creation of two states that would opt for peaceful co-existence thereafter.

As long as the US does not see the need for a non-partisan solution that addresses the needs of both ethnicities and religions and goes all-out, as it were, to have it implemented, the Middle East would continue to bleed.

However, staunching the blood flow through the creation of two states would be only half the job done, though a very important part of it. More pernicious, pervasive and difficult to remedy are the inter-ethnic and inter-religious hatreds that have been unleashed over the decades.

However, if substantial, long-lasting peace is to be fostered in the region the latter ‘demons’ would need to be exorcised from the hearts and minds of the communities concerned. No doubt an uphill task but one that must be undertaken by those who wish the region well.

The UN would need to put its ‘best foot forward’ in such undertakings but it is time that it dawned on the international community and other caring quarters that Middle East peace, and all other such uphill challenges, require proactive peacemaking on the part of all civilized sections for their effective management. That is, public involvement in peacemaking too is a must.

Since hatreds are harboured in the human consciousness the enmities embedded in the latter need to be managed and defused judiciously alongside other undertakings in a peace process. In the case of West Asia, such enmities could be even spread globe-wide besides being multi-dimensional. For instance, it ought to be thought-provoking that Iran is insistent on a peace initiative that would also include Lebanon.

Besides security considerations it is also ethnic and religious affiliations that account for Iran making this demand. For instance, the Shias are a numerically important religious community in Lebanon and they provide a significant number of Hizbollah fighters, who are in a vital sense carrying out a ‘proxy war’ for Iran. It also needs to be factored in that Iran is a Shia-majority country.

Thus trans-border religious affiliations could add to the complexities and enormity of ethno-religious conflicts. However, the task of managing centuries-long enmities needs to be launched and prodded on with by peacemakers since a downing of arms alone would not guarantee substantive peace.

It is not realized sufficiently that the process of ending hatreds begins with mutual apologies by antagonists to a conflict for the harm inflicted on each other. This would be anathema in some ears but there is no getting away from the requirement. It is the vital first step to permanent peace anywhere.

In fact there could be no reconciliation worth speaking of without such mutual apologies. It is a point worth re-iterating in these times when even the government of Sri Lanka is voicing the need for national reconciliation. Well, without the words, ‘I am sorry’, there could be no permanent end to enmities – they would do well to remember.

The above requirements may not go down very well with governments, but they resonate in the hearts and minds of most people, since they are inheritors of religious traditions of some kind.

This is a principal reason why peacemaking works well when publics too are involved in them. The effectiveness of such campaigns increases several fold when they have a Mahatma Gandhi or a Jawaharlal Nehru at their helm. A strong proactive involvement by the public in peace could lead to the emergence of such leaders at some point in these campaigns.

Features

Dialog Brings Sri Lanka’s Largest Digital Vesak Experience to Matara

Published

11 hours ago

2026/06/4

Sahan Weerasooriya

From left to right: Hon. Saroja Savithri Paulraj, Hon. Sunil Handunnetti, and Lasantha Theverapperuma experience the Dialog 5G Ultra-powered VR tours.

Official Digital Partner of the 2026 ‘Dakshina Prabha’ National Vesak Zone

Dialog Axiata PLC, Sri Lanka’s #1 connectivity provider, collaborated with the Ministry of Buddha Sasana, Religious and Cultural Affairs to bring one of Sri Lanka’s largest and most technologically advanced Vesak experiences to the ‘Dakshina Prabha’ National Vesak Zone. The three-day celebration, in Matara attracted more than hundred thousand visitors, who engaged with a series of innovative digital activities powered by Dialog 5G Ultra, including Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Virtual Reality (VR) experiences, digital pandols and a Data Dansala. The opening ceremony was attended by Hon. Sunil Handunnetti, Minister of Industry and Entrepreneurship Development and Hon. Saroja Savithri Paulraj, Minister of Women and Child Affairs, along with distinguished guests and Dialog’s senior management.

One of the key attractions at the venue was the Dialog 5G Ultra-powered Virtual Reality (VR) experience, which attracted more than 35,000 participants. The activation enabled devotees to virtually visit and pay homage to sacred Buddhist sites, including the Jaya Sri Maha Bodhi in India and the Atamasthana in Anuradhapura, directly from the Vesak zone in Matara.

Visitors receive complimentary mobile data through Dialog’s QR-powered Data Dansala.

Dialog also conducted an AI Digital Vesak Greeting Card Competition from 21 May to 01 June 2026, attracting numerous entries from across the country. The shortlisted designs were showcased across 20 large LED screens throughout the venue and across Matara City, and were also made available for download via mobile devices. Further, through the use of AI, traditional Jathaka Katha were reimagined in a digital format, demonstrating how technology can be used to preserve and enhance cultural and religious heritage. Together, these initiatives blended traditional Vesak celebrations with emerging technologies, offering visitors a unique and immersive way to engage with Vesak traditions.

Extending the spirit of Vesak through connectivity, Dialog conducted a special Data Dansala powered by its QR Reload platform, enabling visitors to receive complimentary mobile data by scanning QR codes placed across the venue. In addition to the Matara National Vesak Zone, similar Data Dansala activations were also conducted at the Gangaramaya and Bauddhaloka Vesak zones in Colombo.Visitors also had the opportunity to create personalised Vesak-themed digital photos through an AI Photo Booth, generating AI-enhanced portraits using their own photographs and adding a contemporary digital element to the Vesak celebrations.

Visitors watch AI-generated Jathaka Katha

Commenting on the initiative, Hon. Sunil Handunnetti, Minister of Industry and Entrepreneurship Development, said, “The 2026 Dakshina Prabha Vesak Festival marked the first time AI-powered digital innovations were incorporated into a National Vesak Festival in Sri Lanka. Presenting Buddhist stories and teachings through technology created a new and engaging way for visitors to connect with these traditions. We thank Dialog for supporting this initiative and for working closely with us to bring our vision to life. Their contribution played an important role in making this first-of-its-kind event a reality.”

Lasantha Theverapperuma, Group Chief Marketing Officer of Dialog Axiata PLC said, “We thank the Government of Sri Lanka for the opportunity to support the 2026 Dakshina Prabha National Vesak Festival and for embracing technology as part of this year’s celebrations. As the Official Digital Partner, we were privileged to contribute through our Dialog 5G Ultra and AI capabilities, creating new ways for visitors to engage with Vesak traditions while preserving their cultural significance for future generations.”

Beyond supporting the National Vesak Zone in Matara, Dialog also enhanced the Gangaramaya and Bauddhaloka Vesak zones through a range of digital activations during the Vesak season. The company additionally continued its sustainability initiatives, including the Thirasara Aloka Poojawa, which illuminated rural places of worship through solar-powered lighting solutions.

Features

Beauty, elegance and talent…for women

Published

11 hours ago

2026/06/4

Sahan Weerasooriya

Universal Woman is an international pageant focused on “beauty, elegance, and talent” for women, positioning itself as a platform to shape global ambassadors. The 2026 edition will be held in Cambodia, and Sri Lanka will be there, as well.

According to reports coming my way, contestants, at the international event, will work with industry trailblazers, under international standards.

Sri Lankan supermodel, runway and pageant trainer Chulpadmendra Kumarapathirana, is the National Director for Universal Woman Sri Lanka 2026.

With over two decades in the industry, Chula was crowned Miss Sri Lanka 2006, and has since shaped the next generation of titleholders through her Colombo-based Chulpadmendra Catwalk Studio, widely regarded as one of the country’s leading modelling academies.

The team behind Universal Woman Sri Lanka 2026

A former host of Derana Miss Sri Lanka for Miss World 2008 and a judge for Miss Universe Sri Lanka 2025, Chula now serves as National Director for Universal Woman Sri Lanka 2026, leading the franchise’s search for Sri Lanka’s delegate to the international final in Cambodia.

Applications for Universal Woman Sri Lanka 2026 are being taken, via WhatsApp: 077 659 4994, says Chula.

The judging panel for Universal Woman Sri Lanka 2026 includes Senaka De Silva, Pageant Aesthetic Advisor & Chairperson of the Judging Panel, Angela Seneviratne, Caroline Jurie, Rozelle Plunkett, and Suraj Mapa.

Universal Woman Sri Lanka 2026 officially began its journey with a first round of auditions, held in Colombo, marking the start of an exciting new chapter in Sri Lanka’s pageant industry.

Launching the first round of auditions

The platform aims to empower women while selecting an intelligent, confident, and inspiring representative to compete at the Universal Woman International Pageant 2026 in Cambodia, this September.

Universal Woman Sri Lanka now moves forward with the vision of creating one of the country’s most prestigious and empowering pageants while preparing to crown a queen who will proudly represent Sri Lanka on the international stage.