Features

A Tribute to Kumari Jayawardena

Published

2 years ago

2024/06/28

Thilina Walpola

By Uditha Devapriya

“But that was another time. Almost another country.”

Mervyn de Silva (1973)

Last month the Collective for Historical Dialogue & Memory (CHDM) organised a screening of Conversations with Kumari, a documentary on Kumari Jayawardena. Last week Jayawardena turned 93. Yesterday I reflected on her and the generation she represented. That generation is leaving us, but it remains as influential as ever.

I then went back to Kalana Senaratne’s brilliant interview of Jayawardena, done by the Social Scientists’ Association nine years ago. Watching it, one is taken aback by the breadth of her interventions. Once in a while I get taken aback too.

Five years ago, after meeting Kanishka Goonewardena at Barefoot, I visited the bookshop with my friend Shiran Illanperuma. Poring through the obligatory coffee table biographies, we came across a copy of Labour, Feminism, and Ethnicity in Sri Lanka.

I remember Shiran commenting, “She never stops writing.” And I remember smiling.

I wasn’t smiling at Shiran’s remark only. I was thinking of the irony of a collection of 30- or 40-year-old essays by the country’s foremost social scientist being sold at a place one hardly associates with such books. For Barefoot is the capital of Sri Lanka’s Bobos. You go there to buy biographies of Geoffrey Bawa, the latest art and culture publications from the National Trust. Kumari Jayawardena’s essays, by contrast, stick out like Gananath Obeyesekere’s – also sold at Barefoot – studies of the doomed king and the Veddas.

But then that is a testament to her contribution, and his. Jayawardena began her career at a particular point in Sri Lanka’s intellectual history. One can’t write about her, or comment on her, without considering the period she worked and lived in. This was after 1956, when the shift to Sinhala and Tamil had emancipated the social sciences from its colonialist shackles. Scholars like Ralph Pieris, and the first generation of Western scholars, like James Brow and Edmund Leach, had made waves in the country.

Jayawardena represented a second generation of social scientists in post-independence Sri Lanka. This generation had been radicalised from an early age, by their families, at school, and most formatively in university. Conversations with Kumari recounts Jayawardena’s encounters in England, where she attended the LSE. In London, she befriended Romila Thapar. The parallels between these two thinkers are striking, but undeniable. Both fell into the company of freethinkers and radicals. Both absorbed the thinking of those radicals. And both applied their modes of analysis upon their return home.

To appreciate Jayawardena’s achievement, it would be pertinent to recall that, by Thapar’s time, India already had a long, rich tradition of Marxist and progressive social scientists. Jayawardena did not have the benefit of this lineage in Sri Lanka. The sole Marxist or overtly leftwing social scientist working in Sri Lanka at the time – Newton Gunasinghe – had only begun his academic career. As Jayadeva Uyangoda has observed in an essay on the man, before Gunasinghe Sri Lankan social scientists tended to operate within a liberal framework. It was left to Gunasinghe, and Jayawardena, to change this.

The intellectual-academic establishment Jayawardena and Gunasinghe encountered in Sri Lanka was highly conservative. It fundamentally bifurcated between a Westernised and a (predominantly Sinhala) nationalist wing. Often these two wings came together. Dayan Jayatilleka’s critique of Sri Lanka’s political bourgeoisie can, in one sense, be levelled at its intellectual bourgeoisie: it was deeply Westernised, but failed to become a modernising, emancipatory force. This is why, and how, apart from R. A. L. H. Gunawardana, Sri Lanka did not produce a politically radical historian. “We never had a Nehru,” Jayatilleka once pointed out. Well, we almost never had a Romila Thapar either.

: A. E. Goonesinha with Nehru (Courtesy of Yasmin Koch)

: A. E. Goonesinha with D. S. Senanayake (Courtesy of Yasmin Koch)

It would be amiss to say there were no radical scholars before the likes of Gunasinghe. We did. It’s just that they weren’t sociologists or anthropologists by profession. As I have noted in an essay on Gunasinghe, some of the earliest, if not the earliest, anthropological studies of Sri Lanka were authored by Marxist radicals. Hector Abhayavardhana, who wound up as the LSSP’s chief theoretician, along with N. M. Perera and Colvin R. de Silva, looked at, and analysed, Sri Lankan society from a more materialist perspective, providing historians and social scientists in later years with much material. For some reason, this contribution tends not to be made, but it must. At a time when national politics was dominated by a class of landed proprietors willing to collaborate with the British, their interventions were pivotal in moulding a more progressive generation of scholars.

Jayawardena stood out in that generation, even if her discipline was political science, not history. Not that such demarcations ever mattered: though a political scientist by training, she was a historian by conviction. The essays, books, and other interventions she made filled gaps that almost none of her contemporaries could. Eventually, 19th and 20th century Sri Lankan society, the material and social history of British Ceylon, became her specialisation. At the National Archives, which she visited regularly, she discovered a rich storehouse of material from this period – including colonial despatches – which had been used by other scholars, but gained a new lease of life through her writings.

What made these interventions so unique? At a time when Sri Lankan history tended to be seen through the prism of kings, rulers, and prime ministers, she preferred to write on the marginalised underclass: workers, peasants, and political radicals. Among the many figures she re-evaluated here was Anagarika Dharmapala: she devoted a considerable portion of her work on the labour movement in Sri Lanka to him. By this point, Dharmapala, like that other parvenu of 20th century Sri Lanka, A. E. Goonesinha, tended to be lionised or demonised by the establishment, depending on the ideological sympathies of the writer or historian. Jayawardena rescued him from these polarities.

The significance of Jayawardena’s essays becomes clear here when you look at what history writing had become by then and would deteriorate into later. A case in point would be what I see as her magnum opus, Nobodies to Somebodies.

The definitive study of the Sri Lankan colonial bourgeoisie, Nobodies to Somebodies created a stir when it first came out. As she acknowledges in Kalana Senaratne’s interview of her, not a few descendants of the families in the book came out against her. I myself realised the extent of this opposition when, at an otherwise harmless school function, one of the guests began chatting with me and revealed herself as a scion of one of these families. I recall what she told me about Jayawardena’s book distinctly.

“Why did she have to dig so much? What did it matter that we were arrack renters or plantation owners? Couldn’t she have left us in peace?”

Simply put, that kind of historical writing was not done, or permitted, when the likes of Jayawardena, Gunasinghe, and Michael Roberts began their careers. A work like Nobodies to Somebodies resonates today in a way that, for instance, K. M. de Silva’s biographies of D. S. Senanayake and J. R. Jayewardene – the latter deconstructed admirably by Rajiva Wijesinha in his recent study of Jayewardene – do not, because there’s no attempt at depicting their subjects as icons and mannequins. This is not to demean those other books, but merely to suggest that her approach was radically different.

Since then the situation has deteriorated considerably. One is tempted to rail against the Sri Lankan State here. Successive regimes have attacked academic freedom, and they need to be censured. Such onslaughts, however, have been more than matched by a diminution in academic standards throughout the country.

Today both academia and think-tank spaces have become bureaucratised, compartmentalised, and commodified, a reflection of what they used to be. It is easy and legitimate to criticise the government’s complicity in all this. But there are other reasons for the decline as well.

At the CHDM screening, much was made about the importance of producing knowledge, and the contribution of the non-governmental or development sector to this. But I think it’s only fair to say that, deplorable as the government’s response to the development sector has been over the last 50 years, the development sector itself has failed to recover from the shocks of the 1980s and 1990s. It continues its downward trajectory.

Jayawardena’s interventions were unique and progressive because they dared to question mainstream narratives. Today, both the government and the highly stratified NGO space of Colombo have been tamed to regurgitate those narratives.

This is not to say that we cannot conjure a Kumari Jayawardena, but that – to rehash an earlier point – we cannot judge her contributions in isolation from the period she hailed from. Like Camelot, it is a period we can only dream of returning to: another time, another world.

Uditha Devapriya is a regular commentator on history, art and culture, politics, and foreign policy who can be reached at . Together with Uthpala Wijesuriya, he heads U & U, an informal art and culture research collective.

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Features

The Division Bell Mystery

Published

16 hours ago

2026/05/29

Thilina Walpola

Tales of Mystery and Suspense 3

The murder, in a private dining room in the house, is of a financier with whom the government was negotiating a loan. When this seemed difficult the Minister of Home Affairs agreed to lead discussions, since he had known Mr Oissel the financier when they were young. Hence the private dinner, but when the Minister stepped out for a vote, Oissel was shot just as the Division Bell rang.

The Brahms and Simon detective novels, the first of which I wrote about last week, were amongst several books by the pair that Robert Scoble gave me when I was in Australia towards the end of last year. Amongst them was another thriller of a very different sort, though that too was written and set between the wars.

Called The Division Bell Mystery, it was set in the House of Commons, the first such book I believe, and was by Ellen Wilkinson, a Labour MP who became Minister of Education in Attlee’s government after the war, having served previously as Parliamentary Private Secretary to several ministers. Her hero Robert West is also a PPS, but a conservative, and his Minister, of Home Affairs, is an old style aristocrat, not much loved by the less orthodox Prime Minister, who nevertheless needs his support on many occasions.

The murder, in a private dining room in the house, is of a financier with whom the government was negotiating a loan. When this seemed difficult the Minister of Home Affairs agreed to lead discussions, since he had known Mr Oissel the financier when they were young. Hence the private dinner, but when the Minister stepped out for a vote, Oissel was shot just as the Division Bell rang.

West was just outside the door when the shot was heard, and when he opened it saw only the dead body with a revolver beside it. The assumption that this was suicide was however challenged by Oissel’s grand-daughter Annette, who was his heir, on the grounds that he would never have killed himself. But her view was given greater credence by the Inspector put in charge of the case who said there were no burn marks on the body which would have been the case had Oissel fired the pistol himself.

Matters are complicated by the fact that Oissel’s flat had been burgled while he was at dinner, and Jenks the policeman allocated to him, who had served the Home Secretary and seemed more acceptable to Oissel than someone from the Security Service, had been killed. Matters get even more complicated when Annette says her grand-father’s notebook in which he wrote his secrets in cipher was missing.

That was found in Jenks’ pocket, and then a photographer came to West to say he had been asked by Jenks to photograph this. More worryingly for West, he finds in the Home Secretary’s drawer a few pages from the notebook with what appears to be an interpretation of the cipher.

Ellen

Overwhelmed by all this he confides in a recently created peer who knows all about the business world, who insists that they leave the house party at which they had met over dinner and discuss the matter with the Prime Minister who promptly summons the Home Secretary.

But the Home Secretary had gone to Scotland to launch a ship over the weekend, so the meeting could take place only on the morning of the Monday, when difficult questions were expected on the adjournment motion. He admits at the meeting that he had got Jenks to take the notebook, and also that he knew the code since it had been created by him and Oissel when they were young.

He thought he should resign, and even contemplated suicide, but the Prime Minister told him that that would be even worse for the government, and that he should go home to bed. The Prime Minister said that he himself would handle the question, which he did with aplomb, insisting that confidentiality was needed until the inquest. What had happened would be made clear then, he declared, leaving West and Inspector Blackit and Lord Dalbeattie what seemed the impossible task of solving the murder.

Dalbeattie had suggested that West ask a female Labour MP who was very fond of him to get what information she could from the staff. That there was some involvement there had become clear when West, going back late one night to collect a briefcase he had left in a dining room, found someone lurking in the dark in the corridor outside the private rooms. Room J, where the murder had happened, was meant to be guarded throughout by a policeman, but he had left the room having felt dizzy, and it seemed that his coffee had been drugged. West’s sudden appearance however had prevented anyone else getting into the room.

Dalbeattie decides to recreate the scene of the murder and has a dinner party in Room J on the Tuesday night, inviting West and Annette and the society hostess at whose house he had met, and also Patrick Kinnaird, an MP who was engaged to Annette, as well as the Permanent Secretary to the Home Ministry.

After coffee Inspector Blackit comes in with Grace, the Labour MP who had got the confidence of the staff, and a journalist who had also been helpful, and just as they say they think they are on the track the division bell rings. Grace jumps up and tells the Inspector that that provides the solution and they get a ladder, and sure enough find the revolver in the space where the bell is. Directed at the place where Oissel had sat, it had been primed to go off with the ringing of the bell. The waiter who had helped to set things up made clear who the murderer had been.

The reason for the murder and the confused motives of all those involved made for a fascinatingly intricate mix. But also impressive in the book were the descriptions of the isolation possible in the crowded premises of the house, the forceful characterization of the members – Grace based on the writer, the society hostess based on Nancy Astor, the first female MP – and the laid back nature of senior politicians which West realized had to change in the brave new world of high finance.

Features

The challenge of keeping value-based politics alive

Published

2 days ago

2026/05/28

Sahan Weerasooriya

Anti-migrant protests in Durban, South Africa. BBC

The current outbreak of anti-immigrant protests in Durban, South Africa is bound to have taken many a subscriber to value-based politics or political idealism quite by surprise. After all, this is evidence that despite the historic accomplishments of nation-builders of the stature of the late President Nelson Mandela it cannot be taken for granted that identity politics, including racism in its worst forms, is no more in South Africa.

At the time of this writing details are scarce on the substantive root causes of the protests but it could very well be that economic grievances, particularly on the part of the majority community in South Africa, are contributing considerably to the disaffection. Shrinking employment and material prospects are likely to figure majorly among the factors igniting the unrest.

Fortunately, the local authorities in Durban are losing no time in calling for peaceful co-existence among the relevant communities and are pointing to the vital importance of stepping-up national integration processes. Apparently, immigrants in sizable numbers from neighbouring countries are present in Durban. However, international TV footage of the protests quoted some local authorities as saying that the majority of the immigrants in some centres that housed them were not illegal migrants and had the documents that entitle them to be in Durban.

In the Durban protests the world has fresh proof of the socially divisive consequences of the gathering globe-wide economic disaffection, touched off particularly by the continuing crisis in West Asia. Going ahead, the world would need to brace for increasing identity-based unrest of the kind it is just witnessing in South Africa.

Considering that the material lot of ordinary people everywhere could only aggravate progressively, with the US and Iran showing no signs of negotiating an end to their confrontation any time soon, it will be left to the more democratic and progressive sections of the world community to initiate positive measures collectively to bring a measure of relief to the discontented.

The swiftness with which such relief will be provided would depend crucially on the importance those sections taking up these undertakings attach to value-based politics as opposed to Realpolitik of power politics.

Going by these yardsticks, Italy could be considered to be moving in the right direction. Recently Italy came to the fore in initiating the collective named, ‘Rome Coalition for Food Security and Access to Fertilizer’, which has as one of its aims the swift provision of fertilizer to economically weak African countries.

In a recent statement Italian Minister of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation, Antonio Tajani, said that a principal aim of the project was to ensure that the farmers of Africa gained easy access to fertilizer, considering that food security is a growing concern among some of Africa’s economically vulnerable countries.

The statement went on to mention that some 30 countries hailing from the Mediterranean region, the Middle East, the Balkans as well as the FAO had been invited to join the coalition. The venture is far-seeing in that food security is main among the reasons for social discontent which in turn could degenerate into endemic political turmoil and bloodshed. Separatist violence and geographical fragmentation of countries wouldn’t be too far behind these developments, as Africa itself has often proved.

It is hoped that more G7 countries would take the cue from Italy and do what they could to ease the hardships of economically distressed countries, particularly of the global South. In these efforts they would need to break rank with the US, which is today brutally indifferent to the consequences of its policy of making ‘America First’, come what may.

Going by current developments, the Trump administration seems to be blithely oblivious to the wider, deleterious effects of its policy course in West Asia. Besides rendering Iran militarily and otherwise impotent nothing else seems to matter to Washington, as regards West Asia. This is policy short-sightedness of an extreme kind. After all, right now West Asia could be said to be sitting on the proverbial powder keg.

On the other hand, Iran is not giving the world the impression that it is doing anything constructive to get out of the policy straitjacket that it wove for itself decades ago. Rather than enter into a policy of ‘live and let live’ in relation to Israel in particular and initiate a process of reconciliation with the latter, it has chosen to operate within policy parameters that continue to damn Israel. This has put Israel always on the ‘defensive’ so to speak and prevented the opening up of space for meaningful dialogue.

That said, Israel is obliged to explore the possibilities of entering into a negotiatory process with the Arab-Islamic world that could lead to a de-escalation of tensions and bloodshed. It cannot continue to look at its neighbours through lenses that distort them as archetypal enemies who should be ‘wiped off completely from the face of the earth.’

In other words, the need is urgent for Realpolitik to give way to value-based politicks. Italy is beginning to prove that the latter approach could be pursued with some success. May be the EU and the UK could throw their weight behind these initiatives as well and establish that international politics could be refashioned on the basis of humane, civilized norms. The UN would need to be fully supportive of these moves and prove an organizational nucleus of the operations that follow.

In fact the time is ripe for people of conscience to collectively stand up on the side of peace and say ‘No’ to war and violence. Organizations such as the ICRC, the WHO and Medicines Sans Frontiers have already taken up this call. Referring to the widespread destruction of health facilities and their dehumanizing results these organizations have said, among other things, that ‘This is not a failure of the law. It is a failure of political will.’

True, ‘failure of political will’ among those powers that matter accounts for the runaway, uncontrollable nature of war and destruction in contemporary times, but more fundamentally it is a failure of the human conscience. It could very well be that the phenomenal levels to which violence and war have been unleashed today have had the effect of deadening consciences. This is a matter for urgent study and wide discussion.

Features

Vesak celebrations … with Cuteefly

Published

2 days ago

2026/05/28

Sahan Weerasooriya

Perfect for celebrations, gifts, and meaningful occasions // Gift pack

I would describe Indunil Kaushalya Dissanayaka as innovative and creative, and she operates under the name of Cuteefly.

Indunil always comes up with something novel to celebrate special occasions, and she does it with candles … and that’s her profession.

She was in the spotlight when she created a happening scene, with candles, for Christmas, Sinhala and Tamil New Year, and Valentine’s Day.

As lanterns light up Sri Lanka for Vesak, the Colombo-based candle maker is quietly turning wax and wick into little pieces of the festival.

Candles reflecting Vesak themes

Her candles reflect Vesak themes – light, peace, remembrance, giving, etc., to enable you to fill your Vesak celebration with devotion and beauty.

Among her Vesak creations is a lotus-shaped soy candle, scented with sandalwood, lavender, etc., meant to burn during this Vesak Poya Day.

Indunil Kaushalya Dissanayaka: Customers
praise her for her creativity

These handcrafted Vesak candles are perfect for offering at the temple, she says.

What makes her creations so novel is that they come in different shapes, scents, themes, and all are handmade.

What’s more, her customers have heaped praise on her for her creativity.

According to Indunil, her creations are perfect as a thoughtful gift … to bring beauty, unity, and light into every moment.

Says Indunil: “Our beautifully handcrafted Unity candles are designed with premium detail and love, making them perfect for celebrations, gifts, and meaningful occasions.”

Cuteefly, says Indunil, is available online.

Readers could contact Indunil on 0778506066 for more details.

He Facebook Page is: Cuteefly.