History / Sociology

Democracy Stillborn traces the present plight of Sri Lanka to the battles of the 1920s over the championship of labour by Ponnambalam Arunachalam.

His ouster in 1921 from the Ceylon National Congress, led to the country's politics becoming dominated by estate capitalism. This in turn resulted in an anti-labour stance blended with communalism, which received a boost from the total disenfranchisement of plantation labour by 1949. The main legal battle around citizenship of plantation labour left the Judiciary deeply compromised. The right of habeas corpus affirmed in the Bracegirdle case of 1937 was attacked by the 1947 Public Security Ordinance permitting 'murder in good faith.' With elite Tamil and Muslim complicity, politics which was anti-labour at first, turned to ethno-chauvinism, surrendering the Parliamentary Left to Sinhalese exclusivism by 1964. Organised labour, weakened by abandoning the Plantation sector, was crushed by the UNP government in the General Strike of 1980. The right of habeas corpus, rendered virtually extinct by the 1979 PTA, made way for the cruel joke of the 2007 ICCPR Act.

Observing that the country is tired of revolutions, Democracy Stillborn places its hope in the survival in a mangled form of the Separation of Powers and of new life in a Judiciary with the courage to declare bad laws unconstitutional.

WINNER OF THE STATE LITERARY AWARD 2023 Who are the Väddas? Where do they come from? Where have they gone?

While many continue to accept the storyline represented by colonial era thinkers that of the romantic and benign image of Väddas as children of nature living in tune or harmony with their environment. Anthropologist Gananath Obeyesekere brings back into our contemporary discourse the voices of Väddas silenced by history or misrepresented in Western scholarship, dispelling the prevailing view of primitive hunters and gatherers living in isolated pockets in the wilds of Bintanna.

In this bold and captivating account, drawing on his research conducted during the periods 1999-2001 and 2007-2009, Obeyesekere presents an alternative narrative of these Väddas of Sri Lanka with a fresh look at their crucial role in society. Further, Obeyesekere cautions that they are a disappearing "tribe" that may soon vanish from the world's ethnological museum

A Study of the Caste System in Northern Sri Lanka

Caste, while being one of the dominant socio-economic institutions in the Indian and Sri Lankan societies is also one of the most complicated because of its multiple ramifications. Numerous scholars and researchers have made in-depth studies of the subject and their conclusions in turn have evoked further interest and queries on the subject.

The present study offers a substantial detour into the operational aspects of the system. The main focus of the study lies in the historical reconstruction from the pre-colonial period. An innovative turn of the study is its efforts to cull evidence and information from the literary productions authored by the very victims who suffered under the system. Anti-caste movements and their socio-political transformations form one section. Speaking to and listening from the victims and the perpetrators is the most revealing part of this study, which is a contemporaneous and existent situation. This process has also revealed the different modes of caste operation in the three different regions in Northern Sri Lanka which were covered in the research. 

Surrounded by magnificent mountains, the city of Kandy, home of the Temple of the Sacred Tooth and the Royal Palace, was the capital of Lanka for about three hundred years. Gananath Obeysekere paints a vivid portrait of the kings of these great green highlands of Kandy, revealing a complex and advanced society every bit as violent as any other civilization. Focusing on kings Vimaladharmasuriya 1, Rajasinha II, Sri Vijaya Rajasinha and Kirti Sri Rajasinha, he brings the Kandyan monarchy to life, depicting them not as mythic figures but as real flesh and blood, larger than life characters who ruled over the last citadel of Lankan aristocracy

How did the British come to conquer South Asia in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries?

Answers to this question usually start in northern India, neglecting the dramatic events that marked Britain's contemporaneous taking of the island of Sri Lanka. In Islanded, Sujit Sivasundaram reconsiders the arrival of British rule in South Asia as a dynamic and unfinished process of territorialization and state building, revealing that the British colonial project was framed by Sri Lanka's traditions and maritime placement and built in part on the model they provided. Picking up a range of unusual themes, from migration, orientalism, and ethnography to botany, medicine, and education, Islanded is an engaging retelling of the advent of British rule and a theory of colonial impact that speaks to other places that have been lost from dominant histories.

'A wonderful read that calls into question many assumptions on the nature of colonial domination.' - Nira Wickramasinghe, Leiden Univesity

'Sujit Sivasundaram's Islanded is one of the most important historical studies on Sri Lanka in the early colonial period. It deals with the British advent to Sri Lanka in the context of the country's recent past and its strategic location in the Indian Ocean.' - Gananath Obeyesekere, Princeton University

A requiem for Sri Vikrama Rajasinha

On 24 Jan 1816, the captured king of Kandy was escorted on board the Cornwallis together with his queens, relatives and servants. Almost a month later, King Sri Vikrama Rajasinha arrives at the Vellore Fort in India, to spend his remaining days in exile. Thus ends the tragic tale of the Doomed King of Lanka.

Using Kadaimpot, vittipot and documents from English servicemen, Gananath Obeysekere reveals a portrait of a king who was much maligned and betrayed by those he trusted. The Doomed King makes for fascinating reading where a master spy, a Machiavellian governor and an opportunistic nobleman together, bring about the fall of the Kandyan Kingdom.

'This book confirms that Obeysekere, probably the most distinguished living anthropologist, remains at the peak of his prodigious scholarly powers.' - Rajeev Bhargava, Professor, CSDS, Delhi

'Essential reading, not only for its accounts of colonial rule in Kandy, but also for providing an example of the long-lasting persistence of historical knowledge that was constructed to justify imperial expansion.' - John Rogers, American Inst of Sri Lankan Studies