Category: Review

Vajra Chandrasekera I have meant to read Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978) my whole adult life but only picked it up while glued to the current horrific news about Israel’s genocide in Palestine. On reading the book for the first time, I found perhaps unsurprisingly that I already knew it. Not Said’s close readings of specific… Continue reading Best Reads 2023

Since the mid-1980s, the subjects of nationalism and Sinhalese identity have dominated scholarly output on Sri Lanka. Negotiating Power and Constructing the Nation: Engineering in Sri Lanka offers a range of fresh perspectives on these subjects by considering the close relationship between engineering – a site that has received little academic attention in Sri Lanka… Continue reading Negotiating Power and Constructing the Nation: Engineering in Sri Lanka by Bandura Dileepa Witharana. Colombo: Tambapanni Academic Publishers, 2022 – Reviewed by Cherry Briggs

Brotherless Night is V. V. Ganeshananthan’s second novel. I read this novel in late July 2023, with a fevered reminder of the commemoration of the 40th anniversary of Black July in Sri Lanka. The reading was a moving exercise that prompted me to pause and reflect on the fractured nature of modern Tamil identities, and… Continue reading Brotherless Night by V.V. Ganeshananthan. Manhattan: Random House, 2023 – Reviewed by Vasugi Kailasam

The 150th anniversary of the beginning of the tea industry in British Ceylon was marked in 2017 by a range of government and corporate events, mostly to promote Sri Lanka’s premier agricultural export. In counterpoint, the Gampola-based Tea Plantation Workers Museum and Archive hosted a symposium in Hatton that year, with the purpose of redirecting… Continue reading Claiming Identity, Dignity, and Justice: Malaiyaha Tamils of Sri Lanka – B. Skanthakumar

The Ramayana has many retellings, and there will be more to come. Kanchuka Dharmasiri’s new play, Surpanakha (2022), is a brilliant retelling of an episode in the South Asian mythical narrative of which Lanka is part of the setting. It has been pointed out that the ‘Lanka’ of the myth is not the country known… Continue reading Abolish Marriage? Kanchuka Dharmasiri’s play Surpanakha – Liyanage Amarakeerthi

When I was given Kate Cronin-Furman’s book Hypocrisy and Human Rights to review, I imagined a different kind of book. International law scholarship is now flooded with literature that posits human rights as the big lie. Seen as a product of the European Enlightenment and the handmaiden of imperialism, some of our best scholars have… Continue reading Hypocrisy and Human Rights: Resisting Accountability for Mass Atrocities Kate Cronin-Furman. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2022 – Reviewed by Radhika Coomaraswamy

A murdered journalist “awakens” in a ghostly world to witness his dead body being pulled out of a polluted Colombo lake to be dismembered and fed to animals. He suffers from amnesia and has “seven moons”, or seven days, to solve the mystery of his murder before he must move on to another plane of… Continue reading Shehan Karunatilaka’s The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida: Impunity, violence, and the politics of representation

The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida. Shehan Karunatilaka. Gurugram, Harayana: Penguin Books, 2022 – Reviewed by Harshana Rambukwella

Michelle Gamburd’s ethnographic monograph Linked Lives looks in depth at practices of care in a Southern Sinhala village, documenting the nexus between kinship relations, globalisation, and migration and its impacts on eldercare. At the heart of the book is the question “how to care for the elderly in times of (economic) crisis when migration is… Continue reading Entangled Lives and the Crisis of Care

Linked Lives: Elder Care, Migration, and Kinship in Sri Lanka. Michele Ruth Gamburd. New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 2020- Reviewed by Asha L. Abeyasekera

“I understood I was to be carried to the country [to] which the ship was going, which was inhabited by giants and cannibals,” Louis Badgamege explained in 1813 (86). The nine-year-old boy did not speak his abductors’ language, but he knew that the “particular dress” they made him wear indicated he had been enslaved, along… Continue reading Slave in a Palanquin: Colonial Servitude and Resistance in Sri Lanka. Nira Wickramasinghe. New York: Columbia University Press, 2020 – Reviewed by Paul D. Halliday

Caste in Sri Lanka is something of an enigma to social critics and social researchers alike. People do not justify, refer to or even openly talk about caste in day-to-day conversations. Yet caste seems to operate at various levels in Sinhala and Tamil communities in marriage partner selection, recruitment to some branches of the labour… Continue reading The Changing Role of Caste in Northern Sri Lanka. Thiruchandran, Selvy. Caste and its Multiple Manifestations: A Study of the Caste System in Northern Sri Lanka. Colombo: Bay Owl Press, 2021, pp. 231 + xii – Reviewed by Kalinga Tudor Silva