Sri Lanka in the Modern Age PDF Download

Author: Nira Wickramasinghe
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190225793
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 476

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On the ethnic relations and politics in post 1978 Sri Lanka.

Author: Nira Wickramasinghe
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
ISBN: 9780824830168
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 396

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Book Description
Since the late 1970s civil war has left Sri Lanka in an almost permanent state of crisis; conventional histories of the country by liberal and Marxist scholars in the last two decades have thus tended to focus on the state’s failure to accommodate the needs and demands of the minorities. The entire history of the twentieth century has been tied to this one key issue. Sri Lanka in the Modern Age offers a fresh perspective based on new research. Above all, the author has written a history of the peoples of Sri Lanka rather than a history of the nation-state.

Author: Nira Wickramasinghe
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 1782382437
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 191

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Everyday life in the Crown colony of Ceylon (Sri Lanka) was characterized by a direct encounter of people with modernity through the consumption and use of foreign machines – in particular, the Singer sewing machine, but also the gramophone, tramway, bicycle and varieties of industrial equipment. The ‘metallic modern’ of the 19th and early 20th century Ceylon encompassed multiple worlds of belonging and imagination; and enabled diverse conceptions of time to coexist through encounters with Siam, the United States and Japan as well as a new conception of urban space in Colombo. Metallic Modern describes the modern as it was lived and experienced by non-elite groups – tailors, seamstresses, shopkeepers, workers – and suggests that their idea of the modern was nurtured by a changing material world.

Author: Nira Wickramasinghe
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231552262
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 204

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For hundreds of years, the island of Sri Lanka was a crucial stopover for people and goods in the Indian Ocean. For the Dutch East India Company, it was also a crossroads in the Indian Ocean slave trade. Slavery was present in multiple forms in Sri Lanka—then Ceylon—when the British conquered the island in the late eighteenth century and began to gradually abolish slavery. Yet the continued presence of enslaved people in Sri Lanka in the nineteenth century has practically vanished from collective memory in both the Sinhalese and Tamil communities. Nira Wickramasinghe uncovers the traces of slavery in the history and memory of the Indian Ocean world, exploring moments of revolt in the lives of enslaved people in the wake of abolition. She tells the stories of Wayreven, the slave who traveled in the palanquin of his master; Selestina, accused of killing her child; Rawothan, who sought permission for his son to be circumcised; and others, enslaved or emancipated, who challenged their status. Drawing on legal cases, petitions, and other colonial records to recover individual voices and quotidian moments, Wickramasinghe offers a meditation on the archive of slavery. She examines how color-based racial thinking gave way to more nuanced debates about identity, complicating conceptions of blackness and racialization. A deeply interdisciplinary book with a focus on recovering subaltern resistance, Slave in a Palanquin offers a vital new portrait of the local and transnational worlds of the colonial-era Asian slave trade in the Indian Ocean.

Author: Zoltán Biedermann
Publisher: UCL Press
ISBN: 1911307843
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 357

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Book Description
The peoples of Sri Lanka have participated in far-flung trading networks, religious formations, and Asian and European empires for millennia. This interdisciplinary volume sets out to draw Sri Lanka into the field of Asian and Global History by showing how the latest wave of scholarship has explored the island as a ‘crossroads’, a place defined by its openness to movement across the Indian Ocean.Experts in the history, archaeology, literature and art of the island from c.500 BCE to c.1850 CE use Lankan material to explore a number of pressing scholarly debates. They address these matters from their varied disciplinary perspectives and diverse array of sources, critically assessing concepts such as ethnicity, cosmopolitanism and localisation, and elucidating the subtle ways in which the foreign may be resisted and embraced at the same time. The individual chapters, and the volume as a whole, are a welcome addition to the history and historiography of Sri Lanka, as well as studies of the Indian Ocean region, kingship, colonialism, imperialism, and early modernity.

Author: Asoka Bandarage
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110838648
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 420

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Author: Nira Wickramasinghe
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781850657590
Category : Sri Lanka
Languages : en
Pages :

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Author: Madurika Rasaratnam
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 9780190498320
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Why are relations between politically mobilised ethnic identities and the nation-state sometimes peaceful and at other times fraught and violent? Madurika Rasaratnam's book sets out a novel answer to this key puzzle in world politics through a detailed comparative study of the starkly divergent trajectories of the 'Tamil question' in India and Sri Lanka from the colonial era to the present day. Whilst Tamil and national identities have peaceably harmonised in India, in Sri Lanka these have come into escalating and violent contradiction, leading to three decades of armed conflict and simmering antagonism since the war's brutal end in 2009. Tracing these differing outcomes to distinct and contingent patterns of political contestation and mobilisation in the two states, Rasaratnam shows how, whilst emerging from comparable conditions and similar historical experiences, these have produced very different interactions between evolving Tamil and national identities, constituting in India a nation-state inclusive of the Tamils, and in Sri Lanka a hierarchical Sinhala-Buddhist national and state order hostile to Tamils' political claims. Locating these dynamics within changing international contexts, she also shows how these once largely separate patterns of national-Tamil politics, and Tamil diaspora mobilisation, are increasingly interwoven in the post-war internationalisation of Sri Lanka's ethnic crisis.

Author: Harshana Rambukwella
Publisher: UCL Press
ISBN: 1787351300
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 178

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Book Description
What is the role of cultural authenticity in the making of nations? Much scholarly and popular commentary on nationalism dismisses authenticity as a romantic fantasy or, worse, a deliberately constructed mythology used for political manipulation. The Politics and Poetics of Authenticity places authenticity at the heart of Sinhala nationalism in late nineteenth and twentieth-century Sri Lanka. It argues that the passion for the ‘real’ or the ‘authentic’ has played a significant role in shaping nationalist thinking and argues for an empathetic yet critical engagement with the idea of authenticity. Through a series of fine-grained and historically grounded analyses of the writings of individual figures central to the making of Sinhala nationalist ideology the book demonstrates authenticity’s rich and varied presence in Sri Lankan public life and its key role in understanding postcolonial nationalism in Sri Lanka and elsewhere in South Asia and the world. It also explores how notions of authenticity shape certain strands of postcolonial criticism and offers a way of questioning the taken-for-granted nature of the nation as a unit of analysis but at the same time critically explore the deep imprint of nations and nationalisms on people's lives.

Author: Roma Tearne
Publisher: HarperCollins Canada
ISBN: 1554689708
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 267

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Book Description
On the lush coast of Sri Lanka, a talented and beautiful young woman, Nulani, returns day after day to the verandah of a beach house to paint. Her subject is Theo, a writer attempting to heal from a tragic loss and struggling to complete a faltering novel. Just as love blossoms between them, the country is shaken by civil war. Through the years that follow, Nulani and Theo must depend upon their memories and the art that once brought them together to find the strength to face their much changed lives. In a rare and unforgettable work, Roma Tearne captures both the fragility and the endurance of love. The story unfolds in a beguiling landscape as Tearne presents us with the turmoil of the Sri Lankan civil war, told unusually from a woman's point of view.