Shehan Karunatilaka The reason I chose 1989 was because I was a bit of a coward. I wanted to write about 2009 and the end of the war, with the basic premise of what if the dead could speak. But I wasn’t brave enough to engage there. by Pasan Jayasinghe, The Hindu’s Frontline, Chennai, September… Read more »
Posts Categorized: Book Reviews
Asymmetric Warfare at Sea: The Case of Sri Lanka
by Jayanath Colombage, LAP Lambert Academic Publishing, September 24, 2016 ISBN: 3659865753 EAN: 9783659865756 Reviewed by P.G. on Amazon in the United States on July 9, 2022 and given two out of 5 stars An Academic Paper with a Few Nuggets, But Not a Naval History Book I have had an interest in maritime special… Read more »
Noolaham: Preserving Lanka’s Tamil Language Heritage Digitally
by Shannine Daniel, The Sunday Times, Colombo, May 29, 2022 The Noolaham digital library was initially a Tamil language “virtual library” which contained documents, books, manuscripts, videos, photos and other material in the Tamil language. Established in 2005, it has since expanded to include books and other documents in Sinhala, English, Sanskrit, Dutch and French…. Read more »
‘Prisoner #1056: A Survivor’s Story’
Why and how, I wrote Prisoner #1056 – The story behind the story by Roy Ratnavel, May 18, 2022 Book expected to be released by Penguin Random House on April 18th, 2023. Pre-order at https://www.amazon.ca/Prisoner-1056-Survivors-Roy-Ratnavel-ebook/dp/B09Z4JKCCV/ref=sr_1_1?crid=2D3PVSCLYHW3V&keywords=roy+ratnavel&qid=1652886733&sprefix=roy+rat%2Caps%2C115&sr=8-1 ‘The Rise’ Keynote Address about the book, May 8, 2022, London on YouTube In my thirties, perhaps around the age… Read more »
Sex, Repression & Sanskritization in Sri Lanka 1987
The 1987 Stirling Award Essay by Dennis McGilvray, Ethos, American Anthropological Association, Vol. 16, No. 2 (June 1988), pp. 99-127 The_1987_Stirling_Award_Essay_Sex_Repres Since 1952, when the concept of Sanskritization was first utilized by M. N. Srinivas in his study of the Coorgs of western India, the idea has been a useful, if at times ambiguous, tool… Read more »
Review: ‘The Red Tern’
by Zulma Publishers, France, Spring 2022 Originally in Tamil, translated into French as ‘La Sterne Rouge’ A major Sri Lankan voice Ala is born and raised in Sri Lanka, in a Tamil village prone to attacks from Sinhalese paramilitary groups. Exposed to inter-ethnic violence, she is still a child when she joins the Tamil Tigers…. Read more »
Book on Sri Sri Ravi Shankar’s Peace Efforts
in Sri Lanka to release on Feb 28 by Press Trust of India, February 2, 2022 New Delhi, Feb 2 (PTI) Revealing the untold story of Sri Sri Ravi Shankar’s peace efforts in Sri Lanka, a new book, “The Tiger’s Pause”, gives readers a sweeping view of the spiritual leader’s endeavours towards a ceasefire agreement in… Read more »
From Temple to Battlefield
Bharata Natyam in Sri Lanka’s Civil War by Janet O’Shea, in ‘Choreographies of 21st Century Wars,’ edited by Gay Morris, Jens Richard Giersdorf, Oxford University Press, 2016 Three Images of Dance and Cultural Production in Sri Lanka and the Sri Lankan Tamil Diaspora Early parts of the chapter are readable at https://books.google.com/books?id=54ZVCwAAQBAJ&lpg=PT118&ots=Z8jFNbl3LZ&lr&pg=PP1#v=onepage&q&f=false Book Synopsis Wars… Read more »
Indian Ocean Strategic Studies Newsletter
by Indian Ocean Strategic Studies, New York, January 2022 Indian Ocean Strategic Studies newsletter January 2022 Mission of the IOSS Indian Ocean is at the heart of international geo-politics. Some 80% of the world’s maritime oil trade flows through three narrow passages of water, known as choke points, in the Indian Ocean. This includes the… Read more »
‘Sovereignty, Space and Civil War in Sri Lanka’
Porous Nation by Anoma Pieris Routledge, 2019 9781351246347 Analyses of the Sri Lankan civil war (1983–2009) overwhelmingly represent it as an ethnonationalist contest, prolonging postcolonial arguments on the creation and dissolution of the incipient nation-state since independence in 1948. While colonial divide-and-rule policies, the rise of ethnonationalist lobbies, structural discrimination and majoritarian democracy have been… Read more »
Review: ‘You People’ by Nikita Lalwani
The limits of compassion by Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett, The Guardian, Manchester UK, April 1, 2020 A London pizzeria staffed by undocumented migrants is the setting for a moving exploration of how to be kind in an unkind world Nikita Lalwani’s 2007 debut Gifted, the story of a maths prodigy raised by her Hindu parents in Cardiff… Read more »
Banishment and Belonging
Exile and Diaspora in Sarandib, Lanka and Ceylon (2019) Book Review by Greg Fealy, New Mandala, June 29, 2020 Ronit Ricci, Banishment and Belonging: Exile and Diaspora in Sarandib, Lanka and Ceylon, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2019, 282pp, ISBN 978-1-108-72724-2. For well over a century, Sri Lanka was the Dutch colonial administration’s main site of exile for… Read more »
Book Review: ‘Wanderers, Kings, Merchants’
Peggy Mohan’s ‘Wanderers, Kings, Merchants’ is about language, land & the people by Pushpinder Syal, The Tribune, Chandigarh, India, June 13, 2021 Peggy Mohan’s book tells a story of language, which is that of a fascinating process of mixing and adaptation through time. Language, in its very existence and evolution, resists the notion of purity,… Read more »
Deterrence, Mass Atrocity, and Samantha Power’s “The Education of an Idealist”
by Anjali Dayal, Medium, November 19, 2019 For nearly two decades, Samantha Power and her work have served as a crucible for larger debates about the United States’ use of force around the world. For critics across the ideological spectrum, Samantha Power, the idea, serves as synecdoche for liberal interventionism. The disagreements her work sets in… Read more »
The Origins of the Great Divergence
A review of Peer Vries’ “Escaping poverty” by Branko Milanovic, his personal Substack, July 22, 2021 While the world is witnessing global convergence (essentially the catch up of Asia with the West), the debates about the origins of the Great Divergence—the take-off of the West and absence of growth in the Rest—are going strong. I… Read more »
Review of ‘A Passage North’ by Anuk Arudpragasam
Long shadows by Nilanjana Roy, Financial Times, London, July 2, 2021 The Sri Lankan writer’s second novel attempts to air the wounds of the country’s civil war and refuses to succumb to collective amnesia It can take just two novels to establish a writer as one of the most individual minds of their generation. Anuk… Read more »
Performing Politics
State Power, Ethnicity and Gender in Sri Lanka by Janet O’Shea, Dance Chronicle, 34:146–151, 2011 Review of Susan A. Reed’s 2009 book “Dance and the Nation: Performance, Ritual, and Politics in Sri Lanka” 288 pp. with DVD. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2009. $29.95 paper. ISBN – 13: 978-0-29923-164-4 Performing Politics O’Shea review 2011 Reed’s… Read more »
‘Tigresses in the Tamil Eelam Struggle’ Review
‘The Orders Were to Rape You: Tigresses in the Tamil Eelam Struggle’ review: Surviving war by Meera Srinivasan, The Hindu, Chennai, India, April 24, 2021 Meena Kandasamy records the gruesome first-person experiences of two women of the Tamil Eelam struggle The picture of a woman with cropped hair, attired in camouflage shirt and trousers, and… Read more »
Rathika Pathmanathan’s Northern Memoir
Light to shed darkness on Southern war-myths by Lanka Associate blog, December 19, 2019 Rathika’s narrative builds through her experiences as a trainee in an LTTE camp, her brief war experiences, and the last days of battle after which she enters military-held ground as a maimed combatant. The spirit that echoes through these words is… Read more »
Home Is Elsewhere
One of Sri Lanka’s most compelling voices plays with ideas of displacement by Shahnaz Habib, OpentheMagazine.com, February 15, 2015 In an airplane from Frankfurt to Colombo, as the seat belt sign flickers alive, warning passengers of turbulence, two men sitting next to each other wonder where they have seen each other before. Sitting in the… Read more »