Sunday, 10 Sep 2023
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By Prof. Sasanka Perera
Reflections on a Personal History:
It is unlikely too many people in Sri Lanka would know today who P.S. Jayasinghe was. But it is more than likely that academics in my generation and those older in India will know who he was and what he did. But even so, his is a waning memory overtaken by more recent events and individuals’ histories that have more forcefully entered the public domain since his time. But...
Even though I have been reading on and off the poetry of the Sufi mystic and poet Rūmī for a long time, it never occurred to me that his poetry was almost completely unexplored in Sri Lanka – at least in the Sinhala language.
Part of the reason for my own ignorance about this was because I had no need to read Rūmī in Sinhala since excellent English translations by...
In my essay in the Sunday Observer on March 28, 2021 on the status of social sciences and humanities in Sri Lanka, one of the issues I flagged was the relative lack of critical theoretical engagement which negatively impacts knowledge production in this broad disciplinary area. I want to explore this issue further today.
My point of departure is a 2016 essay titled, ‘The...
In 2010, looking at the British university system, Terry Eagleton posed the following simple question: “are the humanities about to disappear from our universities?” In answering his own question, he noted that ideally, “There cannot be a university without the humanities,” and “if history, philosophy and so on vanish from academic life, what they leave in their wake may...
In a hurried visit to the Bodh Gaya Archaeological Museum in December 2015 just outside the Mahabodhi Temple, a description of one of the artefacts – a fence-like structure in granite – took me by surprise. While referring to the Mahabodhi Temple, it noted, “A monastery was also built by King Meghavarman of Sri Lanka for his Bhikkus”. The artefact was supposedly a remnant...