Kasun Kavishka | A ‘Duty of Care’ to Animals: Two Decades of Struggle for Law Reform in Sri Lanka

Kasun Kavishka is an undergraduate in the Faculty of Law at the University of Colombo. | In late April 2026, Sri Lanka welcomed Aloka, an Indian stray dog who walked along with US-based Buddhists monk...

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Binu Peiris | A Heart That Never Forgets

Binu Peiris is an undergraduate in the Department of English at the University of Colombo.

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Ruben Thurairajah | DBS Jeyaraj: The Witness in Exile

Ruben Thurairajah is a Yorkshire-based general practitioner in Britain’s National Health Service; who also tweets https://x.com/RubenThurairaj and writes https://drruben.substack.com/

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Nadeera Rajapakse | Literature and the Politics of Plural Identity, in and beyond Sri Lanka

Nadeera Rajapakse is an Assistant Professor in the History of Economic Thought at University Paris 1, Pantheon-Sorbonne, with research interests in identities, migrants, and global mobilities.

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Shannon Constantine | Dear Children, Sincerely: Seven Decades of Sri Lanka. Stages Theatre Group. Colombo. 2026.

Shannon Constantine is a PhD. candidate in the Department of Theatre Arts and Performance Studies at Brown University.

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Suvendrini Kanagasabai Perera | Gather Up Your World in One Long Breath. S. Shakthidharan. Sydney: Powerhouse, 2025

Suvendrini Kanagasabai Perera is John Curtin Distinguished Professor Emerita at Curtin University. Among other books, she is the author of Survival Media: The Politics and Poetics of Mobility and the ...

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Thiruni Kelegama | தாயகம் (𝘵𝘩𝘢𝘺𝘢𝘬𝘢𝘮 / motherland). Amita Arudpragasam. Harvest Moon, 2026. 76 mins.

Thiruni Kelegama (PhD., University of Zurich) is a lecturer in modern South Asian studies at the Oxford School of Global and Area Studies in the University of Oxford, and author of Central Margins: Sr...

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Elizabeth J. Harris | Aloysius Pieris, S.J.: Visionary Activist

Elizabeth J. Harris retired as Associate Professor in Religious Studies at Liverpool Hope University and is presently Honorary Fellow in the Edward Cadbury Centre in the Department of Theology and Rel...

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Roshni Kapur | Shattered Lands: Five Partitions and the Making of Modern Asia. Sam Dalrymple. Harper Collins, 2025.

Roshni Kapur is a PhD student at the University of Ghent focusing on caste and land conflicts in Sri Lanka. She is an editor of a forthcoming volume on the 2022 economic crisis and implications for co...

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MC Kanula | Chemmani '25

MC Kanula has an LLB from the University of Colombo and is currently pursuing a degree in English and English Language Teaching at the Open University of Sri Lanka.

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Sharni Jayawardena | ‘Just A Phase’: The forgotten lunar calendar

Sharni Jayawardena is a documentary photographer and filmmaker.

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Editors | Neutrality in the Face of Injustice

The Iranian ship with around 130 crew on board had concluded goodwill visits in India between mid and late February. This was just before 28 February when Israel and the US began their unprovoked atta...

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Centre for Society and Religion (CSR) | Memory, Pain, and the Hope of Justice

Seven years after the brutal terrorist attack in Sri Lanka on 21 April 2019, on Easter Sunday, the primary objective of publishing a special report by the Centre for Society and Religion (CSR) is to c...

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Shashik Silva | Ditwah Relief Management: Politics and Perceptions in ‘Kolamba Gama’

Shashik Silva is Chief Operations Officer of the Social Scientists’ Association (SSA) and the Quantitative Research Lead for the SSA January 2026 survey on public perceptions of Cyclone Ditwah impact,...

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Gananath Obeyesekere - polity.lk

Gananath Obeyesekere Collection

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Jonathan Spencer | The Conscience of the Scholar

Jonathan Spencer is Emeritus Professor of South Asian Language, Culture and Society at the University of Edinburgh; co-editor (with Harini Amarasuriya, Tobias Kelly, Sidharthan Mounaguru, and Galina O...

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Dennis B. McGilvray | Gananath Obeyesekere: Dazzling Scholar of Integrity

Dennis B. McGilvray is Professor of Anthropology emeritus at the University of Colorado Boulder, and a past president of the American Institute of Sri Lankan Studies (AISLS). His new book, A House for...

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Selvy Thiruchandran | Laughter, Debate, and Dissent: Personal Glimpses of Gananath Obeyesekere

Selvy Thiruchandran is a founder, former executive director, and presently a Trustee of the Women’s Education and Research Centre (WERC) in Colombo.

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Richard F. Gombrich | A Bridge Between East and West

Richard F. Gombrich was Boden Professor of Sanskrit at the University of Oxford from 1976 to 2004 and is the founder-president of the Oxford Centre for Buddhist Studies; author among other works of Pr...

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Crystal Baines | Ranjini Obeyesekere interview | A literary man interested in anthropology

Ranjini Obeyesekere is Lecturer Emerita at Princeton University | Crystal Baines is a researcher at the Social Scientists’ Association and a lecturer at the University of Colombo.

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Geethika Dharmasinghe | Conversion and Tradition: The Religious Public in Millennial Sri Lanka

Geethika Dharmasinghe (PhD., Cornell University) is senior lecturer in the Sociology Department at the University of Colombo and post-doctoral fellow in the Department for the Study of Religion at the...

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Anne M. Blackburn | A Tale of Two Islands

Anne M. Blackburn is the Old Dominion Foundation Professor in the Humanities in the Department of Asian Studies at Cornell University; and author most recently of Buddhist-inflected Sovereignties Acro...

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Radhika Coomaraswamy | Gananath’s Tryst with Lawyers

Radhika Coomaraswamy is a lawyer and academic; earlier the Executive Director of the International Centre for Ethnic Studies, Colombo; past Chairperson of the Human Rights Commission of Sri Lanka; the...

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Mark P. Whitaker | An Accidental Education with Gananath Obeyesekere

Mark P. Whitaker is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Kentucky; and co-editor (with Darini Rajasingham-Senanayake and Pathmanesan Sanmugeswaran) of Multi-Religiosity in Contemporary Sri L...

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Chulani Kodikara | Twenty Years of the PDVA: How has it worked for Women?

Chulani Kodikara is an editor of Polity and a director of the Social Scientists’ Association.

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Victor C. de Munck | Gananath: Two Stories and A Review

Victor C. de Munck is Professor of Anthropology at Vilnius University, Lithuania, and the author of several works on Sri Lanka including Seasonal Cycles: A Study of Social Change and Continuity in Sri...

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B. Skanthakumar | Plucking the Stars

B. Skanthakumar is co-editor of Up-country Tamils: Charting A New Future in Sri Lanka (2019, International Centre for Ethnic Studies, Colombo); and a director of the Social Scientists’ Association (SS...

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