Published in my column in The Nation on December 09, 2012  By Darshanie Ratnawalli                         The Cobra hood cave in Sigiriya donated around 2nd century B.C. by someone called Naguliya I went to Sigiriya recently. At the entrance to one of the several caves, at the base of the ...

Published in my column in The Nation on November 18, 2012  By Darshanie Ratnawalli Ananda Wakkumbura is a man who has recently put behind him a daunting task: translating into Sinhalese ‘Sinhala Consciousness in the Kandyan Period’ by Michael Roberts. Here’s the kind of sentence which makes this a daunting task. ‘Secondly he imposes the gemeinschaft/gesellschaft distinction borrowed from

Published in my column in The Nation on October 14, 2012  By Darshanie Ratnawalli What does the common man want? He wants among other things to be fair; to keep up at least a semblance of fairness and fair play. When the CFA came into being in 2002, and it looked like they were finally going to wrench Sri Lanka free, from the pincer-like grip of the integrating dynamic it had been held in for

Published in my column in The Nation on September 30, 2012  By Darshanie Ratnawalli The DPhil (Oxon.) who lent me his copy of ‘The Evolution of an Ethnic Identity’ by K.Indrapala had written with a scornful pen on the last page of the preface; “So: Indrapala is NOT a charlatan, a political animal. Indrapala seeks intellectual rigour.” This is the impression the author seeks to create by

Published in my column in The Nation on September 16, 2012  By Darshanie Ratnawalli Sigiri. A rock turned into a sitting lion and a secure palace complex by Kasyapa in the 5th century A.D. After his death, Sigiriya stood abandoned to the forest, the palace complex falling to ruins, desolate but not fully. During the 8th, 9th and 10th centuries A.D., the site became a visitor magnet, drawing

Published in my column in The Nation on September 02, 2012  By Darshanie Ratnawalli “I will erase even the memory of Sparta from the histories…” - Antagonist dialogue line from the movie 300- Here is the storyline given in 'The Evolution of an Ethnic Identity'; “The Tamils of Sri Lanka evolved as a second ethnic group. Their evolution was parallel ...

Published in my column in The Nation on August 19, 2012  By Darshanie Ratnawalli Why did Professor K. Indrapala write his 2005 book, ‘The Evolution of an Ethnic Identity’? Some people suggest external duress (Nalin De Silva; ‘he became a prisoner of the LTTE’) while some allege duress exerted by the subconscious. Michael Roberts, an old Peradeniya colleague of Indrapala said; “knowing

Published (as a severely edited version) in my column in The Nation on August 05, 2012  By Darshanie Ratnawalli “The comparative religious tolerance of Lankan kings, their willingness to perform to the sacral expectations of many moral communities, can be dazzling to modern eyes. But it ought not to blind us to the presence of quite other boundaries, often irrelevant or submerged, but

Published in my column in The Nation on July 22, 2012  By Darshanie Ratnawalli Is religious rivalry in Sri Lanka a modern thing begotten and sustained by another modern thing; the Sinhala Buddhist consciousness? Or is it an old thing, which owes its genesis to something deeper and older? The latter of course. The former is a 1980s 90s delusion of a particular Ism; Post-orientalism. This

Published in my column in The Nation on July 08, 2012  By Darshanie Ratnawalli The duo Nissan and Stirrat and the solo Bruce Kapferer were the anthropologists who discovered a unique and distinctive dynamic in the way the Sinhalese disposed of their Enemy Other. This, they said, was directed by the compulsions embedded within the Sinhalese cultural DNA. These cultural compulsions, said they,

Published in my column in The Nation on July 1, 2012  By Darshanie Ratnawalli However it may be defined elsewhere in the world, power sharing in Sri Lanka is about drawing up constitutional title deeds to enshrine communal claims on a common territory. Consequent to this local twist, there are many barriers to power sharing in Sri Lanka. One major barrier is the wide, nonexclusive dissemination

Published in my column in The Nation on June 10, 2012  By Darshanie Ratnawalli This is a horror story. It follows a classic plotline of the genre; the gradual emergence of the hidden revenant from under the guise of apparent goodness. At night, during a thunder storm, the hero would be necking in the car with his beautiful girlfriend (who is really the female revenant, a malignant supernatural

Published in my column in The Nation on May 27, 2012  By Darshanie Ratnawalli “When you stare into the abyss the abyss stares back..” - Friedrich Nietzsche The testimonies of the hoards of civilians who recounted their NFZ experiences to the LLRC contradict the set of testimonies culled by Rajan Hoole and Co and included in the UTHR(J) special Report ...

Published in my column in The Nation on May 13, 2012  By Darshanie Ratnawalli Marga in their analysis of the Darusman report says that it presents possibly the strongest case against the Government and the Army. This is wrong. The strongest case is presented by UTHR (J) special report No.34. It came before everything; Darusman’s, The Cage, Marga Seminar report and the LLRC. In 2009 December,

Published in my column in The Nation on April 29, 2012  By Darshanie Ratnawalli There is one part in the UN report on Sri Lanka that even should one have passionate crushes on one or all three members of the panel one should find hard to read without wincing. That is when they talk of the Government shelling of the 11th UN convoy. From paragraph 79 to 91, the report details the adventures of

Published in my column in The Nation on April 08, 2012  By Darshanie Ratnawalli How did the UN Panel report on Lanka affect the local commentators? I say nothing about foreign commentators because all cultures across the world have popular tropes that depict foreigners as credulous fools (the Brooklyn bridge story, the ‘parangiya kotte giya’ story, etc.) and we can ...

Published in my column in The Nation on March 25, 2012  By Darshanie Ratnawalli I wonder if it behoves me to say something about THE CURRENT ISSUE instead of being so stuck in the past and its different presentations. I could, but then there is very little emotional satisfaction to be had in holding up a spotlight to mediocrity. “To ...

Published in my column in The Nation on March 11, 2012  By Darshanie Ratnawalli In 1984, Gamini Iriyagolla accused C. R. De. Silva of suppressing something. Some evidence. Historical not litigious. Probably because Gamini Iriyagolla was a lawyer, it looked a bit convoluted. So that at first it confounded even me. (And I am quite brilliant). But finally I got it. (I always do). The charge was, on

Published in my column in The Nation on March 4, 2012  By Darshanie Ratnawalli Some historians are good people who are ideologically excited by how harmoniously the multicultural motif lies on the landscape of this country’s past. They contemplate the Nayakkar accession to the throne of Sinhale, the medieval incorporation of South Indian immigrants and religious cults and the whole cultural

Published in my column in The Nation on February 19, 2012  By Darshanie Ratnawalli Sometimes a geographical space acquires an equation of predominant association with a certain identity and when this happens it enables an alien motif to come into existence in the plane of perceptions and take the other identities under its shadow. For example; "The inhabitants of Jaffna consist of a