Published in my column in The Nation on April 28, 2013  By Darshanie Ratnawalli Leslie Gunawardana Leslie (R A L H) Gunawardana, (not to be confused with Vivien’s husband, Leslie Goonewardena) was a historian specializing in the ancient period (500 BC to 1232 AD) of Sri Lankan history. He was a historical revisionist who aspired for admiration from a certain school and got it. His 1979 essay

(Actually I was not dating Ajith then, but can’t a girl dream?) Published in my column in The Nation ‘The Painted Goose’ on January 22, 2012 By Darshanie Ratnawalli In the afternoon of 10 October 1987, sound of shelling was once more heard in Jaffna barely three months after peace was enforced in Sri Lanka by India with the Indo-Lanka Accord. Most Jaffnese (records UTHR) couldn’t believe

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 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 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 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 (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 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 January 13, 2013  By Darshanie Ratnawalli Not for personal gain is this exercise of mine but in pursuit of redemption. Redemption is a curious thing. To counter every wrong pattern that gets drawn on the canvas of existence, it draws some other pattern, next to which the wrong pattern looks so godawful and out of place that it soon gets erased by the

Published in my column in The Nation ‘The Painted Goose’ on January 1, 2012 By Darshanie RatnawalliErnest Hemingway was passionate about bullfighting and wrote two books revolving around it. When I was in school or just after, I read one, ‘The Dangerous Summer’ it must have been not ‘The Sun Also Rises’ or I would remember the plot. What I ...

A response to ‘What to do with Dharshanie Ratnawalli?’ Published in my column in The Nation on January 27, 2013  By Darshanie Ratnawalli I view with extreme concern Dr. Dharmawardana’s efforts to extricate himself from a past indiscretion. This was committed when he confided to Dr. Michael Roberts in an email note that the inscriptions of Lanka in the second century B.C. are really not

Professor Colvin Guneratne. The chain of events that led to my standing naked above the waist in front of that suave, sophisticated, straight talking, famous and sometimes scratchy man started with puberty. Mine not his.Here, Watson let us examine this strange woman whose seeds of strangeness started sprouting from puberty onwards. I am in a dilemma here folks because I don’t want to call myself

Published in my column in The Nation ‘The Painted Goose’ on January 8, 2012 By Darshanie RatnawalliThe LTTE were technically Sri Lankan Forces too. They are on record in non- Sri Lankan sources as having had amputations performed on people to stop them from leaving no-fire zones. A book, which announces that Sri Lankan forces amputated people’s limbs to stop ...

Published in my column in The Nation on May 05, 2013 and in Colombo Telegraph on the same date. By Darshanie Ratnawalli I am the legitimate issue of a woman who unabashedly claims to admire the Bodu Bala Sena. This affords me a critical perspective into the issue, without which everyone is floundering like headless chickens. There may be other people, whose mothers etc. harbor soft spots

Published in my column in The Nation on February 17, 2013  By Darshanie Ratnawalli                         The Elara Vs Dutugemunu as depicted on a mural from Dambulla Today the vast majority of common people in Sri Lanka can distinguish between a language and its script. They may not be able to articulate what the difference is, but instinctively they know. I surmise that this

Published in my column in The Nation on Sunday, 29 September 2013 and in Colombo Telegraph on the same date. By Darshanie Ratnawalli His name was Knox. Robert Knox. English. He was a prisoner in Lanka from 1660 to 1680. Finally he escaped from Kandy or more specifically from Rajasinha II, who claimed to be the sovereign overlord of the whole of Lanka and its people. The world-view

Published in my column in The Nation on Sunday, 10 November 2013 and in Colombo Telegraph on the same date. By Darshanie Ratnawalli The Vanni was the source of elephants to the Kingdom of Jaffna and elephants were Crown Property. By issuing a proclamation dated Lisbon, 3rd Jan., 1612, the King of Portugal had let the natives know that he had cottoned on to that and no one therefore should

Published in my column in The Nation on Sunday, 24 November 2013 and in Colombo Telegraph on the same date. By Darshanie Ratnawalli The Vaddas are of course carriers of the name “wanniyalettho”, the present Vadi chieftain being “Uruwarige Wanniyalettho”.  I will call him Jayaseelan because I can’t recall his name (Preposterous but bear with me). Jayaseelan is a Tamil speaking Vadda who

Published in my column in The Nation on Sunday, 08 December 2013 and in Colombo Telegraph on the same date. By Darshanie Ratnawalli I got a query from Tissa Devendra regarding my previous piece, “Memories of the Vanni, Vaddas and Vanniyas”. “Do you mean to say that the Vanni was peopled by a slow influx of Vanniyar caste infiltrators from South India?” he asked. I told him that it’s

Published in my column in The Nation on February 10, 2013  By Darshanie Ratnawalli                         Taking a tracing “When it comes to ancient history, historical linguistics and such matters, surprisingly little is known in any tangible sense although much is claimed by the practitioners of such studies. ... We ...