But that was
another time.
Almost another
country.
– Mervyn de Silva (1973)
Last month the Collective for Historical Dialogue & Memory (CHDM) organised a screening of Conversations with 
Kumari, a documentary on Kumari Jayawardena. Last week Jayawardena turned 93. I thought back on the generation she represented. That generation has more or less left us, but it remains as influential as ever.
I then went back to Kalana Senaratne’s incisive interview of Jayawardena, done by the Social Scientists’ Association nine 
years ago. Watching it, one is taken aback by the breadth of her interventions. Once in a while I get taken aback too.
Five years ago, after meeting Kanishka Goonewardena at Barefoot, I visited the bookshop with my friend Shiran Illanperuma. Poring through the obligatory coffee table biographies, we came across a copy of Labour, Feminism, and Ethnicity in Sri Lanka.
I remember Shiran commenting, “She never stops writing.” And I remember smiling.
I wasn’t smiling at Shiran’s remark only. I was thinking of the irony of a collection of 30- or 40-year-old essays by the country’s foremost social scientist being sold at a place one hardly associates with such books. For Barefoot is the capital of Sri Lanka’s Bobos. You go there to buy biographies of Geoffrey Bawa, the latest art and culture publications from the National Trust. Kumari Jayawardena’s essays, by contrast, stick out like Gananath Obeyesekere’s – also published by Perera-Hussein – study of the doomed king.
But that is a testament to her contribution, and his. Jayawardena began her career at a particular point in Sri Lanka’s intellectual history. One can’t write about her, or comment on her, without considering the period she worked and lived in. This was after 1956, when the shift to Sinhala and to a lesser extent Tamil had emancipated the social sciences from its colonialist shackles. Scholars like Ralph Pieris, and the first generation of Western scholars, like James Brow and Edmund Leach, had made waves in the country.
Jayawardena represented a second generation of social scientists in post-independence Sri Lanka. This generation had been radicalised from an early age, by their families, at school, and most formatively in university. Conversations with Kumari recounts Jayawardena’s encounters in England, where she attended the LSE. In London, she befriended Romila Thapar. The parallels between these two thinkers are striking, but undeniable. Both fell into the company of free thinkers and radicals. Both absorbed the thinking of those radicals. And both applied their modes of analysis upon their return home.
To appreciate Jayawardena’s achievement, it would be pertinent to recall that, by Thapar’s time, India already had a long, rich tradition of Marxist and progressive social scientists. Jayawardena did not have the benefit of this lineage in Sri Lanka. The sole Marxist or overtly leftwing social scientist working in Sri Lanka at the time – Newton Gunasinghe – had yet to foray fully into academia in the country. As Jayadeva Uyangoda has observed in an essay, before Gunasinghe Sri Lankan social scientists operated within a liberal framework. It was left to Gunasinghe, and Jayawardena, to change this.
The intellectual-academic establishment Jayawardena and Gunasinghe encountered in Sri Lanka was highly conservative. It fundamentally bifurcated between a Westernised and a (predominantly Sinhala) nationalist wing. Often these two wings came together. Dayan Jayatilleka’s critique of Sri Lanka’s political bourgeoisie can in that sense be levelled at its intellectual bourgeoisie: it was deeply Westernized, but failed to become a modernising, emancipatory force. This is why, and how, apart from R. A. L. H. Gunawardana, Sri Lanka did not produce a politically radical historian.“We never had a Nehru,” Jayatilleka once pointed out. Well, we never had a Romila Thapar either.
Kumari Jayawardena stood out in this crowd, though her discipline was sociology, not history. Not that those fine lines ever mattered: though a sociologist by training, she was a historian by conviction. The essays, books, and other public interventions she made filled gaps that almost none of her contemporaries could. Her focus on 19th and 20th century Sri Lankan society, the material and social history of British Ceylon, helped her find her footing. Frequently visiting the National Archives, she discovered a rich storehouse of material – including colonial despatches – which had been referred to and made use of by others until then, but which gained a new lease of life through her writings.
What made these interventions so unique? At a time when Sri Lankan history tended to be seen through the prism of kings, rulers, and Prime Ministers, she preferred to write on the marginalised underclass: workers, peasants, and political radicals. Among the many figures shere-evaluated here was Anagarika Dharmapala: she devoted a considerable portion of her work on the labour movement in Sri Lanka to him. By this point, Dharmapala, like that other parvenu figure of early 20th century Sri Lanka, A. E. Goonesinha, tended to be lionised or demonised by the establishment, depending on the ideological sympathies of the writer or historian. Jayawardena rescued him from these polarities.
Since then the situation has considerably deteriorated. One is tempted to rail against the Sri Lankan government here. There is much in what successive governments have done, and not done, which deserve censure. The deterioration of intellectual freedom and intellectual space since 1977, however, has been more than matched by a diminution in academic rigour in civil society. Today both academia and think-tank spaces have become bureaucratised and commodified, a reflection of what they once were. It is easy to criticise the Sri Lankan State’s complicity in all this. But there are other reasons for the decline as well.
At the CHDM screening, much was made about the importance of producing knowledge, and the contribution that the non-government or development sector makes to this. I think it’s only fair to say that, deplorable though the Sri Lankan State’s response to this has been over the last half-century, the development sector has never recovered from the shocks of the 1980s and 1990s, and it continues its downward trajectory.
Jayawardena’s interventions were unique and progressive because they dared to question mainstream narratives.
Today, both the government and the highly stratified NGO space of Colombo have been tamed to regurgitate those narratives. This is not to say that we cannot conjure a Kumari Jayawardena, but that – to rehash an earlier point – we cannot judge her contributions in isolation from the period she hailed from. Like Camelot, it is a period we can only dream of returning to: another time, another world.
Uditha Devapriya is a writer, researcher, and analyst who writes on topics such as history, art and culture, politics, and foreign policy. He is one of the two leads in U & U, an informal art and culture research collective. He can be reached at [email protected].
