A story of two friends. A story which is medieval in its savage retribution. A story of chastity, purity, idealism and betrayal. A story of disguise and concealment. A story about the gods deserting his own men. Sujatha and Vedant are inseparable. With her faith in him, and the training of a devoted teacher, he blossoms. Eventually, a fork in the road takes the three of them on paths leading to different destinies. The backdrop to all their destinies is common — a horrible civil war that devastated an island nation. A Civil War. A war which would turn heaven into hell. As the life of an entire generation is snuffed out, the world with its short supply of compassion and sympathy simply turns a blind eye. In the perfectly random way that life is, Sujatha and Vedant find themselves at odds while love binds them to each other. And in a blazing charge towards victory, for a young Indian political leader, the wheel was surely coming to a full circle.
Well over a million people of Sri Lankan origin live outside South Asia. The Encyclopedia of the Sri Lanka Diaspora is the first comprehensive study of the lives, culture, beliefs and attitudes of immigrants and refugees from this island. The volume is a joint publication between the Institute of South Asian Studies, NUS, and Editions Didier Millet. It focuses on the relationship between culture and economy in the Sri Lanka diaspora in the context of globalisation, increased transnational culture flows and new communication technologies. In addition to the geographic mapping of the Sri Lanka diaspora in the various continents, thematic chapters include topics on “long distance nationalism”, citizenship, Sinhala, Tamil and Burgher disapora identities, religion and the spread of Buddhism, as well as the Sri Lankan cultural impact on other nations.
The island of Ceilao occupied a permanent and singular place in the political imagination of early modern Portugal. Concurrently, the Portuguese left a strong imprint in the Sri Lankan collective memory of the period. Five centuries later, a group of historians, art historians, anthropologists, and linguists reflect on the multiple dimensions of this phenomenon by rethinking texts and maps, ruined churches and ivory caskets, oral tales and Creole communities. Authored by 15 international scholars, Re-exploring the Links is divided in four parts: "Political Realities and Cultural Imagination"; "Religion: Con. ict and Interaction"; "Space and Heritage: Construction, Representation"; "Language and Ethnicity, Identity and Memory". While published on the occasion of the Portuguese arrival in Sri Lanka five centuries ago, this book is far from being a celebratory piece. Re-exploring the Links does not conform to nationalist models of historical interpretation and refuses both the rhetoric of discovery and the rhetoric of aggression. The aim of the volume is not to celebrate "encounters", but to reinvent an academic debate, independent of any political agenda and concerning a history that is Portuguese and Sri Lankan alike.INTRODUCTORY ESSAYChandra R. de Silva, Portugal and Sri Lanka: Recent Trends in HistoriographyPOLITICAL REALITIES AND CULTURAL IMAGINATION S. Pathmanathan The Portuguese in Northeast Sri Lanka (1543-1658): An Assessment of Impressions Recorded in Tamil Chronicles and Poems Rohini Paranavitana, Sinhalese War Poems and the Portuguese Karunasena Dias Paranavitana The Portuguese Tombos as a Source of Sixteenthand Seventeenth-Century Sri Lankan History Rui Manuel Loureiro, The Matter of Ceylon in Diogo do Couto's Decadas da Asia Jorge Flores, Maria Augusta Lima Cruz A 'Tale of Two Cities', a 'Veteran Soldier', or the Struggle for Endangered Nobilities: The Two Jornadas de Huva (1633, 1635)RELIGION: CONFLICT AND INTERACTIONAlan Strathern, The Conversion of Rulers in Portuguese-Era Sri Lanka John Clifford Holt, Buddhist Rebuttals: The Changing of the Gods and Royal (Re)legitimization in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Sri Lanka Ines G. Zupanov, Goan Brahmans in the Land of Promise: Missionaries, Spies and Gentiles in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Sri Lanka Jurrien van Goor, State and Religion under the Dutch in Ceylon, c. 1640-1796SPACE AND HERITAGE: CONSTRUCTION, REPRESENTATIONZoltan Biedermann, Perceptions and Representations of the Sri Lankan Space in Sixteenth-Century Portuguese Texts and MapsHelder Carita, Portuguese-Influenced Religious Architecture in Ceylon: Creation, Types and ContinuityNuno Vassallo e Silva, An Art for Export: Sinhalese Ivory and Crystal in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth CenturiesLANGUAGE AND ETHNICITY, IDENTITY AND MEMORYKenneth David, Jackson Singelle Nona/Jinggli Nona: A Traveling Portuguese Burgher MuseDennis B. McGilvray, The Portuguese Burghers of Eastern Sri Lanka in the Wake of Civil War and Tsunami
This book presents a survey, dynamic monitoring and comprehensive analysis of Sri Lanka’s land, vegetation, surface water, ocean and other environmental resources, as well as its economic, transportation, urban, agricultural and tourism development. It offers readers accurate, systematic and comprehensive information on Sri Lanka’s ecological setting and socio-economic development. It also sheds light on policies for the protection of the environment and biodiversity.
Advertising is a central part of the global system of commerce and culture. Every day it exposes consumers around the world to practices associated with the West, urban life, prosperity, and modernity. One consequence of this exposure is that it frees people's imaginations from time and place, and imposes a new and foreign reality. In this book Steven Kemper looks at a parallel trend, arguing that advertising firms in Nairobi, Caracas, and Colombo also domesticate the imagination, insinuating images into people's minds of the traditional as well as the modern, the local as much as the global. Drawing upon fieldwork conducted over thirty years, Kemper examines the Sri Lankan advertising industry to show how executives draw on their skills as folk ethnographers to "Sri Lankanize" commodities and practices to make them locally desirable, essentially producing new forms of Sri Lankan culture. Addressing many of the most pressing agendas of contemporary anthropology, Buying and Becoming breaks new ground in studies of culture and globalization.
The coastal belts and hinterlands of East Africa and South Asia have historically shared a number of cultural traits, commodities and cosmologies circulated on the wings of the monsoon winds. The forced and voluntary migrations of Asians and Africans across the Indian Ocean littoral over several centuries have reverberated in the memories, literatures, travelogues and religious, architectural, and socio-political imaginations of both the regions. And, they continue to do so in various forms and platforms. This book explores nuances of various narratives on these long-term transcultural exchanges with a special focus on India. It explores the ways in which Africa and Africans have been narrated in South Asian history and culture in order to unravel the nuanced layers of reflexive, rhetorical, stereotypical, populist, racialist, racist and casteist frameworks that informed diverse narratives in vernacular texts, songs, films and newspaper reports. Emphasizing the interdisciplinary approaches of narratology, Afro-Asian studies, and Indian Ocean studies, the contributors enunciate how the African lives in South Asia have been selectively remembered or systematically forgotten. Through multi-sited ethnographies, multilingual archival researches and interdisciplinary frameworks, each chapter provides theoretical engagements on the basis of empirical research in such regions as Gujarat, Kerala, Karnataka, Goa, Hyderabad and Mumbai as well as in Sri Lanka. This book was originally published as a special issue of South Asian History and Culture.
This is the firsthand account of the induction of Author and his Brigade into Sri Lanka on 11 October 1987 to form part of the Indian Peace Keeping Force (I.P.K.F.) and immediately on landing; after a daylong air journey from Gwalior in central India to Palaly Airfield on the Northern tip of Sri Lanka; his launch into fierce battles, against the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (L.T.T.E.), an ally turned bête noire, which he fought for a year thereafter. As per the Indo-Sri Lanka Agreement, signed on 29 September 1987, between Prime Minister of India Rajiv Gandhi and President of Sri Lanka J.R. Jayewardene, I.P.K.F. was sent to insurgency-stricken Sri Lanka to help restore peace in the Country. But the Agreement sadly failed and still more, digressing from the objectives of the Agreement, I.P.K.F. was ordered to launch an offensive against the L.T.T.E. Narrated here are many less known facts like the 'Quick Reaction Force' (Q.R.F.), under the Author's command, staged forward to Bengaluru, for rescuing President Jayewardene and his family, in case of a coup in Colombo, to overthrow him as also L.T.T.E.s decimation in 2009 by General Fonseka's Forces and his subsequent politically inflicted fall and rise. Twenty-four years after the withdrawal of I.P.K.F. from Sri Lanka, Author revisited the Jaffna Battles zone' in 2014 to see for himself the changes in life and subsistence of the Tamils in the Island nation. Albeit there was an apparent peace in the land, the politico-economic tribulations of the Tamil people were still writ large on the war-torn landscape of the place.
This Research Handbook offers contextualized perspectives on entrepreneurship in emerging economies. Emphasizing how national context profoundly shapes incentives for entrepreneurial efforts, chapters dissect the opportunities emerging from various institutions and social practices from the Middle East, North and Sub-Saharan Africa, Asia and Latin America. This Handbook is an ideal guide for researchers working on emerging economies, particularly those with an interest in global entrepreneurship.
