![]() ![]() Similarly, right through our history, even when Väddas practiced agriculture, they were depicted as a different ethnic group, that is, as hunters. This was portrayed as the legitimate right of citizenship particularly incorporation of South Indian people into Sri Lanka and their subsequent Sinhalization and Buddhicization. With those combinations he tends to critically investigate the country’s important historical process where the foreign visitors are “naturalized” as Sri Lankan Buddhists and only then can they be “citizens” and permitted to work for the king. His scholarly craft combines attentiveness to the historical and contemporary dimensions of the tradition. In one of the prefaces he writes, “History in my thinking, as with some of my professional colleagues, is something in the making….the tentativeness of historical knowledge and hence its vulnerability”. Obeyesekere has taken that daunting task seriously and, in my view, has done justice to the reader by inviting them to investigate our past in an unconventional or unorthodox manner. Voluminous writing of our past with a lens of critical re-reading is not an easy task. ![]() As a result of that, he managed to publish two other volumes about our past namely The Doomed King (2017) as well as, The Many Faces of the Kandyan Kingdom, 1591-1765: Lessons for our Time (2020). The second book is based on his original archival (historical texts) and ethnographical (popular folk traditions) research conducted during the past several years, particularly on cultural and social formations of pre-colonial Kandyan regions. It was well supported by a prologue by T.N.Madan who is one of the prominent Sociologists in South Asia. In general, the first volume is a collection of his previous publications with a solidly grounded introduction titled ‘Tellers of Stories, Writers of Histories: Essays on the Buddhist Past’. The essays comprised in the two volumes are based on a firm ethnographical and historical foundation and analyses that have been adopted by Obeyesekere throughout his long-illustrated career as an anthropologist. The common feature of these two books is that they deal with multi-faceted aspects of Sri Lankan narrative pasts, more precisely our past linked with Buddhism. The two books are, ‘ The Buddha in Sri Lanka: Histories and Stories (2018 and reprint Special Sri Lanka edition 2019, Routledge) and ‘ Stories and Histories: Sri Lankan Pasts and the Dilemmas of Narrative Representation’ (2019, Sarasavi Publishers). ![]() His writings have always been well received by the readers especially by the Sri Lankan Studies reading public. Even after two years of publication, I would like to write a brief review on two books written by Professor Gananath Obeyesekere, truly a gifted scholar, who still has not abandoned his scholarly life even at the age of 91. Naturally, once any serious scholar publishes work in the related field one would be tempted to read and comment on such work. Currently, I am spending a fair amount of time to read and write thanks to my long overdue sabbatical leave. ![]() However, due to administrative and teaching commitments at my university, I hardly found time to look at them until now. There are a number of books on my shelves to be read and understood, and most of them deal with Sri Lankan past. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |