Making 'Sinhala Studies' globally relevant

ANALYSIS COMMENTARY

- by Sasanka Perera (The writer is on X as @sasmester)

On 8 January 2026, I delivered a talk at an event at the University of Colombo marking the retirement of my longtime friend and former Professor of Sinhala, Ananda Tissa Kumara and his appointment as Emeritus Professor of Sinhala in that university. What I said has much to do with decolonising social sciences and humanities and the contributions countries like ours can make to the global discourses of knowledge in these broad disciplines. I have previously discussed these issues in this column, including in my essay, ‘Does Sri Lanka Contribute to the Global Intellectual Expansion of Social Sciences and Humanities?’ published on 29 October 2025 and ‘Can Asians Think? Towards Decolonising Social Sciences and Humanities’ published on 31 December 2025.

At the recent talk, I posed a question that relates directly to what I have raised earlier but drew from a specific type of knowledge scholars like Prof Ananda Tissa Kumara have produced over a lifetime about our cultural worlds. I do not refer to their published work on Sinhala, Pali and Sanskrit languages, their histories or grammars; instead, their writing on various aspects of Sinhala culture. Erudite scholars familiar with Tamil sources have written extensively on Tamil culture in this same manner, which I will not refer to here.