Nira Wickramasinghe
Biographic Data
| ID | 163665 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Nira Wickramasinghe |
| GIVEN NAMES | Nira |
| FAMILY NAME | Wickramasinghe |
| SIGNATURE | WICKRAMASINGHE N |
| AFFILIATIONS | Leiden University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-0240-1882 |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 30 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 50 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 27 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 3 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1995 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
Sri Lanka’s Leftist ‘Renaissance’
Two years after protests ousted an authoritarian conservative ruler who had plunged the country into an economic collapse, voters turned to a party of former Marxist rebels in hopes of a new, more inclusive approach to governance
Monsoon Asia: A reader on South and Southeast Asia
A Country in Abeyance
Amid an economic meltdown in 2022, a nonviolent citizens movement in Sri Lanka ousted Prime Minister Mahinda Rajapaksa and President Gotabaya Rajapaksa, brothers from a family that had dominated national politics since 2005. But Parliament filled the presidential vacancy with Ranil Wickremesinghe, a six-time former prime minister seen as a proxy for his predecessors. After a draconian crackdown on protesters, the streets have quieted. But the cou…
Sovereignty, space and civil war in Sri Lanka: Porous nation
Sovereignty, Space and Civil War in Sri Lanka: Porous Nation sits within a recent body of work that has initiated a reading of Sri Lanka’s three-decade-long civil war from a different angle. Most a
Sri Lanka in 2020
President Gotabaya Rajapaksa and his brother Prime Minister Mahinda Rajapaksa set in motion a process aimed at consolidating their family’s control of the executive, cabinet, and legislature. The global coronavirus pandemic gave them an opportunity to further militarize the administration of the country. The ruling party, the Sri Lanka People’s Front, won a two-thirds majority in the parliamentary elections, which allowed them to enact decisive c…
Being a Slave: Histories and Legacies of European Slavery in the Indian Ocean
Slave in a Palanquin: Colonial Servitude and Resistance in Sri Lanka
Nira Wickramasinghe uncovers the traces of slavery in the history and memory of the Indian Ocean world, exploring moments of revolt in the lives of enslaved people in Sri Lanka in the wake of abolition. Slave in a Palanquin offers a vital new portrait of the local and transnational worlds of the colonial-era Asian slave trade in the Indian Ocean
Being a Slave. Histories and Legacies of European Slavery in the Indian Ocean: Histories and Legacies of European Slavery in the Indian Ocean
This multidisciplinary volume brings together scholars and writers who try to come to terms with the histories and legacies of European slavery in the Indian Ocean. The volume discusses a variety of qualitative data on the experience of being a slave in order to recover ordinary lives and, crucially, to place this experience in its Asian local context. Building on the rich scholarship on the slave trade, this volume offers a unique perspective th…
Ronit Ricci, Banishment and Belonging, Exile and Diaspora in Sarandib, Lanka and Ceylon
The Ambivalence of Freedom: Slaves in Jaffna, Sri Lanka, in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries
This article discusses slavery and the lives of enslaved people in Jaffna, northern Sri Lanka, under Dutch and British rule. It argues that by sanctioning and tapping into a perceived local practice of slavery and legally constituting slaves, Dutch colonial rulers further strengthened the power of the dominant caste Vellalar over their subordinates. This was done through processes of registration, legal codification, and litigation. For some ensl…
Forcing the archive: Involuntary migrants ‘of Ceylon’ in the Indian Ocean World of the 18–19th centuries
This article examines some marginal stories of subaltern individuals shipped and trans-shipped between the Dutch and British colonial territories of Ceylon, Mauritius and the Cape in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. After addressing the difficulties in retrieving traces of their lives and the ambiguities of categories of classification, the article offers insights into everyday cultural ties forged among diverse groups and looks into acts…
Citizenship Reborn in Sri Lanka
The unexpected ouster of an authoritarian president in January's election was the result of a slow-burning citizens' uprising. Will this revival of civil society lead to lasting progress
Sri Lanka in 2014
The year 2014 witnessed a few cracks in the government of the United People’s Freedom Alliance in the face of internal and external challenges. Still, anti-Muslim violence, setbacks in provincial elections, and mounting concerns over the coalition’s human rights record failed to disrupt continued high economic growth. The surprise was the January 8, 2015, election: defeating the incumbent, on January 9, former Health Minister Maithripala Sirisena…
Colonial governmentality and the political thinking through “1931” in the Crown colony of Ceylon/Sri Lanka1
This paper uses the Arendtian notion of the “political” to argue that the colonial framework and modernity have for long overdetermined the way historians have analyzed the “political” in South Asia. Using 1931—the year universal suffrage was introduced to the Crown colony of Sri Lanka—as an entry point, it engages critically yet constructively with the subaltern studies school’s creative adaptation of Foucault’s notion of governmentality, as wel…
Metallic Modern
Everyday life in the Crown colony of Ceylon (Sri Lanka) was characterized by a direct encounter of people with modernity through the consumption and use of foreign machines – in particular, the Singer sewing machine, but also the gramophone, tramway, bicycle and varieties of industrial equipment. The ‘metallic modern’ of the 19th and early 20th century Ceylon encompassed multiple worlds of belonging and imagination; and enabled diverse conception…
History as Heritage: Producing the Present in Post-War Sri Lanka
This paper explores the consolidation by a patriotic post-conflict state of a notion of history reinvented as national heritage. The distinction between history as an analysis of the past and heritage was rarely made explicit in the public discourse. After the war ended the distinction disappeared entirely except in some rare university history departments. Heritage as we understand it, is present centred and is created, shaped and managed by and…
Metallic Modern: Everyday Machines in Colonial Sri Lanka
Everyday life in the Crown colony of Ceylon (Sri Lanka) was characterized by a direct encounter of people with modernity through the consumption and use of foreign machines - in particular, the Singer sewing machine, but also the gramophone, tramway, bicycle and varieties of industrial equipment. The 'metallic modern' of the 19th and early 20th century Ceylon encompassed multiple worlds of belonging and imagination; and enabled diverse conception…
Sri Lanka in 2013
The year 2013 witnessed a further consolidation of the power of President Mahinda Rajapaksa and his loyalists of the ruling United People’s Freedom Alliance. The country’s high economic growth continued amid allegations of corruption and nepotism. The regime’s past and present human rights record came under serious scrutiny
Sri Lanka in the Modern Age: A History
Now available as an updated second edition covering the brutal end of Sri Lanka's civil war and creeping state authoritarianism that has grown in its wake, Sri Lanka in the Modern Age recounts the island's modern history in an accessible yet unconventional manner. While most histories of the country published in the last twenty years have tended to focus on the state's failure to accommodate the needs and demands of minority communities, this boo…
Democracy and entitlements in Sri Lanka: The 1970s crisis over university admission
Affirmative action policies came into effect in Sri Lanka in the 1970s with the left-of-centre United Front government headed by Sirimavo Bandaranaike. Her government introduced changes in the criteria for university admission, initially designed to benefit the majority Sinhalese students. These policies were later transformed into a regional quota system cutting across ethnic and religious identities. The schemes were condemned for straying away…
In Sri Lanka, the Triumph of Vulgar Patriotism
Rajapaksa's patriotism merges nation and state, and it promotes a love of country based on a particular reading of the Sinhalese people's foundation myth, a reading in which all other groups ... are present only as shadows
The Imagined Spaces of Empire
Many Little Revolts or One Rebellion? The Maritime Provinces of Ceylon/Sri Lanka between 1796 and 1800
Contemporaries and later historians have recorded that between 1796 and 1800, when the island of Ceylon was ruled from Madras by the English East India Company, a number of violent protests directed against the new rulers took place. These are generally read as a single rebellion ‘caused’ by the imposition of a tax on owners of coconut gardens, a reading that justifies the often violent counterinsurgency methods practised by the British military …
Sri Lanka in 2008: Waging War for Peace
The year 2008 saw a successful military campaign by government security forces against the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) in the North. Elections to the Eastern Province resulted in a break away faction of the LTTE sharing power with the government. People continued to endure high inflation in the price of essential goods and services, and the country's human rights record remained dismal
After the War: A New Patriotism in Sri Lanka
On May 19, 2009, the president of Sri Lanka, Mahinda Rajapaksa, dressed in his traditional white sarong and shirt, solemnly addressed Parliament: "The writ of the state now runs across every inch of our territory ... we have completely defeated terrorism." The same day, photographs of the corpse of the ruthless rebel leader Vellupillai Prabhakaran adorned all of the local newspapers. With his death, the secessionist war was over-this endless war …
After the War: A New Patriotism in Sri Lanka
On May 19, 2009, the president of Sri Lanka, Mahinda Rajapaksa, dressed in his traditional white sarong and shirt, solemnly addressed Parliament: "The writ of the state now runs across every inch of our territory ... we have completely defeated terrorism." The same day, photographs of the corpse of the ruthless rebel leader Vellupillai Prabhakaran adorned all of the local newspapers. With his death, the secessionist war was over-this endless war …
Being a Slave. Histories and Legacies of European Slavery in the Indian Ocean: Histories and Legacies of European Slavery in the Indian Ocean
This multidisciplinary volume brings together scholars and writers who try to come to terms with the histories and legacies of European slavery in the Indian Ocean. The volume discusses a variety of qualitative data on the experience of being a slave in order to recover ordinary lives and, crucially, to place this experience in its Asian local context. Building on the rich scholarship on the slave trade, this volume offers a unique perspective th…
The Ambivalence of Freedom: Slaves in Jaffna, Sri Lanka, in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries
This article discusses slavery and the lives of enslaved people in Jaffna, northern Sri Lanka, under Dutch and British rule. It argues that by sanctioning and tapping into a perceived local practice of slavery and legally constituting slaves, Dutch colonial rulers further strengthened the power of the dominant caste Vellalar over their subordinates. This was done through processes of registration, legal codification, and litigation. For some ensl…
Democracy and entitlements in Sri Lanka: The 1970s crisis over university admission
Affirmative action policies came into effect in Sri Lanka in the 1970s with the left-of-centre United Front government headed by Sirimavo Bandaranaike. Her government introduced changes in the criteria for university admission, initially designed to benefit the majority Sinhalese students. These policies were later transformed into a regional quota system cutting across ethnic and religious identities. The schemes were condemned for straying away…
Forcing the archive: Involuntary migrants ‘of Ceylon’ in the Indian Ocean World of the 18–19th centuries
This article examines some marginal stories of subaltern individuals shipped and trans-shipped between the Dutch and British colonial territories of Ceylon, Mauritius and the Cape in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. After addressing the difficulties in retrieving traces of their lives and the ambiguities of categories of classification, the article offers insights into everyday cultural ties forged among diverse groups and looks into acts…
The Idea of Civil Society in the South: Imaginings, Transplants, Designs
The genealogy of the most influential understanding of the term “civil society” can be traced to what has been described as the “Americanization” of the concept in the last two decades. Through the instrumentalization of this neo-Tocquevillian conception of “civil society,” a new social space is being designed in the global South. With the growing flow between academic theories and knowledge and the world of aid agencies, policies and practical p…
Colonial governmentality and the political thinking through “1931” in the Crown colony of Ceylon/Sri Lanka1
This paper uses the Arendtian notion of the “political” to argue that the colonial framework and modernity have for long overdetermined the way historians have analyzed the “political” in South Asia. Using 1931—the year universal suffrage was introduced to the Crown colony of Sri Lanka—as an entry point, it engages critically yet constructively with the subaltern studies school’s creative adaptation of Foucault’s notion of governmentality, as wel…
Sri Lanka in 2020
President Gotabaya Rajapaksa and his brother Prime Minister Mahinda Rajapaksa set in motion a process aimed at consolidating their family’s control of the executive, cabinet, and legislature. The global coronavirus pandemic gave them an opportunity to further militarize the administration of the country. The ruling party, the Sri Lanka People’s Front, won a two-thirds majority in the parliamentary elections, which allowed them to enact decisive c…
Sri Lanka in 2013
The year 2013 witnessed a further consolidation of the power of President Mahinda Rajapaksa and his loyalists of the ruling United People’s Freedom Alliance. The country’s high economic growth continued amid allegations of corruption and nepotism. The regime’s past and present human rights record came under serious scrutiny
Many Little Revolts or One Rebellion? The Maritime Provinces of Ceylon/Sri Lanka between 1796 and 1800
Contemporaries and later historians have recorded that between 1796 and 1800, when the island of Ceylon was ruled from Madras by the English East India Company, a number of violent protests directed against the new rulers took place. These are generally read as a single rebellion ‘caused’ by the imposition of a tax on owners of coconut gardens, a reading that justifies the often violent counterinsurgency methods practised by the British military …
Sri Lanka in 2008: Waging War for Peace
The year 2008 saw a successful military campaign by government security forces against the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) in the North. Elections to the Eastern Province resulted in a break away faction of the LTTE sharing power with the government. People continued to endure high inflation in the price of essential goods and services, and the country's human rights record remained dismal
Sri Lanka in 2007: Military Successes, but at Humanitarian and Economic Costs
The year 2007 saw a successful military campaign that led to the “liberation” of the Eastern Province by government security forces. The country's high economic growth rate continued despite the war, but inflation and the cost of living also rose significantly. The regime's human rights record came under serious scrutiny
The sari - Mukulika Banerjee & Daniel Miller
Quest for freedom: The United States and India's independence
In an attempt to publish some reviews sooner after material comes out, the Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars has added this section of short reviews of individual books, movies, TV series, and so on. For more information about short reviews as well as review essays, see the introduction to the list of books to review on p. 92 of this issue
Civil Society in Sri Lanka: New Circles of Power
Introduction The Many Faces of Security in Sri Lanka Good Governance and the New Aid Regime Partnership in Development and NGOs: A Critique of Donor Conceptions Sovereignty and Humanitarian Relief Organizations Conclusion Index
The Idea of Civil Society in the South: Imaginings, Transplants, Designs
The genealogy of the most influential understanding of the term “civil society” can be traced to what has been described as the “Americanization” of the concept in the last two decades. Through the instrumentalization of this neo-Tocquevillian conception of “civil society,” a new social space is being designed in the global South. With the growing flow between academic theories and knowledge and the world of aid agencies, policies and practical p…
The sari - Mukulika Banerjee & Daniel Miller
Sri Lanka in 2007: Military Successes, but at Humanitarian and Economic Costs
The year 2007 saw a successful military campaign that led to the “liberation” of the Eastern Province by government security forces. The country's high economic growth rate continued despite the war, but inflation and the cost of living also rose significantly. The regime's human rights record came under serious scrutiny
The Imagined Spaces of Empire
Many Little Revolts or One Rebellion? The Maritime Provinces of Ceylon/Sri Lanka between 1796 and 1800
Contemporaries and later historians have recorded that between 1796 and 1800, when the island of Ceylon was ruled from Madras by the English East India Company, a number of violent protests directed against the new rulers took place. These are generally read as a single rebellion ‘caused’ by the imposition of a tax on owners of coconut gardens, a reading that justifies the often violent counterinsurgency methods practised by the British military …
Sri Lanka in 2008: Waging War for Peace
The year 2008 saw a successful military campaign by government security forces against the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) in the North. Elections to the Eastern Province resulted in a break away faction of the LTTE sharing power with the government. People continued to endure high inflation in the price of essential goods and services, and the country's human rights record remained dismal
After the War: A New Patriotism in Sri Lanka
On May 19, 2009, the president of Sri Lanka, Mahinda Rajapaksa, dressed in his traditional white sarong and shirt, solemnly addressed Parliament: "The writ of the state now runs across every inch of our territory ... we have completely defeated terrorism." The same day, photographs of the corpse of the ruthless rebel leader Vellupillai Prabhakaran adorned all of the local newspapers. With his death, the secessionist war was over-this endless war …
In Sri Lanka, the Triumph of Vulgar Patriotism
Rajapaksa's patriotism merges nation and state, and it promotes a love of country based on a particular reading of the Sinhalese people's foundation myth, a reading in which all other groups ... are present only as shadows
Democracy and entitlements in Sri Lanka: The 1970s crisis over university admission
Affirmative action policies came into effect in Sri Lanka in the 1970s with the left-of-centre United Front government headed by Sirimavo Bandaranaike. Her government introduced changes in the criteria for university admission, initially designed to benefit the majority Sinhalese students. These policies were later transformed into a regional quota system cutting across ethnic and religious identities. The schemes were condemned for straying away…
Metallic Modern
Everyday life in the Crown colony of Ceylon (Sri Lanka) was characterized by a direct encounter of people with modernity through the consumption and use of foreign machines – in particular, the Singer sewing machine, but also the gramophone, tramway, bicycle and varieties of industrial equipment. The ‘metallic modern’ of the 19th and early 20th century Ceylon encompassed multiple worlds of belonging and imagination; and enabled diverse conception…
History as Heritage: Producing the Present in Post-War Sri Lanka
This paper explores the consolidation by a patriotic post-conflict state of a notion of history reinvented as national heritage. The distinction between history as an analysis of the past and heritage was rarely made explicit in the public discourse. After the war ended the distinction disappeared entirely except in some rare university history departments. Heritage as we understand it, is present centred and is created, shaped and managed by and…
Metallic Modern: Everyday Machines in Colonial Sri Lanka
Everyday life in the Crown colony of Ceylon (Sri Lanka) was characterized by a direct encounter of people with modernity through the consumption and use of foreign machines - in particular, the Singer sewing machine, but also the gramophone, tramway, bicycle and varieties of industrial equipment. The 'metallic modern' of the 19th and early 20th century Ceylon encompassed multiple worlds of belonging and imagination; and enabled diverse conception…
Sri Lanka in 2013
The year 2013 witnessed a further consolidation of the power of President Mahinda Rajapaksa and his loyalists of the ruling United People’s Freedom Alliance. The country’s high economic growth continued amid allegations of corruption and nepotism. The regime’s past and present human rights record came under serious scrutiny
Sri Lanka in the Modern Age: A History
Now available as an updated second edition covering the brutal end of Sri Lanka's civil war and creeping state authoritarianism that has grown in its wake, Sri Lanka in the Modern Age recounts the island's modern history in an accessible yet unconventional manner. While most histories of the country published in the last twenty years have tended to focus on the state's failure to accommodate the needs and demands of minority communities, this boo…
Citizenship Reborn in Sri Lanka
The unexpected ouster of an authoritarian president in January's election was the result of a slow-burning citizens' uprising. Will this revival of civil society lead to lasting progress
Sri Lanka in 2014
The year 2014 witnessed a few cracks in the government of the United People’s Freedom Alliance in the face of internal and external challenges. Still, anti-Muslim violence, setbacks in provincial elections, and mounting concerns over the coalition’s human rights record failed to disrupt continued high economic growth. The surprise was the January 8, 2015, election: defeating the incumbent, on January 9, former Health Minister Maithripala Sirisena…
Colonial governmentality and the political thinking through “1931” in the Crown colony of Ceylon/Sri Lanka1
This paper uses the Arendtian notion of the “political” to argue that the colonial framework and modernity have for long overdetermined the way historians have analyzed the “political” in South Asia. Using 1931—the year universal suffrage was introduced to the Crown colony of Sri Lanka—as an entry point, it engages critically yet constructively with the subaltern studies school’s creative adaptation of Foucault’s notion of governmentality, as wel…
Forcing the archive: Involuntary migrants ‘of Ceylon’ in the Indian Ocean World of the 18–19th centuries
This article examines some marginal stories of subaltern individuals shipped and trans-shipped between the Dutch and British colonial territories of Ceylon, Mauritius and the Cape in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. After addressing the difficulties in retrieving traces of their lives and the ambiguities of categories of classification, the article offers insights into everyday cultural ties forged among diverse groups and looks into acts…
The Ambivalence of Freedom: Slaves in Jaffna, Sri Lanka, in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries
This article discusses slavery and the lives of enslaved people in Jaffna, northern Sri Lanka, under Dutch and British rule. It argues that by sanctioning and tapping into a perceived local practice of slavery and legally constituting slaves, Dutch colonial rulers further strengthened the power of the dominant caste Vellalar over their subordinates. This was done through processes of registration, legal codification, and litigation. For some ensl…
Being a Slave: Histories and Legacies of European Slavery in the Indian Ocean
Slave in a Palanquin: Colonial Servitude and Resistance in Sri Lanka
Nira Wickramasinghe uncovers the traces of slavery in the history and memory of the Indian Ocean world, exploring moments of revolt in the lives of enslaved people in Sri Lanka in the wake of abolition. Slave in a Palanquin offers a vital new portrait of the local and transnational worlds of the colonial-era Asian slave trade in the Indian Ocean
Being a Slave. Histories and Legacies of European Slavery in the Indian Ocean: Histories and Legacies of European Slavery in the Indian Ocean
This multidisciplinary volume brings together scholars and writers who try to come to terms with the histories and legacies of European slavery in the Indian Ocean. The volume discusses a variety of qualitative data on the experience of being a slave in order to recover ordinary lives and, crucially, to place this experience in its Asian local context. Building on the rich scholarship on the slave trade, this volume offers a unique perspective th…
Ronit Ricci, Banishment and Belonging, Exile and Diaspora in Sarandib, Lanka and Ceylon
Political science (23 works) · Law (22 works) · History (21 works) · Politics (17 works) · Sri lanka (17 works) · Law (16 works) · Sociology (15 works) · Ancient history (14 works) · Asian Geopolitics and Ethnography (14 works) · History (12 works)