Gunadasa Amarasekara Archives

Lowering the brow : The films of H.D. Premaratne-By Uditha Devapriya Source:Island The face of Sri Lankan films changed in the 1970s. This was due to a number of reasons. Arguably, the most important of them would be the rise of the Sinhala Buddhist rural petty bourgeoisie. Initially represented as side characters, they eventually became protagonists and antagonists in the films which featured them. Lester James Peries’s Golu Hadawatha and Akkara Paha broke ground, in that sense, by casting this milieu in films that not only performed well at the box-office, but also won awards, internationally. These were decades of expansion in the university system and the public sector. The SLFP’s historic win in 1956 had secured for the Sinhala middle-class a place in the sun: that spilt over to the country’s cultural and social landscape. It was in this interregnum, between the Bandaranaike and the Jayewardene years, that pulp fiction became established in ...

A critique of Jathika Chintanaya (Part II)-by Uditha Devapriya Source:Island “The middle-class of this country, a majority of them, appear to follow Jathika Chintanaya. But it’s very clear that they don’t know what Jathika Chintanaya means. Nor do they seem interested in knowing what it is. Gunadasa Amarasekara talks about Jathika Chintanaya. I talk about Chintanaye Jathikathwaya. Those not hailing from the middle-class know what Chintanaye Jathikathwaya is. But they don’t yet know how to articulate it.” — Nalin de Silva, “Jathika Chintanaya and Chintanaye Jathikathwaya” Despite what supporters and critics may say, from its inception Jathika Chintanaya was, as it still is, moulded by a Protestant ethic. Nalin de Silva’s famous critique of contemporary Buddhism – what he contemptuously derided as “Olcott Buddhism” – should not mislead one into thinking that followers of Chintanism questioned seriously the bourgeois Protestant ethic on which that variant of Buddhism was based. As scholars have ...