Drawing inspiration from Ian Hacking's claim that new modes of description generate new possibilities for action, this essay explores the impact of changes to the mode of description through the 1901 Census in Ceylon. It begins by exploring the modes of description used in the censuses prior to 1901 to demonstrate that in Ceylon, the census was yet to emerge as the critical tool of colonial governance claimed by dominant scholarship around colonial census taking. This leads to an exploration of how the changes that Sir Ponnambalam Arunachalam, the first Ceylonese Census superintendent, made to the Census Ordinance, Census Manual, and Census Report impacted the function of the census as a mode of description. It then explores the possibilities for action generated by these changes in the mode of description, paying particular attention to the ways in which the census shaped elite, indigenous activism leading to the first major reforms of the colonial governance structure in Ceylon, including the introduction of limited franchise. Thus, Ceylon's 1901 Census affords a unique opportunity to examine the impact that shifts in modes of description have on possibilities for action.

Modern historians have repeatedly cast Sri Lanka’s historical female monarchs as ‘queens’, without critically reflecting on the conceptual limits and nuances of that term. Through a close examination of sources from the early second millennium, and their reception by scholars from the colonial period onwards, I demonstrate that Sri Lanka’s female monarchs—particularly Līlāvatī of Poḷonnaruva (r. 1197–1200, 1209, and 1210)—engaged in a more creative and subversive performance of gender than modern ‘queenship’ allows. In particular, I argue, a discourse of kingship’s inherent masculinity, advanced in literary and didactic texts written primarily by male monastics, was too-willingly accepted by colonial-period scholars. Closer attention to the material evidence of Līlāvatī’s reign, however, challenges this discourse and further suggests a politics of gender beyond the binary.

Is Sinhala caste simply a weak regional variant of Hindu caste or is it something else entirely? This essay argues that Sinhala caste as found in the territory of the former Kandyan Kingdom has had a distinctive ontology and retains its unique character. The essay begins with an overview of textual, genetic, and archaeological evidence for the origins of caste on the subcontinent. It then turns to the island and the fourth century CE bifurcation of Sinhala society into “high” and “low”; this duality’s persistence into the second millennium CE; its elaboration in the Kandyan Kingdom’s bureaucratic political economy; and the dissonance between this Sinhala “cartwheel” model of collective inequality and the Brahmanical “ladder” of colonial powers and the Sinhala elite. The essay concludes by examining how the ongoing discordance between these two models of Sinhala caste plays out in people’s lives through a case study of a non-elite caste community.

In the early twentieth century, economic and religious antagonism between Sinhalese and Moors in Ceylon escalated into widespread, deadly violence. In the immediate aftermath of the 1915 pogrom, which involved the targeting of Moors and their property, the Sinhalese nationalist Anagarika Dharmapala observed that ‘Muhammadans’ had accumulated wealth through ‘Shylockian methods’. Even prior to Dharmapala’s claim, Moors were repeatedly depicted as the ‘Jews of Ceylon’ by both influential Sinhalese actors and colonial state actors. As Ceylon did not have a local Jewish population, this article investigates the use of a rhetorical device that was familiar within the broader networks of empire to ‘other’ a non-Jewish mercantile minority. The article accordingly enquires into how and why antisemitic epithets came to be used in prejudicial speech against Moors. It also explores propaganda portraying Moors in terms of ‘hostile’ Jewish stereotypes and the way in which such stereotypes were deployed in Sinhalese interactions with Moors. By tracing the connections between antisemitism and anti-capitalism, this article aims to contribute to a broader discourse on the positions of Semitic groups in British imperial ideology.

The use of stated preference methods with monetary payments in developing countries can be problematic as barter and paying with labor are common in rural areas. In response, a growing number of stated preference studies explore using monetary and nonmonetary payment options. We contribute to this literature by exploring the impact of monetary vs. labor payment options on values elicited from choice experiment studies conducted in rural developing country settings. We also contribute to the literature by comparing data-gathering methods, specifically individual surveys vs. group information sessions. Our application is the restoration of an ancient irrigation system known as cascading tank systems in Sri Lanka. We conduct a choice experiment to understand the willingness to pay/willingness to contribute of rural households to restore these irrigation systems. We find that in the individual survey setting, there are no significant differences between monetary and labor payments. We also find that there is no difference between the group and individual survey settings for the monetary payment treatment. For the labor payment treatment, the group setting results in a positive payment coefficient for the labor payment attribute. This highlights that labor payments should be used cautiously in group evaluation settings.

This paper studies the contradictions of peasant politics in Sri Lanka’s dry zone frontier in a highly militarized colonization scheme (‘System L’ of the Mahaweli Development Programme in Weli Oya in northern Sri Lanka). Through a detailed ethnographic study of the life histories of settlers who came in two waves to this scheme (1980s and post-2009), we show the workings of what we call the ‘lure of land’: first, as the (al)lure that attracts landless families to live out the mythical dream of becoming a paddy farmer; second, this lure of land is intimately tied to a nationalist territorial aspiration that transforms the settler into a patriotic colonizer of the land: due to its strategic location in the frontier zone between Sinhalese and Tamil inhabited territories, settlers became ‘home guards’ who live on and protect the frontier. But the lure of land is not without contradictions: Life in the frontier is dangerous (for the early settlers) and economically precarious (for the early and late settlers), because the state is unable to deliver the promise of land and water. Government officials deploy various tactics of repeatedly deferred promises and subtle threats to discourage settlers to abandon the colonization scheme despite the settlers’ precarious life conditions, disappointments, and frustrations. A ‘cunning state’ thereby betrays its own ‘frontiersmen’, while safeguarding its nationalist territorial agenda.

The coffee plantations of late nineteenth-century Ceylon (modern-day Sri Lanka) were rocked by a series of crises, including the appearance of numerous insect pests. Scholars have demonstrated that nineteenth-century plantations were both ecologically vulnerable and reliant on exploited labour, with entomology deployed in their defence across the British Empire. Yet this paper argues that, despite its global reach, colonial entomology was sometimes conducted by individuals in pursuit of such parochial concerns as their local reputation and social standing. This case study examines the beetles of Ceylon through the eyes of Scottish plantation owner and amateur naturalist Robert Camperdown Haldane. His 1881 tract All About Grub erroneously identified the island's beetles as relatives of the European cockchafer (Melolontha melolontha). Although Haldane was a well-travelled individual who adopted a global science, he was also a product of Ceylon's plantation society: touchy about his social status and dismissive of his Indian labourers. The insular priorities of individuals or tight-knit communities could direct an enterprise with superficially global characteristics.

Sri Lanka’s Constitution authorises the state to limit certain fundamental freedoms on the grounds of specific public interests. This article examines how this constitutional limitation regime has become vulnerable to majoritarian influence. It uses a case study approach, supplemented by key informant interviews, to delve into Sri Lanka’s constitutional practice with respect to limitations on fundamental freedoms such as the freedom of religion or belief, and the freedom of expression. The article illustrates how organs of the Sri Lankan state have equated notions of ‘public interest’ with the majority community’s conceptions of ‘security’, ‘order’, ‘health’ and ‘morals’. It argues that this practice reflects a cleavage between the moral legitimacy and the legal claimability of fundamental freedoms of minorities and satirists in Sri Lanka. It concludes that legal regimes designed to guarantee fundamental freedoms offer very little protection to minorities when the underlying politics driving the application of law is majoritarian.

This month's issue of BJPsych International focuses on psychiatry in Sri Lanka, with articles on suggested improvements in education and training, the country's outdated legislation regarding involuntary psychiatric treatment, and the misuse of prescription medications.

Sri Lanka has faced two major catastrophes in recent history: the civil war (1983–2009) and the tsunami (2004). Furthermore, there is a continuously changing socioeconomic situation which is becoming ever more challenging. Nearly a quarter of the Sri Lankan population is a youth or adolescent, and this age group is particularly vulnerable to adversity. Over the past decade Sri Lanka has acknowledged the need to support these young people and embarked on developing adolescent mental health services, but they require further expansion. This article provides a critical review of the state of current adolescent mental health services in our country and makes suggestions for improvement.

Sri Lanka has a history of successfully managing communicable diseases by utilising its extensive public healthcare network of community clinics and public hospitals. This article makes use of Job Demands-Resources theory (JD-R) to examine the impact of COVID-19 on nurses’ working conditions in public and private hospitals in Sri Lanka. Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, nurses’ job demands on public hospital wards included long working hours, limited workplace autonomy, minimal medical resources and high workloads caused by understaffing. Private hospital nurses experienced pressure from patients and their families to provide them with discounts on medical bills. Nurses allocated to work on COVID-19 wards experienced additional physical job demands from wearing personal protective equipment (PPE) for lengthy periods on hospital wards in a humid climate. Nurses on COVID-19 wards also experienced increased anxiety that they could transmit the disease to family members. While nurses experienced job resources such as social support from nursing supervisors and other nurses, they reported receiving minimal training in the provision of healthcare to COVID-19 patients. This combination of high job demands and low job resources increased the levels of exhaustion and mental distress experienced by many nurses working on COVID-19 hospital wards.

This study explores employees’ perceptions of organisational support, commitment, job satisfaction and turnover intentions in Sri Lanka Telecom (SLT). Organisational support involves the provision of valued financial benefits along with employees’ perceptions of support from supervisors and co-workers, and procedural fairness in decision-making. We found strong evidence that high levels of organisational support lead to employee reciprocity via increased affective commitment and job satisfaction and reduced turnover intentions. We also found evidence, albeit weaker, of a positive relationship between economic exchange and continuance commitment, where employees may be dissatisfied but stay because they have too much invested in firm specific knowledge and skills. The firm provided above average compensation and benefits and with limited alternative job opportunities in the formal economy in Sri Lanka the costs of leaving the organisation are likely to have outweighed the costs of staying.