Where global discourses meet local realities: the case of scholarly publishing in Sinhala [Sāhityaya]

When invited to contribute to this issue of IJSL we were excited but also perturbed. Due to decades of underfunding, structural weaknesses, a teaching-based model as opposed to a research university model and the decline of the welfare state which historically provided patronage for Sinhala language publishing (the language of the numerical majority in Sri Lanka) we felt there was little to say about academic publishing in Sri Lanka – except to lament its virtual non-existence. But when we brainstormed this invitation we realized we had a story to tell – a story of how global discourses translate into local contexts and how this process replicates the asymmetries of the global knowledge economy.

Wolfgang Klein’s satirical piece on academic overproduction that IJSL selected as the centerpiece for this anniversary issue, highlights the “banality” of contemporary academic publication. We invoke “banality” with a nod towards Hanah Arendt and how routine and bureaucracy have become self-perpetuating rationalities in scholarly publishing. The story of Sinhala language scholarly publishing we narrate here is one where global knowledge asymmetries and neo-liberal thinking interact with local ideologies and structural weaknesses to render Sinhala language publishing “banal.” As we outline below, publishing in the Sinhala language goes from being a site of vibrant intellectual cultural and ideological debate – within a larger history of decolonization stretching from the mid nineteenth to the twentieth century – to a situation where it has lost its wider social and cultural resonance both in terms of production and readership. Faced with multiple existential threats – the aggressive promotion of English, neo-liberal transformation of higher education and an educational rationality heavily defined by metrics – Sinhala scholarly publishing has become narrowly instrumental. We also add a couple of caveats to our narrative. Our story is limited to Sinhala language publishing – Tamil, the other national language of the country, is not represented. In addition, since journals exclusively focused on linguistics are rare, our commentary covers publications dealing with Sinhala culture, defined broadly.

The emergence of a “modern” Sinhala literary culture can be seen from the mid to early twentieth centuries (Dharmadasa 1992; Sarachchandra 1943). Twin processes of literary vernacularization – where an accessible mass-written form accompanied an emergent culture of print capitalism – and resistance to this process, in the form of attempts to preserve a classical scholarly register, played out against a larger history of decolonization. The language became a site of ideological struggle – a communicative tool appropriated by Christian missionaries as well as Buddhist activists resisting missionary activity and a site on which nascent identarian discourses such as the Hela Havula [] (Coperahewa 2011), which advocated linguistic and cultural purism through de-sanskritization of Sinhala, unfolded. While not scholarly in a conventional sense, a culture of sangarā [සඟරා] – an expansive term in Sinhala that covers different serial literary forms such as magazines, journals and newspapers – emerged alongside a culture of lively public debate. Kalukondayave Pragnasekhara notes that between 1832 and 1932 there are records of 3,000 titles which he classifies as sangara (Kalukondayawe 1965: vi). These sangarā – such as Shashtralankāraya [ founded in 1853] and Yathabala [යතබල founded in 1854] – were sometimes sites for seemingly esoteric debates such as the meaning of a name poet found in a classical poem, but also for more ideologically charged issues such as the panadurāwādaya [ the Panadura debate], a doctrinal confrontation between Christian missionaries and Buddhist priests.

This vibrant Sinhala literary culture received little or no support from the colonial state but gained institutional legitimacy after independence in 1948. With Sinhala being declared the sole official language in 1956 – a highly controversial decision which overturned decades of linguistic activism seeking to replace English with the two dominant local languages Sinhala and Tamil (Coperahewa 2009; Dharmadasa 1992: 239–306) – Sinhala became exclusively identified with the postcolonial nation state. In this context, Sinhala became paradoxically a hegemonic national majority language but nonetheless remained a global minority language. This “majority at home, minority at large” status meant that since Sri Lanka gained independence in 1948 from British rule, investment in Sinhala language and cultural production was mediated by the state. Given Sri Lanka’s relatively small demographics and lack of economic value for the language outside the territory of the country, “investment” in the language literally happened under the sign of the nation state. Successive governments invested heavily in the promotion of Sinhala language and culture (it was only in 1987 that Tamil was made a national and official language due to Indian geo-political pressure).

This state patronage helped Sinhala gain prominence in the education system and enter many “modern” domains, such as technology, science, governance and the law. Academic journals in Sinhala such as Piyawara [පියවර] and Nawa Piyawara [නව පියවර], Lekhana Mālā [] Samskruthi [සංස්කෘති] and the Sāhityaya [] journal by the Department of Cultural Affairs (of which we are editorial board members) emerged in the post-1956 context and with the expansion of Sinhala language “print capitalism” under state patronage. However, one negative consequence was that proximity to the state resulted in greater cultural and linguistic regulation, leading to a hegemonic discourse, sometimes described as sambhāvya [ – a word that has associations of classical elitism] becoming dominant. One can see in this early post-colonial phase a continuation of the lively culture of public literary debate visible during colonial times. While the production of ideas became more institutionalized – associated with institutions like universities – the readership represented a wide profile: a literate public (extending across rural and urban demographics) hungry for new ideas and fired by the trials and tribulations of a newly independent nation-state.

However, by the early 1980s, with a shift to a more “neo-liberal” economic model this situation began to change dramatically. With the shrinking of the welfare state, the Sinhala language and culture began to lose state patronage. This in turn produced ambiguous outcomes. At one level the sambhāvya cultural discourse lost its dominance giving way to market forces. While many Sinhala literati saw this as a form of moral and spiritual debasement of Sinhala society (Sarachchandra 1982) this also resulted in mass media such as radio and television, which were state controlled until the early 1980s, becoming more open and artistically and intellectually daring. One can, however, also see an accompanying shrinking of the reading public. The readership for this kind of avant-garde cultural production was mainly confined to relatively small intellectual circles and reading groups which were also often urban-centric. The larger literary life which we documented earlier shrank as more commodified cultural production became the norm.

Ironically, therefore, while state support declined, a rich tradition of semi-academic journals, or periodicals in Sinhala, though limited in their reach, were produced from the 1980s till the 2000s. The state was replaced by Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) and, in some instances, private capital. These journals were an important part of Sinhala cultural life of this period and because of their relative distance from the state they explored topics such as ethno-nationalist conflict, decline of democratic values and sexual politics. One of the most prominent examples of such a journal was Pravāda [] published by the Social Scientists Association – a think tank associated with a progressive agenda. Others included Māwatha [මාවත] and Shakthi [ශක්ති] and Nivēdini [] by the Women’s Education and Research Center (WERC), and Sankalana [සංකලන], Patitha [පඨීත], Vivarana [විවරණ]. Some of these publications such as Rāvaya [රාවය (reverberations)] and Yukthiya [යුක්තිය (justice)], began life as magazines and went on to become influential Sinhala language tabloids. Collectively these publications provided alternative avenues for educated Sinhala youth, hungry to explore radical cultural and political ideas. The magazines Māthota [] and London associated with the X-group – a radical avant-garde movement – introduced post-modernist and post-structuralist ideas to Sinhala social and artistic discourse (Dewasiri 2010). However, the X-group’s controversial and relatively short career marked the ambiguity of this moment – though originating as a progressive left-oriented movement critiquing commodification and the market and promising an alternative to the vacuum left by the decline of state-sanctioned cultural discourse, it disbanded in the 2000s with many of its members joining the very market forces it set out to critique.

It is within this context that we can connect the decline in Sinhala language publishing with asymmetries in global knowledge production. We believe the 1980s decade can be taken as a watershed. It was in the 1980s that English, the colonial language that the 1956 language policy sought to displace, returned aggressively to institutional and public life. In the sociolinguistic literature on Sri Lanka this is theorized as the kaduwa syndrome (Kandiah 2010 [1984]) – where English is seen by learners from marginalized socio-economic backgrounds as a symbolic sword (‘kaduwa’) that signifies linguistic capital they desire but are excluded from. A number of subsequent developments which favor English have further exacerbated the decline of Sinhala (and Tamil) in academic, institutional and public domains.

One was a shift towards English-medium university education. Science, Medicine and Engineering had retained English medium instruction since independence. But by the turn of twenty-first century, many other disciplines adopted English. Another reason was the unavailability of instructional and reference material in Sinhala. While there was an effort to vernacularize science education at school level through the creation of Sinhala terms for science, the heavily sanskritized nature of new coinages resulted in limited use. Similarly, subject areas such as computer science, information technology and business studies used English terminology extensively, providing little incentive for higher education to pursue vernacularization.

This already skewed sociolinguistic context was further exacerbated in the early 2000s with multilateral funding. As Philipson (1992) has argued, the English language was packaged with development aid and finance by funders such as the World Bank and International Monetary Fund. With the intrusion of neo-liberal and utilitarian logic that began to reshape higher education in Sri Lanka, Sinhala language scholarship began to appear increasingly arcane. From the 1990s, mushrooming privately funded schools enabled urban middle-class families to educate children entirely in English. This turn towards solely English medium instruction is reflected in state discourse post-2000 and parallels the loan facilities provided by the World Bank. Fluency in English is strongly correlated with extra-linguistic traits such as efficiency and leadership skills and potential employment. Humanities and Social Sciences education, one of the few remaining areas of study in Sinhala and Tamil, was predictably seen as the target for ‘reforms.’ Three World Bank loan cycles from 2003 to 2023 prioritized English language proficiency in universities, and promoted English medium education.

While the situation of Sinhala-language academic publishing in Sri Lanka is shaped by many context-specific factors, it can also be connected to global asymmetries in scholarly knowledge production. Canagarajah (2002) has argued that hegemonic practices of the academic publishing industry exclude periphery scholars. For instance, citation indices and research databases are predominantly in English. Canagarajah also called out the irony of West-based “international journals” which tokenistically include non-western scholars based in Western academia in their editorial boards (Canagarajah 2002: 37). This has also meant that academic conversations are skewed – further exacerbated by the small market for local publishing in places like Sri Lanka, which provides little impetus for academic publishing (Uyangoda 2023).

In the Sri Lankan context the impact of this global knowledge production economy became very visible in the aftermath of a series of trade-union struggles led by the Federation of University Teachers’ Associations (FUTA) – the largest university trade union in the country. Beginning in 2012 FUTA led a highly effective public campaign demanding the allocation of 6 % of GDP to education, in a context where the country’s education spending was below 2 % of GDP (Witharana 2015). This campaign resulted in the government of the time substantially increasing the salary of university faculty, which had remained stagnant for decades. However, along with the salary increase a new metrics-based promotion scheme alongside quantity-based annual evaluations of academics were introduced. These changes coincided with the advent of a “quality discourse” that was directly connected to the three World Bank loan cycles mentioned above (Mendis 2017; Perera 2024). The cumulative result of these developments was a heightened awareness and anxiety among academics of the need to publish (Berg et al. 2016) – signaling the arrival of a “publish or perish” mentality that is a longstanding feature of first-world academia but a much more recent phenomena in places like Sri Lanka (Uyangoda 2023).

This instrumental push to publish resulted in a scramble within universities to publish, particularly in peer-reviewed journals which receive the highest number of ‘marks’ in the new promotion scheme. While this journal-centric publication-as-excellence discourse favored STEM disciplines it placed Sinhala-language social sciences and humanities scholars at a particular disadvantage. This in turn has led to a hasty journal ‘boom’ – with journals set up with the instrumental objective of satisfying the criteria for promotion and annual evaluations. One can now see a darkly ironic situation where Sinhala language publishing within the university system is expanding but with little scholarly relevance. Most papers in these journals do not reach a broad readership, as the primary focus is not on the circulation of knowledge but on accumulating points for promotions.

A particularly telling example of this situation was a failed attempt, a few years ago, to convert Sāhityaya (the trilingual journal published in Sinhala, Tamil and English with which the authors of this piece are associated) into a scholarly journal which conformed to the requirements of the academic promotion scheme mentioned above. The proposal was made with little understanding or sensitivity to the rigorous peer-review and editorial infrastructure processes necessary for “proper” scholarly publishing. Instead, it was seen as a quick fix which would enable academics publishing in Sāhityaya to claim relevant points in the promotion scheme and therefore attract more submissions from those with a scholarly background. While the proposal may have been made with positive intentions, it demonstrated how scholarly publishing was being insidiously reshaped by instrumental discourses. Sāhityaya has always been run on the basis of solicited articles which can vary in terms of quality and content. Nonetheless, this has ensured that the journal publishes content that derives from a sense of passion and engagement. The journal also literally comes alive when the deadline for the annual State Literary Festival approaches because the journal is published each year to coincide with the festival. This also means the journal has no real publishing infrastructure and had the proposal to convert it to a scholarly journal been adopted, it would simply have added yet another banal publication to the scholarly publication boom in the country.

This situation is further compounded by advances in publishing technology and the shift to online publishing. With the ease of low-cost desktop publishing, journals are mushrooming in universities but often are journals only in outward appearance, with highly questionable per-review and editorial processes. What one sees in Sri Lanka in relation to Sinhala scholarly publishing is the unhappy convergence of a number of factors: the systematic withdrawal of the state from higher education; increasing intrusion of neo-liberal capital; the mainstreaming of a metrics-based culture of evaluating academic excellence and productivity; and the instrumental desire of faculty to publish. We end on a rather despondent note. But perhaps, as in the brief history of Sinhala publishing we have traced, scholarly and cultural publishing may once again flourish outside institutional spaces – driven not by metrics or instrumental discourses but by the ‘cultural life’ of Sri Lankan/Sinhala society.

Krishantha Fedricks and Kaushalya Perera are editors of the English language edition of the journal Sāhityaya and Harshana Rambukwella is one of its former editors.