(This essay was initially published in The Island on 29 October 2025: https://island.lk/does-sri-lanka-contribute-to-global-intellectual-expansion-of-social-sciences-and-humanities/)
Let me begin with a confession. Even though I have been conventionally located within social sciences in terms of training and university location, I have never been a discipline or subject puritan throughout my career. As a result, I have transgressed across broad disciplinary borders and specific subject domains in search of what interested me. This has taken me from sociology to history, philosophy and bodies of theory across disciplines and more recently to creative writing including poetry and translation of literature. Much of this is beyond my formal training in social anthropology, but one can – and I believe one actually should – venture beyond the ramparts of one’s training.
This preface is to offer a simple explanation as a point of departure for the ideas I want to present here. From this eclectic – and what has been an adventurous academic background, I want to raise very briefly two broad, but fundamental questions today on the intellectual personality of both social sciences and humanities as they manifest in our country. These are questions I have raised both in Sri Lanka and elsewhere in South Asia for well over two decades:
A) Does the research we produced locally in these disciplines make an impact on the corresponding global or regional discourses? For example, does Sri Lankan sociology, political science, literature, cultural studies and so on make a difference in the ways in which these disciplines work and think elsewhere in the world?
B) To what extent has theory and philosophy produced by our social sciences and humanities, which ideally should be so fundamental to these disciplines, impacted global discourses? Again, to simplify, have Sri Lankan social sciences and humanities taken a lead at any time in the intellectual histories of the world in theorizing these disciplines more broadly as have bodies of knowledge that range from Marxism to Structuralism to Poststructuralism, all of which emanated from the West at different historical times which we have embraced without much reflection?
While the responses ought to be clear, I am not going to answer these questions. Instead, I will place several related issues in context and let you think and make up your own minds – but hopefully founded on concrete bases, as the social science tradition I come from insists.
Does the Research Produced Locally Have a Global or Regional Discursive Impact?
Until about the early to mid-1970s, at least where the University of Peradeniya-based social sciences were concerned, the work of scholars such as Ralph Pieris, Gananath Obeyesekere, Leslie Guanwardena among a few others, did write for us as well as for the world. Their work had an impact on the ways in which historical sociology was to be conducted; how Theravada Buddhism might be studied as a distinct category through its practice rather than simply via precepts; and the ways in which ethnicity and similar ethno-cultural markers could be seen – or might be absent – in ancient historical sources and in latter day historiography, and how these would impact identity formation in the present.
All this was local research produced by social science scholars working in our country at the time. And their work was read across the world in their own disciplines and beyond. More importantly, not only were they read, but they contributed to scholarly discourses beyond our shores.
Fast forward to the present. Does this happen now? Today, we certainly have many more scholars in these disciplines in universities, practitioners beyond universities and almost limitless forums for publishing locally. Universities, faculties and even departments run journals. But do we speak to the world convincingly through our research? Do we even speak sense to ourselves based on what we do? Why is it that we still often talk about the theoretical contributions of ‘dead white men’ in these journals – and that too, centuries after their demise and newer ideas have emerged and overtaken theirs – in the most simplistic terms without reference to any new sources or ideas that might allow their thinking to be reinterpreted?
This situation comes about as the result of three inherent problems. One, the lapses in the academic networks in which we have become a part. These networks decide where we present our ideas abroad and who we invite to our deliberations here. What if these networks are spurious and mediocre? How would these interactions impact knowledge production? Two, there is no intellectually serious encouragement from universities or other entities within the country to produce core research in social sciences and humanities. The questionable and school-like award schemes adopted by many universities and conferences to offer recognition to so-called best papers’ will not pave the way for this. It is precisely this lack that led to the brain drain of the 1960s and 1970s which significantly impacted social sciences and humanities, a situation from which we have not yet fully recovered. Three, this also results from very insular and often non-reflexive and non-critical writing appearing locally without offering core research outcomes through which comparable social systems or analytical domains can be read elsewhere in the world. This is also directly linked to the space that becomes available to take our writing to the world outside – basically where and how we publish and how that knowledge circulates. Will this kind of situation allow us to be leaders in global knowledge production.
Does Sri Lankan Theory and Philosophy in Social Sciences and Humanities have a Global Impact?
I am personally not aware of theoretical or philosophical contributions from Sri Lankan social sciences and humanities in recent times that have or could contribute to theory-building, methodological fine-tuning or conceptualization in these disciplines at a regional or global scale. The reason is that we have become mere followers and imitators of borrowed bodies of theory and other forms of abstract thinking rather than being inventors of core bodies of knowledge ourselves, based on our histories, experiences, research and thinking. We continue to be blinded by the false colonial legacy of the alleged ‘universality’ of theory and philosophy. In our country and elsewhere in South Asia, it almost seems that the abstract thinking we profess today have to be imported from the west for our disciplines to survive and thrive.
It is in this context, but with reference to India that Prathama Banerjee, Aditya Nigam and Rakesh Pandey have observed in their important essay, ‘The Work of Theory Thinking across Traditions’ (2016), “theory appears as a ready-made body of philosophical thought, produced in the West …” while “the more theory-inclined among us simply pick the latest theory off-the-shelf and ‘apply’ it to our context, notwithstanding its provincial European origin, for we believe that ‘theory’ is by definition universal.”
Though on a different intellectual trajectory, this is also what Dipesh Chakrabarty attempted to argue in his 2008 book, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. He hoped to show his readers the limitations of western social science when they attempt to explain the historical experiences of political modernity in South Asia. However, it was not his intention to reject western thought completely. Instead, he wanted to renew western and particularly European thought ‘from and for the margins.’ It was a matter of bringing in diverse histories from marginalized regions when it came to global knowledge production. That is, to count knowledges and historical and political experiences of South Asia, Africa, Latin America and other such marginalized regions in the production of knowledge for the world.
Is it not this same blindness to the limitations of theory and absence of innovation in constructing knowledge in general, and theoretical knowledge in particular, that also prevails in social science and humanities classrooms in our universities and in related discourses beyond? That is, we are trained to be intellectually subservient and inferior, and be mere followers, not innovators and inventors. So, how can any disciplinary domain thrive and produce serious knowledge for the world in such conditions? My young friend Prof. Renny Thomas from the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research – Bhopal, and I have attempted to address this issue in our forthcoming book to be published in December this year, Decolonial Keywords: South Asian Thoughts and Attitudes.
In it,we have provided space for thirty South Asian scholars from across disciplines in social sciences and humanities to “discusse[s] words and ideas from a variety of regional languages, ranging from Sinhala to Hebrew Malayalam” encapsulating “the region’s languages and its vast cultural landscape, crossing national borders.” Each encyclopedic-entry-like chapter “reiterates specific attitudes, ways of seeing and methods of doing that are embedded in the historical and contemporary experiences of the region” keeping in mind “the contexts of their production and how their meanings might have changed at different historical moments.”
Crucially, the volume explores “if these words and concepts can infuse a certain intellectual rigour into reinventing social sciences and humanities in the region and beyond.” In short, we are initiating a fairly comprehensive and culturally, linguistically and politically inclusive effort at theory-building and conceptual fine-tuning based on South Asian experiences that might be able to speak to the world in the same way schools of thought in politically dominant regions of the world have done so far to us. This is a matter of decolonizing our disciplines.
When Sri Lankan social sciences and humanities thoughtlessly embrace knowledges imported in conditions of inequal power relations, it can never produce a forum or discourse from which we can speak to the world with authority. Renny Thomas and I have made an initial and self-conscious effort to literally and metaphorically turn the tables on theory-building and conceptualization in social sciences and humanities in South Asia in our favor.
Nevertheless, our aim is to do this without succumbing to crude and parochial forms of nativism that are also politically powerful in the region including in Sri Lanka. I flagged this example to show both what is possible and what is necessary if we are truly keen to infuse power into the discourses we author.
As I said at the outset, I did not answer the two questions I posed. But when I pose these questions, I do not wish to abrogate my share of the responsibility. I am sure at another time in our country’s intellectual history, I may have been part of the problem too. But I continued to reflect. I continued to look for ways to act and search for similarly inclined people to create a critical mass who might be able to make changes. The book I referred to earlier is one clear outcome of these explorations. Another is the PhD theory course I co-designed and co-taught with my colleague Ravi Kumar at South Asian University titled, ‘Social Theory, Society and Modes of Thinking.’ Its sole purpose, while teaching theory, was to look at regional knowledge sources across history to build a body of theory and analytical categories to read our social systems.
I hope the related issues I placed in context would lead readers to think through these issues on their own. One can also disregard my thinking in preference to one’s own comfort zones. Interestingly, whenever I talk about these issues, the polemical title of Kishore Mahbubani’s 1998 book, Can Asians Think? often comes to my mind. In this context, I want to ask from colleagues, friends and former students in Sri Lankan social sciences and humanities, why we are so reluctant to think? Why are we so lackluster and backward in creating knowledge not just for ourselves but for the world as well? My fear is, if we continue along this path, we will always remain in the margins in the worlds of knowledge.
(This essay is adapted from the keynote address titled, ‘Social Sciences and Humanities: Does Sri Lanka Contribute to the Global Intellectual Expansion of Disciplines?’ delivered at the inauguration session of the ‘Annual Research Symposium 2025’ of the University of Colombo on 28th October 2025)