(This essay was initially published in The Island on 05 November 2025: https://island.lk/harini-amarasuriya-social-ethnographic-research-lab-much-ado-about-nothing/)
As I listened to the Prime Minister, Dr. Harini Amarasuriya at University of Colombo on 28th October 2025, she noted that research symposiums, conferences, and academic publications across the country’s universities have expanded in recent years, and this visibility had contributed to improved global university rankings. Nevertheless, and more importantly she cautioned that rankings should not be the sole benchmark of academic excellence. She rightly observed that research is a central mission of universities, not only for generating new knowledge but also for enriching the learning experience and nurturing future scholars. After a long time, I was able to agree with a political leader, and much of what I said later that morning in the same event resonated with her basic assumptions.
However, as I listened to her thought-provoking address and the need to reflect and analyze which should necessarily be part of university training, the recently established eponymous research ‘lab’ in her name at Hindu College, University of Delhi, came to mind.
Taking a cue from the Prime Minister and the need to be reflective in what we write, it would be disingenuous on my part if I do not discuss what the ‘Harini Amarasuriya Social & Ethnographic Research Lab’ means in terms of real politics as well as common sense. After all, she is not just an anthropologist and a former academic but also and more crucially, Sri Lanka’s Prime Minister. The overwhelming majority of Sri Lankans, including me, voted to send her and the government she represents to parliament with considerable electoral backing. As a voter and a scholar, but importantly as a citizen, the public use of a Sri Lankan leader’s name internationally is a matter of interest as it has broad connotations and implications beyond individuals.
In this context, having had a similar training as the Prime Minster and being familiar with Hindu College and other affiliated colleges of Delhi University, the foremost question to my mind is why a lab is needed for serious social research or more specifically ethnographic research. Incidentally this is the kind of research that is mostly associated with the published work of the Prime Minister in her former academic incarnation. By definition, the ‘lab’ for these broad disciplines is society itself.
Granted, on the one hand, some very specific streams in social research can of course have labs focused on fields such as psychology, linguistics, visual research and so on. On the other hand, one can always have a specialized lab like the Urban Research Lab run by the Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology Delhi which organizes seminars, panel discussions, film screenings and book talks in its efforts at knowledge production. In more recent times, the word lab is used to denote a hub of related academic activities – often interdisciplinary – including organizing specialized lectures, workshops etc., which once used to be done by academic departments.
However, nothing available in the public domain from Hindu College or the Prime Minister’s Office elucidates what the exact focus or expertise of this ‘lab’ purports to be. Moreover, being very familiar with the sociology (and social anthropology) teaching program at Hindu College, why an undergraduate college of this kind needs a lab of unspecified expertise towards social research is beyond comprehension. More than a thoughtful addition to the college’s necessary academic infrastructure, this unfortunately looks like a hastily concocted afterthought.
At the moment, the lab remains an inconsequential room with a steel plaque bearing our Prime Minister’s name. I wonder if her office or our High Commission in Delhi made inquiries from Hindu College or India’s Ministry of External Affairs, as to what exact purpose this room would serve and how it will cater to knowledge generation. For example, will it promote research in areas such as child protection and welfare, human rights and social justice, youth dynamics and social development and gender dynamics and women’s rights which are also interests the Prime Minister has had in her academic career? Or will it promote research on Sri Lanka more generally? Or will it be a generic all-weather centre or lab that organizes seemingly academic events of no particular consequence in universities? No one seems to know. It is also not clear if the Prime Minister’s Office or the Sri Lanka High Commission in Delhi asked such questions in preparing for the Prime Minister’s visit.
In the same vein, did her office and the High Commission ask who the Head of this lab is and what kind of governance structure it has, including the nature of Sri Lankan representation? To elucidate with a similar example, the Indian High Commission in Colombo wields unmitigated influence in the functioning of the Centre for Contemporary Indian Studies at University of Colombo, which, granted, is funded by the Indian taxpayer. But the lab in Hindu College, is named after our Prime Minister in “recognition of her achievements” as a press release from her office states. Therefore, our government should have some serious say in what it stands for and what it should do in the name of research in the same way the Indian government does with regard to the Centre for Contemporary Indian Studies.
Given the Prime Minister’s early education in India and particularly at Hindu College, albeit at a very different time, the sentimentality with which she views her alma mater and the country is understandable. However, sentimentality should not be a consideration when it comes to matters of the state in which the name of our country, our sense of politics and our collective common sense are also implicated. Even if the Prime Minister’s Office or the Sri Lankan government did not ask the necessary questions due to their pronounced lack of experience and inability to seek advice from the right quarters in matters of international relations and regional politics as already proven multiple times, our High Commission in Delhi which is no longer led by a political appointee should have asked all the right questions and advised the government on the suitability of this initiative.
The eponymous lab is not an awe-inspiring phenomenon, but by virtue of carrying the Sri Lankan Prime Minister’s name, its significance should be mirrored in remaining relevant. Anyone with an iota of national pride would not want a room bearing our Prime Minister’s name to fall by the wayside, as many other ill-thought-out political projects in India and Sri Lanka have become or could become. After all, University of Delhi, to which Hindu College is affiliated, recently cancelled a scheduled lecture which was part of the long standing ‘Friday Colloquium’ series at the Department of Sociology at Delhi School of Economics right next door to Hindu College and in the same breath asked its affiliate colleges to promote a summit on “cow welfare.” This emanates from the sanctity associated with that animal in Hinduism.
Against this established backdrop, would the ‘Harini Amarasuriya Social & Ethnographic Research Lab’ be required to sponsor similar events in the future? Would it become yet another organization facilitating the steady decline in academic freedom sweeping across Indian universities? Would it become a place where bizarre and ill-advised lectures and workshops might be organized and substandard publications released? If so, all this will go against the Prime Minister’s own track record as a former academic who has spent considerable time battling such nefarious practices. Have mechanisms to manage and control such unenviable outcomes been put in place at the intervention of the Prime Minister’s Office or the Sri Lanka High Commission in Delhi?
I am asking these questions with another unfortunate and somewhat comparable example in mind. In 1993, the then Sri Lankan President R. Premadasa established a ‘reawakened village’ based on his locally tested ‘udagama’ concept in Mastipur, Bodhgaya. Its work began in 1989 and went on for four years. It was described by the Times of India of June 15, 1998, as “a Rs 75-lakh housing project and a spanking residential complex.” As the newspaper reports further, “on April 13, 1993, Premadasa flew into Bodhgaya from Colombo to hand over the keys of the 100 new houses to poor Dalit families. ‘Buddhagayagama’ was inscribed at the entrance to the colony in Sinhalese, Hindi and English.” And yet by 1999 and certainly today, the Buddhagayagama is a site of extreme poverty and utter deprivation despite the fact that it was much better thought out, better funded and better led diplomatic and political intervention compared to the ‘Harini Amarasuriya Social & Ethnographic Research Lab’ with the direct involvement of the Sri Lankan President’s Office, the High Commission in Delhi, among other institutions, both in Sri Lanka and India. Crucially, it failed as there was no mechanism in place to maintain the complex and improve the livelihood of the villagers.
Compared to this Sri Lankan failure in India, what exactly is in place in Hindu College to ensure that the ‘lab’ in that college does not become yet another dormant entity bearing our Prime Minister’s name or become an institution championing academic ‘unfreedom’ with zero Sri Lankan diplomatic intervention?
I remain open to being educated and would gladly accept being proven wrong.