Gananath Obeyesekere Collection
The Conscience of the Scholar
Jonathan Spencer
When news started to spread of the death of Gananath Obeyesekere, a younger colleague said to me, “Oh, you must have known him. What was he like?”....
Gananath Obeyesekere: Dazzling Scholar with Integrity
Dennis B. McGilvray
Adding to the Polity conversations about Gananath Obeyesekere, I wish to mention a further dimension of his remarkable career that deserves praise:...
Laughter, Debate, and Dissent: Personal Glimpses of Gananath Obeyesekere
Selvy Thiruchandran
I first met Gananath at the International Centre for Ethnic Studies (ICES) in Colombo, when its Director, Radhika Coomaraswamy, invited me to...
A Bridge Between East and West
Richard F. Gombrich
My love and admiration of Gananath are so rooted in my view of my own life that if I failed to respond to this invitation to write something about...
‘A literary man interested in anthropology’
Ranjini Obeyesekere interviewed by Crystal Baines
Dr. Ranjini (Ellepola) Obeyesekere is one of Sri Lanka’s leading translators, and among its first female theatre directors. She is the author, among...
Conversion and Tradition: The Religious Public in Millennial Sri Lanka
Geethika Dharmasinghe
A proletarian ethic parallel to the bourgeois ethics of Protestant Buddhism has not developed in the city’s working class, and in spite of many...
A Tale of Two Islands
Anne M. Blackburn
As long as I have studied Buddhism and Southern Asia, Gananath Obeyesekere has been a guide and interlocutor, always through his powerful writings,...
Gananath’s Tryst with Lawyers
Radhika Coomaraswamy
After the International Centre for Ethnic Studies (ICES) was set up in 1982, it gradually became a dynamic centre for the interaction between...
An Accidental Education with Gananath Obeyesekere
Mark P. Whitaker
I must begin with an embarrassing admission. Although Gananath Obeyesekere became my PhD thesis supervisor in 1981, our association was...
Gananath: Two Stories and A Review
Victor C. de Munck
I was an undergraduate, and later a graduate, student of Gananath.[1] I have two stories I would like to recount. The first was as an undergraduate,...
Obeyesekere the Dreamer: Visionary Journeys in Anthropology
Anushka Kahandagamage
I remember vividly one pattern in my youthful dreams repeated time and again, without too much variation, that of roads amidst green hills and open...
Gananath Obeyesekere: The Anthropologist and the Historian
John D. Rogers
I first met Gananath at the Annual Conference of the Association for Asian Studies in Washington DC in March 1984, several weeks after I had...
The Creation of the Hunter. The Vädda Presence in the Kandyan Kingdom: A Re-Examination. Gananath Obeyesekere. Colombo: Sailfish, 2022.
R. S. Perinbanayagam
Robert Siddharthan Perinbanayagam died on 5 November 2025 in New York City where he lived most of his life. Born in Rangoon, Burma on 14 February...
‘Guru-Ship’: An Epistemological Turn in My Anthropological Education
Sanmugeswaran Pathmanesan
This paper narrates the epistemological shift that took place in my anthropology learning journey, mapping how the guru-ship system functioned as...
Gananath: Renaissance Man
R. L. Stirrat
I met Gananath in July 1969 on the day I first arrived in Sri Lanka, Edmund Leach and Stanley Tambiah having imposed their naive research student on...
The Doomed King: A Requiem for Sri Vikrama Rajasinha
Harini Amarasuriya
Polity Volume 7, Issue 2, pp. 78-80 (Download PDF) Harini Amarasuriya in her observations on Gananath Obeyesekere’s latest work The Doomed...




















