The ‘Radical Impulse’ in Music in Pre- and Post-Partition India - Sumangala Damodaran

From its second decade, the 20th century saw the need for a people’s art, a need to represent, unearth, popularise, and express through forms that emerged from and belonged to ‘the people’.[1] A whole plethora of ideas and experiments on what people’s music is, should be, and can be, emerged in different parts of the world, fuelled by…

Read More...

On the Life and Work of Gananath Obeyesekere - Call for Articles

Polity magazine invites contributions for a forum dedicated to the life, scholarship, and intellectual legacy of Professor Gananath Obeyesekere (02 February 1930–25 March 2025), longtime friend of the Social Scientists’ Association of Sri Lanka, to…

Read More...

The development of S.B.D. de Silva’s political economy | Shiran Illanperuma

For those who knew him or have read his work, the late S.B.D. de Silva could be considered one of the greatest political economists ever produced by Sri Lanka. In fact, many might say that he is worthy of being included in the pantheon of those intellectual giants from the Global South who fought to unravel the riddle…

Read More...

Aid Interrupted: Reverberations in Sri Lanka of USAID’s Dismantling | Sandunlekha Ekanayake

In a shocking move, President Donald Trump’s ‘America First’ right-wing populism and economic nativism has led to defunding the United States (US) Agency for International Development (USAID). Growing negative sentiment towards USAID had been fuelled by Trump during the 2024 election campaign, with the rhetoric that funding did not have a direct return for the US people and was wasteful. What began on 20 January 2025 as a 90-day pause on all foreign aid…

Read More...

Polity aims to advance democratic consciousness, gender equality, state reform, and social change in Sri Lanka, while interested in South Asia and the World.

As its predecessor Pravada (1991-2002), Polity is published by the Social Scientists’ Association in Colombo, with critical content on politics, political economy, history, women, ethnicity, sexualities, religion, labour studies, agrarian relations, nationalisms, violence, ecology, and much more…

Read More

Current Issue

120 pages of analysis and perspective including: Sri Lanka’s elections, politics, and parties; ‘settler tourism’ in the wake of the Gaza genocide; the spaces of the Aragalaya; child marriages and their miseries in the East; gendering climate-adaptation projects in agriculture; the ‘hidden politics’ of critical agrarian studies; Europe’s far right and its battery of women’s rights; Martin Wickramasinghe and the Sinhala short story; trans-gendered lives amidst war, violence, and displacement; South Asia’s debt crisis is missing collective action; India’s general election; race, class and multiculturalism in Hanif Kureishi’s work; and some favourite books in 2024.

Vol. 12, Issue 2 (December 2024) is now available for LKR 500, from the Social Scientists’ Association and Barefoot bookshop, Colombo 3.

Visit Here

Calls

On the Life and Work of Gananath Obeyesekere - Call for Articles

Archive

Pravada (1991-2002) and Polity (2003-) back issues available here.

Visit Here

Social Scientists’ Association

The Social Scientists’ Association (SSA) is an organization working to investigate the way in which social change is contouring the multiple realities faced by communities in Sri Lanka and South Asia. The SSA is deeply committed to promoting a culture of knowledge production that informs and undergirds interventions aimed at achieving social emancipation for marginalized communities.

Read More...
Share This