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Sri Lanka’s Social Scientists’ Association (SSA) connected Tuesday (June 16, 2026) launched the Kumari Jayawardena Feminist Archive, marking the 95th birthday of 1 of South Asia’s foremost feminist scholars, whose contributions to the survey of labour, ethnicity and nationalism, women’s past and movements, are internationally acclaimed.
The archive aims to collate and showcase Dr. Jayawardena’s published enactment — spanning the realms of assistance and activism — done her writings, and ephemera by and astir her. Best known for the iconic 1986 work ‘Feminism and Nationalism successful the Third World’, an indispensable substance successful women’s studies worldwide, Dr. Jayawardena played a cardinal relation successful generating feminist assistance and spurring women’s activism not conscionable successful Sri Lanka, but across South Asia.
Speaking astatine an intimate day gathering organised successful Colombo earlier this week, writer-publisher Ritu Menon, who co-founded India’s archetypal feminist press Kali for Women in 1984, described Dr. Jayawardena as a “beacon crossed South Asia”. Recalling Dr. Jayawardena’s 1989 effort with Govind Kelkar for the Economic and Political Weekly, offering a crisp critique of leftists who described feminism arsenic “western” to ridicule autonomous women’s organising, Ms. Menon said: “It was an denotation to america of what was imaginable — that we could collaborate crossed borders, arsenic feminists. Kumari was the initiator and backer affirming these initiatives.”
The archive is simply a “work successful progress”, said Crystal Baines of the Social Scientists’ Association, a probe institute co-founded by Dr. Jayawardena and different academics successful 1977. Work connected the archive began precocious past twelvemonth with idiosyncratic contributions, and it is present backed by the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation. “We person truthful acold curated a small implicit 250 items, and what we’re sharing with you contiguous is simply a preview of much fantastic things to come,” she said astatine the launch. The team behind the curation hopes that wider engagement with the level volition uncover additional writings, including letters, diaries, manuscripts, oregon handwritten notes, allowing the postulation to grow.
“For implicit 5 decades, Kumari Jayawardena produced an bonzer assemblage of work, including monographs and diary articles, but besides mag and paper articles, argumentation manifestos, pamphlets, and collectively authored pieces that stay applicable to this day,” said Chulani Kodikara, a subordinate of the steering committee of the Kumari Jayawardena Feminist Archive.
“She deployed intersectionality agelong earlier the word was coined,” Dr. Kodikara said, adding that Dr. Jayawardena’s absorption connected the subaltern, the unrepresented and under-represented, and the historically marginalised working class, women, taste and spiritual minorities, was uncommon astatine the time. The archive overlaps considerably with the past of Sri Lanka’s women’s question and that of the vibrant feminist solidarity crossed South Asia, “because she was 1 of the foremothers of the feminist question successful South Asia”, she said.
The motorboat of the portal (www.feministarc.org), held at Dr. Jayawardena’s Colombo residence, was attended by Prime Minister Harini Amarasuriya, erstwhile President Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunga, and eminent governmental scientist Jayadeva Uyangoda, among others. Dr. Jayawardena’s location is fondly remembered arsenic a abstraction of refuge to activists and dissidents done Sri Lanka’s tumultuous history. Dr. Jayawardena sheltered Tamils fleeing the unit of the July 1983 pogrom that would acceptable disconnected a brutal, 26-year-long civilian warfare connected the island.
In a peculiar day message, recorded successful New Delhi and played astatine the gathering, renowned historiographer Romila Thapar fondly recalled her archetypal gathering with Dr. Jayawardena successful London successful the mid-1950s. Prof. Thapar was astatine the School of Oriental and African Studies while Dr. Jayawardena was astatine the London School of Economics. “We were unneurotic successful the hostel [Canterbury Hall],” she said, speaking of Sunday meals and watching films together. “She was doing economics and her economics was heavy polluted, arsenic we each teased her, with authorities due to the fact that that was a clip erstwhile authorities and economics were very closely knitted,” Prof. Thapar said.
In the 1990s, Dr. Jayawardena wrote 2 acclaimed pieces for Frontline magazine — ‘The Widow’s Might’ and ‘Annie Besant’s Many Lives’. In a speech with The Hindu in 2017, successful the discourse of London-based extremist steadfast Verso Books republishing her classical ‘Feminism and Nationalism successful the Third World’, 3 decades aft it was archetypal published by Zed Books [London] and Kali for Women [New Delhi], Dr. Jayawardena said: “To sermon the cognition and presumption of women today, it is important to cognize what they person gained and how,” and that “the women’s question is ever with us.”
