The full title of this study is Sinhala Consciousness in the Kandyan Period, and its author is the historian and anthropologist Michael Roberts. It was published in Colombo by Vijitha Yapa Publications, and carries a foreword by Christopher Bayly.
The book has a long gestation. It grew out of a course Roberts taught at the University of Peradeniya, "Nationalism and its Problems", and it was written as a response to a body of scholarship that had played down the significance of Sinhala and Tamil collective identities in the centuries before British rule. Roberts takes the opposite position. His argument is that a Sinhala consciousness — not merely a Kandyan one, localised to the kingdom and its court — can be traced in the period before the British arrived, and that the evidence for it is there if one is prepared to read widely enough for it.
That widening of the evidence is much of what distinguishes the book. Alongside written documents, Roberts draws on oral records, on visual and iconic material, on dramatic traditions, and on war poems composed during the Kandyan era. The chapters take up Sinhala identity as it appears across different times and places, the political ideology of the Kandyan kingdom — which Roberts refers to by the name Sinhale — and Sinhala attitudes towards the British.
It is a scholarly book rather than a general history, and it was received as such. Reviewing it in the Sunday Times, Professor Bertram Bastiampillai described the work as demanding, and judged that Roberts had in places strained the sources he was working from. Readers coming to it should expect sustained argument, close engagement with other historians, and a willingness on the author's part to press unconventional material into evidential service.
The audience is a particular one: students and researchers in Sri Lankan history, anthropology and the study of nationalism, and general readers with an existing interest in the Kandyan kingdom and in the longer history of ethnic and religious identity on the island. Anyone following the debates about when Sinhala and Tamil identities took the forms they now hold will find this a direct contribution to that argument, stated from a clear position and defended at length.
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