This is a Sinhala-language book, written and printed in Sinhala throughout. Readers who do not read Sinhala will not be able to use it.
Nandasena Ratnapala was a Sri Lankan sociologist and anthropologist who held the chair of Sociology and Anthropology at the University of Sri Jayewardenepura. He is remembered in large part for the method he was willing to use. While holding that professorship, he spent several months living as a beggar on the streets — begging at Maharagama and at the entrance to his own university, and sleeping at Fort Railway Station. He wrote about that period in the English-language book The Beggar in Sri Lanka. His other work includes Crime and Punishment in the Buddhist Tradition.
That combination — a university sociologist who went and lived among the people he was studying, in a country where the social distance between a professor and a pavement beggar is considerable — is what gives his work on begging its particular standing. He was not reporting from interviews conducted at a desk. He was describing conditions he had slept in.
Godage International Publishers, an established Colombo house publishing in Sinhala and English, issues this title. Godage has long carried Sinhala academic and social-science writing alongside its general list, and Ratnapala's books have appeared under the imprint.
The book will suit readers of Sinhala with an interest in Sri Lankan sociology, in poverty and street life, or in Ratnapala's own body of work. Students of sociology and anthropology at Sri Lankan universities, where his name is familiar, are an obvious readership, as are readers abroad who want Sinhala-language social research rather than the English literature on Sri Lanka. Anyone who has read him in English and wants to read him in Sinhala will know what they are looking for here.
- Author: Nandasena Rathnapala
- Publisher: Godage International Publishers
- Language: Sinhala
- Pages: 192
- ISBN: 9789553070760
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