Name Ambalavaner Sivanandan Role Novelist | Education University of Ceylon | |
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Books When Memory Dies, Catching history on the wing, A different hunger, Communities of Resistance, Where the Dance Is | ||
Sri Lankan born Indian author Ambalavaner Sivanandan Died at 94
Ambalavaner Sivanandan (born 20 December 1923, in Colombo) is a Sri Lankan novelist, and director of the Institute of Race Relations, a London-based independent educational charity. His first novel, When Memory Dies, won the 1998 Commonwealth Writers' Prize in the Best First Book category for Europe and South Asia. He left Sri Lanka after the 1958 riots.
Contents
- Sri Lankan born Indian author Ambalavaner Sivanandan Died at 94
- Background and history
- At the Institute of Race Relations
- Writing and publishing
- References
Background and history
The son of Ambalavaner, a worker in the postal system who came from the village of Sandilipay in Jaffna in the north of the island, Sivanandan was educated at St. Joseph's College, Colombo. There he was taught by J. P. de Fonseka, who inspired him with a love of the English language alongside his native Tamil. He later studied at the University of Ceylon, graduating in Economics in 1945. He went on to teach in the Ceylon "Hill Country" and then worked for the Bank of Ceylon, where he became one of the first "native" bank managers.
On coming to the UK, after a spell as a clerk in Vavasseur and Co and unable to obtain work in banking, Sivanandan took a job in Middlesex libraries and retrained as a librarian. He worked variously in public libraries, for the Colonial Office library and in 1964 was appointed chief librarian at the Institute of Race Relations (IRR) in central London. The library on race relations built up by Sivanandan was, in 2006, moved to the University of Warwick Library, where it is known as the Sivanandan Collection.
At the Institute of Race Relations
In 1972, following an internal struggle at IRR (in which Sivanandan was a principal organiser) with staff and members on one side and the Management Board on the other, over the type of research the IRR should undertake and the freedom of expression and criticism staff could enjoy, the majority of Board members were forced to resign and the IRR was reoriented, away from advising government and towards servicing community organisations and victims of racism. Sivanandan was appointed as its new director.
In 1974 he was appointed editor of the IRR’s journal Race, which was renamed Race & Class. Under his editorship, Race & Class – a journal for Black and Third World Liberation – became the leading international English-language journal on racism and imperialism, attracting to its editorial board Orlando Letelier, Eqbal Ahmad, Malcolm Caldwell, John Berger, Basil Davidson, Thomas Hodgkin, Jan Carew, Manning Marable among others.
IRR is best known for its quarterly journal Race and Class, which was extremely important in terms of developing an indigenous British anti-racist movement and is one of the key academic journals in the British New Left.
Writing and publishing
Sivanandan is regarded as one of the leading Black political thinkers in the UK. Most of his work was first published in the journal Race & Class. "The liberation of the black intellectual" (1977) examined identity, struggle and engagement during decolonisation and Black Power. "Race, class and the state" (1976) provided the first coherent class analysis of the black experience in Britain, examined the political economy of migration and coined the idea of state, structured racism. "From resistance to rebellion" (1981) tells the story of black protest in the UK from 1940 to 1981. "RAT and the degradation of black struggle" (1985) made the crucial distinction between personal racialism and institutional or state racism. "Race, terror and civil society" (2006) showed new racisms, such as the attack on multiculturalism and growth of anti-Muslim racism, thrown up by globalisation post-9/11. Changes in productive forces, especially the technological revolution, were themes taken up in "Imperialism and disorganic development in the silicon age" (1979) and "New circuits of imperialism" (1989)
He has been highly critical of some trends in modern leftism, such as the New Times movement pioneered by Marxism Today, and Postmodernism.
Sivanandan’s political non-fiction articles were published in a number of collections: A Different Hunger: writings on black resistance, 1982 (Pluto Press); Communities of Resistance: writings on black struggles for socialism, 1990 (Verso); Catching History on the Wing: Race, Culture and Globalisation, 2008 (Pluto Press).
In 1997 Sivanandan published an epic novel on Sri Lanka entitled When Memory Dies (Arcadia Books) which went on to win the Commonwealth Writers' First Book Prize (for Eurasia) and the Sagittarius Prize. In 2000 a collection of his short stories was published entitled Where the dance is (Arcadia books).