• Uthpala Wijesuriya on how the Open Society Fellowship will support his law, history, art and culture, and foreign policy work

The Open Society Fellowship (OSF) recently announced its 2025 fellows, among which were four Sri Lankans. According to the fellowship, the programme supports public intellectuals from seven global cities that are home to a dynamic circle of thinkers and cultural producers engaged in high-level critical debate.

The fellows selected from Colombo include Uthpala Wijesuriya, a student of law who spoke to The Daily Morning Brunch about OSF and how it can shape his work. At present, Wijesuriya is a law undergraduate at the University of Peradeniya and a student at the Sri Lanka Law College. Last year, he completed a Diploma in International Relations at the Bandaranaike Centre for International Studies (BCIS) and in 2022, he sat for his Advanced Level examination in the arts stream.

“I now work at the intersection of law, history, art and culture, and foreign policy,” Wijesuriya said. When asked how such varied interests have shaped him as an individual, Wijesuriya said: “Law is the path I pursue as a profession, while history, art, and culture are the passions that inspire and ground me.”

Choices and what we do with them

When asked what drew him to his current area of study, which is law, Wijesuriya said: “It is cliched to put it like so, but I was drawn to law primarily because, from an early age, I looked up to the legal giants of our country. I think this early fascination with law led me to choose logic and political science, in addition to history, for my A-Levels.”

He said his parents were entirely supportive of his choices at a time when almost everyone at his school selected science or maths. “But they told me I would have to ‘do something’ with my choice – and I suppose that also helped me focus on law. Given my interest in history, I am particularly interested in subjects like legal history and constitutional law,” he added.

In 2023, Wijesuriya interned at the foreign policy think-tank Factum and at the National Archives in Colombo. “This was when I was serving as the Head of the Student Archives Committee at Royal College, during my tenure as a Senior Prefect,” he shared.

From Moragollagama to Colombo

Speaking about his childhood, Wijesuriya shared: “I was not born in Colombo – rather, 150 km away, in Moragollagama. That is in the Kurunegala District. I entered the local school, and in 2014, I entered Royal College, Colombo through the Grade 5 Scholarship.”

At Royal College, he engaged in many activities. He was Senior Corporal of the Cadet Band and the chair or among the top board members of three clubs during his A-Level years.

“Since 2023, if not 2022, I have been working on various research projects. My first stint in this direction, if you can put it that way, was when I conducted research in 2022 on the Royal College Hostel, where I was Head Prefect, for an article. Digging through old magazines and material sparked in me an interest in historical research – something I had anyway been interested in, given that I had served as the Chair of the History Club at my school the previous year,” he said, pointing out that things progressed from there.

In 2023 and 2024, Wijesuriya was involved in four projects: An upcoming publication on the Church of Ceylon and its education work in Sri Lanka; a book of essays by political analyst and former ambassador Dr. Dayan Jayatilleka, which was launched at the Marga Institute in May 2024; an official publication of the Sri Lanka Law College, which was launched in October 2024; and a study of author Martin Wickramasinghe, an official publication by the Martin Wickramasinghe Trust that is being written by Uditha Devapriya.

Going into more detail about these projects, Wijesuriya said researching the Church of Ceylon and its education work was fascinating, especially given that it was the first such project he worked on. This work took him to Trinity College, Kandy and St. John’s College, Jaffna, in search of archive material.

He shared: “What many Sri Lankans don’t realise is that the Anglican Church played a pivotal part in our education system – something that often gets missed, I suppose, because of the perception that the Church was, as scholars have not incorrectly put it, a handmaiden of the Empire. One of my friends argues we need to chart the history of Sri Lanka through the lens of the headmasters and wardens of these schools – including my own – during the British period. I agree.”

Wijesuriya described early-2023 as a tough time, given that he was working on multiple fronts. Mornings would see him carrying out prefect duties in school, while in the evening, he would engage in interviews and field research for the Church of Ceylon book. This work often went late into the night.

“I was also cataloguing Dr. Jayatilleka’s essays for his anthology. In these two projects, I served as research assistant to Uditha Devapriya, whom I had met during my A-Level years, at the peak of Covid-19, in 2020. Working with him was tough, but I am happy to say I gave my best, at a time when I had several responsibilities,” Wijesuriya recalled.

He shared that the Law College publication was also a memorable experience. “Fate decreed that I would engage with it right after I entered Law College in March 2024. I had worked with Devapriya, its author, before, but nothing prepared me for the work I had to do here. I must say, however, that even with the limited time we had, my team and I visited various places, including the National Archives, the J.R. Jayewardene Centre, and the library of the BCIS – the latter two, in my view, are somewhat underrated – and did the best we could.”

He added: “Before I forget it, my friend Pasindu Nimsara, who was also assisting Devapriya at the time, and I got involved, rather peripherally, with historian and art historian Dr. SinhaRaja Tammita-Delgoda’s magnificent book on George Keyt – ‘The Absence of a Desired Image’, which was launched in January 2024.”

They assisted Dr. Tammita-Delgoda on the index and some other sections of the book, with Wijesuriya saying: “Dr. Tammita-Delgoda was kind enough to permit me to be interviewed by Gasma on his book and on Keyt. I acknowledge Dr. Tammita-Delgoda here for another reason: He got me interested in a subject I had been cut off until then – art history. In 2021, I read his book on Ridi Vihare with much interest – partly because I hail from Kurunegala, which is where the temple is.”

Reignited interest in history

Moving on to the Open Society Fellowship, Wijesuriya said there was a public call on the fellowship in December 2024. It covered seven cities, including Colombo. He participated in a meeting, described as a convivial half-hour chat, with the OSF delegation that visited Sri Lanka.

“I had anyway been fascinated by the OSF, because it stood out from other such organisations in ways that appealed to my sense of fairness, justice, and academic integrity. This was during a rather turbulent period in Sri Lankan and global politics – especially the Israel-Gaza War, not to mention elections here,” he said.

This, Wijesuriya believed, encouraged him to apply, a decision he is glad of not because he received the fellowship but because it got him to reflect on his interest in history – something he feared his legal studies had put on the backburner.

When asked how the fellowship will support the work he does, Wijesuriya said: “While I will not reveal too much about my project, I will say that the fellowship will lend crucial support to it and enable me to critically enquire into areas that have long been tabooed in Sri Lankan society.”

He was quick to clarify: “This is not to say that I am hankering after controversy, or that I want to deliberately anger people. But I think history is ultimately what is written and what is read. We need to go back to the sources. Even these, we must examine with a critical gaze. I think history has been politicised so much here that, while we get enraged over rumours of the subject being scrapped off from the syllabus, we don’t do much ourselves to promote it.”

To further elaborate his point, Wijesuriya quoted Prof. Sujit Sivasundaram, who said history at schools here amounts to “the memorising of dates and facts and the multiple-choice questions and answers”.

“I hardly think that is history, and the fellowship will support me in my endeavours to explain to people and to the world why it is not, and what it should be,” Wijesuriya said.

Commenting on the importance of such fellowships, especially for the youth, he said we lacked critical thinkers, in Sri Lanka and beyond. “Look at what is happening to academic institutions in powerful Western countries. For so long countries in the Global South have received bad press – mostly for justifiable reasons – for a lack of academic acumen and integrity. But when you have not one but two or three Western countries cracking down on academic institutions over political issues, it makes you think and provokes you into wanting a better state of affairs.”

“There is currently an outpouring of youth rebellion on the academic front almost everywhere. I think that is where fellowships of this sort can prove extremely important,” he added.

Wijesuriya went on to point out that he doesn’t come from a privileged background, with English still being his second language and one, he felt, he was far from proficient in. “But that never kept me back. I just kept trying. I must admit that the work I did in 2023 and 2024 daunted me somewhat, since I was not, and still am not, a trained researcher. Yet the exposure it gave me is something I can never forget,” he shared.

The main challenge, Wijesuriya said, was financial, as many don’t have the money to pursue projects of their choosing. “This has become severe considering the recent US funding cuts. But with every challenge comes an opportunity. The OSF has been quite helpful in this regard. Their intervention can and will help people my age to progress much farther than they ordinarily can, given the state of the economy and our academic institutions now.”