Where global discourses meet local realities: The case of scholarly publishing in Sinhala [Sāhityaya]

Scholarly publishing in the Sinhala language (the language of the numerical majority in Sri Lanka) has "mushroomed" in the recent past. However, this rapid growth - fueled by instrumental professional needs, the mainstreaming of a metrics-based culture in the university system, and neo-liberal discourses about measurable academic productivity - we argue is of little intellectual consequence. We trace a history of how a vibrant Sinhala-language public culture emerged in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries within a larger history of decolonization; how this public culture became institutionalized within the postcolonial state from the late 1940s; and how Sinhala language publishing lost its state patronage in the 1980s with neo-liberalization which ironically created space for radical Sinhala-language intellectual debate. We conclude by contrasting this history with the present where Sinhala scholarly publishing has become banal and faces an existential threat from the "return" of English due to neo-liberal market forces.