Before his posting in Indonesia, he served as the High Commissioner for Sri Lanka in Singapore.
While de Silva’s work is undeniably rooted in Sri Lanka, it transcends the simplistic postcolonial binary of colonizer vs. colonized or Sinhalese vs. Tamil. Instead, he exposes the internal fractures within the postcolonial nation-state. The violence he chronicles is not the spectacular violence of the war front, but the intimate, bureaucratic, and domestic violence of a state of emergency. He is acutely sensitive to the ways in which nationalism—both Sinhala Buddhist and Tamil separatist—produces a kind of psychic mutilation. prasannajit de silva
In a striking poem titled “National Dress,” he writes: “The white / of the shirt // is not / the white // of surrender.” Here, de Silva plays with the semiotics of the national—the white shirt of the schoolboy, the white of the peace activist, the white flag of the vanquished. He refuses to let any symbol settle into a fixed meaning. The poem’s brevity forces an uncomfortable equivalence: the purity of national identity is always already contaminated by the possibility of capitulation. Similarly, his treatment of the military is never simply condemnatory nor glorificatory. Soldiers appear as exhausted laborers, as children holding guns too heavy for their frames, or as ghosts haunting the homes they once protected. This refusal to assign clear moral valence is not an abdication of ethics; rather, it is a deeper recognition that in a civil war, the categories of “victim” and “perpetrator” are often held in the same trembling body. Before his posting in Indonesia, he served as
One of the most significant milestones in his career was his leadership of the Bar Association of Sri Lanka (BASL), the apex body of the legal profession in the country. In between overseas postings, he held senior positions
In between overseas postings, he held senior positions at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Colombo, including: