Ganga Rajinee Dissanayaka

Dr. Ganga Rajinee Dissanayaka doesn’t just study the past,she interrogates it, liberates it, and demands it answer for itself.

As a leading ethnographer and art historian, she has built her distinguished career on a singular conviction: that every temple wall, every carved deity, every museum artifact contains multitudes,stories of power, resistance, devotion, and the communities who created meaning through material culture.

Decoding the Sacred: 17th-Century Image Houses as Political Texts

Her pioneering research into 17th-century Sri Lankan Image Houses reveals what others have overlooked: these sacred spaces were never merely religious. Through rigorous participatory research methodology, Dr. Dissanayaka exposes how temple architecture functioned as sophisticated political discourse—where iconographic choices became ideological statements, where spatial arrangements encoded social hierarchies, and where devotional art masked (and revealed) contests for authority.

This is ethnography as archaeology of power. This is art history that refuses to be neutral.

From World Bank Projects to Repatriation Battles

Dr. Dissanayaka’s expertise transcends academic silos. Her work has shaped:

• World Bank-funded cultural heritage initiatives that recognize temple preservation as essential to sustainable development
• The groundbreaking PPROCE-Netherlands repatriation project, working to return stolen Sri Lankan artifacts from institutions like the Rijksmuseum to their rightful communities
• The Dutch Research Agenda’s “Assessment Committee member and Sounding Board member for Research into Collections with a Colonial Context 2024”, where she interrogates the very foundations of European museum collections

Her research on the LEWKE Cannon, published in The Rijksmuseum Bulletin, exemplifies her scholarly approach: meticulous, multilayered, and unafraid to challenge institutional narratives about how objects traveled from colonies to collections.

The Public Intellectual: Writing Beyond the Ivory Tower

While many academics speak only to each other, Dr. Dissanayaka actively bridges scholarship and public consciousness:

• Regular full-page research articles in ARUNA Sunday newspaper, translating complex academic insights into accessible cultural commentary on temple design and architectural heritage
• Multiple authored books that serve as definitive texts on Sri Lankan temple culture
• Directed documentary films that bring scholarly rigor to visual storytelling, making heritage research viscerally compelling for diverse audiences

In the Classroom: Igniting Critical Consciousness

As a visiting lecturer at the University of Visual and Performing Arts and the University of Kelaniya, Dr. Dissanayaka is celebrated for transforming how students encounter cultural heritage and research methodology. Her pedagogy reflects her research philosophy: knowledge emerges through dialogue, history is contested terrain, and studying the past is always a political act with contemporary consequences.

Current Projects: Decolonizing Knowledge Systems

Dr. Dissanayaka’s latest work addresses the most urgent questions in heritage studies:

Transforming History Education

She’s developing a teacher’s guide for government schools that revolutionizes how Sri Lankan children learn their own history—using museum artifacts as entry points to critical thinking rather than mere nationalist mythology.

Colombo in Colonial Context

Her newest research project excavates the layered histories of Colombo under colonial rule, revealing how urban space itself became a site of cultural erasure, resistance, and hybrid identity formation.

Trade Routes as Cultural Superhighways

Exploring the intricate relationships between trade networks, Buddhism, and artistic exchange—particularly through Trincomalee Harbour and East Asian connections-Dr. Dissanayaka maps how religious ideas and material cultures traveled, transformed, and took root in unexpected places.

Ethnographic Collections and Their Contested Histories

She investigates the provenance of ethnographic materials in global museums, asking uncomfortable but essential questions: How did these objects leave Sri Lanka? Whose consent was never sought? What narratives were constructed to justify their removal?

Discourse Communities and the Politics of Artifacts

Dr. Dissanayaka’s commitment to multidisciplinary research is evident in her engagement with discourse communities—examining how different groups (colonial administrators, Buddhist clergy, local artisans, museum curators) constructed competing meanings around the same cultural objects. This approach reveals that heritage is never singular or stable, but always multiple, contested, and alive with political possibility.

A Legacy of Reclamation

In an era when museums worldwide reckon with colonial legacies, when cultural repatriation becomes urgent ethical imperative, and when heritage education demands decolonization, Dr. Ganga Rajinee Dissanayaka stands at the forefront.

She is the scholar who insists that objects have biographies and museums have responsibilities. She is the public intellectual who refuses to let academic knowledge remain cloistered. She is the educator reimagining how the next generation encounters their own cultural inheritance.

Dr. Dissanayaka doesn’t just preserve heritage—she liberates it from the narratives that have constrained it, and returns it to the communities who created its meaning in the first place.