Ambalavaner Sivanandan

A. Sivanandan died in London on 3 January 2018, aged 94.

A full bibliography of works by A. Sivanandan is available at https://web.archive.org/web/20120324191945/http://www.irr.org.uk/pdf2/Sivanandan_bibliography.pdf.

National Life Stories conducted an oral history interview (C464/76) with Ambalavaner Sivanandan in 2010 for its National Life Stories collection held by the British Library.

Sivanandan published an epic novel on Sri Lanka entitled When Memory Dies (Arcadia Books, 1997), which won the Commonwealth Writers' First Book Prize (for Eurasia) and the Sagittarius Prize. A collection of his short stories was published entitled Where the Dance Is (Arcadia Books, 2000). In the same year, Sivanandan collaborated with British band Asian Dub Foundation in their album Community Music, providing one of his treatises as lyrics for the track "Colour Line", and also lending his voice.

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). He was highly critical of some trends in modern leftism, such as the New Times political initiative of Marxism Today in the late 1980s, and of Postmodernism.

Sivanandan was regarded as one of the leading 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)

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 Lionel Hodgkin, Jan Carew, and Manning Marable, among others.

In 1972, following an internal struggle at the 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.

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.

Sivanandan's first marriage in 1950 was to Bernadette Wijeyewickrema; they divorced in 1969, and he married his long-time partner, Jenny Bourne, in 1993.

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 of Sri Lanka (formerly Ceylon), 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. Sivanandan 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.

Ambalavaner Sivanandan (20 December 1923 – 3 January 2018), commonly referred to as A. Sivanandan or "Siva", was a Sri Lankan and British novelist, activist and writer, emeritus director of the Institute of Race Relations (IRR), 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.