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Ambalavaner Sivanandan
‐
Director of the Institute of Race Relations and major writer and theorist on racism, nationalism and socialism
Other names
Siva
Place of birth
Date of arrival to Britain
Place of death
London
Date of time spent in Britain
1958–2018
About
Born into a Sri Lankan Tamil family in Jaffna, Ambalavaner Sivanandan became involved with the Trotskyite Lanka Sama Samaja Party (LSSP) as a student of economics at the University of Ceylon. He played a part in the LSSP’s mobilization of trade unions, strikes and anti-colonial demonstrations. This clarifies his affinity with international socialism on his arrival in Britain in 1958. He left Sri Lanka after anti-Tamil violence erupted in 1958. His activism in Britain emerged into a context of anti-racist socialist and Black nationalist movements in Britain and the US.
In 1972 he became the Director of the Institute of Race Relations, an independent educational charity in London. The IRR’s journal, which he renamed from Race to Race and Class, became a key journal of the British New Left. His long career was characterized by a tireless determination to fight against the racism and disempowerment experienced by Black British working-class communities.
Sivanandan’s self-representation was assertively Third Worldist rather than Sri Lankan or British. He negotiated his identity in terms of an international socialism not aligned to any racial identity or geographical location, drawing on Marxism as 'a way of interpreting the world to change it', as he put it. Sivanandan inspired several generations of anti-racist socialists. His novel When Memory Dies won the 1998 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize in the Best First Book category for Europe and South Asia.
Tariq Ali
Race and Resistance: The IRR story (London: Race Today Publications, 1975)
A Different Hunger: Writings on Black Resistance (London: Pluto Press, 1982)
Communities of Resistance (London: Verso, 1990)
When Memory Dies (London: Arcadia, 1997)
Where the Dance Is (London: Arcadia, 2000)
Kushnick, Louis and Grant, Paul, ‘Catching History on the Wing: A. Sivanandan as Activist, Teacher, and Rebel’, in Benjamin P. Bowser and Louis Kushnick (eds) Against the Odds: Scholars Who Challenged Racism in the Twentieth Century (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2002), pp. 227–42
Ranasinha, Ruvani, South Asian Writers in Twentieth-Century Britain: Culture in Translation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007)
Image credit
© Remaking Britain: South Asian Connections and Networks, 1930s – present
Entry credit
Ruvani Ranasinha
