Robe and Plough: Monasticism and Economic Interest in Early Medieval Sri Lanka; and 'The People of the Lion: The Sinhala Identity and Ideology in History and Historiography' (1979)

Gunawardana — one of Sri Lanka's most respected historians of the early medieval period — opened the academic conversation in 1979 on the historiographical formation of the modern Sinhala identity. 'The People of the Lion' (1979) argued that the modern Sinhala identity in its present unified form is a substantially modern construction layered over a more variegated pre-modern reality. Cite alongside Indrapala 2005 on /research/formation-question to demonstrate that the layered-formation argument is held by historians from both communities and is not a Tamil-nationalist artefact.