Kumari was born in Colombo in 1931, to Agampodi Torontal Paulus de Zoysa and Eleanor Hutton. She studied at Ladies’ College, Colombo and received a BA in Economics at the London School of Economics (LSE) in 1955. She was called to the bar at Lincoln’s Inn, London and holds a doctorate from LSE. She has taught at both the University of Colombo and the Institute of Social Sciences at The Hague, and is a founding member of several civil society organizations in Colombo, including the Civil Rights Movement of Sri Lanka, the Social Scientists’ Association, Voice of Women, and Women’s Education and Research Center (WERC). 

Kumari was among the first generation of feminist activists in Sri Lanka who emerged during the second wave of feminism. As an activist, she was one of the founder members of the first feminist organisation – the Voice of Women collective, established in 1978 and dedicated in its own words to ‘breaking down the oppressive structures that keep women in a subordinate position, (Editorial, Voice of Women). In 1980, this collective published the first feminist magazine in Sri Lanka in English, Sinhala and Tamil called Voice of Women (Kantha Handa in Sinhala and Pennin Kural in Tamil). It was subtitled ‘A Sri Lankan journal for women’s emancipation’ and its logo was fashioned from a photograph of protesting women workers at the Wellawatte Spinning and Weaving Mills (Jayawardena and de Alwis 2002: 252). Although Voice of Women  split in 1983 over how to respond to rising nationalism and militarism in Sri Lanka (2002: 261), Kumari and a few others would go on to establish the Women’s Education Centre (later Women’s Education and Research Centre, which continues to this day. 

She also established the gender unit of the SSA where she led interventions in the areas of law, policy, and political representation. It was from the gender unit of the SSA, that she did much of her work of recovering what she has called ‘the lost history of women’s achievements and resistance which had been bypassed or ignored by both local and foreign scholars until then’ (Jayawardena 2017: 217). She was active in several different feminist networks that came together to address specific issues. For instance, she was a member of Women for Peace, formed in October 1984 to demand for a peaceful and politically negotiated settlement of the ethnic conflict. One of the first activities of this group was to launch a signature campaign which called for the cessation of hostilities in the north and east of the island. The petition signed by 100 women was published in one of the mainstream newspapers. She was also founder member of the Cat’s Eye collective, a collective of women and a few men who wrote a regular column providing a feminist analysis and critique of current political, social and cultural events and issues relevant to contemporary life in Sri Lanka and South Asia. The column was first published in the Lanka Guardian and later in the Island newspaper. It was unique in that it was collectively authored under the pen name of Cat’s Eye, and written in the true spirit of feminist cooperation. Archiving Kumari’s work means also that we archive, in part, the histories of the women’s movement. 

She became part of the faculty of the Women and Development course at the Institute of Social Studies (ISS) at the Hague in 1980, and wrote her seminal/classic work, Feminism and Nationalism first as a textbook for her students, published by the ISS in 1982 and later expanded and published by Zed books in London and Kali for Women in New Delhi in 1986. This book has now gained iconic status,  winning the Feminist Fortnight Award in the UK in 1986 and was chosen as one of the top twenty Feminist Classics published between 1970 and 1990 by Ms. Magazine. It was republished by Verso as a part of its feminist classic series in 2016.  

Her other monographs are: The Rise of the Labour Movement in Ceylon  (1972); The White Woman’s Other Burden: Western Women and South Asia during British Colonial Rule (1995),  and Nobodies to Somebodies: The Rise of the Colonial Bourgeoisie in Sri Lanka (2000). She was also co-editor of the following publications:  Feminism in Europe: Liberal and Socialist Strategies, 1789-1919 (1986 with Maria Mies); Embodied Violence: Communalising Female Sexuality in South Asia (1996 with Malathi de Alwis), Class, Patriarchy and Ethnicity on Sri Lankan Plantations: Two Centuries of Power and Protest  (2015 with Rachel Kurien); and The Search for Justice: The Sri Lanka Papers (2016 with Kishali Pinto Jaywardena). In 2017, Sailfish, an imprint of Perera Hussein Publishers brought together a collection of her essays titled Labour, Feminism and Ethnicity in Sri Lanka: Selected Essays.

A festschrift honouring the work of Kumari Jayawardena titled At the Cutting Edge edited by Neloufer de Mel and Selvy Thiruchandran with contributions by Uma Chakravarti, Kumkum Sangari, Nancy Fraser, Valentine M. Moghadam, Radhika Coomaraswamy, Laksiri Jayasuriya, R.S. Perinbanayagam, Aloysius Peiris, Malathi de Alwis, Sheila Rowbotham, Romila Thapar and Maithree Wickramasinghe was published in 2007.  

References: 

Jayawardena, Kumari and Malathi de Alwis. (2002). The Contingent Politics of the Women’s Movement in Sri Lanka after Independence. In Women in Post Independence Sri Lanka. (Ed) Swarna Jayaweera. Colombo: CENWOR. 

Jayawardena. Kumari. (2017). The Women’s Movement in Sri Lanka (1985 – 95): A Glance Back Over Ten Years. In Labour, Feminism, and Ethnicity in Sri Lanka: Selected Essays. Colombo: Sailfish.