The Kumari Jayawardena Feminist Archive is a long-term project to document the histories, memories, debates, and struggles of the women’s rights movement/s in Sri Lanka. It is conceptualised from a desire to support contemporary feminist activism and new imaginaries for gender and social justice, build solidarity and community across organisations and issues, and preserve histories that are being lost due to inadequate documentation and archival processes. It is envisaged that the KJF archive will function as a central and accessible digital resource center for students, activists, scholars, policymakers, artists and other stakeholders who wish to learn about and/or draw upon the rich history of feminist thought, knowledge production and praxis in Sri Lanka. It is named after Kumari Jayawardena – one of Sri Lanka’s most celebrated scholars and a foremother of the feminist movement in South Asia. As Kate Eichhorn reminds us, the feminist archive is ‘where academic and activist work frequently converge’. In a way, Kumari combined these aspects of feminism in one person, as a pioneering scholar par excellence, an indefatigable activist, and an inspiring teacher, educator and mentor. 

Presently, this archive features the Kumari Jayawardena Collection, which captures some portion of the work and life of Kumari Jayawardena. The work of constructing the archive began in mid-2025 with the generous support of individual donors. Over six months, the team collected, collated, categorised and digitised, physical and digital copies of her published work and photographs. In 2026, in partnership with the Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung South Asia office, the site for the archive was designed and the collated items made available. The Archive was launched on 16 June 2026 on the occasion of Kumari’s 95th birthday. 

At this moment, this archive only captures a sliver of her work and life. What we have collected is limited to the published writings of and about Kumari. It does not, at this moment, include letters, diaries, papers, manuscripts, handwritten notes, etc. As more and more people engage with this archive, we hope that it will lead us to unknown or lost writing and records relating to Kumari, including ephemera, such as letters and correspondence with other scholars and activists, thereby allowing us to expand the archive.

The work of the archive is lead by the Steering Committee:

 Chulani Kodikara, Crystal Baines, Neloufer de Mel, Tehani Ariyaratne, James Nye

The SSA team that executed this project consists of:

Heshani Dharmapala, Tavishi Arunatileka, Suresh Amuhena, Balasingham Skanthakumar and Taniya Silvapulle.