One of the most significant milestones in his career was his leadership of the Bar Association of Sri Lanka (BASL), the apex body of the legal profession in the country.
While de Silva’s work is undeniably rooted in Sri Lanka, it transcends the simplistic postcolonial binary of colonizer vs. colonized or Sinhalese vs. Tamil. Instead, he exposes the internal fractures within the postcolonial nation-state. The violence he chronicles is not the spectacular violence of the war front, but the intimate, bureaucratic, and domestic violence of a state of emergency. He is acutely sensitive to the ways in which nationalism—both Sinhala Buddhist and Tamil separatist—produces a kind of psychic mutilation.
In a striking poem titled “National Dress,” he writes: “The white / of the shirt // is not / the white // of surrender.” Here, de Silva plays with the semiotics of the national—the white shirt of the schoolboy, the white of the peace activist, the white flag of the vanquished. He refuses to let any symbol settle into a fixed meaning. The poem’s brevity forces an uncomfortable equivalence: the purity of national identity is always already contaminated by the possibility of capitulation. Similarly, his treatment of the military is never simply condemnatory nor glorificatory. Soldiers appear as exhausted laborers, as children holding guns too heavy for their frames, or as ghosts haunting the homes they once protected. This refusal to assign clear moral valence is not an abdication of ethics; rather, it is a deeper recognition that in a civil war, the categories of “victim” and “perpetrator” are often held in the same trembling body. prasannajit de silva
Mr. De Silva also served as the Consul General of Sri Lanka in Mumbai.
De Silva’s most tangible impact has been in the realm of taxation. He has frequently contributed to policy discussions on: One of the most significant milestones in his
Industry insiders note that several pragmatic amendments to Sri Lanka’s tax codes can be traced back to white papers and committees on which he served—often anonymously.
In a rare interview with the Bar Association Law Journal, Prasannajit de Silva articulated his core philosophy: "Commercial law is not a set of handcuffs; it is the lubrication for the engine of commerce. Without trust in the legal system, capital flees to jurisdictions with clearer rules." While de Silva’s work is undeniably rooted in
This pragmatic, pro-business yet pro-integrity stance distinguished him from the populist regulators of his time. He argued against over-regulation of small-cap companies while advocating for zero tolerance for fraud in blue-chip firms.
Prasannajit De Silva is a senior career diplomat belonging to the Sri Lanka Foreign Service (SLFS). He is known for his extensive service in key diplomatic posts, particularly in Europe and Asia, and for his role in shaping Sri Lanka’s foreign relations regarding trade and maritime security.
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In the landscape of Sri Lanka’s corporate and legal sectors, few names carry the quiet weight of Prasannajit de Silva. While he may not be a headline-grabbing public figure, those who navigate the upper echelons of finance, taxation, and corporate law recognize him as a formidable architect of modern regulatory practice.