Big questions sometimes present themselves in small form. The grand themes of Sri Lanka's contemporary history – its quagmire of nationalist politics, the hampered solution of provincial devolution and the incessant friction between constitutional, administrative and political realities – became manifest in the minutiae of a marginal bureaucratic problem when I was in Colombo in October 2019. For just a moment, all the central concerns of this book were folded into a discussion between a civil servant and a constitutional lawyer about a topic that would never have occurred to me as one of my research interests: the appointment of schoolteachers.

I was attending a seminar titled ‘Thirty Years of Devolution’ at the Galadari Hotel in the historical heart of the capital. Constitutional experts were launching a book (Amarasinghe et al. 2019) to an audience of civil servants: chief secretaries and legal officers from various provinces. The debate centred on the unresolved problems of the provincial council system three decades after its creation. Any talk of fixing devolution felt like a rear-guard battle, though. We all knew that the world outside our elegant conference room had moved on. Whatever had been left of the consultative process on constitutional reform, which had started with much excitement under the Sirisena–Wickremesinghe government in 2015, had been thrown off the rails by the constitutional crisis of 2018 (Welikala 2020). The governing coalition had become defunct. The country was now holding its breath for the presidential elections, which would be in two weeks. Until the race between Sajith Premadasa (United National Party, or UNP) and Gotabaya Rajapaksa (Sri Lanka Podujana Peramuna, or SLPP1) was adjudicated, all other political matters were on hold. Quite literally so at the provincial level: by now, all councils had been dissolved. Their term had expired, but new elections had been postponed time and again due to a stalemate over electoral system reform. In effect, we had entered a new ‘interim period’ where the provinces were ruled by presidential appointees (the governors) rather than elected politicians (the provincial council and the board of ministers), not just in the north and east this time but in all nine provinces.