The son of Ambalavaner, a worker in the postal system who came from the village of Sandilipay in Jaffna in the north of the island of Sri Lanka (formerly Ceylon), Sivanandan was educated at St. Joseph's College, Colombo.
[2] On coming to the UK, after a spell as a clerk in Vavasseur and Co and unable to obtain work in banking, Sivanandan took a job in Middlesex libraries and retrained as a librarian.
Under his editorship, Race & Class – a journal for Black and Third World Liberation – became the leading international English-language journal on racism and imperialism, attracting to its editorial board Orlando Letelier, Eqbal Ahmad, Malcolm Caldwell, John Berger, Basil Davidson, Thomas Lionel Hodgkin, Jan Carew, and Manning Marable, among others.
[14] Changes in productive forces, especially the technological revolution, were themes taken up in "Imperialism and disorganic development in the silicon age" (1979)[15] and "New circuits of imperialism" (1989)[16] Sivanandan's political non-fiction articles were published in a number of collections: A Different Hunger: writings on black resistance, 1982 (Pluto Press); Communities of Resistance: writings on black struggles for socialism, 1990 (Verso); Catching History on the Wing: Race, Culture and Globalisation, 2008 (Pluto Press).
[17] He was highly critical of some trends in modern leftism, such as the New Times political initiative of Marxism Today in the late 1980s,[18] and of Postmodernism.
[20] In the same year, Sivanandan collaborated with British band Asian Dub Foundation in their album Community Music, providing one of his treatises as lyrics for the track "Colour Line", and also lending his voice.