Abstract
This chapter discusses recent trends in Sri Lankan anglophone fiction of the last two decades; it contextualizes and reviews the fiction of some of the best-known Sri Lankan authors, notably Shyam Selvadurai, alongside others less well-known outside the island, such as Ameena Hussein. Sri Lankan writing is especially marginalized in the canons of postcolonial and contemporary fiction and in the academic study of ‘South Asia’ more generally. It has not reached the international visibility of ‘Indian writing in English’ in part because of its smaller literary output and comparatively nascent anglophone publishing culture. Thus the location and politics of publishing has had considerable impact on Sri Lankan anglophone writing, favouring authors published abroad and marginalizing the distinctive perspectives of local writers, lead to contrasting culturally located reader-responses. Lankan-based reviewers prove far more critical of Lankan texts than their counterparts elsewhere. However, as I’ve argued elsewhere, these distinct readerships have shifted within the last two decades (Ranasinha 2013). The power of the Euro-American reviewer to confer ‘authenticity’ on chosen diasporic writers is now increasingly interrogated, as are texts perceived as manufactured for easy Euro-American consumption. Moreover, geopolitical shifts, the Sri Lankan polity’s move (away from allegiance to the former colonizing power towards the multiple centres, and economic powerhouses China and India) has rendered less significant ‘the stamps of approval from the centre’.
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- 1.
Minoli Salgado’s (2007) detailed analysis of how cultural nationalism has influenced the production and reception of eight leading Sri Lankan writers provides an important intervention in this regard. See also Qadri Ismail (2005); Maryse Jayasuriya (2012) and my own discussion of Sri Lankan writers in Ranasinha (2007). More recently Shyam Selvadurai’s anthology of Sri Lankan literature (poetry and prose) Many Roads Through Paradise (2014), structured not by language or chronology but by four interlinking themes, celebrates the diversity of modern Sri Lanka’s peoples and cultures and features translations of some iconic works written in Sinhalese and Tamil.
- 2.
See Vihanga Perera’s criticisms of expatriate writers in Phoenix, 3 (2011), pp. 53–9.
- 3.
The approval that Thiru Kandiah (1997) called on Sri Lankan critics to resist when Romesh Gunesekera’s Reef was published and shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1994.
- 4.
Gratiaen Prize-winner Madhubashini Ratnayake’s novel There is Something I Have to Tell You (2013) is a prime example of this kind of writing.
- 5.
For a reading of this shift, see Jayasuriya (2012).
- 6.
Due to space constraints, I will not consider Sri Lankan authors’ treatment of migrancy which remains the usual focus of the existing, limited literary discussion of Sri Lankan fiction. Migrancy has been explored by diasporic writers including Romesh Gunesekera, Roma Tearne, Yasmine Gooneratne, Chandani Lokuge and Roshi Fernando.
- 7.
I refer to the dehistoricized, exoticized treatment of Sri Lanka’s ethno-political crises in Romesh Gunesekera’s early fiction. Similarly Roma Tearne’s mapping of Sri Lankan conflicts in her novels Mosquito (2007), Bone China (2008) and Brixton Beach (2009) is governed by an aesthetic ideology that privileges retreat from the brutal political violence through the redemptive power of art.
- 8.
For a critique, see Perera (2012), pp. 103–11.
- 9.
For instance, in Selvadurai’s Funny Boy, all the transgressive pairings across ethnic divides ultimately fail. In contrast to the subversive thrust of the novel, these failures do not challenge the fixity of constructions of ethnic difference. See also Roma Tearne’s portrayals of Sinhala-Tamil marriages as doomed alliances caught up in a bitter feud of prejudices and hatred and intercommunal friendships marked by mutual suspicion. Similarly, the potential for intercommunal solidarity and friendship via protagonist Krishna’s involvement with a Marxist group is negated by his friend Iqbal’s elitist comments in Pradeep Jeganathan’s short story ‘At the Water’s Edge’ (Jeganathan 2004, p. 100).
- 10.
Similarly, Ameena Hussein’s Booker-long-listed The Moon in the Water (2009) foregrounds the multiplicity of Sri Lankan identity with its insights into a Sri Lankan Muslim family, which is seldom explored in Sri Lankan fiction. Although Sri Lankan Muslims comprise the island’s second largest ethnic minority, they tend to be erased in nationalist essentialized binaries of Sinhala versus Tamils. Like these other authors, Hussein documents a gentle cultural hybridity. A Muslim protagonist attends a Catholic school where her best friend is a Buddhist. Arjuna, adopted by a Sinhala Buddhist family, articulates his fascination with Hindu temples, in a time when Islamic identities were less heightened, recreating the author’s childhood era when Muslim girls attended school without wearing hijab.
- 11.
For a feminist critique of Muller’s work, see Ranasinha (1994).
- 12.
However, see V. Chandrasekeram’s play The Forbidden Area (Gratiaen Prize-winner 1998) for a more complex, nuanced treatment of the patriarchal structures masked by the rhetoric of gender and class equality that provides an illusory appeal to the Tamil female militant protagonist.
- 13.
See Ranasinha (2007) for a discussion of this aspect of Sivanandan’s fiction.
- 14.
The author was tragically killed in a landmine explosion in Wilpattu national park (described so lovingly in this book) in 2006.
- 15.
In contrast, see critiques of more partial one-sided Sinhala accounts, Punyakante Wijenaike’s The Enemy Within or Shirani Rajapakse’s Breaking News, in Perera (2012).
- 16.
The Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP) first came to prominence in the late 1960s with the aim of establishing a socialist state. It was founded by Rohana Wijeweera, educated at a Soviet University, who brought a rural revolutionary attitude to this anti-government rebellion. The JVP’s first period of insurrection (April–June 1971) was crushed by the then socialist government (explored in the fiction of Ediriweera Sarachchandra among others). The background to Anil’s Ghost is the second, more brutal insurgency (mid-1980s to late 1980s) that almost brought down the UNP government; this insurgency and the government’s equally vicious repression resulted in the death and ‘disappearance’ of an estimated 60,000 people. Minoli Salgado’s novel A Little Dust on the Eyes (2014) explores lives ‘enmeshed in this hidden war that failed to make international news … masked by the shrieking headlines on the larger war between the government and the LTTE .. that lacked the comfortable logic of race and ethnicity, religious, cultural difference, easy distinctions favoured by those who liked to keep things simple and clean’ (Salgado 2014, p. 76).
- 17.
The three ‘suitors’ are the anti-government insurgents, separatists and the government’s forces against both.
- 18.
Although strikingly different to Chinaman in other ways, Tissa Abeysekera’s Bringing Tony Home (Gratiaen winner 1996) also explores social issues obliquely. It combines fiction, memoir and history in sensuous, detailed meditations on adolescence, memory and ageing.
- 19.
Shehan Karunatilaka, Sri Lankan Writers Talk, Asia House, May 2011.
- 20.
A number of tsunami fictions have been published by Sri Lankan writers, including Ashok Ferrey’s collection of short stories Love in the Tsunami (2012), Minoli Salgado’s A Little Dust on the Eyes (2014) and Simon Harris and Neluka Silva’s The Rolled Back Beach: Stories from the Tsunami (2008).
- 21.
See ‘Avidreader’ in Community Reviews of Wave www.goodreads.com
- 22.
This theme is also explored in Ameena Hussein’s novel The Moon in the Water (2009).
- 23.
Madhubashini Ratnayake explores the politicization of Buddhism in her novel There is Something I Have to Tell You (2013). Shyam Selvadurai’s The Hungry Ghosts (2014) provides a different critique of how Buddhism is practised in Sri Lanka: how concepts of Karma are used to explain away social injustices of racism, homophobia and caste discrimination. Similarly, Minoli Salgado’s A Little Dust on the Eyes explores how religion can obstruct justice: those traumatized by violence lived by the ‘lie that there was no point in trying to enforce earthly mechanisms of justice’ (Salgado 2014, p.183).
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Ranasinha, R. (2016). Sri Lankan Fiction in English 1994–2014. In: Tickell, A. (eds) South-Asian Fiction in English. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-40354-4_5
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