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Funny Boy
'An extraordinarily powerful, deeply moving novel' Amitav Ghosh NOW A MAJOR FILM ON NETFLIX In the world of his large family - affluent Tamils living in Colombo - Arjie is an oddity, a 'funny boy' who prefers dressing as a girl to playing cricket with his brother. But as Arjie comes to terms with his own homo-sexuality and with the racism of the society in which he lives, Sri Lanka is plunged into civil war as fighting between the army and the Tamil Tigers gradually begins to encroach on the family's comfortable life. Sporadic acts of violence flare into full scale riots and lead, ultimately, to tragedy. Written in clear, simple prose, Shyam Selvadurai's first novel is masterly in its mingling of the personal and political. WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY NEEL MUKHERJEE
Writing Sri Lanka
Focusing on ways in which cultural nationalism has influenced both the production and critical reception of texts, Salgado presents a detailed analysis of eight leading Sri Lankan writers - Michael Ondaatje, Romesh Gunasekera, Shyam Selvadurai, A. Sivanandan, Jean Arasanayagam, Carl Muller, James Goonewardene and Punyakante Wijenaike – to rigorously challenge the theoretical, cultural and political assumptions that pit ‘insider’ against ‘outsider’, ‘resident’ against ‘migrant’ and the ‘authentic’ against the ‘alien’. By interrogating the discourses of territoriality and boundary marking that have come into prominence since the start of the civil war, Salgado works to define a more nuanced and sensitive critical framework that actively reclaims marginalized voices and draws upon recent studies in migration and the diaspora to reconfigure the Sri Lankan critical terrain.
Terror and Reconciliation
Terror and Reconciliation explores the English language literature that has emerged from Sri Lanka’s quarter-century long ethnic conflict. It examines poetry, short fiction and novels by both diasporic writers and writers resident in Sri Lanka. Its discussion of resident Sri Lankan writers is particularly important because it calls attention to a rich and ambitious body of work that has largely been ignored in the Western academy and media until now. The book outlines the ways in which a wide range of resident and diasporic writers have sought to represent the conflict, mourn the violence and terror associated with the conflict, and present options for reconciliation in the conflict’s aftermath. The writers discussed grapple with issues of terrorism, human rights, nationalism, war, democracy, gender, ethnicity, and reconciliation, making this a study of profound interest for students and scholars of South Asian literature and culture, postcolonial studies, race and ethnic studies, women’s studies, and peace studies.
Sri Lanka at the Crossroads of History
The peoples of Sri Lanka have participated in far-flung trading networks, religious formations, and Asian and European empires for millennia. This interdisciplinary volume sets out to draw Sri Lanka into the field of Asian and Global History by showing how the latest wave of scholarship has explored the island as a ‘crossroads’, a place defined by its openness to movement across the Indian Ocean.Experts in the history, archaeology, literature and art of the island from c.500 BCE to c.1850 CE use Lankan material to explore a number of pressing scholarly debates. They address these matters from their varied disciplinary perspectives and diverse array of sources, critically assessing concepts such as ethnicity, cosmopolitanism and localisation, and elucidating the subtle ways in which the foreign may be resisted and embraced at the same time. The individual chapters, and the volume as a whole, are a welcome addition to the history and historiography of Sri Lanka, as well as studies of the Indian Ocean region, kingship, colonialism, imperialism, and early modernity.
Many Roads through Paradise
Shyam Selvadurai pieces together the best of Sri Lankan poetry and fiction in this anthology. From the Sinhala and Tamil writers of the 1950s to diasporic writers of today, from stories of love and longing to those of brutality and death, this masterfully constructed anthology will give you a rich sense Sri Lanka’s history, its people and the stories they have to tell.
The Politics and Poetics of Authenticity
What is the role of cultural authenticity in the making of nations? Much scholarly and popular commentary on nationalism dismisses authenticity as a romantic fantasy or, worse, a deliberately constructed mythology used for political manipulation. The Politics and Poetics of Authenticity places authenticity at the heart of Sinhala nationalism in late nineteenth and twentieth-century Sri Lanka. It argues that the passion for the ‘real’ or the ‘authentic’ has played a significant role in shaping nationalist thinking and argues for an empathetic yet critical engagement with the idea of authenticity. Through a series of fine-grained and historically grounded analyses of the writings of in...
A Passage North
SHORTLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE 2021 It begins with a message: a telephone call informing Krishan that his grandmother''s former care-giver, Rani, has died in unexpected circumstances, at the bottom of a well in her village in the north, her neck broken by the fall. The news arrives on the heels of an email from Anjum, an activist he fell in love with four years earlier while living in Delhi, bringing with it the stirring of distant memories and desires. As Krishan makes the long journey by train from Colombo into the war-torn Northern Province for the funeral, so begins a passage into the soul of an island devastated by violence. Written with precision and grace, A Passage North is a poignant memorial for the missing and the dead, and a luminous meditation on time, consciousness, and the lasting imprint of the connections we make with others.
Upon a Sleepless Isle
Dense Green forests in Yala, white-sand coasts in Trincomalee, azure waters off the South Coast, Anuradhapura's ancient temples, and cricket. Civil war, political assassinations, internally displaced communities, industrial-scale corruption. All are Sri Lanka. As are smug bureaucrats, nosy neighbours, and stray dogs with serious axes to grind. Through the eyes of Andrew Fidel Fernando, cricket writer par excellence, both a local and a tourist in his home country, Sri Lanka comes alive as he hurtles down hills in Kandy, breathes in the history at the rock fortress of Sigiriya, grapples with the aftermath of war in Jaffna, and has himself evicted from restaurants near Galle. Weaving through al...
The Encyclopedia of the Sri Lankan Diaspora
Well over a million people of Sri Lankan origin live outside South Asia. The Encyclopedia of the Sri Lanka Diaspora is the first comprehensive study of the lives, culture, beliefs and attitudes of immigrants and refugees from this island. The volume is a joint publication between the Institute of South Asian Studies, NUS, and Editions Didier Millet. It focuses on the relationship between culture and economy in the Sri Lanka diaspora in the context of globalisation, increased transnational culture flows and new communication technologies. In addition to the geographic mapping of the Sri Lanka diaspora in the various continents, thematic chapters include topics on “long distance nationalism”, citizenship, Sinhala, Tamil and Burgher disapora identities, religion and the spread of Buddhism, as well as the Sri Lankan cultural impact on other nations.
Elephant Complex
A gripping account of an under-reported island' Spectator, Book of the Year '[A] brilliant new book about an island that has a geography from heaven and a history from hell' Daily Telegraph 'A brilliant work of travel, history and psychological insight . . . astute and sympathetic . . . very funny' Wall Street Journal Everyone has wanted a piece of paradise John Gimlette - winner of the Dolman Prize and the Shiva Naipaul Prize for Travel Writing - is the kind of traveller you'd want by your side. Whether hacking a centuries-old path through the jungle, interrogating the surviving members of the Tamil Tigers or observing the stranger social mores of Colombo's city life, he brings his own unique insight to the page: a treasure-chest of research and a gift for wry amusement. Through him, Sri Lanka - all at once dazzling, strange, conflicted and beautiful - comes to life as never before.
