Sites Of Battle

What Sri Lankan civil-war fiction tells us about the country’s political landscape

- Sharanya Manivannan

ONE DAY IN EARLY APRIL, after contemplating a shelf of local literature for an essay reflecting on the tenth anniversary of the official end of the Sri Lankan civil war, I walked through a Colombo neighbourhood, in defiance of the exceptional heat, giddy with joy to know again so comfortably the city of my childhood. The ease with which I moved through the streets was snatched away from every person in the country when churches in three locations around the island—Colombo, Negombo and Batticaloa—were attacked by suicide bombers on Easter Sunday, killing and injuring hundreds. These attacks were followed a few weeks later by anti-Muslim riots, and an elevated state of tension and distrust that persists months later. The pre-existing communalist sentiments that had preceded the attacks saw a sharp and more explicit rise.

These events spun the island’s people, within and afar, into a mix of horror at what was unfolding and a complex sense of trauma at how recognisable that horror is, and at the same time, different. Reading three recently-published novels, by authors of differing backgrounds and positionalities—Sharmila Seyyid’s Ummath (2014, English translation by Gita Subramanian, 2018), Rajith Savanadasa’s Ruins (2016) and Anuk Arudpragasam’s The Story of a Brief Marriage (2016)—set at the end of 26 years of war as events unfolded anew, I was intrigued by the foreshadowing they seemed to contain. Ummath explores women’s issues through the eyes of two cadres and an activist, Ruins looks at the frustrations of domesticity even when ordinary people can afford to look away from the conflict and The Story