Sri Lankan novel : Getting intense, getting political

By B.S. Prakash

The Gratiaen Trust, which awards the Gratiaen prize annually for the best Sri Lankan creative writing in English recently organised a workshop at the British Council on 'The Novel'.Below are excerpts from the presentation of one of the panellists, who is also the Deputy High Commissioner of India in Sri Lanka:

In this discussion on the novel, specifically the Sri Lankan novel, the question as framed by Mr. Godfrey Gunatilleke is, "What do we look for in a good novel?" And he has enumerated some excellent criteria. I would like to approach this issue somewhat tangentially. Let us also ask this question in a different way - who is doing the looking is perhaps as relevant as what is being looked at. I can explain my own positioning in this panel with this perspective.

Is there a distinctiveness to the Sri Lankan novel? What is Sri Lankan about Sri Lankan literature, apart from the fact that it is being written by Sri Lankans? Could we make any generalisations at all about this distinctiveness? Is the search for such distinctiveness even legitimate? Before bouncing off my ideas on this with you, let me spend a few moments on asking the same question about lndian writing in English.

I have grown up reading Indian writers in English, apart from reading writers in my own language. What is "Indian" about them? Recognising and reiterating that all generalisations are wrong and all categorisations distort reality, one could still think, perhaps not of one central feature but of a few characteristics of Indian writing. Let us look at some categories very briefly.

First, there are novels about the quintessential and quixotic India, with the novels of R.K. Narayan as a good example. This is about an idyllic, sometimes pastoral India. In Malgudi, a town that Narayan created but which acquired a life if its own, events happen slowly, if at all. These are the stories of small men but with problems which seem large to them and leading lives almost totally insulated from the larger world outside. In some of the later novels of Narayan, the unchanging India, has to come to terms with modernity and change. However, what captures the imagination are the essentially and authentically human stories in Malgudi: universal truths about simple human relationships but cast in a typical Indian setting.

Swamy and friends, for instance, is a simple story of the friendships of childhood - very authentically and essentially Indian - but finds a resonance anywhere in the world, where cricket is understood! The second category would be writings of exiles and expatriates, of Indians living outside. One could put VS Naipaul and Bharati Mukherjee and several others in this category, though Naipaul is not an Indian.

The last category is the most fascinating one of Salman Rushdie, Arundhati Roy and others wherein the different, difficult and complex reality of the Sub-continent is recreated by a virtual refashioning of the language itself as in Rushdie's Midnight's Children. There are too many stories to be told, these stories virtually envelop each other, there are no beginnings or ends and stories spill on to each other - just as the lives spill on to each other and an intricate and complex web of relationships reflect the living reality. I feel there is a category of nostalgic Sri Lankan writing - going down memory lane to look at the past and at contended lives - a story telling of innocent pleasures, intimate friendships and of a simple life well lived, as I wrote in one of my articles. Michael Ondaatje and Carl Muller belong to this genre but also some others. When memory dies and Among my Souvenirs, as the names suggest, are also novels involving 'looking back' but they are also political in content. There are perhaps good economic and sociological reasons of why there is a natural nostalgic impulse.

Looking at some of the novels which have won the Gratiaen Prize in the last few years, we see some novels which could be called totally indigenous or rooted in the soil. These are descriptions of Sri Lankan life, perhaps authentic, perhaps distinctive to a region. Examples: Amulet, Bringing Tony Home or The Child in me. True to life, but also untouched by the complexities and the turbulence of the contemporary problems of Sri Lanka.

Last, but for an outsider a most interesting feature is the way politics has begun to intrude on Sri Lankan fiction. In Rajiva Wijesinha's - Servants and An English Education - there is a clever and conscious mapping of the changing socio-political landscape of Sri Lanka through a process of looking at ordinary lives, outside politics. In the Servants, the changing equations between members of a large family and their domestic staff is affected by the big events and the changing fortunes of the parties in Sri Lanka.

This year's Gratiaen winner - Mirage by Akmeemana is a novel as contemporary as today. All of us living in Sri Lanka will be familiar with the images it presents - checkpoints, NGOs in Jaffna, Human Rights activists and the rich in Colombo entering Majestic City Shopping Complex with as much elan as any in Singapore. What is more, Akmeemana is nonjudgmental. The novel is intense and is also intensely political without taking sides or indulging in any moralising. This is a clear case of the content gripping you, even when the craft is simple and straightforward.

One can then reflect on this question: Is Sri Lankan writing likely to get more and more intense and also political? The major landmarks and mega events in recent Sri Lankan history are beginning to feature regularly in Sri Lankan novels. Years such as 1956, 1983, and 1987 are beginning to feature regularly in many narratives. These events are a part of everyone's consciousness and it will be difficult for a sensitive person - and all writers are sensitive - to insulate individual lives and stories from these public events which affect even private lives in a country, particularly in a small country.

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