what is the literature of Sri Lanka?
The literature(s) of Sri Lanka form undoubtedly a deep time writing and oral tradition. The most remote importance of Sri Lanka may be associated with the genesis of the canon of Tripitaka, those three baskets of palm-leaf manuscripts gathering the Buddhist teachings. The spiritual legacy is believed to have been preserved precisely in Sri Lanka, transmitted orally from generation to generation, till it was put into writing almost half a millennium after the death of Gautama Buddha. This work is believed to have be done under the reign of Valagamba of Anuradhapura, when the country faced a perspective of war and famine. This is when 1000 monks who had attained the level of arahant (an advanced stage on the path toward the Enlightenment) decided to write down the transmitted teachings and commentaries.
Among the two major ethnic groups and languages of the island (Singhalese and Tamil), the Sinhala seems to predominate both by the number of texts and by the antiquity of its texts. Among the oldest known Sri Lankan texts there is the 5th-century Mahāvaṃsa ("Great Chronicle"), a long historical poem written in Pali by a Buddhist monk from the Mahavihara monastery in Anuradhapura. There is also Siyabaslakara ("The Ornaments of One's Language"), a treatise on rhetoric ascribed to King Sena I (r. 832–851). One of the most celebrated figures in Sinhala poetry is Thotagamuwe Sri Rahula Thera, known for his epic poem "Buthsarana" and other religious and philosophical writings.
Modern Sinhala literature has produced influential authors like Martin Wickramasinghe, Ediriweera Sarachchandra, and Gunadasa Amarasekara, who have contributed significantly to the development of Sinhala fiction, drama, and poetry.
Tamil literature is connected to Indian Peninsula. It includes classical works like "Manimekalai" and "Silappatikaram," which have their roots in South Indian Tamil literature. Modern Tamil literature in Sri Lanka has produced notable authors such as S. V. Chelvanayakam, who was not only a politician but also a prolific writer, and Cheran, a contemporary Tamil poet known for his contributions to poetry and literary criticism.
In colonial and postcolonial times, there is also an important strand of English literature in Sri Lanka. It includes Michael Ondaatje, Shyam Selvadurai, Romesh Gunesekera, and many others. These writers often explore themes of identity, displacement, and cultural hybridity in their works. Michael Ondaatje's novel The English Patient, although written in exile, is one of the most internationally acclaimed works by a Sri Lankan author.
The modern literature of the country was primarily associated with tales, shorter narrative genres, rather tenuous tradition of writing and readership across the country's turbulent history. Since 1972, it has been marked by the bloody Tamil insurrection in the northern part of the island. Finally, in 2022, Sri Lankan literature imposed itself in the global bookish landscape with the Booker prize of Shehan Karunatilaka, attributed for The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida, a novel telling the story of a war photographer killed during the civil war of the 1990s. Maali wakes up dead and has those seven moons to guide his loved ones to some hidden photos that offer the testimony of the brutality of the conflict.
My favourite bibliography:
Edwin Coomasaru, Queer Ecologies and Anti-Colonial Abundance in Lionel Wendt's Ceylon, Art History, Volume 46, Issue 4, September 2023, Pages 750–776, https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8365.12745
Among the two major ethnic groups and languages of the island (Singhalese and Tamil), the Sinhala seems to predominate both by the number of texts and by the antiquity of its texts. Among the oldest known Sri Lankan texts there is the 5th-century Mahāvaṃsa ("Great Chronicle"), a long historical poem written in Pali by a Buddhist monk from the Mahavihara monastery in Anuradhapura. There is also Siyabaslakara ("The Ornaments of One's Language"), a treatise on rhetoric ascribed to King Sena I (r. 832–851). One of the most celebrated figures in Sinhala poetry is Thotagamuwe Sri Rahula Thera, known for his epic poem "Buthsarana" and other religious and philosophical writings.
Modern Sinhala literature has produced influential authors like Martin Wickramasinghe, Ediriweera Sarachchandra, and Gunadasa Amarasekara, who have contributed significantly to the development of Sinhala fiction, drama, and poetry.
Tamil literature is connected to Indian Peninsula. It includes classical works like "Manimekalai" and "Silappatikaram," which have their roots in South Indian Tamil literature. Modern Tamil literature in Sri Lanka has produced notable authors such as S. V. Chelvanayakam, who was not only a politician but also a prolific writer, and Cheran, a contemporary Tamil poet known for his contributions to poetry and literary criticism.
In colonial and postcolonial times, there is also an important strand of English literature in Sri Lanka. It includes Michael Ondaatje, Shyam Selvadurai, Romesh Gunesekera, and many others. These writers often explore themes of identity, displacement, and cultural hybridity in their works. Michael Ondaatje's novel The English Patient, although written in exile, is one of the most internationally acclaimed works by a Sri Lankan author.
The modern literature of the country was primarily associated with tales, shorter narrative genres, rather tenuous tradition of writing and readership across the country's turbulent history. Since 1972, it has been marked by the bloody Tamil insurrection in the northern part of the island. Finally, in 2022, Sri Lankan literature imposed itself in the global bookish landscape with the Booker prize of Shehan Karunatilaka, attributed for The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida, a novel telling the story of a war photographer killed during the civil war of the 1990s. Maali wakes up dead and has those seven moons to guide his loved ones to some hidden photos that offer the testimony of the brutality of the conflict.
My favourite bibliography:
Edwin Coomasaru, Queer Ecologies and Anti-Colonial Abundance in Lionel Wendt's Ceylon, Art History, Volume 46, Issue 4, September 2023, Pages 750–776, https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8365.12745
I have readShehan Karunatilaka, The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida (2022)
Frances Harrison, Still Counting the Dead: Survivors of Sri Lanka's Hidden War (2012) |
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I have written... nothing ...
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When all bad things have already happened
You turn back to the woman behind the counter and you try again.
‘This is a mistake. I don’t eat meat. I only smoke five a day.’ The woman
seems familiar to you, as perhaps your lies are to her. For a moment, the
jostling seems to stop. For a moment, it feels like you are all there is.
‘Aiyo! Every excuse I have heard. No one wants to go, not even the
suicides. You think I wanted to die? My daughters were eight and ten
when they shot me. What to do? Complaining won’t help. Be patient and
wait your turn. Forgive what you can. We are short-staffed and looking
for volunteers.’
She looks up and raises her voice at the queue.
‘You all have seven moons.’
(...)
‘It’s all the same,’ wails the dead woman with the dead baby. ‘Every
universe. Every life. Same old. Same old scene.’
Shehan Karunatilaka, The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida
Shehan Karunatilaka looks at the Tamil-Sinhalese conflict from the bright side: sharing the perspective of those who are already dead. In other words, for them, the worst is over. The ghosts just fly around, transported by winds, revisiting the places where their bodies have been. Nothing hurts anymore. Nothing matters. Except, perhaps, some photos left in boxes under the bed. And for a long time, it is not quite clear which. Those of historical importance, documenting crimes and secret deals? Or perhaps those selected ones, that the gay photographer kept for his private pleasure? What does matter beyond the death?
The production of corpses, and concomitantly that of ghosts, is massive. Any individual death loses any interest, any right to attention or compassion. It is such a cursory, casual matter, and the dead are so many. "They are perched on graves, they hover behind mourners, they occupy the trees and the railings. They lurch like the damned, with eyes of every shade and a talcum hue to their peeling skin" (p. 42). Karunatilaka mixes all eschatologies, but the prevailing one -- we are in Sri Lanka after all -- seems that of the Buddhist bardo. The dead have a certain period in between, and when it elapses, they are expected to join the Light. Certain do not.
But for many of us, the time after death, dementing the saying often repeated in Sri Lanka (especially at such time as that narrated, 1989-1990), is not simply a time when "all bad things have already happened". There is a possibility of hell. There is a hope that hell was life, and death will bring solace.
Shehan Karunatilaka, The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida, 2022.
Kraków, September 25th, 2023.
The production of corpses, and concomitantly that of ghosts, is massive. Any individual death loses any interest, any right to attention or compassion. It is such a cursory, casual matter, and the dead are so many. "They are perched on graves, they hover behind mourners, they occupy the trees and the railings. They lurch like the damned, with eyes of every shade and a talcum hue to their peeling skin" (p. 42). Karunatilaka mixes all eschatologies, but the prevailing one -- we are in Sri Lanka after all -- seems that of the Buddhist bardo. The dead have a certain period in between, and when it elapses, they are expected to join the Light. Certain do not.
But for many of us, the time after death, dementing the saying often repeated in Sri Lanka (especially at such time as that narrated, 1989-1990), is not simply a time when "all bad things have already happened". There is a possibility of hell. There is a hope that hell was life, and death will bring solace.
Shehan Karunatilaka, The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida, 2022.
Kraków, September 25th, 2023.
