Weeraperuma’s Kelaart: A Different Lankan Gay Experience

By Vihanga Perera In queering their literature, Sri Lankan English Writers have habitually resorted to gay boys and men. From Arjun and Shehan in Shyam Selvadurai’s Funny Boy (1995), Kumaran and Naveen in Visakesa Chandrasekaram’s Tigers Don’t Confess (2011), Shehan (who is in love with Robbie, his Australian school mate) in Channa Wickremesekera’s Tracks (2015),...

When the Writer is Outside History and Politics: “A Passage North”

By Vihanga Perera In 1983, Julia Leslie, a British writer, published a novel set in the years immediately after the youth uprising in April 1971. The book was titled Perahera and followed a story where a group of locals conspired to grab power by stealing the tooth relic of Gautama Buddha. The miscreants planned to...

A Wild Man’s Encounter with Buddhism in “The Village in the Jungle”

By Vihanga Perera Of Leonard Woolf’s The Village in the Jungle (1913) biographer Victoria Glendinning states the following: “Though I do not altogether understand the import of the old Buddhist’s interventions towards the end [of the story], I can find no other technical glitch in the novel” (Glendinning 15). Glendinning’s reference is to the fleeting...

The Toxic Women of Punyakante Wijenaike’s Fiction

By Subhagya Liyanage In a critically acclaimed corpus that includes the likes of Giraya, Amulet and The Rebel amongst others, Punyakante Wijenaike demonstrates an awareness of female oppression and women’s struggle for empowerment against a hostile world. However, this concern in Wijenaike’s writing is also written over by several memorable characterizations of manipulative female figures...

Nationalism, Caste, and Sinnathamby’s “Letchimey”

Nationalism, Caste, and Sinnathamby's Letchimey. By Vihanga Perera In one of the opening passages of Letchimey (1898), by “Sinnathamby”, the eponymous character is identified as follows: Her forehead was streaked with white ash and her throat with sandal wood paste, blessed by the King’s High Priest, for such is the custom of pious Hindoos; and...

Madhubhashini Ratnayake’s “A Strange Tale of Love”

A Strange Tale of Love by Madhubhashini Disanayaka Ratnayake: A Novel Miscasted. By Subhagya Liyanage Misleadingly labelled as a “collection of short stories”, the 2005 Gratiaen-shortlisted A Strange Tale of Love is actually a novella of sorts. Perhaps it has been marketed as “a collection” because the story does not quite meet the mark of...

Quintus Fernando’s “Celibacy Factor”

Being Priest and Hu/Man: The Struggle for Innocence in Quintus Fernando’s Celibacy Factor By Gayathri Madhurangi Hewagama This diary was written in the nineteen sixties when Sri Lanka was still innocent (7). A Catholic priest’s need for recognition as a hu/man is the central struggle in Quintus G. Fernando’s Celibacy Factor: From the Diary of...

The Slain Journalist Lasantha Muthukumarana in Shaveen Bandaranayake’s Groundswell

Who is Lasantha? The Slain Journalist Lasantha Muthukumarana in Shaveen Bandaranayake’s Groundswell By Vihanga Perera The defining feature of Shaveen Bandaranayake’s novella Groundswell (2021) is the intrigue the writer evokes by creating several characters who echo high-profile men and women and household names. Apart from this feature – and despite references to two political murders...

Manuka Wijesinghe’s Experiments with Idiom in “Like Moths to a Flame”

A New Idiom to Narrate the Tamil: Manuka Wijesinghe’s Like Moths to a Flame.   By Vihanga Perera Manuka Wijesinghe’s fourth novel Like Moths to a Flame revisits the familiar terrain in her work – that of the post-1956 nation – through a lens completely different to the one used in her earlier books, Monsoons...

“A Way of Life”: Punyakante Wijenaike’s Servants and Some Rural Women in Her Work.

The Raw Matter of Her "Rural" Women: Some Household Servants, and Punyakante Wijenaike's A Way of Life and The Waiting Earth. By Vihanga Perera In 1987, Punyakante Wijenaike published A Way of Life, a memoir. In this, the writer’s retrospective impressions and recollections are united in introducing a host of "household persons" from grandparents, parents,...