Sri Lanka

Introduction

The pandemic, which devastated practically every corner of the world in 2020, had a deleterious effect on literary and academic activity in Sri Lanka as well. All plans had been made to hold the SLACLALS Conference “Continuing Postcolonialism” in May 2020, with venues booked, sponsorships secured, agreements reached with the keynote and plenary speakers, and some abstracts already received, but it had to be indefinitely postponed. As mentioned in last year’s introduction, the spectacular gala normally held to announce the winner of the Gratiaen Prize was converted into a virtual event. Virtual conferences, workshops, seminars and prize ceremonies have their merits (more participants can be accommodated with no travel, meal or other expenses being involved), but the camaraderie generated by human interaction and the excitement of exploring a new city are lost.

One sad constant from previous years is the demise of yet another senior writer. Last year’s introduction referred to the passing of two writers who had been awarded the Gratiaen Prize: Carl Muller, the recipient of the inaugural prize, and Jean Arasanayagam, who won the silver jubilee prize. In 2020, Sybil Wettasinghe, who was the joint winner of the third Gratiaen Prize for The Child in Me, died at the age of 91. Dinali Fernando, Senior Lecturer in the English Department, Kelaniya, provides this memorial tribute:

Sybil Wettasinghe is probably the most popular children’s writer and illustrator that postcolonial Sri Lanka has produced. Born two decades before national Independence, she had published over 200 children’s books when she died in July 2020 at the age of 91 after a writing career of nearly 75 years.

Her roots are in a village close to the town of Galle in Sri Lanka’s verdant south. It was her grandfather, a sculptor, who discovered her remarkable gift for drawing when she was still a child. By the time she was 17, she had illustrated a Sinhala primer Nava Maga Readers, and was employed at a leading Sinhala language newspaper to retell folktales and folksongs in cartoon form. For this she mined the rich cultural traditions of the village of her childhood, which continued to inspire her writing to the end.

An artist with no formal training, she was prolific, winning several awards. Her work was also translated into multiple languages, which gained her an international readership. Arguably her best-known work, Kuda Hora, originally written in 1956, was translated into eight languages, including Mandarin, Danish, Korean, Japanese, as well as into English as The Umbrella Thief. Others include Duwana Reula, translated into English as The Runaway Beard; Uda Giya Baba (the child who floated away); Sooththara Puncha (the little trickster) and Magul Gedera Bath Netho (no rice at the wedding), a comic story in verse.

She also illustrated the first ever children’s Bible in Sinhala, Deeptha Lama Maga (1987). Its memorable cover of a brown-skinned Adam and Eve in a lush tropical jungle, won her an award in the Biennale of Illustrations in Bratislava. There is a belief among the literati that children’s literature in Sinhala was pioneered by Wettasinghe and many have followed her distinct artistic style. By the time she passed away, she was considered a national treasure, a much-feted celebrity who now had a third generation of children growing up reading her picture books.

As a part of the charmed group of intellectuals and local artistes that rediscovered local folk arts and culture in the heady days of national independence in the mid-20^th century, Sybil was equally at ease in the East and the West, urban Colombo and rural Gintota, and in English and her mother tongue Sinhala. She lived through a world war, several cycles of violence and the civil war in the country, but she remained seemingly untouched by the tragedies that befell the country especially after 1956; however, her biographer Vijita Fernando notes the subtle social change from the rural to the urban in The Umbrella Thief and the phantasmagoric The Runaway Beard. In the latter, the uncontrollable white beard that overtakes a village seems to foreshadow the violence of the 2004 tsunami in which her village was partially destroyed.

In her later work, like the autobiographical Child in Me which was the joint winner of the 1995 Gratiaen Prize, she retreated more and more into the imagined perfection of her rural childhood. Written in a style of child-like wonder, it is imbued with a nostalgia that at times borders on the naivete, but it is also a repository of cultural practices and beliefs of a time and a region that have seen rapid change. A work of hers that is not well known is the novel Kusumalatha (1971), a comic satire chronicling the life of a young working woman and her daily travails in suburbia.

With her formidable storytelling skills, she remained a much-loved raconteur who told her stories as vividly as she drew and wrote them. She kept her audiences — primary school children in Yorkshire, Fiji and in her neighbourhood school in Nugegoda, as well as roomfuls of fans, friends, and acquaintances in many parts of Sri Lanka — spellbound, or helpless with laughter.

Wettasinghe remained a traditionalist who eschewed didacticism, believing that her stories should entertain and inspire, not preach. She was generous with her knowledge — she conducted countless workshops for aspiring writers and artists, both in Sri Lanka and overseas. She also regarded with some alarm the 21^st century digitized mass production of children’s books that is now becoming popular in Sri Lanka. But it will probably take a lot more than technology to diminish Sri Lanka’s love for her work.

John Keells, the major corporate body that began funding the Gratiaen Trust last year, is yet to host the much-anticipated annual Gratiaen gala because the announcement of the winner was held virtually for the second year running. The panel of judges was an interesting mix of Mahendran Thiruvarangan (chair), who recently obtained his PhD, and works as a Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Jaffna; a writer who has been shortlisted for the Gratiaen Prize on multiple occasions but never won in Ashok Ferrey; and Victoria Walker, a former Australian diplomat, currently in Sri Lanka working as a volunteer for Sri Lanka’s Design for Sustainable Development Foundation. There was a time when the Trust used to be subjected to flak as soon as the panel was announced, with journalists and others quick to castigate the selection for a cluster of reasons. Such critique has subsided in recent years, perhaps because some of the commentators have lost interest in the Gratiaen and moved on. But there were some murmurs of discontent when this panel was announced. It was suggested in blogs and columns that the Gratiaen should jettison its policy of not having the same judges more than once in pursuit of securing the best possible judging.

Carmen Miranda won the Gratiaen Prize for her debut novel Crossmatch. The judging panel gave the following citation in awarding her the prize:

The winner of the 2020 Gratiaen Prize for Creative Writing was selected for its compelling storyline, its convincing characterizations, and its skilful use of language. Set in and around Colombo and bringing to the fore the power and power structures that produce the human and physical geography of this city, the novel explores themes of longing and belonging from the vantage point of different characters from different socio-economic backgrounds. Untangling the mystery surrounding the death of a poor boy in a hospital ICU, the novel uses Colombo’s medical establishment as its backdrop, putting a particular spotlight on its dark side. But the novel is also about the quest for justice and putting the system right, and what that looks like from the perspective of different protagonists. Our judging panel was particularly impressed by the ability of the author to structure and pace the novel with such mastery and confidence.

Descriptions of three of the five shortlisted works (all manuscripts) — Mind Games by Jehan Aloysius, Restless Rust by Lal Medawattegedara and The Red Brick Wall by Ciara Mandulee Mendis — can be found on the Gratiaen website (https://www.gratiaen.com/archives/the-short-list-for-the-gratiaen-prize-2020).

The H.A.I. Goonetileke Prize for Translation was won by Malinda Seneviratne for the manuscript “Indelible”, a translation from the Sinhala work Senkottan by Mahinda Prasad Masimbula. It should be noted that the Gratiaen Trust decided to allow the submission of manuscripts a few years into its existence on the basis that some authors do not have the resources to have them published. Part of the prize money was supposed to be utilized for publication within a year so that the public could have access to the winning entry and the balance was to be given to the author only upon publication. Malinda Seneviratne won this prize based on a work submitted in manuscript form on a previous occasion but has yet not fulfilled the requirement of having it published. That he has not collected his prize money is true; one wonders, however, whether the Gratiaen Trust should allow previous winners from sending in entries for the Gratiaen or the H. A. I. Goonetileke Prize in the future until this publishing requirement is fulfilled.

Although Jean Arasanayagam died last year, her poetry continues to be published posthumously —Epiphanies and The Historiographer were brought out in the year under review. It must be said, though, that the titles do not always capture the poems therein and the concerns she deals with are not startlingly new. Attention to her work and persona continues, with innumerable references still made to her Dutch Burgher ancestors, to issues with her identity (given that she is married to a Tamil living on an island that is predominantly Sinhala), recuperations of what happened during the insurrections and the ethnic conflict. But these poems are far more accessible than some of her previous ones. Furthermore, while one does not know if they were written over an extended period, or when Arasanayagam was aware that she had reached the twilight of her days, images of impending nullity and death recur in both volumes. These telling lines occur in Epiphanies: “… age, that cannot be/discarded until that final summons/unclothes this pitiful mortal frame” (“The Past Is a Tableau”); “it’s best that we forget, bury once and for all the/dead in the mute chambers of the past,/release their spirits from their shackles and bonds,/free, free, free them from memory until /we too join them” (“I Cannot Speak with Ghosts”); “there are no more bridges to cross,/although perhaps there is still one more river,/as I await the boatman Charon to row/me across that mythical river, Styx,/within that underworld of perpetual darkness” (“The Suspension Bridge”).

While the concern with death also figures in The Historiographer, Arasanayagam deals with other issues as well. The last poem in the selection. “Which Way to Go” can be read as a revision of Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken”. However, while in Frost’s poem, the speaker can make a choice, in “Which Way to Go”, she feels that she is “rudderless”, a drifter, as it were, and wonders if she ever had a choice. Arasanayagam attended the University of Peradeniya in what many consider were its halcyon days. Much purple prose has been expended in eulogising the institution and its salubrious environs. Arasanayagam’s poem is somewhat more complex with negative images overshadowing the positive. The title of the poem “Dead Notes” is a pointer to the kind of poem it is. She seems to wonder if all the intellectual discussions, the copious notes and the neatly formulated examination answers were in any way relevant to their later lives. While many studied in this privileged enclave and found employment in spheres totally unrelated to English Literature, others emigrated. Unlike them, the poet remained in town to capture what happened to the university in later years of carnage “. . . young men face down on the bloodstained/ earth, blindfolded, hands tethered to their bodies/limp and still, nor did they return to see/bodies like empty sacks hanging from the gibbets/of gaunt tree branches”. While she can still remember her university friends who have long since left or died, she wonders who will “write her epitaph” when she too passes on. As already indicated, no collection by Arasanayagam is ever free of references to her colonial ancestors. In the title poem, “The Historiographer”, she places photographs that capture her family history in front of her and begins to speculate on what kind of people they were, what she has inherited from them, and to what extent she should celebrate her colonial inheritance. Though she claims her task is to “… insert my life insidiously perhaps /subversively to have knowledge of my lost and/hidden forebears…”, there is very little here of the subversion and awareness of the plight of the subjugated in the poem “Memoirs” where the poet ponders “what did they know of the ‘other’,/the fisherman who brought in the catch/what did they feed on, rice and scraps of salt fish”, while her ancestors indulged in gargantuan feasts. “The Historiographer” for the most part focusses on the way that the conquerors enriched the culture of the land they subjugated with their own.

The Eagle’s Wing is an interesting collection because the original was written in Sinhala by Jagath J. Edirisinghe (now based in Australia) and translated by Manel K. R. Fernando (based in Canada). That the Sri Lankan/Buddhist ethos is very much a part of his being is patent in Edirisinghe’s poems. “The Middle of a Journey” and “On the Way” capture the suffering and tedium of those who must go through the cycles of birth, death and rebirth in pursuit of samskara; for instance, the latter poem concludes: “But he must finish this journey/Carrying the weight on his shoulder/When there is no one to help him/Even when he begs on his knee”. “In the Refuge of Samsara” is yet another example of such a poem. Recognition of the importance of Buddhism does not preclude withering criticism of how Buddhism is practised in Sri Lanka, however. “A Parasite” is a devastating critique of the new generation of Buddhist monks in the image of the junior monk, “Holding his robe tight/Lifting it high up to the knee/Protesting to save the political goons/Amidst the people in the street”. The senior monk is not spared either. Edirisinghe suggests that instead of removing the parasite which will destroy the Bo tree (symbolizing Buddhism), he keeps “gazing at the sky”, satisfied with inaction. This is a reference to the way some monks joined violent mobs in attacking people from other ethnic groups and the criticism levelled at the chief incumbents of temples for not reining them in. “End of the Journey” perhaps refers to expatriate unease as the speaker of the poem arrives in the land of adoption and initially finds it different from what he had expected. While the translations do capture the spirit of the originals, they are somewhat impaired by indifferent grammar; for instance, “After a Long Time” ends with the line “where did you stop, and gone [sic]”.

When Shehan Karunatilaka’s self-published version of Chinaman first appeared, many spoke about it but only the judges who had given him the Gratiaen Prize for the original manuscript and a few literary aficionados had read what Henry James would have called his “baggy monster” of a novel. Since I was a member of the Gratiaen Trust at the time and editor of The Sri Lanka Journal of the Humanities, I asked Harshana Rambukwella who had actually read the novel to produce an extended review for the journal, which was one way of whetting the appetite of at least an academic readership. His extended review appeared before the novel was internationally published and won the DSC, Commonwealth Writers, and other awards. It is appropriate, therefore, that Rambukwella should introduce the published version of Karunatilaka’s next novel which was shortlisted as a manuscript for the Gratiaen Prize two years ago. Rambukwella writes,

Chats with the Dead (2020) by Shehan Karuntilaka is a genre-defying whodunnit which explores the culture of impunity in late 1980s Sri Lanka. The text creatively deploys an avenging ghost as the narrative voice which is a particularly apt metaphor. Many extra-judicial killings from this period — which witnessed Sri Lanka’s second violent Maoist youth uprising in the south of the country and a disastrous intervention by the Indian Peace Keeping Force in the north —remain unresolved, with survivors of victims engaged in a frustrating search for justice. Written in Karunatilaka’s trademark sardonic vein, Chats with the Dead creates a parallel universe full of spirits, ghouls and other creatures all attempting to find an elusive sense of closure for their violent and undignified deaths. Written consistently in the second person, the narrative interpolates the reader through the ambiguous use of the second person pro-noun “you” —leaving an uncanny sense of uncertainty whether the narrator refers to himself or the reader. The novel also skilfully draws upon the history of the period, with the main protagonist loosely based on a famous English-language journalist who was gruesomely tortured and murdered and whose mother’s iconic quest for justice became part of this country’s history of human rights discourse. However, it is also in the use of this contemporary history that the novel treads a thin line between fictionalization and “bearing witness”. Some observers have found the novel’s depiction of its main protagonist troubling due to its irreverence. Overall, however, Karunatilaka’s text is a compelling read which breaks new ground in Sri Lankan writing in English, both in terms of theme and craft.

A postcolonial literary critic would no doubt be apprehensive if asked to evaluate a novel entitled A Maiden’s Prayer because of the likelihood of such a title producing a novel that is hyper-romantic, even exotic. But Sriyanthi Perera’s debut novel is not enervated in such ways. The title, in fact, was inspired by the author having to listen to a neighbour playing this piece frequently while growing up. That a generation of children from upper-middle class homes studying for the Royal or Trinity College music exams had to prove their mastery of Tekla Bądarzewska-Baranowska‘s composition is absolutely true, so Perera’s choice of title is perfectly appropriate, given that the book is composed in realist vein. Written by a journalist with an English degree who has worked in several countries besides Sri Lanka and is now living in the USA, A Maiden’s Prayer is an engaging, occasionally hilarious account of Sri Lankan life in one of the most significant decades of its existence —the 1970s. The book was a finalist for the INDIE New Generation Book Awards for Multicultural Fiction. The United Front government comprising Left Wing parties was swept into power in 1970 on a platform that promised drastic social change. However, in 1971, radical youth from the universities and elsewhere banded together in a party known as the JVP and took up arms against the State, impatient that the promised reforms were not being implemented. This was the first such insurrection in the island’s history. Once the government had crushed the rebellion, it began to adopt draconian socialist measures feeling that inaction on its part had led to the revolt: there were limitations imposed on the ownership of land, the power of institutions like the University of Peradeniya was substantially reduced and austerity measures were adopted to reduce dependency on imports. It was a period that was fraught for those in the upper middle class who found it difficult to adjust to the new dispensation. This is the background to Perera’s novel. Narrated by Tamara, who is traversing the path from early to late teens as a somewhat rebellious child, it largely focusses on Berty Rajakaruna, a benevolent engineer with a lucrative job in the middle east, who must negotiate his extended family’s attempts to have him married and the fraught decision whether to use his wealth to reclaim his ancestral “walauwe” property. Ultimately, he finds his own destiny without encumbrances or succumbing to pressure. Perera brings in many references to Buddhism, astrology and horoscopes into her novel. Some Sri Lankan writers have impaired their work by making these ends in themselves or by exploiting their “exotic” potential, but they fit in well with Perera’s concerns. One of the strengths of this novel is how it demonstrates the resilience of Sri Lankans who adjusted to life’s challenges while still retaining a sense of joie de vivre. She recalls exclusive girls schools being invaded by flag waving boys during the “big” school cricket matches in a spirit of fun and even finds amusement in recollecting the necessity to stand in line from early morning for bread. Bread was rationed at the time and the number of loaves one was allowed to purchase depended on the size of the family.

2020 was also notable because Shyam Selvadurai’s popular novel Funny Boy was made into a film. Kanchana Warnapala, a Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Sri Jayawardenapura, makes these observations on the film version:

Film adaptations rarely live up to the spirit and popularity of the novel, and to translate from page to screen is a difficult task for any director. Director Deepa Mehta, too, faces a similar challenge in visualizing a text that has occupied the imaginary of many Sri Lankans. Adapted from Shyam Selvadurai’s 1994 novel, the screenplay written by Selvadurai himself, Mehta’s Funny Boy (2020) is a coming-of-age film that follows Arjie Chelvaratnam through his journey from queer Tamil boyhood to adulthood. Arjie’s coming-out narrative, set against Sinhala Tamil inter-ethnic rifts, is a needed interrogation of hegemonic discourses of heterosexuality and ethno-centric nationalism in Sri Lanka. The film deserves attention for what it tries to do: to bring to focus the racial and sexual tensions of the early 80s which culminated in the Black July in 1983, a dark period in Sri Lankan history. However, it is disheartening to note that a film with potential greatness was severely compromised by cast and dialogue. While the film generally retains the novel’s plot and setting and is delivered with the expected elaborate and exotic visuals, it fails to emotionally connect. The film’s promising opening with a bevy of young children playing “bride-bride” in the garden, where eight-year-old Arjie, veiled and decked up, runs in, followed by the pretend wedding troupe, is visually arresting. The colonial-style houses with billowing, though somewhat unrealistic, white curtains, nevertheless draw the viewer to colonial traces not only in the physical but the cultural landscape as well. Yet, as the action moves forward, the film loses credibility when it cannot authentically tell its story. Many characters are poorly cast, the predominant being the adolescent Arjie whose character and perspective the plot hinges on. Brandon Ingram as adolescent Arjie ends up delivering a wooden performance, unable to register the confusion and vulnerability that are required of his role or to stir the audience. While a younger actor would have been better suited to play Arjie’s teen years, Rehan Mudannayake as Shehan, Arjie’s Sinhalese lover, is far more convincing in his role. Arjie’s Tamil parents are less so, unable to embody a “Tamilness”, either through behaviour or language, critical to the politics of the film. While Nimmia Harasgama, cast as Arjie’s mother, has proven herself as a versatile actress elsewhere, she is out of her element in the film. In fact, the film runs the risk of appropriation through casting when non-Tamil actors are cast as Tamil and non-queer as queer. Further, while a film has the prerogative to take creative liberties with the source text, the conspicuous absence of characters such as Daryl, Arjie’s mother’s former Burgher boyfriend, jeopardizes the complexity of the message of the text, reducing the racial politics of Sri Lanka to only the Sinhala Tamil ethnic divide. While one cannot, of course, underestimate the cultural impact of Mehta’s Funny Boy, the film unfortunately subverts its own message of Tamil and queer visibility through a misguided casting choice.

Former Gratiaen winner Vihanga Perera continues to publish prolifically. Bodies in Art is a book in three movements of which the first two sections draw on largely biographical details related to arts practitioners in Sri Lanka during Vihanga Perera’s early years as a writer. They relate to various events in Kandy’s theatre scene and the poetry and arts circles of Colombo between 2005 and 2020. The third section is framed as a sexual history of the Sri Lankan high school as a nursery for emerging artists in the country. As author Perera declares, “The history is written from a broad sexuality-related perspective: sexual identity, coming of age, sexual expression, and sexual oppression”. Bodies in Art is perhaps the only such experimental, multi-genre work —composed of biography, criticism, satire, fiction, and poetry —to emerge from Sri Lanka in recent years. Writing to the Daily Mirror, Nelani de Costa refers to Bodies in Art as a “deeply entertaining, memorable, provocative, and offensive work of part-autobiography” that was written “to provoke and offend, be playful and poignant, and through the use of memory and humour to make a wholescale critique of the Sri Lankan literary landscape”. Samantha Wickramasinghe, in Ceylon Today, applauded the book for depicting the “horrible, relatable, oppressive sex culture in boys’ schools” in an age where sex culture was not widespread through digital culture.

The Single Tumbler was awarded the prize for Best International Feature Film at the Cinemaking international Film Festival held in Bangladesh. Sivamohan Sumathy, the Director, who is also a Professor in English at the University of Peradeniya, has this to say on the film:

The Single Tumbler depicts a slice of contemporary life in post-war northern Sri Lanka. The war is over. One of the main protagonists, Lalitha, who lives in Canada, returns to Sri Lanka, to the family she left behind in a time of great turbulence. Memories are hard and bitter. Why does “Daisy’s teacher” cling to the single tumbler? Did Fatima curse them when the Muslims were evicted by the militants? Why did Jude the brother disappear? What secrets do Jessie and Anthony hide? The Single Tumbler looks for answers that this family seeks. The film marks an inward glance —a close intimate glance —at northern Tamil society in Sri Lanka at a time of a crisis of identity. It is riven from within by its class, gender, and ethnic persuasions. I look at my own home, family, community, and nation through the lens of displacement. I look at post-war Sri Lanka, haunted by its past and marginalization, exclusions and complicities that exist side by side. Sarath Kellepotha, the writer and critic, in a personal communication, makes this observation on The Single Tumbler, “War has a catastrophic effect on the wellbeing of the peoples. Although not a single shot was shown about the war, we could very well feel its presence throughout looming in the background. It aptly portrays the destiny of a nation. Nowhere to go, no idea about where to go, no one to guide them.”

Many individuals who were involved with the English academe at one time, creative writers and publishers, have produced engaging biographies and autobiographies in the recent past. The trend continued in the year under review. Both books introduced below are by Muslim authors and, in their different ways, they capture the vicissitudes within the Muslim community and its interaction with others over the years. Yasmin Azad grew up in Galle, worked for a short time as a lecturer in Kelaniya after graduating with an honour’s degree in English from Peradeniya and subsequently emigrated to the US where she changed career to become a mental health counsellor. She has this to say about her autobiography Stay Daughter: A Memoir of Muslim Girlhood:

Set in the colonial citadel of the Galle Fort, Ceylon, Stay, Daughter, follows the history of a Muslim community that, in the late 19^th century, breaks with the traditions of the time, to give girls a secular education. Together with intimate glimpses into the everyday lives of females, it explores the impact of Westernization and modernity on a traditional people — exposure to foreign ideas brings heartbreak to many families. Although the book narrates the story of a single family, it draws on a situation almost all Muslims struggle with: the challenge of balancing the rules of orthodox Islam with the freedom and innovations of the modern world.

Here is a representative extract:

It took only minutes for a girl attending the Convent School to get down from a buggy cart and walk into the classrooms. Yet, in that time she could manage to look from under lowered lashes at the boy from the Jesuit College nearby who had fixed his gaze on her. He waited every morning until she arrived. She rewarded his patience with a clandestine glance; each longed for the same thing to happen the next day. Christian schoolmates giggled and offered to pass love notes. Phone calls were made. “I am going to have a l-o-n-g chat with cousin Ameera”, a girl announced to her family before dialling his number.

Without much face-to-face conversation, without a holding of hands or brushing of lips, girls and boys pledged understanding. The chaperones swore they had been vigilant all the time. “How could this happen under our very noses?” they asked.

The community then had to relearn what their forebears must have known when they set the rules for female seclusion. Passion fed on miniscule fare: heart-catching tendrils breaking loose from under a veil, muscles tensing against a thin cotton shirt, and desire seized the heart. Black robes draped from head to toe gave some protection. Confining women entirely to the inner rooms mostly worked. Lesser safeguards, it was turning out, were lines drawn in the sand.

Novelist and publisher Ameena Hussein’s Ibn Battuta in Sri Lanka is the other notable book in this category. Ostensibly, the title would suggest that Hussein has produced a biographical or sociological account of the Berber Moroccan traveller/scholar who visited the island in 1344 and chronicled this and his other travels in the Rihla. However, Hussein does not adopt a traditional approach. While she has perused Battuta’s writings and previous research on them assiduously, the slant she provides in this book is somewhat different. While focussing on some of his adventures and misadventures in Sri Lanka in a manner that is accessible to the general reader, Hussein succeeds in humanizing this individual from a bygone age who is treated with almost excessive awe and reverence elsewhere. But this book on Battuta also demonstrates a larger purpose. A predominant concern in Ibn Battuta in Sri Lanka is the interethnic and interreligious harmony which prevailed during Battuta’s sojourns in Sri Lanka. He was welcomed into the homes of Buddhists, Hindus and Muslims and discovered people of different religious faiths worshipping at the same shrines. This largely harmonious historical period is contrasted with the current situation on in the island. As Hussein says in her Afterword, “I began this journey when Lanka was going through the rumblings of yet another ethno-religious upheaval. The militant association of Buddhist monks called Bodu Bala Sena or the Buddhist Power Army was in the throes of agitating against the minorities of Sri Lanka”; at the same time, however, she is unflinching in her criticism of her own community in noting how their “gentle Sufi antecedents have given way to Saudi Wahhabi/Salafi inspired intolerance and rigidity. Their change in dress and sometimes fierce public display of the practice of their faith has only served to alienate a previously well integrated community from the rest of the population”. The book appears to have been written in the hope that, by reflecting on this heady past, Sri Lankans would be able to return to the spirit of peaceful cohabitation that prevailed at one time.

This introduction has often referred to the lack of literary, in fact, any kind of academic journals dealing with the humanities and social sciences being produced in Sri Lanka in the recent past. Often, journals are established only to fold after a few issues. One hopes that the third revival of the University of Colombo Review will be sustained. Another inadequacy highlighted is the dearth of good publishers. The setting up of The Jam Fruit Tree Publications by the late Carl Muller’s son and the plethora of literature in English it has brought out in a short time is an encouraging sign indeed. The dilemma faced by publishers on the island that accept books in English by local writers has been identified before: to encourage writers by readily publishing their work or to be selective and give primacy to quality. One hopes The Jam Fruit Tree Publications can strike a balance.

Compilers of this bibliography have employed the Sri Lanka National Bibliography as the core source for information for decades. All published works (even those that are self-published) are required by law to be despatched to the National Library and Documentation Centre of Sri Lanka which produces the bibliography. Numbers would appear with unfailing regularity each month. As I have mentioned in my recent introductions, however, this publication is now considerably delayed (it is the middle of 2021, but only the 2019 issues are publicly available) and to this has been added a deviation from standard bibliographical practice, from about 2019, in not always providing the total number of pages of published books. Then again, the convention of giving the same information in formally reviewing, say, a novel or collection of poems in newspaper or academic journals, seems to have also been abandoned. This results in a conundrum for the compiler of the bibliography: to have some entries with page numbers and others without is unprofessional but to leave out items for this lack would be equally unacceptable. Under the circumstances, it was decided to include all records without indicating the total number of pages in some entries.

This is my 26^th compilation of the bibliography on Sri Lanka and easily the most challenging, given the pandemic and the closure of libraries and bookstores. While I appreciate writers and colleagues who gladly agreed to write a few paragraphs on their own work, or those of others, I am especially grateful to Thanuja Lamahewage who compiles the English section of the Sri Lanka National Bibliography, and Anoma Wijesinhe, Assistant Director Bibliography Division, for going beyond the call of duty and providing me with what information was available when the SLNB was still in draft stage. Such kindness shown to a stranger working on a bibliography for an unrelated journal is truly commendable.