In the subcontinent, conflict has erupted whenever there have been attempts to polarise and divide. Partition and the violence that followed in 1947, and memories of another division in 1971, continue to haunt the region. Writers from Pakistan, India, and Bangladesh have tried to make sense of happenings on the ground through both fiction and non-fiction.
Sri Lanka, which too has a long history of colonialism, and complex undercurrents of religious, cultural and linguistic identities, has often seen outbreaks of violence, leading to lives being uprooted, and a feeling of tremendous loss and insecurity. After months of devastating economic misery, the island country is witnessing an unprecedented people’s movement that has forced a president out of office. Literature will someday try to explain the monumental changes, but we go back to a 1994 debut novel which told a coming-of-age story in the backdrop of ethnic tension between the Sinhalese and Tamils, and the anti-Tamil riots of July 1983.
Mounted police personnel patrol a street amidst the current economic crisis | Photo Credit: Getty Images
Shyam Selvadurai’s Funny Boy is set in Colombo of the 1970s and revolves around the growing up — and going away — of Arjun (Arjie) Chelvaratnam. Selvadurai wrote the book in Canada, where his family had migrated. Inspired by Anita Desai’s Clear Light of Day, and its Partition overtones, he tried to examine what had happened in Sri Lanka and how it had reached the brink.
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The author sticks to the world he knew. Thus his protagonist also reads western novels (Enid Blyton to begin with) and acts in western plays (The King and I), but is “firmly rooted within the social, physical and political landscape of Sri Lanka”. The novel begins with Arjie visiting his grandparents’ home for a spend-a-day with his cousins. Acutely observed, from experience and imagination, he recalls his grandmother “smelt of stale coconut oil, and the diamond mukkuthi in her nose always pressed painfully” against his cheek when he stooped down for a kiss. It’s during one such spend-a-day that young Arjie realises he is happiest playing bride-bride, staying clear of the boys playing cricket.
‘Pigs can’t fly’
Arjie’s journey to coming to terms with his sexuality is far from easy. When an aunt finds him dressed up as a bride and drags him to a room full of adults including his parents, his father has a row with his mother at night, telling her: “If he turns out funny… it’ll be your fault.” His mother urges him to play with boys; when he asks why, she blurts out: “Why? Because the sky is high and pigs can’t fly, that’s why.”
The best-selling novel was adapted into a film (2020) by Deepa Mehta in which Selvadurai co-wrote the screenplay with the director | Photo Credit: Special arrangement
When Arjie, a Tamil, meets Shehan, a Sinhalese, in school, his tender relationship is not the only one frowned upon. At home, another of his aunts, Radha, is in trouble for daring to fall in love with someone outside the community. But Arjie, a keeper of secrets, stumbles upon the biggest of all, his mother’s love for Daryl Uncle, a Burgher, descended from the Dutch, and “a Sri Lankan just like us”. How will the family cope when the madness in the world threatens their home? They will have to flee the country in 1983, remembering forever the kindness of Sinhalese neighbours and friends who protected them during the ugliness of the riots. The Sri Lankan civil war may have ended in 2009, but Selvadurai’s universal story of love, loss and complex identities is still relevant.
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In his introduction to an anthology of Sri Lankan literature, Many Roads Through Paradise, Selvadurai outlines the implications of Sri Lanka’s language policy of 1956 when the Sinhala Only Act was passed. “The Sinhalese would study Sinhala in school, the Tamils Tamil. Burghers [those descended from the Dutch and Portuguese], Muslims and those of mixed parentage could, if they chose to, study in the English medium, which would be gradually phased out as well.” Though English has since been restored in schools, the repercussions of a policy creating “three solitudes: Sinhala, Tamil and English,” still divide a diverse nation. Like Arjie, many lives have changed irremediably, the horrors leaving no one untouched.
The writer looks back at one classic each fortnight.
