Allegory and counter-realism in Sri Lankan fiction

By Dr. Wilfred JAYASURIYA

Writing on Shyam Sevadurai's Funny Boy, Rajiva Wijesinha, in a newspaper review, said the homosexuality which separates the boy from his playmates is also an allegory of the separation of the Tamils from the Sinhalese, the other theme of the book. Allegorical writing in India and Sri Lanka is part of the theme of Chelva Kanaganayakam's book: Counterrealism in Indo Anglian Fiction. His general theme is that, deriving from Salman Rushdie, the use of "magic realism" as a literary device is widespread among Indian writers. Magic realism involves exaggeration and distortion, a departure from the conscious to the unconscious, which is a familiar aspect of literature. The child in Funny Boy dresses himself up as a girl and enjoys it, this being a poignant symbol not only of his personal deviance and non conformity but also of the unavoidable difference of identity, between races, that seems to be the cause of the troubles. "Is such conflict inevitable?" the novel seems to say.

Selvadurai's other well known novel, Cinnamon Gardens, celebrates the past, before the First World War, around the 1930s. In this novel too the hero is a homosexual young man, who belongs to the Tamil elite in Colombo, which played a major role in civic and political life, in the halcyon days of British rule, the long period of peace, which changed the society of Ceylon from a feudal to a modernizing one. The connection between Jaffna, the original place from which the Ceylon Tamils came to Colombo is retained through *the pater familias, the Mudaliyar*, maintaining a separate family in the ancestral village back there, while ruling the roost in Colombo. The novel is also about the hegemony of a patriarchal order and its subversion in various forms. Word pictures of characters, locales and customs are lovingly created and the State Council days, when colonial culture bloomed, is celebrated. Much research has gone into this superb recreation. Kanaganayakam says that expatriate writers like Selvadurai (who lives in Canada) face an anomalous self image.

We look before and after and pine for what is not,

Our sweetest songs are made of saddest thought

This may be generally true of all human beings but it is more true of those who have sought refuge in another country, another world. Clearly Selvadurai feels the need to write about a home "which is the source of identity but not necessarily a repository of consciousness." (Kanaganayakam 164). He must use a language that is virtually his mother tongue but one that has limited currency in Sri Lanka. He must write about the East for readers who belong to the West. For those who left fairly late in their lives the consciousness is largely Sri Lankan. So Selvadurai writes about the land of his birth for readers in the English speaking world. This sense of being an expatriate writer and what it means is not limited to those who live abroad.

E. R. Sarathchandra, with his complex east west alignments also began to write in English in later life, remaining in Sri Lanka but addressing a larger audience. He won the Magsaysay Award given by the Philippines for work done in Ceylon/Sri Lanka. His novel Foam Upon A Stream about a Sri Lankan professor in Japan, is clearly autobiographical but it is also a skilful fantasy of love and death written with superb narrative art.

Sarathchandra dramatized his life experiences in fiction written in English as well as Sinhala, which because they are overshadowed by his achievements in nationalistic drama, Maname and Sinhabahu, have not been much acclaimed. I once asked him whether he regrets having to write in English and he said, "On the contrary I revel in writing in English. It frees me from constraints and I have an audience which is much more widespread and sophisticated."

Counterrealism and IndoAnglian Fiction by Chelva Kanaganayakam. Wilfrid Laurier University Press, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada 2002.