Contemporary Sri Lankan Literature and Art: The Creation of a New Post-War Community
Photo courtesy of SCMP
After the end of the Civil War with its haunting legacy, Sri Lanka endured the Easter bombings, national bankruptcy and witnessed the aragalaya, which led to the ousting of the Rajapaksa dynasty as well as Ranil Wickremesinghe. With the new NPP government under President Anura Kumara Dissanayake for the first time in decades, change and progress seem to be possible but economic problems remain, just as Sinhalese ideas of supremacy linked to a unique kind of militant Buddhism, traumatized and marginalized minorities still awaiting meaningful accountability and a growing dependency on countries like China, India and the US. There is still a lot of work to do politically and otherwise.
Since politics has always been a fought terrain and continues to be so, 19 academics and artists decided to take a critical look at a sphere where creative thinking is rarely boxed in by party lines, history and politics, i.e. Sri Lanka’s vibrant art scene, and to explore how concepts of community, of living together, of building the new country are envisaged there. As the first of its kind, Contemporary Sri Lankan Literature and Art, co-edited by Stefan Horlacher and Thilini Meegaswatta, brings together contributions that look to literary and theatrical production and cinema as well as the performing and visual arts to explore timely concepts and questions ranging from Buddhist nationalism, Sinhala identity politics, truth in testimonial literature, the (im)possibility of transitional justice, surveillance and self-censorship to morality, the function of rituals, queer embodiment and community creation through performance. The book is supplemented with interviews, illustrations and unpublished short stories and poetry from well-known resident and diasporic Sri Lankan writers so that this volume does not only talk about but also withartists and their work.
The knowledge of the arts
In this project, art is understood as a space in which ludic, creative and experimental thinking becomes possible, allowing us to transcend social, political but also epistemological and ontological boundaries to probe new ways of living (together) and alternative concepts of community. Art, we further argue, has the ability to confront us with a kind of knowledge which we usually either deny or do not have access to but which we must embrace if we want to make progress as a community. For these reasons, the works of art we selected for analysis in Contemporary Sri Lankan Literature and Art have not only made identity, community, the social fabric and socio-symbolic order we live in (and by) one of their most important topics but through their very functioning play a significant role in the construction of the identity of their readers, viewers and listeners. Through mechanisms of transfer, identification and empathy, these works communicate forms of shared existence that have the power to “[implore] us to act with a compassion born of familiarity towards our fellow human beings ” (Phillips 2011, 16-17). Moreover, they prove that through novels, films and paintings distances/differences can be bridged without being negated and that new forms of togetherness can be conceived and experienced. For these reasons, this volume does not primarily focus on traditional or mainstream artworks but centres on those works of art which are more likely to possess the power to interrupt the myth of completion and totality, to reveal the heterogeneity of community, to give voice to marginalized and minoritarian groups and discourses and to produce new and different forms of knowledge.
To lay a solid foundation, the volume starts with two extensive theoretical and contextualising chapters by Stefan Horlacher, which focus on Sri Lanka’s postcolonial/post-civil war conundrum on transitional justice, the power of art and recent history up to the elections in 2024. The concepts of hybridity, difference and diversity introduced by Horlacher are then put to the test in Benedikt Korf and Thamali Kithsiri’s ethnographic chapter on hybrid culture and identity politics inside the ethnically mixed community of Paanama. Instead of hybridity, Korf and Kithsiri argue that what we find is an original syncretism that blends practices and rituals from Hindu, Buddhist and other local kinships; a syncretism that is being increasingly purified into proper Sinhala Buddhist hegemonic identity that people aspire to.
The contribution following Korf and Kithsiri’s chapter extends their ethnographic frame to the judicial system and the question of how to manage transition successfully and achieve transitional and affective justice. As objects of analysis, Lars Waldorf and Nilanjana Premaratna take two Sri Lankan films – Paangshu (2018) and Demons in Paradise (2017) – that depict how Sri Lanka’s best known militant groups practice violence against their own communities and demonstrate how both films recover traumatic counter memories and recuperate uncomfortable counter narratives that have been forgotten or silenced within the Sinhalese and Tamil communities. Most importantly, the analysis reveals how ordinary Sinhalese and Tamils are implicated in the violence that was committed in their names and how the films help create a shared story of mutual suffering among Sri Lankans, one that might provide a foundational narrative for a (re)imagined community one day.
The medium of film is also central to Neluka Silva’s chapter on Sinhala Buddhist nationalism and post-war Sinhala cinema. Here she demonstrates with the help of Anagarika Dharmapala Srimathano (2014) and Mahindagamanaya (2011) how the substantial patronage provided by the State Film Corporation had enabled mainstream Sinhala cinema to become a conduit for producing and reinforcing hegemonic ideologies in the post-war context. The overarching emphasis on Buddhism and its nexus with Sinhala in the films facilitates the forging of exclusionary cultural and national identities in the cinematic terrain, calling attention to the problematic role of history and memory in the landscape of reconciliation. However, it is not only cinema and film which are influenced by politics and the horrors of the past but more traditional forms of art such as landscape painting as well. This is demonstrated by Priyantha Udagedara who argues that it is imperative to critically explore and analyze contemporary paintings that often showcase the beauty of Sri Lanka but forget to acknowledge the depraved atrocities that took place within that landscape. This political and referential function of art is also central to Thamotharampillai Sanathanan’s contribution, which enquires into the notion of artistic freedom and the role of self-censorship in art production in the controversial space that exists between the majoritarian state and artists from minority communities.
The next two chapters are also dedicated to painting and focus on Sujith Rathnayake’s work during the aragalaya. A succinct report of Rathnayake’s Harrow Exhibition in London in 2023 is followed by an interview in which Rathnayake explains his motives for actively taking part in the aragalaya as an artist, discusses the precarious relation between art for art’s sake and art for an ethical or political purpose, and critically reflects on his own artistic process and the works of art he created during the aragalaya. Linked to this interview is Ruhanie Perera’s chapter on the enactment of community in artistic practice with a special focus on performance, public space and politics. Her analysis of an embodied act by Thilina Sampath and two performances by the Ogha Collective demonstrates how the works discussed present important parallel expressions of community articulated through performance as encountered in public spaces decentralized from art contexts and venues.
With Minoli Salgado’s chapter on Sri Lankan witness literature and the new poetics of affective truth telling in post-war testimonial narrative, this volume finally approaches the realm of literature. Based on a critical reading of Sunila Galappatti and Ajith Boyagoda’s survivor memoir A Long Watch (2016) and Anuk Arudpragasam’s novel A Passage North (2021), Salgado argues that the political discourse on the civil war is underscored by a contestation over facts that marks a crisis of truth and that Sri Lankan witness literature in English serves to fill the truth-bearing gap created by this contestation by mediating traumatic memory as an explicitly testimonial narrative. The question of truth is also important for Shermal Wijewardene’s chapter on queer voices in the narration of the ethnic conflict in Tamil diasporic women’s writing. In her analysis of V.V. Ganeshananthan’s Love Marriage (2008) and S.J. Sindu’s Marriage of a Thousand Lies (2017), Wijewardene demonstrates how the trope of queer visceral embodiment depicts epistemic inequalities in war narratives and possibilities for alternative knowledges.
The civil war is also central to Stefan Horlacher and Thilini Meegaswatta’s chapter on the creation of meaning by means of rituals, taboos and the abject in Anuk Arudpragasam’s The Story of a Brief Marriage (2016). The chapter follows Wijewardene’s lead in looking at what could metaphorically be called the small voices of history (Arundhati Roy) and analyzes how the protagonist navigates the impossible conditions of a state of exception and bare life by functionalizing the abject and resorting to rituals to sustain his humanity and make meaning out of the nothingness he is reduced to. Horlacher and Meegaswatta further argue that the novel offers its readers a possibility of renewal through cleansing by forcing them to work through the horror of the national (and individual) past. Arudpragasam’s second novel, A Passage North (2021) occupies a central position in Neloufer de Mel’s contribution. She traces morality’s immense authority (and therefore irreducibility) in relation to humanitarian aid, sovereign power and terrorism, particularly in contexts of natural disasters/states of exception and builds a strong argument for locating A Passage North as a compelling, if fraught, intervention on morality in and for the present.
The volumes comes to a close with poems by Gratiaen prize-winner Vivimarie Vanderpoorten and Jaffna poet and writer Ayathurai Santhan as well as three short stories by Ameena Hussein and two diasporic Sri Lankan writers – Minoli Salgado and Romesh Gunesekera. Their contributions interact with and complement the critical pieces of this book, for example by illuminating how works of literature can be rich sites for negotiating history, identity, memory, politics and visions for future.
Art meets reality
To reduce Contemporary Sri Lankan Literature and Art to one single message is futile. What it demonstrates is the enormous rolethat art can play in peacebuilding and community building and how it can help to deal with the horrors of the past and pave the way to a different future. What it further demonstrates is the potential of art to crystallize moods, feelings and topics that are censored in public discourse but part of the collective sub or unconscious; to create a connection between different individuals by giving them the opportunity to experience and understand other points of view and realities and thereby create (collective) identity, solidarity and community; to make us feel what it means to be human in contexts of conflict and to open up a space where values and norms are (re)negotiated and where horizons can be transgressed; and to make new alternative realities thinkable and liveable and finally to vigorously interfere with and change reality.
As the contributions in Contemporary Sri Lankan Literature and Art prove, art exposes culture and society as a constant process, a never-finished coming into being. Thus, it has the power to disrupt the foundational, the economic, historical, political, religious and ideological narratives dominant in society and to pave the way for new and different forms of sense and meaning. If this sounds too abstract, let’s tie it back to recent history, i.e. the aragalaya as a total work of art and an impressive space of national imagining (Klett 2022, para. 1). It is especially at Gota Go Gama (GGG), which had been shaped by the contributions of artists expressing their frustrations and aspirations as part of a peaceful movement of citizens voicing their dissent (Klett 2022, para. 1), that it becomes evident that the power of art to effectively shape and change reality and create new communities is no abstract theory or wishful thinking. Consider how in a notable moment for inter-ethnic solidarity, GGG was not just a future-directed protest against the government but also saw the first ever public commemoration held in the capital for the thousands of Tamils killed and disappeared during the final phase of the civil war (Waldorf and Premaratna 2023). As Naila Rafique (2023) points out, for the first time in the country’s history, Sri Lankans from diverse ethnicities, religions, generations, and social classes came together to collectively protest and to oppose corruption, violence and coercion and shape a new future. Significantly, it were the various forms of art – banners, posters, songs, sculptures, performances and films – that became the glue that brought people together and gave them a sense of community that transcended linguistic, ethnic, religious, and cultural demarcations.
