{"id":83349,"date":"2022-01-04T18:15:35","date_gmt":"2022-01-04T18:15:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/websitedesigns.com.au\/elankanew\/?p=83349"},"modified":"2022-01-04T18:15:35","modified_gmt":"2022-01-04T18:15:35","slug":"the-best-books-on-sri-lanka-by-razeen-sally","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/websitedesigns.com.au\/elankanew\/the-best-books-on-sri-lanka-by-razeen-sally\/","title":{"rendered":"The best books on Sri Lanka-by Razeen Sally"},"content":{"rendered":"

The best books on Sri Lanka-by Razeen Sally<\/span><\/h1>\n

\"The<\/p>\n

Source:<\/span><\/strong>Fivebooks<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

Many visitors to Sri Lanka have been beguiled by its charms, from its hill towns to its beaches, its ancient temples to its friendly people. And yet, for a quarter of a century until 2009, it was torn apart by a brutal civil war. Here, Sri Lanka-born political economist\u00a0Razeen Sally<\/strong>, author of\u00a0Return to Sri Lanka: Travels in a Paradoxical Land<\/em>, recommends the best books to get a better understanding of Sri Lanka and the complexities that make the country so fascinating to visit and read about.<\/span><\/p>\n

Y<\/span>ou were born in\u00a0Sri Lanka<\/a>\u00a0and lived there until you were 12. You then rediscovered it as an adult so, in a way, you\u2019ve experienced it as an outsider as well. Before we get to the books, I wondered whether, as an introduction, you could tell me why Sri Lanka is such a fascinating place to discover?<\/span><\/p>\n

There\u2019s the immediate charm of the place. Most of it is very green and lush\u2014that\u2019s the wet zone of the country, which covers over half of the landmass. I like to think of the Sri Lankans as the Irish of Asia or the Irish as the Sri Lankans of Europe, because they\u2019re very friendly, open, warm and welcoming. It\u2019s an incredibly diverse country, culturally, ethnically and religiously. You see that expressed in the way people dress and what they eat, where they go to worship, and the languages: \u00a0Sinhala and Tamil as well as English. That\u2019s all on the surface.<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

The attraction of Sri Lanka beyond that, for me, is all wound up with being half Sri Lankan and having been born and spent my childhood there, and then coming back\u00a0to write a travel memoir<\/a>\u00a0about the country. My main fresh discovery, traveling around the island properly, was the back-of-beyond places that I didn\u2019t really get to see as a child. Getting under the skin of people in these places, walking all over the landscapes, was just wondrous. I can\u2019t think of anywhere else\u2014at least that I\u2019ve been to\u2014where in a comparable space you have as much variety of people, cultures, flora, fauna, and landscapes. You don\u2019t have to travel long distances in Sri Lanka to come across something quite different. In a mid-sized island roughly the size of Ireland, you have an incredible variety.<\/span><\/p>\n

The other thing I would point to about Sri Lanka is its baffling complexity. I call it \u2018paradoxical\u2019 in the subtitle of my book, and for a small country with a population of around 20 million, there are just so many contradictions. In the book, I say it\u2019s a heaven-and-hell country, engulfed and consumed by its own extremes. The obvious paradox is this beguiling charm I mentioned, especially of Sinhala-Buddhist culture in the lush, green wet zone, alongside an astonishing record of violence that leaves admiring foreigners completely puzzled and in a state of consternation. They just can\u2019t explain it. That, among other contradictions, always puzzled me as a child, and they lingered with me during my three decades or so of absence. I suppose that central paradox of beguiling charm and violent eruptions was the really hard puzzle that I set off on my travels with, when I came back to rediscover Sri Lanka in my mid-40s.<\/span><\/p>\n

So, that\u2019s the attraction of Sri Lanka for me, in a nutshell.<\/span><\/p>\n

I suppose to get a grip on these contradictions you need to have an understanding of the history?<\/span><\/p>\n

Yes, which I knew little about until my mid-40s. I didn\u2019t really get a sense of Sri Lanka\u2019s many-layered history as a child. My school career was highly fragmented, back and forth between Britain and Sri Lanka: I think I changed schools 10 times before I turned 16.<\/span><\/p>\n

These travels and my book project have been a good excuse for me to dive into Sri Lanka\u2019s history, cultures and religions. It\u2019s incredibly complicated which makes it interesting: there are puzzles to unravel.<\/span><\/p>\n

On that note, let\u2019s turn to the books and in particular\u00a0The Sri Lanka Reader<\/em>\u00a0which you mentioned as the best place to start.<\/span><\/p>\n

Of all the books I\u2019ve read on Sri Lankan history, this is the one that I found best in terms of a sweeping overview of a blend of history, politics and culture, from many different angles and authors\u2014as opposed to having, say, a textbook by one author. There is a rather\u00a0good textbook on the history of Sri Lanka by Professor K.M. de Silva<\/a>. That\u2019s the one most people go to, especially if they\u2019re not specialist historians.<\/span><\/p>\n

But for an introduction that\u2019s erudite and not superficial,\u00a0The Sri Lanka Reader<\/em>\u00a0is the one I would go to. It came out about 10 years ago. It\u2019s edited by John Holt, who is now emeritus professor at Bowdoin College in Maine. He\u2019s a specialist on\u00a0Buddhism<\/a>\u00a0and its relationship to Sinhala culture and has a long association with Sri Lanka. What he\u2019s put together in this book are these very accessible short excerpts that cover the whole range of history\u2014about 2,500 years of it\u2014taking us all the way to the end of the Civil War in 2009. Some of the authors are long dead, some still living.<\/span><\/p>\n

Can you give me a sense of the kind of excerpts that he includes?<\/span><\/p>\n

The very first entry, in the section on ancient and medieval history, is from\u00a0the\u00a0Mahavamsa<\/em><\/a>, the national epic. It translates from the Sinhala as \u2018Great Chronicle.\u2019 There are many chronicles, but this is the one that\u2019s really elevated to Olympian status. It was written by a leading monk, Mahanama Thera, in the fifth century CE, most probably. He was the abbot of one of the three main monasteries in the capital city of Anuradhapura and an uncle of a king. The\u00a0Mahavamsa<\/em>\u00a0is very tendentious. It presents about 1,000 years of history, up until the fifth century CE, with Theravada Buddhism and Sinhala kingship and the alliance between the two in the foreground. Its style is what we would today probably call \u2018magical realism\u2019. The Buddha flew three times\u2014before the age of flying machines\u2014from North India to Sri Lanka. He said on his deathbed that Sri Lanka would be the cradle of his religion after his death. The founder of the Sinhala race, Vijaya, was the issue of the union between a lion and an Indian princess, and so on.<\/span><\/p>\n

There is also a short account from\u00a0Ibn Battuta\u2019s travels<\/a>\u00a0on his stay in the 14th century, and a fifth-century account from a Chinese pilgrim monk, Faxian, about his visit to the Anuradhapura kingdom.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cI can\u2019t think of anywhere else\u2026where you have as much variety of people, cultures, flora, fauna, and landscapes\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Then there is a long middle section on the colonial encounter, which was roughly 150 years of Portugal, 150 years of the Netherlands, and 150 years of the British before independence in 1948. It\u2019s probably the longest colonial encounter of any country in Asia.<\/span><\/p>\n

I suppose my favourite entry in the book is from Leonard Woolf\u2019s memoirs. He was in the Ceylon civil service for seven years in the early 1900s, and married the more famous\u00a0Virginia<\/a>\u00a0when he returned to London. He was much more interested in the locals than he was in what he considered to be rather boring and pompous fellow colonial officials and their families. He wrote a marvelous novel,\u00a0The Village in the Jungle<\/em><\/a>, which is still famous in Sri Lanka. His second volume of memoirs,\u00a0Growing<\/em><\/a>, is set in the Ceylon of the period just over a century ago.<\/span><\/p>\n

The Sri Lanka Reader<\/em>\u00a0ends with a \u00a0short \u201cPolitical Epilogue,\u201d taking account of the end of the Civil War. The leading entry is by an eminent Sri Lankan journalist, Lasantha Wickrematunge, who wrote an editorial in his paper, the\u00a0Sunday Leader,\u00a0<\/em>predicting his murder at the hands of the government. He criticized the government mercilessly, because of human rights violations and corruption, with the instruction that the article was to be published in the event of his murder. It was published on January 11th, 2009.<\/span><\/p>\n

So the book covers a very, very broad spectrum and is highly readable.<\/span><\/p>\n

You mentioned that the editor of this book, John Clifford Holt, is an expert on Buddhism. That\u2019s a very important part of the story of the Civil War, isn\u2019t it, the connection between politics and religion? Could you say a bit about that for people who don\u2019t follow Sri Lanka closely?<\/span><\/p>\n

Buddhism in Sri Lanka, whether you\u2019re writing a travel memoir, as I did, or a history or current affairs book, is the proverbial elephant in the room. You can\u2019t avoid it. Ethnic Sinhalese are roughly three-quarters of the population, and about two-thirds of the population are Sinhala Buddhists (other Sinhalese being mainly Christian). The long laborious process of writing a book got me much deeper into Buddhism in Sri Lanka than I ever did as a child and got me to go into the history of it.<\/span><\/p>\n

What you see today is a ritualistic, almost pagan worship because Sinhala Buddhists tend to worship a whole range of gods and spirits with the Buddha as the central character in the pantheon. This has little to do with original Buddhism. That\u2019s combined with a Buddhism that, particularly since independence, has become highly politicized and involved with money and business, including lots of shady characters. It drives a chauvinist, supremacist, even racist political agenda. So that\u2019s the Buddhism that the observer sees on the surface.<\/span><\/p>\n

The origins of this go back to the founding of Buddhism in Sri Lanka, because when Buddhism came, sometime in the third century BCE, it was linked to Sinhala kings in the Anuradhapura kingdom from the outset. That political connection has always been there and was only interrupted during the colonial encounters with the Portuguese, Dutch and British. It was then restored with independence. It was Theravada Buddhism which really got anchored in Sri Lanka and came to monopolize Sinhala Buddhism. It tends to be doctrinally very conservative, without much evolution over 2000 years or more.<\/span><\/p>\n

The paradox is that for most of this time, Buddhism in Sri Lanka tolerated other religions, and there was a lot of syncretism. If you go to a Buddhist temple in Sri Lanka today, you will see Buddha statues worshipped alongside Hindu gods without worshipers thinking anything of it. You will see a lot of Hindu influence, particularly from Shaivite Hinduism in South India, which most Tamils in Sri Lanka practise. There are also Mahayana influences\u2014because Mahayana coexisted with Theravada probably for the best part of 1,000 years before Theravada erased formal Mahayana religious orders and worship.<\/span><\/p>\n

But the kind of political Buddhism we have in Sri Lanka today is much more exclusive, supremacist and discriminatory against other religions and their communities. While it has some historical precedents, this is more of a modern phenomenon. It\u2019s mainly a feature of how a Buddhist revival that took place as a backlash against British rule in the late 19th century, went from being culturally expressive to politically expressive. As it acquired more of a political patina, especially with independence, it became wound up with a Sinhala Buddhist political agenda, largely directed against \u2018others\u2019. The others started off being elite Christians, and then became Tamils and now, more recently, especially with the Easter Sunday bombings in 2019, it\u2019s Muslims. It\u2019s all incredibly complicated but it\u2019s not something that started the day before yesterday.<\/span><\/p>\n

Let\u2019s go back in time, then, to the 17th century and a book by Robert Knox, who was a prisoner in Sri Lanka. It\u2019s called\u00a0An Historical Relation of the Island Ceylon\u00a0<\/em>and it was published in 1681, when it caused quite a sensation. Tell me about that book, and why you\u2019ve chosen it as a good one to read on Sri Lanka.<\/span><\/p>\n

I think Robert Knox has a good claim to be the most important foreigner who lived in Sri Lanka in its recorded history because of this book. It\u2019s still very readable and captures very vividly the politics, culture, and landscapes of the Kandyan kingdom in the central highlands of Sri Lanka in the middle of the 17th century. Knox was in captivity there for 19 years and the book is all the more remarkable because he wrote the first version in one go on the ship back from Batavia (what is now Jakarta) to London, completely from memory, because in captivity he never had access to pen and paper. A lot of accounts of that period, and in the centuries afterwards, were either made up or plagiarized or both. In his case, most of it has been corroborated by historical research. It\u2019s fairly accurate, and indeed was used as a key reference by colonialists who had their eye on Ceylon in the 18th century, especially the British.<\/span><\/p>\n

The author himself is absolutely fascinating. He led as varied a life as one could imagine. He took to sea early. He was on his father\u2019s trading ship, the\u00a0Anne<\/em>, on its way to Fort St. George in Madras (occupied by the British at the time) when it lost its mast somewhere off the east coast of Ceylon and ran aground. He and his shipmates were captured by soldiers of the Kingdom of Kandy and taken inland to the hill capital and held captive there. His father died after the first year, and many of his other shipmates succumbed to drink and malaria. A few of them made it back to the mother country eventually.<\/span><\/p>\n

For Knox, acquiring a copy of a\u00a0King James Bible<\/a>\u00a0was top of the agenda. That was the only book he had: he read it and quotes from it assiduously. He says he took an oath of celibacy. He was relentlessly resourceful. He built his own houses, did market gardening and animal husbandry, knitted cloth caps, and walked around the kingdom as a pedlar. The reason he couldn\u2019t escape is because the Central Highlands have a ring of mountains around them, a natural frontier. In those days it was covered by jungle and wild animals and was without roads. All the while Knox was observing very keenly and plotting his escape, which he eventually managed in 1680, through the animal-infested jungle to Dutch controlled territory, and eventually he made his way back to London.<\/span><\/p>\n

The book became an instant bestseller. I think its wider legacy\u2014going beyond what it has to say about the Sri Lanka and the Kandyan kingdom of the time\u2014is that in all probability, Knox was the model for\u00a0Daniel Defoe<\/a>\u2018s\u00a0Robinson Crusoe<\/em>. The setting was somewhere else and the man who was stranded on a desert island was Alexander Selkirk. But we know that Defoe read that first edition of Knox\u2019s book and was highly taken by it. When it comes to the descriptions of the resourcefulness of Robinson Crusoe, that\u2019s Knox, not Alexander Selkirk.<\/span><\/p>\n

For me, of central interest is what Knox has to say about the Kandyan kingdom of the time\u2014and it\u2019s not just of historical interest. It resonates with what goes on in politics and culture in Sri Lanka today.<\/span><\/p>\n

In what way?<\/span><\/p>\n

I quote some of the relevant passages in my book. Knox refers to the king of the time, Rajasinghe II, as an absolute tyrant. He indulged in wanton cruelty, invented methods of torture and had absolutely no regard for people\u2019s human rights as we would nowadays call them. He threw people in jail at the drop of a hat, there was no real rule of law, and the justice administered by the nobility was for sale. Much of that rings true in Sri Lankan politics today.<\/span><\/p>\n

Kandyan society was highly caste-riven at the time. The king was the only person allowed to sit on a stool with a high back and only the nobility could sit on stools. Everybody else had to sit on the floor. Now, that\u2019s not how quite how things work in the Central Province of Sri Lanka today, where the hill capital of Kandy is located, but it\u2019s still probably the most conservative part of Sinhala Sri Lanka.<\/span><\/p>\n

Knox refers to the people worshipping a whole range of gods. They\u2019re idolaters and pagans, he says, and the Buddha but one great god in the pantheon. That hasn\u2019t changed very much. One thing that has changed is that Knox, with that observant eye of his, notices how the Kandyan king and the nobility and indeed ordinary people, are very tolerant of people of other religions. The king gave refuge to Muslims and Christians who fled persecution, first by the Portuguese, then by the Dutch. The last three kings of Kandy\u2014before the British conquered the place\u2014were actually Tamil Hindus from the south of India. They became ardent defenders of Sinhala Buddhism as that was their source of legitimacy, but they continued to import Hindu brides from South India who kept their religion. There were also Tamil merchants in the ancient pre-Kandyan kingdoms of Anuradhapura and Polonnaruwa, there Tamil was a court language because it was a trade language, and Brahmins officiated at court. During the Kandyan kingdom, there were waves of migration of artisans from what is now Kerala and Tamil Nadu who were Tamils and Hindus. So there was an incredible amount of religious tolerance and syncretism that took place along with everything else. That\u2019s a legacy of Sinhala Buddhism that\u2019s been erased from current thinking and indeed current historical memory.<\/span><\/p>\n

You mentioned the British. Let\u2019s go on to Sir Ivor Jennings\u2019s autobiography. He was sent by the British Empire to set up a university in Colombo and advised on the country\u2019s post-independence constitution. Fill me in on who he was and why we should read his autobiography.<\/span><\/p>\n

Not many people living today have heard of Ivor Jennings, either in Britain or in Sri Lanka, but I think he was probably the most important foreigner to have an influence on Sri Lanka in the 20th century, and his story is largely unsung. He came in 1941.<\/span><\/p>\n

Again, his is an interesting biography. He grew up fairly poor in a non-conformist family in Bristol. He was raised with those non-conformist virtues of hard work, thrift and self-improvement through education. He was a scholarship boy and ended up where I taught much later: he was a professor of constitutional law at a very young age at the LSE in the 1930s. Then he came to Ceylon, which was the making of him. Over the course of almost 15 years, not only did he turn the University College of Ceylon\u2014what he called a \u201cGovernment cram-shop\u201d\u2014into one of the finest universities in Asia, but he also published prolifically on the law, politics and the economy of Ceylon. He was a leading player politically in the runup to independence because he effectively wrote Ceylon\u2019s first constitution, which is known as the Soulbury Constitution. It\u2019s named after the commission that was set up to turn Ceylon from a colony into a dominion, but it should be called the Jennings Constitution because it\u2019s his draft with minor amendments that became the constitution of Ceylon for the first 24 years after independence. So, Jennings is important for all those reasons.<\/span><\/p>\n

The book is called\u00a0The Road to Peradeniya.<\/em>\u00a0Now, for tourists who have been to Sri Lanka, Peradeniya will ring a bell because it\u2019s on the tourist trail. The Royal Botanical Gardens are sited at Peradeniya, which is about 10 miles from the hill capital of Kandy. Lord Mountbatten had his headquarters for South East Asia Command there during the Second World War. But, for me, Peradeniya is its university campus, which has a wonderful setting. I\u2019ve seen many university campuses and I can hardly think of one to rival Peradeniya for its sheer loveliness. Ivor Jennings laid the groundwork for it in the early 1940s, in wartime, in the Meda Oya valley with the Hantane ridge of hills in the distance. He wrote 200 pages of delegated legislation to make sure it came to life after the war and he was its first vice-chancellor.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s a heaven-and-hell country, engulfed and consumed by its own extremes\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

The Road to Peradeniya<\/em>\u00a0is his memoir of his upbringing and career before he came to Ceylon, and then of his time in Ceylon until the early 1950s. He wrote it intending to raise funds for a new art gallery for the university, but it languished in his archive. His last official position was as vice-chancellor of the University of Cambridge, and he died in 1965. This memoir was discovered gathering dust in his archive and published in the mid-1990s, by a former librarian of Peradeniya University, the university Ivor Jennings founded.<\/span><\/p>\n

The book is of interest, for me, for several reasons. It gives us a sense of where Ivor Jennings came from and what made him tick. Now he was clearly a rather dour workaholic. He had many Knox-like characteristics. He believed in the virtue of hard work, of resourcefulness. Most Ceylonese exasperated him because they were too laid back. He was self-made, while the elite he interacted with came from gilded families: they didn\u2019t need to work for a living. When they retired for their gins and tonics come five or six o\u2019clock in the evening, he would repair to his study to do his writing.<\/span><\/p>\n

The book\u2019s tone is razor-sharp, the sentences are short and simple. It\u2019s quite unlike most South Asian writing, especially literary writing, which is luxuriant, with these very long meandering sentences full of big words. His style is quite the opposite. It\u2019s plain, and often dripping with condescension and sometimes rather cruel mockery of the people he has to deal with.<\/span><\/p>\n

He\u2019s especially scathing of the political class, though he makes two exceptions: for Oliver Goonetilleke who became the Governor-General of Ceylon, and for Ceylon\u2019s founding father D. S. Senanayake, the country\u2019s first prime minister, for whom he wrote that constitution I told you about. But as for the rest\u2014a phrase which sticks in my mind\u2014he calls them \u201cthe Bloomsbury Boys of Cinnamon Gardens\u201d. \u00a0Cinnamon Gardens is the Chelsea or Mayfair of Colombo, where the beautiful people live, people who never had to work for a living, who inherited their houses and estates as well as the leadership of Ceylon in the run-up to independence and afterwards. He has a very low view of most of them, as well as of the undergraduate politicians he met in student union politics when he was vice-chancellor. He thought the British taught them to be capable talkers in English. They parroted cliches and slogans. They had a sense of entitlement. They took themselves very seriously. Their egos were bloated and their language bloviated, but they were incapable of\u2014these are my words, not his\u2014organizing a piss up in a brewery. He thought them rather venal characters who had a lot of potential for bribery and nepotism. And he thought they might ruin Ceylon, as it then was, in its post-independence years.<\/span><\/p>\n

He was writing this in the early 1950s, when there was so much complacency about Ceylon. The experts at the time predicted a golden future for Ceylon, as they did for Burma and the Philippines\u2014but not for places like South Korea or Singapore.<\/span><\/p>\n

That was very striking in your book, how peaceful it was in those years after independence. Everything looked like it was on track, but then it went horribly wrong.<\/span><\/p>\n

I think it started to go horribly wrong soon after Jennings left in 1955. There was a crucial election in 1956 when the leading politician of the time, S.W.R.D. Bandaranaike\u2014who was subsequently assassinated by a Buddhist monk\u2014played the language card, Sinhala First, \u2018Sinhala Only\u2019 as he called it. Then Sinhala became the exclusive official national language at the expense of Tamil and English. Arguably, Ceylon, later Sri Lanka, went downhill from there.<\/span><\/p>\n

What\u2019s striking is Jennings\u2019s sense of foreboding, even when he was writing in those peaceful times. He thought that maybe there was something unpleasant lurking around the corner, though not his own constitution. He was too complacent about that, even though the safeguards for minorities were pretty weak. His constitution relied very much on the right people running Sri Lanka, but that didn\u2019t last. The political class did ruin Ceylon, later Sri Lanka, with the help of Buddhist monks and many other contributory factors besides.<\/span><\/p>\n

In terms of what he says in the book, the only thing I would change in updating it, almost 70 years on, is that when he was thinking of the political class of his time, it was dominated by what the contemporary journalist Tarzie Vittachi called \u2018the brown sahib\u2019. These were very anglicized, rather deracinated members of the local elite, whose mother tongue was English. They went to Oxford and Cambridge and spoke Sinhalese to the lower orders, starting with their servants, as well as to their constituents, but not among each other. That gave way, gradually by the 1980s, to what I call the \u2018Sinhala Big Man\u2019 in my book. So the political elite of Sri Lanka today is dominated by Big Men who largely come from outside Colombo, as is the case with the present Rajapaksa dynasty that rules Sri Lanka. Their mother tongue is Sinhala and their English isn\u2019t that good. They\u2019re much more populist. They have more of a connection with the small-town bourgeoisie. But in terms of their dictatorial instincts, their corruption, their nepotism, that\u2019s all there in\u00a0The Road to Peradeniya.<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

Let\u2019s talk about\u00a0When Memory Dies<\/em>\u00a0next, which I believe is your favourite\u00a0political novel<\/a>\u00a0about Sri Lanka.<\/span><\/p>\n

It\u2019s a political historical novel, and covers three generations of Tamils: a grandfather, father and son. It spans almost the entire 20th century, from about the year 1900 to the outbreak of the Civil War in 1983. Its protagonists are very much wound up with the turbulent politics and racial divides of first pre-independence Ceylon and then later independent Ceylon and Sri Lanka.<\/span><\/p>\n

The author, Ambalavaner Sivanandan, is Tamil and there are autobiographical traces in the novel. Like his alter ego, whose name is Rajan in the book, his ancestral village is a little village in the Jaffna Peninsula. He goes to Colombo\u2019s leading Catholic school as a scholarship boy. He emigrates to the UK after the 1958 race riots, never to return. Sivanandan, in his later British incarnation, was the head of the Institute of Race Relations. He edited a journal called\u00a0Race and Class<\/em>\u00a0which was the leading journal on racism and imperialism. His politics were left-wing, and there is a strong left-wing slant to the novel. Its characters seem to be carried along willy-nilly by these wider forces of class and race iniquities and inequalities.<\/span><\/p>\n

The story I find gripping, there are many passages that are electrically charged. That includes a really overpowering scene which takes place during the 1958 racial troubles between the Sinhalese and Tamils. Rajan\u2019s wife is raped and mutilated before his eyes, and she subsequently dies. That prompts a nervous breakdown and his emigration to the UK, never to return to Ceylon.<\/span><\/p>\n

But it\u2019s also a very lyrical book in many parts. I took a long passage from it for the epigraph of the hill country chapter in my book because it describes a man standing at the edge of a lawn of a tea estate bungalow, watching the sun rising out of the mountain mist, and casting its shadows over the teascapes. It\u2019s those early mornings in the hill country that I particularly savor, that I always look forward to on my trips. I have never seen it described or evoked so lyrically. So all that is wound into the book alongside the politics and the racial and ethnic divides.<\/span><\/p>\n

Let\u2019s go on to the last book you\u2019ve chosen on Sri Lanka,\u00a0Running in the Family<\/em>\u00a0by Michael Ondaatje.<\/span><\/p>\n

I suppose I\u2019ve suggested it as the last book of the five for a couple of reasons. Firstly, it\u2019s a thinly fictionalized novella. It\u2019s quite a short, light read. You can read it in an afternoon or evening if you\u2019re a fast reader (I\u2019m not, I\u2019m a very slow reader). Its tone is light, often hilarious, sometimes bittersweet. It evokes the generation of Michael Ondaatje\u2019s parents and grandparents, particularly in the 1920s and 30s.<\/span><\/p>\n

Most people think of Michael Ondaatje as a world-famous Canadian novelist who won the Booker Prize for\u00a0The English Patient<\/em>,<\/a>\u00a0which became an Oscar-winning film. He made his reputation first as a distinguished poet. Most of his writing has little to do with Sri Lanka, at least directly. But he was born and spent the first ten years of his life in old Ceylon. He left in the early 1950s. He\u2019s of mixed minority parentage. Ondaatje is not actually a Dutch name, but a Chetty one. The Chetties are a caste of Indian moneylenders from South India, who came over from Chettinad under the British in the 19th century. That\u2019s his father\u2019s side. On his mother\u2019s side he is a Dutch Burgher. The Burghers are the mixed-race descendants of first the Portuguese and then the Dutch. His mother came from a prominent Dutch Burgher family.<\/span><\/p>\n

The Dutch Burghers, particularly the elite, did very well under the British and became very anglicized. English was their mother tongue and their cultural reference points were very much Old England. Many elite \u00a0Burgher families had big tea or rubber or coconut estates. Michael Ondaatje\u2019s grandparents and parents had this gilded upbringing, but a lot of this novella is about the squandering of family fortunes in a very carefree manner, hilarious along the way. It\u2019s rather like the bright young things in Anthony Powell\u2019s\u00a0A Dance to the Music of Time<\/em>. But there\u2019s a twist to this tale because, of course, these tales never have a happy ending. Most of the characters ended up destitute. The males generally ended up as alcoholics, as did Michael\u2019s father. That led to divorce and his mother had to take on menial jobs when she emigrated to the UK in order to put Michael and his elder brother Christopher through school. The brothers then emigrated to Canada. There\u2019s a favorite ditty in\u00a0Running in the Family<\/em>\u00a0that I reproduce in my book because it reminds me of some sweet drunks I came across in my childhood, who were also squandering family fortunes. Thankfully, I never saw how they behaved behind closed doors with their own families. A lot of those stories were very nasty, but what I saw in my father\u2019s clubs were these well-off men drinking themselves slowly to death, and singing the odd ditty, rather like Michael Ondaatje\u2019s father, who had his own take on\u00a0My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean.\u00a0<\/em>It goes like this:<\/span><\/p>\n

My whiskey comes over the ocean<\/span><\/p>\n

My brandy comes over the sea<\/span><\/p>\n

But my beer comes from F.X. Pereira<\/span><\/p>\n

So F.X. Pereira for me.<\/span><\/p>\n

F.X.\u2026 F.X.\u2026<\/span><\/p>\n

F.X. Pereira for me, for me.\u2026<\/span><\/p>\n

That kind of tone was very much part of my growing up in the 1970s, not with my own father, but with many of his friends and acquaintances. Reading that passage in\u00a0Running in the Family<\/em>\u00a0reminded me of it. You can picture young Michael\u2019s father sitting in a lounger on a very spacious estate bungalow veranda with a drink.<\/span><\/p>\n

You\u2019re quite similar to him, in a way, in terms of your relationship with Sri Lanka?<\/span><\/p>\n

I suppose I left the country at a slightly older age than he did and my reconnection with Sri Lanka has, I think, been more in-depth and prolonged. At least until the pandemic struck, he did go back once every few years. I think he has a sister still living in Sri Lanka, but his actual connection with the country has been more distant for a long time, whereas for me, it\u2019s come back to the center: it\u2019s part of my foreground and a preoccupation.<\/span><\/p>\n

Yes, because your day job is as an economist, and weren\u2019t you an adviser to the Sri Lankan finance minister?<\/span><\/p>\n

I did that for about three years, not under the present government, but under its predecessor. I had a ringside seat because I was an advisor to the Prime Minister and to the Minister of Finance. It\u2019s the closest I\u2019ve ever been to the coalface of real-world politics, having been a student and teacher of politics and economics for quite a while. It was a dispiriting experience, I have to say. It showed me how dysfunctional Sri Lankan politics is and how far beyond repair the political class is. But that\u2019s it: my involvement is in the past tense. I haven\u2019t been for almost two years because of the pandemic, but when I do go back to Sri Lanka, it will be simply as a citizen, as a traveller, as an observer.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The best books on Sri Lanka-by Razeen Sally Source:Fivebooks Many visitors to Sri Lanka have been beguiled by its charms, from its hill towns to its beaches, its ancient temples to its friendly people. And yet, for a quarter of a century until 2009, it was torn apart by a brutal civil war. Here, Sri […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":83350,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"aside","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[40730],"class_list":{"0":"post-83349","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-aside","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-articles","8":"tag-the-best-books-on-sri-lanka","9":"post_format-post-format-aside"},"yoast_head":"\nThe best books on Sri Lanka-by Razeen Sally<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Many visitors to Sri Lanka have been beguiled by its charms, from its hill towns to its beaches, its ancient temples to its friendly people.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"noindex, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The best books on Sri Lanka-by Razeen 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