Koyamparambath Satchidanandans column in the #Frontline focuses on a book of #SriLankan #Tamil #shortstories. ...stories which are not “great” can be interesting for other reasons, too. One of the many assignments I had during my recent Sri Lanka visit was the release of such a book of Sri Lankan Tamil short stories in a highly readable English translation by S. Pathmanathan, popularly known as “#Sopa”. The 12 stories in the collection (Tamil Short Stories from Sri Lanka, S. Godage & Brothers, #Colombo, 2013), though translated at different times for different journals and anthologies, together provide the reader a glimpse into the diversity of the patterns of Tamil life on the island country, while #ChelvaKanaganayakam’s informed introduction locates the collection in the modern narrative traditions of Sri Lanka. The attraction of these stories, which are not necessarily “great” in the aesthetic sense, is the way they narrate Tamil life in Sri Lanka. Admittedly poetry, which has deeper roots in the literary tradition, has been more popular as a genre in recent Sri Lankan Tamil literature than short fiction and has perhaps better reflected the social turmoil and political violence in the country since the 1970s. This column had earlier contextualised and dealt with the traumatic poetry in Tamil occasioned by the Eelam movement and its aftermath. But parallely, short story, too, has been reinventing itself and finding its own niche. As a genre, it has a history of nine decades in Sri Lanka, but it has gained real significance in literary terms only since the 1960s. Until recently, the short story remained conventional in form as well as substance, realist but without actually confronting the specificities of ethnic and political conflict. Tamil short story in Sri Lanka is not yet entirely free from the hangovers of that conventional past, and its chief mode continues to be premodern naturalism, unlike in most Indian languages, including Tamil where diverse kinds of experimentation —intertextuality, radical rereadings of myths and legends, use of unconventional structures and narrative modes and voices, symbolic, allegorical, surrealist/magical representations of reality, metanarrative mode—have kept the form fresh and vibrant. To quote the introduction, “We see in them the residual influence of a previous generation of writers whose impulse was more spatial than temporal. They were not unaware of social or cultural issues, and in fact often drew attention to them, but their strength lay in framing the ordinary within a vision of consolidation. Writers were often sensitive to systemic forms of oppression, but in many instances, the experience of otherness was subsumed in a world view that was cohesive and benign.” While some of the stories in the present collection, as also in Bridging Connections (edited by Rajiva Wijesinha, National Book Trust, Delhi, 2006), do reflect the trend, many of the stories have gone ahead to capture the estrangement and the dilemma of the Tamil ethnic-religious-linguistic minority in a country dominated by Sinhala-speaking Buddhists. frontline.in/columns/K_Satchidanandan/sri-lankan-stories/article6144647.ece
Posted on: Fri, 27 Jun 2014 03:36:20 +0000