Photo courtesy of Capital Gardens
The Asian Literary Society (ALS) facilitated a forum at the National Library in Colombo where the convenors invited a range of academics, scholars, journalists and creative writers to discuss a timely and relevant topic: “How far do we adhere to our roots? Exploring literature, language and cultural heritage of Sri Lanka”.
ALS is a platform established in 2017 to celebrate and support Asian literary arts and indigenous languages. It operates in the international digital sphere and in the last year has organised physical events in several Asian countries to celebrate the literature of each country. The event held in Colombo was the ALS Caravan 2025 Forum and comprised a panel discussion, poetry readings and the awarding of prizes in the ALS poetry contest for poems in Sinhala, English and Tamil.
ALS has members in over 100 countries and almost 25,000 active followers on Facebook, encouraging members to share articles, poems and short stories that are relevant to Asian art, literature and culture. The community ALS is creating is inclusive, intergenerational and diverse. Young and emerging writers are welcomed to participate and engage with the work of established authors and teachers and this forum facilitates mentoring, which is a vital component of building literary culture.
The chief guest at the Colombo event was Dr. Rajiva Wijesinha, writer and former MP. Other speakers included Professor Ankuran Dutta from the High Commission of India, Mr. W. Sunil, Director General of the National Library and Documentation Services Board, Dr. Bina Gandhi Deputy Director of the SAARC Cultural Centre, Dr. Ratna Sri Wijesinghe Chairman of the National Library and Document Services Board and Professor Emeritus of Peradeniya University Walter Perera.
The focus of the panel at the event was a discussion about adhering to our roots as writers. This is a topic of interest for Sri Lankan writers who are born into diverse ethnic and religious communities, and who now also comprise writers who have emigrated to other countries, who have studied, worked and lived in Australia, the US, Canada and the UK among other countries, and who identify as part of the diaspora Sri Lankan community.
Dr. Vivimarie Vanderpoorten, Senior Lecturer in English and Linguistics at the Open University, commenced discussion by pointing out that cultural identity these days is a fluid concept. It is not solely determined by where you are born or grow up. We all have unique relationships to the nation and of Sri Lanka, its history and culture and its society determined by our own personal and familial experience of the country in the timeline of its formative events.
Shankari Chandran, for example, born in the UK, identifies herself as a Tamil Australian author on her website. She was educated in Australia and lives and works in Australia and was recently awarded Australia’s Miles Franklin Literary Prize. She has been open in interviews about her complex relationship with both Australia and her Tamil family’s experience of Sri Lanka. The subject matter of her books contains references to both countries and the lived experiences of generations of her family in both cultures.
Michael Ondaatje, in Anil’s Ghost, was criticised for writing a book set in Sri Lanka and dealing with its recent history at the time of publication, when he had emigrated to Canada decades before. It seemed to matter a great deal to local authors that anyone writing about contemporary Sri Lanka should be physically domiciled here and have viscerally lived through the events they portray in their fiction. If they had not suffered, as part of the country, they should not speak about it.
Some commenters went so far in the social media discussions that have had such a strong impact on literary culture in Sri Lanka as to suggest that anyone who had chosen to emigrate to another country should not write about the country they had left behind, as if their roots were severed, or should be severed, as a sort of penalty for their choice to live and work elsewhere. Even within Sri Lanka, if a writer living in Colombo had not gone out into the field and lived in the war zones, lost family members or been directly affected by the tsunami, could their fictional narratives of the recent war or the natural disaster of 2004 really be taken seriously? Research is part of the answer to that rhetorical question but surely the other part is imaginative empathy, essential to the creation of any truly great literature.
Whether diaspora writers have a right to stand up and be counted as Sri Lankan writers is a contentious subject as the reasons for the mass exodus of Sri Lankans from the country over the past few decades have been socio-economic and the inevitable consequence of war, austerity, economic frustration and diminishing productivity, and those who had the opportunity to go abroad and study and work abroad were usually the more likely to be English educated. In fact, many countries demand English proficiency as part of their immigration admission criteria into the country.
The spectre of the post-independence Sinhala Only legislation of the late 1950s hovered over us as we discussed the diversities of words and breadth of meaning in the Sinhala language as illustrated by Dr. Dhammika Jayasinghe and Dr. Ramola Rassool. Dr. Kamala Wijeratne, having explored the complexities of the Russian Doll layered identities of race, religion, region and caste built into our very names, referred to the well known children’s song “Me Gahe Boho”, which many of us from all communities had heard sung in our childhood.
The cultural focus on the Sinhala language that is evident in Sri Lanka makes sense politically in its context in the need to cultivate national pride, post-independence but in 2025 it is clear that short-sightedly relegating English and Tamil to secondary status for the last 70 years has resulted in the talents and creative skills of many local writers being restricted in their impact to the borders of Sri Lanka. Not being taught English language or literature at an excellent level from a young age in Sri Lanka has limited many writers in their 20s, 30s and 40s and above from reaching an international audience. This is a loss to the international literary community, not just the writers themselves. And an inevitable result is the hostility directed towards the English speaking elite, who are always perceived as differentially and unfairly advantaged.
The rise of the internet and the digital proficiency of the millennial generation since the early 2000s has to a great extent opened the borders of the imagination for readers and writers in contemporary Sri Lanka, who have access to computers and international English language and literature forums discussions via digital media. Poets, short story writers, essayists and novelists are now not limited to entering the literary competitions available in Sri Lanka. Many international journals accept incoming contributions from all over the world and so it is possible to be published widely in English speaking countries as a local Sri Lankan author.
Reconciliation after civil war and socio-political disruption is an ongoing process and it is evident that many writers have been contending with unwanted challenges in recent years. For my part, as an outsider coming into the country nine years ago, I was struck by the number of excellent women writers in Sri Lanka and also by the way many of them had been unfortunately subjected to misogynistic stereotypes and verbal harassment after winning some of the few awards that were available to writers in this country.
Articulate and expressive women in South Asia are intersectionally discriminated against both because of their gender and their race. By writing their stories and articulating their narratives, they assert their right to occupy cultural space and this seemed to be resented by many men who saw themselves as disrespected and threatened and potentially excluded from the echelons they so wished to enter and in which they sought acclaim.
It was clear that there was then, circa 2015, no objective reviewing culture in the literary sphere in Sri Lanka and that the reviews of people’s work that were offered on social media were often biased and based on personal viewpoints that would be considered inappropriate in both content and mode of expression, in other countries. Unfortunately, as it was in other spheres of this country, unacceptable and damaging conduct in the literary sphere had become normalised in the Sri Lanka of those times.
Certain people were even apparently designated attack worthy and women writers in particular were critiqued not for the quality of their work but for their appearance and their clothing and even the elitist locales of their homes. These sneering attacks reached up to 20,000 followers on social media and inevitably influenced the ideas of many impressionable writers in the country. Several writers stopped writing creatively after they were subjected to this sort of barrage and our literary culture is poorer for the loss of their voices.
It is easy for perpetrators of such denigratory behaviour to claim that they never intended their blogs or their FB posts or comments to be taken so seriously, yet that is how careers are built in the contemporary era, through approval ratings measured in sensationalist content, digital likes and follows. The older generation, operating in the sphere of print papers, formality, self-restraint and old school courtesy, had no idea of the impact and influence that could be wielded by proponents of social media in the literary sphere. Wielded carelessly or intentionally to cause harm, their unfiltered and often wilfully inflammatory commentary could cause lasting reputational damage.
The late Anne Ranasinghe the poet had been attacked a decade ago when this low point in the culture was prevalent, in a “review”of her work, where she had been accused of elitism and classism in some of her poetic works set for the local English syllabus. Looking at this and other critiques of that kind today, they seem to have been an attempt on the part of the authors to clear space in the syllabus, and the literary culture as a whole, for local Sinhalese authors by excluding people like Anne Ranasinghe, who was of European origin, although marrying and living her entire adult life in Sri Lanka.
Her socio economic status of relative privilege as the wife of a doctor also seemed to influence the writer of that review against her. It is easy, but also lazy, to claim that a person who is economically secure must also be blinded by their privilege, entitled and indifferent to human suffering and to then view their writing through that lens of self-justifying moral contempt. Anne Ranasinghe, then in her eighties, threatened to sue the paper in which the review was published for defamation and reputational damage. To have your poetic works misunderstood and written about as being damaging to the culture and having an author suggesting that they should be removed from the national syllabus is surely an example of the impact of this kind of so called literary criticism. Under the aegis of free speech, some people felt empowered and free to express such opinions in the DemocraticSocialist Republic of Sri Lanka on social media, which seemed so informal, so ephemeral but was, in fact, so impactful.
A truly vibrant Sri Lankan literary culture cannot be built on the indulgence of personal bias and perceived grievance and self-serving, narrow definitions of race, gender, religion and class. People like Anne Ranasinghe who write in English because it is their primary language seem to have often been looked at askance by local writers, who feel that they themselves are disadvantaged or disrespected in comparison, this grievance clearly being a residue, inevitable and pernicious, of the vicious colonialism to which the country was subjected.
The impact of identity politics operating to exclude or marginalise diaspora writers who have achieved public recognition encompasses writers as diverse as Nayomi Munaweera and Michelle de Kretser, both highly awarded internationally but the one often criticised for her “exoticism” and the floridity of her fiction, and the other relatively little recognised or written about in Sri Lanka.
It is evident that we are short changing ourselves as a literary culture if we continue to narrow rather than expand our definitions of what we term Sri Lankan. To expand the metaphor of roots, we could say that sometimes unsightly or unwanted emergence of elements that are part of the growth process must at times be cut back to promote healthier flourishing at the root level and good future growth and longevity.
On a personal note, I gather from engaging with people from diverse communities here that issues based on the facts of their birth into whatever physical form and social context into which they were born profoundly shape their world view. The daily life of many people involves dealing with acts of random hostility and aggression and derogatory accusations levelled at them and they are therefore quite likely to misunderstand and misinterpret others.
I find Sri Lanka to be a vantage point from which I can process the bicultural life I’m now living. For the first time in my life since I was a very young girl I am in a country where the majority of people look like me. The roots I have started to uncover are racial, ethnic, reconnecting with extended family, culinary and artistic and creative – responding to a hugely contrasting tropical landscape and the complex history of the country with its multiple strands and threads.
We grew up in Australia eating Sri Lankan food, reading traditional folk tales and the Buddhist scriptures, listening to baila music and going to the temple. The rhythms of Sri Lankan music, the ornate jewellery and the lively conversations I have always loved and the bright colours and the atmosphere of chaos, overwhelming at first, is like a vibrant cacophony and a mystic kaleidoscope. But I lost the Sinhala language. I can’t read it or write it. I’m learning Sinhala and Tamil only now. The written scripts are beautiful to my eye and I am slowly understanding the rhythms and idioms used in daily life. I am impatient with my ignorance. I want to fill the gaps in my knowledge. It was my loss.
When we were children, the chicken curry our fellow expatriates made for the Sunday lunch in Sydney was too chilli hot for me. Now I have a bowl of green chillis next to my plate for my meals. I appreciate the less processed food here. The fresh vegetables and fruits in profusion. It’s healthier. I haven’t watched television since I left Australia. Real life produces enough drama!
I feel that it would benefit Sri Lanka to be more inclusive in its appreciation of what constitutes Sri Lankan literature.
Many diaspora writers are not regarded as having a right to write about Sri Lankan topics or themes if they emigrated to other countries years ago as punishment for being able to make a choice to live a life of greater opportunity. Their lesser recognition in their country of origin is an opportunity cost. But it’s a collective loss.
Some are seen as “exoticising” Sri Lankan to suit a Western audience or catering to Western stereotypes because they write in English and live in the “First World”. Some are even seen as appropriating their own culture, focusing on aspects that will appeal to Western sensibilities, marketing their root culture for profit, skewing their history, parading stereotypes and exoticising their own personae.
I argue that a more inclusive, compassionate and less threatened and defensive approach to diaspora writers would be helpful in appreciating the complex journeys of immigration and cultural dislocation that Sri Lankan writers undergo in the globalised world of today. These disruptions produce a wealth of experience that are the source of rich content for writers of poetry and fiction.
If we collectively revision the way we view each other, as all being creative entities operating variously in a broad and diverse framework, we need not experience a breach in which otherisation and hostility can operate but instead create expansion, breadth and greater depth in Sri Lanka’s literary landscape.