Category: From the Archive

I was in a trishaw recently trying out my discussion topic of the month — social violence — when the driver suddenly launched into a passionate tirade that the reason for all the violence within our society was that “our” (i.e. Sinhala) women were no longer committed (kapaweemak athuva) towards working for the development of… Continue reading The Moral Mother Syndrome – Malathi de Alwis

Novels like all other texts take sides. Literary orthodoxy may hold, still, that fiction must be read and evaluated on purely aesthetic grounds. But leftist literary criticism has always emphasised—and at its best demonstrated—the political consequences of fictions; it reinforces certain constructions of the social (what more colloquially would be called a worldview); such constructions… Continue reading A Flippant Gesture Towards Sri Lanka: A Review of Michael Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost – Qadri Ismail