Posts Categorized: Book Reviews

by V. Suryanarayan, ‘The Book Review India,’ March 2016 CLASS, PATRIARCHY AND ETHNICITY ON SRI LANKAN PLANTATIONS: TWO CENTURIES OF POWER AND PROTEST By Kumari Jayawardena  and Rachel Kurian Orient BlackSwan, Hyderabad, 2015, pp. 364, Rs. 825.00 VOLUME XL NUMBER 3 March 2016 The book traces two centuries old history of plantations in Sri Lanka… Read more »

By PK Balachandran, ‘The Indian Express,’ August 13, 2016 COLOMBO: Rathika Pathmanathan, a former combatant of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), urges fellow Sri Lankans divided by a 30 year ethnic conflict, to stop “accusing and punishing each other, and begin addressing the root causes of the conflict” so that Sinhalese and Tamils… Read more »

by Jane Sullivan, ‘Sydney Morning Herald, July 9, 2016 Rajith Savanadasa had written a few drafts of his first novel, and it wasn’t working. It was supposed to be a big novel about a Sri Lankan family that also commented on the country, culture and politics and the civil war that had raged for 25 years… Read more »

by Hugh White, ‘The Lowy Interpreter, Sydney, Australia, July 4, 2016 To read Kurt Campbell’s reply to this review, see below or click here. As Assistant Secretary of State for Asia in Barack Obama’s first term, Kurt Campbell has a respectable claim to being the principal architect of the president’s Pivot to Asia. Not surprisingly, then,… Read more »

by N. Kalyan Raman, ‘The Hindu,’ Chennai, May 21, 2016 (Oru Kuurvaalin Nizhalil was published by Kalachuvadu Publications in February 2016.) The first true-life story to emerge from Sri Lanka, the memoir of former LTTE functionary Tamizhini lays bare not just the horrors of war but the tragic moral decline that accompanies it The anti-colonial… Read more »

by Sanjana Hattotuwa, ‘The Sunday Island,’ May 22, 2016 “I didn’t want to die so I had to live. I wanted to live. I wanted to leave” — Commodore Ajith Boyagoda as told to Sunila Galappatti A Long Watch: War, Captivity and Return in Sri Lanka is an unusual book for an avid reader on Sri… Read more »

by Mini Krishnan, ‘The Hindu,’ Chennai, May 12, 2016  Lakshmi Holmstrom entered not only the literary texts she selected for translation, but the cultural establishments that produced them A powerful translatorial voice has fallen silent. Once in a long while, we encounter a writer who really changed the literary landscape he or she inhabited. While… Read more »

Edited by Kannan Muthukrishnan, Rebecca Whittington, D. Senthil Babu & David C. Buck Paperback: 304 pages Publisher: Penguin Books India (1 December 2014) Language: English ISBN-10: 0143423045 ISBN-13: 978-0143423041 Kannan Muthukrishnan (b. 1968) heads the Programme on Contemporary Tamil Culture, Department of Indology, French Institute of Pondicherry. Rebecca Whittington (b. 1987) is a PhD student… Read more »

Edited by Shyam Selvadurai, May 2014 Paperback Publisher: Penguin Books Limited (India) Language: English ISBN-10: 0143423037 ISBN-13: 978-0143423034 About the book Shyam Selvadurai pieces together the best of Sri Lankan poetry and fiction in this anthology. From the Sinhala and Tamil writers of the 1950s to diasporic writers of today, from stories of love and… Read more »

Two books by Nagaratnam Parameswaran are now available on Kindle via Amazon. Modern Tamils and Tamil National Question: Sri Lanka/Ilankai 1798-2012 This book is the third and final in the series on the history of the Sri Lankan Tamils. As its title states, it covers the modern period of British rule of the island (1796… Read more »

Hundred Hindu Temples of Sri Lanka: Ancient, Medieval and Modern by Sanmugam Arumugam, 2014 Ohm Books, UK http://www.ohmbooks.co.uk/hundred-hindu-temples-of-sri-lanka.html http://www.amazon.com/Hundred-Hindu-Temples-Sri-Lanka/dp/0957502346/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1458141145&sr=8-1&keywords=Sanmugam+arumugam ISBN-10: 0957502346 ISBN-13: 978-0957502345 ASIN: B00M60XIA6 (Kindle)  In 1980, Sanmugam Arumugam (1905 – 2000) wrote a book titled ‘Ancient Hindu Temples of Sri Lanka’. There was a good demand for the book and a second revised… Read more »

Listen to the interview at https://www.wnyc.org/story/look-complex-history-sri-lanka/ The South Asian island nation of Sri Lanka has been colonized by three different empires and has endured brutal civil war and political instability. In Elephant Complex: Travels in Sri Lanka, travel writer John Gimlette illustrates how Sri Lankans have preserved their cultural identity, and how incredible wildlife and natural beauty have withstood centuries… Read more »

Book review by Merlin Linehan, London School of Economics, September 16, 2014 The need to negotiate effectively with India is only growing as its power rises, and in the literature on international negotiation experimental studies point to specific behavioural characteristics of Indian negotiators. This book focuses on India’s negotiating traditions through the lens of the classical… Read more »

As such, Santhan strives to – and succeeds in – capturing a “local resonance” and a “response of the soil” to the political and social alienation of which both Northern and Southern Tamils were victims. Santhan’s Rails Run Parallel is a rare moment of unambitious honesty in a story teller trying to represent the above: a far cry from those who make writing stories out of the Lankan Civil war a livelihood and the means of a quick buck.

Samanth Subramanian’s forensic account of the 26-year Sri Lankan war is a remarkable book by one of India’s most talented writers of non-fiction