When Memory Dies

"It’s 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. 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’s 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 Race and Class which 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. 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’s 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. But it’s 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’s 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."