‘I have always been cautious’: Sri Lankan writer Shehan Karunatilaka | Books and Literature News,The Indian Express
The Booker Prize winner on the literary milieu that nurtured him, not taking freedom of speech lightly and his next novel
You mentioned in your acceptance speech that you could not set the novel anywhere but in 1989. Why is that so?
My initial idea or conceit was to make it a ghost story. If the silenced voices of Sri Lanka’s conflicts were allowed to speak and speak freely, what stories would they tell? When I was writing in 2010-2011, right after Chinaman: The Legend of Pradeep Mathew (2010, his debut novel), what was freshest in mind was 2009, the end of the war that we thought would go on forever. We knew they were huge civilian casualties, the numbers kept getting pushed around. There was no truth or reconciliation, not enough. That central thing they were arguing about was whose fault it was. And so, I thought a ghost story would be a neat way of exploring this. But I wasn’t comfortable because it was contemporary history, and, in South Asia, you are always wary about offending the wrong people. So, I went back. I could have gone to ’83 (when the war began), that would have been obvious, but that story has been well-documented and I felt that it wasn’t my story to tell. I was a Sinhala Buddhist male. I was the oppressor, I wasn’t the one who suffered great loss during that period. But, as a teenager, I remembered ’89. I wasn’t aware of much of the politics but I remember how uniquely messed up it was for Sri Lanka. We had the LTTE (Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam), the JVP (Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna, the Marxist-Leninist Communist Party in Sri Lanka), the Indian Peace Keeping Force on the ground. Within the framework of a typical murder mystery, I got to explore this period that I wasn’t that aware of at 14-15 (years of age). It’s only later that I read about it and found out that it was more absurd than I ever thought it was.
You spoke of your debt to Kurt Vonnegut, George Saunders, and Douglas Adams. Sri Lanka itself has a robust literary legacy. Did that influence you anyhow?
Growing up, there wasn’t a Sri Lankan section in the bookshop. We might have had a few Sri Lankan books written by some professors. But in the ’90s, that all changed and Michael Ondaatje deserves a lot of credit for that. He wrote Running in the Family (1982), which was a seminal book. Suddenly a book was talking about my street and my neighbourhood. Then Romesh Gunesekera was shortlisted for the Booker Prize for Reef (1995). But these are two expat Sri Lankan writers writing very elegant, crafted, beautiful prose, which, as a young writer you aspire to, but can never write like. Then there was Shyam Selvadurai, who published Funny Boy (1994), a quite groundbreaking gay coming-of-age story. But for me, Carl Muller was the guru. He was the first writer unlike the rest that I described, who wrote like Sri Lankans spoke, he told stories like us, and I borrowed very heavily for Chinaman the idea of a drunken uncle telling a story and the style that they would tell it in. It was quite liberating. We could write in our own voice and tell stories of ourselves, not like an outsider looking in and doing a forensic analysis on it.
Also, with Ondaatje winning the Booker, he donated his prize money to set up the Gratiaen Prize (Started in 1992, the annual prize recognises a work of outstanding literary merit in English by a Sri Lankan resident). It’s genre agnostic, and that was the goal for us. I wanted to write something that I could enter in the Gratiaen Prize (Chinaman won in 2008). That’s why there has been a lot of Sri Lankan writing in English. But, apart from the writers of the ’90s, certainly Kurt Vonnegut, George Saunders and Douglas Adams — you can see the commonality, they’re writing about quite serious topics, but they have that freewheeling tone, and it’s almost like a trick. They get you interested, and then you suddenly realise you have read a very grim subject.
Rating: 5