“New patriotism” in post-war Sri Lanka and the revival of the Walauva as a site of power in contemporary Sri Lankan English fiction

Imagining the walauva in an age of “new patriotism”

In the immediate post-civil war decade (2011–2021), the feudal grand house (the walauva) has re-emerged in Sri Lankan English fiction as a narrative epicentre, including in works such as Nayomi Munaweera’s What Lies Between Us (2016), Madhubhashini Disanayaka Ratnayake’s There is Something I Have to Tell You (2011), and Charulatha Thewarathanthri’s Stories (2016). As will be discussed in the course of the article, this revival of interest places an emerging generation of the country’s novelists adjacent to a narrative focus that has traditionally been central to Sri Lanka’s English writing — through the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. Often represented as a site of social and economic struggle manifested through class and/or caste friction, the walauva, in the mid-1990s, was pushed to the narrative margins as Sri Lanka’s long civil conflict — which was fought from 1983 to 2009 — dominated the imagination of the creative writing industry. Of the pre-1990 canon, Sri Lankan English writers’ response to the walauva, on the whole, was governed by a progressive critique that often questioned the feudal economy as an exploitative structure where a master class dominated and controlled its subordinates. Among the outstanding contributors to this body of literature in the four decades from the 1950s to the 1990s are fiction writers such as Punyakante Wijenaike, Raja Proctor and Chitra Fernando whose work represents the walauva as a site of inter-class friction, while poets such as Lakdas Wikkramasinha — in “Discarded Tins” and “The Death of Ashanti” — focused especially on the feudal exploitation of the poor classes. In “Discarded Tins”, Wikkramasinha encourages a revolutionary subversion of the class structure through violent uprising (Wikkramasinha, 1965: 48).

However, the first decade of post-civil war literature in Sri Lanka suggests a notable deviation from the “traditional response” by Sri Lankan English writers to the walauva through romanticized portrayals of feudal grand houses as sites of benevolent patriarchies that guarantee stability, security, and a strong sense of self and social cohesion. These writings often foreground a master class that shares with its servants a relationship of equal exchange. In this regard, the work of writers like Munaweera, Ratnayake and Thewarathanthri — widely circulated novels which, having won numerous awards, have come to be accepted as a part of Sri Lanka’s post-war literature vanguard — present instructive case studies. In their emergence, circulation, and reception, these works coincide with a political paradigm shift in post-civil war Sri Lanka — largely based on power centralization, majoritarian populism, and “golden age” sentimentalism — where a nationalist bloc has risen to dominate the country’s political consciousness through promises of economic and social sustainability by a benevolent soft authority whose outlook and principles reinforce the worldview of the feudal walauva of the past.

In Sri Lanka, the walauva has a grandeur-evoking resonance of pre-modern times and a sense of pre-colonial/colonial feudal heritage. The pre-European economy was arranged around the feudal system and its political allegiances which, in spite of modernity and social changes over 430 years of European domination (1521–1948), remain deeply etched in the hearts and minds of people. While the emerging bourgeois social and political elite during European colonial rule (especially in the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century) gave birth to a “new league” of walauvas — a branch upon which older, archaic walauva folk often looked down with disdain — and as power shifted to an emerging new bourgeois economic ownership, the walauva perpetuated its symbolic and physical significance as an emblem of civil authority. As a political space, it iconized social and economic leadership that translated into control over the people of a local area. Its deep-rootedness in the social imagination is reflected in the emerging political elite of modern day Sri Lanka who, even in the present, are often referenced in terms of the walauva they belong to — as, for instance, in allusions to the Senanayakes (who produced two heads of state between 1948 and 1970) of the “Bothale walauva”, the Bandaranaikes (three prime ministers and a president between 1956 and 2000) of the “Horagolla walauva”, and so on.

In post-civil war Sri Lanka, a new walauva-centric political dynasty came to the social fore: the family of the Rajapaksas of “Medamulana walauva”. Having first been sworn in as the country’s president in 2005 and, post-war, having consolidated his popularity and appeal, the elder Rajapaksa — Percy Mahendra, or Mahinda — was Sri Lanka’s head of state for two terms, from 2005 to 2014. With the support of a two-thirds majority in parliament, Mahinda Rajapaksa, in 2010, effected an amendment to the Sri Lankan constitution (commonly known as the “18th Amendment”) to strengthen his position as president. The amendment cancelled the presidency’s limit to two terms, and gave the office considerable control over public appointments including those in the high judiciary. Part of the Rajapaksa governing philosophy was (and remains) to place family members in key portfolios and public and diplomatic offices which mirrored a palpably feudal-style power operation. In spite of an election defeat in January 2015, the Rajapaksa project returned to eminence in 2018 by convincingly winning the local government elections. In November 2019, Mahinda’s younger brother Gotabhaya won a resounding victory in a presidential election contested on the promise of a “secure nation” (Miglani and Aneez, 2019). During the civil war under Mahinda Rajapaksa’s watch, Gotabhaya was the president’s handpicked secretary of defense, which made him a popular hero among the Sinhalese masses. In September 2019, when Gotabhaya Rajapaksa commenced his election campaign with a rally, the backdrop of the stage illustrated the decoration of the Rajapaksa ancestral grand house in Weeraketiya: the Medamulana walauva. Once elected, his parliamentary team consisted of five members of the immediate family — two brothers and three nephews — while a constitutional amendment tabled in October 2020 was, according to speculation, aimed to revoke restrictions that prevented a sixth Rajapaksa from entering the House (Liyanagama, 2020).

Though as a modern nation the Sri Lankan state has been characterized by some as a “control regime” (Rainford, 2014: 1), its slide towards “soft authoritarianism” (De Votta, 2010: 331–340) has been detectable ever since a neoliberal economic programme was initiated by J. R. Jayewardene in the late-1970s. In 1978, Jayewardene set in place Sri Lanka’s second Republican Constitution and created an executive presidential office which, detracting from the Latimer principles of power devolution, overreached the powers of the legislative and the judiciary. In Jayewardene’s own words, the new office enabled him to be all and do all except “turn a man into a woman and a woman into a man” (Abeysekara, 2002: 94). Centralist power concentration reached a new height with Mahinda Rajapaksa who, having led the state’s defeat of the Tamil liberation movement in 2009, ushered in what Nira Wickramasinghe has conceptualized as a “new patriotism”: a political creed which implied that the “true path and best interests of all people were being pursued by the ruling party” (Wickramasinghe, 2009: 1048). As Wickramasinghe argues, the Rajapaksa regime set in place a “symbiotic state-society Utopia” where “class politics, opposition politics, and identity politics wither away and disappear” in a political programme with the “rural person” as its focus (2009: 1048). Having built his political image on his rural roots in the heart of the Sri Lankan south, Rajapaksa’s post-war vision evoked an attempt “to include all peoples of the island in [a] patriotic fold” as long as they were “motivated by a common love of the country that transcended other communal belongings”: a zealous project of which the gravitational point was “an idealized Sinhalese rural man who cultivated the land and gave his life to protect his country against secessionists” (2009: 1050).

In spite of the fact that Sri Lanka is a middle-income country with increasing economic liberalization, the state — through education, textbooks, and political rhetoric — has traditionally promoted a culture evoking nostalgia for rural life. This rekindling of a lost golden age expressed itself as a central motif in the Rajapaksa camp during its first term (2005–2010) which commenced with irrigation projects likened to tank building programmes of the pre-modern regal period. As Nirmal Dewasiri asserts, Rajapaksa’s first term coincided with the rise of “ultra nationalist groups within the political mainstream as a powerful, and often determining, politico-ideological force” (2013: 4). After the civil war, Rajapaksa reoriented himself on the promise of a firm, father-like figure: an unwavering, taciturn male ruler who decorated himself as “guardian” and “father of a victorious nation” (Perera, 2009). By the time Mahinda Rajapaksa’s sibling Gotabhaya was endorsed as presidential candidate in 2019, not only was the mantle of leadership dynastically handed from brother to brother, but the campaign had advanced the promise of national security through firm control as its main pledge to the people. In referring to the elder Rajapaksa, the word “appachchi” — or, father — was used with endearment by his loyalists and with derision by his opponents. In the post-war consciousness of the country, the word gained an added meaning of a leader banking on populism and wielding a nationalist rhetoric embedded with feudal values, Sinhalese-Buddhist aspirations, and pretensions of safeguarding customary and traditional culture. The birth and evolution of the “appachchi” image can be ascertained by Rajapaksa’s campaign song during the 2015 presidential election — titled “Appachchi” — and social media comments by Rajapaksa-loyalists following the politician’s 2018 comeback (The Straits Times, 2018).

The emergent ideology of “new patriotism” gravitated the electorate around a centralist ruler who — so it was promised — understood their every need and responded with generosity. The diminishing significance of the war narrative — as well as its being “fixed” as a glorious and heroic tale to be written by former elite combatants — has challenged the Sri Lankan English writer to look for novel territory. This demand has partly been addressed by writers who have turned anew to pre-war sites such as the feudal walauva: a returning which, as this essay proposes, often endorse and confirm the feudal economy as progressive, benevolent, and as a reflection of a wholesome way of life. These post-war characterizations of the feudal walauva are often found to lack depth and, at best, to obscure or undermine the complex economic and social negotiations between diverse agents who occupy it as a site. An assessment of the representations of the feudal walauva in the Sri Lankan English writing canon up to the 1990s contributes to an informed illustration of this point, which I propose in the next section of this article.

The walauva in Sri Lankan English language writing from 1919 to 2009

The Ceylonese/Sri Lankan writer’s interest in the walauva as a political and economic space dates back to the origins of modern English language writing in colonial Ceylon, in which caste and class friction were already points of discussion with which writers were engaged. ¹ Lucian de Zilwa, arguably Ceylon’s first English language novelist, titled his second work, published in 1919, A Chandala Woman. The novel follows the story of a woman from a challenged caste who, after rejection by an upper caste man, redeems herself by marrying into a higher caste. de Zilwa’s novel can be considered as a prototype for writers’ assessment of class and caste politics and social relations in the early twentieth century. Among writings contemporaneous to de Zilwa’s, several short stories written by Leonard Woolf, who, for seven years, was an appointed civil servant in Ceylon, make crucial reading. In spite of there being no direct references to feudal ancestral homes, stories like “The Two Brahmans” (Woolf, 2006: 39–47) echo feudal socioeconomic value systems that impose a fixed and unassailable hierarchy. In “A Tale Told by Moonlight”, Woolf (2006: 3–14) constructs the story of a colonial officer engaged in a domestic relationship with Celestinahami, a woman of “low-caste” origins: a story that is reminiscent of a popular folk narrative inspired by Britain’s second governor to Ceylon Thomas Maitland’s affair with a local woman (Jayawardena, 2016).

Among others who published in Ceylon’s late colonial period and immediately post-independence, writers such as H. E. Weerasooriya — author of The Trousered Harijan (1946) — and Raja Proctor (Illicit Immigrant (1977) and A Fisherman’s Daughter (1972)) examine aspects of class, caste, and social identity in depth. Critical of feudal values and social formations, these works focus on inter-class/-caste power play, and frictions that are therein formed. The emergence of a Sinhalese national consciousness post-independence — in which ethno-nationalist identity dominated over caste in many ways — appeared to influence some of the work of poet Patrick Fernando, which explores life on Sri Lanka’s south-western coast. Fernando’s thematic concerns are predominantly framed by a Christian consciousness and a judicious eye for day-to-day situations. His poetry rarely, if at all, elevates caste-related aspects of coastal life. For example, “A Fisherman Mourned by His Wife” (Wijesinha, 2006: 159–160) is set in a fishing village, with detailed references to the community’s way of life but without a single explicit reference to the Karava caste of Sri Lanka’s south-western coast. The emerging consciousness of a sharp class division in post-independence Ceylon/Sri Lanka is intelligently explored by writers like James Goonewardene whose protagonists in A Quiet Place (1968) and The Call of the Kirala (1972) promote a lifestyle of minimalism turned away from the upper-middle-class pretensions of urban life. Similarly, Punyakante Wijenaike, in Giraya (1971), explores a feudal world challenged by economic change in a novel set in a walauva where forward-minded youth are in tension with the traditions of the walauva which are portrayed as stifling and regressive.

Writing between 1965 and 1978, Lakdas Wikkramasinha published five collections of poetry. Characterizations of the walauva as a site of exploitation, perversion, and depravity are powerfully captured in poems such as “To a Servant Girl” (1965), “The Headman’s Son” (1965), and “The Death of Ashanti” (1975). In his critique of the walauva Wikkramasinha maps systemic domination, normalized plunder and extortion, and multiple forms of manipulation from the economic to the sexual. For instance, in “The Death of Ashanti” Wikkramasinha portrays a subordinate woman within a walauva with a “seven month old baby in her belly” — insinuated as a victim of sexual exploitation — who takes her life by consuming acid (Wikkramasinha, 1975: 12). In Annemari de Silva’s assessment, Wikkramasinha, while making a “mature connection with social realities”, constructively explores an “intermediate between the privileged class […] and the underprivileged sector of society” (de Silva, 2014: 7). Wikkramasinha’s call for social revolution seems, in part, to emerge from a radical idealism rooted in the political and social environment of the 1960s and 1970s where revolutionary youth mobilization was rife in Sri Lanka. While the radical youth movements in southern Sri Lanka drew from Leninist-Marxist and Maoist inspirations, the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP) led by Nandasiri “Rohana” Wijeweera had, by 1969, emerged as a frontrunner in organizing armed revolution on a platform that rejected traditional feudal structures and class exploitation. Wikkramasinha’s empathy for social revolution challenges simplistic representations of youth agitation in novels such as Manuka Wijesinghe’s Monsoons and Potholes where the narrator-cum-protagonist likens the JVP of the early 1970s to a “red fungus”, and its agents — caricatured with long unruly beards — to “chimpanzees” that had reversed “civilization’s clean shaven-ness” (Wijesinghe, 2006: 123). Such representations place under a dehumanizing gaze of class entitlement the socially challenged enclaves that led transformative revolution.

In spite of the rise of ethno-nationalist tension in the 1970s, and frequent attacks on the Tamil community which deteriorated into an open war in 1983, the walauva remained a deeply rooted space in the Sri Lankan writer’s consciousness until the divisions sharpened by ethnic friction emerged as a literary focus in the early to mid-1990s. In the decade and a half between 1980 and 1995 several acclaimed literary works critiqued the walauva. Of these, the writing of Chitra Fernando — which includes short stories and a novel — deserves attention. Fernando’s collection Three Women (1983) contains stories such as “The Perfection of Giving” (later republished as “Action and Reaction”) in which she critiques the walauva for its narrow-minded archaisms, its socially backward traditions and customs that ring hollow, and its preoccupation with popular religion that contradicts the word of Theravada Buddhism. Like the narrator of “The Perfection of Giving”, who decisively turns away from the archaisms of his walauva legacy, the protagonists of Sita Kulatunga’s story “The High Chair” (1997) negotiate with the boundaries set between them by traditional caste hierarchy.

Coinciding with the spread of globalism in South Asia, the 1990s and 2000s saw the publication of an increasing number of expatriate, non-resident Sri Lankan authors who explored themes of a local interest. While some of these writers undertook representations of Sri Lankan culture — including local conditions, social dynamics, and politics — these representations often echoed a spatiotemporal disconnect (Perera, 2015: 25–27; Ranasinha, 2013: 29, 32–33) which lies beyond the confines of this essay. For the present, it is sufficient to note that attempts by some of the non-resident writers to illustrate local situations are defeated by a lack of the nuance and depth that comes from organically participating in a culture. As an extreme example, the storyline of Karen Roberts’ The Lament of the Dhobi Woman (2010), in spite of its reference to the Dhobi/Rajaka (or washer) caste in its title, fails to include anything remotely to do with that caste group. Roberts seems to use the word/signifier “Dhobi” to imply the impoverished social background of the novel’s focal character, Seelawathi, which has prompted critic Walter Perera to suggest that the novel should be retitled as “The Lament of the [Absent] Dhobi Woman” (Perera, 2015: 30)

The walauva and the post-war nation

My interest in Nayomi Munaweera’s What Lies Between Us, Madhubhashini Ratnayake’s There is Something I Have to Tell You, and Charulatha Thewarathanthri’s Stories lies mainly in their being cultural and political expressions of an age overseen by Sinhalese-Buddhist nationalism and power centralization, and creative expressions in which the space of the walauva is often a romanticized idyll that thrives on inclusive trust and mutual empowerment among classes. Interviews given by Ratnayake and Thewarathanthri indicate that the walauvas they construct in their fiction are informed by childhood nostalgia associated with the feudal grand homes of their families and immediate relatives. Smriti Daniel asserts that the characters Ratnayake presents in her novel “often reflect [the writer’s] own preoccupations” (Daniel, 2012) while, in interviews, Thewarathanthri has acknowledged her own childhood memories to have influenced depictions of Nuge Ela walauva in Stories (Anandanayagam, 2019; Illankoon, 2017).

Both There is Something I have to Tell You and Stories endorse traditional patriarchal value systems where the universe which the feudal master class presides over is harmonious with generous patronage. The servants — who, as caretakers of the feudal world, often play a secondary role — are unquestioning, passive, and obedient. These representations categorically upset the approach to feudal politics in Sri Lanka’s English-language writing canon which I illustrate above. Instead, a work such as Munaweera’s What Lies Between Us, through the childhood story of Ganga, proposes “a sultry, tropical paradise” which, in many ways, evokes an “idyllic life” (Sipin, 2016). Commenting on the inspiration to write Stories, Thewarathanthri alludes to memories of her aunt’s estate in Ruwanwella in the low highlands which, she claims, haunted her imagination (Illankoon, 2017). Birthed through romanticized nostalgia, the feudal promise of Thewarathnthri’s imaginary world converges with the nationalist realpolitik of post-civil war Sri Lanka and its kindled longing for a lost past.

Stories builds through the childhood story of Dimuthu Elizabeth Morgan, a young London-based woman of Sinhalese-British heritage who, after twenty-odd years, returns to her feudal home in the Sri Lankan countryside. Fondly known among the villagers as Muthu, Dimuthu Elizabeth’s first four years had been spent at Nuge Ela walauva. In spite of the long absence, Dimuthu’s return there with her London-based ethnic Tamil boyfriend Cheran is warmly welcomed by her kinsfolk (Thewarathanthri, 2016: 27). Dimuthu had been a “special child” who, assisted by a mysterious psychic insight, had foreknowledge of pending misfortunes: a knowledge she often used to the advantage of her family and the servants. As a child, she was able to recover lost objects (2016: 83), save the life of a small girl who had been beaten by a mob and left to die (133–137), and resurrect the family’s faithful servant, Seneviratne (170–171). These restorative acts symbolically enforce the dictum of feudalism: in exchange for service and loyalty, the perpetuity and safeguarding of the feudal universe and its satellites by the powerful master. The benevolence and generosity of the walauva which Thewarathanthri characterizes override class/caste, ethnic, and regional differences: social identities that often determine, and divide, society. As these social determinants were centrally hinged on prestige, socioeconomic viability, matters of lineage, and so on, both caste and regional biases were fundamental to one’s being admitted to or denounced from traditional feudal worlds.

The feudal universe in Stories crosses paths with Sri Lanka’s post-civil war “new patriotism” where loyalty shown to the grand house is valued over social and cultural determinants that contribute to diversity. The walauva which Thewarathanthri imagines brings together a varied ethnocultural membership whose differences rarely interfere with, or are rarely viewed as interference to, the walauva ethos. Dimuthu’s mother Kumudu, a Sinhalese woman from the “Upcountry”, is married to Morgan, a British school teacher. Their daughter Dimuthu is betrothed to Cheran Selvanayagam, a London-based refugee of northern Tamil heritage. Anula, who is born to a Sinhalese Buddhist family, marries an “Upcountry” Tamil worker of Malaiha (Indian Tamil) descent; their marriage is spoken of with disapproval but not denounced. Of “Upcountry” Sinhalese Buddhist heritage, Suranga, who is an immediate heir of the walauva, is married to Nelum of “Low-country” Sinhalese Christian origins. In alignment with Nira Wickramasinghe’s assertion of “an idealized Sinhalese rural man” being the desired subject of post-civil war Sri Lanka (2009: 1050), Stories presents a universe shaped by an inward-looking value system that is nurtured by Sinhalese-Buddhism and within which (otherwise) complex identities are homogenized. The implied movement of different cultures towards one dominating epicentre gains in visibility in a novel from the traditional canon such as Punakante Wijenaike’s Giraya, to which I refer above, in which class differences and intergenerational frictions consistently threaten the feudal space. The novel’s principal character, Kamini, is married to Lal, the heir of the walauva, whose homosexuality is hidden from the world. While her university education is considered an “advantage”, Kamini’s financially inferior background alienates her as a class other to the feudal gaze. Rather than compromise with and conform to the ways of the walauva, Kamini resists the dominating traditionalism that surrounds her and contends for a space of her own.

Resonant of Stories, Munaweera’s What Lies Between Us, in part, maps the coming-of-age story of Ganga, a nurse of Sri Lankan heritage who, like the book’s author, lives in the United States. Ganga’s childhood had been spent in Kandy, in Sri Lanka’s central hills, where the first part of the novel is set. Her childhood is often mapped through scenic descriptions that are idyllic and akin to romance (Munaweera, 2016: 8–9, 61–62). As an adult, Ganga is troubled by traumatic triggers connected with her Kandyan childhood. Munaweera, for the greater part of the novel, leads the reader to believe that Ganga had been sexually molested by the family’s faithful servant, Samson (2016: 66–67), a man with whom the child shared a close and trusting relationship (the novel’s concluding sections introduce a twist to the storyline which reverses this assertion when Ganga’s mother reveals the childhood assailant to have been Ganga’s father). Ganga’s childhood unfolded in a Sinhalese-Buddhist household steeped in tradition and custom and overseen by a benevolent father figure whom Ganga looked up to. Her childhood world included a well-maintained, extensive garden where Ganga ran and played and was looked after by Samson whose presence makes Ganga stressed over time. In leading the plot to Ganga’s molestation, Munaweera, by drawing on the myth of the servant as sexual aggressor, uses Samson as a convenience. Within the text, Samson is given neither voice nor agency: like a shadow, he is cast to the side with the charge of sexual predation projected onto him. A complementary passage can be found in Thewarathanthri’s Stories where a gardener lures young Dimuthu to a hut and cradles her on his erect member (Thewarathanthri, 2016: 53). Tenshi, Dimuthu’s loyal pet dog, attacks the aggressor and saves the child.

In spite of their contribution to suspense, descriptions of the above kind lack the psychological depth found in a novel such as Punyakante Wijenaike’s Amulet where the servant Nonchi, for her gratification, grooms a girl and a boy — two siblings — to have a sexual relationship (Wijenaike, 1994: 77–81); or the complexity of Adeline’s relationship with her servant Lucia Hamy in Giraya which, in the view of Anupama Mohan, embodies the “decline and degradation” of a receding economic class (2015: 30). However, the somewhat simplistic descriptions of servant-as-predator found in Stories and What Lies Between Us undermine the more prevalent critique in the Sri Lankan English language canon: the sexual exploitation of girls/women of the servant class by the master of the walauva. Such exploitation is powerfully addressed in poems such as Lakdas Wikkramasinha’s “The Death of Ashanti”, “Discarded Tins”, and “To a Servant Girl”. In this latter poem the narrator instructs an underage servant girl who is being routinely beaten by her mistress to take revenge on her aggressor when she becomes a woman by submitting to the master’s sexual advances – by which time the mistress, as the narrator suggests, would be aged and invalid (Wikkramasinha, 1965: 40). In works such as Raja Proctor’s Waiting for Surabiel (1981), the sexual exploitation of servants by the walauva’s master is addressed as a political problem. In a commentary on Waiting for Surabiel, D. C. R. A. Goonetilleke notes the hardened fatalism with which ordinary peasants were forced to accept such exploitations, as is symbolically expressed in the financially and socially dependent peasant worker Surabiel’s acceptance of Gnanawathie (the walauva master’s “kept-woman”) as his wife and Kiriya (the walauva master’s illegitimate son with Gnanawathie) as his son (Goonetilleke, 1993: 141–142). Proctor’s characterization of the walauva’s domination of the bodies and the labour of the servant class is developed as a political commentary as the 1971 youth insurgency, in which Surabiel’s family gets entrenched, is represented as the response of a dominated class to its dominator.

At the outset of There is Something I Have to Tell You, Ratnayake allows the segregated worlds of the masters and servants to intermingle in a children’s playing field: a space which Janu, the son of the walauva, and his peers from the servant class such as Kamal and Upali share. However, as they grow into young adults and are shaped by the economic and social conditions that oversee their respective class environments these characters also come to an awareness of their place in a complex post-independence world. In a narrative that is unabashedly biased towards the socialite class, Ratnayake’s portrayal of the servant class often lacks empathy and nuance. This results in her celebration of the feudal system as a benefactor of society which, in turn, collides with the perceptiveness of a writer like Raja Proctor in work such as Waiting for Surabiel. In alluding to the 1971 insurrection, Ratnayake trivializes what Proctor looks on as the explosion of centuries of social pressure on a downtrodden class as a “ranting against privileged classes” (Ratnayake, 2011: 126). Her omniscient narrator claims, “the speakers themselves got fat mostly on the rice grown in the paddy fields belonging to the feudal households” (2011: 126–127). In 1971 and 1987–1990, the JVP led two revolutions against the Sri Lankan political and social elite which were defeated by the state through violent suppression. These coups are the closest the Sinhalese-speaking districts of Sri Lanka have witnessed to a holocaust. While a number estimated as between 5,000 (Senaratne, 1997: 103) and 10,000 (Thomson-Senanayake, 2014: 36) were killed between April and July 1971, the widespread extra-judicial form of the state’s response to the rebellion in 1987 resulted in a far more ruthless counter-insurgency programme. The conventional estimate of men and women killed and disappeared during this period is 40,000 (Watkins, 2005: 220) to 60,000 (Senaratne, 1997: 103), of which the vast majority were JVP activists and ordinary citizens.

The war strategy of the state included unauthorized killing squads, unmarked incarceration and torture camps, and private armies operating under the national and provincial political elite. Ratnayake’s assessment of the JVP as “ranting against privileged classes” and fed by “the paddy fields belonging to the feudal households” (2011: 126–127), in this context, underlines an entitled condescension and explicit class elitism. This elitism is tangibly illustrated by choices in wording which Ratnayake uses at crucial points. In referring to Hemantha and Chaya’s relationship — one that reaches over the class divide maintained by the feudal order — Hemantha is referred to as “the first yako” (Ratnayake, 2011:147; my emphasis) whom Chaya had dated. “Yako” is a derogatory term used by the westernized upper class to refer to their subordinates. In similar vein, Ratnayake introduces the young Upali (a child from the working class) as one who “still could bowl and catch a ball better than any of Janu’s classmates at Royal College” (2011: 5; my emphasis). These references radically undermine the progress Sri Lankan society has made through several generations of state-funded compulsory education which encouraged marginalized communities of the colonial era to be empowered on social, economic, cultural, and political fronts. In the present, to refer to a people as “Yakkos” would be considered both offensive and deeply insulting.

Concluding remarks

The post-civil war works of Nayomi Munaweera, Madhubhashini Ratnayake, and Charulatha Thewarathanthri represent an emergent tendency in Sri Lankan English language writing to romanticize, endorse, and embellish the walauva and the feudal economy in which it is anchored. The present exploration has situated this trajectory within two pertinent contexts which I have drawn into the discussion: the post-civil war centralism and hegemony of soft-authoritarianism in Sri Lanka, and, from the literary domain, the investigative, nuanced, and (overall) critical approach by writers of the Sri Lankan English language canon writing of the walauva from the 1950s to the mid-1990s. This discussion has juxtaposed the writers’ “traditional” response to the walauva and illustrated post-war impressions where some writers seem to celebrate and reinforce patriarchal systems such as the feudal walauva. I propose this to be a (conscious or subconscious) response brought on by the prevailing nationalist mentality of the epoch in post-war Sri Lanka. Future research might investigate why these writers — in spite of their education, their exposure to westernization, and their cosmopolitan lives in urban locations — have retreated to a frame mapped by majoritarian populism. An investigation of post-civil war Sinhalese writing and its representation of sites such as the walauva and systems like the feudal economy presents an equally informative research direction.

Capitalizing on the resounding election victory of the Rajapaksa-led Sri Lanka Podhujana Peramuna (SLPP), an amendment to the constitution was proposed in parliament in September 2020. This amendment (the 20th Amendment) has further strengthened the position of the president by investing in his executive office powers that exceeded the three-way power balance it shared with the legislative and the judiciary. The bill was criticized by activists and political commentators as an unprecedented attempt at power centralization, and as comparable to the 18th Amendment enacted by Mahinda Rajapaksa’s government in 2010 (Jayawardena, 2020). In effect, the 20th Amendment has extended the powers conferred by the 18th Amendment on a single central ruler in a country which is Asia’s oldest democracy. The emergence of a centralism under a Sinhalese-Buddhist banner is a triumphal stage of the Sinhalese nationalist project that was strengthened through the state’s defeat of the LTTE in 2009. The literary works I have drawn on are cultural expressions of a decade of post-war nation-building hinged on majoritarian populism. The endorsement of the walauva as a benevolent power structure that benefits and safeguards all demonstrates an interpolation of the writer into the rhetoric of the majoritarian nationalist project of post-war Sri Lanka. The deviation in these writers from the probing and politically nuanced assessments of the walauva of the pre-1990s canon is both significant and noticeable. It suggests an entrenchment of Sri Lanka’s emerging English creative writer in the imagination of the state’s centralist nation-building project of which the walauva is a key signifier.