📚 Southasia Review of Books - January 2024
The Southasia Review of Books is a monthly newsletter that threads together our latest reviews and literary essays, curated reading suggestions on all things books-related from Himal’s extensive archive, as well as interviews with select writers and their reading recommendations.
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Hello reader,
Welcome to another edition of the Southasia Review of Books newsletter!
This month, we rolled out a special series on incarceration in Southasia, Beyond Bars, where leading thinkers reflect on the region’s carceral systems and to imagine what a more just system would be.
The series includes a review essay on For, In Your Tongue, I Cannot Fit: Encounters with Prison, an anthology of prison poems edited by Shilpa Gupta and Salil Tripathi (November 2022). Sharmila Purkayastha writes on how the collection testifies to the coercive nature of the state and society – yet its under-representation of regional poets speaks of wider exclusions. Sharmila highlights that it has become especially necessary to give voice to marginalised prison poets since over half of the prisoners in Indian jails are Dalits, Adivasis and Muslims.
In Sri Lanka, disaffection with the political status quo gave rise to a 1971 Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP) insurrection among rural Sinhalese youths in the south that was violently quelled by the state. In the early 1980s, ethnic and political tensions would heighten into two brutal conflicts; an armed struggle for an independent state in the Tamil majority North and East that would intensify into a civil war and a second JVP insurrection.
The shock of the first insurrection, in 1971, turned the world of Sri Lankan literature towards the political, and invited the country’s anglophone elite to an interrogation of themselves as the insurrection’s target. Among these writers was Lakdhas Wikkramasinha – the first Sri Lankan poet to be published in the New York Review of Books Poets series.
In Himal’s pages this month, Ashik Kahina unpacks how the new collection presents the harsh, even brutal lyricism of Lakdhas Wikkramasinha. “As an observer, not a participant, in the movement, and as a member of the elite himself, Lakdhas had a strangely personal identification with the young rebels.” writes Ashik, “He transposed onto them, perhaps, his own feelings of rejection and neglect as a poet.”
Take a look below for a special interview with Ashik Kahina on Lakdhas Wikkramasinha’s poetry.
Interview with Ashik Kahina on the insurgent poetry of Lakdhas Wikkramasinha
Shwetha Srikanthan: The poet and writer Michael Ondaatje claims that Lakdhas Wikkramasinha, the first Sri Lankan poet to be published in the New York Review of Books Poets series, represents a “self-portrait of his time”. Would you say Wikkramasinha was successful in depicting the violence and tragedies that prevailed during the 1971 JVP insurrection in his poetry?
Ashik Kahina: What I feel about Lakhdas — and I say this in the piece — is that in his better moments he approaches his time in a manner unique and distinct from others writing on similar subjects. The predominant mode of writing about the violence surrounding the insurrection seems to be confessional, sometimes journalistic, often sentimental and to revolve around the conventional lyric “I”, which, to sketch is out further, is usually a concerned but impotent witness. Lakhdas, who was inspired by the formally innovative poetry of Lorca and Mandelstam, seems to have tried to break or abolish this distance between the “I” and the observed, to have the poem turn away from representation and towards embodiment. Successful or not, this makes him a significant witness to his times.
SS: In Wikkramasinha’s preface to his first volume of poems, Lustre, he writes, “To write in English is a form of cultural treason.” In this way, Wikkramasinha articulated a rejection of colonial language, culture and form in most of his works. Could you tell us more about this, and how Wikkramasinha’s Sinhala poems might pose a unique challenge for translators?
AK: Sinhala, like many other Southasian languages, is diglossic. So there’s a clear divide between the formal language used in writing and speeches and the language one speaks everyday. This is somewhat complicated by the fact that people have always produced art and literature in the spoken language as well. So called folk songs are often in the spoken language, for example. Lakhdas, who was, I think it’s clear, determined on breaking all kinds of aesthetic boundaries, tried to disrupt what you might call chaste or pure Sinhala in his poems. Change the diction, the syntax, sometimes violently. So the English translation would have to bear some indication of how unusual his Sinhala poems were. This is the difficulty.
SS: The review essay also touches on Tamils in the Sri Lankan hill country, brought over as indentured labourers in the 19th and 20th centuries to build up the island’s plantation economy. Among the many literary works published in Sri Lanka, would you agree that the world of contemporary literature by the Malaiyaha Tamil community is still underexplored? And are there particular writers and works you think deserve more attention?
AK: I have to confess that I myself haven’t explored this literature adequately. But this is a good reminder to do so. For now I can recommend the fiction of Thelivathai Joseph and there are also many collections of Malaiyaha Tamil songs, both recorded and transcribed.
This month in Southasian publishing
Southasian science fiction, stories on Sri Lanka’s civil war, and more
Science fiction as a space for imagining different versions of the universe and potential futures is a genre perfectly suited to represent a diversity of voices. In Southasia, we’ve seen more diverse and inclusive works of science fiction in the past few years alone, and 2024 promises to be one of the most significant years yet.
Two new sci-fi books from India, Acts of God by by Kanan Gill (January 2024) and Idolatry by Aditya Sudarshan (January 2024), explore religious motivations in a near future apocalyptic vision of India.
The Inhumans and Other Stories: A Selection of Bengali Science Fiction edited by Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay (March 2024) brings the world of kalpavigyan, the bengali term for imaginative science or speculative fiction, to an English-speaking audience in Southasia and beyond.
On the heels of his debut sci-fi novel, The Saint of Bright Doors (July 2023), Vajra Chandrasekara brings us another dark science fiction epic Rakesfall (June 2024) following a tale of two souls reincarnating across multiple generations. (For more on The Saint of Bright Doors, read Gautam Bhatia’s essay for Himal on the extraordinary burst of anglophone SF writing from Sri Lanka.)
This month also marks the publication of Where God Began by Appadurai Muttulingam, translated by Kavitha Muralidharan (January 2024). Set against the backdrop of the civil war in Sri Lanka, the book gives an account of a young man in exile and his encounters with numerous refugees like himself from various parts of Southasia and Africa.
It is rare for books tethered to Sri Lanka to speak so potently to the country’s history of violence. Another recent work of fiction that reveals the moral nuances of violence to tell the story of war and Sri Lanka’s Tamil community is Brotherless Night by V V Ganeshananthan (January 2023). The novel follows Sashi, a medical student, and her family who are caught up in the unrest, violence and war in Sri Lanka.
India’s former Foreign Secretary and Ambassador to China, Vijay Gokhale, in his new book Crosswinds: Nehru, Zhou and the Anglo-American Competition Over China (January 2024) explores how India’s diplomacy since the 1940s was shaped by a complex dynamic involving Britain, the United States, China, and the Cold War.
Nehru’s Bandung: Non-Alignment and Regional Order in Indian Cold War Strategy by Andrea Benvenuti (June 2024) attempts to reconstruct Indian prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru’s role in organising the first Asian-African Conference in Bandung in 1955 and India’s Cold War diplomacy. Paul M McGarr’s book Spying in South Asia: Britain, the United States, and India's Secret Cold War (June 2024) tells the story of India’s secret Cold War and Indian politicians, activists and journalists as they fought against or collaborated with members of the British and US intelligence services.
Together, these books shed light on India’s role in the Cold War and the nexus between intelligence and statecraft in Southasia.
The 11th Nepal Literature Festival is returning to Pokhara from 15-19 February 2024. If you’re attending, come say hi to our Editor, Roman Gautam!
Until next time, happy reading.
Shwetha Srikanthan
Assistant Editor, Himal Southasian