The civil war in Sri Lanka, which began in 1983 and lasted for nearly three decades, killed hundreds of thousands of people, displaced millions, and convulsed the island nation for a generation. Brotherless Night , V.V.
Ganeshananthan’s powerful novel and the winner of Women’s Prize for Fiction 2024, is an evocation of those terrible times, when boys flung themselves into the arms of the Tamil separatist movement before they had become men and waged battle on a fearsome opiate of nationalism, violence, and brutality. The novel traces the life of Sashikala, a Sri Lankan Tamil girl growing up in a village near Jaffna, a town in the Tamil-dominated northern part of the island. She finds her own fate and that of her family inexorably threaded with the trajectory of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) .
The LTTE and other Tamil separatist groups sprang up as a reaction to the predominantly Sinhala Sri Lankan government’s repressive policies against the Tamil minorities. Over time, the LTTE subsumed the other groups, and, as it turned increasingly brutal—blithely crossing the thin line between an armed struggle for self-determination and indiscriminate terrorism—many local Tamils ceased to be sympathetic to it. Ganeshananthan’s novel, told in the first-person narrative of Sashikala, is at once nuanced and clear-eyed, exploring as it does the movement and the human tragedy it unleashed—not only upon its deemed enemies but also upon its own.
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