Memorializing the Sri Lankan Civil War in Anuk Arudpragasam’s The Story of a Brief Marriage

Abstract

 The paper, analysing the character of Dineshkanathan
(Dinesh), identifies Arudpragasam’s novel The Story of a Brief Marriage
(2016) as the literary memorial site of the twenty-six years long Sri Lankan
Civil War (1983- 2009) with its brutal curtailing of human rights. The
paper draws its theoretic framework by utilizing Nayar’s concept of
‘Postcolonial Decadence’ and his theorizations of Human Rights
Literature (HRL). The paper, contextualizing the turbulent history of Sri
Lankan Civil War between the predominantly Sinhalese Sri Lankan
government and the dissident minority Tamil Tigers (LTTE), endeavours
to highlight the postcolonial decadence of Sri Lankan state as it, after
achieving independence, alienated and subalternized its ethnic and
religious minorities. The study makes it obvious that the Sri Lankan civil
war was actually the end product of postcolonial decadence of Sri Lankan
state. The paper, putting the fictive character of Dinesh at the heart of the
study, attempts to point out the novel’s agenda of representing the rough
images of the Sri Lankan Civil War as the conscious memorializing effort
to commit its devastations to the nations memory and hence a ‘novelized
testimony’ to the blackest chapter of Sri Lankan national history.