The Struggle of a Sri Lankan-Tamil in Anuk Arudpragasam’s The Story of a Brief Marriage

Abstract

Literary works acutely depict human sensibility especially during the times of crisis, chaos and change, since there occurs transition in human emotions and rationale. For instance, world war writings including T.S. Eliots Waste Land represented the disorder and its affectations on human faith that there can be different modes of peace and faith establishment as The Waste Land  ends with the decry of Shantih shantih shantih! A major manmade destruction enabled the great thinkers to ameliorate the monolithic faith. Such great change in human sensibility was acknowledged through literary writings. The changes were caused by the regional happenings over international occurrence called the impact and loss created by the World War II.  Similarly, a number of civil wars are affecting the peaceful lives of the people of different regions of the world. One such major civil war was the Sri Lankan civil war, which lasted for twenty-six years in between Sinhalese and Sri Lankan Tamils. However, the war was put to an end by the Sri Lankan government asserting that Sri Lanka is for Sinhalese, which made the Tamil community to find another habitation for survival and re-establish their lives anywhere in the world other than Tamil Nadu from where they started their journey. Nevertheless, they can live in India without civil rights by renewing their annual Visa. Bett and Higgins highlight that United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees [UNHCR]  Asylum Applications in Industrialized Countries: 1980-1999 Trends in Asylum Applications Lodged in 37, Mostly Industrializes Countries state, Over next few years, 106,000 Sri Lankans claimed asylum in Europe, constituting the fourth largest country of origin for total asylum applicants on that continent. This asylum-seeking journey is a strong motif in Sri Lankan Tamils writings, which could be understood through the risk-taking journey of a father, mother and their two sons in the novel Life of Pi. Sri Lankan Tamils are made stateless in Sri Lanka and non-citizens in India.  Overall, terrorism shaped the discourse on the war and Sri Lankan bio-politics of the past three decades (Neloufer, 2013, 1). This paper delineates the sense of unresponsive acceptance of cruelties caused during Sri Lankan civil war as represented by Anuk Arudpragasam in his DSC prize for South Asian Literature (2017) winning debut novel The Story of a Brief Marriage (2016). It also analyses the various actual factors behind this mute acceptance.