what is the literature of Sri Lanka?
The literature(s) of Sri Lanka form undoubtedly a deep time writing and oral tradition. The most remote importance of Sri Lanka may be associated with the genesis of the canon of Tripitaka, those three baskets of palm-leaf manuscripts gathering the Buddhist teachings. The spiritual legacy is believed to have been preserved precisely in Sri Lanka, transmitted orally from generation to generation, till it was put into writing almost half a millennium after the death of Gautama Buddha. This work is believed to have be done under the reign of Valagamba of Anuradhapura, when the country faced a perspective of war and famine. This is when 1000 monks who had attained the level of arahant (an advanced stage on the path toward the Enlightenment) decided to write down the transmitted teachings and commentaries.
Among the two major ethnic groups and languages of the island (Singhalese and Tamil), the Sinhala seems to predominate both by the number of texts and by the antiquity of its texts. Among the oldest known Sri Lankan texts there is the 5th-century Mahāvaṃsa ("Great Chronicle"), a long historical poem written in Pali by a Buddhist monk from the Mahavihara monastery in Anuradhapura. There is also Siyabaslakara ("The Ornaments of One's Language"), a treatise on rhetoric ascribed to King Sena I (r. 832–851).
The modern literature of the country was primarily associated with tales, shorter narrative genres, rather tenuous tradition of writing and readership across the country's turbulent history. Since 1972, it has been marked by the bloody Tamil insurrection in the northern part of the island. Finally, in 2022, Sri Lankan literature imposed itself in the global bookish landscape with the Booker prize of Shehan Karunatilaka, attributed for The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida, a novel telling the story of a war photographer killed during the civil war of the 1990s. Maali wakes up dead and has those seven moons to guide his loved ones to some hidden photos that offer the testimony of the brutality of the conflict.
Among the two major ethnic groups and languages of the island (Singhalese and Tamil), the Sinhala seems to predominate both by the number of texts and by the antiquity of its texts. Among the oldest known Sri Lankan texts there is the 5th-century Mahāvaṃsa ("Great Chronicle"), a long historical poem written in Pali by a Buddhist monk from the Mahavihara monastery in Anuradhapura. There is also Siyabaslakara ("The Ornaments of One's Language"), a treatise on rhetoric ascribed to King Sena I (r. 832–851).
The modern literature of the country was primarily associated with tales, shorter narrative genres, rather tenuous tradition of writing and readership across the country's turbulent history. Since 1972, it has been marked by the bloody Tamil insurrection in the northern part of the island. Finally, in 2022, Sri Lankan literature imposed itself in the global bookish landscape with the Booker prize of Shehan Karunatilaka, attributed for The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida, a novel telling the story of a war photographer killed during the civil war of the 1990s. Maali wakes up dead and has those seven moons to guide his loved ones to some hidden photos that offer the testimony of the brutality of the conflict.
I have readFrances Harrison, Still Counting the Dead: Survivors of Sri Lanka's Hidden War (2012)
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I have written... nothing ...
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