Devakanthan (Bala Kumarasamy) is a Tamil writer and art critic who “was exiled by the war in Sri Lanka in the early 1980s” and settled in Canada via India. He lives in Toronto and writes in Tamil. A quintet of novels received the Tamil Literary Garden’s Best Novel Award (2014) for the work as a whole. The individual novels are being translated into English and published by Mawenzi House with the series title Prison of Dreams. The first of the quintet is His Sacred Army. The original version won the Government of Tamil Nadu Novel of the Year Award (1998).
Fiction
His Sacred Army
Translated from Tamil by Nedra Rodrigo.
Toronto: Mawenzi House, 2021.
Prison of Dreams ; bk 1
Publisher’s Synopsis (From its website)
His Sacred Army is the first volume of the quintet, Prison of Dreams, depicting the growth of the Tamil armed struggle in 1980s Sri Lanka. The five novels together describe the Sinhala-Tamil ethnic conflict, the hard choices faced by the minority communities subject to pogroms and oppressive laws, and the sufferings and exiles of simple villagers as the conflict finally flares up into a full-fledged and bloody civil war.
His Sacred Army centres around the life of Rajalakshmi, a young woman in the small island community of Nainativu, off the coast of Sri Lanka. Rajalakshmi’s simple ambition of employment to support her widowed mother and struggling family is thwarted by malicious gossip, for which the solution is to marry her childhood friend Suthan. As the ethnic conflict heats up, Suthan faces the dilemma of whether to follow his father’s political path of constitutional reform and nonviolence or to join the growing separatist movement. He goes into exile in India, and Rajalakshmi is faced with the choice whether to follow him.
Fiction
A Time of Questions
Translated from Tamil by Nedra Rodrigo.
Toronto: Mawenzi House, 2021.
Prison of Dreams ; bk. 2
Publisher’s Synopsis (From its website)
A Time of Questions explores the choices faced by Tamil youth in the face of a growing Sinhala Buddhist nationalism. Rajalakshmi—married in all but sacred ritual to Suthan—faces two options: to remain in her beloved little island, Nainativu, or to seek refuge in India and join Suthan. At the same time, the insurgent movement for Tamil separation begins to fracture through internal differences and Suthan makes a decision that irrevocably alters his and Rajalakshmi’s fates.
Links
Publisher Mawenzi House