Cumaratunga Munidasa wrote Magul Kema for children, and it is one of the pieces of his that has stayed in the hands of young readers rather than becoming a scholar's curiosity. This is that work carried into English as The Wedding Feast.
Cumaratunga was a Sinhala grammarian, poet, editor and teacher, and a central figure in the Hela Havula movement, which argued for a Sinhala stripped back to its own roots rather than leaning on borrowed vocabulary. Much of his writing is technical and addressed to adults; alongside it he produced verse and stories pitched at children, written with the same attention to how the language sounds and how a line falls on the ear. That double career — the grammarian who also wrote for the nursery and the classroom — is part of why his children's work has kept its readers across generations.
For families outside Sri Lanka, an English version gives children who are not reading Sinhala a way into a writer whose name is familiar in every Sri Lankan school. It will also interest readers following the Hela Havula story and wanting to see what its chief advocate wrote when he was writing for the young.
- Author: Cumaratunga Munidasa
- Publisher: M. D. Gunasena & Co. (Pvt) Ltd
- Language: English
- ISBN: 9789552119170
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