Non-fiction, and a survivor's own testimony: Rohitha Munasinghe was detained at the Eliyakanda camp during the years of insurrection and counter-insurgency in southern Sri Lanka, and lived to write about it. This is the English-language edition of that account, published in Colombo by Godage International Publishers.
The camp stood at Brown's Hill in Matara, close to the sea, in an old manor-type house. It was also known as K-Point. Writing about the book, the Daily Mirror described it as an account of torture carried out under the guise of counter-insurgency, and called Munasinghe a pioneer of survivor literature from that period of violence — one of the first people held in such a place to set down what happened there, in print, for a general readership.
The book first appeared in Sinhala under the title Eliyakandha Wadha Kandhawura, which translates literally as "Eliyakanda torture camp". The author has since lived in France.
Readers should know what they are buying. This is a record of captivity and of what was done to people in custody, written by someone who was there, and it is direct about it. It belongs with the literature of detention and political violence rather than with general history: the frame is personal, the vantage point is from inside, and the material is distressing by its nature.
It will matter most to readers working on the contemporary history of Sri Lanka, on human rights and the documentation of state violence, and to anyone interested in testimony as a form — how a person who has survived detention chooses to narrate it, and what a written account preserves that official records do not. Students and researchers approaching the period through Sinhala-language sources will find in this English edition a text that first appeared in Sinhala. For readers outside Sri Lanka, and for the Sri Lankan diaspora in particular, it offers access to an episode that is often referred to in general terms and far less often described from within.
Published in English by Godage International Publishers, Colombo.
- Author: Rohitha Munasinha
- Publisher: Godage International Publishers
- Language: English
- Pages: 208
- ISBN: 9789553039576
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