For a Sovereign State is Malinga H. Gunaratne’s first-person account of Sri Lanka’s separatist war, written from an unusual vantage point — not the battlefield and not the cabinet room, but the bulldozer track. In the mid-1980s Gunaratne, then a senior official of the Mahaweli Authority, was sent to open and settle the disputed dry-zone land lying between the Northern and Eastern provinces. What he found there, what he was asked to do, and what he understood it to be for became this book. It was first published in October 1988 and has been reprinted repeatedly since; the edition sold here is the fifth, published by Vijitha Yapa Publications in 2009 with an updated epilogue.
Its setting is System L of the Accelerated Mahaweli Development Programme — the tract known as Manal Aru until it was renamed Weli Oya in 1988, in what is today the Mullaitivu District. Gunaratne describes the clearing of the jungle, the recruitment and arrival of farming families, the raising of the first colonies out of scrub, and the violence that followed them there. He is unusually direct about the strategic reasoning he understood the scheme to serve: a settled corridor running to the sea between the two provinces, intended, in his account, to deny a separate state its contiguous land base.
The telling is informal and personal rather than scholarly. There is no apparatus of footnotes and no attempt at detachment. It reads as a memoir — arguments with ministers and officials in Colombo, journeys made under escort, small administrative victories, and the deaths of people he had himself persuaded to come. Political figures of the period, President J. R. Jayewardene among them, run through the narrative, and the shadow of the wider war — Jaffna, the security forces, the shifting policy of successive governments — falls across every chapter.
It is a partisan book and does not pretend otherwise, and that candour is exactly why it has become a standard citation. Scholars of land settlement and of the conflict quote it in journals such as Modern Asian Studies and Development and Change; writers wholly opposed to the policy quote the same passages as the clearest available statement of its intent. Read it as what it is — the testimony of a participant, in his own words, about an episode that remains contested — and set it beside accounts written from the other side of that argument. Very few books on the war put a senior official’s reasoning on the record at this length.
About the author. Malinga Herman Gunaratne is a third-generation Ceylon tea planter with more than four decades in plantation management, on British-owned estates before nationalisation and on the state plantations after it, and later proprietor of Handunugoda Estate near Ahangama, where the much-written-about Virgin White Tea is made. His seconded years in the Mahaweli programme sit in the middle of that career. He is also the author of Tortured Island and the Price of Peace and of the plantation memoir The Suicide Club: A Virgin Tea Planter’s Journey, and has been nominated for the Gratiaen Prize.
A book for readers of Sri Lankan history and current affairs; for anyone travelling in the north and east who wants to understand the landscape they are crossing and why it looks the way it does; and for students of the conflict who want primary material rather than commentary. It sits alongside the rest of our books about Sri Lanka.
- Author: Malinga H. Gunaratne
- Publisher: Vijitha Yapa Publications, Colombo
- Edition: 5th edition, 2009, with an updated epilogue
- First published: October 1988 (Sarvodaya Book Publishing Services, 299 pp)
- Format: Paperback, approx. 358 pages
- Language: English
- ISBN: 978-955-665-050-1
- Subjects: Sri Lankan history, current affairs, memoir
