Leela is the first novel by Martin Wickramasinghe (1890-1976), the writer now regarded as a founder of modern Sinhala fiction. It was first published in 1914, when he was still a young man in his early twenties, and this is a Sinhala-language edition of the book.
Wickramasinghe later said that he wrote Leela at the age of nineteen, deliberately following the pattern of Piyadasa Sirisena, the most popular Sinhala novelist of the day. The story itself is cast as a conventional melodrama, but the young author used it, through his hero Albert, to put forward ideas that were very new to Sinhala readers at the time: modern science, biology, evolution and anthropology, and the view that progress comes from questioning old customs as well as preserving them. In the preface he argued that there cannot be one system of knowledge for Asian people and another for Western people.
The book was not a success. It drew hostile notices, including a series of attacks in the Buddhist press by the monk Yagirala Pagnananda Thero and criticism from Sirisena himself, who objected to its promotion of the theory of evolution. By the author's own account only a few hundred copies of the first edition sold. Wickramasinghe later judged it thin as a story but valuable as a work of ideas, and he moved on to essays for his scientific writing and to a different kind of fiction in Soma (1920).
Read today, Leela is chiefly of interest as the starting point of a sixty-year career that led to Gamperaliya, Madol Doova and Viragaya. It suits readers of Sinhala who want to follow Wickramasinghe's development from the beginning, and anyone interested in the early history of the Sinhala novel.
- Author: Martin Wickramasinghe
- Published: 1914
- Language: Sinhala
