Jean Arasanayagam turns here to a childhood that was not her own: her husband's, spent in the village of Navaly in Jaffna in the middle of the last century. The boy at the centre of the book is called Arjun, and the village comes to the reader through what he notices — Hindu rites and rituals, the festivals that mark the year, the architecture of temples, and the adults who move through all of it. One sustained episode belongs to Arjun's schoolmaster, Perambalam, an eccentric figure remembered in detail. Another chapter carries the title "The Butterfly Wars and the Children of Saturn", which gives a fair sense of the register the book works in.
It is prose, but prose written by a poet, and a Daily Mirror reviewer described the narrative as reading like a prose poem. The chapters function less as a plot than as a sequence of recollections and observations, each holding to a place, a ceremony or a person. Readers who come to Arasanayagam through her poetry will recognise the attention to ritual and to the textures of northern Sri Lankan life.
The work has a publishing history under another name: it won the State Literary Award for non-fiction as Bhairava: A Childhood in Navaly. The Navaly of these pages is a village recorded before the decades that followed changed Jaffna, and the book's value as a record of Hindu religious practice and village life in that period sits alongside its qualities as writing.
This edition comes from Godage International Publishers, a Colombo house with a long list of Sri Lankan titles in English and Sinhala.
For readers interested in Jaffna before the war years, in Tamil Hindu ritual as it was lived in a particular village, or in Arasanayagam's prose, this is a direct and particular book — one childhood, one village, remembered closely.
- Author: Jean Arasanayagam
- Publisher: Godage International Publishers
- Language: English
- Pages: 224
Browse the rest of our book collection.
