Yuganthaya is a novel by Martin Wickramasinghe, first published in 1949. This is a Sinhala-language edition from Sarasa. The title means "the end of an era", and the book has also appeared in English under the title Destiny.
It is the third and final part of the trilogy that begins with Gamperaliya (1944) and continues in Kaliyugaya (1957). Although it closes the story, it was published eight years before the middle volume. The trilogy follows three generations of one family, from a landed household in the southern village of Koggala to the businessmen and professionals of Colombo, and with them the change in Sri Lankan society across the first half of the twentieth century.
Here the focus is on the family of Nalika, daughter of Nanda and Piyal, and her husband Kabalana, a wealthy and hard-driving capitalist whose fortune rests on his factories. Their son Malin returns from his education in England a socialist. Sympathetic to the workers in his father's businesses, he turns against Kabalana's methods and throws in his lot with the trade-union movement, and the conflict between father and son carries the novel.
Where Gamperaliya charted the decline of the village gentry, Yuganthaya deals with industrial capitalism and the birth of organised labour, ending on the rise of a labour movement and its hopes for a new social order. Lester James Peries filmed it in 1983 as the last of his three adaptations of the trilogy, with Gamini Fonseka as Kabalana and Richard de Zoysa as Malin; Peries won Sri Lanka's Presidential Award for best director for it.
It suits readers who have followed the family through the first two books, and anyone interested in how Sinhala fiction portrayed the rise of the labour movement.
- Author: Martin Wickramasinghe
- Publisher: Sarasa Publishers
- Published: 1949
- Language: Sinhala
- Pages: 224
- ISBN: 9789550201372
