Features
Comment: V V Ganeshananthan’s Brotherless Night
Prize
This British prize was conceptualized in 1992 by a group of publishing industry professionals including journalists and librarians, and founded in 1996 by Kate Mosse CBE, novelist and playwright. This year a prize for nonfiction was also instituted. The winners were announced at a ceremony in Bedford Square Gardens, central London, with Naomi Klein winning the first Non Fiction Prize for her Doppelganager. V V Ganeshananthan goes as a Sri Lankan Tamil although born and nurtured in the US where her father migrated for further medical training and moved to Bethesda, Maryland. VV’s prize was pounds sterling 30,000 anonymously endowed, and the bronze statuette known as ‘Bessie’.
Author
V V Ganeshananthan does not reveal what the double Vs stand for. However, I found ‘Sugi’ inserted in her name, maybe abbreviation of her first name. I refer to her as VVG.
She was born in Connecticut, USA, in 1980. Her entire education was in America, her first degree earned in Harvard in 2002 and then Masters from Columbia Graduate School of Journalism. She is a journalist, essayist and of course novelist, her first book being Love Marriage which was published in April 2008 by Random House and named one of Washington Post’s World’s Best Books of the Year. It was also long listed for the Orange Prize.
She took 20 years to write Brotherless Night which necessitated much research and interviews, I suppose, with people who were in Sri Lanka during the infamous black day of July 23, 1983, and thereafter during the civil war. Her book is a first person record through Sashikala of all these times, and accurate. Nowhere in her biographies is it said she herself was in Sri Lanka. They are short and nothing much is revealed of her personal life except professionally – teaching creative writing in prestigious universities.
Prize winning book
The Chair of Judges which awarded VVG the Women’s Prize for Fiction 2024, Monica Ali said: “Brotherless Night is a brilliant, compelling and deeply moving novel that bears witness to the intimate and epic-scale tragedies of the Sri Lankan civil war. In rich, evocative prose, Ganeshananthan creates a vivid sense of time and place and an indelible cast of characters. Her commitment to complexity and clear-eyed moral scrutiny combined with spell binding story telling renders Brotherless Night a masterpiece of historical fiction.” I totally agree with this multi-faceted justified praise.
The narrator is Sashikala Kulenthiran, 16 when the story starts, daughter of a government surveyor often out of home and a strong mother. Brothers are Niranjan – ‘Periannai’ – 25, just passed out doctor in Peradeniya; Dayalan 19, novel reading worker in the Jaffna Library; fiery Seelan 17, in college in the AL class; and younger to her Aran, 13.
The story of the Kulenthiran family and Sri Lankan history starts in Jaffna in 1981. The book is in five parts. Within each Part are chapters with titles usually of the place in which the incidents occur and dates. It spans the start of racial tensions and includes much of what happens in Jaffna till 1989. Then the end of the civil war is documented with questions focused on how many civilians died –conscripted as a human shield by the retreating LTTE leadership and shot by the LTTE and by the SL armed forces – 2009.
The very beginning of the novel is attention grabbing, innovative yet so simple, but it clutches the reader hard and lets him/her off only when the last page is read and the Prologue re-read. Part One carries the title and subtitle: A Near Invisible Scar – The boys with the Jaffna Eyes -Jaffna 1981. Its first sentence: “I met the first terrorist I knew when he was deciding to become one. K and his family lived down the road from me and mine…” Sashikala toppled a kettle of steaming water on herself and this neighbor – named only by initial K – runs in and breaks eggs over her scalded stomach. Then or earlier his fascination over her had taken hold. He sacrifices it all, his brilliance, even his medical education, to join the Movement. Her devotion to him is unwavering and lifelong with nothing to sustain or nurture it. Only once does he hold her hand to walk to the university when she is a medical student and he a high ranking LTTEer; to request a favour.
The entire story is meant to be read as a first hand detailing. Sashi is taken to Colombo by Niranjan to do her ALs to enter medical college. While living with her grandmother who’s late husband was a doctor, the July 83 riots occur. Thus the author, through Sashi, is able to give an authentic, first hand sounding description of what occurs. Niranjan, most adored by her, is killed by a Sinhala mob. She and her Ammammah are rescued by Sinhalese neighbours as the mob torches their home. They are taken to a refugee camp and then to Jaffna by boat.
Sashi enters the Jaffna University Medical Faculty. There she meets the much admired and respected anatomy lecturer, just returned from further studies in UK. Anjali is thinly veiled Rajini Tiranagama though Anjali retains her Tamil surname and lives with Varathan; possibly meant to be Rajan Hoole. They write true, unbiased reports of happenings in Jaffna and the region which are secretly disseminated to Colombo, even overseas. (I remember the University Teachers for Human Rights (Jaffna) pamphlets/reports that at first were almost smuggled in to the HR Library in Colombo I worked in).
Sashi’s return to Jaffna means she reports all the turmoil of the place from the rise of the LTTE which her two older brothers Dayalan and Seelan join. Aran is totally opposed and later moves to Colombo to reach his aim of engineering.
She is in the thick of the fast unto death of K, promoted by the lecturer T. K wants her to be beside him. His demand is for the IPKF to leave Jaffna, release of LTTE prisoners etc. He refuses even water. It is paradoxical as the LTTE is an armed terrorist group calling themselves freedom fighters. but on killing sprees, and here is one of their leaders undertaking a Gandhian fast. Ambassador J N Dixit visits Jaffna but does not offer K a drink as requested by Prabhakaran.
Sashi has been working very much in the field hospital manned by mostly medical students, treating both LTTE cadres and civilians. Seelan arranges for Sashi to migrate to the UK holding a false passport. As she awaits boarding at Katunayake, she runs out and returns to Jaffna and then hears of Anjali having been taken away by the LTTE. She is shot in the back as she is made to walk in a jungle area at night. Different in details from how Rajini T was shot as she cycled home from university. The attack on the Army Commander is also given but differently. A raped girl who Sashi treats and is now pregnant from the rape comes to Colombo and in a high rise building blows herself and one of her army rapists.
My comments
Most certainly Brotherless Night is ‘blazingly brilliant’ and ‘beautiful, heartbreaking’ as is written on the cover of the book published by Penguin. You can read all the praising comments written by distinguished reviewers.
One critic did not much favour the completely linear style of narration. I loved it. VVG goes on with the story, detail by detail, chronologically with dates given. This is a pleasing change from modern writing which aims often at complexity of structure and style. VVG’s style of writing and language are easy flowing but very often scintillating, as a critic has said. Her description of K’s death as Sashi sits by him and tends to him is superb. Not only does she make us see the entire scene of crowds surrounding the stage where K is lying with her beside dodging cameras, with a doctor at hand, but with no effort creates pathos and deep sorrow. He dies after 12 days. I googled and found that Rasiah Partheeban alias Thileepan, top LTTEr, died thus after his fast started on 15 September 1987.
As mentioned earlier, VVG manages the plot and structure of the story so that her protagonist Sashikala is present at all the significant occurrences that led to the racial riots in Colombo; the rise of the Boys in Jaffna; cruel elimination of all other political parties like TELO and the travails of civil war as endured in the peninsula. The end of the war is not detailed as Sashi is overseas; merely mentioned. But the question of human rights weighs in.
Best and minor minuses
One thing needs mentioning by a Sinhalese woman who lived through all the troubles in Colombo (me). VVG is completely unbiased and mentions the crimes of the LTTE, IPKF and the GoSL. She balances extremely dexterously on the high wire she traverses with these forces beside her. The feeling I got was that she was more censorious of the LTTE. She cannot but condemn their brutality and the utterly useless waste of Tamil youth. She does not mention child soldiers no women cadres , though in passing she mentions Anton Balasingham and wife.
The minor complaint I have is how Sashikala is suddenly a doctor and in the US with no details given. Maybe the author felt they were not necessary. However Sashi’s escape to UK (which she aborted) was very detailed – her false Malaysian passport, visa etc.
Another described incident I got stuck at, unbelieving, was her meeting a person she knew at the UN and at Seelan’s bidding (he is in NY) asks the VIP to intervene on behalf of the Tamil civilians cornered in the Nandikadal area and negotiate their release. He says he is helpless.
I have taken objection to writers who lived safe and far removed in the West and wrote about our travails. I secretly thought it was for fame and gain. Not at all so with VVG’s book. It is valuable and historical.I urge you Reader, if you have not done so already, to read Brotherless Night. Maybe after, read Manuka Wijesinghe’s Like Moths to the Flame – fictionalized but mostly true life of Prabhakaran.