ABSTRACT
In Shyam Selvadurai’s postcolonial novel of manners,CinnamonGardens (1999), we enter Colombo’s southern suburbs inhabited by the colonial elite in 1927, the high water mark of colonialism in Ceylon/Sri Lanka. We meet several related families whose first language is Tamil but who communicate easily in English, and whose livelihood depends ultimately on the income from remote tea plantations in the hills or rubber estates in Malaya. The most influential character for these families is the septuagenarian Navaratnam, bearer of the honorific title of Mudaliyar (the ‘first’ or the ‘chief’) bestowed by the Government of Ceylon, who controls most family assets and the old family temple in the Pettah or Native Town, and autocratically expects obedience from the many petitioners requiring his administrative intervention, from his many servants exploited for physical labor and sexual favors, and from his extended family members. His arrogance has already driven his eldest son into exile in Bombay; his interference has brutally ended the relationship between his younger son, Balendran, and the love of his life, Richard, during their school years together in London. Now Balendran is in his forties, married and with a son studying in England. He expends much of his energy earning his father’s trust in business matters and dedicating himself to his supportive wife – while paying men for casual sex near the railway tracks. His cousins living in the nearby estate include Annalukshmi, graduate and now teacher in an exclusive English-medium missionary school, whose great love is the reading of English literature. Balendran finds his brittle reality challenged by Richard’s visit to Ceylon during the governance inquiries of the Donoughmore Commission and then the impending death of his exiled brother; Annalukshmi’s world is perturbed by pressures to marry and by encounters with individuals representing the hitherto distant world of labor unions and the hitherto unimagined world of modern art.
