ABSTRACT
Shiva Naipaul’s last travel memoir, An Unfinished Journey (1981), opens in Sri Lanka on the eve of the 1981 race riots. Colombo is “festive under smoky skies,” “in a condition approaching civil war.” A description of the city at dawn, “uninviting and unkempt,” its gutters “littered with piles of refuse” is ironically juxtaposed with his hotel’s card, which reads, “Welcome … to Sri Lanka, Pearl of the Indian Ocean.”3 It is against such a background of civil war, nationalist ideology, and ethnic conflict that much of Sri Lankan writing has been written and read. Minoli Salgado argues that Sri Lankan literature in English is an “emergent canon” in postcolonial writing.4 Early Anglophone writers such as Rev. W.S. Senior and Patrick Fernando came from the English-speaking Europeanized upper classes and their work was mostly concerned with adapting Yeatsian and Leavisite aesthetics to reflect Sri Lankan culture. The aesthetics of the 1930s and 1940s school known as the Kandy Lake poets were restricted by the colonial curriculum and limited to imitation of the Romantics, although they were partly inspired by the nationalism of Indian poets such as Tagore and Sarojini Naidu.5
