Shedding light on Sri Lankan Civil War

Sharmila Seyyid, the author, grew up during the blood-letting decades of the Sri Lankan Civil War. Her experiences and her work as a social activist helping to rehabilitate women of different communities gave her an in-depth understanding of the shared experience of the people. Her conviction that the stories of the women must be told led her to write this book. Gita Subramanian, the translator, opens up about the book and why translations deserve our attention.

The novel unfolds its story through the lives of its three protagonists. One is Thawakkul, a young Muslim woman, a character perhaps partly based on the author herself, who is an activist working with various organisations in the field of rehabilitation. Another is Yoga, a Tamil Tiger, who joined the militants as a 13-year-old, only because she wanted to die to escape the terrible conditions she found herself in due to the poverty of her family. The third is Theivanai, another Tamil Tiger, who volunteered out of a genuine desire to see the birth of a Tamil Eelam.

“Through the eyes of these three women we see the events of the civil war: we experience the exhilaration of the genuine idealism of the Tigers during the early years of the war and their subsequent disillusionment and the effects of the majoritarian policies of the Sinhalese government at the centre. The novel also deals with the rise of fundamentalism and misogyny in the Muslim community, something that the author herself had to face,” says Gita.

Also, a reader can expect to completely get immersed in the horrors of a civil war, something that is a universal experience of all the nations that have had the misfortune of going through harrowing upheavals of this kind. “While translating the narration of the events of the last stages of the war, I was so shaken by them that I found it difficult to extricate myself from what was happening in the book and accept the reality of everyday life — and honestly, I am not exaggerating when I say this,” muses Gita about the book published by HarperCollins India.

What strikes one most about the book is the author’s forthrightness.  She has written and described the truth as she sees it.  So she does not spare any community, including her own, in her honest appraisal of the way things unfolded during those tumultuous years. This honesty illuminates the entire work and truly unless someone wants to lie to oneself, they should have no cause to take offense.

Gita Subramanian, who took up translation after a long teaching career in Hong Kong, has published four translations of Tamil novels. “I have been translating for more than 12 years. This is my sixth published work. I think my years as a teacher of English Literature and History also give me the sensitivity to understand characterisation. I always do my best to try and bring the characters to life and keep them as close to the original imagination of the author as possible. I know a certain element always gets lost in translation, but as I can think in both languages, I do get as close to the author’s version as I possibly can.”

Translations deserve our attention as there are many chances that we miss out on many interesting books written in various regional languages. Gita opines, “I most passionately agree that translations are very important in world literature, and even more so in India. Some of the best works in India, I firmly believe, are done in the regional languages and not only will they not be read by readers in other countries, they will not even reach neighbouring states within our own country unless they are translated. Besides, even among people who speak the same language, youngsters who grow up in other states or abroad are often not literate in their mother tongue. That is an unfortunate truth and such children have to read their own literature in translation. I am sure we have many potential winners of the Nobel Prize for Literature in our regional languages.  But how will they be recognised and awarded if we do not have good English translations of their works?”