Politics of Tamil Fiction: A Critical Study of Class Contradiction and Ethnic Conflict Constructed in the Up-country Tamil Novels

Abstract

Up-country Tamils, descendents of the immigrant workers, brought by the British to Sri Lanka from South India during the 19th and early 20th centuries to work in their coffee, rubber and tea plantations, were predominantly settled in the central region of the hillcountry. They evolved into a significant portion of the working class of this country during the pre–independent period and into a separate ethnic community in the post–independent Sri Lanka, identifying themselves as malayahath thamilar in Tamil and symbolizing the consolidation of their ethnicity separating themselves from the indigenous Sri Lankan Tamils. The Up-country Tamils have produced a rich and a unique variety of literary works, ranging from folk literature to modern poetry, fiction and theatre, the aesthetic expressions of their socio-political and cultural life. They are separately identified as malayahath thamil ilakkiyam, the Up-country Tamil literature, and constitute an integral part of Sri Lankan Tamil writing. The Up-country Tamil writers and also some writers from the North have produced a number of Tamil novels depicting the socio-cultural life of the Up-country Tamils. Most of the novels are in the realistic mode of narratives and portray the Up-country Tamils as an exploited working class and an underprivileged and suppressed ethnic community. The modern Tamil literary historians and critics have written on various aspects of Up-country Tamil literature, but there is no in depth studies on the politics of this writing. The paper studies critically the politics of selected Up-country Tamil novels to find out how the writers constructed the social reality into a fictional reality, the textual strategies they used to construct the social reality in their novels, their political ideology and aesthetic sensibility. The main focus of the paper is the political dimension of class and ethnicity portrayed in the novels and the aesthetic value of them.