On reading Aravind Adiga's The White Tiger, this writer could not help wondering why Sri Lankan novelists writing in Sinhala have consistently failed to maintain a critical distance from their own culture and the status quo. The White Tiger may not be the greatest work of fiction to come out of India in the last decade, but it did reveal the dark side of India's so-called economic boom, and questioned the ideals of the consumerist middle class that is the most vocal supporter of neo-liberal economic policies. Of course, the 'Indian novel' (at least its English-language incarnations) has long been critically evaluating postcolonial India – Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things, Rohinton Mistry's A Fine Balance and Upamanyu Chatterjee's English, August being just three well-known examples. An early masterpiece such as Raja Rao's The Serpent and the Rope (1960) likewise investigated India's possible relationship with the West, with an implicit critique of trying to be Western and Indian simultaneously.
The White Tiger, however, was a sharp slap in the face of neo-liberal India, and the book has illustrated that a novel can indeed 'intervene'. Keeping one's critical distance from the dominant ideologies of the time is a precondition of becoming a great writer, particularly when these very ideologies are smuggled in through the intricate and seductive means of audio-visual media. Arundhati Roy was right on target when she stated, in The Ordinary Person's Guide to the Empire, that new media is not the mere 'vehicle' of neo-liberalism – media is neo-liberalism. Along these lines, the majority of Indians only enjoy the image of being rich, rather than actually being rich.
Sri Lanka's neo-liberal façade of 'being rich' is equally thick, though only a few writers have attempted to pierce it and take a look at the other side. Moreover, there is no major writer using Sinhala-language fiction to produce a counter-narrative to the nationalist 'grand narrative', which maintains that post-LTTE Sri Lanka will be wonderful simply because there will be no LTTE. Of course, few will deny that Sri Lanka is better off without the LTTE; but the group's military defeat clearly does not mean that Sri Lanka's intelligentsia can now go off to sleep and hope to wake up in a paradise. Furthermore, during the past decade no Sinhala writer attempted a novel that challenged prevalent mainstream ideologies. In fact, postcolonial Sri Lanka is yet to produce a great novel that is equally critical of colonial cultural dominance and extreme nationalisms of various kinds, despite potent examples from the neighbourhood. As early as the 1920s, for instance, Rabindranath Tagore's Gora sought to depict "the illegitimacy of Nationalism", in the words of the political scientist Ashis Nandy. It should be noted, however, that Sri Lanka's theatre scene is markedly more engaged on this level.
To make matters worse, most senior Sinhala writers are nationalists themselves, of one kind or another – a situation that has only become exacerbated since the defeat of the LTTE in May 2009. Now, more than ever before, there is space for only two facets: patriotic or unpatriotic, and any critical thinking is naturally termed the latter. (Recently, a plan to modernise the Sinhala alphabet was even dubbed 'unpatriotic' in the popular press.) It is time to recast the net. At this point, the Sinhala literary scene is faced with two major problems: first, it has not been able to produce any serious counter-narrative to the neo-liberal promise of a 'new Sri Lanka'; second, no major writer is critiquing Sinhala Buddhist nationalism. These two problems are related, of course, as the dominance of the Sinhala Buddhist nationalist discourse over the past two decades remains a significant factor contributing to the failure of the Sinhala novel.