Ganeshananthan’s Brotherless Night: A Fictive Site to Recount Evisceration of Human Rights During the Sri Lankan Civil War

Abstract

This paper closely reads V.V. Ganeshananthan’s Brotherless Night (2023) as a fictive literary memorial site of twenty-six years long Sri Lankan Civil War. The paper draws its theoretical framework from Pramod K. Nayar’s (2016) concept of Human Rights Literature (HRL). The paper, contextualizing the living conditions of Tamils in predominantly Sinhalese Buddhist Sri Lanka, brings to the fore the atrocious violation of basic civil and human rights of Sri Lankan Tamils. The study makes it obvious that the Sri Lankan Civil War observed the complex historical marginalization of Tamils through massive genocide, exclusion from national mainstream and abdication of rights to grow. The paper, putting the fictive character of Sashi, at the heart of the study, manifests the novel’s agenda to explore turbulent history and precarious repercussions of Sri Lankan Civil War as the ugliest chapter of Sri Lankan national history.