Book Review| Brotherless Night: A Novel that Explores Sri Lankan Civil War and its Human Tragedy

Tamil women grieve during a ceremony commemorating those who died in the civil war at Mullivaikkal village in northern Sri Lanka on May 18, 2024.
| Photo Credit: ISHARA S.KODIKARA/ AFP

The civil war in Sri Lanka, which began in 1983 and lasted for nearly three decades, killed hundreds of thousands of people, displaced millions, and convulsed the island nation for a generation. Brotherless Night, V.V. Ganeshananthan’s powerful novel and the winner of Women’s Prize for Fiction 2024, is an evocation of those terrible times, when boys flung themselves into the arms of the Tamil separatist movement before they had become men and waged battle on a fearsome opiate of nationalism, violence, and brutality.

The novel traces the life of Sashikala, a Sri Lankan Tamil girl growing up in a village near Jaffna, a town in the Tamil-dominated northern part of the island. She finds her own fate and that of her family inexorably threaded with the trajectory of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). The LTTE and other Tamil separatist groups sprang up as a reaction to the predominantly Sinhala Sri Lankan government’s repressive policies against the Tamil minorities. Over time, the LTTE subsumed the other groups, and, as it turned increasingly brutal—blithely crossing the thin line between an armed struggle for self-determination and indiscriminate terrorism—many local Tamils ceased to be sympathetic to it. Ganeshananthan’s novel, told in the first-person narrative of Sashikala, is at once nuanced and clear-eyed, exploring as it does the movement and the human tragedy it unleashed—not only upon its deemed enemies but also upon its own.

Also Read | Sri Lanka: The stranded state

In 1981, 16-year-old Sashi dreams of becoming a doctor. So does the boy she is sweet on, the brilliant K, who is a year older than her. She and her four brothers are bright young adults focussed on their future careers. Her eldest brother, Niranjan, is already a doctor at a hospital in Peradeniya. They lead their peaceful, studious lives, even as the discontent over the government’s oppression of Tamils simmers around them. It is not until the bloody anti-Tamil riots break out in Colombo in July 1983 that things finally boil over. Niranjan is killed in the riots: burnt alive when a mob sets fire to the car in which he and two others were travelling.

Deep dive

The civil war gathers pace now, and Sashi finds her brothers growing quiet, angry, their jokes drying up and the music they used to listen to falling silent. Not much later, K and Sashi’s other two older brothers, Dayalan and Seelan, join the LTTE. They melt away one night, joining the ranks of tens of thousands of Tamil boys who leave their homes to fight for the cause. Sashi understands their rage and the reason they felt they had to choose the movement and abandon the life path they had once set for themselves. But as the months and years roll on, it becomes clear that the movement that was meant to free the Tamil people has become a prisoner of its own viciousness. The LTTE’s barbaric slaughter of civilians, the regular bomb blasts that kill innocents, and the army’s reprisals keep up a never-ending cycle of violence, turning the prospect of peace more and more elusive.

Brotherless Night won the 2024 Women’s Prize for Fiction.  
| Photo Credit:
By special arrangement

Dayalan, Seelan, and K quickly rise in the LTTE hierarchy, and before long, the Tigers take control of the Jaffna peninsula. But Sashi grows disenchanted with the movement, especially after the militants kill a beloved and widely respected teacher in Jaffna. She recoils from their casual brutality, their justification of every atrocity as “necessary’’ for the attainment of a larger goal. But despite that, when K comes calling and asks Sashi, who is a medical student now, if she would help treat patients at an LTTE field hospital in her spare time, she agrees. And so, in a sense, she, too, becomes part of the LTTE. As she says in the prologue: “I used to be what you would call a terrorist myself.’’

The unspoken love between Sashi and K is one of the most moving elements of Brotherless Night. They never become lovers, they never exchange tender words—the circumstances allow no such luxury. He wants her to emigrate abroad to safety, but she refuses, and you wonder if it is because she will not leave a country that contains him. He seeks her out at the most critical moment of his life, and she stands by him, their bond unbroken until the end.

Also Read | Distress and divide

Ganeshananthan, who is an American of Sri Lankan descent, is meticulous about the historical details of the period she sets her novel in. But the history is enmeshed in the story of Sashi and the people she loves; it is never a dull drone overwhelming the story itself. The narrative is sparse and matter of fact, yet it vividly portrays the turmoil that tore Sri Lanka apart, capturing both the public upheaval and the private agony of its citizens.

At its core, however, Brotherless Night is about a fundamental question of our time: Who is a terrorist? A freedom fighter who becomes brutalised? A girl-next-door who turns a traumatic corner and comes out the other side firing from an automatic weapon? Can the term “terrorist” truly contain all the complexities that go into the making of such an entity?

Shuma Raha is a journalist and author.