Review: "Brotherless Night"

By Nilima Sinha

Brotherless Night by V.V. Ganeshananthan is a heartbreaking story of the Sri Lankan civil war between the majority Sinhalese-dominated government and the minority Tamil insurgents, the Tamil Tigers, spanning almost three decades from 1983 to 2009.

Sri Lanka was colonized by the Portuguese, the Dutch and finally the British.  The British followed a “divide and conquer” rule and left a broken independent country in 1948.  To fix the inequities created by the British, the Sinhala government imposed property and language rules which caused major friction between the ethnic communities giving birth to the horrific civil war.

​The novel is an exploration of the civil war through the eyes of a Tamil woman caught up in the devastation. The story begins in1981 in Jaffna, a predominantly
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Tamil community, located at the northern tip of Sri Lanka.  The narrator, Shashikala (Sashi), is 16 and is living in Jaffna with loving parents and four brothers.  She aspires to be a doctor like her eldest brother, Niranjan, whom she idolizes, her late grandfather who was a renowned physician in Colombo, and her brilliant, charismatic neighbor K whom Sashi hero worships and has a crush on.  The burning of the local library signals the start of the civil war, which wreaks havoc in Sashi’s idyllic life.  Her beloved family is torn apart.  Niranjan is killed in the violence.  Two of her brothers, Dayalan and Seelan, join the Tamil Tigers, as does K.  Sashi’s younger brother, Aran, decides not to join the Tigers and stays at home. As events unfold around her, Sashi is forced to make difficult choices about her life, politics and activism.  She is an eyewitness to the plight of the civilians, especially women, who are caught between the battling Sinhala government, the Tamil tigers, the Indian peace-keeping forces and the United Nations which failed to act in a timely manner.

The content is harrowing, but the writing and the plot kept me spell-bound as I devoured every word of this novel with fleshed-out characters. This historical novel also highlights the strength and courage of women in pain and adversity within a culture that undermines women.  The narrator is a female, and women are at the center of the story.

Ganeshananthan lives in Minneapolis and teaches at the University of Minnesota. Brotherless Night is available in the Coffman Library.