This Divided Island Stories from the Sri Lankan War

Language: EnglishPages: 336About the BookSamanth Subramanian is a New Delhi-based journalist. He has written for the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Guardian, Caravan, Minit, New Republic and Foreign Policy. His first book, Following Fish: Travels around the Indian Coast, won the 2010 Shakti Bhatt First Book Prize in India and was shortlisted for the 2013 Andre Simon Award in the United Kingdom. This Divided Island was shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction 2015 and won the Raymond Crossword Book Award for Non-Fiction 2014.IntroductionA Time of war is a time of unfathomable flux. The terrains of the soul and of the body, of the family, of the community and of geopolitics itself all undergo extensive renovation. It can seem, sometimes, that even the very land rearranges itself. And, of course, in the fraction of a second that it takes for a bullet to find flesh, life can turn into death. There is no more drastic or permanent transformation than that.But peacetime can witness swift, profound change as well. In 2013, when I was writing the first draft of this book, Sri Lanka was a tense, wary place. Its twenty-six-year-long civil war had ended in 2009, in a final paroxysm of bloodletting. Mahinda Rajapaksa, the president of the country at the time, had supervised a brutal assault upon a mass of Tamil civilians huddled on the north-eastern shore of the island, hoping to flush out the leaders and guerrilla cadre of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). The United Nations estimated that 40,000 people died in this bombardment, but the Sri Lankan government didn't appear to care. It had ended the insurgency, hunted down its quarry, won the war. Not long afterwards, Rajapaksa won a re-elec