Fractured Bliss

Author – Sree Padma

Publisher – Godage Publishers

First Edition 2018

ISBN 978-955-30-9436-0

360 Pages

Inspired by Sri Lanka and the island culture’s similarities to her own native culture in Andhra Pradesh, India, Sree Padma has endeavored to portray the “Fractured Bliss” of Sri Lanka’s recent past. The fictionalized biographical approach she deploys paints a portrait of Sri Lanka’s social and cultural complexities owing to its centuries of European colonization as well as the evolving nature of Sinhala Buddhist and Tamil Hindu relations that have emerged after independence.

The narrative follows Rita, a Sri Lankan woman of a mixed Eurasian racial origin, who grew up as an orphan during the island’s decolonization. Her background, her marriage and her eventual change of religious identity represent a slice of the emerging ethnic complexity on the island. She not only witnesses close-up the tragedies that occur in independent Sri Lanka in the form of Janatha Vimukti Peramuna (JVP) uprisings in the early 1970s and 1980s, the Sri Lankan government’s brutal suppression of them, the terrible ethnic riots of the Sinhalese against the Tamils and the rise of the Liberation Tamil Tiger Eelam (LTTE) and their terror tactics, but she also experiences other struggles coinciding with the political fate of the nation and its own self-inflicted calamities.

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