Ape Gama

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Apē Gama (Sinhala:අපේ ගම, Tamil:எங்கள் கிராமம்) (lit. Our Village)[1] is a semi-autobiographical book by Sri Lankan author Martin Wickramasinghe detailing the narrator's experiences as a child in Southern Province, Sri Lanka. Initially published in 1940,[1] it was translated into English in 1968 as Lay Bare the Roots. It is seventeen chapters long.

Ape Gama
AuthorMartin Wickramasinghe
TranslatorsLakshmi de Silva
LanguageSinhala
GenreFiction
Published1940
Publication placeSri Lanka
Media typeBook
ISBN9789558415443

Plot

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A young boy growing up in a village in Ceylon and how he deals with rapid economic and social changes that are going on around him.[2][3]

Reception

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Charles Hallisey in Literary Cultures in History: Reconstructions from South Asia states that the narrator is "a villager, unself-consciously secure in his local experiences of the world to such a degree that by nature he was 'literary'." "...this villager becomes a tutor to urbanized authors and readers, who must unlearn what they have been taught in school in order to regain the cultural authenticity that survives in the village."[4]

The work was well received by the English educated people of Sri Lanka.[5]

References

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  1. ^ a b An Anthology of Modern Writing from Sri Lanka. Association for Asian Studies. 1981. pp. 126–127. ISBN 978-0-8165-0702-3.
  2. ^ Anderson, Sarah, ed. (2016). Anderson's Travel Companion: A Guide to the Best Non-Fiction and Fiction for Travelling. Routledge. ISBN 9781351958394.
  3. ^ Samaraweera, Vijaya, ed. (1987). Sri Lanka (Volume 20 of ABC-CLIO World Bibliographical Series). Clio Press. p. 135. ISBN 9780903450331.
  4. ^ Pollock, Sheldon; Arvind Raghunathan, eds. (2003). Literary Cultures in History: Reconstructions from South Asia. University of California Press. p. 718. ISBN 9780520228214.
  5. ^ Nyrop, Richard F. (1971). Area Handbook for Ceylon. U.S. Government Printing Office. p. 173.