Fractured Bliss

About the Book

The plot is situated in twentieth-century Sri Lanka. Th e protagonist is a Sri Lankan woman of a mixed racial origin (Eurasian) who grew up as an orphan at a time when the island was transitioning from colonial rule to independence. Her background, her marriage, and later her 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 Perumuna (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-infl icted calamities. Th is makes the aim of the book somewhat ambitious, as it intentionally sets out to be a personal witness to issues of colonization, the constitutional fl aws of an emerging nation, power-mongering politics, racial and ethnic tensions, emergent religious/political identities, and gender discrimination.

About the Author

Sree Padma is the executive director of the Inter-Collegiate Sri Lanka Education (ISLE) Program, a study abroad program in Sri Lanka. She also teaches at Bowdoin College, Brunswick, Maine, offering courses on the cultural history of South Asia. She has been a research associate in the Department of History and Archaeology at Andhra University, Visakhapatnam, Andhra Pradesh, where she completed her PhD. She has taught at Harvard University as a lecturer and research associate in women’s studies and history of religions and at Bowdoin College as assistant professor of history. She is the author of Costume, Coiffure, and Ornament in the Temple Sculpture of Northern Andhra (Agam Kala Prakasan, 1991) and the coeditor of Buddhism in the Krishna River Valley of Andhra (State University of New York Press, 2008). Her recent books are Vicissitudes of the Goddess: Reconstructions of the Gramadevata in India’s Religious Traditions. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013) and an edited volume of Inventing and Reinventing the Goddess: Contemporary Iterations of Hindu Deities on the Move (Lexington Books, Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, 2014).