Sarasa

යුගාන්තය – Yuganthaya
Translated by Ranga Wickramasinghe & Dinesha Wikramasinghe

Destiny is the third novel of Martin Wickramasinghe’s Uprooted trilogy: Gamperaliya, Kaliyugaya and Yuganthaya.

The narrative of the trilogy links three generations descended from the Kaisaruwattes, a family of the gentry of a Southern coastal village. Gamperaliya (The Village) is the story of the First and Second generations in a Changing village culture of the latter half the nineteenth century’ Kaliyugaya (The Age of Kali) deals with the urbanized, anglophile second and third generations, living in Colombo from the early part of the twentieth century, whilst still sustaining links with the village.

Yuganthaya (Destiny) is the story of the fourth generation. This generation, completely anglophile and oblivious of their village origins, is the destiny of the evolutionary and revolutionary changes in people and society depicted by Martin Wickramasinghe in the trilogy. Inevitably, the destiny of the new generations of the educated rural professional class of the mid twentieth century becomes linked to that of this fourth generations. Tissa is the only second generation kaisaruwatte surviving in Destiny. He has preserved some of his simple humane village values by cultivating a hard protective cynical and sceptical intellectual shell, and a life style bordering on asceticism.

The central characters of Destiny are Saviman Kabalana, the unrelenting capitalist, his son Malin, the socialist trade – union leader educated in England rebelling against his father and his business empire, Malin’s sophisticated Young sister Chamari, also a rebel against the snobbish elitism of her own anglophile class, and Aravinda, the bright village lad who has become a gifted surgeon, and seeks to become one of the urban social elite of Colombo.