Published Paper Details:

Shyam Selvadurai is an immigrant Canadian novelist whose family migrated to Canada in the wake of ethnic conflicts in Sri Lanka. Born to a Tamil father and a Sinhala mother, Selvadurai became aware of the ethnic tension in his country during his childhood only. As a growing child he could very well experience the bitterness and the consequences of ethnic hatred within his own family. His fiction is, therefore, a very meticulous amalgam of the vicissitudes of his own life and the gradual disintegration of his country due to incessant strife between the Tamils and the Sinhalese. His novel Cinnamon Gardens is a fine rendering of the causes which led to the situation of ethnic conflict in Sri Lanka. This paper would attempt to critically explore the narrative of Cinnamon Gardens to understand the historical as well as socio-political causes which gradually lead to the situation of conflict in Sri Lanka resulting in the dislocation and mass migration of millions of people from the country.