anupama mohan Giraya and the Gothic Space: Nationalism and the Novel in Sri Lanka abstract The essay turns to Punyekante Wijenaike’s 1971 novella, Giraya, to study the ways in which the Gothic features as a framing device for the exploration of the gendered and ideological domain of home in twentieth-century Sri Lankan writing. The walauwe or feudal manor is transformed, in Wijenaike’s novella, into a spectral space that challenges the prevailing nationalist discourses and literatures which fashioned the Sri Lankan nation as a rural utopia. Nostalgia and visions of national utopias give way to terror and dislocation as the fragmen- tary narrative of Giraya calls into question, from the very heart of the idealized nation – its home – the representational powers of the ordered social realist novel, Sri Lanka’s most dominant literary genre in the post-Independence era. KEYWORDS: utopia, Gothic, Sri Lanka, Wijenaike, spectral i Giraya is, in many ways, an unusual work. Written in 1971 by Punyekante Wijenaike, it is a novella composed mainly of diary entries spanning a year, written by Kamini, the young daughter-in-law of an elite, English- speaking Sinhalese family, living in a feudal manor. As Wijenaike notes in the preface to the 1997 edition of the novella, 1971 was the year when ‘‘Land Reform was knocking like a wolf on the door of people accus- tomed to living on inherited wealth’’ (n.pag.). The first chapter – unmarked by date or title – is written in the confessional first-person mode and ends with Kamini reading her diary entries, presumably after all the events described in them have occurred, as a way to understand the transformations that have come upon her and her family: ‘‘And now as I read my dairy. . .’’ (5; ellipses added). The diary begins on 13 April and ends the next year on the same day, and the intervening entries are marked with the Gregorian date as well as the day on the Sinhala calendar. The first entry, e.g., ‘‘BAK (April) 13th’’ sets the template for all the other entries to follow. What is interesting is that the entries are rarely mentioned university of toronto quarterly, volume 84, number 4, fall 2015 6 university of toronto press doi: 10.3138/utq.84.4.04 http://www.utpjournals.press/doi/pdf/10.3138/utq.84.4.04 - Anupama Mohan <anupama.mohan@gmail.com> - Monday, November 16, 2015 7:52:49 AM - IP Address:182.66.19.192