Teaching the Sri Lankan Civil War through Brotherless Night
To begin, you must put one foot in front of the other, one word after another word, one story after another story. Have you ever tried to record this kind of history? No sooner would we write something down that the Tigers or the Indians or the Sri Lankan Army would follow in our wake, trying to erase it. I had asked Anjali and Varathan to teach me how to collect the truth. They showed me that it was something I could only learn by talking to ordinary people, by asking them questions, by waiting and listening. – pg. 265
This curriculum unit invites high school and community college educators to explore the complexities of family, civil war, and memory through the lens of V. V. Ganeshananthan’s novel Brotherless Night. Set in 1980s Sri Lanka, the novel follows a young Tamil woman, Sashi, whose life is upended by the escalating violence of the early years of civil war. Through Sashi’s journey as a daughter, sister, student, aspiring doctor, and witness to the unraveling of her community, the novel challenges students to grapple with the ethics of political resistance, the human costs of war, and the blurred boundaries between victim and perpetrator. The book examines how war fundamentally alters the physical, emotional, and social environments of civilians struggling to survive amid conflict. Through Sashi’s eyes, students confront how the conflicts upend everyone’s life, education, family relationships, professional ambitions, and even basic safety.
The Sri Lankan civil war, which lasted from 1983 to 2009, primarily involved the Sri Lankan government fighting against the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE or “Tamil Tigers”), who became the dominant Tamil militant group after mostly eliminating rival organizations by the end of 1986. While ethnic tensions between the Sinhalese majority and Tamil minority had existed since Sri Lanka’s independence from Britain in 1948, the conflict escalated into large-scale military confrontations in the mid-1980s, particularly in the northern and eastern regions where many Tamils lived. The war devastated the country, destroying infrastructure, displacing hundreds of thousands, and deepening ethnic divisions. Anti-Tamil pogroms led by government-aligned mobs in 1983 made recruitment easy for Tamil militants in the early years of the war, but over time, it became clearer and clearer that the dominant militant group, the Tamil Tigers, was brutally oppressing many of the people they claimed to represent.
Author Ganeshananthan has said she was drawn to writing about the early years of the war—particularly the 1980s—because this period remains underexplored in English-language fiction and wanted to set the story in Jaffna as much such fiction is set in Colombo. While the war’s brutal end has been widely discussed in journalism and political writing she wanted to understand how the contested beginnings of the conflict shaped what followed. She was especially interested in writing beyond the 1983 anti-Tamil pogroms known as Black July, and in exploring whether fiction could do justice to the complexity of the war’s early years. Born in Connecticut in 1983 and growing up in Maryland, her decision was also personal, shaped by the stories she had grown up hearing from Sri Lankan communities in exile.
It is important to note that Brotherless Night concludes in 1989. Between 1989 and 2009, Sri Lanka experienced the final two decades of its protracted civil war between the Government of Sri Lanka and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). What began in the late 1970s as a separatist struggle for Tamil self-determination had, by this period, evolved into one of the world’s longest and most brutal civil conflicts. Thus, her writing about the early years of the war cannot be read as a simple reflection of that moment alone. Her perspective is inevitably shaped by what she later came to know about how the war unfolded and ultimately ended. By the time the war ended in 2009, with the military defeat of the LTTE and the death of its leader, Velupillai Prabhakaran, any illusion of victory by either side had long vanished. The final months of the conflict brought catastrophic suffering in which tens of thousands of Tamil civilians were trapped in the crossfire, cut off from aid, and subjected to relentless bombardment.
This unit provides teachers with six deep dives into historical events and people featured in the book that support close reading, critical thinking, and empathy-building. Designed for humanities and social studies classrooms, the unit encourages interdisciplinary engagement and supports educators in addressing these topics with care and nuance.
Ultimately, I hope that teaching this text can empower students to reflect on the conditions that fuel violent conflict—both abroad and at home—and to consider the role of storytelling in truth-telling, healing, and justice.
This unit is organized about six major historical events and/or figures.
- The Burning of the Jaffna Public Library
- The Riots of Black July
- The Formation of Jaffna (Northern) Mothers Front
- The Jaffna Hospital Massacre
- Rasaiah Parthipan (Thileepan)
- Rajani Thiranagama
