Books that capture richness of Sri Lanka

An Interview with renowned Author Asiff Hussein, whose latest work, The Zeylonese Treasure Book of Myth, Mystery and Mystique has just hit the shelves.

by Ifham Nizam

Q: You are a prolific writer and the author of several books on Sri Lanka. So, let’s go back to the very beginning. What inspired you to be a writer?

A: It’s a long story really. I started life as a freelance journalist contributing to Explore Sri Lankatravel magazine. That was back in the mid-1990s.These articles covered all manner of things to do with Sri Lankan culture and one very early article I wrote dealt with the origins and evolution of the Sinhala language. I was fascinated how Sinhala was related to many other languages including a good many European languages. This was something never taught to us in school.

So, I guess that’s where it all started. This fascination with the Indo-European family of languages of which Sinhala was very much a member, separated from the rest of the family on the mainland by a large swath of Dravidian speakers in South India. What was equally fascinating was that the parent form of this great family of languages had also been reconstructed by German scholars such as August Schleicher way back in the 1800s. That the Sinhala language had many words in common with other Indian, Iranian and European languages in its basic vocabulary such as kinship terms, body parts, numerals etc. was something so intriguing that I decided to expand on it.

The resulting work after several years of study incorporated not only the origins and evolution of the Sinhala language in much more detail, but also traced the origin of its early speakers to the Southern Russian and Ukraine regions through Central Asia and eventually to West Bengal before they finally settled in Sri Lanka. This formed by far the major portion of the work, but I also thought it necessary to cover the origins of the rest of the communities that have made this beautiful island their home. It was a multi-disciplinary study that incorporated historical data, linguistics, anthropology and geography among other things. The resulting book is titled The Lion and the Sword. An Ethnological Study of Sri Lankawas launched at the Royal Asiatic Society of Sri Lanka in 2001.

In 2009, I further expanded on this work to include ten comprehensive chapters and retitled it Zeylanica. A Study of the Peoples and Languages of Sri Lanka, which is presently in its third edition. The earlier work however continues to be cited on occasion including in the latest genetic study of the people of the country in the form of a scientific paper Xchromosomal STR based genetic polymorphisms and demographic history of Sri Lankan ethnicities and their relationship with global populations by Nandika Perera, Gayani Galhena and Gaya Ranawaka contributed to Nature Journal’s Scientific Reports of 2021.

Q: What are your other major works and what do they deal with?

A: Once I published my maiden book, there was no looking back and the rest followed as a matter of course. I made it my calling to bring subjects of academic interests to a popular readership. One such work was about our Muslim community and titled Sarandib. An Ethnological Study of the Muslims of Sri Lanka. It is now in its third expanded edition. It covers the major Muslim groups of the country including the Moors, Malays and Memons and has separate chapters and sections dealing with their origins, affinities, languages, settlements, cultural traditions and religious beliefs.

Another covered our little spoken of caste system which of course remains a social reality to this day as you can see in the candidates fielded by political parties in different areas and our matrimonial columns. This work is titled Caste in Sri Lanka. From Ancient Times to the Present Daystill remains one of my best sellers and contains little known facts about our castes gathered from field inquiries, old Dutch-era tombos and other historical records as well as little known books on individual castes authored by members of those particular castes and meant for circulation only among members of such castes as they contain sensitive information including caste-specific patronymic ge-names. Being a Muslim was an advantage here as many would not have trusted these works in the hands of a fellow Sinhalese who happened to belong to another caste.

Yet another is Ivilly Pevilly. The astronome’s Guide to the Culinary History & Heritage of Sri Lanka which is more in the form of a coffee table book with hundreds of photographs illustrating the work. It is more like an ethnography of food and covers the traditional foods and dietary habits of all the major communities of the island from the Stone Age Balangoda Man to the Portuguese and Dutch Burghers.

My other works include Thirty Shades of Taprobane on thirty strange beliefs and customs of the country and more recently the Zeylonese Treasure Book of Myth, Mystery and Mystique which contains a hundred mysteries, oddities and curiosities of our hauntingly mystique island whose existence demands answers which I have done my best to explain on a scientific basis, though there are still those that defy scientific explanation.

And then there is Accha House and Umma House on my mixed childhood growing up in the Sri Lanka of the late 1970s and early 1980s, a fairly popular book.

Q: What are your best-selling books and why so?

A: My best-selling books have actually been my two latest coffee table books. The Great Days of Colombo published a couple of years ago was by far the best selling, with an average of 100 copies a month being sold. This huge volume of over 800 pages is about the city of Colombo and its evolution over the ages, with Colombo Port, Galle Face, Beira Lake and each zone from Fort to Mutwal being covered separately and illustrated with old maps, sketches and photographs. This work which was sponsored by Expolanka had its humble origins in a series of articles on Colpetty, Bambalapitiya and Wellawatte I contributed to Roar.lk. I hear it being said that it is the modern equivalent of Twentieth Century Impressions of Ceylon Published in the early 1900s.

Sadly, it’s out of print now due to the steep rise in paper costs and those 500 lucky ones who possess a copy today are truly fortunate. There is still a huge demand for it and I’m working with the publisher to get a second edition out soon. I have also contracted with a Chinese Publisher, the Foreign Language Press, to release an abridged version of the book to the Chinese market aimed at Chinese tourists visiting Sri Lanka.

My next best-selling book is also a coffee table book Iconic Masjids of Ceylonpublished by Ceylon Baithulmal Fund. This copiously illustrated book covers thirty mosques in the country from the centuries old Bakinigahawela Mosque in Uva Province to the ultra-modern flying saucer-like Jamiah Naleemiah mosque in Beruwala and comes with a recommendation by a Professor of World History of the University of Cambridge and a Beit Scholar of History of the University of Oxford.

Q: Any advice for aspiring writers?

A: Yes, a lot really. For one thing, before embarking on a book, you need to be prepared to sacrifice. Writing a good book takes a lot of time and mental effort, and the opportunity cost is severe. But then you must also think of the payoff because you can enjoy the royalties from your work amounting to as much as10 percent of the cover price which will last your lifetime and pass on that estate, so to say, to your offspring who could also benefit from it possibly for their lifetime as well. Copyright law ensures this.

Also, you need to make up your mind to be obsessive about writing a book. It’s not just about love or passion, it has to be an obsession. Truly it is said that a book is an extension of the writer’s personality, so that’s what you need to cultivate. You must put your heart and soul into it.

You also need to look around for a good publisher who would take the risk of publishing your book. Of course, it goes without saying that your book must be good and will have a ready market. Else no publisher would bother. But once you make your name, it’s easy to get published. It’s important that your publisher places trust in your work which will encourage you to work on more books. I for one enjoy a very good working relationship with my publisher, Neptune Publications, and this gives me the confidence to write more books.

So how should one set about writing a book? First conceptualise what the book should look like. Think of this as the soul of the book; then set about gathering material for the book, which can be achieved in many ways such as inquiries, field studies, library visits, going through the archives etc. Think of this as the emerging skeleton of the book; then comes the analysis of the data collected and the conclusions to be drawn from them. Think of this as the flesh of the book that is gradually taking form, and finally you do the fine-tuning by self-editing and rephrasing passages if need be. Think of this as putting on the skin, so to say, making it both tasteful and easy to read.

And always keep the reader in mind. Be sure to incorporate details that you are confident will interest the reader and not anything that will interest you in particular. True, a book is an extension of the writer’s personality, but that does not mean you impose it on the reader lock, stock and barrel. Rather it means that you refine it and put it in a form to suit the reader’s taste. A book is only as good as the reader’s captivation with it. So, you need to appeal to the reader. All good books do this.