Ape Gama
1940 book by Martin Wickramasinghe
Apē Gama (Sinhala:අපේ ගම, Tamil:எங்கள் கிராமம்) (lit. Our Village) is a semi-autobiographical book by Sri Lankan author Martin Wickramasinghe detailing the narrator's experiences as a child in Southern Province, Sri Lanka. Initially published in 1940, it was translated into English in 1968 as Lay Bare the Roots. It is seventeen chapters long.
Plot
A young boy growing up in a village in Ceylon and how he deals with rapid economic and social changes that are going on around him.
Reception
Charles Hallisey in Literary Cultures in History: Reconstructions from South Asia states that the narrator is "a villager, unself-consciously secure in his local experiences of the world to such a degree that by nature he was 'literary'." "...this villager becomes a tutor to urbanized authors and readers, who must unlearn what they have been taught in school in order to regain the cultural authenticity that survives in the village."
The work was well received by the English educated people of Sri Lanka.
The public source identifies “Ape Gama” as 1940 book by Martin Wickramasinghe. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Gama, book and Martin.
Why this record matters
A short description can identify a subject without explaining its stakes. For “Ape Gama”, the useful work is to connect “1940 book by Martin Wickramasinghe” to the records capable of establishing context and consequence.
Object files, edition statements, performance records and contemporary criticism preserve different stages of the work’s history. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 14, 2024. The linked authority identifier is Q105559567. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1940 and 1968.
Rights, attribution and provenance may remain disputed even when a general reference summary presents a stable account. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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Three-step research path
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Questions for further research
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This entry incorporates text from “Ape Gama” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.