Fyodor Dostoevsky is a Christian novelist in a broad sense of the word. Dostoevsky puts Christian themes in an anthropological perspective: belief and unbelief, good and evil, freedom and determinism, guilt and innocence, love and hate are dealt with as fundamental human problems. Besides this, there are explicitly biblical subjects in the novels, such as spiritual rebirth, forgiveness, love for one's neighbour, joy in the creation, the meaning of suffering, evangelical meekness, and the figure of Christ.

Although God, love and crime are perennial concerns of literature, Dostoevsky was the first writer to approach these themes, so uniquely combined, from a Christian anthropological perspective and he is still the most original. He does not present his Christian themes as a postulation or as a religious matter of fact, but in a non-religious context and, within that, in a ‘vulnerable’ way, by the use of contradiction and negation, and by incarnating Christian attitudes in characters with whom the reader cannot directly identify. Dostoevsky's method of work is a paradoxical presentation of Christian themes.

The first paradox is precisely this combination of faith and fiction. By using faith in a fictional context, faith becomes a part of the fiction and remains, in the last instance, literary fantasy. Religious themes are used in gripping psychological detective stories, conflicts about female beauties, or in an atmosphere of terrorist conspiracies. In publicistic essays, letters or a diary one can write far more directly about religious-philosophical matters.

Dostoevsky's last novel, The Brothers Karamazov, is not only an engrossing detective story, but also the culmination of the religious themes of his earlier great novels. It is the ripest expression of Dostoevsky's literary Christianity, with which he strongly identified himself in his letters. The fact that, owing to the author's death, the second part of this novel was never written, remains an inestimable loss to world literature.

Besides the Legend of the Grand Inquisitor, The Brothers Karamazov contains other extensive religious passages. The longest of these is The Life and Teachings of the Elder Monk Zosima (Book 6 of the novel). This was designed by Dostoevsky as the answer to the challenge to Christianity by Ivan Karamazov and the Grand Inquisitor in the previous book, but earlier in the novel, four chapters are already devoted to Zosima. Then there are other chapters with religious themes: the discussion on Ivan Karamazov's article on the relationship between church and state, Dmitry Karamazov's outpourings on the divine mystery of beauty, Alyosha Karamazov's vision of the Wedding at Cana, Grushenka's fable on the little onion and the hallucinatory confrontation between Ivan and his sarcastic devil.

The Main Religious Characters

The monk Zosima is immediately introduced in the first book of the novel and his activities are described in the second. In the latter, religious themes appear that return in the Life and Teaching and continue to sound throughout the entire novel.

The Sahib in India, during the heyday of the East India Company, behaved, when it did not concern his financial status directly, in an affable manner, often intermarrying and adopting the local inhabitants' art of living. The growth of the company's dominions and later the involvement of the Crown's servants in Indian affairs changed the friendly relation between the Sahib and the Indian to one of cautiousness. In The Plain Tales from the Hills, Kipling points out that the Sahib sought a self-contained English life in India. The reason for this retreat is the Sahib's inability to leave a permanent mark on the country he has decided to rule. Thus, the Club and the Hill Station become the sanctuary of the Empire. It represents symbolically the Anglo-Indian novelist's acceptance of the recessional period of British imperialism in India. In A Passage to India, the English community at the ghetto of Chandrapore express in their attitude a form of petrifaction in their relations to Indians, which Forster maintains, in Abinger Harvest, to be the product of an undeveloped heart. Bond's desire to de-ghettoize himself is a critique of the imperial practice and a symbol of the developmental process of the heart, negotiating with anxieties of identity.

Notions of alterity in the post-1857 imperial period in India underwent a review as the British government became excessively disposed to mapping their overseas dominion in terms of their domestic features. The consequence of which was the birth of an Anglicized Indian elite who were chosen for passing over the responsibility of governance of the country after it was made independent.

This chapter explores the politics of market reform in Sri Lanka and its relationship to the escalating ethnic conflict during the J.R. Jayewardene period of 1977–88. It describes how the exacerbation of the ethnic conflict in these years occurred in the context, and as a largely unintended by-product, of a larger political strategy directed primarily at winning consent for a radical programme of marketisation. In doing so, it also draws a broader conclusion that due to certain enduring features in the structure of Sri Lankan electoral politics, market reforming governments are inherently in a weak position to implement state reforms of the calibre necessary to address the ethnic conflict.

This broader conclusion has particular relevance in understanding the political strategies and coalitions that emerged subsequently in the 1990s under Presidents Premadasa and Kumaratunga. It also provides a broad analytical framework to evaluate the failure of the ambitious peace process from December 2001 to April 2004 under the United National Front (UNF) government of Ranil Wickremasinghe. Wickremasinghe explicitly crafted a two track parallel agenda of accelerated market reforms and deep concessions on the ethnic conflict. Leaving aside the specificities of this project and the many idiosyncratic problems in its formulation and implementation (see for example Bastian 2005 and Venugopal 2009), the comparative historical experience of the 1980s provides insights as to the inherent limitations of this approach.

Introduction

In 1977, the UNP government of J.R. Jayewardene initiated a landmark change in the direction of Sri Lanka's economic policies.

Charan Rainford and Ambika Satkunanathan

With the apparent military defeat of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) in May of 2009, the Sri Lankan government was presented with an opportunity to craft a political settlement that would go some way to meet the decades' long grievances of the Sri Lankan Tamil community. But as is evidenced by the speech quoted above, President Mahinda Rajapakse outlined a post-war (as opposed to post-conflict) Sri Lanka ‘without minorities,’ that effectively eschewed ethnicity in favour of a single identity. While effectively denying the need for a political solution, President Rajapakse and members of the regime have equated peace, and stability, with economic development, which they claim will address the concerns and grievances of minorities.

The peace through development paradigm presupposes that economic development is the primary approach to generating peace, by alleviating minority grievances without any explicit state reform. This approach has fundamentally underestimated the overwhelmingly political nature of both peace and development.

This study is an analysis and interpretation of Dostoevsky's literary presentation of Christianity. It revises the image of Fyodor Dostoevsky as a novelist with a Russian Orthodox world view. On the basis of textual analysis of his five great novels, I argue that Dostoevsky not only remains aloof from traditional Orthodoxy but is also not an ‘alternative’ Orthodox. The writer Dostoevsky gives expression to a biblical and ethical Christianity, not connected with institutional forms of religion. The study is based on a balanced method of literary analysis and theological evaluation of the texts, avoiding the free theological association and the hermeneutical mixing with the non-literary writings of Dostoevsky, that characterize many studies of religious themes in Dostoevsky's novels.

By free theological association I mean that, often subconsciously, Dostoevsky is placed within the researcher's religious line of thought or, more consciously, interpreted from a denominational viewpoint. Christian terminology and scenes from the novels are then often used to lead to further religious reflections, or theological evaluations of Dostoevsky's non-conformist views on the official church doctrine. In such cases, the researcher's religious interest over-rules a business-like literary analysis. In my case, an implicit view of religion unavoidably plays a role, of course, but I have not used it in a normative way and have limited myself to a literal analysis of texts, not giving symbolic interpretations or unveiling ‘hidden’ iconic images.

Hermeneutical mixing is a question of principle, with which one fundamentally agrees or disagrees, dependent on the various streams in Dostoevsky studies.

I will now take up a few texts that Ruskin Bond composed mid-career, in the 1960s and 70s, to diagnose how the authorial unconscious betrays itself in the process of signification. I will begin with a short autobiographical anecdote, ‘The Last Time I Saw Delhi’, which embodies the author's feelings on his visit to see his mother in a Delhi hospital awaiting an operation on her left breast at 54. Although the story is written in present continuous, we are not supposed to think that the author was actually putting the words on paper during the conversation. Published in The Illustrated Weekly of India in the late 1980s, the original draft of the sketch was made in 1967.

Ruskin Bond recounts the story from memory, as well as from notes jotted down in a Delhi hotel. Through the metonymic absence of the factual reality traces of the entire history of the retroactive past permeate the signifying procedure. This trace is like the ‘faded negative’ of the photo of the author's maternal grandparents that the narrator says was lying with him before he cared to print it with the intention of presenting it to his mother in hospital. The printed photo becomes the metaphorical mirror for the subject to anticipate union with the mother. The act of printing metaphorically secures the unconscious from obscuration, a fact that can be testified in the repetitive literalization of the historically inflected moment of the imaginary event twenty years later, in 1997, when Bond speaks about his mother in his Memoir.

Ruskin Bond did not feel at home in England. His yearning for the Indian atmosphere and the ‘human contact’ of the company of Somi, Kishen and other Indian friends in the environs of Dehra Dun is projected in The Room on the Roof. A work written in exile, it portrays the author's notion of place and belonging. A contextualist idea of the individual – the individual posited in the context of his human and non-human environment rather than in the Cartesian boundary of his self – is fused with the subjective concerns of place. For Bond, space is invested with an animated subjectivity that works in a horizontal relationship with his androgyny. The cessation of parental contact – his mother's separation and father's death – instilled in him a sense of lonely abjection that the non-human nature helped him to master in many ways. His father helped him attune his feelings to nature in one such way. In his absence, the child's Oedipal drive is held in balance by the agency of the environment. Nature acts as an imaginary correspondent in the form of a tactile, physical care-giver. It assumes the role of the motherer. Bond's perception of nature is engendered by his corporeal experience of location and his father's presence in it. The Indian environment and the Hindu myth – in contrast to the West's Cartesian concept of selfish circumscription – contextualizes the self in the same manner in which the eco-feminist philosopher, Jim Cheney, shows (117–134) that tribal cultures contextualize discourse.

In the previous chapters, I have attempted to give an analysis of the Christianity presented by Dostoevsky in his novels, based on textual evidence and literal interpretation of words and passages. This resulted in a sober evaluation of Dostoevsky's literary Christianity. On the one hand, I have found few expressions of traditional Orthodox ideas and images, on the other, it has become clear that the novels contain many religious elements, many biblical references and essential Christian ideas. In this closing chapter, I want to summarize my conclusions and clarify the religious presuppositions that have implicitly played a role in my judgement of the contents of Dostoevsky's novels.

The first part of my conclusion – the non-Orthodox character of the novels – is summarized by references to the main characters in them. To be perfectly clear, I do not use the term ‘orthodox’ in a normative sense, but in a phenomenological sense: ‘relating to Eastern Orthodoxy’.

• Raskolnikov did not come to the market place for his public, non-ecclesiastical confession from Orthodox motives and he did not end in the penal colony as a reborn Christian. Sonya propagated the Christian idea of resurrection from a Bible that was given to her by a Protestant woman. Raskolnikov did not open the Bible.

• Myshkin did not become the personification of an ideal Christian, let alone a symbolical Christ-figure, in spite of his evangelical virtues and his deep remarks on belief. He fails in his ethical calling. All the main characters in the novel come to a bad end.

• […]

Only very gradually do religious themes start to play a role in Dostoevsky's literary work after his Siberian period. In spite of the fact that his detention in the Siberian penal colony greatly contributes to Dostoevsky's re-assessment of Christianity, Christian themes play no part in two of the first three works from the beginning of the 1860s, The Insulted and Injured and Notes from the Underground. Only at the end of the 60s do Christian themes and motifs become clearly defined in the psychological, ethical and ideological conflicts in the novels, finally culminating in the predominately religious novel, The Brothers Karamazov.

In Notes from the Underground, Dostoevsky did try to include a religious theme but, to his astonishment, the censor eliminated it. In a letter of March 26th, 1864 to his brother, Mikhail, Dostoevsky speaks with bitterness of the censor's activities in Chapter 10 of the first part: ‘The censor pigs have passed everything where I scoffed at everything and, on the face of it, was sometimes even blasphemous, but have forbidden the parts where I demonstrated the need for belief in Christ from all this’ (XVIII, 2, 73). This philosophical-psychological masterpiece has thus remained secular and Dostoevsky did not keep the missing part.

The themes from Notes from the Underground, however, not only the anti-rationalist and anti-utilitarian protests, but also the unfathomable depths of human freedom, have a direct relationship with Christian anthropology: the human will as a potential for good and evil.

During the 1970s and early 80s, Ruskin Bond's economic crisis as an author – one of the causes of his loneliness and self-pity – shows signs of alleviation as some publishers come forward to print his works in book form. Bond becomes more sensitive towards his past, the enterprises of which now bear fruit while a dynamic correspondence between his present feelings and his memory of the past equips him for a more mature negotiation with the anxieties of identity.

One of the attendant sentiments that engage his thoughts is the memory of his father. Aubrey's iconic influence on his son's authorial bearings finds occasion for cultural celebration as hope in the commercial viability of the vocation is redeemed. He begins ruminating on the memories of those places which are redolent with the impress of his father and writes ‘My Father's Trees Still Grow in Dehra' dedicates Strange Men Strange Places (1969) to his memory of a man ‘who when I was a small boy, led me by the hand up the steps of old forts and palaces, these memorials of forgotten men and places’ (Strange Men, 3); and visits his father's birthplace, Shajahanpur, where the incidents of A Flight of Pigeons take place. Nevertheless, the author's sensibilities of inheritance are so problematic that the unconscious concerns of belonging begin to revive from the anthropological recesses of his mind. Bond's sense of humanism includes memories of incidental rifts and differences that used to torment his sensibilities of space and time during his adolescent days.

It is hard to imagine a greater contrast between two people's intellectual attitudes than those of Vladimir Solovyov and Fyodor Dostoevsky: the idealistic philosopher of a harmonious view of the world versus the existentialist, wrestling with human irrationality; the Christian cosmopolitan versus the religious Slavophile. Yet, in the second half of the 1870s, Solovyov and the more than thirty years older Dostoevsky were spiritual friends.

They were kindred spirits, a fact which they hardly mentioned but which can be reconstructed from sources from their surroundings. It can also be gathered from Dostoevsky's literary portrait of Solovyov as ‘Vladimir Karamazov’, and from Solovyov's ‘Three speeches on Dostoyevsky’, that he gave on the occasion of the commemorations of Dostoevsky's death. But these references to each other are ambivalent: in The Brothers Karamazov, young Solovyov appears both in the character of the religious Alyosha and in the rational, irreligious Ivan; and Solovyov's praise of Dostoevsky in his memorial speeches, highlights those aspects of the writer that are the least characteristic of him, but very much of Solovyov himself.

In any case, there was a general religious relationship between the two thinkers, ‘based, above all, on the universality of a Christian world vision in a period in which the majority of the Russian intelligentsia was attracted by materialism and atheism’. But there was more. Both were particularly preoccupied with the figure of Christ, a specific view of the Godman and a Christian anthropology that that entailed.

The Peace Process and the Excluded Public

Sri Lanka's 5th peace process was characterised by being narrowly confined to formal negotiations between the principal protagonists to the conflict. The negotiations between the United National Front(UNF) government and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) excluded a broad range of elite and popular actors in political and civil society (Liyanage 2008, Rupesinghe 2006b, Uyangoda and Perera 2003). Sinhalese political parties such as Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP), Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP) and Jathika Hela Urumaya (JHU), Tamil parties such as Tamil National Alliance (TNA) and Eelam People's Democratic Party (EPDP) and Muslim political parties such as Sri Lanka Muslim Congress (SLMC) were excluded from the formal negotiations. In civil society there was no independent representation of trade unions, religious communities, popular movements, non-governmental organisations or mass media in the formal negotiations and no parallel process of dialogue and reconciliation. This design was a pragmatic adaptation to the military-territorial balance of power between two warring parties that was further institutionalised through the GOSL–LTTE negotiations over cessation of hostilities, implementation of the Ceasefire Agreement, humanitarian relief and rehabilitation and political conflict resolution. Although the conflict resolution process revolved around contested issues of state and market reforms, there were no institutionalised channels for inclusion of other political actors, civil society associations or the public in general.

Despite this exclusion of stakeholders within the political elite and in civil society, the peace process was nevertheless based on the assumption that it would deliver popular support and disarm political spoilers.