Ceylon’s eastern coast, 1966. A family’s land, held since 1817. A trial built on lies.
Betrayal in Batticaloa is a historical courtroom drama set on Ceylon’s eastern coast in 1966. Mangalam Thurairatnam, the matrilineal guardian of a paddy field her family has held since 1817, is attacked and maimed while trying to stop a tenant cultivator from harvesting her land in defiance of a court order. When a bystander is killed by a stray shot in the chaos, a politically connected landowner with his own designs on the property arranges the witnesses and police statements to have her charged with murder.
Her brother summons a defense team from Colombo, and over four months of hearings, investigation, and a dawn reconstruction at the scene itself, the team dismantles a fabricated prosecution and exposes the conspiracy behind it.
The novel is grounded in a real, documented Magistrate’s Court case from Batticaloa, and is framed by three centuries of family history — from the Kudi clan system that governs land and inheritance among Ceylon’s Tamil communities, through the violence and displacement of the decades that followed 1966, to the present day.
It combines the procedural detail of a legal thriller with the scope of a multigenerational historical novel, set in a specific time and place — Tamil Ceylon on the eve of its civil conflict — rarely depicted in English-language fiction.