Toota Tiger

For twenty-six years, Sri Lanka's civil war ground on — one of Asia's longest and most destructive internal conflicts, drawing in not only the island's Sinhalese and Tamil populations but also India's southern states, whose kinship with those across the Palk Strait made the war a wound felt on both shores. Swami Virupaksha tells the behind-the-scenes story of those years: the conspiracies, the intelligence operations, the human anguish that rarely made it into official accounts.

At the centre of this narrative is Sri Sri Ravi Shankar's sustained effort over two and a half decades to reach across the lines of conflict and help end the killing. The attempts were difficult, sometimes dangerous, and not always successful — but they were unrelenting. Virupaksha writes from a position of close observation, recovering stories that the formal histories of the conflict have largely left out.

For readers who know the war only through its military and political dimensions, this book opens up the human and diplomatic underside of a tragedy that cost tens of thousands of lives.