Chitra Fernando's short history “action and reaction”: a sociological perspective

Abstract

Chitra Fernando is the most prominent and important writer and critic in Sri Lankan English fiction. One of her major works include the short story ‘Action and reaction’ from her short story collection ‘Three women’(1984). It is necessary to bring her short stories which contain various social problems as the contents into the area of research. Her short stories can be analyzed in different perspectives. Hence, this study was conducted based on Chitra Fernando’s short story “Action and Reaction” from her short story collection ‘Three women’. Main objective of this research is identifying the challenges and issues related to adoption and child labour in the story. One of the research questions of this article is why children from poor families are adopted by the adopters in order to meet their needs and the other question is how the adopted children are used as child workers under these adopters and act according to their demand and orders. The third question of this research is what the mental and social problems are those adopted child labourers face eventually when they grow up. In this research, the short story “Action and Reaction” has been used as the primary data source. books, research journals and websites related to the study have been used as secondary data too. A sociological and rights-based approach has been applied for the textual analysis of the story. As a result, psychology, physical and social challenges related to adoption and child labour faced by the character ‘kusuma’ – the child labourer of this short story were found and discussed in this study. Therefore, it is recommended that policies that are made for fighting against adopting children illegally and engaging them as child labourers should be implemented.