Ape Gama
{{Short description|1940 book by Martin Wickramasinghe}}
{{Infobox book
| name = Ape Gama
| image = Ape Gama cover.jpg
| country = Sri Lanka
| author = Martin Wickramasinghe
| language = Sinhala
| isbn = 9789558415443
| genre = Fiction
| media_type = Book
| translators = Lakshmi de Silva
| published = 1940
}}
Apē Gama (Sinhala:අපේ ගම, Tamil:எங்கள் கிராமம்) (lit. Our Village){{Cite book|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=wuBjAAAAMAAJ&q=ape+gama|title=An Anthology of Modern Writing from Sri Lanka|publisher=Association for Asian Studies|year=1981|isbn=978-0-8165-0702-3|location=|pages=126–127|language=en}} 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.{{cite book|title=Anderson's Travel Companion: A Guide to the Best Non-Fiction and Fiction for Travelling|editor=Anderson, Sarah|publisher=Routledge|date=2016|isbn=9781351958394}}{{cite book|title=Sri Lanka (Volume 20 of ABC-CLIO World Bibliographical Series)|editor=Samaraweera, Vijaya|publisher=Clio Press|date=1987|isbn=9780903450331|page=135}}
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."{{cite book|title=Literary Cultures in History: Reconstructions from South Asia|editor1=Pollock, Sheldon|editor2=Arvind Raghunathan|publisher=University of California Press|date=2003|isbn=9780520228214|page=718}}
The work was well received by the English educated people of Sri Lanka.{{Cite book|last=Nyrop|first=Richard F.|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=WbHw2Uvr7dwC&q=ape+gama&pg=PA173|title=Area Handbook for Ceylon|publisher=U.S. Government Printing Office|year=1971|isbn=|location=|pages=173|language=en}}