External Degree Program-2017-2018 Bhiksu University of Sri Lanka Seminar -22.04.2018 8.00 am-12.15 pm

Read the following text and identify the problems faced by the people of Beddagama. When you attend the lecture, please bring the relevant quotations. You will be given marks for this activity.

1.  Improve your handwriting.

2.  Improve your spelling.

3.  Improve your grammar

4.  Write the name of the novel and author correctly.

5.  Read and collect relevant extracts.

6.  Get ready to do the classroom test

7.  Read all the prescribed novels, poems etc.

8.  Your accuracy is highly considered.

9.  All the take home assignments should be submitted on time.

10.              You should have done both presentation and classroom tests.

Please pay your attention to the above facts. It is compulsory.

The Village in the Jungle is a novel by Leonard Woolf, published in 1913, based on his experiences as a colonial civil servant in British-controlled Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) in the early years of the 20th century. Ground-breaking in Western fiction for being written from the native rather than the colonial point of view it is also an influential work of Sri Lankan literature.

Leonard Woolf worked for the British Ceylon Civil Service in Sri Lanka for seven years after graduating from Cambridge University in 1904. In Cambridge Woolf had become part of the Bloomsbury Group. He became Assistant Government Agent in Hambantota District, dealing with a variety of administrative and judicial issues. The district he was in charge of had a population of 100,000 people. Books he took with him to Sri Lanka included the complete works of Voltaire. Woolf also kept a comprehensive diary while there, and later said that his experiences in the country led to him adopting liberal political views and becoming an opponent of imperialism. He wrote The Village in the Jungle, his first novel, after he returned from Sri Lanka to England in 1911 while he was courting his future wife Virginia Stephen. He dedicated the novel to her.

The novel describes the lives of a poor family in a small village called Beddagama (literally, "The village in the jungle") as they struggle to survive the challenges presented by poverty, disease, superstition, the unsympathetic colonial system, and the jungle itself. The head of the family is a hunter named Silindu, who has two daughters named Punchi Menika and Hinnihami. After being manipulated by the village authorities and a debt collector, Silindu is put on trial for murder.

Leonard Woolf’s village in the jungle is a fascinating novel written about the life of the peasants in Sri Lanka during the British rule. The story takes place in a remote jungle village called “Baddegama”. The writer recalls the strange happenings not only within Baddegama but also in its surroundings. The story is between a high cast family and a low cast family and how a foreign man who comes to the village influences these two families. The story goes on describing how the low cast family is suffered by the high cast family and their friends in the village.

In 1980, Sir Lester James Peries released a superb film based on this well-known novel, naming it “Baddegama”. The film helped the novel to be as real as it was in the reader’s …show more content… 

Very fair…... and looking into her eyes goes round and round very quickly on the floor.”
Another feature I noticed in the book is that the descriptions involved the switching of characters, showing omniscient, so that different points of views are shown to the reader. This is the main and the most important technique used by Woolf to keep the readers eye on each and every letter of the novel. It amplifies the curiosity and helps the reader to understand what exactly is happening in each scene of the story. The film does this very mildly but can say it is a good attempt to give the reader more sensible feelings so that each scene was an exciting one. This is seen clearly in the court scene where Silindu and Babun are taken to court by Bebehamy and Fernando.

“The parties and witnesses in the case were taken at once to the court-house. They waited…... a small square wooden platform surrounded by a wooden balustrade on three of its sides”, this indicates that the narrator sees all this and it makes the reader look in the narrators point of view. 

The following lines shows how Silindu and Babun sees the court and the writer let the reader experience the state of the men
“Nothing happened all the morning. Babun and Silindu squatted down…, and they were led out and made to stand up against the wall on the left of the bench.”

Leonard Woolf’s village in the jungle is a fascinating novel written about the life of the peasants in Sri Lanka during the British rule. The story takes place in a remote jungle village called “Baddegama”. The writer recalls the strange happenings not only within Baddegama but also in its surroundings. The story is between a high cast family and a low cast family and how a foreign man who comes to the village influences these two families. The story goes on describing how the low cast family is suffered by the high cast family and their friends in the village.

In 1980, Sir Lester James Peries released a superb film based on this well known novel, naming it “Baddegama”. The film helped the novel to be as real as it was in the reader’s imagination as it gave faces to the main characters such as “Silindu”, and his two daughters, “Punchi Manika” and “Hinnihamy”, “Babun”, also not forgetting the cruel native doctor “Punchirala”, the village headman “Bebehamy” and “Fernando” the man who ruined the peace in Baddegama.

However in the book “village in the jungle”, Leonard Woolf has described the story approaching the reader in three different aspects which the film barely touched. As for one such characteristic is the use of dialogue. In the book, Woolf has used so much of dialogue, where as in the film less dialogue is seen. This is the first characteristic I saw when I watched the film. It felt as the book it self gave the needed pictures through the use of dialogue than the film. This was clearly seen in the scene where Fernando comes to the house of Babun and Punchi Manika. The conversation between Babun and Fernando when he says he wants Babun to be the “Gambaraya”. “Yes, aiya, we know that. The tank was built in my father’s time. And…….Appu was dead of the fever, and that his wife had gone away, and no one knew where she had gone” And also when Punchi Manika asked Fernando about the British women in Colombo, the film has given little dialogue of Fernando..

The story of Village in the Jungle is full of acrimony. It is disgusting to see that human beings are subjected to such levels of torture and misery by their own neighbors and the administrators. Unfortunately the story of the novel is not unique only to Baddegama. It is the story of the rural Sri Lanka during colonial times. The story of the rural villages is not that different even today with all the advancement of technology and democracy we are supposed to enjoy.

Leonard Woolf selects a few characters of the village Baddegama in the deep down south of Sri Lanka and tells us a story about how the dreams of a young couple, Babun and Punchimenika shatter away due to the lewdness of a trader who comes to the village and subsequent troubles created to separate Babun from Punchimenika.

In the backdrop of the main story, there is another story about Punchimenika’s younger sister, Hinnihamy being forced to marry an old and vicious indigenous medical practitioner and her subsequent death by the villagers due to the suspicions inculcated against her in the villagers’ mind by the medical practitioner as she refuses to be his wife.

Silindu, the protagonist of the novel leads a miserable life squeezed in to the jungle and the bureaucracy. He is as silent as a deer and becomes violent as a provoked water buffalo when it is too much for him to tolerate the wickedness of the world.

There is a Sinhala language movie with the same name based on the novel with lead roles played by Wijaya Kumarathunga, Malani Fonseka, Joe Abeywickrama, Tony Ranasinghe, D. R. Nanayakkara and Nadeeka Gunasekara. Dr. Arthur C. Clarke makes a cameo appearance. The film is directed by none other than Lester James Pieris.

This was so interesting. Horribly depressing and a little terrifying, but very interesting.

I happened across this minor classic novel at work. It was chosen by my library director as a featured book for one of our newsletters. I never heard of it before, but she discovered that it was written by the husband of Virginia Wolfe. I was curious enough to read a bit more about the novel and discovered it was about colonial Sri Lanka and that Leonard wrote it after being a general in Ceylon for many years.

Early prose has a fascinating way of being disturbing with very little actual disturbing imagery. There are no sex scenes and the violence is much more understated than that found in novels today, but Leonard definitely makes his point. Life in the tiny jungle village is rough and if the higher ups, the Sri Lanken headman and his associates, didn’t like you, then you are likely to starve. In years of poor crop yield disease is rampant in the weakened villagers and unless the headman is sympathetic to your family, death abounds.

The jungle is described in enough detail with enough personification that it is a character itself. It comes across as an indiscriminate monster and savior alike. The real monsters are the people. Power and safety are difficult to come by and when one or the other is secured, anything will be done to keep it.

I really felt for the protagonists and even the antagonists when all is said and done. The story mostly chronicles the life of Silindu and his twin daughters. They are individuals with their own agendas to live peacefully with themselves and the jungle. The villagers decide they are pariahs and even demons and therefore lift not even a finger to help them as they are plotted against over and over for the gains of others. The stories of his daughters, Punchi Menika and Hinnihami, are heartbreaking in the way there lives are wasted at the expense of others.

This is not a story with a happy ending, but in the end it’s clear that things keep moving regardless of the suffering of one village. This book really should be more well known. It’s unique in the period which it was written as it is about the colonists and not the colonizers and it is sympathetic to the colonists giving them life and stories of their own.

The village in the jungle described in the book is called Beddagama. It consists of 10 crude mud huts in a hot dry clearing hacked from the inexorable jungle in the south of Sri Lanka, the island then known as Ceylon. The novel tells the story of one family, the wild hunter Silindu and his two daughters, Punchi Menika and Hinnihami, and the bad things that happen to them when their lives start to go wrong. There is no safety net here. The jungle is harsh, the village malicious.

We enter into the mindset of rural people, feeling the terrors and joys of their spiritual beliefs. We also come to see how, in the material world, they are continually oppressed by debts to money-lenders and unbreakable obligations to village elders. Lust and greed start a chain of tragic events which, compounded by the ignorance and misunderstanding of judges, leads to the destruction of Silindu's family, and the swallowing up of their homes by the relentless and hostile scrub.

How on earth did the author come to compose it? How did he know so much about Sri Lanka, on the other side of the world?

Leonard Woolf was the son of a Jewish barrister who attended St Paul's School in London and then went to Trinity College, Cambridge University, in 1899. There he made friends with people like Lytton Strachey, John Maynard Keynes, Clive Bell, EM Forster, Desmond McCarthy and Thoby Stephen, in whose rooms he first met Stephen's sisters, Vanessa and Virginia, in 1901.

This group of Cambridge friends would over the next few decades become the core of the progressive and bohemian Bloomsbury Group, named after the London neighbourhood near the British Museum where, as the saying went, "they lived in squares and loved in triangles".

When he graduated from Cambridge in 1904, Leonard Woolf joined the Colonial Civil Service and was sent to Ceylon, where he stayed for the next seven years. Woolf was a liberal intellectual - he travelled out with the complete works of Voltaire in his luggage, in 70 volumes - and he was not enamoured of the white colonial society he found himself in. He threw himself into his administrative work, was promoted to Assistant Government Agent and in 1908 he was put in charge of running his own district in south-east Ceylon, Hanbantota Province, which covered 1,000 square miles and contained 100,000 people.

Woolf taught himself Sinhalese and Tamil and he travelled all over his district, dealing with agriculture, justice, public health, road-building, taxation and petty problems of every kind. He got to know the people of the area and the hard lives that they led. He kept a detailed diary of his daily activities, which still survives and was published in 1963, and he drew on it heavily when he came to write The Village in the Jungle on his return to England in 1911. There's a murder in the novel, for example, which is just like an incident which Woolf himself had to investigate, the corpse slowly swelling in the heat. And there's a trial, which takes place in the very court-room in Hanbantota where Woolf himself sat as the magistrate. So the book is detailed in its authenticity and observation. It's not invented by someone who hasn't been there.

"The village was called Beddagama, which means the village in the jungle. It lay in the low country plains, midway between the sea and the great mountains which seem, far away to the north, to rise like a long wall straight up from the sea of trees. It was in, and of, the jungle; the air and smell of the jungle lay heavy upon it - the smell of hot air, of dust, and of dry and powdered leaves and sticks..."

Perhaps this is why the book is so well known in Sri Lanka - it's seen as a sociological or ethnographic description of south-east Ceylon in the early 1900s - and almost completely neglected in Britain. It's not part of the literature of Imperial Adventure - there's no white hero finding King Solomon's Mines or a Treasure Island. It's not part of the literature of Imperial Derangement either. There's no Mr Kurtz, driven mad by the atrocities of enslavement, as in Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. The Village in the Jungle is different because it's not about Us, but wholly about Them. It was very advanced in 1913, when many people in Europe were racist.

Leonard Woolf said that his experience of empire made him a liberal, and his later witnessing of poverty in the East End of London made him a socialist. He worked with the Co-Operative movement, became a Fabian and wrote a book in 1916, International Government, which influenced the founders of the League of Nations, the forerunner of the United Nations. There followed other works on economics and imperialism and a five-volume autobiography before he died in 1969.

But of all Leonard Woolf's works, the slim volume The Village in the Jungle will probably live the longest. It was written 10 years before the far better-known novel of imperial cross-purposes by his friend EM Forster, A Passage to India, and 20 years before George Orwell's critique of empire, Burmese Days, based on his experiences as an officer in the Indian Imperial Police. The book represents a shift in 20th Century consciousness - from north to south, from top to bottom, from ruler to ruled, from agent to acted upon. It shines the light of intelligent sympathy on the desperately benighted, the world's poor.