The Village in the Jungle External Degree Program Bhiksu University of Sri Lanka-2018/2019

Kumudini Hettiarachch’s Comments on The Village in the Jungle

Sparsely or hardly populated, a chena cultivator's hut is seen only rarely, hidden by the jungle, proving the words of a colonial "Agent Hamuduruwo" uttered so many years ago.

The wewa too with its parched patches of mud has starkness about it aptly described by the Assistant Government Agent of Hambantota, Leonard Woolf in the early part of the last century. "The years had brought more evil, death and decay upon the village........It seemed, as the headman said, to have been forgotten by gods and men. Year after year, the rains from the north-east passed it by; only the sun beat down more pitilessly, and the wind roared over it across the jungle; the last patches of chena crop which the villagers tried to cultivate withered as soon as the young shoots showed above the ground. 

"No man, traveller or headman or trader, ever came to the village. No one troubled any longer to clear the track which led to it; the jungle covered it and cut the village off...

"The village was forgotten; it disappeared into the jungle from which it had sprung..."

As we stare at the four pillars marking the place Silindu, one of the main characters in Woolf's 'The Village in the Jungle' or 'Beddegama', lived a life of fear, of evil and deprivation, we are transported back in time to the early twentieth century. It was an era when the jungle ruled the lives of the humble peasant as it does even now in remote villages scattered across the country.

The men, women and children were not only the hapless victims of the "evil" they feared which came from the jungle but were also under the almost tyrannical rule of the headman, with access to the Assistant Government Agent, a near impossibility.

The belief in the area is that 'Beddegama' was based on the lives, loves, hates and ordeals of villagers in Pallemattala clustered around the Malasna Palugalwewa. Even the shooting of the headman and a money-lending mudalali by Silindu had apparently taken place here. 

What a contrast it is a few kilometres away in Meegahajandura. Where there was jungle before, in this bustling village there is life and activity. We are in the home of retired principal S.A. Munasinghe and wife Leelawathie, the grand-daughter of a Vidana Arachchi or headman.

"Yes, the Assistant Government Agent, Leonard Woolf had been a frequent visitor to my grandfather's walauwwe, as he was the arachchi of the area. It is here that Woolf held court," says Leelawathie stepping out into the garden to point to a massive, gnarled tamarind tree (the girth is 35.6 feet), forming a large canopy by the roadside. 

Who was Leonard Woolf?  Leonard Woolf was just 28 when he was posted as Assistant Government Agent in Hambantota under the British in 1908, bringing under his purview all administrative and judicial matters of the area. Woolf born in London to an affluent Jewish family had had his university education at Cambridge. From university he joined the Ceylon Civil Service and came to the country as a cadet in 1904. "His intelligence and abilities attracted the attention of the formidable Sir Hugh Clifford, the Colonial Secretary. So at the early age of 28 Leonard Woolf found himself Assistant Government Agent - the chief administrative and judicial officer - at Hambantota. He was responsible for an area as large as Northamptonshire, sparsely populated, most of it in malarial jungle in the dry zone of South Ceylon. He spent close upon three years there, walking and riding his pony and his bicycle all over the district. He threw himself with energy into dealing with the problems facing him as administrator - chiefly those of rural indebtedness and rinderpest," says E.F.C. Ludowyk in his Introduction to 'The Village in the Jungle'.  After a three-year stint in the southern dry zone, he left Ceylon on leave in 1911 and retired from colonial service in 1912. He married Virginia Stephen the same year and took to a different career in England, that of writing along with his novelist wife. together they set up the Hogarth Press. Dedicated to wife Virginia Woolf, he published 'The Village in the Jungle' in 1913. It was reprinted twice that year. Woolf revisited Ceylon briefly in 1960 and spoke with quiet satisfaction and some surprise at the warmth of the welcome he received, and even the fact that he was still remembered, adds Ludowyk.  He died in 1969.

"When Leonard Woolf came from Kamburupitiya, he didn't have a place to hear minor cases such as chena disputes and domestic tangles. So court was set up under the siyambala tree," explains Munasinghe, proudly adding that his wife's grandfather was the Vidana Arachchi known as Don Samel Nallaperuma Disanayake. The walauwwe where Woolf sometimes stayed the night is farther down the road. 

"Leelawathiege Muththa awe poniya pita, Woolf ave ashwaya pita," explains Munasinghe. "The files required for the cases were brought by bullock cart." 

There was a bedroom specially set aside for Woolf in the headman's home, because it was about 32 kilometres to Hambantota from Meegahajandura. 

There were no roads and at that time people had to go through elephant and bear infested jungle. 

Leelawathie's arachchi grandfather had a son from the first marriage and three other children from the second. "When his wife died at a very young age, he remarried. His bride was his wife's sister," says Munasinghe. Leelawathie's father was the boy from the first marriage who took over as arachchi. Later the system changed, with Grama Niladharis being appointed. Leelawathie is one of 14 children and most of her brothers and sisters live in the area. 

"The properties are handed down from generation to generation," says Leelawathie. 

Woolf had been very close to the people. "He loved the villagers very much. Stories told to us by our elders show that he also liked to watch the herds of deer drinking water at the tank and was comfortable in these surroundings," says Munasinghe.

And what Leonard Woolf said so many decades ago rings true when visiting abandoned villages such as Pallemattala, for the lives of the peasantry and their fight for survival do not seem to have changed much from those times to these.

Comments by Larissa Distler

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 better 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.

Yasmine Gooneratne's Edition

Sidelined by Leonard Woolf’s involvement in politics after he left the Civil Service, overshadowed by Virginia Woolf's continuous and brilliant achievement as a novelist, The Village in the Jungle (1913) fell from notice in Britain until, by the time its author died in 1969, it was almost forgotten. In Sri Lanka and southeast Asia, however, scholars recognize this classic novel as part of a distinguished literary line extending from Kipling through Conrad and Forster, to Paul Scott and Ruth Jhabvala. The value to scholarship of Professor Yasmine Gooneratne's edition is enhanced by perceptive comparisons, now made for the first time, of the novel's various editions with Woolf’s original manuscript. Highlighting substantial amendments made by the author prior to publication, she shows in detailed notes how they reflect his passion for accuracy, his wish to maintain objectivity while writing of another culture, and his humane sympathy for the people among whom he had worked for seven years as a civil servant in Sri Lanka. Errors and misprints in the first edition are corrected, local customs explained, Sinhala words glossed, the novel's themes related to the politics of colonialism, and the entire work brought within the ambit of the 21st century.

Review

 “The Village in the Jungle is a novel that should be far better known. One may hope that now, in this fully restored edition, it will find a readership moved by its carefully developed tragic narrative and challenged by its prescient political analysis. It is a fiction whose human drama is driven by the economic motor of imperial policy, its enforcement, its interests, self interests and murderous entanglements ... One of the many benefits offered by this scrupulously annotated scholarly edition is that, by providing cancelled passages as well as other emendations and substitutions in the Notes, it enables us to watch the narrator in this act of disappearing. As one reads, one gradually enters a text that seems to be happening outside the narrator’s earshot, beyond his power to influence or control. It becomes as a result a witness text by the voiceless. The village world, the jungle landscape are their own space, not symbols of the writer’s metaphysical anxieties. The western presence is there, but only at the margins, in the brief appearances of the magistrate. Constructed directly out of Woolf’s own experiences in that role, he is a reluctant but complicit imperial agent, what Woolf came to understand his own role to have been in the imperial system ... In detail after detail, this remarkable novel’s analysis of imperialism is grounded in the process of its repudiation.

“It is a pleasure to read Leonard Woolf’s novel The Village in the Jungle in this new edition compiled by Yasmine Gooneratne. First of all, it makes good reading because the author, who was at the beginning of his writing career when he published it for the first time with Edward Arnold in London in 1913, displayed a strong and experienced voice with a convincing and persuasive literary style. The story takes the reader behind the orderly façade of colonial Ceylon to the rural milieu in which clashes of emotions and cultures occur. Secondly, it reveals the conflicts which the imperial power of Britain inflicted on an indigenous people, and which determined the lives and fortunes of many an individual torn between tradition and innovation. Succeeding the works of Rudyard Kipling and preceding those of Joseph Conrad and E.M. Forster, The Village in the Jungle occupies an important place in the history of English colonial literature ... Dr. Yasmine Gooneratne presents a convincing scholarly edition of this classic of colonial literature. Being of Sri Lankan origin herself, she knows the setting of the plot from her own childhood experience; and as an experienced author of two postcolonial novels, A Change of Skies (1991) and The Pleasures of Conquest (1996), she possesses the necessary insights into the narratological and academic demands of such an enterprise. In her persuasive introduction she deploys all these skills, beginning by explaining to the reader the biographical background of Leonard Woolf, whose life was darkened by his wife's ill health while his life's work was overshadowed by her literary fame. She draws our attention to the novel's implied criticism of British imperial policy, and points out analogies with T.S. Eliot's famous poetical sequence The Waste Land (1922), which owes so much to Leonard Woolf’s prophetic inspiration anticipating the destructive powers of the Great War. Her fresh evaluation of the symbolic strengths which underscore on a fictional level the gap of two narrative discourses, those of the colonial and postcolonial phases in recent British history, rightly locates Woolf’s novel as an important text amidst Rudyard Kipling's Jungle Book , Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness and E.M. Forster's A Passage to India. In doing so she picks up the research lines of Basil Mendis, Peter Elkin and Mervyn de Silva, who had previously analysed the novel along critical assumptions now dated, her scholarly acumen and credo prompting her to return to the novel's source, i.e., to the 264-page manuscript which reposes in the steel safe of the Librarian of the University of Peradeniya in Sri Lanka. She conducted this archival research to mark the passages which vary substantially and significantly from the printed editions of the book, thus enabling the reader to observe and participate in the creative process which the author underwent in writing his novel ... It would have been difficult for a Western reader to follow the plot of this intriguing novel without the understanding of certain Sinhala words and a knowledge of some indigenous myths. Dr. Gooneratne, with her academic expertise in oriental and Western culture, guarantees the necessary insights into the intricate and conflicting traditions which meet in this novel. A comprehensive bibliography invites further research on this seminal book. This careful edition of The Village in the Jungle will, one hopes, restore the novel's literary reputation and help to establish its proper profile in the field of literary studies.”

“Professor Yasmine Gooneratne has edited Leonard Woolf’s novel with the meticulous care it deserves, taking into consideration the entire range of critical interpretations the text has generated in the ninety years of its existence. The extensive notes at the end provide useful textual as well as cultural information, and a fascinating Appendix brings to the notice of the reader a film version of The Village in the Jungle made in Sri Lanka and a somewhat curious reading of the novel by a recent biographer of Virginia Woolf who holds Leonard Woolf responsible for his wife's suicide. Complete with a detailed Introduction and an exhaustive bibliography, this is likely to become the definitive edition of this twentieth century classic. The novel may be a minor classic as far as mainstream English literature is concerned, but in the context of Sri Lanka it occupies a prominent position, somewhat similar to the position of E.M. Forster's A Passage to India in India. The two novels, written within a few years of each other, are both attempts by unusually perceptive British writers to understand the countries ruled by Britain. Both have been widely read and discussed in the respective countries, and often prescribed in courses of study. Leonard Woolf’s novel has an elemental quality about it. The paradigmatic story of a simple village community disintegrating under the multiple assaults of 'civilization', inclement nature and hostile fate has been told in diverse ways in several non-Western cultures later in the century (e.g., Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart or Gopinath Mohanty's Paraja but this book is unique in having been written by an 'outsider' who had empathy with the village people as well as an ironic realization of the limitations of a colonial legal system (of which he himself was a part) in providing justice to them.”

“ … presents true scholarship value, enhanced by perceptive comparisons (made for the first time) of the novel’s various editions with Woolf’s original manuscript. With her substantial amendments made prior to publication, Dr. Gooneratne showed in detailed notes how they reflected Woolf’s passion for accuracy, his wish to maintain objectivity while writing of another culture; and his humane sympathy for the people of Ceylon among whom he worked for seven years as a civil servant ...”

From Wikipedia

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,^[1] it is also an influential work of Sri Lankan literature. It was republished by Elandin 2008.

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.^[1] 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.^[2]He wrote The Village in the Jungle, his first novel, after he returned from Sri Lanka to England in 1911^[1] while he was courting his future wife Virginia Stephen. He dedicated the novel to her.

Plot

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 farmer 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.

Reception and influence

Written two decades before George Orwell's much better known anti-imperialist novel Burmese Days, The Village in the Jungle has been described by Nick Rankin as "the first novel in English literature to be written from the indigenous point of view rather than the coloniser's." Victoria Glendinning described it as "a foundational novel in the Sri Lankan literary canon", but the novel remains little known in the wider world. In 1980 a Sinhalese language film entitled Beddegama was released based on the novel.

Village in the jungle: Woolf portrays a multitude of themes by W.T.J.S. Kaviratne Leonard Woolf was born in 1880 in Kensington, London, England. He was the third of ten children born to Soloman Rees Sidney Woolf and Marie Woolf. Leonard Woolf was educated at St. Paul’s School, London and won a classical scholarship in 1899 and gained admission to Trinity College, Cambridge. Leonard Woolf was a political theorist, author, publisher and a civil servant and identified as a liberal intellectual and was in the habit of carrying 70 volumes of complete works of Voltaire in his luggage during his travels. During his university career in Cambridge his close associates were Lytton Strachey, John Maynard, Clive Bell, E.M.Forster, Desmond Mccathry and Thoby Stephen. They formed ‘Bloomsbury Group’ comprised of intellectuals of the calibre of Virginia Woolf who was the wife of Leonard Woolf. Just after his graduation In the year 1904 Leonard Woolf came to Sri Lanka (then Ceylon) and became a cadet in the Ceylon Civil Service under the British Colonial Administration. First he served in the Jaffna peninsula and later in Kandy and again in the year 1908 he was promoted Assistant Government Agent of Hambantota district considered as the least developed district in the country. After serving three years in the Hambantota district as the Government Agent out of seven years stay in Sri Lanka , Leonard Woolf left Sri Lanka in 1911 and got married to Virginia in 1912. Woolf studied both languages of Tamil and Sinhala which facilitated him in his communication with the villagers of grass root levels. An analytical study of Village in the Jungle reveals Leonard Woolf's mastery of Sinhala colloquial expressions of simple rural folk of Sri Lanka. He has made use of expressions of the villagers in conversation during their day-to-day activities and also the filthy language when they lost their temper. ‘When the belly is empty the mouth talks of rice.’‘Vesi! vesi mau ! (How Silindu reacted when his wife Dingihami gave birth to twins of two girls the characters of Punchi Menika and Hinnihami in the novel.) In addition, Woolf’s exceptional knowledge on Buddhism, Jataka stories, hinduism, superstitions, rituals, traditions, customs and agricultural methods of the country helped him in creating an authentic milieu to his tragic narration of ‘Village in the Jungle’ published in 1913. ‘The Buddha said, kill not at all, kill nothing. It is a sin to kill. (This was the sermon given by by the old man to Silindu on his way to prison after killings.) Woolf had implied the effects of redemption taken place in the mind of Silindu just after listening the basic tenets of Buddhism. ‘The Village in the Jungle’ (Beddegama) compiled by Woolf can be identified as a tragedy of vast dimensions unfolding the stark reality of every facet of lives of rustic communities exploited by numerous forces including outside influences. It is not an exaggeration to say that the reader of the novel ‘Village in the Jungle’ never feels leaving it till the last page which is of highly emotive in nature. Evil forces lurking in the jungle, corruption rampant among the members of the administrative hierarchy and superstitions, effects of fate, poverty and hunger, alienation, exploitation and discrimination of simple villagers are the numerous themes highlighted by Woolf in his novel. ‘A man may wash himself clean of oil, but however much he rubs himself he will never rub off fate.’(Chapter vii.) Corruption Woolf had constantly highlighted the corruption rampant among the peons, koralas and jail guards who were in the habit of obtaining bribes even to provide some information as experienced by Punchi Menika when she reached the Prison of Tangalla. Mudalali Fernando tried to obtain a sexual bribe from Punchi Menika to relieve their family of debts and to offer her husband Babun a job as a gambaraya This was the situation during the Colonial era in Ceylon but now in post independent Sri Lanka the situation has become worst. The novel can be considered a treatise on the socio-economic study comprising every aspect of the lives of the people of a remote hamlet in Ceylon under the British Colonial Administration. ‘Beddagama’ was the name of the village in the jungle and it originally comprised 10 wattle and daub huts and at the end Woolf had given a vivid description of how the last house where Punchi Menika lived in isolation disappeared. When she was struggling for survival in her hut all alone Punchi Menika reminisced on the evil powers and devils reigning in the jungle. This was constantly reminded to her by Silindu whenever she was with him in the jungle. ‘Did I not often tell you of the devils of the trees that lurk for you by the way? I have stood by you against them in the day. I have held you in my arms when they howled about the house at night.’ Woolf had symbolically portrayed the evil forces of the jungle and the effects of fate in his narration. ‘When the end was close upon her a great black shadow glided into the doorway. Two little eyes twinkled at her steadily, two immense white tusks curled up gleaming against the darkness.’ ‘Appochchi, Appochchi’ she screamed. ‘He has come, the devil from the bush. He has come to me as you said. Aiyo! Save me, save me! Apochchi!, were the last words of Punchi Menika. Woolf had woven a closely knit story based on a family alienated and discriminated by the rest of the families of Beddagama. Silindu was the protagonist of the story and he and his two daughters Hinnihamy and Punchi Menika were inextricably interlinked to the jungle and its evil forces, devils and its wild animals. Unseen forces In addition to the unseen evil forces lurking in the jungle the outside intruders to Beddagama brought endless problems to their family. Silindu and his family were fully aware of the nature of the jungle and lived along with the evil forces and the devils suffering silently and never making an attempt overcome them.Silidu mistakenly believed by killing of two intruders to his family could put an end to all the misery. Woolf had attributed misery, sorrow and tragedy destroyed the peace and harmony of Silindu’s family and the disintegration of the whole village to the outsiders who intruded Beddagama in order fulfill their vicious desires. Throughout the story Wolf had given detailed descriptions about the abject poverty perpetual starvation and the deaths occurred on daily basis due to the affliction of malaria. This was the atmosphere that pervaded the villagers of Beddagama in addition to the catstrophic effects caused chiefly by the non- availability of rain water for chena and paddy cultivations. ‘Usually the villagers lived entirely by cultivating chenas.’(Ch. 1) ‘hunger and the fear of hunger always lay upon the village.’ ‘It was only for a few months each year after the crop was reaped that the villagers knew the daily comfort of a fully belly.’ Woolf could gather vital information during his frequent circuit visits to remote villages of Hambantota district. Diary notes ‘Village in the Jungle’ is based on his diary notes he had made during his visits to the remote villages of Hambantoa district. His unique knowledge on chena cultivation is evident by the authentic description given in the first chapter of the novel. ‘In August every man took a katty and went out into the jungle and cut down the undergrowth, over an acre or two. Then he returned home. In September he went out again and set fire to the dead undergrowth.’ As a writer deeply involved in political ideology of Liberal Party and a keen student of sociology, Woolf put into practice his knowledge when he assumed duties as the Government Agent of Hambantota. Even though he was a British national he visited the remote village areas to gather firsthand information of the issues affecting the marginalised rural communities of the Hambantota district. Prof. Yasmin Goonaratne backed by her academic expertise on oriental and occidental literature and cultural diversities has done a comprehensive research on the conflict that emerged in between the two cultures which is vividly portrayed by Woolf in his narration on Beddagama. The themes depicted in the novel bear some parallelism to the themes highlighted in the novels of Rudyard Kipling, Joseph Conrad and E.M.Foster belongs to the genre of British Colonial literature.

Comments  by Nanda Wanninayaka

 

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.