The
Political Agenda behind the Literary Work
January 26, 2016, 6:16 pm
By
Dr Shihan de Silva Jayasuriya
University of London
Leonard Woolf (1880-1969) is an
important figure in international relations and imperial history but he was
also a writer. The literary genius of his wife Virginia (neé Stephen)
overshadowed him. This is partly due to lack of recognition of Woolf’s own novel,
The Village in the Jungle which is shaped around a marginalised group of jungle
dwellers in Ceylon/Sri Lanka. The Village in the Jungle (1913) ranks on par
with E M Forster’s Passage to India and George Orwell’s Burmese Days but
predates both these works; eleven years before Passage to India (1924) and
twenty years before Burmese Days (1934).
The
novel was not received enthusiastically by those nearest to Woolf. Lytton
Strachey, his friend from Cambridge undergraduate days, said the novel was
"about nothing but the blacks". Virginia rated The Village in the
Jungle lower than Woolf’s second novel, The Wise Virgins. But The Village in
the Jungle is unique among early twentieth century novels as an attempt to
depict rural coloniality. Unsurprisingly, the novel also found a place in the
study of English Literature in Sri Lanka. The Sinhala translation Beddegama was
for a time, a prescribed text for GCE (Ordinary level) exams. Beddegama was
popularised through the Sri Lankan cinema in 1964 by her internationally
recognised director, Lester James Pieris. The cast included well known stars
such as Joe Abeywickrema, Malini Fonseka, Trilicia Gunawardena, Tony
Ranasinghe, D R Nanayakkara and Henry Jayasena. The 140-minute long film, was
screened on Channel 4 (UK) and at the Cannes Film Festival (France) where a
reviewer compared it to Satyajit Ray’s Indian classic film, Pather Panchali.
There
are a number of issues to be tackled if we are to give Woolf his due. The
first, is his achievement as a colonial officer in penetrating the minds of
those he administered. Associated with this is the task of disentangling
Woolf’s life and position within the Bloomsbury set, a group of well known
writers and other intellectuals such as John Maynard Keynes, E M Forster and Lytton
Strachey. Second, is his work as a product of Modernity. Third, are the
dimensions of the novel which go beyond the "literary".
Vernon Mendis, a senior diplomat,
regrets that none of the British Governors and Civil Servants were
"Ceylonphiles" (‘lovers of Ceylon’) excepting for Leonard Woolf and
John Still who wrote Jungle Tide. He asserts that The Village in the Jungle
simply resulted from Woolf’s creative imagination, whereas Still’s book is the
result of a jungle-lover who saw history and romance in the jungle.
After
graduating from the University of Cambridge (Trinity College), aged twenty
four, Leonard Woolf served as a colonial administrator in Sri Lanka until 24
May 1911. The British empire was at its zenith when Woolf arrived in Sri Lanka
on 16 December 1904. Leonard Woolf’s seven years in Sri Lanka (Jaffna, Kandy,
Hambantota) had a lasting impact on his career. He acquired a distaste for
power and turned his back on the imperial enterprise becoming ambivalent about
the absurdity of one civilisation imposing itself upon another. The Village in
the Jungle was written at a crucial time in Woolf’s life, shortly after he had
married Virginia Stephen on 10 August 1912, and was therefore part of the
process in which he was changing direction. Woolf decided that he did not want
to be a successful imperialist, to become a Colonial Secretary or a Governor,
His Excellency Sir Leonard Woolf, KCMG.
The
Village in the Jungle intertwines fiction and lived experience. A reading of
Leonard Woolf’s Autobiography in conjunction with the novel is recommended. The
novel was written after Woolf returned to England in 1912 and resigned from the
Civil Service, drawing on his memories of the Ceylon that he had left behind;
he situates himself in the novel adding to its realism. To do justice to Woolf,
and to correct the imbalance that The Village in the Jungle has only been
partially understood, an exploration of Woolf’s use of Sinhala is necessary. A
P Gunaratna localised the novel further in his translation - Beddagama (1947) -
through the jungle villager’s idiom. Woolf’s mastery of the Sinhala idiom and
nuances is exemplified in the phrases, utterances and exclamations in the
narratives. Woolf’s adherence to Sinhala speech patterns facilitated
Gunaratna’s translation.
Though
Woolf was a Classicist, imbued with the Greek and Latin languages, their
history and literature, his horizons expanded in Sri Lanka. In the Southern
Province, Woolf’s interest in Sri Lankans and Sri Lanka took over as he
distanced himself from his intellectual Cambridge English past. Woolf served in
Hambantota, as Assistant Government Agent (AGA), the chief administrative and
judicial officer, from 28 August 1908 to 20 May 1911. The novel displays
Woolf’s grasp of Buddhist philosophical thought, folk beliefs, horoscopes and
omens. Language and culture are interwoven with the political. Woolf had a
complex task in portraying both the plight of the oppressed and the power of
the colonial rulers. In the early twentieth century, Britain was not contemplating
to abandon the empire. Woolf could not advocate decolonization in 1911. Though
masked in a piece of literary genius, The Village in the Jungle may be read as
a code for decolonisation. The subject matter of the novel is ‘colonial’ but it
focuses on marginalised jungle dwellers and it is difficult to pin down Woolf’s
sentiments. Woolf’s vivid ethnographic observations and awareness of the
ecological balance in the jungle are apparent in the novel. The depiction of
the local power structures, which operate independently of British rule, mark
the novel as unique and give depth to a cryptic anti-colonial code. The depth
of hostility to imperialism is perhaps surprising as one might doubt whether
anyone operating within the colonial framework could have such sentiments. Not
surprisingly, the novel does not easily fit into an anti-colonial or a colonial
mould.
Judith
Scherer Herz, Professor of English, says that "The Village in the Jungle
is a profoundly anti-imperialist text. In point of fact, anti-imperial/liberal
as well as imperial/racist elements co-exist in The Village in the Jungle, both
elements contribute to produce a memorable narrative."
Woolf’s
Jewish origins made him an "insider-outsider" in the English milieu.
In Sri Lanka, he was an "outsider-insider". Anti-semitism prevalent
in Britain during the early part of the twentieth century seems to have left
its mark on the young Woolf. His ‘otherness’ coloured his attitudes to
colonialism and subjugation.
Woolf’s
political colourings became apparent in the years after the novel was written
through his involvement in the Fabian Society and Labour Party. Did Leonard
Woolf influence his friend and fellow Bloomsbury group member, Sydney Webb (who
became Lord Passfield), the Labour/Liberal Party Coalition Government Minister
of Colonial Affairs, to send radical-thinking Donoughmore Commissioners to
Ceylon in 1931? The Commission awarded universal franchise to Ceylon in 1931,
setting in train the process for democracy to be introduced throughout the British
empire, which inevitably led to decolonisation and eventual independence for
many countries in the former empire.
Though
the main plot of the novel concerns an impoverished family in a jungle village,
the wider, deeper and cryptic message might signal that the British were
governing a people possessing an old civilisation and culture who were capable
of self-government with their own set of rules and philosophies.
Decolonisation, giving people agency in their own affairs and self-government,
was not envisaged when Woolf served in Ceylon. The right of peoples to govern
themselves was internationally accepted only after Woodrow Wilson’s affirmation
of self-determination at the end of World War I.
The
Village in the Jungle could be viewed as a piece of creative writing which
emerged in the Modernist Period of English Literature where experimentation and
individualism were virtuous. Through Silindu, Woolf successfully created an
Asian character, out doing Rudyard Kipling’s Mowgli in the Jungle Books. No
western novelist had successfully created an Asian character and novelist Alec
Waugh told Woolf that he had accomplished a feat considered not possible for a
Westerner; Woolf got inside the mind and heart of the Far East. Unsurprisingly,
when Woolf returned to Sri Lanka in 1960, he was given an official welcome by
the Prime Minister (W Dahanayake) and the Governor-General of Ceylon (Sir
Oliver Goonatilleke).
