Of greasy notebooks and dirty newspapers: Reading the illegible in The Village in the Jungle

Abstract

This essay examines the proliferation of colonial bureaucratic documents in Leonard Woolf’s The Village in the Jungle (1913). With these ranging from account-books to gun permits and legal notices, the essay argues that documents play a fundamental yet mundane role in the lives of the novel’s characters. In the varied responses to these documents, from the confusion of the illiterate peasants to the sly manipulations of the village headman, it is their materiality that is highlighted, revealing them to be objects that are modified, circulated, handled and left unread. The essay goes on to argue that the novel also presents us with examples of documents and colonial spaces that simply cannot be read, thus exposing the limits of any colonial bureaucracy’s efficiency.

For a novel whose main characters are illiterate, there is an awful lot of reading and writing in Leonard Woolf’s The Village in the Jungle (1913). Mundane documents filter into the life of the village through petitions that are written and submitted to various governmental authorities, permits that are obtained to clear plots of land for agriculture, legal sentences that are read out in court from the papers they are written on. When Silindu the hunter goes to the Ratemahatmaya with the story of how he was driven by desperation and anger to shoot the village headman and Fernando the Mudalali, it may strike the reader as odd that the Ratemahatmaya interrupts him with the question: “‘Was it [the gun he used] licensed?’” (Woolf, 1913: 238). ¹ This is a universe in which, to use Matthew Hull’s words in another context, actions are guaranteed by paper, “vouching [is] done by artifacts, not people” (2012b: 8).

The proliferation of books and paper in The Village in the Jungle is an ineluctable sign of colonial bureaucratic rule. Given not only the far-flung limits of the empire but also the immense diversity of its colonies, an organized system of control and surveillance that would obliterate distance and domestic difference was required. As Matthew Hull further argues (2012b: 7), not only is bureaucratization a sign of the attempt to construct such a modern regime of power, it is also seen typically to characterize the workings of the empire in South Asia. Take for example J. S. Mill’s extended reply in 1852 as to the reason for the British government’s perceived success in colonial India:

I conceive that there are several causes; probably the most important is, that the whole Government of India is carried on in writing. All the orders given, all the acts of the executive officers, are reported in writing, and the whole of the original correspondence is sent to the Home Government; so that there is no single act done in India, the whole of the reasons for which are not placed on record. (quoted in Hull, 2012b: 7)

Of course, despite its best efforts, the long arm of the Law cannot reach everywhere and, instead, what comforts bureaucrats is the knowledge that every action has, or at least should have, its very own paper trail. In fact, it is the ability of paper and writing not only to record, but also to travel, that fuels governmental efficiency. The state “multiplied, literalized through court papers, certificates, and forged documents […] can enter the life of the community” (Das, 2004: 254) — with these documents becoming, with varied consequences, signs of its presence. But while bureaucracy makes people and their practices manageable, it acquires for itself a vague opacity — no one is quite sure how bureaucratic processes work.

To put this argument another way, the question at hand is primarily one of legibility. In Seeing Like a State, James Scott argues that the concept of legibility is “a central problem in statecraft” (1998: 2), creating the need and means to carve out a disciplinary space within which one’s subjects can be understood, categorized, regulated, and controlled. The flipside of this is, by extension, the illegible: the unruliness of people and circumstances that make them impossible to read. It is the duality of the illegible — the illegibility of people and places, as well as the illegibility of bureaucracy — that this essay is concerned with. It will focus on the peasant-reader’s confused encounter with writing, specifically with the bureaucratic document, which, I will argue, becomes the material locus around which the complex relations between power, performance, and writing amalgamate in The Village in the Jungle. As I hope to demonstrate here, writing’s force becomes most clear when we turn to its materiality, its object-like quality.

There are two levels of textual analysis I rely on in this article. The first is the literary, focusing on a close examination of Woolf’s novel as an exemplary or “diagnostic text” chronicling the peasant condition in Ceylon. Part of its status as such draws from its ambiguous position in literary history. At one level, it seems to occupy that Victorian tradition in which colonial administrators and missionaries, who had returned to Britain, wrote about their experiences abroad. However, the absence of the sort of exotic stereotypes that made this kind of writing popular seems to anticipate the novel that “writes back” to the metropole. Thus, Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (1958) is a likely parallel, even while Woolf’s narrative technique of disorientation finds an obvious precursor in Conrad, as Anna Snaith (2015) and Nisha Manocha (2015) both further explore in this special issue. Of primary importance to this essay, however, is the status of the text as an exercise in ethnographic writing. ² The Village in the Jungle anticipates what James Clifford (1988: 21–54) has identified, drawing on Bakhtin, as the heteroglossic ethnographic account, allowing for the interaction of different voices and participants in the writing of culture. The “double-voicedness” (Boehmer, 2002: 171) in The Village in the Jungle combines these two positions and thus allows for an uncertain ethnography of sorts, permitting Woolf to write from “inside” a culture, using an unnamed, though obviously local, narrative voice which is not afraid of not knowing.

The second, parallel level of analysis is pieced together from government documents from the Hambantota District, housed at the Department of National Archives, Colombo, Sri Lanka. These challenge Woolf’s victimized portrait of Ceylon, primarily by demonstrating that the peasants’ interaction with colonial bureaucracy was not simply through oppressive acceptance, but rather through acts of wheedling and manipulation, often appropriating legal processes and writing to their own ends. Uneven and unequal as these interactions are, archival research does help to alert us to their presence, creating a complement to the dominant narrative of Woolf’s novel.

The theoretical context of this essay draws from a rich body of recent work on what Harper (1998) calls the “ethnography of documents”. At a primary level, I take the document to be something that is “preserved or recorded towards the ends of representation, of reconstituting, or of proving a physical or intellectual phenomenon” (Briet, 2006: 10). While focusing on the material nature of written communication, I also attempt to expand the definition of the “book” as a text that has been “printed and bound” (Kafka, 2009: 341) to include a range of written material including ledgers, petitions, and legal documents (Chakravorty and Gupta, 2004: 2). ³ By bringing together the methodologies of anthropology and history, scholarship on this subject reorients the manner in which we study the role of writing in the world. As Ben Kafka reminds us, many have “discovered all sorts of interesting and important things looking through paperwork, but have not paused to look at it” (2009: 341; emphasis in original). Much like recent re-examinations of archival practice, Kafka is aware of how documents in various shapes and sizes are often merely read as sources, holding an authentic historical narrative that needs to be discovered or recovered. In this light, my essay will focus on both the content and the material form of these documents, studying their representation and circulation, to determine how their trajectories highlight the uncertain modalities of colonial rule. In doing so, it will move away from reading documents as playing a mediatory role and instead suggest that they are autonomous objects that “transform, translate, distort, and modify the meaning or elements they are supposed to carry” (Latour, 2005: 39). That is, they are to be read “less as stories for a colonial history than as active, generative substances with histories, as documents with itineraries of their own” (Stoler, 2009: 1), which therefore shape rather than merely convey bureaucratic practice.

Focusing on the materiality of the document, this essay therefore seeks to remind us that books and other written objects may very well enter human lives and relationships in ways that are not necessarily contingent on their being read. The documents in The Village in the Jungle, I will argue, become important tools through which to read bureaucracy’s role in the formation of modern colonial subjectivities, if only as Derridean supplements that substitute for or add to other documents and ultimately deceive those who read (or do not read) them.

My argument unfolds in three, not always discrete, parts, each of which focuses on the particular quality of a genre of documents. In the first, I read the money-lender’s account-book as a sign of the bureaucratization of village life; in the second, I turn to the gun license, the legal notice and the petition to highlight the villagers’ complex, manipulative relationship with writing as official discourse that is often rendered invisible by the intractability of print. In the final section, I put forward a counterpoint that emerges in the chance appearance of a dirty English newspaper at the end of the novel, which replaces the act of reading with the act of imagining. Placing this alongside the novel’s preoccupation with the jungle, we are constantly reminded that not everything can be read.

I

One of the most everyday bureaucratic documents that the peasant encounters is the account-book. The account-book is wonderfully versatile, varying in size (from small, personal ones to huge government ledgers) and moving between spaces as disparate as domestic interiors to colonial financial offices. In this section of the essay, I examine its representation in The Village in the Jungle as a small, portable object that alternates between occupying a zone of empirical truth and one of unintelligibility.

One of the reasons for the emergence of the account-book in The Village in the Jungle is the newly inscribed set of economic relations that colonialism necessitates. The major set of petty bureaucratic encounters in which the book appears is related to debt. Debt is central to the movement of the plot as the “mainspring upon which the life of the villager worked […] the villagers lived upon debt, and their debts were the main topic of their conversation” (30). Driven by the perpetual fear of hunger, and the impending fear of death, the social dynamics of the village are consequently closely tied up with the very complex interactions of its debtors and creditors.

The real problem that the characters face, however, is not the inability to repay their debts (which it is taken for granted they never will), but that their creditors will refuse to keep them in debt. This quickly becomes a bargaining point across sections of village society, with the novel’s characters, and Silindu in particular, being forced to adopt tactics of bribery, begging, and coercion to obtain the food necessary to feed their families.

The novel provides us with an odd though not surprising amalgamation of different ways of understanding these relations of exchange. On the one hand, family connections and good will are evoked to shame wealthier villagers into sharing money and crops with their less fortunate brethren. On the other, we also see distinct signs of the bureaucratization of the system of debt and credit. This is most strikingly represented in an extended section from the earlier pages of the novel, describing the arrival of “strangers” from town to collect village debts:

With the reaping of the chenas came the settlement of debts. With their little greasy notebooks, full of unintelligible letters and figures, they descended upon the chenas; and after calculations, wranglings, and abuse, which lasted for hour after hour, the accounts were settled, and the strangers left the village, their carts loaded with pumpkins, sacks of grain […]. And when the strangers had gone, the settlement with the headman began; for the headman, on a small scale, lent grain on the same terms in times of scarcity, or when seed was wanted to sow the chenas.

In the end the villager carried but little grain from his chena to his hut. Very soon after the reaping of the crop he was again at the headman’s door, begging for a little kurakkan to be repaid at the next harvest, or tramping the thirty miles to Kamburupitiya to hang about the bazaar, until the Mudalali agreed once more to enter his name in the greasy notebook. (31–2)

The focus of this section, and the sign of debt’s bureaucratization, is the account-book, the “little greasy notebook”. The symbolic power of this book is undeniable: it is a literal sign of debt, reduced from the visceral bodily hunger that prompts seeking credit in the first place, to a set of figures on a white page. More interestingly, however, it is reconfigured not just as an appendage to the money-lender, a mediating force between him and his subjects, but rather, as an autonomous object in the eyes of Silindu. This is largely due to its form. One’s relationship with a book, as Leah Price notes, draws on the recombination of reading (“doing something with the words”), handling (“doing something with the object”), and circulating (“doing something to, or with, other persons by means of the book”), acts that may or may not overlap (2012: 5–6). The critical field broadens to include the processes of touching, feeling, and holding; material experiences that find their way into the histories of books, alongside the already well-established study of textual content. In the case of the account-book, attention is drawn to its state: it is dirty, much used, circulated, and well-worn; material attestations to the seasons, possibly years, of hunger and exploitation the villagers have faced. Small in size, it can be slipped into the money-lender’s pocket and travels with him at all times, its portability thus multiplying and intensifying its potential power. The notebook is greasy by extension, through the many hours it is held in the greasy palm of its owner. Further, in The Village in the Jungle the account-book remains an immobile object for Silindu and his fellow villagers, largely because they cannot read it. The “unintelligible letters and figures” (31) scrawled on its pages are incomprehensible to them, and indeed, the power of the notebook arises from this very unintelligibility. ⁴

Importantly, it is not that Silindu does not understand the concept of debt and repayment, but rather the form that it takes in the account-book. He is, for example, familiar with what could be called divine or cosmic debt. This is perhaps best highlighted in a single off-chance statement that Punchirala, the witch doctor infatuated with Silindu’s daughter Hinnihami, makes. The family is on a pilgrimage to a Hindu shrine in order to heal an ailment Silindu has contracted (hinted to be the work of Punchirala himself), and after praying to the deity, Punchirala gives the family a rupee to be given as an offering, saying “[e]ven the gods require payment” (116). This is reiterated through the echoing phrase “something must be given” (121; 122), that functions as a refrain of sorts in the novel. Though not explicitly stated as such, the statement reflects the notion of the ritualistic promise or pledge, of asking God for something, but having to repay the favour in money or kind. The promise is made at the moment of seeking the favour, and acts as a kind of collateral — if the promise is not kept, there are consequences to be dealt with. In return, the successful completion of this divine transaction is sealed with a sign of fulfilment acting as a kind of spiritual receipt; for example, Hinihammi sees the child she gives birth to soon after as a sign of protection; the gods are now satisfied. The fatalistic dimensions of the novel, the belief in a redemptive universe, are perfectly comprehensible to its characters, even as their reinscription in a new language by the machinery of colonial bureaucracy is not.

But while Silindu is shrewd enough to comprehend the power of the notebook and the importance of having one’s name written down in it, he often forgets that documentary evidence is intractable. Begging for loans from Babehami, more often than not he slips into exaggerated declarations, promising to repay him “twofold” (39), “threefold” (40). These are momentary enunciations, not binding promises he expects to be held to — he thus fails to realize that once words are on paper, they cannot be taken back. Headmen are as unforgiving as the gods.

II

The question of the material document as official document reemerges in The Village in the Jungle through the specific case of gun licenses. Obtaining gun licenses is a major concern not only in the novel, but across all kinds of bureaucratic documents in late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Ceylon. At one level, the license reaffirms many of the characteristics of material bureaucracy that this essay has already discussed; it stands as a document that authorizes the possession and use of firearms and is thus once again a sign of the regulatory control of the colonial government. At another level, this burden of signification makes it susceptible to the difficulties of negotiating the boundaries of the official and the unofficial.

An excellent example of this is a file from the Hambantota district, labelled “Missing stamps on gun licenses issued by AGA [Assistant Government Agent] on circuit” (File 27/715 G 261). According to the first document in the file, dated 19 March 1913, many gun licenses issued in the province were not properly validated: the necessary revenue stamps were missing from them. Orders were issued, suggesting a systematic examination of all the licenses in the district, but these efforts were quickly foiled by the non-cooperation of the village headmen, who claimed that the villagers had gone for chena cultivation and taken their licenses with them. Further investigation in East Giruwa Pattu reveals a second turn to the problem: the revenue stamps have, in some cases, been affixed to the counterfoils of some licenses, rather than to the licenses themselves. Despite the careful paper trail of empire, the situation is not helped by claims on 29 March 1915 that no one remembers exactly what happened in their districts. Matters come to a head when a letter is received from G. F. Roberts on 5 July 1915, an official who was the AGA at the time the licenses in question were issued, in which he summarizes the situation:

In view, however, of the fact that the kachcheri Mudaliyar stated definitely that the stamps were affixed to the licenses, whereas the investigation revealed that they were not so affixed, I am not at all satisfied with the decision [to simply recall the faulty licenses]. The stamps were issued by me and were affixed to the licenses by the kachcheri Mudaliyar, yet are not to be found on the licenses. It would not appear to be a difficult task to trace exactly why the stamps do not appear on the licenses, and what became of them.

While Roberts’ statement clearly implies that the Mudaliyar has stolen the stamps, this is not merely yet another example of the corruption of the petty government official. Rather, what a case like File 27/715 G 261 does is once again highlight the insidious relationship between the official and the unofficial in the colonial world. This can be primarily seen in the connection between the licenses and the stamps. The stamp is what gives the gun license its legitimating power; without a stamp, the license is little more than a piece of paper. This becomes something of a parody in the case of the stamped counterfoils. This could have happened either due to simple carelessness or in a crafty effort to make sure that, along with the counterfoils, the stamps remained with the headmen in question. Either way, what this seemingly simple confusion does is to allow the shadow of the original license, the counterfoil, to masquerade as real or authentic, in what unconsciously becomes an ironic statement on the fluid nature of bureaucratic rules and protocol.

What of the missing revenue stamps? This brings us to a crucial question that extends across the British empire in the nineteenth century, that of forgery. Bhavani Raman, writing of the difficulties of verifying signatures in nineteenth-century Tamil Nadu, cites the 1811 Bengal Regulations on Forgery as encompassing “[a]ll fraudulent and injurious fabrications or alterations of written deeds or written or printed papers, counterfeit seals, or signatures and the illicit imitation of any public stamp or stamped paper established by the government” (2012: 145). It is the link established between the state and the veracity of writing that is of interest here. Reading this as a specific form of the relationship between institutions, practices, and the circulation of capital, I turn to the work of Pierre Bourdieu to develop a model to understand the interactions of the “authentic” and the forged document. The bureaucratic state, Bourdieu suggests, is based on the fundamentally misleading premise of its neutrality; that it stands for the universal, rather than the particular, good of society. The result of this, as The Village in the Jungle demonstrates, is not merely the problematic absolute authority of the state, but the much more deep-seated concern mirrored in the realization that “when it comes to the state, one never doubts enough” (Bourdieu, 1998: 36). Of course, as Bourdieu goes on to argue across much of his theoretical work, this is a reflection of the bureaucratic state’s power to “impose and produce categories of thought that we spontaneously apply to all things of the social world including the state itself” (1998: 35). It also clouds us from reading the subtle manipulation of both symbolic and informational capital as hidden gestures of the state to control, unify, and totalize people, categories, and knowledge in acts of silent domination. Behind every product of the state is the

mobiliz[ation] [of] a symbolic capital accumulated in and through the whole network of relations of recognition constitutive of the bureaucratic universe. Who certifies the validity of the certificate? It is the one who signs the credential giving license to certify. But who then certifies this? We are carried through an infinite regression at the end of which “one has to stop” and where one could, following medieval theologians, choose to give the name of “state” to the last (or to the first) link in the long chain of official acts of consecration. It is the state, acting in the manner of a bank of symbolic capital, that guarantees all acts of authority — acts at once arbitrary and misrecognized as such […]. (Bourdieu, 1998: 51)

Such are “official” acts of discourses, effective because the signatories are given a certain authority by their positions in the state, and the documents that issue from this, as Bourdieu argues, become institutors of socially guaranteed identities. One must exist on paper to exist at all.

The misplaced stamps therefore create a loophole that Bourdieu anticipates. Presumably the stamps have been kept by the headmen for their own personal use — to authorize illicit documents they may want to distribute. These documents, with the revenue stamps affixed to them, will have all the markers of a government authorized document — and importantly, are not an “illicit imitation of any public stamp or stamped paper established by the government” (Raman, 2012: 145). How can we distinguish one from the other? A possibility like this once again shores up the limits of bureaucratic power that, in this case, escapes itself to create possibilities for its own subversion.

While the pandering recorded in petitions takes an official, stylized form, the role that unofficial pleading and bribes have in shaping the outcome of a dispute or complaint is equally, if not more, important. Excellent examples of this can be found in the interactions and manipulations of Babehami, the village headman in The Village in the Jungle. The narrator observes that he can write his own name (having learnt to do so quite by accident), but Babehami is, for all practical purposes, illiterate. Nevertheless, he quickly learns to take advantage of the illegibility of state practices. The ability to do so comes from his position as the local “big man”; and, indeed, it is this ability that legitimizes that position. This makes him particularly mobile. On the one hand, his power is, as Veena Das and Deborah Poole write in another context, personalized, consolidated by the soliciting of favours and the acceptance of bribes (2004: 14). The villagers astutely realize that while “[with] the traders in Kamburupitiya the transactions were purely matters of business […] with the headman […] they were something more” (32). On the other hand, he remains the representative of the shadowy, neutral state. He vacillates, like so many in his position, between the legal and the extralegal, the official and the unofficial, according to his needs (Das and Poole, 2004: 14).

The villagers soon realize that pleasing Babehami automatically implies the protection of their own interests, even as this arises from a complex interaction of threat and blackmail:

It was a very good thing for Babehami, the Arachchi [village headman], to feel that Silindu owed him many kurunies of kurakkan which he could not repay. When Babehami wanted someone to clear a chena for him, he asked Silindu to do it; and Silindu, remembering the debt, dared not refuse […] And Babehami was a quiet, cunning man in the village: he never threatened, and rarely talked of his loans to his debtors, but there were few in the village who dared to cross him, and who did not feel hanging over them the power of the little man. (32–3)

The implicit threat is the withdrawal of such support, which acts as the source of the novel’s dramatic impetus. This complete dependence of the villagers on the headman is not merely fictional. Leonard Woolf’s administrative diaries, meticulously kept bureaucratic documents themselves, contain an unusually sensitive passage about chena permits and the callousness of bureaucratic middle-men. On 18 January 1909 he writes:

The sins of the headmen are frequently and unfortunately necessarily visited upon the villages, e.g. in East Giruwa Pattu last year one vidane arachchi failed to send in his list of chena applications by the due date — consequently in that V.A.’s [vidane arachchi’s] vision no chena permits were issued. The result is that a village in that division must either lose all opportunity of a chena crop or chena illicitly and pay double rent. Of course, one is told at once that the villagers did not apply in time: but it is the V.A. who knows the date by which applications should be in and if he does his work properly the villager will apply in time. This is a case of “the house that jack built”. The villager does not apply because the V.A. is slack and the V.A. is slack because the Mudaliyar is slack. (Woolf, 1983: 42–3)

Similar recognition is registered by the Moorman in The Village in the Jungle, who Babun and Silindu meet when they go to Kamburupitiya to register a complaint regarding the confiscation of their chena:

I should like to stop that swine’s [Fernando’s] game. But it is difficult. One wants time. We must send a petition; the Agent Hamadoru would stop it if he knew. But there are always peons and clerks and headmen in the way before you can get to him. Cents here and cents there, and delays and inquiries! You want time, and we haven’t got it. (182; emphasis added)

While both passages acknowledge that the difficulties of village life can in most cases be attributed to the village headman, the very process of bureaucracy makes it impossible to determine this. Not only is laziness reinforced by a hierarchical chain of commands (villager to Arachchi to Mudaliyar), one must also make do with the “official” reasons provided for various inconsistencies (“one is told at once that the villagers did not apply in time”, clearly not the whole story). Any attempt to assert an alternative story, and one is swamped by “peons and clerks and headmen”. In this manner, the Moorman’s statement highlights yet another crucial element of the peasant-subject’s relationship with colonial rule: it is not the white British official who is his enemy, but the petty native one who blocks access to who is. However, while Woolf’s frustrated comment highlights the fracture in the native colonial hierarchy, this should not obscure the fact that a well-established system of checks and balances, whatever its effectiveness, did exist to keep government employed officials in place. This was in the form of the conduct register — large, unwieldy volumes maintained by the offices of the Assistant Government Agents of each province. There was a register for each district, and several pages for each official employed — policemen, Mudaliyars, Vidane Arachchis — noting, from the time of their employment to its termination or conclusion, all the “rewards” and “punishments” they received for their actions, ranging from giving false evidence in court to sending requested information and reports late. Meticulous detail distinguishes these registers; it is also clear that officials were dismissed for all the connivances associated with Babehami in the novel. ⁵

Silindu’s unsuccessful attempts to work his way around bureaucratic practice are nevertheless not an exemplary case of peasant experience in South Asia. As Uday Chandra (2013) argues in the case of colonial India and the particular circumstances of the Santal Hul of 1855, ⁶ contrary to popular Subaltern Studies readings, the revolt arose not from a spontaneous moment of radical peasant consciousness or religiosity, but rather from the long-term grievance that in the fight against landlords and moneylenders, middle-men were blocking their access to justice. This traces back, as Chandra’s archival work demonstrates, to a long history of negotiation with the colonial state, largely through the form of the petition. Ceylon and the Hambantota district are no exception in South Asia. Records at the Department of National Archives in Colombo today reveal not only huge numbers of petitions filed, but also that many of them end in flamboyant appeals to the ultimate power of colonial rule. ⁷ Further, my examination of petitions submitted to the AGA’s office also revealed numerous examples of peasant cunning. An important example is from a petition from a villager in Tissamaharama, accusing the headman of carrying a gun without a license. He vociferously states that he saw the headman bury the gun to hide it, and concludes the petition with the cheeky “I therefore beg that you may be pleased to enquire into the above matter and though he being a Headman, I am of opinion that he has no right to use a firearm without a license, if I am not mistaken” (26 April 1911: File 27/399). The accusation, investigation reveals, was a false one. Such examples nevertheless work together to support a historical argument against the naiveté of the colonial peasant-subject, who in this case is shown to be capable of learning not only of how others manipulate the system, but also how to do so himself.

Contrast this with the exchanges between Silindu and Babehami in The Village in the Jungle. We are told by the narrator that according to colonial regulations, every individual in Ceylon must pay what is rather dubiously termed a “body tax”. This is soon revealed to possibly be part of an elaborate scheme to obtain free labour as defaulters have to work on public projects such as road construction. Moreover, we are told that Babehami usually takes further advantage of the penniless villagers, offering to pay their taxes on their behalf and then demanding repayments with exorbitant interest. A shift comes about when Babehami uncharacteristically refuses to pay Silindu’s tax on his behalf. This becomes an increasingly common phenomenon; Babehami also presses him to get a permit for his gun. His answer to Silindu’s pleas about not having enough money to pay for one is the obstinate “[i]t is the order of the Government” (38).

Babehami’s insistence that Silindu obtains a gun permit is one of the first instances of his embrace of the immutability of colonial law, fulfilling his task as headman and representative of the government. His exaggerated insistence disguises that this is the most effective way to exploit Silindu at this moment. He appropriates the rules to reinforce his position. The gun permit’s presence, legitimizing Silindu’s possession of a weapon, stands as a material reminder not of the colonial attempt to categorize and codify, but rather, within the logic of the novel, of Babehami’s own machinations, and of favour lost.

The best example of this can be found in the first court scene in the novel. Silindu and Babun find themselves being tried against fabricated charges of theft concocted by Babehami and Fernando the Mudalali, who is insulted that Babun is unwilling to give him his wife, Punchi Menika. The result of this is multiple levels of miscommunication: the two villagers are overwhelmed by the presence of the English judge; are baffled by legal jargon in which they are the “accused” in a “case” (190); and, since the proceedings are being translated into Sinhalese, are not sure if the judge is speaking to them, or if the translator is freely interpreting his words. All of this stands in stark contrast to Babehami’s own sense of familiarity with the space of the courtroom: “Babehami knew exactly what to do; it was not the first time that he had given evidence. He was quite at ease when he made the affirmation that he would tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth” (191). Not only does this point towards the headman’s experience in these circumstances, as well as his complete ease with perjury, but it also reminds us once again of the proliferation of documents in the novel. The courtroom scenes carry within them the barely visible form of these, hinted at, but not always mentioned. Babehami’s oath must have been sworn on, if not a Bible, then some other book of equitable authority; further, the entire court scene proceedings would have been recorded in the form of a case report. This becomes particularly important when we examine the reiteration of the necessity of “evidence” in the courtroom. Within this space, only when proof is substantiated and takes the material form of a recorded, written testimony, does it become true. Against Babehami’s trumped-up story, Babun struggles to find “evidence” to prove not only his innocence, but the deceitful nature of the headman and his ploy for revenge. That “[n]o one will give evidence against the head man” (196) is undeniable.

The magistrate who records Silindu’s confession of murder is perhaps the only person in the novel who realizes that things around colonial regulations and official documents are not always as they seem. While the evidence against Silindu is damning, it contains buried within it a history of cruelty, hunger, and exploitation that cannot be recorded in bureaucratic documents, yet is no less true for all that. But while the magistrate confesses that he “shouldn’t want to hang Silindu of Beddagama for killing your rascally headman” (246), he cannot do otherwise. The incommensurability of circumstance, character, and evidence, is one to which the material document cannot bear witness.

III

Having outlined moments in The Village in the Jungle in which material documents are revealed to be inadequate, or co-exist with other means of understanding laws and rules, the article now focuses on two of the most striking instances through which the limits of bureaucracy are held up, and the importance of material form is dismantled: Silindu’s meeting a Buddhist mendicant towards the end of the novel, and the sustained descriptions of the jungle that run through the novel.

Silindu’s chance encounter with a proverbial mad man when he is being escorted to prison for shooting Babehami and Fernando allows us to rethink the relation of reading to material form. While the mad man’s exaggerated gestures point towards a complex Buddhist cosmology of sin and merit, these are oddly prefaced by the appearance of an unlikely object — an English newspaper (as also discussed by Nisha Manocha in this special issue, but with a different emphasis). The paper is old and dirty, marked perhaps by fingerprint smudges, signs of touch; these are ironic when we hear the man’s admission that he cannot “‘read writing or letters’” (261). The newspaper is, however, preserved because it is given to him by a white Mahatmaya; it is preserved precisely because it cannot be read. Gaining a power that is not dissimilar to that of the account-book, here the lure of the exotic translates the dirty paper into a sentimental object.

However, the newspaper opens up alternative possibilities of legibility for the old man. While the peon escorting Silindu impatiently reminds them of material contingency, grumbling that “‘it is hard enough to live on the eleven rupees which the government gives us’” (268), for the old man, the newspaper is of “‘great power’” (261), making legible a set of imaginings that he could not otherwise articulate:

“Well, if you are quite quiet and no gecko cries and the jackals don’t howl, I will look at it like this afterwards, for some short time — staring hard — then I shall see things on the paper, not the writing […] but I shall see things themselves, a little hut up there in the jungle, if you desire it — your hut, my son — and I’ll tell you what is doing there, that the woman in lying in the hut, crying perhaps […] before I could only see what was doing in this country; but now, by its help, I can see over the sea, to the white Mahatmaya’s country. Then they say this is a mad old man.” (261–2; emphasis added)

While the man follows this up with a seemingly unconnected discussion of sin and punishment, he also recites a Pali stanza (the content of which we are not told) for Silindu and urges him to repeat the “‘holy words’” as part of his attempts to “‘acquire merit’” (271). Meditating on it, he suggests, will allow Silindu to find his way to the right Path. Of course, presumably being illiterate, the man has obviously heard, learnt, and remembered the stanza, doing away with the need for writing at all. The stanza allows him to “see” in a manner that overrides his inability to “read”, wrenching the epistemological act away from the written document.

If the account-book’s “unintelligible letters and figures” remain baffling to Silindu, the mendicant’s lesson reminds him of something that he has known all through the novel — that not only are there different ways of reading, but some objects and spaces constantly, by their very nature, resist being read. A key example of this is the representation of the jungle. Take for example this extended passage in the novel:

The jungle surrounded it [the village], overhung it, continually pressed in upon it. It stood at the door of the houses, always ready to press in upon the compounds and open spaces, to break through the mud huts, and to choke up the tracks and paths. It was only by yearly clearing with axe and katty that it could be kept out. It was a living wall about the village, a wall which, if the axe were spared, would creep in and smother and blot out the village itself. (1)

The village is not only in the jungle; daily existence is pivoted on the necessity to constantly fight its oppressive presence, mirrored in the jungle-like profusion of description in the novel. The narrative truth on which this text is hinged is the understanding that “the rule of the jungle is first fear, and then hunger and thirst” (5). Linked in this manner to both the metaphysical and the very mundane aspects of life, the jungle becomes an object that cannot ever be known. So integral to the life of the Sinhalese and yet so life-denying in its cruelty and power, it is a zone of reference that remains inexplicable to every character in the novel, even to the animal-like Silindu and his daughters. It is this absence or, rather, impossibility of signification that characterizes Silindu’s relationship with the jungle. It stands thus as both perpetrator of and witness to all events in the novel: the exactor of dues and punishment, the place of both god and the devil. It embodies a fatalism that Silindu understands perfectly — hence his realization that the jungle cannot ever truly be known or mastered. Its illegibility must be accepted.

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This essay has attempted, through a series of micro-studies, to demonstrate how The Village in the Jungle both highlights and challenges the nature of bureaucratic documents. Focusing on their materiality, it has demonstrated how they circulate in the colonial village, less as texts and more as objects or anti-texts, accruing a varied set of meanings. To return to Veena Das and Deborah Poole, the state’s attempt to negate the “wilderness, the lawlessness, and savagery” (2004: 7) of the marginal spaces of the jungle is constantly thwarted from within. This is not to emphasize the primitive nature of these spaces but, rather, the limits of bureaucracy’s dependence on reading and writing. The Village in the Jungle reminds us that, more often than not, these can be manipulated, or are unnecessary and sometimes simply recalcitrant.