The shifting reception of The Village in the Jungle (1913) in Sri Lanka

Abstract

This article seeks to explore the reception of Leonard Woolf’s novel The Village in the Jungle (1913) in Sri Lanka. It examines the contrasting responses between those Sri Lankan critics who read the novel as anti-imperialist, and a younger generation who argue that the text manifests a wholly imperialist attitude and ideology and that its troping of colonial Ceylon and its inhabitants as savage, primitive, and Other replicates the discursive project of imperialism. This discussion asks to what extent are the differing responses to The Village in the Jungle explicable in terms of differing “horizons of expectations” and suggests how and why these have changed over the last few decades. It demonstrates how these responses problematize the nature of readerships, as well as the tension between aesthetics and politics in the literary text.

In 1995, Anthony Spaeth’s review of contemporary Sri Lankan fiction in English in Time magazine likened post-independent Sri Lanka’s insurrections and brutal civil war to an intrinsic evil: “the nation’s fearsome devils” (Spaeth, 1995: 98–100). The Sri Lankan writers Shyam Selvadurai, Romesh Gunesekera, and Carl Muller are described as “voices in the jungle struggling to make sense of their country’s demons” [ emphasis added]. Diasporic writer Gunesekera’s photo is captioned “away from gods and devils […] at home in London”. The reviewer goes on: “But the Sri Lankan jungle, with its howling gods, was always there. It was the setting of Leonard Woolf’s 1913 classic, The Village in the Jungle, a novel that has only gained in power since the slaughters of the 1970s and 1980s”.

This association of the surroundings of former colonial territories such as Sri Lanka with endemic, innate evil has a long colonial history: from Bishop Heber’s (1924) infamous colonialist statement on colonial Ceylon “where every prospect pleases | And only man is vile”, to William McGowan’s Only Man is Vile: The Tragedy of Sri Lanka (1992), which purports to give an “account of the implacable hatreds of race and class found beneath the superficial gentleness of people, tropical languor and spiritual traditions”. This view was most recently reinscribed in Julian West’s novel Serpent in Paradise (2007). The reviewer for Time reinforces this tradition in invoking the trope of Woolf’s fearful jungle as a prophetic lens through which to view Sri Lanka’s more recent turbulent political history. As I have argued elsewhere, such formulations are complicit in naturalizing an ultimately empiricist and even colonialist understanding of Sri Lanka, and in naturalizing the apparent fixity of the violent present (Ranasinha, 2013). Yet this reading of Woolf’s novel as “only gaining in power” through the intensifying force of civil war events is countered by some recent Sri Lankan critiques. While Woolf has been hailed by Sri Lankan and European critics alike as a sympathetic “insider”, certain Sri Lankan critics have more recently begun to question Woolf’s anti-imperialist objectives. It is these shifts in the Sri Lankan reception of The Village in the Jungle that form the subject of this essay’s discussion.

Despite Edward Arnold’s prediction of poor sales, in its first year of publication The Village in the Jungle (1913) required not only a reprint but also a second edition. However, subsequent to this initial flurry, the novel was relatively neglected in Britain, side-lined in Woolf’s own framework of activity by his involvement in suffragist, Fabian, and Labour politics after he left the civil service. Occasional European reviewers, such as Arnold Toynbee (1939: 9), compared Woolf’s novel favourably to the work of Joseph Conrad and E. M. Forster and conferred “authenticity” on the text. Edward Thompson (1935: n.p.; emphasis added) characterized The Village in the Jungle as

one of the best half-dozen novels ever written about the East, and the only one I recall which concentrates on the native scene and does it convincingly with a single white character in contrast to Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899) and E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India (1924).

The editor of Woolf’s Letters, Frederick Spotts (1990: 61) similarly suggests “The Village in the Jungle has an authenticity […] unequalled even in works by Conrad and Forster”. However, the novel was not subject to sustained analysis, and only occasionally evoked as an appropriate “filter” for Europeans visitors to see Sri Lanka (Cunningham, 1979). Elleke Boehmer’s (2000) analysis of Woolf’s novel in the volume Modernism and Empire was a notable exception to this neglect. More recently, Victoria Glendinning’s biography Leonard Woolf: A Life (2006: 165) — in which she argues the novel is anti-imperialist rather than paternalist and imperialist — has revived discussion of The Village in the Jungle. So, too, has the turn to postcolonial book history, particularly recent work on Leonard Woolf’s role in publishing radical British and South Asian Writers of the day as Director and Commissioning Editor of the Hogarth Press which he and Virginia Woolf founded in 1917. In my introduction to South Asians and the Shaping of Britain (Ranasinha, 2012: 17), for example, I explored the way in which Indian nationalists’ increasingly vociferous demands for independence alongside debates concerning the Muslim question, caused rifts between Leonard Woolf and his former anti-imperialist ally, the left-wing author Mulk Raj Anand. Repudiating Anand’s nationalism, comparing it to Irish nationalism and arguing that it distorts British involvement in India and marginalized the Muslim position, Woolf went on to introduce Anand’s Letters on India (1942: vii) with a serious indictment: “imperialism produces an extreme nationalist psychology in its victims, and its nationalism is just as ugly and dangerous in Indians as in Britons”. ¹

However, The Village in the Jungle has consistently received more sustained attention in the country in which it is set. Translated into Sinhalese in 1947, it has been widely read by many Sri Lankan readers. The Sinhala version Beddegama became a set text in schools and this led in 1949 to the publication of an expurgated version considered more suitable for schoolchildren. The Sri Lankan reception archive includes several newspaper articles that appeared in the 1960s, when Woolf’s return visit to Sri Lanka regenerated discussion of his novel and in 1980 a symposium was held marking the centenary of Woolf’s birth. Sri Lanka’s leading filmmaker Lester James Peiris adapted the novel into the highly acclaimed Sinhala film Baddegama in 1981 that drew in a wider public in Sri Lanka. ² Sri Lankan playwright Ernest Macintyre wrote and produced a play of the novel in Australia in 1994. In 1996, Prabath de Silva published Leonard Woolf: A British Civil Servant as a Judge In The Hambantota District of Colonial Sri Lanka (1908–1911). In 2004, the International Leonard Woolf Memorial conference was held at the University of Ruhuna in Matara in Southern Sri Lanka to mark the centenary of Woolf’s first arrival in Sri Lanka. The following year saw the publication of Christopher Ondaatje’s detailed monograph, Woolf in Ceylon: An Imperial Journey in the Shadow of Leonard Woolf, 1904–1911 (2005).

My survey of Sri Lankan literary responses to the original novel divides these into broadly two schools. On the one hand, a group of mostly older Sri Lankan critics (there are of course exceptions to this generational divide) tend to interpret The Village in the Jungle through the lens of Leonard Woolf’s own retrospective judgement of his novel. In his autobiography Beginning Again: An Autobiography of the Years 1911–1918, Woolf wrote:

The jungle and the people who lived in the Sinhalese jungle villages fascinated, almost obsessed me in Ceylon. They continued to obsess me in London, in Putney or Bloomsbury or Cambridge. The Village in the Jungle was a novel in which I tried somehow or other vicariously to live their lives. It was also, in some curious way, the symbol of anti-imperialism which had been growing upon me more and more in my last years in Ceylon. (1964: 47)

The early Sri Lankan critics of the novel frame their analysis in relation to Woolf’s own self-judgement, reflected here, and his post hoc construction of his growing anti-imperialism during his years in Ceylon.

On the other hand, Sri Lankan critics writing in the 1990s began to emphasize that the novel was not as anti-imperialist as claimed by Woolf. They were writing in response to the advent of postcolonial theory and the impact of Edward Said’s Orientalism on literary criticism — his important study showing how “the system of European knowledge about the Orient becomes synonymous with European dominance of the Orient”, in which the East in Oriental discourse is “less a place than a topos, a set of references, congeries as characteristics” (1978: 197; 177) — For the younger generation of Sri Lankan critics, then, the style, narrative devices and metaphors of Woolf’s novel reflect colonialist attitudes, judgements, and ideological and cultural conditioning.

I will trace the arguments of both schools of thought in turn. While the novel’s reception is composed of a continuum of responses, this selective survey focuses on the two ends of this spectrum. The first group of critics tend to sideline the issue of imperialism as not central to the novel: most notably, Mervyn De Silva in articles in the 1960s and his later introduction to Woolf’s diaries published in Sri Lanka in 1983, Professor Yasmine Gooneratne (1972), and Peter Elkin (1979). Professor D. C. R. A. Goonetilleke (b. 1940) in his book Images of the Raj (1988: 59; 66) describes Woolf as an “anti-imperialist crusader”, and also argues “that imperialism is not a central issue”. (Goonetilleke later acknowledged this as an oversight in the comments he circulated to participants prior to the Woolf Symposium workshop in Oxford in March 2013.). ³ His 2007 article on Leonard Woolf certainly contrasts with the effusive, unalloyed praise of Woolf in his early monograph, and appears to be modified by the work of younger Sri Lankan critics. It is important to point out that this sidelining of imperialism is also true of European critics during this period: see for example, George Spater and Ian Parsons’ (2007) book, A Marriage of True Minds: An Intimate Portrait of Leonard and Virginia Woolf and Peter F. Alexander’s (1992) Leonard and Virginia Woolf: A Literary Partnership. An exception is Jane Russell’s (1980) article “Leonard Woolf — Innocent Imperialist” in The Sunday Times in which she unpacks Woolf’s (1961: 125) claim to have been a “very innocent, unconscious imperialist”, noting that he was a product of the psychology of the time.

In the early 1970s Woolf’s literary executor, Trekkie Parsons, gifted Woolf’s original handwritten manuscript of the novel to the University of Peradeniya in Sri Lanka. On examining this manuscript Professor Yasmine Gooneratne identified significant alterations made prior to publication. For example, the substitution of the Sinhala word “vesi” for whore. In the key passage when Babun first has sex with Punchi Menika, Gooneratne noted the insertion of Punchi Menika’s exclamations in Sinhala “aiyo”, which replaced the original which read “Punchi Menika cried with joy and desire mingled with fear and pain”. In her article on the subject, Gooneratne (1972: 143) interpreted these changes as “having made a profound effect on the tone of the narrative as a whole, establishing the author’s attitude to his subject in these key passages as being sympathetic and serious, rather than condescending or coldly analytical”. This was a view challenged by Sri Lankan critics writing in the 1990s, as we will see.

In a similar vein to Gooneratne, the Sri Lankan academic Nihal Fernando emphasizes the novel’s unique status in engaging with non-white peasant colonial subjects as the main characters, in his paper at the symposium on Leonard Woolf held in Sri Lanka in 1980. Fernando praises the novel in high terms. He describes it as infused with Woolf’s first-hand, detailed knowledge as Assistant Government Agent in Hambantota of the hard lives of dry-zone peasants trying to eke out a living in ferociously harsh conditions in an isolated village community. Fernando suggests Woolf evinces more empathy than local Sri Lankan authors writing at the time. He concludes: “the novel is an articulation of Woolf’s conviction of the futility of attempting to maintain agricultural communities in the arid zones of Sri Lanka”, citing the way the novel traces Silindu’s reliance on the “chena” slash and burn cultivation, and his struggle against a colonial administration that is irrelevant to his daily concerns. The eminent literary critic, the late Professor Ludowyck, agrees that Woolf shows a “classic level of understanding”, but argues with some force that Woolf overdoes the mysterious evil of the cruel, unrelenting jungle and its power to ravage and destroy all human life, as evoked in the opening descriptions of the novel:

The trees are stunted and twisted by the drought, by the thin and sandy soil, by the dry wind. They are scabrous, thorny trees, with grey leaves whitened by the clouds of dust which the wind perpetually sweeps over them: their trunks are grey with hanging, stringy lichen. And there are enormous cactuses, evil-looking and obscene, with their great fleshy green slabs, which put out immense needle-like spines. More evil-looking still are the great leafless trees, which look like a tangle of gigantic spiders’ legs — smooth, bright green, jointed together — from which, when they are broken, oozes out a milky, viscous fluid. (Woolf, 1913: 4) ⁴

While it is perhaps not surprising that a writer who had only experienced the English countryside of Sussex and Cambridge should experience an element of fear on encountering Sri Lankan jungle, it can be argued that Woolf’s troping of the landscape as hostile, devalued, and a place of impending disaster lays bare the habits and replicates the discursive projects of imperialist colonization. Yet for Christopher Ondaatje (2005: x), the jungle is depicted as threatening and sinister for dramatic purposes; he argues that the sinister portrayal in the novel contrasts with lyrical description of the jungle in Woolf’s life-writing, particularly Growing (1961). Charles Sarvan (2011: 5) argues that while “much of the damage and destruction in the novel is because of the environment — insufficient rain, heat, intractable soil and disease — even more they are the result of human action”. Sarvan (2011: 5) makes an interesting comparison between the novel’s closing portrayal of the encroaching all-powerful jungle that symbolizes the defeat of the villagers — “the jungle surged forward over and blotted out the village” (304) — with Doris Lessing’s novel The Grass is Singing (1950), where the triumph of nature and the bush symbolizes the native African coming into his own after years of colonization and exploitation.

Post 1990s, Sri Lankan writing on Leonard Woolf’s novel took a different turn, primarily in the scholarship of younger Sri Lankan feminist scholars Lilamini de Silva (1991), critic and author Jeanne Thwaites (1995), and Minoli Samarakkody (1997), who focused primarily on three aspects of the text: the representation of the colonial subjects, imperialism, and language.

With regard to the representation of colonial subjects, this group of critics collectively argues that both European and Sri Lankan critics have overstated Woolf’s penetration of village life and his “respect for the natives” (Goonetilleke, 1988: 74). In a way that contrasts with Charne Lavery’s (2015) eco-critical reading, as it does with Glendinning’s (2015) essay — both in this special issue — they interpret Woolf’s description of the Sinhalese peasant villagers as “very near to the animals that live in the jungle around them” (9) as one of the ways in which the text portrays the villagers as intellectually and emotionally deficient, unpredictable and primitive. They corroborate their argument with analysis of passages such as “They look at you with the melancholy and patient stupidity of the buffalo in their eyes, or the cunning of the jackal. And there is in them the blind anger of the jungle, the ferocity of the leopard, and the sudden fury of the bear” (9). This extract can be read in dialogue with a similar passage in Growing where Woolf observes:

They are — or at least were in 1905 — nearer than we are to primitive man and there are many nasty things about primitive men. It is not their primitiveness that really appeals to me. It is partly their earthiness, their strange mixture of tortuousness and directness, of cunning and stupidity, of cruelty and kindness. They live so close to the jungles […] that they retain something of the litheness and beauty of jungle animals. (1961: 54)

Lilamini de Silva (1991: 73–4) further examines the critical limits of liberalism in Woolf’s text. She interprets the relationship between the villagers and animals in a different way to Woolf. De Silva suggests Woolf portrays Silindu’s close relationship with animals as an aberration. However, as De Silva perceptively argues, it is not that the villagers who live close to nature think that they are like animals, but that the animals are anthropomorphized by the villagers. Woolf’s letter to Robert Trevelyan (1990: 91) betrays his own prejudices about the peoples whose victimization his novel traces: “they are, I was surprised to find, just what the oriental is popularly supposed to be, but with many more queer little traits […] shifty and abnormal liars, abnormally fatalistic”. This group of Sri Lankan critics goes on to argue how portrayals of the ignorant, gullible and superstitious Silindu, likened to a wild animal capable of terrible acts when threatened, feed into justifications of the civilizing mission. Such depictions are read alongside the novel’s suggestion that the villagers are destroyed by their own religious fatalism and inertia rather the ruling colonial system.

These feminist critics focus for the first time on the novel’s sexualized portrayal of both the male and female characters. This is seen in Babun’s portrayal as the sexually attractive native: Babun “was tall for a Sinhalese, broad-shouldered, and big-boned. His skin was dark chocolate brown, his face oval, his nose small, his lips full and sensual” (27–8). However, intellectually, he is described as simple, capable of being cheated by a child. His inability to defend himself in court is treated as an act of irrationality. These critics interpret lecherous Punchirala’s sexual fantasies that drive the plot in terms of the Orientalist association of the East with lustful men and alluring women. Unlike the older group of critics who focus exclusively on the novel, both Samarakkody and Thwaites read The Village in the Jungle in relation to Woolf’s wider oeuvre of non-fiction and fiction writing on Ceylon, namely, his Stories from the East: Three Short Stories on Ceylon (1962) (reprinted in Diaries in Ceylon 1908–1911: Records of a Colonial Administrator) and his letters and autobiographies.

In her article on Woolf, Thwaites (1995: 18) examines the portrayal of the female protagonist Celestinahami in his short-story “A Tale Told by Moonlight”. One can trace parallels between the portrayal of the female characters in The Village in the Jungle and this short story, which depicts “the slow big-eyed women of the East” as animals “dumb and stupid and beautiful” (1962: 263). In “A Tale Told by Moonlight” Celestinahami, a prostitute from a Colombo brothel, “a warren of filth”, is described as “a simple and soft little golden-skinned animal with nothing in the depths of the eyes at all (1962: 261). She follows her English lover Reynolds “like a dog […] a nice simple soft little animal” and is defined in contrast to this “civilised, cultivated intelligent nervous little man.” Punchi Menika is similarly characterized by her “blind love for her father” and her “fierce attachment” to Babun (65). Samarakkody (1997) relatedly argues that Woolf reinforces Orientalist stereotypes of Eastern women characterized by Said (1978: 207) as “the creatures of male power-fantasy. They express unlimited sensuality, they are more or less stupid, and above all they are willing.”

Thwaites (1995: 18) further records how such native women were abandoned by both their English “lovers” and rejected by their own families especially when they became pregnant. For Thwaites, the British treatment of these women “epitomised the colonial lack of concern and irresponsibility”. Woolf frequented brothels as his letter to his friend Lytton Strachey makes clear (1990: 102): “I suppose you want to know everything — well, I am worn out or rather supine through a night of purely degraded debauch. The pleasure of it is of course exaggerated, certainly with a half-caste whore”. While this autobiographical information has no direct bearing on the text itself, it certainly modifies the previously dominant Sri Lankan view of Woolf as a benign, sympathetic presence, respectful to the native population. Clearly, Woolf’s private letters written to Strachey at the time, contrast with his crafted, self-conscious, even rose-tinted, retrospective autobiographical judgements (written decades after independence and the dismantling of the British Empire), where he would reflect more self-critically on the contradictions of his role as an “anti-imperialist who enjoyed the fleshpots of imperialism” (1961: 157). Ambiguities are more apparent in Woolf’s fictional textual slippages and can be read as indicative of his internalization of colonial ideology. In his foreword to Growing, Woolf appears aware of this disjunction between his non-fictional and fictional works:

I have tried in the following pages to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, but of course I have not succeeded. I do not think that I have anywhere deliberately manipulated or distorted truth into untruth, but I am sure that one sometimes does this unconsciously. (1961: 133)

As for the representation of imperialism, Samarakkody (1997: 75) concedes there is some critique of the British justice system, citing for instance the English magistrate’s failure to act on his intuition that “there is almost certainly something behind this case which has not come out” (123). ⁵ However, as Samarakkody (1997: 75) argues, the older generation of Sri Lankan critics tend to overlook Woolf’s own role in the subjugation of a colonized people. She concludes that while Woolf may have been sympathetic to the predicament of the colonized, he fails to perceive a solution to this predicament within the native’s system and cannot see in the native the ability for self-government, thereby justifying the colonial presence and his liberal imperialist belief that superior peoples had a duty to aid inferior ones. Indeed, while the novel presents a differentiated portrait of the Sinhalese, it is still nonetheless an overwhelmingly negative one: particularly that of Silindu’s oppressors, the self-interested, corrupt Sinhalese headmen (Ratemahatmaya), village headmen (Arachchi), and the “cunning, unscrupulous” moneylender Mudalali Fernando (144). Their insensitive and callous tormenting of the villagers and their bringing of false cases against them implies the necessity of the European official to bring about law and order. Moreover, it is only the white “Hamadoru” — an English magistrate who is portrayed as having the knowledge, intelligence, and psychological insight to see beyond the bare “simple” facts of the homicide — who has the compassion to recognize the accused Silindu’s sufferings “as a human being” when he is brought before him on a murder charge. The magistrate is defined in contrast to Ratemahatmaya who despite having “lived [his] whole life among these people” easily condemns Silindu as an “ignorant savage”. The magistrate makes the contrast between their insights clear:

You don’t help the psychologist much, Ratemahatmaya. This man now: I expect he’s a quiet sort of man. All he wanted was to be left alone, poor devil. You don’t shoot, I believe, Ratemahatmaya, so you don’t know the jungle properly. But it’s really the same with the other jungle animals, even your leopard, you know. They just want to be left alone, to sleep quietly in the day, and to get their food quietly at night. They won’t touch you if you leave them alone. But if you worry ‘em enough; follow ‘em up and pen ‘em up in a corner or a cave, and shoot .450 bullets at them out of a express rifle […] they get angry as you call it, and go out to kill. (236)

Similarly, Rajiva Wijesinha (1980) reads the novel as patronizing and paternalistic: he objects to the way the native officials and headmen are shown as corrupt or incompetent, without a parallel, similar scrutiny of British officials. ⁶ However, here I would argue that given Woolf’s forthright criticisms of British officials in his later non-fiction life-writing, such an absence in the novel is likely to stem in part from the discursive pressures of publishing a novel on the colonial territories in 1913 in London. ⁷

As for the question of language, Samarakkody (1997: 82) disagrees with Gooneratne’s interpretation of Woolf’s use of Sinhala words as evidence of his sympathetic and serious attitude to his subjects. Citing a letter written by Woolf to his publisher Edward Arnold in 1912, she argues instead, that some words (such as “whore” and “mother of whore”) were changed from English in the original manuscript into Sinhala (“vesi!” and “vesi mau!”) in the published novel, simply because the English words were too sexually explicit and therefore objectionable for European readerships, from the publisher’s reader’s point of view. She goes on to argue that Peter Elkin (1979) and Goonetilleke (1988) et al. overstate Woolf’s brilliant use of Sinhala idiom with examples of inaccurate translations.

To conclude, the shifts in the academic reception of the novel in Sri Lanka show how each generation reinterprets this complex text according to its not their own politics. We can read the changing reception in part as a local, internal, and intergenerational dialogue between students and their former university lecturers, as much as it is a commentary on Woolf’s novel. I would suggest the more critical younger group does reveal some important blind-spots in the earlier criticism. However, published locally in Sri Lanka, their criticisms have not received much attention outside Sri Lanka. The growing body of scholarship on The Village in the Jungle published in Euro-American contexts focuses exclusively on the more appreciative responses of Professor Yasmine Gooneratne (now Emeritus Professor of Macquarie University in Australia) and D. C. R. A. Goonetilleke. As we have seen, while the early European commentators Frederick Spotts and Edward Thompson confidently conferred authenticity on the novel, subsequent European critics instead tend to cite selected, positive Sri Lankan responses as evidence of the novel’s verisimilitude, and construct these voices as privileged insiders and informants. This article has aimed to consider the more critical voices in the debate in order to show how the reception of The Village in the Jungle in Sri Lanka is much more varied than is often assumed in the West. At the same time, these criticisms are perhaps tinged with retrospective judgements and disappointment that the text failed to transcend the imperialist mind-set so ingrained in the early 1900s. When we consider Strachey’s oft-quoted response to the novel (cited in Ondaatje, 2005) — “I was disappointed to see that it was about nothing but blacks — whom really I don’t much care for” — we can see why critics have wanted to see Woolf’s novel as a perspicacious critique of imperialism ahead of its time, and praise Woolf for having “got closer than any other Western writer to the heart of Asian life” (Peiris, quoted in Goonetilleke, 1988: 73–4). For Sri Lankans, however, questions remain, which are pointed up by the debate over Woolf’s novel. What is the relevance of the novel in Sri Lanka today where, despite the absence of armed conflict since 2009, following almost three decades of civil war, there is still little prospect of a just and inclusive society where diversity and dissent is accepted? What is its role in the context of a pressing need for a paradigm shift away from exploring the influence of deep structures of colonial governance on ethnic identity formation and on Sri Lanka’s present postcolonial predicament, and towards imagining alternative futures not determined by the weight of history? How these concerns will impact on the ongoing reception of The Village in the Jungle in Sri Lanka remains to be seen.