Leonard Sidney Woolf (Barrister and Queen's Counsel) moved to then
Ceylon; Sri Lanka today in October 1904 to join the Ceylon Civil Service [CCS]
as a cadet. After a brief period in Colombo, he is posted to Jaffna in January
1905. Two years and seven months in Jaffna, Woolf is transferred to Kandy as an
apprentice to the Ceylon Civil Service, on a salary of £ 200 a year. A year in
Kandy with three and a half years of cadetship in the CCS, he is promoted to
assume duties as Assistant Government Agent in the Hambantota District in August
1908. From then until May 1911, he worked in Hambantota for 2 years and 9
months.
Woolf returns to England on vacation in May 1911, after serving in the civil service in Sri Lanka
for nearly six and a half years. While in England he meets Virginia Stephen and
they fall in love. The intended marriage took time and his leave coming to an
end Woolf applies for an additional three months quoting it to be a private
matter. On his refusal to divulge the nature of his private business he is not
granted an extension and he in turn sends in his resignation and marries Miss
Adeline Virginia Stephen in 1912. She became one of the brightest stars in
English literature, entitled Virginia Woolf. After marriage, Woolf turned to
write and published his first novel, The
Village in the Jungle (1913), which is based on his years in Ceylon
[Hambantota]. The source of Sinhalese life in the early 19th century is
chronicled in the book as noted and recorded by the author. By now he became a
bitter enemy of the Colonial Service turning out to be a Fabian and a Socialist
in his own country.
Woolf is remembered in Sri Lanka
for the excellent record keeping during his time in the CCS. “Diaries in Ceylon, 1908-1911” the
official diaries maintained by Leonard Woolf; Assistant Government Agent
of the Hambantota District, Ceylon, during the period August 1908 to May 1911
are now compiled and published, and is today a proven reference for scholars
.
However, in Sri Lanka it is the
translation of Village in the Jungle
by A P Gunaratne into Sinhala as Beddegama (1949) [should not be
mispresented as Baddegama a town in the Gale district] that became popular which
made Leonard Woolf a household name in Sri Lanka. The harshness of the jungle life
became closer to the Sinhala reader with the naturalism of the novel through
the smooth and friendly vocabulary practiced by Mr. Gunaratne. The simple,
direct, and elegant style of writing used by him is an excellent means of
stimulating the real taste of the original story. Accordingly 'Beddegama' is thought
to be independent of Leonard Woolf's book The
Village in the Jungle by the literary luminary in this country. Thus Beddegama by A P Gunaratne was recommended a middle school reader in Sri
Lanka schools.
It is also interesting to note
that Woolf in his autobiography notes that over a period of fifteen years the
first edition of the book brought him only 38 pounds and that it was a total
failure as a novel in England. This was not the case with A P Gunaratne’s Beddegama and the reason for its failure in England
is shown as there are no Western characters in it to be attractive to the
English society. For this reason nobody talks of Village in the Jungle as a great English classic unlike A J Foster’s ‘A Passage to India’ both
being set in the Colonial East.
Beddegama a cinema
Lester James Peiris [LJP] the
father of Sri Lankan outdoor cinema personally picked the Village in the Jungle to
be turned into a cinema and it was only after Woolf’s demise that he was able to
get the film rights from the agency that took up Woolfe’s publishing. The story of
Beddegama being very popular in Sri Lanka and a commercial film on it was
thought to be an investment.
Beddegama consisted of just ten houses. The houses which are made of clay are more like poor shanties.
Only the village headman had a proper roofed house in the whole village. Almost
all the other houses were coconut thatched. The lake was situated on the east
side of the houses. They sowed paddy fields below the village tank, and when asked about their occupation, they were told, "Paddy farming is the
norm." They were all members of the Govi-gama clan and lived through chena [slash
and burn] cultivation. Grains such as kurakkan, millet, and vegetables such as
chili, cucumber, and pumpkin was grown in them. This grain from these chenas was
thought not to be good for them. Some people suffered from Lassa fever
[parangi] with the heat around affected their blood; it was thought to make them
sick. It was difficult to find a villager who was not with infected wounds attracting flies and deep in the flesh exposing bone.
Little children who were born
were also malnourished. Those who were lazy to cultivate chenas used to hunt
the animals in the forest. It was the forest itself that encroached the village
turning them into animals in the forest. The author symbolizes the tragedy that
befell the village and its people through the character Selindu who also
perishes with a double murder committed by him. The village Headman or Archchirala
is Babehamy. One of his sisters, Dingyhamy, is Selindu's wife, who is beaten by
Selindu for having delivered twins and she dies two days after the twin childbirth.
From then on, Selindu and Arachchirala
are alienated. Babehamy cancels Sindhu's chena license in revenge. This indicates
the existence of aristocracy in remote and underdeveloped Hambantota even
then. Beddegama exemplifies how the aristocrats worked to crush the poor
farmers and make their lives miserable. But they seem not to know it.
Arachchirala's brother Babbun,
makes Punchi Menika, one of Selindu's daughters as his wife. Babehami and
Nanchohamy opposes this marriage. Fernando Mudalali, who came to collect the
loans given to the villagers, gets help from Arachchirala as he wants to have a
casual association with the Punchi Menika. Babun opposes this approach and as a
result, he is sent to jail for six months on false charges that he had stolen
items from Arachchirala's house. Selindu is shocked by this outcome.
Arachchirala and Fernando Mudalal are shot dead. Selindu is sentenced to 20
years in prison. Punchi Menika is now alone in Beddegama.
LJP on
completion of this cinema Beddegema was at the receiving end of a host of local
critics. Some even went to the extent of calling him to have castrated the
novel Beddegama. LJP had a preference for selecting his cast from a selected group
of local actors. Malini Fonseka and Vijaya Kumaratunga characterizing Babun and
Punci Menika with their beautiful bodies did not match the inhabitants of Beddegama.
Their hairstyles and picked eyebrows were too significant. The houses built were
more new than described in the book. The front yard of the houses were picked
and clean. The oil lamps were of modern-day type. But LJP defended the critics
with his cinematography to those details in the novel.
However, as always LJP extends
his cinema to the Western media and Beddegama was purchased by Janus, a big
German Company and was screened at the Cannes Film Festival in 1980.
Locating the Village in the Jungle
Ever since the screening of the film Beddegama
there was a curiosity to visit this village by the increasing new rich of the middle class that took to traveling the countryside in
the late 80’s and the 90’s.
Hambantota district extends from
Nakulugamuwa to the West and Yala border in the East. The area either sides of
the Malala Oya basing was not that harsh as described in the book with the
promising irrigation schemes that Woolf himself managed which were
rehabilitated by the Colonial British. Therefore the said arid and difficult
lands that Woolf regularly visited as per his diaries should be the arid and
dry Malala Oya basin that is just to the North of the Hambantota town which
housed Woolf’s headquarters or the Kachcheri the district administration unit.
As the name implies (Mala)-la is dead in native Sinhala while the adjoining
basin to the west is named (Mau) Ara, meaning the maternal seemingly dependable water
source. The Malala Oya basin was also considered for restoration by the British
to a limited extent. The uppermost village Mahagal Wewa and the lowermost village
the Badagiriya Wewa were restored. Mahagal Wewa has its catchment in the
intermediate climate zone with a favorable rainfall did fill up during the
monsoon and Badagiriya Wewa did catchup all the drainage from Mahagal Wewa and
the not so promising monsoon rain. Woolf has numerous entries related to a
location by the name Meegahajandura in the upper reaches of the Malala Oya,
just below Mahagal Wewa. Thereby many are
of the opinion that the Village in the Jungle that Woolf described is
Meegahajandura.
Christopher Ondaatje the elder
sibling of Michael Ondaatje a world travel adventurist and researcher has
researched Woolf and produced a detailed volume on him; ‘Woolf in
Ceylon’. He traveled the path that Woolf took in the turn of the 20thcentury and does an in-depth study on the novel and his diaries and finds a
combination of an isolated incident that took place in Hambantota which is
recorded in his diaries under the date 13th December 1910…….
‘During my absence on circuit there has been a most cold-blooded murder
at Malasnegalwewa which Mr. Willett came down especially to inquire into as
police magistrate…. In this case the vel-vidane deliberately shot the acting
vidane arachchi from behind and then walked a mile to shoot the ex-vidane
arachchi, the acting V.A’s father. He found the old man digging in his garden
and shot him dead. He then went to the mudaliyar and gave himself up’.
Christopher Ondaatje has followed
this entry on the ground and visited Malasnagalwewa and located a family who has
documentation related to Woolf compensating land to a Siriwardane family
possibly for acting for the responsibilities of the Vidane Arachchci until the
appointment of a new Vidane Arachchi was made.
Therefore it could be said that
there is no such particular village that Woolf highlights in his novel but that
of the miserable lifestyle that peasantry in the whole of Malala Oya Basin
experienced and how their own aristocracy exploited them. He has adopted the
character Selindu to the incident at Malasnagalwewa which is also located lower
down in the Malala Oya basin to signify the plot in the novel.
Woolf’s Return Visit to Ceylon - February 1960
Woolf did a second visit to
Ceylon in 1960 at age 79. He traverses the same route to Jaffna, Kandy and
Hambantota. In Hambantota he comments to that the courthouse which had not
changed a bit. The environs to the immediate of Hambantota and the surround to
his Jungle Village is still the same. This is almost 50 years ago and the
poverty, the hardship, and the misery of life he saw then are still the same. He did have a
bitter feeling when a person by the name of E R Wijesinghe then in his 80’s
approached him at the Galle Face Hotel; Wijesinghe was then a mudaliar and later a Local Government Officer
in Hambantota and questioned him of reprimanding him during his tenure as
the Assistant Government Agent on an incident related to the shooting of a buffalo
contacted with rinderpest. This issue did continue in the print media even after
Woolf ended his three-week tour of Ceylon. Woolf had to respond in replying from England to
which he said it was correct then for that was the law and he had to abide in
it. Woolf was a very strict administrator.
Hambantota after 1977.
Much did change after 1977 with
the new political administration that was established liberalizing the economy
and the undertaking of foreign investment for large-scale development. Hambantota
was earmarked to be a backward district needing much economic development. NORAD, the Norwegian Agency for Development
Corporation a state agency under the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs took
up the uplifting related to economic development in the Hambantota district with a grant
for development over a 10 year timeline. It was a multi-faceted
approach for agriculture, education, irrigation, culture, cottage industry,
roads, forestry, etc.
Much of this development took
place in the dry parched Malala Oya basin. The significance being the total
rehabilitation of the village irrigation tank system in the several cascading clusters
in the Malala Oya basin. This was accomplished in a five-year program but the
rehabilitated infrastructure now faced a greater problem of there being no
water in the catchment to hold back in these restored tanks for irrigation.
 |
| The Malala Oya Basin and location of the trans-basin canal. |
The Malala Oya Basin is a highly
water-short basin where the mean annual rainfall is around 1000 mm while the
mean annual evaporation is around 1550 mm. This figures itself are self-explanatory
of the scorching heat in the area. Of a total of 371 small tanks within the basin, only 29 tanks are currently functioning. And that too only during a single wet monsoon
season called the Maha crop of paddy. That too in a good rainy season. This
gives the measure of the hydrological stress that is present within this basin.
It was this factor that we in the
Irritation Department of the Hambantota Irrigation office had to solve in order
to augment these renovated tanks. I was also a member of a team headed by the
then Engineer Mr. Paranammne to investigate and suggest a solution for the scarcity of water
in the Malala Oya basin.
The Mau Ara to the West of the
Malala Oya basin was untapped even for the Uda-Walawe Scheme as it fed the
Walawe River in the form of seasonal flash floods. It was therefore an
unreliable water source in the Uda Walawe design. Our investigations showed
that damming this and feeding the Malala Oya basin was a possibility. This new
dam which will be located within the Udawalawe National Park was proposed as a
water source for the wildlife in the Park and a trans-basin canal would take
the water to the Malala Oya basin.
The Irrigation Department initially was not in favor
of the project given the many stakeholders to deal with. NORAD though in favor
of the project was not willing to finance it both for its colossus amount already
expended in the rehabilitation of tanks in the basin and its development plan being
in the finishing stage. The unstable political situation in the country in the
late ’80s did not have priorities for such projects. We then approached the
Director ARTI to organize an awareness seminar to the numerous stakeholders
that needed to be coordinated for such a project. Even after such an awareness
programme, the project was to be shelved.
It was only after a new government
which came to power in 1994 that the then Minister for Irrigation and
Agriculture being an elected member from
the Hambantota district that the project became a reality and a trans-basin
canal 34 kilometers in length from the Mau Ara Reservoir built across the Mau
Ara augmented the Malala Oya basin. The Village in the Jungle that Woolf saw is
no more. On the 2nd day in November 2002 with water from Mau Ara coming all the
way to Palle Mattala Tank feeding many of the cascading clusters that were once
parched of water is today a mat of green paddies.
A few years later came the
Mattala Airport which is just below the Palle Mattala Tank, which is also the
endpoint of the trans-basin canal and in close proximity to the Malasnagala
Wewa where the double murder during Woolf’s time tool place. There is today an
International Cricket Stadium just below the Meegahajandura Tank. Lately the
Southern Expressway cut across the Malala Oya basin linking the Hambantota
Airport with the Colombo Metropolis.
It’s almost 100 years since
Woolf sentenced the accused for the double murder at Malasnagal Wewa and his
Village in the Jungle is a totally different habitat today. But travel-hungry people
still come looking for the Tamarind tree under which Woolf and Mr. Willett conducted
the inquiry into the double murder on a day in December 1910.
References:
Ondaatje Christopher - Woolf in
Ceylon
De Silva Kumar – Lester by Lester
as told to Kumar de silva.
Gunaratne A P - Baddegama
Panabokke C R et.al - Characterization
and Monitoring of the Regolith Aquifer within Four Selected Cascades
(Sub-watersheds) of the Malala Oya Basin