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| Wednesday, 14 July 2004 |
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Leonard Woolf : Traces of anti-imperialism by Derrick Schokman One-hundred years ago in 1904, Leonard Woolf, a 24-year-old Cambridge graduate, arrived in Colombo as a Cadet in the Ceylon Civil Service, a small group of white administrators who ruled the country. He was first sent to the Jaffna Kachcheri, where he served as Office Assistant to the Government Agent until August 1907, and then he was transferred in the same capacity to Kandy. Woolf was an efficient and innovative worker. He learned both Sinhala
and Tamil to enable him to understand and sympathise with the people he
had to work with. He was an administrative taskmaster, but gained the
respect of the locals for his fair evaluations. The Colonial Secretary, Sir Hugh Clifford, was impressed and recommended Woolf for a promotion as the Assistant Government Agent of the Hambantota District in 1908. He was only 28, the youngest AGA in the British Civil Service. Woolf discharged his duties in Hambantota in an exemplary manner in regard to salt and rice production, education, controlling cattle disease and judging local disputes. Yet when he went home on leave in 1911, he decided to retire from the British Civil Service. Moral issue Now why did this star performer decide to do this? It was surely something more than the fact that he met and fell in love with Virginia Stephen who became his wife. Actually there was a moral issue involved, one that had been troubling him ever since he became a British civil servant. But we only became aware of it after his autobiography Growing was published in 1961 when he was 80 years old. It tells the story of his six to seven years in Sri Lanka and his growing disillusionment with the British colonial system At the very outset of his service period in Jaffna he wrote: "The company of white sahibs there formed a strange society such as I had never known before and would never know again. It was the produce of British imperialism in Asia." Later he wrote: "What is perhaps interesting in my experience during the six years in Ceylon is that I saw from inside British imperialism at its apogee, and that I became fully aware of its nature and problems. "Inso far as anything is important in the story of my years in Ceylon, imperialism and the imperialist aspect of my life have importance and will claim attention." Woolf was increasingly beginning to dislike the whole system of imperialism. He wrote: "I certainly, all through my life in Ceylon, enjoyed the flattery of being the great man and father of the people. That was why as time went on I became more and more ambivalent, politically schizophrenic, an anti-imperialist who enjoyed the fleshpots of imperialism, loved the subject peoples and their way of life and knew from the inside how evil the system was below the surface for ordinary men and women." Uncivilised Woolf was a great believer in the maintenance of law and order. But the way he saw British criminal law practised was what he thought to be an uncivilised method of punishing and deterring crime. Woolf's duties involved seeing that flogging and hangings were properly carried out. He was repulsed by capital punishment. "Flogging a man with a cat-o'-nine-tails is the so disgusting and barbarous thing I have ever seen", he wrote. "It is worse than hanging." Finally when he returned to England Woolf made up his mind that even the most benevolent imperialism for all the good that it ultimately brought in terms of peace, justice, and improved standards of health and education, could not be morally justified. The jungle He quit the colonial service, but he could not quite get Sri Lanka out of his mind. He remembered Magampattu where he had worked the last three years, riding a horse or travelling by bullock cart among the villages in the jungle. The jungle had made a great impression on him, so he used it in his classic novel The Village in the Jungle as the stage on which the poor villagers of Magampattu played out their hopeless lives: "The village was called Beddegama, which means Village in the Jungle ... All jungles are evil, but no jungle is more evil than that which lay around Beddegama." The story is one of unrelieved tragedy where all the characters are destroyed by disease, starvation and the malice of their fellows, leaving the village itself to be ultimately overwhelmed by the jungle. Based on the book, Lester James Peries produced a Sinhala film called Beddegama in 1979. Sir Arthur C Clarke who took the part of Leonard Woolf had this to say: "It is certainly an astonishing fact of sympathetic understanding for a young colonial administrator to enter so completely into the minds of Sinhalese peasants, that his novel has now become a classic in their own language." **** Back **** |
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