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| Sunday, 12 October 2003 |
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A vote on a premature celebration : The two faces of Leonard Woolf SUNDAY ESSAY by AJITH SAMARANAYAKE Unnoticed and uncelebrated by the Establishment and the media (which doubtless has other greater concerns) a civic organisation in Matara has celebrated rather prematurely as it will transpire, the centenary of the arrival of Leonard Woolf to the then colonial Ceylon. Although often eclipsed by the charisma of his wife Virginia, the path-breaking novelist, Woolf in his own right was a writer and a thinker who had a profound influence on the British Labour Party. In Sri Lanka of course, he will be remembered best for his novel 'Baddegama' which he wrote out of his experiences as the Assistant Government Agent of Hambantota and which captured unerringly the pathos of a peasantry relentlessly ground down by the juggernaut of colonialism. Woolf came to hate colonialism out of these experiences as passionately as George Orwell, that most trenchant of essayists, out of his experience as a Policeman in Burma under the British. These were the glorious days of the British Empire when upper class youngmen just out of university were sent to the colonies to preside over the heathen native hordes. They were expected not merely to be administrators but also magistrates in short, the lords of all that they surveyed. Both Woolf's 'Baddegama' as well as Orwell's novel 'Burmese Days' are true portraits of the dismal conditions which they discovered in the colonies and which had such a profound influence on their intellectual development. By the time he came to Ceylon, Woolf was already a member of the Apostles, a highly-selected intellectual circle in Cambridge,in retrospect a kind of intellectual Mafia, which was to form the core of the Bloomsbury Group which had such a profound influence on the arts and letters during the inter-war years. Although a man of great intelligence Woolf like men many of that tribe took his mental abilities for granted so that when he sat for the Civil Service examination he could only be the 69th of the lot. This meant that he could not hope to get the coveted posts in the Treasury or the Foreign Office. He was even overage for India and therefore decided to apply for Ceylon which as he explains in 'Sowing' a volume of his monumental autobiography, was a senior Crown Colony and was high enough up on the list to get what he asked for. And he adds, 'I found to my astonishment, and it must be admitted, dismay in the Ceylon Civil Service.' So in November 1904 Woolf set sail to Ceylon on the P and O SS 'Syria' in all he spent six and a half years in Ceylon serving initially in Jaffna from 1905 to 1907, in Kandy from 1907 to 1908 and in Hambantota from 1908 to 1911 when he just could not stand it. He put in ten to eleven hours at his work, learnt to write, read and speak Tamil and Sinhala and rode all day on horseback in the tropical sun. He was a cadet both at Jaffna and Kandy but was finally made Assistant Government Agent of Hambantota responsible for 100,000 people living in an area of 1,000 square miles. He was the youngest AGA and three years younger than the next youngest AGA which meant that this was an extraordinarily rapid promotion. Lytton Strachey, a fellow Apostle and a brilliant biographist imagined Woolf to be the 'Lord of a million blacks.' This was true but in other senses too. Not only did he develop an empathy with the poor peasantry but he also flowered into a competent administrator. Hambantota was the first district to complete the Census taken in 1911 and it collected more salt in his time than ever before. For a period of nearly two years he fought the Rinderpest, the scourge of cattle and buffaloes, and was a moderniser in agriculture as well. He introduced modern ploughs which he first mastered himself to take the place of the buffaloes normally used to muddy the fields. He superintended the pilgrimage to Kataragama with no staff or Police force but responsible for the well being of 4,000 people in the heart of the jungle. Although he may have appeared as an ascetic and reclusive character, Woolf had his own flamboyance at least in Ceylon. He brought with him to Jaffna the complete works of Voltaire in 70 volumes. His wardrobe contained a green flannel collar of a type that had never been seen in Ceylon. He also brought with him a dog which excelled in killing cats and snakes. He maintained this man-of-the-world tableau by buying whisky six cases at a time, visiting whores and taking part in all the colonial sports, even golf and polo, the most elitist of them all. What emerges is a fascinating portrait of a man who many would believe had saint-like qualities. It would appear that Woolf while in Ceylon had consciously cultivated this gregarious character so that he would appear to be the pukka sahil that he was inwardly not. The man who wrote 'Baddegama' and the man who administered Hambantota were two different people. As he admits in his autobiography he was scrupulously fair but outwardly truculent and often ruthless because he wanted the people to save them from themselves. In his letters to Strachey, his closest friend and confidant, he revealed himself. He wrote about his dull, incompetent and pompous associates, the sordidness of many of the natives, the decay and the drudgery of the kachcheris, the uncomfortable climate and the many diseases. It will be safe to conclude therefore that Woolf the colonial administrator calculatedly assumed a carapace so that he could achieve what he set out to do but that looking back both in his autobiography as well as 'Baddegama' he captured the true face of Ceylon as he had seen it. The many references to buffaloes and his experiences of the Kataragama festival figure prominently in 'Baddegama'. The pathos of the peasantry is captured poignantly in the buffalo like look of Silindu who appears before the Magistrate (surely Woolf himself) and does not even know that he is acquitted because the law is handed down in a language which he cannot understand. Although he also lived in Jaffna, the Tamil heartland, and Kandy, the Sinhala heartland, it was Hambantota, steeped in the direst poverty of the southern Dry Zone, which captured Woolf's imagination. Woolf sailed to England on May 21 1911 presumably for a 12 month spell of leave but never returned. It is safe to assume that it was Woolf's experience of the harsh conditions of colonialism in Ceylon which he administered outwardly with aplomb but inwardly resented which made him into the man that he was just as Orwell's experience in Burma demonstrated most tellingly in his brilliant essay 'A Hanging' which made him the man that he was. Note: Woolf returned to Sri Lanka on a visit in the 1960's when he was accompanied to his old stations by Mr. Shelton C. Fernando who was then the Permanent Secretary to the Ministry of Home Affairs, the father of Foreign Minister Tyronne Fernando. Source: For much of the information on Woolf's stay in Ceylon I am indebted to the book 'A Marriage of True Minds' by George Spater and Ian Parsons - Jonathan Cape and the Hogarth Press, London 1977. |
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