100 years after the Village in the Jungle

By Kalakeerthi Edwin Ariyadasa

"The jungle and the people who lived in the Sinhalese villages fascinated, almost obsessed me in Ceylon. They continued to obsess me in London, in Putney of Bloomsbury and in Cambridge. The village in the Jungle, was a novel in which I tried to somehow or other vicariously to live their lives." Leonard Woolf-1914

After a round century, The Village in the Jungle still retains the stature of the perennial embodiment of the creativity of those in the higher rungs of state administration.

This finding leads to yet another compelling implication.

In the last century, the British Civil Servant Leonard Sidney Woolf, has been the government bureaucrat par excellence, to morph his diurnal frustrations, tensions, trepidations and soul-searings into a work of fiction that could assert itself defying vagaries of veering social and human destinies.

Contours

When we return to The Village in the Jungle, in the 100th year of its original publication, some thematic contours of this work of fiction, begin to assume a prominence, commanding emphatic attention.

We look again at the title of the work which seemed routine at that time with a sharpened scrutiny. To the author it is the village "in the Jungle". To him, 'the jungle' is not merely an obsession that he cannot get rid of, but it is a pervasive, haunting phenomenon, that exerts a bewitching influence. He is bound to it by a contradicting duality-attraction and repulsion.

He articulates this emotional "push-and-pull", in his summing up of the experience of seven years of administrative service in Sri Lanka (Then Ceylon). "... My seven years in Ceylon were good for me, and though they gave me a good deal of pain, they gave me also a good deal of pleasure."

While re-visiting Sri Lanka in 1960, he was interviewed for the Ceylon Observer. There, he had this to say: "....the jungle is not kind to the people who had little to eat-to them the jungle was a fightening place."

In the first instance, Leonard Woolf would have resorted to this fiction-exercise, perhaps as a therapeutic effort to achieve a catholic release, through fictionalising the jungle and its denizens that continued to haunt his soul.

He opens his novel, with a scary episode of a seasoned hunter, who succumbs to the evil jungle under circumstances that evoke a shocking sense of horror.

The narration is presented in such an incantatory rhythm, that even a modern, hardened reader, to whom blood-curdling dramas are routine media-material, will experience a cold shiver of fright.

Hunter

He dwells with such detail on the remains of the hunter that were discovered that his description magnifies the mysterious evil.

All this is the technique he utilises to establish quite early in his work, the pervading theme that the jungle is evil. He piles up the horror: "I do not know how he died, but I know that he had boasted that there was no fear in the jungle, and in the end the jungle took him."

The total work of fiction, acquires sustaining vista from this initial conjugation of the un-named, unidentifiable evil, that lurks in the jungle.

He itemises and formulates the evil the jungle holds. The narration continues to elaborate it in terms of the lives of the village-dwellers who seem to be driven by an enormous force, to which these men and women fall victim, utterly helplessly. The characters who inhabit the landscape - Babun, silindu, Punchimenike and others, move through life without making an effort to live.

These who implement law and justice assume the appearance of exerting at least a peripheral control over their alloted destinies.

Leonard Wolf's story - telling dexterity enables him to weave all these human lives and the inanimate yet mysteriously alive jungle, into a telling phase of his own philosophic interpretation of the idiom of existence of the members of this naïve, destiny-driven community.

Struggle

As the village continues to accept without any struggle, the evil dictates of the evil jungle, the community disintegrates. The waiting jungle, ever ready to assert its evil potency, engulfs the village.

The end comes, with Punchi Menike's fruitless call to her father for help. The jungle deploys its emissary in the evil form of a great box to snuff out what dying embers are left of life.

What Leonard Woolf gave us a century ago was a parable of mighty nature, demolishing edifices of human prowess on an epoch basis.

Nature

Man may come again. But, nature will again undo his doing. Arnold Toyabee, in his monumental analysis of world history, quotes Leonard Woolf's the Village in the Jungle as an instance to prove, the recurrent dominance of nature over man's world.

Today, after a whole century, Leonard Woolf's jungle has been defeated by modern, sophisticated equipment of man. The evil has been exorcised.

What will be Leonard Woolf's thoughts if he views the spectacular urbanisation of his former jungle?