“In this fourth and last part, I purpose to speak concerning our Captivity on this Island…At our first coming thither, we were shy and jealous of the People of the Place, by reason our Nation never had any Commerce or Dealing with them……By this time the King of the Country had notice of our being there and as I suppose grew suspicious of us not having all that while by any Message made him acquainted with our intent and purpose…When we were come before him, he demanded who we were and how long we should stay? We told him, We were English, and not to stay above Twenty or thirty days [The British ruled Ceylon as a Crown Colony for 131 years]…”
—-An Historical Relation of the Island Ceylon, in the East Indies, Together, With an Account of Detaining in Captivity [for 19 Years] of the Author…by Robert Knox, published in London 1681
“In October 1904 I sailed from Tillbury Docks in the P&O Syria for Ceylon…I was leaving in England everyone and everything I knew; I was going to a place and life in which I had not the faintest idea of how I should live and what I should be doing. All that I was taking with me from the old life as contribution to the new and to prepare me for the task of helping to rule the British Empire was ninety large beautifully printed volumes of Voltaire and a wire-haired fox terrier..and my experience with dogs and other animals had taught me that corporal punishment is never a good instrument of education.”
—-.Growing, Seven Years in Ceylon, volume ii of Leonard Woolf’s autobiography
George Orwell’s Burmese Days and E.M.Forster’s A Passage to India are equally anti-imperialist and better known, but Leonard Woolf’s The Village in the Jungle, a novel set in Ceylon and based on his 7 years residence there as a colonial administrator- which ended when he returned to London to marry Virginia, preceded both of them and attempts what they did not- to imagine the colonial world through the eyes of the colonized, with a tip of Woolf’s hat to Candide’s “we must cultivate our own garden”, not someone else’s halfway around the world from England.
The presumption of writing a novel from the point of view of the colonized is striking, but Woolf jumped in with both feet, playing on every stereotype of the “savage under Crown rule” ever spewed by imperial apologists. “The spirit of the jungle is in the village, and in the people who live in it. They are simply sullen, silent men…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…”
His story’s characters are the wild man of the jungle Silindu, a “silent little man with the pinched-up face of a grey monkey” who people mistake as an ethnic Vedda, a hunting-and-gathering aboriginal of the Sri Lankan forest with no fixed abode (Woolf always toyed with the image of the Wandering Jew); his two daughters left motherless after he kills her in a rage for not delivering sons; his sister, “a short dark stumpy woman”, with “big breasts and thick legs”; a kindly man who marries the prettier of the two daughters; and the evil headman and his money-lending crony who want to keep the pretty daughter for themselves in a state of concubinage.
The jungle setting seethes with sexual desire. Here is Silindu’s daughter’s and future son-in-law’s first encounter. “She allowed him to take her into the thick jungle, but she struggled with him , and her whole body shook with fear and desire as she felt his hands upon her breasts. A cry broke from her, in which joy and desire mingled with the fear and the pain. ‘Aiyo! Aiyo!’ ”
The Sinhala cry Aiyo can be conveyed in English as Ouch, but Woolf apparently was undecided for some time whether to translate it as My Heavens or O God. The matter of sex consensual or otherwise always sat heavily on his mind, long before his Hogarth Press published Sigmund Freud in English, and at the ripe old age when once at a well lubricated luncheon with other literary luminaries, as the question was asked, What do you want to die doing, Woolf, usually the high-minded, well-mannered gentleman, answered, “fucking“.
His thirty year sex-starved marriage to Virginia was troubled by her mental illness and strong aversion to physical contact. After her death, he entered into a 28 year long cuddles-only relationship with a married woman. No need for Aiyo! Aiyo! from him.
Now back to Robert Knox, the 19 year long captive of the King of Kandy. His book’s chapter on domestic arrangements include such subheadings as “Nothing so common as Whoredom”, “The Man may kill whom he finds in Bed with his Wife”, “Women have two Husbands”, “They do Treat their Friends with the use of the Wives and Daughters”, and “The Mother for a small reward prostitutes her Daughter”- so no wonder that Woolf arrived in Ceylon in 1904 as a twenty four year old expecting a most interesting introduction to real life.
A Woolf stand-in in the guise of a British judge makes an appearance midway, when he sends Silindu’s son-in-law to jail for theft on a technicality, even though the testimony points to his innocence. This letter of the law ruling sets into motion the pretty daughter’s imagined violation and Silindu’s murder of the two violators in the book’s second half. Perhaps Woolf would have been better off ignoring the lesson of his fox terrier- that yes it is better to order corporal punishment of the natives, in order to get the punishment over and done forthwith, than to separate a man from his wife, a relationship that even in the seething jungle, if not in Bloomsbury, is of the natural order.