The rule of the jungle is first fear, and then hunger and thirst. There is fear everywhere: in the silence and in the shrill calls and the wild cries, in the stir of the leaves and the grating of branches, in the gloom, in the startled, slinking, peering beasts. And behind the fear is always the hunger and the thirst, and behind the hunger and the thirst fear again.
(The Village in the Jungle, page 11)
It was a strange world, a world of bare and brutal facts, of superstition, of grotesque imagination; a world of trees and the perpetual twilight of their shade; a world of hunger and fear and devils, where a man was helpless before the unseen and unintelligible powers surrounding him.
(page 21)
They say the man first finds heaven in a woman, later in a field, and last in the temple. (p.101)
Where there is food, there is happiness.
‘The Village in the Jungle’ is a really brilliant feat of imaginative writing. I expected it to be like Kipling’s Jungle Book for adults but quickly realised it’s far more serious and intense than that. It is an unflinching and brutal depiction of the harshness and primitiveness of Singhalese peasant life. It reminded me of Chinua Achebe’s intense novels about tribal life in West Africa, Things Fall Apart and No Longer At Ease.
This is because it’s a completely unpatronising, utterly believable description of the very poorest of the poor, living a pre-industrial illiterate life in a small clearing in the primeval jungle, barely subsisting under the harshest conditions imaginable. Unlike sentimental western notions of The Noble Savage, their lives are characterised by fear, hunger, anger and violence. (Key words which recur on almost every page are evil, devil and anger.)
The novel is so fully imagined, so complete and deep and convincing, that you feel like you are there, and I got to know these strange, remote, utterly alien people far better than many of the English characters in other novels I’ve read. But Achebe started writing about 1960 whereas this novel dates all the way back to 1913, half a century earlier. The way it takes such a blunt unflinching view of ‘native’ life was pioneering in its day.
Leonard Woolf in Ceylon
Leonard Woolf (1880 to 1969) had taken the civil service exams straight after leaving Cambridge, in 1903, passed with not particularly flying colours, and was offered a post in the Diplomatic Service. His family not being affluent enough to subsidise any other career (lawyer, academic), he accepted and in October 1904 was posted to Ceylon (now Sri Lanka). Here he became a cadet in the Ceylon Civil Service, serving first in Jaffna and later in Kandy.
Woolf served in Ceylon for seven long, intense years, gaining promotion to become an assistant government agent in the Southern Province, where he administered the District of Hambantota, an area of 2,600 square kilometres with a population of 100,000 people.
Throughout his time in Sri Lanka Woolf kept a detailed daily diary which he drew on for the detail of this novel, for the stories which make up his 1921 collection ‘Stories of the East’, and in the relevant volume of his multi-volume autobiography, titled ‘Growing’, published half a century later in 1961.
In May 1911 Woolf returned to England for a year’s well-deserved leave. He quickly realised he didn’t want to go back and in 1912 resigned his post. Part of the reason was that he had proposed to his long-term friend Virginia Stephen and she had accepted him. They married on 10 August 1912, both quite old, Virginia being 30 and Leonard 31. Over the next year he continued work on this novel which he had begun in Sri Lanka and it was published in October 1913. The book is dedicated to his new wife. It would be two years before she published her first novel (‘The Voyage Out’, in 1915).
During his seven years in Sri Lanka, Woolf learned the language and travelled intensively in the regions he administered. As a magistrate he was daily called on to adjudicate disputes, often between the poorest of the poor, between illiterate villagers in remote areas. And it’s in just such a remote village, really a straggling settlement of ten meagre houses, among utterly poverty-stricken illiterate villagers, that this extraordinary novel is set.
The village in the jungle
The village is called Beddegama, meaning ‘the village in the jungle’, and Woolf immediately throws us into the harsh environment with five dense pages powerfully conveying the relentlessly dog-eat-dog nature of the all-enfolding jungle.
All jungles are evil, but no jungle is more evil than that which lay about the village of Beddagama.
Only barely do the villagers manage to scrape a living by every year cutting and burning clearings called chenas in which to plant grain and vegetables. Everything depends on the rain which only falls for a few months a year, allowing the villagers to grow just enough crops to live on for the remaining ten months. Very rarely one or other of them makes the thirty mile trek to the small town of Kamburupitiya, there to borrow more seed, buy curry stuff or clothes, at ruinous rates of interest.
But for most of the villagers the horizon of their lives is the jungle which is only with difficulty kept outside the perimeter of the village, and into which they only penetrate a mile at most, to find water.
Silindu
The central character is the bad-tempered loner Silindu. He keeps himself to himself, is slack and lazy when it comes to raising crops, prefers to go hunting in the jungle with a long muzzle-loading gas-pipe gun, lying for hours on end in the foliage near waterholes hoping to shoot deer or sambur. His aloofness leads the other villagers to call him tikak pissu meaning ‘slightly mad’. By his laziness and lack of respect he also alienates the village headman, Babehami. (Babehami is known as Punchi Arachchi meaning ‘the little Arachchi, where Arachchi means the lowest rank of headman, headman over a village.)
Slindu marries and has twin daughter
Silindu has a wife, Dingihami. He gets her pregnant and she bears twin girls, Punchi Menika and Hinnihami. Silindu is furious that his wife has borne him daughters and rushes into the hut (all the ‘houses’ are made of mud), yells at her and beats her round the head and breasts. Two days later Dingihami dies. No-one seems to blame him, no steps to punishment are taken, Instead he has his sister, Karlinahami, who lived in a house at the other end of the village and whose husband had died of fever two months before, move in to become the twins’ step-mother. They grow up with her as the only mother they’ve ever known.
The twins grow up
The years pass. Silindi ignores his daughters until they’re three and one of them comes poking around at which he sets the girl on her feet and tells her a long story of the jungle. From that moment onwards he tells them stories and legends about the jungle and its creatures. He takes them out hunting with them and they acquire more knowledge of jungle fare, more confidence in the dark undergrowth, than the other villagers, especially the girls.
Babun Appu marries daughter 1, Punchi Menika
Over ten years later, when Punchi Menika is an adolescent of 15, she comes to the notice of a young man of the village Babun Appu. He is 21 years old and has only recently, after the death of his father, moved in with his sister Nanchohami who is married to the village headman, Babehami.
and suddenly notices her budding breasts and soft skin. Babu:
was tall for a Sinhalese, broad-shouldered, and big-boned. His skin was a dark chocolate-brown, his face oval, his nose small, his lips full and sensual. His expression was curiously virile and simple; but his brown eyes, which were large and oval-shaped, swept it at moments with something soft, languorous, and feminine.
After encountering her in the jungle and, from what we can make out, forcibly having sex with her, this still isn’t enough so he tells his parents he wants to marry Punchi Menika. They tell him he’s mad because Silindu is a famous eccentric and poor. He should trek to the nearest village and find a girl with a good dowry. But Babun insists and goes to see her father, Silindu. Silndu fatalistically regards this as just the latest calamity in his life and laments that he will lose his daughter. But Punchi Menika hears everything, comes out the hut, throws herself at his feet and says she needn’t move out. Instead Babun can build his own hut within Silindu’s compound, so she’ll be his wife, but still be there for her father.
So Silindu acquiesces, Babun builds his own hut in the compound and lives there with Punchi Menika. Babun is a simple honest guy and his living there slowly dispels the bad odour surrounding Silindu. People visit and the whole family becomes more accepted into the little village community.
Punchirala fancies daughter 2, Hinnihami
Hinnihami resents her sister going over to a strange man like this but life is life. So, in her turn, she becomes the target of various proposals, chief among them from 38-year-old Punchirala, with a face ravaged by a bear, but a reputation as a witch doctor or vederala.
When Punchirala comes to ask Silindu for Hinnihami’s hand, Silindu reluctantly refuses, knowing his daughter is a wildcat who will never accept the scarred vederala. Very angry, Punchirala puts a curse on Silindu who immediately starts to sicken. When he next goes into the jungle he has a panic attack, gets lost, injures himself.
Back in his compound he sickens and weakens. When his sister, Karlinahami, begs Punchirala to stop his spell, Punchirala disclaims all knowledge and claims it is the work of some devil. There is only one cure, which is to go on a pilgrimage to the Buddhist shrine at Beragala, five days’ trek through the jungle to the East.
Pilgrimage to Beragala
And so the family group of sick Silindu, Karlinahami, Hinnihami and Babun set off on the hard journey to Beragala, a journey described in vivid detail. After a few days their path joins a wider track, and they encounter larger and larger groups of pilgrims all trekking the same way, including an old man who shares his food with them.
In Beragala
Beragala is something beyond most of their experience, a wide street lined with shops and proper houses, with temples at either end and huge crowds of pilgrims, overwhelming for people used to seeing no more than 30 fellow villagers from one year’s end to another.
But to their surprise they discover the vederala Punchirala has travelled to Beragala too, claiming to have come for the festival. In reality he has come as part of his scheme to win Hinnihami as wife. He now tells the surprised pilgrim that there is only one man who can save Silindu from the devil which is possessing him and making him ill, a sanyasi, a holy man, a Hindu seer.
So they go to see this holy man, who has an immense length of hair and is dressed in a filthy dirty gown. There’s a problem that he doesn’t speak Singhalese so they require an interpreter. There’s another problem which is that the holy man requires payment and they have little or no money. They have to cadge a rupee off Punchirala, who makes them promise to give him food in the dry season.
Long story short: the holy man chants spells and announces that the cause of Silindu’s sickness is that the family refused to marry Hinnihami to Punchirala. (Did Punchirala pay him to say so? It’s not clear.) Either the man will have to be given or the girl, meaning either Silindu will die of Hinnihami will have to be given to Punchirala (p.75).
So, very reluctantly, having finished their pilgrimage, the little team pack and leave and on their first day back in the jungle they encounter Punchirala at an agreed rendezvous, hand Hinnihami over to him. Once this disagreeable duty is performed, they simply turn and continue their 4-day trek through the jungle. And with every day Silindu recovers his health and is more or less back to normal by the time they reach the village.
Punchirala’s life with Hinnihama
What happens next, over the coming weeks and months, is that Punchirala discovers that Hinnihami is, as Silindu warned him, a wildcat who obeys nobody. She allows herself to be ‘taken’ but with utter frigidity, and spends her days mocking him, calling him devil and dog. Quite quickly he realises she is not going to be his cook and comforter (p.81). After one outburst from Hinnihami Punchirala lets her return to live in her father’s compound.
Months pass. That year there are abundant rains. Not for 40 years had it rained so abundantly and the harvest is bounteous. Punchi Menaka has had a baby who is now 18 months old. Now Hinnihami has a child (Punchirala’s child), a girl she names Punchi Nona. On the day she is born Silindu returns from the jungle carrying a baby fawn. He had shot and killed its mother for meat but couldn’t bring himself to harm the now helpless fawn. He hands it to Hinnihami as she is suckling her baby and the fawn suckles from the other breast. This feels like a departure from realism into magical realism or the realm of fable.
Thus Hinnihami’s little girl and the fawn grow up side by side, nurtured and cared for by Hinnihami. She calls the fawn Punchi Appu and cares for it as much or maybe more than her own daughter. Inevitably, the other villagers think this is strange and unnatural, although what you’d expect from the mad father, Silindu.
Disaster
The year of plenty is followed by a year of disastrous drought. The rains fail during the planting season but when they do come, bring disease. We learn that the village had a population of 41 but that no fewer than 16 villagers die of dysentery and fever. When the novel began the village had ten ‘houses’ i.e. mud huts within fenced compounds. Two had been abandoned earlier (one when Babun moved into Silindu’s compound). Now two entire families are wiped out, their compounds are abandoned, so the village is reduced to six ‘houses’.
Death of the granddaughters
Both Silindu’s grand-daughters die in the sickness. In fact it hits him harder as he’d grown to love the toddlers, than it affects the mothers.
The death of the child is what every mother must continually expect. They had seen it too long in the village to be surprised at their own suffering : the birth of children every year and then the coming of the fever to carry them off. Their grief was lightened by the feeling of resignation to the inevitable. (p.85)
Fate
A pause to say that all the villagers believe in a fate or destiny which is harsh and punitive. They have a saying about evil which comes from the jungle and repeat it whenever anything bad happens.
‘Always evil is coming into this house from the jungle…’
Silindu is particularly pessimistic. When his wife gives birth to girls, when Babun takes Punchi Menika from him, when Punchirala puts the curse on him, at more or less every event in his life Silindu bewails his harsh fate.
In addition, he doesn’t realise that the village headman, Babehami, has got it in for him, and carries out a long, underhand vendetta. Babehami never liked him but is offended when Silindu beats his wife for bearing daughters. Slyly Babehami works against him, for example refusing to loan Silindu rice to sow in the fallow season, claiming he doesn’t have enough for himself; or in the matter of Silindu’s gas-gun which Babehami reports to the authorities away in the nearest town, because Silindu needs a license for his gun but doesn’t have the money to pay for one so uses it illegally.
This vendetta of Babehami’s against Silindu adds to Silindu’s sense of an overwhelming black destiny bearing him down.
Murder of Hinnihami
Punchirala feeds the rumours about Hinnihami and her fawn. He says it is a devil and she is a devil woman which is why he kicked her out of his compound. The rumours become toxic when the headman’s little son dies suddenly, for no apparent reason, and words gets around that the boy was carrying leaves in the jungle when he encountered the fawn which bent forward to nibble them but the boy snatched them away. Rumour says the fawn and the woman then put a curse on the boy.
After much muttering and conferring in Babehami’s hut, one day Hinnihami and her fawn are ambushed on a jungle path. A mob of Babehami’s kin stone then beat the fawn, deliberately breaking its legs, then beating and stoning it more. When Hinnihami tries to intervene she is beaten, her clothes town off her to reveal her breasts, and she is dragged over to the dying fawn where they are both, eventually, abandoned.
She lies half conscious by the fawn as it slowly dies, then lies out night in the jungle chill. Next morning Silindu finds her half-delirious, and takes her back to his compound where, unwilling to live on, she dies.
Arrival of Fernando
Everyone is surprised when the headman, Babehami, arranges for an outsider known as Fernando, from the town of Kamburupitiya, to come and live on a new house built on land adjoining his compound. This man runs a boutique in the town but has also loaned money to all the villages. After the fallow year he risks losing all his loans. Instead he’s agreed a plan with Babehami, whereby the latter will assign larger than usual chenas to each villager, of four acres, but on condition they all assign to Fernando one fifth of their crops. Fernando will supervise the villagers’ work on their chenas and guarantee the return of his loans, with interest. He is accompanied by a boy servant of 8, and is regarded by all the villagers as a social superior, given the honorary title of Mahatmaya.
Fernando fancies Punchi Menika
He hasn’t been there long before sex rears its head again. Silindu’s daughter, Babun’s wife, Punchi Menika, has a ‘face and form’ more attractive than the other squalid village women, and Fernando decides to make her his. Slight problem of her husband, Babun, standing in the way. So Fernando hatches a plan. He decides to schmooze Punchi Menika’s husband, Babun, by offering him the role of gambaraya to oversee all the chenas.
Then he enacts part two of his plot: this is to approach Punchi Menika and blackmail her into having sex with him by threatening to not only take away the role of gambaraya from Babun, but to call in his debts and ruin him. Even under these direct threats, Punchi Menika refuses to give in.
Babehami and Fernando conspire
They take three steps. 1) First the headman invites Babun to his compound. This never normally happens so Babun is surprised. They amaze him by telling him that Punchi Menika came to Fernando and asked to leave her husband and become his woman. Therefore, Babehami very reasonably suggests that they let Punchi have her wish, the marriage ends, and Babun comes back to live at his (Babehami’s) compound. Babun refuses to believe it but is so simple and gullible that he is tempted, until Fernando gives the game away by bursting out laughing at the foolish look on his face. He goes home and Punchi of course confirms that it’s a lie, that it is Fernando who tried to lure her away.
2) Next Babehami and Fernando unfold another plan: they appoint an outsider over the chena which Silindu and Babun have spent several weeks clearing. When they go to see Babehami the latter tells them permits or licenses to cultivate chenas can only be given to ‘fit’ persons and neither of them is fit. This is obvious intimidation. Silindu and Babun confer and decide Babun must make the three days journey to the nearest town to present their case to the Assistant Government Agent. He hastens there but discovers the AGA is absent on his rounds and no-one can tell him when he’ll return.
Walking through the town he passes the shop of the Moorman (Muslim?) Cassim who calls him in. When Babun explains his trouble Cassim immediately sees what fernando is doing and laughs at the lengths he’s going to just to bed a village woman. For fun Cassim offers to help him and writes a petition to the government agent, which is signed and sent. Cassim tells Buban to come back to town in ten days’ time.
3) Meanwhile Babehami and Fernando cook up another plan. They put word about that Babehami’s house has been broken into and burgled. They call in the Korala, a fat , consequential, bullying man. He goes into Silindu’s compound and emerges with a bundle containing two cloths, a pair of gold ear-rings, and some other pieces of gold jewellery. They claim Babun and Silindu stole this. Then they get their goons to find in the undergrowth nearby a large box which everyone recognises as the headman’s. They have been framed for a robbery.
All this is bad but has one ‘good’ consequence which is that Silindu finally realises that Babehami has had it in for him all along. In a flash he realises the whole sequence of vengeful decisions Babehami has made against him, for years, in fact for decades. He realises the headman has been for years his implacable enemy, behind much of his long string of bad luck.
The trial
In a pretty low key way, they are ‘arrested’ i.e. the headman orders Silindu and Babun to spend the night on his verandah, then the next day they are told to accompany Babehami, Fernando and the Korala to the nearby town.
Here they stand trial in a court run and administered by the colonial authority (Britain) with a white judge.
At this point you begin to understand that this is where Woolf’s own personal experience comes in. He himself was a regional administrator and judge and oversaw hundreds of cases which consisted of petty arguments from little villages between illiterate peasants. He must have seen hundreds of cases which were just the tip of slow-burning vendettas and village feuds, just like the one this novel records.
The trial is described in excruciating detail and takes up 13 long pages. What comes over is how painfully useless the court process is. Everything is relayed to the judge through an interpreter. The innocent (Babun and Silindu) don’t have a clue what’s going on or how they’re expected to behave. The guilty (Babehami, Fernando and the Korala) are familiar with court protocol, take the stand one after the other and lie their head off, but are believed.
It’s notable that Woolf doesn’t ridicule or satirise the process. That would be an easy win. He does something subtler but much worse. He shows all the procedures being strictly adhered to and the judge having a pretty shrewd idea that something is wrong with the prosecution i.e. taking against the bad guys. But he can only act on the basis of the evidence placed before him and that is all in their favour, one eye witness after another queuing up to lie about seeing Babun break into the headman’s house then make off with the loot.
And so the judge finds Babun guilty and sentences him to six months ‘rigorous imprisonment’. (No one is charging Silindu with actual burglary and so he is dismissed without charge.)
Silindu plans revenge
Punchi Menika had been present in court throughout the trial and a fairly big plot hole is that neither Silindu nor Babun thought to call her as a witness to prove their central claim that Fernando was pursuing a vendetta against them because they refused to let him take Punchi away. After the verdict she staggers out into the street where she is joined by Silindu. He is muttering to himself and mutters and laughs all the days’-long trek back to their village.
Because at last he understands the nature of the ‘fate’ which has been doing him down and has a plan. He is a hunter, a well-known hunter, with a gas-gun.
So they all arrive back in the village. The next day Silindu goes to call on Babehami. The latter is understandably nervous about what’s happened but Silindu lures him into a fall sense of security by telling him that he now understands that the Bad Guy, the bad influence in his life for years, has been Babun Appu. Silindu goes on to say there is nothing now to stop Punchi Menika being given to Fernando. This is what Babehami wants to hear though he is still unnerved. He has to tell Silindu to slow down, that Punchi Menika can only slip into Fernando’s house at night, secretly, in order to keep up appearances.
Then Silindu says he wants to sort out the misunderstanding whereby another man has been assigned his chena. Since Babun was at fault and has been imprisoned can this not now be reversed? Again he forces the pace and wants Babehami to go with him and tell the usurper, Appu, that he’s got to relinquish the chena. Again Babehami is suspicious, he doesn’t like being rushed into anything. But on the other hand it would be better to get everything sorted as soon as possible and specially to keep Silindu onside.
So he lets himself be persuaded to set off on the long trek to the chena, during which Silindu becomes more and more excited, telling increasingly pertinent stories about how the hunters might wound and corner the old buffalo who will wait till the very last minute, when the hunter thinks he’s won, and then charge. And as Babehami finally realises something is up, he turns just in time to see Silindu racing towards him, virtually foaming at the mouth, and then shoot him at point-blank range, ripping a hole in his chest.
Silindu kicks the corpse then hurries back to the village. Here he finds Fernando in his compound and simply walks over to him with his gun levelled. As Fernando tries to duck behind the fence Silindu fires between the slats and rips his guts out.
Silindu walks calmly back to his house, neatly leans his gun in a corner, comes out again and sees the crowd gathering round the headman’s compound, before walking into the jungle and making for the track which leads to Kamburupitiya.
Walking to Kamburupitiya
Silindu doesn’t know exactly what he wants to do and Woolf shows us his thoughts, that he doesn’t realise just how much trouble he’s in. He thinks he might be able to go back to the village and live a normal life, the worst happening that the other villagers might bully him a bit. On the evening of the third day he arrives at Kamburupitiya and goes straight to the house of the local administrator, the Ratemahatmaya, a Sinhalese.
This man is fussy and nervous. At first he says it’s late but he sits up when Silindu tells him he’s committed a murder. When Silindu goes on to calmly explain that he is the murderer and has killed two men, the official is at first scared.
The light of the lamp fell upon the dark, livid face. It was the face of the grey monkeys which leap above the jungle among the tree-tops, and peer down at you through the branches; a face scarred and pinched by suffering and weariness and fear. It was as if something evil from the darkness, which he did not understand, had suddenly appeared in his quiet verandah. (p.140)
This is good, isn’t it? It reminds me of the fear expressed in many of Rudyard Kipling’s Indian stories, some of which are out-and-out horror stories.
Anyway, the Ratemaharatmaya is a nervous and ineffectual man. Not knowing what to do he officiously demands that Silindu should stand, even though he’s exhausted from trekking through the jungle for three days. When Silindu is slow to react the Ratemaharatmaya gets his servant to kick him.
After some hesitation he forces Silindu to accompany him in a bullock cart three-quarters of a mile to the residence of the white British magistrate. This is the same man who tried and sentenced Bupan. Silindu has never seen such a clean room before, full of so much furniture. The narrator explains that it’s just a cheap rug on the floor, a table with pens and papers on it, and an old bookshelf, but Silindu is dazzled by it, and in this moment the reader very vividly feels the difference between the two worlds, the urban colonial world and the incredibly primitive world of the village.
As in the courtroom scene, the magistrate is painted sympathetically. For example, unlike the Ratemaharatmaya he sees that Silindu is exhausted and lets him sit down. Still, he insists the formalities are gone through, so he thoroughly questions Silindu, who freely and openly gives a complete account of how he murdered Babehami and Fernando.
Back to Beddegama
Having done so, Silindu naively expects to be punished straightaway. He vaguely hopes that, having explained that he just wanted to eliminate the source of evil in the village and bring peace, he’ll be allowed to go back home. Instead he is, of course, consigned to a cage-like lockup overnight.
Next day a procession of the magistrate, the Ratemaharatmaya and various servants set off with Silindu on the trek back to the village, to make a formal enquiry. Here they find the two corpses, still lying untouched where they fell, examine them, make notes etc. Then the magistrate sets up base in the shade of a tree and interviews a series of witnesses. Everyone corroborates Silindu’s story but the facts were never in doubt, just how they are interpreted.
For now we see the grand design of the novel as a whole, which is to juxtapose the two completely different value systems, of town and village, of literate and illiterate, above all of colonial law and jungle culture – and observe in detail how they fail to match or comprehend each other.
The magistrate is given a speech in which he shows a surprising understanding of Silindu’s mentality. He understands that the villagers just want to be left alone to live their miserable lives in peace. In this they’re like the animals of the jungle which the magistrate hunts, something he shares with Silindu. They both know that jungle animals are dangerous when injured or cornered, as Silindu was after his family was attacked by Fernando and Babehami.
The mad old Buddhist wanderer
After the afternoon of questioning, Silindu spends the night locked up, then is taken back to Kamburupitiya, and from there sent west to Tangala. Silindu is taken there by a simple peon who loves talking. Along the way they fall in with other travellers. The first night they sleep, along with other travellers, in a shop by the roadside. There are two traders and a filthy old man, a wanderer who is generally considered mad. The peon has mocked Silindu to the other travellers but the old man sees his case is right: he was defending himself when he was attacked. That said, he is a Buddhist and keeps repeating the Buddhist dogma that all killing, of anything, is a sin, including all the animals Silindu has spent his entire life hunting in the jungle.
Suddenly something in Silindu snaps, and he throws himself at the feet of the old man saying that, Yes, yes, now he understands: all the animals of the jungle live in fear, there is no end to the killing, he thought he could find peace by killing his two antagonists but all he did was increase the killing and the fear. Surprised, the Buddhist old man tells him it is never too late to acquire merit to improve your next rebirth, tells him to spend his last days in holy thoughts and teaches him a Buddhist scripture, a sentence from the Pali to memorise and repeat.
This conversion to Buddhism is important. Maybe it allowed Woolf to make some points about what was and still is the main religion in Sri Lanka. But within the narrative it indicates a new and different attitude to his life. Previously Silindu had thought a dark fate was out to get him with evil continually coming out of the jungle and he felt beaten down and defeated by it, which led to his outbursts of anger. Now he has accepted his fate, he finally finds the peace and rest he has been seeking all his life. In a sense, the novel has a Buddhist message in how it shows that fighting back or revenge multiply the causes of unrest and disquiet. Only complete acceptance can bring real peace to the spirit.
Trial at Tangala
Sindilu is locked up in the town gaol for 3 weeks. One day he spots Babun but the latter is a changed man, sickly and yellow, his fine muscle tone wasted and all the sparkle gone from his eyes. When Silindu yells at him from his cell that he has killed Fernando and Babehima so now everything will be alright, Babun replies that he is mad, he knows he will die in this prison, nothing is alright, and he makes a point of avoiding Sindilu thereafter.
After three weeks, the date of his trial arrives and Silindu goes through the motions, once again answering what he takes to be repetitive pointless questions. His defence lawyer tries to get him off on account of his madness, but Silindu answers the questions clearly and logically, explaining how he cold-bloodedly planned the murder of the two men, and so the jury quickly finds him guilty of murder, and the judge sentences him to be hanged in two weeks’ time.
With four days left to go a smartly dressed Sinhalese official arrives at Sindilu’s cells and announces that his hanging has been commuted to 20 years hard labour, and his part of the narrative ends with a short, blunt, brutal indication of what this will mean.
A jail guard came and unlocked the cell gate. Silindu was taken out and made to squat down in the long shed which ran down the centre of the courtyard. A wooden mallet was put into his hand and a pile of cocoanut husk thrown down in front of him. For the remainder of that day, and daily for the remainder of twenty years, he had to make coir by beating cocoanut husks with the wooden mallet. (p.167)
Aftermath
When Silindu had been brought by the magistrate to the village to take part in the inquiries, he had been met by his daughter Punchi Menika, Buban Appu’s wife, the proximate cause of all the trouble insofar as it was Fernando’s infatuation with her that triggered the series of events.
She asks Silindu if it’s true that he killed Babehim and Fernando and he says yes. She says it would have been better if she had voluntarily gone to Fernando but that makes Silindu angry and he says, Never, he would never have allowed it, and she shouldn’t think like that. He tells her Babun will be released from prison in a matter of months and he will return to look after her. He tells her to wait.
After Silindu is taken away what that waiting entails is carrying on sharing the manless house with Silindu’s sister, Karlinahami. At fifty, Karlinahami is a very old woman, in terms of jungle life. Maybe it’s worth giving this description in full, because it gives a clear indication how unsentimentally Woolf describes this harsh subject matter. And how utterly convincing it is, written with all the depth of first hand experience.
Karlinahami was nearly fifty years old now, and in a jungle village a woman — and especially a woman without a husband — is very old, very near the grave at fifty. The sun and the wind, the toil, the hunger, and the disease sap the strength of body and mind, bring folds and lines into the skin, and dry up the breasts. A woman is old at forty or even thirty. No one, man or woman, in the jungle, lives to the term of years allotted to man. It would have been difficult to say whether Karlinahami looked nearer eighty than ninety, nearer ninety than a hundred. The jungle had left its mark on her. Her body was bent and twisted, like the stunted trees which the south-west wind had tortured into grotesque shapes. The skin, too, on her face and thin limbs reminded one of the bark of the jungle trees; it was shrunken against the bones, and wrinkled, and here and there flaking off into whitish brown scales, as the bark flakes off the kumbuk-trees. The flesh of the cheeks had dried and shrunk; the lips seemed to have sunk into the toothless mouth, leaving a long line damp with saliva under the nose. And under the lined forehead were the eyes, lifeless and filmy, peering out of innumerable wrinkles. The eyes were not blind, but they seemed to be sightless — the pupil, the iris, and even the white had merged — because the mind was dying. It is what usually happens in the jungle — to women especially— the mind dies before the body. Imperceptibly the power of initiative, of thought, of feeling, dies out before the monotony of life, the monotony of the tearing hot wind, the monotony of endless trees, the monotony of perpetual hardship. It will happen at an age when in other climates a man is in his prime, and a woman still bears children. The man will still help at the work in the chena, cutting down the undergrowth and sowing the crop; but he will do so unthinking, without feeling, like a machine or an animal; and when it is done he will sit hour after hour in his compound staring with his filmy eyes into nothing, motionless, except when he winds one long thin arm round himself, like a grey monkey, and scratches himself on the back. And the woman still carries the waterpot to the muddy pool to fetch water; still cooks the meal in the house. While they still stand upright, they must do their work; they eat and they sleep; they mutter frequently to themselves; but they do not speak to others, and no one speaks to them. They live in a twilight, where even pain is scarcely felt. (p.167)
The objective narrator dispassionately describes the impact of all these tragic events on the village. At a stroke the village loses one more house (reducing the number to five) and seven of its 25 inhabitants, for the headman’s wife, Nanchohami, decides to leave, taking her two children with her. Two dead, two in prison, three left.
Woolf explains how the headman’s house is ill-omened, associated with devils. No-one wanted to live there, well-made though it was. And so Woolf gives a bravura description of how the abandoned house is slowly recolonised by the jungle, low bushes taking over the fence, the walls developing holes, the branches it was made of taking root and growing, plants on the rooftiles – after three years the whole thing has reverted to the wild.
The new headman is the witch doctor, the vederala, Punchirala, the one who cast the spell of sickness on Sindilu when he refused to hand Punchi Menika over to him.
As to Punchi Menika, she partakes of the vagueness of the peasant, and so she has little or no sense of time. She was told to wait for Babun Appu to be freed but doesn’t know how to count time and so when to expect his return. They all hear the news that Sindilu’s sentence was commuted but all ‘life imprisonment’ means to her is that she’ll never see him again, so he drops out of her life and thinking.
Instead she has to work like a dog, scavenging roots and berries from the jungle in the fallow season, working on other people’s chenas and living on charity. But she hopes that Babun Appu will return and the evil will end, she will have closure and peace. She and the villagers debate, sometimes bad-temperedly, whether the six months have passed or not.
Eventually Punchi Menika decides she must find out for herself. Punchirala explains that she will have to go to the prison which is in Tangalla. First she must do the two-days’ walk along a trail to Kamburupitiya, and then join the bigger road which heads west to Tangalla. So Punchi Menika makes some kurakkan cakes and wraps some uncooked grain, and sets off.
The path to Kamburupitiya is alright, she’s used to it, but she hates the wide straight road to Tangalla, packed with carts and bullocks and traders. She is terrified of the strange villages she passes through and feels all the strangers are looking and laughing at her. She arrives in Tangalla on market day which feels like chaos to her, stumbles through the tangle of streets to arrive in the market place at its busiest, before felling to the hill on the outskirts of town.
There’s one big building in isolation at the top of the hill. In a consciously artistic passage Woolf describes how Punchi Menika goes to the top of the hill and there finds an exhausted old man tending a pathetic herd of five cows. He confirms that the building is the prison but warns her, in heavily fatalistic tones, that nobody ever comes out, especially if they come from a village such as hers (and his, he originally came from a village not far from Beddegama). When she tells him she’s come to discover the fate of her husband Babun Appu, the old man says he’ll be dead.
She taps on the huge door of the prison but so diffidently that the sound doesn’t carry inside then sits down with vast resignation. Hours later a guard opens the gate and sees her. She asks to know the fate of her husband. He, like all low ranking officials, demands money but she pleads she is far too poor to have any. So the guard tells her, yes, he knew the man Babun, and he died two months earlier.
Punchi Menika is too tired and fatalistic to cry and beat her breast, She just walks away, down the hill to where the old man is sitting and confirms he hunch that her man is dead, then she sets straight off to walk back to her village. There she will be safe and have peace.
The end
Two years pass. The rains fail, the crops fail and more people die or move away. Silindu’s sister, Karlinahami, fades and dies. After two years there are only two houses left, one containing just Punchi Menilak and the other belonging to the vederala Punchirala. No-one bothers to visit the village any more, and the track to it from the outside world itself grows over. The jungle, described at such length with such power in the opening pages, is reclaiming its own.
The narrative picks up speed, covering more time from a detached distant point of view. Woolf describes how Punchirala grows old and sickly, eventually too old to care for himself and moves into Punchi Menilak’s hut. Now she has to forage for two, since they don’t have the strength to clear chanaks any more and, anyway, the rains keep failing.
Instead of being grateful Punchirala, now an old man in his 40s, becomes more spiteful and hateful with age. Hunger and fever eventually give him release.
And then, on the last two pages, the jungle surges forward to reclaim its own, the ceaseless plant life, bushes and trees moving right up to the perimeter of her compound, then over it and up to the door of her hut.
In an ending which feels like a fairy tale or a legend, but without any sentiment, Punchi Menilak becomes one with the beasts of the jungle. Her feeble foraging expeditions no longer scare the wild pigs or deer. When she was small, Sindilu had told her that you have to live many years before you understand the beasts of the jungle. Now she understands them. She has become one of them.
Perpetual hunger wastes her away. Eventually, in her last few days, she is bedbound with fever. The fire between its three stones which has burned for generations goes out. One night, in her last moments, she wakes from fever to see two small eyes shining in the doorway. Suddenly terrified she calls out to her long-distant father that the devil has come for her, Save me, save me!
But as Punchi Menilak falls backward the animal moves through the doorway into her hut. It is a wild boar and it closes in. The last sentence reads:
As she fell back, the great boar grunted softly, and glided like a shadow towards her into the hut.
I assume the boar is going to eat her, possibly while she is still conscious. The circular shape of the narrative, returning here at the end to the triumph of the all-conquering jungle which was so extensively described at the start, now that the story has dwindled down to one last human survivor on the brink of being extinguished, has a fairy tale feel. But it is not a fairy tale for children.
Descriptions of village people
The spirit of the jungle is in the village, and in the people who live in it. They are simple, sullen, silent men. In their faces you can see plainly the fear and hardship of their lives. They are very near to the animals which live in the jungle around them. 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, the ferocity of the leopard, and the sudden fury of the bear.
People who live in towns can hardly realise how persistent and violent are the desires of those who live in villages like Beddagama. In many ways, and in this beyond all others, they are very near to the animals; in fact, in this they are more brutal and uncontrolled than the brutes; that, while the animals have their seasons, man alone is perpetually dominated by his desires. (p.48)
The minds of most villagers are extraordinarily tortuous and suspicious.
Why I write summaries
I give such detailed summaries of the novels I read for two reasons. 1) As notes to myself about what happens and what I found noteworthy. 2) Because just using the generic terms we have to describe books, such as ‘realist’ or ‘sentimental’, in a general description, is always inadequate. Giving a synopsis of the plot is the best way to convey the complex reality of engaging with a long narrative, much more effective than stock phrases. And in many cases a full summary of the plot shows that the standard descriptions are actually wrong.
Plus 3) I do summaries because they allow me to record my reactions to narratives as they unfold in real time – reactions of surprise or excitement or boredom – and some readers have commented that they enjoy following me on this journey of discovery and understanding rather than reading the flat factual summaries you can get on Wikipedia or Sparks Notes. Wikipedia summaries are never shocked or surprised but I frequently am, as well as delighted, bored, irritated and so on. I record my honest responses. Sometimes, later, on reflection, I moderate or even retract my opinions, but the summary remains of my initial responses and some readers find that useful.
Anyway, this summary is designed to be 1) helpful for anyone who’s never read and is never going to read ‘The Village in the Jungle’, and 2) to give a really detailed sense of what the book is about.
Glossary
I make glossaries of unusual words I encounter in books partly for their own interest, but also because odd or unusual words shed light on a text from a different angle. They offer a kind of different route into and through a text. They are like threads in a complicated tapestry, gleaming for a moment, linking disparate moments; especially in a novel like this which is trying to inhabit a completely different culture, with its own language, and so uses them very freely.
Part of the verisimilitude of the novel is Woolf’s concern not just to capture customs, modes of life and speech of his Sri Lankans, but to use their own terminology. In fact the book contains numerous footnotes, one every few pages, giving the meaning of the many native words he deploys (most but not all in Sinhala) as well as explaining other factual elements, such as the native titles given to different ranks in the social hierarchy, the difference between Tamils and Sinhalese, the likely origins of different religious rituals and so on. It kind of overflows with authenticity.
- Aiyo! – common exclamation or cry
- amma – mother
- Appochchi – Father
- chatty – earthenware bowl for carrying water
- chena – patch of jungle cleared and sown
- dagoba – the shrines built by kings long ago to hold the relics of the Lord Buddha
- gama – village, hence Beddegama, ‘the village in the jungle’
- gambaraya – oversees the cultivation of rice fields for their owners
- ge – house
- goiya – caste of cultivators
- Kachcheri – government offices
- kapurala – persons who perform services in temples
- kunji – rice gruel
- kurrakan – a grain
- punchi – little
- mudalali – rich trader
- poya day – day of the change of the moon, kept as a holiday
- Ralahami – respectful form of address
- Rodiyas – lowest Sri Lankan caste
- sanyasi – Hindu holy man
- veddas – aboriginal inhabitants of Sri Lanka before the Singhalese arrived; a term often associated with devils and used as an insult
- vederala – native ‘doctor’
- yakko – male devil, common insult
- yakkini – female devil, common insult
Thoughts
‘The Village in the Jungle’ won very good reviews, not only in Britain but also in Sri Lanka, where colonial officials testified to its accuracy and the island’s small literary community recognised a milestone account of their own culture.
As the years went by Woolf was delighted when it came to be a set text in Sri Lankan schools. In her biography of Leonard Woolf, Victoria Glendinning describes it as ‘a foundational novel in the Sri Lankan literary canon’. Christopher Ondaatje in his Afterword says that it ‘has become an essential part of the literary culture of Sri Lanka’.
Part of what made it so unique is the way it is written entirely from the native rather than the colonial point of view. My summary makes that pretty obvious without needing much additional comment. Various blurbs describe how the British colonial system is not directly criticised but just shown to be largely irrelevant to, and at odds with, the actual lives and values of the locals.
The main and obvious comment is how amazingly authentic it appears. It’s a miracle of imaginative projection. There isn’t a single false note. You are utterly transported into the mindset of the jungle, the village and its illiterate peasant inhabitants, in all the superstitious wretchedness of their conditions and lives. It’s an absolutely amazing achievement.
Credit
‘The Village in the Jungle’ by Leonard Woolf was published by Edward Arnold in 1913. Page references are to the 2008 Eland Publishing paperback edition, though the text is freely available online.
Books & Boots 