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4th August 1996

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Woolf as Judge: understanding contradictions in British justice

A review by Regi Siriwardena

LEONARD WOOLF: A BRITISH CIVIL SERVANT AS A JUDGE IN THE HAMBANTOTA DISTRICT OF COLONIAL SRI LANKA (1908-1911)

By Prabath de Silva

It's more than three-quarters of a century since Leonard Woolf left Ceylon, and more than a quarter-century since he died; but his personality and his writings continue to engage the interests of many Sri Lankans. There has accumulated over the years a certain body of critical and biographical writing on Woolf and Ceylon, his official diaries and his novel.

Prabath de Silva has made a valuable addition to this literature by his work; Leonard Woolf: A British Civil Servant as a Judge in the Hambantota District of Colonial Sri Lanka (1908-1911).

All the more so because the particular facet of Woolf's life and activity that he has explored has not been dealt with in any detail in previous writings. Mr. de Silva has diligently collected the facts about, Woolf's work as a judge in the Hambantota district between 1908 and 1911; he has taken advantage of his own judicial service in the Hambantota district to transcribe records of some of the cases Woolf heard when he exercised his judicial functions by virtue of his position as AGA.

He has also brought together from Woolf's diaries, his autobiography and his novel, The Village in the Jungle, a kind of anthology of Woolf's writing deriving from his experiences as judge and from his observations on the law and justice in general.

In all these ways, Mr. de Silva has placed in his debt all those who are interested in the life and work of one of the most remarkable figures of the British colonial administration in Ceylon.

The judicial activity that Woolf was required to engage in by virtue of his position as AGA was clearly a crucial formative experience in shaping his understanding of the contradictions of British imperial rule as well as the contradictions of the judicial role itself.

It has been pointed out that Woolf didn't resign from the Civil Service because of doubts about the benevolence of imperialism but because of the fact that while he was on leave in England, he fell in love with Virginia Stephen, and by the time his leave ran out, he wasn't yet sure whether she would marry him.

That is factually correct, but there seems to me no doubt that by that time certain, perhaps subterranean, qualms about the imperialist system and his own role as one of its servants had arisen in his mind.

The conclusive evidence of this is in the novel he began soon after he left Ceylon and published two years later. I remember my own experience of reading The Village in the Jungle at the age of fourteen, at a time when the blessings of British rule in Ceylon were questioned by not many people in the world in which I had been brought up.

It was the trial scene in The Village in the Jungle that for the first time raised some disturbing questions in my mind which my own immature and restricted experience of life had never made me confront before. Was it fair that people should be tried in a language they didn't understand and by a system of law that was to them a complete mystery? And could a process of law that resulted in a monstrous iniquity really be justice?

The chapter from the novel that Mr. de Silva has very relevantly reproduced in his book shows that Woolf must have faced these questions himself while sitting on the bench. The 'white Hamadoru' who is trying the case of Babun feels uneasy: all the rules of the law have been observed, but he senses that, in his words, 'there is almost certainly something in this case that has not come out'.

Yet there is nothing he can do except to find the accused guilty in accordance with the evidence that has been led in court and sentence him.

Several decades later, while writing his autobiography, Woolf was to generalise from his Ceylon experience as well as from the observation of cases in the British courts to make some searching comments on the frequent gulf between the law and justice and on the dangers for the judge himself of falling into 'sadistic self-righteousness'

It is an incisive and eloquent passage (Mr. de Silva has quoted it), and it evoked some protests in Britain when it was first published. Woolf answered these criticisms in a later volume of his autobiography by citing some cases and judgments by eminent British judges that he considered inhuman.

He ended by quoting the words of King Lear in the piercing sanity of his madness: Hark in thine ear: change places, and handy-dandy, which is the justice, which is the thief?

Woolf himself had its own share of human frailties, and some of you may have read the recent series of articles on him in the Lanka Guardian by Ms. Jeanne Thwaites which subjected him to relentless criticism. There are indeed several adverse judgments that can fairly be made of him: he was, by his own admission as well as by the accounts of several memoirs, an exacting disciplinarian: he must have been a difficult person to work with: he seems to have been curmudgeonly with money: and, as Mr. de Silva records, he could be extraordinarily obstinate, even when he was in the wrong.

But, I don't think that one should follow Ms. Jeanne Thwaites in being induced by these and other failings to underestimate the achievement of The Village in the Jungle and of Growing as enduring additions to the literature of Sri Lanka. It may be unfortunate, but good writers are not always nice people, or vice versa.

In particular, one should hardly ignore the fact that in his novel Woolf was daring enough to attempt what no other English writer of his era - not Kipling or Conrad or Maugham or Forster - had ventured to do: to depict the experience of Asian peasants through characters belonging to that milieu. Nor should one forget, that Woolf's novel has survived the most exacting test to which such a work can be subjected: it has been translated into Sinhala and has been enjoyed and admired by many thousands of Sinhala readers.

Woolfe wasn't a novelist by natural vocation: he never again wrote as good a work of fiction, but the contact with the jungle and the village seems to have released the springs of his creative imagination to produce this solitary masterpiece. Reading his autobiography, one can hardly doubt that his seven years in Ceylon were the great experience of his life: he returns to them over and over again even outside the pages of the Ceylon volume.

When he says in a later volume that the name of a place can often recall from memory the vision of it, this is the example he finds, in a passage that is almost Proustian: I have only to murmur to myself Angunakolapelessa and it brings to me from 50 years ago quite clearly the vision of that small Sinhalese village: I can feel again the whip of heat across my face from the village path: I can hear again the hum of insects across the scrub jungle: I can smell again the acrid smell of smoke and shrubs!

Mr. Prabhath de Silva's book and the records it presents will help future readers, critics and students in their understanding of the unlikely encounter between Hambantota jungle peasants and a Cambridge-educated intellectual that produced The Village in the Jungle


Meaning before money

Under Dog by Vinoth Ramachandra

Last month a new Family Law was passed in the British Parliament. The Act, which will come into effect in 1998, will scrap "quickie" divorces and introduce "no-fault" divorce after an 18 month waiting period to allow "reflection and consideration" for couples to consider whether they really want to divorce. England and Wales have the highest divorce rates in Europe, and the British government believes the new Act will reduce the acrimony of marriage break-up and make it easier to resolve issues such as the welfare of children.

There is much to be said in support of the Act. From a legal point of view, its aim is reasonable. It expresses a desire to simplify what legally is often a "messy" and expensive affair in the courts, and to bring about a smooth end to a broken relationship between a husband and wife.

But words do matter, and the idea that there is "no-fault" involved in divorce is a dangerous moral myth. It invites people to live in delusion. Telling the child, whose father's adultery and desertion has left her emotionally bereft and financially stranded, that there was "no-fault" is to confuse her sense of what is right and just and to add insult to her injury. There is often real injustice, dishonesty and cruelty involved in marriage break-ups. Many marriages are destroyed by the persistent unfaithfulness and betrayal of one partner.

The husband who steals his wife's savings and gambles it away in casinos, or has already squandered most of his pay packet at the local tavern before returning home has no one but himself to blame when the family deserts him. Many wives or husbands are discarded by spouses to whom they have been faithful through many years of marriage, and in this kind of breakup the pain of rejection can linger for many years. The trite phrase "no-fault" glosses over the human tragedy that brings hurt, depression and poverty in its wake. Not to mention deep emotional scars left in the children.

In many marriages where there is no obvious injustice involved, breakdowns occur when faults on both sides come to the surface. Marital counseling takes this for granted. When Mr. & Mrs. Perera constantly bicker over the children, money, parents-in-law and a host of things that they find irritating in each other, there are faults in both partners.

When Mr. & Mrs. Silva become slowly distant from each other once their children have grown up and left home, it probably indicates poor communication from the beginning of their marriage which child-rearing happened to disguise for a while. In very few couples does one partner have a monopoly on goodness and reasonableness. We may find it easier to blame the other and excuse ourselves (especially if we are males), but we rarely fool others. Tragically, we can get locked into patterns of guiltdenial and suppression that make any possibility of restoring a spoilt relationship futile.

So a far more accurate description of what goes on in most marriage break-ups (whether it be Britain or Sri Lanka) is not "no-fault" but, to employ a term from tennis, "double fault". Helping couples to see the "double fault" that may lie behind their divorce is far more helpful than kidding them that there was "no-fault" on either side. What may be legally convenient may also be morally disastrous. For if there is "no-fault", neither partner needs to change.

I don't need to repent, to ask for forgiveness, or to offer forgiveness. Acknowledging openly that we have sinned is a deeply humbling experience. Yet it is an experience which is essential not only for coming to terms with my past, but also for my relationships in the future. Genuine human community is impossible without it. To deny that fault exists on my side, even in law, is to remain imprisoned in hopeless delusion.

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