Our Heritage 061126

Leonard Woolf is a well-known name in Sri Lanka. An Englishman who was born on November 25, 1880, came over to Ceylon, as Sri Lanka was then known, in 1904 as a novice in the Ceylon Civil Service which was then a small group of English administrators who ruled the country.

He served in Jaffna, Kandy and Hambantota but is best remembered as Assistant Government Agent at Hambantota. He had a great sympathy for the rural villager and tried to improve their lot. He also functioned as a judge.

Woolf's writings are interesting reading. As was the practice those days, the Assistant Government Agent had to maintain a daily diary of work. His 'Diaries in Ceylon 1908 - 1911' was published in Colombo in 1962, two years after he re-visited the Island to see the places where he worked. He was then 60.

Best known of his writings is 'The Village in the Jungle', written in 1913. It is a study of life in a poor, dry zone village in the deep South and was rated the most artistically successful novel set in Sri Lanka. He describes the rural-folk with deep sympathy and understanding. Translated into Sinhala as 'Baddegama', Dr Lester James Peries made a film from it.

In a five-volume autobiography titled 'Growing' (1961), Woolf devoted the second volume to describe his experiences in Ceylon. Letters written by him detailing his day-to-day experiences as a colonial bureaucrat in Ceylon (Letters of Leonard Woolf) were also published.

By the time he left Ceylon, he was disillusioned with the imperial administration. One year after he returned to England, he resigned from the Colonial Service in 1912. In 1917, he and his wife Virginia, who had made a name for herself as a novelist, established a publishing firm, the Hogarth Press. He was quite involved in publishing until his wife's death in 1941.

Woolf lived up to 89 and died in 1969.

Excerpts from Woolf's writings

Colombo in 1904
Woolf arrived by ship in mid-December 1904 and moved into the Grand Oriental Hotel (GOH) which was situated just opposite the jetty where the ships berthed. This is his observation of Colombo: "These were before the days of the motor-car. Colombo was a real eastern city, swarming with human beings and flies, the streets full of flitting rickshaws and creaking bullock carts, hot and heavy with the complicated smells of men and beasts and dung and oil and food and fruit and spice."

Trip to Jaffna
After two weeks in Colombo kachcheri, Woolf was posted to Jaffna. He travelled by train to Anuradhapura, then by mail coach - "an ordinary bullock cart in which the mail bags lay on the floor and the passengers lay on the mail bags" - to Elephant Pass. From there it was another train ride.

Of the country
"One of the charms of the island is its infinite variety. In the north, east and southeast you get the flat, dry, hot, low country with a very small rainfall which comes mainly in a month or so of the northeast monsoon..... This is a country of sand and sun, an enormous blue sky stretching away unbroken to an immensely distant horizon. Many people dislike the arid sterility of this kind of Asiatic low country. But I lived in it for many years...and it got into my heart and my bones."

The sea at Hambantota
This is Woolf's description of the sea from the Residency, his bungalow at Hambantotota: "All year round, day and night, if you looked down that long two-mile line of sea and sand, you would see, unless it was very rough, continually at regular intervals a wave, not very high but unbroken, two miles long, lift itself up very slowly, wearily, prise itself, for a moment in sudden complete silence and then fall with a great thud, the thunder of the wave, became part of the rhythm of my life."

The people
"I fell in love with the country, the people, and the way of life, which were entirely different from everything in London and Cambridge to which I had been born and bred."