 The village in the jungle byLeonard Woolf | |
| Author | Leonard Woolf |
|---|---|
| Publisher | Edward Arnold |
Publication date | 1913 |
The Village in the Jungle is a novel byLeonard Woolf, published in 1913, based on his experiences as a colonial civil servant in British-controlled Ceylon (nowSri Lanka) in the early years of the 20th century. Ground-breaking in Western fiction for being written from the native rather than the colonial point of view,[1] it is also an influential work of Sri Lankan literature. It was republished byEland in 2008.
Leonard Woolf worked for the BritishCeylon Civil Service inSri Lanka for seven years after graduating fromCambridge University in 1904. In Cambridge Woolf had met and befriended members of theBloomsbury Group.[1] He became AssistantGovernment Agent inHambantota District, dealing with a variety of administrative and judicial issues. The district he was in charge of had a population of 100,000 people. Books he took with him toSri Lanka included the complete works ofVoltaire.[1] Woolf also kept a comprehensive diary while there, and later said that his experiences in the country led to him adoptingliberal political views and becoming an opponent of imperialism.[2] He wroteThe Village in the Jungle, his first novel, after he returned from Sri Lanka to England in 1911[1] while he was courting his future wifeVirginia Stephen. He dedicated the novel to her.[2]
The novel describes the lives of a poor family in a small village called Beddegama (literally, "The village in thejungle") as they struggle to survive the challenges presented by poverty, disease, superstition, the unsympathetic colonial system, and the jungle itself. The head of the family is a farmer named Silindu, who has two daughters called "Punchi Menika" and "Hinni hami". After being manipulated by the village authorities and a debt collector, Silindu is put on trial for murder.
Written two decades beforeGeorge Orwell's much better known anti-imperialist novelBurmese Days,The Village in the Jungle has been described by Nick Rankin as "the first novel in English literature to be written from the indigenous point of view rather than the coloniser's."[1]Victoria Glendinning described it as "a foundational novel in the Sri Lankan literary canon",[3] but the novel remains little known in the wider world.[4] In 1980 aSinhalese language film entitledBeddegama was released based on the novel.[5]
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The Village in the Jungle public domain audiobook atLibriVox