A THUPPAHI NOTE, April 2025: I came across this short account of a visit to the dry zone village arena of Weliweva by Gerald Peiris and Professor Rao in 1983. We are thereby taken into a life-world far removed from our experience of urban, peri-urban, village and plantation district life in other parts of the island. It can generate reflective assessments of value — the more so when set against readings of Woolf’s Village in the Jungle and his essays when he returned to that arena in the early 1960s.
MEMO from Gerald Peiris to Michael Roberts, in 1983
After getting the article in Thuppahi on Leonard Woolf and Silindu presented by Ernest MacIntyre, I read Village in the Jungle (for the second time since long ago) and found it difficult to connect the essence of the Woolf narrative with what the producers of the play referred to as an attempt to portray village like in a remote setting in the interior of the deep south.
I had visited that area in the company of Prof. V. M. Rao in 1983 during the course of our field investigations on the first generations of IRDPs (just before that Russian pogrom broke out interrupting out work for several months). In villages like Weliweva, even by the early 80s living conditions had improved only marginally from those of the early 20th century, and the people were still dependent largely on chena growing of dry grain and cannabis — something Woolf appears to have missed — for the local market the trading of which was almost totally under the control of middlemen.
Rao and I came across an extraordinarily good-looking young woman (probably a genetic freak) with two children (one, an infant) – the man having decamped, his whereabouts not known — living in a single-room wattle-and-daub hut.
As in hundreds of other purana villages; in the drier parts of the country, here in Weliweva also there was an unusually large presence (that is to say, at least about 10 persons) with fairly prominent physical deformities — obviously a result of generations of inbreeding).
The village of Weliweva was intended to benefit from one of the two Tank Cluster Projects launched by under the IRDPs in the area. It was a total flop. However, [by now], my guess is that the Weliweva locality (along with the Mattala area where the second Tank Cluster project was located) must have benefited a great deal from the Airport, Highway, a Major Irrigation system, and other infrastructure development projects of the recent past.
You might not be interested in the foregoing sketch; but what I really wanted to say was that the I found Leonard Woolf displaying a remarkable grasp of that social setting during his relatively brief spell as AGA — a good mastery of Sinhala idiom and even the spicy kunuharapa freely used in village brawls. The Silindu-centred parts of the story (he was convicted of murder, commuted to life imprisonment) is obviously intended to highlight the benevolence and wisdom that issupposed to have featured the colonial regime at its higher levels (quite different fromnits reactions to the 1915 Riots, contrasting with the crudely exploitative social relations that prevailed among the natives.
Still for all that, it is a fascinating read — the book, initially published by Hogarth Press (London), re-printed four times thereafter up to up to the 1961 version which I have. It has been translated to Sinhala by a scholar named Erathne under the title Baddegama. Tissa J[ayatilleka] who borrowed my copy some years ago (and returned it!) said that it was not available with any of the booksellers in Colombo.
Christine Wilson’s Bitter Berry is also quite interesting but not as good as Village in the Jungle.
Best regards, Gerry
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PERTINENT CONTEXTUAL TEXTS
- https://i0.wp.com/thuppahis.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/gerry-22345.webp?ssl=1
- https://thuppahis.com/2021/06/27/leonard-woolf-in-hambantota-an-interpretation/
Village in the Jungle can be bought at EBay.