Snippets from Leonard Woolf’s Growing, with comments

I have been immersed and absorbed in the second volume of Leonard Sydney Woolf’s six volume autobiography from the first sentence onwards. Second time of reading but now with more discernment. Discussing this matter with Leelananda de Silva from whom I borrowed the book, I said I wonder whether it is because I admire this man and am a believer that British colonialism conferred more benefits to Ceylon than what we materially lost, unlike in India, or whether it is purely the writing skill of Woolf. Leelananda, who is of like opinion regards Brit governance of us, opined it was both.

It is apt to remember Woolf and his years as a British Civil Servant in Ceylon because he died on August 14, 1969, and we are now in the month of August. He was born November 25, 1880, to Jewish parents, his father being a barrister and Queens Counsel. Leonard is listed as political theorist, author, civil servant, publisher (his and Virginia’s Hogarth Press). He was of the Labour Party and Fabian Society. Studied in St Paul’s School and graduated from Trinity College, Cambridge.

After six years as an administrator of the British colony of Ceylon from 1905-11, he left the civil service, disillusioned by the way the British Raj governed its colony – Ceylon. He married Virginia Stephen who was a rising author in 1912 and last resided in Monk’s House, Rodmell, East Sussex, where she committed suicide in 1941.(Google Beautiful Simplicity and enjoy views of house and garden now within the National Trust). He was nominated Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1965 but refused a Queen’s birthday honour.

To me, next to this marriage, in interest is the Bloomsbury Group of which he became a member. It was a gathering of writers, artistes and intelligent people formalized in 1905; meeting in the home of Vanessa, Virginia and brother Thoby Stephen, in Gordon Square, Bloomsbury. They shared ideas, supported each other’s creative activities and formed close friendships, even marriages as Vanessa married Clive Bell in 1907 and five years later Virginia. Woolf visited Sri Lanka in 1960 and expressed surprise and delight at the warm reception he received, and that he was remembered. It would have been then that he was invited as chief guest to the Trinity College, Kandy, prize giving.

Woolf has 19 publications to his credit: political treaties, journal articles, addresses and fiction – Village in the Jungle published 1913, which for long was considered the best novel in English of Ceylon/Sri Lanka. I mean here to only list the titles of the six volumes of his autobiography. Sowing (pub. 1960) which covers the period 1880 (birth) to 1904; Growing (1961) 1904 to 1911- his years in Ceylon; Diaries in Ceylon (1963) 1908 to 1911; Beginning Again (1964) 1911 to 1918; Downhill All the Way (1967) 1919 to 1939; and The Journey not the Arrival Matters (1969) 1939 to 1969.

Quotes and Comments from Growing

Woolf set sail in the P&O ship Syria in October 1904, at age 24: “I can remember the precise moment of my second birth. The umbilical cord by which I had been attached to my family, to St Paul’s, to Cambridge and Trinity was cut when, leaning over the ship’s taffrail, I watched… mother and sister waving goodbye …” The journey from Tilbury Docks to Colombo took three weeks. He describes other passengers and comments: “…we developed from a fortuitous concourse of isolated human atoms into a complex community with an elaborate system of castes and classes. The initial suspicions and reserve had soon given place to intimate friendships, intrigues, affairs, passionate loves and hates.”

He spent a fortnight in Colombo and on January 1, 1905, now a Cadet in the Ceylon Civil Service, was sent to Jaffna with a Sinhalese servant, his dog James brought over from UK and a wooden crate with his volumes of Voltaire, to Anuradhapura by train and then in a bullock cart called the ‘mail coach’ to Jaffna. This tedious stretch took two days and was through unending jungle. He began to love the solitude of the jungle. “One of the charms of the island is its infinite variety. In the north, east and south-east you get the flat, dry, hot low country … It is a land of silent, sinister scrub jungle or of great stretches of sand. Many dislike the arid sterility of this kind of Asiatic low country. But I lived in it for most of my time in Ceylon and it got into my heart and my bones, its austere beauty, its immobility and unchangeableness except of minute modulations of light and colour beneath the uncompromising sun; the silence, the emptiness, the melancholia, and so the purging of the passions by complete solitude.”

Writing about the people of his time he assesses them thus: “They (Tamils of Jaffna) have to work hard and they do work extraordinarily hard to make a living out of a stony, unsmiling and hot, not fertile soil. I came to like them and their country, though never as much as I like the lazy, smiling, well-mannered lovely Kandyans in their lovely mountain villages or the infinite variety of types among the Low Country Sinhalese in their large, flourishing villages or the poverty and starvation stricken villages in the jungle.”

He managed to catch the essence of the general personalities of the people who lived in the three major divisions of the country: northern peninsular and below, moving down the east coast to Hambantota; the Hill Country; and the western and southern wet zones. About the Kandyans he has nailed their characteristics; I would add naivete too! Not foolishness; though in my time in Kandy there was a village – Thumpané – known for its people’s imprudence or idiocy. Wasn’t the Mahadenamutta and/or his golayas from this village?

The Civil Service and Administration of then

The island was divided administratively to nine Provinces and each was divided into Districts, the number varying. Jaffna had two – Mannar and Mullaitivu. Each Province had its Government Agent – GA – very senior official with at least 20 years’ service. The head official in each district was the AGA, counting anything from six to 20 years. The GA had two directly under him: the Office Assistant and Cadet. In the main city of a Province the officers were divided into: administrative and judicial – Police Magistrate and District Judge, the former posts considered more prestigious. The GA reported to the Secretariat in Colombo which had the Second Assistant Colonial Secretary, the Second and the Principal Assistant Colonial Secy, all below the Colonial Secretary who reported to London.

I remember the structure was this in the 1940s when my brother was a first batch Divisional Revenue Officer, DRO, them having replaced the Rate Mahathayas. The DRO reported to the AGA of the District while being the administrative head of a Pathu. My brother wore many hats, even that of the police in the Demala Hath Pathu with his reporting Kachcheri in Puttalam. In Anamaduwa at that time the public servants were the DRO, Engineer and District Medical Officer – DMO. The system changed with independence and Parliament and Cabinet of Ministers. In 1957 though the nine Provinces remained as such, 21 Districts had GAs who reported to the Home Minister. The Ceylon/S L Administrative Service was established in 1962 replacing the Civil Service and saw the last of DROs.

People of then

In Growing, Woolf writes about the ‘imperialists’ in Jaffna; generalizing and also creating accurate word pictures of most. “Our society was exclusively white. In the conversations on the Jaffna tennis courts there was the same incongruous mixture of public school toughness, sentimentality and melancholy… Colonial government servants were displaced persons. People whose lives had suddenly been torn up by the roots, and, in a foreign country, had therefore become unreal, artificial, temporary and alien.” The officers in these Provinces had a daily routine of work, tennis, drinks (whiskey soda) and dinner at the club, or socially, mostly at the GA’s Residency or in their homes. A few succumbed to tuberculosis; many had warts in personality. But all had hard lives of privation. Woolf was rare in that he appreciated the country and its people, while most white administrators were disdainful and uncaring of the locals.

Speaking of the people who came to the kachcheri for various purposes, he writes: “I too, like everyone else, was at first irritated and contemptuous. But gradually these feelings began to evaporate.” He became fascinated watching the streams of locals walking along the corridors of kachcheries in Jaffna and Hambantota. He felt they were closer to primitive man. “They live so close to the jungle they retain something of the litheness and beauty of jungle animals. The Sinhalese seem to have subtle and supple minds. They do not conceal their individuality. Lastly, when you get to know them, you find beneath the surface in almost everyone a profound melancholy and fatalism which I find beautiful and sympathetic, extremely fascinating so that few things have ever given me greater pleasure than, when I had learned to speak Sinhala, sitting under a tree in a village or on the bund of a tank, discussing with them their interminable problems, disputes, grievances.”

Leonard Woolf was one white civil servant who empathized and even liked the locals he had to deal with officially. And thus his disillusionment of how the British ruled the colony Ceylon that grew and finally had him not return after his first furlough back home.