Woolf in Ceylon : An Imperial Journey in the Shadow of Leonard Woolf, 1904-1911

by Christopher Ondaatje

Leonard Woolf was born in London in 1880 and spent five years at Trinity College, Cambridge where he began lasting friendships with men such as Lytton Strachey, E. M. Forster and John Maynard Keynes. In 1904 Woolf applied to join the home civil service but failed the exam. Instead, he was sent to Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) as a cadet in the Ceylon civil service, joining the small group of white administrators who ruled the colony. He remained there for nearly seven years. In Woolf in Ceylon Christopher Ondaatje, who was himself born and brought up on the island, follows in the footsteps of Woolf. Drawing on his personal experience of Ceylon and empire, he compares the way of life during imperial days with that of the post-colonial era. We learn as much about the country, its people and their transformation of the country during the past century as we do about the man who used his colonial career to become one of the leading English men of letters of the twentieth century. Ondaatje's sensitive descriptions, illustrated with period and modern photographs, tell the compelling story of Woolf s sojourn in Ceylon and his developing disillusionment with the British colonial system. The result is a unique evocation of both a vanished imperial world and a colonial servant s enduring legacy in the contemporary culture of an enchanted but troubled island.

Genres: Travel

326 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2005

About the author

Sir Philip Christopher Ondaatje, OC, CBE, FRSL born 22 February 1933) is a Sri Lankan-born Canadian–English businessman, philanthropist, adventurer, writer and bob-sledding Olympian for Canada. Ondaatje is the older brother of the author Michael Ondaatje and lives in both Chester, Nova Scotia, and the United Kingdom.




Olympic Victory: The story behind the Canadian Bob-Sled Club's incredible victory at the 1964 Winter Olympic Games (1967)
The Prime Ministers of Canada, 1867–1967 (1968)
Leopard in the Afternoon — An Africa Tenting Safari (1989)
The Man-eater of Punanai — a Journey of Discovery to the Jungles of Old Ceylon (1992)
Sindh Revisited: A Journey in the Footsteps of Captain Sir Richard Francis Burton (1996)
Journey to the Source of the Nile (1999)
Hemingway in Africa: The Last Safari (2004)
Woolf in Ceylon: An Imperial Journey in the Shadow of Leonard Woolf, 1904–1911 (2005)
The Power of Paper: A History, a Financial Adventure and a Warning (2007)
The Glenthorne Cat and other amazing leopard stories (2008)
The Last Colonial: Curious Adventures & Stories from a Vanishing World (2011)
Ondaatje, Christopher, ed. (2013). Love Duet and Other Curious Stories about Music. Minehead, Somerset: Rare Books and Berry.

Reviews

[Shane · Rating 4 out of 5]

Christopher Ondaatje follows in the footsteps of his idol, Leonard Woolf, traversing the English civil servant turned publisher’s path through Jaffna, Kandy and Hambantota, unearthing parallels and differences in their lives and in their respective journeys undertaken a hundred years apart through these cities in Sri Lanka.

Both writer and subject were born into the colonial British Empire, during its decline, both saw a dramatic change in living circumstances when they lost their fathers at a young age, and both came of age outside the land of their birth—Woolf in Ceylon, and Ondaatje in Britain and Canada. The difference between their journeys through Jaffna, Kandy and Hambantota, cities in the north, central and southern parts of the island, was that Woolf undertook his as part of being assigned as a civil servant and having to spend several months, even years, in each place, while Ondaatje journeyed as a tourist along with three trusted locals to help him along the way.

Woolf was brutally honest about his character limitations, which he elaborated on at length in his six-part autobiography (the second part, Growing, covers Woolf’s entire Ceylon period from 1904-1911). Despite being a hardworking but strict disciplinarian, he was arrogant and offensive, and was not liked by the more educated locals. He enjoyed the perks of imperialism but suffered the moral ambivalence of his position. He administered beatings to the locals, even presiding at executions of criminals whom he tried and sentenced, as the civil service ran almost everything during his tenure. He was more interested in the Sinhalese rather than the Tamils and preferred Buddhism over other religions. He would let civil cases drag on so he could discover more about the Sinhalese and their way of life. He liked travelling in the jungles, often alone. He was prone to crippling bouts of depression following the recovery from an encounter with typhoid.

Some interesting factoids on Ceylon in the early 1900s emerge: the Kandyans practiced polyandry; British sponsored opium fuelled the Tangalle economy; Hambantota had the largest proportion of Malay Muslims in Ceylon; the houses or Jaffna were surrounded by cadjan fences.

Along the way we are entertained to a lengthy treatise on Woolf’s most famous novel, Village in the Jungle, which went onto become a school text in Ceylon while being condemned as a book about “blacks” by the racist Bloomsbury Group in London. “Man in the jungle is closest to the beast” and “the jungle subsumes everything in the end just like the destructive evil in the human heart,” are a couple of the themes in this book, along with greed, desire, superstition and religion. Woolf was credited as the only westerner who was able to get inside the mind and spirit of the Ceylonese local.

The book also covers Woolf’s life after he left Ceylon in 1911 and includes his married life with Virginia upon his return to England. Theirs was a dysfunctional marriage. She was racist, anti-Semitic and had no interest in Ceylon. He was sympathetic to brown people (although relishing his role as a colonial). His alienated lust (i.e. he consorted with an abundance of prostitutes while in Ceylon) and her terrified frigidity (she was abused by two older half-brothers as a child) were at opposite ends of the sexual spectrum. Was it therefore purely intellectual and literary interest that brought and held them together?

Ondaatje’s own journey a hundred years later takes place during the civil war in Ceylon (now renamed Sri Lanka), albeit during a period of ceasefire and negotiation between the battling Sinhalese and Tamils. The scars of war are everywhere in Jaffna, and the many photographs in the book are testament to this. Alas, this war too was a legacy of colonization, for the “divide and conquer” rule of the British played its part in keeping these two ethnic communities apart, and the hasty independence granted in 1948 didn’t work out as favourably for minorities such as the Tamils. In fact, Woolf, during his 1960 visit to the country, had second thoughts about his advocacy for self-government when he saw creeping nationalism, the “Sinhala first” policies, and the take-over of the civil service by politicians.

This is a very well researched book for the Sri Lankan expatriate, especially for those who missed the war years in the country. It is also a good primer on Woolf. As much as Leonard Woolf’s sojourn in Ceylon was a journey into himself, Ondaatje’s journey through Sri Lanka helped him to understand his birthplace. It filled a vital gap for me who went back to an almost fully restored Jaffna in 2016 and wondered what the heck had gone on there during the civil war.

[David Kimber · Rating 4 out of 5]

Christopher Oondatje documents his journey in 2004/5 around Sri Lanka in following the path of Leonard Woolf during his period as a civil servant in Ceylon from 1904 to 1911.

He uses this framework to reflect on Woolf’s life in Sri Lanka. He analyses how it led to his early writing - his first novel “A village in the Jungle”, three short stories based on his experiences, and a volume of his biography “Growing” written in 1960 on his Ceylon period.

It is both a scholarly analysis of Woolf’s thoughts and an easily read travelogue on Sri Lanka one hundred years later. It effectively touches on how a young government officer lived and worked in Ceylon during the height of its colonial period and how Sri Lanka and its people lived during the civil war period.

It parallels Emma Larkin’s book “Finding George Orwell in Burma” - her travelogue retracing his Orwell’s footsteps, life and times.

[Mhbright · Rating 3 out of 5]

I preferred it to the Man-Eater of Punanai and to his brother's Running in the Family.

[Tanja (Litteraturhesten)]

Sri Lanka