Quotations - Leonard Woolf
From The Village in the Jungle
‘The village was called Beddagama, which means the village in the jungle. It lay in the low country plains, midway between the sea and the great mountains which seem, far away to the north, to rise like a long wall straight up from the sea of trees. It was in, and of, the jungle; the air and smell of the jungle lay heavy upon it - the smell of hot air, of dust, and of dry and powdered leaves and sticks. Its beginning and its end was in the jungle, which stretched away from it on all sides unbroken, north and south and east and west, to the blue line of hills and to the sea. The jungle surrounded it, overhung it, continually pressed in upon it... It was a strange world, a world of bare and brutal facts, of superstition, of grotesque imagination; a world of trees and the perpetual twilight of their shade; a world of hunger and fear and devils, where a man was helpless before the unseen and unintelligible powers surrounding him.’
‘Nanchohami had touched the mainspring upon which the life of the village worked - debt. The villagers lived upon debt, and their debts were the main topic of their conversation. A good kurakkan crop, from two to four acres of chena, would be sufficient to support a family for a year. But no one, not even the headman, ever enjoyed the full crop which he had reaped... With the reaping of the chenas came the settlement of debts.’
‘People who live in towns can hardly realise how persistent and violent are the desires of those who live in villages like Bedagamma. In many ways, and in this beyond all others, they are very near to the animals; in fact, in this they are more brutal and uncontrolled than the brutes; that, while the animals have their seasons, man alone is perpetually dominated by his desires.’
‘Want had already begun to be felt by bodies weakened by the long drought, and fever and dysentary swept over the country. There was not a family in Beddagama which did not suffer, nor a house in which death did not take the old or the children.... When at last the sickness passed away, it was found that the village had lost sixteen out of its forty-one inhabitants. And the jungle pressed in and claimed two of the eight houses, after dysentary and fever had taken the men, the women, and their children, who lived there.’
‘Babun and Silindu very soon became aware of the web that was being spun around them... No permit could be given to Babun and Silindu this year. It was a Government rule that permits were to be given only to fit persons. Babun and Silindu were not fit persons, therefore no permits could be given to them. That was all... they knew that no one would dare to side with them against the headman and Fernando, who already held the whole village enmeshed in their debt.’
‘It was like a dream. They did not understand what exactly was happening. This was “a case” and they were “the accused”, that was all they knew. The judge looked at them and frowned; this increased their fear and confusion... Silindu sighed and looked quickly from side to side like a hunted animal. The eyes of the judge frightened him. He was uncertain whether he was being charged again with the theft. He had not listened to what was going on after he had been sent out of the court. It occurred vaguely to him that the best thing would be to pretend to be completely ignorant of everything... Babun had not understood a word of the broken sentences of the judgement until the interpreter came to the last words, “six months’ rigorous imprisonment.” Even then, it was only when the peon took hold of him by the arm to put him back into the cage, that he realised what it meant - that he was to be sent to prison.’
From ‘Pearls and Swine’, from Stories of the East (Hogarth Press, 1921)
‘ … Two of the others were talking, talking as men so often do in the comfortable chairs of smoking rooms between ten and eleven at night, earnestly, seriously, of what they call affairs, or politics, or questions. I listened to their fat, full-fed, assured voices in that heavy room which smelt of solidity, safety, horsehair furniture, tobacco smoke, and the faint civilised aroma of whisky and soda. It came as a shock to me in that atmosphere that they were discussing India and the East; it does, you know, every now and again. Sentimental? Well, I expect one is sentimental about it, having lived there. It doesn’t seem to go with solidity and horsehair furniture: the fifteen years come back to one in one moment, all in a heap. How one hated it and how one loved it!
I suppose they had started on the Durbar and the King’s visit. They had got on to Indian unrest, to our position in India, its duties, responsibilities, to the problem of East and West. They hadn’t been there of course, they hadn’t even seen the brothel and café chantant at Port Said suddenly open out into that pink and blue desert that leads you through Africa and Asia into the heart of the East. But they knew all about it, they had solved, with their fat voices and in their fat heads, riddles, older than the Sphinx, of peoples remote and ancient and mysterious whom they had never seen and could never understand.’
‘And White thought they weren’t real, that they were devils of Hell sent to plague and torture him. He cursed them, whispered at them, howled with fear. I had to explain to them that the Sahib was not well, that the sun had touched him, that they must move away. They understood. They salaamed and moved away slowly, dignified.’