Today, Leonard Woolf is remembered, if at all, as
Virginia (neé
Stephen) Woolf’s husband.
But he was himself a man of many
parts, and one of these was as a servant of the British
imperial order in the South Asian island colony of Ceylon
– today’s Sri Lanka.
Born in November 1880, to Marie de Jongh
and Sidney Woolf, a barrister, Leonard was the third of nine
siblings. The family was solidly bourgeois, Jewish but not
religious, and even after Sidney Woolf’s early death, when
Leonard was just 11, they managed to live in relative
comfort.
Woolf attended St. Paul’s School in
London and then went to Trinity College, Cambridge
University, in 1899. There he made friends with people who
would over the next few decades become the core of the
progressive and bohemian Bloomsbury Group, named after the
London neighbourhood near the British Museum.
He never dwelled upon the anti-Semitism
of the English culture of his times, but it set him apart as
an outsider even among his intimates; his nickname was “the
rabbi.” The best-known figures of the Bloomsbury group were
all capable of appalling examples of casual anti-Semitism.
Even Virginia told friends she was marrying “a penniless
Jew.”
When he graduated from Cambridge in 1904,
and now a liberal intellectual, Woolf joined the Colonial
Civil Service and was sent to Ceylon, to assume the
first of three posts in the Ceylon Civil Service.
For the next seven years he served in three of
its nine provinces, while also travelling around the
country for various purposes, at one point supervising the
Pearl Fishery in the Gulf of Mannar.
Promoted to Assistant Government Agent,
in 1908 he was put in charge of running his own district in
south-east Ceylon, Hanbantota Province, which contained
100,000 people.
Woolf taught himself Sinhalese and Tamil
and he travelled all over his district, dealing with
agriculture, justice, public health, road-building, taxation
and petty problems of every kind.
His acute observations of the customs and
behaviour in the Sinhalese, Tamil and Anglo-Indian cultures
of the country would all appear in his five-volume
autobiography, of which Growing: An
Autobiography of the Years 1904 to 1911, published in
1961, was the second volume.
In
1913, back in
England and now married to the non-Jewish Virginia, he
wrote a novel, The Village in the Jungle, described by the
British writer and broadcaster Nicholas Rankin in 2014 as
“the first novel in English literature to be written from
the indigenous point of view rather than the coloniser’s.”
The
book is well known in Sri Lanka, where it is seen as a
sociological or ethnographic description of south-east
Ceylon in the early 1900s.
He
went on to publish studies of imperialism and act as
Secretary of the Labour Party’s Advisory Committee on
International and Imperial Questions. He ran,
unsuccessfully, for Parliament for the party in 1922.
Along with Virginia, he founded the
Hogarth Press, and he was an editor at several journals, as
well as a director of the New Statesman. After Virginia’s
suicide in 1941, he traveled, wrote his memoirs, and
gardened until his death at 88 in 1969.
Woolf
admitted to having been “a very innocent, unconscious
imperialist” upon arrival in Ceylon. What grew was his
recognition of the absurdity in “a people of one
civilisation and mode of life trying to impose its rule
upon an entirely different civilisation and mode of life.”
When he returned to England on leave in 1911, he resigned
from the Colonial Civil Service.
He
was in a sense an early proponent of what we might today
call “Huntingtonianism”-- named for political scientist
Samuel Huntington’s famous thesis outlined in his 1996
book The
Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order,
where he argued that the primary axis of conflict
in the future will be along cultural lines.
No comments:
Post a Comment