Other editions of book The Village In The Jungle

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This is a pre-1923 historical reproduction that was curated for quality. Quality assurance was conducted on each of these books in an attempt to remove books with imperfections introduced by the digitization process. Though we have made best efforts - the books may have occasional errors that do not impede the reading experience. We believe this work is culturally important and have elected to bring the book back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed works worldwide. This text refers to the Bibliobazaar edition.

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‘The Village in the Jungle sits with Burmese Days by George Orwell as the very best of the literature written by servants of the British Empire in the twentieth century [...reflecting] the misgivings Woolf came to feel about the imperial enterprise.’—from the Afterword by Sir Christopher OndaatjeLeonard Woolf, husband of Virginia Woolf, the celebrated author, drew on his own experiences as a colonial civil servant in Ceylon to write this ground-breaking book. It is one of the best-loved and best-known stories in Sri Lanka, even today. The Village in the Jungle describes the lives of a poor family in a tiny isolated village as they struggle to survive. Apart from the problems of poverty, disease, superstition and the pitfalls of the jungle itself, they must contend with an unsympathetic colonial system and the corruption it engenders. The head of the family is a hunter, Silindu, with two daughters. Their lives are shattered when a licentious trader comes to the village and convinces the headman to frame the elder daughter’s husband and send him to prison. Although Silindu tries to intervene, he is put on trial for murder in an English-speaking court where he has no voice. This volume includes a short story, ‘Pearls and Swine’, which vividly draws on Woolf’s own experiences as a young District Commissioner, as well as a new biographical afterword by Sir Christopher Ondaatje, author of Woolf in Ceylon. Packed with first-hand knowledge of the colonial machine, The Village in the Jungle accurately depicts its profound disregard for its subject peoples.

Excerpt from The Village in the JungleThe village was called Beddagama, which means the village in the jungle. It lay in the low country or 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 the hills and to the sea. The jungle surrounded it, overhung it, continually pressed in upon it. It stood at the door of the houses, always ready to press in upon the compounds and open spaces, to break through the mud huts, and to choke up the tracks and paths. It was only by yearly clearing with axe and katty that it could be kept out.About the PublisherForgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.comThis book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.