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

Steve Pitt is a Toronto-based freelance writer and an award-winning journalist. He has written many young adult and children's books, including Day of the Flying Fox: The True Story of World War II Pilot Charley Fox.

In 1904, Cambridge student Leonard Woolf failed to score top honours in
his civil service exam, which meant he would not get a placement within
Great Britain’s home civil service. Already too old for the Indian
civil service, he settled for a career in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), a
beautiful backwater of the mighty British Empire. Woolf would spend
seven years there, officially overseeing everything from approving
licences and growing tea to witnessing executions. He recorded his
experiences in his autobiography and in three short stories.

In 2004, the centenary year of Woolf’s arrival in Ceylon, Sri
Lanka–born author Christopher Ondaatje returned to his homeland to
retrace Woolf’s career from Colombo to Ceylon’s hinterlands. As in
many of his earlier works, Ondaatje tries to find a common link between
himself and the person he is profiling. In this case, he does not have
to look hard. Both Ondaatje and Woolf are sons of prosperous
upper-middle-class parents and both were educated in the exclusive
British public-school system. Ondaatje even confesses that he
understands the pro-imperial mentality that Woolf possessed when he
first arrived in Ceylon. What fascinates Ondaatje is Woolf’s
transformation from an “unconscious imperialist” to an
“ambivalent, politically schizophrenic, an anti-imperialist who
enjoyed the fleshpots of imperialism.”

Ironically, as Ondaatje visits the same locations Woolf visited exactly
a century earlier, the days of empire often look like the “good old
days.” Years of civil war since Sri Lanka’s independence in 1948
have taken a heavy toll on the island’s people and infrastructure.
Where Woolf could go safely and at will, a hundred years later Ondaatje
is often forced to endure road blocks, skirt mine fields, and obtain
permission from police officials to view battle-scarred ruins. At the
same time, Ondaatje shows how much of the conflict of today has roots
extending directly back to the imperial past. Scores of fascinating
vintage and recent photographs contrast what Ceylon once was to how it
looks now.

Well researched and elegantly written, this is Ondaatje’s best work
to date.