Seeing the Village through the Trees: Representing the Village in Sri Lankan Fiction

Abstract

Sri Lanka’s postcolonial history is unique amongst South Asian countries in that Sri Lanka has not seen a major flight of people leaving rural villages to settle in urban centers. Today, 85% of the population lives outside of urban areas, and urbanization is occurring at the slow rate of .5% (CIA World Fact Book). I point to these numbers to underscore that Sri Lanka is seen today as a country that has kept its rural roots, so to speak. Moreover, I want suggest that with this view comes a host of cultural connotations about the rural. In this paper, I trace a trajectory of Sri Lankan Anglophone narratives that have imaginatively represented village life. My starting point is Leonard Woolf’s novel Village in the Jungle, published in 1913. Next, published about a half century later in 1966, is Punyakante Wijenaike’s The Waiting Earth. And, at the other end of my track is P.G. Punchihewa’s novel The Shattered Earth, published first in Sinhala in 2000 and then rewritten and published in English in 2008. In this 95-year time span, I would like to posit that a specific kind of narrative is being retold. The brand of story goes something like this: Each of these three texts tells of peasant life in an agrarian community, seemingly far-removed from the reaches of big-city Colombo. Most importantly, each work is dark; all three narratives represent villages on the brink of disintegration. Each employs a landless male protagonist around whose life the plotline unfolds. Similarly, each 24 introduces the figure of the outsider as a character entering the village and creating conflict. At the heart of each story, chena and paddy cultivation are depicted as central means of wellbeing, ways of life that promises, or should promise, to maintain a selfsufficient community, working harmoniously with the land. In my critique of these texts, I point to the work of Mick More to show there is a macro narrative at play in Sri Lankan politics, one that I would argue is expressed and reinterpreted in these three novels. Second, that rural spaces in Sri Lanka have been morally coded through an agrarian relationship with the environment. In other words, growing rice and chena is traditional, nationally Sri Lankan, and forms a normative land ethic. From here, I argue that these three novels can help us understand some of the nuances of the ways in which agricultural Sri Lanka has been represented. Rather than treating these texts as cultural productions of this dominant ideology, that is the one that More outlines, I read these texts dialsogically. In this way, we can look at these three works as complicit in perpetuating this narrative tradition but also we can scrutinize the novels for the ways they challenge or resist entrenched ideas about agrarian Sri Lanka