Deep in the Colonial Darkness: An analysis of literary portrayals of Indian and Sri Lankan jungles

Abstract

According to colonial-era literature, the colonised jungle is a setting that has for the most part represented the darkness and evil of the uncivilised world. In this thesis, I question whether this pattern occurs in the same way in South Asian based literature, and how this portrayal has changed in a postcolonial world. I have chosen the following five texts to analyse this change over time: Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book (1894), Leonard Woolf's The Village in the Jungle (1913), Richard L. Spittel's Where the White Sambhur Roams (1951), Nihal de Silva's The Road from Elephant Pass (2003) and, Aravind Adiga's The White Tiger (2008). Starting from the earliest published, I analyse how The Jungle Book, while not necessarily portraying a dark and evil jungle, nevertheless emphasises pro-imperial ideologies. In my second chapter I consider how Woolf's Sri Lankan jungle, while filled with Sri Lankan characters, depicts the jungle as dark presence and a scapegoat to many of the problems caused by outsider interference in the narrative. Next, I analyse Spittel's early colonial set jungle narrative, to understand how literary portrayals of Sri Lanka shift after the country gained Independence from Britain. In this chapter it becomes clear that there is a strong emphasis on decolonising ideologies and complex portrayals of indigenous Sri Lankan through the narrative. Lastly, I analyse the physical jungle of De Silva's text and the metaphoric jungle in Adiga's narrative. It is clear that in the 21st century there is a further shift from the decolonising methods we observe in Spittel's narrative. Modern day postcolonial writers appear not to make a conscious decision to either wholly ignore the colonial past, or directly engage with colonial influences. Instead, postcolonial writers focus on modern day problems that South Asian people must cope with daily, like the ethnic conflict in De Silva's text and the social corruption discussed in Adiga's text. By using jungle settings and imagery to portray these narratives, modern day South Asian writers essentially take back control of the literary South Asian jungle space that was once a stronghold of British values and colonial-age ideologies.