UNCHANGING HAMBANTOTA

In the Southern Province of Sri Lanka, the districts of Matara and Galle were relatively prosperous compared to the poverty-stricken Hambantota district.

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NU was to be linked closely with all three districts of the Southern Province in his youth. The Hambantota district was 1,013 square miles in extent, and in 1911 the population of the district was 110,508, mainly Sinhala, except for the townof Hambantota, which had a large Muslim population – many of Malay origin, dating from the time of Dutch rule in the maritime regions.1 NU’s parents had many Malay friends, as recollected by his sister Rosalind.

The district of Hambantota had three divisions – West Giruvapattu, East Giruvapattu and Magampattu – with a Mudaliyar as well as superior and minor headmen involved in the administration. While the Government Agent (GA) of the Southern Province was stationed in Galle, the Hambantota district was administered by an Assistant Government Agent (AGA) resident in Hambantota. A few months after NU’s birth in February 1908, Leonard Woolf became AGA of this district, serving there from August 1908 to May 1911. Woolf had joined the civil service in 1906, and on returning to Britain in 1911, he became a Labour Party political activist, anti-imperialist agitator, writer, publisher, and author of The Village in the Jungle, a novel of rural poverty based on his Hambantota experiences.

But he was, perhaps, to achieve most fame as the husband of the novelist Virginia Woolf, whom he married on his return from Sri Lanka. Valuable insights into life in the Hambantota area in that period are given in the second volume of Leonard Woolf 's autobiography, Growing which also describes his years in other parts of the country. His Diaries in Ceylon (1908-1911), published in 1962, details his day-to-day activities and observations as a civil servant.