By Christine Hill Smith
With a human history going back to 500 BCE, Sri Lanka has endured and occasionally benefited from over 450 years of European colonization, starting in 1505 with the Portuguese, the Dutch East India Company in 1640, and finally the British in the 1790s. It was colonized for its gemstones, cinnamon, rubber, elephants, coffee, tea, and textiles.
After gaining independence from Great Britain in 1948, the country demoted the English language in 1956 and set about rediscovering its culture from the centuries of abuse.
Martin Wickramasinghe led the cause to preserve his country’s folklore and rural customs. He wrote several books depicting them and established a large folklore museum and campus around his birthplace in Koggala, near Galle, on the south (surfing!) coast of Sri Lanka. His agenda was to capture Sri Lankan culture before westernization and modernization destroyed it. He was a journalist for much of his life and only began to make a living from his books past middle age.
I spent three sabbatical months in Sri Lanka in 2019, trying to teach English at a Sri Lankan non-profit and generally rethinking western and Asian culture, religion, media coverage of world politics, and gender equality, or the lack thereof. One night in an English lesson with one of my young charges, the boy’s name “Huck” turned up in a grammar sentence in our reader.
As I related to my student the story of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, he got a faraway look in his eye and told me that there was a Sri Lankan novel called Madol Doova by one Martin Wickramasinghe, in which two teenage boys go live on an island of that name.
Wickramasinghe did read The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, and Madol Doova (1947) is arguable his most famous book, a Tom Sawyer/Huck Finn-like adventure of two boys – the leader Upali and his faithful and superstitious sidekick Jinna – who escape from dull, confining middle-class village life in the 1890s and find an island on which to live and farm. Everyone I met – young and old – in Sri Lanka seemed to know of the book.
Incidentally, Mark Twain briefly visited Sri Lanka, en route from India in 1896 on his second world trip when Wickramasinghe was just six years old.
Madol Doova was originally written in Sinhala and has been translated into Tamil, English, Chinese, Japanese, German, Russian, and Dutch, and Italian. The basic trajectory of the novel is similar to aspects of both The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, but the story shows us that soon after lighting out for the Territory, the Sri Lankan boys ease into adult responsibility and reconnect to the world of social interconnectedness. They are more like Huck Finn than Tom Sawyer in that they manage “adulating” well. Huge differences remain, however.
The similarities between the stories show us in the beginning of Madol Doova the Sri Lankan boys getting in fights and playing robber in their boy gang in the village, like Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn disturbing the peace or playing Robin Hood. Upali is the chief miscreant, like Tom Sawyer, and is always the one leading the mischief.
The Sri Lankan boys also flirt with girls (much to the Sri Lankan girl’s detriment!), though less directly than Tom flirts with Becky Thatcher. Separation of the sexes was, and in some ways remains, the norm in some circles in modern Sri Lanka – a whole other topic for discussion!
Like in Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, superstitions abound and mysteries crop up for solving in Madol Doova. The Sri Lankan boys believe that snakes are the rebirth of dead relatives.
We hear of Buddhist auspicious and inauspicious days and individuals affecting family and village traditions. Likewise in the Twain’s tales, the Huck and Tom share various non-scientific beliefs – often African-American in origin – and indeed enact magic rites, such as that for the removal of warts with the dead cat in the graveyard.
In Madol Doova, mysterious lights and clandestine canoes appear on the other side of the island when the boys first get there, and they won’t rest until they figure out what’s behind them. This echoes the “blue lights slipping by the window” in the haunted house in Tom Sawyer.
There’s a cave on both Jackson’s Island and on Madol Doova, though the former is large and scary, and latter small and used as a comfortable shelter. Dead men turn up too, to terrify and tantalize both teenage and adult readers alike, an old skeleton of a robber in Madol Doova and the fresh corpse of Dr Robinson in the graveyard in Tom Sawyer and Pap Huck’s abusive father in Huck Finn.
Incidentally, there’s a real island called Madol Doova. I traveled down on the marvelous, ramshackle, and inexpensive Sri Lankan trains to see it, hiring a small launch at a village to take me there. It’s actually smaller than Wickramasinghe depicts it, with no flat areas suitable for cultivation and no cave. There is a well. Cinnamon trees do grow on nearby islands, and other small-scale tropical crops too.
The indigenous peoples of the two locales are part of the backdrop of the two stories, but they function differently. Injun Joe is the villain in Tom Sawyer, but in Madol Doova, the village boy gang plays at being Veddahs, the jungle-inhabiting, indigenous groups that apparently still forage in remote Sri Lanka forests.
The boys hitch up their sarongs and dress up in belts and headgear of native leaves, brandishing their bows like Veddhas. When a girl they accost worries what people will say to their inappropriate interaction with her, the boys “What do we care about people? We are Veddahs!” This is like the devil-may-care robber attitude that Tom Sawyer and his gang affect.
Both stories portray adolescent young men who want to light out for the Territory. In Madol Doova, the protagonist Upali chafes at having to go to school and is bored by the frequent and long Buddhist ceremonies and customs. Huck similarly and famously rejects new clothing, restrictive schooling, and not being able to smoke!
Halfway through the novel, after committing a minor crime, the two boys grab a bullock cart and take off from their village, at first doing odd jobs at farms and upcountry settlements and eventually finding the uninhabited (because haunted) island of Madol Doova.
They take up fishing and farming to support themselves. They fish, plant, farm, harvest, and sell their goods to a local village, having been befriended by a local village man. They even build a small house on the island. Like our Missouri boys, they maneuver small craft in rough waters and fish for their dinners.
But unlike Tom and Huck, once on the island of Madol Doova they become self-sufficient and sustainable. Tom Sawyer is dependent on his family and town for sustenance, while Huck does no real work at all. When he and Jim escape down river on the raft, he resorts to “borrowing” food and other things to survive.
Perhaps Twain is validating an American ethic to enjoy irresponsibility in one’s youth for as long as one can. The Sri Lankan ethic, however, by contrast, is to create a new life of work but in a less restrictive locale and milieu. Ultimately the Sri Lankan story upholds connectedness and adult responsibility, while Twain’s boys, Tom and Huck, don’t want to grow up.
Other differences in the texts include the point that Twain’s psychology is more fleshed out. We hear the many paradoxes and questions of Tom’s and Huck’s inner thoughts, whereas Wickramasinghe keeps his protagonists less complex in motivations and self-reflection. Madol Doova often tells us Upali’s internal dialogue, but his or the narrator’s questioning of society’s values seems less pronounced. That said, the translation I read doesn’t seem at that fluid, so there may be nuances in Sinhala that I’m not getting in the English.
The end of Madol Doova is the most poignant part of the book. Upali returns to his village: “The Return of the Prodigal” is the title of the last chapter. His father dying, he pays the family bills, but he has made a new life on the island and loves the freedom. He doesn’t want to be smothered again.
His stepmother asks him to return and live among his kin. He doesn’t want to. After the village trip, back on the island, he sits contentedly with his buddies and muses to himself.
“A great stillness hung over the big forest, the far hills and the calm, blue expanse of water, merging into the endless silence of the sky. A strange pang of sadness went through me as I took in the immense silence. Father dead, stepmother old before her time, repining over the past and facing a future of bleak loneliness, my old friends, all scattered[.] I would see those friends but rarely, if indeed I was ever to see them again [at all].”
These contemplative, bucolic images are like Huck’s musings on the raft as he and Jim float along the great Midwest waterway. With a sigh, as Upali turns to his pals and tells them that he must make another visit to the village soon, he comments to himself that “my unaccustomed sadness grew deeper.”
Perhaps he fears he’ll be drawn back into the officious world of village respectability against his will. Maybe that’s not accurate though. Maybe he’s just facing change and death–an adult awareness of lacrimae rerum, the tears of things. It could be that he’s merely growing up as one does, as one should. If Huck Finn were there on the shore next to him, however, smoking his pipe, he would encourage Upali to light out for the Territory again.
Christine Hill Smith was born in the eastern part of the US in Boston, but has lived for 43 years in the intermountain West in Colorado, New Mexico and Texas. She has degrees from Tufts University and the University of Denver, with an emphasis on American Studies. She has published a couple of literary articles and a couple of books on western women writers.
Factum is an Asia Pacific-focused think tank on International Relations, Tech Cooperation, and Strategic Communications accessible via www.factum.lk.
The views expressed here are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the organization’s.
