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SRI LANKA & DIASPORAS

Observatoire pluridisciplinaire

SRI LANKA & DIASPORAS

The Ceylon Land Settlement Department and its fight against land speculation from 1897 to 1930

by Eric Meyer

In the series of articles on agrarian history of colonial Ceylon, we publish a new study on the Land settlement department, based on the diaries of Settlement officers.

 

Land settlement in time and space

In colonial Ceylon, ‘settlement’ meant establishment and registration of land rights by a judicial or an administrative process set up by the colonial authorities, with or without the concurrence of the population. As such, it introduced full property relations in an agrarian society where they were inexistent or limited. There was a tendency along the years to extend its scope to a sort of planning of land use. In India, settlement was the basis for taxation of the regularly cultivated lands: no such mechanism existed in Ceylon, the meaning of the term was thus different [1].

The general policy of the British regarding land can be characterized by four periods: before 1840 there was no fixed policy; from 1840 to 1897, land administration was taken up by local Revenue officers through headmen; from 1897 to 1931, it was progressively centrally coordinated by a department with specialized Settlement officers; after 1931, the land policy became politicized through the creation of a Ministry of Agriculture and Lands.

During the second part of the 19th century, in the plantation areas, the colonial agents felt free to declare the property of the Crown under the 1840 Waste Lands Ordinance lands areas sought after by purchasers, usually European planters, but also locals, on the basis of ad hoc surveys, and without any general policy. There was no idea of planning. The first wave of plantation development was characterized by systematic official favouritism of the British planters. Until 1897, the system of indirect administration through the recourse to headmen selected by the colonial government meant that for land matters the Revenue officers depended on headmen and that these headmen were in position to manipulate the system to their advantage.  The institution of special officers distinct from the Revenue officers under the new Waste Lands Ordinance of 1897, and the creation of a separate department limited the power of the headmen over land, which was until then the basis of a sort of unspoken and unwritten political pact with the colonial administration; it opened the way to a form of direct administration, which was strongly opposed not only by headmen but by the rising land-based bourgeoisie; it set in motion a process which contributed to the drive towards independence.

When land grabbing by locals became an organized business which impinged on colonial authority, and when individuals started to contest every decision taken by the colonial State, land policy became stricter, at a time when the Ceylonese would-be planters of citronella, tea, rubber and coconut came into the picture. It was evident for the first nationalists that the new land policy was aimed at Ceylonese entrepreneurship, rather than at land speculation in general, even if European land speculators were also affected. The setting up of a distinct Settlement administration, in addition to the Revenue officer system to enforce the new Waste Lands Ordinance of 1897 was a decision of the first magnitude taken by the governor West Ridgeway. It was immediately resented by the emerging Ceylonese bourgeoisie and by a section of the colonial milieu, and its working met with constant hurdles. The first three settlement officers working under the Waste Lands Ordinance of 1897 were John Penry Lewis[2] (November 1897 to December 1900), Walter Edward Davidson[3] (January to September 1901) and John George Fraser (1901 to 1911)[4]. Before them, Leonard William Booth had been Forest Settlement officer in the early 1890s and his opinion on settlement work is also valuable. J.P. Lewis could not find the time to review the general policy because he was busy countering in Matara the claims of Le Mesurier and his followers. J.G. Fraser was the real initiator of the Land Settlement Officer way of thinking, distinct from the Revenue Officer ways: he systematized a conception based on direct administration at the root level bypassing the recourse to the headman system.

The Department was set up progressively during the first decade of the 20th century ordinance and impinged on the prerogatives of the local revenue officers and their headmen.  In the context of the second wave of plantation development, in which the British planters were partly superseded by local entrepreneurs, the activity of the department was resented more by the rising bourgeoisie than by the colonial plantocracy. With the emergence of a social approach among a section of the colonial administration and among the rising political class, the Department slowly evolved in the late 1920s into a tool of social redistribution. At that point, the emerging bourgeoisie changed its mind and used land administration as a tool to rule and the headmen system disappeared (but a part of the headmen class joined the ranks of the emerging bourgeoisie whose power was based on land control)

A spatial approach is necessary to understand the working of the Settlement Department: its activities did not extend to the whole of the island. The map produced in 1930 by the survey department provides a synthetized information on its first thirty years.

  • Its initial activities focussed on the Morawak korale of the Matara district, the theatre of intense speculation and opposition led by a former revenue officer, Le Mesurier, who attempted to subvert the official land policy
  • Then the Ratnapura and Kurunegala districts were taken up, together with parts of the Kalutara district, because these were the areas were land speculation for rubber was booming
  • Other districts such as Uva, where land hunger was intense, were also taken up at the same time
  • The villages of the coconut triangle in the North western province were then systematically settled
  • And finally, work was started in the extensive north central areas where paddy colonies were being set up in the dry zone.
  • The plantation areas of Kandy, Nuwara Eliya, Matale and Kägalla districts were practically left aside

The principle of individual property was initially the basis of the working of the department. It is only after many years that a section of the officers stared to think in terms of ‘commons’. No settlement was possible without a preliminary survey; the next step was for Government to recognise claims (of actual cultivators or of outsiders) or the sell (at low price) land to cultivators or would be cultivators. This process involved the fixation of individual property where before there was an undefined common usufructuary system controlled by the headmen.

The motive behind the new Waste Lands Ordinance of 1897 was to block the extension of land speculation to the mid-country where new products – low grown tea, rubber and coconut, and new actors – Ceylonese entrepreneurs, local lawyers, small scale planters, Chettiar moneylenders, and a few European speculators, were at work. The position of the colonial administration was however ambiguous, because its aims were often contradictory: revenue considerations, economic development, European planting interests, preservation of the peasantry, preservation of natural resources. It was too late in many areas to stop land speculation: chena highlands in the Kelani valley, Kägalla and some areas of Ratnapura and Kurunegala, had already been sold out to land brokers through Ceylonese middlemen, to the final benefit of European planters. But there were large chena or forest areas where coconut and rubber plantations could be developed, in Kurunegala, Ratnapura and Kalutara districts, and the emerging Ceylonese entrepreneurs were prospecting these new opportunities, bypassing the colonial government control.

There was a contradiction at the core of the colonial system: the European colonial planters of the 19th century had initiated the land grabbing process; they were followed by the Ceylonese bourgeoisie of the next generation; the colonial administration which had set the alienation process into motion (or left it to develop) pretended to protect the peasantry at a later stage. The Ceylonese who resented the difference of treatment between the European speculators and the local speculators, turned towards a specific form of nationalism, and accused the colonial administration of hypocrisy when it pretended to protect the peasantry against the native speculators with its settlement procedures, but at the same time the nationalists were accused of hypocrisy by the colonial administrators when they pretended to side with the peasantry.

Initially, there was no question of interfering with claims and rights between villagers, but only to define the respective property of the Crown and the people. Ellis, when he was Government agent of the Western province, wrote in 1900[5]: “It is in every way better to leave the people to settle their own land claims rather than make any attempt to do this for them” Quoting the case of a garden possessed in common: “These people have up to the present lived quite peacefully, possessing the produce of the land by some system of division known to themselves. I can hardly imagine a more helpless task than that of an officer who undertakes to make in this garden a proper surveyed division based on the legal rights of the parties”. The settlement officer Fraser considered that it was outside the scope of the ordinance to assign the private property of a land to a specific individual[6]. But the experience of settlement work progressively put into question the principle of non-intervention, and led the Land settlement department to redefine its policy during the 1920s, on the basis of a new concept: land planning.

 

The sources: diaries and the other land settlement records[7]

From the 1880s, and especially during the governorship of Arthur Gordon, the members of the Ceylon Civil Service administering districts  (Assistant Government Agents) and provinces (Government Agents,) were required to keep official diaries which were sent to their hierarchy for reading and comment before being returned and kept in the record room of the kachcheri for the perusal of their successors[8]. With the development of specialized departments, the practice was extended to a few of them, and these documents were kept in their respective offices. The Settlement officers and their assistants, who were originally drawn from the same pool as the district administrators and had the same kind of field experience, adopted the practice which they found useful for the efficient functioning of their department. These semi-official sources are extremely valuable. Of course, their value depends on the personality of their authors, which they reveal[9], and they must be analyzed and interpreted in the context of power relations and often conflicting interests within the colonial administration. But they have the freshness and often the frankness which the official and publicized administration reports lack. This is specially the case with the Land settlement administration reports which are statistical lists of villages settled (for example the 84 page report for 1912-1913) and offer little information on the social history of the villages.

The diaries of the settlement and assistant settlement officers were meant to be read by their superiors (the Controller of Revenue, the Colonial Secretary or the Governor, and after 1931, the Minister of Agriculture and the Land Commissioner) who sometimes wrote marginal comments, and returned them[10].  

Little research has been done on the basis of these documents, which were difficult of access. Lal Jayawardena read and used for his unpublished Cambridge thesis[11] a certain number of them. I have myself examined all the diaries from 1897 to 1939 and noted the information of a general nature and the local information dealing with my research on the relations between the plantations and the villages. I propose here, using a selection of significant excerpts, to show the difficulties and oppositions encountered by these colonial administrators to define and defend a clear policy in land matters, and in a second part to follow the evolution of the Land settlement doctrine and practice in fighting land speculation until 1930. Of course, on the subject of the relations between colonial administration and the people at large, the partiality of the source should be balanced by the recourse to other sources and/or to inner critique – reading against the grain. 

Apart from diaries and administration reports, the departmental records contain the files of settled villages, the final village reports which were printed until the late 1930s: they are very detailed, giving population statistics, often information on caste, agricultural resources, land acreages; but they can be used only in specific cases and lack the vivid notations of the diaries. There are also special files regarding the work of such and such civil servant and the general correspondence of the department.

 

John Penry Lewis in Morawak korale of Matara district (1897-1900)

The Southern province had specific features which distinguished it from the Kandyan provinces: the Dutch impact was much deeper, especially in the registration of land and people. Morawak korale was the northern part of the Matara district, abutting on the Ratnapura district. The villagers of this hilly area, many of them belonging to minority castes, especially Vahumpura, were living on a mix of chena, paddy and garden produce, and had been the victims of bouts of chena repression by several revenue officers, in the 1860s-70s, and again in 1890, with the result that starvation conditions were often prevailing; an Assistant Government Agent, Elliott, had recognized the right of the peasants to cultivate their highlands on the basis of the ‘Dutch thombos extracts’, in order to settle the long standing distrust between the administration and the people, but he was disavowed by his superior[12]. By the end of the 19th century, under the impulse of Karawa entrepreneurs from the coastal areas, the cultivation of tea, citronella and rubber was developing in Morawak, and the colonial administration was confronted with a demand for land which it could not understand nor admit because in its conception, based on the Crown ownership of ‘waste’ and forest lands, land development was to be controlled by the State (and practically reserved to European planters), and any attempt at claiming private rights was suspect. For example, this is how in 1898 the Matara Assistant Government Agent described the process of land appropriation[13]: “A suitable extent of forest or jungle is selected, if possible with indication of its containing plumbago. A neighbouring villager is then persuaded that as the owner of a garden on the borders of the forest, the whole tract belongs to him. Or else an old family tradition that his ancestors at one time cultivated the land is revived. A claim thus springs up, a transfer in favour of a speculator is executed. Jak and other fruit trees which are found in nearly every jungle in the district are seriously pointed out as indication of a former cultivation, and the Crown (in stepping in to prevent the destruction of the forest) is loudly accused in the public newspapers of wholesale spoliation and oppression. The result of course has been demoralizing in the extreme. Fictitious claims have sprung up in the most unexpected quarters, and both villagers and speculators are intent on acquiring land at the public expense”.

The diaries of J.P. Lewis span a period beginning in November 1897 up to the end of December 1900. They offer an insight into an intensive land broking activity of a very unusual nature, because it was encouraged or rather engineered by C.J.R. Le Mesurier, an ex-civil servant formerly posted at Matara, who had been dismissed as a result of various provocations[14].  During these first three years, most of the time of Lewis was spent fighting the ‘spurious’ claims set up by Le Mesurier and his associates (Lewis 9.02.1900)[15]. The paradox was that the appointment of a special officer to enforce the ordinance of 1897 was done at the request of Le Mesurier himself.  The legal issues raised by Le Mesurier touched on the sore point of the colonial system in which the colonial agent was at the same time judge and party as defender of Crown interests (Lewis 27.06.1899), and he radically challenged the concept of Crown land, which was at the basis of the settlement work. The following quotations of the diary give an idea of these exchanges:

“Mr. Le Mesurier has told the people that the only Crown land in the island are Pidurutalagalla and Adam’s Peak” (Lewis 13.11.1897) and the growing number of claims is due “to the notion developed by Le Mesurier that the payment of 1/10th tax before 1874 meant that the land was private”. In the settlement of Atureliya village, (Lewis 21.01.1898) Le Mesurier appeared as agent of the claimant who promised to give Le Mesurier 1/3rd of the land to if he won: “this is a case of champerty”. Lewis was compelled to stay with Le Mesurier at the kacceri while the latter studied the wattoru (taxation lists) to find out which chenas were taxed at ‘private’ rate. Le Mesurier declared (Lewis 31.01.1898) “I do not even know where the land is. I claim it on public grounds and in order to prevent government from getting possession of it”. Lewis commented (14.02.98): “I have never seen a case more dishonorably conducted, even by the shadiest of proctors”. “Engaged in reply to Le Mesurier memo facetiously entitled ‘Spoliation of lands by the Crown in the Matara district’. It is a plausible but ridiculous attempt to show that the British government have by Ordinance 12 of 1840 dispossessed the villagers of their highlands. According to Mr. Le Mesurier there are no Crown lands in the Matara district, not even the primeval forests. He has put this theory into practice by setting up claims to half a dozen of the latter” (Lewis 16.01.1899).

Lewis depicted Le Mesurier as a dishonest land grabber, even at the time he was posted at Matara: Le Mesurier’s brother had started mining operations in the district while Le Mesurier was Assistant Government Agent, and according to Lewis he was just a front-man for Le Mesurier who paid himself the mining coolies (Lewis 6.06.1899).  At Talgahahena in 1893 as Assistant Government Agent he prosecuted a villager for illicit clearing, but the villager was cleared, he then put up a part of the land for sale at 10 Rs per acre, and when dismissed he purchased himself the rest of the land from another villager (20.02.1900). Lewis considered that the extensive land purchases at the beginning of 1890s at Asmagolla, Kotawila and Marambe by one Mr. Bultjeens for Mr. Creasy were actually for Le Mesurier who was then Assistant Government Agent and conducted the sales, and to whom the lands were transferred in February 19th 1896. The firm Julius and Creasy were the agents for T.N. Christie, an influent member of the Ceylon Planters Association, who was an associate of Le Mesurier during and after his Kägalla days[16]

Among the documents used by Le Mesurier and his associates to assert private property were the ‘Dutch Extracts’ forged by a local goldsmith, Don Salomon Wijendra, (who was rewarded once the claim was admitted) and certified by the notary B. J. Wijenayaka “who was prepared to write any act, the usual practice being to describe a chena as garden and a forest as chena”. Another actor in the land business was Jayasuriya, the son of a land registrar of Matara, who was using an old fiscal transfer of 1834 to assert private title (Lewis 4.12.1897), in competition with T.N. Christie : “It is a relief to have these landgrabbers quarreling among themselves”. But it appeared that Christie was acting for Le Mesurier to whom he sold back his claim as soon as it was admitted by the Crown by a Certificate of Quiet Possession for half the area claimed, and Le Mesurier transferred the property to his wife (Lewis 6.09.1898).  Another actor, Floris de Silva, was the schoolmaster of Urubokka (Lewis 22.03.1900): “nominally schoolmaster but his real business is acquiring shares in claims from the villagers”. He was the brother of Francis de Silva, a dismissed mudaliyar (chief headman) of Wellaboda pattuwa, who was behind most of the sales together with his brother in law, the division officer of Morawak korale (Lewis 3.03.1898): “I have been told several times that that the late mudaliyar of Morawak had examined the wattoru and had ‘made the land private’ (praveni karala).  Possibly it is from him that Mr. Le Mesurier got this notion on which all his claims are based, or it may have been the reverse. The mudaliyar was his agent in the plumbago business, and Mr. Le Mesurier was very much concerned to hear of his dismissal as he told me himself”. There were other schoolmasters involved, and the brother of the Rest House keeper of Urubokka (Lewis 25.03.98), Dias (31.10.1898) “trying to get into favour with the villagers by posing as an exceptionally devout Buddhist”. There was the case of an ex- village headman, who threatened to commit suicide if his claim was not recognized (Lewis 19.11.1898); in some cases, there are several actors who purchased the same land from a villager or ‘helped’ him purchasing it at an auction sale to grab it after. Local headmen or dismissed headmen were always involved in these land dealings (Lewis 16.12.1897). “I wonder whether there is any native official, clerk, registrar or headman in the Matara district who is not interested in some claim, either openly or secretly” (Lewis 3.10.1900).  What Lewis failed to clearly understand is that the power of headmen over highlands was the result of their giving permits to cultivate highlands at the demand of the colonial authorities. 

The diary leaves the impression that Lewis was obsessed with the defense of Crown rights, overwhelmed by the fight against land speculators, and unable to understand the real grievances of the peasantry. He was upset by the systematic attitude of the judges who usually discharged the offenders, and of the press, especially The Independent, that sided with Le Mesurier in February 1899, and The Times of London that published a letter of the same in April 1899. Lewis felt insulted by Rudra, Le Mesurier’s lawyer, and by the Chilaw Association which started its agitation against the Waste Lands Ordinance of 1897 and also against that of 1840 by using the arguments of Le Mesurier (Lewis July 1899). His action was also impeded by the poor quality of many surveys, the lack of cooperation from the Survey department, and the corruption of young surveyors who accepted bribes (Lewis 17.03.1900). Another problem was the lack of cooperation between the Assistant Government Agent and the Settlement Officer, the former putting up for sale or settlement lands which the latter was going to proclaim under the Waste Lands Ordinance. And the worst point was that the kacceri and the district court administration themselves were “the headquarters of the land speculation” (Lewis 20.11.1900). Lewis felt betrayed by the position of the Supreme Court which considered as peasants notorious landgrabbers such as Dias; the clash between the judicial order and the executive was just the same as in Kägalla during the preceding decade.  

Lewis admitted genuine claims, but felt that the system did not preclude speculation (26.10.1898): “The villagers complain that when the lands are put up for sale they are unable to compete with the outsiders – rich fisher caste people and Moormen who want land for citronella cultivation. If the extents sold are small (3 or 4 acres only), the villagers are not likely to sell them to outsiders, as they prefer cultivating themselves than becoming the coolies of the citronella people”. In a Vahumpura village, Narawelpita, “noted both for their industry and for crime, especially cattle stealing”, but where there were many disabled persons “I found that the real explanation for it was want of land,  and I decided that it would be better not to proclaim this block, but to have it surveyed into small lots to be sold to the villagers” (16.12.1897). Progressively, Lewis became more preoccupied with the condition of the peasantry and the impact of the restriction to chena cultivation; he took into consideration that the local headmen had always admitted wattoru as proof of property. In the end of his diary (10 and 26.11.1900) he quoted the case of Alapaladeniya and Idandehita villages: “chena was allowed from 1885 to 1892 and in 1892 it was fully put a stop to. The people were then much better off than they are now, as there is not enough paddy land to cultivate. The men now go to Panagoda in Hinidum pattu to work in the plumbago pits (…) but all the people cannot get work at the pits. The headmen assure me that very few families in their division have more than one meal a day. Whether they tell a different story to the Assistant Government Agent I don’t know. I am told by the headmen that the people owing to the stopping of chena cultivation and the want of paddy lands do not get enough to eat. Yet the Administration report usually says that ’food was plentiful’ etc…”

 

Walter Edward Davidson as Settlement officer (9 months in 1901)

Davidson had an extensive knowledge of land speculation when he was Assistant Agent in the Kägalla district in the early 1890s[17], and was an efficient administrator, but his experience as Settlement officer was limited and his appointment of short duration. A practical and hard-working man, his future career as Colonial secretary in Transvaal, then Governor of Seychelles, Newfoundland and New South wales in Australia is a testimony for his value.

In his diary of July 1901, he gave an illuminating explanation of the working of the ‘Dutch Extracts’ system in the Matara district: “The Dutch made a record of all cultivated lands in private hands with a view to their taxation” “It became the custom for each native family to hold an extract [of the register]. The Sinhalese called it a ‘black letter’, or Dutch extract from the rolls, and we can see from the date of the issue of true copies by the authorities when pressure was put on them. It then became a mark of gentility to hold an extract, like a sannas in Kandyan district. I know of one case when a copper sannasa was made simply to forward negotiation for a marriage into a respectable family, to show that the suitor’s family was also respectable. These paper monuments have often been destroyed – damp, rats, white ants and so on. But the tradition in the village that your panguwa has held a Dutch extract was enough among easy going people. Then came Mr. Le Mesurier, and the land speculator’s period, and each family became anxious especially as government (very wrongly as I most deferentially submit) practically prohibited chena cultivation and absorbed chenas which the villagers bona fide believed to be theirs, and a desire arose for extracts. Ingenuity is never lacking in the forgery line in the Matara district, when a saleable article is wanted. So, two sets of makers of Dutch extracts appeared. The procedure was this: an agent found an anxious householder who either believed that the family had had an extract, or wanted one badly to recover his chenas. Enquiries by the forger’s agent ascertained what the householder believed to be his lands and elicited what more he would like to have. A suggestion followed that the extract might be traced and recovered for a consideration. The householder readily concurred. A few months later, an extract appears. It is very worn and aged, but it is taken to the village schoolmaster, and he traces triumphantly the name of the family and the names of the family’s fields and gardens and these coveted chenas. The body of the document was in an unknown tongue and did not signify. The bargain is then struck. One hundred rupees in cash if squeezable, if not cash down as much as possible and a pronote or assignment of half the chenas.”

“Then speculators appeared and bought conditionally the highlands for citronella cultivation. The difficulties arose. A painstaking officer, with highly developed antiquarian tastes [J.P. Lewis] arrived to settle this title to waste land. He peered into those easily acquired documents and found that the balance of the extract was gibberish, that a whole series contained the same type of errors, he collated them and called in experts in Dutch, brought the documents before the civil courts and had them declared forgeries (…) But an able and painstaking advocate, Mr. Bawa for instance, can convince a jury if he be strenuous enough (that) the expert is no clever than you and after all he knows very little more than we do about what happened about 150 years ago.”

Davidson attempted to win the confidence of the Wellaboda pattu villagers  (Davidson 20.06.1901) “If I am to do any good in the settlement of these valuable villages (…) it will be by a crushing defeat to the most prominent landgrabber [Don David Kulatunge](…) The people understand that while settlement is going on I am all patience and consideration. It is only the interloper who has cause for fear”.

When he left his post as Settlement Officer, he drew a program for his successor (Davidson 10.08.1901), in which he displayed his deep understanding of the peasant condition and the role of chena cultivation in the villager’s subsistence, his paternalistic attitude, and the opposition he encountered on the part of a section of the Ceylon civil administrators[18]:  

“Keep good relations with Government and Assistant Government Agents and never appeal to the government against their wishes. Consult Ellis [Controller of Revenue] personally, not on papers because he has a destructive genius and is an awkward person to disagree with. Spend time with Surveyor General and Government printer and give them full particular of what you require, never oblige a busy man to make reference and thus delay his answer. Work with the mudaliyar and headmen; the clerk Gunatilake wants to do too much himself. Continue to work on the lines of the panguwa or communal interest. It is true that in the Southern province the communal instinct has been dying out. Revive it, it gives the poor man and the stupid man a chance and it saves you the risk of doing the weaker man an injury. Hunt out men that should be claimants and let them come in at any time. Do not rule out claims for want of a paper title, but strive that every householder should have 5 acres of highland near his field or garden to do what he likes with. You will thus check illicit chena clearing and yet provide a man enough land to feed him.

Keep the man on the land. Let him have land sufficient to feed him and keep him honest. Your settlement will last twenty years, but then the people will be encroaching just as they do now. Then there should be a revision and a further apportionment of Crown land for nothing, for by then most of the chena given will have become garden lands. Begin before you ‘notice’ the land by a cursory inspection of the land and note then what you mean to give and what you mean to reserve. Speak firmly then to the villagers as to what you mean to reserve. By the time the three months are passed, no one will claim what you mean to reserve.

Your duties are merely to declare this or that land Crown or private. Never hesitate to exceed your duties. You will have occasional setbacks and be told to confine yourself to your duties. Don’t take much notice of that, always exceed your duties in these directions. When and where you can, declare a private land in favour of the persons who ought to have it. If you think a ‘Crown land’ should be devoted to any specific purpose (village forest, small allotments, sale to capitalists for plantation or plumbago, deniya for paddy, irrigation scheme etc.), attach a rider to your finding and convey the recommendation to the Government Agent…Always value the lands, undervalue per choice. The Crown does no want to lock up a lot of unproductive land, it wants it to go into cultivation. My scheme is good of apportioning a tract of Crown chena with permission to cultivate small extents, an acre a year, paying a rent of 1/10th to government. The Government Agent of the South Province disapproves it, but with all deference, he carries his horror of chena cultivation to extremes. A landless labourer is the lowest of all in the scale of happiness. A wanderer is a danger to the community. And you cannot make colonists of the weak and stupid and timid villager. Give him an opportunity to live and thrive in the village where he was born. The government did not definitely decide against me, it merely said it was not my duty to make such proposals. Remember that chena cultivation to excess is destructive, yet it is in moderation in some districts a necessity for bare livelihood, and it will be continued in defiance of you, if you do not make reasonable provision for villager to raise their food somehow. Keep the two registers I have opened out (…) This has the immediate advantage of interesting the government in your work and preventing your being forgotten (…) Get each report printed (…) it is the landraad roll of the village it should contain the description of the village” etc.

Davidson ended his diary with a personal note: “Both my present work and the Ceylon Civil Service I leave with the keenest regret. Starting life again at middle age I have doubts whether my wife and I will ever do such good work again and whether we will succeed in winning this regard and confidence of the Afrikaners as we believe we have won the real affection of the Ceylonese. In the East only custom and caste continue undisturbed. Individual influence may work largely for the time, but the work and name perish out of memory. It is something to remember for a year or two.”

 

Land Settlement under John George Fraser (1901-1911)

Fraser remained in his post for an unusually long period and was able to set up the principles and the practice of settlement on a firm footing, but his progressive views, partly inherited from Davidson, were opposed by a section of the colonial administration and he was prevented from implementing them. He was however critical of the idealism of Davidson (Fraser 24.09.1901): “The more I see of these villagers, the more I am persuaded of the fatuity of Mr Davidson’s hopes of re-establishing a communal system. That idea had passed away and individual possession is the aim of everyone”. His project was to develop a land settlement department with an island-wide approach and a strong staff, which would deprive the local Revenue officers and their headmen of a large part of their power, and to set up a sort of rural development planning – which actually took shape 30 years later.  With the passing of years, he became more interested in developing the strength of his department and his later diaries are less interesting for the social historian.

From August 1901 to June 1903, Fraser was special officer under the Waste Land Ordinance of 1897. In July 1903, a Department was set up by the Governor West Ridgeway with wider powers: “to settle amicably as between the Crown and subject the title to all land, cultivated as well as uncultivated”. It was staffed with one Settlement officer, one Assistant settlement officer and 18 employees. In 1911, the Department had one Settlement officer, 11 Assistant settlement officers, and 84 employees.  In the meantime, 1081 villages had been settled and 1357 were being settled, in spite of the difficult coordination with the Survey department.[19]

During the first two years, under the governorship of West Ridgeway, Fraser was busy trying to pacify the relations between the Morawak villagers and the Crown. His diaries from October 1901 to January 1904 are filled with remarks on the difficulty to deal with the headmen in the Morawak korale: “Settlement in this part of the country has been rendered more difficult through the action of a former mudaliyar who went about admitting chenas to be private whenever a 1/10th wattoruwa was produced (…) I have seldom seen a more worthless set of headmen than the vidane araccis and police officers of the Morawak korale (…) The great difficulty in this part of the country is that there is practically no documentary evidence and that most of the headmen side with the villagers when difference of opinion arises”. It is clear that the intervention of the colonial administration in land matters was strongly resented by the landed class – the headmen class, because it impinged on the basis of their arbitrary power. Apart from the questions of power, another problem was the organization of surveys, which “almost exclusively lay on the information of local headmen”. By 1904, Fraser seems to have succeeded in dispelling the distrust[20] : “Features highly indicative of the good relations have been the success of land sales held in course of the settlement of villages and the large number of applications made to the Settlement officer to purchase land. The latter is a new development not originally contemplated and is in great measure consequent on the special arrangements made by the Settlement officer to accelerate the surveys and thus curtail the length of time that elapses between the application for land and its actual sale” “The villagers first imagined that I was merely here for one of these numerous inspections made by Revenue officers which settle nothing. Now that they realize that the whole village is to be completed, they are becoming very anxious of amicable settlement” “A year ago, my operations were regarded with the greatest distrust, now the people willingly come forward and meet me half way in effecting amicable settlements (…) The success is entirely due to our living in the villages, inspecting each lot ourselves and coming into contact with the claimants who soon convince themselves that their distress is unfounded”. For example, in the case of Puwakbodaowita village, (Fraser 12.08.1902): “The claimants all except a landshark, C.A. Goonewardena by name, came before me and asked me to let them have the 6 acres of land I offered them in full settlement of their claims instead of referring them to court. I agreed and we sat down in a roadside hut and made our treaty. This deprives Goonewardena of all his props and we shall now crush him effectually”.

The new popularity of Fraser was also the result of his recognition of the value of chena cultivation in the subsistence economy of the peasantry of the hills; his critical remarks of the effect in Morawak of repressive government policy are worth quoting in full (Fraser 30.11.1901): “I drove to Urubokka Rest House. As I came along, I was forcibly struck by the miserable appearance of the villagers. I stopped my carriage occasionally and had a chat with some of the wayfarers, picking up some hints about their condition and about the geography of the place. They appear a simple-minded set of people, these Morawaka villagers, easily led, not as gentlemanly as the Kandyans in their instincts, but only requiring fair and considerate handling. Their great grievance is of course the restriction, or shall we say prohibition of chenaing. After hearing their views and considering the question without bias, I am of opinion that it is desirable to set apart certain areas of waste land useless for other purposes for chena cultivation in villages in which large areas have not been handed over to claimants. I further believe that the early introduction of some such system would tend to a great reduction in claims. What the people want is to chena. They do not want the land and will be quite content to cultivate on permits from the Crown, and I do not think any damage can accrue to government as such cultivation would only be allowed after all necessary reserves have been set aside. A careful enquiry should be made into the circumstances of each village by a sympathetic but firm officer. The main objections to chena cultivation are: a. That forests, a valuable asset of the community, were frequently ruthlessly destroyed; b. That climatic changes for the worse might follow on indiscriminate felling of forest and jungle; c. That the villagers set up title to the land in any case, clearing without permit; d. Ethical objections [Fraser omits the planter’s pressure to get land]. The first three objections will be surmounted by the operation of the Waste Lands Ordinance and by the constitution of reserved village forests. The ethical objection is that chena cultivation is detrimental to character in making the people lazy and improvident. But for my part I cannot see how the enterprise and exertion spent upon chenaing can be half as demoralizing as periods of enforced idleness and loafing. For it is not as if gardens and fields were being neglected for chenas. No, they are cultivated, in many cases over cultivated, planted with trees until production is impeded by overcrowding. Even if given new areas to convert into gardens, the people, destitute of money, must have a means of livelihood until the new gardens come into bearing. And this means can only be found in chena cultivation. Only by some such scheme will it be possible to introduce a little of the joy of life into the hearts of these dejected and poverty-stricken subjects. And I am sure the government will also reap its reward in the greater contentedness of the people and in the greater rapidity with which chena claims will be disposed of. Often when I ask claimants who have not a bit of evidence why they claim, they say: ‘What are we to do? We are not allowed to chena on Crown land. So, we must claim on the chance of getting a bit of land for ourselves to chena!”

 When Fraser undertook the settlement of the Middeniya area, further east, in the dry zone, he noted (Fraser 14.06.1902): “All the lands here, except a few tanks and fields, is waste land covered with thorny scrub jungle of no commercial value whatsoever. It is of vast extent and will take many years to plant it with permanent products, supposing they will grow in a country where there is so little water. Formerly the villagers used to cultivate large extents on permit from the Crown, paying share to the Crown. During that period, the title of the Crown was never questioned. Then the policy was adopted of restricting chena cultivation, in the hope that the people would then devote themselves to permanent products, especially paddy (…) If I am right that Government desires to foster a native peasantry, I do not think this policy is likely to have the desired results. There has been misunderstanding on both sides of course, and this chena question has greatly strained the relations between the Revenue Officers and the villagers. When chena cultivation was restricted, the villagers retaliated by clearing what they chose without permit, or clearing in excess of their permits. The Revenue Officer then prosecuted them. They pleaded guilty and were fined 4 or 5 Rs for each acre cultivated, instead of 1 Re per acre they used to pay as permit. They still laid no claim to the land in most cases. When the Revenue Officer saw his order disregarded in this way, and that he was hindered with large numbers of prosecutions, he began to forbid cultivation, to prosecute where it was persisted in, and to sequester the crops. This, the villagers say, drove them to desperation for they must live, and they then began to clear, claiming the land on any frivolous title, sure that in the Police Court the Crown would then be referred to its civil remedy. Finding that the result came up to their expectations, they then began to think their claims would hold water. It is in this way that a great many claims have originated. Now the Assistant Government Agent reports that the villagers refuse to acknowledge the Crown title or to take permits. This appears to be the net result of the present policy, according to the views of the villagers. The villagers yesterday spoke quite sensibly and said they did not want the land but only their immemorial right to chena (…) If the intention of the present policy was to protect Crown rights, it does not appear to have been very succesful. If it was to put a stop to a ‘wasteful system’ of cultivation, I fail to see how the present means of cultivating their thorny area can be termed wasteful. There is no doubt that these lands formerly produced an immense quantity of Indian corn and fine grain, whereas they now produce next to nothing. The ‘waste’ all seems to be on the side of the present system if the question is regarded from the economic point of view (…) To ask villagers to desist from chena cultivation is much the same as asking them to starve to please government, and of course if they are not allowed chena cultivation they will cultivate without permits. It is a question of life or death for them”.

Fraser reiterated during the next years his analysis and suggested a new policy, repeated in his Administration report for 1906, but his views were censored by Governor Blake, and it took practically two decades for the colonial administration to seriously reconsider its position with the Land commission of 1927[21]

“To the villager’s mode of thinking, there is nothing immoral in making encroachments on Crown property. Probably this is the result of former administration prior to the British administration. In Dutch times, the Company did everything to increase the area under cultivation and did not much object to encroachment, as every encroachment brought money to the exchequer. The Company had an interest in every land in its domains and maintained these interests by levying a share of the products. The people were content to hold their land subject to these taxes. The Dutch system may thus be said to have encouraged cultivation and as they had regularly kept thombos giving the particulars of each land, there was a very efficient check on encroachment or rather a check that encroachment did not escape payment of taxes.

The British system has altered most of this. The registers were allowed to lapse and gradually a period of chaos set in, the results of which are still being felt. Registers were kept only of Crown lands except in the case of fields. The tax on private gardens and chenas was relaxed and thus all the advantages of having a complete list of all the cultivated lands in each village with all particulars of extent, ownership and so on were lost. It is true that a tax was levied on private chenas also and that yearly statements of crops raised were made but this was quite another thing from the complete register of Dutch times. Now as then, the desire of the people is to have a land for cultivation. The average villager does not much mind whose land it is as long as he is allowed to take his crops. This is seen every day in the case of villagers who chena Crown lands without permit, knowing that they will be prosecuted and fined. They prefer to take this course to that of applying for a permit which may be refused. They are quite ready to pay a fine.

The policy of government has of late been to restrict chena cultivation. With this every right-minded person will agree. But have we substituted anything for it? Have we made it easy for the villager to take up permanent cultivation in place of chena cultivation? I think not. To ask the average villager, leading a hand to mouth existence, to purchase land at 10 Rs an acre and fees, is to demand of him an impossibility. Even if it were possible for him to raise this amount, it would mean that he would have to borrow it or that in paying he would exhaust his capital. Neither of these is desirable. We do not wish him to become indebted, neither do we desire to strip him of all his capital, for the result will be likely that the moneylender will reap the benefit of the villager’s labours by selling him up, and in the other case he will have no capital to enable him to develop his purchase.

What is wanted would appear to be a system of rent in perpetuity coupled with the power to purchase outright whenever desired (…) at a rate of say 50c or 1 Re per acre per annum (…) The result would be:

  1. A great decrease in the number of cases
  2. A development, probably immediate and enormous, of permanent cultivation`
  3. The majority of Crown land in populous villages thus disposed of
  4. The necessary register would keep alive the Crown title
  5. Sales on these terms would form a convenient introduction to a general land tax if it is even desirable to have one
  6. It would save the delays of a re-survey and the difficulties inherent in the constitution of communal chenas”


Formation of the Land Settlement Department: a political decision

The policy of the colonial government in land matters was subjected to recurrent reviews. It was the most intricate political issue encountered by successive governors, from West Ridgeway to Clifford. The contradictory imperatives were:

  • To support British colonial interests, especially interests of the planters
  • To preserve government control over ‘waste’ lands
  • To avoid social discontent and peasant unrest
  • To foster economic development
  • To delineate the respective roles of the Revenue Officers and the Settlement Officers

The Waste Lands Ordinance was the brainchild of Governor West Ridgeway and had met with the opposition of his predecessor Gordon (Lord Stanmore) and of a large section of the Revenue Officers, who considered that the creation of a distinct department would impinge on their prerogatives, that it bypassed the age-long hierarchical working of local administration based on the headmen system and introduced a system of direct administration. For some time, the Revenue Officers could still effect settlements under the Ordinance of 1897, but they could not devote sufficient time and expertise to that work, and they distributed chena permits without proper enquiries, in the view of the Settlement Officers (Fraser, 29.07.1907).

The long despatch sent to London in June 1903 by the governor West Ridgeway[22] paved the way for the formation of a Department (which he would put under the direction of the Controller of Revenue F.R. Ellis, the officers in the field being junior). West Ridgeway was about to leave his post and was anxious to establish on a firm footing a project which he had started in 1897 at the beginning of his almost eight years long governorship (February 1896 to November 1903): “I regard the success of this enterprise as the most important feature of my administration (…) for I have had ample experience of the fatal results of the absence of any systematic method of disposing of land claims which is the main cause of ill feeling towards government and discontent among the mass of people (…) I look forward with apprehension to what may happen during the first years of my successor’s rule, unless the department is placed on a permanent and satisfactory footing before I leave”

He painted the situation prevailing before his ordinance of 1897 as characterized by “a chronical state of hostility between the Crown and the villagers” due to the lack of survey and uncertainty regarding the status of unsettled lands. Hostility to his ordinance was reduced, but the settlement work had to be organized in a systematic way at an all-island uniform level, with a continuity in time. It was therefore impossible to rely on the Revenue Officer network for the task, because of the lack of continuity and the ever-growing multiplicity of tasks. Annexed to the despatch were four case studies (supposedly randomly chosen) with a commentary by Ellis: Baduraliya (Pasdun), Dankoluwa, Gorakawala and Puwakbodaowita (Morawak, along the Nilwala Ganga), to explain the working of settlement. The idea of village planning was present, the basic rule being that no sale should be allowed “unless there is ample reserve to meet the requirements of the expansion of the village for many years. If there is land available, it is desirable to allow capitalists to open an estate, as by this means money is brought into the village, and the people benefit greatly by the demand for labour. But this cannot be allowed if it would have the effect of excluding the villager from his own village”.

During the following years, the policy of the department, under the direction of the Controller of Revenue, F.R. Ellis, was to undertake the systematic settlement of certain areas – especially the coconut areas of the Kurunegala district and the rubber areas of the Ratnapura district, a task entrusted to the Settlement officer Fraser and his assistants; and to intervene where problems arose which could have political consequences, a task reserved to Ellis[23]. The Settlement department records preserve a collection of the cases settled by Ellis; some documents are also found in the Colonial secretary records, and the Colonial Office papers are also useful to follow the affairs. After the departure of West Ridgeway, as head of the department, Ellis effected personally the settlement of the most intricate cases involving European and Ceylonese land speculators, especially in the North Western Province, where the early 20th century witnessed a boom of coconut plantations. This led to an great amount of correspondence between the Settlement department, the Colonial secretariat in Colombo, and the Colonial Office in London[24].

 

The Settlement department facing land speculation by European planters in the Kurunegala  and Matale districts

The Kurunegala district is large and its ‘Kandyan’ identity is somewhat blurred because it is more connected with the maritime areas and the dry zone than with the hilly districts. The history of village land sales in the North Western province started with the bursts of anti-chena legislation in the years 1860-1870, like in Kägalla and Matara. In Kurunegala there were two very different facies of plantation development: in the hilly border areas adjoining the Kandy and Matale districts, especially in Madure korale, the demand for land was for rubber or tea estates by Europeans; elsewhere in the district, especially in the Katugampola and Dambadeni Hatpattus,  it was for coconut plantations and came from Ceylonese rather than from European would-be planters.

Before the ordinance of 1897, there was a general tendency for Kurunegala Government Agents to minimize the impact of village sales, especially when European purchasers were involved[25]. An example is found in the report for 1896 by Aelian King: “As far as the villager is concerned there is, I am convinced, but little room for alarm for he only sells generally speaking what he has a very uncertain claim to, namely some of the waste lands of the village more or less often cleared and sown with dry grain at intervals of from 8 to 15 years, perhaps at even a greater interval, probably not by himself but by the village in general. Defective legislation, or tenderness on the part of the courts, made it very difficult for the Crown to assert its rights. Consequently the village is in a position to offer a good deal of land for sale and the Crown is after all probability the only sufferer in the transaction (sic). No instances have come to my knowledge of villagers impoverishing themselves and rendering themselves homeless by such sales (…) These sales are only possible in the damp and therefore fertile parts of the province. In such localities chenaing is not a necessity to the people while it is certainly a most wasteful system (…) Few candid persons could hesitate to declare that it would be immensely to the advantage of their inhabitants that the desolate wastes should be put under permanent cultivation, bringing capital into their midst and opening up markets for their labour and for their produce. New areas of cultivation are consequently large, cultivation of coconut is advancing everywhere”.  But another administrator, Sewell, drew a different picture : “In many instances whole families have been turned out of the holdings so acquired, their houses broken down and the members left to shift for themselves – in some cases they have left the district, in others they remain about the villages as vagrants and having no occupation it is to be feared become criminals (…) It is also going on in the Katugampola and Dambadeniya Hatpattu to a large extent, chiefly among the invaders from the low country and European companies in search of coconut properties. [It is difficult to dissuade the villagers to sell] as their neighbours selling they are gradually squeezed out of their lands, they find their fields ruined by the wash from the highland opened for cultivation above them”. Sewell pleaded for an immediate legislation to stop sales “for the low country middleman or Moorman is making large profits by buying at low prices and re-selling to Europeans”, and “prevent the serious evils which must ensue from the displacement of a large a number or native landowners and their conversion into casual labourers”. He added: “It is notorious that the planters will not as a rule accept and work Sinhalese labour – especially the Kandyan villagers – and the inevitable result must be the increase of crime and theft of praedial produce”[26]

Madure korale had features similar to Kägalla district: it attracted the attention of European planters between 1890 and 1910. Its center was the upper valley of the Deduru Oya, from its springs to the well-known locality of Ridigama with its historical temple. It was partly inhabited by Kande minissu (Vahumpura), partly by Goyigama, with a few Batgam interspersed. The kandegam were considered as royal villages in the Kandyan times, the Vahumpura being in possession of highland chenas (often cultivated with älvi) for the service of furnishing jaggery and honey to the capital: all the highlands were still in the 1840s recognized private by the Revenue officers[27].

The whole Madure korale became the hunting ground of various land brokers, mostly Europeans (especially the Farquharsons), in association with local headmen (Palipana), who were acting for the big managing agency Finlay Muir, with the assistance of the legal firm De Sarams.  The process was quite similar to that which had taken place in the Kägalla district during the previous years, and was characterized by the considerable extent of gardens and even paddy fields included in the sales. The sales to Europeans for the years 1894, 1895 and 1896 were as follows: 3,149 acres of chenas sold 28,667 Rs (9.10 Rs an acre); 214 acres of gardens sold 5,157 Rs (24.07 Rs an acre); 84 acres of gardens and chenas and paddy fields sold 1,193 Rs (14.10 Rs an acre). And in addition 141 acres of paddy fields and 15 acres of houses and gardens. The large extent of gardens and paddy fields is to be noted, this was quite unusual in such circumstances[28].

In Madure korale, the largest land buyers were the members of a Scottish family, A.J. and R.J Farquharson, who were followed by other members of the same family, George Fraser and Francis G. Farquharson.  Niyangama, a Batgam Duraya locality, was totally absorbed by an estate: there  the Farquharsons purchased between July 1891 and April 1896 an area of 172 acres, allegedly for 5,010 Rs, which included 11 acres of houses and gardens, 31 acres of gardens, 11 acres of gardens and chenas, and 118 acres of chenas. The local headmen (the korala, Palipana Meduma Banda, and the ex-aracci and the vel-duraya) sold their lands and acted as intermediaries to sell first chenas belonging to Batgam people;  the estate later extended with sales of gardens and houses between August 1892 and July 1893 at a rate up to 100 Rs an acre (in the deeds, but probably much less). Further north, in the localities of Padeniya, Mahawela, Akolagomuwa and Madige Malbe, the Farquharsons purchased from May 1895 to September 1896 some 450 acres for 4,930 Rs, including 23 acres of gardens, 8 of fields, 84 of fields, gardens and chenas, and 334 of chenas. The sellers were Goyigama and Muslims in Malbe, and Palipana served as middleman, purchasing for 110 Rs chenas in 1893 and reselling them to the Farquharsons for 817.75 Rs Another Palipana, P.B. Palipana Ratemahatmaya, acted as intermediary in the sale of Bolagama (Goyigama village), Elawissa and Mayamulla (Duraya villages), which were purchased by him for 620 Rs for 364 acres (6 acres of fields and gardens and 357 acres of chenas sold 1.34 Rs per acre), between May 1894 and May 1896.

Another landgrabber was W.L. Strachan, also active in the Kägalla district. He purchased from the peasants and also from the local monk, between January 1894 and September 1896, 404 acres (including 4 acres of gardens) for 3,337 Rs in the localities of Moratuwa, Dunukewatta, Mitenwala. In Panagamuwa (a Muslim village), Rambodagalla, Ogodapola (Vahumpura), the purchasers were the North and South Sylhet Tea Companies which acquired 1,028 acres paid 11,859 Rs (10 to 15 Rs per acre), including 50 acres of fields and 94 acres of gardens, an enormous amount, between August 1894 and August 1896, from various sellers, including numerous Moormen, large Goyigama landowners (notably Tikiri Banda Delwita, 111 acres) and some Vahumpuras : the Delwita estate was as a result a patchwork : this is very characteristic of these estates made up entirely of village sales.  

Pitiakande estate was purchased from villagers by Edmund Scott and Frank Shelley who paid 3,079 Rs for 400 acres including 4 acres of gardens, between 1894 and 1896, from Goyigama villagers of Kotikapola and later Duraya villagers of Rambatta and Mitenwala, including a vel-duraya and a washerman. Another purchaser, J. Manley Power, had acquired 64 acres at 1,946 Rs, and this included 18 acres of gardens and 2 of paddy fields, near Kotikapola. In Ellagonna and Talahengoda 286 acres were purchased by F.W. Harper and F. Watson Davidson, including 62 acres of fields and 26 acres of gardens. And at Etagahawela, one A. Melville White purchased 216 acres (including 5 acres of paddy fields), through the intermediary of Alfred Gaspar Herat, for 2,595 Rs.

Delwita is one of the best documented cases of large estates built up by land purchases from villagers[29]. In 1904, the Controller of Revenue, Ellis, undertook a settlement of the estate’s claims. The Surveyor General sent his deputy, Ferdinands, to inspect Delwita; he was apparently in the best terms with the superintendent of Delwita, Long Price, and wrote that “the settlement should be an easy one with so many facilities placed at the disposal of the Settlement officer”. But Ellis was not prepared to be lax in the matter, and considered that “this is a typical case of large property formed by purchases from villagers, which should be considered as a test case of the working of the Waste Lands Ordinance”. The estate owned 1,846 acres, entirely purchased from villagers by A.J. Farquarson who resold them to the Finlay Muir business. As usual, De Sarams were managing the legal interests of the firm and they sent to the Assistant settlement officer Fox “a trunk containing the Delwita Estate deeds, there are between 500 and 600 of them, most date from 1894-1898”. The settlement proposed by Ellis recognized 597 acres of paddy fields, old gardens and reasonable percentage of appurtenances to be settled on Certificates of Quiet Possession and asked the estate to pay from 10 Rs to 20Rs per acre for the rest, adding that the Crown would not defend the estate against village claimants as it could not ascertain whether all village claims had been purchased by it. Finlay Muir transmitted the refusal of the settlement by the successors of Farquarson, but accepted to pay 17,507 Rs; however the Certificate of Quiet Possession was not issued until December 1912.

In a report of March 1906, the Kurunegala agent informed the government that the superintendent of Delwita was felling 400 acres of forest “apparently outside the settlement, in the village of Reddagoda”, that Farquarson was doing the same near Malbe, and that the superintendent of Nelahella was felling 100 acres of forest. He asked for a general settlement of the whole valley of Madure korale : “the rush for rubber land is so great that it is evident that planters and speculators are not going to wait any longer and are felling freely in all directions, trusting to luck as to the consequence. The land in Madure korale is about the most promising and valuable rubber land in the province.”

Finally, the Settlement department resurveyed in the 1930s several villages of the valley and found that most villagers were practically landless and lived on rubber tapping on the estates, which was curtailed as a result of the great depression[30]. Buluwalakanda was described as follows in May 1931: “One of the largest villages in the korale, a large part occupied by part of the Shakerley estate on title plans. The village lies on the slopes of a steep hill, land is very rocky. I think that the villagers might find it difficult to pay for their settlements because they depend for ready cash on employment in the estate which is now nearly closed. The villagers own no paddy fields. About half the village was sold 20 years ago to the estate”. A few years later, in Niyangama (Pinnapota hamlet), there was “little chena land in the village, ¾ of the village is paddy land, the highlands consist of old gardens. The area under notice was keenly claimed owing to the scarcity of any available highland. In one case, an extent of 6 perches was settled on 6 persons. Many of the villagers find employment in the neighbouring Keppitigala estate, Population 190 for 230 acres of which 150 acres are paddy, 45 families mostly of the Batgam Duraya caste”.

The position taken by Ellis had an echo in the nearby district of Matale, where two influential European land grabbers, Anderson and Malcolmson, who had asked for Certificates of quiet possession for land purchased from villagers, felt threatened. As Europeans, they believed they could obtain the indulgence of the colonial government. In the case of Anderson, the position of Ellis was uncompromising. The file ‘Anderson claims’[31] begins with a minute by Ellis (26.04.1904) dealing with the claim of James Anderson, the owner of Gansarapola / Bandarapola estates, which Ellis considered to be a test case.  “I advise that Mr. Anderson be informed that the Crown is not prepared at present to issue a Certificate of quiet possession (…) This is merely the precursor of much larger similar claims (…) Mr. Anderson has purchased these lands probably at a nominal figure, land which is really the property of the Crown (…) These purchases involved a double fraud: the Crown is deprived of its land, which properly belongs to it, and the people of the use of the land for chena and grazing purposes. If one villager sells land which was in this way occupied by himself and ten others, the latter have no redress, they cannot claim the land because it belongs to the Crown and no one therefore has a locus standi to eject the purchaser (…) There is some reason to suppose that in the past there has not been sufficient check exercised by government over the alienation by private parties of land of this description (…) The question is simply whether the laxity is to be continued. If it is, it will involve to giving up of probably half the land in the North Western province and three quarters of the land in Ratnapura. I cannot for a moment advise this wholesale abandonment of Crown right especially when it is borne in mind that the benefit will accrue no to the villager, who will in all probability sustain severe loss, but to foreign speculators, who will, not improbably, resell at a fair price when they had bought it at an inadequate one, and who will do this on the strength of a title which government, entirely disapproving of the sale, has given to them (…) Anderson  now asks government to give him a good title for his defective one, and thereby allow him to secure for himself the difference between what he paid for the land and its true value. It seems clear that the difference in justice belongs to the villagers and not to Mr Anderson [author’s emphasis]. I cannot see how the fact that a man has succeeded in inducing the headmen not to report a clearing, or the fact that the Revenue Officer has delayed in holding an inquiry into the matter, can in any way alter the occupant’s title.”

The other speculator, Joseph Malcolmson, was an Anglo-Irish Quaker turned missionary, who attempted to use his status to exert an influence in favour of the planter’s lobby. His exchange of letters with the colonial administration offers a typical example of the colonial discourse at the beginning of the 20th century[32]:  

“The action of Government in the North Western Province with regard to native lands has caused considerable disquiet amongst planters in this district, and will certainly do so amongst capitalists at home. Though I am now a missionary and I am not directly connected with business except so far as being owner of this estate [Clodagh], I have a great many friends and connections at home who are very considerably engaged therein, and I know how they and other possible investors will be influenced by the action taken. Not long ago I was spoken to regarding the possibility of one of the Cadbury family coming to the island and acquiring land for cocoa. The Cadburys have I believe cocoa estates in other countries and are as you probably know one of the largest cocoa firms in the world. I also know the heads of the firm of J.S. Fry and co, Bristol, and Rowntrees of York, both very largely interested in this product, as well as others who are very largely interested in tea; some of them are already owners of estates in the island. I am quite sure these men, who are cautious but at the same time enterprising men of business, could be greatly if not entirely dissuaded from investing in new estates in Ceylon by the fear that the government might step in and claim their purchase, when it is considered that land which costs say 20 Rs., takes 300 to 400Rs. to bring into bearing in tea or cocoa. There is a considerable amount of land in the Matale district suitable for planting cocoa, coconuts and rubber, but it is mostly in native hands and is of little benefit to anyone at present, being under chena cultivation only. I need hardly throw Your Excellency’s attention to the general benefit that arises when such land is opened up and planted. An estate of the size of this (800 acres opened) pays about 7,500 Rs a year in rail freights, in some cases more, say about 10 Rs per cultivated acre. I have paid during some years over 15,000 Rs per annum in wages to the Sinhalese villagers, apart from carpenters, carters and contractors employed, and Tamil coolies’ wages, which are mainly spent in the district. The villages adjoining the estate, when I came first, were exceedingly unhealthy, fever, dysentery, etc. constantly prevailing. Since the land has been opened, they are as healthy as any in the district (…)

No one can blame the Crown for claiming land which has been undoubtedly encroached on, but lands which have been held by villagers for generations without dispute, and have been bought in good faith for estates from them while the Government has been quiescent, ought certainly not to be subject to dispute and disturbance. I may say that my own investment here was on the faith of Sir West Ridgeway statement to the Matale planters eight years ago [1896]. His words are well remembered by me and can no doubt be referred to, “that bona fide investors and planters had nothing to fear from the Waste Lands Ordinance, that it was only directed against land speculators and middlemen; and that Certificates of quiet possession would be given without difficulty”. How difficult these are to obtain is well known and from the nature of the case it must be so. It would take the Assistant Agent some weeks to inquire into all my title deeds for instance of which I have some 300 to 400, though I believe not one piece of my land has ever been claimed by the Crown, except the Crown land I have bought in the usual way at the kacceri sales (…) As you are aware the largest portion of lands bought from villagers are held by them under piya uruma [ancestral heritage] and Government can easily dispute such title (…) I cannot conceive of anyone either purchasing for himself as a bona fide planter or acting in good faith for his employer, speculating as you suggest (…) If he was a man of any substance, he would rarely take such a risk, and I feel sure few Europeans would do so. I do not dispute that such may be done by Moor traders and Low country Sinhalese. I do not think I have ever come across a case of a Kandyan doing so (…) My position as a Sinhalese missionary [sic] brings me into close touch with the Kandyans and I can positively state that ancestral lands are well known to the people”.

Malcolmson pointed the problem resulting from the frequent change of Revenue officers “I communicated with the Assistant Government Agent and told him what boundaries I wished to buy within, and asked him ‘was any land belonging to the Crown?’;  he informed me that he would take no responsibility and that I must find out for myself. Mr E.B. Alexander was the first Assistant Government Agent that I could get information from and he came down here and took great pains to investigate doubtful pieces on more than one occasion (…) I would far rather buy from the Crown than from the villagers, but there is almost no good land in the hands of the Crown in this district. We are compelled to buy from the villagers or not at all.”[33]

Storey, Chairman of the Matale Planter’s Association, exchanged simultaneously letters with the Colonial Secretary in September 1904, who answered that intending purchasers could ascertain from Government if a land was Crown land, that after Kurunegala, Matale would be taken up by the Land Settlement department, and that “until each case has been considered on its merits, Government does not propose to issue Certificates of quiet possession”. Storey insisted that “if carried out to the letter, it will affect thousands of acres of land in the Matale valley, and the owners thereof could ill afford to pay even 10Rs an acre for such lands (…) In the case of the estates Muwagala and Owitikande (…) held mainly on native titles purchased in good faith by me (…) will you kindly give me a letter assuring me of government’s no intention of contesting our claims to same, similar to the document or letter given to Mr James Anderson on behalf of the owners of Gansarapola estate by Mr Im Thurn”.

Ellis, in a note to the Governor, developed his position: “Government is not prepared to depart from the policy previously communicated (…) It does not feel called upon to supplement the titles which capitalists have considered sufficiently strong to justify investment as the land has probably been bought below its value on account of the weakness of the title.(…) Mr. Storey’s letter is full of humour. He first states as a threat or warning that planters will cease to buy lands on native titles, this being the very object with which the circular issued. He then predicts the practical ruin of the villager”. Storey should send a schedule of his deeds and then trace the title to the original owner: “It is a common practice for low country men and other unprincipled speculators to go round the villages collecting signatures on native deeds which they use to form the basis of a subsequent transfer to the planter”

The enquiry of the Assistant Agent at Matale (25.11.1904) concluded that Malcolmson had paid a fair price for the lands but revealed that there were many cultivated lands included in the estate, just as in the case of Delwita: 348 lots purchased from 441 persons covering 1,075 acres, were paid 45.77 Rs. an acre. The larger lots, 165 acres in all, were purchased in 1897-1898, they were paid 41 Rs. per acre: “all appear to have been old gardens, some with coconut trees over 20 years old, except one claimed as appurtenance to a field; coffee had previously been planted on much of the land and there are on some lots old houses or sites of houses; as regards the other lots generally inquired into, it will be seen that they include fields.” Malcolmson had purchased mainly from Low country men and not from Kandyans: one lot from Abraham Appuhami, the schoolmaster of Kaikawela, his wife and other family members who themselves had house and coconut trees; another from Lokuge Alwis Silva who declared that he bought the land in 1873 from the (Kandyan) aracci Koralegedara Appuhami, another from Samuel Appuhami “It was old paddy field or small garden, purchased from 100 to 200 Rs per acre. These lands have been planted by me with tea and coconut and rubber at different dates from 1897 on”. Other intermediaries, Welgamage Simon and David Appuhami “bought the land to sell to Mr. Malcolmson, including small paddy fields (about 13 acres)”; and one Wickramasekere who claimed upon a fiscal transfer”. On the basis of this enquiry, Ellis was compelled to admit Malcolmson’s claims (minute of 10.02.1905) but added: “it could be noted that for a good deal of the land claimed by Mr. Malcolmson, title deeds have been issued by Crown (but) he apparently has no bought from the persons who received the deeds; this however is not a matter in which the Crown is interested”.  

In his annual report for 1905, Hellings, the new Assistant Government Agent, underlined the social effects of such the land sales[34] : “Sales of whole chenas by some of the shareholders only; many of these transactions occurred years ago; the chenas were recently cleared by the purchasers, and the co-owners who did not join in the sale found themselves compelled to accept such compensation if any as the purchaser chose to offer, or to enter upon a costly action at law against perhaps a wealthy company. This involved hardships on poor people. I did what I could to promote fair settlements”

 

The Settlement department facing land speculation by Ceylonese entrepreneurs : the first Kurunegala meeting (June 1904)

There was a geographical and historical continuum between traditional coconut cultivation in small holdings in the coastal areas (Chilaw / Negombo) and its extension in the interior (Kurunegala). But investment in large scale coconut cultivation was not a peasant activity: it became between 1880 and 1930 the main field of investment for the emerging bourgeoise hailing from the coastal areas, from Chilaw to Panadura via Negombo, Colombo and Moratuwa. Quite often belonging to the Karawa caste, these investors had accumulated a capital through arrack distillery or tavern renting, trade and the professions, and could hardly access the European banks. Rich Muslim traders were also in the field. Following their example, smaller investors, such as clerks and government employees, opened medium scale coconut estates with borrowed money. The Nattukottai Chettiar merchant bankers from South India (Chettinad) established at that time hundreds of small agencies in the district to finance the development of coconut estates. Their implantation in Ceylon dated from the mid-19th century: they acted as money changers for the coffee planters and the Tamil coolies up-country, and after the collapse of coffee by 1880 they partly converted their activity to money lending to Ceylonese on mortgage[35].

Among the pioneer Karawa entrepreneurs stand out the De Soysas, who had already entered the plantation business up-country in the mid 19th century during the coffee area, and continued to do so in rubber and coconut areas of the mid-country after 1900. The Lenawa case[36] offers an early example of the trend: in this remote area of Hiriyala (north of the Kurunegala district), the elder son of C.H. de Soysa, J.W.C. de Soysa, in association with one Mr. Whitehead, had purchased five entire villages (1168 acres) from Thomas Benjamin Lenawa in 1899, including paddy fields and chenas, and started planting on forest and chenas “claimed by the villagers on deeds as the paraveni appurtenances of their fields: no highlands were thus left to villagers who complained (…) They continue to chena and grow tobacco on highlands and dispute the right of De Soysa ». The Settlement officers therefore allowed the villagers some highlands (134 acres on the condition that they reach an agreement with De Soysa) – but they were opposed by the De Soysas who were influent in Colombo (“hopes to obtain better terms from H.E. the Governor”) and wanted them to lower the price they asked for the offer of a Certificate of quiet possession for the Lenawa estate (17,900 Rs for 998 acres)”.  In 1936 when the village was surveyed for mapping out there was absolutely no Crown land left: “Lenawakanda from which the villagers had been in habit of obtaining their fence sticks and creepers had been settled in 1906 on Lenawa estate”

The colonial administration was more alert to the activities of the Ceylonese land speculators in coconut than in the case of European land grabbing in Madure. The governors Henry Arthur Blake (December 1903 to July 1907) and Henry McCallum (August 1907 to January 1913) had to manage the agitation created by the government policy in the Kurunegala district. The starting point of the whole affair was a petition of “landowners and proprietors of estates” of the Kurunegala district led by Jacob de Mel[37], Clovis de Silva and others, dated 10.10.1903 (just before the governor West Ridgeway left), in which the petitioners expressed their dissatisfaction of the land policy of the Government Agent, S.M. Burrows, who attempted to control the sale of village lands as he had done a few years before when he was in charge of the Matale district. They asked – paradoxically, the government to bring the district under the Land settlement department and entrust the work to Fraser. The government answered that it would treat liberally the paraveni owners but strictly scrutinize the claims of “the persons who, by purchasing such lands, have ejected the original proprietors”.

A few months later, the Controller of Revenue, Ellis, went to Kurunegala to find out by himself the situation[38]. Ellis position was to defend Crown rights uncompromisingly, his approach was that of a legist and an accountant: “As far as I could discover, the land business in the North Western Province is in a more unsatisfactory state than in any other part of the island (…) Everyone seems to have taken possession of any land that he thought suitable for his purposes (…) The usual mode of procedure has been as follows: any person, native or European, who wished to become possessed of an estate and had a small capital, selected a certain block of land and obtained a transfer for it from anyone who was willing to sign the deed (…) The land was then cleared. If the matter was reported, the occupant forwarded his transfers and, in some cases, the Ratemahatmaya reported that the land was chena; this was considered sufficient to justify the tacit abandonment of all claims on behalf of the Crown. In many cases the cultivation was not reported, but the claimant himself when he had cleared and planted the land got it surveyed by a private surveyor and applied for a Certificate of quiet possession which in many instances was granted to him (…) In this way many estates varying in extent from 3,000 to 2,000 acres have been acquired without the payment of one rupee to government, by the simple process of giving a trifling sum to some villager who may or may not have had a small interest in the land.” In the area between Wariyapola and the Kurunegala-Negombo road – the heart of what was to become the ‘coconut triangle’: “the whole country seemed to have been planted within the last few years, say since 1896. On enquiring who were the planters, I found that with few exceptions they were non-residents who had taken possession of the land in the manner indicated above. Mr J.G. de Silva has already taken a Certificate of quiet possession for over 300 acres and now applies for 340 acres more”. Quoting the case of a Kurunegala shopkeeper, and of Mr Modder, a resident of Kurunegala, (“who had bought land on a writ issued against some Tamil man”) “it has I believe been the practice in Kurunegala tacitly to waive Crown rights with reference to chenas and to allow the villagers the temporary use either of chenas where the paddy crop was insufficient for their maintenance, or as appurtenance of their fields (…) this cannot however be constructed into the abandonment of Crown rights when the villagers have shown that the possession of these lands is in no way necessary to them”

Ellis concluded: “I advise that an offer be made to the occupants of a grant at 10 Rs an acre for all the lands planted prior to 1899 (…) For the lands cultivated or purchased since 1900, I would advise that 15 Rs be demanded for cultivated and 20 Rs for uncultivated land (…) For the future I advise that the Ratemahatmayas be informed that they will be held strictly responsible for failure to report at once any clearing (…) I believe from what I have seen that chena cultivation is much less extensive than it used to be, and if the land which I inspected were really old chenas, the representations made by scientists and others as to the injury done to the soil by this species of cultivation must be considerably exaggerated (…) The villager at all events can have no cause of complaint at the resumption by the Crown of land which he himself has already alienated.” Ellis failed to understand that only some of the villagers had sold, while all had use of the highlands; another factual element is that in the Kurunegala district there was a gradual transition between the intermediate zone, where chenas were a supplement to paddy and garden and the dry zone, where they were the main source of food especially when paddy crops failed: it was therefore difficult to impose a uniform rule.

In the case of the coconut lands of Kurunegala, the Governor decided to publicize the decision to settle lands at a price on the basis of Ellis advice: 3,000 copies were printed in Sinhala and a few in English together with oral instructions to headmen (“held strictly responsible for failure to report at once any clearing ”) but also with the recommendation to be lenient and use the ordinance of 1897 and not that of 1840. The publication of the notice created a commotion, but interestingly enough it is group of estate proprietors distinct from the petitioners of 1903 who reacted. Most but not all of them were anglicized Kandyans, their leaders were T.B.L. Moonemalle and G.E. Madawela, together with C.F. Markus, a Burgher lawyer.  They held a public meeting at the Kurunegala town hall (4.06.1904), and sent a resolution to the private secretary of the Governor, in which they made out that the unsigned notice distributed by the kacceri “will involve a large majority of villagers in absolute ruin (…) One question only for a series of years has disturbed our equanimity, namely the tenure of land in this district. It seems to have been a mistake from the beginning”. The ordinance of 1840 had never really been enforced in Kurunegala and the courts “recognized the distinction between Crown lands and private chenas” and often issued Certificates of quiet possession for the latter; this proclamation “has been flown among us like a bombshell (…) That you have opened up lands and planted them at great cost, increasing thereby the wealth and importance of the district, and that you have largely employed native labour, and put into circulation among them money, whereby their condition has been materially improved, will not be considered”. Commenting on the report of the Government Agent Burrows (15.06.1904) on this meeting, Ellis asserted that “there is no intention of government to interfere just at present with the system of chena cultivation”, but to prevent the alienation of highlands to outsiders. Another meeting was held on 30.07.1904 by the Kurunegala Planter’s Association which condemned the action of government ‘as unconstitutional’ in stronger terms[39].

Blake, under the influence of European planters whose interests in the Kurunegala and Matale districts were similar to those of the Ceylonese petitioners, finally gave an oral promise that the administration would recognize the principle of appurtenance of chena lands to paddy fields on a ‘3 to 1’ basis in the North Western province, and this offer was the starting point of a long opposition between the Land settlement department and the central government.

 

The controversial history of the “appurtenances to paddy fields” and the “3 to 1 settlements”

The introduction of the principle of appurtenance was the result of the pressure put on the Settlement department by the Kurunegala petitioners. The history of the case is given in a letter sent by the Settlement Officer to the Colonial secretary (12.10.1929), where he regrets that the issue has not been raised before the Land commission[40]. “The origin is a speech made by Sir H. Blake at Kurunegala on 6.02.1906. There is I believe no official record of this speech, but according to newspapers reports of this time, a deputation consisting of Mr T.B.L. Moonemalle, G.E. Madawela and T.B. Delwita waited upon H.E.” stated that “it had always been recognized fact that the owners of paddy land had from time immemorial possessed highlands as appurtenances to their paddy fields” and went on to urge that the people “be allowed to retain their highlands without payment of the high rates demanded and that a Certificate of quiet possession in respect of such lands be issued to them on payment of survey fees to Govt”. Blake answered that “all officers have been instructed to concede highlands in the proportion of 3 to 1 of paddy land”. “No such instruction had, as a matter of fact, been issued to this Department, and the method of settlement adumbrated in this speech was at that time wholly unknown and a complete innovation and I believe that the Settlement Officer of this period, sir John Fraser, had no previous intimation of a proposed change of policy. Therefore, until the present day, the 3 to 1 system has been in operation in those parts of the Kurunegala district (and not elsewhere: this is underlined by the papers of the 3rd interim report of the Land Commission quoting the letter of the Colonial Secretary to the Government Agent Central Province, 20.04.1912, excluding the Matale district from the benefit of the promise) where chenas are claimed. In the case the villagers prefer a 3 to 1 settlement, there is no survey and no individual settlement but a global area of chenas is allowed free to the villagers as a group. The application of the 3 to 1 system is the source of difficulties, because they have been clearly exploited by purchasers of land to develop coconut cultivation and that it gave rise to endless disputes. Among these purchasers of village title figure chief headmen such as C.E. Tennakoon (Devamedi Hatpattu), who acted as middleman for Mr. Dias Bandaranaike and Proctor Paul”[41].

The historical argument of the Kurunegala petitioners is corroborated by a few texts of the 19th century unknown to them. In discussions regarding the Waste lands ordinance of 1840[42] in which the Kurunegala agent said that “scarcely any land in this district is held upon sannas or grant, and more particularly of the original possessors. Many lands are held by deeds of purchase from the ancestors of those who have no documents whatever for the remaining portions of their lands. The decisions in these cases will therefore affect a very large proportion of the property in this district as it is only in the upper part that paddy has ever been cultivated on high ground which have been taxed (…) Each field has always been considered to have a certain portion of high ground attached to it”. In a further letter, Morris raised the issue of the kandegam – the villages inhabited by jaggery caste villagers, who had no documents to prove their ownership of highlands, but should be recognized by virtue of tradition.  In 1884 it was still accepted by the administration: “The jaggery caste people owned no paddy land and only occupied gardens as tenants of a Vellala landlord. Yet I have seen claims admitted to chenas claimed as appurtenant to the arambas of the jaggery caste people”.  In other districts, the principle of appurtenances was also accepted: in Madulla village, Nuwara Eliya, in 1869, the administrator, Braybrooke considered “that highland should be allowed in the village in the proportion of 2 to 1 or higher according to the local custom and the nature of the soil”; and in 1927 the Settlement officer finds that “there are evidences of settlements on these lines”. According to Hulugalle, Ratemahatmaya of Dewamedi Hatpattu the rule 3 to 1 was the result of an undated conference between Braybrooke, Government Agent Central Province and Kandyan chiefs, but in Kurunegala there was no fixed proportion. [43]

The appurtenance principle was always unpopular with the settlement officers. Fraser wrote in 1903[44] : “there being no such things as appurtenances to fields, the best basis in determining the land to be given is in ascertaining the area required to produce a sufficient supply of food for the claimants and their families”.  One year after the Blake promise, at the request of Fraser, Brodhurst, the Controller of Revenue, wrote to the Colonial Secretary to suggest that 3 to 1 settlements be no longer offered and that settlements should be done by the Revenue officers only in cases of great urgency and on the principles of the Settlement department: “The villagers are not so much interested in the question of appurtenances for ranges of paddy fields as in securing a clear title from the Crown for each individual holding (…) The general recognition of appurtenances, especially where they have been alienated, is likely to give rise to untenable claims and consequent dissatisfaction as there are cases in which rights to appurtenances did not exist”[45]. The government answered by the negative.

In practice, the Settlement officers advised the claimants to prefer either individual settlements which gave definite title to land, or chena reserves, but they often met with the opposition of the headmen and the reluctance of the peasants. Brayne, when he was Assistant settlement officer, vividly described the process:[46] “I was present at an interview between the Settlement officer and C.E. Tennakoon, the Ratemahatmaya of Devamedi Hatpattu, at which the Settlement officer carefully explained to him the two methods of settlement now definitely approved by Government in this district, viz. the grant of appurtenances – a concession in land; or instead an all-round concession in price. The Ratemahatmaya finally expressed his opinion that the terms were ‘more than liberal’. An old ex-aracci of Dehikumbura was the called in. He had no land of his own but seemed to consider he held a brief from his fellow villagers, and had petitioned government that they should be granted appurtenances. The Settlement officer carefully explained matters to him, showing him how in this part of the district where a great deal of land was planted the all-round concession in price was very much more to the advantage of the people than the grant of appurtenances. The ex-aracci pretended to think that the people might get appurtenances and an all-round concession in price as well. The SO made quite clear to him they he could net eat his plantain twice, and he said that his people would choose concession in price”. The story is recounted by Fraser in a private and confidential correspondence in which he mentions that Tennekoon had purchased from the villagers and sold to one Miss Wodehouse, and that the demand for a 3 to 1 settlement by the ex-aracci was “instigated by someone behind the scenes”. He suggests that “the concession of highlands to owners of paddy fields is made in the interests of paddy cultivation (…) if such lands are diverted from the purpose for which they were granted, the land is to revert to the Crown, for example if they are planted with coconuts they will cease to be appurtenances; and that when the demand is made by a majority of field owners for a settlement on the 3 to 1 basis, the whole village will be dealt with on that system and no application will be entertained to a reversion to the other system”[47] .

According to other settlement officers, “The more I see of the results of the 3 to 1 provision, the more I realize how unfortunate that promise was. In the first place, a large acreage is admitted private and the villagers have a heritage of disputes concerning the division, or else, as this is done in most cases, they sell the lands to some speculator who plants coconut. The villager has a temporary benefit as he receives a certain amount of money, but in 2 or 3 years he is worse off than he was.  Then, no chena at all. Consequently the 3 to 1 settlement is not in the interest of the villager. A chena reserve is Crown land and the villager enjoys the right of re-cultivation”. “From a government point of view, a 3 to 1 settlement is a sheer waste of time and money, for the villagers, it is the beginning of litigation and trouble”. Stace showed the class implications of the choice to the villagers and asserted the position of the colonial administration: “I explained in detail the options, between 3 to 1 settlement and individual settlements, the disadvantages of the former and the advantages of the latter. After I had finished two of the chief men of the village at once rose and demanded a 3 to 1 settlement. The others were silent. Then I pointed out to the crowd that it was in the interest of the two powerful men of the village to ask for 3 to 1 settlement since they could seize whatever chena land they liked and the other villagers would be pushed out. I said that this matter was not going to be decided by the wishes of the first two speakers but by a majority of claimants and I asked the rest what they had to say. With one accord they called for individual settlements and so it was decided”.[48]

In 1926, Madawela raised before the Legislative Council the question whether the Settlement Officer always offered the villager the 3 to 1 option.  Hodson, the Government Agent at Kurunegana, answered in an official letter to the Colonial secretary explaining the options offered: either 3 to 1 free, or 3 or more to 1 as chena reserve, or land sold in individual shares at 20 Rs maximum per acre. The last option according to him was preferred in the wet zone, and the second in the driest zone; the only case where the appurtenance system was regularly adopted was in the case of the pillewas close to the paddy fields. In his diary he reiterated his  position in favour of individual settlements and against the projects of communal lands: “ In a few cases, the villagers have sold to capitalists chena lands which were admitted private by the S.O. but as a rule they did not part with any lands to which the SO gave them individual title (…) A villager complained that 1 ½ acre of his land had been sold to a capitalist by another man, and the capitalist had forcibly fenced it: another Victor Corea case, but I hope to get the capitalist to disgorge without recourse to court”. The same Hodson, in his Administration report for 1928, wrote that “the villager is ready enough to part with his sometimes shadowy and always vaguely defined claims to unsettled land, but he is extremely loath to part with land settled on him to which he has good title. I have therefore found little need for using the ‘peasant-proprietor’ system in disposing of Crown land to villagers, except in a few cases where the village lands are hemmed in by estates which are anxious to expand”[49].

After the reforms of 1930, the social implications of the 3 to 1 offer were still apparent[50].  “All the claimants except an e-aracci preferred a settlement according to claims. The ex-aracci had recently planted up more than his share and would no doubt have continued to plant a further acreage, had a 3 to 1 settlement been made. It is interesting to note that the villagers are gradually opening up most of the chena land in permanent products and the only sales to outsiders amount to about 2 acres. In the surrounding villages most of the lands except old gardens and fields, and sometimes even old gardens and fields, have passed into the hands of outsiders within recent years”. In that case outsiders were taken away by the enterprise of ‘koulaks’.  But the domination of a few enterprising individual could lead to violence: “Villagers stated they had violent quarrels over land disputes and a 3 to 1 settlement would they said reduce their population quickly by the number of fatal affrays over land questions”. In April 1934, Rasaretnam noticed “the inclination of the average villager to ask for a 3 to 1 settlement. The reasons appear to be: 1. Poverty, 2. Desire to get land free 3. A mistaken idea that the Crown is benefitting pecuniarily from individual settlements 4. The desire of the rich landlord or bully to squat on more land than his lawful share 5. The desire of the unscrupulous villager to sell land for which he has no claim 6. The anxiety of the village capitalist to lay claim to village chena for which he has paid and to which he vendor has not a justifiable claim”. In his opinion,  3 to 1 settlements should be restricted to cases of real poverty. In 1936, the Ellepola wrote: “I am of opinion that the preference of 3 to 1 settlement is at the instigation of the more influential people of the village (Illukpitiya). On such a settlement they will continue to possess the land themselves to the detriment of the interests of the weaker and more ignorant among them. This appears to be how the land is possessed in the village at present (…) The complaint of inability to pay individual settlements seems a myth” He succeeded in convincing the villagers after 2 months that individual settlements were in their interest.

 

Charting settlement work: the second Ellis memorandum and the Fraser report (1906-1907)

After the Kurunegala meeting, the department continued to systematically organize its work in the coconut areas of the district and confront numerous speculative claims. In December 1904, the Settlement officer Fraser wrote in his diary[51]: “The usual North Western Province speculative type: 1,059 acres in 9 villages on either side of the Deduru Oya near the confluence with the Maguru Oya. Mr. Dandasekera bought these lands from the villagers and resold 1/3rd of it to Mr. Scott (…) who sold ½ of it to Mr. Van der Poorten”. In immediate proximity, the department had spotted another speculation[52]: “Gonagama coconut estate is claimed by H.H.J. Pieris on the basis of 30 acts (1895-96), 6 villages, more than 1,000 acres, one third or one quarter cultivated in coconut. Includes an old gangoda (village cluster). The land purchased includes old gardens and paddy fields, chenas and forest, but consists mainly of the latter two”.

By the end of 1906, Ellis, who was to relinquish his office, sent privately and directly to the Colonial Office a second long and detailed memorandum[53] including guidelines for his successor, in which he explained the settlement process, expressed auto-satisfaction on the success of the settlement operations (contrary to the persisting critique of the Kurunegala memorialists) and developed his views on the origin and nature of land ownership and the legal value of titles.  “Fiscal transfers, because they are executed by Government officers, are sometimes regarded almost in the light of Crown grants. Such view is totally erroneous. Prescription is established only by uninterrupted possession for 30 years, that is when a chena has been transformed into garden or field. The claims on the basis of ‘appurtenances’ are accepted by an act of grace, as a right to use and not as a right to possess: the ‘3 to 1’ rule (allowing 3 acres of highlands for 1 acre of mudlands) is just indicative and can be increased: in point of fact, the smaller the amount of paddy with the Kandyan family, the larger may be the extent of appurtenance which it may require for its maintenance (…) The extent of land which the villager has already alienated or converted into garden must be taken into consideration (…) and it is usual to make allowance to the requirements of the poorest by assigning to them limited extents”.

Ellis explained the working of the settlement: verification of titles, genealogies, determination of limits in the field, and then “fair offer by the settlement officer”, and noted that when the settlement was made by a revenue officer, reports by headmen instead of personal enquiries, were usually accepted as conclusive, which was absolutely unsatisfactory. The question of who effects the settlement depended on the nature of the claims. The head of the department took up cases “in which capitalists, whether European or native, have purchased lands alleged to be chenas from villagers”; Ellis quoted the Delwita case, in which the sellers admitted they did not know what they had sold; “in many cases, especially in Ratnapura, the villager has been careful to sell nothing to which he could set up any reasonable claim (…) in addition to this, the deeds obtained from the villagers are in the majority of cases defective and self-contradictory”; in such settlements work was made heavy : a mass of acts had to be analysed, private surveys usually inaccurate to be checked, erroneous decisions by former Revenue Officers to be accepted (“it would be unequitable to hold purchasers responsible for the carelessness or inefficiency of government servants”). The proposed settlement was finally submitted to the Colonial Secretary and to the claimant and if he accepted it, he was given a deed precising that the government does nor guarantee his rights against those of other native claimants: the settlement did not determine the right of one individual versus another, but only the rights of a family group (actually a panguwa) versus the rights of the Crown.

According to Ellis, who criticized earlier settlements by Revenue officers, cases dealt with by Settlement officers were usually well received: “The outcry raised on various occasions by interested parties, that Government was taking possession of the ancestral lands of the people, never proceeded from the villagers or from paraveni owners. It has emanated entirely from speculators who had purchased, frequently for a nominal figure, lands belonging to the natives, often the only lands they have, but had also obtained transfers of large extents of Crown lands to which people had never asserted any claims. Such settlements take time and require field inspections instead of headmen reports; there is no short and at the same time reliable mode of settlement”. Settlements by Revenue officers had hitherto proved almost total failures: the kacceries were full of unfinished enquiry files and the carelessness of the administration had encouraged the swelling of spurious claims and petty encroachments which grew from year to year with the complicity of ‘village proctors’. To get rid of these land problems, the Revenue officers distributed Certificates of quiet possession: “the insertion of the magic letters CQP in the plan or the record was the most effectual way of evading a land enquiry (…) Some Revenue officers are I fear unwilling to undergo the fatigue, exposure and hardship necessarily involved in a personal lot to lot inspection in remote villages and lack sufficient authority on headmen to impose the respect of the settlement by the villagers”.   

In 1906, H.R. Freeman, the Revenue officer at Kurunegala[54] recognized that “the law as what constitutes Crown waste land has not been enforced in the past: Certificates of quiet possession were given right and left on the recommendation of Agents and with the sanction of Government. Lands for which Certificates of quiet possession were given should have been settled on purchasers from villagers on payment of a fair settlement price to Government, and it required the intervention of Mr. Ellis in 1904 to indicate to everybody that land affairs were not what they should be”. He insisted on a speedy settlement of large claims[55]: “For years it had been said : the Settlement officer is going to the district, though, when he does come, it is not the burning claims, with few exceptions, which he undertakes, but block plans, where there is no particular hurry. He works I know on a proper method, whereas what is in the most insistent interest of government here is: Johannes de Mel’s claims in Gadolwakka[56]; another similar claim of the De Mels[57]; the new Delwita estate clearings; Mr. Holloway’s claim; Capt. Farquharson; Mr. Vanserslots. There is between 30,000 and 40,000 Rs of revenue in this list and possibly more”.

The same year Fox, the Assistant settlement officer, pleaded for wider powers to sell or lease Crown lands in villages already settled: according to him there was a great desire to purchase lands but the process when dealt with by the kacceri administration was impeded by the necessary recourse to headmen. In his opinion the settlement was useless if it was not followed by a continuous monitoring of village development through judicious land sales; the popularity of settlement depended on the possibility it offered the villager to obtain land when required. Such a plan would go “a long way to obliterate the recollection of the former antagonism that existed between the Crown and the subject” “The facility for the acquisition of land thus offered renders land settlement easier for us and more palatable to them. But on the completion of these villages, these facilities will cease to exist and would-be purchasers will no doubt encroach on Crown lands that they want for the cultivation of citronella and for the extension of their gardens” [58]. This proposal was opposed by most Revenue officers, notably those of the Southern and Central provinces, who felt that it would deprive their headmen of their authority, except Brayne (at Mullaitivu) and Booth (at Badulla) who stressed the necessity to have a large staff of settlement officers “ One of the most urgent needs of the colony is a speedy land settlement. The existing uncertainty (…) creates a feeling of irritation between the officers of government and all classes of the community (…) The settlement must be a fair compromise between the Crown and the subject, erring if at all on the side of generosity towards the latter”[59].

Fowler, successor to Ellis, aligned himself on the position of Governor Blake[60]: “I find that in the North western province it is generally believed that the policy of government is to prevent as far as possible the alienation of chena land, not because such alienation is illegal, but because it is desirable to keep the land available for chena cultivation. This is the sense in which the Government Agent, headmen and natives understand clause 11 of the notice of 1904. If this view is correct, I can only express my dissent from such policy, as I consider that there cannot be greater blessing than the conversion of chena into permanent cultivation of any kind. The contention that chena cultivators will become vagrants and pests carries no conviction to my mind when I see the results of the process of conversion in Kegalle, Ratnapura, Kalutara and many parts of the North western province, where chenas have been converted with plantations of coconut, tea or rubber. The people are far better off than before, with profitable employment at their doors and an improved and assured market for their field and garden produce. The people who become vagrants for the want of chenas are of the class already worthless, depending solely on desultory cultivation, and the absence of chenas is more likely than anything else to compel them to take to honest work and a settled life”.

The relations between the Settlement officer and the Revenue administration became again tense. In January 1907 Fraser sent to the governor a memorandum on the future of the Land Settlement Department which included paragraphs (14 to 26) omitted from the printed Administration Report for 1906, at the express request of governor Blake[61]. In these censored sections, he developed a strong critique of the colonial land policy: “The English government having upset or allowed to fall into disuse the land policies existing in his Eastern possessions at the time of annexation cannot escape the responsibility of substituting for these the most perfect form of land policy which our western civilization can devise. The present chaotic state of land matters in Ceylon is most unsatisfactory both to the government and to the governed”. “The question must be dealt with as a whole, the chief points being the making of the block survey, the settlement of whole claims between the Crown and private individuals, the preparation of plans showing such settlements, the gradual conversion of the block survey into a cadastral survey in connection with the registration of private title to land, the keeping up to date of the cadastral survey and the registers of titles, the question of a land tax”. Fraser finally respectfully demanded “a complete scheme for dealing with the lands of the colony” and insisted that his proposals outlined what could be the basis for “a homogenous and continuous land policy for the whole island” to prevent “the recurrence of the same deplorable state of things as has just been remedied” by the work of settlement.

The omitted paragraphs affirmed that the retransfer of settled villages to Revenue officers “would be a retrograde step”, that only a Land department, “a natural outcome of land settlement”, could manage settled villages in order to keep the settlement plan up to date, secure the protection of Crown lands, reserve certain lands and “offer business-like facilities for the purchase or lease of such areas not required as reserves” and organize land registration for the areas recognized as private. The cost of such undertaking would be upset by the reduction of land-related crimes and the creation of a land tax. This program was actually realized thirty years later under the ‘mapping out’ system developed by C.V. Brayne.

In his diaries of 1907, and his correspondence of 1908, Fraser looked back at his action, and tried to defend his views against the critiques which were expressed by the governor himself. In his diary of March 1907, entitled ‘the dawn of a new era’, he wrote: “It must of course take time to reintroduce the idea of purchasing land from the Crown after so many years during which everyone and anyone has simply helped himself to any land he fancied, and no one objected, least of all the headmen who were all in the swim”. In July 1907, according to Fraser, the peasants were rushing to purchase lands from the Settlement department: “If Government desires the ‘pacification’ of the North Western Province, the moment has now come for it. So take action. Large areas adjoining those now dealt with have been surveyed and these can now be settled and revenue of many million rupees gathered in if Government will give the necessary staff and equipment”. In August 1907, just after Governor Blake left his post, he expressed his hope that the new governor, Mac Callum, and his Colonial Secretary Hugh Clifford, would be more open than Blake: “I have endeavoured to demonstrate that it is possible to settle disputes as to the ownership of land on a large scale practically without recourse to litigation (…) As the time went on, I arrived at the conclusion that it was feasible to settle not only all waste lands, but all lands whatsoever in a village, and after much opposition on the part of the Revenue officers, my scheme prevailed and the Land settlement department was constituted. It was obvious to me at an early stage that encroachments on Crown lands had in the past been done as much to want of proper facilities for acquiring land in a legitimate way as to any desire to rob the community of its prosperity, and I succeeded in obtaining authority to receive applications to purchase land and to hold the sales. These facilities which I offer bring the people into personal touch with me, convince them in the long run that my intentions are honest, and result in the effacement of all bad feeling due to the long-maintained struggle in the past for the assertion of their claims. (…) It is true that my operations have hitherto been on a comparatively small scale and that their effect on the progress of the colony can therefore not be assumed to have been great [its extension is a matter of men and money] My appeals to government for assistance in carrying out this scheme have been numerous, the appreciation of the work by government considerable, the answers to my appeals entirely inadequate (…) One of the chief duties of the British in this island at the present moment is the establishment of a sound and consistent policy in connection with land, and I am confident that this will soon be a fait accompli”.

 

 

The second Kurunegala mass meeting (October 1907) and renewed agitation in the North Western province[62]

Kurunegala remained the focus of organized agitation against the land settlement policy. Opposition to the Settlement department in the North western province was led by the lawyers of the Chilaw Association and more generally by the interests of the landed bourgeoisie who was investing in the ‘coconut triangle’. They were vocal enough to have the sympathy of a section of the Colonial office, as in the case of their critique of the Land Registration ordinance of 1907[63]. Their argument was that land registration should be effected by persons independent of the government and with a legal background; enquiries should be made where there are lawyers and not on the spot : “a peripatetic court is altogether unsuited to the conditions of the people , it would always be less expensive and more convenient  to the people to have their claims taken up at places where they have been accustomed to go for legal redress and where the services of lawyers are easily procurable, that is in the towns where the ordinary courts of law are, than at places at which legal assistance will not be available although such places maybe nearer their own homes”

Another mass meeting (40,000 participants according to the organizers, 6,000 “peasants collected and brought in by their headmen” according to the Government Agent) was convened at Kurunegala in October 1907 by the same Ceylonese leaders as in 1904. At that date T.B.L. Moonemalle had been chosen as the first Kandyan member of the Legislative Council and his position was much stronger than previously; he had the support of Buddhist monks, headmen (Hulugalle Dissawe), and Low country plantation owners. They elaborated a memorandum (dated 29.10.1907) signed by Moonemalle, Madawela, Modder, Markus, Dodanwela, Jayasundera, followed by a question before the Legislative Council ‘on the Kurunegala land question’ (15.11.1907)[64]. Their thesis was grounded on historical arguments: that the kings had never asserted their proprietorship over chenas; that in 1840 the absence of a Kandyan member led to the acceptance of the Crown lands ordinance; that sannas “ were granted to immigrants from India and other places who desired to settle down in this country  and to that end sought the protection and patronage of the king”; that the provisos of the ordinance of 1840 were never strictly enforced in the North western province: “as regards chenas in this district, successive Government Agents who being on the spot foresaw the evil effects, doubtless informed the government as to the situation. As a result the law was not put in force as regards chenas (…) In this feeling of security the people periodically cultivated and sometimes planted (…) and the Crown gave certificates of no claim and purchased from villagers chenas for public purpose such as building of village tribunals …(…) While the Waste lands ordinance on 1897 was before the Council it was the cause of no small agitation among the people from the sense of insecurity it had aroused, and though the ordinance was passed, it was not put into operation in this district to any considerable extent.” The Governors (Ridgeway, then Blake) proclaimed that “the government wishes to make the people sure and safe in the possession of the land”. The memorandum mentioned the special case of the Vahumpura caste: “There is a section of the Kandyan people known as Kande Ätto (hill tribe) who live in the hills and whose chief occupation is the manufacture of jaggery. They have been known to live on and possess these hills, chenaing and planting them from time immemorial.” Finally, the enforcement of the 1904 circular “must undoubtedly have involved much hardship to the ordinary villager as he was totally unable to pay the rate demanded from him”, and its suspension by a circular of 10 September 1907 “aroused a feeling of widespread unrest” : “the government had not laid down a settled policy on the land question”.

The new governor (McCallum) and his Colonial Secretary (Hugh Clifford) were really upset by the situation and in a lengthy despatch they exposed in detail the problem to London in order to cover themselves in the eventuality of a serious political crisis[65]:  “in spite of the firm attitude which I have taken up in the matter, a very determined attempt is still being made by certain interested individuals to keep alive the excitement and to mislead the ignorant peasantry as to the intention of government (…) When I assumed the government of this colony I found that the Land settlement officer was engaged in settling claims in the North western province on equitable terms, irrespective of the above mentioned notification”. McCallum therefore decided to cancel the notification of 1904: “the immediate consequence of this action was a public meeting held at Kurunegala on October 5th , Mr Moonemalle taking the chair on that occasion (…) It may safely be predicated that any action which government may take in this matter, unless it be in the direction of abandoning all claims to Crown lands, will assuredly meet with more or less violent protests”. The attitude of Hulugalla Adigar encouraged the obstruction of surveyors, and the press published ironical letters attacking the colonial authorities, for example by Mr. Corea (who signed ‘Abhayaratna Vijayasekera Seneviratne’): “In this 20th century of grace Hon. members of the executive ask in derision and scorn how is it possible that this rabble horde of nigger, this canaille of natives, could ever had justly acquired the vast tract of land which they now so impudently claim”. Corea in his articles and Moonemalle before the Legislative council developed arguments which were reiterated in the 1930s during the depression: the owners had no money to pay for the settlements and were compelled to borrow from Indian Chetties who exploited them. Petitions received in 1907 had a xenophobic tone: “Ceylonese borrow money the interest of which they cannot pay, and the invariable result is litigation which ends disastrously to themselves, the alien Shylock-like moneylender grabbing their land”.

In 1908, the agitation eventually receded in the Kurunegala district, but other demonstrations against settlement were held in the deep South, (Beliatta, 22 May 1908), instigated by the chief monk of Mulkirigala and one Ratnayaka, which led to obstruction[66]. A result of the agitation was to define the principles governing the selection and action of Settlement officers[67]: “The work is of a somewhat unpopular character, and it is of supreme importance that the settlements arrived at should be accepted without question (…) I consider it would be unwise to select for such work gentlemen who have local ties, sympathies and connections”.  The Governor reiterated the official position in a minute on the Administration report of 1907 that the Settlement officer should not deal with the disputes of ownership between private parties, but only with the relations between Crown and private rights; Fraser answered in March 1908 that “where different  portions of what appears to be prima facie one block of Crown land are claimed by different parties, it is necessary to subdivide the block as originally surveyed in order to deal with the separate claims”.[68]

The success of direct administration by the Settlement department was underlined in a memorandum of 1909 by the Controller of Revenue[69]  : “Theoretically after paying the first one tenth instalment to the Settlement officer the purchaser should pay the balance 9/10th to the kachcheri, but this balance is almost invariably paid to the Settlement officer on his next circuit to the village (…) The purchaser naturally prefers to pay in the village as it saves him the journey to the kachcheri and back, the time occasionally wasted in obtaining a receipt, and other possible irregularities” – allusion to the widespread corruption of kachcheri petty officials.

But discontent in the North western province was simmering during the following years, and the relations between Settlement and Revenue officers remained strained. The clash between J. G. Fraser and W. E. Thorpe is an example of this state of things.[70] In April 1911, Thorpe, the new Government agent of the North-western province, in a letter to the Colonial Secretary, warned of numerous sales of so-called ‘paraveni’ chena lands, even of considerable growth, to outsiders for the plantation of coconut estates, with the assistance of headmen who regarded ‘paraveni chenas’ as lands not at the disposal of the Crown, “trading upon the apathy of the kacceri in years past”. He considered that the settlement system was too slow to take pace with the growth of the plantations. He quoted the case of Digana, a whole village sold through a Colombo middleman, Sundarasekera, to a German planter, Boysen. He proposed that villagers be noticed ‘by tom-tom’ that they have no right to sell to outsiders, that permits for chena must be insisted upon and delivered by chief headmen. The Secretary instructed him to “confine himself to prevent further encroachments and let the Settlement officer deal with land ownership”. Thorpe further requested government to let him deal with the chena question, stating that during numerous meetings the chief headmen “entirely accept the government view of the law and the baselessness of the paraveni chena claim”. He considered that the ordinance of 1840 should not have been superseded with ordinance of 1897, and that settlement should be undertaken by the Revenue officers as before and not by Settlement officers.

Fraser, in a personal letter (31.07.1911) to his superior Frederick Bowes expressed his apprehension: “We have had several interviews on the subject since Thorpe assumed duties as Government agent, but nothing has been in writing. I now wish to put on record that I believe the apprehensions that I have communicated to you verbally are well founded, and that unless great care is exercised by government, in restraining Thorpe’s well meant but almost fanatical zeal, you will shortly have a recrudescence of the whole land question in Ceylon (…) I understand that the people of the Weudawili Hatpattu are contemplating organized action which may result in the whole land question being brought up again, when the reorganized Legislative Council meets for the first time (…) The trouble is that Thorpe is persuaded that the action taken by him is absolutely in the interest of government, that such action is popular, and that no opposition will result. I advise the government to act on the safe side…”  As a result, the Secretariat sent a confidential mail to Thorpe censoring his “apparently unconscious inability to discern the natural feelings of the people”, and warning him of dismissal in case of any indiscreet further action.

In a long letter (22.08.1911) Fraser reviewed the policy concerning the application to ‘paraveni’ chenas of the 1840 land ordinance: “The Government had seemed fit to relax its application to some extent, and to undertake that in the Kurunegala district certain undetermined extents of chena proved to be the appurtenances of fields shall be regarded as private property: a class of chena lands has been created which, though falling within the definition of the chenas by ordinance of 1840, has been as an indulgence exempted from the application of that ordinance (…) A very difficult position was created for the officers of the Crown [and now] interference with such chena rights may give rise to very intricate situations” . The Settlement officers adapted themselves to the situation, and the smooth working of the settlement depended on “what I may call a truce”.  “To my mind matters have been allowed to go so far in the Kurunegala district in the past that it is exceedingly doubtful whether any commensurate result will be obtained from a belated attempt to deal with this class of land (…) I can see no object in exasperating the people with fines and prosecutions”. Fraser added that “the planting up of chena lands with permanent products is in my opinion a very desirable thing”. Fox, the successor to Fraser, was again attacked by Thorpe who wrote that the settlement department “deliberately exposes the administration to suspicion of corruption” and Thorpe was again censored in January 1912: “The Governor views your letters with much displeasure”

Criticism of the settlements and sales done by Revenue Officers remained frequent in the settlement diaries after Fraser left the department. Davies mentioned ‘extraordinary settlements’ by Thorpe, “the result of trying to settle land without personally inspecting it and examining the alleged documentary title”.  Settlement work was made difficult because some villagers objected to the headmen playing a role in the settlement sales: “This department has always found that the direct communication between the Settlement officer and the villager which is always insisted on in this department even in small matters, has entirely prevented this sort of grievance from arising”[71]. In other districts, the rivalry between Revenue and Settlement officers was common. For example, the Revenue officer at Matale, Saxton, considered that the government should not intervene in disputes between villagers and planters and that the time-consuming genealogical enquiries of the Settlement officers were useless, when a simple report by the chief headman could easily settle the matter. Fox, on the contrary, considered that it was unjust and unpolitical to leave the villager without support facing the planter’s raj. Similarly in the Sabaragamuwa province where the Government agent, E.B. Alexander, was notoriously pro-planter, Madampe Estate was asked to pay for his settlement 150 Rs per acre by Fox, for land purchased from villagers, and Alexander intervened to reduce the price at the instance of planters; he was followed by the Controller of Revenue, who disavowed Fox[72]. During the next decade, the Revenue officers were still considered by the Settlement officers as bureaucrats out of touch with the people[73]: “There must be scores of villages the Government agent never finds time personally to visit while under present conditions we have lot of departmental people going about the country whilst the Civil service sits largely in office” The nomination in September 1925 as settlement officer of a member of the revenue service, Frank Bartlett, former Government agent at Galle, was resented by the settlement department and finally Bartlett had to leave his post.

 

The Settlement department at war with Ceylonese land speculators in the 1920s.

In the context of the accelerated development of coconut and rubber estates after the first world war in the areas where settlement was in progress (especially in the Kurunegala and Ratnapura districts), Settlement officers fought against powerful Ceylonese entrepreneurs who purchased large extents of village highlands for conversion into plantations, generally in advance of settlement. These entrepreneurs followed the example set up by the European land speculators in the 1880s, with the difference that the colonial administration was equipped with new legal tools and was harsher against ‘native’ speculators in its paternalistic defense of the ‘native’ peasants, and that Ceylonese entrepreneurs could tap on the nascent nationalist movement to confront the colonial administration. The position of the settlement department was either to protect the rights of the villagers by forbidding the sales or forcing the purchasers to pay them a fair price – but it lacked the authority and the means to implement such a program, and consequently it more often tried to make the purchasers pay the highest price to the Crown in exchange of the legal recognition of their acquisitions.

Among the big coconut plantation investors stands out the powerful De Mel family from Moratuwa, who had made a fortune in plumbago mining in the Kurunegala district in the late 19th century. The H.L. De Mel company started acquiring extensive highlands in the same district for coconut and also in the Ratnapura district for rubber in the late 19th and early 20th century. The same De Mel company also tried to develop tobacco cultivation in the driest part of the Kurunegala district which was settled in the 1920s[74]. At Diyankonwewa (near Maho): “Villagers appear to be poor, their gardens and coconut being in bad condition. Several attempts have been made to grow tobacco but there has been sufficient water. Most of the chenas was high jungle. Was interested to find that the villagers had sold their rights in chena land about 10 years ago to one Peter Perera of Kurunegala and De Mel company. The villagers while admitting that they had sold all the chenas stoutly asserted that they had not received the full consideration which was promised on survey of the land (…) They described the visit of the brokers like martial law in the riots. People were paid 5 Rs for deeds transferring about 3 villages to which they had no paraveni claim, and some of the grantees had no claim at all. This method is of course common, but in this case the purchaser left behind his agreements, or rather receipts, which clearly show that the full purchase amount was not paid”. When Batugedara, a feudal village in Ratnapura, was settled in 1924, the department had to deal with the “extremely speculative claim” of H.L. De Mel “representing himself and eleven brothers and sisters”[75].

During the 1920s., the hostility increased between the Settlement officers and the coconut lobby represented by the Low Country Products Association, an extension of the Chilaw Association. In the settlement diaries there are constant allusions to the activities of the Corea brothers, C.E. and Victor[76]: “Ratmale, one of the villages claimed on the Pihimbiya sannas. Villagers had previously on the advice of Mr. C.E. Corea refused to pay for their gardens and wanted Certificates of quiet possession. They now greed to accept Crown grants in the absence of Mr. Corea, there was no difficulty at the sales. I feel sure the villagers would have accepted settlements long ago but for the intervention of Mr Corea who I believe told them he would get them all their lands without payment”. C.E. Corea was indeed very vocal against the British land policy, as member of the Legislative council: “There was a time when it was the proud boast of this country that every villager within its bounds was a landed proprietor, but thanks to the activities of a callous bureaucracy (…) I think that about 50 p.c. of our peasantry are coolies or vagabonds while their forefathers were independent freeholders”[77].

Land speculation through legal means was widely practiced by the Chilaw lawyers, especially the Corea brothers who were considered by the Settlement officers as their strongest opponents, especially because they adopted a nationalist stance, which was not the case with the De Mels who were strong supporters of the colonial government.[78]: “These speculations [in  Puttalam district] have been greatly encouraged by the success of the claimants in the Potukulama case which went to the Privy council and in which careless handling in Ceylon caused government the loss of about 90,000 Rs over the one claim”. The officer Davies pleaded for the nomination in this district of officers “as strong in character, numbers and ability as possible”, as for example “the total value of the land inspected this week is about half million rupees”. Local Mudaliyars (one Rajapaksa), local Tamils (Canagasabei) and several low country Sinhalese (A de Zylva) were together active in manipulating old deeds to purchase and re-sell large tracts of land[79]. Among the people dabbling in land for rubber before the ordinance of 1927, Francis Kotelawala was especially active in the Weudawili area (close to Madure korale, in a Vahumupura area) and his purchases disturbed the peace in the villages[80] (Puswelikanda, Puswella, Erepolakanda). D.D. Pedris, the most affluent and influential member of the Vahumpura caste, was himself active as a land buyer in the area, although the basis of his wealth was not plantation land.

Baladora korale (north of Hettipola) was already the scene of intensive land speculation in the 1910s: “proctors, plumbago merchants and ratemahatmayas have vied with each other in buying up large tracts of chenas; in some cases whole villages have changed hands and always at the rate of one or two rupees an acre (…) the aracci apparently buys at 2 Rs per acre and sells at 34 Rs perhaps the money will not pass until the land has been settled. The aracci has applied for a Certificate of quiet possession for more than 1,000 acres”[81]. In the 1920s, the scramble for land extended to Yagam Pattu, and finally to the whole district. The Government agents at Kurunegala were facing new methods of land speculators who took advantage of the recognition of ‘paraveni chenas’ by government in 1926[82]: “The settlement is difficult to carry out with any justice to the villager (…) There are usually several claimants, and advantage has been taken of the policy recently adopted in this district by persons whose claim is, to say the least, dubious, to submit applications for chenas. Another aspect which strikes villagers as an injustice is the fact that they have been compelled to submit applications for their chenas, while many estates equally held on village title in practice escape with immunity.”

In 1927, the Government Agent, asking for the proclamation of the totality of the district of Kurunegala under the new Land ordinance, mentioned that the most affected areas were Dewamedi, Hiriyala and Madure. His aim was to prevent speculative purchases before settlement “it had come to my knowledge that 800 acres of land at Kiribamuna, Hiriyala, had been purchased by an outside capitalist for a consideration of approx.. 2.50 Rs an acre and this was one of a number of other cases (…) In Madure which is being block-surveyed, land speculators are doing their best to get a footing. In unsettled parts of Dewamedi, all of which are suitable for coconut cultivation, I have considerable difficulty with capitalists who buy up unsound claim to a small share in a large extent of land and then put their men to take possession of the land. In Hiriyala a number of cases where extremely exiguous claims to chena have been sold to capitalists in Kurunegala and Colombo. Hitherto I have generally succeeded in protecting these lands from depredation, but my powers are limited and the capitalists know it”. The commission after hearing Hodson recommended the proclamation of these areas, in spite of the strong opposition of Madawela who feared that this measure would prevent the ordinary villagers of his coconut district to clear their ‘paraveni chenas’, and of Senanayake, who considered the measure to be unjust for owners who were in the process of opening their lands. The question of ‘paraveni chenas’ was specific to the North Western Province, and was since the beginning of the century the subject of a long-standing controversy between the colonial administration and the local members of the Legislative council, especially G.E. Madawela.[83]

Outside the coconut triangle, the settlement department had to deal with European as well as Ceylonese planters, and in many cases the Planters Associations played the same game as the Ceylonese entrepreneurs in the 1920s. For example, in the Kägalla district, where many rubber estates sprang up on lands purchased from villagers, a deputation visited the Colonial secretary in 1922, using the same arguments as those of C.E.Corea to circumvent the rules established by the Settlement department under the Waste lands ordinance[84] 

In the war between land speculators and the Settlement department, the latter was handicapped by the slow pace of its operations, which allowed the former to keep the initiative in purchasing land in advance of settlement. “The delay in settlement [in the south of the Kurunegala district] encourages the operations of the speculators, and leads to the available land passing into the hands of outside capitalists to the exclusion of the small local man and to the creation of a landless peasantry”. “Much harm continues to be done in unsettled areas by speculative capitalists who buy up shares of land on village title, often from someone who has no shadow of right to the land, and then endeavour to take forcible possession”. “During the previous two years speculators, mostly low-country Sinhalese, had been buying up village claims to unsettled lands on an enormous scale in areas which it was expected would in the near future be taken up for settlement by the settlement officer [in the Ratnapura district]. Whether his vendor’s claim was a genuine one or not was of little interest or concern to the purchaser. His object was to create for himself a ‘claim’ to cover his entry upon the land, which he would then proceed to clear and plant”[85].

This is how a fresh Settlement officer described the situation: “My first experience of the chaotic land grabbing in progress in the North Western Province. Half the chenas had been planted up since the surveyors left the village. There is no doubt that the Land Settlement Department operations are a powerful fertiliser of the soil here. Most of the encroachments were by big landowners. The notary of the place came to pay me a call. I found he was an ex-Badulla practitioner whom I had occasion to report to the attorney general for irregularities. Mr. Rajapakse, one of the late agricultural scholarship holders of the island, accompanied me on a couple of inspections, representing one of the estate owners for whom he is now doing agency work”[86]

In a report of 1926 which was perused by the Land Commission, Tyrell, the Government agent of the North western province, gave several examples of settled villages in Kiniyama korale around Dandagamuwa where land sales which were rife before settlement had ceased after settlement: “For this reason, efforts are always made by speculators to induce villagers to part with their rights before settlement. When the settlement survey is in progress, these harpies appear and carry on their propaganda. They tell the people that all the land will be declared Crown. ‘You will in any case lose your land, you may as well get something for it and transfer your claim to us for hard cash’.  On the same theme, Hodgson, the Government agent of Sabaragamuwa reported in October 1925 on the situation in Kukul korale: “The action of the Land Settlement department tends to accelerate the sale of village lands in undeveloped parts of the province, for example in the Kukul korale, by attracting speculators who hope to open the country in rubber or tea. But in the more developed regions such as Nawadun or Kuruwiti, I do not think that settlement accelerates or retards the sale (… ) The ordinary villager cannot command the capital required for the development of permanent cultivation, except on a small scale, and the idea of combination and cooperation does not enter his head (…) The chief benefit that strikes the villager is that he can sell lands with a Crown title at a considerably enhanced price” [87].

With the second boom in rubber demand after the end of the war, there was a rush for rubber land by Ceylonese investors in the wet zone, especially the Ratnapura district[88]. European speculators had started the process before the war. In the Karandana area there was initially “a large rubber estate set up after 1910 by a Mr. Fletcher through share purchases from villagers done in 1907 for about 600 acres, and resold in 1910 to the Grand Central Rubber company at a price of… 760 Rs per acre! When the area came under settlement 15 years later, the estate, property of the Grand Central Rubber company was of 900 acres. Wattoru I find cover only 690 acres, the rest is at law Crown land” As usual in such cases it was the De Sarams firm which was employed by the company to negotiate with the Settlement officers, and which said they would ask Fletcher to pay what was demanded (24 Rs. an acre…), but “Fletcher has retired to the remote fastness of Scotland in order to be safe from the Land Settlement Department”. Finally, the local representative of Fletcher, another planter, alleged that “in 1910 Mr. Fletcher applied to the Government Agent for a Certificate of quiet possession and was allowed to continue clearing and planting on the understanding that the SO would deal with the application after the block survey. These are the pleasant creations of Mr. Fletcher’s imagination”. But after the first world war, the most enterprising investors in rubber were Ceylonese. A very powerful concern, the Panadura bus company founded by W. Leo Fernando (allied with the De Mels) invested in rubber land in the Kukul korale, together with other ‘rubber kings of Panadura’ such as Abraham Perera. And the example set up by these big entrepreneurs was followed by smaller investors.

The settlement officers were confronted by 1925 with a spate of speculation which they found difficult to resist.  Stace described the process at work in the Ratnapura district: “In nearly all the villages, low country speculators, chiefly from Panadura and Moratuwa, had feverishly bought up just about the time of the survey (1922-23) and were excitedly rushing in and clearing and planting large extents of chena lands, evidently with the idea that if only they got extents planted up  before the settlement enquiries, the Settlement officer could be practically compelled to settle on them what they had planted. Warnings were sent through headmen and had little effect. These gentlemen gave solemn undertakings to stay operations pending settlement but after staying their hands for a few weeks they began once merrily burning down jungle and sticking in rubber plants (…) The Settlement officer cannot allow himself to be coerced in this way, and it may be necessary either to refuse to settle on these people considerable tracts of land actually planted by them, or have them declared Crown and sold by auction, or settle on them at prices which will teach them a lesson”. The same Stace noticed another trick to ‘fortify’ title: “every villager has sold chenas to each other villager (…) the result was that practically every single claimant produced stacks of deeds and then greatly complicated the enquiry”. “The most important of the causes which complicated the settlement and rendered a fair division of the chena land almost impossible was the growing habit, not only of speculators, but of villagers, to clear and plant up their chena claims in rubber just before settlement enquiry. Some plant and clear far more than they are entitled to, some far less or none at all”.

The case of the village of Nugadanda Kahandikele was typical of the difficulties encountered by settlement officers[89]: “Any rights to chena lands have mostly passed out of the hands of the villagers in the following way. They signed a deed to the late korala of the district, locally known as Toranagoda korala. This gentleman however, being a government servant, did not wish to appear in the deed, which was actually drawn in favour of a certain vederala whose miserliness, rapacity and meanness are well known in the district. The korala died almost at once, without paying the consideration on the deed to the villagers, or paying only small sums of 2,3 or 5 Rs each, the balance being promised at a later date. On the death of the korala, the vederala declined to pay anything further to the villagers, but sold his rights for fat sums of money to various low country speculators who have now planted up nearly the whole of the chena lands in rubber.  I do not think there are 50 acres of chena left. At the inquiry all the villagers claimed when it was pointed out that they had sold all their rights, they replied: ‘yes, but we claim because we were paid nothing’ I shall certainly do anything that appears possible to help the villagers in this case”

“I contrived to settle at least small areas on those villagers who had the best claim to consideration. Land settlement in Ratnapura is an odd business. It is so complicated and the claims so confused and muddled that no matter what you do, your decision is certain to be illogical and inconsistent with some other decision in the same inquiry. If the inconsistency is spotted by the claimant there is a howl at once. One becomes expert at reconciling irreconcilable principles, and making the illogical appear logical. The whole business is one of dancing among eggs.”. “The notorious landgrabber and forest thief, Mr. W.D. (Warusahennedige Daniel) Fernando, who was a large claimant in the village, received a block of 200 or 300 acres and is forming himself into a limited liability company and wants to hurry up the sanction of government for his settlement. The agents of the new company (Gordon Fraser and co) appear to have seen the Controller of Revenue, and I received letters from the Settlement officer and Gordon Fraser and a personal visit of Mr. Fernando. Incidentally he informed me that he was appealing to the Colonial Secretary against the decision in Ayagama calling him to withdraw his claim to forest. He hopes if the matter was referred to me that I should view it ‘with sympathy’”

The village of Hindurangala was the theatre of extensive purchases by the well-known ‘bus tycoon’ from Panadura Warusahennedige Leo Fernando; Stace wrote in his diary: “The most difficult settlement I have done. Nothing seemed to fit in. Every inch of chena feverishly planted up by speculators after the survey so that he village bears little resemblance with that shown on the plan (…) The biggest claimant was Mr W.A. Fernando: he told me in his evidence that he had planted up some 300 acres and that he had bought up the whole of a certain panguwa (…) It was shown on inspection that he had planted only 180 acres and that he had purchased only about 1/3rd of the panguwa (…) I decided to make him pay heavily in order to get him in the right frame of mind”. Stace proposed to sell him 100 acres and to retain 80 acres for the Crown, and Fernando “sat in total silence, unable to speak, beads of perspiration on his forehead”, then he proposed an enhanced price for the remaining 80 acres “which was that I had intended all along. He agreed with infinite relief (…) His statement that he had bought the whole panguwa was apparently his bona fide belief”[90]

In the village of Yatipahuwa, Stace met with what he called the machinations of Moratuwa speculators: “One group of lots had previously been sold to Mr. H.P. Dickman de Mel. It was afterwards found on the representation of a certain apothecary Jayaratne that he had obtained the settlement of these lands upon himself by what may be euphemistically called an omission to state the whole truth. I held full enquiry and settled them upon Jayaratne. In another group of lots the same De Mel figured. He and a certain Dr. Mendis had nearly come to blows and their coolies had actually come to bloodshed in their feverish endeavours to plant up in rubber certain chena lands in the village and to get them fully planted prior to settlement. I had both parties up about a year ago and they gave solemn undertakings to cease operations pending settlement. This solemn undertaking they soon broke, each clearing and planting, and each accusing the other of having begun it. They were warned many times. Now one block of this land has I found been declared Crown by the Government agent 20 years ago. I therefore put up this block for sale without of course bringing it under the Waste Lands Ordinance. At today’s sale I made these parties pay at the rate of 150 Rs per acre for this chena land since it had been declared Crown, I had them completely at my hand. It is a pleasure occasionally to be able to make the land speculator dance to the tune one sets”[91].

 

Land settlement, peasant indebtedness and peasant resistance

Critics of land settlement operations argued that they contributed to peasant indebtedness and eventually led to land alienation to outsiders. The argument was already developed by Moonemalle in his speech of 1907, and was regularly invoked by the nationalist leaders during the next twenty years. There was a definite tendency for members of the national elite to lay the blame of landlessness at the door of non-Sinhalese groups, especially the Chettiar moneylenders. In 1925, a Committee of the Legislative council on landless villagers, of which D.S. Senanayake was a member, collected evidence from Madahapola, Ratemahatmaya of Hiriyala hatpattu[92]:

Senanayake: “About 50 years ago the villagers owned much land, but now very much less. The chief offenders have been the coast Moors, Chetties and so on. Do you know that they tried to get undivided shares and harass the villagers and put them into court and so a man loses all his land?

Madahapola: “Yes, that is the chief cause of losing land that must be prevented if we want to make the people prosperous”

Senanayake: “What is the effect of the Waste Lands Ordinance in your district. Has it not helped the outsider to acquire title to the land?”

Madahapola: “When Land settlement is going on, they have to borrow money to pay. Then the outsiders make arrangement with the land owners and afterwards buy these lands. In certain cases they buy the land before the settlement. At the same time the settlement helps the villager to get away from litigation”

Senanayake: “After settlement will the villagers not get rid of the land?”

Madahapola: “Before settlement outsiders buy the land at the rate of 10 to 25 or even 35 Rs an acre. The villager will not sell the land after settlement unless he gets a very good offer”

A couple of years later, the evidence collected by the Land Commission, especially the testimonies of Mediwaka, of Jayatileke and of Leslie de Saram, together with the diaries of the Settlement officers, suggested that the working of the sales and settlement under the Waste Lands Ordinance had encouraged land litigation and land speculation, and the large scale transfer of land from peasant cultivators to absentee coconut landowners in the North Western Province. In his comments on the proposals of the Land commission[93] the Assistant Settlement Officer Bassett considered that 50% of the lands settled on peasants were resold, and that if the resale was forbidden, the villagers would sell their fields and gardens to pay for the settlement; in his diary[94] he wrote: “Now that villagers may not sell lands settled upon them, a certain hardship has arisen (…) If a very poor villager gets the settlement of perhaps 3 or 4 acres at even 10Rs an acre, he cannot pay for it. If he could sell one acre, he could do so (…) the remedy is for villager’s settlements up to about 5 acres to be given free. There is a present marked increase in the sale by villagers of fields and old gardens, partly to meet this difficulty, although to a great extent the increase in this disastrous practice which was rare before the prohibition of unsettled lands, is due to the necessity for ready money which the villagers used to meet by the sale of chenas on doubtful title”.

The diaries of other Settlement officers are full of similar stories: “The general complaint is that the villager cannot afford to pay. It appears that previously he was prepared to pay because as soon as he got a settlement a capitalist was ready to buy up the land or a portion of it settled on him at a much higher price, and thus he raised the money to pay. Now he cannot sell. This is one of the drawbacks of ordinance 8 of 1927 as the villager has to deal with his garden or paddy field to raise the money”[95]. “One result of the overlavish settlement of chenas on ancestral claimants: quite a number of lots sold in Mangulagama were at once transferred, before the ink of the land register was dry, to the proprietor of a large coconut estate, who was there waiting for his prey. These lots would have been of inestimable value for future village expansion. Instead of that they have in effect been alienated at slightly over 10 Rs an acre to an outside capitalist”. “A villager [of Karaulla] who purchased [at settlement sale] was already so heavily in debt that he wanted me at once to enter the name of an outsider. This is a direct infraction of the spirit of ordinance 8 of 1927 to prevent improvident alienation, but very difficult to prevent, unless the debtor can be put on his legs to start afresh, it is doubtful whether he will have the energy, enterprise and the capital required to make his land pay. He certainly cannot do it by drawing merely 50 to 75 cent a day as an estate coolie”[96]. “Two women appeared and asked me to allow them to sell the greater part of the land I had just settled on them. One of them I know head over ears in litigation and debt, the other an old cousin completely under her influence (…) If one consents, they will lose most of their chena lands; if one refuses, their planted and dwelling lands will be sold up for debts and they will be ruined hat way. It is a choice of evils. They have not paid for the lands yet, and are not likely to be able to pay for it. One sometimes wonders whether it is possible to rescue the peasant from his own innumerable weaknesses”[97]

“The sales may be divided into two classes: to outside capitalists / to villagers. The capitalists in most cases paid the full sale value, but the villagers were unable to even pay a first deposit, that is 1/10th price of their lands. In such cases, a few hours’ time was given to them to make the payment, which they did during the course of that day. There were two instances where the villagers on being told the sale value negotiate with outside capitalists who were present, and obtained from them the necessary sum. In these latter cases, it is surmised that the villagers arranged to sell their lands to the capitalists.”[98]. “Sales on applications by landless villagers about 2 or 3 years ago. There is reason to believe that quite a number of these applications have been made at the instigation of third parties who intended subsequently to get hold of these lands. Several of the applicants who appeared before me asked permission for the deed to be drawn up in favour of a third party, who was in no way connected with the applicant. In some cases the third party was some big landowner owning lands adjoining the allotment or some representative of him. Such cases were turned down”.[99]

The link between settlement sales and indebtedness is suggested by the extension of the activities of Chettiar moneylenders in the North Western province. In the diaries of the 1930s, there were very numerous cases of villagers either indebted before settlement to Chettiars, who needed titles to repay their debts, or who mortgaged their land to Chettiars as soon as it was declared private. The obvious correlation between the rapid development of Chettiar agencies in the North Western province and the advance of settlement will be explored in a further study[100].  

It is difficult to assess the depth of peasant discontent and resistance using the settlement diaries as a unique source: when such cases of opposition occurred, the colonial authorities usually explained them by the peasant ignorance of the real working of the settlement, and by the influence of outside agitators, speculators affected by the working of the settlement. On the other side, complaints against settlement were often aired in the Ceylonese press by nationalist writers but not by peasant themselves. What cannot be doubted is that opposition in land matters was the most sensitive issue encountered by the colonial administration. There was a tendency for settlement officers to see land speculators everywhere, and on the part of the villagers, to see administrative demands as potential expropriation and/or greed for taxes. As late as after 1931, when the department was manned by young Ceylonese officers, distrust or diffidence was not far away: “Villagers here seem to regard land settlement as land grabbing. A villager presented a petition, it mentioned that there was a rumour that the Crown intended to take away from the villagers a considerable extent of their land, which they had owned from the time of the Sinhalese kings. It was an unalienable right of the villager to till his paddy field and clear his chena. The Crown had therefore no right to interfere with his land”[101]. Even when villagers accepted to collaborate with the Settlement department, “I was struck by the intimate knowledge the villagers had, especially the elder ones of the village, and by their usefulness in settlement work. They show you round out of sheer willingness to help you, but have a certain fear that some of their lands may be taken away from them”. “I found the villager an extremely courteous man, a characteristic which should not be confused with subservience” [102].

The most common form of resistance was delaying acceptance, refusing to collaborate, pleading poverty and refusing to pay for settlement, as in the case of Welipitiya (Hambantota district): “the failure to pay is due not so much to the want of money as to a conviction that if they do not settle nothing will happen”, wrote the Settlement officer[103]. According to his subordinate, C.V. Brayne, the difficulty to settle in the region of Walasmulla was due in part to poverty, in part to organized resistance: “The people are poor and very obstinate, and repeated visits at short intervals will be necessary to complete settlement (…) They are under the influence of one Don Lewis Appuhamy of Dikwella, a pretty scoundrel who was the only claimant under the old notice and had no real claim”. Another young officer, Wedderburn, displayed a typical colonial attitude in his description of the confrontation: “Crusade against the villagers who refuse to pay and plead poverty. I assisted the crusade by being mistaken for a police superintendent. The chena headman joins the crusade. The villagers show a more reasonable frame of mind and a number of settlements are effected”[104]. The settlement officers were often confronted by these amaru karayo, acting for their fellow villagers as ‘jungle proctors’. But popular forms of defiance or opposition were also expressed through rumours. For example, in 1908 in the Matara district, “there is a curious rumour prevalent among the uneducated classes (sic) that the Japanese are to take over Ceylon in a few years with a view to the improvement of Buddhism, and that is the reason why Government wants to collect as much money as possible through the sale of lands before the transfer takes place”.[105]

 

 

Self-critical views of settlement work in the 1920s.

After the first world war, a new generation of Settlement officers such as Hughes (1924), Stace (1923-1932) and Sandys (1929-1930) produced diaries or memoirs in which they questioned the aims and impact of settlement work and exposed its practical and structural difficulties. In the 1920s, at least in Ceylon, colonial paternalism began to be undermined by a section of the officials who denounced its inefficiency in fighting land speculation, questioned the legitimacy of the colonial interference upon the socio-economic structure, or pleaded for a redistributive policy.

The first pages of the diary of Hughes show how a candid Settlement officer discovered field work in the Ratnapura district: “The long and tedious work of inquiry into genealogy is apparently necessitated by the intention to deal mildly with the villager, and settle land at upset price on claimants who have an equitable, if not legal claim. Some knowledge of the rules of equity as established by settlement officers is common in the villages” “It looks like a jigsaw jungle, first getting applicants into genealogical groups according to the panguwa and then fitting their reduced demand into the available lots. The settlement officer has to be the historian and geographer of the village (…)  but the original necessity for chena cultivation had passed to a great extent with the development of the district and the demand for other forms of labour”. Interference by the Settlement officers with the balance of village society is another problem: “To raise the question of ownership occasionally store up a hornet nest of petitions (…) Once you propose to sell land to a villager, others will remember all sorts of occasions on which their ancestors took a crop off it or helped him to cultivate. The enquiry then becomes one of settlement of family disputes rather than waste lands proceedings” [106].

In the village of Batugedara, Hughes came across an “extremely speculative claim. It is astonishing to find a highly placed Ceylonese family (Sir H.L. de Mel’s family) involved in such a transaction. The unmasking and defeating of such sales appear to be a strong justification for the existence of this department”. Later, on inspection in the North central province: “One feels rather an intruder in these villages where for years the villagers have cultivated their chenas and planted up land with coconuts undisturbed by the claims of the central government; and in many cases to charge them for their land cultivated with recent but permanent cultivation appears as harsh as squeezing a man struggling from poverty. In the case of these jungle surrounded villages, struggling with survival where so many have succumbed, I should like to have discretion to recognize the fait accompli and charge up the villager only with the cost of survey”. In the margin of the diary E.B. Alexander, then acting Controller of Revenue, wrote this patronizing comment: “Mr. Hughes ideas will probably be considerably modified after a year or two of work in this department”. In the wet areas of the south-west Hughes questioned the status of deniyas and owitas (wet/marshy areas where cultivation was possible)[107]: “It is clear  from the attitude of the people that although they often claim them, they really regard them as Crown lands which they occupy temporarily from year to year for their own purposes, usually with impunity, unless the headman, for some particular reason, brings in a prosecution. This is however a very rare occurrence” Hughes decided to admit these private or settle at low rates instead of reserving them as Crown, because “land would probably be sold hereafter at auctions at which outsiders from Ambalangoda would buy out the villagers” and that “it is very unsatisfactory having a large number of small pieces of Crown land scattered about in the village”

  1. T. Stace in his manuscript Notes on Life in Ceylon offers an uncensored vision of the working of the colonial administration, and of land affairs[108]. According to him, the colonial government was “wholly paternal and undemocratic” and the Revenue officers were left without any training, although they had “to deal with the land [which] is to deal with the heart of the people”. The Settlement officers were working close to the people without depending on headmen, especially if they could speak sinhala. Stace admitted that the land settlement system could appear unjust because the government compelled villagers to pay for their lands “but in fact the claimants usually welcomed our enquiries and decisions because a Crown grant put an end to all private disputes”: because of the system of undivided shares (complicated by polyandry up-country), in the absence of individual settlement, “the land would go out of cultivation altogether and revert to jungle because if any individual tried to cultivate his share he would be attacked by others who disputed his right”. Stace put his fingers on the result, a settlement between villagers, which was not the initial intention of the Waste Lands ordinance: with the passing of time the settlement of claims between private parties became de facto the main raison d’être of these operations and the reason why they were accepted. “There was scarcely a villager who did not claim to be a part owner of some of the lands included within the boundaries of his village. There were indeed a few landless villagers but this was a recent condition produced mainly by large estate owners, many of whom were European firms, who largely bought up village claims for a song in order to get the land they needed for tea and rubber plantations. Lipton’s Ceylon tea, known to everyone, has usually this sort of background. But in my day in Ceylon this process of dispossessing the villager of his land, though well advanced, still left perhaps 80% of the land in the hands of the peasant proprietors. And this left plenty of work for the Land settlement department to do”.

In his diaries written on the spot, Stace offers a much less optimistic view of settlement work, pointing the lack of money to pay for the auctioned lands and the resulting indebtedness[109]: “How auction sales hit the villager: practically all the sales in this circuit were small village lots, mostly of planted lands (…) As a rule it was found that the influential village applicant had succeeded in suppressing bids, while the poor man with no influence in the village had to bid high and generally lose his land to an outside applicant. The excessive price of land in the Kalutara district rendered it practically impossible for the poorer villagers to get even an acre of land, so long as auction rules are applied. The fat mudalali from Bentota or Kalutara, replete with combs, watch chains and sandals, come on the scene, his pocket bulging with 100 rupees notes, and snaps up even the one acre for which the villager applied and paid his survey fees, often 5, 8 or 10 years ago”. Almost ten years later, another Settlement officer, Abhayakoon, noted that in a North-western province village, Malabendiyawa, where “villagers had bought large extents of land from the Crown, some of them are still in chena: the villagers in some cases exhausted all their resources in paying for the land, and have no means of improving the land a present”[110]

The finality of settlement operations was also questioned by the young M.K.T. Sandys when he undertook field work for a rather short period (1929-1930) in the Dandagamuwa/Kuliyapitiya area of the Kurunegala district[111].  He was a strong critique of the method of settling land according to the genealogical rights of the claimants: settlement according to claims based on tax receipts and genealogical position tended to enhance inequality and favour the more assertive claimants:  “The drawbacks of accepting the inheritance principle in the matter of what is presumed to be Crown lands are obvious. [Some villagers] inherit too little to support them and have to emigrate or starve. If one could treat the land on a different basis, they could all have a new start. I do not mean that one could prevent the subdivided inheritance principle from operating thereafter. The only way to do that would be to adopt the leasing system”.

Sandys was upset by the arbitrary character of the settlements: “I tremble to think what will be the result if a board is ever appointed to review our settlements. What is wanted is more finality about it, not less. In these congested regions where the chenas are in an inextricable muddle, it is impossible to give reasons why one settles the fraction of an acre more on this party than on that; legal considerations are not the only ones and one feels that if one came to a decision on purely legal grounds it would generally be wrong. For example a man gets into debt and sells the whole of his vague ancestral share, but his widow and children go on living there and from time to time, without taking he slightest notice of the sale, help themselves to the chena. Other villagers living in the neighbourhood do the same. 10 or 20 years later, it is impossible to say that the purchaser who bought 10 acres is now entitled to have anything like 10 acres settled on him”. In August 1929, Sandys considered that the possibility to revise settlements as suggested by the Land Commission would nullify the benefits to the poor villager to escape from endless litigation: “What is wanted is a reasonably speedy and final decision, not a slow and revisable one that is theoretically equitable”. He also noted that confusion regarding land rights was common in the villages of the North western province, as is the case of Akkarawatte, where “the villagers had been leaving fallow for several years a relatively large tract of their own paddy fields under the belief that they were Crown”. In Denawaka Udakada (Ratnapura district), he noticed a similar situation: “It was quite a new experience for me to find a number of small lots settled on villagers some years ago but left uncultivated and still in jungle. A good illustration of the advantages of the lease system over a system of outright sales”[112]

In a perspective of social justice, Sandys envisioned that settlement work could be a tool of redistribution: “One claimant said: ‘the fact is we have not the least idea which chena is which or what the extents are’. The names vary from time to time and some people call them by one name, and some by another[113]. The same kind of remark could be applied to almost every chena tract in Ceylon, yet it is on this shifting, variable, unreliable basis that all so-called village title rests. Why should we lay such exaggerated stress on paraveni claims, thereby ignoring the point of view that Crown land should be given not to those villagers with the biggest claims but to those whose needs are greatest?” “There is a regrettable lack of finality about the whole business. In this part of the country, which is seething with litigation, I am frequently asked by parties in whose favour I have decided in settlement and who have paid for the lots or shares settled on them, to save them from the legal machinations of the defeated opponents. There are unfortunately no satisfactory means of doing so. The Crown is thereby exposed to a charge of breach of faith in that it has raised hopes whereof it is unable to secure the realization” (…) “One family claims 2/3rd of a village and another family 1/3rd (but) it was found that the second claimed 10 acres more than the first” because they had been more enterprising. “Morale: grab as much land as you can before settlement (…) It is practically impossible to discover what each individual possesses; they possess in most cases not as individuals but as groups and what share of each ‘group possession’ (old gardens) the individual owns is an unknown and unascertainable quantity” [114].

The position of Sandys was that it should be better for both the administration and the villagers to abandon the tedious work of genealogical reconstruction and distribute land according to the needs of each villager and not to his pedigree, especially in the North-western province where the landless outsiders are numerous. “but this would be unorthodox”. His critique of settlement work was that it creates private property and inequality “The villagers before settlement wander all over their neighbour’s lands, whether planted or not, because the title is vague and uncertain and few are in a position to forbid them. But after settlement all is changed. Title becomes stronger, and the exact position of the land is known. Barbed wire fences spring up in all directions. The villagers do not have plans before them and often cannot realize in advance that their easiest route to the tank or for their children to go to school is liable to be cut off by settlement”[115].

 

The Settlement department and the Land commission of 1927-28. 

The decision to review the land policy of the colonial government of Ceylon was taken by Hugh Clifford, governor from November 1925 to June 1927, as the result of a combination of often contradictory factors: to answer the criticism of the land by a section of the westernized bourgeoisie adopting the nationalist stance and at the same time investing in the plantation economy; to remedy the lack of coherence and vision in the management of land matters; to protect the peasantry in a context of growing landlessness. A Land commission reporting to the Legislative council sat in 1927 and 1928, collected extensive evidence and proposed substantial reforms. The Land settlement department was in the spotlight, and using the platform offered by the proceedings of the Land Commission and the debates at the Legislative council, nationalist critics renewed their attacks against the department, which answered by accusing its detractors of double standards, and defending the fairness of their decisions. G.E. Madawela, member of the Legislative council and leader of the Kurunegala demonstrations before 1915, accused the Settlement officer of arbitrary behaviour in favour of European planters: “The Settlement officer has prostituted the ordinance to squeeze money out of the villager (…) It is not possible for a man to pay 15 Rs to 20 Rs.  for an acre without getting into debt (…) It was Mr. Fraser who commenced this policy, he gave to European planters and to Messrs Finlay Muir land in Kurunegala at 7.50 and 10 Rs an acre. He also gave to other capitalists at that price”[116]. Madawela, together with other witnesses at the Commission such as Mideniya Adigar, defended his thesis that the ordinance of 1840 did not aim at koralegam (freehold) but only at feudal villages, and that prior to the ordinance of 1897 the government regularly recognized the existence of private ancestral (paraveni) chenas by the issue of Certificates of quiet possession. Repeated pronouncements of the Kägalla administrators, and admission under pressure of the appurtenance principle (3 to 1) by the Revenue officers, in spite of the opposition of the Settlement department, were according to him sufficient proofs of his thesis.  He therefore proposed that a new legislation compel the Settlement department to recognize paraveni chena rights.

Wait, Controller of Revenue, retorted: “In the Kurunegala district in which the mover is most interested, the settlement of the village is really a compendious series of partition cases on a system which most villagers well understand and appreciate, and which they generally prefer to the 3 to 1 alternative”. Wait defended the ‘case on its own merits’ approach of the Settlement department; according to him: “the claimant pays no legal fees whatsoever, and gets the land demarcated and settled on him at a less cost than he would have had to pay for a mere survey of the same extent in a partition case in a civil court. If the motion is accepted, it will lead to a scramble in which the honest villager will go to the wall, ousted by the more unscrupulous trafficker in paper titles”.

In his official report for 1929, Stace considered that the proposed rules would deprive the Settlement officers to decide ‘according to the merit of the case’ and finally benefit the capitalist speculators[117]: “The settlement has usually consisted in a mediation or compromise between the two sides, the village claimant buying from the Crown whole or part of the chena lands claimed at a low rate such as 20 Rs per acre. This purchase constitutes the ‘settlement’ of their claims. The land might often be worth 100 Rs an acre, but the lower rate was the recognition of the equitable right of the claimant. It represents the price paid for the bare legal right and the good title conferred upon him”. According to Stace, the new instructions concerning ‘bona fide ancestral village titles’ to be settled gratis except survey and title fees (about 10 Rs more or less) would not affect the fundamentals, but established the right of every claimant to obtain a settlement for the whole of his claim, and the principle that it is not the price of the land, but the price of the title to land, which is paid by the claimant: hence the Crown is no longer the proprietor of uncultivated highlands as in 1840, but the administrator of these lands for the benefit of the people if the people recognize this role by signing the settlement. But as regards the outside claimants, until then the rate was fixed by the Settlement officer according to the merits of each case (usually from 25 to 100 Rs an acre) but “in future, the capitalist claimant will know beforehand exactly what rate he will have to pay – the same whether the land is valuable or worthless, whether he has paid the villager handsomely or meanly. The rates have been fixed by the Governor in council as follows: Sabaragamuwa and North Western Province, 24 Rs per acre, North Central Province 10 Rs per acre, Central Province 20 Rs per acre, Uva 22 Rs per acre. On the whole, the capitalist claimant will get his land settled on him at considerably cheaper rates than he did before.”

In their unpublished diaries, the settlement officers denounced the collusion between the promoters of the proposed legislation and the land speculators: “Many lawyers have stated that there is considerable prospect of very nourishing fees in the latest Waste Lands Ordinance” [118]. One went so far as to cross out some sentences in a manner which made them readable[119]: “A large amount of clearing by low-country landsharks, a good deal of which forests. The position is bad enough now, but it will be worse if the proposals of the Land commission are put into operation. If these proposals which in matter of private and Crown title must surpass the landshark’s wildest dreams meet with the politicians’ approval, government will find it difficult to adopt proposals less favourable to them which have not been discussed, and the political and landgrabbing classes, if they are not identical, have a great deal in common (…) Some of Mr. Madawela’s ad hoc historical pronouncements seem to have been swallowed without condiments (…) The method of arriving at conclusions first and recording evidence later appears a novel one, but is perhaps dictated by political exigencies. Apparently one side is prepared to stomach the peasant tenure scheme, if the other will refrain from regurgitating the former historical notions”.

Among the land speculators denounced by the department were G.E. Madawela and his father in law C.E. Tennekoon: “Mr Madawela, a staunch upholder of villager’s rights, appeared in office on behalf of Mr Tennekoon, a speculator”. After the passing of the new legislation recognizing paraveni chena rights, Tennekoon claimed entire villages, some of them uninhabited, on no other title than “having by the more or less illegitimate use of his great influence as Ratemahatmaya, forced the villagers to yield 2/3rd of the produce” and the settlement officer was compelled to settle on him large extents owing to the new legislation based on the Land Commission recommendations recognizing as private ‘paraveni chenas’[120]. Madawela’s expertise was sought in the whole island: he was considered as the authority able to oppose the Settlement officers. In the case of the village of Paranagama where the leading family held a sannasa apparently never produced and had sold most of their lands for rubber, the headman “had consulted the Hon. Mr. Madawala about the sannas some 2 or 3 years ago and the fee he demanded was too high for them to pay”[121]. Other nationalist leaders followed suit in the 1930s.: for example, in Hitgoda Wapola village (Kandy district) in 1933, “M. George de Silva appeared and wished the sales postponed with a view to his making representations to have lands involved declared private. I declined to allow a postponement. The villagers however sensing the presence of a champion in their cause brought the old cry of ‘no money’, thus bringing things to an impasse. Mr Winter too and Mr Halloway, local planters and purchasers of land from the villagers, declined to pay anything more than 6 Rs. per acre. I wonder how far all this had to do with the electioneering campaign that was going on in the area at the time”.[122] 

The new land policy which was the outcome of the recommendations of the Land commission and was framed by the State council instituted by the Donoughmore constitution and its Minister for agriculture and lands, D.S. Senanayake, will be the subject of a further chapter. It put the Settlement department under the control of the Land commissioner and organized land development from above with the ‘mapping out’ concept.

 

Appendix : the testimony of Frank Leach[123]

In his interview with Michael Roberts and in written answers to questions posed by him, Frank Leach recalled his experiences as Assistant Settlement Officer in the Kurunegala and Badulla districts and gave detailed descriptions of the working of the settlement team and of the speculator’s tricks. The working of the department depended on the character of the officers who started with ‘easy villages’: some worked on a day to day routine, others (like him) had a wider vision of the future. It depended also on the type of villages settled: in small villages of the dry zone without much speculation the work was simple, but in the estate areas it involved a lot of preliminary research “it was surprising how the extent of a piece of land grew with the number of transfers made”. It depended also on the quality of the survey

Leach confirmed the role played by Kurunegala proctors as land brokers, their stratagems in preventing claimants to appear before the settlement officer, and the preference of the villagers for allotments, which saved them disputes, and opened the possibility for paddy-less villagers to obtain land, instead of undivided chenas given on a 3 to 1 basis. He listed as land speculators Victor Corea, Van der Poorten, Charles Batuwantudawe, Madawela, Berry, Henry de Mel. Chief headmen, such as Madahapola, who claimed half the villages north of Kurunegala along the Dambulla road, induced the surveyors to demarcate more land than what was given by the settlement; but the simple village araccis had less lands than village traders who advanced paddy upon mortgage and became petty landlords. The result of the extension of coconut plantations was to make the villages dependent on coconut and to block the extension of subsistence agriculture: “they were no longer agriculturists, except for their own little garden”.

Answering supplementary questions by Michael Roberts, Leach mentioned the frequent recourse to courts by speculators “who wanted to get full credit for dubious paper title often deriving from diga-married women (…) They would purport that the woman was not married in diga but in binna”. “It was common for a large land speculator with probably a mixture of good and bad village title to institute a partition case to get his portion defined by the courts. Having taken the initiative he stopped anyone else taking a case, and then he would take a minimum of action. If the judge insisted on getting on with the case, it would usually be found that one party had died and so the case would be postponed (…) meanwhile the speculator’s rubber grew and the other claimants were powerless to do anything short of murder”

Leach disagreed with the view that “selling the land to its occupant, even at a nominal price, meant selling it to the speculator”, because according to him the villager had time to save enough money to pay by planting one or two crops on the land or pledging valuables. He added that “one must not forget that in sophisticated areas such as the estate areas of Uva, Sabaragamuwa and Kandy, many of the villagers were rogues themselves in land matters and were not above engineering claims and selling on no title (…) but not so much in Uva where Crown title had been more rigorously defended”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  

 

 

 

 

 

[1] Research on the working of the land settlement department before independence is practically inexistent, except a chapter in the unpublished thesis of Lal Jayawardena, who made use of the Settlement diaries. The Agrarian Research and Training Institute (Colombo) had published in 1976 under the title Land Settlement in Sri Lanka, 1840-1975 a review of the writings on the subject which offers little information on the British period.

[2] J.P. Lewis (1854-1923), author of the Manual of the Wanni, ended his career as Government Agent of the Central Province in 1906, and was an active member of the Royal Asiatic Society

[3] W.E. Davidson (born in Malta, 1859, died in Sydney, 1923) had an Oxbridge education, and a brilliant career of colonial administrator, ending as governor of New South Wales; a representative of the progressive-paternalistic approach, his diaries display a witty frame of mind and a deep understanding of the Ceylonese society

[4] John George Fraser, junior of the three, was born in Edinburgh in 1864, and died in Launceston, Tasmania in 1941; a Scotsman, married to a German lady; he came as cadet in 1887 (Jaffna) and was Assistant Government Agent Chilaw in 1899. Wrongly qualified of pure bureaucrat by Bowes (Bows and Arrows p. 43), he was a sensible person who did his best to understand the people and a serious administrator who put his department on a firm footing. He was in 1903 assisted by Howard Orme Fox (born in 186, Cambridge educated, Assistant Government Agent Matale in 1899), and in 1907 by Walter Ernest Wait, son of a tea planter in India, cadet in 1902, and member of the Ceylon Rifle Corps (Arnold Wright, Twentieth Century Impressions of Ceylon, p. 135)

[5] Administration Report Western Province 1900, p. B9

[6] Diary  Fraser, 5.09.1901

[7] These land records were still kept in the Land settlement department record room and in the Old colonial secretariat record room in Colombo Fort area when I studied them in between 1979 and 1983; they are said to be now in the Sri Lanka National Archives repositories in Kandy and Colombo.

[8] The only published diaries are those of Leonard Woolf when he was Assistant Government Agent at Hambantota. The unpublished diaries are available in the Sri Lanka National Archives (SLNA). 

[9] The qualities of the Settlement officer are resumed by Frederic Lewis (not to be confused with J.P. Lewis) in his autobiography: he must have a flair for spotting tricks and falseness, and a gift to negotiate and convince.

[10] In his diary of 9.11.1937, the fresh Assistant Settlement Officer Ratnatunga writes: “Spoke to the Settlement Officer about diaries. He said we were the Minister’s eyes in the districts in which we worked. Our diaries should give an account of our observations, what we saw in these places”

[11] L.R.U. Jayawardena, “The supply of Sinhalese Labour to Ceylon plantations, 1830-1930, a Study of Imperial Policy in a Peasant Society”. University of Cambridge, Ph. D. Thesis, 1963.

[12] AR Matara 1872, p. 180 : see the controversy in my previous article on chena repression.

[13] Administration Report Matara 1898, p. E20

[14] C.J.R. Le Mesurier was a favourite of the former governor Arthur Gordon-Hamilton (later lord Stanmore) and in his various posts had acted as a sort of almighty benevolent despot. He pleaded for the abolition of the paddy tax and the defense of the peasantry, but was himself involved in numerous land speculations; his conversion to Islam in order to remarry in the face of the refusal of his first wife to divorce finally led to his dismissal. See Michael Powell “Fragile Identities: the Colonial Consequences of C.J.R. Le Mesurier in Ceylon” in Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History,11,1, spring 2010.

[15] The dates given between brackets or in footnotes refer to the entries of the diaries, preceded by the name of their author

[16] see “Abortive Chena Settlements in the Kägalla District during the late 19th and early 20th centuries” https://slkdiaspo.hypotheses.org/6432 (2024)

 

[17] See “Highland Appropriation by the Plantation Sector in the Kägalla District (1870-1930) https://slkdiaspo.hypotheses.org/6273 (2025)

 

[18] It is worth noticing that 27 years later, the Assistant Agent in Matara, A.N. Strong,  reproduced extracts from this entry in the diary of Davidson, with this commentary : “Compared with the state of affairs existing today, the truth of this prophecy is amazing (…) As a matter of fact, the villagers were too well looked after by the headmen to do much illicit clearing. Instead of that they either contented themselves with an adequate pittance (in Pittabeddara I found 180 shareholders subsisting on about ½ acre of village garden), or else eked out a living by precarious coolie work on other people’s land. The new policy came none too soon” (Administration report Matara 1928, p. C33)

 

[19] Administration report of the Land settlement officer Fox for 1911-1912, p. K1

[20] Administration report of the Land settlement officer Fraser for 1904, p. N1; Diary Fraser 26-27.01.1904

[21] Diary Fraser 31.10.1903; see also Administration Report Settlement Officer 1906; SLNA 65/Pending file 1684A ‘Formation of a Land Settlement Department’, Settlement Officer to Colonial Secretary. 9.01.1907

[22] CO54/682 n°240 of 17.06.1903

[23] Francis Robert Ellis (1849-1915) was a witty Irishman who was known for having “the gift of detecting at a glance anything that had the faintest scent of humbug or weakness about it” (Frederick Lewis, Sixty years…p. 317). A punctilious and painstaking administrator, his actions were resented by the young enterprising Ceylonese.

[24] Land Settlement Department Records, files on Ellis Settlement work: Anderson’s claims (1904), Land Settlement Work in the North-Western Province (1904), A uniform system of dealing with encroachments (10.02.1904). Colonial Secretariat records SLNA 65/Pending file 1075 (“Land settlement in the North Western Province”) for 1904-5 and Pending file 2537B (same title) for 1907-8. See also CO54/712.

[25] Administration reports North Western Province 1895 p. G1 to 5, 1896 p.G3, 1902 p. G9 .

[26] SLNA 59/Pending File 178 : Government Agent North Western Province to Colonial secretary, 13.11.1896

[27] SLNA18/2490 (Old chena file): Assistant Agent Kurunegala report, 26.10.1840: “There are in this district a number of hill villages called kandegam in which it is highly desirable that some measures should be taken to secure an equitable adjustment of the lands as regards the proprietorship of the inhabitants and the rights of government. The villages alluded to are situated chiefly on the ranges between Madure and Hewawisse, Tiragandahe, and Ganhaye korale, on which they occupy all the best portions of land such as would be preferred for coffee plantations. The kandegam were all royal, and their rajakariya was to provide jaggery and honey for the king’s store. The original proprietors are said to have been forced by the kings to reside on the hills for the above-mentioned service which was continued by their descendants until after the British possession, when the rajakariya was altered for road service, peeling cinnamon, furnishing cadjan and so on. On the abolition of the compulsory services and introduction of commutation, the holders of paddy land in the other royal villages were allowed to register them in their own names, and have since paid the same taxes as the other paraveni proprietors. The kandegam people, having no low grounds, were excluded from the registry, but the portion of high ground annually cleared and sown with paddy has always been taxed at the same rate as other paraveni grounds (…) The inhabitants of these villages claim the whole extent of lands included within the reported boundaries of the village and from which an extent sufficient for the wants of the inhabitants is annually cleared. The extent varying with the increase or decrease of the population. There can be no doubt of the proprietorship of these people to some portion of all these villages (…) in which I consider they ought to be quieted in possession as much as the other nilakarayas of royal villages. They, like almost all the proprietors of lands in the Seven korales, hold no sannas or document”.  

[28] SLNA 59/PF 178: correspondence and statistics on village sales in Weudawili for the years 1894-1896

[29] SLNA 59/ PF 1384 (Delwita estate settlement); “Land settlement work of F.R. Ellis”, file in the Land Settlement Department records; also Diary Fox, December 1904.

[30] Diaries of Cocks, May 1931 and Navaratnam, April 1937

[31] Land Settlement Department Records, file on Ellis Settlement work, subfile ‘Anderson’s claims’ (1904)

[32] SLNA 59/PF 1074 (Land settlement in Matale): Joseph Malcolmson to Governor, 10.08.1904; Malcolmson to Colonial Secretary, 9.09.1904 and 15.10.1904.

[33] Among the Matale agents, two opposite figures stand out: S.M. Burrrows, in 1896, was instrumental in bringing the issue of land sales by villagers to the attention of Ridgeway by publishing the description of the disintegration of village life written by Aluvihare Ratemahatmaya. And E.B. Alexander, who became after he left the service the head of the Ceylon planters lobby in London.

[34]  Administration report Matale 1905, p. B28

[35] On the Nattukottai Chettiar, see W.S. Weerasooriya, The Nattukottai Chettiar Merchant Bankers in Ceylon, Dehiwala, Tisara, 1973; David Rudner, Caste and Capitalism in Colonial India, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1994; Éric Meyer, Dépression et malaria à Sri Lanka: l’impact de la crise économique des années 1930 sur une société rurale dépendante. Paris, doctoral dissertation EHESS, 1980. On the Karawa elite, Michael Roberts, Caste Conflict and Elite Formation : the Rise of a Karawa Elite in Sri Lanka, 1500-1931, Cambridge, University Press, 1982.

[36] Diary Fraser, January 1906, Fox, September to December 1906, Administration report of the Land Settlement Department 1906, p. N22, Ellis Settlement Work file in Land Settlement Department records; Diary Perera 12.05.1936

[37] Jacob de Mel (1839-1919) from Moratuwa, a Christian Karava, plumbago mine proprietor, invested his fortune in large scale coconut plantations in the Kurunegala district; his son Henry de Mel (1877-1936) became the leader of the Low Country Products Association (founded in 1910) and a politician and died after being shot by a worker on one of his plantations. Clovis de Silva (1852-1916) and several other petitioners were also Moratuwites. The full list of the petitioners offers a fascinating catalogue of the coconut planters listed in order of importance, first those who write in English, including a few Tamils, then in Sinhala (about half their names being Kandyan); there is not a single Moor among them.  

[38] The Land settlement department file titled ‘Land Settlement Work of F.R. Ellis in the North-Western Province’ begins with a memorandum on encroachments dated 10.02.1904 (also found in SLNA 59/Pending File 1075 under registration number 03334) written after Ellis had “spent some days in the Kurunegala kacceri” while the Revenue Officers were on leave.

[39] SLNA 59/Pending File 2537B

[40] SLNA,65 L754/1929

[41] SLNA 6/374, RN 18393/1909 Settlement Officer to Controller of Revenue, confidential letter 3.11.1909

[42]  SLNA 18/2490 (‘Old chena file’) 8.09.1840 and 26.10.1840, letters of the Assistant Government Agent Kurunegala, William Morris, to the Government Agent Western province, Buller; Administration report Puttalam 1884, p. 100A.

[43] Diary Leach, 4.11.1927; SLNA 65, PF 1075, report Hulugalle of 4.06.1904

[44] Diary Fraser, 4.07.1903

[45] SLNA 6 box 15, 0107/1907

[46] Diary Brayne, 28.11.1909

[47] SLNA 6/box 374, RN 18393/1909 Settlement Officer to Controller of Revenue, confidential letter, 3.11.1909 Note that Charles Edward Tennekoon’s daughter married Godfrey Edward Madawela in 1903.

[48] Diaries Leach, 4.12.1924, Sandys, 3.09.1930, Stace, 1.07.1923

[49] SLNA L91/1926; SLNA L24/1928 3.02.1928; Diary Hodson, 6.08.1928; Administration report North Western Province, 1928

[50] Diaries of Seneviratne, February 1933 (Kahadenigama, near Kuliyapitiya), Abeyakoon, March 1933 (Ketiyawa), Rasaretnam, April 1934, Ellepola, April-June 1936

[51] Fraser, 9.12.1904, 05.1905

[52] Fox, 8.06.1904

[53] CO54/706, 16.11.1906

[54] Administration report North-western province 1906, p. F3

[55] Letter of GA Kurunegala H.R. Freeman to Colonial Secretary, 14.08.1906, in SLNA 59/Pending File 1383.

[56] Diaries Fox, 08.1906, Wait, 10.1906. Johannes de Mel had refused the terms of the Kurunegala circular in his numerous claims (Hendiyapola, Malattawa, Urapotha) and planted with coconut on the sole basis of village purchases

[57] Henry Lawson de Mel was a compulsive buyer of village lands, who was ready to settle with the Crown, but always at reduced prices. He became one of the biggest plantation owners in the coconut triangle: Diary Davies, 31.10.1907 (Nabeta), 12.12.1918: “Inspected Pallama, Pahala and Ihala Kolaeliya. In the list is a preposterous claim by Mr. de Mel, obviously a mere speculation in the hope of inducing the Crown too part with valuable land for less than its value; he has purchased from the villagers 300 acres of Crown forest”

[58] SLNA 59/ Pending File 1684A, Fox to Colonial Secretary, 1.07.1906

[59] SLNA 59/ Pending File 1684A, Government Agent Uva to Colonial Secretary, 8.05.1906; 

[60] Memo 8.09.1906 (SLNA 59/ Pending File 2226): the notification of 1904 is described by Fowler as “a bold attempt to create a new departure in the settlement of the land in the North Western Province, which proved a comparative failure”

[61] Fraser to Colonial Secretary, 9.01.1907, RN 0430/07 in SLNA59/Pending File 1684A

[62] SLNA 59/Pending file 2537B (‘Land settlement in the North western province’), CO54/712 (dispatch 740, 11.12.1907), Diary Fraser, 7-8.10.1907 

[63] CO54/709, dispatch 345 and 362 of 1907

[64] Burgher lawyers like proctor Modder of Kurunegala became experts in fighting the Settlement officers (Diary Fox, 7.12.1912).  

[65] CO54/712, 11.12.1907

[66] Diary Fraser, 27.05.1908

[67] CO54/718, 1.09.1908

[68] SLNA 59/Pending File 2226

[69] CO54/724, annex to despatch of 24.03.1909

[70] SLNA 59/PF 2059, April 1911. Thorpe was previously deputy collector of customs, and in 1901-1903 District Judge Matara, where he had already been in opposition with Fraser (Diary Fraser 15.02.1903)

[71] Diary Davies, 11.12.1913, 25.04.1914, 6.07.1914

[72] SLNA 6/ 761, RN 03961/1913 

[73] Diary Hughes, November 1924

[74] Diary Leach, 30.01.1924 and 8.12.1924

[75] Diaries of Wedderburn and Hughes, February 1924

[76] Diary Christoffelz, 8.05.1930

[77] Hansard 1931, p. 160 (17.02.1931)

[78] Diary Davies, 12.1918. Wright 20th Century Impressions of Ceylon… p. 749 ; SLNA 59 PF 2537B; See on Potukulama CO54/735 (20.07.1910)

[79] SLNA 6/483, Settlement Officer to Colonial Secretary, 2.04.1910; Diary Fox, 5 .12.1912

[80] Diaries Cocks, 15.05.1931 and Abhayaratne, 23.11.1933

[81] Diary Archibald, September 1915

[82] SLNA 65 L73 /1926: Government agent North Western Province (Codrington) to Colonial Secretary, 25.06.1926

[83] Diary Hunter, 20.05.1926; Government Agent North Western Province to Colonial Secretary, 25.11.1927 (printed in the 5th interim report of the Land Commission, SP16 of 1928).

[84] Diaries Wait, 30.03.1922 and Wedderburn, April and June 1922

[85] Administration Report North Western Province 1924 and 1926; Administration Report Sabaragamuwa 1927, p. I4

[86] Diary Hughes, 24.07.1926 (Walgam pattu)

[87] SLNA65  L295/1926 ‘Effect of Land settlement on the alienation of village lands’, Kurunegala, 7.01.1926; Ratnapura, 12.10.1925

[88] Diary Stace 16. 02 to 26.10.1925, Karandana area (west of Ratnapura) and May 1926 (Kiriporuwa village)

[89] Diary Stace, 11/1925, 01/1926, 05/1927

[90] Diary Stace, September – October 1925

[91] Diary Stace, 7.01.1926

[92] SLNA, Land Commission file 907

[93] SLNA 65 L62/1928 Reports of the Revenue and Settlement Officers concerning their comments on the 3rd interim report: “It has been my experience that after settlement quite 50% of the villagers immediately make every effort to sell the land to which they have got good title to capitalists, usually rich men from Panadure or Kalutara.

[94] Diary Bassett, 24.11.1927 (Akkarella, Ratnapura district)

[95] Diary Christoffelz, August 1928 (Lekamgoda, Ratnapura district)

[96] Diary Sandys, October 1929 and 16.07.1930

[97] Diary Aluvihare, 1.08.1930 (Kirindawa, near Kuliyapitiya)

[98] Diary Rasaretnam, 6/7 December 1932 (Kuliyapitiya)

[99] Diary Seneviratne, October 1933 (Niladure and Welanga, near Sinharaja forest); also 5.04.1932 (Wilattawa village)

[100] Diary Jansz, 12.03.1936; on the Chettiar moneylenders, W.E. Weerasooriya, The Nattukottai Chettiar merchant bankers in Ceylon, Dehiwala, Tisara, 1973

[101] Diary Ratnatunga, October 1938 (Nildandahinna, Walapane, Nuwara Eliya district)

[102] Diaries De Mel, January 1937 (Matale district) and Wijekoon (October 1937)

[103] Diary Fraser, 12.07.1909

[104] Diaries Brayne, 1910 and 1911, Wedderburn, February 1912

[105] Diary Toller, 14.11.1908

[106] Diary Hughes, January and February 1924, November 1924. 

[107] Diary Hughes, 18/19.11.1924.

[108] Walter Terence Stace (1886-1967) had an initial training in philosophy; he joined the Ceylon civil service in 1910 and retired in 1932 to become professor of philosophy at Princeton, where his influence was deeply felt. His unpublished Notes on Life in Ceylon are kept at the Institute of Commonwealth Studies, London (ms. ICS 100)

[109] Diary Stace, 25-26.01.1926 (village of Ratmale, Kalutara district)

[110] Diary Abhayakoon, December 1935

[111] Diary Sandys, August and October 1929, July and December 1930. Melville Kerverne Trelawny Sandys entered the Ceylon civil service in 1919 and ended his career as Government Agent at Ratnapura in the 1940s. Copies of some of his diaries (but not those of his settlement officer period) are deposited at the Institute of Commonwealth Studies, University of London [ICS 71]  

[112] Diary Sandys, October 1929

[113] This was already noticed by Fraser (diary November 1901 “It is therefore desirable that any alias should be recorded”)

[114] This view was shared by his superior the Settlement Officer (diary July 1929, Tabbomulla, North Western province): “This village will be almost entirely private by the time it is finished (…) I gather that when these sales are completed, there will still be quite a number of applications for land by those who have abstained from putting forward these preposterous claims, and there will be no land left for them. That is the worst of admitting these claims: it puts a premium on grabbing”

[115] Diary Sandys, 18.07.1930

[116] Hansard 1927, p. 139-163. He was seconded by Francis Molamure, who insisted that there had never been Crown chenas in Kägalla, and that wattoru and ninda registers should be considered as proof of private property and should be freely accessible, while recognizing “that Settlement officers are most fair and most considerate when dealing with the villagers”. Victor Corea supported Madawela with pseudo-historical arguments drawn from the Mahavamsa chronicle

[117] Administration report of the Land Settlement Department (Stace), 1929, p. K3-4

[118] Diary Luddington, 13.12.1927

[119] Diary Hudson, 12.03.1928

[120] Diaries Hunter, 23.01.1928, Leach, 26.02.1927, Stace, 25.04.1930

[121] Diary Christoffelz, 23.10.1930

[122] Diary Seneviratne, March and December 1933

[123] Frank Leach interviews with Michael Roberts and written testimony,1966, in Michael Roberts Oral History Project, Oxford and Adelaide manuscripts. Not to be confused with the anthropologist Edmund Leach.

Sri Lanka’s NPP Government: From system change to structural compliance

Article by IFRI: Institut Français des Relations Internationales

https://www.ifri.org/en/studies/sri-lankas-npp-government-system-change-structural-compliance

In September 2024, a relative outsider to Sri Lanka’s two-party-dominated political system, Anura Kumara Dissanayake, won the presidential elections. The anti-establishment, populist movement he represented, the National People’s Power (NPP), went on to receive an overwhelming mandate in the November 2024 general elections, winning 159 seats in a 225-member parliament.

BNF – France-South Asia, shared heritage online

https://heritage.bnf.fr/france-southasia/en/homepage

Resources on France and South Asia’s shared heritage.

Power structures and spaces / Sri Lanka

Sri Lanka

Ceylon was mostly known for its strategic trading position in the Indian Ocean. European powers, the Portuguese (1505-1658), the Dutch (1658-1796) and the British (1815-1948) colonized the island. The attempts by the French to establish a trading post in Ceylon began when French naval expeditions prospered during the reign of King Louis XIV.

The French crown in Ceylon

The French East Indies Company, created in 1664, soon had the monopoly of French commerce and navigation in the Indian Ocean. In 1670 the French Minister of Finance Jean Baptiste Colbert summoned a naval force under the official name of “Squadron of Persia”. This was the first military squadron sent to the Indian Ocean, entrusted to Admiral Jacob Blanquet de la Haye. A few years earlier, the French East Indies Company had recruited François Caron, who had previously served the Dutch East India Company for 30 years. Caron was French by birth and Dutch by adoption. As Commander of the Dutch East Indies (Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie -VOC) forces he succeeded in capturing Negambo (on the west coast of Ceylon) in 1644 from the Portuguese. When he offered his services to the French, he declared that he knew of a suitable location for them to establish their maritime base, and suggested Trincomalee, on the east coast of Ceylon. Caron became the Director General of the French East Indies Company. 

It was thus that the squadron reached the bay of Trincomalee in March 1672. The king of Kandy, in the central highlands of Ceylon, King Rajasinghe II was engaged in getting rid of the Portuguese. He had signed the Kandyan Treaty of 1638 with the Dutch, which secured the terms under which they would cooperate in defending the Kingdom from the Portuguese. Caron knew that King Rajasinghe was at war with the Dutch and made use of this situation to gain favor with the King. He negotiated with the King, offering French help to oust the Dutch, while requesting to occupy the bay of Trincomalee in return.

French at the court of King Rajasinghe II

The French saw Trincomalee as an important target in their greater aim of controlling trade in the Indian Ocean. Also known as Koddiyar Bay, it had received high praise for its beauty and location by countless travelers and explorers of all origins. The French too were prolific in their descriptions of the bay, as the journal entries of various officials show. Logbooks from the French National Archives provide insightful accounts of their encounters in Ceylon. The French were entranced by the customs and behavior of the natives in the Kandyan court. One of them is noteworthy. Sieur de La Nérolle arrived in 1672 and left behind a living legacy. He was part of an expedition which departed from La Rochelle in 1670 and arrived at Trincomalee Bay in 1672. The expedition failed to secure control of the Bay, although the French connection with Ceylon was not entirely severed. The members of de la Haye’s delegation sent to the Kandyan King’s court remained in Ceylon and the story of Lieutenant de La Nérolle, whose descendants today belong to the 12th generation, testifies to lasting connections surpassing trade or colonial ties. It emphasizes the impact the French strategies had on Sri Lanka’s history and identity. 

King Rajasinghe II officially handed over Trincomalee Bay to the French. On the 17th of June 1672 the French flag was hoisted on the Sun Island. However, the French occupation of the bay did not last long. De la Haye’s attempt to take over Trincomalee was foiled by the Dutch.

Second French naval expedition to Ceylon

A century after this expedition, many French governors and generals serving in India brought up the importance of Trincomalee again. General de Bussy and Admiral de Suffren pointed out that it was to be regretted that the French possessed no harbor equal to Trincomalee. In 1781, a French squadron was sent to the Coromandel Coast under the command of the experienced naval officer Suffren. In August 1782, his fleet anchored in front of Trincomalee in Ceylon. The French had joined up with Hyder Ali, the leader of Mysore, to counter the British. In fact, out of the five battles fought between Suffren’s fleet and the English fleet led by Admiral Edward Hughes in the Indian Ocean, the Battle of Trincomalee of August 1782 is the most well-known.

The second French expedition was carried out not through negotiations, but through battle. It also had a different focus. It aimed to destroy the English squadron, and to seize the English establishments in India. Unlike their first expedition, the French won the second battle for Trincomalee. However, their control of Ceylon was short-lived. As a result of the 1783 Peace Treaty in Europe, they had to restore Trincomalee back to the Dutch. The political forces in Europe, once again grasped the control of Ceylon from their hands. Then in 1795 it was taken over by the British.

Published in February 2025

 

HIGHLAND APPROPRIATION BY THE PLANTATION SECTOR IN THE KÄGALLA DISTRICT (1870-1930) by Eric P. Meyer

We publish here the 5th paper on the history of land appropriation by plantations in colonial Ceylon, after 

Gamperaliya (Village Upheaval) in the Kägalla district” [http://slkdiaspo.hypotheses.org/1354],

“Landgrabbing by coffee estates in the Kägalla district : mid-19th century case studies” [http://slkdiaspo.hypotheses.org/5090

“Chena (slash-and-burn cultivation) and its repression in colonial Ceylon”[https://slkdiaspo.hypotheses.org/6273]

“Abortive Chena Settlements in the Kägalla District during the late 19th and early 20th centuries” [https://slkdiaspo.hypotheses.org/6432].

Further papers will be devoted to the history of the Land settlement department and to the new land policy adopted after 1927.

*

The Kägalla district has been the scene of a large scale and brutal appropriation of its highlands by planters of tea and later of rubber, beginning in the 1880s and until the late 1920s. The process started with the sale of blocks of chena lands which had been appropriated by the Crown under the block settlement system and it continued with the sale by villagers themselves, through intermediaries, of the lands which had been left to them under the same settlements or which had not been settled. This sudden extension was not anticipated by the colonial powers; after unsuccessful attempts to stop it, the administration was compelled to legalize these sales.

In the British colonial system of administration, at least during the 19th century, the civil servants were noted according to their ability to increase revenue. The sale or lease of lands appropriated by the Crown under the ordinance of 1840 was in the rural districts one of the main sources of revenue to the State, besides grain taxes and arrack rents. Crown land sales were considered in a purely revenue perspective. Before block chena settlements, Crown land sales in the Kägalla district were generally held in a haphazard manner, according to the applications of individual would-be planters, the lack of surveys was an impediment, and the annual reports lamented the poor revenue of the district[1]. Chena settlements had been started in the 1870s, before the coffee collapse, but at that time the district was not very attractive. When tea began to replace coffee, chena and forest lands of the wet zone were found to be adapted to the new product, and the chena settlements attracted the attention of the colonial investors.  The ‘opening’ of the country with the idea of planned ‘development’ found its way in the official documents during the 1880s, when the rush for tea land began, especially along the valleys of the Kelani river and its tributaries, and Kägalla became for a decade the most profitable district for the colonial treasury.

 

Land sales by the Crown

Block chena settlements made under the Ievers system resulted in putting at the disposal of the colonial government large extents of highland in compact blocks – exactly what the planters were looking for. During the tenure of the Assistant Agents Wace (in 1884), Le Mesurier (in 1885-86) and Price (from mid 1886), large auction sales of Kägalla Crown lands took place in Colombo and not in the district, which gave big European investors an advantage over local purchasers: F.R. Saunders, the Government Agent of the Western province which at that time included the Kägalla district, had close links with the Planters Association and the business firms of Colombo. These early sales resulted in consolidating the colonial appropriation of land, in spite of the uncertain legal status of the settlements, while leaving the peasants to fight between themselves to apportion the village block.

The chena settlements were organized distinctly with a view to offer accessible lands in the Kelani valley to planters as quickly as possible. The idea by the mid 1880s was to sell large blocks; the Surveyor general office proposed initially to put to auction 5,000 acres once a year[2]: “There is such a demand for land now springing up in the district that it would be as well for the Crown to adopt a regular system of selecting and putting up for sale a certain extent of land every year and not to advertise any block simply because it is applied for”. It could thus raise the price by competition (actually there was no such rise because prospective buyers made arrangements) and exclude “men with a small capital who are on the lookout and who apply for small lots in order if they get them to obtain the command of a larger bock hereafter or to make terms with an intending purchaser of such a block”. The Agent considered that “it is absurd to sell fine tea land at anything under 25 Rs an acre, but owing to lack of capital men make arrangements at sales and agree beforehand what lots they should buy and hence the upset price of 10 Rs per acre is the average (…) If the paddy is without complaint put up 40 Rs per acre I see no reason why the European cultivator should have a preference shown”[3].

The first large chena and forest land sales were held in 1884[4] : 3,517 acres of chenas and 1,783 acres of forest in Lower Bulatgama; 1,850 acres of chenas and 656 acres of forest in Atulugam korale, 1,462 acres of chenas and 5,902 acres of forest in Dehigampal korale, 2,960 acres of chenas and 566 acres of forest in Panawal korale. The Assistant Agent Wace played a leading role in proposing a list of lands for sale, and on the planter’s side, William Forsythe was the driving force, buying land for himself or for other investors at very low figures (for example at Pambagama at 10.15 Rs an acre). The result of these sales, in the area at the limit between Atulugam and Panawal, was the constitution of a block of continuous tea estates (Nahalma, Pambagama) later amalgamated to form the Sunnygama group, one of the most prosperous Kelani valley companies. Forsythe in his memoirs published after his death, gives a lively picture of the country and of his relations with the local villagers in the 1880s[5].

But on 17.10.1885 the alienation of lands of the Wace list was suspended at the request of the Surveyor general who considered that the legal value of settlements was too unsafe for the sales to take place. A new Agent, Le Mesurier, backed by the governor Gordon, would prefer to sell smaller extents to discourage ‘arrangements’ between prospective buyers. He would raise the upset price at 25 Rs an acre “the lowest value at which land in the hands of private persons can be obtained in the Kelani valley”. But these ‘arrangements’ were not avoided, and finally a good part of the lands was sold at 10 Rs an acre in the land sale of Panawal korale in February 1886, the best attaining 27 Rs. The same names of purchasers are found in every sale: W. Forsythe, W.W. Mitchell, H. Whitham, W.L. Strachan. In areas further north, some lands were sold at a higher price:  32 Rs per acre at Edurapola, in Lower Bulatgama[6]. In spite of these low rates, Crown land sales represented in 1886 56% of the revenue of the Kägalla district, which thus became the most ‘profitable’ district in Ceylon. But its population derived no benefit at all from the alienation of its lands to outsiders, because the expenditure was kept at a very low level.

From 1886 to 1888 the large auction sales continued in Colombo. At the sale of 20.10.1886 besides the usual buyers – William Forsythe (acting for J. Crickton) for Waharaka (282 acres) and Hinguralakande ( 412 acres), W.L. Strachan for Debatgama (73 acres), new names appeared: David Fairweather for Yatideriya (451 acres), and Waharaka (198 acres),William Anderson for Uduwe, (534 acres), H.A. Clarke for Indurana (258 acres), Waharaka (200 acres) and Pannila-Patberiya (228 acres). Another large sale was held in Colombo on 1.10.1888 where 3,210 acres were adjudicated at an average of 18 Rs per acre only[7].

The planters’ demand for land was so pressing that land sales at the initiative of the Western province kacceri (Saunders being Government Agent) were not confined to block-settled villages. This led to serious embarrassment for the successor of Le Mesurier, Price, who was the first administrator not to consider land sales from the sole point of view of revenue. In May 1886, he inspected 6,000 acres of Crown land proposed for sale near Bulatkopitiya, in the villages of Tunbage, Rangalla and Yatideriya. The area was traditionally chenaed without state interference under the control of the Uduwe korala family. His findings were as follows: “I am satisfied that Tunbage is a nindagama, copy of Service tenures register, exemption certificate and a tudapota produced. How this land came to be included in those selected for sale I cannot imagine. Especially as the adjoining village, Rangalla, land belonging to which is also included in the plan, is not even surveyed for chena settlement, much less settled. After this, I shall not be surprised at the Surveyor General proposing to sell any private land however good the owner’s title may be (I find now that I was wrong in attaching blame to the Surveyor General Department about this). Nevertheless, the case only shows how unadvisable it is to cut out thousands of acres for sale without reference in the first instance to the Assistant Government Agent”[8].  Some of these sales were so hastily organized that they disregarded the settlements: “The whole village of Dehiowita (settled) was surveyed as available for sale! If the Agent had not inspected the block, the lands granted to the villagers by formal settlement would have been exposed for sale probably, and the complications subsequent thereon – to say nothing of the hardships entailed upon the villagers – are obvious”[9]

Surveys for Crown land sales were frequently botched, to the detriment of villagers as in the cases of Batangala, a village finally absorbed in Woodend estate, where 50 acres were erroneously sold ; of Udabage where the planters encroached 40 acres ; of Morawatte where T.N. Christie erroneously purchased village gardens with the connivance of Le Mesurier (see my paper on “Abortive Chena Settlements in the Kägalla District during the late 19th and early 20th centuries”). Still in 1893, there were sales of blocks containing planted gardens in Rangegama which were finally stopped (the intending purchasers wanted to buy the whole land just excluding the gardens which would have been made inaccessible). After the sale, the planters did not hesitate to encroach on lands not sold to them and then come to the administration to ask it to sell them the encroachments. Price resisted their pressure, especially in the case of lands included in the projected Kelani forest reserve or in the densely populated northern part of the district, near Kägalla and Rambukkana: “It is very desirable to put a stop to the hole and corner style in which so much land is now applied for and sold – nearly always at upset price only”.[10]

The government agents and their assistants were constantly bombarded with requests by planters, usually made in unformal meetings or by private letters[11]. For example, William Forsythe wanted 1,000 acres near the Ritigaha Oya, and wrote to the new Government Agent Wace:

Forsythe to H. Wace, 27.10.1889. Nahalma Estate

“My dear Wace,

Any chances of a small land for sale this year? Say 5,000 acres (sic). With tea booming, the present would be a good opportunity for realizing high price, and I  know of a few would-be purchasers, myself among the number. I want 1,000 acres in the Bulatkopitiya side, well away from the Kelani Valley Reserve. The Surveyor General has lots of land blocked out, and a sale on January 1st 1890 would be time enough for opening. I will write you officially if you can hold any prospect of a sale.”

The letter bears endorsements which prove that the civil servant obeyed the request of the planter:

“Dear White, what surveys have been made? Send me any Preliminary Plans. What were last orders for Govt. on subject last year? – Mudaliyar: on this, Surveyor General referred to PP 10, Rangalla and Tunbage. This is not right, I want plans of lands between Ritigaha Oya ferry and Bulatkopitiya – Plans Lewala, Wegalla, Welatuduwa and Panawitiya are herewith submitted”.

Between 1890 and 1892, the demand for tea land boomed: “the leading planters are behind that demand”; and the Assistant Agent complained that such demands occupied most of his time while his staff in the kacceri was reduced, which he resented as “an incredible injustice”.  Planters pressed the Agents to offer land where they liked: “Orchard asks if I can point out any land. I reply certainly in the Kelani valley now at this moment surveyed and blocked out. No he does not like that, he wants the rich soil of Four-korales”. They often tried to extend by bits existing estates such as Ardross Estate, and Lavant estate, or to exchange abandoned coffee estates for fresh fertile land[12]. Any trick was good to obtain land, including spurious ‘land exchanges’. Strachan, a planter qualified by the Assistant Agent Davidson of ‘typical Mercator Britannicus’ threatened to cut for himself 200 acres[13] : “He has a high blown hilltop which he wishes to trade, acre per acre, for land which he wishes in a more favoured place. Urakande, his mountain, is isolated, it has already been once denuded with fatal results to the gentleman who planted coffee there, and it might be denudated again without affecting anybody but the experimentalist. I enjoyed the conversation, the upshot of which was that he would make his selection up to 1,300 acres in the Central Province and would persuade the Government Agent to give Mr. Strachan his fertile acres in order to preserve out hill top in Kägalla”. Another planter, Patterson, described the land he wanted to buy as ‘slab rock’, “the term by which planters describe government jungle when they want to buy it”.

When some Agents, such as Price and Davidson, backed the villagers to resist the pressure of the planters, they were accused by the colonial press and answered: “We hear much of the evil deeds of the ‘native’ who prosecutes the ‘planter’ with cases. The ‘planter’ is not wholly downtrodden. For instance, I do not pretend to have detected half the encroachments on Crown land by him, but I have around dozen proved cases in hand, and the amount paid in compensation to the Crown will be over 5,000 Rs before I leave the district. Again it might surprise newspaper readers to know that I have a list of 21 separate instances of encroachment by planters on seven estates on private lands, which are all a cause of heart burning to the villager who rightly or wrongly considers himself the downtrodden man”[14]

To satisfy planters, the administration launched new large sales of lands in the Kelani river valley, 2,800 acres in 14 lots, in July 1891 and May 1892, in the “hope that the sale of this land will tend to satisfy the wants of investors in tea, and so to diminish the activity of the land brokers whose dealings with village chena land for transfer to estates are so prejudicial to Kandyan life”. But the land reached only 22 Rs an acre because the big estates already established (such as Polatagama) bought adjacent lands with no competition. Davidson, the new Assistant agent, concluded: “This office is the busiest land office in the island. We have constant applications for land both from Europeans and natives. We sell more land than the rest of the island put together. There is a larger acreage put under ‘constant’ cultivation yearly here than in any other district and almost in each case encroachments are made on Crown reserves knowingly or through the plunders of clearing contractors. There is no district in which there is more imminent difficulty in the settlement of the land question, involved as it has been by the system of chena settlements”[15]

The sale of large blocks by the Crown encouraged the proprietors of nindagam (feudal proprietary villages) to follow suit: this is what happened in Udapota, in the Uduwe area[16]. This locality, a nindagama with a Duraya population living by the cultivation of chenas, had been the object of a chena enquiry in 1877: it belonged to the Uduwe korala who had a sannasa. According to the Assistant agent, “by virtue of a chena settlement, one of the earliest, 70 acres were taken to the Crown as excluded from the nindagama portion of the Uduwe korale’s lands (…) The korala’s son negotiated the sale of the whole village to Mr. W. Murray, superintendent of Ugieside Estate. The sale was detected and Mr. Murray, an old Rakwana pioneer of great shrewdness, promptly replied: ‘if it is Crown, sell it to me and I will buy from you too’. So we sell. But an avaricious neighbour steps in and says: give me a 9 acre lot or I will run you up to 1,000£. To the other land hunters Mr. Murray replied: I have already bought from the native landlord all his title to all the adjoining land except the precipice and the peak behind. So this block went to him for comparatively little, the 2,000 Rs obtained being the accidental result of the trick of an arrack renter who wished to establish a business as pirate attending land sales to be bought off.” 

Another means for planters to obtain highlands was to lease them, in the case of villages belonging to temples. In the Kägalla district there were a few large temple villages belonging to the Kandy Maha devale, such as Talduwa and Galpata, where all the highlands including those of the temple tenants (978 and 864 acres) had been leased at the initiative of A.B. Ratwatte, Basnayake Nilame and financier, who had acted “as the agent of the planter H.S. Saunders”, brother of the Government agent F.R. Saunders. The tenants protested and the Assistant agent was put in a difficult position to arbitrate between the planter, brother of his superior, and the villagers: “I hope he will now desist troubling the villagers (…) Mr. Saunders was in such a hurry to get his leases that he probably did not take the trouble to make careful enquiries as to what lands the Temple could lease, and the Basnayake nilame was in such a hurry to get Mr. Saunders’ money that he did not take the trouble to undeceive him”.[17]

In 1894 the colonial administrators attempted to resist the pressure of the big tea planters, to encourage the development of smaller estates, and to reserve forests for the use of the villagers: “there will be no large land sales effected. The government has wisely checked the extension of tea. There is lots of land available for coconut and plantain”[18]. In the diary of 30.06.1896, the available Crown land for sale (in acres) in the Kägalla district was thus tabulated:

                                   Crown land       Reserved     Settlt in course       Settled for sale    Unsettled for sale

Galboda-Kinigoda      7926                6668                                       889                 369

Paranakuru                 3912                1483                                        1255               1174

Beligal                        13933              3883                4989                1587               3473

Three-korales             17365              1230                9315                5817               1003   

Total                           43140              13266              14304              9548               6019

But it was too late to control a rush initiated by the colonial administration itself: land sales by villagers (actually through various intermediaries) had exceeded land sales by the Crown, and led the administration to promulgate in 1897 a new Land ordinance.

 

Sale of village lands in the Kelani valley after block settlements to planters

When Crown sales did not satisfy the new demand for mid-country tea land and where villagers were impoverished and affected by fiscal sales for arrears of tax, there was a sudden burst of sales of village lands. Colonial administrators (Le Mesurier in that case) were aware of the danger resulting from this conjunction, and proposed a policy in 1885[19]: “Legislation is required in the direction of prohibiting the alienation of village highlands to outsiders (…)  I have already mentioned the evils that result from the extended sale of lands for arrears of tax and these evils will be intensified if steps are not taken to preserve the village lands to the villagers themselves. So long as the planting enterprise was confined to the forests of the hill country, there was little or no interference with village interests. But now that estates are being opened in the middle of villages, and village lands are being eagerly sought after by planters, the case is different. If no check is put upon their alienation, the villagers, tempted by an offer of ready money, will be only too ready to part with their lands, and when their money is exhausted, will become with their families a portion of the vagabond population of the island. Whatever good the planting enterprise may do the district in the way of opening up land, distributing money and giving employment to villagers, it will certainly not counterbalance the enormous evil of floating and unsettled population (…) It is only of late years that the idea of an individual and alienable right in village chenas has sprung up. Hitherto they had been regarded as a species of communal or family property, and unless the village system is to be entirely broken up, it is advisable that this communal property should be preserved to it”. The first documented example is that of Hinguralakanda village, where in 1885 the Assistant agent was unable to effect a settlement, because part of the chena area “adjoins the estate [Nahalma] opened up by Mr. Forsythe and the villagers want it so as to be able to sell to him : they will then be without chenas and be continually in need and complaining. It is not I think advisable to encourage the sale of villagers chena to planters to tea estates. This village is also divided into two castes, Vellala and Jaggery, and this makes any joint possession difficult”.[20]

With the development of tea cultivation linked with the large Crown block sales effected during the time of Wace and Le Mesurier (held in Colombo until the creation of the new province of Sabaragamuwa in 1889), the arrival of big planters in the district put pressure on the local administration. The large land sales acted as a sort of ‘settlement by sale’ consolidating the block alienated to the planters, while the village block became fragilized. Once the movement was started, the Agent Price became conscious of the dangers but it was late and he had to fight constant battles in a position of weakness because the chena block settlements were not legalized. The administration was faced with contradictory injunctions expressed in the report for 1886[21]: “The demand among Europeans for land in the Kelani valley has caused much interference with village interests, and the sale of village chenas is open to grave objections (…) Indiscriminate alienation of Crown land is open to grave objection, but a judicious sale of chenas which are the property of the government is to be desired. Politic action in this direction would have the effect not only of largely adding to the revenue, but also of satisfying the demand for land which is at present productive of frequent complications. Investors in the tea enterprise are determined to have land in the Kelani valley, and if they cannot buy it from Government, they purchase it in fragments from the Sinhalese. The result of such transactions is disastrous. Native brokers make it their business to acquire chenas of the Kandyan villagers, who rapidly dissipate the purchase money and eventually become migrants. An extent of 16,700 acres of which 4,000 acres are in forest and 12,700 acres are in chenas is at present surveyed and practically available for sale”

From 1886 to 1896, two successive Assistant Agent, Price and Davidson, were constantly at war with land brokers and planters. The story of their fight is worth recalling in detail, as an example of the inner contradictions of the colonial land policy. In his diary of 13.02.1886, Price wrote : “I am constantly receiving queries from planters as to whether or not the Crown claims such and such lands – as in the latter event they wish to purchase them from natives – and I know of several instances in which negotiations are now going on for the purchase of such lands. If the Crown withdraws its claims definitely and there is no prohibition against alienation, the natives tempted by an offer of ready money will be only too ready to part with what does not really belong to them but to their families, and when their money is exhausted, will become a portion of the vagabond population of the district. Whatever good the planting enterprise may do in the shape of opening land, distributing money and giving employment, it will certainly not counterbalance the enormous evil of a floating and unsettled population such as would inevitably result from the wholesale alienation of village chenas”. In the margin, the Governor Gordon commented: “I agree”.

Price held idealistic views, shared by Gordon, and believed that village economy was still based on a communal principle. His successor Davidson was skeptical: “The question as to the rights acquired by Kandyans, based on the practice by families of cultivating certain specific ranges of highlands, to alienate those lands, is a matter of the gravest importance in this district. The Kandyan customs, in my opinion, did not allow individual members of a panguwa or family to alienate any portion of that range of hills which members had cultivated for generations. The members of the family had a life interest only in the chenas, and it was never contemplated that individuals of the family should have the power to transfer the right to cultivate the soil to strangers, to the detriment of future generations. Now, however, chenas have a money value, and are readily bought for tea cultivation, often without sufficient scrutiny as to the title of the vendors. The temptation to realize the money value of the lands has resulted in families being divested of their highlands for the benefit of a few unscrupulous members, who, at most, only hold a life interest in an undivided share of the range of chenas. The sale of these lands will eventually tend to make the Kandyan villagers landless, and being without trade or means of livelihood and without any predisposition to regular labour – even were it available – they may become a cause of danger to their neighbours and a source of anxiety and expense to the government”[22].

The year 1889 could have been decisive. Kägalla was delinked from the Western Province and linked with Ratnapura, to form the new province of Sabaragamuwa, of which Wace was put in charge. The influence of Saunders was reduced, but the power of the big legal firms of Colombo and of the planter’s associations was too strong to resist: by the initial chena settlement the colonial Government had brought the wolf into the fold.  Wace suggested a new ordinance to prevent the alienation of chena lands, but in spite of a decision of principle taken at a conference in 1889, the ordinance was never drafted in Colombo. The Attorney General, Layard,  in a minute (26.05.1891) wrote bluntly that “no legislation is desirable nor is required, all that is required is that a special deed should be drafted as occasion may require”, in his answer to a long letter written by Wace, who used the Teligama case to plead again for a new legislation: recalling that Ievers had “expressly recorded that his apportionment did not leave the villagers much chena lands and never contemplated the subsequent alienation of the area so allotted by him”, Wace noted that a few years later one third of the village block was already alienated by certain villagers to the detriment of the community. He was shocked at the idea that the Agent “whose duty and desire is to protect the villagers in the enjoyment of the settlements” was required to give a certificate of quiet possession “to the person who has induced a few villagers to break the spirit of the settlement for the advantage (merely temporary to them) of a few rupees”. It is useless to advise the beneficiary of a certificate of quiet possession that he is exposed to an action on the part  of the other villagers “for the land grabber knows perfectly well that the other villagers have not the means or the spirit of cooperation required to take legal proceedings” More generally, Wace considered that “it is no answer to say that the tea enterprise is to the benefit of the villagers who thus alienate their lands ; it is not so, the Kandyan villager will never take the place of the Tamil coolie on tea estates even assuming that the enterprise is of a permanent nature and the very existence and continuity of the village system is weakened and threatened by the evil I complain of (…) I beg that I may be authorized to suspend the issue of certificates of quiet possession for the lands so acquired”. His request was refused in the letter of the Colonial Secretary Swettenham of 5.06.1891. The question of stopping land grabbing was again raised by Wace in January 1892.  Swettenham in a memorandum (10.08.1892), criticized the chena settlement as “a very rude idea, imperfectly worked out without even thinking out the immediate and ultimate consequences” The principle of non-alienation of the village block “found no part of the original plan of the settlement”, and all the plans to give legal retroactive effect to the settlement were impracticable because “the settlements have been loosely made, often in the teeth of considerable opposition” and lacked “the scrupulous regard for fairness which would entitle them to become law without any appeal”. On the question of a new ordinance to forbid further alienation of chena lands, Swettenham put so punctilious and obstructive conditions that they discouraged any serious attempt at rendering chenas inalienable. At the conference held in Colombo in August 1892, the colonial government finally decided not to render chenas inalienable, nor to give retroactive effect to interdiction of sales already effected, but to resettle the lands under the Forest Ordinance and to apply ordinance 12 of 1840[23].

By that time the great legal firms had entered the game, a new governor, Havelock, had replaced Gordon, a new Assistant Agent, W.E. Davidson had replaced Price, and the powerful Kelani Valley Planter’s Association succeeded in imposing its law.

 

*

The detailed land files – some kept at the Kägalla kacceri, others removed to the Kandy repository of the Sri Lanka National Archives, make it possible to retrieve the alienation process in particular villages. The first villages to be affected were close to Ruanwella, where bazaar traders and tavern keepers from the low country were quite active. The Morawatte affair, studied in “Abortive Chena Settlements in the Kägalla District during the late 19th and early 20th centuries”, took place in that area. Another example is that of Mahalla which had been the subject of chena enquiries in 1873 and 1877 and of a chena block settlement in 1879. A.J. Bell (of Hakurugala estate) asked the opinion of the Agent about the purchase of village land; Price “informed him that in the present case the Government would take steps to call in question the right of the villagers to alienate their communal lands. I am glad of this opportunity to express the views of Government in a letter the contents of which will no doubt be made known among the caucus of speculators who are busy in this district”. Finally Bell purchased the lands and Price concluded that “the only sure remedy lay in the confirmation by the Forest settlement officer of all the settlements hitherto made”.[24] At this juncture appeared a land broker who was a well-known figure of the Kelani valley land business of Morawatta fame: “A certain Baron Perera also connected with this matter (he has like Mr. Bell bought a few acres of communal land) presented a petition asking ‘if the villagers might cultivate the lands allotted to them’ (he is not a villager, nor a Kandyan). Having some private information about this man, I read between the lines and told him to go to his lawyers if he wanted advice on the legal question that the land was the villager’s only to use and not to alienate ; and that he had better not come meddling with things which do not concern him”. The four pangu of the village eventually sold the whole of their block, 558 acres, to Baron Perera, who resold them to Bell, and the planter trespassed on other lands, a common behavior in such cases: “wanton damages by Mahalla estate on Mapitigama korala’s lands. The Mahalla superintendent has acted in an overbearing way, rooting up a village plantation without any notice to me or my headmen”[25].

Not far from Mahalla, Wahakula, a large forested Goyigama village located to the west of Ruanwella, was the theatre of extensive land grabbing activities in the late 1880s[26]. The village had been the subject of a chena enquiry in 1877 in which was produced a sittuwa (a donation on ola leaf) registered at Ratnapura in 1872, but later pronounced false, supposed to have been given by Mattamagoda Dissawe in sk. 1734 (1810 a.d.) to Ranatunga Appu kankanama of Wahakula, describing fields, gardens and appurtenances of the gamwasama.

The Wahakula sittuwa

In December 1879, the Assistant agent Ievers made a chena settlement by which the 6 families with 3 acres of paddy only were allowed 100 acres of chena, while large extents of forest were kept for the Crown, and were subsequently sold to a planter. In 1886, a local land broker, Hettirala, started to buy shares of two shareholders against the opposition of the eight others and sold them to the tea planter Thornton: “I am surprised that Ekneligoda Ratemahatmaya has not reported this, as he has strict injunctions to keep me informed. (…)  I know this man Hettirala, he gains his livelihood by buying and selling lands, and this year he has been very busy trying to buy chena lands on all sides from the villagers for transfer to planters (…) Mapitigama and Punahela korales are both aware now of the objections which exist to the indiscriminate transfer of land from the villagers to the planters (…) The case is a good example of the hardship which is entailed on poor and ignorant villagers by the land grabbers, the demand for land being great in the Kelani valley. I propose to the Government Agent that the eight defrauded shareholders should be told to take legal proceedings to oust Mr. Thornton and that a proctor should be retained and the cost being borne by government”. Price was unable to convince his superior at Colombo, Saunders, and Ekneligoda, the chief headman of Three-korales, to support him in the matter of the Crown land rights “but apart from the land there is no doubt that eight of the ten shareholders have been unfairly treated, by the aid of the Chetty land broker and the English purchaser”. Baron Perera and Hettirala were joined by other land brokers, such as Romanis Pieris “a provision dealer and storekeeper, and a man of much influence in the Kelani Valley”, whom Price tried to dissuade to engage in this trafficking. But the defect of the chena settlements was that the term ‘communal land’ was not legally binding to prevent alienation : “The sooner these settlements are legally confirmed the better ; negotiations are going on all sides between speculators in land for tea and village pangukarayo who wish to sell their blocks (or part of them) handed over to them by settlement”.

The case of Atalawa village is typical of an ecologically and socially fragile locality in the same area whose highlands had been sold to planters as a result of the land dealings of Ekneligoda, during the chena settlement operations[27]. In 1879, there were 8 pangu (lineage holdings) in the village, and 16 families, belonging to the Duraya caste (except one Muslim). There were practically no wet paddy fields: the village economy was dependent on chenas and gardens. The Crown asserted its rights to forests and chenas and had already sold 77 acres before December 1879, when the Ratemahatmaya effected the chena settlement, apportioning 350 acres for the Crown (the forest and a block of chenas, which were not surveyed but only “approximately estimated”) and 400 acres for the villagers, without taking into account the fact that some villagers used to cultivate the block taken by Crown and were disadvantaged : the villagers were left to sort the issue by themselves and the so-called settlement was in fact a major factor of unsettlement for village society. Five years later the Crown in the ‘Colombo large land sales’ sold 300 acres to James Gibson, 310 acres being chenas from 11 to 26 years, the rest forest. Gibson was in affairs with M.B. Ekneligoda, and those villagers who had rights in the village block started selling most of their chenas which the villagers who had rights in the block taken by Crown could not do. A part was purchased by one Bawa Lebbe Vedarala (a yunani medical practitioner residing in the village) and by local Muslim petty businessmen from Mattamagoda and Kannatota, established long ago as dealers of arecanut, the traditional major export of the area. Another part was purchased by Ekneligoda himself, who gave the land back to villagers as sharecroppers. A fresh wave of sales (often by women) occurred between 1895 and 1906, and a new land speculator, L.M. Sekku Marikar, trusted the sales, purchasing 65 acres with a view to resell the lands to a planter, which he did in August 1906. The area was much affected by anti-muslim riots of 1915, which were violently suppressed by British volunteers, most of them planters, and in 1931, in the context of the first democratic elections in Ceylon, tension erupted in the area between the superintendent of Atalawa estate and the villagers.   

On the road leading up-country, Yatiyantota was an active bazaar in a central position for the new tea estates opened on chena lands recently sold by the Crown. The case of Garagoda, which has been studied in “Abortive Chena Settlements in the Kägalla District during the late 19th and early 20th centuries”, was not isolated. In the nearby villages of Warakagoda and Polatagama, closely connected, the first cultivated by Duraya and Goyigama people, the second inhabited by Duraya people, land brokers were trying by mid-1888 to offer the village blocks for sale to the planters. The operation and the fight against land grabbers by Price, supported by the governor Gordon, is worth a detailed study: it may be one of the origins of the creation of the new Sabaragamuwa province[28]. This is the area in which Saunders had attempted in the 1860s to repress chena cultivation; it was surveyed and after a chena enquiry (1877) two block settlements were made, at Warakagoda by Ievers in 1879, at Polatagama by Murray in 1880, which decided that the people of Polatagama who used to cultivate chenas in Warakagoda should restrict themselves to Polatagama, and allowed large areas to the Crown. All the villagers did not sign the agreements, and land brokers began to purchase Warakagoda lands from Polatagama villagers for sale to planters in 1888 : Makevitage Baron Perera of Ruanwella, alias Morawatte Baba Sinno, qualified by Price as “head of the land grabbing concern” was reputed for having fought the authorities in the Morawatte case. He acted in association with Hettirala and Sanmugam Pulle “Tamil land broker, Chetti man of Karawanella”. They hired lawyers, C.J.A. Marshall, notary at Awissawella, Ferdinands, proctor at Kägalla, and even the Colombo firm of Julius and Creasy, and “applied to the Surveyor General for a copy of a plan of a chena lot in Warakagoda in view of obtaining from the Crown a certificate of no claim”. Price answered that the villagers themselves should ask for the certificate, and explained that as he had refused to give a certificate to Sanmugam Pulle: “now the interested parties try to get what they want through the intervention of a proctor (…) Certificates of quiet possession[29] for land in a village block of chenas should not, as I think, be issued in any case. In the present instance it is wanted in order to perfect a title to communal land offered for sale to planters”.

Apparently Price was not supported by his superior Saunders, who wrote on the 15th of July 1888, probably under the pressure of Julius and Creasy : “If the petitioner is entitled to receive a copy of the plan on payment of survey fees he ought not to be refused it, simply because he has made a purchase the validity of which only a court of law can settle”. If one reads between the lines, it looks as if Saunders was acting in favour of would be planters and thus protected land speculators. During the following months, Perera, Pulle and Ferdinands regularly and separately repeated their requests. Price commented in his diary: “The land brokers, finding that the intervention of their proctor had been of no avail, addressed themselves to the Surveyor General who answered them to the following effect: ‘the village of Warakagoda was surveyed for the information of Government ; as soon as the Government Agent has investigated claims and granted certificates of quiet possession, a copy of the plan may be supplied on payment of survey fees’. Baron Perera once more turned to Price and asked for a certificate. Price told him to put a statement of his title and wrote in his diary: “Careful circumspection is needed to prevent the alienation of these village chenas, and if once such alienation on a large scale begins or is allowed to begin, there is no knowing where it will end”. His position was supported by governor Gordon who wrote in the margin: ‘this is perfectly true and a matter of great importance’. A few days later “A petition reaches me from Sanmugam Pulle applying for a certificate of quiet possession for certain chenas in the village block. The applicant explains that he presents this petition as Mr. Marshall, his lawyer, and Baron Perera, his agent, both of whom have addressed the Agent on his behalf, have failed to get what is wanted. He states that he has taxation list extracts for these lands, and deeds from the vendors, but recites no other titles. Today a petition from of some of the villagers of Warakagoda (the Vidanelage) who complain that Sanmugam Pulle and others have bought chenas in which they have a share, against their will, and that these chenas are about to be sold for tea plantation, and they ask that sale may be prevented and the vendors may be ordered to prove their rights to sell”. The petition mentioned that “certain persons with the help of Ekneligoda are going to sell the petitioner’s lands”.

What was the role played by Ekneligoda Ratemahatmaya in the affair? On 26.11.1888, being apparently under suspicion, he reported to Price that “I only told them not to buy high lands. I never helped them at any time nor did I connive at their doings”. He recognized that “the signatures of certain Durayas were not taken to the settlement in the first instance (…) they signed subsequently”. He added “David Sinno of Gomaduwa has also purchased land in this village. The statement that those lands were purchased for me is wholly untrue”. In January 1889, Baron Perera had exhausted the resources of presenting petitions to government and of lawyers’ letters and the Agent triumphantly wrote : “I have checkmated him in his nefarious business of buying village chena (generally against the will of a proportion of the shareholders, always to the real detriment of all of them) in order to sell again at a large profit to planters”. But Perera was still active in 1891: “ Baron Perera, the leading land broker, happening to be present, I took the occasion to publicly impress on the people that they must not sell chenas forming part of the village blocks, pointing out the evil results of doing so, and explaining that the Agent would endeavour to satisfy from land at the disposal of the Crown the demands of tea planters”. In December 1890 and then in March 1891, the Vidanelage Govi family petitioned against Pulle, Perera and David Sinno; Ekneligoda again affirmed “I have not bought any land in the village, petitioner was never prevented by me from cultivating any of his lands”, and accused him of false testimony.  In May 1892, the new assistant Davidson compelled Ekneligoda to hold a gansabhava with all the local headmen, but in the absence of Vidanelage who pretended that he had not been summoned and in July, another gansabhava was held, in which the the Vidanelage family was given lands, which were immediately seized for a fiscal’s sale by Pulle who was their creditor.

Finally in May 1894, the actors behind the scene came into the open: the planter W. Mitchell of Degalessa, with the support of the big Colombo legal firm De Sarams, in a private letter on a paper headed Kelani Valley Planter’s Association, asked for a certificate of quiet possession for 299 acres he purchased at a fiscal’s sale of Pulle property; he complained that just after the sale, L.S. de Silva obtained from Polatagama villagers acts of transfer so that he could blackmail the planter; and Vidanelage petitioned to prevent Mitchell from seizing their lands; the Agent advised them to hold on “Mr. Mitchell on paper to the contrary not withstanding”, but could not go further.

William W. Mitchell, already active in 1886 as a purchaser of Crown land, was considered by Price as ‘an eminent member of the land grabbing fraternity’. In 1891 and 1892, he requested the Assistant agent to assist him in obtaining land in Gantune and Neluwakkana, where there were large gardens and practically no forests, and in Uduwe[30]: “Mr. Mitchell writes to ask me in effect to help him in the matter of buying some native holdings which adjoin his Glenalla estate. He requests me to tell him if the men who claim the land are in any way recognized as its owners by Government, and whither receipt for taxes which is sent with his letter would enable them to procure from the Governement CQPs. I reply that the document in question is not a receipt for tax on land in Uduwe, it is an extract from the Service Tenures Register for the village of Kekalapone which lies in a different direction. The land Mr. Mitchell wishes to acquire is part of the block allowed to the villagers of Uduwe for chena cultivation and I decline to its alienation for the purpose of cultivating tea”. Two days later, “Mr. Mitchell writes to me privately to ask me to expedite the issue of a certificate of no claim on the part of the Crown in respect of a piece of land which was bought from some villagers of Teligama. From the Government Agent a letter on the same question. To the Government Agent I send a copy of the particular chena settlement, in the preamble to which Mr. Ievers remarks that his apportionment ‘does not leave the villagers much chena land’. The necessary implication is that he did not contemplate the alienation of any part of it (…) The intention of these settlements was to grant the usufruct only of chena and not the right to alienate it. The Crown has abandoned its claim against the villagers of the village concerned, but taking into consideration the spirit of the dedication, I am inclined to suggest that if all other experience fail, the claim of the Crown should be treated as having revived in case where such land has been transferred to others from the pangukarayo of a particular village”. “Had interview with Mr. W.W. Mitchell, relating to his application to purchase lands from the Crown and from his neighbours. Also his information that villagers had chenaed Crown land near him: on enquiry it proved to be private land. Had also various complaints against him by villagers for encroachment on their lands. He admits an encroachment of 8 ½ acres for which he says he has settled to pay 50 Rs per acre: his experience in the Matara district has taught him how to handle his neighbours making them friends. Most managers merely accentuate by their manners the prejudice with which the villager views the strangers invading their hillsides. I told Mr. Mitchell that I exceedingly objected to his proposal to buy from a Moorman 120 acres bordering his estate for 35 Rs an acre. I pointed out to him that the Moor broker was rendering he villagers landless, and when the money has gone, they would be vagrants, and some of them criminals.”

Kitulgala was a large bazaar on the road to the Kandy district, where another powerful Chetti trader, Juan Pulle, was busy acting as intermediary for would-be planters, such as M. Rogers, who came to ask Price “in an artless way how he could most easily and securely buy land from natives”[31]. Close to Kitulgala, the village of Teligama had been the theatre of extensive land grabbing operations in 1888-89[32]: Ross Wright (Chertsey estate) after having purchased the Crown block started encroaching on the village block. He then asked the Agent through his lawyer, C.J.A. Marshall of Avissawella, whether or not the block settlement gave the villagers their lands in full property.  Price answered that it was the villagers and not the prospective buyer or his agent who should ask such a question, and noted in his diary that “the elements of this lawyer’s letter in this matter are objectionable and should I think be repressed in a politic manner (…) In all parts of the island where villages adjoin estates the same thing is going on. I think it advisable not to make more informal settlements at any rate in the neigbourhood of estates, or where estates may some day be formed”. The case was brought to Colombo, and after the Attorney General had advised that by the Ievers settlement the Crown has lost its rights on the village block, the government decided that it would give M. Wright Ross the certificate of no claim he was asking for, with the important qualification that “in issuing a certificate to Mr. Ross, warn him that the certificate will not protect him from any possible right of the villagers to eject him”. As mentioned above, W. Mitchell was himself involved in purchases in the same village in 1891-92.

Further south, a Muslim businessman of Colombo, Mohammadu Lebbe Marikar, was the only non-British purchaser of Crown land in the large sales of the Kelani Valley. He then wished to extend his Al Noor Estate by purchasing a part of the village block. Patberiya, a village bi-caste (Goyigama-Vahumpura) of easy access from the Ratnapura road, had been settled by Ievers in 1884: with 22 pangu, 51 families, 21 acres of paddy; and 1,700 acres of chenas; 341 acres were retained as Crown block, sold to M.L. Marikar in October 1886 and 1,365 acres formed the village block. “The number of pangu being so large made a division very difficult”; some Goyigama pangukarayo (Senanayake) lost all their chenas and complained in 1888 that the other pangukarayo refused to give them a share, and Ekneligoda pretended that until then the villagers had not asked for a repartition; a gansabhava convened in October 1888 failed to persuade the other pangukarayo to give a share ; another meeting was held in 1892 in which a compensation was decided, again to no avail. At that point, the pangukarayo had already started to sell their chena rights to outsiders, while the Alnoor estate superintendent encroached on stream reservations to build a factory, and Ekneligoda reported (24.01.1893), that Al Noor estate had purchased village chena land in 1891 from the panguwa which had been deprived of its lands and from Manuel Perera, who had acquired them from a Vahumpura panguwa. In 1897 the same Senanayake panguwa petitioned again: the Assistant agent was ready to recognize that the Crown had not kept its promise of compensation, but its superiors in Colombo censured him, arguing that the petitioners “did not make any protest against the sale by the Crown of the land taken over which seems to indicate that they were content to abide by it (…) I do not see any evidence that the petitioners had any legal title to the land which the Crown sold”. Finally, the Governor himself decided in 1898 that compensation should be given in land, but there was not a single Crown land left in the village…[33]

Near Dehiowita, the proprietors or managers of large estates formed by Crown sales were also busy extending by buying village lands. “Mr. David Fairweather of Kanangama Estate wants 20 acres of the villager’s block for a firewood reserve for his property, and also applies for several other lots which form part of the villager block. He urges that the 20 acres piece is rocky and precipitous forest, and maintains that it would not be unfair to deprive the villagers of this piece of land – apparently because it is not fit for chena cultivation. But he perhaps forgets that the villagers want firewood as much as he does, though for a different purpose – to say nothing of fence sticks. It cannot be”. Kanangama, a large village, located to the east of Dehiowita, was first the subject of a chena enquiry (1877) which allowed the villagers small lots on the basis of a detailed survey, and then block-settled by Ievers  who noted that it contained 308 acres of forest ‘nearly all sold’, 1570 acres of chenas, 30 acres of mudlands. Finally the successive settlements created a mess which was finally exploited by land grabbers and the village lands were entirely sold by the beginning of the 20th century to R.J. Mackenzie and the sale legalized by the colonial administration[34].

 

A freak case: the formation of Yataderiya and Knavesmire estates

The hilly area between the We Oya, Ritigaha Oya and Gurugoda Oya valleys was a remote part of Uduwe korale of Lower Bulatgama, which attracted the attention of planters who were established upstream since the time of coffee estates and had extensively encroached upon the highlands of the local high caste families who were in the process of losing their authority. In the 1870s it was a forested area with good land, a road close by, and coffee estates further up; it was therefore selected by prospective planters of new land for tea when coffee collapsed in the early 1880s. Ievers, the assistant agent in 1885, had foreseen difficult relations between villagers and planters in that area: “Uduwa, Yatideriya, Dedugala, Kekulapone adjoin Genalla, Gangwarily and Rangalla estates, and I am disposed to allow villages a good extent of chena land to form a good ring fence (so to speak) round the villages to prevent encroachments and raids on their gardens from Tamil coolies”. In the north, accessible from Undugoda, the village of Yatideriya had a Goyigama and Vahumpura population, while Diyahitiyawala was a multi-caste feudal village belonging in part to the Ranasinha Mudianselage family who held the post of Uduwe korala. In the south, near Bulatkopitiya, Pilawela, Wiyalapitiya and Rangalla were also mixed caste villages where the Dissanekge family was influent. On the other side of the river, Edurapola was a Goyigama village without paddy fields.  

In May 1886, the Colombo authorities, without informing the new assistant government agent Price, proposed for sale to planters some 6,000 acres in Tunbage, Rangalla, and Yatideriya; on enquiry, it appeared that only Yatideriya was settled, while Tunbage was a nindagama, and the sale was restricted in October 1886 to the Yatideriya lands[35].   The Yataderiya [sic] estate was established in 1889-90 by James Richard Fairweather, and it was extended in January 1891. James Richard Fairweather (1861-1910) and his elder brother David Fairweather (1859-1922) were typical colonial Scottish adventurers, who developed extensive interests in Ceylon[36]. There were thereafter constant incidents between the planter and the villagers: encroaching, cattle trespass, silting, and difficult relations with Tamil coolies. Fairweather had cut a road across village land, which had affected a house wall, felled timber on a land which he has not yet purchased from the Crown, refusing to obey Price orders, and finally succeeding in purchasing it when Price on leave was replaced by Bertram Hill who was in better terms with planters: “ The superintendent of Yataderiya was very anxious to buy a block of 46 acres that lies between his store and the main portion of his estate. The block includes village chenas the owners of which are however unwilling to sell their lands. It would save future trouble if they can be induced to part with it. The superintendent is not a desirable neighbour for them” On his return, Price noted: “M. Fairweather is in the high degree unpopular with his neighbours, and it is quite impracticable to settle the matter out of court. The kacceri has done all in its power to help the aggrieved Sinhalese; it has now retained lawyers and has instituted a case in the District Court, the result of which will I hope bring Mr. Fairweather to his senses”.

J.R. Fairweather was noted for his brutal management and his miserliness. For example, in 1894, the Assistant agent Davidson wrote in his diary: “A bill for one rupee was sent in to the superintendent of Yataderiya in the ordinary course for treatment of a Mr. David who died in consequence of the wounds which he received in his bungalow on the estate at the hands of culprits as yet undetected. The poor man was brought to hospital and died the next day. The superintendent now returns the bill and suggests that I should proceed against the estate of the late Mr. David for the recovery of the amount as ‘he was removed to Kegalle by the orders of the medical officer, the case then being in the hands of the police’. Words fail me. I have paid the miserable rupee myself rather than stoop to argue with people capable of such a suggestion, but the less said the better”[37]. Finally, Yataderiya was rounded to form a very large estate (1,865 acres) comprising 1,118 acres of tea, 740 acres of rubber, and 7 acres of paddy, which was extremely profitable, “earning for its shareholders dividends amounting to an average of 25 per cent, for eighteen years”.

In the early 1890s, J.R. Fairweather was also involved with his associate Gallway in the development of Knavesmire estate, in conditions which caused a serious embarrassment to the colonial administration[38]. The story begins in 1872 with a petition of low caste (Duraya and Henaya) villagers of Rangalla and Pilawela who complained that the high caste Dissanekge family pretended to be the proprietors of Rangalla, Wiyalapitiya and Pilawela on the basis of a forged sannasa. Ten years later, the same Dissanekge began to fell forests to assert their title but were defeated in court in 1884; they contested the judgement which went to the Supreme court, they lost the case in 1887, and their lands were sold at a judicial sale in 1889 to a straw man, who immediately resold them to Ekneligoda, the Chief headman of Three-korales and Lower Bulatgama, before C.J.A. Marshall, proctor-notary of Avissawalla, a well-known member of the ‘fraternity of land grabbers’. Ekneligoda was early involved in land dealings in the area he was administering.

Chena settlements of Rangalla, Wiyalapitiya and Pilawela were made hastily on 4.03.1890 by Price and Ekneligoda, under the pressure of a tea planter, Gallway, who was promised land in that area in exchange for land he gave up in the Nuwara Eliya district: the villagers were allowed 1,000 acres and 420 acres were reserved for the Crown for the exchange with Gallway. 32 villagers of the 3 villages signed the document, including the Dissanekge. But immediately afterwards a petition by the Dissanekge and some Durayas complained that the lands left to them by the division were being cleared by the superintendent of the ‘Galgadiyana’ estate. Ekneligoda reported that these lands were declared Crown “and given to Mr. Gallway” and that a division would be made by holding a Village council meeting to give the Dissanekge in exchange a portion from private lands; this was done one year later and the headmen decided to reallocate the chenas to answer the claim of the Dissanekge with the conclusion : “not a single pangukaraya is a loser”. Then Gallway was accused of having encroached on the village block but Ekneligoda reported that these lands were declared Crown and sold to Gallway. In January 1893, Davidson, the new Assistant agent, asked for a report on the purchase by Gallway from villagers of 24 acres which were included in the Crown block by settlement, but were not given then by the Crown to Gallway, and which the villagers considered private as they remained unsold ; Ekneligoda reported that the Dissanekges, the Badahelas (potters) of Wiyalapitiya, the village headman of Rangalla and the Durayas of Rangalla had sold these lands to Gallway. In March 1893, Davidson met J.R. Fairweather, representative of Gallway, who said he was prepared to buy this time from the Crown the same lands, and he reported to his superior Wace that Fairweather was bona fide and that the aracci and the korala were also persuaded that the lots were private as they had not been sold by the Crown. But Fairweather pushed his demand further and asked to purchase 54 acres from the Crown (instead of 24 acres) and the Agent answered by the negative. These 54 acres were actually sold by villagers to the planter according to a report of September 1893.

The affair became unpleasant at that juncture : the Government Agent Wace insisted that his subordinate Davidson should warn the villagers to return to the estate the money they got for the sale of lands belonging to the Crown, as “to allow the villagers to retain possession of monies recovered by them for sale of Crown land appears a distinct encouragement to evade and disregard the past and present chena and forest settlements (…) I cannot regard it as a matter of ‘no official concern’ and I must beg you to take action to compel the refund of such monies”. The position of Davidson was on the contrary that “the question is one between the estate and the villagers and is officially no concern of mine: I have no legal power to compel restitution.  My contention has been all through that the managers not only of this estate but of several others buy up any native pretentions as a preliminary to pressing the Crown title as well. These things are done by managers with their eyes open. The superintendent of Knavesmire could have seen by a tracing from the Surveyor General office that the land was Crown by settlement”.

The villagers, when asked by Ekneligoda (who was probably involved in the deal), refused to appear and refund the money, except the Rangalla aracci. Davidson then went to Bulatkopitiya (13-14.11.1893) : “A very unpleasant job, much against my will, trying to frighten Duraya villagers with refunding to an unscrupulous estate manager money he paid them for land bought behind my back from the villagers who had no right to sell it as it was Crown land. The Crown is going to sell it and the estate may buy it if it pleases. But I have no power to recover the 400 rupees paid by the estate to the dishonest villagers and I would not try if I had any choice”. During two days, he led his own enquiry, and the truth appeared[39]. The Dissanekge brothers had received only 3 Rs in cash and the rest (18 Rs 87) “in chits on the store, about 3 bushels of paddy”; they could not repay in cash but were prepared to work twenty days each on the estate. The Badahela (potters) admitted to have received 10.75 Rs in cash and undertook to repay. Others had received 8 Rs in cash and some rice, others were old and infirm but also ordered to pay or face prosecution. The gamaracci paid 22.50 Rs under threat of dismissal. Most Dureyas refused the terms proposed, that is free work on the estate.  Finally Davidson wrote that “if the proprietor wishes to recover the money he must do so himself by process of law; I repeat that he deserves to lose it for his superintendent negotiated this transaction surreptitiously: I myself discovered the fraud by an accident”. And Wace agreed to let the matter drop. The affair must have impressed durably the people: according to the local tradition collected by me in 1978 on the spot from a descendent of the Uduwe family, the villagers were paid “with dry fish on the estate store”.

A new light was thrown on the affair when Ekneligoda was replaced by Mideniya in March 1895. Ekneligoda petitioned the Governor saying that he claimed chenas in Pilawela purchased from a fiscal’s transfer but sold by the Crown to Knavesmire. Mideniya reported (22.08.1899) that these lands were those of the Dissanekge which were declared Crown at chena settlement which Ekneligoda signed. As to the subsequent division and repartition of land by gansabhava “no one seems to have observed the decision of the meeting”. In May 1901, there were new encroachments by the estate and by the Dissanekge who had regained power in the village of Rangalla by having its aracci Mohotti, a family member, on their side. Anonymous villagers backed by Ekneligoda and by the late korala Punahela Mudianse accused Mohotti of buying everybody, his power coming from selling arrack in his own boutique. In March1903, one Fernando, carpenter at Bulatkopitiya purchased shares ‘private by settlement’ in Rangalla to resell to Knavesmire, and in August 1906, villagers continued to sell lands out of the village block to Fairweather.

Knavesmire remained a hot spot for the following decades, during the riots of 1915 and much later during the JVP insurgencies. Its acquisition by the State was contemplated in 1938 to settle villagers hemmed-in by the estate; it was purchased in December 1945 for distribution to villagers of Rangalla, Wiyalapitiya and Pilawela, at the initiative of D.S. Senanayake, Minister of Agriculture who wrote in a report (17.05.1946): “The Kegalle district is one in which the sale of Crown land to estates and of private land by villagers also to estates has rendered the district particularly short of land for the genuine needs of the villagers (…) The claims of the villagers – genuine villagers – whether they are of the agricultural class or workers in other trades must receive prior consideration. Reference is also invited to the definition of the Ceylonese as a person possessing a Ceylon domicile of origin”. The Tamil coolies, supported by their union leader Thondaman, refused to quit the estate they were working on for generations. Thondaman declared (4.06.1946): “Knavesmire episode is an indication of things to come. The complete amity and good fellowship that exists between the Indian labourers of Knavesmire and the Sinhalese of the neighbourhood should be an object lesson to the protagonists of communalism who are in power today. It is a crying shame that such an amity on which a united nation can be easily built up is being destroyed. Mr. Senanayake would treat estate labourers and villagers living in mutual friendship as two different entities. His officers evidently under his directions are in search of domicile of origin to create division. Their object is that Indian labourers who have for generations contributed to the development of the country should be kept secluded as estate labourers and transferred as such from estate to estate if work is available, or repatriated across or into the sea.” The controversy dragged on with an attempt to organize a hartal, until Nehru in the name of the Indian National Congress advised Thondaman to drop the matter. The take-over was completed in 1950 with the tea lands on which 175 families were settled[40]

Estates resulting from the land sales of 1886 other than Knavesmire and Yataderiya did not attract similar public attention: in such cases there was at work what contemporaries called ‘a silent revolution’. Among the blocks of chena lands sold by the Crown in 1886 in the Bulatkopitiya area, those of Edurapola, amounted to 1,200 acres: ‘Ederapolla estate’ was thus formed, and the small Gamage local family emigrated and sold in 1896 the 600 acres left to them by the chena settlement but not clearly demarcated. But in this case the transactions were controlled by a member of the family (Appuhami, the Dombepola korala) who managed to sell the same lands to two different purchasers, a low country Karawa ayurvedic doctor and a Muslim bazaar keeper who fought against each other to take possession of the land, while the Crown attempted to assert its title to a portion unsold in 1886.[41]

 

Davidson facing the planters.

When the idealist Assistant Agent Price left the district into the hands of Davidson, he wrote what he called ‘Friendly notes’[42] in which he instructed him to distinguish two parts in the district, one left to the planters – the south, Three-korales and Lower Bulatgama, the other reserved to the villagers – the north, Four-korales: “Restrict further sale of land to Three-korales and keep Four-korales as the Garden of the East – with a prosperous peasantry untainted by the civilization [sic in text] of Scotland and Mincing Lane”. The dualistic theory which was at work at the village level in the system of chena block settlements imagined by Ievers, was translated at the district level in the system imagined by Price to protect the traditional values embodied by the peasantry.

Davidson, who was a modernist and a realist, shared his concerns but questioned his assumptions[43]: “My predecessor strongly held that the remedy for the present evil lay in legislation ‘to prevent the alienation of holdings intended to be communal’. Although I sympathize with the spirit which led him to advocate this course, and although I apprehend the difficulties that may arise with a landless and indolent peasantry, I cannot see my way to recommend legislation to restore the communal character of village holdings after the practice of alienation has been countenanced for so many years in the Supreme Court of Ceylon. No legislation can at this stage in my opinion arrest the progress of the decay in Ceylon of the communal village system, where that system runs counter to the temporary interests of the villagers and the interests of the European element, and I am disposed to think that when the process of transition be past, with its misery and attendant crime, the Kandyan villagers will develop into as honest and industrial a race as the Sinhalese of the Europeanized portions of the southern province, or the Tamils of the Jaffna peninsula. Meanwhile I advocate that the Government should not countenance the alienation of the village lands and should refuse to make surveys or grant Certificates of Quiet Possession [CQP] to purchasers, and thus devise a means to make the transitional stage between the old time Kandyan usage and the Europeanization of the hill country as slow and gradual as possible”.

In his diary Davidson was more straightforward in arguing against the granting of CQPs[44]: “Let it be granted that the Crown is not directly concerned, and that the survey (for CQP) gives remunerated occupation the Surveyor General Staff (planter’s motive). The object of the planters is to get a title deed from the Crown. It is true the Crown certificate is of no value in itself. But it is notorious that whereas the borrowing power of a whole sheaf of native title deeds is nil, yet the mere appearance of a Crown certificate gives so respectable an air to the document that the banks will make advances on them (…) Hence I maintain that no encouragement should be given to purchases from villagers by the estates and that, when a CQP is asked for, the Agent should refuse to certify it for survey if he finds out that it is applied for merely to strengthen the estate title. I could name a dozen estates off-hand which are now negotiating to get CQPs under these conditions. It does not matter to them what belongs to the people”.

Several papers appeared in the Colombo newspapers in July 1893 commenting and criticizing Davidson’s administration report, arguing that “it would be hardly just and honest for the Government to refuse surveys and deeds of quiet possession whilst all along acknowledging that it has no right to prevent the village owners from selling”. Davidson reiterated his belief in progressive change[45]: “I believe that the present reckless alienation of village land for tea cultivation will make its own cure speedily, for in some instances I believe that European purchasers have, under misrepresentation, purchased land with unsecure titles from the villagers. The vexation and expense caused to these purchasers in having to defend their title or to buy off claims will serve as a deterrent to others who may wish to acquire land at a trifling cost on a risky title”.

Two years later, Davidson found that sales of village lands had increased instead of cooling down, for a simple reason: “Tea estates can no longer expand by the purchase of Crown land. So they expand by the purchase of native holdings. I do my best to stop it, but no lessons will deter the planter from taking the risk and no consideration of the future welfare of the native who sells his land will stop either the purchaser or the vendor”. He annexed a list of Kelani Valley planters who had come to ask for CQPs : Smith for Walpola (Sapumalkande), Wright for Maha Oya and Pelellegama (purchased entirely from private holders), S.L. Harries for Kahanowita purchased entirely from private holders, Tottenham for Dickella/Digalla as addition to previous estate, Dankin for Aludeniya purchased entirely from private holders, Grigson for Densworth addition to previous estate, Hayes for Maldeniya addition to previous estate. He added a few planters who purchased village lands in Four-korales (“ Mr. Price hoped to keep the Four-korales for the Kandyans but where there is profitable investment for the Europeans and cash down for the natives nothing will stop expansion”) : L. Stuart for Dampelgoda, W.L. Strachan for Debatgama, T.N. Orchard for Udagoda, Golledge for Ettie in Udumagama.

In January 1896, Davidson seemed resigned: “I believe that, do what we will, the whole of the Three-korales will shortly be a sheet of tea with gardens and a few silted up paddy fields interspersed”. “Planters are keen on getting more land; as there is very little Crown land going, they are buying right and left from the villagers and giving good prices too, 30 Rs and forward for chena! Unfortunately it is not always the original village owner who gets this. He has often been previously cajoled out of it by some of these low country sharpers at anything down to Rs 8 an acre or even less. However the extension of tea is without doubt fastly increasing the general prosperity. The Three-korales, which was the poorest division of the district, is fast taking its place among the richest”. “The Three-korales, owing to the upheaval of all titles to land arising from the enhanced value of chena lands, is the busiest and most responsible rata in the Kandyan country. The Ratemahatmaya there, Mideniya, knows exactly what to do, and does it with industry, tact and judgement. Twenty years ago, a villager got no value on his highlands, now they are worth 40 Rs an acre. The temptation to realize a large sum on a land he still has no use for is tempting. Yet they most of them realize the horror of being landless and déclassé. I have often discussed with them the misery of the transition stage between their present un-monied ease and the Europeanized condition of the Southern province where each man has to work for his living. But a great deal of lands is nevertheless changing hands and going to tea cultivation and serving as such to maintain large numbers where few could get a living before. The Ratemahatmaya consequently has 200 petitions which he dealt with while I have been away, settling rival titles amicably and blocking fictitious claims. In this work the Forest settlement is of great benefit, though of course by defining Crown and private titles it directly conducts to the alienation of private lands by clearing them of Crown claims” [46]

But in his official report he insisted on the necessity to restart Crown sales to prevent village sales through Ceylonese speculators[47]: “With a view to supplying the demand for land from European investors, a class of native speculators has arisen, who secure a profit in buying up doubtful titles at low figures and reselling some of them at high prices (…) I would point out that 412 native deeds conveying title to 116,323 acres of native lands in parts of Three-korales have been registered during 10 months in 1896 (…) The total in native hands within that area does not exceed 60,000 acres (…) The average price, is 1.64 Rs per acre, when it is known that Europeans would pay 50 Rs per acre (…) Enormous extent of business transacted at the Kägalla Land Registry Office arising from these wild speculations in village lands: number of deeds registered : 6,485; of properties affected (sold or mortgaged) : 12,003; amount secured by mortgages: 1,712,032 Rs ; value of properties transferred by sale: 2,386,405 Rs (…). Beyond illustrating the activity in the land market, these figures are of little value for in many cases lands are overvalued for the sake of ostentation, and in others undervalued to avoid stamp duties. I estimate that over 10,000 acres or so of village land have passed into European hands during the year 1896, fully 9/10th of it being in the Kelani valley. The nominal extent of land bought up by speculators for sale to Europeans must exceed 150,000 acres but very little of it has really changed hands. Where the vendors were not in possession the land brokers have in many cases retransferred the lands to their vendors. The speculative mania has been stamped” [This was wishful thinking: the retransfers were a tool to fortify title.]

By the end of 1896, with the gradual extension of the alienation of village lands to the north of the district, which had been partly settled by Booth under the Forest Ordinance (see previous chapter), the relations between Davidson and the planters reached a critical point. In October, he issued a circular printed in Sinhala and distributed in the villages. The original text is not available but only its English translation; it reads as a defense and illustration of the traditionalist/dualistic view of village life and could have been written by Price[48]:

“In the Four-korales there are as many Kandyans as the fields will grow food for. Therefore there should be no strangers introduced. If you sell your chenas you will lose part of your food supply, and the rest of your food supply will be destroyed through the fields being silted up from the drains in the highlands. If you sell your chenas, you will lose your lands and will some day soon have to work as daily labourers for other people who have obtained possession of your lands. You are happy now because you have only to work for yourselves to provide yourselves with sufficient food. When you lose your lands you must work as daily labourers and must always work whether you wish to or not, and/or whether you are well or sick; for if you do not earn your wages you will starve. You will be cheated by kanganis who will keep back part of your wages or who will get you into debt by giving you advances on high interest. When once you have got into debt you will never escape: as, if you go away, you can be brought back on warrants. Furthermore, your children will learn the vices of their masters: you will see your children learning to drink strong drinks and to fight and to swear. They will copy the vices of the Europeans and not all their manly virtues. So, do not be persuaded to sell your lands but keep your ancestral lands to yourselves and let the Four-korales remain what it has always been, the most favoured garden of the Kandyan provinces. There is plenty of room for tea plantations in the Three-korales and up in the hills where there are no paddy fields and only a few villages”

Davidson commented in his diary: “I hope it may help to stop the reckless sale of village land in the prosperous and thickly populated Four-korales ; we have no need of tea plantations here ; they do good where the land is not settled or fully occupied, but the harm they would do is infinitely greater than the good”. The circular attracted the attention of the pro-planter Times of Ceylon newspaper which argued that land sales would liberate the villagers from the grip of the moneylender, and that it gave a false image of the labour relations on the estates and thus discouraged the villagers from taking employment on the plantations. The Governor then requested an explanation from Davidson who answered that “Agents commissioned to buy lands have penetrated into every village: and what is already taking place on a small scale, if it were not checked, would assume in a few weeks huge proportions. In proof of which I am prepared to prove that titles to more than 100,000 acres of village lands has changed hands within 6 months of this year in the adjacent divisions of the Three-korales, Sabaragamuwa and Kurunegala. The harm done in Four-korales would be greater than that caused elsewhere because the soil already carries a heavy population which maintains itself on the produce of its own fields and chenas, and there is practically no waste land”. Davidson explained that he “decided to issue warnings (1) to the members of the Kelani Valley Planters Association not to buy lands without bringing their intention to my notice and without a certificate of no claim from the Crown (2) to the notaries not to execute deeds conveying more than 50 acres of lands on titles based simply on the assertion of hereditary possession (3) to the villagers not to sell lands. The Governor Ridgeway (who had succeeded Havelock in February of the same year) censured Davidson, considering that while the intention was good, Davidson had used an unproper language referring to planters and kanganis.

Davidson in his diary insisted on his good relations with the planters: “ I met Messrs. Forsythe, Steward, Jones, Kingsford, Brace, Raffin and Oliversand. Despite the press attacks on my conduct in a recent incident, my social relations with the Kelani Valley planters remain as excellent as they always were (…) I shall be curious to see if there is any manifestation when the Kelani Valley Planters Association (KVPA) meets (…)  It is odd considering the abuse reported in the Times to have been showed at me at the meeting of the KVPA of 7 December, that the only communication received by me subsequently should convey the thanks of the Association to my letter”. He recapitulates his actions and underline their results : 18 applications for Certificates of Quiet Possession in the case of Kelani Valley purchases covering 6,000 acres, “letter from Mr. Golledge giving up the attempt to buy behind my back (this attempt was the most serious) and pay directly “30 Rs per acre to those villagers who have spare lands”; notaries being warned, “ the whole land broking middlemen business is at a standstill and one at least of the two notaries will be broken over glaringly bad cases: now the villagers petition for the Certificate and get it readily if they want to sell, and the Certificate just make their lands worth ten times as much” . He recognized that he “greatly appealed to the prejudices of the Four-korales villagers, judging that common sense appeals would not win against the chink of rupees, and that the tone of that appeal was indiscrete and was deservedly censured”. Davidson considered that that his action succeeded in arresting to extension of the land grabbing activities out of the Three-korales ; he added – wishful thinking – that henceforth “now that the mania has subsided, and the methods to be adopted in transfers are recognized by both sides, the extension of the tea industry will proceed on sound lines, only chenas the clearing and opening of which will not destroy the fields, will be sold; only the chenas which the village vendors really own will be sold, only chenas which the pangukarayo in gansabhava decide to be more than they want will be sold, and when sold the chenas will realize 30 Rs per acre, not the Rs 1,71 they did average. The price realized will go to those who really own the lands which are sold. The purchaser will not have to buy off half a dozen different claimants later. The peasantry will still have their fields and arecanut groves as their main source of subsistence and can increase their income or not, as they like, by working on the neighbouring estates and in practice, the Europeanization of the district which we cannot arrest will be made as slow and as easy as possible”.[49]

In July 1897, Davidson was replaced by Bertram Hill and the tone of the official correspondence became purely factual, listing village sales, the names of middlemen, and showing the extension of their activities to the north of the district. Hill commented the lists by these words, which signed the defeat of the interventionist policy of his predecessors: “I am not of opinion that any action is necessary”. In 1897, 8,000 acres “were sold to middlemen or capitalists for tea, and there is no reason to doubt that vendors are as reckless as ever in disposing of lands to which they have insufficient title” and in 1898 “7,500 acres of chena land have been sold by the villagers and 80 acres of gardens, in many cases land was disposed of to which vendors had little or no title”. By the beginning of the 20th century, the demand for tea land in the Kägalla district slowed down: “sale of lands by villagers have been rare” [50]. One of the successors to Hill, E.B. Alexander, produced another piece of wishful thinking (or hypocrisy), praising “the success of the policy pursued by the previous Assistant Government Agents in preventing the villagers selling their lands and jealously resisting the invasion of European capital and the immigration of Tamils, Moormen and Low-country men. It has prevented the swamping of the Kandyans and gave them time to develop their resources gradually. I don’t think that even a boom in rubber would make them fool enough to sacrifice their possessions now”[51]. Actually the rubber boom of the beginning of the century did just that, and the result was a wave of Certificates of Quiet Possession. The power of the plantocracy was to prevail over the attempts of the administration for the next thirty years.

 

Kelani valley planters and the Certificates of Quiet Possession (CQPs) until 1913[52]

In 1897, under the Governor West Ridgeway, to replace or rather supplement the ordinance of 1840, a new Waste Lands ordinance had been enacted, which eventually led to the establishment of a Land settlement department with extensive powers. The failure of the Kägalla settlements was one of the motives for the new legislation, others being the urge to curb the rise of the land grabbing activities by Ceylonese planters, and the provocative attitude of the former civil servant Le Mesurier who played the game of the land grabbers to ruin the authority of government. An added element was that with the abolition of the paddy tax in 1892, it would be impossible in the future for älvi (hill paddy) chena cultivators to prove title to highlands by the production of wattoru. “Since 1890 [sic] the tax on all fine grain has been abolished and ord. 12 of 1840 sect. 6 can no longer be used as a test of private right to chena land. It has been customary here to admit the right of villagers to clear chena under 20 years of age when they can prove that they have paid tax for a certain portion of them. Clearings of chenas under 20 years of growth are not reported to the kachcheri. Mr. Booth in his settlements allowed three times the extent shewn in the claimants’ wattoru as private to make up for the absence of wattoru for amu and kurakkan [millets]”. The local agents pleaded for a settlement of the district with the new tool at their disposal: “obvious advantages would be gained by defining once and for all the at present vague and debatable limits of Crown rights (…) The findings of the Assistant Government Agent or the payment of a fine is no evidence of the Crown title in a civil proceeding and even the admission of a claimant would not bind others, for villagers frequently dispose of a chena to which they have a real or imaginary right to planters and low country Sinhalese speculators who have not the Kandyan’s respect for the law (…) The policy of systematic settlement has long been recognized in this district. Mr. Booth has been engaged in work in Beligal korale and Kelani valley as a Forest settlement officer. Mr Ievers and the other AGAs have made settlements of whole villages. Questions of title arise daily and the same Crown is gone over again and again (…) Unless a special officer is detailed for duty in this district, the complete settlement will be the work of years; a beginning should however be made, and the existing policy continued under the protection of the new ordinance”[53].

However the colonial administration was unwilling to apply the new ordinance to the Kägalla district: on a mild interpretation one might justify it because it was too late to control village land sales, and because enquiries at the village level would be time consuming ; I would rather suggest, on the basis of the documentation available, that it was avoided because it would affect British planters and expose the profits derived from the mechanism of land speculation, in the context of the rubber boom which impacted a large area comprising the west of Ratnapura district, the east of Kalutara district, the whole of the Kägalla district and the borders between the Kurunegala and Matale districts.  The process of acquisition of village highlands for the planting enterprise was subsumed under a profitable business of appropriation of land value by a succession of intermediaries. When the stakes were high, huge profits could be cashed, but it required the concurrence of influential legal firms to obtain certificates from the administration which could enable the entrepreneurs to float big companies on the London sterling market: only the British-funded managing agencies were able to do that. The CQPs enhanced the value of the land and gave the estate openers access to the British share market. They were therefore eagerly sought after, with the assistance of local and Colombo lawyers. These ‘settlements by CQP’s[54] were therefore preferred as a novel manner of obtaining lands by planters after the failure of the block chena settlements and the forest settlements, in a context of heavy demand first for tea, and in a second phase for rubber land.

The settlements under CQPs in the Kägalla district dealt after 1897 with three categories of village lands purchased by outsiders: 1. lands of the village block recognized as belonging to villagers under chena settlements;  2. lands allowed for chena cultivation by villagers under forest settlements; 3.unsettled lands. A first series of CQPs concerned lands purchased to extend the estates sold by the Crown for tea in the late 80s and early 90s in Three-korales and Lower Bulatgama. A second series concerns lands sold in the Four-korales, most of them in Beligal korale, especially during the first rubber boom (first decade of the 20th century). The last series concerns the sales in the Kälerata after 1910, but in that case the system was generally replaced by settlement under the Waste Lands Ordinance of 1897, and monitored by the Land settlement department.

The history of the systematic and massive use of the CQPs as a mode of settlement with planters who had purchased land from villagers started with the outcome of the Davidson circular affair: he advised the Kelani Valley planters who had purchased village lands to ask for CQPs. A list of the CQP demands in the district at the date of January 1897 was prepared, covering 7,889 acres[55]. Some ‘openers’ were more active than others in the game: J.A. McAlistair for Pannila-Imbulpitiya and Urapola (1,140 acres), J. Patterson for Polpitiya and Punugala (630 acres) and Seymour Luce Harries, a close associate of W. Forsythe, who had purchased lands in ten villages, with a total of 2,513 acres, forming the Sapumalkande group; Kahanavita (123 acres), a block settled village, entirely sold, Hatnagala (355 acres), Lakmana (400 acres), a nindagama of the decadent Eheliyagodas totally dismembered later between Yogama estate (J.P. Anderson), Rangegama estate, Woodend estate, Panawatta (464 acres) a part of Udaramba which was the subject of ample information and was block settled, Talapitiya (241 acres) not settled, Dikella (83 acres), Kudagama (208 acres) another Eheliyagoda nindagama, Uda Yogama (173 acres) block settled by Ievers, Maha Oya (210 acres), Walpola (256 acres) block settled. 

A section of the administration objected to the easy delivery of CQPs. The Surveyor General wrote to the Government Agent Sabaragamuwa in 1899[56] : “In many cases, applications for CQPs are not bona fide, the real object being to secure Crown land and I therefore trust that some checks will be provided on applications for survey of this nature”. At the same time, the rationale behind the Forest settlements of Booth was questioned by the authorities in the case of Bambarabotuwa, Madampe and Gilimale villages (located in the nearby Ratnapura district) where a quantity of chenas were sold from 1901 onwards, after the Crown had abandoned its rights to highlands in former gabadagam by letter of 14.05.1897. In October 1903, the Controller of Revenue F.R. Ellis (1849-1915) underlined the urgency to decide on the issue in the Ratnapura district where the demand for land was enormous. He considered that by the decision to allow chena cultivation the Crown lost its authority on land, keeping a purely theoretical ownership of high lands and could no longer prevent the villagers from disposing of their chena lands, and that the Forest settlement blocked any attempt at permanent cultivation : “No house can be built, no garden can be made, the chena if irrigable cannot even be converted into a paddy field. A chena it is, a chena it must remain (…)  The settlement is an effective and complete bar to improvement of any kind”.

The new governor, Henry Arthur Blake (December 1903-July 1907) undertook to review the land policy of his predecessors in the context of a booming demand of land for rubber cultivation. He expressed his opinion in a minute (9.12.1903) which can be considered as a master text of the colonial policy: “It appears to me that the question to be first decided is: do we wish to encourage or to repress individualism? The village system seems to me so far as I can judge by the reading of these papers akin to collectivism, and the proposed reservation of Crown lands with chena rights is as Mr. Ellis points out a bar to all progress. I do not know enough practically to offer a valuable opinion, but it appears to me that the speculator is a bugbear that loses its stems on close examination. What if he does buy the land for a song from a village community? He takes the land out of the unprogressive system of primitive civilization and endorses it with the magic of individual ownership. Without cultivation it is useless to him and it may be expected that permanent crop will take the place of the wasteful exhaustion of the communal system (…) No matter how produced, I think each additional cacao or coconut tree is an addition to the wealth of the island, and even though the speculator may disproportionately prosper, the island at large is a gainer”.

His subordinates were more cautious. The Colonial secretary (Im Thurn) made the following comment: “We do nothing to prevent the speculator from acquiring the land legitimately. It is only his illegitimate acquisition of land, say from one member of the community, to which we object. Moreover even legitimate acquisition on anything like a large scale would saddle us with a peasantry unattached to any land, which is always a bad thing”. Ellis added: “What H.E. says is quite true (…) Two questions however have to be considered : 1- the speculator, if he cannot purchase the villager’s chena at a nominal figure, will buy Crown land at a fair price : the Crown thereby secures a double advantage : it promotes progress and increases the revenue which is devoted to the advancement of the island in other respects; only one of these ends is attained by allowing the purchase of chenas 2- why do we give the villager a chena ? because his paddy field is insufficient to provide him and his family with maintenance ; what then will the villager do when the speculator has obtained possession of the village chena ? he must either undergo the privation from which the chena was intended to forestall him, or he must cultivate Crown chenas either with or without permit, most probably the latter ; he may be prosecuted and punished, but we have already seen in the North Central Province how formidable passive resistance may become ; the only way of avoiding this is to discourage for the present at all events the sale of these lands (…) If the sale of these lands are recognized, speculators will begin to buy in the whole waste land of the island ; only a small portion will be cultivated, the rest will be held on the deeds executed until the price of land rises and they will be sold at a large profit”[57].

During the following years, Ellis continued to deprecate the easy issue of CQPs[58]: “the only safe title is that based on purchase from the Crown. Cases in which land has been bought from villagers must be decided on their own merits but it is not as a rule intended to issue CQPs. Government does not feel called upon to supplement the titles which capitalists have considered sufficiently strong to justify investment as the land has probably been bought under its value on account of the weakness of the title”. But the pro-planter lobby – the Planter’s Association, the big Managing agencies and firms of lawyers – successfully stifled the move, probably with the support of governor Blake. In any case, the aim of the colonial administration was no longer to prevent land sales by villagers, but to make the planters pay to the exchequer a share of the value of the land by raising the requirements for issuing CQPs.

In Kägalla, the Assistant government agents who succeeded Hill, especially E.B. Alexander, had close relations with the planters and were ready to encourage rubber development without objections: “In Three-korales and Lower Bulatgama, Mr. L. Bayly is negotiating for the purchase of 400 acres of private jungle at Lewalla, and Mr. Harries has bought 400 acres near Deraniyagala, 100 acres at Walpola and 150 acres at Mahinkanda for rubber cultivation. The private title in all these cases is sound. The Ratemahatmaya reports that there is a large demand for land suitable for rubber cultivation”[59]. Vaughan, another agent, wrote in 1906: “In every part of the district except in Galboda and Kinigoda, considerable extents of high land have been sold by the villagers to planters for rubber cultivation, and will no doubt effect a marked change in the ordinary Kandyan village. The villagers have not as yet taken to selling their fields and gardens, and so long as they do not part with them, the replacing of the chenas by rubber estates will I think on the whole prove beneficial” [60].

The attribution of CQPs was simple when the chena settlements had recognized as private all the highlands of a village. Near Patberiya, the Vahumpura hamlet of Kotunna[61], recognized entirely private by Ievers settlement, was sold by villagers, share by share, in 1896-1898, to the usual group of land speculators, Karpen Chetty, Don Salomon Appuhami, K.A.D. John Perera, and C.J.R. Marshall. They asked for a CQP in late 1905, and resold in November 1906 to the Durampitiya Rubber Company. The government admitted 179 acres as private by settlement, but asked payment for 72 acres not covered. The Assistant Agent Stevenson in a comprehensive memo on the attribution of CQPs in the district (27.11.1907) pointed out that it was the rule to charge only 10 Rs an acre for CQPs “where the AGA is satisfied that the transaction is bona fide and where the consideration paid is thought as adequate (but) it is only recently that cases of chena lands sold by villagers to European planters have been taken up for settlement and CQPs issued on payment of 10 Rs an acre for Crown claims. Before 1905, the practice here was to recommend issue of CQPs for all chena blocks without any payment”.  

When the chena settlements were more complex or when there had been no settlements, the colonial administration, willingly or not, took the side of the planters rather than of that of the villagers. We give here the details for some of these villages, in which were often involved three leading planters of Atulugam korale, William Forsythe, Seymour Luce Harries, and J.P. Anderson. In that area, the sparse population was often settled in small villages dominated by one lineage belonging to the Goyigama caste, considered since the time of the kings as land owner, so long as it rendered  services such as clearing the roads, hosting and feeding the Dissawe (provincial governor) in visit, and assisting in the elephant kraals. Such a domain was called gamwasama and its chief, the gamladda or gamarala, could employ pelkarayo to cultivate his chenas, and got only a very small proportion of the crop, but the pelkarayo had not to perform any service to him as in a nindagama. The special status of the gamladda was recognized by the other villagers and the headmen, as being the result of a will of the Dissawe, but there were no formal documents, and the colonial administration was at a loss to define the rights of each claimant. Most of these villages, such as Udarambe, Walpola, Wattegedara, Maldeniya, Digala, Pannila, Kehelwala and Udabage, were located at the periphery of the large blocks sold for tea plantations after the block settlements of Ievers, many had not been settled, and they attracted the greed of land speculators, especially of S.L. Harries, who employed as middlemen tavern keepers and bazaar traders.

Udarambe (Uda Arambe) and Panawatte[62] were two small Goyigama villages on the south bank of the Kelani Ganga. Land sales to planters started early, in 1874, and the Pennycuick settlement of 1877 allowed many chenas to the villagers, who sold them with the connivance of local headmen. In October 1897, S.L. Harries who had acquired before the notary C.J.A. Marshall of Avissawella 453 acres of land (actually, shares) from various low country, Kandyan and Muslim middlemen, asked for a CQP from Bertram Hill, the successor of Davidson. Harries pretended that according to the villagers, the whole village of Udarambe had been settled ‘by Ievers’ as private, while the village of Walpola had been taken by the Crown (and later sold to the planters).  In a private letter (26.10.1897) written to his ‘Dear Hill’ he asked him to lend him the local chena plan (which was refused). In a second letter (7.03.1898), he told his ‘Dear Hill’: “Do you think you can arrange to get me one CQP for the whole lot, Panawatte and Udarambe? They all join each other and there should be no difficulty as regards Udarambe as it is entirely chena lands. I wish you could help me in this matter as my partner Mr. Forsythe is going home in April and is very anxious to have all the deeds fixed up before he leaves”. ‘Going home’ was the grand affair of these colonial entrepreneurs whose business it was to have their plantations taken up by sterling companies with unassailable deeds…

In April 1898, he asked for a further CQP for 66 acres already planted in tea in the locality of Panawatta. In June 1898, the chief headman Meedeniya reported that Udarambe was not a settled village contrary to what Harries pretended, and the CQP was refused because the plan was inexact. In December 1900, Harries wrote again to his ‘Dear Hill’ to ask him to expedite the CQP: “I want to get it very much before I go home in January and if you can hurry it up for me I shall be greatly obliged to you. Do please try and let me have the CQP this month without fail [in text] as the non-receipt of it may very seriously inconvenience me. I am sorry to trouble you but if you can do this for me you will really be doing me a very great favour and I trust you will arrange it for me.” He insisted in a last letter dated 16.12.1900: “Mind in those hard times one does not get a chance of a sale every day, and if I don’t get a CQP I shall lose my chance of selling”. Hill finally wrote to the Government Agent and the Surveyor General in favour of Harries.

Between 1905 and 1907, A.B. Smeaton (who succeeded Harries), acting for the Panawatte Tea and Rubber Company, added a request for a further CQP concerning a series of lands (431 acres including a few acres of gardens) in Panawatte already planted in rubber which were not included in the first CQP; they had been sold by the same middleman, Kolonda Kader Thamby, with the usual numerous sale and resale of shares to fortify title, effected between 1.06.1895 and 7.11.1905, in most cases before C.J.A. Marshall.  The middleman had himself acquired some shares of the land from the Gamarallage people of Udaramba who were indebted to him. The CQP was supposed to extinguish the claims of those villagers who had not or pretended not to have sold their shares.

Walpola[63] was a small Goyigama hilly village of Atulugam, between Dehiowita and Deraniyagala, which had been sold to the Sapumalkande estate after having been settled by Ievers, partly by the Crown, partly by the gamladda who claimed a portion of it as a gamwasama. Village chenas were sold by the gamladda family from 1891 onwards to Kader Thamby, who resold to Harries. In 1906, the Agent, Stevenson, proposed to give him a CQP on very easy terms. Six years later Smeaton, successor to Harries at Sapumalkande, purchased land from Kader Thamby who had got it from the gamladda, before the notary C.J.A. Marshall, and although all the shares had not been purchased, the CQP was given free of charge….

Pelellegama [64], located close to Udarambe was settled by Pennycuick in 1877; the village lands (25 acres) were not demarcated from the Crown lands (78 acres) and the villagers had not respected the settlement: “they regularly cultivated the chenas, and obtained wattorus for land before declared Crown”  S.L. Harries wanted to extend his Maha Oya estate: he employed a Muslim, Ana Lebbe, as intermediary, and purchased “all the village”. Ellis wrote in a memo dated  2.12.1904 : “the case is a typical one and the same procedure can be adopted when the circumstances are similar (…) it was impossible to protect the Crown land (…) there was no correspondence between the plan with dotted lines of Pennycuick and the actual extent (…) It is I think worth taking some trouble to meet Mr. Harries views because he has adopted the course which is desirable that all planters should adopt before buying lands. Sales by villagers have been checked if not stopped, settlements have been completed, Crown land paid for, and the present case shows that planters are prepared to take up a fair and reasonable attitude. This should I think be encouraged in every way”. In this case, the government decided to give him not a CQP, but a Crown grant without guaranteeing the title against the village claimants : 25 acres gratis, 78 acres at 10 Rs an acre, and forest at 20 Rs an acre  “it is understood that you undertake to settle native claims to any portion of the area in question”. Harries, not content to be given this Crown grant, tried to evade the payment of survey fees (180 Rs) and the government answered that the private plans were often ‘grossly inaccurate’. He sold his estate in 1906.

Wattegedara[65] was another gamwasama, close to the small Deraniyagala town, purchased by S.L. Harries. The Controller of Revenue, Ellis, considered the case as a test in his attempts to control land grabbing in Atulugam korale and led himself the inquiry in November 1904. The testimonies of the villagers give a precise image of the peasant economy and society. According to Ellis, it is the issue of CQPs on easy terms by the Assistant agent Vaughan “which started the whole business”. The village was unsettled; it had been founded in the 18th century by two brothers in law who married two daughters of the local gamarala. Their sons either married in binna (uxorilocally) or in polyandry. Their descendants at the third generation sold their shares in 1895, and some left the village. The middlemen, Domingo Perera and Joseph Peris, resold to K.D. John Perera who resold to S.L. Harries, while Bastian de Silva sold to another planter, on the basis of an arrangement of 1897. Harries, with the support of Mideniya, the chief headman, argued that the special status of a gamwasama gave to its owner the full property of its highlands, while Ellis considered that the Crown had retained its rights, and asked Harries to pay for the lands.

Padugama[66] was another a small unsettled village where S.L. Harries purchased land for Polatagama estate: the village  (172 acres including 34 acres of forest, 6 of gardens, 3 of owitas) was sold to him by Edwin Francis Mapitigama (then korala of Galboda) at the rate of 40 Rs per acre, and the CQP was issued to the planter at the rate of 10 Rs per acre for the areas not covered by wattoru. But villagers who had planted trees on supposed Crown land in the same village were required to pay at half improved value between 25 and 100 Rs per acre.  When the Settlement department took up the area in 1933 the village was “extensively planted up in old rubber by estate companies and there is not much land left to settle”. The double standards of the colonial administration are evident, and CQP just like the previous systems of settlement was open to corruption especially because the correspondence between the wattoru and the actual lands was, like in the first chena settlements, ascertained by headmen and kacceri clerks who could be bribed to expedite the matter, to admit forged wattoru, or to alter a decision[67].

Further south, Pukunuwala[68] was a very small Goyigama village in the interior of Panawal korale, in the heart of what was to become one of the largest estates of the Kelani Valley, the Pambagama alias Sunnygama group. Its alienation to planters became the subject of several cases involving W. Forsythe and big planting interests. Contrary to Pelellegama, the village was not settled under the chena settlement nor the forest settlement. Pambagama estate began to purchase it in 1898 from the Ranwila Vidanelage family and a CQP was issued in 1900 without serious enquiry. In further reports, it appeared that Ekneligoda, the former chief headman, and the decayed aristocratic Eheliyagoda family were involved from the beginning together with various other middlemen. In 1917 the final purchasers of Pukunuwala (the Pambagama estate and J.P. Anderson for the Panawatte Tea and Rubber company) were refused a CQP by the Settlement officer Fox, who criticized the laxity of the local administration (report dated 10.09.1917):  “Settlement of large extents of land in the Kegalle district should not in my opinion be recommended except after personal inspection of the lands by the Assistant Government Agent (…) He has not carried back the title completely to the original title by inheritance as desired by government (…) the planting of rubber began in 1912, that is before Panawatte Tea and Rubber Estate had any interest in any of the lots (…) Neither the Government Agent nor his assistant has made out any case for settling any part of the land to Mr. Anderson”. He concluded that it was unadvisable to recommend the settlement of these lands to J.P. Anderson, and asked for the detailed notarial deeds to check the extents given in the documents. After years of litigation, in which the interests of the planters were defended by the legal firm of De Sarams, the Controller of Revenue was compelled to accept a settlement: in a letter dated 10.03.1919,  he wrote to the Colonial secretariat: “About two weeks ago, Mr. W. Forsythe, who has recently returned from England and is the principal director of the Sunnygama Co., interviewed me on the subject of his claim which is now being dealt with in the District court Kegalle 4944. Mr. Forsythe stated that it was not his wish that his Company should litigate with Government and suggested that the question of a settlement should be considered. From the Solicitor general I learnt that the evidence was not at all favourable to the Crown case. There are wattoru which cover portions of each of the 4 chenas involved”. As a result, Forsythe had an interview with the Controller of Revenue, the Settlement Officer and the Solicitor General, and of course in such cases, a gentleman agreement was found and the case was dropped…. Finally out of the 64 acres, 56 were sold by government at 75 Rs per acre [the villagers had been paid about 24 Rs an acre] “It was understood that this settlement is in no way to act as a precedent to the settlement of other claims either by Mr. Forsythe or anyone else but that each such case must be settled on its own merits”.

Dulgalla, Narangalla, Denawakawatta, and Kendawe, in the Bulatkopitiya area, were solid Duraya villages whose chenas, regularly cultivated, but interspersed with small forested areas, had been admitted private in various settlements by the end of the 19th century[69]. With the rubber boom of the early 20th century the villagers progressively abandoned chena cultivation and sold their lands to a middleman (Arnolis Baas) who acted for the planter R.H. Brodie, linked with Finlay Muir and Aitken Spence firms, and locally represented by the lawyer Philip Ondaatje; there were more than 100 notarial deeds. In 1908-1910, a CQP was asked for 758 acres, but as all the shares had not been purchased and as the wattoru produced covered only 100 acres, the government was unwilling to give a certificate. The investors in London (The Doolgalla Rubber Estates Ltd) became nervous and asked De Sarams to intervene, and the Crown finally refused to deliver a CQP but instead delivered a grant in January 1914 with a special provision refusing to guarantee the purchaser against possible claims of a third party, for the sum of 9,268 Rs. This form of settlement distinct from the CQP system became frequent when the legal status of the land had been entangled by numerous sales. The administration attempted to compel the planters to purchase all the shares and protect the weaker members of the village society.

In the same area, Lewala, Wegalla, and Welatuduwa were also Duraya chena villages totaling 2,362 acres, which had been settled by the Booth Forest settlement. Three years before, in 1889, Wace, as Government agent Sabaragamuwa, had attracted to these villages the attention of W. Forsythe who was himself connected with J.P. Anderson[70]. In their reports on the forest settlement (5.04.1892 and 8.08.1892), M.B. Ekneligoda and L.W. Booth established that “the Crown does not claim any of the chenas in those villages, the growth of jungle on which is less than 20 years; the chenas belong to the villagers and have been cultivated by them and by their ancestors for generations”. The control was limited to the small patches of forest scattered all over the highlands, and to älvi cultivation (taxed at the rate of 1/14th when notice was given in advance, or 1/10th if not). The villagers were submitted to services in the time of the Kandyan kings, but since the British accession they were owners of their lands without any conditions, as in any koralegama. They had proved title to 1,305 acres of chenas and owitas, 95 acres of gardens and 53 acres of paddy fields, so that only 908 acres of scattered forests were reserved to the Crown by settlement. As a result, the situation was not conductive to the formation of a large estate in compact block from Crown sales, but as all the chenas had been recognized private, and as the attention of land speculators had been attracted to the area, the villagers began to sell their highlands to J.P. Anderson, before any survey was done, so that it appeared that about 100 acres of reserved forests had been planted with rubber in 1899.  In the highlands of Urumiwela, another Duraya village close by, 600 acres were similarly purchased through a Muslim middleman by William Forsythe and planted in 1902.  Between 1899 and 1903, the case was shelved, and when it was reopened it appeared that a part of the so-called forest was in reality chena with tax receipts. In August 1908, a CQP was applied for by J.P. Anderson with the project of integrating Lewala and Urumiwella lands into a group (1,081 acres), and the certificate was issued at the pressing request of Anderson in April 1910 on easy terms: as a result, the Grand Central Rubber company was incorporated in July 1910[71].

 

The struggle between the planters and the administration over CQPs (1913 to 1926)[72]

The above mentioned cases must be understood in the context of a shift in the land policy of the district: with the support of the Land Settlement officers and the Controller of Revenue, two Assistant Agents, Codrington (July 1911 to July 1914) and Burden (July 1914 to July 1917), attempted to clear up the backlog of CQP cases, in a context of pressure exerted by the demand for rubber land in the populated areas of the district. Most of the new plantations partly or entirely made up of village chenas since the beginning of the century were located in Four-korales, and after the Crown decided in 1916 to cease selling land, there was a further rush to purchase village chena lands, which continued until 1927 [73]: “There is a great demand of land for rubber planting but there is very little Crown land available for sale. Large areas of unsettled chena lands and lands allowed for chena cultivation are being bought by capitalists with a view to obtaining a settlement with the Crown. Numerous complaints have been received from the villagers with regard to these purchases. It is not an unusual thing for a capitalist to buy up a few shares of land and then clear the whole land. The only remedy is a vigorous campaign of block survey and settlement, but unfortunately (sic) this does not seem likely to materialize in the near future”.

In a memorandum dated 4.09.1913, Codrington listed the plantations in the Four-korales “owners of which should be called upon to produce deeds” : Arandara Estate (Kottepola, Boyagama), Ambanpitiya estate, Asideniyewatta (Balapane), Higgoda (Lahupone), Markville (Alawatura), Atale estate, Puspane estate, Panane estate,  Pallegama estate, Mayfair (Algama), Etna estate (Etnawala), Barrington (Kempitiya), Yatiwela, Kovilakanda (Mahantegama), Mahaganga (Dodantale), Mattamagoda, Kannatota, Algoda, Denakantota, Gonagama, Maragalla, Hendagama, Debatgama estate, Gankorahene estate (Makure), Paranagama, Uduangama, Gantune, Yatideriya estate (Wadiyakanda, Kudelanpota), Dickella and Godapollawatta (Paragammana), Loolpola estate, Narangalla estate, Hatbawe (Rambukkana). The three largest estates made up of village lands in that area, Madeniya (Dorawaka), Golinda (Haloluwa) and Karandupone, were not mentioned in this first list. They appeared later in the list made by Burden in 1916 of pending cases, with the names of the legal firms involved:  Kempitiya (167 acres, De Sarams), Digala (111 acres, De Sarams), Karandupone (231 acres, De Sarams and Ondaatje), Lewala (60 acres De Sarams), Walpola (152 acres, De Sarams), Kapuella (236 acres, Whittals), Berannawa (217 acres, Ondaatje) , Golinda (337 acres, Ondaatje), Bodawela (126 acres), Udahenkanda (345 acres, De Sarams), Meneripitiya + Patberiya (226 acres, Whittals).

The Kägalla lawyer Philip Ondaatje (himself the owner of Godapolla estate) had been entrusted by the proprietors of several estates, including Karandupone and Golinda, to represent them, and he discussed the matter in April 1914 with Codrington and Thaine (the Government Agent of Sabaragamuwa). In continuation of this interview, he defended in a letter of 9.04.1915 arguments which Albert Alfred Wickremesinghe, another local lawyer, the proprietor of Madeniya estate, later developed in a booklet published in 1924[74]: “The rights of the villagers in chena lands, provided that they have not developed into forests (i.e. where growth on it is over 20 years) have been recognized since the British occupation of the Kandyan districts. For instance in this district, the majority of land cases heard and decided in courts are suits in which the title to highlands or chenas are in issue (…) Further, on writs issued from the courts, chena lands belonging to judgment debtors are seized and after due notice and publication sold in satisfaction of writs. Thereafter fiscal’s conveyances are granted to purchasers under the hand and seal of the Government Agents. It cannot therefore be urged that these adjudications (…) are in respect of lands to which suitors have no title (…) In this district, the Government has recognized the rights of the villagers and estate proprietors by acquiring the same for public purposes (railway lines, hospitals…)” “The title to most estates in this district will be found to be partly by purchase from the Crown, and partly by purchase from the villagers, the Crown generally putting up for sale forest lands by public auction and when they have been acquired by estates, these estates proceed to buy up intervening blocks of highlands or chenas which government has not put up for sale by reason of these lands belonging to or being in possession of the villagers”. Ondaatje omitted to mention the case of estates made up exclusively of village lands, such as Golinda, Madeniya and Karandupone. He quoted the Administration reports of Hill, Vaughan and Alexander as a recognition by the administration that “when chena cultivation can be proved within the last 20 years the land is allowed as private”, and added that in some districts the soil being not favourable to the cultivation of älvi, and the other grains not being taxed (“by some oversight or mistake”), no wattoru were available to prove title under ordinance 12 of 1840; with the abolition of the paddy tax in 1892, the ordinance of 1840 became invalid: “the abolition of the tax has the unforeseen and immoral effect of confiscating to the Crown all the highlands and chenas in the Kandyan provinces after a lapse of 20 years after 1892”. He finally asked what proof of possession could be accepted in lieu of wattoru “on behalf of the estates noticed and also Golinda and Karandupone estates”. The Assistant Agent answered that he was not prepared to reopen the question.

Then the legal firm De Sarams, acting for the Managing Agency Whittalls and Co, sent a letter (3.05.1916) recalling the arguments of Ondaatje, requesting the administration to give them CQPs under the same conditions as heretofore and criticizing the publication in the Government Gazette of ‘Sale and Settlement’ notices (which might encourage “possibly frivolous and vexatious claims, the enquiry into which may delay and embarrass the issue of CQPs.”), adding that the question of the relations between estates and third parties was not the affair of Government. In his diary, the Assistant Agent Burden recognized the contradictions of the land policy[75]: “The whole difficulty of chena CQP settlements is due to the fact that it is not possible to decide what are Crown and what private chenas without a survey (…) If government insists on its own legal rights it will make estate owners very shy of opening up fresh chena lands and therefore the development of the district will be severely prejudiced (…) There is one aspect of the question which is of some interest : the fact that the estates buy up many hundreds of acres of chena lands paying the villagers a fair price [sic] before applying for a CQP prevents any contest or disagreement between government and villagers regarding the chenas which the Crown may be found to have a legal right to (…) In view of the complicated state of the chena question (…) coupled with the desirability of encouraging the opening up of chena lands in permanent cultivation, it is expedient that the terms of settlement offered be no harsher than they have hitherto been.”

In his official report (15.08.1916)[76], Burden reviewed the general question of private chenas from the legal point of view, stating against Ondaatje that a fiscal sale transferred no property right but the debtor’s title, good or bad, and that it was too late to argue against the non-taxation of amu and kurakkan. He added critical remarks regarding the laxity of CQP settlements with the planters: “it would be natural to expect that the Crown claims would have been more strictly enforced. This however was not the case and I find [in settlements] prior to 1905 that the fact that chena was under 20 years of age was considered sufficient grounds for allowing private title”. Until 1905, CQPs were given out without reference to the central authorities (i.e. the Controller of Revenue and Colonial Secretary), and on the simple testimony of the chief headmen, who had all facilities to influence the result. After that date, the ordinance 12 of 1840 was adhered to and the planter made to pay about 15 Rs an acre for chena lands without taking into account the fact that the growth was under or above 20 years. But the ordinance was not clear regarding the date of the cultivation and the proof of limits. The wattoru lists were discontinued only in 1911, although the paddy tax was abolished in 1892: “It was clearly wrong to admit these lists after 1892. After the repeal of the tax there was no incentive to put in false extents as cleared. These lists after 1892 therefore show larger extents than the earlier lists. Now these recent wattoru are no longer accepted, and when chenas of the same name appear more than once only one wattoruwa is recognized as proof, while in the older CQPs all the wattoru were added of whatever date! The equivalent to one amunam is now 4 acres and not 8 acres as formerly (…) In 1878 at the time of Mr. Ievers report the value of chena lands was only 2 Rs per acre; with a chena land at this price, strict settlement was not a matter of importance. But with chena lands at 40 Rs per acre, it is obvious that a lenient settlement may mean considerable loss to revenue”.

Lahupone village provides a documented example of such a laxity in the delivery of CQPs, by the exploitation in this case of the flaws of the Forest settlement, which had recognized 255 acres of chenas and gardens as private on the basis of wattoru, but had failed to demarcate its boundaries[77]. Between 1902 and 1905, Vaughan, the Assistant Agent, who considered that “the best way of dealing with these old settlements awaiting final proclamation is to survey merely the unclaimed land and proclaim it”, had sold two small plots to the well-known land speculator and estate opener D. Fairweather, who asked him what was the status of the surrounding lands; he answered that they were all private, and on the basis of this assertion Fairweather undertook to purchase them to form the Higgoda rubber estate which became the property of the Kegalle Rubber Company, a director of which was W.W. Mitchell (now Sir William) another big planter above mentioned in several cases, and the representative of the mercantile community at the Legislative council.  In 1912-1913, Codrington on the basis of the deeds which covered areas outside the 255 acres allotted to the villagers, proposed to make the estate pay at the rate of 100 Rs an acre for the excess lands. At that stage Mitchell interviewed Booth, then acting Colonial Secretary, and Fox, then Settlement officer, to challenge the rate, and during his enquiry at Kägalla in April 1913 Fox was shown by Ondaatje the letter written by Vaughan in 1905 “which must have encouraged the predecessor in title of the Company to buy from the villagers the land for which the Crown now demands 100 Rs an acre”. As a result the CQP was issued at 15 Rs an acre… but the authorities were not concerned with the rate payed to the villagers.

In the case of Kempitiya estate[78], opened by two speculators, Hawke and Siebel, in the 1890s, and sold in 1911 by them to a company, Hatbawe rubber estates Ltd, the Settlement officer Fox demanded that the lands be put up for sale instead of being given a CQP, because the wattoru produced were forgeries and all the rights of the shareholders had not been purchased. The legal firm De Sarams argued that “the Crown is not concerned in any question that may arise as to title between third parties and the Company” and that “the means for ascertaining [villager’s] claims by the advertisement of the Company’s lands constitutes a slander of the company’s title (…) The company claims a right to have a CQP granted upon due enquiry, but without any suggestion or invitation to third parties to put forward what may be frivolous or/and vexatious claims leading also to unnecessary delay”: the company needed a quick CQP to fortify its title and complete the payment to its vendors.

Meneripitiya[79], a large Batgama village located at the limit of Panawal, was the theater of an intense speculation which led to the formation of a plantation belonging to the Grand Central Rubber Company.  The land broker was a Muslim, Lebbe Sinna Podian, late town aracci of Parakaduwa, the large local bazaar, and the acts were certified by Marshall. In order to obtain a CQP, the services of De Sarams and Ondaatje were required, but the administration was reticent to deliver the precious sesame.  In a letter dated 5.11.1912, De Sarams wrote: “All the deeds are deposited in safe custody at a bank here; the deeds are several thousands in number”: a precious collection! The case dragged on and was finally submitted to the Settlement Officer by letter of the Government Agent of  Sabaragamuwa (25.06.1919) “in view of the tricky attitude taken up by this company which asks for a concession and then interprets a proposal made by the Government Agent discountenanced by the Controller of Revenue to grant them more favourable terms (…) all the Ratemahatmayas will be instructed to report forthwith with any clearings of chena lands made by this Company so that prohibitory actions may be taken against them forthwith. They will also report whether they are undertaking any negotiations for the purchase of chena lands in your district”. The Settlement Officer Fox answered (5.11.1919): “Each case must be dealt with on its own merits. When the Pambagama case was settled it was stipulated that the settlement was not to be treated as a precedent for the settlement of other cases”. The CQP was finally issued at 100 Rs per acre.

Boralankada[80] was a sparsely populated hilly Vahumpura village (700 acres) which had been chena surveyed in 1877 but had not been settled nor included in a forest reserve. It became the hunting ground of several land grabbers trying to build up title by purchasing shares from the various members of the Manannalage family, descendants of the founder of the village. A CQP was asked in 1897 by a local planter, Smeaton, to whom a Muslim middleman offered 71 acres adjoining his estate, but there was an adverse claim which led the planter to apply for another CQP in 1905, by the intermediary of Marshall, the notary and proctor of the Kelani valley planters, while a third party, a Sinhalese entrepreneur, Simon Baas, tried to encroach on the same lands. A second attack was led on a larger scale by J.C. Mitchell (Sir William’s son) of Degalessa estate for the Sapumalkande rubber company. He employed in 1914 as land broker one Aron Fernando of Karawanella to purchase land belonging to the Manannalage family, but over a disagreement Fernando instead sold the lands in 1916 to a local Muslim, S.M. Mohammadu Lebbe, who asked for a CQP which was refused by the administration in 1921. The case was finally taken up on behalf of J.C. Mitchell by A. A. Wickremesinghe, the Kägalla lawyer, who in November 1923 produced a detailed report based on a complete genealogy of the Manannalage family showing the shares of each member, and on an exhaustive list of some 40 land transactions by them to several successive outsiders with the object of ‘fortifying title’ and resulting in a jungle of intertwined acts.

The case of Berannawa signaled the decline of the CQP system of settlement. Berannawa was a small village of chena cultivators up in the upper We Oya valley, surrounded by the Dolosbage/Yakdessa estates. (Kandaloya, Halgolla and others). It was populated by people locally considered as Väddas and the name of the country, Yakdessa, points to its place in the representation of the region as the abode of demons [81]. These peasants were free from any service to the kings, provincial governors and local chiefs, because the area was of little economic and strategic value, and they could keep their high status of hunters and forest people. The village was registered in the Service Tenures Register as a gamwasama, (a nindagama without services), although it did does not appear in the lists of the Commissioner, and was later considered as a koralegama. The case was taken up in 1912 by the erudite Assistant Government Agent Codrington, who relied on the Settlement Officer Fox expertise rather than that of the chief headman Mideniya before giving out a CQP[82]. Two planters, Arthur Watt and W. Russell Scott had requested a CQP for 263 acres purchased from the villagers “for an adequate price”, upon wattoru which after enquiry by the Ratemahatmaya were considered to cover half the area, 133 acres. The sale was realized through two intermediaries who purchased from villagers and happened to be minor officials: Hendryk Appu (a low country man), aracci of Dombepola, and Brampi Appuhami, registrar, and Ondaatje was employed by the planters to sort the case and collect wattoru. The Land Settlement Department insisted in a long exchange of correspondence on personal inspection and checking of the Ratemahatmaya’s reports; this being done the area covered by wattoru was reduced to 82 acres: the difference was therefore the profit expected by the planters. Mideniya apologized, explaining that it was a ‘clerical error’.

 

The formation of Karandupona, Madeniya and Golinda estates

The formation of these large estates in the populated and easily accessible parts of the Kägalla district at a relatively late date raises a series of questions, which the documents available cannot entirely answer. In each case, it appears that the erratic administration of the land legislation, and the failure of the Booth Forest settlement, opened the way to the appropriation of extensive areas with the concourse of astute lawyers, and that the long delays in making surveys and taking up the CQP applications resulted in a sort of settlement by prescription.   

Located close to Kägalla town, Karandupona estate[83] was started in 1898 on about 300 acres of land sold by the Crown, to which 230 acres were added later through purchase from villagers. Uda Karandupone village had been a thorn in the side of the successive local administrators since the 1870s: originally a nindagama belonging to the ancient Elapata family which had lost its feudal authority, inhabited by numerous Vahumpura and a few Goyigama families, its highlands had been extensively chenaed, escaping government interference. When the Crown attempted to assert its rights to forested areas under a settlement arrived at in 1888-89, it met with the stiff resistance of the villagers led by their headmen (“a set of regular lawyers”), who refused to agree to the proposals of the Forest settlement officer Booth to exchange lands to constitute two blocks. The final settlement in 1894 allowed 247 acres to the villagers and reserved 206 acres for the Crown but as these were “scattered in small blocks all over the village and are for that reason not worth reserving, those adjoining the streams may be kept but the others might be sold”. This was done before 1898 and the estate was formed with lands purchased from the Crown in Kägalla, Uda and Palle Karandupone and Attanagoda, to which were added private lands from these and other villages such as Diwela, a former royal village. The estate tried to obtain a CQP in 1911 through its legal adviser Ondaatje, then left its demand to expire and in 1922 the administration, desirous to get rid of this tangle, admitted that the plantation company had prescribed over any possible counterclaims and requested it to pay for its title only in unsettled villages.

Madeniya group (about 1,140 acres) was principally formed by the sale of the Dorawaka village lands which had been affected by contradictory settlements (see my paper on Kägalla settlements). Dorawaka was originally a very large, prosperous and densely populated gabadagama (royal village) whose muttettu (reserve) lands had been sold by the Crown after 1833, while the tenures had been recognized the property of former tenants, belonging to the Batgama caste. The villagers regarded their chenas as their property and until the Ievers settlement the colonial administration had not interfered with chena cultivation, but considered that in former royal villages, the highlands still belonged to the Crown and attempted to tax älvi crops at 1/10th instead of 1/14th in the district. In the same area, Maha Pallegama village had a similar history and a plantation had been opened with the tolerance of the administration: “as the settlements proceeded on different lines, there has been considerable confusion since, practically all the highlands in the village having been chenaed. My predecessors Mr. Alexander and Mr. Vaughan both recommended that the Crown claim in this village should be waived” [84].

Madeniya was the first large estate of the district opened by a Sinhalese lawyer, Albert A. Wickramasinghe (1877-1941), who was involved from the start in land speculations and acted not as a middleman, but as a prospective landowner.[85] He was only 29 years old when he started purchasing village lands in Dorawaka, at a judicial sale in 1906. These chena lands were in the eastern part of the village which had been declared private in the first chena settlement by Le Mesurier but not in the following settlements. Strictly speaking, the subsequent Forest settlement by Booth affirmed the Crown property of the chena lands in gabadagam, subject to a right of user by the villagers, and if followed it would have prevented the village sales; but the slack attitude of the colonial authorities who failed to demarcate the Crown lots, and to proclaim the settlement, nullified the intentions of Booth. A CQP was asked by Albert A. Wickramasinghe for 800 acres of lands in March 1907, and the Assistant Agent suggested to give a CQP only after receiving the plans approved by the Surveyor General and checking if all the shares had been purchased, on payment of a flat rate of 10 Rs an acre for chena lands, the forests being assessed separately: “Mr. Wickramasinghe agrees to this and I think that such a settlement would be very satisfactory as far as the Crown is concerned, for in view of the settlements already attempted the Crown would be in a unsatisfactory position if we went to Court”.[86] But in 1911 the survey department rejected the plans; afterwards, “several abortive surveys were made and the new plans were only received in September 1918 ; they cover 900 acres, which with the exception of about 20 acres of forest, were all chena at the time of the application. They are now nearly all planted”. In his practice as lawyer, Albert A. Wickramasinghe was in touch with Philip Ondaatje who was entrusted by most planters to represent them for their CQP applications, and he published in 1924 a book in which he systematized a theory of land tenure opposite to that defended by colonial administrators such as Codrington:  “No Crown chena lands ever existed or exist now in the Kegalle district (…) Whatever lands held by the Crown must be forest and cannot be chena”[87]. The situation remained untouched for years, when finally a survey was made in 1926 and the plan issued in 1929 by Jonklaas, a private surveyor. Dorawaka village was the subject of an inquiry by the Land settlement department in 1933.  At that time, there was practically no highland left in the village; the Madeniya group comprised 733 acres in Dorawaka itself, 228 in Makurugala, 198 in Tennehena, 23 in Warakapola, 159 in Ebidi/Rabidigala, 133 in Kongoda, and apart from rubber and tea it included about 21 acres of paddy and almost 100 acres of gardens, which was a very unusual situation.[88]   

In a previous article[89], I have analyzed in detail the history of the micro region, south of Kägalla town, where Golinda estate was carved out by the early 20th century, and my field study in 1979 tried to elicit the villager’s view of the process and the role played by different families of the five villages involved (Haloluwa/Getaberiya, Damunupola, Atugoda, Talewala and Malawita); I shall focus here on the formation of the estate itself, which had been entirely made up of village sales piece by piece, and on the role played by land agents in the process. The first official chena surveys were made in 1880-1881 in Malawita and Talewala by Philip Francis Ondaatje, then chena surveyor, at the demand of two British planters, for 67 and 28 acres; these lands were sold by the Crown much later, in October 1886. In 1884, the Assistant agent Wace applied for a survey of Damunupola, a registered feudal village claimed by Haloluwe Kiri Banda, which he thought could not be in entirety the property of an individual, for want of a sannasa; a judicial sale of Banda’s property (including the services of the tenants), for debts to a Chetty had been held in 1873[90]. This demand produced an exchange of correspondence with the Surveyor General, who was reticent to undertake a task which he thought unremunerative if it could not lead to a Crown sale: the affair was given publicity by the unusual quotation of the case in the Administration report of the district for 1888, and one can suspect that a land grabbing operation was already in the making. At the same time the land market in the area was dominated by the activities of Appuhami, a headman belonging to the Renapane family hailing from a nearby village, who purchased at fiscal sales some of the paddy fields of the Haloluwe family;  in the 1880s he was active in extending chena cultivation on forests which the administration wanted to preserve; he did so openly and the case was given a large publicity in 1891-1893 when it was brought by the Assistant Agent to the local court and went up to the Supreme court[91]: “Renapane Appuhami concocts bogus deeds giving himself Crown forests. He then clears, crops them. His position is very strong. The Supreme court is so strong against the Forest ordinance that convictions cannot be sustained before it in appeal”. For this case, the government retained the services of Philip Ondaatje, then advocate, who was to become its regular opponent in further land cases in the area and may have been initiated by this very exercise… During that period, three members of the Haloluwe family (Kiri Banda, Punchi Banda and Ukku Banda) started purchasing shares of village lands; their land grabbing cautious strategy was managed or supervised by Ondaatje from the beginning: they undertook also to purchase from the Crown several small patches of forest, from 1895 to 1905. By these legal as well as unofficial purchases they accumulated a capital of scattered lands which added to the Damunupola lands they considered as their ancestral possessions, which were however claimed by the Crown and by their former Duraya tenants who had ceased to recognize their lordship. According to the testimony of the villagers collected in 1979, there was ‘a gentleman from Kägalla’ (Ondaatje) who in association with Ukku Banda went round the villages to gather wattoru and obtain deeds of purchase of chena lands.

In 1905-1907, the applicants for small patches of forest Crown lands in the various villages were no longer Kandyan villagers, but a British planter, C.D. Hunt, and in 1908 his successors, Fellowes and Harper. To these piecemeal lands were added a quantity of chenas purchased from villagers, including the Haloluwe family. Fellowes and Harper opened in March 1912 an estate which they called Golinda [92]. Philip Ondaatje, acting for the planters, immediately asked for a CQP. But it took eleven years to settle the matter, which involved the collection of a huge amount of documents, a voluminous correspondence and belated surveys. The planters were influent enough to make the Colonial secretary instruct in 1912 the provincial and the district agents to expedite the matter in spite of the absence of a survey: “Golinda estate is entirely made up of lands purchased from natives. To effect the formation into a Company, a clear title is required (…) As the Surveyor General cannot undertake a survey of the area without very serious detriment to his other work, and as it is not desirable that an application of this nature should be met by Government with a mere expression of its inability to give the required information, the Controller of Revenue suggests that the Assistant Government Agent should make as careful and minute an enquiry as possible without a survey into the respective rights of the Crown and the villagers with a view to arrive at an approximate valuation of the claims of the Crown. When this has been done, it may be possible to arrange with the promoters of the Company for its purchase by them of the Crown rights and thereafter to issue to them a CQP”. The provincial agent, E.B. Alexander, strongly pro-planter, wrote to his assistant Codrington at Kägalla in February 1913: “I gather that the Company is anxious to get a Crown title quickly. I should not waste much time over tax receipts (…) The one thing to be careful about is that the villagers have not any claims which are averse to the estate; if they have, the Company should settle with them before Government can settle with the Company”. Codrington informed him of “that the existence of a private plan was concealed by the estate when asking for CQP” and was censored by his superior for the tone employed in his letter. Codrington had an uphill task described two years later in the diary of his successor Burden[93] : “The estate was in a frantic to get a CQP, as a company was in process of formation, and through their representations, my predecessor had to cover the whole ground and make a report as to the probable settlement, in the absence of the Surveyor General’s plan. This he did relying on the estate plan. I have now to go over the whole ground again with a plan issued by the Surveyor General. All this land is now planted up with rubber, and there is nothing to distinguish the land purchased from villagers from the land purchased from the Crown. However with the assistance of the individual who acted as intermediary between the estate and the villagers when the lands were purchased, considerable progress was made.” Meanwhile, the Duraya villagers of Damunupola had petitioned against Haloluwe Ukku Banda, accusing him to claim a share of the lands they were going to sell to the estate, and other villagers followed suit, while the estate purchased several other chenas without including them in an application for CQP. Thus tea and rubber flourished everywhere in the area, while the legal status of the lands was in a total mess.

With the disruption caused by the world war and the riots of 1915, the case was shelved. In the early 1920s there was a certain number of pending cases of CQP, including Golinda, and an ultimate attempt was made by the Kägalla agent to settle them[94]: “Mr. Philip Ondaatje came to see me in connection with several pending land matters. During the rubber boom many chena lands were bought up in this district by estates and CQPs were applied for. Many of these cases have dragged on for years and at the present time the estates are not so anxious to obtain certificates. In the meantime however the lands have been cleared and planted and in some cases the rubber is now over 25 years old. A plea of prescription will doubtless be set up if the Crown waits much longer before asserting its claims, though whether that plea will succeed in the case of lands which were originally chenas is open to doubt. I have unearthed many files which have been sheltered of late years and am endeavouring to get these claims settled by degrees, but the work which has to be faced is too much for my present staff”. In June 1922, the administration requested Ondaatje to furnish a list of the lands correlated with the deeds of purchase and the official survey plans of Golinda. He answered that “it is not possible to reconcile or identify the names and extents of lands appearing in the CQP plan with the names and extents of the chenas purchased by the estate on their several title deeds, nor do the blocks as they appear on the CQP plan correspond either in name or extent with the original title plans on which the lands were purchased”. The kacceri land clerks were directed to connect these documents with the wattoru copies for about 100 chenas, but concluded that wattoru were useless because they were not certified. Finally a list of 50 lands was advertised in the Ceylon Government Gazette (20.10.1922), and the 1st of March 1923, the CQP was issued for 338 acres, at 20 Rs an acre for the 270 acres for which the purchasers could not prove private title, and free for the 68 acres covered by tax receipts.

But this settlement covered less than 30% of the estate, which according to the Ferguson’s planting directory finally consisted of 689 acres in tea and 484 acres in rubber: this means that the colonial administration turned a blind eye to the ulterior transfer of lands to the estate. E.B. Alexander who had then been promoted Controller of Revenue made the following comment: “this is a piecemeal settlement but better than none at all (…); in view of the long possession by the claimants, I consider the price per acre fair”.  The result was in any case quite remunerative for the estate company, with a capital subscribed of 81,275,000 Rs, which distributed handsome dividends in the 1920s (22% in 1924, 40% in 1926, 15% in 1928)[95].

The patchy collection of 37 Golinda estate deeds still kept in the estate office in 1979 show that Ukkubanda was paid a commission on most village sales, plus batta (allowance) of 1 to 1.50 Rs a day, or sometimes a measure of rice, and that Philip Ondaatje supervised all the sales, which span a long period, from 18.09.1894 to 8.10.1919 for the main portion of the estate, but extend until the end of the 1920s for Atugoda village. The amount paid was 10 Rs an acre in the beginning but rose to 45 Rs for the last sales. According to the testimony of Kiri Ukkuwa, an old villager born around 1900, whom I interviewed in 1979, the first Atugoda sale was in 1915, he himself sold in 1928, Ondaatje acting as legal adviser and one ‘Wanumara Nilame’ (a nickname for Ukkubanda, meaning something like the forest killing squire) as middleman, getting 12 Rs and a bushel of rice per month. But all the villagers did not sell all their lands: some Duraya families in Atugoda and Damunupola resisted the temptation of easy money, transformed their chenas into vegetable and fruit gardens and invested in the purchase of lands still available the profits obtained from the sale of these products on the Kägalla market after the second world war.[96]

 

The formation of estates in the Kälerata and the end of the CQP era.[97]

Atulugam korale east, alias Kälerata (Forest Country) was the last area to be engulfed by the growth of estates. After 1910, there was little other land available elsewhere in the district, the system of settlement by CQPs was being replaced by the strict procedure of the Land settlement department which intervened for the first time in the Kägalla district, and with the rubber boom Ceylonese investors were looking for land. The major part of the area had been settled by Booth in the 1890s under the Forest ordinance, and in many cases, a right of user, but not of ownership, had been recognized to chena cultivators on the highlands: neither the Crown, nor the villagers, could alienate them to planters. Land speculators were looking for devices to circumvent the rule. Mideniya Adigar who assisted Booth in settlement operations was best placed for the task, in association with lawyers such as Ondaatje and Wickramasinghe, and they obtained the implicit or explicit support of a section of the colonial administration, led by E.B. Alexander, acting Colonial secretary in 1926.

The question was raised at the Colombo level and led to a tense exchange of correspondence[98]. The Controller of Revenue Jackson wrote to Alexander in July and September 1926 about the problem of the lands allowed by Booth for chena cultivation but not alienable, which had been planted in rubber after alienation by villagers: “the question of these settlements under pressure of land hunger often presents considerable difficulties (…) The outside speculator who comes in should be charged full value. Claimants who are descendants of the chena rights holders should receive liberal terms for the purchase of the soil rights, or where for any reason they are unable to purchase, they may be allowed a small extent free of charge”. In November 1926, Brown, the Assistant at Kägalla raised the case of an investor in Magala village who “asked what attitude government would take up if the chena rights of the villagers were bought up ; this information is naturally required before any money is spent in negotiations made with the villagers”; he recalled that the usual way of dealing with such lands was for the Crown to sell them under the Waste lands ordinance (WLO) of 1897, and said that “if any radical change in the policy of government is contemplated, I consider it advisable to give the matter wide publicity in the form of a press communiqué”. In forwarding this letter to the Colonial Secretary, the Controller of Revenue wrote : “I think Government should take the line that it will discountenance all traffic between outside speculators and villagers in buying up such chena rights (…) These lands were set apart for the villagers to ensure that their needs were sufficiently protected. It was specially laid down that the chena rights should not be alienated without permission. The available Crown lands in the district have been alienated to such an extent that if these chena reserves too are bought up by capitalists, the villagers will have no other area to meet their needs”. Alexander retorted: “I know Sabaragamuwa well. A press notice will be absolutely futile. It might deter one or two honest men who, as proprietors, would treat the villagers decently. But it will deter no one else. I believe that it is true that there is not an acre of Crown land suitable for rubber up to the top of Adam’s Peak that is not claimed upon some spurious deed. The villagers themselves have become speculators. The only thing that could have prevented these spurious claims and wholesale speculation was early settlement under the WLO, but the boom in rubber since 1904 caught the government unawares”. Brown argued in answer that “in the past, the custom has been for the Crown to take up the position that rights to the soil could be purchased for ½ value of the bare land by anyone who could prove he has bought the chena rights of the villagers (… ) The Crown took action which extinguished villagers’ chena rights. The position which I gather government wants to take up is that the Crown will not alienate its rights to the soil and when land is used for purpose other than chenaing it becomes entirely vested in the Crown (…) The Crown formerly abetted, it now intends to prevent traffic by outsiders in such land. This complete change should be widely published in order to deter would-be bona fide purchasers of chena rights. Unless this is done, persons who, considering past customs, would look for government assistance in obtaining good title, would unexpectedly find themselves baulked by their former ally”. In January 1927, at a conference held at the demand of Alexander, with Jackson and the Settlement officer, “it was agreed that nowhere in the Forest ordinance of 1885 was there any provision to preclude successful claimants of chena land from transferring their rights by sale or otherwise”, that the rule followed by the Settlement department was to consider claims on their own merits, and that a press communiqué would be counterproductive. In forwarding his reply, Alexander blamed the terms used by Brown as “entirely inaccurate, wholly unwarranted and grossly improper”, but his assistant took the defense of Brown, saying that “it was a bona fide description of the position as it appeared to Mr. Brown and not being in any sense a public pronouncement and that the point which he wished to make was quite a legitimate one”.

*

Before 1900, the hilly upper valley of the Magal Ganga and its tributaries, above the small bazaar of Deraniyagala, along the ancient path to Sri Pada, was largely forested, with very few paddy fields, and scarcely populated. The main valley was occupied by the Maliboda nindagama belonging to the decayed Eheliyagoda family and by the Magala village, while the southern valley (Miyanawita Oya) was a Vahumpura area, and the northern valley was Goyigama ; in the hills to the north of the Magal Ganga there was a group of betel-delivering (bulatgam) very poor Panna Duraya villages (Pandaha, Haradaha, Panakure, Hingurana).

The whole area was hardly administered, until various commissions and settlement operations decided to ‘reserve’ it but at the same time ‘opened’ it to outside influences. The Kälerata being difficult of access had been spared by the large land grabbing activity of the tea planters in the 1880s. It was selected by the Government to experiment the Forest Ordinance of 1885 because it was largely forested: the idea was to form a Forest reserve where “the government decided to sell no land whatever and to remove gradually and judiciously any squatters who may have entered it”[99]. In 1894, the governor Havelock, in reply to a deputation of Kelani Valley planters, had pledged that the Government would not sell more land for tea cultivation in the Kelani valley, both for ecological and economic reasons: “It is true that there is a large reserve, in extent I think about 30,000 acres, but it became the fixed policy of my predecessor, and I think that it was a very wise policy, that these reserves should be kept inviolate and that the Crown should not sell a single acre of it. At present that is the firm intention of government. Of course I cannot answer for what my successor may do, but as long as I am here I think you may rest assured that the Government will not part with a single acre of the Kelani valley reserve”.

However the Booth Forest settlement, started in February 1894 and completed in March 1897, attracted the attention of the planters and of various intermediaries. Booth, in his manuscript report on the Kelani Valley Reserve (§ XVI), anticipated land sales by villagers for plantations and mentioned advances made to the Eheliyagoda family for the purchase of Maliboda nindagama[100]. The chief headmen Ekneligoda and Mideniya made themselves acquainted with the minute details of the area because they acted as translators and they became involved as intermediaries or even actors in covert land transactions. In 1897 Davidson, Assistant Agent at Kägalla, produced a report for the new Governor West Ridgeway, which argued in favour of the sale of 4,000 acres of Crown lands now that the work of the Forest settlement officer was almost over, leaving 26,743 acres for the Crown, 15,095 acres allotted for chena cultivation, and 7,523 acres private (including the Maliboda nindagama)[101] He considered that forest should be preserved only at elevations above 3,500 ft (1,066 m), and that Crown land sales in the thinly populated Kälerata would protect the heavily populated Four-korales from speculation and ecological disaster, and develop a backward zone. The Executive Council decided to effect the sale, against critical comments by the Colonial Secretary (“The custodians of Kegalle used not so much to favour the introduction of European influence and associations in this markedly native district (…) The absorption of villager’s lands will still go on by those desirous of extending existing estates”) but with the support of the Governor (“I am altogether opposed to any grandmotherly policy as regards tea in the shape of restrictions”). Finally the sale was postponed in June 1898 “in view of the depressed state of the tea industry”, and the question was again raised in June 1899 although the opening of such a large area “followed as it is almost certain to be the case by the opening of a large extent of private land in the same locality” would lead to environmental consequences.

Meanwhile in August 1898 the indebted Eheliyagoda family had proposed his Maliboda nindagama for sale and Bertram Hill, the Assistant agent, commented[102]: “Messrs. Davies and co. of Colombo offer for sale some 5,000 acres in the Kelani Valley suitable for tea. 3,000 acres are in the Kegalle district at Maliboda, 14 miles from Dehiowita, and no road. No one is likely to buy the land at any price”. The situation changed during the next decade. In 1904, the Kägalla Assistant E.B. Alexander – notoriously pro-planter, described the Kälerata in his diary: “A beautiful but poverty-stricken district now. The people have very little to eat. Rice and salt are luxuries. The villagers own large tracts of chena land. There is a good story of a man who owned 1,000 acres being bought up for default of payment of road tax: he was ordered to pay 3 Rs, he could not find it, he would have gone to prison but the headmen subscribed the amount among themselves. In the not very distant future this country promises to be the center of a large rubber growing district: and Mideniya Ratemahatmaya has already selected the site of the future race course! There are over 20,000 acres of Crown forest lying idle. Wanted a road, or a navigable river to them, or preferably both.”[103]

The sale of 5,000 acres of Crown lands (in 250 acres lots) of the Kelani Valley reserve, suggested by Davidson in 1897, was held in Colombo in October 1905 and February 1906; the decision was taken in view of the new rubber boom; the upset price was low: 15 Rs per acre, and after bidding the lands were sold at 25 Rs per acre; the lands, of easy access, were located near Deraniyagala, at Munagala, Udabage, Lassegama, Kehelwala and Muddagala; most of the purchasers were Europeans, notably William Wilson Mitchell[104]. Some of these sales were muddled by the imprecision of the forest settlement and the manipulations of the headmen, as in Udabage[105]: a wooded lot was allowed as private by settlement but never used as chena by the villagers who believed it was Crown forest; Mideniya therefore recommended the sale of this lot by the Crown as had been done in a Colombo land sale of 1906 for a similar lot in another village sold to the planter Anderson. The Agent refused to put up the lot for sale as the same Mideniya had reported that the villagers had not enough chena lands and that there were wattoru for the land. Then the lawyer Marshall acting for Anderson asked in May 1908 whether the Crown had any claim to the land adverse to that of the ‘Udabage korala’, and the answer was that it was Crown land: therefore it could be sold, which was done in May 1909, against the protest of the villagers.

As could be expected, Crown sales were followed by village sales, first of lands recognized private by settlement, and later of lands reserved for chena cultivation. Lassehena estate[106] is a typical case of the first configuration: 207 acres had been purchased from the Crown in 1906, and 300 acres from villagers before 1908 “via an enterprising land broker, an ex-aracci”, but their status was not clear enough to justify a CQP, and an intermediary, H.O. Weerasooriya, asked the administration if a chena land allowed for chena cultivation by Forest settlement could be sold by the villagers. The case was still pending in 1937 when the Settlement department took it up and Archdale, the planter, lost 80 acres sold by the villagers for which they had no title. His reaction is thus reported in the diary of the assistant settlement officer: “After being informed by Mr. Archdale that his knowledge of land law, thanks to a number of settlements made on him by CQPs, was considerably greater than my own, I politely intimated that I was not prepared to discuss the matter further (…) the mentality of the gentleman in question is something new in my experience”.

The same intermediary, Weerasooriya, was involved in land dealings in the hilly village of Magala in the upper valley[107]. In May 1910, he wrote to the Colonial Secretary, with certified copies of the Booth settlement, “inquiring whether the Crown had any claim to the extent of 1,400 acres in Magala dealt with in the 14th § of his judgement (i.e. allowed for chena cultivation). If this extent is allowed to the claimants, I beg to inquire if a certificate to that effect will be granted to them. I am informed by them that in respect of the following lands which had been excluded in favor of the claimants in another inquiry similar to that, the Crown granted documents disclaiming any rights on the part of the Crown: 1. Lassegama lands taken by Lassehena estate; 2. Kosgahakande and Yatiwala taken over by Mr. Mitchell of Digalessa estate”. The Assistant agent reported: “it is true that CQPs have been issued in respect of such lands set apart for chena cultivation at Kosgahakanda and Yatiwala (…) 702 acres and 56 acres in the former, 10 acres and 261 acres in the latter. In the case of Lassegama no actual grant of CQP has yet taken place but my predecessor has admitted private claims to a large extent of chena land and was prepared to apply for a CQP on suitable plans being furnished by the claimants”. In 1922, the Assistant agent at Kägalla mentioned “Petitions of villagers of Magala and Yatiwala who have illicitly cleared many acres of Crown jungle notwithstanding the fact that the Forest settlement officer set apart for their use over 700 acres of chena land in each village in 1896. The fact is that they have sold to capitalists and landgrabbers the greater part of the land which was allowed them for chena cultivation and are now chenaing crown jungle which being entirely virgin forest brings them in good crops”. These sales continued in 1926, as shown in the correspondence above quoted of the Kägalla agent with the Colonial secretariat. When the Settlement officer Cocks inspected the village in 1935, he unearthed the speculation process: “A large purchaser of land, U.L. Siriwardena of Deraniyagala, has entered into an agreement to transfer a large extent of land in this korale to Mr. Van der Poorten, who has not appeared in the enquiry. In view of the size of the claim and of the extent of land involved, I decided to postpone the settlement to April 8th in Colombo (…) The claimant who has purchased large areas in Atulugam east and is bound by an agreement to transfer them to a capitalist, refused the settlement offered and it will be necessary to refer his claim to the district court”.[108]

The sale of the large Maliboda nindagama gave a decisive impetus to the plantation conquest of Kälerata and had a ripple effect. Mideniya, who had been bestowed the title of Adigar by the British administration, was behind the scene of land speculation in the Kälerata and had acted as middleman in the sale of the nindagama: he was entering the narrow circle of the elite through the marriage of his two daughters which was very expensive in terms of dowry. At the Forest settlement, James Eheliyagoda had claimed Maliboda, Pallepansiya and Ranwala as his nindagama. In the words of Booth, “The Ratemahatmaya Mideniya is anxious that an amicable settlement be arrived at. He says both he and the korala of Atulugam when giving evidence stated that Maliboda had always been considered a nindagama and dealt with as such, no taxes recovered from any of the chenas”. Out of the 3,535 acres of the nindagama, 735 were already admitted private, 773 were high forest, and Eheliyagoda accepted that 500 acres be reserved for the Crown in the north of Rangala, the rest (1,527 acres) being admitted private, including Piliwala and Potdenikanda hamlets. Maliboda estate was opened in 1918 on the lands admitted private by the Forest settlement[109] but “there is the question of the nindagama tenants. The estate has bought the whole village and while not willing to give deeds to the tenants for the lands occupied by them, has no intention of evicting them” “the people of Maliboda renewed their complaints against the superintendent of Maliboda Estate of depriving them of their ancestral lands”. Two hamlets, Ranvala and Telhitigala had been absorbed in Maliboda estate between 1911 and 1921, and between 1931 and 1946, the population had shrunk from 72 to 49.

The nindagama lands which had not been sold to the Maliboda estate had been purchased to form another estate, Dabar. The Settlement officer, Stace, visited the place in 1930 and wrote in his diary[110]:  “The villagers of Piliwala and Potdenikanda, which are part of Maliboda nindagama, had complained that the superintendent of Dabar estate, Mr. Smurdon, was cutting down all the old gardens and demolishing their houses to plant rubber on the sites. I found numerous old gardens completely devastated and one or two village houses demolished. In one place I noticed an old garden about 1 ½ acres in which there was a villager’s house. The estate had enclosed the house with barbed wire, leaving about 2 perches for the man to live in and including the rest of the old garden in the estate with the apparent intention of cutting down. The whole village presents an appearance of systematic destruction. I have never seen such a thing before in any other part of the country”. The Assistant agent at Kägalla had received a petition and “referred the villagers to their legal remedy”. The chief headman of the Three-korales, the son of Mideniya Adigar, was just as evasive: “His father Mideniya Adigar was the vendor of the nindagama to the estate (…) he believes that the estate has no title to the old gardens”; in Colombo, Mr. Maddox, manager of Harrison and Crossfields, the agents for the estate “believes that the estate is entitled to the old gardens, he says they have taken disclaimers of title from some of the villagers”. Stace made a confidential report to the Governor “on the subject of the extraordinary proceedings of Dabar Estate. One of the difficulties is that either the whole or some of the area was admitted private by the Forest settlement officer many years ago, but I doubt whether Government can sit doing nothing in a matter of this kind.” The Assistant agent at Kägalla answered that “it is difficult for the Crown to interfere in this case as all the lands in this wasama were admitted private by the Forest settlement officer. However I think the Company can be persuaded to give up a block of about 14 acres on the estate boundary where those who have lost their gardens can settle. The present claimants appear to be squatters of less than 10 years standing and have therefore no prescriptive title. The company’s legal title appears to be sound enough and any concession that is made will be purely on compassionate grounds”. Next year in May 1931, the Assistant settlement officer Northcroft inspected Piliwala and Potdenikanda and drew a different picture:  “there are numerous village plantations of rubber, cinnamon and tea besides the usual areca and jak gardens (…) there is ample chena and practically no sales to outsiders” ; he however took the testimony of villagers complaining of being hemmed-in by estates: “a large number of claimants stated that the deeds on which they relied were missing. On further enquiry I discovered that some enterprising individual had collected all the available deeds and was hawking them around with a view to selling them to an estate company. However nothing has come of the transaction, probably owing to the slump in rubber and tea (…) There has been some heavy selling and there are a good number of more or less landless villagers”[111].

D.S. Senanayake, who was in charge of agriculture and lands in the government established in 1931, decided in 1935 that the tenants of Maliboda nindagama evicted by Dabar estate would be settled on the other side of the river Magal Ganga, at the cost of Dabar estate, in lands belonging to Pandaha village[112]. The result was described by a settlement officer: “Allotments have been cut out for them, they have been generously treated. This treatment however seems to have had the effect of encouraging a number of other squatters from other villages to effect similar encroachments in the south east of the village. The extent of these encroachments came as a shock to me. Either the intruders will have to be ousted altogether which would entail at this stage a good deal of hardship, or the encroachment will have to be systematically surveyed and settled”. Another result was that the very poor original inhabitants of Pandaha, who belonged to the Panna Duraya caste, were thus deprived of a part of their lands, and they were at the same time pressed by land speculators (U.L. Siriwardena of Deraniyagala acting for A.J. Van der Poorten, represented by Aelian Ondaatje, Philip Ondaatje’s brother) to part with their chena rights in the rest of their village: the burden of land hunger was thus passed on to the weakest. When the settlement officers visited the village between 1937 and 1939, they remarked that “there seems to be very few men of ripe age in the village, half the villagers have parted with their rights, for what return seems extremely doubtful, most of the deeds being of ‘consideration already paid’. A woman vendor on one deed, consideration shown 200 Rs, informed me that she got 3 Rs only. I am inclined to think she was telling the truth”. The speculator, U.L. Siriwardene, who had purchased the rights of user to chena cultivation allowed by the forest settlement to the villagers for a trifle sum, tried to obtain from the administration the recognition of an extensive domain…

In the northern part of the Kälerata, the opening of Noori estate was also the result of the land grabbing activities of Mideniya and Van der Poorten[113]. According to the diaries of the Assistant agents at Kägalla “A land declared Crown by final order under Waste Lands Ordinances appear to have been purchased by Mideniya Adigar from a private party without any enquiry into the vendor’s title (…) The present case shows inexcusable neglect on the part of the chief headman”. The Adigar was acting as agent for and was indebted to the well-known land speculator, A.J. van der Poorten. He had purchased from villagers 968 acres in Dodawatte, Basnagala and Mudagala (which later formed the Noori estate), had mortgaged them to Van der Poorten, and was “endeavouring to obtain Crown title in order to sell to a Company. Most of the land was allowed by the Forest Settlement Officer for chena cultivation to the villagers and their descendants; it is extremely questionable whether any particular villager had the right to sell any portion of it”. But in 1927, the Agent showed a singular leniency towards Mideniya: “The whole affair is merely a financial speculation on the part of the Adigar, who has already I am informed sold the land to the Colombo merchant Adamalee (…) I came to the conclusion that if the 1,000 acres claimed by the Adigar are settled on him there will still be ample land left for the villagers. They as a matter of fact are making little if any use of the land in their possession. They can make all the money they want by an occasional spell of work on the estates”.

The valley of the Miyanowita Oya, in the south of the Kälerata, was occupied by the village of Miyanowita, and by the kandegama of Kosgahakanda made up of a very large number of hamlets. Miyanowita was a multicaste village, looking like a temple village but not registered as such[114]. It came under the forest settlement scheme and the lands declared crown but allowed for chena cultivation were described as “allowed to the villagers” rather than “allowed for chena cultivation” by Mideniya when a CQP was issued in 1916 for a small extent to the benefit of a Colombo Burgher investor, Rosslyn Koch. Miyanowita estate was formed under the auspices of Mideniya by 1925: “The sale to the Company of these lands (part of which fall within the area originally tentatively reserved for the Colombo water supply) was negotiated by Mideniya Adigar. I hear that he is now thinking of extending similar operations to Magala. At present one estate, Kosgahakanda, belonging to Mr. D.R. Wijewardena [Mideniya’s son-in-law] has already been opened within this area on land allowed on CQP some years ago. There are also within the area village gardens and large extents of land allowed for chena cultivation”. Ondaatje was looking after the Miyanowita affair and the company expected to get a CQP for a paltry sum, 10 or 15 Rs an acre…But a third party appeared, a speculator who had bought land shortly before with a view to bleeding the company. When Miyanowita came within the enquiry of the Settlement department in 1937, “about half of the village was already planted in tea by an estate company who obtained a settlement by the Assistant Government Agent 4 or 5 years ago (…)  practically all the area claimed by the temple and I suspect a considerable area in excess of that had been sold to outsiders”.

Kosgahakanda, whose inhabitants, of Vahumpura caste, lived on the sale of jaggery and betel leaves, was also the theatre of land speculations following the Forest settlement. A large village (273 inhabitants in 1931, 60 families), it had only 7 acres of paddy but 223 acres of garden, mainly planted in kitul (sugar palm trees). It had been settled by Booth with the help of Mideniya, and in 1904 a CQP was applied for based on a “transfer from natives, executed in 1896 but only recently sent to the kacceri, covering 1,100 amunam of land or 5,500 acres. The survey of the village shows a total extent of 2,528 acres. There is something wrong here (sic)”. The claimants, D.G. and T. Perera, obtained a CQP for a portion of the village in November 1905, and the land was transferred to D.R. Wijewardena, the press magnate of Colombo, who married Alice, one of Mideniya’s daughters, in 1916.  The Kosgahakanda estate contained 335 acres of tea, 24 acres of rubber. But the Kägalla agent noted that there were still large gardens and chenas available in 1927: “This is one of the few remaining areas where good land is still to be had for planting, and it is receiving plenty of attention. It is all unsettled land [?], mostly claimed chena, and is suffering the usual fate of such land in this district i.e. the village claims are being bought up by capitalists and the land cleared and enclosed. The only remedy is for the whole area on both sides of the Deraniyagala Oya to be taken up by the Settlement Department. In another year or two it will be too late, and hundreds or even thousands of acres will have passed into private hands”. Ten years later, when the Land settlement department finally took up the village, the prediction had become true. In the words of Ingledow, the settlement officer, “All the lands appear to have been sold outright and the original owners have left. The proportion of outside speculative claimants appears roughly to be about 1 to every 15 villagers. Sales prolific. Some of the outside claimants had no idea whatever what or where their lands were and knew nothing of the source of title. While one is glad to help an ignorant villager who is in difficulty about his title, it seems rather off the mark that the settlement officer should be expected to act as a consulting lawyer for such claimants who can well afford to pay for legal advice (…) To several of these I put it plainly that I was here to adjudicate on a definite claim and not to try to ascertain for them what their claim was”. In the margin of the diary, the Minister of Agriculture D.S.Senenayake – himself a close associate of D.R. Wijewardene, commented: “it may be better to do both”[115]

*

The years 1927-1931 represent a turning point in the history of land appropriation by the plantation sector. The initial push was given in 1927-1928 by the recommendations of a land commission convened by the governor Clifford and comprising Ceylonese nationalist representatives, which reviewed the policy followed under the Waste lands ordinance of 1897: the stress was put on hereditary rights of the villagers to highlands, and on the need to protect them against foreign outsiders;  a preferential treatment was requested for middle class Ceylonese investors instead of big capitalist firms, but the foremost place of the plantation sector in the economy was upheld: the Ceylonese bourgeoisie had indeed invested in coconut, and to a lesser degree, rubber plantations. The impact of the great depression reshuffled the cards: the demand of new land for plantations collapsed and the slump led to the closure of a number of estates, especially those owned by Ceylonese who could not repay the debts incurred for the acquisition of lands;  but it is the village population which was worst hit: it could no longer sell its highlands to outsiders, and it lost the employment which the people who had sold their highlands could obtain on the estates. Finally, the representative system established in 1931 opened the way to a complete overhaul of land laws, taking land matters out of the hands of the Revenue Officers and headmen and introducing a sort of land planning at the village level. These developments will be the subject of further articles.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[1] Administration Report (AR) Kägalla(Kä) 1867 p. 19; AR Kä 1881 p. 24A

[2] Diary Kä 12 .12.1885

[3] Diary Kä 17.05.1884

[4] AR Kä 1884, p. 22-23A; Diary Kä, 11.11.1884 (Wace)

[5] W. Forsythe in Times of Ceylon 11.02.1937

[6] Diary Kä January and February 1886; AR Kä 1886 p. 145A

[7] Sri Lanka National Archives (SLNA) 6/7333, SLNA 6/795, diary Kä 1.10.1888

[8] Diary Kä, 26.05.1886 and 15.07.1886

[9] Diary Kä, 16.06.1886

[10] Diary Kä, 21.07.1886, 26.04.1887, 28.01.1888, 7.07.1893, 7.03.1887, 25.03.1890

[11] Diary Kä, 14.11.1889, 7.01.1891. The letter of Forsythe to Wace is kept in the Kägalla kacceri records (Panawitiya file)

[12] Diary Kä, 8.07.91, 25.07.1891, 13.05.1891, 26.02.1892, 10.06.1892

[13] Diary Kä, 26.02.1892, 14.06.1892, 1.08.1892; also 4.08.1899 

[14] Diary Kä 3.06.1893 

[15] Diary Kä, 14.07.1891, 25.05.1892, 10.06.1892 

[16] Kägalla kacceri records, Udapota village file, 17.02.1877 ; Diary Kä, 7.07.1893

[17] Diary Kä 20.11.1885, 17.01.1886, 7.02.1886

[18] Diary Kä 16.10.1894 and 7.03.1895

[19] AR Kä 1885, p. 167A-168A

[20] Diary Kä 26.03.1885 and 13.08.1885; see also William Forsythe memoirs (Times of Ceylon 11.02.1937)

[21] AR Kä 1886, p. 147A-149A

[22] AR Kä 1892, p. J6

[23] SLNA 65/173

[24] Diary Kä, 6.05 – 24.06 1886

[25] Diary Kä, 28.07.1886, 8.09.1886, 10.09.1892

[26] Diary Kä, 2 and 5.10.1886, 13.12.1886, 15.07.1887; Kägalla kacceri records, village file PP98, 4.12.1879

[27] Kägalla kacceri village file; Diary Kä, December 1879, November 1884, January 1885, September 1931; SLNA 65/958 (24.10.1884); SLNA 30/514

[28] Diary Kä, 24.06.1888, 3-14.11.1888, 17.01.1889, 21.01.1891; AR Kä 1888 p. 49A; Kägalla kacceri village records, chena settlement files PP 78 and 115; SLNA 30/572; SLNA 65/173. There is a local lore in two different versions regarding these two villages : “Warakagoda belonged to Dehigampal korale until one day 27 heads of cattle belonging to king Rajasinha I of Sitawaka were drowned in the We Oya, in consequence of which he gave to 9 durayas of Polatagama [Lower Bulatgama] the village of Warakagoda, transferring Badullawala to Dehigampal korale as compensation for loss of territory” (SLNA 6/10989 RN014496, G.A. Sabaragamuwa to Colonial Secretary, 18.09.1897) “The durayas of this village carried the palanquins of Dodantala Dissawa. There is a tradition that when the Sinhalese kings were reigning at Sitawaka, when it was represented to the kings that the cattle of Polatagalma were washed down, permission was given to the villagers of Polatagama to put up a cattle shed on the land now known as the village of Warakagoda” (SLNA 30/572, Ekneligoda report 25.11.1888).

[29] A Certificate of Quiet Possession (CQP) or Certificate of no claim is an official document issued by the colonial administration attesting that the Crown does not claim the ownership of a particular land.

[30] Diary Kä, 30.01.1886, 8-10.01.1891,01.1892, 5.09.1892, 19.04.1894

[31] Diary Kä, 25.06.1886

[32] Diary Kä, 2.11.1888 to 21.08.1889, 10.01.1891, SLNA 65/173 (minute of 5.12.1890 and exchange of letters between the Colonial Secretary and the Government Agent of Sabaragamuwa), SLNA 30/519, Administration report Kägalla 1889, p. J28.

[33] Kägalla kacceri records, village file Patberiya, SLNA 30/424, SLNA 30/482, Diary Kä 3.11.1891

[34] Diary Kä, 15.04.1891, Kägalla kacceri records series A, 25.10.1882, SLNA 30/502.

[35] Diary Kä, 18.03.1885, 26.05 – 15.06. 1886, 11.10.1889, 20.01.1890, 24.04.1890

[36] The detailed biography of David Fairweather is offered as a sort of colonial model in Arnold Wright ed., Twentieth Century Impressions of Ceylon, Colombo 1907, p. 875-877: “In the circumstance of this gentleman’s career we have brought into striking prominence the spirit of enterprise and adventure which has contributed so much to the success of the great planting industry of Ceylon”. After an experience in Assam, he contributed to popularize the cultivation of tea in Ceylon, but left the island to lead an exploration in east Africa, launched enterprises in South China and Java, before returning to Yataderiya.

[37] Diary Kä, 26.04.1894

[38] SLNA 30/573, 30/471; Diary Kä, 12.11.1872 and March to December 1893; Knavesmire is the name of a marshy waste land where the gallows were erected in the city of York…

[39] Kägalla kacceri, Rangalla village file, penciled notes of enquiry, 14.11.1893 ; Diary Kä, 13.11.1893

[40] CO54/988/4, file 55569/14; Kägalla Kacceri Records, Land file LK 154. See also the autobiography of S. Thondaman, Tea and Politics, Colombo, Vijitha Yapa 1994, vol 2, p. 26-30.

[41] SLNA 30/444 and 496 (especially report of 9.07.1907)

[42] SLNA 30/2246, undated manuscript. Ferdinando Hamlyn Price (1855-1942) was described by Leonard Woolf as “a terrific snob”; while in Kägalla, he built for himself a walauwa, tried to uphold Kandyan traditions and behaved as an aristocrat. Walter Edward Davidson (1859-1923) was a brilliant administrator and man of action, an independent mind, who ended his career as governor of New South Wales in Australia. He resented the meanness of the colonial administration and he wrote in his diary (21.07.1895): “I have been treated harshly in several matters lately, and I wish I had never entered the Ceylon Civil Service, and I shall leave it as soon as I can afford to do so”

 

[43] AR Kä 1892, p. J6

[44] Diary Kä, 3.12.1892

[45] AR Kä 1893 p. J12-13; Diary Kä, 25.08.1895 

[46] Diary Kä 3.01.1896, 18-19.03.1896

[47] AR Kä 1896 p. J16

[48] Diary Kä 30.10.1896; SLNA 59/178, RN 015233/96; Times of Ceylon, 17.11.1896.

[49] Diary Kä, 25.11-31.12.1896

[50] SLNA 6/10983, 10988, 10989. Administration Report Kägalla 1897 p. J11, 1898 p. J12. The diaries for 1897 are missing from the Archives.

[51] AR Kä 1902 p. J19, Diary Kä 4.12.1903

[52] There is an extensive documentation available on the subject: 1. at the general level, voluminous ‘pending files’ of the Colonial secretariat including correspondence, reports and decisions of the administration: SLNA 65/1187 and 1288; Land Settlement Department Records, file on ‘Land settlement work of F.R. Ellis’; SLNA 30/868 ‘Crown rights to chenas sold by villagers and planted up by capitalists’. 2. At the local level, all the certificate of quiet possession cases kept in the SLNA 30 series.

[53] SLNA 6/10988, encl. to Government Agent Sabaragamuwa to Colonial Secretariat, 30.08.1897; SLNA 6/10990, exchange of correspondence between AGA Kä, GA Sabaragamuwa and Colonial Secretary 29.07.1897.

[54] The administrators used themselves the word ‘settlement’ instead of CQP, as in AR Kä 1912 p. I24.

[55] SLNA 6/10983 (Minute paper 02392/97)

[56] SLNA 30/462, SG to GA Sab, 6.03.1899. Surveys for CQPs by private surveyors are constantly criticized as most unsatisfactory in the successive administration reports of the Surveyor General (1923 p L17, 1924 p. J9), but the recourse to private surveyors is the result of the shortcomings of the survey department; the major private agency involved in CQPs is the Moratuwa Survey Agency headed by Charles Peter de Silva

[57] SLNA 65/1187

[58] SLNA 65/1074, Minute by Ellis on a letter of the planter Malcolmson to Governor, 10.08.1904

[59]  AR Kä 1903, p. K21. E.B. Alexander became President of the Ceylon Association in London after he left the Colonial service.

[60] Diary Kä 31.03.1906 (in 1906, there was an outburst of CQP direct demands by planters, rubber planting being maximal, followed in 1907 by a recourse to lawyers)

[61] SLNA 30/482

[62] Kägalla kacceri records PP106 ; SLNA 30/447, 491, 497, 518 ; diary Kä 17.04.1893

 

[63] Kägalla kacceri village file (PP 118 chena settlement 3.11.1877, report 15.05.1879), SLNA 30/505 and 542; diary  Kä 14.02.1884

[64] Kägalla kacceri records village file PP117, SLNA 30/448, SLNA 65/1352 (Harries land claims), and Land Settlement Department Records, Ellis settlement work : Harries claims.

[65] SLNA 65/1352 (Enquiry held by Ellis, 27.11.1904, memo 03318/1905, Executive Council minute 245/1905), and SLNA 30/449

[66] SLNA  30/495, Ceylon Government Gazette 31.07.1908, Diary ASO Northcroft, 7.04.1933

[67] SLNA 30/564, 18.09.1922, minute by the AGA: “There is plenty of evidence that the late land clerk has endeavoured to hookwind my predecessors into granting and recommending CQPs for Crown lands”

[68] SLNA 30/451, 30/550 and 30/552

[69] SLNA 30/508, 30/564

[70] Kägalla kacceri records, Lewala forest settlement and Wegalla settlement; SLNA 30/ 510 (Lewala estate CQP); Diary Kä, 9.03.1902, 11.02.1907

[71] The history of the Grand Central is given in T. Villiers, Mercantile Lore, Colombo, Ceylon Observer Press, 1940.  It was the first large scale transition from a rupee to a sterling company and the largest rubber enterprise in Ceylon. In 1904, J.N. Campbell discussed with J.P. Anderson, manager of the Panawal group, the perspectives of rubber development. “They decide to acquire a large tract of land suitable for development and they set to work to form a syndicate made up of the following gentlemen: J.N. Campbell, Joseph Fraser, W. Saunders, W. Forsythe, E.J. Weatherall, Tim Bayly, J.P. Anderson. Carson was the managing agency; by the mid 1910 ‘the concern had become so large that a flotation in London seemed desirable: in July the company was floated with capital of 1 ½ million £, the largest rubber concern in Ceylon; in 1912 it absorbed Weganga co., Southern Ceylon co. and Durampitiya Estate.”

[72] The main source is SLNA 30/868 ‘Crown Rights to Chenas Sold by Villagers and Planted up by Capitalists’. This is a file kept in the Kägalla kacceri following the request to produce their deeds, addressed by Codrington in 1913 and his successor Burden to the owners of new estates in the Four-korales, and the subsequent management of these affairs for the planters by Philip Ondaatje, A.A. Wickremasinghe and De Sarams.

[73] Diary Kä 8.09.1916 ; AR Sab 1916 p. I7; AR Kä 1926 p. I24, 1927 p. I29

[74] Albert A. Wickremesinghe, Land Tenure in the Kandyan Provinces, Colombo, Mahajana press, 1924.

[75] Diary Kä, 28.12.1915, 6.02, 25.07 and 12.08.1916

[76] In SLNA 30/868

[77] Kägalla kacceri records, village file Lahupone, settlement of 12.07.1893, Diary Kä (Vaughan) 23.06.1902, SLNA 6/814 : Letter Vaughan to D. Fairweather 5.06.1905, Diary Settlement Officer Fox 17-29.04.1913 ; SLNA 65/1187

[78] SLNA 30/544

[79] SLNA 30/545

[80] SLNA 30/445, 30/453, 30/578; see also my “From Landgrabbing to Landhunger: High Land Appropriation in the Plantation Areas of Sri Lanka during the British Period.”  Modern Asian Studies  26, 2 (1992) pp. 321-361.

[81] Diary Kä 27.04.1913 (Codrington): “M. Russell Scott tells me that when he came there 15 years ago the people lived often in caves; one old man still does so. It is one of the Vädda villages mentioned in the Kohomba Yakkunkankariya”. See G. Obeyesekere,  The Cult of the Goddess Pattini,  p. 304-305, quoting Kohomba Kankariya by C. E. Godakumbura, Colombo 1963, p. 90-91, where the ‘calling of the Väddas’ specific to Four-korales tradition enumerated the names of the villages from which the Väddas must come to participate in the devil ritual.

[82] SLNA 30/478

[83] SLNA 30/537 and 422b; Diary Kä July – August 1893 and April 1894; Kägalla kacceri records, Uda Karandupone Forest settlement file (1894)

[84] Diary Kä, 9.05.1907 cf. ibidem, 10.05.1871

[85] Born in Kägalla in a Catholic family, educated at Kandy, Colombo and Calcutta where he studied law, he became proctor in 1901. According to Winston Wickramasinghe, Albert’s son, in an interview I had with him in 1978, his grand-father Don C. Wickramasinghe, a notary public, had directed the attention of the young Albert to the documents of the Forest settlement kept at the Kägalla kacceri. Albert became a member of the anglicized Sinhalese bourgeoisie who invested in the plantation economy, and a moderate supporter of the nationalist movement in 1915  (he published a booklet on the 1915 riots); he was close to D.S. Senanayake but he failed to enter the political arena; a rich man, he built for himself a magnificent walauwa in Kägalla.

[86] Land settlement department, Dorawaka file, list of 99 deeds purchased by an intermediary, Egodawatte Araccilage Don James Perera Appuhamy (from December 1905 to April 1906); at a subsequent judicial sale (19.05.1906) for an amount of 20,000 Rs before the British District Judge Davies the deeds were transferred to Wickramasinghe; SLNA 45/1886 correspondence between Kägalla and Sabaragamuwa, 12.07.1906; Diary Kä 4.03.1907, 16.09.1918

[87] A.A. Wickramasinghe, Land tenure in the Kandyan Provinces (Colombo, Mahajana Press, 1924); compare with H.W. Codrington, Ancient Land Tenure and Revenue in Ceylon (Colombo, Government Press, 1938)

[88] My visit to the spot in 1978 elicited the following information: Madeniya had been the subject of constant recriminations by the villagers recalling the manner in which the lands had been grabbed, and violence often erupted between villagers and estate workers. The estate lands were squatted on, and in 1971 the rubber factory was occupied by the insurgents who established their headquarters there, and burnt down when they left ; then the estate was taken over by the State and the management was catastrophic ; violence continued during these years, and the Tamil school was burnt down in 1977.

[89] Gamperaliya (village upheaval) in the Kägalla district, https://slkdiaspo.hypotheses.org/1354

[90] Ceylon Government Gazette, 1.02.1873, p. 147

[91] Diary Kä, 23.07.1884, 19.11.1888, 22.08. and 30.11.1892, 3.07.1893

[92] Survey department records, Chena plans 300, 218 and 219 (Malawita and Talewala); Sabaragamuwa  Preliminary plans 48 and 2428 (Damunupola), 727 and 1149 (Haloluwa), 1321, 1348, 1358, 1366, 1367 (Talewala, Haloluwa and Malawita); SLNA 30/615 (Chena case Haloluwa 1893-1898); SLNA 30/540 (Golinda CQP file)

[93] Diary Kä, 27-28.10.1914

[94] Diary Kä 17.07.1922

[95] SLNA 30/540 (Golinda CQP file); Ceylon Government Gazette 20.10.1922, p. 1366; Ferguson’s Ceylon Directory for 1937, p. 814

[96] The resulting upheaval of village society is described in Gamperaliya (village upheaval) in the Kägalla district, https://slkdiaspo.hypotheses.org/1354. I hope to publish later the full file of documents and interviews connected with the Golinda estate and its surrounding villages which I collected during my fieldwork (summer 1979); some of the documents kept in the estate office may have disappeared after 1989.

[97] Kelani Valley Forest Settlement Register (SLNA 45/1726), Report on the Forest settlement of the Kelani Valley Reserve and village cases (Kägalla kacceri records); SLNA 65/958 ‘Kelani Valley Forest Reserve’; Settlement diaries and reports of the Land Settlement Department in the 1930s

[98] Ceylon Secretariat file L205/1926

[99] Government Agent Western Province to Colonial Secretary, 16.12.1884 in SLNA 33/2476; Booth to the Government Agent  Sabaragamuwa 24.04.1893 in SLNA 45/3161

[100] ‘Report on the Forest settlement of the Kelani Valley Reserve’ (in Kägalla kacceri land records)

[101] ‘Projected land sale in the Three-korales’ 12.03.1897, Executive Council minutes 04251, 16.03.1897 in SLNA 65/958 ‘Kelani Valley Forest Reserve’

[102] Diary Kä, 15.08.1898,

[103] Diary Kä, 19.01.1904

[104] Diary Kä 30/03/1905, 26/02/1906

[105] SLNA 30/574

[106] SLNA 30/533; Diary SO Jansz, 6.05.1937, ASO Ingledow, June to October 1937:

[107] SLNA 30/533 and SLNA 30/431

[108] Diary Kä, 11.09.1922; Colonial secretariat file L205/1926; ASO Cocks, 14.01.1935 to 8.04.1935; A.J. van der Poorten was a Belgian planter-businessman who had settled in Ceylon by the end of the 19th century and married a Kandyan lady.

[109] Diary Kä 1.02.1918, 16.07.1918

[110] Diary of SO Stace, 18-25.02.1930; Diary Kä, 10.04.1930

[111] Diary of ASO Northcroft, May 1931, February 1932, April 1933.

[112] Diaries of SO, 5.09.1935, of ASO Cocks, 6.03.1935, of ASO Ingledow, 11-13.10.1937, 10.01.1938, of ASO Wijekoon, January 1938. Pandaha and Haradaha were two villages where, under dalamura tenure, the Duraya inhabitants had to deliver five and four thousands of betel leaves – hence their names.

[113] Diary Kä 4.06.1923, September to December 1925, 11 January to 22 June 1927, 15.09.1931. In 2013 Noori estate was the scene of a murder of the manager and great violence in the surrounding villages was unleashed by a local goon with political affiliations, who ruled the area as a private kingdom; a similar state of affairs prevailed in Maliboda (Daily Mirror August 2013)

[114] SLNA 30/557; Diary Kä 19.02.1925; Diaries of ASO Northcroft, 8.07.1932 to 27.03.1933 and Ingledow, 12.01.1937

[115] Diary Kä,  23.12.1904, 1.07.1905, 23.12.1904, 19.02.1925, 22.04.1927 

Words to Kill a Man, and Free a Man

https://polity.lk/words-to-kill-a-man-and-free-a-man-kanya-d-almeida

 

Words to Kill a Man, and Free a Man

Kanya D’Almeida

 

In the early months of 2012, I inherited two troves of literature. I had been hunting for one of them for years; the other arrived unsolicited.

The first was an archive of the journalistic work of my uncle, Richard de Zoysa, during his career—cut short by his murder in 1990—as a reporter for the Rome-based Inter Press Service (IPS) news agency. 

The second was the unbound, unedited manuscript of an American political prisoner, a former Black Panther named Russell ‘Maroon’ Shoatz who had been incarcerated in the state of Pennsylvania for nearly four decades.

I was a news reporter myself at the time, employed by the same agency that Richard had been working for when he was killed. I had recently been transplanted from New York City to a desk at IPS’ Washington office, where my bureau chief, an exceptionally sharp, veteran journalist—whose small room on the 14th floor of the National Press Club in DC was primarily occupied by heavy metal filing cabinets jammed with news cuttings and clippings from decades past— kindly allowed me to conscript him into my search for Richard’s dossier.

All my life, Richard had twirled above me like a mobile over a baby’s crib: shifting, wonderful, shadow-casting, and always out of reach. He and my mother, first cousins, had been raised as siblings in the same home. She had witnessed, perhaps more intimately than anyone else, his evolution from a precocious child (whose mind may have bordered on genius) to a kind of cultural titan in Colombo, his presence dominating the stage, his voice crackling through radio broadcasts, his face on television screens reading the evening news—and finally, his byline on the international wire, in dispatches from Sri Lanka.

I had read his poetry and paged through dozens of photo albums documenting his acting career (which began with a very professional adaptation and home production of Hamlet’s soliloquy To Be or Not to Be when he was nine years old) and I had heard stories about stories about stories—but never actually read his journalistic work.

All these articles, I would ask my parents, his colleagues, the Internet—that he was threatened for, followed for, murdered for—where are they?

            Gone? Lost? Scrubbed out?

It was with my excellent bureau chief, both of us huddled over his archaic desktop computer one afternoon, that we managed to extract, from the depths of JSTOR, one of Richard’s pieces entitled ‘Pride Stalks Beneath a Full Moon’. The dateline read “COLOMBO, May 22, 1989”. It was locked behind security passwords and paywalls. While my boss made stern phone calls to the relevant, automated authorities of that impenetrable digital library, I hurled abuse at the screen that kept telling me I lacked the required credentials to access my uncle’s writings.

What we ultimately ended up with—a small cache of articles constructed in the signature IPS style of an inverted pyramid with a buried lede and delivered in Richard’s sparse yet polished prose—felt to me like finding the missing shard in a fragmented family heirloom.

*

A few weeks later (or was it a few weeks earlier?), I received a FedEx envelope containing a 200-page document titled, The Making of a Political Prisoner by Russell Maroon Shoatz. An accompanying note from a recent acquaintance said only that he wished me to review the draft of this autobiography with a view to using it as the basis for a screenplay. The man whose life story was contained in that bulky envelope, my friend explained, was nothing short of jaw-dropping—he’d escaped prison twice in the 1970s, spent over 22 years in solitary confinement, and was a prolific revolutionary theoretician and scholar, revered by The Movement and despised by the authorities who had sworn to preside over his slow death in the Hole. The Hole. Shorthand among prisoners and guards for solitary confinement.

The name ‘Maroon’ was an honorific, a respectful reference to the many thousands of slaves who, on almost every continent, escaped the plantations, formed liberated communities, and lived as free people. His supporters and some of his family believed that a powerful biopic would help to ignite an international campaign for his freedom bid. After all, everyone loves a good story. It would require a significant commitment on my part: to interview Maroon himself, which was complicated by his status as a maximum-security prisoner; and to meet and speak with his tribe—children, comrades, counsel, co-defendants.

I was fresh and green—25 years old, with a ready pen, steeped in American cultural mythology (particularly such vague notions as freedom of speech, or the power of the people, organised and united)—and hungry for meaningful work as a writer.

I was also afraid. The twin revelations of Richard’s past and Maroon’s imagined future—with myself strung between—felt somehow double-edged: the sweet promise that words might be powerful enough to free a man were dogged by the horror that words were dangerous enough to kill a man. 

Both men were stunning writers, in very different ways. Maroon’s chapters read like spoken word, a beautiful language of the streets fine-tuned in the depths of isolation. He grew up in a gang in West Philadelphia, became a community organiser, joined the Panther Party, and stood trial for murder before spending most of his adult life in prison. But his story had no ending, whereas Richard’s seemed to begin at the end—with his own death—and then plough its way painfully backward in time through a dismal chapter of Sri Lanka’s history.

*

All of Richard’s articles I unearthed were published roughly in the first half of 1989 and ceased abruptly on 10 August with the publication of a piece entitled, ‘SRI LANKA: Nearing a Human Rights Apocalypse’. Still, after thirteen years and dozens of reads, the prophetic flavour of that pithy 899-word bulletin sends chills down my spine. The opening paragraphs need little explanation:

Residents of the seaside suburb of Mount Lavinia, three miles from the Sri Lankan capital of Colombo, were awakened at around 3:00 AM on Aug. 6 by gunshots.

As the night curfew in force throughout Sri Lanka ended one hour later, the bolder ones ventured out of doors. They found the bodies of six youths – five dead, one dying of gunshot injuries – their hands tied behind their backs, lying on the beach.

The injured boy told them he was from Ganemulla, a small town 25 miles from the capital. Mount Lavinia residents say he accused the Special Task Force (STF) – police commandos – of dragging him from his house, bringing him to Colombo and shooting him.

Killings like this happen daily in southern Sri Lanka, where the security forces are hunting down left-wing rebels from the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP) in a major government drive to wipe out what it calls “subversion”.

This, in a nutshell, was Richard’s beat: piecing together, victim by victim, corpse by corpse, the story of the violent insurgency and still-more-violent counter-insurgency that throttled Sri Lanka in the late 80s. And it wasn’t the first time—the piece took its title from remarks delivered in Parliament on 9 August 1989 by the then-opposition leader Sirimavo Bandaranaike, demanding the creation of a parliamentary committee to look into arrests and indiscriminate killings, which had topped 1,000 just that month:

Bandaranaike, who crushed a JVP-led student insurrection when she was prime minister in 1971, yesterday chose to make a distinction between the JVP and the youth who support it in her apocalyptic statement in Parliament.

“These are our future generations. Why have they resorted to violence? Because they have no education — schools and universities are closed, they have no hope of employment, they see injustice and corruption all around them, she declared.

“If you have no answer except to meet indiscriminate killings with equally brutal reprisals . . . You will build up a monster no-one will be able to control”, Bandaranaike warned.

The article goes on to detail the particular horrors of that time, namely the lawlessness that rendered the entire population either victim or suspect, and the rest terrorised into silence:

Masked men travelling in vehicles without license plates were abducting young men from their homes. Human rights activists say most of the “secret” killings are carried out by plainclothes squads from the regular forces. The government closed down schools in Sinhalese areas in June and followed up by sending the military onto southern campuses July 11.

Members of the campus group “Students for Human Rights” say the 250 students taken into custody were the lucky ones.

“Most of those arrested on campus are still alive, although in detention”, says “Kumar”, a spokesperson for the group. “It is when the students go back to their homes that they are in the greatest danger. The local police or military come for them with a license to kill.”

The “tire treatment” is a common form of punishment meted out to suspected rebels. Villagers and townspeople alike have grown used to the sight of bodies smouldering on public roadways, charred flesh indistinguishable from burning rubber.

Other suspects were blindfolded, tied to trees or lampposts, and shot – often after being tortured.

Under Sri Lanka’s harsh emergency regulations and anti-subversion laws, police or military officers can dispose of dead bodies without autopsies and detain anyone for up to 18 months without producing them in court.

“We have filed hundreds of habeas corpus applications (calling on police to produce arrested people before magistrates) but under the law, the government need not do anything about these”, explained human rights lawyer Prins Gunesekera.

Gunesekera says he himself is in danger. He and another lawyer, Kanchana Abeypala, have been placed on an “endangered” list by the human rights organisation Amnesty International after they were warned to stop campaigning against rights abuses.

A third lawyer from the human rights lobby, Charitha Lankapura, was murdered – allegedly by the STF – in early July after returning home from a student demonstration.

Surely, no clearer prologue to his own death could have been written: abducted from his home without charge or warrant, shot, and his body dumped in the sea. No investigation, no explanations. For decades I have listened to my elders talk in circles of speculation as to the causes and culprits behind Richard’s murder—Why? On whose orders? For what?—without ever arriving at an undivided answer.

*

It is tempting to surmise that Richard’s clarity of analysis and reporting were reason enough for the government to remove him. In a dispatch from 22 May 1989, Richard notes:

Pride stalks Sri Lanka today, in a variety of guises. There is the racial pride of the Sinhalese, who make up 70 percent of the island’s 17 million people (mostly Buddhist), as well as the pride of the 1.4 million-strong Tamil minority.

There is also the pride of two fierce militant groups, one Sinhalese and one Tamil; the pride of two armies, one Sri Lankan and one Indian; and the political pride of their governments in Colombo and New Delhi.

He goes on to detail the political manoeuvres required to juggle multiple conflicts, with the government funnelling its armed forces into the “economically underprivileged southern belt” to root out the JVP while simultaneously directing a stream of soldiers to the Northern Province to wage war against the LTTE. All this, Richard notes, while the Indian Peacekeeping Force (IPKF), by order of Rajiv Gandhi, were half-cajoling, half-strong-arming the Tigers to a negotiating table, upon which lay the highly divisive devolution plan outlined in the 1987 Indo-Lanka accords.

“The JVP and the shadowy organisation suspected of being its armed wing (known as the Patriotic People’s Movement or DJV) [are] implacably opposed to Tamil separatism or anything remotely approaching it”, he wrote, adding that on the flip side of the coin, the LTTE remained hell-bent on the creation of a wholly separate Tamil homeland, despite a strong political tide amongst more moderate Tamil forces that would have accepted an agreement for regional autonomy. Richard concluded:

A triangle of power [now governs the country]. If [President Ranasinghe] Premadasa, a shrewd self-taught professional politician, wants his presidency to get off the ground, he will have to deal swiftly with two men who, like him, have simple origins – Tamil Tiger guerilla leader Velupillai Prabhakaran and JVP supremo Rohana Wijeweera.

The actions of this trio will determine Sri Lanka’s immediate future – as well as the fate, in life or death terms, of the country’s 16.4 million people.

It was the kind of journalism I aspired to: clean, clear, concise, and contextual, with a beating heart that seemed able to keep time with the louder pulse of the nation. Nothing seditious or revolutionary. No call to arms. Nothing but a writer’s quiet plea for sanity or humanity to prevail amidst a massacre. It was not, to my mind, the kind of blazing scroll that an artist might—even for the faintest moment—think they’d die for.

The unasked question being, of course, Was it worth it, in the end? These dispatches from Sri Lanka, written in a time of terror, delivered to an international audience that could do nothing to stop the bloodshed—was it worth it? How, really, do you value a human life against the value of his or her work?

Such was the diabolic arithmetic I was being forced to work out in real time as a small team of freedom fighters working on behalf of Russell Maroon Shoatz pressed me for an answer on the proposed assignment of working with a complete stranger to tell his life’s story. I read and reread Richard’s articles, and read and reread Maroon’s letters, which had begun to arrive in my mailbox on Georgia Avenue NW Washington, DC. I observed the words of both men fusing together in unnerving ways. Notions of duty, legacy, and artistic responsibility jostled in my mind with a dull, pervasive anxiety at the prospect of committing myself to a literary work with the highest possible stakes: another person’s life and freedom, and—if I was to follow the mad logic that resulted in Richard’s murder—possibly my own.

“Let’s say I write this book, with a high-security prisoner who’s accused of murder and who calls himself a prisoner of war,” I said to my father, trying to laugh off my deepest fears. “What’s the worst they can do to me? What’s the worst that could happen?”

To which he answered, quietly and without pause, “Deportation. Incarceration. Torture.”

I grieved that response for a long time, perhaps because it was the first time I had truly confronted the fear that the survivors of Sri Lanka’s violence—my own family, myself—carry with them, in their bones. I grieved also for these two men, one who had been killed, and the other who’d been sentenced to a different kind of death, which in the twisted parlance of the American justice system is known as Life. Maroon was serving back-to-back life sentences in solitary confinement. His letters to me were composed in the laboured hand of an old man with a youthful spirit who has been made to stare into the black abyss and see right through it, to the beauty and the hope.

I shared some of Richard’s work with Maroon, and told him, briefly, the story. He wrote back at once, soulful and wise: When we speak truth to power… When we speak truth to power… When we speak truth to power. It was, in a way, an answer to the question I had not asked, that my family have prowled around all my life, that Maroon had, I later learned, been avoiding and confronting for decades in the screaming quietude of a cage measuring five by seven feet: Was it worth it, in the end?

A year later I met Maroon in person, down in the dungeon of the State Penitentiary at Mahanoy, an all-male prison in rural Pennsylvania, in a visiting room bisected by a sheet of bulletproof glass. Throughout the visit Maroon remained shackled at the ankles and at the wrists, a bright-eyed, ageing, and agile man with whom I would collaborate for 12 years on his autobiography I Am Maroon. He did not live to see its release. It was published, posthumously, on 3 September 2024, nearly three years after Maroon died of cancer.

People often ask my family how we make sense of Richard’s life and death. It was not until I met Maroon and undertook a kind of doctoral degree in American studies under his tutelage, with his supporters acting as my academic advisors and the prisons of Pennsylvania serving as my campus, that I began to understand how legacies work: they must be allowed to live. Nothing finishes a person quite like memorialising them; nostalgia and romanticising will make quick work of whatever is left. Maroon did not suffer from nostalgia—probably because, I always assumed, it’s a deadly disease for a prisoner serving a life sentence. He was a great believer in living legacies. He mentored countless young men who were thrown into the penitentiary alongside him and saw many of them off into the free world while he continued to Do His Time. Dozens have said they regard him as a father-figure, as their greatest teacher.

As for me, writing together with Maroon, through the bars and over all the hurdles thrown at us—visits cancelled and monitored, our correspondence surveilled, letters destroyed or returned to the sender, threats and lawsuits—seemed like the most sensible way to honour Richard’s legacy in my own lifetime. Mainly because it helped me to do away with that blasted question: Was it worth it, in the end?

Turns out it’s not a question at all, but a slow reckoning with language itself, with these words that are strong enough to kill a man, and free a man. And what emerges from that reckoning is not doubt or unknowing, but a certain certainty, that you have to use words to make sense of them. You have to let them play, let them remake themselves: We are worth more than the ends they devise for us. We live, and live on, because we are worthy of life.

 

Kanya D’Almeida is a writer, and winner of the 2021 Commonwealth Short Story Prize. She is the co-author of I Am Maroon: The True Story of an American Political Prisoner, available now from Hachette Books.

Sustainable Human Development – article

Reducing inequalities for equitable, sustainable human development

Nadeera Rajapakse

Policy Tribune, Vol 1 -Issue 2/ January 2025 The Bandaranaike Academy for Leadership & Public Policy

https://balpp.com/publications/

Policy Brief

Reducing Inequalities for Sustainable, Equitable Human Development

By Professor Nadeera Rajapakse

In the context of the economic (and political) crisis and its impact on individuals, groups, and communities, recovery measures need to address existing structural inequalities for two main reasons: first, because without removing inequalities, widespread economic and social prosperity is impossible, or is at best inequitable and non-inclusive. Second, inequalities are harmful in themselves, not only as effects on economic growth. In other words, like the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) highlight [1] , inequality is a standalone goal as well as a cross­cutting issue.

The brief makes policy recommendations aiming for meaningful, inclusive, sustainable economic development in Sri Lanka’s post-crisis context. By meaningful, we focus on people and not only on infrastructure; by inclusive we refer to policies that take into account plural identities, and by sustainable we target long-term goals over short-term profits. By using Amartya Sen’s concept of human development as enhancing personal and collective freedoms alongside GDP growth (1984, 1999) [2] , the recommendations made here aim to address the existing structural weaknesses and inequalities that have been exacerbated by Sri Lanka’s political and economic crisis. Interdisciplinary analysis is essential to take stock of intersecting categories of identity that influence inequalities. We focus on two areas, debt refinancing and the export of low-skilled labour, which are related concerns in Sri Lanka today, with widespread effects on human development.

Debt Refinancing

As a result of authoritarian political decisions on large-scale loss-inducing infrastructure investments and policies, the country faced severe foreign exchange shortages culminating in a debt crisis amounting to 103.8% of GDP as of March 2023 (Dias, 2023). [3] This crisis hit households at a time when many had not yet recovered from the shocks of COVID-19. After struggling through months of shortages of gas, fuel, electricity, medicine and many other essential items, the people took to the streets in protest.

With a change in leadership propelled by the people’s protests, the government’s response was to secure an International Monetary Fund bailout in 2022. In June 2024, the IMF agreed to a 48-month Extended Fund Facility providing the country with immediate access to about US $336 million, bringing the total funds disbursed to about US $1 billion (IMF executive board, 2024). These financing deals were linked to the IMF’s 2023 debt sustainability and requires debt to be paid down through high budget surplus.

Sri Lanka’s debt is held by both foreign and domestic creditors. Foreign creditors have been categorised into various groups [4] , of which we can differentiate bilateral creditors and ISB (International Sovereign Bond) holders and other commercial creditors. Negotiations are underway with bilateral creditors for debt relief, while ISB holders have suggested GDP growth-dependent debt restructuring. This means that debt repayments will be made according to GDP growth rates, with the country expected to pay higher interest rates on estimated future growth rates. Thus, the 28 percent debt concession granted at present could be reduced to 15 percent if growth rates surpass the limit set by the IMF (Kuruwita, 2024). In exchange for this emergency loan, the IMF imposed a series of conditions. Briefly, “further trade liberalization to promote exports and foreign direct investment; labor reforms to upgrade skills and increase female labor force participation; and state-owned enterprise reforms to improve efficiency and fiscal transparency, contain fiscal risks, and promote a level playing field for the private sector” (IMF, 2024).

These conditions along with the GDP-related concessions, calling for a budget surplus, which in turn requires greater inflows of foreign exchange, bring us to the second issue discussed here: Sri Lanka’s highest foreign exchange earner: low-skilled migrant workers.

Export of Low-skilled Migrant Labour

Contributing to 5.1% of GDP, low-skilled women migrant domestic workers (maids) overall remittances surpass earnings coming from tea and garment exports (World Bank blog, 2022). While, on the one hand, remittances are seen as exerting a positive effect on development, poverty alleviation and unemployment (Ratha, 2023), on the other hand, this type of gendered labour is characterised by exploitative and abusive working conditions, the lack of rights, and multiple layers of risk and vulnerabilities. The government has been unable to protect migrant workers and often use restrictions and bans as a way of addressing the dangers they face (Weeraratne, 2022). However, as Amartya Sen’s development framework shows, restrictions imposed on the women’s (and men’s) right to migrate and find employment opportunities only exacerbate the risks. Instead of effectively dissuading them from migrating, restrictions force migrants to seek irregular, informal means of mobility, thus exposing them to even greater vulnerabilities. Just as the IMF emphasises female labour force participation, the lack of alternative employment and of sustainable livelihood options are seen as push factors driving women to seek employment abroad despite the risks.

Exacerbating Structural Inequalities Prevalent in the Country

Inequalities

The IMF debt finance scheme was hailed by many with relief as the only resort for Sri Lanka to emerge from its debt crisis. However, many others spoke out against its debilitating effects on the wider population. The bail out came with austerity measures, including cuts in public spending, steep increases in utility tariffs, food and energy costs, indirect and regressive taxation, limited cash handouts as social security. While we separate inequalities into various categories for purposes of clarity, we insist that these categories overlap and need to be considered as intersecting and compounding factors.

Gender-based inequalities : Due to their unpaid caregiving roles at household level, women often shoulder responsibilities of ensuring families are fed, looked after and educated, even as they face falling wages, rising food, electricity and water bills, precarious and informal employment and lack of access to meaningful social security. Consequently, the current debt refinancing proposals, which prioritise external creditors and ensure re-entry into finance markets, bail out private finance (both local and global) by putting the burden on the workers, and especially women workers – both paid and unpaid. [5]

Domestic debt restructuring has placed the burden on public pension funds, with teachers and nurses, among others, having their pensions slashed. Cuts in public spending on education, health and social security will further aggravate the burden faced by women, but not only: income, age and ethnic origins are also categories upon which inequalities thrive.

Income inequalities: Colombo may look dazzling with its luxury hotels and malls, but the crises faced by working class families tell a different story. Research has shown that the quality of life of working-class families has deteriorated and that they are still battling with everyday expenses. Accumulated bills and shortages have put them in situations of severe debt, compounded by the increases in the prices of essential items, following VAT increases. They are at a “point of no return” (Colombo Urban Lab, 2023), taking loans to survive, rather than to navigate one-off shocks. Consequently, reducing inflation and bringing food prices down are welcome, though not sufficient to ensure long-term sustainable growth. Here too women face much of the burden of managing the daily needs of their families and face the pressure of negotiating loans. In a situation where alternative funding is absent, they turn to microfinance and moneylenders (Arambepola, 2019). Thus, understanding the complex and intersecting needs driving households to debt is essential when discussing the regulation of microfinance and informal credit markets.

Age-related inequalities: Older people are particularly at risk during the current situation as a result of underlying health conditions, social and economic disadvantages, and insufficient social protection mechanisms. In addition, the economic crisis led to greater food insecurity and inaccessible healthcare for older people. “Many older people aren’t receiving their full list of prescribed medicines and cannot afford to buy privately. Some have stopped taking their medications altogether, waiting until the drugs are available again. Others are turning to alternative medicines such as Ayurvedic or traditional methods which can only serve as a temporary measure” (Helpage International, 2022).

The domestic debt restructuring also worsens the situation for older people, who tend to either be out of paid work or earning very little and whose pensions and available savings are very quickly used up on food and healthcare. According to the Household Income and Expenditure Survey of 2019, people aged 65-years-old and above are the poorest group in Sri Lanka (Department of Census and Statistics, Multidimensional Poverty in Sri Lankan, 2019).

Minority rights-related inequalities: Crises and conflicts tend to exert disproportionate impacts on vulnerable groups, which include ethnic and religious minority groups in Sri Lanka, who have faced long-term patterns of discrimination (Hennayake, 2006). The State needs to recognise and remedy human rights violations to ensure justice, safety and security, essential capabilities for inclusive human development and growth (Sen, 1999). Justice is required to address enforced disappearances, land disputes, disenfranchised populations and environmental issues.

Harassment and discrimination on the basis of identity-related issues (gender, sexual origin, sexuality, religion, ethnic origin, etc.) not only impede productivity on labour markets, thus hampering economic growth, but also cause harm to society’s wellbeing (Ariyarathne, 2022).

“Decisions on economic policies must be guided by Sri Lanka’s international human rights obligations, including by ensuring adequate social protection. (…) Sri Lanka’s creditors should provide the Government with the fiscal space needed to realise economic, social and cultural rights” (Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, 2024).

The failure to protect minority rights and well-being creates a big push factor propelling risky, costly emigration, borne by society at large.

 

“(…) the dominant three foreign exchange earners for the country – garments, tea exports and migrant workers to the Middle East – rest on the efforts of women workers” (Ruwanpura, 2022).

The unforgiving spiral of debt servicing without considering equitable growth: The imperatives of debt service put huge pressures on essential social spending in Sri Lanka, even before being forced into debt default and having to approach the IMF for assistance. Sri Lanka now faces massive constraints even in continuing with earlier social spending levels, much less in responding adequately to the need for greater social protection in the face of the economic crisis caused by debt distress. The lack of professional skills, which would be further widened by reduced public spending, and the lack of imagination in absorbing women gainfully into the economy, along with the pressures to tend to her dependents will not remove incentives pushing women to migrate. However, valuing her work and enabling freedoms to migrate safely and work in decent conditions are feasible policy orientations.

Recommendations

Deprivations are intersecting. Some workers face numerous compounding deprivations stemming from gender and ethnic discrimination, such as women employed in the garment industry and tea-plantation workers, especially those from minority Tamil groups. Policy conditionalities associated with debt relief have rarely shown an understanding of gender dynamics, not recognising the different ways that women and men – across intersectional identities – interact with the economy, as paid and unpaid workers, as household providers, as family members and as citizens (Ghosh, 2021).

Universal social protection “Social security is not charity but a human right of all people. Women’s groups are demanding that universal social security in this time of crisis be made binding and enforceable by law. Without meaningful expansion of social safety nets and increasing fiscal allocation, targeted schemes like Aswesuma will not benefit the millions of families hit hard by the crisis.” (Dias, 2023).

Sri Lanka must move away from targeted social welfare schemes to systems that offer universal social protection, particularly in the context of crises. Targeted poverty reduction schemes have their weaknesses and in Sri Lanka, inefficient targeting as well as outdated eligibility criteria – those for the Aswesuma welfare scheme were developed before the debt crisis – result in many vulnerable groups slipping through the net. The multidimensionality of vulnerability and poverty also needs to be considered, going beyond basic income related criteria. [6]

It should also be recognised that 66 per cent of the labour force work informally, including women who do unpaid domestic care work, so have little access to social protection schemes. Similarly, only 40 to 50 per cent of older people receive any form of benefit such as pensions, provident funds, or cash payments (Helpage International, 2022). Contradictory measures like targeting the already meagre pension funds of Sri Lanka’s wage workers, only exacerbate existing class, gender, and ethnic inequalities. In particular, any requirements of public spending cuts that reduce employment in public services or reduce wages of public workers, should be avoided.

It is unrealistic to expect specific programmes targeted to women/children to undo the damage created by broader macroeconomic policies that reduce employment and livelihoods. Therefore, as far as possible, policies should be universal so as to prevent unjustified exclusion of those already disadvantaged in other ways. [7]

Collective bargaining for women migrant workers

Commodification is a phenomenon afflicting women migrants, by which they are recognised only for the service they provide, and hence low-skilled and low valued (Rajapakse, 2023). The unlimited supply of low-skilled labour from competing sending countries in the face of asymmetric power wielded by receiving countries is a situation that facilitates commodification of migrant labour. Sri Lanka’s National Migration Policy has the protection of workers as a core policy area, which can be made more efficient if sending countries negotiate collectively for their migrant workers’ rights. Turning regional rivalries in South Asia into potential collaborative endeavours, such as the Colombo Process, is imperative (IOM, 2003). [8]

The nature of vulnerabilities as well as the exploitation and abuses that low-skilled workers from the region generally experience is similar despite the differences in their nationalities. South Asian countries need to demand better terms of employment and increased protection for their workers. Most sending countries have ratified conventions and laws aimed at protecting their migrant workers. These are nonetheless ineffectual if destination countries, especially in the Middle East, have not. Developing common solutions, strategies and facilities, such as insisting on domestic work being included in labour laws in destination countries, setting up common safe houses and transit homes in destination countries, in coordination with embassies/diplomatic missions of SAARC Member States need to be done collectively. [9]

Avoiding fiscal austerity

Imposing fiscal austerity measures should be avoided because countercyclical policies are required during the downswing and debt relief measures should be directed towards ensuring such countercyclicality. Regressive indirect taxation measures like value added tax (VAT) that increase prices of essential commodities are anti-poor and anti-women and can inhibit economic recovery. They also have a significant gender dimension for female consumers and producers, since women-run Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises (MSME) are more likely to be unregistered, and therefore less able to redeem tax payments on their inputs, which are already likely to be more expensive as they are buying on a smaller scale. Instead, the structure of taxation can be changed to focus on more progressive taxation, in particular through equitable taxation of multinationals, taxes on extreme wealth, taxes on financial transactions.

Ensuring equitable labour-market participation

Since labour market participation is often at the core of IMF conditions, especially that of women, the country should take measures to ensure equal wages to men and women in both the public and private sectors. There needs to be appropriate measures for internal debt relief, especially for women-owned MSMEs in informal credit arrangements. It is important consider specific requirement of women borrowers and borrowers from previous conflict-zones who are less likely to have collateral and land titles that provide access to credit. It is also important to recognise the very specific needs of women entrepreneurs, especially with regard to access to inputs and markets. For example, facilitating childcare arrangements for working mothers and migrant mothers. Policies need to facilitate greater associations and unions of women workers, both employed, self-employed and migrant.

Considering debt cancellation

Scholars have pointed to the possibility of debts unpayable being cancelled. Debt justice movements across the developing world have urged for the cancellation of all unsustainable and illegitimate debts in a manner that is ambitious, unconditional, and without carrying repercussions for future market access. Past cases show how reducing debt stock and debt payments allow countries to increase their public financing for urgent domestic needs. The IMF’s Debt Sustainability Analysis (DSA), which measures sovereign vulnerability to sovereign debt stress, must incorporate SDG financing needs, climate vulnerabilities as well as human rights and gender equality commitments into its methodology (Ghosh, 2021). Sri Lanka is strengthening ties and membership with the BRICS and this is an opportunity to suggest greater solidarity, cooperation and stronger governance: in other words, opportunity to discuss alternatives to ultraliberal, competitive, market-based economic policies.

Strengthening Justice and Human Rights

It is essential to strengthen Sri Lanka’s Human Rights framework in order to enhance the freedoms of every person by repealing discriminatory laws (for example, 365 and 365A of the Penal Code of Sri Lanka, which criminalise same sex intimacy) and ensuring that the country move away from a military state by repealing the prevention of terrorism act. (Rajasingham Senanayake, 2011). Overall, in keeping with the goal of greater accountability and governance, stakeholders and experts need to be continuously included in participatory, deliberations on decision-making, laws, truth and reconciliation commissions and anti-corruption efforts (Orjuela, 2008).

Conclusion

We need to break the vicious spiral: because there is more power given to external creditors, maintaining investor confidence and avoiding the risk of capital flight are priorities underpinning all macroeconomic policies. As a result, public spending is further curtailed to make sure eventual capital flight can be absorbed without expanding the budget deficit. Consequently, there is lower social security and greater deprivation for many categories of people. Therefore, countries like Sri Lanka, with the greatest need of social protection for its most vulnerable categories of people, spend the least amount on it through public expenditure, which is, on the contrary directed towards debt servicing. [10]

Acknowledging that broader development depends on equitable development and considering the detrimental effects neoliberal policies have exerted in Sri Lanka, Sen’s idea of finding the middle path – combining the advantages of liberal and open economic systems with strong welfare and social protection policies and governance – offers alternative possibilities. Finally, the struggles for debt justice and overall economic justice need to be linked to the struggles for equality and freedom.

Notes

  1. SDG 10 Reduced inequalities: “Inequalities based on income, sex, age, disability, sexual orientation, race, class, ethnicity, religion and opportunity continue to persist across the world. Inequality threatens long-term social and economic development, harms poverty reduction and destroys people’s sense of fulfilment and self-worth. This, in turn, can breed crime, disease and environmental degradation. We cannot achieve sustainable development and make the planet better for all if people are excluded from the chance for a better life”. https://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/inequality/
  2. “The Capability approach judges individual well-being not in terms of goods consumed nor in terms of utility satisfaction, but rather on the realized functions, i.e., the set of alternatives a person has”. In Sen’s words, it is a “perspective of freedom in a positive sense: who can do what” (Sen 1984, 376).
  3. Political crisis because: “This latest round of ‘odious debt’ in Sri Lanka was created by an authoritarian and corrupt government, led by a President who initially fled the country rather than take responsibility for the economic catastrophe he unleashed. If the Pandora papers are anything to go by, a former President and an entire corrupt family clearly accumulated personal wealth at the expense of Sri Lankan people. This is an economic catastrophe that was enabled and facilitated by highly paid financiers at places like Blackrock and other private investment firms, which now hold almost 35% of Sri Lankan external debt. Their windfall profits during a global pandemic indicate the extent to which they have profited at a time of human misery” (K Ruwanpura, 2022). Also, it has been termed odious debt because “much of it is odious debt used to extract funds by both global creditors and local elite, without using it in the interests of the broader citizenry” (Yukthi, 13 May 2024).
  4. “These creditor groups are the Official Creditor Committee of official bilateral lenders (co-chaired by France, India, and Japan), who hold $5.8 billion of Lankan debt; the China Exim Bank ($4.2 billion); other Official Creditors (Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Pakistan – $0.3 billion); ISB holders ($14.2 billion); China Development Bank ($3.2 billion) and other commercial creditors (under $0.2 billion)” (Kuruwita, 2024)
  5. Amartya Sen refers to the “social technology” that enables the economic system to function thanks to the invisible contribution of women performing unpaid work (1991). $10.8 trillion – the total earnings of women’s unpaid care work as reported by Oxfam (2020)
  6. “According to the UNDP report on multidimensional vulnerability of Sri Lankans, as many as 12.34 million people in Sri Lanka (55.7% of Sri Lankans) are multi-dimensionally vulnerable, and yet only 2 million households have been selected as beneficiaries under Aswesuma” (Colombo Urban Lab, 2023).
  7. “In the 2023 budget, the Government allocated LKR 539 billion for defense and public security while household cash transfers and food relief (which includes all the key social welfare programs such as Samurdhi, allowances for elders, disabled, kidney disease, school meal programs and nutrition programs for mothers and children) was allocated LKR 187 billion. Sri Lanka continues to remain one of the countries in the region that spend the least of its GDP on social welfare” (Colombo Urban Lab, 2023).
  8. “The Regional Consultative Process on Overseas Employment and Contractual Labor for Countries of Origin in Asia or the Colombo Process aims to provide a forum for Asian labor-sending countries to (…) Share experiences, lessons learned and best practices on overseas employment and contractual labor; Consult on issues faced by overseas workers, and labor sending and receiving states, and offers practical solutions for the well-being of overseas workers, particularly the vulnerable overseas workers; Optimize development benefits from organized overseas employment, and enhance dialogue with countries of destination; and review and monitor the implementation of the ministerial recommendations and identify further steps for action” (IOM, 2003)
  9. “(…) SAARC countries, including Sri Lanka, have been in a search to find broader regional groupings that are capable of meeting particularly their economic objectives in a sustainable manner. These have included joining organizations such as the BIMSTEC and the IORA. Sri Lanka has most recently sought membership of the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP)” (Colombopage quoted in Ariyasinha, 2023). There are increasing calls that Sri Lanka seeks the membership of the BRICS – the group of emerging economies (Ariyasinha, 2023).
  10. “(…) comparing debt service payments to core social spending (covering expenditure on education, health and social protection). In upper middle income countries, just under half of the amount of social spending was spent on debt service, but in lower middle income countries (where such spending is all the more required) the debt service payments were more than social spending. Shockingly, in the low income countries, debt service payments came to 171 per cent of social spending! These are not just the poorest countries, with significant proportions of absolutely hungry people, but also the most climate-vulnerable countries, which are already experiencing a range of climate-related shocks that affect ordinary people” (Gosh, 2023).

References

Arambepola, C. Romeshun, K. 2019, Debt at My Doorstep: Microfinance Practices and Effects on Women in Sri Lanka, Centre for Poverty Analysis

Ariyarathne, Kaushalya, 2022. Impact of Sri Lanka’s economic crisis on LGBT+ population Employment, Westminster Foundation for Democracy, UK, January

Aryasinha, Ravinatha, 2023, A ‘Global Order’ in Flux: Challenges and Opportunities for Sri Lanka. Lakshman Kadirgama Institute of International Relations and Strategic Studies.

Colombo Urban Lab, 2023. Borrowing to eat. The Impact of Sri Lanka’s economic crisis on Colombo’s working class poor. September

Department of Census and Statistics. 2019. Multidimensional Poverty in Sri Lanka. www.statistics.gov.lk/Poverty/Staticallnfor

Dias, Prashani. 2023. Expert’s Take: Six ways Sri Lanka’s National Action Plan on Women, Peace and Security will support women during crises, UNWomen, Thursday, 8 June

Ghosh, Jayati, 2023. The International Financial System and Women’s Poverty. Background paper for CSW68 Expert Group Meeting | UN Women – Headquarters

Ghosh, Jayati. 2021. Gender concerns in debt relief, IIED, London. Helpage International, 2022.

Sri Lanka’s economic crisis hits older people hard – an urgent call for action Hennayake, Nalani. 2006. Culture, Politics, and Development in Postcolonial Sri Lanka, Lexington Books, Oxford

ILO, 2014. SAARC commits to helping migrant workers, https://www.ilo.org/resource/news/saarc- commitsDhelping-migrant-workers

IMF Executive Board, 2024. IMF Executive Board Concludes 2024 Article IV Consultation with Sri Lanka and Completes the Second Review Under the Extended Fund Facility. https://www.imf.org/en/News/Articles/2024/06/12/pr-24214-sri-lanka-imf-concludes-2024- article-ivDconsultation-completes-2nd-review-under-eff

IOM, 2003. Regional Consultative Process on Overseas Employment and Contractual Labor for Countries of Origin in Asia (Colombo Process). https://www.iom.int/regional-consultative-process- overseasDemployment-and-contractual-labor-countries-origin-asia-colombo-process

Kuruwita, Rathindra, 2024. “Sri Lanka’s Debt Restructuring Deal: Economic Relief or Creditor Windfall?” The Diplomat. https://thediplomat.com/2024/07/sri-lankas-debt-restructuring-deal- economic-relief-orDcreditor-windfall/

Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, 2024, Sri Lanka: Transformational changes needed for accountability and reconciliation – UN report. https://www.ohchr.org/en/press- releases/2024/08/sriDlanka-transformational-changes-needed-accountability-and-reconciliation

Orjuela, Camilla, 2008. The Identity Politics of Peacebuilding: Civil Society in War-Torn Sri Lanka. Sage Publications.

Rajapakse, Nadeera. 2023. “Women Migrant Workers and Market Forces: Toward an Inter­disciplinary Representation of Female Labor Migration,” Research in the History of Economic Thought and Methodology, volume 41, pages 3-25, Emerald Group Publishing Limited.

Rajasingham Senanayake, Darini. 2011. “Is Post-War Sri Lanka Following the ‘Military Business Model’”. Economic and Political Weekly, April 2-8, Vol. 46, No. 14, pp. 27-30

Ratha,                     Dilip.                    2023.                      Resilient                                Remittances,         IMF.

https://www.imf.org/en/Publications/fandd/issues/2023/09/B2B-resilient-remittances-dilip-ratha

Revollo, P.E. 2020. Time to Care: Methodology note. Oxfam. https://www.google.com/url? sa=t&source=web&rct=j&opi=89978449&url=https://oxfamilibrary.openrepository.com/bitstrea m/handle/10546/620928/rr-time-to-care-methodology-200120-

en.pdf&ved=2ahUKEwjk4PjJ_rGJAxVVRaQEHTvhOKIQFnoECBUQAQ&usg=AOvVaw3epYjJj4 vVyW pH5VH3vZmv

Ruwanpura, K, Muchhala, B, & Rao, S. 2022. Gendering the debt crisis: Feminists on Sri Lanka’s financial crisis, https://developingeconomics.org/2022/12/02/gendering-the-debt-crisis-feminists-on- sri-lankasDfinancial-crisis /

Sen, Amartya. 1999. Development as Freedom. New York: Alfred Knopf

Sen, Amartya. 1991. On Ethics and Economics, Blackwell Publishers, Oxford.

Weeraratne, Bilesha. 2022. Good Riddance to the FBR: What Next to Increase Migrant Remittances to Sri Lanka? Jul 04,https://www.ips.lk/talkingeconomics/?author=42,

Yukthi 2024, YUKTHI Calls for Rejecting the Recent Bond Deal, https://yukthisl.org/yukthi-calls- forQrejecting-the-recent-bond-deal/

Yukthi, 2024, A platform for working people in Sri Lanka’s economic crisis. 13 May.

https://yukthisl.org/debt-justice

ABORTIVE CHENA SETTLEMENTS IN THE KÄGALLA DISTRICT 

DURING THE LATE 19th AND EARLY 20th CENTURIES

By Eric P. Meyer

The following paper completes the previous article on Chena cultivation and its repression in Colonial Ceylon

In the colonial Ceylon context, a settlement is theoretically a contractual decision arrived at between a representative of the colonial government (‘the Crown’) and a claimant, peasant or landlord, or a purchaser from them, recognizing private title to the land claimed or deciding the land to be ‘at the disposal of the Crown’. The ‘contract’ is generally unequal, the power of the Crown being stronger than that of the subject, but the judicial system offers opportunities for the latter to defend his rights. Settlement may be analyzed purely in terms of rational administration, a typical 19th century tendency which led European powers to introduce, instead of undefined customary rights, the concept of absolute property in their colonies after imposing it at home. But it can be understood as a tool legitimizing the appropriation of land by right of conquest for colonial purposes. The concept of land as territory with fixed boundaries, and not as a means of production, was implicit in the ‘Roman-Dutch’ law system imposed by the Dutch on the Low country of Ceylon, but was rather new in the former Kandyan kingdom, although in its border areas, such as the Kägalla district, the situation was more complex. Establishing the legal status of a land involved specific operations: surveying the land, naming it, measuring its area (and not estimating as before its ‘sowing extent’), mapping it, before defining its owner. These operations were never completed on a systematic basis for want of method, means and political will, and they resulted in a mess which suited the interests of the planting industry[1].

The starting point of all that is the policy pursued after the annexation of the Kandyan kingdom and the subsequent rebellion of 1819, at the initiative of D’Oyly, the first British resident at Kandy, to let the people (local and low country) fell the ‘forbidden forests’ (tahansi käle) which served as a bulwark for the Kandyan kings to develop guerilla activities against invaders. Hatarakorale (‘the Four counties’) and Tunkorale (‘the Three counties’) were essential in that respect, located as they were along the shortest route from Colombo to Kandy.

In the Kandyan times, the area was disputed between the Western powers (first Portuguese, then Dutch) and Kandy, and was therefore often depopulated and repopulated. A side aspect of the policy of the Kandyan kings was to employ several categories of ‘low caste’ people (collectively known as Duraya – the name given to their headmen and used as a generic) to guard the paths and to act as porters; among these people were Kande minissu (hillmen), local Hakuru, palm sugar tappers with a good knowledge of the jungle, and Panna living in hilly areas, distinct from Batgama, paddy cultivators attached to royal villages. The area was caste-mixed, the Goyigama being in the majority but many of them belonging to a lower stratum of the caste (naides – the term erroneously reserved for artisan castes by most authors was widely employed in Hatarakorale for Goyigama living in free villages – koralegam – but subject to service) ; apart from the various Duraya  and the Goyigama, there were a few Karawa and a few Moor villages, both engaged in trade, a couple of Salagama villages engaged in cinnamon peeling, and a few Berava/Nekati villages usually connected with temple property[2].  

In his diary of October 1916, the Assistant Government Agent H.A. Burden, after reading the diaries of his predecessors, wrote[3]: “During the time of Mr. Price and for about 30 years the chief source of worry to the Assistant Government Agents – as is quite apparent from a perusal of their diaries, was the alienation of their chena lands by the villagers and the creation of a landless and improvident class of people. There was therefore a continuous attempt to hedge round the chena settlements with such conditions as would tend to restrict the alienation of the chena lands. One of such conditions was to allow the right of chena cultivation only (…) These precautions have not prevented the alienation of many thousands of acres of chena lands settled in such a way. The attempt to make the Kandyan villager thrifty in spite of himself (sic) is not an undertaking which is likely to achieve much success”

That these ‘abortive’ settlements left deep traces in the minds of the villagers is shown by the note found in the diary of 1937 of the Settlement Officer Jansz regarding the village of Malwana[4]: “A number of villagers of the Batgama caste refused to sign agreements under the Land Settlement Ordinance of 1931. They profess not to be dissatisfied with the settlements offered but are unwilling to put their signature to any agreement. It is a recollection of the position following certain Forest settlements made by Mr. Ievers which they bring forward as reason for their refusal.” In this case as in others, the settlement (actually by Booth and not Ievers) had never been given official sanction.

Successive and contradictory settlements such are those of Dorawaka, Pallegama, and Edurapota resulted in a mess. In Edurapota, which was initially a feudal (saramaru) village[5] “The village was the subject of an informal settlement by Mr. Wace as Assistant Government Agent in 1884. The overlord and tenants repudiated this settlement which had no legal value and Mr. Price settled the village again in 1888 as Forest Settlement officer, which was slightly different from Mr. Wace’s. This settlement was duly proclaimed but owing to some irregularity was declared ultra vires. Proceedings were to be started again but the papers got lost and the villagers received instructions to cultivate any land to which they had title. After that date I find that several blocks of land declared private by Mr. Wace and Mr. Price have been surveyed and sold by the Crown”

The erratic land policy pursued by the colonial administration in the Kägalla district is a clear example of the contradictions of the system, which was actually driven by the wishes of the planters but candidly considered by some naïve administrators to function for the sole benefit of the peasantry.

In the years following the enactment of the ordinance 12 of 1840, government interference was limited to the rare cases when a coffee planter wished to acquire land in the mid-country, which was then considered a second choice compared with virgin up-country land: a kind of rough and arbitrary block division was made on the spot, with little regard to the claims of the local villagers: a typical case is that of Berawila, detailed in a previous chapter on land-grabbing by coffee estates in the Kägalla district. But there was no systematic attempt to survey and settle all high lands.

By the end of the 1850, the property of lands belonging to temples (especially to the Kandy Maha devalaya in the Kägalla district) was reviewed by Government and surveyed; the title of many lands given to the temples was rejected by the Commission and these lands were appropriated by the Crown, while large areas recognized private could be leased to planters by temple trustees.   

By the mid-1860s, when highland for coffee became scarce in the upper districts, colonial administrators such as Frederick Saunders envisioned the forcible appropriation of whole areas in the mid-country on the basis of ordinance 12 of 1840, and this policy was put into practice with much difficulty by his successors (Lee, King, Dowson, Pennycuick) between 1871 and 1877, on the basis of systematic surveys, especially in the Kelani Valley, but  it was then found that the ordinance of 1840 was unworkable without the agreement of the villagers.

When Saunders became Government Agent of the Western Province (from 1879 to 1890), an energetic Assistant Agent, Ievers, followed by Murray, Le Mesurier and Wace, backed by the new governor Arthur Gordon (later lord Stanmore) invented a new system of ‘block settlement’ which partitioned highlands on the basis of needs of the villagers and with their agreement (or rather that of their headmen) with little regard to the letter of the ordinance, and in a context of crisis of the plantation industry. The result was to demarcate two blocks of highlands, one which the Crown could sell to planters, the other which was supposed to be reserved for the use of the villagers.

During the next decade, with the growing demand of land for tea, the sale of Crown blocks was soon followed by the sale by villagers of their supposedly inalienable chenas. With the arrival of more ‘pro-peasant’ revenue officers, such as Price, Booth and Davidson, attempts were made to curb the process by applying the Forest Ordinance of 1885 which was not devised for that purpose.

By the end of the century, the southern part of the district (Tunkorale and Pata Bulatgama) was practically left to the tea planters, but the administration still attempted to block the development of plantations in the more populous northern part and to enforce the reservations in the upper reaches of the rivers (the Kälerata).

This policy again ended in failure, in the context of a demand for rubber land, and the administration was compelled or chose to legalize the planter’s acquisition of village land by issuing Certificates of Quiet Possession (CQPs) on payment, except in the case of the Kälerata, which was settled with much difficulty under the Waste Lands Ordinance of 1897 by the Land Settlement Department in the 1930s.

Administratively speaking, the lessons drawn from the failure of the experiments made in the Kägalla district led to the 1897 ordinance and the setting up of the Land Settlement Department. But politically speaking, the whole exercise was doomed from the start by the contradictions of the colonial system, which at the same time arbitrarily vested land rights in ‘the Crown’, encouraged the planter’s enterprise and attempted to protect the local peasantry. In the drama there were three actors with shifting alliances, or rather four because the legal profession acted often independently from the actors it was supposed to support.

 

Chena surveys and settlements upon wattoru: 1873-1878[6]

The ‘chena question’ became in the early 1870 a major issue in the colonial administration of the Kägalla district ; the policy of Saunders in 1863-64 was a forerunner of what was to lead to a general ‘un-settlement’ of high lands in an area where they were integrated into the village ecology more than in the upper districts. This was the result of a convergence of factors : the new demand for land at mid-elevation by the planters, first of coffee, then of tea (rubber impacted the demand only during the second part of the 1890s) ; the inconsistent interpretation of the land ordinance of 1840 and the extension of älvi (hill paddy) cultivation in the district ; and the ‘victorian’ methods of the colonial administration : this is the period when the first population census was undertaken; the idea of ‘settlement’ became a driving force. But all these attempts at control ended in failure and the result opened the way to a large-scale appropriation of land by outsiders, which impeded in many cases the transformation of highlands into gardens and household plots by the local villagers.

The clumsy attempts at repression of chena cultivation between 1870 and 1873 under Lee and King had led to resistance and near-famine conditions especially in the Tunkorale and Pata Bulatgama areas as explained in the previous chapter. It was then proposed by the Assistant Agent Aelian King and the Government Agent of the Western province to set up a regular mechanism of settlement based on systematic surveys. The Survey department, a colonial institution linked with the planters, was principally used to demarcate the blocks of lands sold by the Crown to planters, and was reluctant to undertake such an unfamiliar task.  The project was started in August 1873 in Tunkorale and Pata Bulatgama (the Kelani river basin), beginning with the villages close to the roads accessible from Ruanwella, ‘with a young and inexperienced staff’ made up of private licensed surveyors specially recruited for the task : Kavanagh, Durnford, White, Philip Francis Ondaatje[7], De Silva, Willams under the direction of D.G. Mantell, and later Ondaatje, Ch Patterson, R. Langslow, J.G. Koch, W.H. Mackenzie, under the supervision of W.A.B. Fryers (the son of the Surveyor general…).

In practice, the surveyors were guided by the Ratemahatmaya (chief headman) M.B. Ekneligoda. In a first phase, every plot in cultivation was to be surveyed but this was soon abandoned for a block survey of chenas of different ages without regard to individual claims. The decision was taken “to survey chenas in blocks village by village wherever the chenas of a village are so distributed; to survey chenas of every age recording on the plan the approximate age of each”; and to demarcate rectangular blocks to avoid encroachments, while the real chenas were generally rounded[8]. In addition to the practical difficulties of demarcating the areas, some surveyors were not reliable (Kavanagh was so negligent and troublesome that he was suspended). The Administration reports of the Surveyor General show that while initially the survey was planned lot by lot it was later decided to block survey “for the settlement of such worthless lands”; the ‘rejected temple lands’ were surveyed at the same time with a view to put them up for sale. It became soon evident that survey work was done in the interests of prospective planters, who were connected with the Survey department: in the words of D.G. Mantell “7,000 acres of forest saved from destruction by chena cultivators will be purchased by planters of robusta coffee and of tea and were already visited by several capitalists” [9]. In November 1873, detailed surveys were restarted and Mantell complained of contradictory instructions in a letter to the Surveyor General.

An enquiry by the Assistant Agents followed the survey, but the instructions given were confusing. It was not initially to be a settlement with the claimants, but a decision from above by the administration. In practice, the first chena enquiries of the 1870s made under the Assistant Agents King, Pennycuick and Dawson (actually by the Ratemahatmaya Ekneligoda), and supervised by Saunders, former Assistant at Kägalla and now Government Agent of the Western province, show a strict application of the ordinance of 1840, with the clear intention of reserving as much lands as possible for the Crown with a view to sell them to planters, while recognizing the validity of wattoru (receipts of payment of paddy tax) as proof of ownership. When there were wattoru of less than 20 years (generally dated of the 1860s), the chenas were ‘allowed’. In some cases small chena plots were allowed as appurtenances to paddy fields: Kudagama (Dehigampal) offers an example of a chena enquiry of 1875 by Ekneligoda which appears to take into account the concept of appurtenance[10].

Another procedure was possible “in case of chenas generally possessed simply under claim supposed to be won by repeated occupation: 1. Find the number of families in the village 2. Find the extent of paddy land for each family and taking the admitted proportion of chena to paddy land, apportionate an extent of chena land for the whole village somewhat greater. If the survey be in excess of this, let it be reduced with regard to the adoption of the most well-defined boundaries, or with regard to the reservation of soil best suited for the growth of timber”. But this procedure was rarely followed because it involved an in-depth study which the administration was not prepared to undertake.

Regarding ‘old’ gardens, for which there were no tax receipts because they were not cultivated with älvi, the practice was to give a Certificate of Quiet Possession on compulsory payment of survey fees : see for example in the village of Kahanawita, lot 2237 “Old garden more than 50 years, fully planted. Certificate of no claim will be granted on payment of survey fees. Advertise if not paid” (signed Saunders).  Arbitrary decisions were frequent, under the influence of the chief headman, as in the case of the small village of Degalatiriya, near Undugoda, where claims to chenas were ‘rejected’ in 1873 for want of a sannasa, in spite of the village being registered as a nindagama. The decisions were delivered in an abrupt way, like those of the Temple lands commission, without taking into account the position of the villagers: they were not in the nature of settlements. A question constantly raised in these chena enquiries was that of the ‘new gardens’ which were created as an answer to demographic growth. When there were wattoru for the chena on which the garden was created, the land could be allowed as private but when there was no tax receipt (for example for rejected temple lands), the administration usually demanded the sale at half improved value. The files of the ‘chena cases’ kept in the Kägalla kacceri show a systematic refusal by the authorities to recognize the rights of the villagers in the case of recent transformation of chenas into gardens, and the theoretical assertion of Crown property over most of the chena areas. But the system was soon found to be not only unjust, but also unworkable.

In December 1873, it was also decided to select special headmen to look after chena cultivation, and the Assistant Agent Dawson, successor of Aelian King, published a series of rules relating to their role in distributing licenses and seizing crops “illegally raised on Crown lands” – an unworkable bureaucratic mechanism[11]. These headmen were selected with the idea that they would act in surveyed villages. But further correspondence in 1874 admitted that “the appointment of these headmen has not prevented or checked forest clearings to any extent”, and that their authority ran parallel to that of the regular headmen, which complicated things[12]. The administration reports for 1874 and 1875 are quite clear on the impact of the repressive policy which had become much harsher with the progress of surveys[13]: “The people compelled by a strict enforcement of the orders of government to abandon to a great extent the cultivation of chenas, gave more attention to their fields”. “In Pata Bulatgama, there must have been a scarcity of food, but it was relieved, I hear, by emigration to the neighbouring coffee estates of much of its adult population during the year, and so avoided calamity. The cultivation of high lands in this division should I think be liberally regarded.”

Regarding the settlement work, the same reports noticed that “the people have not responded willingly to the notice of government to attend and prove their claims. Very many absented themselves and their claims were in consequence rejected”. Pennycuick in the report for 1876 noted that the progress of the survey was too slow and that settlement was often difficult owing to confusion in names ; it is only in the report for 1879 that his successor Ievers considered that, with the help of Ekneligoda, the chena enquiries were accepted and even sought for by the villagers. The poor quality of the surveys sometimes gave rise to contestations by the villagers: the case of Kappagoda sales in 1872 is very typical[14]. In this ‘rejected’ temple village inhabited by Duraya and Muslim villagers, some of whom had sold their lands to a certain P.G. Fernando mudaliyar, the surveyor had included as Crown lands for sale paddy fields and gardens “because he could not take the proper bearings”

A regular difficulty was absenteeism of the claimants, especially of Duraya villagers as in the case of Dannorukanda; they were supposedly ‘noticed in advance’, but as the notice was delivered by high caste headmen, one can suspect that it was often not properly done: then the land was declared Crown and these headmen were in a position to point them to planters and pocket benefits for themselves: this is probably how Ekneligoda (and later Mideniya) became affluent. It is quite clear that corruption was the result of colonial interference in land matters, and not the cause of poor performance of the administration in land matters. The case of Narangala, a remote Panna village in Pata Bulatgama, settled by Dawson in 1874, is an example of the repressive policy pursued by the administration and of the resistance of Duraya villagers: Vikrampedige Goma petitioned against the chena headman who failed to notice him : because he was absent for the enquiry, the rocky highland adjoining his paddy field “never sown with paddy but with amu seed which is used by the meanest and poorly class of people every two or three years” was taken to the Crown. This chena had been converted by him into ‘peasant’ coffee: proof of the enterprise of these villagers living in contact with planters of the Dolosbage district; finally the enquiry was reopened and the land was given to the claimant on payment of ¼ share. Another case of resistance in the same area was that of Badahela (potters) and Vahumpura villagers of Pilawela and Rangalla: they opposed the claim of a high caste clan, the Dissanekge, who pretended that the highlands of these villages belonged to them on the basis of a sannasa. The document was found by the Courts to be a forgery, but it is the Crown and not the villagers who appropriated the lands which were subsequently sold to a planter[15]

Many high caste villagers were not better treated,  especially along the road leading up-country along the Kelani river where early purchases by colonial administrators and by low-country traders were frequent:  in Gomanduwa, a small Goyigama village near Yatiyantota (“2 pangu, 5 families, only 6 pelas of mud land”), most of the chenas were declared Crown in the 1877 chena enquiry and many gardens were sold at half improved value: “the land to the south of the road belongs to Mr. Anstruther (…) who is said to have bought it from Mr. Power who bought it in 1841” (Both these gentlemen were government servants). Another village in the same area, Karawudeniya, a rejected nindagama, has been sold by the Goyigama to Moors after a dramatic flooding.

In a critical analysis of these settlements on wattoru[16], the Assistant Agent Ievers posted at Kägalla in 1878 reported that the extent to which title was shown was only a small proportion of the whole chena area, impossible to locate and broken in small patches: the settlement was on paper, and assented to in so far as the villagers knew it was not put into practice. “I believe the existing system to be absolutely useless as a settlement” The report gives an history of the chena surveys, (first chenas were surveyed separately, then range by range), and describes the procedure: “on the day of the enquiry, all the claimants being present, I proceed to decide what chenas are private property and what are Crown (… ) the burden of ownership lies on the claimant, he may show title in four ways : by producing sannas, by producing deed of gift or purchase giving a prescriptive right, by custom which gives an appurtenance of highlands to a paddy field, by proof of payment of tax within 20 years ; practically only this fourth proof is adduced (…) but the full tax is hardly ever paid owing to the venality of the assessors who underassess the extents actually cultivated (…) When the claimant gives notice that he is about to clear a chena, the Ratemahatmaya permits him to clear the extent given in the list, but the claimant then goes and clears as much as he pleases and wherever he pleases, as the village headman is sure not to make any objection, or if he does, his scruples are easily removed (…) Nothing remains but an elaborate settlement on paper (…) If by chance the Crown is sufficiently ill advised to go to law, a recent decision of the Supreme court (…) will send the defendant triumphant to his village” “The present survey is quite unremunerative (…) The land declared Crown cannot be put up for sale, mixed up with private land (…) The present system is fruitful in irritation and an objectionable feeling of insecurity and unsettledness among the people, who finds the chenas which they believe to be theirs partly ‘become Crown’. The Crown decides against their title but cannot enforce its own possession (…) To decide according to the strictest letter of the law has proved useless and has only been acquiesced in by the people because the decision has been a dead letter and allows them to do as they please.”

 

Chena block settlements, or the contradictions of ‘dualism in action’.

Ievers was the first in the district not to restrict himself, like his predecessors, to legal considerations, and to devise a form of planning taking into account socio-economic factors (a process later formalized by the Land Settlement Officers as ‘mapping out’). He was initially supported by Layard, Government Agent of the Western province, and later by Gordon (later Lord Stanmore), Governor of Ceylon from 1883 to 1890, but Saunders, who succeeded Layard, was rather skeptical: “all this money and time are absolutely thrown away unless the agreements are made legally binding”[17]

Ievers experimented his plan in the remote village of Welihelatenne[18]:  “I admit that the claimants can show title to a very small portion of the chenas, that in fairness they must be given sufficient for the support of their families and that consequently, the Crown will allow them more than they can show title to. I proceed to find out how many families there are in the village, the extent of paddy lands and gardens, and the extent of the chenas. From these data I decide what extent of chenas they should be allowed, taking everything into consideration. Where paddy fields are very few and comparatively unfertile, the people must of necessity cultivate chenas, but it should be the object of government to restrict such to the narrowest limits. After the agreement is signed by the headman and the family heads, the Crown block is demarcated”. The settlement of Hatnapitiya (Tunkorale)[19] provides a precise example of calculation of villagers’ needs in a small Goyigama village of the Panawal korale: 7 families have 3 acres 20 perches of irrigated paddy and a chena area of 825 acres; each family needs 2 pelas a year of chenas x 10 years (the interval between two cultivations) x 7 families = 140 pelas = 280 acres, considered as ‘a most liberal allowance’: the balance of 545 acres is taken as Crown land.

The difference between the early ‘settlements’ on wattoru and the new chena block settlements imagined by Ievers are clear from the case of Paradeniya[20], a small village with 14 houses, one Goyigama panguwa of 4 families and one Vahumpura panguwa, near Mattamagoda. Paradeniya was settled three times: under the old chena enquiry system by Pennycuick (7.07.1877); under the block chena settlement system by Ievers (24.04.1884); under the Forest settlement system by Booth (26.05.1893). The detailed settlements lot by lot in the first settlement show the results of a settlement upon wattoru, which decided to be Crown all the highlands even those regularly cultivated such as owiti (wet valleys) because owiti and chenas cultivated with amu and kurakkan did not pay taxes ; even coconut gardens of less than 5 years were declared Crown ; coconut gardens of less than 20 years growth were also settled at half improved value. In the block settlement made by Ievers seven years later, it was decided that “a block of 127 acres in the north will be sufficient as the Crown land in this village”, and the rest was allowed to the villagers; this was confirmed nine years later in the Forest settlement.

The major innovation was to divide village land into two blocks, with the idea to give the Crown the possibility to sell a compact part of the village highlands to planters: the ideology behind the move was that of ‘dualism’[21]. Ievers was still of opinion that the object of government was “to restrict chena to the narrowest limits and prevent the hitherto desultory and nomadic cultivation”. He thus justified his plan: “Land is now in much request and is daily becoming more valuable in the Tunkorale, applications are numerous, as the soil and climate are eminently suitable for tea, liberian coffee and cocoa. Several estates have already been opened and are very promising. But land remains tied up, owing to the present impossibility of settling the native claims, and planters will not purchase small isolated pieces”. That this consideration was always in the background when settlements were made on these lines is clearly shown in the diaries, as in the example the Patberiya settlement[22] : “I took as Crown block a piece of about 200 acres divided off from village on east by Gomala Oya and adjoining the Crown block at Hatnapitiya. The two together make a fine compact block of about 750 acres which will be very valuable some day for tea”. In the margin, the Governor Gordon, who read the diaries before returning them to their authors, wrote: “good”.[23]

But the settlement process imagined by Ievers, which requested the acquiescence of the villagers, soon ran into problems. The vivid details given in his diaries show how difficult it was to explain to the villagers the rationale of a system of settlement imagined from above which was so much at variance with the land practices of the Kandyan peasants: “It takes at least three hours patient talk and reiteration before a village settlement can be made and the same points and explanations gone over and over twenty times before they really understand”[24]. In practice Ievers was assisted by M.B. Ekneligoda, the Ratemahatmaya of the Tunkorale and Pata Bulatgama, whose integrity was soon suspected by the villagers. A major problem arose in villages where the settlement deprived certain pangu[25] of the area in which they used to cultivate: “pangukarayo would disagree between themselves and if they decline to accept a compact block of chenas in place of their small scattered pieces scattered all over the village mixed up with Crown land, the officer making the settlement could not compel them”. There was a basic discrepancy between the actual chena practices (varying according to localities) and the rational system of surveys and establishment of property rights implied by the colonial logic. The Ievers settlement system totally ignored the fact that in many large villages, each panguva used to cultivate chenas in specific ranges, and that no collective decision by a gansabhava (village council) always convened by high caste chiefs often opposed by coterie rivalries could be imposed.

Ievers was replaced momentarily by Baumgartner, who mentioned that chena surveys had been stopped when he took over. He added: “The apportionment of the private block among all the claimants was left to be settled by the Ratemahatmaya and the village council (…) In not a single instance has the Ratemahatmaya of Tunkorale been able to effect a settlement owing to the refusal of those in possession of the block assigned to the villagers to give any share of it to others. In the case of 27 villages referred to him, he had to report in September 1881 that in every instance there were people who objected to a division, the very people who had signed the agreement at the time of the enquiry. There being no legal power to enforce the written agreements, it was useless attempting any further settlements”[26]. Other unresolved issues were the question of mortgages or leases on lands included in the Crown block, of people who had not signed the agreement returning to the village, and more generally of the arbitrary and extra-legal character of the settlement process, which could not be legalized by an ordinance.  The result was again that the authority was jeopardized and that only the hard fact of plantation clearing would enforce these paper settlements.

Returning to the district, Ievers in his report for 1882 defended his plan saying that “the conflicting claims of the villagers and the Crown had been arranged in 71 villages, 15,020 acres recovered as Crown property, and already 1,977 acres sold ; the villagers with a few unavoidable exceptions are satisfied with the settlement (…) capital is attracted into the country and barren wastes of jungle are formed into flourishing tea estates. During the year under review, I have only made settlements where the villagers asked me to do so, or where the planters applied for tracts of chena land partly claimed by the villagers”. In the first settlements effected by Ievers after 1883, he explained his method to the Governor Gordon, as in the case of the village of Pannila: “In making chena settlements one of two courses must be pursued : 1. To treat all claims from the strictly legal point of view and only admit title to such lands as it can be shown that the customary tax has been paid within 20 years or by virtue of a Crown grant or sannasa [It is how Dawson and Pennycuick worked]. 2. To treat the claim upon a communal basis and give a fair share to the pangukarayo, defining accurately the limits of the communal lands. I have made the chena settlement of this district upon the latter basis as I consider the former to be inequitable, and the villagers in fact in almost every case have agreed to my settlement (…) It is to avoid constant disputes between the villagers and the Crown claims, where neither can definitely say “this is Crown” or “this is communal land” that I have made these settlements, and the system has worked very well. If the agreement be cancelled, each man must produce his wattoru before the Ratemahatmaya, after giving notice to the chena headman of the extent he means to clear, and if he clears more than what appears in the wattoru, he is liable to prosecution if he clears any jungle over 20 years old ; and in fact the want of settlement gives rise to constant worry and annoyance both to villagers and headmen and the Assistant Agent”[27].

In his Administration report for 1884 the new Agent Wace made a case for pushing the settlement of the district[28] : “The definite settlement of village claims has too long be deferred already, to the great damage of Crown lands and the demoralization of the villagers (…) Government rights are necessarily in suspension as long as such claims remain undecided and the private capitalist is shut out as he is between two claimants he does not know with which to deal. The wealth of this district is in its gardens and highlands and it is a policy attended with loss both to the Crown and the public to neglect any longer the definite land settlement of their district. I would commence with Tunkorale and Pata Bulatgama, where villagers are chiefly dependent on älvi for food supply, and where the demand for government land is greatest.”

But when a village was large, multi-caste, divided between rival families, and prospected by would-be planters, such as Pannila, it was difficult to reach a settlement[29]. As early as March 1872, Goyigama villagers had petitioned the Governor against the first wave of chena repression and the answer of the colonial administration was:  “the petitioners be informed that there is no intention to interfere with their property in chena and that they are perfectly at liberty to do as they please with their own. It is necessary however to impose a check on the promiscuous occupation of crown lands and the wanton destruction of timber for worthless purpose, and with this view, chenaing any such land without a license cannot be permitted”. Twelve years later, Ievers  undertook to settle these chena lands and reported: “Pannila is a large village with flourishing fine gardens and people in good sort ; but mud land in this korale is very little (…) Great difficulty in making settlement : 7 pangu, 26 families, 1555 acres : 20 acres of paddy, 69 acres of garden, 1191 acres of chenas,  273 acres of forest ( 3 large pieces in the east), so to preserve them I took a block of about 200 acres (actually 354 acres) surrounding them. Had to talk for about 2 hours before I could get a few recalcitrants to sign agreement. These settlements whenever they are made legal should be sufficient if 4/5 of the pangukarayo agree. I now have to get unanimity and this entails great loss of time in talk before they can be convinced.”   “The 837 acres allowed as private was divided between 3 gamwasam and the Vahumpura panguwa; one of the gamwasam received 500 acres and none of it was taken to the Crown. On the other hand, one of the gamwasam was entirely taken to the Crown. As a compensation, when the 350 acres of the Crown block was settled under the WLO, 37 acres was allowed out of the Crown block to the gamwasama entirely taken”. But the representatives of the Mahagamarallage alias Mahagamwasama panguwa “of the class known as village proctors”, who would lose 8 amunam in the division out of the 11 amunam of chenas they claimed, refused to sign the settlement. In their petition of 27.09.1884, they affirmed that their right to cultivate chenas as members of a high caste family who rendered feudal services was registered in a lekammitiya, that they paid tax at 1/14 for their chenas, that they could not pay survey fees. They recalled that in 1872 being obstructed in the cultivation of their chenas they petitioned the governor and apparently obtained satisfaction. The Governor Gordon commented on this report: “I quite agree with the principle enunciated in this very clear and full report, and am anxious that these communal chenas should be established if consent can be obtained. But a general consent is necessary to the working of the system successfully. I do not agree except in a very restricted sense with the opinion expressed in the minute of 1872 and the villagers should be made to understand that while the chenas may be ‘their own’ to use, they are not their own to alienate”.  The end of the story, according to the Kägalla kacceri file, is characteristic of the failure of the process of settlement in this case. In 1887 the gamwasama panguwa petitioned again and the new Assistant Agent Price reported that “cases of this description have frequently occurred in these unformal settlements which provide for the decision of all disputes by a reference to a gansabhava. If the petitioners are unable to obtain redress in that manner, they must wait till the Forest Settlement Officer deals with Pannila”. In November1889, Price reported on another petition of the Mahagamarallage panguwa which complained that a larger area of chena lands was taken from it than from other pangu; the Agent considered that there was a real grievance but that the expression of their hardships was as usual in a petition largely exaggerated. In 1896, Pannila Mahagame Appuhami re-petitioned and said that in any case the panguwa would cultivate these chenas taken by Crown. This time, the Vahumpura panguwa made a similar request, recalling that they had signed the settlement on the condition that they would be given other lands. In reports of 28.03.1896 and 19.05.96, the new chief headman Mideniya confirmed what they said and “failed to settle the dispute” even by holding a gansabhava. Shortly afterwards (12.06.96), the Assistant Agent Davidson wrote to A.J.R. de Soysa, a well-known land speculator: “I have been informed by certain villagers of Pannila that it is your intention to buy from a dismissed aracci of Pannila, Punchirala, a range of the village chenas. These chenas were especially reserved with villagers for chena cultivation. It is to my personal knowledge that the distribution of chenas based on this settlement has been made impossible in its operation  by the ex-aracci Punchirala, and the deprivation of their shares of this chena is calculated to turn some of the villagers into vagrants and thieves”  But Punchirala meanwhile sold on 25.08.1896, to various intermediaries (KDJ Perera and S Velayden Chetty about 150 or 200 acres, and 280 acres to Thomis Appu, another shopkeeper), and Davidson wrote to them that the sale was invalid; they waited until a change of Assistant agent and in  September 1906, they resold the lands to two British planters, G. Talbot and L. Bayly, who asked the government for a Certificate of Quiet Possession in April 1907.

In the case of Morawatte, a village located close to the town of Ruanwella, the situation was still more complex because influent planters, local land brokers, and a possibly unscrupulous civil servant were involved[30].  The first settlement had been made in 1879 by Ievers, but “in defiance of their agreement and subsequent decisions of the gansabhava, the villagers who were in possession of the village block declined to allow any portion of it to those who gave up their lands to the Crown (…) It seems that some village proctors among them have advised the others to resist”. These Crown lands made up of numerous small lots were sold by auction by the Assistant Agent Le Mesurier in December 1885 and were aggregated to form Ruanwella estate. The purchaser was T.N. Christie, the chairman of the Ceylon Planter’s Association from 1885 to 1888, who had been previously in affairs with Le Mesurier. One of these lots was an old coconut garden erroneously included in the survey, another a new garden which the villagers failed to keep to themselves, trying to bid against Christie. In spite of petitions against the sale, Christie attempted to take possession of the land and tried to obtain from government that the adverse claims be compensated and silenced; the offer was refused by the villagers: they were supported by a contractor formerly employed on the estate, called Baron Perera, who bought their rights and fought in court ; then government asked Christie to desist after being reimbursed, which he refused “because it will impair the value of his estate”. Cases ensued which were won by the villagers. Meanwhile Christie, himself a land speculator, had resold half his estate to one Mrs. Drummond-Deane in 1887. They both brought the affair before the Colonial Office in London and were finally awarded handsome damages. Le Mesurier was later accused of being the real owner and Christie a figurehead.

In 1884, block settlement was undertaken in Beligal, a section of Hatarakorale (Kiraweli and Kandupita pattu)[31]; population was denser, chenas lands were more scattered and the planters were less pressing to obtain fresh land than in Tunkorale. The project soon ran into difficulties. Some land had already been sold or appropriated by the government, as in Pindeniya, (21.04.1884). In Nikapitiya the village obtained all its remaining high lands in view of the fact that most its chenas had been seized and sold by the Crown after the Temple Lands commission. When the paddy land was extensive and chena land was not, all the chenas were recognized private on the principle of appurtenance (Digogedara, 2.04.1884, Bopetta 7.04.1884). When Crown blocks were demarcated they were generally much smaller (Kiridena, Epalotutuwa, Kinigama, Kanatuwawala, Harigala, 22-23.04.1884; Naranwatte 17.05.1884). When fields, gardens and chenas were mixed, settlement was difficult and might be abandoned (Tambadiya, Kanatuwawala, Kinigama: “any block settlement would be very difficult. I think none is necessary and the Crown claim to chenas might be abandoned as the extent of high land in proportion to mud land is not excessive”. “I do not think any block of Crown chenas can be formed in this village. There is no forest in the village nor in adjoining villages. I would recommend that claims be allowed.”  In Lahupone the settlement was abandoned until 1893. All these villages were inhabited by Goyigama and Vahumpura peasants, who cultivated chenas separately: block settlements created problems between the two groups as in Epalatotuwa, where the Vahumpura panguwa felt discriminated against by the decision of the gansabhava, saying that they had lost 17 acres in the process, while the other pangu have benefitted.

The case of the large village of Maha Pallegama (25.04.1884), populated by Goyigama and a few Vahumpura peasants, was singular: on the basis of the former status of the village as royal , “the people desire a settlement to have the chenas alotted to them without Crown claim” ; and indeed on the appurtenance basis all chenas could be recognized private. In this and the neighbouring villages Kuda Pallegama (entirely Vahumpura), Udagama, and Pelpita, Crown blocks of about 50 acres were carved out but the settlement was finally abandoned.  

Disputes between owners and tenants made settlements impossible or difficult in formerly feudal villages such as Malwana (24.09.1884), a large nindagama given by the British to a Kandyan chief who collaborated with them after the 1818 rebellion, and later purchased by another collaborator, Edward Wijesinghe, who had usurped the prestigious name of Molligoda and was not recognized as landlord by the Batgama peasants. A similar situation prevailed in Edurapota (29.10.1884) given by the British in 1821 and resold to a Low-country Christian mudaliyar, C. Perera Samarasinghe: the settlement was constantly contested because the tenants (Goyigama and Vahumpura) and the proprietor were at war: “From time to time the tenants have shown themselves very obstructive and have repeatedly refused to obey the decisions of the gansabhava on the division of the village block (…) The landlord wrote a letter formally repudiating the agreement of 1884. Both tenants and landlords being decided in their determination not to observe the terms of the settlement, the Crown may also disown it”[32]. Even in small high caste ‘simple’ villages with 3 pangu only, such as Basnagoda, settled by Ievers in 1879, the situation could be very tense. One of the three pangu had lost ‘its’ chenas included in the Crown block which was sold and the other pangu refused to let it cultivate chenas in ‘their’ range of highlands. As late as 19.07.1898, the chief headman Mideniya failed to solve the dispute, which lasted since 1884.

Pata Bulatgama differed from Tunkorale. In these narrow valleys going up to the former Dolosbage coffee estates of the Kandy district, the impact of the plantation system was felt before 1870, and the connivance between the colonial administration and the planters had deprived the locals of the control of their highlands. In the upper Ritigaha Oya valley, a declining aristocratic clan (Ranasinghe Mudianselage) still exerted its authority, but highlands had been sold by the Crown to Dolosbage coffee estates (Gangwarily, Glenalla, Dedugala, Kelvin, Doteloya). The whole area (Dedugala, Yatideriya, Tumbage, Kekalapone, Udapota) was claimed by the Mudianselage extended clan, which held the post of Uduwe korala and possessed a sannasa for the whole valley. Dedugala was a remote Goyigama village, possibly originally Vedda; a large part of the land was rocky chena or patina (grass land). There were three pangu, two belonging to the Ranasinghe Mudianselage clan (Ihala walauwa, Pahala walauwa) and one Mullilage. Kekalapone was a large, mainly Vahumpura village situated above Dedugala, which was registered as a nindagama belonging to the Ranasinghe clan, with 8 nila (service) pangu and 12 families. After initial Crown sales in the late 1860s, the Gangwarily planter, Drummond, had attempted to grab Dedugala and Kekalapone village lands to extend and ‘round’ his estate. In January 1876 he wrote a letter to the Assistant Agent Dawson, asking to enter into possession of a land adjoining his estate but claimed by Dedugala Ranasinghe, arguing that “in a governmental point of view, no doubt the land is much more valuable in my possession than in the hands of the natives; for I will cultivate, they will not. In the like manner, the natives put in a claim for a considerable portion of the present estate, but Mr. Worthington did not recognize their title to it some seven years ago”. At the chena enquiry of Dawson in 1876, it appeared that the survey contained errors, that the surveyors had made no enquiry from the headmen, and that the genuine sannasa of the Uduwe family was interpreted as covering only a part of the land: “the korala claimed the greater part of the Gangwarily estate on the same sannasa, but his claim was disallowed”. Again in 1884,  Drummond “applied for 278 acres as a free grant”; the Assistant Agent at the chena settlement recommended that “half the remaining chena (of low growth) be allowed to villagers and the rest (old chenas and forest) be marked off and sold (…) These villagers deserve to be liberally dealt with, as in Gangwarily are included several old gardens and one paddy field, all of which with the surrounding chenas and gardens were sold by the Crown in 1868 or 67. Some small compensation was given for the paddy field but none for the gardens”. The governor Gordon asked in the margin of the diary: “How this came about?” The Agent answered that he was unable to find the papers relative to this sale, and concluded: “I am disposed to allow the villagers a good extent of chena lands to form a good ring fence (so to speak) around the villages to prevent encroachments and raids on their gardens from the Tamil coolies – even at the sacrifice of a little more land than usual in these cases. At Dedugala and Kekalapone their need is so considerable as so much was sold to Gangwarily estate in 68 or 69”. In 1885, when the settlement enquiry was held, Kekalapone had 11 acres of paddy, 37 acres of gardens and 128 acres of chena “the remaining lands in this village have been sold to Gangwarily”. The Assistant Agent Wace concluded : “I do not think it advisable to take any portion in this village for Crown, lots 388 and 389 are the only large lots left between the village and the estate” [33].

In 1884 the planters’ demand was in full sway and Wace was constantly pressed for land[34] : “It will be observed that these settlements have reserved for the Crown a very considerable extent of so-called forest and chena lands (…) The question now is how much of this land may be offered for sale? That it will sell well to tea planters is certain. I have received several applications for land for tea estates and am continually being pressed for information (…) It should be remembered that the village chenas (and many tea estates already opened) adjoin these portions reserved for the Crown, and that consequently it is difficult to protect them as in spite of the settlement they will assert a claim by wattoru or even cultivate without claim (…) So much land has already been sold in these villages that together with the private lands of the villagers it is impossible to secure any considerable unbroken extent of Crown forest, and I therefore submit that it is desirable to offer the remainder for sale. The question is one of pressing importance to this district which already enjoys the reputation of being the best suited for tea cultivation in the island.”

Chena block settlements made under the Ievers system in Atulugam and Panawal korales allowed the Government to sell large blocks of chenas and forests to planters in the 1880s, resulting in the creation of a large planting district generally known under the name ‘Kelani Valley’. In the process, the solidity of the Crown block was rarely questioned, while that of the villager block was constantly jeopardized by the problems of redistribution between the pangu. This situation contributed to the sale by villagers of their chenas to neighbouring estates, generally through middlemen such as contactors, bazaar traders and tavern keepers.

A typical case was that of Hinguralakanda, a bi-caste locality located close to the pioneer tea estates of the Kelani Valley at the limit between Panawal and Atulugam. Wace was unable to effect a settlement, because part of the chena area “adjoins the estate opened up by Mr. Forsythe and the villagers want it so as to be able to sell to him: they will then be without chenas and be continually in need and complaining. It is not I think advisable to encourage the sale of villagers chena to planters for tea estates. This village is also divided into two castes, Vellala [Goyigama] and Jaggery [Vahumpura], and this makes any joint possession difficult”. This complex Hinguralakanda settlement made Wace to suggest the legalization of the chena settlements under the new Forest ordinance: “it would further prevent the alienation of village chenas. It often happens now that after settlement the villagers decide to whom a land shall belong and they sell it off to outsiders. The title is weak, but the Crown having withdrawn its claim the purchasers are willing to risk a claim by anyone else, whereas in a settlement under the new ordinance the village portion would be reserved for village chenas and its alienation effectively prevented. Nor would the reservation affect the right of the Crown to sell any of the portion reserved to it, for the government can always withdraw the reservation either wholly or in part”[35].

The judicial system of Ceylon appeared as obstructive to the colonial administrators. In their Administration Reports[36], Wace and Price had insisted on the necessity to legalize settlements and render impossible the sale of shares in the chena block without sanction by other community members and the administration: “Under present circumstances it is impossible to entirely prevent the sale of such lands to those who are interested in the cultivation of tea. It is equally difficult to obviate the hardships which the poorer class of shareholders in such lands frequently suffer in consequence of sales which may have been effected without their knowledge or against their will”. As long as a villager can sell his share “the chief object and benefit of the chena settlement policy will be lost. It has been due to the settlement work pursued so steadily in the Kägalla kacceri during the last ten years that the district has advanced so rapidly and that the villagers themselves have so largely benefitted by the introduction of European capital and the opportunities afforded them of estate labour. But the conditions under which such settlements were made must be observed if the same advance and prosperity is to be continued. If the result of the settlements is to enable the villagers to deprive themselves and the village of their highlands allotted to them for one purpose for the immediate attraction of a few rupees, their agricultural condition will hardly be ultimately improved. All that is necessary is to pass an enactment that land so settled shall not be alienated except with the consent of the whole village and the Crown”. Chena settlements were perhaps adapted to the period before the tea boom but “will not stand the scrutiny of the law courts”.

Davidson, a new Assistant Agent, took a slightly different position in 1892[37]: “My predecessor strongly held that the remedy lay in legislation to prevent the alienation of holdings intended to be communal. Although I sympathize with the spirit which led him to advocate this course, and although I apprehend the difficulties which may arise with the landless and indolent peasantry [sic], I cannot see my way to recommend legislation to restore the character of village holdings after the practice of alienation had been countenanced for so many years in the Supreme Court of Ceylon. No legislation can at this stage arrest the progress of the decay of the communal village system, where that system runs counter to the temporary interest of the villagers and to the interest of the European element (…) When the process of transition be past, with its misery and attendant crime, the Kandyan villagers will develop into an honest and industrial race as are the Sinhalese of the Europeanized portions of the South or the Tamils of the Jaffna peninsula. Meanwhile I advocate that Government should not countenance the alienation of the village lands and should refuse to make surveys and grant Certificates of Quiet Possession to purchasers, and thus devise the means to make the transitional stage between the old time Kandyan usage and the Europeanization of the hill country as slow and as gradual as possible”. The alienation of lands from the village block will become the main preoccupation of the administration and eventually lead to the Waste lands ordinance of 1897, which will be the subject of another study.

The aim of the settlement was to obtain land for planters without ‘legal uncertainties’ and in this it succeeded, but it failed to preserve village interests. It is when planters who had acquired Crown blocks started to extend their lands by purchasing in the village block that the settlement was contested. These purchases were later legalized by the Government conferring Certificates of Quiet Possession under the pressure of the planters and of their legal advisers, actually nullifying the work done by his own agents. Another weakness was that these settlements were conducted with meagre means, very quickly: the British agent visited the village with the headmen and decided in an abrupt way to cut into pieces the village land. As soon as these intelligent peasants or some of them, the so-called village proctors, began to understand the game, they started to contest the colonial authorities with its own arms – the legal apparatus.

 

A new system of chena settlement under the Forest Ordinance[38]

 

A Forest ordinance had been enacted in 1885 following the report on forests of Ceylon made by a member of the Indian forest service, D’A Vincent, who had pointed the difficulties of working the ‘chena survey’ whose object was “reclaiming large areas of Crown land which have been cleared for chena and in which individual proprietary rights have grown up under ord. 12 of 1840. The land originally either communal or Crown, is now cut up by plots claimed in individual right, and although the joint area of these claims may not be 1/10th of the whole, in the interest of the Crown and to permit of the land being sold, it is desirable to come to an equitable settlement with individual proprietors” but it requires the unanimous assent of the villagers and “has only the sale of land as an object” and not forest conservation.[39]

To overcome the shortcomings of the Ievers system, a new Assistant Agent, Price, proposed in 1886 to undertake the chena settlements on a new legal basis, using the Forest Ordinance of 1885 instead of the Ordinance of 1840, following a suggestion made by his predecessors Le Mesurier and Wace[40]. It could prevent the alienation of village chenas: “under the present system it often happens that directly Crown has withdrawn its claim, the villagers decide to whom a land shall belong and they sell it off to strangers. This was of course not the intention of these settlements. The lands should be, as laid down in a minute of H.E., ‘the villagers to use but not to alienate’. The title is weak but the Crown having practically given a Certificate of Quiet Possession, the purchasers are willing to risk the very remote chance of any other villagers ousting them by due course of law”. In June 1887, Price wrote to Saunders, his superior in Colombo, to expedite legalization of the chena settlements on the basis of the Forest Ordinance, but Saunders was not prepared to press the matter, probably because it would freeze the land market, contrary to the wishes of the planters with whom he was closely connected. The first attempts at applying the Forest Ordinance to the old chena settlements were made by Price in Edurapota in November 1887, and his diary was annotated by the governor: “I think this is a most excellent suggestion if there is no legal impediment”. Price was nominated as Forest Settlement Officer (26.10.1888) but nothing official was done because the Forest department opposed it, considering that it was a misuse of the ordinance to allow chena cultivation instead of protecting the forests[41].

The Forest Ordinance of 1885 had been enacted to constitute Forest Reserves in the still uninhabited or very sparsely inhabited parts of the island. In the Kägalla district, the only area which could be considered to correspond to that definition was the eastern part of the Atulugam Korale, commonly called Kälerata (Forest country). The initial plan was to give villagers the right to cultivate chenas in certain areas under the control of the forest administration, but not the right to alienate these areas: “The demand among Europeans for land in the Kelani Valley has caused much interference with village interests and the sale by villagers of chenas which should be theirs only to use and not to alienate is open to grave objection  (…) Indiscriminate sale of Crown land is open to grave objection but a judicious sale of the chenas which are the property of government is to be desired (…) Investors are determined  to have land in the Kelani valley and if they cannot buy it from the government they purchase it in fragments from the Sinhalese. The result of such transactions is disastrous. Native brokers make it their business to acquire the chenas of the Kandyan villagers who rapidly dissipate the purchase money and eventually become vagrants”. The same message was repeated in 1887, with the precision that the main victims were the shareholders who had not sold their shares, and Price began to put his idea into practice, and extend its application to other districts as well: “The people of Digala asked for a chena settlement. But I pointed them that in view of the obstructive action of the people of Morawatta, Garagoda, and other settled villages, I was not prepared to make any more informal settlements which could not be legally enforced”. The announcement of a new settlement must have raised an alarm among the population, once again. In his diary the Agent mentioned that he had to tour his district to allay the fears of the villagers : “All that the government wants is settlement (…) They must not conclude that because they may not be able to prove title they will therefore be mercilessly deprived of all means of cultivation and subsistence (…) I think that the distrust which the enquiries of the Forest Settlement Officer have, I am told, created in the past, will now disappear”[42].

The Forest Department considered that it was not his job to make chena settlements. Initially the aim was to form a forest reserve in the upper reaches of the Kelani Valley basin – the east of Atulugam korale, above Deraniyagala, unsurveyed and unsettled. It is only in early 1887 that after a lot of evasiveness a captain Walker had been posted as Forest Settlement Officer in Three Korales.  He was tasked to report on which chena rights could be admitted in the reserve: he proposed to base them on wattoru, but the Agent considered it should be extended, as amu and kurakkan were not taxed, on the basis of population. He raised a series of questions regarding the use of wattoru which underassessed the extents actually cultivated, the existence of joint ownership (which was denied by the Assistant Agent who wrote: “Chenas are never held in common amongst different pangu; the tenure which the Forest Settlement Officer calls as communal I should define rather as tattumaru – rotating”), using the example of Ballahela village, and the position to take in the case of sales to outsiders : “The people seem to have sold their property or any title or claim they may have had to it for a mere trifle and then left the village for good. In many instances the vendors are dead.”[43]. Price suggested that the ‘Forest settlement’ should be done by the Agent himself and not by a Forest officer, and that the chenas of the village block should be declared by him ‘village forests’ at the disposal of the village community, and those of the Crown block ‘lands at the disposal of the Crown’; he added that people could object that “the intention of the chena settlement was to hand over to the villagers an absolute and unconditional right to the village block” but that in his opinion the holdings were considered as “communal and beneficial only”. At that point, the Government Agent of the Western Province disagreed and considered that it was not proper to deny full rights of highland property to individuals : “there can be no doubt that for years in the Kandyan districts persons have been allowed to hold them absolutely and they have feely exercised a right to dispose of them by sale”.

But in 1889, the Governor decided to de-link the Kägalla and Ratnapura districts from the Western province and create a new province, Sabaragamuwa, with Wace as Agent: the explicit intent was to reduce the distance between the administration and the people, and the implicit object was to remove these districts from the influence of Saunders[44]. At that juncture, the repressive policy was found to be unrealistic and practically abandoned. In the words of Wace: “Since 1815, the private title of villagers in highlands has been enjoyed without interruption and in every part of the Kandyan provinces chena lands have changed hands repeatedly on notarial deeds; it has been held by the Supreme court that the payment of tax constitutes a good title against the Crown, and wattorus establishing proof of such payment could be produced for the greater part of the chena lands in these settlements. I believe myself that this individual right among members of each pangu existed in village life even under the Kandyan dynasty, and that it was recognized even in gabadagam”. Communal lands should be settled on villagers “strictly prohibiting the alienation of such lands to other classes or for other purposes. I have repeatedly pointed out how greatly Kandyans have suffered from the failure of their coffee gardens; if in addition they lose their chenas they will certainly have no visible means of subsistence left and will become vagrants, and a serious burden on the general community, as soon as the small sums acquired by the sale of their chena lands have been consumed.”[45]

In 1892, it was decided to assign to a member of the Civil service (and not of the Forest department) the task of expediting the Forest settlement of the Beligal korale. L.W. Booth was appointed in June 1892, and his instructions were to abandon the block principle and settle according to the ordinance of 1840.  18 villages in Kiraweli east (a section of Beligal) were selected; 16 were already block settled and there was in this district a tendency to repudiate these settlements (for example in Elamaldeniya and Narangoda). All these villages had a population belonging in majority to the Vahumpura caste and formed a compact block, on the western side of the Gurugoda Oya, north of Salgala monastery, 5×2 miles, 4,800 acres of forest and chenas. Another group of villages was added later on the eastern side of the Oya, in Kandupita south, around Pindeniya, a multicaste area (Goyigama, Vahumpura, Batgama) with several plumbago pits. Most of these villages had been block-settled on the basis of surveys made north of Ruanwella and they were already eyed by land speculators, although they were not considered fit for tea cultivation, and the Crown blocks had not been alienated; in almost all these villages the Crown block was less than 100 acres. In the first series of villages (Kiraweli east), the aggregate area was 5,161 acres, with 175 acres of gardens, 201 acres of fields, 3,297 acres of village chenas, 1,259 acres of Crown chenas and 229 acres of Crown forest.

The systematic work of L.W. Booth was first hailed by the colonial administration as a great success but eventually ended as a major failure. The Assistant Agent commented favourably on the advance of the surveys in his diary[46]: “The decisions are fair: there would be no appeals; they follow very closely the chena settlements (identical in 13 cases, very different in 4 cases where the chena settlement was flatly rejected). About 2,800 acres are the absolute property of the Crown, the Assistant conservator of Forests must have his say; I suggest 1/10th as village forest, 2/10th sold for village gardens, 3/10th sold in large blocks for estates, 4/10th reserved for timber supply”. But the Conservator of forests in a letter of 22.06.1894 wrote that it was not the job of a Forest Settlement Officer to advise concessions to villagers but the job of the Revenue Officer. The Administration Report of the Kägalla Assistant Agent for 1896 still described it in optimistic terms: “During the years 1893-1897, Mr. L. W. Booth settled in this district an extent of 70,644 acres, settling finally I hope the long continued disputes between the Crown and villagers over an area equal to 1/6th of the whole extent of the district. A permanent settlement of this nature followed by a block survey is one of the greatest benefits to all parties which the government has ever carried through. One appeal only was taken from Mr. Booth decision, and his decision was upheld in the Supreme Court. The universal acceptance of his settlements is the highest testimony to the fair and liberal spirit which characterizes his work.” The following year the picture was less optimistic: “It is most important that the work of the settlement officer in Beligal korale and the Kelani valley should be completed. The boundaries between the Crown and private chenas still remain to be demarcated before the necessary proclamations can be published. Beligal was settled in 1895 but only 22 out of the 46 villages have been proclaimed under the Forest Ordinance”[47]

The Forest settlement soon ran into difficulties in Beligal korale[48]. Between December 1894 and March 1895, the settlement was contested by petitioners who after accepting the chena and forest settlements: “allege that they have not enough to live upon”. Upon enquiry, the Government agent found that “it is not the limited extent they demur to as much as the arbitrary location of the highlands at points which do not suit their convenience or are not in keeping with their tradition”. Contrary to the situation which prevailed in Atulugam, in the densely populated area of Beligal, each panguwa cultivated chenas in specific areas and the settlements failed to recognize that practice. The high proportion of Vahumpura caste villagers, who had a tradition of fighters and were more than others dependent on chena cultivation, may have contributed to their resistance. Their discontent was increased by the high-handed attitude of the surveyors, who misunderstood the tracings made by Booth and cut into chenas in cultivation, as in Hinwella (petition of 29.05.1895), while the villagers themselves might have ignored the delimitation of the Booth settlement in opening their chenas. The Agent eventually decided that they could cultivate their chenas “irrespective of the lines now being cut by the chena surveyors”. “To my thinking the method pursued in giving effect to Mr. Booth forest settlement in this district has been injudicious (…) The fundamental error has been in construing Mr. Booth tracing as absolutely accurate (…) The villagers throughout the settled area have upon legal advice from Colombo deliberately proceeded to clear all land on which the growth was less than 20 years, whether decreed to them or not, in order to have possession on their side”. Booth recognized that “the villagers will not consent to take their lands in solid blocks and I must admit on consideration that the Government Agent is right in saying that I probably exceeded my powers in so arranging them thought it did not occur to me at the time”.

According to the Assistant Agent Davidson, these villagers were manipulated by “mischievious advisers”  and undertook willfully to cut chenas in the Crown sector in Narangoda, Kurunegoda, Welhella, Kiwuldeniya and Elamaldeniya: “The villagers throughout the area have upon legal advice from Colombo deliberately proceeded to clear all lands upon which the growth is less than 20 years, whether decreed to them by the Forest Settlement Officer or not” “The stupid [sic] villagers instigated by designing persons and encouraged by the consistency with which the Supreme Court sets aside all convictions under the Forest Ordinance have cleared these lands to see whether the Crown can maintain its own rights. If the Crown fails, the villagers will fell every stick of forest which has been reclaimed from chena clearing for the last 30 years and under the good of a consistent policy which has curbed promiscuous clearing”[49]. Davidson sought the assistance of the renowned advocate Bawa to defend the Crown: “the issues are very serious ; there is a risk of an organized attack on the settlements not only in the Beligal korale, but also in the Three Korales ; the benefit of the policy of the last 18 years, which has led to a marked afforestation of the hills bordering the western province, will be swept away if we fail to secure a conviction. The villagers have organized a fund and will be represented by the leading lawyers of Colombo”. Among the lawyers involved was the young advocate Aelian Ondaatje, who was to become a staunch adversary of the colonial administration in land cases: he argued that a land having been cultivated three times during the last 30 years gave the cultivator a presumption against the Crown.

The hostility of the villagers focused on the surveyors as had been the case in the first decades of estate development up-country. The Surveyor General received petitions and the district surveyor of Sabaragamuwa, Snowden, wrote in a report to his superior who annexed it to his letter to the Government Agent of  Sabaragamuwa (23.11.1895): “the surveyors cut trenches through standing hill paddy and this occasioned a great outcry ; so to pacify the natives I gave it up with the understanding that they cut the trenches themselves where indicated when the paddy is harvested. The natives had no objection to my surveying the boundaries but they said after I had finished that they would clear where they liked. They would not touch the forest but the chenas belonged to them and nothing will induce them to give them up to government. They have employed counsel in Colombo who advises them to say that when signing the agreements on 18.11.1880 they were under the impression the land was being consigned to them”. At the beginning of 1896, tension increased and the administration forced chena cultivators to pay the ‘ground share’ (1/5th) to the Crown, in Welhella, or prosecuted and forcibly removed the crops (in Kiwuldeniya).

By the end of 1896, it appeared that the survey plans were no longer valid for a legal proclamation, that the lack of cooperation between the settlement officer and the surveyors was fatal to the exercise, and that the cost of detailed surveys could not be recouped by the sale of small lots to enterprising villagers, as Wace was contemplating in 1895. Finally, most of the Beligal settlements were never proclaimed. The Surveyor General proposed in October 1902 the abandonment of these ‘useless surveys’: his department was obviously unwilling to do any other survey than block surveys of forests, and in January 1903, the Agent answered to the Surveyor General: “It appears to me unnecessary to survey and define on the grounds the limits of each separate chena”.[50]

After these successive, often contradictory, and never legalized settlements, the situation was in an incredible mess in many villages of the Kägalla district: “A certain block of chena was declared Crown, another private; the pangu whose lands were declared Crown were compensated by lands of other pangus out of the private block. When the people who had thus received lands had planted them, the original owners took a case against them and ejected them. The original owners of the Crown block then began to clear the Crown block”. In other cases, two or even three successive settlements did not fit with each other: the villagers followed neither and no further settlement was possible, as in the case of Amitirigala (a Vahumpura village) where the original owners of the village chena block ejected the people who had been settled in ‘their’ lands and the latter then fell back on their original chenas.  In 1905, dealing with what remained of the ‘old settlements’ and connected intractable land cases in the village of Paradeniya above mentioned, the Assistant Agent Vaughan concluded: “The sooner the land is sold the better”[51] .

The final failure of these various settlements was due to the fact that they contradicted the legal system, that they depended on the honesty and diligence of headmen, and that they could not resist the pressure of the land demand of the planters coinciding with the sudden shift from coffee to tea, and later to rubber. One may even consider that they were self-defeating, in that they attracted planters close to the village. It resulted in a pressure exerted by the planter’s interests in favouring, first block settlements to obtain continuous blocs of lands sold at cheap prices by the Crown, in the line of what was done up-country during the coffee days ; and secondly in purchasing through intermediaries lands in the village block by asserting the rights of alienation by the villagers. As soon as the Crown had sold its block to the planters, the villagers saw no reason why they should not sell their block as well.

 

The case of Dorawaka[52]

Colonial land management in Dorawaka village offers a typical example of what Swettenham, a member of the governor’s staff, called ‘chena un-settlement’. Dorawaka was a very large and prosperous ancient gabadagama (royal village) in Kiraweli section of Beligal, disputed for centuries between the hill country kingdoms and the low country kingdoms and subsequent colonial powers. It is said to have been depopulated in time of war and repopulated by Duraya (Batgama) people after having been degraded and deprived of its original name of Mawatagama (‘Village of the road’). These people were settled by the kings on the land to cultivate paddy, carry burdens and act as foot soldiers and the village was organized to furnish rice, coconuts and arecanuts, under the control of high caste officers. It was especially prosperous, well-watered, with excellent coconuts and extensive chenas. According to the thombo (land roll) of 1614, there were then 100 amunam of paddy (26 for the muttettuwa (royal domain cultivated by the Duraya) 1 for the vidane (high caste overseer), 31 for 15 Duraya families, 18 ½ for 30 service coolies, 6 ½  for 4 dancers, 3 for 4 lascarins (soldiers), 10 ½ for 11 natives (i.e. Goyigama, living in the separate hamlet of Ganegama), and each of these categories had coconut and arecanut gardens. The leading Duraya family (Meragal) had a sittuwa (written act) from the time of the last Kandyan king. After the British accession, the muttettuwa was sold to locals, and paddy cultivation was still controlled by the high castes in 1861. During the chena enquiries of 1871 and 1874, “people represented that they considered the chenas theirs and paid tax for älvi at 1/14th rate” and highlands were therefore “allowed on long possession”, without being demarcated. But these enquiries began to unsettle the ancient order, and in 1876 the Goyigama accused a Duraya family of “possessing Crown land called Bulatwatte – formerly the property of the Kandyan kings – without paying tythe to government, by planting coffee, coconut and plantain”.

In 1880 the village was surveyed, and in July 1885 it was settled for the first time by the Assistant Agent Le Mesurier who found that it contained 190 acres of paddy, 137 acres of gardens, 1,000 acres of private chenas and 964 acres of Crown highlands: “After a long and troublesome debate, the villagers at last agreed : I gave them 1000 acres for their chenas and confined them to the western side of the village”. This settlement did not meet with universal approval, the representatives of some of the pangu refusing to sign the agreement because these chena tracts were too far from their houses. According to a report written 20 years later, “the greater majority however of the pangukarayo accepted the arrangement and chenaed or converted into gardens the lands allowed as private; on the whole however the settlement was unsatisfactory as some pangu had not been fairly treated”.

In March 1890, a second settlement, orthogonal to the first, was effected by Price, giving the villagers the northern lands, closer to the houses of the Durayas, about ½ of the village to the south being taken as Crown property; but it was immediately contested in a lengthy petition by a few Goyigama cultivators of chenas living and chenaing in the southern part ; Price commented : “It is impossible to find boundaries to suit everybody, the very small minority must give way for the general good”. According to the report above quoted, “this was a good settlement, and met with approval among nearly all the villagers, only 2 pangu out of 36 refusing to sign the agreement. There is little doubt that matters would have been satisfactorily arranged on the basis of Mr. Price settlement, but unfortunately another settlement was undertaken under the Forest ordinance. By this settlement, about 1,600 acres were allowed to the villagers to practice chena cultivation, and the balance 500 acres made up of isolated strips throughout the village was set apart for the Crown. The portions taken by the Crown under this last settlement were never demarcated, and at present hopeless confusion reigns”

This third settlement made by L.W. Booth as Forest settlement officer at the end of 1893 and detailed in a report of January 1894 was based on the proved claims to chena and actual practice of the 83 different family groups. And what emerged was that the villagers had from time immemorial “chenaed in all directions of the village” [53], over an extent calculated as 1,358 acres : “This it is submitted is by no means an excessive quantity of chena for the [increasing] population, 785 in the last census, while the settlement of 1890 was on the basis of the census of 1881, only 674 persons. The village being a gabadagama, I have held that only well-established gardens of long possession and regularly cultivated fields are the absolute property of the people, and that their interest in the highlands is limited to a right to practice chena cultivation upon them, the soil of such lands belonging to the Crown. The effect of this is : 1. That the people cannot sell such lands belonging to the Crown or in any way dispose of their rights to do so ; 2. That several pieces of chena which have been planted as gardens [26 acres] are the property of the Crown subject to the planter’s interest on them”. Booth clearly stated that point 1 preserved the communal character of the village chenas, and that point 2 could evolve in full property of the newly planted gardens “on payment of survey fees or other easy terms ; this liberality will lend to secure cheerful acquiescence in the settlement, a very desirable object, and to encourage industry in bringing waste land under regular cultivation.” Booth recognized that “the settlement had not done much to secure valuable property for the Crown but [it is hoped that] it will put an end once for all to the frictions between the authorities and the people which have existed for such a long time past”.

This Booth settlement was severely criticized by the Controller of Forests in a letter to the Government Agent of Sabaragamuwa (21.06.1894), in which he pointed out that its result was to reserve an infinitesimal area as Forest reserve : “This settlement cannot honestly be called a Forest settlement (…) and I would again suggest that the Forest Ordinance be used only for bona fide forest purposes. In 1885, half of the land was given over to the villagers to destroy, and in 1890, half of the remaining half was likewise conceded to them, and now the depredation over ¾ of the area not having proved to be sufficient, some fresh areas out of the remaining quarter have been opened out to them. Speaking generally, Mr. Booth settlement report appears to be more the proposal made by an advocate on behalf of his clients – the villagers – than those of an impartial judge, dealing with the claims of both sides. He also makes proposals which are not part of his business regarding the sale of certain lots of land to people who have lately started illicit cultivation (…) and states that there can be no objection to the villagers helping themselves to fence sticks etc.”. The Assistant Agent Price recommended “that no proclamation be issued at all; let the required demarcations be effected at once, let the large blocks be subdivided into small lots each ranging from 5 to 10 acres roughly, let the assistant conservator of forests cut out all the available fuel. And I will then offer for sale the whole Crown land in the village with the exception of lot 6674 ½”.

The Booth settlement affirmed the principle of Crown property of the chena lands in gabadagam[54]. It recalled that in the early days of British rule, “nilakarayo had no paraveni right in their pangu but were maruveni tenants removable at pleasure (…) The nilakarayo were from time to time chiefly between 1819 and 1826 relieved of the duty of cultivating the crown muttettu fields which were either farmed out or sold by the crown, and their fields were subjected to tax in lieu of such services. By the present time, hereditary rights have come to be practically conceded in the case of regularly cultivated fields and well-established gardens, but not in the case of waste and highland chenas which have not been under continuous cultivation. The Crown has never abandoned its claims to such lands (…) and has often asserted it (…) For the above reasons I find that all highland chenas in gabadagam are lands at the disposal of the Crown”. But the slack attitude of the colonial authorities who failed to demarcate the Crown lots, and to proclaim the settlement, nullified its intentions. We shall study in a further chapter how this state of things attracted a land speculator, Albert A.Wickramasinghe, who purchased the village chenas to form Madeniya estate around 1906, how this estate became the subject of constant recriminations by the villagers, how violence often erupted between villagers and estate workers, and how the factory, especially during the insurgency of 1989.

 

Forest settlement in Pata Bulatgama

The area, especially its Uduwe division, had attracted the attention of the colonial authorities at the time of Saunders and had been the theater of the first movement of discontent in the 1870s when the administration attempted to repress chena cultivation, with severe food shortage as a result. Twenty years later, another attempt was made, this time under the Forest ordinance, and under the pressure of the planter’s demand of land. In the diary for November 1871, the area between Bulatkopitiya and Welihelatenne was described as “almost continuous chena with here and there a forest or an occasional arecanut grove”. Already in 1874, a series of chena cases were instituted in Wegalla and Welatuduwa and on enquiry by the Assistant Agent Dawson it appeared that many chenas had been transformed into gardens five to seven years before; the chenas were allowed by Dawson ‘on account of long possession’; a few areas had been purchased by Muslims but their presence remained marginal. Wegalla, Welatuduwa and Lewala were three localities on the southern bank of the Ritigaha Oya: here subsistence depended on the cultivation a few paddy fields and of extensive chenas and gardens producing arecanuts and betel leaves (hence the name of bulat gam – betel villages) by peasants belonging to the Panna Duraya caste.

The Forest Settlement file of Lewala (including the other two villages), dated 8.08.1892, offers a detailed analysis of the history of these bulat gam and of chena cultivation practices in that area[55]. Detailed information is given in the statements of the Ratemahatmaya Ekneligoda (5.04.1892), confirmed by Uduwe korala Punahela Mudianse and in individual cases, for example that of Mutugalpedige Unga Duraya (n° 49). The first characteristic is that “the Crown does not claim any of the chenas in those villages, the growth on which is less than 20 years. The chenas belong to the villagers and have been cultivated by them and their ancestors for generations”. Chena cultivation until 1873 was totally free without having to ask permission, and since that date, älvi was taxed at 1/14th when permission was asked, and at 1/10th  when it was not “as a punishment but not because the Crown claimed the chenas”.  “In the time of the Kandyan kings the occupants of lands in these villages were liable to be called upon to supply adukku (provisions) to the higher chiefs when travelling, to carry messages and render other services; they had also to attend when called upon to work in Kandy to collect timber, to supply guards etc. Since the British accession, such services have been abolished and the people in such villages have possessed their lands absolutely as their own without any condition”. “In the time of the Kandyan kings, some of the lands in the koralegam were paraveni (hereditary), and others were held on the condition of performing services but since the accession, no distinction has been made in koralegam between paraveni and service lands, all the lands possessed by the villagers are now paraveni”. The peasants had therefore acquired full land rights and their personal status was the same as that of high caste villagers. Gardens, owita, and pillewa regularly cultivated were never taxed, chenas when cultivated with älvi at long intervals were taxed; untaxed “amu and kurakkan chenas belonged to the villagers”. Owiti were often transformed into gardens.

In the final settlement of the three villages by L.W. Booth in 1892, out of a total of 2,362 acres (302 lots claimed by 113 persons), 95 acres of gardens, 53 acres of paddy fields, 1,305 acres of owiti and chenas were recognized as private; 908 acres were “at the disposal of the Crown, out of which provision will have to be made for village forest, supply of timber and other forest produce”, but this Crown land was scattered in small parcels and impossible to make into one block and therefore difficult to sell for estate development.

In these villages, chenas were individually cultivated and possessed. The case of the Mutugalpedige panguwa in Lewala shows the structure of an extended family farm: out of a total extent allowed after settlement of 66 acres, the panguwa possessed three permanent irrigated paddy fields (kamburu) totaling  2 acres 1 rood 9 perches, three recently irrigated paddy fields (asweddum) totaling 4 acres 1r 8p, one threshing floor (kanatiya) of 2r. 19 p.; two gardens with houses totaling 5 acres 2 p.; three fields cultivated at short intervals (2 to 4 years) with amu and kurakkan (owiti) totaling 4r. 29 p; and seven chenas totaling 40 acres, cultivated with älvi every 12 or 13 years, or with other grain at shorter intervals like the owiti, including 5 acres left fallow for more than 20 years.

In the same area, the villages of Tunbage and Urumiwala had similar features, while Panawitiya had a Goyigama population. The extensive chenas of all these villages were coveted by planters established further south. The private correspondence between Wace, the Government agent of Sabaragamuwa, and Forsythe, one of the pioneer planters of the Kelani valley, bears testimony to the influence exerted by the planters on the colonial government[56]:

W. Forsythe to H. Wace, 27.10.1889. Nahalma Estate

My dear Wace,

Any chances of a small land for sale this year? Say 5,000 acres. With tea booming, the present would be a good opportunity for realizing high price, and I know of a few would-be purchasers, myself among the number. I want 1,000 acres in the Bulatkopitiya side, well away from the Kelani Valley Reserve. The Surveyor General has lots of land blocked out, and a sale on January 1st 1890 would be time enough for opening. I will write you officially if you can hold any prospect of a sale.

The letter bears endorsements which prove that the civil servant obeyed the request of the planter:

Dear White, what surveys have been made ? Send me any Preliminary Plans. What were last orders for Govt. on subject last year ? – Mudaliyar : on this, Surveyor General referred to PP 10, Rangalla and Tunbage. This is not right, I want plans of lands between Ritigaha Oya ferry and Bulatkopitiya – Plans Lewala, Wegalla, Welatuduwa and Panawitiya are herewith submitted.

In the decade following the Forest settlement, the planters laid their hands on the area. Intermediaries were already at work in 1892: Moor traders (Lebbe Marikar) who had purchased land from villagers and planted extensive gardens (coconuts, arecanuts, banana) ; village headmen and the chief headman Ekneligoda himself who had purchased land from the Durayas ; even the Vidane duraya Devatapedige Pina (village headman of the Duraya caste) was busy “getting people to sell him their shares including the other shareholders shares”. The Lewala estate was created on 200 acres of village land and 40 acres of Crown land by the notorious land speculator J.P. Anderson (of Glassel estate) with Marshall of Avissawella  as notary and Saibu Lebbe of Mattamagoda as middleman, for the Grand Central Rubber Company, in very dubious conditions[57] : the Forest settlement had not been respected, the survey was made after the settlement. In 1899 there was already an encroachment of 99 acres on reserved forest which had not been clearly demarcated by the survey department; actually it was found that that area included old chenas covered by wattoru and that there were only 16 acres of forest. There was a further extension of area clearings of about 150 acres. The company asked for a Certificate of Quiet Possession through the advocate Aelian Ondaatje and the legal Colombo firm of De Sarams in February 1907: “the estate has encroached upon a considerable portion of Crown land; some of the lands encroached upon have been unreserved and sold by Crown. There is nothing for it but to unreserve the rest and sell them to the estate at a high figure” concluded the Assistant Agent of Kägalla (11.02.1907) who advised to sell the forest land not covered by wattoru (37 acres) at 200 Rs per acre, which was raised by the Colonial Secretary to 400 Rs an acre, that is half improved value (15.04.1910).

 

The case of Garagoda

The Forest settlements were unable, for want of legal strength, to solve the problems raised by previous settlement, especially the sale of chenas from the village block to planters. An early and typical case is that of Garagoda village, a Tunkorale locality very close to Yatiyantota, with a mixed Muslim and Goyigama population, which had been settled for the first time by Ievers in 1879: out of 1,046 acres, 800 acres had been taken and sold by the Crown to establish Degalessa estate and the remaining 246 acres left to the villagers were composed of fields, owitas, gardens and chenas.

After enquiry held in May 1892, the Forest settlement officer Booth reported on the intractable situation created by the block settlement and subsequent sale to the planters[58]: “The villagers successfully established their title to their chenas (by wattoru at private rate of 1/14th) and the records of the chena settlement effected from 1879 to 1886 show that these areas were admitted as private by settlement”. But the villagers as elsewhere in the area undertook to sell lands from their village block to the nearby plantation : “The idea of those who initiated the Forest settlement was not to obtain a reserved forest proper, so much as to procure the apportionment of the chenas among the villagers for communal purposes and so prevent their alienation to the proprietors of the adjoining tea estate. This object was no more attainable than was a reserved forest. The Forest Settlement Officer has no power to take away any private land from their owners and redistribute them (…) This is not the first attempt that has been made to arrange the possession of the land in Garagoda according to a preconceived ideal. There was first the chena settlement of 1879 which considerably curtailed the extent of chenas previously possessed by the villagers. By it several lands which had formerly been enjoyed by a portion of them were declared Crown property and afterwards sold as such, other lands possessed and claimed by other villagers being assigned to them in lieu of those taken away. The original possessors of the lands so assigned in many cases refused to make room for the incomers, and this gave rise to a good deal of discontent which is still simmering and to many disputes among the villagers themselves (…) Next, and probably due to the unsatisfactory state of matters subsequent to the chena settlement, came in 1888 the Forest settlement of Mr. Price who attempted to arrange the possession on a satisfactory basis on the lines of the chena settlement ; his efforts however proved abortive, and the settlement effected by him was cancelled. (…) The present settlement had done nothing to effect what are the legitimate objects of all such undertakings (…) It has tended to revive the old discontent which followed the chena settlement of 1879 and has raised vague hopes that in some way or other the lands then taken away were about to be restored or compensated for (…) The settlement will perhaps also tend to hasten the process of alienation by the villagers of their lands to the proprietors of the adjoining Degalessa tea estate, which it was wished to prevent. The latter will certainly be now more ready to purchase village lands than they would have been if the villagers had not been publicly put to the proof of their title and had not successfully established it”.

The subsequent history of the lands is given in the diary of the Assistant government agent Price under the caption ‘Nabboth Vineyard’[59]: “Mr. Wilkins of Degalessa Estate has written to ask for ‘a little information with regard to a small block of land adjoining his property which was settled some years ago upon a native, who is now willing to lease it to Mr. Wilkin’s company ; the company is helpless in the matter without a plan or tracing of some kind’ so Mr. Wilkins says ‘help us in the matter by letting me have a tracing of your office plan or even the number of the lot’. Not so. I reply to the effect that the usufruct of the land to which Mr. Wilkins refers was conferred on the Gallatgamage pangu of the village of Garagoda, that no right of alienation was implied in the grant, which was made for the purpose of chena cultivation ; that a revision of the entire settlement is required ; that blocks of chena land are not given to the villagers with the view of their being alienated for purposes of tea cultivation.” The estate however continued to press the administration as is very clearly shown in the following entry of the diary for 5.09.1892: “Had interview with Mr. Mitchell, manager of the Degalessa estate, relating to his application to purchase lands from the Crown and from his neighbours. Also his information that the villagers had chenaed Crown land near him: on enquiry it proved to be private land. Had also various complaints against him by villagers for encroachments on their lands. He admits an encroachment of 8 ½ acres for which he says he has settled to pay 50Rs per acre. His experience for very many years in the Matara district has taught him to handle his neighbours making them his friends, he says. Most managers merely accentuate by their manners the prejudice with which the village views the strangers invading his hillsides. I told Mr. Mitchell that I exceedingly objected to his proposal to buy from a Moorman 120 acres bordering his estate for 33 Rs an acre. I pointed out to him that the Moor broker was rendering the villagers landless, and when the money has gone, they would be vagrants, and some of them criminals.”

Several other cases of forest settlement resulted in the rapid alienation of village chenas in spite of the restrictive condition allowing villagers to cultivate but not to alienate. A later example is that of the Mahabage Forest Settlement (1896)[60], a Goyigama village located to the north of Kitulgala, close to the abandoned coffee estates of Yakdessa. In February 1897, three months after the settlement, three middlemen acting for the aracci of the nearby town of Kitulgala, Juan Pulle (a Chetty land speculator who tried to pass as a Kandyan under the name of Mudianselage) started to offer village lands to a planter (Protheroe, superintendent of Ingoya). In 1904, the Ceylon Tea Plantation Company acquired the land, which had been allowed for chena cultivation: according to the report of Mideniya, the chief headman “this was communal land, and the original owners thereof, possessing some more communal lands, have set apart for each some definite land out of the communal property” and his subordinate the korala had signed an attestation to the effect that “there was no dispute to the land, either from Crown, or from his villagers to his best belief and knowledge”. A few years later, Mideniya, who had assisted Booth in the Forest settlements as Ratemahatmaya of Tunkorale and Pata Bulatgama and was therefore well informed of the situation in these villages, became himself a land speculator specializing in the sale to planters of these chenas allowed for cultivation by a Forest settlement which had not been given legal authority.

 

The ambiguities of forest settlement in the ‘Kelani Valley Reserve’[61]

In remote areas with extensive forests and limited land speculation, such as the west and south of Adam’s Peak (called Kälerata), the Forest settlement could have succeeded in reserving forest areas while allowing villagers to carry on subsistence cultivation on highlands, realizing the wishes of the governors Gordon and Havelock. But the ambiguities of the colonial policy which at the same time wanted to protect the peasant society and ecology, and to promote modernity and planting interests, and the dependence on headmen for settlement enquiries, resulted in a failure to fulfill the initial project.

After the short-lived attempt of settlement in Atulugam by Captain Walker in 1887, another forester, W.H. Clarkson was posted, this time to settle the large hilly villages Bambarabotuwa Gilimale, Eratne, Morahela and Madampe in the Ratnapura district, with the project of protecting the Kaluganga valley. He wrote in his memo dated 26.08.1889 “the general maxim is that there can be no such thing as a right to a wasteful and destructive user of another’s property”. His successor Frederick Lewis, in his memoirs[62], recalled the unpopularity of the Forest officers: “The nature of my work was of a character that was intensely displeasing to many classes of people : to the natives I was a constant source of irritation as I hindered him greatly with his chena cultivation when I found the forest destroyed; to the land speculator I was an unmitigated nuisance because I thwarted his designs as I knew too much to suit his particular book; to the illicit plumbago miner I was to be more hated than the plague; to the timber trader particularly disliked the way I insisted on his having a permit to remove timber; to the planter I was obnoxious because I did not agree with him that it was right to cut down forest that did not belong to him about which he thought ought to”. The findings of the Forest Settlement Officer were generally disregarded, and these areas of the Ratnapura district were engulfed by rubber estates during the first decades of the 20th century.

The forest settlement of the upper Kelani valley could not be started before 1896, as Booth was busy with the Beligal korale villages. Meanwhile the governor Havelock, in answer to a deputation demanding the extension of the Kelani railway, had declared in 1894 that there was no Crown land to sell in that area and that regarding the reserve “it became the fixed policy of my predecessor, and I think it was very wise policy – that these reserves should be kept inviolate and that the Crown should not sell a single acre of it. Of course I cannot answer for what my successor may do”. Two years later, the planters launched a fresh offensive and the Government Agent of the Sabaragamuwa province explained to the new governor Ridgeway that Havelock was under the pressure of up-country planters who feared that the extension of low country producers would overstock the market, adding that “the result which these gentlemen feared has not been prevented for the attraction of large profits has merely caused investors to buy land from the native owners instead of from the Crown”; a change of policy was possible if the Forest settlement was sped up.

A series of 34 villages was taken up for settlement by LW. Booth assisted by Mideniya Ratemahatmaya in August 1896, and completed in February 1897. The forest settlements distinguished private lands, crown lands subject to the right to practice chena cultivation, crown lands on which this right was strictly limited, crown lands on which this right was disallowed but on which villagers had the use of water and right of way, and forbidden crown lands.

Contrary to Ievers, Booth followed ordinance 12 of 1840; even when there were wattorus paid at ‘private’ rate, when the extent could not be ascertained, he rejected property rights and allowed the right of cultivation only, as in the case of Nakkawita, a small Goyigama village on the Maliboda path on the Magal Ganga : regarding the chenas, “the claim to the soil has not been established (…) but the claimants have established their right to practice chena cultivation [which] has been permitted from time immemorial and must be allowed to continue (…) The right above admitted is common to all the claimants, their heirs and successors, and may be exercised by them individually” [63].

In March 1897, the Assistant Agent Davidson after the completion of the Booth settlement raised the question of the 26,743 acres now at the disposal of the Crown[64]: “the announcement of the intention of Government to sell Crown land (…) will tend to check the large purchases of private land, and may lead to a suspension of any further alienation of land now by Kandyan villagers”; in his opinion forest must be reserved above 3500ft (1066 m.) for ecological reasons, but can be felled at lower elevations: the Kelani and the Ritigaha are already silted and unnavigable, the We Oya will soon be bordered by estates, only the Sitawaka and Gurugoda are yet unexploited; in any case, a railway will replace the water way “and the vested interests in the boat trade are trifling”; and the possibly of floods inundating the lower Kelani basin is possible but not likely to occur.  In other terms, Davidson was ready to sacrifice Gordon’s project of Kelani reserve in order to ‘develop a backward area’. His arguments were based on a dualistic view: in order to save the colonial capitalist enterprise it must be limited and concentrated in specific zones; in his view, the Hatarakorale had a balanced and self-sufficient peasant economy which might be preserved, and the only means to do it in the colonial system as it was, was to channel the capital towards the Tunkorale: “this district has 165,000 persons on 420,000 acres; of this total 115,000 live in one half, the Hatarakorale, and 50,000 in the other half (the Tunkorale). It is manifest that in an agricultural country with no townships of any size a population of 350 to a square mile is as much as agricultural land can bear, it being remembered that there are no industries and no pauperism and that the soil produces all that the peasantry depends upon. It is manifest that if that peasantry alienated much of its holdings, it will be left untrained to support itself by the fruits of its labour for others. If an outlet is not given to capital elsewhere, this peasantry will yield to inducements to sell its holdings, and such is the lies of the country of the Hatarakorale that the clearing and draining of the high lands will lead to the destruction of the low-lying lands which are now paddy fields. I hold it to be a very strong administrative argument that capital should be led elsewhere, and whither it could be better led than into that poor country where excluding the 28,000 imported Tamil coolies the indigenous population is still so meagre as to represent only 64 persons per square mile. And more so in the Kelani valley with 4,481 persons, 50,000 acres and 26,743 acres for the Crown”. He therefore proposed to sell 6,379 acres (4,000 acres immediately) from the reserve or nearby, all in the vicinity of Deraniyagala, and detailed the lands village by village, giving time to the investors in London to prepare for the acquisition. As regards the sale of the lands allowed to villagers, the policy of Davidson was also dictated by the same dualistic approach[65]: “In the Hatarakorale where the population is numerous, long settled and well to do, I have used my personal influence and checked almost altogether the alienation of village chenas. In the Tunkorale and Pata Bulatgama, i.e. the Kelani Valley where the population was sparse and underfed, I contented myself with vigilantly guarding the Crown interests and impeaching on all occasions the folly of selling for less than the ultimate purchaser was willing to pay, i.e. something between Rs 25 and 50 per acre. Furthermore, I stopped persons of family and consequence from alienating their family holdings without special sanction from me”

On 16.03.97, at a discussion on the subject held at the Executive council, the Colonial secretary wryly remarked that “the custodians of Kägalla used not so much to favor the introduction of the European influence in this markedly native district (…) The absorption of villager’s lands will still go on by those desirous of extending existing estates”. But the governor Ridgeway declared: “I am altogether opposed to any grandmotherly policy as regards tea in the shape of restrictions in order to protect existing forests. The Treasurer, Lee, who knew Kägalla in the 1870s, commented that  “It is only since the prohibition of chena cultivation that the trees were grown up upon these lands and they are now, I understand, covered with heavy jungle, but when I knew the country 25 years ago, there was little or no forest on it. It was all chena”. It was decided by the Executive council in June 1897 to wait until the railway was decided upon. In June 1898, the project was abandoned: “in view of the depressed state of the tea industry at present, it would be well to indefinitely postpone the sale”. But in June 1899, Booth, then in charge of Sabaragamuwa, considered that in view of the rise in tea prices it might be time to resume the project, but that if the land was not demarcated no sale could take place.

The Forest settlements were never legalized, for want of political will, and because the judiciary system opposed it: “The findings of the Forest Settlement Officer are too vague for any definite action to be taken (…) I am in worse position than if no settlement had been made at all”, wrote Bertram Hill, the successor of Davidson[66] The only possible solution would have been another resettlement under the Waste Lands Ordinance  (WLO) which had been enacted in 1897: “What I want to do is to be able to proclaim in one notice all the chena land and forest and waste land in one village. There would then be absolutely no difficulty in making a settlement and there would be some hope of getting the whole district settled”. “I shall now proceed to settle the district village by village working from north to south”. Five years later, nothing had be done: “It would be advisable to have many of the former settlements in this district resettled under the Waste lands ordinance. The proclamations under the Forest Settlement Ordinance are so imperfect that no court would uphold them, and besides the Supreme court has held that the decision of a Forest Settlement Officer under the Forest Ordinance is not binding as to title”.

The failure of the Kägalla successive settlements is one of the origins of the Land Settlement Ordinance of 1897, and the lessons of the experience framed the future land policy of the island. At the level of policy making, while initially the ordinance was presented by Governor Ridgeway as a means to give the Crown more land to sell, the Colonial office requested him to rectify the position and present it as a tool to prevent “the growing practice of villagers unable to resist the temptation of a little ready money, to sell chena land, and even gardens and homestead, for some trifling sum to middlemen, who now roam the country with purses in their hands tempting the people to sell their inheritance, and thus veritably transform a population of landowners into a proletariat of wage earners”.[67]

Meanwhile, as the settlements were not given legal strength, the lands allowed to chena cultivation but not alienable began to be treated as villager’s properties and eventually offered for sale to planters by various intermediaries, including Mideniya. A typical example is that of Malalpola, close to Halgolla Estate[68]: “The villagers have sold all their land to Halgolla estate and now have the impudence (sic) to claim the Crown lot. They will not withdraw their claim and must be referred to court”. In 1924, the Agent at Kägalla concluded[69]: “Most of the lands in this district allowed for chena cultivation in the 1890s have now been planted up and are the subject of partition cases, fiscal’s sales, testamentary actions, etc.” The situation was discussed by the end of 1903.  The outcome was the publication of a circular which opened the way to what could be called the system of settlement by Certificate of Quiet Possession in the case of former settlements. One should note that it was not proposed to use the ordinance of 1897. A few ‘WLO enquiries’ were held in specific localities of the south of the district such as Welangalla and Udapota, but these localities which had been settled under the old chena settlements were already encroached by planters. In Welangalla, a multi-caste village, the ‘village block’ of Ievers settlement had been partially sold through the usual speculators (Kader Thambi, Velaiathan Chetty, K.D.J. Perera) to Fern Lands Tea Company, represented by proctor Marshall of Avissawella. Marshall attempted to effect an unofficial settlement of private lands of the village parallel to the official settlement by the Revenue Officer and with the consent of him. But they met with the opposition of an old woman who refused to sign an agreement “in spite of the objurgation of proctor Marshall” – a late case of peasant resistance.[70]

To understand the failure of the Booth settlement, one must take into account a series of factors: the imperfection of the surveys and their discrepancies with the findings of the Forest settlement officer; headmen interested or corrupt who pointed the boundaries; the usual lack of professionalism of the surveyors, their frequent hostility towards the villagers and partiality in favour of the planters; the Forest and the Survey departments the last to be relied upon for a pro-villager policy as they were the most repressive in the matter of villagers rights; the skeptical,  hostile, or lackadaisical  position of the administrators who were posted after Booth.; and the rubber boom of the early 1900s which led to a new burst of land hunting.

Settlements in the Kägalla district had been undertaken with the Ievers project of establishing a dual economy at the village level, protecting the traditional village sector by admitting chena cultivation and fostering the development of plantation economy. They concluded with the Davidson project of establishing a dual economy at the district level, protecting Hatarakorale, the “garden of the East”, and leaving Tunkorale to the European tea planter’s rule. Both projects failed because in the colonial context the power and attraction of the plantocracy surpassed the authority of the Raj. We shall study in the next chapters how the local administration attempted to clean up the mess in the Kägalla district by distributing Certificates of Quiet Possession and how the new Settlement department attempted to curb the speculative activities of rubber and coconut planters, most of whom were members of the rising Ceylonese national bourgeoisie, who were not as powerful as the European planters.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


 

 

 

 

 



[1] See Ian Barrow, Surveying and Mapping in colonial Sri Lanka, 1800-1900. New Delhi, O.U.P., 2008

 
[2] E. Meyer “Historical Aspects of Caste in the Kandyan Regions, with particular reference to the non-Goyigama castes of the Kägalla District” Sri Lanka Journal of the Humanities and Social Sciences, 40, (2015) pp. 21-54
[3] Sri Lanka National Archives (hereafter SLNA) /30/37, diary of the Assistant Government Agent at Kägalla (hereafter Diary Kä) 3.10.1916
[4] SLNA, diary of the Settlement Officer (hereafter Diary SO) 28.06.1937
[5] SLNA/30/37 Diary Kä 29.08.1916
[6] The question has been briefly treated by Michael Roberts in History of Ceylon volume III p. 129-130, who describes the chena survey of the 1870s, without giving any information on the further settlements which were attempted for about 30 years
[7] The fact that Philip Francis Ondaatje (1860-1938), elder brother of Aelian Ondaatje (1874-1942) was chena surveyor for a long time strongly suggests that the work of the survey department contributed to start the whole land grabbing business in Kägalla. Philip Francis was the father of Philip Mervyn, an alcoholic planter, and the grandfather of Philip Christoph the Canadian billionaire and of Michael the novelist, who recalled his childhood in Kägalla in his novel Running in the Family. Lawyer specializing in land cases, Aelian Ondaatje (whose Christian name was that of the Kägalla Agent at his birth), married an English woman who had inherited a share in an old British grant in Nuwara Eliya, and he pursued the claim against the government. He was behind most of the land litigation in Kägalla after 1900 and opposed the government policy of restricting plantation development in Hatarakorale.
[8] Administration Report (hereafter AR) of the Surveyor general 1873 II p. 14; Diary Kä, 7.09.1873
[9] AR Surveyor general 1875, app. L, p. 11; 1876 II p. 10A-11A.
[10] These ‘chena cases’ are available in the ‘village files’ kept in the Kägalla kacceri records, series Y and Z (consulted in August 1979). The cases quoted in the next pages are all taken from these records
[11] SLNA 30/612, 8.12.1873.
[12] These headmen were still in existence in 1886, when Price wrote to Saunders that the system “only added to the difficulty of the question” because the village headmen rejected on them their responsibility and vice versa.(Diary Kä 28.10.1886) ; but Saunders answered that they should be retained « and absorbed into the ranks of forest rangers » ; as soon as the Sabaragamuwa province was created, Price reiterated his demand, which was accepted by the GA Wace in 1889.
[13] AR Kä 1874 p. 23-24 and 1875 p. 65-66:
[14] Diary Kä, October 1872
[15] Kägalla kacceri records, chena case Narangala, and Diary Kä, 12.11.1872 and 31.01.1887.
[16] AGA(Assistant Government Agent) Kägalla to GA (Government Agent) WP (Western Province) n° 916, 12.12.1878 as annexure to Burden report, SLNA 30/868; same report a draft in the Kägalla Kacceri records together with the chena settlement files.
[17] AR WP 1879 p. 21; letter GA WP to the Colonial Secretariat, 15.02.79.
[18] Settled on 29.08.1878 “without special enquiry into the claims to chenas and gardens” ; resettled under Forest settlement but a lot of land had been sold to Lavant estate and according to the diary (8.01.1893)  “this village has been a good deal cramped by the sale of the large Crown block in this village and around it”
[19] Diary Kä, 1.04.1884, Chena file Hatnapitiya at the Kägalla kacceri (see also copy annexed to Burden report 1916)
[20] Kägalla kacceri records, Paradeniya file, PP 91
[21] Later theorized by Julius Hermann Boeke (1884-1956) in Dualistische economie. Leiden 1930

 
[22] Diary Kä, 3.04.1884
[23] When Gordon became Governor in December 1883, he compelled his provincial and district agents to keep a diary which was to be sent to him and which he read and annotated personally. These diaries are therefore much better kept than the previous diaries, and provide a fascinating source to observe the day to day administration of the district; note that Ievers could speak fluent Sinhala and was interested in the sociology of Ceylon (he later authored a Manual of the North Central Province) 
[24] Diary Kä, 1.4.1884. (village of Uda Yogama)

 
[25] A panguwa (plural pangu) is a share of the village territory belonging to a group of families having a common ancestor or common caste affiliation and common economic interests or/and service obligations; its members are called pangukarayo. The term gamwasama (plural gamwasam) is employed for a high caste panguwa and may cover the whole of a village if it belongs to the upper Goyigama caste.
[26] AR Kä 1881 p. 25A-26A
[27] Kägalla kacceri records, Pannila village file, and Diary Kä, 3.04.1884
[28] AR Kä 1884, p. 22A-23A
[29] Kägalla kacceri records, village file Pannila ; Diary Kä 1884 ; SLNA 33/2497 (‘Forest settlement in the Kägalla district’)

.
[30] SLNA, Diary Kä (Le Mesurier), 15.01.1886; CO54/610 Governor to Colonial Office, 5.11.1893
[31] Diary Kä for April – May1884
[32] Diary Kä, 23.06.1887
[33] Diary Kä, 18-19.03.1885
[34]  SLNA 65/ 958, letter 829, 30.12.1884 Wace to GA WP
[35] Diary Kä 26.03 and 13.08.1885
[36] AR Kä 1888, p. 43A, 1889 p. J28, Sabaragamuwa 1890 p. J2, 1892 p.J4
[37] AR Kägalla 1892 p. J6
[38] SLNA 65/ 173 ’Forest Settlement in the Kägalla district’ ;  SLNA 65/ 958 : Kelani Valley Forest Reserve ; SLNA 45/1866,67,68,69,70. (for Beligal settlements) ; SLNA 65/1187 (on the failure of the Forest settlements) ; Land settlement work of F.R. Ellis (Land Settlement Department Records). SLNA L205/1926 : Forest settlements
[39] Sessional paper 43 of 1882, § 65
[40] Letter AGA Kä to GAWP, 13.08.1885; Administration Report Kägalla 1886 p.147A-149A
[41] Diary Kä, 12.12.1887 and Administration reports Kägalla, 1889 and 1890
[42] Diary Kä, 19-21.02.1887
[43] SLNA 65/ 958 ‘Kelani Valley Forest Reserve’: letter of Walker to Colonial Secretary, 31.01.1887, and letter of Price, AGA Kä.to GA WP, 5.03.1887
[44] Saunders was distrusted by Gordon, who wrote in a private letter to the Colonial Office (CO54/653, Stanmore to Lucas, 9.03.1898): “My reasons for distrusting Sir Frederick Saunders’ judgement it is unnecessary to state. It may suffice in this connection to say that as Government Agent of the Western Province, when that province included Sabaragamuwa, he was always in favour of placing the harshest and strictest interpretation of native land claims, except indeed in a few cases where he showed singular indulgence.”
[45] SLNA, 65/173, Forest Settlement in the Kägalla district, report by Government Agent Wace, 30.01.1889

 
[46] Diary Kä, 19.05.1892, 28.07.1893
[47] Administration reports Kägalla 1896 p. J9, 1897 p. J11
[48] It was the subject of a quantity of reports and correspondence collected by the administration: SLNA, 65/ 1167, see also SLNA 45/1867, 45/1868 and 45/1869 (Davidson report, 8.10.1895)
[49] Diary Kä, 4.04.1895, 9.04.1895, 31.08.1895, 12.09.1895, 10.04.1896, 5.06.1896
[50] Diary Kä 5.06.1902, SLNA 45/1870, correspondence between the Government Agent Sabaragamuwa and the Surveyor General, October 1902 to January 1903
[51]  Diary Kä 3.01.1905, 18.01.1905, 15.05.1905  
[52] Diary Kä, 10.05.1871, 27.07.1885,20.03.1890, 3.03.1906, 4.03.1907; SLNA 45/1866; Land settlement department records, Dorawaka file, Booth report (annexure to letter of GA Sabaragamuwa to Controller of forests, 22.01.1894); Kägalla kacceri records files Y2/46 and Y99, Old chena plan PP269 (1880); “Kiraveli Pattuwa 1614”, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society Ceylon Branch 36:4, 1947

 
[53] Five Duraya pangu in the North West corner, three Duraya pangu in a small tract in the East, the majority of the Duraya pangu cultivating a very large undivided area in the East, the rest of the Duraya pangu cultivating a large tract in the South West, and the Goyigama cultivating a smaller tract in the West.
[54]  ‘Findings on the question of title to highland chenas in gabadagam’, Land Settlement Department Records; another copy as annex to Burden report in SLNA 30/868.
[55] Lewala Forest Settlement, Kägalla kacceri record room, series Y

 
[56] Loose documents included in the unnumbered Panawitiya village file, Kägalla kacceri record room.
[57] SLNA 30/510 (CQP series)
[58] Kägalla kacceri record room, Forest settlement report by L.W. Booth, 19.05.1892
[59] Diary Kä, 2.05.1891 and 5.09.1892  
[60]Mahabage Forest settlement (1896), Kägalla kacceri record room; SLNA 30/434; SLNA 30/480 (Certificates of quiet possession, Mideniya report, 22.05.1905)
[61] SLNA Colonial Secretariat 65/ 958 brings together the correspondence relating to the proposed Kelani forest reserve from 1884 to 1898; Report on the Forest settlement of the Kelani valley reserve, original signed by L.W. Booth, Kotagala, 9 April 1897, kept in the Kägalla kacceri record room in the series called ‘Booth Settlement’ together with the different case studies of each village; Kelani valley Forest settlement Register, SLNA 45/1726; for the Kaluganga project, Administration Report Sabaragamuwa 1889 p.J4.
[62] F. Lewis, Sixty-Four Years in Ceylon, p. 224-225
[63] SLNA 30/868, Burden report, 15.08.1916; the chenas of this village were eventually sold to a land speculator, Van der Poorten, with the help of Mideniya.
[64] SLNA 65/958, report 04251, 12-13.03.97; see also Executive council paper 680/97 
[65] SLNA 65/178, RN 012857, Govt Agent Sabaragamuwa (acting) to Colonial Secretary, 3.10.1896 
[66] Bertram Hill, Davidson’s successor, in Diary Kä 15.06.1898, 14.10.1898, 13.03.1899; 21.04.1903
[67] SLNA, 65/1187 (GA to CS, 26.11.1903, circular n° 4 (12.01.1904); CO54/639, Ridgeway to Chamberlain 349, 15.10.1897
[68] Diary Kä 24.09.1900  
[69] Diary Kä, 22.08.1924
[70] Village file Kägalla kacceri, 30.11.1878 (Ievers settlement); Diary Kä 10.10.1905, SLNA 30/509 (6.02.1907).

World Development – article “Lives in Exile”

World Development
Lives in exile? Perspectives on the resettlements of Sri Lankan refugees in
Tamil Nadu, India

Anthony Goreau-Ponceaud

This article looks at subjectivities and regimes of homing from a position of liminality and questions the placements dynamics displayed by Sri Lankan Tamil refugees in Tamil Nadu, India. Based on long-term and longitudinal fieldwork conducted in Keezhputhupattu refugee camp near Pondicherry between 2010 and 2023, this study analyses the experience of the refugees, which combines a “know-how” that they have developed due to a life in exile since 1983, which is linked, among other things, to a sometimes well-developed diasporic network; and a restrictive agency that has been granted to them by the Indian and Tamil Nadu authorities, which places them in a regime that is intended to be exceptional. The results of the study are significant and show how families spanning three generations may reproduce their new normalcy and negotiate their lives.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0305750X24000998

CHENA (slash-and-burn) CULTIVATION AND ITS REPRESSION IN COLONIAL CEYLON by Eric P. Meyer

“Asking villagers to desist from chena cultivation is much the same as asking them to starve to please government”

John George Fraser, Ceylon Settlement Officer, diary, 16.02.1902.

 

Chena (slash-and-burn) cultivation is commonly regarded as characteristic of the dry zone of Sri Lanka; its technical, economic, and social features have been analyzed by anthropologists doing field studies in that area, such as Leach, Yalman, Brow, Kloos and Spencer, the best informed of them all; most of them allude to the repressive policy pursued by the colonial raj against chena (so vividly pictured by Leonard Woolf in The Village in the Jungle), and to the discourses and myths used to justify it, especially by contrasting chena  with paddy cultivation.[1]

The purpose of this study is to complete the analysis by focusing on chena cultivation in the wet and intermediate zones of the island (Central, Uva, Sabaragamuwa, North Western provinces and the northern fringe of the Southern province), mainly during the period 1830-1930. This is the area and the period in which plantation economy reached its maximal development, eventually wiping out chena cultivation, which was vital for the peasant economy before plantation growth. It is possible to argue that repressive practices and discourses aimed at chena cultivation in the dry zone originated or at least took their compulsive strength in the experience of chena repression to make room for plantation growth elsewhere in the island. Repressive attempts were passively or even actively opposed by the peasantry; this policy may be analyzed as a major failure of the colonial administration, always creating discontent and sometimes famine conditions. In a further study, the focus will be narrowed to the emblematic Kägalla district.

 

Economic and social aspects of chena cultivation in the wet and intermediate zones

“All have not watered land enough for their needs, that is, such land as good rice requires to grow in; so that such are fain to sow on dry land, and till other men’s fields for a subsistence.  These persons are free from payment of taxes; only sometimes upon extraordinary occasions, they must give a hen or a mat or such like, to the King’s use: for as much as they use the wood and water that is in his countrey. That is if find the duty to be heavy or too much for them, they may leaving their house and land be free from the King’s service, as there is a multitude do, and in my judgement they live far more at ease after they have relinquished the King’s service than when they had it.”[2]. The situation described by Robert Knox by the end of the 17th century was still valid two centuries later: the contrast between state control and taxation of settled wet paddy cultivation, versus freedom and tax evasion of unsettled highland cultivation, is a structural feature of the wet and intermediate zones of Sri Lanka.

I shall first try to draw a picture of the Ancient agrarian regime, which is of course an artefact and should not make us lose sight of the very real changes which occurred during the 16th to 18th century period. But one can call it ‘Ancient regime’ in view of the ‘Revolution’ which followed. In this system as it prevailed in the wet and intermediate areas controlled by the Kotte and later the Kandyan kingdom, the availability of space and the diversity of resources made it possible for the peasant to minimize risks ; this does not mean that the village was self-sufficient or that the system was working smoothly: except in out-of-the-way areas of the dry zone, a certain amount of trade contributed to the balance of rural economy: areca nuts, jaggery (palm tree sugar) and various garden produce were bartered for rice, fish, salt and textiles.

 

A vital or a minor resource? The place of chena in ‘Ancient regime’ economy and society.

Contrary to a common view, chena was not a minor or subsidiary resource in the wet and intermediate zones, but was central to the survival of large sectors of the peasantry: their choice of chena cultivation was rational in socio-economic terms in a context of limited population, space availability and resource diversification. This is the kind of rationality which is branded the ‘safety-first’ approach by J.C. Scott in his analysis of the subsistence ethic of the Asian peasantry.[3] 

The flexibility of the system resided in the ability of the peasantry (and especially the young people), to mobilize peripheral resources in case of need. And chena cultivation was the major resource of that kind, certainly more than forest as such. The problem raised by Jayawardena and Roberts is one of quantification: they argue that these resources “were only of marginal utility to Kandyan village ecology”[4]  By marginal, they seem to imply unnecessary; my view is that in a context of scarce, irregular and diversified resources, marginal means necessary. Besides, there were several categories of villages, some in which chena was the major resource for all the inhabitants at all times, others in which it was complementary, but nonetheless necessary to specific categories and/or in specific circumstances. Spencer convincingly suggests that the general under-reporting in official and ethnographic literature of chena cultivation results from the convergence of colonial dislike for its lack of accountability and the cultural valuation of the sole paddy cultivation by the Sinhalese[5].

‘Chena villages’ were not found only in the dry zone, where the local conditions make irrigated paddy cultivation dependent upon irregular weather or elaborated hydraulic techniques. They were also common in the wettest parts of the south-western hills, where marshy or narrow valleys could not be properly ‘asweddumized’ (= converted into irrigated paddy fields). Sometimes älvi  (hill paddy) was sown for two years in owita (unirrigated wet land at the bottom of valleys); afterwards millets and other fine grain were cultivated for a couple of years, and the owita was left fallow as grazing ground for three years.[6] More often hill paddy was cultivated in highland areas where moisture was sufficient and the cultivation cycle could be as long as 10 to 20 years.  Älvi was sown the first year in June and reaped in December (sometimes paddy seeds were mixed with millet or oil plant seeds);  millets or yams were sown the second year, then wood was allowed to grow for a decade or more.[7]  The pattern was typical of Kukul and Pasdun East, on the border between Ratnapura and Kalutara districts; of Atakalan, Hinidum and Morawak on the border between Ratnapura and the Southern province; and of the vast area south and west of Sri Pada, in the Ratnapura and the Kägalla district, where it was called Kälerata (the forest country).

In these sparsely populated localities made up of small scattered hamlets, chena cultivation with hill paddy provided the only source of grain, but it was supplemented by hunting, food gathering (fruit and honey) and kitul (sugar palm-tree) tapping. The enquiries of the settlement officers in these areas (upper Kelani valley hamlets and villages of Gilimale and Bambarabotuwa in the 1890s, Kukul korale in the 1920s) together with descriptions such as those found in the diaries of the Assistant Government Agent Ievers for 1884  and in the memoirs of Frederic Lewis, provide a wealth of information on the local ecology and society of these areas.[8]

A good half of these villages were inhabited by members of the Vahumpura caste (often locally called Kande minissu – people of the hills).[9] Under the service system imposed by the Kandyan kings, they were required to provide jaggery sugar  and cakes (hence their other name: Hakuru) and more generally cooked food, and occasionally to act as bearers and soldiers guarding the hill passes; although fully integrated in the caste system (in the upper strata of the lower castes) and now proud of their Buddhist identity, this community had some features similar to those of the Indian Adivasi and could possibly claim the same antiquity as the more celebrated Vedda. Some chena villages were inhabited by high caste people (some of them being locally called Vedda) and others by members of lower castes such as the Panna Durayi (pastoralists and grasscutters, initially distinct from the Padu who lived in large irrigated paddy villages, with whom the Panna were later amalgamated under the name Batgama)[10].

Chena villages were characterized as such by the peasants and distinguished from rice villages[11]. Among several typical cases in Ratnapura and Kägalla districts one can quote the locality of Bambarabotuwa studied by Fred Lewis: “an instance of what happens when there is a limited population and an unlimited land supply, which being out of sight was out of control”: the absence of State interference and inaccessibility being added factors: peasants were close to a food-gathering economy, settlement in hamlets was sparse and unstable and the only paddy fields “in reality were only swamps roughly turned into paddy lands”[12]. Gilimale, immediately to the west, had more diversified resources owing to the presence of small paddy fields, to the trade linked to Sri Pada pilgrimage, and was characterized by the presence of a seigneurial family. However when settlement was effected, the Settlement Officer defined the village ecology as follows: chena are indispensable, there are no paddy fields, no estate employment, no money to pay for individual settlements: “they seem to have no idea beyond chena…what they want is to be allowed to chena as heretofore”. In the Kägalla district, the villages of Atulugam east, the area close to Adam’s Peak, called Kälerata, and of the Uduwe korale, close to Dolosbage, were practically devoid of paddy fields.[13]

But the most common type found in the Kandyan hilly areas and in the lowlands of the Kurunegala district was the ‘mixed farming village’: there, chenas were associated with gardens and irrigated paddy in variable proportions according to the local ecological conditions. The necessity of chena cultivation in combination with wet paddy, although less evident than in the former category, was generally recognized  and the legal concept of ‘appurtenance on a 3 to 1 basis’ (a highland area three times the acreage of the irrigated area) was later constructed by the British to cover what was initially the acknowledgement of a technical complementarity; but a careful distinction must be made between highland areas close to the paddy fields, which were necessary to wet paddy cultivation itself (pillewa), or for dwelling and growing vegetables (gedarawatta), and the chena  area itself. According to the Assistant Settlement Officer Hunter,  “appurtenances” only included pillewa  and owita , and  “in a large number of cases the claimed chenas are claimed by people who are not paddy field owners, and that calling these as appurtenant to paddy fields is to deny the claims of persons who are not field owners (…) one might as well say that chenas are appurtenant to gardens”.[14]

The colonial administration taxation policy produced a mass of official documents which could have biased the knowledge of agrarian economy. In 1880, a general review of the taxation of crops other than wet paddy was done[15], which showed that only älvi was always taxed, other dry grains being taxed only in North, East and South provinces, and in the Kandyan provinces only when cultivated on Crown land. In the North Western Province in 1880, the Government Agent, Allanson Bailey, distinguished regularly cultivated untaxed chena lands, and chena exceptionally cultivated for älvi, which were taxed. In areas where älvi was regularly cultivated, a detailed analysis of the wattoru (tax registers), such as those for the village of Pannala in the Kägalla district (1858-59 to 1889-90) yields similar results: some large henyaya (chena tracts) were cultivated each season, while others appear only two or three times.          

The necessity of chena cultivation has to be understood both in economic and sociological terms. If wet paddy crops failed owing to bad weather, pests or other troubles, chena cultivation of millets in yala season (April to July) season was the only means to tide over until the next maha season (September to February). Some villages were mixed caste localities, where the lower castes had a limited access to irrigated paddy land and relied more than the high castes on highland cultivation. Moreover, specific groups of any caste had a limited access to irrigated paddy: especially young men and women while paddy fields were in full control of the elder generation; widows or separated wives with children returning from their husband’s village; also people who had lost their rights through indebtedness, family feuds and disputes with more powerful neighbours: these categories could rely on chena cultivation for a couple of seasons. Among these groups, it is likely that women played a major role in dry grain (especially kurakkan) cultivation, while paddy (including älwi) was a male occupation[16]. Another factor was population growth resulting in minute (and usually mortgaged) shares of paddy land, which led enterprising and individualistic people to turn to a form of cultivation where interference by family members or the usurer was not similarly felt.

Chena therefore acted as a safety valve, which prevented a breakdown in the village socio-economic balance, and eventually allowed the peasants to postpone the decision to migrate.

 

Technical and quantitative aspects

Identifying patterns is insufficient to assess the actual role of chena cultivation in the Ancient Regime. But any attempt at quantification is hampered by the paucity and unreliability of general statistics: a slightly better information is available for the 20th century only and can document the gradual disappearance of chena cultivation; it is therefore impossible to quantify the contribution of chena cultivation to peasant resources[17]. Blue book statistics on millets are pure guess, and paddy tax data on hill paddy must be used with care, tax evasion being much more frequent than in the case of wet paddy cultivation[18]. Taxation records suggest that hill paddy cultivation was extremely variable from year to year: as an example, for the period 1852-1878 in the Kägalla district, the data shows peaks (in 1859, 1866, 1873 and 1876) which might be explained by weather conditions favouring älvi cultivation, and a minimum for the period 1867-1872, which is connected with the period of maximal repression as we shall see later.[19]

At the local level, a study of tax receipts checked on the spot by the settlement officers shows that älvi  cultivation was undertaken on a regularly recurrent basis in the large potion of the village highlands, and exceptionally in other parts which were left untouched for longer periods or were usually cultivated with untaxed millets: this does not mean that the latter were ‘unnecessary’ chena  fields.

Slash-and burn cultivation operations in the dry zone have often been described: cutting, firing, digging with mammoty (hoe), sowing, second digging to cover the seeds, fencing and watching. They were the same in the wet zone, except that the interval between cutting and firing was much longer, and that some care was taken to leave tree belts on the slopes to prevent soil erosion.

An analysis of crop timing in the Kägalla district[20] confirms the major differences between hill paddy (älvi) and kurakkan millet: the former was cultivated in maha season (July to February) like irrigated paddy: it was therefore a substitute for irrigated paddy ; kurakkan was cultivated in yala (March to August) only and was therefore complementary with paddy (hill or wet); but amu (another kind of millet) could be cultivated in maha as well. A combination of paddy (hill or wet) and different millets and other chena crops could keep the peasant busy all the year round. Amu and kurakkan therefore acted as a survival crop: contrary to hill paddy, they were not taxed, they grew in a few months, they might be cultivated at shorter intervals than älvi and might follow älvi on the same field; these millets, rather than hill paddy, were the poor people’s crop. They were usually sown mixed with various other grains or pulses, which were ripe at different periods and minimized the risk of loss. The difference between garden and chena laid in the permanent or temporary character of cultivation but the same crops could be found in both, especially spices, vegetables and roots. And even in the Ancient regime, commercial crops were not unknown in temporary fields: tobacco and ‘peasant’ coffee were often cultivated, especially on Uva highlands, but early in the 1840s, “tobacco cultivation has almost entirely disappeared since the natives have been prevented from encroaching upon the Crown lands”[21]

 

Chena cultivation: individualistic? collective? egalitarian?

There is a certain amount of imprecision or even contradiction in the literature on chena cultivation as a social activity. Colonial authors used to describe it as a communal form of cultivation, because they could not discern rights of ownership but only rights of user, and that according to their European experience, individual enterprise was equated with property rights: they viewed chena areas, like pastures, as a local equivalent of the British commons. According to R.E. Lewis, “the work is generally conducted by the inhabitants of the village together, who share equally in the produce; the women do their share of the work in weeding and harvesting, also in carrying the brush off the land to be used as firewood; the labour of two men will produce sufficient for the subsistence of three persons”. On the other hand, many ethnographers who studied dry zone villages analyze chena cultivation as a rather individualistic activity, based on the work force of the nuclear family in opposition with paddy, a definitely social activity, involving “the intricacies of ownership”.[22] Of course there were there were local variants, and in the dry and intermediate zones the ‘wheel chena’ communally organized around a central place was the dominant model. Another explanation of the contradiction could be that in the course of time chena lost its communal character: this is the position taken by Codrington who notes that the claims to individual chenas ‘above the mountains’ appears by the 18th century in the Kägalla district: according to the lekammitiya of Dedigama village, each panguwa has a number of chenas attached to it but without names or extents”. “In the Kandyan coffee districts, ignorance of the real tenure has led individuals being allowed to encroach upon the common property to so large an extent, or even to sell portions of it to coffee planters and other outsiders, that there are probably very few villages in which the common right has not been almost entirely extinguished”[23] (Administration Report of Davids for 1871, Nuwarakalaviya district). This situation still prevailed in the Ratnapura district (villages of Bambarabotuwa, Gilimale and Nagoda) and in the Kälerata by the end of the 19th century – with the difference that the colonial taxation and legal system attempted to introduce rigid categories in a basically flexible practice. When the colonial officer L.W. Booth settled the remote village of Miyanowita, he noticed: “In no single instance has payment of tax been proved for any defined potion of land, the wattoru [taxation lists] give no boundary, each entry merely states the name of the chena, its cultivator, and the quantity of grain sold; each chena is undefined in position and extent, varying in the latter respect at each successive cultivation as the wattoru show”. And almost 50 years later, in the same area, chenas were still held in common[24]

In the South-west, the tracts of temporary fields (henyaya) were organized according to pangu (territories belonging to a lineage) : “In the Ratnapura district a man does not say: ‘I claim Batahena because I had a chena there 5 years ago’ but ‘Batahena lies within the boundaries of my panguwa, my father claimed 1/24th share of the panguwa, therefore I claim 1/24th share of all the chenas in the panguwa”.[25]   Cultivation in the 1840s is described as collective by R.E. Lewis, but it must be understood as collective inside the same lineage: of course when a small village was inhabited by members of only one lineage, cultivation was fully collective.  “Chenas are never held in common among different pangu, although they are frequently so possessed by the various offshoots or families of one panguwa. The tenure which is called communal I should define rather as tattumaru (rotating right of use)”[26].  When a henyaya was cultivated by somebody from outside the lineage, the rights of user of the local family were recognized by the payment of a very small rent (1/20th), later evolving towards the classical 1/4th ande system; if these outsiders permanently settled in the village, they might have either remained tenants, or be given their own highland tract, according to the power relations they had with the original family[27].

In the wet zone the general model in the larger villages was that particular areas were cultivated by particular lineages:  the difficulties encountered by highland block settlements bear ample testimony to the fact (see next section). A detailed analysis of chena cultivation in a very large former royal village of the Kägalla district, Dorawaka, where the original Batgama population had remained on the spot, yields the following results: there were two very large henyaya where a majority of the families cultivated, and some of which were in the 1880s in the process of conversion to gardens; and three smaller tracts where some of the families had supplementary rights.  But in other villages the pattern seemed quite anarchical, at least in the eyes of outsiders who described chena as “scattered all over the villages”. The case of Ampe is quite significant by comparison[28] : Ampe was also a royal village with low caste tenants at will (maruveni) and a few Govi families to manage the estate in the time of the kings: the fragile socio-economic fabric was disrupted by the fall of the monarchy and outsiders, mainly Muslim, came in, asserted property rights and ousted most tenants: the result was that there being practically no established lineage in the village, cultivation was on an individual basis and chena fields scattered, but nevertheless strictly controlled and eventually taxed.

In the hilly district of upper Uva, it seems that chenas were individually appropriated and were fenced with stone walls, even by the beginning of the 19th century, but on closer examination it appears that in these particular areas cultivation was almost permanent, with rotation on a three years basis. And in the North Western province, at least in the 1930s, “the pangu system was not prevalent and chena had to be separately located”[29]

Finally, chena cultivation was certainly more egalitarian than wet paddy cultivation in a context of availability of land and lack of outside interference: it was undertaken by the household, on land accessible to all the members of the community, with minimal capital requirements. “It provides few opportunities either for monetary profit or for the elevation of one villager above his fellows”, according to Brow[30]. But caste distinctions and power relations were reproduced in chena cultivation: in the example of Anhettigama, a village in the Kälerata, the dominant lineage could cultivate chenas anywhere in the territory, while lesser families were assigned specific chena areas. In other cases, outsiders were allowed to cultivate chenas belonging to villagers giving them a share of the crop[31]  Moreover, its dependence upon the good will of authorities (especially in the colonial context) diverted a part of the resources obtained from it to the benefit of headmen and others: to please the colonial authorities, headmen reported ‘illicit’ chena clearings of rival families and of powerless villagers, especially those of low castes.

 

Chena as a space of freedom

Chena cultivation was not only an answer to ecological and economic conditions. It also represented a specific mode of social life, where certain groups could find a recognized space. It was an unbound and changing zone, an area of temporary dwellings, with no stable property and family relations, as opposed to the defined, bounded, policed paddy-cum-house area.    

It is extremely significant that chena cultivation was an un-ritualized activity: R.E. Lewis rightly emphasized that contrary to paddy cultivation, kurakkan and other dry grain cultivation was performed without any rite. In a sense, it was a kind of forest cultivation and as such can be understood in the context of the traditional opposition in Indian thought and rituals between grama (village) and aranya (forest), bound and unbound, so nicely analyzed by Charles Malamoud.[32]

In the chena temporary relations could take place. There young couples could be made and unmade: in the traditional Kandyan villages, the practice of trial unions was common, and such unions were described in a typical sentence: geniyek henata geniyanava (to take a woman to a chena)[33].

Chena cultivation was perceived as a fringe activity between gathering and producing, in constant contact with the jungle, a dangerous but rewarding enterprise which required residence on the spot for purpose of watching against predators.  In chena cultivation, young men could work together, family control over resources was minimal, it was therefore a means to escape from the intricacies of paddy land subdivision. It was also exempt from rajakariya  (king’s service): the refuge for people who tried to shake off the burden of taxes and services, as suggested by Robert Knox quoted in introduction. It was unpoliced, beyond control of the higher authorities – the king and his superior headmen, and therefore the refuge of outlaws or of ordinary villagers in periods of trouble (this is well documented for the 1817-1818 period, and again in 1848, during the anti-British rebellions). It is not clear whether the kings discouraged or not chena cultivation, except in tahansi käle (forests reserved for strategic purposes) in which it was expressly prohibited.

Conversely it was the major area where the arbitrary power of local families could be asserted either against the policy of the State or over the lesser peasant families, who had to bargain for cultivation rights. In ninda (feudal) and temple villages, access to chena was at the pleasure of the lord, while in villages of the royal demesne (gabadagam/bisogam) it was controlled by the vidane (steward). But in freehold villages (koralegam), the majority, it could become a stake in power rivalries between local families, inasmuch as it was less defined than the paddy area, and therefore easier to forcefully control. As soon as the colonial authorities attempted to check chena cultivation, power relations of village families with nominated headmen became the key to have access to highlands.

But chena was also a temporary area which could be converted into permanent gardens – the first step in village expansion process. In a sense, it could be argued that paradoxically it was more dynamic and evolutive – in other terms more modern – than paddy cultivation. In any case, it was the economic, social and political safety valve of the Kandyan peasant regime, which gave it a certain amount of flexibility. It was soon to become a major target of the British colonial policy.

           

Chena as evil: colonial discourse under the British Raj  

 

Chena cultivation epitomized everything the Victorians considered as evil: unrestricted freedom as opposed to responsibility; desultory, temporary and nomadic as opposed to settled activity; laziness as opposed to exertion; imprecision as opposed to visibility. All the available evidence suggests that, in spite of ecological, financial and ‘moral’ justifications, the main motive behind the repression of chena cultivation in the wet and intermediate zones of Sri Lanka under the British raj has always been the demand of land by the planters; in the dry zone, where the planters had no stake, the protection of timber reserves was another factor. The British colonial administration created a legal frame after 1840 with the presumption of Crown property of all uncultivated and temporarily cultivated lands, while before the coffee boom, Turnour, a colonial authority in the matter of Kandyan customary laws, still considered that highlands were private, except reserved forests and highlands of former royal villages.[34]

The Administration Report of the Government Agent of the Southern Province for 1872 is typical of the colonial discourse: “In an oriental and uncivilized country, it is incumbent on the rulers to think for the people and to exercise in some sort a patriarchal sway over them. In no way is the necessity for this shown more than in interposing to protect for them their native land and to prevent its being ‘reduced to a desert’. The objection to chena cultivation may be thus summarized: it is wasteful; it engenders a nomadic and improvident habit among the people and retards civilization; it is ruinous to the general welfare of the country; and it is in reality but a poor means of support, for though the crop produces from 20 to 40 or 80 fold, the grain is so extremely small that the produce is of small bulk” [35]. In 1884, the Agent at Puttalam wrote (note the implicit relation between laziness and women and children’s work):  “Chena is a lazy kind of cultivation in which women and children take part, it introduces lazy habits, the work is easy, the crops are large and the result is a supply of poor indigestible food”.[36]

Chena was branded the lazy man’s crop.  The myth of the lazy native was general throughout the colonial milieus of Asia and Africa[37].  In the Ceylon case, it was  deeply entrenched in the mentality of the planting community, that viewed chena as typical of the native Kandyan laziness as opposed to the energy displayed by the European-cum-Tamil estate production. In 1867, in a critical pamphlet, a Burgher journalist, Leopold Ludovici, denounced the myth of native apathy afloat in colonial circles, quoting governor Robinson [38]: “The wants of the native population of the island are few and easily supplied by an occasional day’s work in their own gardens or paddy fields; their philosophy, their love of ease and indolence, or their limited ideas – whichever may be the real cause, render them perfectly content with what they already possess, and it is therefore futile to expect that they could by any mere outlay of government money, be ever brought to supply with food an immigrant population [the Tamil coolies], whose presence in the island is mainly rendered necessary by their own apathy” Ludovici then analyzed the racial component of the myth and its power implications: “the acknowledged value of his [the planter’s] enterprise to the country gives him such an importance in the eyes of the government as to qualify him to assert his claims with an amount of self-confidence unattainable by a native” . He suggested that the myth was connected with the experience of the European himself and his fears: “Even the European in this country soon yields to the enervating influence of the climate (…) and he soon enough takes to the fashion of damning the climate and speaking of the natives as a lazy apathetic race(…) This belief in native apathy has become fashionable, it has had a prescriptive existence of above half a century and the members of government seem to cling to it as a venerable article of faith in their code of political science”

Although field observers were well aware of the difficulty of the task of chena  cultivation, the myth was so deeply rooted that it survived the failure of the policy it tried to justify. As late as 1911, the governor Mc Callum, who made efforts to help the planters get Sinhalese labour, minuted as follows on the proposal by Leonard Woolf, then Agent at Hambantota, that chena cultivation should be allowed in his district[39] :“It is the proper policy of government to discourage the chenas, which has only been the means of bringing up our people in an atmosphere of idleness and dependence of the government, while the ruin to the country has been incalculable… If chenaing is prevented everywhere and in every province including Uva, there will be no need of villagers leaving one district for another except to find work; and if they only work instead of spending idle life, depending on government and damage to Crown land, it is immaterial whether they are in one district more than another” 

Chena cultivation was also viewed as a dangerous activity by a class of vagrants as opposed to the tightly controlled estate coolies  : “The love of a wandering life which it engenders is one of the greatest evils and we shall never improve the character of the people till we induce them to settle on their legitimate property and devote their energies to a more permanent cultivation in gardens and paddy fields”[40] A typical description is found in the diary of the Assistant Settlement officer Davies for the dry zone village of Talewatte[41]: “The people were a miserable lot, spoilt by unlimited opportunities of chena. In several cases, I found coconut gardens allowed to go to ruin, because the people preferred to cultivate unlimited Crown chenas instead of keeping their permanent cultivation in order (…) It is rather much to expect a villager of the type of this part of the country to observe the present regulations for obtaining land. He has to travel to Hambantota, to fill up a form of application, always done through a petition drawer, and has to deposit his fees with the prospect of having the lot put up for sale in two or three years, when he may get it, or as it is probable any other bidders are around he may not. If he still wants land he can get his fees back and repeat the performance (…) It is no wonder he prefers to take what he wants and pay up when he is found out”

            This discourse was similar to that on the poors/vagrants in 19th century Europe, with the same arguments and the same object: repressing chena cultivation for developing plantations was the same thing as enforcing industrial discipline among fresh unsettled migrant workers. But it was given a further emphasis linked to the spectacular features of slash and burn cultivation represented as a criminal activity carried on in the heart of forests, practically a form of arson or of theft of government property. This kind of pre-ecological discourse was common in 19th century romantic as well as positivist literature: for romantics, the forest was sacred. For example, the French writer Blanqui gave an apocalyptic description of slash and burn (brûlis) cultivation which he compared with a volcanic eruption.[42] 

The opposed myth, that of ‘noble’ paddy cultivation, attained its full development with the nationalists who never attempted to rehabilitate chena  cultivation, except for polemical purposes[43] Paddy and chena cultivation were considered as antagonistic and mutually exclusive: suppress the second and you will develop the first by diverting peasant exertion to paddy. In the North Western Province, the abandonment of many villages was attributed to the neglect and breach of tanks, and concomitant development of chena cultivation: the question whether slash and burn cultivation was the cause or the effect was not seriously considered[44].

In the wet zone, accusing chena of ecological disruption was an easy means to shift the focus from the responsibility of plantation growth in the same process. Chena, destructive of forests, was supposedly disruptive of ecology, and especially the cause of repeated droughts: the equation of drought with fire was obvious; the imagined sequence was chena cultivation > disappearance of forests > droughts > failure of paddy > increased recourse to chena.

In the view of the colonial administration, chena cultivation which was generally an untaxed activity brought little or no money to the exchequer; it was  wasteful, unproductive, technically backward, a primitive form of exploitation.       Chena cultivation was considered as a collective activity based on the feudal idea, and the ‘progress of civilization’ based on the development of individualism was the rationale behind the whole colonization process. In all cases, the moral discourse of the raj was used to legitimize a repressive policy and offset its disruptive impact.

On the contrary, a few traditionalist civil servants defended chena cultivation together with feudal structures, such as J.F. Dickson in 1870[45]: “If a comparison be made between service villages and any adjoining village held by peasant proprietors and not liable to service, the results will be in favor of the former. This is admitted on all hands and is attributable in a great measure to the greater security the service tenants possess from the settlement of the village boundaries in reference to the hen (chenas or commons), which, though cultivated in the most rude and primitive way, are of the utmost value to the poorer classes (…) In the hill country, every field has its appurtenant hena and in some villages the peasants live entirely on the produce of their hen, but it is often difficult to determine where the private hena and the Crown forest begin. The peasant constantly try to encroach on the Crown forest, while the Revenue Officers in their anxiety to preserve the boundaries of the Crown property occasionally lay claim to and stop the cultivation of private hen (…) To refuse to allow the cultivation of hen altogether is often to condemn a whole village or district to starvation. And yet this has been attempted at times, in complete ignorance of the real state of the case. On one occasion, the temporary administrator of the government publicly told a deputation that the government was determined to put down chena cultivation, as the chena plant was a most obnoxious weed which exhausted the soil and so on. Fortunately the deputation did not understand English, and the interpreter failed to explain the reasons of the temporary Head of the government.”

 

The colonial repressive policy and its impact until the end of the 19th century

 

Under the Dutch domination, which affected only the coastal areas, the policy concerning chena cultivation was erratic. As soon as shifting and even garden cultivation impinged on cinnamon collection, the authorities put pressure on the peasants: “The V.O.C. justified these restraints by the arguments that slash and burn agriculture would lead to soil exhaustion; that the clearing of land for chenas would inevitably result in the destruction of cinnamon plants; and indeed that cinnamon seeds scattered by winds and birds would not take root in chena lands cleared of their forest cover” While some governors, such as Van Imhoff, encouraged garden cultivation, others, like Van Loten and Schreuder “ordered the destruction of peasant holdings, gardens in particular, if the cultivator could produce no legal title”, and displaced villages to make room for cinnamon. Peasant resistance eventually led his successor Falck to ease the pressure and set up a kind of cultivation system encouraging cinnamon plantation on a part of village lands.[46]

During the first decades of the British domination, the official policy was laissez-faire or even encouragement of chena cultivation for strategic purposes, so as to ‘open’ the country and destroy the forest belt used by kings and later by rebels for guerilla attacks. In the words of a local chief of the Kägalla district[47]: “The government had observed on many instances the rebellion people had concealed themselves in forests, it is therefore thought that it is a good method to allow to cultivate them into chenas and did so, the Kandian people then entered into all the preserved forests and cultivated them into chenas even the part of Kadugannawa forest and several others have cultivated and now claim their private property.”

Before 1840, there is not a single document suggesting any excessive tendency to ‘illicit felling’ of forests. Forest administration, which is always repressive, was inexistent. Revenue administration was not really concerned. Älvi (dry paddy) was theoretically taxed since 1818 in the Kandyan provinces, and millets were taxed only in the Matara district. But it was done quite unsystematically: as suggested by Ron Herring[48], expropriation of surplus from chena was unremunerative and never insisted upon.  At that time, ‘waste land’ (except for highlands situated in ex-royal villages –  gabadagam), was tacitly or expressly recognized as private property by most British Officers, including Turnour who was to become by 1840 a firm advocate of chena  control. There were no definite rules, and this very imprecision became an insuperable obstacle in the eyes of the would-be planters: hence the famous ordinance 12 of 1840.

The period of 1840 to 1860 saw the rapid development of coffee cultivation on a large scale by British planters, first on former chena lands which were already ‘opened’, then on virgin forest land at higher elevations: the belief that former chena lands were unfit for coffee cultivation became general among the planters by that time. During that period, legal appropriation was followed by unsystematic repression. The ordinance 12 of 1840 (framed by the Turnour) established a legal presumption of highland property in favour of the Crown, with the possibility to assert private title through production of Kandyan grants (sannas), British grants, or proof of payment of tax (i.e. proof of älvi cultivation since only paddy was taxed: this worked to the detriment of millet cultivators). The purpose of the ordinance was to give clean titles to the planters, in the areas where they developed their estates: for example in Uva, the repression led to the abandonment of tobacco cultivation on chena, and in nearby Walapane, according to the testimony of  villagers, while before the coffee era they cultivated kurakkan, maize and chillies, “the Crown afterwards claimed the land and sold it to be converted into estates, all was claimed except a small extent bordering the villages, but these chenas are not fertile as they have to be cleared after intervals of two to three years”[49].

However the ordinance was never systematically applied before the 1860s. See for example what the Matale agent wrote in his report for 1853[50] : “Forest the natives know they have no right to fell. But every man had his chena and the natives cannot understand and never will understand that all chenas with respect to which the evidence required by ordinance 12 of 1840 cannot be adduced are the property of the Crown. Sannas were only granted to families of consideration, yet the owner of almost every paddy field however small claims his chena, and I have never yet met with satisfactory evidence of boundaries of chenas. The only taxable product of chenas within the Kandyan provinces is älvi. On many chenas älvi is never sown but kurakkan. The accident of situation therefore makes the difference. While the law remains as it is, every agent must know that it is utterly impossible to protect the right of the Crown as it should be protected for every headman himself possesses tracts of such chena lands”. According to the Matale agent in 1859, the legal claim of the Crown was not insisted upon:[51] “When it is proved that on many successive occasions the same land has been cultivated even with crop which pay no tax, then I believe government has invariably or almost invariably withdrawn all claim.”

In specific occasions, the arbitrary power of the raj and its local agents could be pushed very far under the pressure of influent planters connected with colonial administrators. A typical example is found in the comments of the Kägalla kacceri mudaliyar (translator for the local British agent) on the validity of älvi tax receipts for a low caste village, the chenas of which that very agent was about to illegally purchase under the name of a friend, to establish a plantation, in 1863: “A practice exists among the natives to cultivate high lands as well as low lands either forest or jungle for anda share which was occasionally done without the knowledge of the owner…At the time of harvest if a person happens to claim the cultivated land…the cultivator quietly gives the claimant’s share of the produce, but in case he finds no claimant (which generally happens when the land is Crown property) and as the headman neglects to report on such matters to government except when called for, the cultivator fraudulently endeavours to establish his claim…and when once taken a receipt on produce he finds no difficulty afterwards to maintain his claim. Therefore I think having tax receipts such as these which are imperfect or possessing once or twice the produce of a chena land by a native would not sufficiently bar the claim of the Crown to a high or chena land if no documents as gifts or transfers written on olas (which were formerly held as valid as notarial deeds are now) were produced in proof of having possessed and devolved from the father to the son” [52]

Some Revenue and Judicial officers were conscious that the implementation of the ordinance was unjust and unpractical. According to the Agent in Kandy, “in their desire to do their duty [i.e. implement the 1840 ordinance], I do not hesitate to say that not unfrequently a grave injustice is done to an individual by the Agent or his headmen”[53]. In the view of Bailey, another Agent who wrote detailed reports on the issue: “the only source of discontent among the Kandyans is the uncertain tenure on which they hold chena lands (…) Every year this fruitful source of litigation swells the work of the courts and the wealth of the proctors (…) This state of confusion is to be attributed to the fact that the law and the custom regarding chenas are diametrically opposed”. In a further report, Bailey rightly defined the legal status of chena as different from that of paddy ownership and characterized the British legal policy as follows : “We appear at once to have done away with the subtle distinction between the right to cultivate and the title to the soil”[54]. Gillman, the district Judge of Kurunegala in 1867, recognized that “ without desiring to add unnecessarily to the vexed question of chenas in this country (…) in a case between the Crown and a claimant in certain parts of this district, it is all but impossible as the law stands for the claimant to have even a chance of gaining his case (…) Grants and sannases are very rare, chenas are rarely ever cultivated with tax paying grain in this district, the claimant is therefore almost absolutely shut out from proof of his title, the only title he holds being possession in such cases”[55].

It was then suggested by some administrators that the ordinance of 1840 could not be strictly enforced and that chenas could be allowed as appurtenance to private paddy fields[56]: “The chena question is one, the settlement of which retards the advancement of the country, from the uncertainty of title – created by the ordinance of 1840 in great measure. It might be settled to some extent by a waiver of claim by government to high land adjoining paddy fields, in proportion of 3 acres of the former to 1 of the latter, provided some slight evidence could be adduced of the owner having had such appurtenances to his property. All other highlands should be declared the property of the Crown, save upon production of sannas or title; [if no survey is effected] authority might be given to rent out chenas claimed by the Crown at a rate of 3 or 4 shillings per acre (…) this arrangement would in itself determine many claims”

The years 1855 to 1864 saw the beginnings of a systematic anti-chena policy, which started in the Batticaloa district, on the east coast. At that time European interests were anxious to secure coconut land there and after settling on the coastal line they may have imagined that they could extend coconut cultivation further inland in chena areas[57]. According to an official, the Auditor general, “repeated complaints of the extensive and wanton destruction of valuable Crown forest lands for the purpose of chena cultivation have reached the Government from the European settlers and others, and it seems expedient that some measures should be adopted to discourage and repress a practice so injurious to the interest of the Crown and comparatively so profitless to the people.” The local agent decided to tax chena produce at one half instead of 1/10th as usual. He was supported by his superior, Morris, but censored by the governor Ward, who wrote the following minute: “If the people of Batticaloa were not the most quiet, orderly and submissive people in the world, the conduct of the Agent must have produced and would almost have justified open resistance to his measures, which appear to me to combine the most characterized imprudence with the grossest injustice. For a nominal increase of land revenue Mr. Morphew has sacrificed the character of government for good faith and plain dealing upon which depend all its relations with the people (…) what one gentleman would scorn to do in dealing with another and could not do without vitiating his bargain, cannot be done by the Queen of England – and it is in her name that we are acting in dealing with a dependent people”. But Morphew was later exculpated, and Morris in his successive posts in the Southern and the North Western province imposed on his subordinates an extremely repressive policy.  

After 1864, repression of chena cultivation depended upon the land requirements of the coffee and later tea planters, who began to abandon their preventions against chena lands for want of fresh forest land, especially in the Kägalla district, but also in Ratnapura, Matara, and later in the Kurunegala and Matale districts. It depended also upon the personal predispositions of the successive governors and the ability of planter’s pressure groups to influence them. Most repressive governorships were those of Hercules Robinson (1865-1872) and much later of Henry Mc. Callum (1907-1913). Among subordinate administrators, a majority was following a repressive policy, some of them in a quasi-military manner such as Saunders and Morris, but a few tolerated or even defended chena cultivation, either by realism or by traditionalism.

By the 1880s, a powerful argument boosted the control of chena cultivation under the governorship of Arthur Gordon, later Lord Stanmore (1883-1890) who, reversing the policy of his predecessors, gave the priority to the preservation of forests. This is analyzed by Frederick Lewis, who was at that time employed by the Forest department[58]: “At the time there was an idea in Government circles that much might be done to lessen the enormous loss of land involved in what is called ‘chena practice’. Thousands and thousands of fine forest land had been destroyed by this wasteful culture that year after year was increasing. It had long been known that the area of regularly cultivated land  was entirely out of proportion to what was in chena, and it was also becoming plain that the people who wasted the country in this way were only too ready to sell to land speculators the very land that they had destroyed”

The case of the Kägalla district is best documented. Even before the development of plantations, timber merchants from the low country (especially Karawa carpenters from Moratuwa, Kalutara and Grandpass) pushed highland cultivation for speculative purposes in the Kelani river catchment area, which was quite close to the active south-western coast. A new burst of repressive policy developed by the end of 1864, with the passing of an ad hoc new ordinance against illicit timber felling, which coincided with a growing demand of highlands by planters for coffee cultivation: in the words of the acting Governor, “it was found that encroachments were made in the very depth of forests which were tolerated if not encouraged by the headmen of the place, and frequently it was only by accident they were discovered”[59]. The detailed source of this statement is to be found in the diary of the Assistant agent for Kägalla, Frederick Saunders[60]:

“As I rode in the Three Korales (the southern part of the district) it appeared to me strange that with so much fine timber forest, so easy of access, not one application for a permit to fell government timber had been made at the kachcheri since I had held office (…) But as  I penetrated further the reason was apparent. The jungles on all sides bore traces of having been from year to year ruthlessly destroyed. Chenas of all ages – of 30, 20, 10 years and of today are seen cut out of the center of blocks of virgin forest presenting an appearance of wasteful destruction such as Batticaloa in the worst days of chena clearing never exceeded. To every enquiry I received the same reply, that in the Three Korales forests and chenas were all regarded as native property”.

The diary includes a collection of documents relating to this affair:  reports by three headmen: Ellawala, Mapitigama korala, Uduwe korala, list of chena permits issued by the Dissawe, enquiries on the spot, translation of olas, and report by Saunders to the Government agent of the Western Province. Mapitigama stated that “Timber felling had always been permitted and the Dissawe was in the habit of giving permits to whoever applied without any reference to him or the other koralas”, that “it is customary to apply for permits to Dissawa when the timber has already been felled”. Ellawala (who was a close collaborator of the British) stated that “in the Four korales and Saffragam lands of this description are generally considered Crown property, unless there were parties who claimed them under special grants”. He hinted that timber was purchased by the rest house keeper of Yatiyantota and a Muslim, Mamalla Marikar. Uduwe korala (who belonged to the dominant local family) gave a complete list of people involved in timber felling, village by village, pointing out that most lands were abandoned chenas whose owners sold the timber to intermediaries, except in the case of the Kendawe/Tunbage duraya, Marasinghe Unga, who explained that he went to Colombo twice a year to sell about 10 timber logs.

The villagers were summoned at Ruanwella in December 1864 and they stated that their chenas were private (this was actually recognized 30 years later by the Forest settlement) and were sold and purchased before notaries (Meeragalge Gunaya said he owned 60 amunam of chenas and 1 ½ amunam of paddy and cultivates 1 or 2 am. of chenas each year). Uduwe korala himself recognized he owned a chena in Yatideriya. It is quite clear that in that particular area – the Uduwe korale, the Duraya population had customary rights on highlands recognized by the dissawes: they were not given written documents by the powers, but oral recognition; and the new headmen, collaborators of the British, such as Ellawala volunteered to deny these rights to please their masters, while old local families, such as the Uduwe, were compelled to do so.

Saunders decided to repress chena cultivation in order to control the sale of timber to low country carpenters and furniture dealers, and to reserve high lands for sale to coffee planters ; at that stage, there was no question of settlement, but just the harsh implementation of Ordinance 12 of 1840: “ I have now given the most stringent and positive orders that no permits whatever shall be granted to remove timber from private lands without reference to me, and have directed that no chenas whether claimed as private or not should be cultivated without notice be given to the kacceri and permission received. Some decided steps should be taken to settle and register all the native chenas in the Three Korales”. Saunders prosecuted timber fellers, among whom one Moratuwe Puran Appu and one Muslim figured prominently, together with a number of Duraya people employed as ‘shareholders in cutting’. He tersely concluded: “This species of cultivation must be put a stop to”, adding: “some new estates are being opened and are said to be doing well. I think all this land will soon sell as coffee land and I shall strongly recommend its being at once surveyed”. It was apparent that the headmen (and their head Eheliyagoda Dissawe, who ran the Three Korales as his personal estate, just like his predecessor Mattamagoda) were involved in the traffic and in the habit of distributing permits to remove timber without reference to the kachcheri. Saunders concluded: “The large and remote districts of Three Korales and Lower Bulatgama should no longer be left under the sole control of the Dissawe (…) Without sufficient local supervision the exertions of a local Assistant Government Agent are almost useless and I again beg to recommend that a Ratemahatmaya may be appointed.”

A similar policy was initiated by the Agent of the nearby Ratnapura district, Birch, who mentioned that the villagers “claimed as paraveni the entire highland, chena or forest within the limits of the village”. This was not new: already in 1840, in a petition dated 3 November 1840, the local headmen had insisted on the dependence of the inhabitants on chenas dreading “in the event of the ordinance being enforced, no less than the actual horrors of famine” Birch argued that the extension of kurakkan cultivation was due to its not being taxed, and proposed to tax all the chenas. He decided to check the tax receipts himself instead of relying on headmen.[61]  A few years later Saunders was posted at Ratnapura and after noticing the discontent created by his repressive policy he changed his mind (at that time, the planters began to consider that it was much easier to buy chena lands from villagers than from the Crown):  “Much dissatisfaction is caused throughout the district by the suppression of chena cultivation, a proceeding which operates with greater hardship owing to the non-settlement of native claims to waste lands…Indeed I consider it would be better at once to surrender the presumed right of the Crown to all chenas or waste lands other than forest, say over 20 years old, rather than allow this uncertainty to exist, an uncertainty under  which no man knows what land he may safely buy, sell or cultivate”[62]  A way out of the uncertainty of title was of course what could be called settlement by sale to the planter.

In spite of these repressive fits, until 1870, the practice in the Kägalla district, or at least in its southern part, was not to interfere with chena cultivation where trees were under 20 years of age and admit the land as private[63]. But in 1870, upon orders from above, a new systematic offensive was launched against chena cultivation. The renewed attempt at strictly enforcing the ordinance of 1840 in the Kägalla district and controlling chena cultivation was linked with the new demands of the planters: Aelian King, one of the Agents, was a regular visitor of the planters, like all his predecessors: he mentions in his diary (28 June 1873) that “he often visited Whitham, the Narangalla planter, for private business”. The actual working of the chena policy in the Kägalla district was largely an affair of persons: the turnover of Assistant Agents left a large power to the chief headmen who remained in charge for long periods, especially in the Three-Korales[64]

 

The attempts at restricting chena cultivation immediately met with resistance of the villagers. In 1871, the Agent, Lee, pointed out to his superiors the dangers of such a policy[65]: “Dissatisfaction is felt among the people at the action taken by me (under orders) with reference to hén (chenas). The ordinance of 1840 vests the title to these lands in the Crown, unless the claimants are able to produce a sannas or grant. The entire cessation of hén cultivation would lead to dire distress in several parts of the district and in Three-korale especially, where the paddy fields are few and not productive. I therefore arranged that licenses should be granted on application, and that a tax of 1/10th should be levied, 1/14th being the tax on private lands. The people however appear to consider that they have acquired a title if they have cultivated the land once or twice within the past fifteen hears, and they decline to accept any compromise. It cannot be denied that the people feel strongly on this subject, and are dissatisfied with any action which tends to weaken their hold on the hén. I do not think the lands are worth the discontent, and recommend that the claims of the Crown be entirely abandoned. By so doing, the Crown would lose perhaps a little by way of royalty on plumbago, but would gain much in the hearts of the people”. In a letter dated 30.08.72, Lee explained the opposition he encountered in applying the instruction of his superior given in a letter of 27.04.1871 : “I have warned the people that they must take out licenses for chena cultivation, and told them that I cannot admit their right to chena unless they can produce sannas. As I reported to you by letter of 21.05.1872, the people altogether declined to consider that chenas are Crown property, and they will not take out a license for cultivation of chenas which they deem theirs”. Lee added that on inspection in Atulugam korale and Pata Bulatgama, the chenas cleared appeared as landu [woods and bush resulting from the regrowth after chena] and not forest. Finally, on 19 September 1872, in reply to a petition sent by ‘certain inhabitants of Atulugam and Panawal korales’ who complained of their chenas being deemed Crown property and taxed at 1/10th, the Governor “informs the petitioners that there is no intention to interfere with the cultivation of chenas, where undoubted proprietary rights exist, but that in every other case, persons cultivating chenas without license will do so at their risk”[66].

 

In the Ratnapura district, a similar offensive was launched in 1872[67]: “The principal subject which engaged my attention was the pernicious system of chena cultivation which has been destroying the district and demoralizing the people leading to encroachments and litigation  (…) The question has to be dealt with cautiously as a great portion of the chena land was claimed and had been held from time immemorial as appurtenances of paddy fields. Even in royal sannas and grants the names of the fields only are mentioned, although 6 times the extent the extent of high lands is generally granted as appurtenances of the fields described. The ill effects of this uncertain tenure encourage encroachment and litigation (and) affords a means of extortion by headmen, whose services must be secured whether the land is Crown or private”. 

In both districts, uncertainty and discontent were widespread. Upon the orders of the Government Agent of the Western province, the Assistant Agents of Kägalla and Ratnapura issued a circular on 5.09.1872, which was supposed to allay the fears of the people and laid down the policy to be implemented by the headmen:

  1. No tax on fine grain
  2. No Crown chena to be cultivated without license
  3. Private chena cultivated with älvi taxed at 1/14th (except in proclaimed villages)
  4. The question of private right will be dealt with liberally. Lands generally to be treated as private when cultivated regularly and at stated intervals.
  5. Forcible entry on Crown land promptly prosecuted and crop confiscated
  6. Licensed chena taxed at 1/5th for paddy and when exceptionally allowed to be cultivated with fine grain to be subject to a moderate rent in money
  7. Attention of headmen specially directed to the necessity of discouraging fine grain cultivation on Crown property, especially in the neighbourhood of forests and on land fit for coffee cultivation
  8. No license on forest land
  9. Necessity to cultivate wholesome food.

In the Kägalla district, the sudden publication of these instructions and of another circular issued to headmen warning them to be very careful in the matter of chena, and that they will be held personally responsible for any illicit clearing, “caused general dissatisfaction. The very liberal treatment which the question is receiving [proof of tax paid within 20 years of the time of the claim being made ; recognition of the principle of allowing appurtenances to mud lands] is gradually dispelling this feeling in the Four Korales, but in the Three Korales, where the inhabitants are less capable of understanding the action of government, and more thoroughly dependent upon this kind of cultivation for subsistence, there is still and will be for some time much discontent”[68].          Chena restriction resulted in severe shortage of food in some areas. This was recognized by the administration but its effects were minimized during the following years[69].

 

Aelian King, who took over the administration of the Kägalla district in September 1872, tried to lay the blame on his predecessor, while insisting on the unreliability of the headmen[70]: “Ekneligoda Ratemahatmaya had instructions from Mr. Lee, who evidently misapprehended the meaning of certain correspondence on the subject, to suffer no chenas whatever to be cultivated without a license from the kutchery and to give the people to understand that a tax of 1/10th would in every instance be exacted”. He therefore in November 1872[71] tried to reassure the chena cultivators and reported that all the chiefs had applied to him on the subject and that there was “a good deal of misconception about the intentions of government”. In order to cool down the public spirit, he proposed to tax the chenas at 1/14th as in previous years (that is at the ‘private’ rate), reserving “the right to reclaim any chena which he may hereafter deem to be the property of government”, and reported to his superior in Colombo, who answered (letter of 9.11.1872) that he had decided to send a surveyor to Three-Korales “to define the limits of such lands as have been generally treated as the common lands of the villagers of that district” and come himself to Ruanwella next month “to initiate a settlement on the principles of the annexed memorandum which you will in the meantime follow as closely as possible”.

 

King was no less repressive than Lee, if one judges by his ‘Memo for the information of each Ratemahatmaya and Korala in the Kägalla district’, of May 1873[72] : “You are hereby warned to be more than ever careful of the Government rights in the matter of chenas throughout your charge. You will send me at once a list of all the chenas being cleared in your jurisdiction and you will carefully report in the case of each as to whether the land belongs to the Crown or to private parties. You will be held personally responsible in cases where you report that the Crown has no right”. An annexure gives a form on which must figure “the name of fields of which chenas are respectively claimed as appurtenances” – this clearly excludes recognition of the property of chenas in village with no or little paddy fields. In his diary from October 1872 to August 1873, one finds several cases of land (including in the town of Kägalla) proclaimed Crown after very summary enquiries. In 6.07.1873, in the case of Alagalla lands, he wrote that “prescription by virtue of intermittent assertions of right as in chenaing and regular cultivation and occupation is different”.

In the Ratnapura district, Atherton, the Assistant Agent, published a victory bulletin which is a piece of wishful thinking [73]: “I am glad to report that the rules proclaimed last year to prevent the destruction of forests have succeeded beyond my expectations”. He then described the lamentable state of things in the Kukul korale, which according to him had become, after ages of chena cultivation, “an unfruitful wilderness which barely supports the few people who exist in it, a sickly useless set like the land they inhabit [sic]”. In the same breath, he mentioned the existence of a large untouched forest at the northern boundary of the district “in every way suitable for coffee and tea cultivation, soil fair, climate pleasant…At present it is the hunting ground of the Galagama villagers who collect large quantities of horn, honey and bees wax.” His next report was more explicit: “There are valuable and extensive tracts of forest which in a few years would realize high prices when the lands in the center of cultivation are exhausted. With a view to their preservation I have put a stop to chena cultivation in their neighbourhood to prevent the depredations committed some years since in the Kukul korale. It is no hardship to the natives who have sufficient lands surrounding their villages, which on account of their being frequently cleared are unfit for coffee cultivation and would only grow cereals.”

Aelian King was instrumental in giving visibility to what he called ‘the chena question’. The ‘chena question’ was discussed at length in the Administration Reports of Kägalla for 1872 and 1873, and the correspondence between the Government Agent of the Western Province and his assistant at Kägalla between September 1872 and February 1873 was published as sessional paper for the information of the Legislative Council[74].  Aelian King began his reports with descriptions on the model of those of Saunders during the previous decade : “The reckless and defiant system in which chena clearings are carried attracts the attention of every traveler (…) the frequent and often audacious encroachments under cover of a chena claim (…) The government is here to a considerable extent at the mercy of its headmen, and frequent changes in the higher and more responsible officers of the Crown afford the greatest facility for gradual and insidious annexations of this sort  (…)  The headmen as a rule endeavor to support native claims to chenas, being themselves highly interested, and therefore desirous of an indulgent treatment of the question. There is much injustice in the partial and erratic consideration of the question whereby numbers of unsound claims are left unnoticed while a few cases are severely dealt with (…) Nor it is in instances where large forest is felled that the greatest injury is done: small jungle containing the germ of future valuable timber is constantly and of course with much fewer chances of detection felled and destroyed. It is highly demoralizing that property apparently worthless for the growth of timber or for any other purpose from which government might derive benefit, can be appropriated with so much facility”[75]. “Once when on circuit through the district shortly after assuming charge, I had occasion to go on foot for some considerable distance in company with a subordinate headman. After accomplishing several miles through jungle, chena and paddy fields, my companion came to a sudden stand, and with the air of a man conscious that his intimation must impart sincere gratification: this, said he, is Government land”.

 

He proposed a general and systematic policy: “It is high time that Government should take active measures to lead to a general and systematic protection of its own rights, while affording to the people a uniform method of dealing with their claims”. The question was before treated in a “highly inconsistent and spasmodic manner”.  The report pointed the contradiction between “the popular notion that every land which do not bear high trees is prima facie the property of the people unless the contrary can be proved” and the idea behind the ordinance of 1840 that all highlands are prima facie the property of the Crown unless the contrary can be proved. It added that « the universality of private claims (…) has frequently led to the sale of much doubtful property by the Fiscal (…) the usual means of parting has been the Fiscal’s department, an execution debtor finding that he could satisfy a writ by surrendering his chena, has naturally done so in preference to losing his paddy field”. Other difficulties experienced by the colonial administration laid in the confusion in the names of the chenas which did not correspond with a precise plot of land but rather to a range of lands where chena was practiced. And in the interpretation of the instructions given by the authorities to tax ‘private’ chenas cultivated with älvi at 1/14th and ‘crown’ chenas at 1/10th  (in that case, taxation is in the nature of a light rent) ; and the interpretation of the ‘equivocal’ 6th clause of ordinance 12 of 1840 itself : “Is a sannas in every case absolutely necessary, or is it to meant that a private claim to be admitted must be either supported by a sannas and proof of boundaries, or by a proof that the land has been taxed as a private land for a certain fixed period ?” And which period? Finally there was “much injustice in a partial and erratic consideration of the question, whereby numbers of unsound claims are left unnoticed, while a few cases which come prominently before the notice of the Assistant Agent are severely dealt with (…) and harassing that parties are frequently submitted to by being required over and over again to attend the kacceri to produce what evidence they can afford”.

           

The case of the Matara district offers a different example. Being a section of the Southern province, and not of the former Kandyan kingdom, it was not legally ruled by the same sections of the ordinance of 1840, but the repressive policy was similar. Morris had become the Agent for the Southern Province, and in a situation of failure of paddy crops, his assistants at Hambantota and Matara asked for a relaxation of the rules limiting chena cultivation to enable the cultivators to avoid famine. Morris refused and in a letter to the Colonial Secretary dated 12.11.1867, he argued against chena cultivation in Matara with the interests of planters in view, attributing the climatic changes to the felling of forests “not only for coffee estates, but to an infinitely greater extent for chenas”, and adding: “in the immediate neighbourhood there is ample employment with liberal wages for the very men who are anxious to clear chenas, viz on the coffee estates, which are now worked with foreign labour, because the local residents prefer to work Government lands on their own account”. He complained that “both these gentlemen were undisposed to act in accordance with the strong opinion held by me on this question” and he accused the headmen to be the principal instigators and profiteers of chena cultivation.[76]

Elliott, his subordinate in Matara, who “finding that Mr. Morris was extremely opposed to the measure, was reluctantly obliged to drop the matter” “Very great distress has been the consequence, especially in Kandaboda pattu where the people have not had a moderate harvest since 1862 and where in 1866-67 between 9 and 10 p. c. of the population were carried off by fever and connected ailments, greatly aggravated by the want of proper food… Dr Anthonisz (the Colonial surgeon) has been shocked by the prevailing misery; the fever is intensified and the death rate magnified by all the horrors of semi-famine (…) the supply of food being much reduced by the prohibition of chena cultivation on Crown lands”. According to Elliott suppression of chena  cultivation “is a mistaken policy and calculated to do immense injury, and I submit that the present order for its suppression should be cancelled, the practice acknowledged… Elliott considered that the principle of Crown property of highlands implied that the British should exert this right “as the fathers of the people”, and that under the Dutch rule it was “usual to allow the cultivation of these waste lands on permission being asked, and a nominal portion of the crop reserved for government (…) while under the term kanuis paraveni many families held a limited hereditary interest in large tracts of chena lands; but claims under this tenure have for some years past not been recognized”. He added that large extents were fit only for chena cultivation “providing a supplementary supply of food for the people” through the system of mixed cultivation. Government should authorise it: “the most effective way of securing this would be to choose blocks of chena lands in central positions, conveniently situated for access from different villages and well away from forest and other valuable land ; these should be cut up by the survey department into 5 acres lots and cultivation permitted on payment of survey fees”. He concluded: “chena cultivation is indispensably necessary for the well-being of the people, as is shewn by the undoubted misery caused in the neighbourhood by its indiscriminate suppression”.[77]

In spite of Elliott’s arguments, Morris four years later carried on his policy:  “I am aware that Mr. Elliott entertains a strong opinion of the benefits of chena cultivation…I would encourage the planting of gardens but in the Matara district I consider that fine grain cultivation ought to be put an entire stop to. There are abundant demands on the estates, the roads, the irrigation works and by private individuals for labour which has now to be imported from India, whilst our own available population is engaged in destroying the country.”[78] When Elliott left Matara his successor Fisher fell in line with Morris, recommending a total prohibition: but “so wedded had the people become to the occupation of chena cultivation that I found the sale of 1/2 the crops had no effect on unlicensed clearing and I accordingly ordered the prosecution of all offenders…These harsh measures have had the desired effect and entirely put a stop to the practice”.[79] Later Elliott became Agent of the province and rules were relaxed from 1885 to 1892, since it was impossible to enforce the control owing to the connivance of headmen, and he considered that in the hilly part of the district (Morawak), chena cultivation was necessary to the survival of the population and could not be detrimental to forests[80]. Afterwards another assistant agent, Le Mesurier, adopted a more repressive policy upon the orders of his superior, who wrote in his report for 1897: “Soon after I assumed duties I obtained the sanction of government to interdict chena cultivation in the Morawak korale and if possible in the Hambantota district. There is such demand for labour throughout this district that there is really very little necessity for chena cultivation as a means of food supply” The assistant wrote: “The only division in which this prohibition is really felt is in the Morawak korale, where the extent of paddy land is quite insufficient for the requirements of the population. The people must however learn sooner or later to find a livelihood independently of Crown chena land, and the sooner they begin the better…however it is desirable that all private claims to chenas be enquired into and dealt with in a liberal spirit.”[81]. Le Mesurier had to quit the Civil Service and started perverting the system by collecting deeds of highlands in the very district he administered before, on the pretense of helping the villagers fight the administration: hence a new repressive fit aimed that time at Le Mesurier but falling on the villagers as well. Finally the colonial administration was compelled to tolerate an amount of chena cultivation which it tried to keep in narrow limits[82]: “For many years past, practice to allow chenas for persons who cannot otherwise maintain themselves, on a nominal rent of 2 Rs per acre and on a scale of 1 acre for a man, ½ acre for his wife and every child over 5. My predecessor only allowed chenas on lands where growth was under 10 years”.

When Morris became Government Agent for the North-Western province, at the border between the wet and dry zones, he carried on his repressive policy. In his view, there was “a steady and rapid desertification of the country by the destruction of forest and jungle for chenas, and the consequent diminution of the rainfall”, and food shortage in 1874 was the result of the sequence chena cultivation > disappearance of forest > drought > failure of paddy cultivation. He inferred from this theory that chena cultivation should not be exempted from tax, and be stopped at once – as if it was to restore rainfall at a stroke![83] This officer went so far as to write leaflets printed in Sinhala “to explain the ABC of the question”, and condemned the laxity of his predecessors : “For years this wasteful cultivation has been far too widely permitted until of late almost all attempt at repression seem to have been abandoned”. Famine was according to his view the result of drought, itself the result of chena cultivation, and paddy cultivation was abandoned because chena cultivation was so much easier… In 1877, a witness explained that stoppage of chena cultivation by Morris three years before had resulted in that in the Wanni “many people died from want of food or from disease brought on from the use of unwholesome food, such as jungle leaves, roots, fruits and so on”. Morris then “told the headmen to allow the people to cultivate chenas, saying that he did not meant to prevent the people to cultivate their own chenas, but only meant to prevent their encroaching upon Crown lands (!!!)* and since then the chena cultivation is continued under many restrictions and great fears of prosecutions by the Government Agent”[84].

After years of more relaxed administration, the extension of private land sales for coconut plantations in the North Western province led to a general revision of the policy by F.R. Ellis (Controller of Revenue) and to an alternation of repressive and permissive fits. During Mc Callum’s governorship, in 1911, a fresh Government Agent, Thorpe, decided that “permits for chenas should be insisted upon” and he was going to proclaim by tom-tom beating in the villages “what the government view of the title to land is”. The then Controller of Revenue Fraser, in a private letter, warned the Colonial Secretary: “Unless great care is exercised by government in retraining Thorpe’s well-meant but almost fanatical zeal, you will steadily have a recrudescence of the whole land question in Ceylon. I understand the people of Weudawili are contemplating organized action… I see no object in exasperating the people by fines and prosecutions”.[85]  In other terms, whatever strong the legal position of the Crown, the only sound policy was to maintain the good feelings of the villagers by expediting amicable settlement: as that time, as we shall see later, a new and on the whole more successful highland policy was being set up by the Settlement department.          

The situation was the same in the nearby the Matale district, where after a long period of rather lax enforcement of the law, there were repressive fits in the 1870s: but the permissive pattern was so well established that the Agent lamented that: “it appears to be the firm conviction of every Kandyan that all forest land belongs not to government but to the natives and that the fact that a man has cleared without the knowledge or with the connivance of the headmen a jungle once or twice at intervals of 7 to 10 years and sown kurakkan gives him a right to claim the land as his own.” Similarly in 1912 and 1913, the Agent (Southorn) noted that the sudden repressive policy pursued by his predecessor (Tyrrell) had created a serious tension – after years of laissez-faire. Tyrrell acting on the orders of the governor McCallum, had decided to enforce the 1840 ordinance  and not to follow any more the practice of recognizing village claims to ‘paraveni chenas’ and allowing highland ‘appurtenances’ to paddy fields, in order to check private land sales to outsiders, especially to European rubber big firms.[86]

The colonial policy as described by J.C. Scott in the case of South-East Asia was at work in Ceylon [87]: “The narrowing of subsistence options 1. forced the peasant family further out of production for his own use and further into the market. Bamboo and firewood had to be purchased (…) Buffaloes for whom there was not enough pasture had now to be rented (…) The peasant might not be poorer but he was increasingly vulnerable to price fluctuations outside his control. 2. The loss of these free gifts of nature together with the decline of labour intensive handicrafts eliminated many of the possibilities for village poor to remain independent. A life on the margin was more difficult. The only route to survival within the village led to a permanent dependence on those who hired labour. 3. Rents and taxes that had been tolerable only because this margin of subsidiary options remained open, became more intolerable once they were closed”.

 

Peasant resistance, administrative tolerance and final extinction of chena cultivation in the wet and intermediate zones

 

Chena repression has been analyzed as “the only source of discontent among the Kandyans” (Bailey 1857). Cases of open opposition occurred and these are by definition well documented: sending petitions and memorials, protesting before grain tax commissioners or settlement officers. But resistance generally took passive or covert forms, with the connivance of headmen: non-reporting of chena clearings, pleading destitution, using forged tax receipts, under reporting of extents were common means open to those villagers who had good connections with the headmen and could eventually bribe them[88]. One should be aware that a large part of the official reports on the subject are pieces of wishful thinking, and that colonial administration was largely self-deceptive in the matter: this becomes evident when comparing official reports with local evidence.

In a report dated 5.03.1887[89], Price, the Assistant Agent in Kägalla, explained that the change of the system of tax assessment in 1880 led to a rise in taxation : “Even as regards älvi, the extent indicated in the tax receipt or the wattoruwa is – if of a date previous to 1880 – generally much smaller than the actual extent which was cultivated . The discrepancy is explained by the fact that before 1880 chena crops were taxed by officers appointed for the purpose and known as wibadde lekam. These headmen were paid at a fixed rate of 37c a day, the number of days allowed for the work in each division being subject to supervision in order that a fair amount of work be ensured. As a consequence the wibadde lekam were, it is believed, not too scrupulous on assessing the extent of the crop, depending on the gratitude of a cultivator whose taxation was liberally reduced rather than on the small stipend which they obtained from the kachcheri [now the assessment is done by the korala who] is paid by a commission of 5% on his collection, it is accordingly to his interest to make as high an assessment as is compatible with justice”.

As early as 1840, the leading headmen of the Ratnapura district submitted a petition on the fate of chena cultivation under the new law[90]: “The greater part of the inhabitants of this district being entirely dependent on their chenas for their subsistence, they dread… no less than the actual horrors of famine and the concomitants of people labouring under want and increase of crime”. The governor replied that there would be no interference with regular chena cultivation, even when no payment of tax was proved. But soon afterwards, by 1848, the Ratnapura headmen found it necessary to write down a chena lekammitiya (register of highlands, in sinhala, still extant) which however was never admitted as proof of title by the administration[91]. In 1847, Kandyan chiefs “complained that Government claimed all uncultivated lands, but there were chiefs who had lands in different parts which they cultivated at intervals. Others had reserved the higher lands on purpose for timber, others did not cut down the timber in some parts of their lands for fear the rivulets and water courses should become dried up by exposure. If the government claims these as forest lands, what was to become of them all?” [92]

Peasant resistance combined with the inner contradictions of the repressive policy led some civil servants to question its relevance before the end of the 19th century. D’A Vincent, Forest Commissioner reported in 1882: “For 10 or 15 years it has been held that in compliance with an order from Government, chena cultivation could be stopped, but the impossibility of stopping the cultivation of grain on which the poorer people depend as much or possibly even more than on paddy, and the inability of any administration to carry out order in opposition to the mass of the people and likely to inflict hardship, unless supported by the law, have not been considered. The issue of the order and its occasional repetition appears to have satisfied the conscience, especially when it has met with an occasional assurance that the order was being carried out and that chenas were stopped.(…) It has been frequently pointed out that if the wants of the people are considered and chenas are allowed in moderation, the people are easy to manage; if chenas are forbidden absolutely, they get exasperated and when owing to some excuse of famine, the orders of government are suddenly relaxed, the forests are devastated wholesale”[93].

It is likely that chena repression led the villagers to lay claims which would not have occurred to them, by a process of reification: such was the case in the Matara district[94]: “Formerly the villagers used to cultivate large extents on permits from the Crown, paying share to the Crown. During that period the title of the Crown was never questioned. Then the policy was adopted of restricting chena cultivation in the hope that the people would devote themselves to permanent products, especially paddy; this may be good policy where paddy land is available in a village, and the people have the means to acquire it. But if the people have no money, they cannot buy it and can only work as coolies or go to a big irrigation work. This chena question has greatly strained the relations between the Revenue officers and the villagers.” The Revenue Officer fined the villagers who disregarded his orders and when he found that they continued, he forbade cultivation and sequestered the crops: “This, the villagers say, drove them to desperation for they must live, and they began to clear, claiming the land on any frivolous title. It is in this way that a great many claims have originated. Now the villagers refuse to acknowledge Crown title. The villagers spoke quite sensibly and said they did not want the land but only their immemorial right to chena” [95]

By the end of the 19th century, peasant resistance began to be assisted by local lawyers, scornfully dubbed by the Bristish ‘jungle proctors’: the method was to play the game by laying claim to huge areas. Hiring lawyers, generally with the help of interested parties such as low-country speculators, and refusing to obey orders, became a general practice, especially in the Kurunegala and Matara districts. As late as 1928, H.R. Freeman, an ex-Revenue Officer with a long experience in the intermediate zone, could question the colonial policy in his testimony before the Land Commission: “How is it that these law-abiding villagers become law breakers in the matter of their food supply ?”[96]

Peasant resistance combined with Le Mesurier’s provocative attitude in Matara contributed to the enactment of a new ordinance on waste lands in 1897 and compelled the administration to set up a mechanism of systematic land survey and settlement. starting work in the Morawak area. Three successive prominent officers, J.P. Lewis, W.E. Davidson and J.G. Fraser were entrusted to the task, and being on the spot they soon realized that chena repression was counterproductive. Lewis described thus the result of the repressive policy : “At Alapaladeniya, chena cultivation was allowed from 1885 to 1892 and in 1892 it was fully put a stop to; the people were then much better off than they are now, as there is not enough paddy land for them to cultivate. Men now go to Panagoda in Hinidum pattu to work in the plumbago pits…but all the people cannot get work at the pits. Nearly everywhere in the district I am told by the headmen that the people owing to the stopping of chena cultivation and the want of paddy lands do not get enough to eat. Yet the Administration report usually says that “food was plentiful”[97]. Davidson, who remained in duty a few months only, had to face the Government agent who criticized his proposals[98]: he wanted to declare Crown all the highlands but to allow chena cultivation to a limited extent and on payment of a 1/10th share to the Crown. His analysis is worth quoting: “The more I see of the condition of the people of Morawak korale, the more I realize that chena cultivation is a necessity for their existence. I did not wish for motives of policy to allow claims which were not really sound. My compromise of allowing the villagers to practice chena cultivation over a defined area of chena while paying 1/10th as rent to the Crown was a solution which pleased the people. Fraser again was struck by the miserable appearance of Morawak villagers, and “after considering the question without bias” he found that “chena cultivation must be allowed. What the people want is chena. They do not want the land”

The situation in the nearby Hambantota district, which lies in the dry zone, was different, but the result of chena restriction was similar[99]: “the land is useless in its present state, no better than when under chena. Why then not allow chenas under certain conditions of re-afforestation (…) Claims are largely put forward because chenaing is forbidden (…) Chena is bad, but no worse than allowing land to remain under scrub”. The situation was described by Leonard Woolf who was posted there in 1908 and by the settlement officer Wait, who criticized the refusal to give chena permits in settled villages of East Giruwa pattu[100]: “the enforcement of such an order must mean either the migration or the starvation of the inhabitants. These people are absolutely dependent on chena cultivation for their supply of grain. Formerly they have chenaed at their own sweet will, tempered with the fear of a fine if they did not obtain permits (… Judging from the number of young gardens and encroachments in nearly all these villages between Talawa and Kirana, the population is increasing and the increase is largely due to people drifting inland from the more crowded population near the coast. Gradually more land will come under permanent cultivation and the spread of coconut plantations will no doubt in time diminish the amount of chenas required. But this gradual growth will be at once checked if a reasonable amount of chena cultivation is not allowed, at all events for some years to come”

The natural process of conversion to permanent cultivation is well documented in the diaries of the settlement officers of the early 20th century, in spite of their colonial prejudice[101]: in the southern province where population pressure was maximal, “the villagers have helped themselves to what they wanted (…) The usual modus operandi of the villager appears as follows. In the 1st year he clears a chena, perhaps on permit, perhaps oftener without one. Along with his chena crop he plants a few fruit trees in the corner. Next year he plants sweet potatoes, sugar cane and plantains and builds a hut. 2 or 3 years after he puts in more fruit trees and some coconut seedlings, and claims his encroachment as a paraveni garden. Where he has a bona fide garden he generally puts his fence out a few yards every now and then till he has taken in a considerable amount of Crown chena” (…) “A villager squats on an acre of land, clears it, puts up a hut, sows fine grain and puts in 6 to 12 coconuts. At the end of 2 years he abandons this portion and opens up another acre or two not adjoining it but in the vicinity. This goes on perhaps for 8 to 10 years and by this time a number of isolated parcels of land containing each one or two coconut plants, the survivors of successive plantations, have been created. Some of the coconut trees in the 1st clearing then come into bearing and became of value in the eyes of the cultivator.  He then clears round them and erects a house of a more permanent nature and then proceeds to carry a fence round all the patches of cultivation so as to enclose them as also the intervening waste land. A coco tree, jak and so on grows up and the waste land is cultivated at times with fine grain”.

But subdivision among shareholders tended to slow down individual peasant enterprise in the view of colonial administrators[102]: “One man starts a new garden and gradually extends it little by little till when he dies there is a thriving plantation of perhaps several acres. By the time the trees are decaying there are it may be 10 or 1é descendants who in the midst of their family squabbles all hold fast to their shares of the fruits of the garden. Ergo when anyone wishes to start with a new garden, he is generally careful to choose a piece of what even the villagers acknowledge to be Crown land. At all events he is free from the claims of importunate relatives or connections by marriage, and if it is an out of the way place and the headmen are complaisant, the tiresome formality and expense of obtaining a Crown title are dispensed with.”

Modernist administrators such as Davidson considered chena doomed by progress but were prepared to encourage the process of conversion to permanent cultivation: “The fixed policy of government is in favour of the extension of permanent garden cultivation. With this end in view, endeavours are being made to limit the area held under the panguwa system of land tenure and now wholly devoted to the destructive methods of chena cultivation. The government hopes thereby to be able to sell small allotments of land to villagers under Crown grants, thus facilitating the transfer of land from the family to the individual”[103]. “Chena cultivation is the result of the communal system of holding highlands in vogue in the Kandyan provinces, and as a method of agriculture it decreases and disappears before the growth of wealth and the security of a personal title in land. I can illustrate this by means of a table in which are placed the korales of this district in order of wealth and population, showing how in the more favoured places the population has grown up to the capacity of the paddy fields to feed it, and the leisure to turn the highlands into gardens instead of being compelled to cultivate them with grain (…) As soon as the peasantry has a margin between it and hunger, it will improve its lands permanently, and chena cultivation will tend to decrease.” [104].       In view of the very general obsession of a release of a vagrant population, everything had to be done to avoid the prospect of an uprooted rural proletariat: the object of most planters was therefore antagonistic with the views of government, which tried to avoid what they called a silent revolution. The best – actually the only means to prevent it, was to keep the peasant on the land, admit any form of cultivation including chena, and then encourage conversion to garden (or small-scale plantation). The alternative was not between chena and paddy, but between chena and garden. Chena cultivation was indispensable for a successful transition to permanent garden cultivation, especially in the intermediate zone as it offered resources until the trees bore fruit[105]: “Gradually the population is increasing, gradually more land will come under permanent cultivation and the spread of coconut plantations will no doubt in time diminish the amount of chenas required in the less arid parts of the district. But this gradual growth will be at once checked if a reasonable amount of chena cultivation is not allowed, at all events for some years to come (…) A liberal chena policy is necessary for the preservation of health and even existence. The undue restriction of chena cultivation, until the villager has learnt to go in for garden cultivation, can only result in the impoverishment and gradual extinction of villages”.

The dramatic increase in garden cultivation and concomitant development of rural markets in the whole of the island during the first decade of the 20th century was noticed by every observer. It started even before in some areas such as the north of the Kägalla district, where 1500 acres were planted in one year[106]. The process of conversion from chena or even patana (grass land) to permanent cultivation is conspicuous in Uva and Sabaragamuwa, where the administration gave up its control over regularly cultivated highlands, and the settlement officers were at a loss ‘to deal with such encroachments’. In 1935 “large number of plots used exclusively for vegetable plantations, lands planted in rotation, hence also they presented to the eye the appearance of chenas recently cleared; they were in reality old vegetable gardens with periods of cultivation extending to over 30 years”[107]. Some areas eventually specialized in market products for urban consumption, as plantains in Kägalla, and vegetables in Rakwana and Uva. In the north of the Kägalla district, garden development was the result of the development of a banana market created by the Rambukkana railway station, of the un-reservation of Crown land previously reserved for fuel supply, and of the enterprise of Batgam and Vahumpura cultivators combined with Moor and Karawa traders.

But of course the larger part of chena land in the wet and intermediate zones had been alienated for estate plantation development, and the reports for Kägalla in the 1920s all notice that “most of the lands traditionally labelled chenas are chenas only by name, growing for the most part rubber, plantain, papaw, arecanut palms”; “chena cultivation seems to be dying out, the villagers preferring to work for wages on the estates and buy imported rice in the bazaars.”  However the transformation of shifting to permanent cultivation was not an easy task and the return to chena was attempted during food crises : “No form of cultivation is so dear to the villager as the chenaing of high forest and when the crisis opened up such vast possibilities he was not slow to take advantage of them”[108]. At the local level, conversion was either through the sale to outside planters, or through the formation of small-scale plantations by the villagers themselves. The question is whether the large-scale sale of chenas to outsiders prevented the development of village gardens and/or of village plantations.  

Conversion of wet zone chenas to rubber and intermediate zone to coconut plantations accelerated during the first two decades of the 20th century. At the island-wide level, it is documented by census statistics collected by Patrick Peebles[109]: between 1921-24 and 1946, areas cultivated under the chena  system in the whole of the island were reduced by 42%; in the dry zone, the reduction was only 32% in the North Central province; in provinces including dry and intermediate/wet areas it reached 37% (Central Province), 40% (North Western Province), 42% (Uva); in the wettest areas it was as high as 75% in Sabaragamuwa, where the rubber boom practically wiped out chena cultivation in the 1920s. But in the dry and intermediate zones, chena cultivation was still practiced besides coconut cultivation, and there were fits of repression, which however were pointed out as abnormal in the context of politicization of the 1920-1930s[110]

                       

Rehabilitating chena cultivation

In colonial circles, there were timid attempts to defend slash and burn cultivation, and critiques of the colonial policy, such as Ludovici, recognized that chena cultivation was complementary and not contradictory with paddy cultivation: “Enthusiastic Government Agents with visions of imaginary forests sprung from the chena looming in the future, have prohibited chena cultivation as to this they attribute the decline of paddy cultivation. We fail to see in this connection the cause and the effect… If ever a paddy field is abandoned it is from causes other than choice… Wet and dry cultivation are not carried on simultaneously…Chena cultivation far from interfering with paddy cultivation, is only intended to supplement the produce of the former.” [111] According to another author, the chief headman Mahawalatenne, the choice was not between locally produced rice and chena products: if chena was forbidden, the people would subsist on imported rice.

Others questioned the reality of its ecological nuisance and noticed that chena cultivators were careful to protect water supply: “The chena system is undoubtedly responsible for a large amount of preventable erosion, but it is possible that the damage is not so great as is often thought. The chena cultivator does not introduce drainage systems into his land, but on the other hand he does not keep the surface of the soil so scrupulously clean as the estate owner, and the very presence of weeds assists in preventing soil wash”[112].       Others defended the cultivation on the ground of its profitability and adaptation to a traditional society: kurakkan cultivated on new clearings yielded much more than paddy; and the nutritional value of älvi was superior to that of wet paddy.

Several observers were conscious that chena products were the poor man’s, and not the lazy man’s crops: chena made the difference between destitution and survival and was the most reliable source of food.[113] The condition of ‘feudal village’ cultivators was considered by some as much better than that of others because they had unlimited access to chena[114]: “If a comparison be made between service villages and any adjoining village held by peasant proprietors and not liable to service, the results will be in favour of the former (…) This is attributable in a great measure to the greater security the service tenants possess from the settlement of village boundaries in reference to the chena  which, though cultivated in the most rude and primitive way, are of the utmost value to the poorer classes(…) To refuse to allow the cultivation of chena  altogether is often to condemn a whole village or district to starvation. And yet this has been attempted at times, in complete ignorance of the real state of the case. On one occasion, the temporary administrator of government publicly told a deputation that the government was determined to put down chena cultivation, as the chena plant was a most obnoxious weed which exhausted the soil and so on. Fortunately the deputation did not understand English, and the interpreter failed to explain the reasons of the temporary head of the government.” However there are numerous examples of feudal villages, especially devalegam, where chena cultivation was controlled or forbidden by their proprietors or trustees who wanted to sell them to prospective planters[115].

These early attempts at defending chena cultivation on the basis of a rational understanding have never been analyzed nor systematized in the literature on Sri Lanka. But I want to direct your attention in this respect to the brilliant defense of ‘swidden’ cultivation in Indonesia by Clifford Geertz in the second chapter of his classical Agricultural Involution[116]. According to Geertz, ‘swidden’ farming is integrated into and maintains the general structure of the preexisting natural ecosystem; contrary to the man-made and highly artificial wet paddy cultivation, its rationale is to reproduce the multiplicity of plants and resources found in the original tropical forest (which is itself the ecosystem with the highest diversity), eliminating the useless plants and adapting itself to a shallow soil which can only be regenerated with ashes and subsequent growth of trees; but intensification is impossible in such a system, and this is precisely why it has been condemned from the start by outside observers and revenue collectors.

Finally, the lucid analysis by the Settlement Officer Fraser underlined the contradictions of the government’s position. In a report to the Colonial Secretary in Colombo on ‘the chaotic state of land matters’ which was later censored on the order of government from his annual Administration Report, he put it bluntly[117] : “The English government having upset or allowed to fall into disuse the land policies existing in his eastern possessions at the time of annexation, cannot escape the responsibility of substituting for these the most perfect form of land policy which our western civilization can devise.”

“The policy of government has of late been to restrict chena cultivation; with this every right-minded person will agree. But have we substituted anything for it? Have we made it easy for the villager to take up permanent cultivation in place of chena cultivation? I think not. To ask the average villager leading a hand to mouth existence, to purchase land at 10 Rs an acre and fees is to demand of him an impossibility. Even if it were possible for him to raise this amount, it would mean that he would have to borrow it or that in paying it he would exhaust his capital…The result in one case will be that the moneylender will reap the benefit of the villager’s labours by selling him up, and in the other case he will have no capital to enable him to develop his purchase.” [118]

“The ethical objection to chena cultivation is that it is detrimental to character in making the people lazy and improvident. But for my part, I cannot see how enterprise and exertion upon chenaing can be half as demoralizing as periods of enforced idleness. For it is not as if gardens and fields were being neglected for chenas. No, they are cultivated, in many cases over cultivated, planted with trees until production is impeded by overcrowding. Even if given new areas to convert into gardens, the people, destitute of money, must have a means of livelihood until the new gardens come into bearing. And this means can only be found in chena cultivation.”    “There is no doubt that these lands formerly produced an immense quantity of Indian corn and fine grain, whereas they now produce next to nothing. The ‘waste’ all seems to be on the side of the present system if the question is regarded from the economic point of view (…) Asking villagers to desist from chena cultivation is much the same as asking them to starve to please government.” [119]

 

Annex:

Analysis by Assistant Settlement Officer L. L. Hunter of land use in the Kandyan villages (1928)[120]

“I do not agree with the proposition that in Kandyan villages the ownership of paddy land carried with it the right to cultivate chena in the village (…) The only land linked with the ownership of fields are what are known even to the present day as pillewa and owita. When a peasant is asked what lands are appurtenant to his fields, the invariable answer is the pillewa – a narrow strip of highland, chena or waste land, adjacent to the paddy field (…) With the exception of the pillewa, the remaining chena in the village was called paraveni chena. In a large number of cases, these paraveni chenas are claimed by claimants who are not paddy field owners. To call all these chenas ‘appurtenances to paddy fields’ is to deny the claims of persons who are not field owners. One might as well say that chenas are appurtenant to gardens.

The extent of the chena does not depend of the size of the family. Where a large extent of chena was cultivated by a village, the inhabitants of which decreased in numbers, the extent of the chena remained the same, the only effect being that the chena was cultivated at longer intervals.

I agree that all the chenas were originally held and cultivated on a communal basis. All the chenas of a village were cultivated by the inhabitants of the village, and individual families cultivated yearly an extent of chena as was sufficient to provide them with dry grains and vegetables for the year. Where the chena land was insufficient or worked too frequently, inroads were made in the adjacent forest which consequently became chena in the course of time. These chena lands were considered suitable only to the production of chena crops in due rotation; they were not considered the property of any particular villager; no claim by any particular villager was admitted, and no villager prescribed against any co-villager by the mere fact of his chenaing a particular area of chena.

When, as a result of the expansion of the gangoda, or the zeal of a particular villager, a portion of this chena was converted into a garden, the village as a whole rose up in arms against the encroacher, though, if he was able to resist his opponents and continue to possess his garden, the communal claim disappeared with the passing of time. The best example of the communal system of chena is to be found in the North Central Province and in the province of Sabaragamuwa, with this difference between the two that while in the North Central Province no claim to chena is made against the Crown, and the entire extent of chena is worked communally by the whole village, in the Sabaragamuwa district, portions of the chena are worked communally by a panguwa of the village, and the chena is claimed against the Crown. In the North Central Province, no claim has been put forward, to the best of my knowledge, by a villager to any particular portion of a chena, based on the fact that a particular chena was worked by him. The chenas in the North Central Province are and have been admitted the property of the Crown, subject to the right of the villager to ask for permission to clear and plant yearly such an extent of chena that will satisfy the needs of the village. This, I take it, is the origin of all chena cultivation in the Kandyan districts. That this practice has changed in parts of the Kandyan districts, due to a demand for land, or the failure on the part of the Crown to exercise its paramount title to chena, does not alter the fundamental principle on which chenas were cultivated by villagers, namely that the land was Crown with the limitation that villagers were allowed to eke out their requirements by cultivation of the soil at regular intervals.

[Hunter misses the point that it is the taxation system together with the nature of the grain which made the difference: where älvi was cultivated, that is in the wet zone, the paddy tax and its written apparatus led the cultivator to claim an individual right to a particular portion of chena; while in the dry zone, where kurakkan or amu only were cultivated, there was no tax on chena, but only the issue of a verbal permit by the headmen. It is essential to study the process by which chenas were appropriated to find out when and where taxation applied to hill paddy: it is likely that Three korale and Sabaragamuwa stand out and that the ordinance of 1840 did not contemplate the use of wattoru to prove title]

 

[1] E.R. Leach, Pul Eliya, Cambridge 1961, esp. p. 289-291; N. Yalman, Under the bo tree, Berkeley 1967; J. Brow, Vedda Villages of Anuradhapura, Seattle, 1978, esp. 100-104; P. Kloos, ‘Agricultural policy in Sri Lanka; the views of a 19th century colonial elite’, Focaal, zomer 1988, p. 56-79; J. Spencer, A Sinhala Village in a Time of Trouble , Delhi, O.U.P., 1990. Strictly speaking, a chena is a temporary field, which is again cultivated after years of fallow during which natural vegetation is allowed to grow; when uncultivated, the area is generally called landu (see Diary Settlement Officer, 7.02.1928).

[2] Robert Knox, A Historical Relation of Island Ceylon, London 1681, p. 43. Reprint with additions, Dehiwala, Tisara Prakasakayo, 1989.  Knox lived in wet zone villages for two decades by the end of the 17th century

[3] J.C. Scott, The Moral Economy of the Peasant, New Haven 1976, p. 15; in the description of swidden cultivation in Indonesia by Conklin , a similar distinction is made between “supplementary swidden farming” and “established swidden farming”

[4] M. Roberts, ‘The Impact of the waste lands legislation and the growth of plantations on the techniques of paddy cultivation in British Ceylon: a critique’, Modern Ceylon Studies 1970 p. 160; Lal Jayawardena, “The supply of Sinhalese labour to Ceylon plantations 1830-1930” PhD Cambridge 1963.

[5] Spencer 1990, p.105-106

[6] On owita, Colonial Office Records, Kew (hereafter CO) 461/2 Replies from the Agent at Ruanwella, and U.A. Gunasekara, ‘Land Tenure in the Kandyan Provinces’, B. Litt. thesis, Oxford, 1959, p. 28; also Sri Lanka National Archives (hereafter SLNA): Diary of the Assistant Settlement Officer (hereafter ASO) Hughes, September 1924: ovita is considered either as paddy or as highland “They may be regarded in an old village as paddy land on the margin of cultivation” (Godamuke village)

[7] R.E. Lewis, ‘The rural economy of the Sinhalese, more particularly with reference to the district of Sabaragamuwa, with some account of their superstitions’ Journal of the the Royal Asiatic Society, Ceylon Branch  II, 4 (1848), p. 41-42

[8] F. Lewis, Sixty four years in Ceylon , Colombo 1926, esp. p. 198 sq (village of Bambarabotuwa); SLNA 30 and 45: Diaries of the Agents of Kägalla and Ratnapura Districts ; diaries of the Settlement Officers (hereafter SO); also ‘Ievers on hen cultivation’, quoted in R. Pieris, Sinhalese social organization , Colombo 1956 p. 86.

[9] Diary of SO J.P.Lewis 18.12.1897: in the village of Narawelpita (Morawak) “chena is the only means of subsistence for depressed Vahumpura villagers”; this pattern was also common on the borders between Kurunegala and Matale districts, for example in the village of Moratihe Gabadagama (Diary ASO Abhayaratne, November 1933)

[10] Eric Meyer, “Historical Aspects of Caste in the Kandyan Regions, with particular reference to the non-Goyigama castes of the Kägalla District” Sri Lanka Journal of the Humanities and Social Sciences, 40, pp. 21-54

[11] examples: Polatagama defined as a ‘rice village’(batgama) vs Denawakawatta defined as a chena village’(henagama), SLNA 30, Diaries of Assistant Government Agent (hereafter AGA) Kägalla, 12.8.1872; ASO Abhayaratne nov 1933 on Moratihe Gabadagama as compared with Moratihe Viharegama.

[12] F. Lewis, Sixty… p. 198

[13] Diary of the Settlement Officer, January and February 1931

[14] SLNA, Comments by ASO Hunter on the 3rd interim report of the Land commission (1928), p. 10; (quoted in annex to this chapter); Sessional Paper (hereafter SP) 22 of 1880 (Dry Grain Commission Report). In a document of the 1830s (CO 416/2 Replies of the agent at Fort King to the questions of the Colebrooke-Cameron commission) the term appurtenance to paddy fields is restricted to permanently cultivated fruit and vegetable gardens with houses

[15] Sessional paper 22 of 1880; from a revenue point of view, the most tax producing districts were Kägalla for älvi, Hambantota and Matara for other dry grains

[16] as suggested by Joke Schrijvers in Mothers for Life: Motherhood and Marginalization in the North Central Province of Sri Lanka, Delft, Eburon, 1986 and personal communication. Freeman, as Government Agent of the Eastern province in 1908, made the same remark in his Administration report (hereafter AR) for 1908, p. E3: widows with children depended on chenas in his district

[17] P. Peebles, Sri Lanka: a Handbook of Historical Statistics, Boston, Hall 1982 p.  111 & 118-119. (see next section)

[18] On tax evasion see Burden report 1916 in SLNA 30/868

[19]  See annex to chapter on Chena unsettlement in the Kägalla district; AR Kägalla 1878 p. 72

[20] AR Kägalla 1886 p. 146A; also CO 416/2 Colebrooke Cameron commission, replies from Ruanwella         

[21] R.E. Lewis 1848, p. 41-43

[22] The Administration Report of the Service Tenures Commission for 1871 gives a vivid description of how the headmanship system developed in Wellassa. It negates the idea current at the time of an original village community “No trace appears to exist of the management of a village community by a council of elders, as in a Jat village community” “all traces of a joint possession is lost” “but the possession of hen [chena] land in common still remains (…) in many villages especially in Matale north the whole of the hen land is held in common and there is a strong ground to believe that prior to the acquisition of the Kandyan territories individual possession of hen land was unknown. So clearly was this recognized that in some of the early records of this government the word hen was ordinarily rendered as ‘commons’. See also R.E. Lewis 1848 p. 40-41; H.W.Codrington, Ancient Land Tenure and Revenue in Ceylon , Colombo, Government Press, 1938, p. 4-5. For modern ethnographers, see especially J. Brow, Vedda villages… p. 100-104: “In summary, chena cultivation is egalitarian it is undertaken by the household on land which is not individually owned and is equally accessible to all”, N. Yalman,  Under… p. 100-101; on the other hand, Codrington, Ancient…, and Leach, Pul Eliya,… when describing “wheel chenas” in the dry zone, insists on the communal organization of the cultivation; Before the Committee on landless villagers, Madahapola, the chief headman of Hiriyala Hatpattu, in the dry zone, says that “chenas are not appropriated to each man, but by pangu” (SLNA, Land Commission records 907). Codrington considers that “the growth of claims on the part of pangukarayo [co-parceners] of a is comparatively recent”

[23] AR Nuwarakalaviya, 1871 (Rhys Davids)

[24] Miyanowita Forest Settlement, SLNA, Land settlement department records.réf?; Diary of ASO Ingledow, October-Novembe1936 (villages of Helarambe and Koskandehena: “I find that chenas are still as a rule worked on a communal basis”)

[25] SLNA, SO Archibald comments on the 3rd interim report of the Land Commission 1928; also diaries of ASO Ingledow, February 1936, for the villages of Gilimale, Helarambe, Koskandehena, and the general definition given by Abeyakoon, the Settlemen officer, before the Land commission of 1956 of the paraveni chenas of each panguwa “well known to the inhabitants and only the rightful owners may cultivate them”

[26] SLNA 65/958, letter 5.03.1887 AGA Kägalla to GA WP.

[27] see the case of Wattegedara: in this small Kelerata locality, the only family employed outsiders called pelkarayo, leading a wandering life, to cultivate its highlands in the 1870s: SLNA 65/1352, Harries claims. In remote dry zone villages such as Kahambane (diary of ASO Wijekoon, August 1938), the evolution from that initial system may be observed:  in the 1930s, the gamarala was still considered as the master of highlands: “Villagers obtained his permission to cultivate any chena in his jurisdiction and gave him a share of the produce of that chena or in lieu of this helped to cultivate a chena for him.”

[28]Land Settlement Records, Dorawaka file. Kägalla kacceri records, Old chena plan 269, Chena settlement file 1880 and Forest settlement file 1894.

[29] CO 416/2 Replies from Badulla :”The chenas on high grounds for the cultivation of dry grains are all fenced”; Diary ASO Seneviratne, September 1933 and August 1935.; diary ASO L.J. de S. Seneviratne, 10.06.1935

[30] J. Brow , Vedda…p. 103-104

[31] SLNA 45/1726: Kelani Valley Forest Register, Anhettigama,. Nur Yalman, Under the Bo Tree, p. 82 shows that people belonging to different castes do not cultivate chenas together. 

[32] R.E. Lewis, The rural p. 41-42; Ch. Malamoud, Cuire le monde: rite et pensée dans l’Inde ancienne . Paris, La Découverte, 1989, p. 93-114: ‘Village et forêt dans l’Inde brahmanique’

[33] Nur Yalman, op. cit.

[34] CO 416/20, G11 Evidence of George Turnour before the Colebrooke-Cameron commission; see also CO 416/2, questions 40 and 69: in the reply from the agent at Fort King “the uncultivated land is used for pasturage and is private property (…) government do not possess lands in the district, to give grants to natives or others”; but on the contrary the agent at Kurunegala says that “all land are supposed to be the property of government, rented to the present occupier on condition of paying a certain annual tythe and performing services  (Turner comments that this is quite wrong); and the agent for Ratnapura “would consider the government as proprietor of all unclaimed waste lands (…) and the proprietors very frequently set up false titles to chenas or highlands which have perhaps become the property of government by the extinction of the family of the original proprietor”, while the chief headman of the dry portion of the same district, Mahawalatenne, , “does not consider the uncultivated land to be at the disposal of government, it is used in pasturing cattle”

[35] AR Southern province 1872

[36]  AR Puttalam 1884 p. 100A

[37] S.H. Alatas, The myth of the Lazy Native. London, frank Cass, 1977

[38]  L.Ludovici , Rice cultivation, its past history and present condition,  Colombo nd (1867) (opening address to the Legislative  Council 3.10.1866) In a letter of Colonial Secretary to Government Agent Colombo of 21.1.73, Ludovici is mentioned as a private surveyor of great experience who could be entrusted with the task of effecting the chena  survey.

[39] SLNA, MP 04261/1910, minute of Governor Mc Callum, 29.05.1911. quoted by L. Jayawardena.

[40]  Administration report of the Agent at Ratnapura, Birch, for 1864 (in House of Commons Parliamentary Papers p. 139); however other administrators were skeptical: see note by Fowler dated 8.09.1906 in SLNA 65/2226: “The contention that chena cultivators if deprived of chenas will become vagrants carries no conviction to my mind when I see the results of the process of conversion; the people who become vagrants for want of chenas are of the class already worthless”. The same representation was found in Europe where the settled peasant population was distinguished from the numerous unsettled mobile occasional workers living in woods and waste lands: Andrée Corvol, L’Homme aux bois, Paris, 1987, pp. 116 to 130

[41] Diary ASO Davies, 9.03.1907

[42]  Andrée Corvol, L’Homme aux bois , Paris, 1987, p. 280.

[43] The only (early) document defending it was a memorial on the Kurunegala land question dated 29.10.1907 in which influent members of the Kandyan aristocracy and low country new rich asserted the necessity of chena in the dry zone and for some groups such as Kande minissu.

[44]  Diary of ASO Hunter, January 1928

[45] Administration Report of the Service Tenures Commission 1870

[46]  K.M. de Silva, A History of Sri Lanka, , London-Berkeley, 1981, p. 173 and 163-165.

  1. Dewasiri, The Adaptable Peasant: Agrarian Society in Western Sri Lanka under Dutch Rule, 1740-1800. Leiden, Brill, 2008, p. 65-67; Davidson and Fraser, as settlement officers, held a slightly different view, insisting on the encouragement of garden cultivation by the Dutch (see my chapter on Land settlement)

[47] David Ratemahatmaya in a letter dated 24.12.1860 included in the diary of the Agent for Kägalla for that year (SLNA 30/1); see also report of the Government Agent for Kandy Braybrooke in CO54/345/D

[48] R. Herring, ‘Redistributive agrarian policy: land and credit in South Asia’, Ph. D. Wisconsin, Madison, 1974, p. 404

[49] RE Lewis 1848 p. 43 ; Great Britain, Eastern pamphlets 52, p. 34-35

[50] SLNA 10/177a: AR Matara 1853

[51] letter AGA Matale to GA Central Province 18.04.1859 reproduced in CO54/345

[52] Included in Kägalla diary for October 1863 (SLNA 30/1) ; the full story of these Dompelgoda lands is found in the diary for June 1871 and in the manuscript ‘Reminiscences’ of the agent, later Reverend, H. Mooyart (available at the Library of the University of Sri Lanka, Peradeniya). Had the village been high caste, there would have been such deeds and the position of headmen might have been more permissive

[53] Templar (Report on the Central Province for 1864, in House of Commons Papers for that year)

[54] CO 54/345, annexures: Memos on the Chena question by Bailey, 1857 and 1859

[55] AR DJ Kurunegala 1867 p;.182

[56] AR Kägalla 1868, p. 32-33

[57]  See CO 57, Executive Council of Ceylon minutes, 4.09.1855 

[58] F. Lewis, Sixty Four Years in Ceylon, Colombo 1926, p. 219

[59] CO 54/393, dispatch of 7.10.1864

[60] SLNA 30/3, diary of the AGA Kägalla, 1-5.10.1864 and 15.12.1864. Frederick R. Saunders was the son of a Controller of Customs, who joined the Survey Department after his return from India; his younger brother, Henry S. Saunders (1841-1919), was the Chairman of the Ceylon Planters Association in 1876-1878; he was associated with Ratwatte Basnaike Nilame regarding the lease of temple lands in Talduwa, and he had as manager of Yellangowry estate been involved in dubious dealings in Dampelgoda with the then Assistant Agent Mooyaart: in all these cases, low caste villagers deprived of land rights were victims of landgrabbing. The Saunders brothers offer a glaring case of close connections between civil servants and planters. In a private letter the former governor Arthur Gordon (then Lord Stanmore) wrote to the Colonial Office (CO54/653, Stanmore to Lucas, 9.03.1898): “My reasons for distrusting Sir Frederick Saunders’ judgement it is unnecessary to state. It may suffice in this connection to say that as Government Agent of the Western Province, when that province included Sabaragamuwa, he was always in favour of placing the harshest and strictest interpretation of native land claims, except indeed in a few cases where he showed singular indulgence.”

 

[61] Administration Report Ratnapura 1864 (in House of Commons Parliamentary papers 1864, p. 139),

[62] AR Ratnapura 1868 p. 18 and 22 (reproduced in Papers on Service Tenures, SP 18 of 1869)

[63] Diary AGA Kägalla, December 1869 (Magala village)

[64] EKNELIGODA Ratemahatmaya was in charge from 1864 to 1892: compare with the succession of Assistant Agents: Frederick SAUNDERS (02/1864-11/1865), George WORTHINGTON (11/1865-01/1867), George DE SARAM (01/1867-03/1869), George PATERSON (03/1869-09/1869), Lionel LEE (09/1869-09/1872), Aelian KING (09/1872-10/1873), Augustine DAWSON (10/1873-06/1875), Frederick Robert BILLS (09/1875-11/1876), Charles Edward PENNYCUICK (11/1876- 12/1877), Robert IEVERS (12/1877-08/1880), Collin MURRAY (09/1880-04/1881), George BAUMGARTNER (04/1881- 05/1883) Robert IEVERS (02/1884-12/1885) with WACE interim in 1884; Cecil John Reginald LE MESURIER (06/1885- 03/1886) ; Fernando Hamlyn PRICE (01/1886-11/1888 ; 01/1890-03/1892 ; 03/1894-02/1895) and Walter Edward DAVIDSON (03/1892 – 12/1893 ; 02/1895 – 12/1896)

 

[65] AR Kägalla 1871 p. 29-30; in the diary of 1870, several petitions against -the new chena policy are mentioned

[66] In the Kägalla kacceri, the file of the Pannila village in Panawal includes this petition of Pannila Goyigama villagers, (2.03.1872)

[67]  AR Ratnapura 1872 p. 27-28 (E.N. Atherton)

[68] AR Kä 1873, p. 117; Sessional paper 15 of 1873, letter n° 443 GA WP to AGA Kä

[69] AR Kägalla 1875 p. 65-66: “It appears that there must have been a scarcity of food, but it was relieved I hear by emigration to the neighbouring coffee estates of much of the adult population during the year, and so avoided calamity. The cultivation of high lands in this division should I think be liberally regarded”.

[70] Diary AGA Kä, October 1872

[71] Quoted in Sessional paper 15 of 1873

[72] Diary AGA Kä, May 1873

[73]  AR Ratnapura 1873 p. 111-112, 1874 p. 18-19

[74] AR Kä 1872 p. 32-35, 1873 p. 117; Sessional paper 15 of 1873 (Cultivation and Survey of Chena Lands)

[75] AR Kägalla 1872 p. 32-35. It seems that Saunders, who became Government agent of the Western province, impressed upon his subordinates at Kägalla and Kalutara to follow a most repressive policy

[76]  AR Matara, 1867  SLNA 11/471 

[77]  AR Matara, 1868, p. 232-33 (Elliott)

[78] AR Southern Province 1872 p. 149 sq.

[79]  AR Matara 1875 p. 19

[80] AR Matara 1886 p. 91A, 1896 p. E17; AR Southern Province 1888 p. 155A

[81] AR Southern Province 1897 p. E8, Matara p. E20.

[82] AR Matara 1904 p. D45

[83] AR NWP 1874, p. 125-127: he based his theory on the work of Col. Corbett from India

* in text

[84]  SP 16 of 1877, Grain Tax Commission report, appendix, answers to questions, J.G. Jayatileke, Kurunegala. This official report is one of the rare sources linking famine conditions in Ceylon in the early 1870s with the anti-chena policy

[85]  SLNA, 65/2059; Fraser to Bowes, 31.07.1911 and 22.08.1911.

[86] AR Matale 1872 p. 61, SLNA 65/1954A, and AR Matale 1911-12 p. B18-19 and 1912-13 p. B22.

[87]  J.C. Scott, The moral …, p. 64

[88] Peasant strategies were those analyzed by J.C. Scott in Weapons of the weak. Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance. Newhaven, Yale University Press, 1985.

[89] SLNA, 65/ 958 (Kelani Valley Forest Reserve)

[90]  CO 54/345, Memorial of the inhabitants of Saffragam, 3.11.1840

[91]  SLNA, 65/2219, letter GA Sabaragamuwa to Col. Secr., 6.07.1908

[92]  CO 54 /238 Torrington to Secretary of State for the Colonies 12.08.1847 encl 2, Notes of the 1st conference held at Kandy 29.07.47 with a deputation of chiefs and priests of the Kandyan Provinces.

[93] Report on the conservation and administration of Crown Forest in Ceylon, Sessional Paper 43 of 1882, chap. 6

[94]  Le Mesurier, Memorial to the Secretary of State for the Colonies, 12 June 1896, in SLNA, 65/570

[95]  Diary SO Fraser, 14.06.1902

[96] Freeman, elected representative of the dry zone peasants, raised the issue before the Legislative council (SLNA L563/27, 26.06.1927, and in his evidence before the Land Commission in 1928. 

[97]  Diary of SO J.P. Lewis, 21 November 1900.

[98] Diaries of SO Davidson, 18-21.06.1901 and Fraser, 30.11.1901

[99] Diary of SO Fraser, 10.11.1901

[100] AR Hambantota 1908 p. D19; Diary ASO Wait, 14.03.1909

[101] Diaries of ASO Wait, July 1906 (Murungasyaya), and SO Fraser July 1904 (Walgammulla)

[102] Diary ASO Wait 24.11.1906 (Katuwana area)

[103]  Kelani Valley Railway Commission Report, Sessional paper 22 of 1895 p. 46

[104] AR Kägalla 1896 p. J 17: see also report of 15.5.95 in SLNA 45/1868=65/1187, Kandupita Forest Settlement

[105] Diary of SO Wait, 14.03.1909., and Tyrrell, GA NWP, in his AR for 1924 p. F2, who had changed his mind when compared with his policy in Matale

[106] AR Kägalla 1891, p. J26

[107] E.B. Denham, Ceylon at the Census of 1911,p 467; Diary SO Fraser, July 1904, and ASO Wait, October 1905; AR Uva 1928 p. H9, Ratnapura 1928 p. I4; diary ASO L.J. de S. Seneviratne, 6.06.1935 (Kumarapattiya village, Uva)

[108]  E.B. Denham, Ceylon at the Census of 1911, Colombo, 1912 p. 467 (summarizing district reports). A.R Kägalla 1920 p. I15 and 1927 p. I 21; AR Sabaragamuwa 1914 p. I4

[109] calculated from P. Peebles, Sri Lanka… table VII p. 118-119

[110] For example, according to the diary of ASO Rasaretnam of October 1932, chena cultivation was not allowed in 1931 [in Ihala Otota country] but “the present ordinance does not prevent the villager from cultivating his paraveni chena, and where they requested permission they were told that as far as Crown was concerned they had no objection. It may be more than one year before the villager will know that he can cultivate his paraveni chena”

[111]  Ludovici, Rice cultivation… chap 1. Mahawalatenne report in Census of Ceylon 1901, vol 1, appendix F: “This much abused but little understood cultivation is in reality not so bad or so unremunerative as it is represented to be”

[112] In SP 3 of 1931, chap 3;  also Ellis (SLNA, 65/1075, Land settlement work in the NWP, memorandum dated 10.02.1904): “The representations made by scientists and others as to the injury done to the soil by this species of cultivation must be considerably exaggerated” . See contra: evidence of planters before the Commission on Soil denudation in the Kelani Valley (SP 42 of 1905), which blames ‘the wasteful and pernicious system” and pretends that “in mountain regions the rivers have a tendency to become naturally silted” !!!

[113] also 65/1187, GA CP to CS 20.01.1904: “the poorer villager who could hitherto get a permit for chena cultivation will be left to the tender mercies of his more powerful neighbour”

[114]  Report on service tenures AR 1870 p. 286 (by Dickson, who is however biased in his defense of the feudal system)

[115] In Kägalla, villages of the Kandy Maha devale; in Matale, case of Ambokka quoted by Lawrie, vol I, p. 42-43.

[116] C. Geertz, Agricultural Involution: the Process of Ecological Change in Indonesia.  Berkeley, 1963.

[117] SLNA, 65/1684A ‘Formation of a Land Settlement Department’, SO to Col. Secr. 9.01.1907

[118] Diary SO Fraser 31.10.1903

[119] Diary SO Fraser, November 1901 and June 1902.

[120] SLNA L/62/1928 Reports of the Revenue and Settlement Officers concerning their comments on the 3rd interim report of the Land Commission. Louis Lucien Hunter (1889-1959) was a first-class but modest Ceylonese Burgher colonial administrator with a grass root knowledge of the country who became a nominated member of the Senate after Independence. Educated at Royal College Colombo, he was initially trained as a teacher. He was free from any prejudices and theories, being neither linked with the colonial business plantocracy, nor with the self-proclaimed national bourgeoisie, nor with the Cambridge-educated progressives.

“Compte rendu de l’exposition « Visages de la baie du Bengale » de V. P. Vasuhan” par Alain Cardenas-Castro et Christophe Comentale

L’exposition des œuvres de V. P. Vasuhan a eu lieu du 1er au 27 septembre 2019 à la Galerie Impressions les mercredis de 18 à 21h et les samedis de 14 à 19h.

Le mois de septembre est propice aux retours des événements culturels et des expositions. La galerie Impressions inaugure cette rentrée avec un accrochage singulier intitulé « Visages de la baie du Bengale ». L’exposition propose le regard de deux peintres sur l’état du monde à travers leurs cultures respectives, l’un du Bengladesh et l’autre du Sri-Lanka, V. P. Vasuhan, qui fait l’objet de cette livraison.

via: Sciences & Art contemporain

“Sociology at the University of Ceylon” by H.L. Seneviratne, in Social Affairs, Vol.1 No.7, 74-87, Fall 2017.

Here is a link to an article published by H.L. Seneviratne, in Social Affairs, Vol.1 No.7, 74-87, Fall 2017.

http://www.socialaffairsjournal.com/CurrentIssue/14_Sociology_at_the_University_of_Ceylon_HL_Senevirathne_SAJ1(8).pdf

ABSTRACT: For eight years after its establishment in 1948, the Department of Sociology remained in the ambiguous terrain of being both an independent department and a subordinate partner of the Economics Department. In that role Sociology supplied courses for students in Economics who wished to choose it as their ‘Special Subject’ within Economics. Sociology also supplied a few courses for the Sinhala and Philosophy departments. This paper narrates the story of how the two major figures to chair the Department of Sociology during this period contributed in their own ways to facilitate the passage of Sociology to the status of a degree-granting department, ending its ambiguous, anomalous, and liminal state

Village versus plantation : colonial & post-colonial ideologies and practices , by Eric Meyer

We publish the revised text of a lecture delivered in November 2017 at the Sri Lanka seminar organized by the South Asia Institute of the University of Heidelberg. The readers will find further information on this seminar in www.sai.uni-heidelberg.de/en/

The social history of rural Sri Lanka is no longer popular among social science scholars while it was in the forefront in the first 30 years after independence : the ethnic conflict studies have swamped the academic field for the last three decades. I am pleading for a return to socio-economic research. I am convinced that such a return can help to better understand the long term trends of the island’s history, including the two major crisis manifested in the double JVP insurgencies and the enduring Tamil separatist movement.
The political implications of colonial and post-colonial land policies have been studied by several authors (notably Mick Moore, Vijaya Samaraweera, Asoka Bandarage) in the 1980s, when the take-over of estates by the SLFP government, just after the first JVP insurgency, gave the issue a great visibility. I reviewed the issue a bit later, with publications in the Journal of Peasant Studies and in Modern Asian Studies in 1992, and that same year, Mick Moore and Jonathan Spencer (in Agrarian Change in Sri Lanka edited by James Brow) added to the literature of the subject. Since that period, the subject has lost its appeal; a quarter of a century later, it may be worth revisiting the question in a critical way.
I am not going to analyse the impact of the plantation system on the village sector (which is the subject of various publications of mine), but rather :
– to trace the origins and development of the representations of ‘the plantation’ and ‘the village’ taken as reified opposite entities, personified by the opposite figures of ‘the peasant’ and ‘the cooly’, and to explain the meaning of the dualistic theories and practices in the colonial context ;
– to document the development and the mass appeal of what could be called the ‘peasantist’ ideology and the role played by it in the land policies promoted, first in the economic and political context of the 1920s-1930s by a section of the colonial administration, then by nationalist politicians before and after independence ;
– to assess the consequences of the different options followed by the colonial administration and by governments after independence, to remedy landlessness and rural unemployment : either large scale agrarian colonization in the dry zone (rougly speaking, the UNP policy, from Senanayake to Jayawardene, from Gal Oya to Mahaveli project) ; or to the redemption and redistribution of plantation land in the wet zone (the SLFP policy) ;
– to review the academic literature on the subject in the 1970s and 1980s – what was called at that time ‘peasant studies’ – , and to discuss the thesis developed by authors such as Moore that the ‘repeasantization’ policies checked the development of violent agrarian movements – taking into consideration the subsequent revolutionary and ethnic violence correlated with these policies, and what could be considered as ‘depeasantization’ resulting from 30 years of war.

Constructing the dualistic model and the ‘peasantist’ ideology

During the last quarter of the 19th century, the impact of the plantation system on peasant agriculture and more generally on the ecological systems of the island began to question a section of the colonial administration. But is is only during the late 1920s and 1930s that it became a central political issue coinciding with the setting up of the Donoughmore system of representation, and with the major depression which hit the plantation economy.
The proto-history of the question is connected with the first cyclical crisis of the plantation economy, characterized by the collapse of coffee in the early 1880s. Until then, the land policy of the colonial government, which appropriated and sold for a song to coffee planters large areas of primeval and secondary forests (generally used for chena – slash and burn – cultivation by villagers) in the Kandyan upper and mid-country, had met with little open opposition, except in 1859 (when a combination of Kandyan headmen sellers and prospective intermediaries and buyers, who actually represented planting interests, met in Kandy), and after the property of some Temple lands was rejected by government (but temples themselves started to lease their lands to planters). Actually a large proportion of villagers in combination with intermediaries started themselves to plant coffee in their gardens and came to depend on coffee sales to pay their paddy taxes. But with coffee collapse which hit both the estates and the village gardens in the early 1880s, many villagers lost their holdings – often mortgaged to intermediaries : they became landless and famine conditions developed (especially in Uva, Walapane, Matale). This is well documented in Asoka Bandarage book.
Before that crisis, only a few civil servants, such as the governor Sir Henry Ward (1855-1860), took an interest in what they described as the decline of the village community due to the growth of individualism. The 1880s represent a turning point : the coffee crisis coincided with the growing popularity in intellectual circles in Britain and the East of ideas held by authors such as Henry Maine and John Phear, who drew an ideal picture of ‘traditional’ peasant societies (1). In their conception, these societies were self-regulating and egalitarian, based on customary institutions such as gansabhava (village councils), and it was the duty of the colonial masters to uphold or restore the (imaginary) village in its pristine purity. These views were reinforced by two contemporary developments : 1. the growing awareness among specialists of botany and forestry of the ecological degradation resulting from deforestation and monoculture (the successive directors of the Peradeniya botanic gardens, Trimen and Thwaites, were quite influent). And 2. the archaeological works undertaken in the ancient cities of the dry zone, which revealed the advanced technology (especially hydraulics) attained by paddy cultivators in the past.
A group of young colonial administrators (Le Mesurier, Fisher, Price, Davidson, Burrows) attempted to alert the public opinion in the island and in Britain on the condition of the Ceylonese (and specifically Kandyan) peasantry ; they were discreetly and later openly supported by the governor Arthur Gordon (who gave them as guideline: « Keep the peasant on the land »). They obtained in England the support of the Aborigines Protection Society. This group proposed practical measures to ‘save the peasantry’ : their campaign led to the abolition of the grain taxes in the 1890s, and to various experiments aimed at creating new villages (such as Lamasuriyagama, named after Le Mesurier) or at minimizing the negative impact of plantations on village life. But at the same time, the colonial system remained heavily dependent on the development of the plantation economy, the political strength of the planting interests was dominant in Ceylon, and many colonial administrators were themselves involved in covert land dealings, including Le Mesurier himself.
These ‘pro-peasant’ administrators attempted to reconcile their practice with their ideas by adopting a dualistic theory which presented the village and the plantation as two totally independent economic and social entities, which were to be protected from each other and which were to be kept apart. They themselves had a romantic image of the village : an harmonious, egalitarian, beautiful, ecological and smoothly working village versus a destructive, exploitative and morally perverting plantation. The dualistic theory was compatible with the view of the mainstream colonial authorities and their successors the developmentalists, who considered the village as stagnant, non progressive, feudal, unenlightened and immobile, better left to its stagnation as long as it did not compromise the working of a vibrant entrepreneurial and capitalistic plantation sector. To take an example, the Revenue Officer of the Kägalla district in the early 1890s, Price, left what he called « Friendly notes » (2) to his successor Davidson, in which he instructed him to distinguish two parts in the district, one left to the planters, the other to the villagers : « Restrict further sale of land to Three Korales and keep Four Korales as the Garden of the East – with a prosperous peasantry untainted by the civilization [sic in text] of Scotland and Mincing Lane ». This instruction was an extension at the district level of a principle which was applied at the micro level to village lands in the same district : the Revenue Officers effected during the 1880s a summary division of highlands, setting apart areas of chenas for villagers and appropriating the rest for sale to planters or keeping them as reserved forests. But the experiment ended in failure, for lack of legal and governmental support in the face of a wave of land speculation.
These debates in the narrow milieu of the Ceylon Civil Service were not without impact on the views held by the Kandyans themselves : an example is that of a chief headman of the Matale district, Tikiri Banda Aluvihare Ratemahatmaya (Sir Richard Aluvihare’s father) : in 1896, he wrote a report (titled « the silent revolution in the village ») at the request of the AGA of Matale Burrows (himself in charge in 1884-1886 of what was to become later under H.C.P. Bell the Archaeology Department, and the author of a guide book on the Buried cities of Ceylon published in 1905 : this is not a simple coincidence). This document is as far as I know the first example of the Kandyan discourse which will become a cliché on the ideal village life disturbed by the advent of the British planter ; I have published this document in my paper published in Journal of Peasant Studies (1992).
The dualistic model became popular in other colonies as well, notably in Dutch territories ; it was theorized in the 1930s by the Dutch scholar Julius Boeke (translated in English only in 1953). And that the same model in another colonial context led to the apartheid system.
In the 1890s, the coffee crisis was over and after the successful conversion of large estates (but not smallholdings) from coffee to tea, would-be tea planters rushed to the Kandyan areas to obtain fresh land either from government, or from the villagers themselves, who were often ruined and could not take to tea, using intermediaries and various stratagems for their landgrabbing activities (see my paper in Modern Asian Studies, 1992). Soon followed a huge demand for land for rubber plantations in the mid-country of the wet zone, especially in the Kägalla and Ratnapura districts, and for coconut plantations, especially in the Kurunägala district, in which the Colombo-based emerging Ceylonese middle class played a prominent role. In these circumstances, the colonial government interfered and tried to curb land speculation and assert its control over land by a new waste lands ordinance in 1897, which paved the way for the birth of a Land Settlement Department.

Building the ‘peasantist’ ideology into the nationalist discourse

By the beginning of the XXth century, the idealized representation of village life became popular among the urban Sinhalese elite, while its lost its appeal to British civil servants. British colonial administrators in the previous years were proclaiming pro-peasant sentiments while practicing pro-planter policies, and the contradiction led some of them to drop out of the civil Service, like Le Mesurier. The views of the colonial administrators with a real knowledge of village life became generally pessimistic. A well known case is that of Leonard Woolf, who came back to England in disgust, to marry Virginia Stephens and write his celebrated novel on Ceylon, The Village in the Jungle, which was certainly not an hymn to the glory of the Sinhala Buddhist village, nor a picture of villagers oppressed by the planters, but on the contrary a representation of village society oppressed by an addition of natural, cultural and colonial forces. Others who remained in the remote areas of the island devoted their time to collect village folk tales (Henry Parker), or to defend the rights of the dry zone villagers (such as H.R. Freeman).
On the contrary, the ‘peasantist’ ideology was adopted as a central argument of the nascent nationalist discourse in its Sinhala-Buddhist version. Apparently this option went against the interests of a large section of the nationalist elite, which was very active in opening rubber and coconut plantations on former village chena lands. In the words of Samaraweera (1981) : « The first generation of national leaders were the most unlikely champions of the cause of the peasants (…) Some among them had actually benefitted from the British Land ordinances (…) It is difficult to resist the conclusion that the land qustion was looked upon by the first generation of nationalists as a convenient issue which would give legitimacy to their claim as representatives of the people of the colony ».
In this « typical urban middle class myth model of the harmonious village » (Spencer 1991), the ‘peasantist’ ideology (restoring the village) was grafted upon the Buddhist revival project (restoring the sasana) :
1. The ‘original’ village society was harmonious, without class conflicts, made up of peasants-aristocrats (in the words of Hocart, archaeologist and ethnologist, using himself the often-quoted Sinhala proverb related by Robert Knox « take a peasant, wash off his dirt, he is fit to be a king »)
2. Its economy was based on paddy cultivation (qualified as an ‘Aryan’ crop) and its inner organization was geared to the proper functioning of the hydraulic systems – revealed by the archaeology of the Rajarata and Ruhuna (the paddy field and the tank, yaya/wäwa) : the publications of Harischandra and his endeavour to make Anuradhapura a sacred city illustrate that view
3. The ‘original’ village society was free from crime, drunkenness, based on Buddhist values, transcending caste differences, and organized around the vihara : this is a central theme in Anagarika Dharmapala’s writings
4. The disintegration of the village was the result of outside malefic forces : the Tamil invasions in the past, the British invasion of the present, with the complicity of the ‘foreign traders and moneylenders’
5. The (British) plantation and its (Tamil) coolies was the negative antithesis of the (Aryan) village and its (Sinhala) peasants
6. Restoring the ‘original’ village was the most urgent national duty, to avoid the degradation of the free peasant into a slave cooly, equated with the degeneration of the Sinhala ‘race’.
These ideas were borrowed from European authors of the late 19th century and early 20th century quoted above. But the myth was promoted among the urban anglicized elite by outstanding writers such as the Anagarika Dharmapala or the young Solomon Bandaranaike (3) ; Indian models such as Gandhi and Rabindranath Tagore were popular among the enthusiastic bourgeois youth who ‘discovered’ a romanticized version of the peasant life, while their fathers were at the same time exploiting the peasantry. The success of the myth had a political utility as well, which was to unite Kandyans and Low Country Sinhalese against a common enemy, real or imagined, the outsider (a composite category comprising the British planter, the Tamil cooly, the Chettiar moneylender, the Indian Muslim trader), and to offset the grievances of the Kandyans against the landgrabbing activities of the Low Country Sinhalese.
A committeee on landless and indebted villagers was set up in 1925 by the Legislative Council. Among its members were two outstanding figures, D.S. Senanayake and Madawela. Madawela was the representative of the Kurunegala district, where he had been active since 1906 in organizing the opposition to the activities of the Land Settlement Department in that area, where he was himself active in land dealings, together with various low country speculators from the Negombo-Chilaw area, such as the Corea brothers. Don Stephen Senanayake and his brothers were the sons of a successful landed proprietor who had made a fortune in graphite mining and had extended his coconut and rubber estates in the mid-country, but his reputation was built as fierce opponent to the repressive policy of the British during the First world war. At the beginning D.S. Senanayake’s position was quite close to that of Madawela: « In Ceylon there is no land at present suitable for the further cultivation of rubber, as the government is adopting the dog-in-the-manger policy. Ceylon would be far more prosperous if the government opens its eyes to the fact and releases land as much as possible » (Testimony before the committee of the Legislative Council on rubber restriction, CO54/874). They both were in touch with the most influent Ceylonese planters of the time, belonging to the new rich class, who in the 1920s were busy purchasing lands for rubber and coconut cultivation, such C.E.A. Dias and Dr Marcus Fernando, and with the Low Country Products Association which represented their interests. At the same time they were connected with Kandyan family groups who had themselves been involved in large scale land trasactions in the mid-country areas, such as the Meedeniyas, and with the influential press baron D.R. Wijewardene. Cases of villages entirely surrounded by plantations, and of villagers forcibly displaced, were frequent in the Deraniyagala area, and in all these cases Meedeniya, various intermediaries such as Van der Poorten and capitalists such as Wijewardene were implicated.
The Land Settlement Department, established by the Land ordinance of 1897, was very active after 1918 in two districts, Kurunegala and Ratnapura, where Ceylonese elite speculators were most involved, and it was their ‘bête noire’. Its officers were the resolute adversaries of the landgrabbers and saw themselves as the defenders of the peasantry, especially in the Kurunägala district, where small and medium landbuyers, anxious to invest in coconut estates, were purchasing title from villagers cheaply in advance of settlement by borrowing money on mortgage of these dubious titles from Indian moneylenders (Nattukottai Chettiar and ‘Coast Moors’). Before the Committee on landless/indebted villagers, Senanayake and Madawela tried to ruin the image of the Settlement officers as defenders of the peasantry, by insisting on the responsability of the Land Settlement operations in compelling the villagers to part with their lands, and pointed the role of Indians in the indebtedness and subsequent land sales of villagers in the coconut triangle, while in fact the Nattokottai Chettiars were lending money to would-be medium scale investors, most of them non-resident, rather than to small peasants. Madawela insisted that the Department should more liberally recognize private property of highlands, while the Settlement officers attempted to check the alienation of land to non-villagers.

‘Repeasantization’ : proactive land policies in the age of economic depression

In 1927, the then governor Hugh Clifford decided to appoint a Land Commission to review the entire land policy of Ceylon (4). This was a time when the great depression had not yet affected the plantation economy, which was booming. The starting points were the motion moved by Madawela and passed by the Legislative Council that the Settlement Officers should be instructed to recognize the private property of chenas, and the pressing request by a group of Ceylonese planters allied with British planters, and especially of Marcus Fernando, to speed up land sales in the wet zone for rubber, especially in Ratnapura and Kalutara, and in the Uva patanas for tea. The argument of Fernando (himself a former medical doctor, connected with the De Soysa big business family) was that many professional men had saved money and were anxious to invest in land, that owing to the slowness of the Land settlement proceedings, money was lying idle, that « the villagers have advanced side by side with the planters », and that the prosperity of the villages was proportionate with their proximity to a plantation.
These projects were opposed by popular meetings organized by local popular assiciations (Mahajana Sabhas) and became a public issue, and the colonial administration, startled by the risk of popular agitation, felt compelled to arbitrate between opposite demands. In a minute dated november 1926, the Acting Colonial Secretary wrote that there were two forces trying to influence the government policy : « the commercial establishment pressing it to expedite land sales to take advantage of the present boom ; the other may be described as the Ceylon nationalist party ; its extremists object to any Crown sale policy for estates and demand that land be reserved for the indigenous population »
Clifford’s own position was expressed in a text dated 11.02.1927 : « A school of thought has developed since 1910 [when Clifford was Colonial Secretary] until 1925-7 [Clifford being Governor] which maintains that tea and rubber estates are a parasitic growth which is battening upon the colony’s lifeblood, that they have worked no appreciable benefit to the indigenous inhabitants of the country and that they owe their existence to a systematic series of acts of expripriation and spoliation » ; Clifford considered it as « an historical and economic error » which « helps to fan the fires of class and racial prejudices, the blazing up of which can work nothing but misery and confusion ». But on the other side his position was that « the primary object of government is the multiplication of smallholdings, provided steps can be taken to prevent improvident alienation. The rapid development by means of estates of land which has not yet been exploited is by comparison a secondary consideration (…) I consider that early steps should be taken to encourage the overflow of (landless) people to such areas of fertile crown lands as are still available (in the wet zone), I should greatly prefer to see suitable crown lands utilized for this purpose than sold for conversion to still more estates. »
The Commission, which comprised officials of the colonial administration and elected members of the Legislative Concil, received a mass of memoranda and sat for one full year ; a part of its records were published in several reports in 1928 and 1929 but most remain in manuscript form. Its findings were informed by the ‘peasantist’ ideology : to quote the reports : « There is a very strong feeling among the unofficial members of the commission that villagers should not become coolies on estates ». « The rapid exploitation of the villager and his expulsion from his ancestral lands, the government being powerless to check the almost universal demoralization resulting from the success of the shameless practice of landgrabbing ». Many colonial administrators pleaded for greater powers to reserve lands in favour of the peasantry, and check landgrabbing, but they were sceptical about the possibility to operate a complete revolution : « I am not aware that anyone seriously contemplates the gigantic task of setting right the mistakes of the past by the only possible method, viz acquisition of lands from estates and their free sale to villagers » (Hodson, Government Agent North Western Province).
Unofficial members of the Commission, notably Madawela and Senanayake (in the 5th and 6th interim reports) while claiming to speak on behalf of the ‘poor peasant’, opposed any measures which would restrict the rights of the villagers to dispose of their lands. Besides these claims in favour of the peasantry, what is significant is that the Commission insisted that ‘middle class Ceylonese’ (as opposed in its phraseology to ‘outside capitalists’) should also get reserved lands, with the idea that their presence in the midst of the peasantry could introduce an element of authority and moral order. Senanayake suggested that blocks of 50 acres of highland suitable for coconut should be sold to these ‘middle class Ceylonese’, excluding outsiders, that is Tamil kanganies and Muslim traders : « the middle and professional classes (…) too wealthy to be classed as villagers (…) too poor to compete with big capitalists and companies (…) for the benefit of peasants men of educated classes should hold and cultivate estates of medium size (…) not only by providing employment for the peasants but also by securing the residence among peasants of men of culture and position ». C.L.Wickremesinghe, a friend of Senanayake and future Land Commissionner, who married his son Esmond to the daughter of D.R. Wijewardene, the press magnate, declared before the Commission : « Many of the middle class eke out a hand to mouth existence [sic]. I agree that Crown Land should be alienated to them… ».
The mechanisms set up to put into practice a new land policy were inspired by an influent but controversial colonial administrator, Charles Valentine Brayne. His elder brother Frank Lugard Brayne, a member of the Indian Civil Service, was one of the promoters of the Punjab colonies (5) ; Charles Valentine as government agent in Batticaloa had experimented a system of restricted tenure and planned alienation of land which he called ‘mapping out’, and obtained the green light of the government for that ; together with some of his colleagues he proposed to extend the system to the planting districts, and applied for the post of Land Commissionner when its creation was decided. His views were developed in an interesting unpublished text titled The protection of the village (6) « Everyone will admit that in parts of the country under rapid development in rubber and other economic products, there is a danger of the village disappearing and the villagers becoming landless. This has been put down by some to the government selling land to capitalists without sufficient forethought for village requirements. This may have occurred in certain cases. There is however a more potent factor at work, and one which presents a more complicated problem : government has now ceased to alienate land to capitalists, except after the most careful precautions to safeguard the future needs of the villagers ; the problem of the landgrabber has not however been solved ».
Brayne was criticized, violently opposed and even ridiculed by some of his colleagues who called him « Brainless Brayne », but his proposals were eventually adopted by the Land Commission and he was put in charge as Land Commissionner. D.S. Senanayake himself sided with him when he became the first Minister of Agriculture in the new State Council established in 1931. The Land Development ordinance of 1935 gave a legal basis to the system : but in the meantime, the great slump had intervened, which ruined land investors, threw out of employment hundreds of thousand coolies, and deeply affected the villagers who depended on estates : the dramatic malarial epidemic in Kurunägala and Kägalla in 1934-35 was partly the result of unemployment leading to undernutrition.
The great depression proved the falseness of the dualistic theories, the vulnerability of the peasant economy linked with the vulnerability of the plantation economy, especially owing to the overproduction of rubber which was the result of extensive planting. Its major political result was to give an impetus to the radical leftist movement, and to make it adopt the ‘peasantist’ approach. Young intellectuals underlined the contrast between abandoned estates and overcrowded villages. Following marxist orthodoxy, some of them undertook to organize (Tamil) coolies, considering them as an industrial proletariat ; but others began to demand the repurchase of estate lands for redistribution to (Sinhalese) villagers. One of the first promoters of the leftist movements, Wilmot Perera, defended a project of ‘Village reconstruction’ in his book Problems of Rural Ceylon (1932). He was the son of a ‘rubber king’ of Panadura, and convened an All Ceylon Rural Reconstruction Conference at his Horana estate in May 1932, where S.W.R.D. Bandaranaike spoke ; shortly afterwards, he founded the Suriya Mal Society in 1933, the precursor of the Lanka Samasamaja Party of which he was a member. He initiated a series of socio-economic studies of villages in 1934. He later became parlementarian and ended his career as Bandaranaike’s ambassador to Mao’s China in 1957.
Meanwhile, the landed middle class demanded the annulation of its debts, the expulsion of Indian moneylenders, and of all immigrants, with racist arguments reminiscent of antisemitism in Europe. Bandaranaike wrote in 1933 : « Rich and poor are being sold up by their creditors and driven in the streets, homeless beggars ». The memoranda and evidence of the Ceylon Banking Commission of 1934 are filled with these claims and complaints. Xenophobic – Indophobic sentiments were fuelled by the policy of the Indian authorities who appeared to interfere in Ceylon affairs, and eventually led to the disenfranchisement of Indian workers and merchants established in the island. The emerging Ceylonese elite (actually Low country Sinhalese) was careful to preserve its interests, through the creation of a Mortgage Bank (headed by Marcus Fernando) and later of a Central Bank. At the same time, the Land Commissionner services (controlled by Senanayake as Minister of Agriculture), undertook the distribution of available Crown land in populous areas of the wet zone, by mapping out and distribution of allotments, but resources were limited as long as the estates were left untouched. In the dry zone land was available, but malaria was still endemic and most attempts at restoration of the ideal hydraulic villages ended in failure.
The second world war, where Ceylon held a strategic position, created a new state of affairs : the rubber economy bounced back, food drive led the authorities to be very liberal in recognizing land rights, the government started to repurchase plantation land alienated to outsiders for distribution to villagers, especially in Kägalla district, where difficulties arose in 1946 in Knavesmire Estate, between expelled coolies and village allottees. Henceforth, the lax policy of succesive governments allowed quiet but uninterrupted encroachments by villagers on lands proclaimed as Crown by the Land Settlement Department. Finally, the extensive use of DDT against malarial mosquitoes made it possible to start land colonization in the dry zone, especially in the Eastern province, under the leadership of Senanayake, who became the First Prime Minister of independent Ceylon, in 1948. His policy of organized peasant colonization was again based on the ‘peasantist’ approach. It had a double objective : developping the country’s self sufficiency in paddy ; and deflecting rural discontent, land distribution to Kandyans in the new settlements acting as a sort of safety valve, without encroaching upon the planting interests. This policy allowed Low Country Sinhalese politicians to get the support of the Kandyans. But it alienated the Tamils because it encroached on the areas they considered as their homeland.

‘Peasantism’ in post-colonial political and academic controversies

At independence, the problem of landlessness was by no means new, but it had acquired such a visibility that it remained in the forefront, and became the major topic of research for social scientists and specialists of economic development, and a central political issue. The 1950s and 1960s witnessed a flurry of field researches on Ceylon villages, including very valuable ethnographical and sociological studies. After the Report of the Kandyan Peasantry Commission (1951), appeared a Report of Peradeniya University social scientists Sarkar and Tambiah (1957) under the title The Disintegrating Village, of the book of B.H. Farmer on Peasant colonization (1957), of Pul Eliya of Edmund Leach (1961) ; in the field of art and literature, the publication in Sinhala in 1944 of Gamperaliya (‘Village Upheaval’) by Martin Wickremasinghe was a landmark. These works exerted an influence on and were themselves influenced by the political controversies of the time.
The Kandyan Peasantry Commission analysed the adverse impact of the plantation system in a systematic way. Pre-colonial peasant economy was presented as an ecological system in equilibrium, achieving self sufficiency in food and employment, through the paddy system of production. Village society was depicted as knit together by common language, religion, and cultural traditions, « a great majority of the peasant population professing the Buddhist religion ». The advent of the plantation economy resulted in dualism, non-integration of the two sectors, and loss ; the villages became hemmed-in by estates : this obsessive image is constantly repeated. The major themes were the theft by the estate sector of useful peasant land and subsequent landlessness ; ecological impact of deforestation on paddy cultivation ; preferential treatment of Tamil coolies by authorities ; moral disintegration of peasant society : « New land was unavailable for village expansion, village councils gansabhava fell into disuse, prospect of crown claiming land prompted numerous sales to speculators, the old unity of village life began to disappear, moral and social standards were adversely affected, child marriage and giving out children for domestic service became common »
There was nothing new in these arguments, and many scholars consider the Report of the Kandyan Peasantry Commission as a rehearsal of commonplaces – what could be expected from a commission made up of a Colombo lawyer, two upper caste Kandyan MPs (Attygalle and Panabokke), and a representative of the Kandyan low castes, all of them close to Senanayake. In my opinion however, the Report is highly significant : its findings were based on a great number of memoranda (about 650), many of them in Sinhala, by various individuals and local associations, and by enquiries on the spot in different parts of the Kandyan regions in March and April 1949, one year after Independence, during which about 150 individuals were heard during public sittings. Most of these papers remained unprinted but are still available in the Archives : for example, the sittings of the commission in Badulla are vividly reported in a sort of diary. These documents reveal a high degree of public awareness of land problems in the Kandyan regions. A detailed examination of the lists of participants shows that the sociology of the memorialists closely corresponds with that of the people who will ensure seven years later the electoral success of the SLFP : schoolteachers, monks, high caste Bandaras and Appuhamys, a few low caste leaders, Village Committees, Cooperative Credit Societies and about 200 Rural Development Societies (the sittings were organized by Ellepola, in charge of these societies in the Ministry) ; besides these Kandyans, a fair number of Low Country Sinhalese established up-country as traders or small scale planters and writing in English ; and very few Muslims and Tamils. The result is that although the Commission was made up of UNP supporters, their report offers a sort of blueprint of what was to become the SLFP master narrative. These arguments are found after 1956 in the speeches of Bandaranaike and his Agriculture Minister (for a short time) the Marxist leader Philip Gunawardena, which are directly derived from the ‘peasantist’ theory, in which the Sinhala people is defined as a people of peasants.
Sarkar and Tambiah’s published six years after the Report of the Kandyan Peasantry Commission, just after the victory of Bandaranaike at the 1956 elections, an academic work, based on a detailed socio-economic quantitative study of a group of villages in the lower Dumbara valley (7). It was introduced by a sort of abstract of the Report, which gave it a scientific legitimacy. The very title of the book was derived from it. But it was however less prone to draw an idealistic picture of village life. Among the similarities, the insistence on history (« the basis of rural economy in ancient Ceylon was paddy cultivation »), the emphasis put on the « well integrated and self-sufficient social and economic system, well adapted to certain ecological factors », the affirmation that « the invasion of this system by the plantations struck a damaging blow to its stability, destroyed the balance between paddy, chena and forest », the use of the term « degeneration of the community »; the emphasis on ecological impact of the destruction of forests ; an analysis of the vicious circle of modernisation, better health services, population increase, landlessness, exploitation by the bourgeoisie of the less fortunate, and impact of the new law system. The study differed from the Report in that it used a statistical and scientific approach, and in that economic exploitation inside the Kandyan society was put on the same footing as « victimization and exploitation by the middle classes, merchants and estate owners » ; although not informed by the marxist theory, the book, because of its scientific approach, was to exert a decisive influence on the leftist Ceylonese intellectuals.
That same year 1957, B.H. Farmer published a detailed study of the dry zone colonies (8), which can be considered as a semi-critical assessment of the first results of the Senanayake policy started with the Land Commission of 1928 and the Land Development Ordinance of 1935, but really applied to the dry zone only after the war and the use of DDT. He pointed out the romanticism which led to exaggerate the wealth and population of ancient Rajarata and Ruhuna based on irrigation works : « it is important to give the lie to estimates which are grossly exaggerated ; if such receive credence as they unfortunately do they engender false optimism about the carrying capacity of the dry zone… ». He therefore doubted the capacity of the colonies to solve Kandyan landlessness problems, which he recognized as serious, while suggesting a balanced analysis of its causes : « The author is convinced by field evidence that the Crown Lands Encroachment Ordinance and the estates which grew because of it, have borne hard on many Kandyan villages and in doing so have accentuated an agrarian problem which would have been serious in any case ». Farmer became the first director of the Center of South Asian Studies at Cambridge, established in 1964, and his book sowed the seeds of a critique of the nationalist discourse on the question of the responsibility of the British pro-planter policy in the Kandyan agrarian problems.
This ‘revisionist’/developmentalist approach was initially defended by Lal Jayawardena : in his Cambridge thesis (1963) he raised the question as to why the Kandyan peasants, if evicted on a mass scale, did not become wage workers on the plantations ; he therefore minimized the impact, maintained that the colonial administration undertook to efficiently protect the peasantry, and at the same time exposed the responsibility of landgrabbers, especially members of the rising nationalist elite (his wife Kumari who wrote at the same time her thesis on the nationalist/working class movements in the interwar period once said to me : « my heroes are his bad guys ») ; but Lal Jayawardena left his work unpublished (he became a career economist and diplomat) and therefore had no influence, except on the group of historians at the Peradeniya University who from the mid-1960s until the mid-1970s undertook to deconstruct the Kandyan discourse, at a time when the campus was the scene of a growing agitation led by marxist students, especially during the year 1971. The Ceylon Studies Seminar met in the late 1960s under the aegis of Kingsley De Silva, with Michael Roberts, Vijaya Samaraweera, and L.A. Wickremaratne : they elaborated the ‘revisionist’ thesis in various papers which found their way in the Peradeniya History of Ceylon volume III. After the JVP insurgency and university reforms, some left Sri Lanka like so many British-educated intellectuals, while others regrouped outside the universities in NGOs and various foreign funded research institutes. But at the same time, western economists such as Snodgrass could still defend the dualistic theory : in 1966, Snodgrass spoke of « the classic purity of the Ceylonese case », of a « dualism nearly perfect » and maintaned that « smallholder production of export crops had only a marginal impact upon the giant mass [sic] of the traditional economy »

‘Peasant Studies’ ‘Repeasantization’, ‘Depeasantization’ : 1971 and after.

The shock of the unexpected 1971 insurgency left indelebile traces in the realm of politics and economy. Its immediate results were the new republican constitution of 1972, and the take-over of the large plantations between 1972 and 75. The event had also a far reaching impact in the research field with the creation of the Agrarian Research and Training Institute established in Colombo in 1972. The insurgency was immediately interpreted (by the ruling classes and by their foreign advisers who began to swamp Sri Lanka with their foundations, NGO’s and the like) as the result of unemployment and subsequent demoralization among the educated rural youth, and also, (I insist on this point which is often overlooked because the JVP itself adopted elements of the nationalist discourse), to the influence of outside, non-national forces. These interpretations reinforced the political attempts to ‘repeasantize’ (term used by Moore) society, to reinject moral values, to promote ‘national thinking’ – Jathika Chintanaya.
It is often assumed – for example by Moore (9) – that the JVP had no agrarian programme, and therefore no real appeal among the rural masses. This is also the impression left by the books of Alles and of Gunaratna, who are up to prove that the only aim of the JVP was the seizure of power by a leninist-guevarist strategy : both books are written in a judiciary and political science perspective, and insist that JVP « was essentially a cadre party which had a limited public support » (10). It is true that the JVP was not an agrarian mass organization as such ; but its appeal for a great number of rural youth was based on what we have called ‘peasantism’. JVPers shared the ‘peasantist’ views of the SLFPers and integrated them in their revolutionary agenda. The ‘Five Lectures’ conceived by Rohan Wijeweera by the end of 1967 and diffused through classes of endoctrination in the high schools and universities give the rough elements of the JVP. ideology. They have not been published as far as I know, but their substance can be found in the statement of Wijeweera to the police (C.I.D.) dated 1971 and in the JVP press in Sinhala (11).
The first lesson dealt with ‘The economic crisis’ (the following were: 2 ‘Independence’ 3. ‘Indian expansionism’ 4 ‘Leftist movement’ 5 ‘The path to revolution’). The lectures were designed to fit with the aspirations of the educated unemployed rural youth. According to a classical marxist-leninist approach, the economic crisis faced by Sri Lanka was attributed to the impact of colonialism and post-colonial capitalism, in the form of the impact of the plantation economy on the peasant sector : « the primary root of the problem is the collapse of a self-sufficient economy ; the birth of the tea plant at the expense of kurakkan is the main cause of the crisis ». Then follows the usual analysis of rural decline found in the nationalist discourse, which is integrated into the revolutionary logic :
1. That the nationalist-bourgeois (and the walauwa people) were actually lying when they pretended to take the side of the peasantry. It was only by armed struggle that a real independence could be obtained, the maoist way; the old left similarly failed because it was prisoner of the democratic game, western ideas and modes, and led a bourgeois corrupt life, cut from the authentic masses. 2. That the real revolutionary class was made up of landless peasants, and swabhasha-educated unemployed youth (including young monks)(12) 3. That Indian plantation workers, contrary to the classical leftist view, were not a proletariat but the agents of imperialism, part and parcel of the plantation system
What was to be done ? According to Wijeweera in his submissions to the CID : « We should change the entire economy. The basic aim is to do away with the plantation industry, the hill slopes should be reafforested, reservoirs built, rivers diverted to the dry zone ». It was commonly said by JVPers in the villages in 1971 that they would uproot rubber and tea and plant yams instead – this is what had been done since 1935 in the Village Expansion Schemes that became the hotbed of JVP activities notably in the Kägalla district. Finally, the JVP strategy was to be guevarist rather than maoist : the conquest of towns from countryside being difficult in Sri Lanka, the leadership envisioned an instant revolution rather than a long walk ; as we know, this strategy ended in failure.
A parallel, or possibly a connection between JVP and Khmer Rouge ideologies may be explored. In a paper read at an international workshop on cultural heritages held at Heidelberg in 2011 (« The myth of Angkor as an essential component of the Khmer Rouge utopia »), Locard shows that there was an ‘repeasantization’ component in the economic policy of the Khmer Rouge. Their utopia – back to the countryside and to self-sufficient food producing peasantry- was grounded on the myth of Angkor ‘the hydraulic city’, just as the JVP utopia was grounded on the image of Anuradhapura. Both kingdoms had grown rich and powerful because they controlled extensive irrigation systems that produced surpluses of rice. By building a nationwide system of irrigation canals, dams, and reservoirs, the Khmer Rouge leadership believed it would be possible to produce rice on a year-round basis (13).
Successive attempts by SLFP and UNP to solve the problem of Kandyan landlessness and unemployment within the framework of the peasantist/nationalist ideology constitute in my opinion a decisive factor contibuting to the violence of the ethnic crisis, and finally fuelling the war itself. The SLFP in 1972 made the choice of the land reforms which were supposed to radically transform the system from above. It entailed a real dispossession for the class of the low country political leaders (coconut estates) but not for the upper caste Kandyans (paddy and temple lands which they controlled were excluded). In part, it was an extension of the principle of Village Expansion Schemes, but only 10% of the land was actually redistributed ; for the rest, it was an attempt at collectivization, creating cooperative production, which resulted in poor management, actual expulsion or even killing of Tamil coolies or supervisors, and the final restitution of plantation management by the state to private firms. The multiplication of violent clashes between Sinhalese (generally people from bazaars rather than villagers) and Tamils on estates, starting in 1977 and renewed in 1983, signalled the failure of the take-over project.
Back into power in 1977 with J.R. Jayawardene, (from a Low Country wealthy planting family connected with the Senanayakes), Gamini Dissanayake (from a Kandyan wealthy Goyigama family of Kotmale) and the low caste rival leaders Cyril Matthew and Ranasinghe Premadasa, the UNP immediately undertook to expedite the ‘repeasantization’ of the country with the Accelerated Mahaveli Development Project, which was meant to relocate impovershed Kandyans (especially from Uva and Matale) close to their native land and in continuity with the Gal Oya project. Jayawadene himself found it necessary to reinvent agrarian rituals in the very district where his class had grabbed land. Even Premadasa, who as a typical working class urbanite could have despised the peasantist ideology, felt it necessary to launch the Gam Udawa project (specifically for low caste villages). But the ‘repeasantization’ project was slowed down by the war, and aggravated interethnic relations, especially in the Eastern province. At the same time, the successive governments, either SLFP or UNP, were very lax in checking encroachment by villagers on public land for the purpose of putting up houses and gardens, either in the wet or in the dry zone. Local civil servants were easily corrupted, and local strong men, with the right political connections, were always ready to help. It was estimated in the 1980s that one sixth of the house cum garden plots in the whole country were thus acquired.
While these developments were taking place in the countryside in the 1970s and 1980s, ‘peasant studies’ became extremely popular in academic circles, but these critical researches had little bearing on actual policies. In the 1960s appeared the great stream of peasant studies – linked with the maoist experience in China. Eric Wolf published Peasants in 1966, Peasant Wars some time later, the Journal of Peasant Studies was started in 1973 by Terence Byres of London University, Eric Stokes published ‘The return of the peasant to South Asian history’ in South Asia, 1976. In France, the publications of the agronomist globe-trotter René Dumont (who was later a founding member of the Green party) were best sellers, and he was invited to visit Sri Lanka by Chandrika Bandaranaike : his book Paysanneries aux abois (Peasantries at bay) published in 1972 devotes 100 pages to Sri Lanka.
Agrarian Research and Training Institute’s field studies were published in a series of monographs in the late 1970s, and some of these studies were collected in Morrison (1979) published under the same title as Sarkar and Tambiah. Shortly afterwards, four theses of political economy using a more or less marxist approach were defended and later published : Tilak Hettiarachchy (The Sinhala Peasant MA 1978), Asoka Bandarage (Colonialism in Sri Lanka Ph D Yale 1980) and Mick Moore (The State and Peasant Politics in Sri Lanka Ph D Sussex 1981). Several papers by the marxist political scientist Newton Gunasinghe (Ph D Sussex 1979, who died prematurately in 1988) were later published by the Social Scientists Association. Further additions to this body of literature were the contributions to a conference held in Anuradhapura in July 1984 published in 1992 by Brow and Weeramunda, Agrarian change in Sri Lanka. Other important publications included Charles Abeysekera, Capital and peasant production, Social Scientists Association, 1985 (especially the introduction by Newton Gunasinghe) ; and the report of the Third Land Commission headed by Prof. Madduma Bandara, in 1987.
Tilak Hettiarachchi’s historical booklet published in 1982 reproduced the nationalist discourse (as suggested by its title, The Sinhala peasant) with a marxist packaging, making a mechanical use of Dobb, Polanyi and Eric Wolf. The cover of the book showed the trinity ‘Wäwa, Caitya, Yaya’ with a crack. The author maintained that the pre-plantation peasant system based on paddy cultivation was balanced, self supporting, sustainable, socially indifferentiated and economically homogeneous and free from any clash of interests. He ignored the debates raised by the revisionist school. The facts were taken mainly from published writings on the coffee era.
Asoka Bandarage’s book on colonialism published in 1983 was more sophisticated. Colonialism in Sri Lanka, the Political Economy of the Kandyan Highlands adopted the general thesis of the disintegrating impact but took into account the revisionist theories ; Asoka Bandarage attempted to deconstruct peasant myths and to analyse class conflicts inside the village society (« the overdrawn image of the Sinhalese as a nation of rice cultivators and rice eaters, constituted an important element in the ideological control exercised by the overlords in keeping peasants tied to the paddy fields »). But at the same time she agreed with the idea that peasantry was homogeneous in Kandyan times, economically speaking, and that « caste differences within an otherwise homogeneous peasantry inhibited the emergence of a class consciousness and collective action among the cultivator class ».
Newton Gunasinghe’s papers and other publications by the group of social anthropologists and political scientists known as Social Scientists Association were much more critical, written in a neo-marxist perspective. Newton Gunasinghe attributed to the repeasantization strategy the technological stagnation, and considered that Village Expansion schemes were more housing projects than agricultural projects.
The theoretical question raised by Mick Moore (who was attached to the Agrarian Research and Training Institute and the Sussex School of Development Studies) was the absence of a peasant (smallholder) political interest group and of peasant movements in Sri Lanka, in which he saw the result of the ‘repeasantization’ strategy of the ruling classes. He considered that this strategy was a success : « Unlike almost all other developing countries Sri Lanka has experienced no major flight of people from the rural areas to the cities » He explained that the major reason for that was « the relative excellence of public provision for most of the population » : a cheap transport network, free education, free health, subsidized prices of foodstuff, land given out to the poor, extension of small scale family farming, social laws, low incidence of taxation. As a result, « the total number of agricultural holdings has increased faster than the rural population ; the center of gravity of the smallholder economy has shifted substantially to the dry zone ; rice production through this process has expanded faster than plantation production ». Even in the plantation sector, the development occurred in Sinhalese-owned smallholdings, especially in the South, and employment on estates was increasingly occupied by non-resident Sinhalese villagers. If we follow Mick Moore, the Senanayake and Bandaranaike policies have succeeded. Then 1971 appears as a minor revolt and not as a peasant class revolt in any case, and the ethnic crisis is something unconnected with general socio-economic problems. On the contrary, C.M. Madduma Bandara (President of Third Land Commission) in a report of 1987 maintained that Village expansion schemes had not ‘created’ a prosperous peasantry as anticipated by the planners of the 1930s : « On the contrary the majority of these settlements have become pockets of poverty and areas of social deprivation. Many of them have become centres of turmoil in the present crisis (JVP) ».

After 30 years of civil war, of militarization or massive outmigration of the youth, and of growing ‘rurbanization’, are the questions raised in the 1970s and 1980s still relevant ? I would suggest that the war signalled the failure of the ‘repeasantization’ projects : a large proportion of the unemployed rural young men found employment as soldiers in the war, while a large proportion of rural women went out as factory workers or as maids in the Middle East.
What happened was ‘de-peasantization’ rather than ‘re-peasantization’ : what remains are nostalgic symbols such as Rajapaksa’s kurakkan-colour shawl… Power in the countryside has been seized not by agrarian leaders, but by successful mudalalis (petty businessmen) and armed gangs. Village Buddhist values have been superseded by the discourse of urban activist monks. It looks as if what a century or more of colonization had spared has been disintegrated by three decades of turmoil.

Bibliography :
ABEYSEKERA Charles ed., Capital and Peasant Production. Studies in the continuity and discontinuity of Agrarian Structures in Sri Lanka. Colombo : Social Scientists Association, 1985
BANDARAGE Asoka, Colonialism in Sri Lanka, the Political Economy of the Kandyan Highlands. Berlin/New York : Mouton, 1983
BROW James & WEERAMUNDA Joe, eds., Agrarian Change in Sri Lanka. New Delhi : Sage, 1992
The Disintegrating Village. Report of a Socio-economic Survey conducted by the University of Ceylon [Sarkar & Tambiah]. Colombo : Ceylon University Press, 1957
DUMONT René, Paysanneries aux abois : Ceylan, Tunisie, Sénégal. Paris : Le Seuil, 1972
FARMER B.H., Pioneer Peasant Colonization in Ceylon. London : Oxford University Press, 1957
GUNASINGHE Newton, Changing Socio-Economic Relations in the Kandyan Countryside. Colombo : Social Scientists Association, 1990.
HETTIARACHCHY Tilak, The Sinhala Peasant in a Changing Society. Colombo : Lake House, 1982
LOCARD Henri, « The myth of Angkor as an essential component of the Khmer Rouge utopia » in Falzer Michael ed., Cultural Heritage and Civilizing Mission, Heidelberg, Springer, 2015, p. 201-222
MEYER Eric « ‘Enclave’ Plantations, ‘Hemmed-in’ Villages and Dualistic Representations in Colonial Ceylon » in Val. Daniel et al. Plantations, Peasants and Proletarians in Colonial Asia, London : Cass 1992 ; also published in Journal of Peasant Studies 19 (3/4)
MEYER Eric « « From Landgrabbing to Landhunger: High Land Appropriation in the Plantation Areas of Sri Lanka during the British Period. » Modern Asian Studies 26, 2, (1992) pp. 321-361.
MOORE Mick, The State and Peasant Politics in Sri Lanka. Cambridge, U.P., 1985
MOORE Mick, « The Ideological History of the Sri Lankan ‘Peasantry’ » in Brow & Weeramunda p. 325-356
MORRISON Barry et al . eds., The Disintegrating Village. Social Change in Rural Sri Lanka. Colombo : Lake House, 1979.
SAMARANAYAKE Gamini, Political Violence in Sri Lanka, 1971-1987. New Delhi : Gyan, 2008
SAMARAWEERA Vijaya, « Land, Labour, Capital and Sectional Interests in the National Politics of Sri Lanka » Modern Asian Studies 15 (1), 1981, 127 – 162
SNODGRASS Donald, Ceylon, an Export Economy in Transition. Homewood : Irwin, 1966.
SPENCER Jonathan « Representations of the rural, a view from Sabaragamuwa » in Brow & Weeramunda 1992, p. 357-387

Sources :
Report of the Kandyan Peasantry Commission, Ceylon Sessional Paper 18/1951
Land Commission Reports, Ceylon Sessional Papers, 1927-1929
Cambridge South Asian Archive : C.V. Brayne Papers
Sri Lanka National Archives (Colombo and Kandy), Record Groups 30 (Kägalla district), 69 (Land Commissionner), 108.28 (Kandyan Peasantry Commission), 220 (Land Settlement)
Colonial Office Archives (Public Record Office, Kew), series CO54.

Notes
(1) Henry Maine, Village Communities in east and west, 1871 ; John Budd Phear (former Chief Justice of Ceylon 1877-79), The Aryan village, 1880.
(2) Sri Lanka National Archives 30/2246
(3) S.W.R.D. Bandaranaike, The spinning wheel and the paddy field, 1933.
(4) Sri Lanka National Archives : Commentaries, Memoranda, and Evidence before the Land Commission, 1927-1928 ; Confidential files 1926 ; Hugh Clifford, Some Reflections on the Ceylon Land Question, Colombo, 1927.
(5) His books published during those years : Village uplift in India (1927) and The remaking of village India (1929) made him famous in India
(6) C.V. Brayne papers, South Asia Archive, Cambridge (undated, probably 1928)
(7) The Disintegrating Village. Report of a Socio-economic Survey conducted by the University of Ceylon [Sarkar & Tambiah]. Colombo : Ceylon University Press, 1957
(8) B.H. Farmer, Pioneer Peasant Colonization in Ceylon. London : Oxford University Press, 1957
(9) Mick Moore, The State and Peasant Politics in Sri Lanka. Cambridge, U.P., 1985, p. 220
(10) Rohan Gunaratna, Sri Lanka, a Lost Revolution. Kandy, 1990, p. 93
(11) Gamini Samaranayake, Political Violence in Sri Lanka, 1971-1987. New Delhi, 2008 p. 254-267
(12) « The so-called left-wing leaders of our country have said that the peasantry is not revolutionary. These leaders will never understand the problems of Ceylon. Due to a failure to analyse the problems of the peasantry scientifically and accurately, there has been no attempt to establish a worker-peasant alliance nor any move to unit the entire oppressed class and to work towards a socialist revolution…It is only socialism that could permanently liberate the up-country landless peasant, the peasant in the wet zone whose crops are being constantly destroyed by the floods, the dry-zone peasant who is the victim of droughts, the agricultural labourers, chena (slash – and – burn) cultivators and sharecroppers. » (« The Peasantry is the Main force of the Ceylonese Revolution », Vimukthi, 4, September 1970.)
(13) The Khmer Rouge leader Khieu Samphan obtained a doctorate in Economy in Paris in 1959 for a dissertation on Cambodia’s economy, which was later eagerly read by the group of Cambodian students (the text is available in English translation at Cornell U.P., 1979) ; he belonged to a proto-maoist group in which the French-reunionnais Jacques Vergès played a prominent role ; the Maison du Cambodge where they all stayed became for a few years the scene of constant incidents between warring factions, especially after 1968 and was eventually closed for 30 years in 1973 ; I met there a few Sri Lankan JVPers in the early 1970s.

​”Towards Recovering Histories of Anti-Muslim violence in the Context of Sinhala-Muslim Tension in Sri Lanka” by Vijay Nagaraj and Farzana Haniffa

This research paper explores three incidents of Anti-​Muslim violence in Sri Lanka: ​Puttalam in 1976, Galle in 1982 and Mawanella in 2001. This paper intends to cast light on anti-Muslim violence over the past three to four decades outside of the north and east, episodes that have been masked, lost or suppressed in the commonly narrated recent histories of political and religious violence in Sri Lanka.

The history of violence against Muslims during this period is overshadowed by the armed conflict and extreme polarization precipitated by Sinhala and Tamil nationalisms. The incidents recorded are often limited to those in the north and east. It is necessary that the post-war resurgence in anti-Muslim hostility is historicized and placed within the wider sweep of anti-Muslim hostility within Sri Lanka over the past few decades. The distinct experience of political and ethnic violence experienced by the Muslims in the context of Sinhala-Muslim tensions requires greater empirical attention and theorizing than it is has received.

This paper is posited as a step towards addressing this lacuna. This research is also motivated by the possibility that a deeper understanding of the temporal, spatial, political economic and social dynamics of anti-Muslim violence can illuminate the broader conditions that generate and reproduce communal violence more generally.

http://ices.lk/publications/towards-recovering-histories-of-anti-muslim-violence-in-the-context-of-sinhalamuslim-tensions-in-sri-lanka/

Landgrabbing by coffee estates in the Kägalla district, by Eric Meyer

After « The 1934-1935 Malaria Epidemic in Sri Lanka » (http://slkdiaspo.hypotheses.org/1251) and « Gamperaliya in the Kägalla district » (http://slkdiaspo.hypotheses.org/1354), we publish here the third paper in a series on the socio-economic history of the Kägalla district.
Download the paper here:
Coffee estates Kegalle

New articles on religiosity among Tamil Hindu youths in Norway by Valen Kleive

Hildegunn Valen Kleive has recently published two articles (one in English and another in Norwegian) looking at religiosity among young Tamil Hindus in rural Norway.

The first (in English), ‘Belonging and Discomfort: Young Hindu Religiosity in Rural Norway’ is published in the Nordic Journal of Religion and Society and may be accessed here.

The second ‘Mestring og balanse. Trekk ved ung hindureligiøsitet’ is published in Prismet and may be accessed here. An English translation will follow at a later date.