“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 17^th 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 16^th 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 20^th 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 18^th 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 19^th 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 1/24^th 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 (1/20^th), later evolving towards the classical 1/4^th 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 19^th 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 19^th 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 19^th 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 19^th 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 1/10^th 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 1/10^th should be levied, 1/14^th 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 1/10^th, 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 1/14^th (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 1/5^th 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 1/10^th 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 1/14^th 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 1/14^th and ‘crown’ chenas at 1/10^th  (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 19^th 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 19^th 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 1/10^th 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 1/10^th 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 20^th 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 1^st 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 1^st 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 20^th 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 20^th 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 17^th 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.

1800. 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 3^rd 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.

EPM

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