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SRI LANKA & DIASPORAS

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SRI LANKA & DIASPORAS

THE IMPACT OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION ON THE RURAL ECONOMY AND SOCIETY OF COLONIAL CEYLON (1925-1939) By Eric P. Meyer Part III: CEYLONESE LAND OWNERS FACING THE GREAT DEPRESSION

It is proposed to examine quite briefly how the Great Depression affected the landowning class of Ceylon, whose plantations of coconut trees, rubber, and to a lesser extent of tea, were probably the main source of income, and certainly the preferred investment. This social category does not belong to rural society, because absenteeism is common among plantation owners, but it influences its fate. To do this, we shall compare numerous testimonies generally based on simple impressions, with the numerical results drawn from an analysis of the sales by judicial authority of properties seized during the period 1924 to 1939. Depression, which occurred at the very moment when this emerging indigenous class entered the political arena, also translated into behaviours whose ideological content will catch our attention. The rise of chauvinism, more anti-Indian than anti-British, represents an interesting colonial variant of the xenophobia epidemic that engulfed the countries affected by the depression, of which Germany represented the most pathological case, but of which Asia was far from being exempt.

A pathological indebtedness

“There is hardly a member of the permanent population who has not invested if not the entirety, at least the major part of his savings in [coconut products]. The sudden and sharp decline in their prices has put every domestic budget out of gear (…) It is no exaggeration to say that practically everybody is a borrower today, while lenders are few and far between”[1]. This is the general feeling of contemporaries, who represented Ceylon as a nation in debt at the mercy of foreign plutocrats. The Ceylon Banking Commission, in charge of evaluating the phenomenon in 1934, collected almost unanimous testimonies that underlined its magnitude. But it proved unable to quantify satisfactorily the mass of private debt. Witnesses claimed, based on subjective impressions, that 90% of the population was in debt, or that 75% of the land in coconut producing regions was mortgaged; in rubber areas, 50% of the owners would be in debt. The Commission scaffolded on this fragile basis risky calculations, which gave for the coconut plantations alone a debt  of about 110 million rupees (370,000 acres mortgaged at 300 rupees per acre); for indigenous rubber plantations, the total investment was estimated at 50 million rupees but no figures were advanced for the debt, the authors of the report simply pointing out that the high profits of these plantations allowed easier financing than for the coconut owners[2].

A few years later, on a monographic scale, village socio-economic surveys found that the majority of households were in debt: percentages varied by region, from 60% in Matara to 86% in Galle. But it was mostly a debt of a different nature, contracted for food consumption by poor peasants, and amounting to a hundred rupees on average[3]. Village debt was a structural phenomenon, linked to the vagaries of the climate and seasonal variations in employment, and aggravated by monetization. The debt of the planter was a phenomenon in principle momentary, linked to the need to wait for the enterprise to become productive and make profits. But the behaviour of the landowner towards debt remained marked by the peasant model; it appeared irrational in the eyes of external observers who reasoned along a capitalist logic: “One gets the impression, wrote a district administrator, that practically everybody who owned some land which could be offered as security during the years of buoyant prosperity borrowed money for no reason other than extravagant living”. “It is common knowledge that the purchase and development of land in agricultural products is the only major occupation in which in the past Ceylonese engaged themselves or are engaging themselves even now” wrote in 1939 the Minister of Agriculture, D.S. Senanayake, as an introduction to a bill to adjust the debts of plantation owners[4]. Productive debt, or sumptuary debt? The problem in fact did not arise in these terms; according to a witness testifying before the Banking Commission, “Our people pride in possessing of acres of land, although it is 5 out of 100 who improve the value of the lands they come into possession. They go on buying land on the security of the landed wealth they possess. Besides they are fond of investing in lands because it is the easiest way to raise money on emergencies such as weddings, or the purchase of other lands”[5]. An almost caricatural example illustrate the effects of this passion for land. A mudaliyar (low country chief headman) had acquired from the Crown at auction in 1925 a land of 50 acres at the phenomenal price of 520 rupees per acre (it was not even an acquisition in full ownership, but an emphyteutic lease!); one of his ‘enemies’ had raised the stakes and to keep face, the mudaliyar had held on to the end: “I came home victorious, he wrote candidly, receiving congratulations of my headmen and the approbation of the villagers. I realized my folly, but sincerely thought that I would receive the assistance of government in adjusting matters as the bidders against me were worthless fellows”[6].  In fact, the mudaliyar obtained staggered payment facilities, but when the depression arose, he again asked for a gesture in his favour: the case went up to the governor, and London finally agreed in 1936 to remit the remainder of the debt. Land, this fixed idea of the peasant as well as of the large Sinhalese owner, was not considered as a productive asset, but as a sign of social status. Its acquisition responded to considerations of prestige, and in the marriage strategy, an art in which the Sinhalese are masters, a dowry in land was the decisive weapon. Dowries commonly reached in the ruling class several tens of thousands of rupees, and served as a means to seal complex political-financial alliances which forged the ‘clans’ that would dominate the political scene at independence. To capture the best party, it was necessary to exhibit the largest landed area; it did not matter if to build up this parade capital it had to be burdened with double or triple mortgages. Once the dowry was paid, it still remained to organize the most ostentatious wedding. Holding one’s rank was also a sure way to develop one’s capital, by obtaining on the services of one’s debtors and the solidarity of one’s peers[7]. The passion for legal squabble, another source of debt, was another face of the same social reality. Court trials, especially in provincial capitals, dramatically manifested wealth and power. The court was a theater where the tragicomedy of boundary or inheritance quarrels was tirelessly played out, which sometimes turned into drama; attendance at the court sessions was the main distraction of the villagers who came to town; lawyers exercised one of the most prestigious and lucrative professions. In the late 17th century, the debts contracted to pay the costs of the trials were one of the main sources of Kandyan indebtedness: one hundred and fifty years later, nothing had changed, and the procedural debt came in order immediately after the debt for the purchase of land, which it somehow complemented and supported[8]. The lawsuits were themselves multiplied by the inaccuracy of the title deeds in areas that had not been the subject of a settlement. Thus, a vicious circle was formed: the money necessary to support lawsuits intended to defend the value of these same securities was borrowed upon the guarantee of doubtful securities. The behaviour of Sinhalese debtors retained many features that can be described as traditional.

We have analyzed elsewhere the characteristics of debt as it prevailed in the Kandyan kingdom in the pre-colonial period, as well as its subsequent evolution under the impact of monetization[9]. We will retain here the features that survived a century and a half of colonization. Peasant debt was first and foremost a maintenance debt consisting of an addition of small loans contracted when need arose: coconut planters also made a series of loans in a fractional manner during the ten years necessary for their plantation to fully mature. Next to maintenance debt there was a ceremonial debt socially necessary to manifest and maintain membership of the community; it is interpreted by anthropologists such as Firth as an elementary form of investment allowing the borrower to subsequently ensure the counter gift of his guests[10]. In traditional debt, theoretical interest rates were very high: 50% from one harvest to another for grain loan, 100% maximum, regardless of the duration of the loan (dam dupat rule). In practice, the interest actually perceived was a function of circumstances, and could take the form of benefits that were difficult to assess. The Sinhalese debtor was therefore not frightened by having to pay rates of the order of 15% to 30% : he did not calculate what the real profitability of the operation he launched could be and he expected his creditor to adapt his requirements to the circumstances. The creditors, being socially close to the debtors, did not claim any other guarantee than the one given to them by the reputation of the debtor, the credit that he enjoyed in the village society. When a guarantee was necessary, the farmer pledged not ‘his’ land, but his cultivation rights on the land of his lineage (panguwa), and he commonly gave these rights in usufruct (ukas mortgage) as reimbursement; the alienation of land in the hands of creditors was very rare, but the usufructuary mortgage very widespread. The debtor in the 20th century still expected his creditor to trust him on his word, and when he was obliged to grant him a mortgage, he did not envisage that it could eventually result in a definitive land transfer: he considered the operation to be of a revocable nature. He also expected that the creditor would grant him terms of payment: this was the attitude that the community expected of him: thus a lasting relationship of structural debt was established, where the lender found his reward in terms of prestige; it was not in his interest to claim repayment of the initial capital. A final settlement of the debt would have meant a breakdown of social relations. Debt, a social contract par excellence, appears in the Indian context as a link of religious essence[11]. If it is difficult to detect in the type of debt that we consider here survivals of these distant origins, it is certain on the other hand that the debtor did not consider the prolongation of the debt relationship as an intolerable constraint, but on the contrary as a perfectly normal situation. He expected his creditor to renew from time to time the bond between them by demanding the repayment of the principal, and considered it abnormal if he seriously wanted to end their relations. In the past, when a debtor was recalcitrant, the creditor could appeal to the justice of the king or his local representative, without the intervention of which no seizure was possible in principle. But it also had a range of methods of social or moral constraint, ranging from the threat of suicide at the debtor’s door (who might have to answer for the death of a righteous person) to symbolic imprisonment – a circle of chalk drawn on the ground, until a relative or friend came to deliver the debtor by acquitting the debt; at the beginning of the 20th century these practices disappeared, but not the prison for debts, to which the colonizers put very real bars.

These are therefore the secret or proclaimed aspirations of potential borrowers. The singular fact is that they found complacent lenders, especially in the person of Nattukottai Chettiar. We have previously described their organization and activities. It is obvious that the Chettiar differed fundamentally from peasant lenders: they were alien to local society, and therefore not bound by social obligations to their debtors. If they agreed to play the game of tradition, it was not out of social obligation, but out of economic calculation. The Chettiar were inserted at the hinge of the capitalist system and the peasant system, connecting their circuits. They chose to finance the development of indigenous plantation agriculture because they saw it as a way within their reach to quickly expand their own capital and the sums they borrowed in the short term from European banks, taking advantage of the significant difference between the interest rates of the capitalist circuit from those of the indigenous circuit. The multiplication of their agencies, each dealing with a limited number of borrowers, gave them the opportunity to personally follow their customers, while the solidarity of their caste organization allowed them to cope with individual accidents. They were therefore able to distribute an easy credit accessible to all, without formalities; they were willing to lend in the long term, to invest. The fact may be surprising if we consider that they refused to settle permanently on the island. It can be partly explained by the permanence of the firms despite the regular renewal of agents, and by the high rate of interest claimed that allowed them to recover the equivalent of the capital after four or five years. It is also explained by their feeling that the economic system put in place by the British was solid, and that they occupied a strategic position by financing the production of Burmese rice and the products of Malaysian and Ceylon indigenous plantations of coconut and rubber. But the major fact seems to me to be the conviction they had that they were covered by the colonial political-legal apparatus. The Chettiar did not execute financial acrobatics without a net; they knew that as a last resort they would be able to stop playing the game and have their debtors’ mortgaged properties put up for sale. But the weaknesses of the system were soon to reveal themselves: classic weakness, so to speak, arising from the contradiction between short-term resources and long-term investments; political weakness resulting from the gradual takeover of the State apparatus by representatives of the Sinhalese majority identifying their interests with those of the debtors, or debtors themselves.

Judicial sales.

In 1931, the colonial government, alerted by the moratorium plans of some politicians, conducted a summary and confidential inquiry with district administrators and judges to find out the extent of judicial sales[12]. It was found that the phenomenon was not serious enough to require public intervention, and the case was closed without further action. Three years later, the Banking Commission of inquiry set up at the request of the same pressure groups concluded that it was necessary to find a solution to a problem considered very serious. Finally, between 1936 and 1939, the village surveys all underlined the extension taken by the property of non-villagers, and implicitly considered that the depression was responsible for it. Difference in appreciation of a political nature, or worsening of the phenomenon over the years? A careful examination of the results of the 1931 investigation leads to doubt the seriousness of the answers, very brief and treated as a routine affair by officials who were overwhelmed with paperwork tasks. Reports from the coconut and rubber areas were much more alarmist: in the Kalutara, Awissawella and Kägalla courts, there was a 20% to 32% increase in the number of lawsuits. In Kalutara, Chilaw and especially Kurunägala, the collapse of land prices was such that the amount of sales did not even cover that of receivables. In the administrative reports of the early 1930s, indications of the same order can be gleaned, but formulated in vague terms[13]. The considerable number of coconut estates sold and become the property of Chettiar, the visible impoverishment of the wealthy peasantry, and in particular of the indigenous chiefs, were highlighted as a recent phenomenon.

The Ceylon Banking Commission said in its report: “Banking institutions, Chettiar and others have admitted that before the depression, it is hardly if they had the opportunity to drag their debtors to court for the recovery of their debts”[14]. The Chettiar themselves, in a memorandum addressed to the same commission, recognized the existence of these transfers, but added that that “most of the acquisitions [of land properties] were forced upon by their debtors who preferred to transfer their properties to the Chettiar rather than face worse difficulties”[15]. The administrator of Puttalam district confirmed that “it is a mistake to think of these moneylenders as rapacious land grabbers. They are no more anxious to buy the lands than the owners to sell them” but added “The general depression is still felt acutely, more coconut estates have been taken over by Chettiar and other creditors in liquidation of their debts”[16]. The tea-producing districts of the upper country were affected, where the network of Chettiar agencies was also dense. The Chettiar were accused of having systematically foreclosed in the province of Uva, and two recently established institutions, the Chettinad Corporation and the Bank of Chettinad, were in the process of building up an extensive land capital by getting their hands on the best tea lands in the vicinity of Bandarawela. “We think, said witnesses, that most of the past indebtedness of the medium size holders and the big private holders has been liquidated by sales (…) Now all the most fertile land in the district is in the hands of this Chetty firm”[17]. The socio-economic surveys of the years 1936-1939 noted similar phenomena in particular villages of the coconut districts. “The expropriation of smallholders by small Ceylon capitalists, Indian Muslim merchants, local shopkeepers and lenders has probably continued at an accelerated pace (…) It is significant that mortgages of coconut land cluster round the depression period. Even the largest areas are not exempt and titles of many of them have passed to the Chettiar and other financiers”[18].

During and after the depression, many small landowners had to sell their lands that were absorbed into larger estates belonging in many cases to non-residents. Thus, in four villages in the district of Kurunägala (Tittawela, Rangama, Hiripitiya and Wilagedara) 30% of the coconut plantations were owned by villagers and 70% by absentees, while 59% of the paddy fields were owned by the villagers and 41% by absentees. The conclusion that emerges from these testimonies and investigations is that it is the depression in general, the action of moneylenders in particular, especially Chettiar, which was responsible for peasant landlessness. Without excluding this hypothesis for some villages, I consider on the contrary that this very real situation was the result of an evolution started long before the depression by speculators grabbing peasant lands with borrowed money to build up extensive land properties for the benefit of the Colombo Ceylonese bourgeoisie.

The statistical review of sales by judicial authority from 1925 to 1939 confirms this general impression. While the number of sales had increased in significant proportions, the share of foreign creditors, and especially the value of the debts claimed by non-Ceylonese, did not increase significantly. On the other hand, the few indications available regarding the ethnic distribution of land ownership in 1939 confirm and clarify the general indications provided by the Chettiar regarding their real estate property. I summarily analyzed the 12,433 judicial sales announced between 1924 and 1939 in the weekly official journal of the colony (Ceylon Government Gazette); and in more detail the announcements every other year, from 1925 to 1939, numbering 6,393, just over half of the total. This particularly tedious work consisted of noting for all sales their number, their location and the percentage of Chettiar creditors in the total, and for sales every other year, the value of the receivables, the ethnicity of the creditor and that of the debtor when they could be ascertained, and incidentally the existence of mortgages and the nature of the properties offered for sale: but these last two pieces of information were neither complete nor really safe, and were excluded from the final operation. The identification of the ethnicity of the parties present was made on the basis of an onomastic tracking whose principles are described in the annex. 

Let’s first consider the overall evolution of the number of sales. It remained until the end of 1930 perfectly in line with the overall economic evolution. Of 400 sales per semester in 1924, it dropped to less than 300 in 1927 and bounced to more than 700 sales in the second half of 1930; then it decreased very regularly, regaining its total of 1929 in 1936, and fell to 230 in the first half of 1939. This movement is confirmed by the statistics of seizures published by the Land registrar services: their number capped from 1931 and decreased from 1933; it is singular that sales had fallen earlier than seizures; one would expect the opposite but increasingly many seizures were not followed with sales (in 1930, 1300 sales for 1800 seizures). The fall in the number of sales after 1930 is surprising in view of the statements of contemporaries who argued in 1931 that alienations were not alarming, but were moved from 1934 by the situation: is it the effect of the chronological shift specific to any awareness, always late after the event? This undeniable decrease can be explained by a series of factors. The first is a change in attitude on the part of the courts: taking into account the depression, they granted creditors the benefit of seizures less easily than in the past, and above all left debtors longer grace periods[19]. According to the representative of one of the major business law firms of Colombo (Julius and Creasy), the average time lag between the beginning of an action and the judicial sale was of the order of two years in 1938. Creditors, discouraged from going to court, especially since lawsuits were expensive in times of crisis, therefore preferred to recover amicably what they could. In addition, the judges enforced an order issued in 1927 on the recommendations of the Land Commission, which prohibited the alienation by any means of land mortgaged after that date when it had not been the subject of a settlement. Another element of explanation lies in the fact that the Chettiar had reduced the volume of their loans as early as 1925 and that the volume of their current claims therefore tended to decrease. The statistics of the Registration show that the depression led to a sudden drop in the number of mortgages from 80,000 in 1929 to 40,000 in 1934. Releases collapsed even more, from 18,000 to 8,600 ; the difference does not correspond to judicial recovery: many amicably releases were not recorded. A last hypothesis is not to be ruled out, although it is contrary to the impression that generally prevails : the improvement in the financial situation of the owners from 1931-33; the increase in the number of releases from 1933, followed a year later by that of mortgages, tends to confirm that the land market was experiencing a recovery probably resulting from the coupon system. 

The evolution of the value of the claims is not the same as that of their number. The statistics collected are less accurate, the enormity of the task having forced me to carry out counts only for every other year. But the overall movement is clear enough: the decline in the value of receivables is faster than that of their number from 1925 to 1927: each debt is of lesser importance; the increase from 1927 is also slower, but it continues until 1933: after claiming small claims, the lenders attack the largest. This fact is perhaps not unrelated to the late but intense awareness of alienations by the ruling classes; if they initially felt little concerned, it is because they were not yet threatened. Among the ‘heads’ that fell from 1932, there were a number of parliamentarians. Subsequently, the average value of receivables decreased again, the rise of 1939 being mainly explained by the presence of a few very large recoveries. The location of the sales provides an indirect indication of the nature of the property affected: in the North Western Province, the coconut tree predominates, in Sabaragamuwa, it is rubber, and in the Central province, tea and commercial interests are important. Sales in the coconut land area followed an evolution in line with that of all sales, but tended to fall more quickly from 1931, probably due to the attitude of the courts and the impossibility for the creditor of making any profit from the sales. The unexpected maintenance at a high level of sales in the tea area suggests that despite the establishment of the coupon system, small tea producers, among which there are many kangani, were experiencing persistent difficulties. It is also likely that creditors would press their debtors more because of the maintenance of the profitability of tea plantations, thanks to the restriction, at a suitable level.  The sawtooth evolution of Sabaragamuwa’s sales is difficult to explain (perhaps it results from the annual periodicity of the distribution

of rubber coupons?), but the overall movement is quite similar to that of the North-western province. It was not possible for me to carry out a rigorous analysis of the nature of the lands sold, because of the often imprecise nature of the description given in the advertisements. The toponymy itself does not make it possible to distinguish simple gardens from modest plantations (both are called watte in Sinhala); in addition, most sales combine houses and gardens, or gardens and paddy fields. A summary survey for the first quarters of 1925, 1931 and 1937 gives the following approximate results (in the count, sales affecting two types of property are counted twice): houses alone and houses and gardens represented 23.5% 20.3%; 23.5% of sales. Houses and gardens, small plantations and gardens and paddy fields represented 51.3%; 67% and 56% of sales. Paddy fields, and paddy fields and gardens 14.4%, 14% and 16.5% of sales. The proportions were therefore stable overall with a slight increase in the place of paddy fields. The extension taken by the sale of paddy fields was the subject of contradictory testimonies. A delegation of indigenous leaders of Kurunägala said that the ukas system remained the rule: “At least 75% of coconut owners have lost their land. – Is this also the case for rice field owners? – No, when they borrow, it is usually from another villager, on a usufructuary mortgage.” But the village surveys present a different picture. In Battulu Oya, 75% of the paddy fields were in the hands of non-residents: “They originally belonged to the villagers but passed out of their hands for failure to redeem mortgage debts”. The Kurunägala survey offered similar cases: “Alienation of paddy lands into the hands of non-residents has been on the increase for some time. In Wedanda, over 25% of the paddy lands are under mortgage to a copra merchant; in Tittawela, about 63% are held by non-residents; in Pannala and Hiripitiya, an increasing proportion has gone to Indian Muslim traders”[20]. I have myself encountered similar examples in the village of Haloluwa (district of Kägalla): the local dominant family, which had invested in a few acres of rubber, had to sell its micro-plantation during the 1930s, then all its paddy fields, which covered almost half of the terroir; the plantation was acquired by a shopkeeper and by a peasant from a neighboring locality, the paddy by the dominant family of another village; the descendants of the former lords of the village after 1940 obtained a lot as landless farmers in a settlement of the dry zone. The growth in paddy field sales only apparently contradicts the hypothesis of an improvement in the situation of the owner classes after 1931-1933, formulated previously: indeed, who owned rice fields in sufficient quantity so that they could be used to pledge a loan? The wealthy peasantry, and the class of indigenous leaders that emerged from it. And who bought them? Other peasants, and also traders, small civil servants, and bourgeois of Colombo or southern cities… in short, the category of plantation owners. This remark leads us to once again emphasize an essential distinction when we talk about the possessing classes: this means the class of the new rich living in the cities and seeking to place their fortune in the acquisition of land ownership, and not that of traditional rural dominants. In short, the bourgeoisie, but a bourgeoisie that remained influenced by the traditional value system.

The last factor analyzed, less in detail than I would have liked, is the community belonging of creditors and debtors. The question is essential, given the controversies raised at the time by the economic role played by the Indians in Ceylon. Let’s examine first the evolution of the share taken by the Chettiar in land sales. At the beginning of the crisis, their proportion in all creditors increased significantly, from 27.5% in the first half of 1924 to 38.7% in the first half of 1930. Then, contrary to the general feeling of contemporaries, their place regularly decreased, to stabilize at around 22% from 1935. If we consider the value of the debt, the evolution was even faster: in 1925, the Chettiar claimed 1,157,380 rupees (33.6% of the total) in 1929, 1,226,639 rupees (43.6%); in 1933, 1,081,319 rupees (31.4%) and in 1937, 868,329 rupees (29%). Such a decrease means that the place was taken by other creditors, mainly the Sinhalese. A comparison of the sales of 1925 and 1933, taking into account only the Sinhalese and the Chettiar, is instructive. In 1925, the debts claimed by Chettiar from the Sinhalese represented 16.5% of the number and 12.2% of the value of the debts; in 1933, they amounted to 16.8% of the number and 12.4% of the value. On the other hand, the loans between Sinhalese, which represented in 1925 25.4% of the number and 10.1% of the value of receivables, amounted in 1933 to 29.5% of their number and 15% of their value.

The structure of Chettiar firms and their operations have already been described in the first part of this study. But it is interesting, to understand the reality of their operations during the depression, to consider the number of cases where each of them was a creditor. From the sales announcements in the Ceylon Government Gazette from 1925 to 1939 (every other year) I drew up a list of 620 firm names. Not all firms on the island were represented on this list, but probably the vast majority of them.  Some were subsidiaries of agencies based in Colombo and the same firms appeared under different vilasam in different years. In 1934, the Chettiar Association declared that it had 556 members, a hundred of which were only pawnbrokers; it added that before the crisis, their number was 50% higher, which would give about 675 ordinary lenders in 1925. The most striking feature is the very large dispersion of operations: only 27 firms appeared more than ten times in eight years, including 7 firms twenty to thirty times. A second significant characteristic is that there were two types of behaviour: some well-established lenders had one or two judicial recoveries per year from one end of the period to the other; others appeared only in an ephemeral way, either that the volume of their cases was not sufficient to lead them to go to court on a regular basis, or that their presence in Ceylon had been momentary. It appears in particular that 315 of the 620 firms ceased to appear after 1931. The ‘Chettiar crisis’ led to the departure from the island after 1925 of a third of the Chettiar, according to their association. A phenomenon of concentration occurred, the most visible manifestation of which was the creation of two organizations, Bank of Chettinad and Chettinad Corporation, both controlled by one of the largest firms in Madras, belonging to Sir Annamalai Chettiar[21]. The evolution of the average value of Chettiar debts reflects these transformations: it decreased until 1931 (1925: 4,704 rupees; 1927: 4,542 rupees; 1929: 3,833 rupees; 1931: 2,820 rupees) which means that small lenders sought to recover their funds. Then it increased (4,142 rupees in 1933, 3,991 in 1935, 5,947 in 1937 and 4,531 in 1939), only the largest lenders remaining active. Among other lenders from the Indian continent, it is worth mentioning in passing the presence of shark usurers, the so-called Afghans, who demanded exorbitant interest and multiplied fraudulent practices against their victims. But the volume of their operations was tiny: they constitute a category that was quite widely represented in Kandy district but the amount of their loans was rarely more than 100 rupees, and the repeated frequency of sale of the same property tends to prove that they rarely achieved their ends by legal processes.

Enriched kangani, especially those who had established themselves as shopkeepers or small plantation owners, were conspicuous among moneylenders in the up-country localities. Unfortunately, onomastics do not make it always possible to distinguish them from the agents of certain Chettiar firms, nor from the indigenous Tamils from Jaffna, so that it is impossible to assess their real role. Kandyan headmen were prominent among their debtors, especially in the province of Uva and the district of Nuwara Eliya; one of them, indebted for the considerable sum of 28,000 rupees with a kangani of Koslanda, was compelled to sell 52 plots, highlands as well as paddy fields[22]. On a smaller scale, the detailed list of claims of a plantation shopkeeper, Muttupalani Pillai, shows that this category advanced money indifferently to Sinhalese, Tamils, or even Chettiar with whom they placed their profits[23]. Nevertheless, the kangani, in this period of immigration crisis, were certainly better represented in the category of debtors than in that of creditors. Most of them had gone into debt to Chettiar to build up their small tea plantations, and the depression led to a fall in profits they derived from their activities as overseers and planters; their debts were often very high: several tens of thousands of rupees[24].

Another notable element is the place held by Europeans as creditors vis-à-vis Ceylonese debtors. This little-known fact deserves to be highlighted, because it runs counter the thesis that European and indigenous credit circuits were watertight[25]. In 1925, Europeans (and perhaps some Burghers, whose names are sometimes difficult to distinguish from those of Europeans), demanded 26.7% of the total value of debts, in 1931, 25%, in 1937, 27.4%. What is the origin of this phenomenon? Possibly the absence of income taxes in Ceylon before 1932, which made profits domiciled on the island more attractive for local Europeans than those that could be derived from dividends domiciled in London. The importance of these small but valuable mortgage claims explains the concerns of European pressure groups regarding moratorium projects and their insistence on limiting to 25,000 rupees the maximum amount of debts for which a conciliation procedure would be possible.

The finding drawn from the analysis of judicial sales that is most contrary to the preconceived ideas of contemporaries is the growing place of indigenous lenders in the mechanisms of alienation. These lenders were less visible than the Chettiar, they handled much smaller sums, and, with few exceptions, did not make a profession of their activities[26]. Three categories stand out in these operations. The landowners have always practiced the loan of seeds to their sharecroppers and neighbors; some seem to have converted to the loan of money on a local basis, which the headmen already did at a time when the conversion of the grain tax into money forced the peasants to borrow to pay the tax. Unlike the Chettiar, their main objective was to get their hands on the land of their debtors. For example, in the district of Kandy, they foreclosed whenever possible. But it is doubtful that the depression had significantly changed the volume of their activities, if not by pushing them to press their claims even faster, to the extent that they were themselves pressed by other creditors, or affected by the collapse of rice prices. A second category was made up of Sinhalese, Muslim, or Ceylonese Tamil shopkeepers. They sold food products and fabrics on credit, and took high margins from the transaction – actually disguised interests; many Muslims, whose religion prohibits interest loans, did so. In times of depression, shop credit tended to be all the more expensive as suppliers, often linked themselves to Chettiar, restricted their facilities. Traders who practiced the loan on upcoming harvest could always make seizures: the traditional practice consisted of presenting themselves on the threshing floor, a bag in hand, solidly framed by acolytes, and to seize on the spot what was due. But they increasingly demanded mortgages, and the transaction frequently led to judicial sales[27]. A third category was made up of government employees, especially rural teachers. Having a regular income, however modest, they were in an advantageous position in times of crisis, and many engaged in lending as a subsidiary activity, constituting a land capital that contributed to raising their prestige, to giving them a social base that they often lacked. Education was booming during the 1930s: all the testimonies suggest that this boom was accompanied by the development of a new type of lender[28]. But our statistics are unfortunately silent with regard to the profession of ‘amateur’ creditors. It was not possible to analyze these categories of creditors from a quantitative point of view, but a number of salient features appeared during the count. In some areas, lenders were almost entirely indigenous: this was the case in Jaffna, where loans were made between Tamils, in Kalutara, and to a lesser extent Galle and Matara, where Sinhalese lenders dominated. Among the latter, the number of members of the Karava caste (originally fishermen) seems particularly high, but the activity was in no way confined to a particular professional caste as in the case of the Chettiar. The absence of a caste of lenders in the traditional social structure of the Sinhalese regions is an important phenomenon, which would deserve an in-depth study: it contrasts with the fairly general presence of such social groups in India: the Chettiar, without integrating into the Sinhalese social fabric, filled this void. A last notable feature is the place of Muslims among the debtors of Sinhalese creditors: it seems that a number of Sinhalese had invested money in commercial activities through this way.

The depression had therefore resulted in a spectacular and early swelling of the mass and value of judicial sales but in this phenomenon, the share taken by foreigners, Indians or Europeans, had not increased exceptionally. Already high in 1925 (60.3% of the value of debts), it remained at a comparable level in 1931 (59.7%) and in 1937 at a slightly lower percentage (54.4%). It is therefore wrong to claim, as the Ceylon Banking Commission did in 1934, that judicial recoveries by foreigners were a novelty linked to the crisis.

The reality of land transfers

Do the statistics of judicial sales faithfully reflect the reality of land transfers? There are two objections. The first is that these are announcements: they do not reveal what finally happened to the land. The second is that they do not represent, far from it, all sales. It would have taken to reach certainties on these points to explore the archives of the provincial courts; an attempt to do so has remained unsuccessful, given the mass and disorder of the documents, and the almost impossibility of making the necessary in-checks with the indications of the Ceylon Government Gazette. The following remarks do not therefore claim to exhaust the question. What happened to the properties put up for sale? And first, how were the sales going? It was not uncommon for properties to be put up for sale two or three times, either that no bidder had appeared, or that the debtor had obtained a last-minute respite; the case seems common when the creditor was a Chettiar and the debtor was an influential person, a Kandyan headman for example; sometimes sales were shunned by potential buyers who feared that their acquisition would cause them more trouble than profits. Sometimes villagers obstructed the effective possession by the buyer. This kind of boycott was, it seems, limited to the Tamil areas of the north and east of the country: the strength of solidarity was much greater in the Tamil society than among the Sinhalese[29]. David Washbrook has shown that at the end of the colonial period, in India, between half and two-thirds of appeals for the execution of judicial sale orders were classified as not executed: their execution did not depend on legal coercion alone, it was mediated by extra-legal institutions that were able to adapt judgments to social realities[30]. The institutions in question are the family solidarity and caste networks. As they were notoriously less solid in Sinhalese society, it is likely that sales were more effective in the south of the island. The absence of bidders frequently resulted in the creditor’s control over the land. According to the main auctioneer at Kurunägala,  “ordinarily, the mortgagee takes the land: nobody bids at the sale”. Of the 37 sales analyzed by the administrator of the same district in 1931, 19 resulted in the acquisition of the land by the creditor, at extremely low prices: the average amount of debts reached 4,200 rupees; the average value of the properties was estimated at 16,644 rupees but the sums obtained during sales reached on average only 609 rupees! In Kalutara the collapse was a little less marked. On a limited sample of 21 cases the amount of debt was 1,909 rupees on average, the valuation 1,529 rupees, the value of sales 1,264 rupees. Extreme cases were mentioned during the debate on the draft moratorium: a 40-acre coconut estate estimated at 30,000 rupees, sold 60 rupees for the satisfaction of a debt of 15,000 rupees; a small 9-acre rubber plantation worth 6,000 rupees, sold 60 rupees for a debt of 406 rupees, and whose owner was sentenced to prison for debts for the rest of his due[31]. Unfortunately, we do not have general data on the movement of land prices. However, scattered testimonies collected by the Banking Commission gave orders of magnitude lower than those just mentioned; the experience of the main auctioneer of the coconut land areas and an expert in evaluation operating in the Kandy regions are particularly valuable. According to them, a coconut plantation in the North Western province, which was worth between 500 and 1000 rupees per acre before the depression, came down to 250 to 400 rupees; a rubber plantation in the district of Kandy worth 500 to 1000 rupees per acre could be sold only between 250 to 600 rupees if it found a buyer; a paddy field went down from 300 to 100 rupees per acre[32].

What happened to the victims of judicial sales? The testimonies diverge considerably[33]. While some claim that creditors returned the land purchased to their former owners as a sharecroppers (this was at least the rule in the case of paddy fields), others argue that they systematically expelled the occupants “to avoid the possibility of trouble; the displaced cultivator had to move out to some other place and work as a labourer; there are owners who advance on mortgages with the main purpose of getting their debtors’ land.” This type of case was frequently encountered when a big owner wanted to round his estate to the detriment of smallholder neighbours, and seemed quite common in the ‘coconut triangle’. Analyzing the distribution of land ownership in the district of Chilaw, (53.4% of families without land, 26.1% having less than 1 acre, 15.3% from 1 to 5 acres, 5.3% more than 5 acres) the authors of a survey commented in 1937: “These figures are hardly believable for an agricultural community. They reveal the extent to which big owners with their estates have consolidated their position and the other villagers were squeezed out or left with holdings of uneconomic size (…) During and after the depression many of the small owners had to sell their lands which were absorbed into the larger units belonging in many cases to non-residents” . According to the testimony of the agrarian services official of the North Western and North Central Provinces, it is not so much the Chettiar than the Ceylonese themselves who were responsible for the evictions: “The number of Chettiar in the district is now greatly reduced, as several had to leave it being bankrupt. The securities they held were sold, and the land was bought by Ceylonese who ousted the original owners from their land”[34].

The second objection is more serious: sales by judicial authority obviously do not represent all land transactions. Two other types of transfers took place: sales made by agreement of the parties by a private auctioneer, and amicable transactions. Let’s start with the latter: they were undoubtedly frequent and have always been, especially among the poorest villagers unable to resist the pressures of the notables and finance the cost of a trial. Can we assume that they multiplied during the depression? The general deterioration in the standard of living may have made debtors retreat from court costs that they would have undertaken in times of prosperity; indeed, several testimonies suggest that the courts exerted less attraction than usual on a people of litigants renowned for their love of chicane. In addition, the more favorable attitude to the debtors of the courts pushed creditors to seek to recover their money by other means. This could explain that despite the decrease in the number of sales after 1931, the value of debts collected did not decrease so quickly. Nevertheless, there is no evidence that debtors in debt with the Chettiar feared the courts more than those who were in debt with their compatriots. In addition, the passionate attachment to the land of the Ceylonese in general, and of the Sinhalese in particular, makes it unlikely that they voluntarily stripped themselves of their property for the benefit of their foreign creditors without resorting to all the means at their disposal. Private auctions, on the other hand, had a considerable extension at the other end of the social scale. Creditors as well as debtors, when it came to high-value domains, often felt that it was worth paying for auctioneer services to get a better price, with a better advertising than that of the administration[35]. It was excluded, given the enormity of the task, to scan the entire press of the years 1925-1939 in search of these announcements. However, I made an effort to carry out surveys, for a few months taken at random. For the second quarter of 1929, the total number of auction sales amounted to 153. The value of debts, in the 64 cases where the sum was mentioned, amounted to 46,6064 rupees, or an average of 7,282 rupees per sale; if we assume, which is not proven, that this average also applies to other sales, we would obtain a total of about 1,114,000 rupees. During the same period, the total amount of judicial sales amounted to 700,833 rupees for 298 sales, or an average of 2,349 rupees per sale. For the month of March 1931, there were 90 auctions; the amount of 39 auctions amounted to 602,106 rupees, or 15,438 rupees per sale, but this figure was inflated by the presence of two very large operations. If we exclude them, we get a sum of 327,065 rupees for 37 sales or 8,839 rupees per sale. The average of judicial sales for the corresponding year is 4,070 rupees, and their number for the month of March 1931, is 114 sales. It can therefore be reasonably assumed that private auctions represent between a third and half of the total number of sales, but that each of these operations amounts to double or triple those carried out by the administration: in value, auction sales would be about 50% higher than judicial sales. If we consider the location of the sales, no well-defined characteristics emerge, if not a slight predominance of auction sales in the coconut districts (Kurunägala, Chilaw, Galle). Finally, the comparative analysis of the debtors’ identity gives exactly the same figure for 1929 (78% of Sinhalese for judicial and auction sales), the value being a little lower in 1931 (62%, but the sample is less large). With regard to creditors, the Chettiar are a little more represented in the auction sales of 1929 (45% of the sample) than in the annual average of judicial sales (43.5%) in 1931, they form only 35% of the creditors in the sample, almost exactly as much as the annual average of the judicial sales (34.7%). I will therefore cautiously put forward the hypothesis that the absence of the statistics for auction sales does not distort the conclusions relating to the community of belonging of the parties involved; on the other hand, it would be necessary to multiply by 2.5 the total value of the claims recovered by judicial means to obtain an order of magnitude of all the sums collected from 1924 to 1939: which would represent 110 million rupees, including 37 million rupees for the Chettiar. This result is perfectly compatible with the estimates provided by the Chettiar in 1934: the value of the land purchased was estimated by them at 30 million rupees, and that of current mortgage loans at 20 million rupees.

There is another way to verify the reality and extent of transfers: the yearly Ferguson directories contain plantation lists mentioning the name of the owner, location, area and nature of the crops. These lists are in principle updated annually, but they cannot be assured of absolute accuracy. Only the plantations whose owners have communicated the data to the publishers are included; however, over the years there is a trend towards swelling in the number of domains recorded: the phenomenon results from the emergence of a Ceylonese bourgeoisie proud to exhibit its fortune in a directory originally restricted to European planters, which became a kind of Who’s Who, an essential reference in terms of social status and marriage strategy. An apparent increase in the number of Ceylonese owners may therefore conceal a stagnation or decline. It was therefore resolved to examine only the situation of the properties belonging in 1939 to Chettiar, Tamils of other castes, and Muslims, excluding the mass of major European estates, which had not progressed since the 1920s, and that of the properties of the Sinhalese. When comparing this list to that of 1925, only the domains whose owner had changed between these two dates were retained, and whose data were clear enough to allow a secure identification. Out of a total of 386 estates, 29% belonged to Chettiar in 1939, 50% to other Tamils, 21% to Muslims. What is the origin of these 112 Chettiar domains? 10% belonged to Chettiar in 1925 (2,304 acres, 85% planted in tea); 14% had been acquired before 1931 (1,865 acres, 45% in tea and 49% in coconut); 26% had been acquired after (1,696 acres including 30% tea, 20% rubber, 50% coconut). Among the properties belonging in 1925 or 1931 to members of other communities, four (3.5% of the total, 587 acres) were previously owned by Muslims; seven (1,888 acres) by Tamils of other castes; sixteen (6,455) by Europeans or Burghers; twenty-seven (25% of the total) belonged to Sinhalese, for a total of 4,966 acres composed of 46% tea, 35% of rubber and 19% of coconut. With regard to the 192 properties belonging in 1939 to Tamils of other castes, 56% were owned by Tamils since 1925, 27% do not appear in the lists prior to 1939, 11% were owned by Europeans or Burghers, and 5% to Sinhalese (2,030 acres). Finally, the 82 properties belonging to Muslims were at 26% the property of other Muslims, 11% of Burghers or Europeans, 14% of Sinhalese (1,724 acres) and 47% do not appear in previous directories. According to these figures, no large-scale expropriation of the Sinhalese would have occurred: the total number of Sinhalese ‘loss’ amounts to 48 estates representing 8,720 acres; even if we add to them the 138 estates of which it was not possible to identify the origin (13,863 acres), we only reach a total of 22,583 acres and 186 estates, or 1.37% of the area and 4.2% of the estate number. However small estates do not appear in the directory.

We will therefore, by taking a closer look at the Chettiar property in 1939, try to assess its importance. In 1939, the Chettiar owned about 10,750 acres of tea; this figure is slightly higher than what they declared in 1934 (7,500 acres) but there is a margin of error from the possible confusion between the names of Chettiar and those of members of other Tamil castes, and on the other hand the alienations continued between 1934 and 1939. These properties represented 1.9% of the area of tea plantations. For rubber, the Ferguson yearbook mentions 6,381 acres, a figure close to the 1934 estimate (7,500 acres), which represented 1.4% of the total rubber area given in the directory. On the other hand, the data on coconut is obviously very incomplete: in 1939, the Chettiar declared in the directory only 6,593 acres; while they evaluated their properties in 1934 to about 35,000 acres. According to the official estimates, the small and large coconut estates covered a little more than one million acres in Ceylon, while the directory mentions only 227,846 acres i.e. 4.5 times less. By assigning the same coefficient to the area declared by the Chettiar in 1939, we obtain about 30,000 acres, a value close to the estimate of 1934. The coconut properties of the Chettiar therefore represented between 2.9% and 3.5% of the total area of these plantations in 1939. We are far from the alarmist figures put forward by the Ceylon Banking Commission, which said that 60% of the coconut estates were mortgaged to Chettiar and that the latter had appropriated a third of these properties, about 20% of the coconut area[36]. Even if Indian bankers resold as many domains as quickly as possible, it is difficult to argue that they were the instruments of a large-scale alienation.

Pauperization and chauvinism.

The impoverishment of the possessing classes, especially from 1933, is open to doubt. It is unlikely that land transfers had such a magnitude; they did not have a comparable severity to those that traumatized Lower Burma at the same time. But if the Ceylonese owners proved to be able to keep most of their assets, didn’t they had to make heavy sacrifices that compromised their standard of living? Was the intense thirst for credit, which the Chettiar were no longer willing to quench, a sign of an impoverishment of the bourgeoisie? There are many examples of individual destinies compromised by the effects of the depression. We will mention only one, which concerned one of the main promoters of the policy of assistance to debtors in difficulty, and is known on the basis of private documents. The member of the State Council for Kägalla, E.A.P. Wijeyeratne, a provincial lawyer who was not known for his excessive lifestyle, and whose modest fortune was not based on the possession of vast plantations or on land speculation activities, was forced by the state of his finances not to run in the 1936 elections; he was compelled in 1935 to solicit a short-term loan of 1,500 rupees from the big Indian Muslim trader Adamalee on the guarantee of his lands[37]. What should not be the situation of more adventurous or more prodigal than him. But despite multiple individual examples, as eminent as they are, it is the overall trends that count. The thirst for credit is not necessarily a symptom of impoverishment; on the contrary, it can be a sign of a resumption of business. We have already noted several indications of such a reversal of trends, in particular that the number and value of mortgages, after a sudden fall from 1929 to 1931-33, started to increase again. The evolution of savings deposited at the Post Office and Savings Banks is also instructive. Until 1932, the impact of the crisis was indisputable; postal savings, whose mass was the most considerable, were decreasing, withdrawals since 1930 exceeding deposits: the petty bourgeoisie, the main user, ate its capital; in the same way, the savings of the Savings Banks, of a more recent creation and of a lower amount, progressed only very little. But from 1933-34, savings increased until 1938-39. This evolution, which went unnoticed at the time, can be explained by the institution of the coupon system that preserved the income of owners at the expense of employment; by the increase in the income of State agents given the decrease in the cost of living; and possibly by a temporary change in attitude towards land investment: the depression made the placement unattractive, especially since the restriction schemes excluded, in the case of tea and rubber, the cultivation of new lands. The total amount of this type of savings was, in 1937, of the order of 4 million rupees: a significant sum compared to that which was collected during the same year by judicial sales: 2,987,000 rupees (1,680,000 rupees if we exclude the 8 largest sales out of a total of 643). If the land market remained depressed, and if on the other hand savings were beginning to increase, how is it that the thirst for credit was still felt so acutely in 1934? The main reason lies in the almost total cessation of Chettiar operations. Since 1929-1930, according to their own testimony, there had been virtually no new transactions[38]. Willy-nilly, from lenders, the Chettiar tended to become rentiers; they deposited in European banks the sums provided by amicable sales and recoveries (about 5 million rupees) and increasingly repatriated their capital to India since the institution of income tax in Ceylon exposed them to being double taxed. The other sources of credit were not of much help: the State Mortgage Bank created in 1931 limited its activities to a tiny minority of very large owners; and, at the other end of the scale, rural cooperative credit companies born during the 1920s were forced into bankruptcy one after the other, and the property of their members put up for judicial sale, especially in the Batticaloa rice producing region[39].

The dry-up of credit sources therefore contributed to prolonging the depression, at a time when the owners were beginning to look to the future with less pessimism. To quench their thirst for credit, they resorted to expedients. The success of the cheetu circles represented an original, but dangerous, response to this need[40]. The principle was as follows: a cheetu was a temporary mutual credit association bringing together a specific number of contributors who paid a fixed sum at regular intervals into the hands of a director. After appropriating the first payment, this director launched auctions for each payment, and the member who offered the highest discount won the total capital paid, less the discount that was redistributed to those who had not yet benefited from an auction; the director was personally responsible for the payment of the remaining payments by those who had already benefited from an auction and required a mortgage or security deposit to do so. When everyone had obtained their cheetu, the circle dissolved. There were many variants of this basic principle, described in the report of the Banking Commission, but we do not need to detail them. More interesting from our point of view are the origins and actual functions of the cheetu. The existence of mutual credit circles is attested in many peasant societies. These institutions represent an extension of the forms of collective solidarity and exchange of work; they are also similar to funeral brotherhoods, and like them, their functioning is accompanied by a ritual of which the banquet organized during each payment is the major element. In modern Europe, tontines offer a variant of the same theme. Closer to the cheetu are the practices of the esusu of which Bascom studied the functioning among the Yorubas, in West Africa, and those of the ho, circles of female mutual credit generalized in Vietnam and widespread in China. The cheetu themselves exist in Malaysia under the name of kutu. Their origin is from Southwest India, from where they reached Southeast Asia[41]. To return to the case of Ceylon, it is important to point out that they represented an innovation there. Their sudden and ephemeral success was directly linked to the effects of the depression, and it is again Indians, this time from Kerala, who imported the system, momentarily taking the place of the Chettiar. In a few years, the cheetu circles they led multiplied in the cities, where they attracted shopkeepers and petty officials, and even in the countryside. In 1934 there were 86 cheetus with official status, but probably many more that operated illegally. Many adventurers took advantage of the thirst for credit to grab small naive savers. Indeed, the effective functioning of the cheetu circles left room for easy embezzlement. A cheetu director could slip away after taking the initial payment; he could also use the services of accomplice members to push the auction when a certain member of the circle had obviously an urgent need for money, so that the discount redistributed to other members, of which he himself was a part, could reach high rates. But even assuming that the circle operated on a perfectly regular basis, his members benefitted from it very unevenly; there were actually two categories of members of a circle: those who joined it as investors, and those who had recourse as borrowers. The former left their money there for as long as possible: they thus benefitted from the largest number of discounts offered by their co-partners and did not have to pay any discounts themselves, competition diminishing as the cheetu approached its end. The latter, pressed by the need, competed with each other from the creation of the circle, so that they eventually paid a very high interest; some estimates show rates of 20% to 35% on average, while investors earned 10% to 15%. This fundamental characteristic of cheetu tends to confirm our hypothesis that there is a category of owners whose savings had not been seriously affected by depression and who took advantage of the situation to become amateur lenders, but a number of them were victims of the actions of Indian adventurers whom they had trusted. The unpopularity of the Chettiar, which probably came more from the cessation of their credit operations than from their land acquisitions, was coupled with hostility towards the Keralite entrepreneurs of cheetu.

Ceylonese or more precisely Sinhalese nationalism, antedates the great depression, but was stirred up by it. After the fall of the Kandyan kingdom in 1815, the monarchical idea coupled with a spirit of independence survived for several decades; the animosity of a fraction of the Kandyan aristocracy towards the foreign presence was not directed exclusively against the British, but also against Indians, who were there prior to colonization: in the entourage of the last kings of Kandy, themselves of South Indian origin, there were many moneylenders, most likely from the Chettiar caste. The figure of the expropriating foreigner became prominent in the political discourse, when Low-country Sinhalese attempted to rally the Kandyans for electoral purposes, whitewashing their own responsibility in the land grabbing process. As early as 1925, D.S. Senanayake, as member of a committee of enquiry on landless villagers, had a suggestive exchange with a Kandyan headman, L. Nugawela who was giving evidence:

  • Senanayake: “About fifty years ago, the villagers owned a lot of land, but now much less. The chief offenders have been the Coast Moors of the coast, Chetties and so on. Did you know that they tried to get undivided shares of property and harass the villagers and put them into court etc., and so a man loses all his lands?
  • Nugawela: Yes, that is the chief cause of losing land”[42].

An extreme expression of xenophobia is found in a long memorandum addressed under a pseudonym to the Banking Commission by a representative of the Sinhalese business community[43]. Its author began with a piece of self-criticism, which took up all the commonplaces conveyed by colonialist circles; these worn themes took under his pen a striking relief, in the context of the crisis and land alienation: “The Ceylonese are not industrious and all their time, all their energy, all their earnings are invested in imitating, ruining their physique, their tradition and love of the country (…) They are bankrupt in all, except verbosity (…) Ceylonese have been borrowers in every respect for the past three or four hundred years. Language is borrowed, literature is borrowed, ideas are borrowed, modes and means of life are borrowed. Money is also borrowed. Foreigners encourage borrowing. A foreign government supports the foreign lenders.” To this cultural and economic alienation, it is necessary to find a responsible person; the Chettiar provides a convenient scapegoat: “They are the canker eating into the vitals of the Ceylonese nationality aided and abetted by all other foreigners. The Chetty’s methods are assured and peculiar, and no ordinary power can cope with him. Physically, he is a mass of cowardice. Morals he has none. Spiritually, he is a mass of superstition, weak, fearing God but not loving, hating humanity, a veritable Jew, ready to tear and destroy. In cunning and treachery he has no equals. Laws are circumvented by him. He spreads dishonesty, bribery, corruption, immorality, and destruction wherever he goes. He is everywhere and in everything. He bribes from the legislators to the fiscal peons. The Chetty along with usury should be exterminated and exorcised to restore our island’s financial balance.” Another ideological loan… this time from Nazism. We should not imagine that such arguments were common; but they were a symptom of a deep malaise of the possessing classes. The foundation by Bandaranaike of an organization called the Sinhala Maha Sabha (Great Sinhalese Association) in 1937, which represented a turning point in the career of the future leader of the national movement, must be interpreted in the light of these xenophobic feelings, although he was not himself a jingoist[44]. Reading through the minutes of the State Council sessions leaves the impression that anti-Indian feelings represented one of the major themes of political discourse and took the place of nationalism. It would be excessive to represent the Ceylonese in general and the Sinhalese in particular as a nation seized by the mania of persecution, and the Chettiar of Ceylon were spared the violence that accompanied the advent of Burmese nationalism. The peasants knew very well that British and Ceylonese speculators were more responsible than the Indians for their condition; as for the bourgeoisie, it expected the State to come to its rescue to redeem its debts.

State assistance.

The gap created in the credit system by the withdrawal of the Chettiar was finally filled by the establishment of a State bank. The story of the birth of a modern banking system in Ceylon has already been written in a valuable book, which exempts us from returning to it in detail[45]. On the other hand, we will focus on successive projects to put an end to land alienations or even to return their alienated properties to unfortunate debtors. During the years of prosperity, a few lucid minds, fearing the fickleness of the Chettiar credit system, called for the creation of a State credit institution[46]. These requests led to the birth of a mortgage bank (State Mortgage Bank) which began its activities in 1931 under the presidency of Sir Marcus Fernando, one of the largest owners of coconut estates. Its purpose was long term lending for all, but having few funds, it restricted its operations to a narrow fringe of rich planters, and generally required mortgages on urban buildings that hardly depreciated during the depression: only the bourgeoisie of Colombo (the absentee owners of the coconut plantations) was able to provide these guarantees[47]. This is one of the many examples of diversion by the bourgeoisie of institutions originally intended for the peasantry, or at least for its wealthy fringe.

The first moratorium projects date back to the beginning of 1931. “If [the debtors] are not saved, said their promoter, the nation is bound to perish”[48]. After the elections, the case was relaunched at the initiative of the representative for Kägalla, E.A.P. Wijeyeratne: “The mortgage debt of this country is gigantic (…) A great authority on finance stated only a year ago that it was over 500 million rupees (…) No agricultural country in this world of the size of Ceylon has yet been known that can bear a debt of that magnitude.”[49]. Wijeratne urged for the State control over the banking sector, which had always refused to invest directly in the development of the country, preferring to place on the London market or with the Chettiar; meanwhile, he considered that a moratorium was necessary. The result of this approach was the formation of a parliamentary commission of inquiry whose report was tabled a year later. This document reflects without detour the class interests of its authors: “While in the case of small debtors the land lost by one villager generally passed into possession of another villager either directly or through the hands of a purchasing creditor, this was not the case with large debtors, as the ability of the Ceylonese to purchase large estates sold under decree sale was indeed small at the present time. Consequently, in the case of the large creditors where the property would ordinarily be purchased by judgement creditors or their nominees, the loss is not merely personal to them but more far reaching,  as the majority of large creditors are admittedly foreign capitalists”[50]. The project (Judgment Debtor’s Bill) was unanimously opposed by European business circles, which had heavily invested in mortgage loans; in his memoirs, a former planter, T. Y. Wright, defined the project as “a way to buy back with taxpayers’ money land that was wasted by pierced baskets of which some were once millionaires”. Europeans were soon joined by representatives of the Indian community who expressed the concerns of the Chettiar, and by the most moderate Ceylonese leaders whose fortune was solidly established. Adopted by the State Council with a narrow majority, the project was vetoed by the governor, and by the London authorities, who were convinced by an avalanche of motions and petitions. That of the Ceylon Chamber of Commerce explained that by virtue of the economic integration of the island, the measure was likely to have far-reaching repercussions: “The commercial and agricultural activities of the island depend largely, if not entirely, on the credit facilities that emanate either directly or indirectly from the banks.”[51]. After this first setback, Sinhalese politicians did not abandon their project. They obtained the creation of the Ceylon Banking Commission, whose composition reveals the evolution of the colonial government: it did not include any European in its ranks, but was presided by an Indian Parsi banker, Sir Pochkanawala, and not by a Ceylonese. Shortly before, similar commissions had investigated the banking system of India and Burma. Following the nuanced recommendations of the commission, which exempted the Chettiar from the sin of usury but accused them of irresponsibility, the attention of the political class was focused on the project to create a State bank aimed at filling the void left by the Chettiar withdrawal, and which the European pressure groups did not want. The moratorium projects were abandoned, possibly because forced sales were not so dramatic, but the relapse of 1938 revived the debate. The new projects first aimed to institute a conciliation procedure between creditors and debtors (Debt Conciliation Bill)[52]. The Chettiar, who had given up recovering all their debts, did not oppose it; on the other hand, the Europeans were fighting a rear-guard fight. The governor planned to oppose his veto and referred it to London. Among the senior officials of the Secretariat of the Colonies was a former director of the agricultural services of Ceylon, F.A. Stockdale, who harshly criticized the project, which he said was intended to benefit only the large absentee owners who led an extravagant lifestyle in Colombo. But the war pushed the authorities to spare the local political class, and London agreed in December 1939, on the basis of a report written in energetic terms by the Minister of Agriculture and future Prime Minister, D.S. Senanayake. Encouraged by this success, politicians reintroduced in 1940 an annually renewable moratorium project, which was opposed by European insurance companies that had invested heavily in mortgages and already felt that they were wronged by the delays of the courts[53]. London finally accepted the project in 1941, because its scope was restricted to small properties.

The last project was by far the most interesting and significant. Its aim was to have the mortgaged properties sold between January 1st, 1929 and December 31st, 1940, bought back by the State, so that they could be returned to their former owners for a repayment spread over 25 years[54]. The governor renounced to veto a measure that he considered anti-Indian and anti-European, doubting the real effects of its application: “The proof of this legislative pudding will lie in its eating.” It does not seem indeed that this law (Land Redemption Ordinance) had spectacular effects: between 1945 and 1947, 5,519 applications were registered and 2,850 rejected, but the examination procedures were especially long and those of acquisition even more. What must hold us back is more the intention than the act. The authors of these laws defended actual interests. But their behavior, consciously or not, was in line with a monarchical tradition that a century and a half of colonization could not erase. “In the time of kings” according to the consecrated expression that always comes to the lips of the Kandyans, land sales were always redeemable during the lifetime of the parties, and when an aristocrat was threatened with seizure, the king intervened to finance the redemption of his debt; it also happened that the monarch obliged the powerful to return to simple villagers the land they had snatched from them by forcing them to go into debt, but there only one attested case in the time of the last king of Kandy, whose anti-nobility positions were to cause the loss[55]. Recourse to the State, a substitute for monarchical authority, in times of crisis, is certainly not a characteristic of Ceylon, as shown by the entire political history of the interwar period in the West. The xenophobia epidemics that accompanied it was also universal. But it is rather in the Indian cultural area that the Ceylon case must be appreciated. There is a significant contrast between a structured Hindu society, where intermediate forms of organization, such as the caste, took precedence over the individual and the State, and more flexible societies – those of the Buddhist countries on the Indian periphery – where the individual did not benefit from the same solidarity or suffer from the same constraints. It is the weakness of social ties in a Buddhist context that the recourse to the State found its justification.

*

To sum up our findings and enlarge the scope of the study, it can be asserted that the depression of the 1930s, in Ceylon as in other areas producing raw materials, was above all the crisis of the small and medium-sized indigenous production, which had developed during the previous two decades. This expansion had been favored by the availability of land (the chenas), of credits (provided especially by the Chettiar) and by the presence of a market where the demand, especially for rubber, grew faster than the production of the large European owned plantation companies. However, during the 1920s, expansion met its internal and external limits. Land was becoming scarce; credit was drying up; the market was getting cluttered. Even before 1929, overproduction was present; it resulted in part from this indigenous growth itself, and large producers were quickly determined to eliminate these undesirable competitors from the market. They exported their crisis, getting rid of their surplus immigrant labor by sending it back to India, and stopped hiring villagers as occasional workers. Finally, the restriction plans adopted in 1933 and 1934 met the expectations of large planters, while ensuring, thanks to the sale of their coupons, a modest rent to small producers. The weight of the crisis was ultimately borne by the most marginal social categories, new Tamil immigrants still poorly integrated into the structure of the plantations, and moreover occasional Sinhalese workers who lost the resources they could derive from hiring on large plantations, from work to task on small plantations and in public works sites. This category survived thanks to family solidarity or the patronage of the notables, and by finding imperfect substitute resources such as home garden cultivation. It exposed itself to climatic fluctuations, to the ‘old regime crises’ from which the peasantry had freed itself thanks to the multiplication of external jobs. When the drought occurred, the malaria epidemic catastrophe, a crisis in the crisis, was triggered, eliminating a hundred thousand victims predestined by malnutrition. The possessing classes of Ceylon became aware of the peasant condition and the duties of the State in this regard, but were quick to defend their own interests. With new political responsibilities, but burdened with their endemic debt, they demanded that the State replace their departing creditors. The colonial government remained reluctant until the war revealed that the advent of the Welfare State was the best way to ensure a quiet transition to independence. This process, of which all the nuances expressed in the previous pages have been erased, translated politically into the appearance of a series of myths. The general spread of the depression, through the credit system woven by the Chettiar, the public finance crisis, and the narrow links of the peasantry with the plantation economy revealed that the entire island economy was integrated into the world market. However, it was at this precise moment that colonial circles developed the thesis that the peasant economy would be immune from fluctuations in the economy. A colonial version of the myth of the return to earth, the dualist theory had the function of concealing the bankruptcy of a dependent but real indigenous development, and of removing the spectrum of a rapid growth in social spending. Let everyone return to his place, the peasant to his fields, the immigrant in excess to his homeland. Under the opposite appearance, the Ceylon political class cultivated the same myth. Discovering the deterioration of the peasant condition, it celebrated the pre-colonial golden age and the virtues of self-sufficiency, rejecting on the colonizer the responsibility for a supposed long-term decline of the peasantry, and a very real spoliation of its lands, and ignoring its own role in the process. At the same time, it accused the Indian financiers, who abandoned it after having largely financed it, of reducing Ceylon to a ‘proletarian nation’, while the Indian immigrant workers of the plantations began to be designated to the peasant vindication as those responsible for unemployment. These facts and myths were far from being limited to the only case that concerns us. We find the equivalent in Malaysia where the ‘sons of the soil’ were beginning to claim the exclusivity of the profits provided by the plantation economy; and in paddy producing Burma where agricultural development that was reaching its before the crisis, was definitively compromised by the great depression. In the latter case, this led to a wide scale peasant rebellion, while no such revolt occurred in Ceylon. Among the reasons explaining the difference between Burma and Ceylon, one should point out the absence of a land tax and the beginnings of a representative political system in Ceylon, but also the fact that expropriation by the Chettiar was limited and affected absentee landowners more than actual peasants.

It is perhaps too easy to assert a link between the global depression and the crisis of the colonial system. The Indian example, which is decisive, shows that the birth of an authentic national movement is significantly earlier, and has nothing to do with the economic situation, which was generally favorable for this country at the end of the 1930s. What the depression calls into question, at least in the colonies most integrated into the British imperial system, is the inchoative development of a small production on the margins of the system, which in a way ensured the collaboration of an important fraction of the peasantry and the entire land-owner bourgeoisie for the purposes of colonization. If the development of this small production was a world-wide phenomenon, which remains to be proven, and that it played a decisive role in the origins of overproduction and the crisis, one is entitled to say that colonization was a victim of its own contradictions.


[1] Sessional paper 23 of 1934: Ceylon Banking Commission, volume II, (CBC II) p. 331 (E. de S. Wijeyaratne, notary, Galle); Administration Report (AR) Puttalam 1932, p. F21

[2] CBC II p. 187 (Madawela), p. 27 (Abeysekera), p. 21 (deputation Ratnapura) ; Sessional Paper (SP) 22 of 1934: CBC volume I p. 161, 170-171 ; Evidence of the Committee on Landless villagers, Land commissioner records file 907, 20.10.1925 (L. Nugawela)

[3] Bulletins of the Ministry of Labour, Industry and Commerce n° 5 to 12: Reports of the Economic Surveys of Villages (SV) Kurunägala n°10 (70%), Kalutara n° 6 (80%), Chilaw n° 7 (75%), Puttalam n°8 (74%), Galle n° 11 (86%), Matale n° 9 (84%), Matara n° 12 (60%)

[4] Administration Report (AR) Puttalam 1932, p. F21, CBC II p. 44-45 (Bostock), CO54/970 (Memorandum by D.S. Senanayake on the Debt Conciliation Bill, 1939), CBC II p. 86-87 (Awissawella), p. 351 (H.W. Dias), p. 496 (Government Agent Southern province)

[5] CBC II p. 178 (R.C. Kannangara, planter, Deniyaya)

[6] CO54/55801/1936

[7] OBEYESEKERE (G.), Land Tenure in Village Ceylon, Cambridge, 1967, JIGGINS (J.), Caste and Family in the Politics of the Sinhalese, Cambridge, 1979, FRYKENBERG (R.E.) ed., Land Control and Social Structure in Indian History, Madison, 1969, POUCHEPADASS (J.), Land, Power and Market. A Bihar District Under Colonial Rule, 1860-1947, New Delhi, Sage 2000.

[8] CBC II, p. 27-28 (Abeysekera), D’OYLY (J.), A Sketch of the Constitution of the Kandyan Kingdom, Colombo, 1929; KANE (P.V.), History of the Dharmashastra, Poona,1946

[9] MEYER (E.): “From Internal to External Debt. Observations on Changes in Credit Practices in Sri Lanka in Colonial Times” in MALAMOUD (Ch.) ed., Debts and Debtors. New Delhi, Vikas, 1983, pp. 161-177.

[10] FIRTH (.), Capital, Saving and Credit in Peasant Societies. London, 1964

[11] MALAMOUD (Ch.) ed., Debts and Debtors. New Delhi, Vikas, 1983.

[12] SLNA 65 Confidential file (CF) 969/1931

[13] AR North Western Province 1930 p. F4, 1931 p. F34; AR Puttalam 1931 p. F22

[14] CBC I p. 21

[15] CBC II p. 67; in the Burmese rice producing areas, the Chettiars were similarly forced into foreclosing: see BROWN (I.), A Colonial Economy in Crisis, Burma’s Rice cultivators and the world depression of the 1930s, London, Routledge, 2005, p. 77

[16] AR Puttalam 1932 p. F21 and 1934 p. F33

[17] CBC II p. 39 (Bassett), p. 406-409 (Badulla session)

[18] SV Kurunägala p. 7-10, SV Chilaw p. 10 sq.

[19] Judicial commission, Sessional Paper SP 6 of 1936; CO54/970, notes of a meeting held in the chambers of the Legal Secretary, 6.04.1938: evidence of Mr. Rowan (Julius and Creasy); CBC II p. 2 (Abeysekera)

[20] CBC II p. 518 (Kurunägala); SV Kurunägala p. 11; SV Chilaw p. 7.

[21] CBC II p. 66-67 (Memorandum of the Nattukottai Chettiar Association)

[22] Ceylon Government Gazette (CGG) 1937, p. 905; see also SP 18 of 1951 (Kandyan Peasantry Commission), p. 275

[23] CGG 1927 II, p. 1063

[24] For example, CGG 1929, p. 912 (Punahela); CGG 1937, p. 891 (19,000 Rupees, Atabage)

[25] CBC I p. 35; CBC II p. 403 (Luddington)

[26] CBC II p. 375 (Negombo), p. 493 (Kalutara), p. 473-481 (Cooperative Mortgage Bank secretary, Kandy); SV Kurunägala p. 33.

[27] CBC II p. 403, 461, 38, 429, 143-145; SV Kurunägala p. 20.

[28] AR Registrar of cooperative societies 1935 p. E4; CBC I p. 52; TAMBIAH (S.J.) “Ceylon” in LAMBERT and HOSELITZ, The Role of savings and wealth in southern Asia and the West, Paris, UNESCO, 1963; YALMAN (N.), Under the Bo Tree, Berkeley, 1967.

[29] CBC II p. 47 (B.P. Nicholas, banker, Jaffna); AR Registrar of cooperative societies 1934 p. E20; CBC II p. 277 (Campbell)

[30] WASHBROOK (D.A.), Law, State and Agrarian Society in Colonial India”. Modern Asian Studies 15 (3) 1981 BAKER (C.), “Debt and the Depression in Madras” in DEWEY and HOPKINS, The Imperial Impact, Studies in the Economic History of Africa and India, London, 1978.

[31] CBC II p. 516-520 (M. Fernando, auctioneer, Kurunägala); SLNA 65/CF969/1930.

[32] CBC II p. 457 (Puttalam), p. 519 (M. Fernando), p. 402 (Government Agent Ratnapura), p. 477 (Walbeoff, valuer); SV Kurunägala p. 32-33.

[33] CBC II p. 375 (Negombo), SV Chilaw, p. 30.

[34] CBC II p. 460; Reports of the Divisional Agricultural Officers for the North Western and North Central provinces; Evidence of the Committee on Landless Villagers (D.J. Jayawardene, notary, Negombo); Hansard 1931 (2) p. 231 and 319 (Freeman, Corea)

[35] Sessional Paper 6 of 1936 (Judicial Commission) p. 66-75

[36] CBC I p. 35 and 70, CBC II p. 403 (Codrington)

[37] SLNA 25/20/20 Wijeyeratne to Will, 29.10.1935; Wijeyeratne to Adamalee, 2.11.1935

[38] CBC II p. 487-488 (testimony of the deputation of the Nattukottai Chettiar Association)

[39] AR Registrar of cooperative societies 1934 p. E20; CBC II p. 277 (Campbell), p. 200 (Kalutara), p. 27-28 (Chilaw)

[40] CBC I p. 55-60, CBC II p. 233, p. 351, p. 500; CO54/55782 (Cheetu Ordinance file, Attorney General report)

[41] FIRTH (R.), op. cit. 1964 ; SWIFT (M.G.), “Capital, Saving and Credit in a Malay Peasant Economy” in FIRTH op. cit. 1964 ; NGUYEN VAN VINH, Coutumes et institutions annamites: les sociétés d’épargne et de prêts mutuels, Hanoi,  1931.

[42] Evidence of the Committee on Landless Villagers, 20.10.1925 (L. Nugawela); CBC II, p. 245.

[43] CBC II p. 105-108

[44] MANOR (J.) The Expedient Utopian, Bandaranaike and Ceylon. Cambridge, University Press, 1989

[45] GUNASEKARA (H.A. de S.), From Dependent Currency to Central Banking in Ceylon, London, 1962

[46] PERERA (G.K.W.), Economic Development, an Appeal, Colombo 1925

[47] Sessional Paper 21 of 1929; Sessional Paper 24 of 1936

[48] Hansard 1931 p. 341-346 (6.03.1931, C.W.W. Kannangara)

[49] Hansard 1931 (2) p. 279-294 (10.09.1931)

[50] Sessional Paper 3 of 1932 CO54/909/92953/2 (Memorial of the Ceylon Chamber of Commerce, 29.03.1932); 8

[51] CO54/909/92953/2 (Memorial of the Ceylon Chamber of Commerce, 29.03.1932); WRIGHT (T.Y.), Ceylon in my Time, 1889-1949, Colombo1951, p. 177-178

[52] CO54/970/56080 (Debt Conciliation Bill)

[53] CO54/984/56152 and 56161 (Suspension of Mortgages bill and Rates of Interest bill, 1941)

[54] CO54/985/56284 Confidential dispatch, 19.01.1943; see also AR Land Commissioner 1940-1947; CGG 1942 p. 471-477 (29.06.1942)

[55] D’OYLY op. cit., p. 96; PIERIS (P.E.), Tri Sinhala, Colombo 1939, p. 77 note 1

THE IMPACT OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION ON THE RURAL ECONOMY AND SOCIETY OF COLONIAL CEYLON (1925-1939) PART II: TAMIL PLANTATION WORKERS AND SINHALESE VILLAGERS IN THE DEPRESSION by Eric P. Meyer

There are not two social categories whose condition was as different as Tamil workers of Indian origin residing on the large European plantations, of which they formed the core of the labour force, and the indigenous Sinhalese villagers living in contact with these plantations. The former were a regularly employed workforce, at a very low standard of living, but nourished, housed and materially protected from absolute misery thanks to a system of recruitment and wage control. In return, these workers were closely supervised, fixed, enslaved, irremediably indebted to their employers and their foremen (kangani). The latter, especially those who lived in plantation areas, had more diversified resources: cultivation of paddy fields, small plantations, gardens, public works sites, occasional or regular jobs on medium and large plantations. Their relationship to the plantation economy was of a different nature from that of resident workers. Auxiliary, peripheral labor, necessary in periods of expansion, but towards which the planters did not feel bound by any obligation; free workers with little supervision, often paid by the task, but for whom the contribution of resources drawn from the plantation economy had often become vital, the balance of the villages having been made fragile by the direct or indirect effects of the intrusion of these plantations. The study of the differential impact of depression on two distinct groups is indicative of both local socio-economic structures and the effective mechanisms of impact of a crisis. The major fact is that villagers were no less affected than workers living in plantations by the crisis – on the contrary. But they were in different ways, and after a certain latency time. We will first observe the apparently simple impact of the crisis on the former, before analyzing the rather complex modalities on the latter.

 

 

TAMIL PLANTATION WORKERS IN THE DEPRESSION

 

One could imagine that in times of economic depression leading to mass unemployment, immigrant workers deprived of rights would be the first to lose their jobs, for lack of means of resistance. The reality is quite different. In the case studied here, this workforce had been established for decades on the estates where it resided, and formed the core of the employees: it was both at the mercy of employer’s decisions, but difficult to replace because of its competence. In addition, if the control over population movements exercised jointly by the planters and by the colonial administration made mass dismissal possible, it also made it visible. Provided that the political context lent itself to it, the case could take on a political dimension. An overview of the history of Indian immigration in Ceylon is essential to understanding the situation of the 1930s.[1]

 

 

The logic of the system.

 

In 1928, British planters could have celebrated the first centenary of the immigration of Indian plantation workers. About a hundred in 1828, Tamils from South India were approximately 900,000 a century later, including 732,000 residing on the plantations. It has been said that the British Empire had three metropolises, the United Kingdom, India and China. Ceylon, unlike Malaysia, never received Chinese ‘coolies’; but without the influx of Indian ‘coolies’, the development of a colonial capitalist economy would have been impossible. It may seem strange that the British planters went to recruit workers in South India, when there was a relatively large peasantry in Ceylon. This phenomenon is in fact by no means isolated, it is found for example in Malaysia and Burma. Its causes have been the subject of historical controversies, from which political concerns were not absent. The planters, and in their wake the defenders of the colonial system, have always maintained that they would have preferred to employ a Sinhalese workforce, but that the indolence and lack of interest of the ‘natives’ for regular work had made it necessary to call on immigrant Indians. The first Sinhalese nationalist historians, on the contrary, claimed that the planters had voluntarily imported Indians in order to better control the colony, by virtue of the motto ‘divide to reign’. Nuancing and refining the colonial argument, ‘revisionist’ historians have sought to prove that the reluctance of the Sinhalese to be employed on plantations was explained by the prosperity of their subsistence agriculture and by the relative egalitarianism of the village society, which ensured the entire population access to land ownership. In addition, the downtimes of paddy farming did not correspond to the periods of activity of coffee cultivation. This interpretation, which is based on solid data, has several shortcomings in our opinion[2]. It turned out that in the very first years, Sinhalese were employed on coffee plantations, and that mistreatment and irregularity in the payment of wages discouraged them from continuing the experiment. On the other hand, there were a number of landless Sinhalese peasants, and their attitude of refusal is explained more by the maintenance of the dominance of the Kandyan aristocracy on which they were dependent than by an alleged rural egalitarianism. Finally, from the 1890s, the Sinhalese whose village lands surrounded by plantations became too narrow given the population growth, abandoned their preventions with regard to salaried work on the plantations.

 

But the advantages of the labour of Indian origin were so obvious to the planters that the employment of the Sinhalese villagers despite its significant increase remained subsidiary (1/5th of the employees in 1943) and did not call into question the foundations of the system. One might think that this system was simply an extension in other forms of the slave system of colonial plantations. But again, the reality is more complex: unlike migrants hired by planters under an indenture system such as those in Mauritius, the Tamil workforce of the plantations had theoretically come of its own free will and was in principle free to leave its employer to which it was not linked by any contract. Cut off from their villages of origin, they lived in their workplace, which allowed the estate to exercise close control and limit the rate of absenteeism, which would be impossible in the case of villagers returning home every night. Migration was not only a spatial phenomenon, but also a social phenomenon whose function was to uproot the workforce to make it docile to industrial discipline, and control them through rigorous master-servant laws. Such a system responded better than any other to the needs of plantations, labour enterprises whose profit rates depended on the ability to mobilize an adequate workforce at the right time and at the lowest cost. It was left for the planters to solve two problems. One was to fix their workers as long as they needed them, while keeping the freedom to send them back at will. The other was to control migratory flows, whose natural movement followed the fluctuations of the agricultural situation in southern India. To retain workers throughout the growing season, the first coffee growers practiced wage retention, content to feed (very badly) their ‘coolies’, paying them only at the end of cultivation operations, and using physical force to prevent any escape. These methods that generated discontent were less commonly practiced as soon as the planters saw that they could exploit the debt of migrants to their advantage. The leaders of migrant groups, called kangani, were tasked with recruiting the workers necessary for the next cultivation campaign, and were entrusted with increasingly considerable sums that they distributed in the form of advances to their recruits, after having taken a comfortable commission.

 

When seasonal coffee cultivation gave way to permanent tea cultivation, and the partially temporary immigration became more regular, the debt of ‘coolies’ reached such a level that they no longer had any prospect of freeing themselves from it. The ease with which the planters began to distribute advances, in contrast to their unwavering refusal to grant the slightest wage increase, had no other reason to be than to make migrants slaves for debts. The ‘coolies’ were in no way legally bound by these debts, only the kangani having signed recognitions to the planters; but they were morally bound. In Indian custom, the debt relationship has a binding force of an almost religious nature, which even death cannot untie, to the point that when a worker died in debt, his family or his comrades were practically obliged to contribute to repay his debt. The diversion of traditional attitudes of submission for profit purposes was one of the hidden springs of the plantation system and perhaps of the colonial system in general. The second problem was that of the adaptation of supply and demand for labour. The misfortune of the Indian peasants made the happiness of the British planters. The curve of migratory flows between 1875 and 1905 is parallel to that of food prices in South India. It turned out that the periods of famine in India coincided with the phases of growth in the plantation economy, which allowed the estates to obtain cheap labour during the years when they needed it most. Nevertheless, the planters were periodically worried about a risk of a break in labour supply, and demanded that the colonial government intervene in their favour; but they called back as soon as the State for the price of its services claimed a right of inspection over the treatment of ‘coolies’ or considered creating new taxes. It was not until the beginning of the 20th century that semi-official recruitment agencies were established in India, and that the authorities became responsible for transporting immigrants free of charge, the invoice being then directly paid by the plantation (a ‘cash on delivery shipment’ as the planters said, with inappropriate humor). Finally, it was necessary to allow the sliding of the workforce from one domain to another according to the work available. But the ‘coolies’ were fixed by their debts. The planters developed a mechanism that allowed a worker or more often an entire team to obtain leave provided that they were hired by another planter who reimbursed the debt of the ‘coolies’ (the ‘invoice’ was called tundu, and the term came to refer to the whole system). Thus, these new slaves could somehow be bought and sold; however, in times of labour shortage the ‘coolies’, or rather their kangani, could exploit the system by seeking to sell their workforce to the highest bidder, moving their teams according to the supply of increasingly higher advances. As a result, the system was abolished in 1923, the planters believing that the kangani had enriched themselves at the expense of the stability of the work force.

 

The ‘long walk’ of the coolies of the mid-19th century was a perilous and often dramatic adventure[3]. In the 1920s it had become a simple routine with the development of railways and the control by a joint organ of the planters and the State of the conditions of migration. Registered in a migration camp located in South India and transferred to the island, the migrants were enlisted on their arrival on the plantation that had pre-recruited them, in a hierarchical organization designed to exploit their workforce to the maximum. Each domain was a closed universe, a kind of small autonomous principality placed under the absolute power of the dorai (the planter, owner or manager), who had his staff administered by a hierarchy of small executives: the kanakapillai, accountant-pointer in charge of drawing up the list of coolies present, noting working hours and preparing pay; the periya kangani (chief-overseer) having under his orders brigades of up to several hundred men, divided into teams of a dozen coolies led by the silara kangani. Residents therefore had no recourse against arbitrariness. The dorai exercised de facto rights of justice, and sometimes even de jure. The registration of births, marriages and deaths was his responsibility, as was the later organization of school and medical services. It was rare for an administrator, a doctor, a judge or a police officer to enter a plantation for the exercise of his duties. Planters could privately welcome visitors, but the slightest attack on the sacrosanct nature of private property triggered reactions that a conservative governor of the 1940s did not hesitate to describe as hysterical. In the current state of research, it is very difficult to assess globally the conditions of existence that have reigned in all the two thousand large plantations of the island. The only certainty that emerges from the comparative study of the information available for the 19th and 20th centuries is that a very significant and general improvement occurred at the turn of the century, both in terms of hygiene and feeding conditions and in terms of treatments inflicted by planters to their people; nevertheless, I still encountered in 1913-1914 dramatic cases of mistreatment against immigrants refusing the discipline imposed on them; and mortality rates, especially infant mortality rates, remained very high (224 per thousand in 1910)[4].

 

 

The prosperous years

 

The 1920s were for the Tamil community of plantations relatively prosperous years. It benefited for the first time of the tea and rubber booms. The abolition of the tundu system at the request of the Indian authorities and with the consent of planters concerned about the enrichment and increased autonomy of the kangani removed one of the binding instruments of the servitude for debts, without making the debt itself disappear. The creation in 1922 of more effective control bodies on both the Ceylon and Indian sides provided more guarantees to the migrant both in terms of hiring and working conditions. Dispensaries and schools became more common on the plantations. Finally, in 1929, after much delay, the Planters’ Associations accepted the fixation of a minimum wage with guarantees for the number of days of work. This change in attitude can be explained by the improvement in living standard in the South Indian villages that supplied emigrants, which the planters mentioned with concern[5]: “To maintain a satisfactory labour position, that prosperity has to be competed with. Therefore, the wages and conditions in Ceylon on plantations must be such that they will induce the right type of labourer to come over”. Emigration itself was one of the origins of this relative prosperity and it is symptomatic that the large Indian landowners sought at the same time to put a brake on the exodus because it led to an increase in the price of labour in the villages. Plantation workers could subscribe significant sums when calamities hit the south of the peninsula in 1924[6]. In Ceylon itself, the spread of prosperity had the effect of diverting a fraction of the plantation workforce to the urban sector or even to the villages. The planters were worried about it and were led to grant bonuses to retain their workforce or resurrect the old tundu system in a disguised form[7]. Does this mean that the condition of all plantation workers had generally improved? Certainly not: this society remained very hierarchical and the main beneficiaries of prosperity were the kangani. Indeed, debt did not tend to decrease; on the contrary, in a period of easy money, it was the kangani who received the advances; the abolition of the tundu system was only illusory; in many cases the planters continued to ask for a certificate of dismissal from the previous employer and the kangani to whom debts were owed by his men and women demanded that the accounts be cleared before transmitting the document in question, which was refused to the worker who sneaked out to escape the debts or the blackmail of his kangani. According to the Agent of the government of India in Ceylon[8] “It is often stated by planters that the necessity for producing a certificate before a labourer can be employed restricts undue movement of labour. My own experience and that of all enlightened planters is that the movement of labour from estate to estate is almost invariably due to their chronic indebtedness”. As for the prosperity of the South Indian villages, it remained fragile and above all unequally distributed: it is the kangani and their protégés who had solid houses built, and became locally powerful; it is through them that transited a large part of the savings that the workers of Ceylon sent home. As the authors of the 1931 Indian Census Report noted, when the first effects of the depression were being felt[9]: “A strong and continuing emigration flow is necessary to maintain the population at a subsistence level (…) The Tamil has long been a rover and it is one of the problems of South India is that his opportunities for roving seem likely to diminish”

 

 

The re-exported crisis.

 

The impact of the Great Depression on migratory flows and on the condition of plantation workers was at first glance simple and somehow automatic: cessation of recruitment, dismissal of surplus workers, partial unemployment, wage reduction if the movement was confirmed. Thus, the plantation economy re-exported its crisis. However, the reality was more complex. First because the adaptation of supply and demand required a longer or shorter latency. Second because a majority of workers established with their families for more than a generation had ceased being mobile. Because from one district to another, or even from one domain to another, the severity of depression varied greatly. Finally because the economic mechanisms were influenced by political action, the worker of Indian origin becoming during the 1930s a pawn in the game played by the Sinhalese nationalists, the British planters and the Indian authorities. As a result, the migration crisis became structural; the movement reversed and then led to the paralysis of the system.

 

The testimonies of the period vary considerably in the assessment of the degree of mobility of the workforce in normal times. It is extremely difficult to interpret statistical data relating to mobility between India and Ceylon, as shown by Patrick Peebles. Case studies suggest that some plantations had a particularly stable staff, coming mainly from a single village and cemented by family ties, while others employed a more mobile workforce, the most frequent case being that of a stable nucleus and a mobile fringe[10]: “It has been the custom for a large number of years for estates to restrict largely their recruiting to relations of their resident labourers and thus on a great many estates the labour force is homogeneous, permanent and settled. To labourers brought up with an old established connection of this sort, the closing of the estate has come as an unexampled calamity, involving in many cases a complete break with the past”.

 

The number of immigrants from India decreased even before 1929, but the figure does not distinguish plantation workers from urban workers [11]. From 159,398 in 1927, it went down to 133,712 in 1928, 105,095 in 1929 and 91,422 in 1930; the early beginnings of the rubber depression corresponded to a series of good years in South India; in addition, the implementation of minimum wages led plantation managers not to rehire a certain number of marginal workers. Recruitment for rubber plantations stopped in 1930, and for tea plantations in 1933. There was a shift in the workforce from closed rubber plantations towards tea plantations, where there was still employment, or where the presence of parents made it possible to survive while waiting for better days[12]. This shift, more considerable than expected, reduced for a time the number of ‘beneficiaries’ of a ‘repatriation’ plan put in place at the end of 1930. The number of returnees amounted to 10,645 (+4,772 indigents) in 1931 “What is surprising is that there are not more because it is estimated that about 100,000 acres of rubber were abandoned”. In the following years, the number of returnees varied greatly: 14,338 in 1932; 42,343 in 1933, due to the entry into force of a new repatriation plan with greater facilities: in two months, May and June 1932, 15,000 workers left[13]. But the adoption of the concerted restriction plan for tea production immediately led to a sudden surge in demand in August 1933 and recruitment resumed from September 1st at the initiative of the planters. The trend intensified in 1934[14]: “The labour requirements of estates had been limited to a flat rate of 1. 1/8th labourers per acre but as a result of representations made by the planting community these were raised to 1. 1/4th labourer per acre. Applications for licenses came pouring in and recruitment from coast went on briskly. The unprecedented drought and the decline in the price of tea during the latter half of the year resulted in the curtailment by estates of their normal cultivation program. In spite of it the labourers were being recruited from India on licenses already issued. Owing to this heavy influx of labour it was found towards the end of the year that there was a sufficiency of labour on estates in Ceylon and that probably the total labour force was slightly in excess of actual requirements”. From the end of September 1934, the authorities sought to curb recruitment by stopping giving licenses to kangani, then resumed small scale repatriation operations (6,252 in 1935, 5,396 in 1936). A minor slump of the tea industry at the end of 1936 determined the adoption of a new repatriation plan in February 1937, of which 4,485 workers benefited during the year but from the month of May the resumption of rubber absorbed the excess tea and the planters demanded 5,000 additional workers: they encountered, for the first time, the opposition of the Indian government. In practice the planters managed to bring back former workers (palaial) accompanied by their close relatives “whose definition is on this occasion changed to include married girls, their husbands and children, parents, brothers and sisters and their children as well as paternal uncles and their families”. Thus 15,681 Tamils were recruited in 1938[15]. This ebb and flow was the sign of a disorganization of the labour market. The precipitation or the procrastination of the planters reflected their nervousness, and administrative measures always lagged behind. Such vicissitudes announced the final crisis of emigration, which will be discussed later.

 

How did returnees adapt to India? Their fate remains the great absentee of this depression story: ceasing to be public, it no longer interested anyone. The published documents are silent, vague, or contradictory, the Indian authorities arguing that there was no problem and the Ceylon administration that the migrants were eager to return. The representative of the Government of India in Ceylon pretended that these repatriates “appear to have settled down in their villages without noticeable distress. Weather conditions in South India were favourable and foodstuffs cheap”[16]. It was assumed that family solidarity and savings accumulated during the prosperous years made it possible to meet the essential needs and that, in any case, a few thousand more or less under-employees did not count in the Indian immensity. However, the good agricultural years were followed by less abundant harvests after 1933, and when the resumption of recruitment by Ceylon planters was announced, the influx of candidates to the employment offices left little doubt about the preferences of Tamils or their forced choices[17]. It seems that many of them had not returned to their villages: India was experiencing an industrial boom at the time resulting in part from the reorientation of local capital invested in agriculture, which was no longer profitable because of the depression. Two poles of this development, Madras and Bangalore, were located near emigration recruitment areas; in addition, large public works sites (irrigation works) were opened at the same time; this job-creating boom, which contrasted with the Ceylon depression, must have attracted many unemployed for a while. And it is the feeling of being able to employ all its workforce that led the Indian government to adopt under the pressure of the nationalist movement an increasingly restrictive attitude towards emigration, not only to Ceylon, but also to Burma, Malaysia and the sugar islands of the Indian Ocean, the Pacific and the West Indies.

 

 

The evolution of the standard of living of plantation workers[18].

 

The vast majority of them remained in Ceylon despite the increased difficulties of their existence. Does this mean that their standard of living had ultimately not been seriously affected, as the planters and the Ceylon authorities repeated? The figures prove them right at first glance: the decrease in wages was accompanied by the decrease in food (especially rice) prices. But to make a global judgment, it is also necessary to take into account two factors that are more difficult to quantify: the actual working hours, and the chronic debt of workers. The procedure for setting minimum wages was quite complicated: in each district, joint councils chaired by an administrator and composed of planters and kangani supposed to represent employees made proposals that were submitted for consent to a central council where employees were not represented, and then to the colonial administration. On the other hand, since 1920, housing, medical care and part of the rice were free, provided that the employee had worked a minimum number of days per month. The wage was usually evaluated on a daily basis and varied according to the amount of latex or tea leaves brought to the factory. Finally, workers were supposed to be able to get work six days a week. The decrease in wages was postponed until 1931, but due to the general decline in rice prices, most workers in the lower and middle districts stopped frequenting the shops of the plantations which continued to sell rice at the price set in 1929, more than 50% higher than the market price[19]. After trying to prevent workers from purchasing outside the estate, which caused deep discontent, the planters accepted to lower rice prices and wages at the same time. The government gave its assent to the new tariff in May 1931. The kangani who represented the interests of the workers at the joint councils raised no objections, admitting the argument that the measure did not affect the standard of living[20]. Immediately a new reduction was demanded by the planters; it did not come into force until February 1st, 1932. On May 10th 1933, another reduction was imposed, which was short-lived, because the recovery led the planters to adopt a higher tariff in November, and then to restore the 1931 rates a year later, which remained in force until 1939. The standard of living of the workers has not been theoretically affected; the continuous reduction in general and infant mortality rates seems to confirm this. In addition, imitating the villagers, a number of employees obtained from the planters permission to garden uncultivated plots or to engage in livestock rearing – an activity in which Tamils excelled[21]. There is no doubt that the legislation in force had protected workers to some extent from the effects of depression, as evidenced by the regular request from the ‘hard’ elements of the planters to suspend its application, which was regularly ignored by the colonial administration[22].

 

However, several signs suggest that the standard of living of those who had kept a job had been seriously amputated. The most obvious is the sudden fall in the amount of sums sent to India by immigrants in the form of postal orders. Other indices go in the same direction, such as the 25% drop between 1929 and 1930 in alcohol consumption in plantation areas[23]. To this amputation of purchasing power, there are three possible explanations: either the minimum wage was not really respected or cuts on the salary were made; or the number of consumers had increased. The latter hypothesis, of which the clues must be carefully sought, must in any case be retained. It seems that in a first phase, this is the mechanism that had made it possible to limit the number of repatriations: rubber plantation workers went up to live on tea plantations, appealing to the solidarity of their relatives established in the upper country. The proportion of people dependent on workers has indeed increased from 18% in 1925 to 28.8% in 1930[24]. Partial unemployment is another form of adaptation to the crisis leading to a decrease in purchasing power. On this point, the testimonies of the Ceylon and Indian authorities diverged, the former stating that the planters had always offered employees that they had not dismissed the six statutory days, while the latter argued that non-compliance with the legislation, even fraud, has been constant. In rubber plantations, it was traditional to employ the tappers only in the morning and to pay them by the weight of latex – tapping is done between 6 a.m. and 10 a.m., and the latex collected between 10 and 12 p.m.[25]. During the depression, the superintendents demanded that workers work eight hours to pay the minimum wage, but since they did not provide them with work in the afternoon, they deducted a quarter of the salary. It was also common to pay only one working day for two on the grounds of insufficient yield, or to deduct a few pounds of tea from the weight brought back at the end of the day by the pickers on the pretext that the leaves were particularly moist. Another expedient was to give less than six days of work a week “a desperate remedy for a desperate crisis” commented the Agent of the government of India in Ceylon[26]. The planters also threatened their workers of dismissal with the help of the kangani. This practice was illegal, but continued for lack of jurisprudence. So the Indian Government representative decided to file a complaint against the intendant of an estate, that of Perth, in order to obtain a judgment making jurisprudence; acquitted in the first instance, the intendant was condemned on appeal by the Supreme Court, to the fury of the planters who accused the Agent of “harassing the planting community in a time of depression”[27]. Colonial justice had so far always shown a certain bias, condemning planters to symbolic fines and workers to heavy prison sentences. Despite this jurisprudence, according to the Agent, the reduction of working days remained very common between 1934 and 1937, under various pretenses: in 1934, drought; subsequently, malaria epidemic, or fall in prices. On the other hand, the Ceylon Controller of Labour maintained after investigation that he has not found any such case. The case took a political turn in the context of exacerbating nationalisms that will be mentioned later[28].

 

There is a final explanation for the deterioration of the standard of living, which is due to the very nature of the employee’s relationship with his employer. The worker was indebted from the start. This structural debt was the main instrument of enslaving the workforce during the 19th century. It remained the best way for planters to fix and control it. To the debt due to estate was often added the debt due to the kangani who managed both debts. In the final analysis, the vital issue for the worker was not that of purchasing power, but of borrowing power and repayment capacity. Thus, the decrease in wages, regardless of the fall in prices, translated into a reduction in cash and pushed back the hope of freeing oneself from previous debts whose amount did not tend to be reduced; in this respect, the situation of the plantation worker was not fundamentally different from that of the small producer in debt with the Indian lender, the relationship to British capital being in both cases changed into a relationship to Indian capital. It is very difficult to obtain precise information on these unwritten debts. Most observers of the time were content with impressions. Asked by the Ceylon Banking Commission, the Indian Agent estimated that 75% of workers were in debt with the kangani and added “if the labourers do send money to India they borrow it from the kangani. About 75% of the labourers on estates are indebted to kangani”. In some estates, the intendants deduced from the wages the debts owed to the kangani. A survey revealed that in a given case, the total deduction amounted to 5,422.37 rupees (unfortunately the number of employees is unknown) but it can be recalled that the monthly pay was lower than 10 rupees[29]. Even when the pay was made without deduction, the kangani was always present during the operation, and passed the money from the master to the servant and inevitably “a portion of the wages sticks to the head kangani’s hands”[30]. How is it that, if wages were adequate, plantation workers continued to go into debt, asked in 1937 the Agent of the Government of India under the title ‘the most perplexing problem’[31]: “This is a question for which no satisfactory answer can be gathered. Some superintendents explain that it is the nature of the labourer to be in debt and that if a kangani does not lend some other professional moneylender will. Perhaps the explanation which is nearest to truth is that the debt to the kangani is the relic of the old days of the tundu system. Even now, it seems to be a fact that few gangs of labourers will go to an estate unless they are offered a substantial sum by the head kangani of the estate as an inducement.   The head kangani either gets an advance from the estate or pays a sum himself to the labourers in order to keep them under his obligation. Once this ‘advance’ has been made, it persists and is scarcely ever admitted to have been completely liquidated even if it has been actually repaid”. We are at the heart of the debt issue. Debt, in the Indian cultural context, constitutes the contract par excellence, which binds the creditor as much as the debtor[32]. To enter the service of someone is to enter into his debt. It is therefore not conceivable to enter into the service of a plantation without performing this quasi-ritual act that must bind the boss or the kangani, commit him to employ and help you since you are his man. But there is another possible explanation, purely economic. Although the plantation worker is paid on a daily basis, he is paid only monthly, and therefore forced to a large extent to live on credit with the local shop, usually held by a relative or friend of the chief kangani[33]: “ Boutiques usually sell goods on credit to the labourers on the security of their head or sub-kangani, and when an improvident labourer has run up bills to a large extent in a boutique, he not only finds his lot on the estate miserable, but any attempt on his part to leave the estate is resisted. Some boutique keepers have gone to the extent of assaulting labourers to recover their debts and where possible have seized their chattels and even their discharge certificates”. Police reports confirm the frequency of the fact, but also suggest that the victims no longer allowed themselves to be done without protest: “In the planting districts complaints by these labourers that they had been robbed of their savings and jewelry just before their departure were frequent. Such complaints were often true, but the offender was not unfrequently some local shopkeeper who had seized the last chance of obtaining something more tangible from his customer than a promise of repayment of his debt”[34]. With this example we encounter one of the concerns that are at the heart of this research, namely the respective game of socio-cultural factors and economic factors. Debt is inexplicable as a pure economic phenomenon. But its economic consequences are no less real Here we have a traditional debt diverted by the planter or the kangani from its primary purpose.

 

The Chettiar debt provided us with the example of a contract in a way secularized, neutralized, but the kangani were themselves in debt with the Chettiar and the movement of judicial sales that will be studied later strongly suggests that many small plantations launched by kangani with the help of borrowed capital had to be sold. However, the principle of debt was beginning to be called into question, as evidenced by the multiplication of cheetu circles (mutual saving associations) on large estates, or the increasingly frequent request of workers to be registered by planters in an autonomous team independent from any kangani. The growth in the number of petitions points to a change of mind: most were directed against overseers (and not against the planter himself) and debt was directly or indirectly responsible for the majority of them. Their number remained stable from 1925 to 1929, then it tripled in the space of four years, to fall after 1934[35].

 

 

The immigration crisis

 

The end of the 1930s was marked by a general crisis, both internal and external, of immigration. Internal: the power of the kangani was called into question, trade unionism developed and the authority of the unions began to supplant that of the management staff. External: Sinhalese and Indian nationalist leaders condemned the system, which resulted in a serious break in relations between the two countries. Depression disrupted the labour market both directly and through politics[36]. Without an external catalyst, it is unlikely that the agitation would have taken on such an open character. The roots of discontent were already solid in the early 1930s, but a decisive element occurred in 1931: the right to vote, granted to about 100,000 ‘Indian Tamils’, made them overnight courted citizens:  meetings were held, an electoral literature was broadcast, and to the surprise of the planters who hoped to be elected by their employees, it is two Indians who became members of the State Council, and one of them, Peri Sunderam, was chosen as Minister of Labour. In addition, the development of plantation schools, however modest, allowed an increased number of young people to keep their accounts and therefore to control the arbitrariness of the kangani. A radical Tamil journalist, a South Indian Brahmin, close to the Ceylon trade union movement for a time, Natesa Aiyar, founded the first trade union for plantation workers in 1931. Charismatic leader (although Brahmin, he defended the Untouchables), he was considered by many as a messiah, and closely monitored by the police. It is significant that his union’s primary objective was to eliminate debt and organize pension funds. But the planters set up the kangani against Aiyar, and the union proved unable to break through in times of depression, especially as the Ceylon trade union movement became violently anti-Indian with the blessing of a section of the British authorities. The fire continued to smolder, as evidenced by the incidents in 1933 in Hatton town[37]. Planters and the police became nervous: it was enough for an Australian apprentice planter, Bracegirdle, to speak in a meeting alongside the representatives of the Tamil workers and members of the Marxist party LSSP (Lanka Sama Samaja Party), and for the police to immediately obtain from the governor the authorization to expel him from the island (April-May 1937). From 1936, the left organized a new union on the plantations. Indians did the same and a demagogic outbidding appeared. The LSSP masterfully used the Bracegirdle case and the governor’s decision was eventually reversed by the Supreme Court.

 

The wave of strikes that shook the plantations in 1939 – 1940 resulted from the paralysis of the fundamental mechanisms of immigration resulting from the rise of the Indian and Ceylonese (rather Sinhalese) nationalisms. Since the elections of 1931 and moreover since those of 1936, a large fraction of the Sinhalese political class had fueled the anti-Indian sentiments of the indigenous population, amalgamating Indian capitalists and poor plantation immigrants according to a well-known process in Europe. Workers of Indian origin, although settled for generations in the estates, were branded as aliens without abiding interest in the island. In this propaganda stands out the founder of Ceylonese trade unionism, A.E. Goonesinha, who remained close to British Labour for a long time, but embarked on a career as a xenophobic agitator after 1930. However, his influence remained strictly urban, practically limited to Colombo. In the same vein, a character of a completely different magnitude, S.W.R.D. Bandaranaike, who would become Prime Minister in 1956, launched an opinion campaign from 1933 in order to limit or even stop immigration accused of being the cause of unemployment, and to replace the Indian workforce with a Sinhalese workforce. Facing the refusal of the colonial administration which declared: “It is not in the interest of the country to prefer an inefficient workforce to a qualified workforce”[38] he persisted and finally obtained in August 1936 the creation of a commission of inquiry, which reported a year later. To satisfy the Sinhalese demands, it suggested the preferential employment of Ceylonese and the organization of local recruitment agencies for plantations; but the planters showed no enthusiasm. The Sinhalese ministers also decided to exclude people of Indian origin from the benefit of agrarian laws providing for the distribution of land to the needy, and to deny plantation workers the right to vote for elections to the village councils[39]. These measures triggered from 1937 a very lively response from the Indian government, threatening to dry up the flow of immigration, which created great concern among the planters. When Colombo authorities decided to dismiss a number of government employees of Indian origin, the crisis broke out. From August 1, 1939, Delhi and Madras forbade former workers from Ceylon to return to the island, which created a dramatic situation for many of them, separated from their families, “ a complete disregard of the ordinary feelings of humanity”, according to the Controller of Labour. Communalist feelings were exacerbated on both sides, the Sinhalese boycotted the Indian merchants of Colombo, the Indians retaliated by ceasing to frequent the Sinhalese shops up-country. The discontent was eventually deflected against the kangani and the planters, and an unprecedented wave of strikes broke out on the plantations[40]. The safety valve that was free migration between the two countries was blocked, while these trips were all the more necessary for those who had interests in India. The flexibility of the system was called into question. It is interesting to note that the first strike that broke out spontaneously, in the Kotagala estate, in April 1939, originated from the workers’ request to form a temperance society that met with the refusal of the superintendent. In the words of the Controller of Labour, “the rise of the unions tends to conceal the fact that the current movement is social and not political” contrary to what the planters thought. In his confidential diary, the Governor commented on the ‘neurotic condition’ of many planters and added: “the agitation is the strongest where the planters are the most retrograde”[41].

 

The impact of the Great Depression on plantation workers was therefore quite complex. The maintenance of the standard of living linked to the decline in food prices is a thesis that does not stand up to the examination: partial unemployment, debt, swelling of the number of unemployed dependent on workers who had kept their jobs, had amputated their purchasing power. But it took almost ten years before the situation resulted in an open crisis. It was when the freedom of movement of Indian migrants was called into question that the explosion prepared by a decade of malaise broke out.

 

 

 

*

 

 

 SINHALESE VILLAGERS IN THE DEPRESSION

 

Village society was infinitely more complex than that of plantations. From one region to another, the resources differed; the major contrast opposed the villages of the dry zone still living largely in self-subsistence, and those of the wet zone dependent to varying degrees on the plantation economy. From one village to another, the social and economic condition was not the same: there were villages of small landowners, villages of day laborers, villages of artisans; a majority of high-caste villages, a minority of low-caste villages and a number of multi-caste villages. And inside each village, social contrasts, which most contemporaries claimed to be definitely less marked than in India and which were indeed less ostentatious, but which remained a determining element when it comes to appreciating the behaviour of a society in times of depression.

 

 

System elasticity and survival strategies

 

When elder villagers were asked about these difficult years, a Sinhala word naturally came to their mind: “pirimähuwa”: we managed, we got by, we survived[42].  In a way, it may be interpreted, along the lines defined by James Scott, as a case of ‘everyday form of peasant resistance’, using the ‘weapons of the weak’[43]. It is not a question of reducing the social history of depression to this aspect of things: powerful forces were at stake, often without the knowledge of those concerned. But to neglect it, we would fall into the bias of so many socio-economic surveys that, ignoring these underground mechanisms, are naively surprised to meet a majority of households that spend more than they earn, debtors who do not care at all about repaying their debts, lenders who claim their debts but never collect them, etc. The question is what is the degree of elasticity of the system, how long, in a given conjuncture, one can hold, and who can hold. Supporters of dualistic theses, already mentioned, imagine the social structure of colonial countries in the form of two juxtaposed entities whose reciprocal influence is minimal: it would be enough to cross the demarcation line to find oneself safe in an intact pre-capitalist universe. On the contrary, I am convinced that the ‘indigenous’ social practice is encompassed in a whole largely determined from the outside by the fluctuations of the capitalist economy.  The administrative reports of the early 1930s repeatedly affirmed that, although depression affected the population, its effects did not reach a severity requiring the intervention of the authorities. The most pessimistic simply stated in 1931: “Although no actual distress save in limited areas was reported during the year, there seems no doubt that indigenous labour in rural and estate areas has had  what would popularly be called a thin time”[44]. These opinions of colonial bureaucrats do not always agree with those of men in the field, notably Settlement officers, who encountered more pockets of misery during their in-depth inspections than district officers. The official argument was nevertheless retained by the Ceylonese historian Lal Jayawardena, who considered that “depression had at most an uncertain impact on the small man in the coconut and rubber areas” because salaried jobs did not represent a decisive element in the balance of the villages[45]. The boundary between poverty and destitution is, of course, perfectly subjective, and it is to be expected that administrators forced to a policy of austerity by the real or supposed crisis of colonial finances tended to minimize the situation to avoid getting caught up in the gear of interventionism, and that their indigenous assistants avoided drawing their attention to unpleasant realities. We also observed how deep-rooted throughout the colonial world was the belief that dualism would allow peasant societies to better resist depression than industrial societies. This colonial variant of the myth of the return to the land certainly influenced many observers: as evidenced by the surprising statement of the interim agent of the government in Ratnapura, who declared in 1934 to the investigators of the Ceylon Banking Commission that the population, living in a non-monetary economy, was spared from the effects of depression[46]. These statements were in perfect contradiction with the pessimistic findings of the investigators of the years 1936 and following, whose observations were indeed made after the malaria epidemic: as much as we are poorly informed about the reality of the peasant condition at the beginning of this century, the information became abundant from the 1930s following the depression and the establishment of the democratic regime, which attracted the attention of the ruling classes to rural poverty.

 

The series of socio-economic surveys undertaken in 1936 was conducted with methods that may seem primitive: random sampling of a very limited number of villages per district; evaluation of family budgets by household and not by family group; collection of employment statistics on the basis of imprecise definitions of rural unemployment, etc. But these investigations remain close to the lived reality, and are much more significant for social history than subsequent work where the search for statistical refinement and systematic aggregates crush the facts under the avalanche of numbers. They also have the interest of having been conducted independently of the official apparatus; the hostility shown towards them by some indigenous headmen says a lot about their fear of losing their monopoly on information on the condition of the peasantry[47]. As far as we are concerned, their main defect is in the end of being isolated and late, which prevents any comparison with the situation before the crisis. Their conclusions are corroborated by the work of the medical teams who came to investigate the state of health and the level of nutrition of the villagers following the malaria epidemic[48]. On the basis of the data from the peasant surveys of 1936-39, it is possible to argue that, from the point of view of the villages, work on plantations, small and large, was something other than an auxiliary resource during the Great depression. In the Kalutara district, 20 to 22% of families mainly derived their resources from occasional work, to which must be added about 20% families more regularly employed on plantations. In the coconut plantation district of Chilaw, the proportion of casual workers was 32%, plus 4% of heads of household regularly employed in coconut plantations. In the district of Puttalam, 22%. In the district of Kurunägala, the total number of agricultural employees was 55% of heads of families, in Galle 40%, in Matara 34%. Finally, in Matale, where tea predominated, associated with rubber, investigators counted 11.85% of daily workers and 15.55% of more regular workers, or 27.4%, the percentages varying greatly from one village to another. It can be concluded that between a quarter and half of the population depended on this type of employment, the percentage being the highest in the coconut areas. But the temporary character of this activity made these villagers eternal job seekers, rarely employed more than 20 days a month, working in a large estate to the task, then employed on a public works site, lending a hand to a neighbour during the harvest, transporting food for a shopkeeper from the nearby village, and so on. This instability, which was attributed by the British to a weakness of character, was in reality a guarantee, however fragile, against the risks resulting from an excessive dependence on a single employer, like the peasant who practices polyculture.

 

 We will now retain an element of particular interest. The district of Matale, on the border of the dry zone, includes to the north and east villages practicing food agriculture, to the south and west villages whose most of the resources are linked to the proximity of plantations. It is in the latter that economy was the most disrupted by depression and where misery was the most visible[49]. In 1940, the diet of the villagers of the plantation areas was found more deficient than that of the inhabitants of the dry zone, although it was commonly admitted that the miserable villages of the north of the district were unable to properly feed their inhabitants; malnutrition reached the highest levels in localities where the majority of the population lived on jobs as day laborers, both on plantations and in paddy cultivation. One cannot fail to be struck by the contrast between the optimistic picture of the peasant condition drawn by official observers at the beginning of the century, whose archetype is the report on the 1911 census[50], and these dark images. A hypercritical historian would conclude that the contradiction was simply political in nature. However, I prefer to test the hypothesis that the depression had indeed led to a profound deterioration in the standard of living in areas dependent on export products, initially delayed by a series of circumstances: existence of village savings, reduction in the prices of consumer products, implementation of substitute resources, family solidarity or customer relations.

 

 

 

 

Lower wages and reduced employment.

 

The movement of village incomes is difficult to grasp statistically. Indications comparable to those concerning resident workers of Indian origin are not available for occasional Sinhalese plantation workers, nor even for workers on public works construction sites. The income of paddy farmers or small planters is also poorly known. The 1936-1939 surveys provide precise figures, but no comparison is available for previous years. Among the few pieces of information available, those provided by headmen to the Labour Controller in 1932 indicate a decrease in wages of the order of 40% compared to the pre-crisis – much lower than that of rice prices; other sources report declines of more than 50%, but these values are not significant if they are not weighted by short-time unemployment rates[51]. However, casual workers were the first to be dismissed when plantations had to cope with the crisis. As early as 1930, for example, a deputy from the Ceylon Chamber of Commerce recognized before the governor that Ceylon planters gave their Sinhalese day laborers only three days of work a week instead of six, and demanded that the government align itself by reducing wages on public works sites which were 75 cents per day compared to 50 cents on rubber plantations[52]. In 1934, wages continued to fall: for example women travelled about twenty kilometers for a daily wage of 25 to 30 cents per day, while an entrepreneur had tiles transported on their head by peasants for 28 cents a day[53].

 

More than the wage trends, it is the variations in the level of employment that matter for day-to-day workers in most cases. To assess the seriousness of the effects of depression, it is necessary to recall the main lines of the history of the employment of Sinhalese workers in plantations[54]. Contrary to popular belief, their number has never been negligible, but statistics, which until the 1930s only take into account workers residing on the estates, conceal this fact, which is revealed by an early 20th century report, and many indications in administrative reports. It is clear that during periods of expansion, planters called on villagers and low country Sinhalese for tree felling and planting operations, and then if necessary as permanent labour (coconut, rubber) or additional (tea). The Sinhalese were considered by the planters as good workers as the Tamils, the only problems being their least regularity and the need for a certain amount of patience and humour to deal with them: in fact, the prevention of planters came from the fact that unlike the Tamils, the Sinhalese refused the sort of military discipline which they tried to impose.  Recruitment was usually done through village headmen, or job middlemen who, like the kangani, were responsible for the number of men present; but it was also possible to show up at the plantation after the call of regular workers to get a day job. Among these Sinhalese, there were many young people who did not yet have access to the land and a number of women. It also seems that the percentage of members of the ‘low’ Kandyan castes was relatively high, and the fact can also be explained by the location of large domains in areas where these communities were numerous. During the 1920s, the expansion of rubber and coconut cultivation attracted a more numerous village workforce, young people that the demographic boom had multiplied or farmers who abandoned paddy fields or gardens whose cultivation was not very lucrative: the impact of depression during the next decade would be all the more conspicuous. In the absence of reliable overall statistics, the only process is to review the various districts, as is done by the authors of a 1934 report, who highlight the particularly difficult situation of the coconut and rubber areas[55].

 

The administrative reports of the province of Sabaragamuwa make it possible to follow the drying up of employment year by year[56]. In 1928, when prices began to fall, village workforce was still welcome. In 1929, a considerable number of young villagers from the most remote canton of the province (Kolonna korale) still abandoned paddy and chena cultivation for salaried work but in 1930, although very few estates closed down, hiring ceased for villagers; at the end of the year, currency stopped circulating in the villages, and the respective condition of the localities that had recently depended on this type of employment and those that had not, reversed to the detriment of the former. The contrast is evident in the canton of Kukul korale, whose southern part continued in 1931 to subsist as usual, while in the northern sector where plantations had been opened about ten years before, destitution was very marked. Two years earlier, villagers could earn a rupee per day (double the normal pay) by working on the task: of the 438 inhabitants of the village of Karawita, 30 to 40 men worked daily on an estate near Niriella after selling their chenas (130 acres) to the plantation, neglecting their paddy fields (190 acres of poor land) and their gardens (291 acres)[57]. Not all villagers had as much land: the fate of some of them, who did not have paddy fields and were deprived of the majority of their chenas during the rise of plantations, was much worse than that of the Karawita villagers. This was the case, for example, in Maliboda (southeast of the district of Kägalla), in Magurukanda (east of the district of Kurunägala, near the plantation of Shakerley), in Puwakpitiya (district of Matale)[58]. The district of Matara was an overcrowded rural area, a source of emigration, on the periphery of which were established, especially by Ceylonese, plantations of tea and rubber employing very few workers of Indian origin. The unemployment already obvious in 1931-32 resulted from the cessation of weeding and pruning operations on the one hand, and the dismissal of tappers and pickers or the reduction of almost half of their wages. In 1936, the situation did not improve, a survey by the headmen estimated at 7,000 the number of people who, having lost their jobs, did not find sufficient resources by cultivating their own land; it was in this area that two years later one of the first rural employment agencies in the country was created and the region subsequently became a communist stronghold[59].

 

The villagers of the coconut areas also experienced serious difficulties during the depression. The dependence of the population varied according to the nature of the exploitation of the coconut tree: grown in gardens, it was only partially marketed; cultivated in large plantations, it dominated all aspects of economic life. In the North Western Province, which is most of the Coconut Belt, the villagers generally had a small coconut garden of less than one hectare and worked part-time on large nearby plantations, or in coir (coconut fibers) or arrack (palm alcohol) local factories. In a single-production area, where the sale of copra and other coconut by-products represented the main support for the economy, villagers were doubly affected: as small producers, by the slump; as employees, by unemployment. From the late 1920s, expansion stopped and new jobs were rare, while shopkeepers sometimes refused to buy nuts from small producers. After a brief recovery in 1932, the relapse in 1933 resulted in the closure of a very large number of estates[60]. In the south of the district of Kägalla there were two villages whose inhabitants, victims of the closure of the coconut plantations, were in a more miserable situation than that of their neighbours surrounded by rubber plantations; at the beginning of 1934, they had only a frugal daily meal for all food. And in the district of Kurunägala, where many immigrant families from coastal areas had settled as squatters near large estates, women and young people were among the hardest hit, the first as tea pickers, or workers in coir factories, the latter, in all sectors where the demand of the 1920s had attracted them; for example in Timbulkotamulla village, “14 out of 17 families are landless outsiders living in wretched little mud huts on the verge of starvation; most are almost entirely unemployed (…) Unemployment is as demoralizing in this country as it is in England (…) A young widow alleged in her thirties with seven children has been living by working as a coolie on an estate for 45 cents a day; recently it was reduced to 30 cents; soon it will be nothing at all and one begins to wander how such people will manage to subsist”[61]. Some planters claimed that the income lost as a result of the unemployment of these categories was not essential, forgetting that female labor provided a substantial part of the village resources[62].

 

It was commonly accepted that the slump in tea price did not have effects on villagers to the same extent as that in rubber and copra: employment of villagers on tea plantations was less extensive and the technical characteristics of tea production differed significantly: tea must be picked, or in any case pruned and weeded, whether the leaves are sold or not, to prevent the estate from returning to the jungle, while the coconut plantations and rubber plantations can be abandoned for a few years without serious risk[63]. However, in tea-producing regions at mid-elevation, in the middle of villages, the situation worsened in 1932. The mechanisms were especially apparent in the Kotmale valley, where a majority of large European plantations and a sprinkling of small tea gardens coexisted. The former, to keep their resident workforce, stopped giving work to the villagers. The latter, who employed only villagers, reduced wages by half, so that they remained competitive for a while. But from 1934, the large planters imposed a system of quota of production that led to the abandonment of small properties, whose owners preferred to sell their coupons to the large estates rather than producing themselves:  so that in 1935-36, the Kotmale valley, once one of the most prosperous in the upper country, became a pocket of poverty and unemployment[64]. On the other hand, the province of Uva, where, according to the authorities, few villagers were employed in the tea fields, was less severely affected by the employment crisis; however difficulties began to appear in 1933[65].

 

According to official estimates, 120,000 workers would have lost their jobs on rubber plantations by 1932. Of this total, about 60,000 would be Sinhalese. Other data, concerning only the resident Sinhalese workers employed on the largest estates also including workers of Indian origin, indicate a decrease of 16% of the former, compared to 19% of the latter, but these were only the resident workers. Statistical data on employment at the all-island level is hardly unreliable, but the employment policy followed in the plantation industry is clear enough. It could have been expected that planters, forced by legislation to pay a minimum wage only to workers of Indian origin, would make more use of villagers for whom there was no control. On the contrary, employers assured that it was the obligation to pay a high minimum wage to their Tamil workforce that forced them to dismiss their village workforce in 1932-33[66]. This choice of planters became more explicit in 1933-34, when the recovery they expected led them to resume hiring. At first, the difficulty of bringing back Indians in a sufficiently short time pushed them to hire villagers. But as soon as the prospects for recovery were confirmed and the possibility of mass recruiting in India was assured, the recruitment of villagers stopped. According to the candid expression reported by the Agent of the Indian Government in Ceylon, the Tamils are “of better composition”[67]. In 1931, 1932 and 1933, 122,000 Indians had not returned to the island; in 1934, the surplus of immigrants was 97,000: the previous deficit was therefore compensated to 80%. These workers were employed on the large plantations which reopened thanks to the establishment of quotas; the small estates operating with the help of only the village workforce closed down and transferred their coupons to the large plantations. It is not possible to accurately estimate the number of villagers who lost their jobs, but it is clear that the return of the Indian Tamil emigrants broke a timid movement of employment of the villagers on the large estates.  Such an evolution, even if not voluntary, was in the logic of the plantation system where the non-resident had always been considered a subsidiary worker. The different treatment of Sinhalese and Tamils of Indian origin was justified by the planters in the name of technical and financial arguments. Tamil veterans would be more productive; they must therefore be kept even if they were more expensive. But this explanation is not sufficient; it is the very structure of employment that determined the policy of planters. In times of crisis and production restrictions, a core of veterans was kept and marginal workers were dismissed. In Ceylon, by virtue of an inversion specific to the colonial system, it is the indigenous workforce that was peripheral and the immigrant workforce that was nuclear. Such a phenomenon was not new: during the brief crisis of 1920, it was already the villagers who had been the first to be reduced to unemployment and especially those of them who had sold their land for the development of the rubber plantations “as the policy of estates was to conserve the immigrant labour force as long as possible, the first class thrown out of employment was the daily paid local Sinhalese labour on local rubber estates”[68].

 

The employment situation in 1936 was therefore, despite the recovery, more serious than in 1933: the survey on unemployment in Ceylon published in 1937 mainly concerned urban employment, but the few passages devoted to rural unemployment, without providing an overview, insisted on the effects of the restriction, citing for example villagers ready to accept a job for 10 cents a day or a little rice, and giving a list of villages where a dozen heads of families were in absolute unemployment, due to the establishment of the coupon system which had resulted in the closure of very small estates[69]. Village surveys revealed the presence of a large number of villagers who could only be classified in the category of unskilled casual workers. According to the enquiry, these villagers were people who had a more regular job on the plantations before the depression. The Labour Controller in his report of 1931 anticipated the situation: “in the rural areas where work available largely depend on estates there has undoubtedly been a great reduction in the work available (…) making men who would not normally work for daily pay, seek for employment”[70]. It is unfortunately not possible in the current state of knowledge to compare these data with those of the pre-crisis to verify these assertions which, if well-founded, would mean that depression had led to a lasting structural change.

 

How did the authorities react to the spread of unemployment? Most district administrators first minimized the seriousness of the situation to avoid being dragged into an interventionist policy, while a few sought to act in favour of special cases, for example by distributing more generously land to needy villagers. The administration woke up from its nonchalance only under the spur of political action. In 1931, the first general elections in the history of the country were held; dominated more by rivalries of people or parties than by debates of ideas, they were hardly influenced by the economic depression. However, a few rural representatives became aware of the situation during their campaign, and once elected sought to remedy it by putting pressure on the administrative apparatus. This was the case of the Minister of Agriculture, D.S. Senanayake, who developed peasant settlement schemes in his stronghold; and of less influential figures, such as E.A.P. Wijeratne, member of State Council for Kägalla, who was faced with the disbelief of the Assistant Government Agent and the refusal of the Labour Controller when he asked for the opening of emergency public works[71]. When the request was made by the peasants themselves, it was even less likely to succeed: in the same district in 1932, villagers who asked the government to organize public works to repair irrigation channels were told that they had to undertake them at their own expense; they replied that being undernourished it was too hard a task for them; the Agent commented: “during the rubber boom, it was so easy to earn a living that these people have lost the habit of working”[72]. Such a reaction should not be surprising if we remember that the government itself set an example, by massively compressing public works expenditure. It was only during the malaria epidemic that government decided to start public works, catching up but too late for five years of inaction. And it is finally only in 1937-1938 that the problem was taken up following the recommendations of the reports on unemployment and immigration, and the results of the 1936 elections that led to a radicalization of political life. The planters then agreed to employ villagers, because the recovery of rubber was accompanied by the adoption of new transplanted plants instead of old trees: felling and planting are operations for which villagers had always been employed in large numbers by the estates. The districts of Kägalla and Kalutara were the main beneficiaries of this movement.  A number of small village tea plantations were reopened, and small businesses such as coir factories resumed their activities; the construction of minor roads in 1935 finally facilitated the access of villagers to plantations. Another reason that pushed planters to these new choices was the increased difficulty they encountered in obtaining Indian labour due to the first restrictive measures of the authorities of the peninsula. Finally, political pressures relayed by press campaigns urged them to do so[73]. Within a year, the percentage of Sinhalese on large plantations went from 10.9% in 1936 (average 1929-1936 9.9%) to 14.2% while between 1932 and 1934 the increase was only two points (9% to 10.9%). The statistics do not distinguish the Kandyan villagers from the Sinhalese who came from the coastal regions of the Low country to work on the estates, but in 1938, workers residing on the plantations represented 30% of the Sinhalese employed on the large plantations[74]. To promote the movement, the authorities initially organized labour cooperatives, to avoid the multiplication of parasitic intermediaries and to ensure the financing of advances for resident workers. They then sought to regularize the conditions of employment, and to eliminate frequent abuses, such as the irregular payment of wages, or the payment by food vouchers on the shop of the estate[75]. Finally, two recruitment agencies were established in 1937-38, one in the southern province, the other near Kandy in the center of the island. Their goal was to get the Sinhalese to live on the plantations, but a large number of new recruits left the domain as soon as they arrived “finding conditions of life so uncongenial” both in terms of housing and discipline. From the point of view of the recruiters, another obstacle was the dispersion of the potential workforce; there was no such thing as “a definite reservoir of labour willing to take up work on estates in gangs or families”. Finally, although the argument was not openly put forward, relations between the Sinhalese and the Tamils had always been difficult insofar as the language, religion, and caste system were different.  The failure of recruitment agencies led to their closure, also explained by the slowdown in the economic recovery from the end of 1937[76]

 

 

The tribulations of small producers

 

Ceylon is often presented as a country of small owners compared to India where in the colonial period the large property (in fact often more theoretical than effective) of the zamindar and other absentee owners dominated. This particularity is attributed to the historical circumstances which spared the island the tax collection systems established by the Muslim sovereigns and taken over by the British, and to the Dutch rule in Ceylon which imposed a legal system copied from Roman law. Such an image should not mask the existence of very large estates – in this case, the plantations owned by British or Ceylonese capitalists, nor that of a few large rice properties, often belonging to temples. The estimates of the number of landless peasants are perfectly contradictory, and this is not the place to go into detail of the controversies raised by the data of the 1936-1939 surveys, which give percentages varying according to the district between 28% and 56%, the average being around 40%. These figures are certainly overestimated, if only because of the basis used for this calculation: young people that did not yet have access to family heritage were considered landless peasants. For the moment, we can simply say that more than half of the villagers owned land; if we follow the conclusions of Lal Jayawardena, it would be the vast majority of families. I would rather say that a majority of villagers had access, directly or indirectly, to the profits provided by the exploitation of paddy fields, gardens and highlands.

 

In the paddy sector, a very large part of the locally produced rice was self-consumed by the farmer or by the owner who gave out his land in sharecropping. The fall in rice prices had no other effect, in this case, than to discourage any expansion of areas. There were a number of large ‘rice villages’, especially in the Kurunägala and Kägalla districts, which marketed a fraction of their production; most of these villages were inhabited by members of the Batgama caste (whose name means ‘rice village people’) who were placed very low in the social hierarchy. The purchasing power of these peasants, some of whom were owners and others tenants, was seriously affected and the debt of sharecroppers with their owners increased; money became dramatically rare in these villages, which were seriously affected during the 1934-1935 malaria epidemic[77]. The impact of the rice price depression was also specially felt in the two areas of large-scale paddy cultivation: the district of Hambantota and its margins on the one hand, that of Batticaloa on the other. In the first, the price of rice paid to the producer collapsed by 50%, and three-quarters of farmers traditionally indebted to their owner were no longer able to pay their due[78]. In the second, owners who employed agricultural labourers could no longer sell their production on their traditional markets, the Jaffna Peninsula and the province of Uva, due to the competition of cheap Burmese rice. The situation was all the more serious as the government had set up credit unions to finance production, which went bankrupt one after the other. Local notables insisted on the abolition of irrigation taxes and the imposition of a surcharge on imported rice, but their request was ignored by the government which considered that the low price of rice was in the present circumstances the only way to avoid a catastrophe in the plantation sector[79].

 

It has already been explained under what circumstances plans were adopted to restrict production, or rather to restrict exportable quantities, first of tea and then of rubber. These plans had been conceived in European metropolises, without small producers, particularly numerous but disorganized. The intention of large planters was to see the competition of small owners, which they considered responsible for overproduction, disappear. In a confidential letter sent in 1932 by the Ceylon Association in London (the lobby of Ceylon planters) to the head of the South Asia department at the Secretariat for the Colonies, these ulterior motives are clearly expressed. The Association was concerned about projects to limit production, and was rather in favour of limiting exports. Limiting production “will in fact produce a very serious danger of still greater overproduction when restriction terminates in five years’ time. Not only those areas, largely native, which produce 50 million lbs. of unwanted tea be kept in being, but also young areas not yet in production will be encouraged to come in production”[80].

 

In times of depression, small holdings had an advantage over large estates: their cost price was lower, they had fewer fixed costs, and they employed a workforce that was not subject to any wage regulation; in 1925, the cost of producing a pound of latex was estimated at 20-25 cents for a large estate, 12-15 cents for a village property, but the latter produced rubber of lower quality[81]. Economists do not agree on the respective degree of flexibility in a period of depression: according to P.T. Bauer, the production of large plantations varies little, while the elasticity of small ones is strong, because of the ability of small farmers to turn to alternative incomes;  for J.C. Kunhardt, on the contrary, peasant farmers tend to increase production to make up for the shortfall in prices; for G. H. Peiris, large plantations adapt their production to the situation by taking advantage of the fact that a large part of their labour force is composed of occasional workers, and small producers do the same[82]. My observations also go in the latter direction, at least for rubber and the period prior to the establishment of the restriction. In 1932, 40% of the areas of rubber were untapped. But in the case of tea, it seems that the production of large plantations had resisted much better while a number of small gardens were abandoned even before the restriction, for technical and economic reasons, as many small producers who used to sell their fresh leaves to the factories of the large plantations lost that outlet[83].

 

The restriction mechanisms had therefore the purpose and effect of endorsing a pre-existing trend in tea, and in the case of rubber to enlarge the gap between large estates whose production was maintained, and small ones, where it was stopped. In order to make this discrimination practically possible and socially acceptable, compensation was given to small producers, by the issue of coupons. The system was not new, it had been experimented with under the Stevenson plan to restrict rubber production during the 1920s; but while in the Stevenson plan, it was theoretically forbidden for the small producer to sell his coupons, that is to say his quota, to a large producer, this possibility was now offered and discreetly encouraged[84]. The survey of the 76,149 small tea holdings was the subject of many challenges: the opportunity was too good for small planters to inflate their income cheaply, by obtaining from an understanding headman the signing of a false declaration, with if necessary the complicity of a planter interested in the low-priced buyout of their coupons: in Kägalla 60% of the declarations were considered false!  According to an administrator in charge of verifying the declarations “tea control seems to be regarded as a philanthropic organization by which small holders get something for nothing”[85]. A year later, the same operation was repeated for the 97,996 small rubber holdings and proved to be even more difficult : “the most troublesome work”, commented a controller in his diary. “They were only concerned about the coupons and not the land”. Others noted a multiplication of thefts of rubber plants, “many rubber plants having a migratory existence”, everyone seeking to have the maximum extent planted before or during the survey[86]. In 1935, in the midst of the epidemic, the Kägalla Planters’ Association was busy hunting shadow holdings, and offered the government its services to do so. A minority of planters were hostile to the negotiability of coupons; one of them declared that “there was no better work for the villager than to get into the habit of rubber tapping by which they would earn much more than by selling their coupons and sitting on their backs”[87]. But once the evaluation was done, small producers almost without exception sold their coupons to a planter. A number of shopkeepers and traffickers appeared, who were in charge of collecting coupons for this or that planter and of course received their commission on the operation: “All coupons pass into the hands of shopkeepers when prices are low; the villagers sell their coupons in advance. Now the price of the coupon on the market is 25 or 26 cents but the coupons were sold 10 or 15 cents by the villagers”. There were indeed significant variations in the prices of the coupon between the moment they were issued and everyone wanted to sell, and the end of the year, so that hoarding developed. The coupon thus involuntarily became a kind of parallel currency, it was exchanged and endorsed, it was used to pledge loans from a lender or a neighbour. As for the registration of property in the controller’s books, it was soon considered a safe title of ownership, in a country where registration did not exist, and where notaries accepted any declaration. But the sale of the coupon did not necessarily lead to the cessation of production. When there was a trafficker to buy their latex, the villagers did not hesitate to sell with both hands but at a very low price[88]. The selling price of the coupon alone was not always remunerative. In 1938, a tea coupon (for an annual pound of tea) was sold 35 cents: an acre of tea would yield about 73.5 rupees. The average area of a small tea holding is 0.8 acre: the rent provided by the coupons was therefore on average 58.8 rupees per year, 4.9 rupees per month. However, village surveys estimated that the resources necessary for the livelihood of a peasant family amounted to about 15 rupees per month. The situation of the villager who owned a plot of rubber was no better. The average size of these micro-holdings was 1.33 acres; an acre yielded about 41.25 rupees (the coupon was sold 25 cents); the annual revenue was on average 54.8 rupees, 4.57 rupees per month. By way of comparison, in the village of Kulupana, when work was resumed, the rubber tappers earned 7 rupees per month, while the teacher earned 50 rupees, and the shopkeeper could go up to 80 rupees[89].

 

It is clear that the sale of coupons lightened the burden of the small peasantry, but that other resources had to be found, possibly by illegally selling their production. In a village, only a minority of wealthy peasants had enough to live on their income, and it is in fact mainly outsiders, shopkeepers and other inhabitants of small towns, who took advantage of the situation. It was precisely these small absentee owners who employed village day labourers to exploit their land; as the sale of their coupons was enough for them to live, they completely ceased exploitation, further reducing the amount of jobs available in the village. The trend towards the abandonment of plantations and the rise in unemployment took on worrying proportions to the point that the Controller was considering stopping the distribution of coupons to abandoned holdings, or finding a way to lower the price of coupons to make them less attractive; thus, the tea factories operating with leaves bought from the peasants closed one after the other (nine around Balangoda town)[90]. The issue was raised before the State Council. A council member representing the interests of these manufacturers took a stand against the alienability of tea coupons, also advancing the argument that the Sinhalese worker would be replaced by the Indian; he questioned the European planters who, according to him, were jealous of the natives capable of producing at a lower cost price. The spokesman for European interests strongly replied. In 1935, another representative raised the question without success. Finally in 1936, the first motion tabled at the opening of the assembly by one of the two Marxist members who had just been elected, N.M. Perera, aimed to abolish the transferability of coupons: “The present condition of the villages is due not only to the dire consequences of malaria, but also to the dire consequences of the coupon system.”[91]. During the discussion of the motion much later the debate opposed the defenders of unemployed workers (N.M. Perera) and those of small owners, such as the member for Gampola, A.S.S. Gunawardena, who stated that the coupon system had greatly improved the condition of small holders by freeing them from their debts, and that these people, even if they no longer employed workers on their land, gave them other work or provided them with food[92].

 

The situation of small owners of coconut plantations was significantly different. They were much more numerous: there is no reliable evaluation, but it can be argued that every villager who owned a garden belonged to this category. They were not affected by any restrictive measure, so that their ability to sell their production alone determined the level of their income: their fate was in the hands of traders, arrack contractors or manufacturers of oil or copra. Prices were very irregular. The number of plantations belonging to Europeans, in Ceylon as well as in the Philippines and in other producing countries, was too small to induce them to control production. Although the fall in prices was apparent as early as 1927, the villagers continued to plant until 1929. The collapse of prices in 1931, the recovery of 1932 linked to Indian demand, the relapse of 1933, the recovery of the end of 1936 partially obliterated by a decline in production resulted in a constant instability of the income[93]. When prices were lowest, the profit of a one-hectare property, which is already considerable, was less than 5 rupees per year, roughly what the sale of coupons of a micro-holding could pay off in one month. It was therefore impossible for a small-holder to live on his income and he had necessarily to work elsewhere or produce fruits or vegetables for the market. On the other hand, as the plantations did not close, it seems that unemployment itself was less marked in the coconut areas than elsewhere, but the misery was certainly not less, and no one escaped it in the villages, the small owner being no better than the small wage earner and often being one with him.

 

 

The drying up of savings.

 

The gap between the moment when the decline in income occurred and when the social effects of the crisis became acute could be explained by the presence of peasant savings. But all contemporaries agree to deplore what they called the lack of foresight of the Sinhalese villager, which they oppose to the thriftiness of the Tamil villager, a stereotype that contains a good dose of exaggeration[94]. The truth is that the climatic conditions prevailing in Tamil areas (a tropical climate with dry season) encourages savings, while the virtual absence of seasons of the humid tropical environment where the majority of the Sinhalese population lives favours a certain carelessness of the next day. One must avoid an excess of schematism: hoarding was not unknown in the Sinhalese villages, and the depression put an end to it. In 1931, the Registrar of cooperative societies noticed that due to the dry-up of employment on plantations, there was a striking increase in the amount of money rupees in the coffers of cooperatives: “In many cases these have come out of holes in the ground. It is a very good thing that they should come out of that very unsatisfactory type of bank, but I am afraid that their appearance means that the pinch is beginning to be felt in the villages”[95]. The Settlement Officers responsible for settling on the villagers or selling to them the lands they claimed met with more and more difficulties in obtaining payment of the survey fees or the price for the lots, as the money was scarce, while during the 1920s peasants were ready to pay for an indisputable property right. The case of Galdunupitiya village is quite typical: “ Some lots advertised for the second or third time. All the claimants as they have done before declared that they had no money, and saw no reason why they should pay even if they had. After a lot of talk, I managed to get one man to buy one lot for which he had to pay 1.30 cash down. He produced one rupee and then disgorged the balance of 30 cents mostly in one cent pieces at the rate of a cent a minute”[96]. The scarcity of money led more peasants to pay their local tax by working a few days a year to repair the roads, although the rates had often been reduced by half, and such work was considered socially humiliating; to the point that in 1933 the village committees that managed these funds found themselves with a manpower they could not employ[97]. Gold jewelry, the traditional form of hoarding among Tamils and Sinhalese bourgeois and wealthy peasants, became rare. Pawnshops in the south of the island had to close down because residents no longer had anything to give as collateral. In the absence of savings, could the villagers have lived on loans? Village surveys reveal very high debt ratios. Depending on the district, between 70% and 80% of families were in debt; the median debt per family was less than 50 rupees, and if we examine the destination of the loans, the majority of them were devoted to food expenses and contracted with shopkeepers or relatives[98]. But with the decline in activity of Chettiar, credit became less and less easy, lenders devoted most of their activities to getting repaid old debts, and shopkeepers were in trouble; the fall in land prices and marketable products reduced the value of guarantees (mortgages or crops) that villagers could provide.

 

The decline in the prices of consumer products.

 

Peasant savings made it possible to meet exceptional expenses (purchase of land, ceremonies) but were in no way used for consumer expenses, for which shop debt was commonly used; if the amount of these debts did not immediately increase in unsustainable proportions, it is mainly because of the sharp drop in rice prices and in some everyday consumer items such as textiles. It is difficult to follow the movement of these prices at the consumer level because of the absence or uncertain nature of market price data. Economists use import price indices, a large part of everyday food being imported, but the question is to what extent the price decline were passed on by retailers; we know, for example, that shopkeepers operating near plantations had lowered their prices enough for immigrants to desert the stores of the estates that continued to sell at a high price. But there was a market to win: what was the attitude of the small village merchant in a monopolistic position, himself pressed by suppliers less inclined to do credit, due to the contraction of Chettiar operations. To the extent that we can rely on rice price data, they confirm that the decline was only reflected incompletely and with delay and they also show that other essential foods, such as chillis or dried fish, had not decreased in similar proportions. With regard to textiles, there are no similar price lists, but a number of qualitative indications suggest that low-priced Japanese imports had largely penetrated rural markets, until the imposition of quotas under the imperial system of preference established by the Ottawa agreements led to a brutal price increase in fabrics, “still lowering the very low standard of living of the poor  peasantry of the district, according to the Government Agent in Kurunägala, and appreciably increasing the hardships of the sick caused by inadequate clothing” [99].  These reservations once made, it is indisputable that a decrease in the price of rice by almost half between 1930 and 1934 considerably lightened the burden of the vast majority of the village population: indeed, according to the figures collected by socio-economic surveys, rice represented between 50 and 75% of household spending at that time, and with the exception of the villages of the dry zone and a limited number of large rice-growing localities in the interior, more than half of the rice consumed was imported. In the villages studied by the 1936-1938 surveys, the percentage of imported rice was estimated between 60 and 75% of consumption depending on the locality. It is generally to this fall in prices that contemporaries attribute the absence of deep misery[100]. Economists studying the period argued that the overall decline in the standard of living had not been as significant as might have been expected. The maintenance of the volume level of rice imports between 1930 and 1933, while the immigrant population of the plantations tended to decline, corroborates this view. However, there was a price that did not fall, that of arrack: consequently the variations in the level of alcohol consumption would be an excellent index of the standard of living, if their movement were not affected by two variables that make its interpretation difficult: the variations in the number of plantation workers, large consumers; and the progress of the temperance movement, which reduced open consumption and encouraged clandestine distillation. Despite everything, their curve is significant especially at the level of certain districts.

 

 

Back to food production

 

In the pre-war colonial domain, the ideal of many administrators was to see the peasants stay where they were, or return to where they came from. Peasants do not bother with theories; if they have the material means, they naturally fall back on food crops as an expedient while waiting for better days. In the case of Ceylon, this decline could take the form of an extension of areas or an intensification of rice yields, or an increase in vegetable, fruit and tuber crops in gardens and on uncultivated land.

 

The state of stagnation in paddy production and yields was linked to competition from imported rice, the facilities offered by other sources of income, and the nature of production ratios in this sector. Of these three factors, one was strengthened (decrease in rice prices), another attenuated (scarcity of jobs) the third remained unchanged. No spectacular development could be expected. As a Settlement Officer noticed in 1934 “Extremely low paddy returns. The villagers hold floods and the ravages of animals responsible, but the truth is that yields are low where the fields are near a road: the work necessary for the production and marketing of rice is not paid enough”[101]. The fact that rice cultivation for self-consumption developed under these conditions in limited areas shows how severe the impact of depression was. Thus, the swampy valley bottoms (owita) of the districts of Kalutara and Galle, abandoned during the rubber boom or even before, or converted into rubber plantations, were again cleared (asweddumized, in the Anglo-Sinhalese sabir) as early as 1930[102]. In the North Western province, coconut plantations established with the help of the government on previously irrigated lands were reconverted into paddy fields[103]. In the Kandy district “the villagers who had been in the habit of supplementing their resources by work on tea and rubber plantations, no longer able to obtain this type of job, cultivated their land more intensively”[104]. But if the phenomenon had been general, it would certainly not have escaped the attention of the agronomic stations whose managers do not mention it in their reports. The problem is that we do not have any reliable statistical data on the evolution of local paddy areas and yields, because the colonial administration was concerned until then only with the plantation sector. The Director of Agriculture admitted in 1931 that “the examination of returns of rice imports are some indications of conditions bearing upon the paddy industry within the island”[105]. We are as unarmed as he was. It is not enough to compare the evolution of the population with that of rice imports: it is also necessary to weigh the result obtained according to the number of residents of the plantations who were proportionally larger consumers of imported rice than the villagers, and take into account a possible reduction in the consumption of rice per capita, which is precisely one of the data that we would be most interested to know.

 

Until 1931 rice imports varied hand in hand with the number of migrant workers, from 1931 to 1933 they were maintained despite their exodus which suggests an increase in indigenous consumption. The recovery of imports in 1934 corresponds to the return of emigrants and a catastrophic drought that annihilated local production, their strong growth in 1935 and their maintenance at a high level afterwards are linked to the sequelae of the malaria epidemic. In any case, the maintenance of imports between 1930 and 1933 excludes any significant growth in local paddy production; given the departure of more than 100,000 Indians, it suggests, on the contrary, a reduction in this production, or an unlikely increase in per capita consumption. The process of intensification of rice production without modernization described as involution, which Clifford Geertz observed in Java, did not occur in Ceylon: the British imperial system, different from the Dutch system, was based on the sharing of tasks, by virtue of the same principle that had led to the abolition of the Corn laws in the previous century. The profitability of plantations, a labour industry, was largely based on the maintenance of low wages made possible by the import of cheap Burmese rice. Planters hardly imported vegetables which were locally produced, and it was precisely in the horticultural sector that the phenomena of intensification and extension of crops were the most marked. To the point that in 1936, nearly 200 hectares of paddy fields were planted with vegetables during the dead season[106]. The first reflex of the villagers was to turn to substitute commercial production and not to food products: thus they cut down rubber trees in Kägalla to grow coffee and pineapple instead; elsewhere they experimented without much success cotton or pepper[107]. Other peasants who were less enterprising, or less stimulated by the market, or closer to famine, resorted to the traditional expedient in the years of scarcity: the cultivation of chenas on highlands. The problem was that in some districts the growth of plantations had not left the slightest space available, and that the State had strengthened its control over ‘waste lands’ since the beginning of the century. The resort to chenas was not general, according to the administrator of Kurunägala who wrote in 1932: “There was not the great increase of chena cultivation that might have been expected for food production in view of the failure to get any profit from rubber or good profit from coconut cultivation”[108].  It is the growth of permanent and not temporary cultivation of vegetables and tubers in gardens that was most marked; the phenomenon was general in the wet zone, especially near the rubber plantations, where this cultivation was undertaken by the rubber tappers who had lost their jobs, but this activity was described as unusual by some administrators when it extended to the tea areas in the upper country[109].

 

When employment resumed on plantations, what happened to food cultivation? It may have experienced a certain decline: at the end of 1938, in the district of Kägalla vast spaces that the peasants had previously planted in älwi (unirrigated rice) were abandoned: the villagers said that this cultivation required a long fallow, which is correct, but it also turned out that they had resumed work on the plantations, which led them to neglect their land. In other regions the change seems to have been sustainable with the transition from intermittent cultivation of chenas to permanent cultivation of gardens; the remarks of the administrator of Nuwara Eliya are relevant in this regard: “ wherever plots of lands are available, vegetable cultivation has become very popular in the district especially during the maha season and is the chief  source of money making in the villages; there is a ready market in the neighbouring estates and Sunday fairs”[110].

 

The growth of food production therefore did not mean that the villagers were returning to self-subsistence. On the contrary, everything indicates that it was accompanied by a marked development of trade[111]. The period of depression paradoxically coincides with that of the development of a dense road network traveled by bus lines and many lorries. After a brief period of stagnation between 1930 and 1933, the number of vehicles in circulation increased by 73% from 1933 to 1938; railway traffic, it is true, stagnated or decreased; railways were used almost exclusively for the transport of the product of large plantations, and it is likely that a transfer from one mode of transport to another occurred. But the multiplication of rural markets during the same period and the observations of contemporaries show that at least part of this spectacular increase in the vehicle fleet was due to the progress of trade in the village sector. The rise of Sunday markets (pola) predated the crisis; it was originally linked to the increase in the purchasing power of plantation residents who, not working on Sundays, went down to stock up in the neighbouring villages, buying from merchants and increasingly from small village producers. Very quickly the small urban merchants followed their example, so that the markets proliferated along all the roads leading to Colombo, Kandy, Galle or Jaffna. This spontaneous proliferation worried the authorities, first because fraud was frequent, and because it was feared that the ‘improvident villager’ would sell the stocks necessary for his livelihood under the pressure of merchants with whom he would have gone into debt, and the swelling of vegetable production was such that prices collapsed and farmers were forced to mortgage their upcoming harvests from local merchants. The return to land was far from being a panacea[112].

 

 

Land hunger and colonization schemes.

 

The redevelopment of food crops in densely populated areas where plantations controlled large areas came up against another problem: many villagers had no longer enough land at their disposal; and when they had enough, the unequal distribution of land reserved the benefits of these crops for the larger landowners. Depression was therefore indirectly responsible for an increased hunger for land. The Land Commission reports mentioned it in the late 1920s but at the time the demand for land was rather a demand from the rural and urban middle classes eager to take advantage of the high price of export products to open new plantations. While during the 1930s, it was the pressing demand of a jobless peasantry, which became aware that in lean times, it was with the small profits of the gardens or the sale of coupons that one could best survive. The period of the Great Depression coincides with the questioning of agrarian policy hitherto followed by the colonial administration[113]. In a first phase, which lasted until about the beginning of the 20th century, the villagers tried to appropriate the lands necessary for the expansion of their crops with the complicity of the indigenous headmen and against the always assertive but unequally effective will of the British administration.  In a second phase, with the establishment of the Settlement Department, the government strove to practice a direct administration to fight against the actions of headmen who, together with the planters and the new class of indigenous land traffickers, plundered the villagers of their lands, and the government of the profits it expected from sales to planters. In the early 1930s, the conjunction of the widely publicized Land Commission’s conclusions, the institution of universal suffrage, and the Depression, resulted in a wave of encroachments on uncultivated lands and, for the first time, by legislation, a ‘decriminalisation’ of these practices. The unpublished diaries of the Settlement Officers show how the normal process of land sales to peasants was disturbed. These administrators, unlike district officers, were field men who resided for days or even weeks in the villages. They were brought to know all the land transactions and get a precise idea of the financial situation of each village family. As early as 1929, the cases of peasants unable to pay for the land they claimed multiplied and traffickers and indigenous owners of large plantations took advantage of it, as in the typical example of Mangulagama village: “quite a number of lots sold were at once transferred, before the ink of the land register was dry, to the proprietor of a large coconut estate, who was there waiting for his prey. These lots would have been of inestimable value for future village expansion. Instead of that they have in effect been alienated at slightly over 10 Rs an acre to an outside capitalist”[114]. Despite the crisis supposed to dry up the resources of plantation owners, the phenomenon continued in 1932: “Piliyapitiya: the capitalists in most cases paid the full sale value, but the villagers were unable to even pay a first deposit, that is 1/10th price of their lands. In such cases, a few hours’ time was given to them to make the payment, which they did during the course of that day. There were two instances where the villagers on being told the sale value negotiated with outside capitalists who were present, and obtained from them the necessary sum. In these latter cases, it is surmised that the villagers arranged to sell their lands to the capitalists.”[115]. Settlement operations, in a situation of scarcity of money, and drying up of savings, had the consequence of aggravating the indebtedness of villagers and favouring the alienation of their lands – a result diametrically opposed to the objective pursued. Settlement Officers encountered increasing difficulties in making the villagers pay, and from 1933 were often forced to postpone sales operations, particularly in the rubber growing areas of Sabaragamuwa and in the coconut regions of Kurunägala[116]. Although the land was put up for sale at a very low price of 10 rupees per acre, sometimes no one showed up. An increased number of peasants asked for free settlements, under a clause that authorized Settlement Officers in the Kurunägala district alone to assign to each villager possessing paddy fields a triple area of highland[117]. The link between unemployment and hunger for land was made explicit in this request made by villagers in the district of Kurunägala in 1932: “Certain villagers stated that as they could not earn money as labourers, the only way they had of trying to earn money and spending their time usefully was to plant coconuts. They wanted to be allowed to plant chenas with coconuts. They were informed that they will have to wait till the settlement enquiries were completed”[118]. Sometimes the Settlement Officer, believing that depression served as an excuse for peasants not to pay, adopted a rigid attitude. One of these administrators was faced with concerted obstruction, in a village where was only 8 hectares left to share between 200 families; a phenomenon all the more significant as it was unexpected for those who took for granted the passivity of the Sinhalese peasantry: “There was something very like a riot in Nanwatta shortly after I got there. A crowd as big as that assembled for an enquiry gathered round me, weeping women with howling children and men who seemed on the verge of physical collapse demanded land”[119]. In the district of Kägalla, where the Settlement Officers hardly exercised their activities, as the amount of available land was minimal, the last uncultivated areas were eagerly coveted by villagers and planters. The government planned to establish colonies in favour of the former, and to reserve them for landless peasants unable to pay the price of a settlement: the land would therefore be allocated as usufruct and not as alienable property, to villagers recruited within a limited radius, who would be invited to reside on their lots. The first colony, that of Paspolakande, was opened in 1927; the success was not very marked at the beginning, but the second tranche of the same project, inaugurated in 1931, attracted 300 candidates for 50 plots. A series of other colonies, established after 1931 on the initiative of E.A.P. Wijeratne (the representative of the district at the State Council), were a great success; they were located almost all in the canton of Kinigoda, where for more than a generation the peasants had embarked on small-scale commercial crops, and where a systematic settlement was carried out during the 1910s, reserving for the State well-defined areas that it was therefore possible to give to allottees. In the northern part of Kinigoda there were 240 hectares for more than 1,000 candidates, and, to the testimony of the agent of government in charge of distribution “the deserving cases are so numerous that it is very difficult to make a selection”[120]. The beneficiaries rushed to plant vegetables, cassava, millet, and banana trees, at the same time as young coconut plants that would take about ten years to mature. Nevertheless, tensions soon appeared between the settlers and neighbouring villagers who did not benefit from the project while they considered these lands as theirs. The villagers took revenge by calling the settlers ‘assisted people’. The Kandyan headmen were accused of having shown bias in guiding the choice of English administrators. Caste rivalries were grafted on these jealousies, the peasants of high caste refusing to mix with Batgama villagers, the majority in this canton, and the latter being systematically excluded by some headmen, to the extent that a new distribution had to be made in their favour [121]. The hunger for land was no less in the south of the district of Kägalla: but there the poorer terroirs were hemmed in by large plantations, and the peasantry, less enterprising, had been living for two generations on the crumbs of large estates. The tradition of the cultivation of älwi [unirrigated paddy] on the chenas had however survived the alienation to the planters of the vast majority of the highlands. As early as January 1931, 176 villagers signed a petition in which they demanded forest land to plant älwi: they had read in the newspapers that it was given to the peasants of Kalutara. A year later, the demand was still pressing in localities affected by unemployment in rubber plantations, where there were many landless peasants[122]. In a group of villages located near Kitulgala, the case took a critical turn: the villagers helped themselves, without waiting for the good will of the authorities, fearing that their land would be used for a colony for the benefit of settlers from elsewhere. There was only a block of 16 hectares left, all that remained of the several hundred hectares once devoted to chena cultivation, which were gradually alienated by the peasants themselves who sold them to Muslim traffickers serving as intermediaries for planters, or to small indigenous capitalists. Regretting their mistake, a number of peasants reoccupied the land of one of these plantations that the buyer abandoned due to the depression. Finally the Marxist deputy N.M. Perera elected in 1936 obtained from the authorities in 1938 the release of the ban on cultivating reserved land in the Kelani Ganga valley, this same region where six years before the peasants had taken the initiative to occupy land. In a further move, Perera pressed for the State to buy poorly managed plantations to distribute them to peasant allottees[123]. In these new demanding attitudes, it is difficult to determine what was the share of peasant initiative and that of external incentives. Informal interviews with former residents of the district I had in 1978-1979 suggest the following pattern: the new electoral system deprived indigenous headmen of their privilege of exclusive intermediaries between the colonial power and the peasantry; some politicians took advantage of it and their initiatives released a long-contained flow of demands. The new settlements soon escaped the control of the traditional leaders, to become the business of politicians, flanked by influential mudalali (petty traders) established nearby, who quickly kept the peasants in their debt and became the new notables.

 

 

A limited rural mobility

 

Rural exodus represented in many countries another way out of the Great Depression. But this possibility was limited, in Ceylon, for two reasons: one of an economic nature: the urban sector was no less affected by the crisis, to the point that population movement was oriented rather in the direction of the villages; the other of a social nature: one of the most striking features of the behaviour of the Sinhalese peasants was their reluctance to move away from their village. Nevertheless, there was a prospect, the repopulation of the jungles of the dry zone. The Rajarata (land of kings) had remained for a millennium and a half the center of the power and prosperity of the ancient hydraulic civilization. Abandoned between the 12th and 14th centuries as a result of a combination of unfavourable factors, the Rajarata had attracted the attention of colonial administrators at the end of the 19th century. While archeologists with the support of the authorities began to raise the ruins of the ancient cities of Anuradhapura and Polonnaruwa, engineers restored some of the ancient dams, and a few nationalists promoted the idea of returning to a glorious past.  But at that time no mass movement was emerging: on the contrary, it was difficult to attract settlers, and in general only adventurers or members of Kandyan ‘low castes’ (especially Batgama) settled there. Many abandoned after a season of cultivation, undermined by malaria, discouraged by a material and psychological isolation particularly trying for peasants accustomed to the sociable existence of the villages, and for whom recourse to family solidarity in case of need was vital. The attachment to the terroir, considered by contemporaries as a cultural trait, is one of those complex phenomena whose analysis raises theoretical controversies. There were exceptions to the refusal to expatriate, such as that of the inhabitants of the southern districts of Galle and Matara who since the Dutch period migrated to the rest of the island to work as artisans, carpenters, shopkeepers and traffickers of all kinds. What was special about them? In terms of caste, there were proportionally many Karava (originally fishermen), Salagama (cinnamon peelers), Durava (toddy extractors), and relatively few Goyigama (theoretically cultivators). The three above mentioned castes settled in the island at a relatively later date and have always been more mobile if only because of their original professions. A second originality of the region is that it had experienced early population growth and was commonly considered ‘overcrowded’[124].

 

With regard to the Kandyans of the central districts of the country, if it is true that until the middle of the 20th century they showed many preventions against mobility. Before the 1940s, two factors seem to have slowed down emigration: the insufficiency of means of transport, and the influence of dominant families who retained enough material resources to ensure the livelihood of their dependents, especially members of the ‘lower castes’, and enough prestige to prevent them from leaving. In this regard, one can quote two successive administrators of the district of Kägalla[125]: “In the division most affected by the fall in the price of tea and rubber, the pressure of economic stress is not as severe as one believes it to be from the considerable number of men who, even in the villages, want work. I have been astounded by the answers I have had from village headmen when I questioned them closely on the number of men who are not only landless or out of work, but also without any relatives on whom they can sponge (…) And yet when I enquire what prospect there is of getting these men from the area near  Talduwa to migrate 15 miles to peasant proprietor allotments I hope to make in Kitulgala, I am assured that the men will not go even so far from their village. Economic stress in this locality then seems to fall short of the point when it exerts enough pressure to disturb custom and habit”. In other words, it is the survival of traditional structures that would make it possible to face the crisis.  “The low mobility of the villager is not entirely due to his lack of entrepreneurial spirit, but at least partially to the awareness that once out of his home and his family group, essential products such as salt, jaggery (palm sugar), sugar or tea will cost him more, but that an acre of land will hardly provide him with a marketable surplus”. A Settlement Officer reported the answer of a simple peasant whom he suggested to emigrate: “And how shall we live while we build new houses and wait for the harvest?”[126]

 

The pressure of the crisis finally proved to be strong enough to push a few villagers to migrate in the mid-1930s,  when the government organized the allotment of uncultivated areas at a reasonable distance from the villages, in the Kalutara district (Pasdun korale east), and later in well-organised colonies in the Rajarata (Kalawewa, Nachchaduwa)  “The effect of the slump in the stimulation of colonization have been very noticeable during the year under review”, wrote in 1932 the Land Commissioner[127] “The peasant is at ordinary times attached to his village and naturally loath to emigrate. During the last 50 years the population of the wet zone has increased by leaps and bounds. Up to the beginning of the present slump this population was largely supported by various forms of employment which was provided at its doors by the prosperity of the major industries. As the depression increased these means of livelihood were gradually curtailed and in some cases cut off altogether. The village population was thrown back upon its resources, and it was then found that the available village land was insufficient to support the largely increased numbers. The result has been that the villagers of the cultivating classes have been more and more compelled to go further afield and seek localities in which Crown land still remained available for allotment to them. This has enabled extensive settlement of peasants from the Kalutara and Colombo districts in the Pasdun korale east colonies, from Galle district in Urugasmanhandiya area, and the development of large acreages under Nachchaduwa and Kalawewa in the North Central province”. But next year “the return of better times in the tea and rubber industry providing employment for increasing numbers of villagers, who have for the last 2 or 3 years been deprived of this additional means of livelihood, militates against colonization. The villager is naturally loath to leave his home and permanently migrate to what is to him a new country (…) He will only be induced to make the plunge after he is satisfied that sufficient means of livelihood are not to be found in his own village”[128]

 

The attraction of the Rajarata was a new phenomenon during the 1930s. It was linked to the publicity given to colonization projects, and to the rise of a nostalgic representation of the Sinhalese past, which presented the rebirth of this lost country as a revenge on the British occupier and the Tamil invader. But the illusion was short-lived; the State councilor of Anuradhapura, a non-conformist former British administrator, gave this picture of the influx of migrants[129]: “A great number of unemployed from all parts of the island have come to Anuradhapura this year. They come without money and without making enquiries as to the conditions there. They start with a few rupees, either on foot or by bus, and get nothing”. These settlements were far from successful. In addition to the sociological obstacles already mentioned, and countless errors due to the inexperience of those responsible, they stumbled on the problem of the weakness of rice prices. This led to a reflux towards the villages of origin, obvious in 1933-1934. It is true that many villagers returned to the colonies afterwards, judging by the number of settlers established in Rajarata at the time of the 1946 census. But it is difficult to measure the exodus accurately due to a lack of indications on the regions of origin of these new inhabitants and because of the excessive gap between censuses. For example, the village surveys of 1936-38 suggest that outmigration occurred from the villages of the district of Kurunägala, because they note that in 9 villages out of 10 the population decreased compared to 1931, and in four of them by more than 40%; but the location of the villages where the decrease was the strongest suggests an alternative interpretation: mortality resulting from the malaria epidemic. In other districts, the correlation between migration and depression is clearer: in Matale, out of 6 villages studied, 5 lost an average of 11.8% of their population, including 2 that lived from employment on plantations. The only locality whose population increased was a village in the dry zone living in self-subsistence. In his personal diary, Bernard Aluvihare, the elected representative of the region, wrote that landless and unemployed peasants left without enthusiasm to a colony near Elahera, and complained bitterly about the favouritism shown by the indigenous headmen during the distribution of land. In the district of Chilaw, where the population decrease was on average 14%, the most affected village, Bandarahena, was also the one where the proportion of coconut estates belonging to absentee owners was the highest. Who left? Landless peasants, mainly squatters from coastal areas, emigrated first, followed by indigenous peasants forced to sell their land to their creditors[130].

 

Solidarity and patronage

 

In the Sinhalese villages, the extended family was no longer the basic social unit. But if conjugal household was the rule, collective solidarity had nevertheless lost none of its strength. In each locality coexisted a certain number of lineages that traditionally divided the terroir into as many lots (pangu) and it is within the lineage that solidarity was first exercised, that allowed the poor relatives to obtain means of subsistence. There was indeed a whole range of invisible resources in the village economy. Some fall under what could be described as a remnant of the gathering economy. It was accepted that poor children, or widows who were not remarried, come to pick fruit in their parents’ gardens, which were never fenced. It was also a rule that they were employed during transplanting and harvesting. They were present at all parties, weddings or funerals, and fed abundantly on these occasions. The tattumaru system described above was able to allow a number of jobless day labourers to reintegrate into the rice cycle, claiming rights that they may have neglected during the period of prosperity. But this phenomenon that could have led to an intensification of rice cultivation probably remained limited, the day labourers being precisely those whose shares in the pangu were too minute to ensure them a livelihood. On the other hand, it is very likely that the practice of ‘family sharecropping’ developed: it is still extremely common[131]. A poor relative was assured of obtaining from a wealthy owner a plot of paddy land or highland, for the duration of a growing season (on average six months). But these expedients were not enough for the poorest, especially since some lineages were poorer than others. In this case, more than the solidarity of the village as a whole, it is the protection of a powerful individual that would be sought.

 

Patronage relationships are one of the most conspicuous features of Sinhalese society. This was the case since the time of the Kandyan kingdom where, from the king to the peasant, a feudal-type hierarchical organisation grafted on the caste system ensured everyone by virtue of their place in the pyramid a capital of rights and obligations. So it remains today, where any successful man, politician or merchant, civil servant or owner, must maintain a clientele of obliged. To what extent and in what way these links have helped mitigate the effects of depression is one of the questions that is not possible to answer with the help of reliable data. It is certain that the depression initially reduced the ability of the powerful to maintain their clientele at least until the institution of coupons. On the other hand, the disintegration of the social position of traditional leaders limited their means of action. Nevertheless, in Kandyan regions where the caste system remained alive in the 1930s, the dependent of an aristocrat Radala, of a temple (devale) or a Buddhist monastery (vihare), could always expect from his or her protector the assurance of means of subsistence. And in areas where new notables (shopkeepers and teachers) sought to carve out a reputation, their assistance would not fail; but in the context of increasing monetisation, the informal interest loan may tend to prevail over the pure and simple donation. Finally, the marked renaissance of Buddhism in the first half of this century encouraged charitable acts, by virtue of an ethics that valued the performance of meritorious acts (pinkama). It is to charity that colonial administrators attributed  the survival of many inhabitants: “the dislocation of the island’s economic life in recent years has very gravely affected the lives and fortunes of very many thousands, and the sums available for relief, whether governmental or local, seem pathetically small and would be so, were it not for the abiding charity of the people which alone keeps utter destitution from of very many homes”[132].

 

Crime and the Depression.

 

There is a tradition of rural violence in Ceylon, probably prior to the colonial period, but certainly aggravated by the trouble it has caused. The research conducted by John Rogers makes it possible to clarify its contours[133]. This tradition of violence was clearly different from that of near India or Latin America, for example, in that it had an individual, or family character, more than collective; the main motives were marital jealousy, disputes of boundaries, succession quarrels. The level of physical violence was very high: 6.9 murders per 100,000 inhabitants in 1933, compared to 0.5 in Great Britain, but 10.8 in the United States[134]. It appears to have worsened during the 1880s and 1890s, probably due to the disturbances caused by the great development of plantations and the population growth. The only type of rural crime that was similar to Indian practices was cattle theft that fed a vast traffic over which Muslim dealers held control. In parallel with the growth of employment outside the village, new types of crime (thefts on plantations or construction sites, burglaries) developed whose variations followed those of the economic situation. Thus, the theft of latex became prevalent when rubber reached high prices, in 1925; on the other hand, in times of low prices and restriction of employment on plantations, unemployment promoted theft of food produce.  In 1923, in the two districts of Kalutara and Kägalla, a growth in crime of the order of 40% was reported, which was of great concern to producers. It was to be expected that the depression of the 1930s would result in a general increase in this type of petty crime. Police statistics and administrative reports provide abundant but repetitive information on a phenomenon to which the authorities have always been very sensitive. The seriousness of the phenomenon may have been exaggerated by the interest they had in it, just as police statistics were inflated by the growth in the number of police stations created to fight against it. The police superintendent, in his 1933 report, analyzed in detail the mechanisms responsible for the rise of crime[135]. “The low country estates in particular provided employment for the villager when not employed in the cultivation of his own fields (…) With many rubber estates abandoned or placed in a care and maintenance basis, and with the cessation of all building or contract work, those who worked as tappers and others who worked as masons and carpenters are living in the villages with nothing to do and unable to earn a regular wage. There may be little acute poverty in the villages, but there is lack of ready money and the smaller towns where the inhabitants catered for the needs of estate labourers have been particularly very hard hit. There is a great temptation for such people to commit crime. Another result of the depression has been the increased attention paid by the villagers to vegetable cultivation with the result that there have been disputes over land which had previously been lain idle. With less money available for settling land disputes by litigation, villagers have been tempted to take the law into their own hands”. The general evolution of the number of crimes and offenses was much faster than that of the adult population. It ran parallel to that of the economic situation from 1926, the recovery of 1934 resulting in a slight drop in the number of cases. However, this decline can also be explained by the malaria epidemic. Local administrators did not always agree with the police to blame the depression for the situation, and the comparison of the curves by province shows that some of the strongest growths were recorded in areas (North Central and Northern Provinces) where there were no plantations. The distribution by type of crime shows that the progression of acts of violence was stronger than that of burglaries; the depression reducing the value of stolen objects, cases went to the rural court and thus escaped police statistics, but thefts of livestock and agricultural products were experiencing a spectacular boom[136]. This point will keep us because it is especially significant of the mechanisms of depression. In this area too, there was a regression towards self-sufficiency, or rather towards subsistence at the expense of neighbours. The villagers of the North North Western Province returned to the abduction of cattle from neighbouring localities: this type of crime, in strong regression during the 1920s, regained in 1933 its level of 1921. It declined in 1934, particularly in the rubber-growing areas where recruitment resumed, but reached a record level in 1935[137]. The period of the malaria epidemic, which was accompanied by a severe food shortage, resulted in a 100% increase in cattle theft in the North North Western Province. The animals were taken to an isolated place and slaughtered; while in the past the meat was sold to Muslim butchers, it was consumed on the spot, which shows how severe the famine was; it was also believed that beef consumption could restore health, by virtue of a total inversion of values in the Ceylon Buddhist context, but that knowledge of the effects of the major European plagues makes less surprising[138]. While slaughtering cattle was a serious business, the spoils of coconut or other fruits and small shoplifting were committed in the absolute indifference of the population and generally did not give rise to complaints to the police, so that their indisputable progression is difficult to quantify[139].  This indifference was not free of ulterior motives; harvesting fruit in the garden of a wealthier parent was a right that no one disputed without being accused of avariciousness. Doing it on the domain of an absentee owner was not fundamentally different: if this owner had established his plantation on land bought from the villagers for a dish of rice, or even downright usurped, the act was appreciated as a fair return of things to which the planter had to resign himself if he did not want to attract the hostility of an entire village. The administration itself was divided: while the police was considering organising patrols in the coconut districts, the head of the Settlement department wrote: “Dowbiggin (the police chief) mentions that in the North Western province burglaries are increasing and that people thrown out of work in estates are stealing foodstuffs right and left. These are probably the people who appeared before us classified as landless. Colonies for these people will be better than jails”[140]. The growth of crime was also noticeable at the local level: the 1936 surveys came across a village where in 1935 all shopkeepers were victims of burglaries while the thing had never happened before. This village was the only one among those in the sample where the plantations had closed[141]. In addition to these petty offenders, professional burglars were also affected by depression: forced to expand their range of action, each catch being meagre, they were increasingly using the bus network. Organised theft was a regular practice in particular villages often located on the border of two provinces. It was often associated with clandestine alcohol distillation and thrived especially near plantations. Gangs of robbers organised as in the time of the famous Sardiel, the Ceylonese Robin Hood of mid-19th century, had disappeared at the beginning of the 20th century. Sign of the times, some reconstituted themselves in the North Western province, long famous for its spirit of insubordination; they were made of hungry peasants, or of beggars scouring local fairs, rather than of professionals[142].

 

The impact of the depression on the level of crime is clear from the point of view of law and order. Reversing the perspective, it may be that petty crime had indeed allowed an appreciable number of people to get out of trouble, somehow replacing the resources offered by occasional work. Looting was a constant in the areas of coconut cultivation and contributed to the subsistence of some marginal families (widows in charge of children, ‘low caste’ groups); it could develop in times of difficulty and contribute to the subsistence of a wider margin of the population. Before concluding this evocation of crime, it would be necessary to question the existence of social violence directed against wealthy peasants and village headmen such as rural societies in Asia provide frequent examples. We have not conducted exhaustive investigations on this subject, but there is nothing to suggest that depression has led to a significant swelling of this phenomenon, of which we have encountered several isolated cases, particularly in Sabaragamuwa and North Western provinces. [143]

 

*

 

Thus the impact of depression was felt unequally in the Ceylonese countryside. Geographical disparities: the crisis spared the villages of the dry zone that lived in self-subsistence, but hit those who marketed their paddy production; it remained more moderate in localities practising polyculture and those where the proximity of major roads favoured the development of horticultural production for the market; it reached its maximum intensity in villages dependent on a single source of income, be it rubber, coconut or even tea, and where the number of landless peasants was high. Social disparities: the crisis revealed the class stratification of the rural world in Ceylon. Indian plantation workers who had been able to keep their jobs had their standard of living reduced, but escaped misery; others were forced to emigrate. Their Ceylonese colleagues had their wages amputated by 50% and their number of working days reduced. Rural artisans working for plantations lost their jobs. Those of them who had a regular job become casual workers, and many casual workers were left out, especially from 1933-1934, when the coupon system resulted in the closure of small indigenous plantations where most were employed. Poor peasant micro-fundiaries with less than 2 or 3 acres of land experienced very difficult years until 1933-1934; they subsisted by cultivating part of their land in vegetables. The restriction system only partially lightened their fate. However, the decrease in jobs deprived them of complementary resources. Wealthy peasants and small non-cultivator owners (small traders, teachers, etc.), after being seriously affected, managed after 1933-1934 to take advantage of the situation by turning into rentiers (which brought them closer to the big planters): it is this category of small notables that began to make its voice heard in politics, and which would later form the social basis of the Bandaranaike regime. It is this class that most loudly proclaimed its fear of seeing ‘Indian immigrants’ steal the jobs of villagers. Indeed, there was a relationship between the coupon system, the closure of small plantations, the dismissal of Sinhalese workers, and the renewed Indian immigration of 1934; but in this process, small and large planters had objectively the same interests. The weight of the crisis, especially in rubber-growing areas, was passed from the capital onto the workforce.

 

 

 

[1] See the synthetic study of PEEBLES (Patrick) The Plantation Tamils of Ceylon, London, 2001, who argues that ‘coolies’ were not ‘migrants’ but a settled population; and the more detailed research work of WESUMPERUMA (Devapriya) Indian Immigrant Plantation Workers of Sri Lanka, a Historical Perspective, 1880-1910, Nugegoda, 1986.

[2] JAYAWARDENA (L.R.U.), The Supply of Sinhalese Labour to Ceylon Plantations, 1830-1930: a Study of Imperial Policy in a Peasant Society. Cambridge, Ph. D. thesis, 1963; MEYER (E.), “Between Village and Plantation: Sinhalese Estate Labour in British Ceylon” in M. Gaborieau & A. Thorner eds., Asie du Sud, Traditions et Changements. Paris, 1979 p. 459-468.

 

[3] VAN DEN DRIESEN (I.H.), The Long Walk. Indian Plantation Labour in Sri Lanka in the 19th century. New Delhi, 1997.

[4] WESUMPERUMA (D.), op. cit, 1986; and MEYER (E.) “A dramatic episode of labour migration to Sri Lanka: Marathi coolies in the Sabaragamuwa rubber estates during the early 20th century” Sabaragamuwa University Journal vol 1 n° 1, pp. 11-28, 1998.

[5] Yearbook of the Planter’s Association of Ceylon (hereafter YPAC) 1928 p. 75

[6] AR Controller of Labour (hereafter: AR CofL) 1939 p. O23; INDIA, Report of the Royal Commission on Labour in India, 1931: Madras and Coorg, written and oral evidence, vol II.

[7] YPAC 1927 p.47-48

[8] INDIA, Report of the Working of the Indian Emigration Act, the rules issued thereunder and of the Labour Ordinances of Ceylon, by the Agent of the Government of India in Ceylon. Calcutta (hereafter AGIC), 1932 p. 18

[9] INDIA, Census Reports, 1931, Madras, p. 45-47.

[10] AR CofL 1932 p.O19; see also JAYARAMAN 1975.

[11] AGIC 1929 p.4 ; 1930 p.5;

[12] AGIC 1931 p.8

[13] AGIC 1932 p. 1-2, 1933 p.3; AR CofL 1933

[14] AGIC 1934 p.3; CEYLON, Sessional Paper (hereafter SP) III of 1938, p.27-28

[15] AGIC 1935 p.4, 1936 p.3 ; 1937 p.6-7, 1938 p7 ; AR CofL 1937 p. 030, 031, 037, et 1938 p.044-45.

[16] AGIC 1932 p.2

[17] AR CofL 1937 P.O30

[18] A contemporary analysis of the social impact of great value is: SUNDARAM (L.)  “The Indian labour force in Ceylon : the impact of the economic crisis” International Labour Review, July 1933

[19] AGIC 1931 p.10-14

[20] AGIC 1931 p.22

[21] AR CofL 1938 p.O44

[22] AGIC 1932 p.10

[23] AGIC 1930 p. 18-19

[24] SUNDARAM (L.) op. cit. 1933

[25] AGIC 1930 P.8-9, 1931 p. 13

[26] AGIC 1930, 1931 p. 13 ; AGIC 1933 p.9, 1934 p.5

[27] AGIC 1932 p.6-7 et 14

[28] AGIC 1935 P.6, 1936 p.5, 1937 p. 11-12. AR CofL 1937 p.O44

[29]  CEYLON, Sessional Paper 23 of 1934, Memoranda and Evidence of the Ceylon Banking Commission (hereafter CBC II) p.475, cf AGIC 1935

[30] AGIC 1930 p. 11-12

[31] AGIC 1937 p. 15-17

[32] MALAMOUD (Ch.) ed. Debt and Debtors, New Delhi, 1983

[33] AGIC 1934 p. 14

[34] AR Inspector General of Police 1933 p. A19

[35] AGIC 1932 p. 12-13; AGIC 1934 p.11-13, 1939 p. 13

[36] JAYAWARDENA (V.K.), The Rise of the Labor Movement in Sri Lanka, Durham, 1972, chap. XIII

[37] AR IGP 1933 p.A31

[38] AGIC 1934 p. 21-22

[39] CO54/55531; AGIC 1937 p.7-8

[40] AGIC 1939 p. 26-28, AR CofL 1939 p. O22-23

[41] AR CofL 1939 p.O9-10; CO54/55569 “Things Ceylonese”, diary of Sir A. Caldecott, 1940

[42] Interview by the author, Talewala, Kägalla district, July 1979; see also AR Registrar of Cooperative Societies (hereafter RCS) 1933, p. E4

[43] SCOTT (J.C.) Weapons of the Weak. Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance in South-East Asia. Newhaven, Yale University Press, 1985; also The Moral Economy of the Peasant. Newhaven, Yale University Press, 1976

[44] AR CofL 1931 p.O35, AR Western Province 1929 p.A4-5, AR Kalutara 1929 p.A23, AR Kägalla 1930 p. I16 and 1932 p.I21

[45] JAYAWARDENA (L.R.U.) op.cit. 1963, p.277-278

[46] CBC II p. 402-405 and p.488

[47] CEYLON Bulletins of the Ministry of Labour, Industry and Commerce n° 5 to 12: Reports of the Economic Surveys of Villages (hereafter: SV) Kurunägala n°10 (70%), Kalutara n° 6 (80%), Chilaw n° 7 (75%), Puttalam n°8 (74%), Galle n° 11 (86%), Matale n° 9 (84%), Matara n° 12 (60%); CBC II p.181 (Ratemahatmaya of Wiyaluwa)

[48] NICHOLLS (L.) & NIMALASURIYA (A.), “A nutritional survey of the poorer classes in Ceylon”, in Ceylon Journal of Science, sect. D, November 1941.

[49] SV Matale p.25 (Selagama, Palleaswedduma, Wellangahawatta, Tibbotuwawa were villages connected with plantations, Bibile was a dry zone village) cf CBC II p.381

[50] DENHAM (E.B.), Ceylon at the Census of 1911, Colombo 1912.

[51] AR CofL 1932 p.O33 ; AR Nuwara Eliya 1932 p.B27

[52] SLNA Colonial Secretariat Records F/407 /1930

[53] Diary GA Ratnapura 18.01.1934 ; see also  Diaries Settlement Officer 25.11.32, Assistant Settlement Officer (ASO) Fernando November 1932, ASO Abeyakoon April 1933.

[54] MEYER (E.) op. cit. 1979  

[55] SP XX of 1934 p. 76

[56] AR Sabaragamuwa 1928 p.I4, 1929 p.I4-5, 1930 p.I5, 1931 p.I4

[57] SP I of 1929 (report on Karawita by Brayne)

[58] Diaries ASO Northcroft 8.02.1932, ASO Cocks 5-7.01.1931, ASO Aluvihare, 30.04.1939

[59] SLNA 26/1408 (15.10.30, 22.10.32, 9.12.320, 13 02.35) ; SLNA 26/256 (15.12.36)

[60] SV Kurunägala p.3 & 8, SV Chilaw & Puttalam, passim; AR North Western Province 1929 p.F18, 1933 p.F4; AR Registrar of Cooperative Societies 1933 p. E3

[61] Diary AGA Kägalla 18.12.1933 et 29.01.1934; diary ASO Sandys 21-22.10.1930 (Timbulkotamulla).

[62] AR Matara 1930 p.C10 ; SP VII of 1937 p. 12

[63] CO54/914/14 Ceylon Association to Cowell, 30.11.1932

[64] AR Nuwara Eliya 1932 p.B27, 1936 p.B33; cf diary ASO Fernando, November 1932

[65] AR Uva 1932 p.H6, CBC II p. 406-408

[66] AR CofL 1932 p.O33-34 ; SV Galle p.37, SP III of 1938 p.27, CO54/975, memorandum by the Controller of Labour 19.06.1938

[67] Diary AGA Kägalla 19.11.32, 18.07.33; AR Southern Province 1933 p.C4; AR Sabaragamuwa 1933 p.I4, 1934 p. I3; CBCII p.472 sq.

[68] AR Kägalla 1920 p. I16, AR Sabaragamuwa 1921 p.I2

[69] SP VII of 1937 p. 11-12

[70] SV Kalutara p. 26, AR CofL 1931 p. O35-36

[71] Diary AGA Kägalla 20.02.34, CEYLON Hansard 1935 p. 19

[72] Diary sAGA Kägalla 14.11.32

[73] AR RCS 1936 p.E5-6, SV Kalutara p. 44, AR Kägalla 1936 p. I22, AR Matale 1937 p.B21, AR CofL 1937 p.O15; Young Ceylon January and July 1936

[74] AR CofL 1938; AGIC 1938 p.8

[75] AR RCS 1936 p.E27-28, AR Central Province 1936 p.B5; AR ColL 1936 p. O5, 1937 p.O16-18, 1938 p.O20-21, 1939 p.O15; SP III of 1938 p. 32 et 36

[76] AR RCS 1937 p.E4, AR Ka1utara 1938 p.A22

[77] AR Kägalla 1932 p.I21, CBC II p. 105

[78] CBC II p.512 sq. and SV Hambantota, passim.

[79] CBC II p.216, AR Eastern Province 1932 and 1933 p. E4, AR Mannar 1932 p.D17, KARIAPPER (M.S.) Our Economic Needs, Kalmunai, 1940, SP IV of 1931 (Report of the paddy marketing committee)  

[80] CO54/914/14 Ceylon Association to Cowell, 30.11.1932

[81] CO54/874 Evidence of the select committee on Rubber restriction, 1925, p.9; AR Western Province 1928 p.A5

[82] BAUER 1948; KUNHARDT (J.C.) – The Future of rubber, London, 1930, p. 10; PEIRIS, 1972.

[83] Divisional Agricultural Officer Report, Central (hereafter DAOR) 1928 p.5, 1929 p,4, AR Director of Agriculture 1930, 1931 p.O5 and O39, 1932 p.05. Diaries ASO Fernando, 30.03.1933, ASO Rasaretnam July 1934.

[84] SLNA 25/14, Minutes of the L.C.P.A. 8.07.1927. cf OLIVER (H.M.) Economic Opinion and Policy in Ceylon, Cambridge 1957 p.16

[85] Diary AGA Kägalla 10.04.1934 and 10.08.1933; AR Tea Controller 1933 p. S8-9, 1934 p. S5

[86] Diaries ASO Rasaretnam July 1934, ASO Abeyakoon, july 1934, AGA Kägalla 10.08.1934

[87] SLNA 25/20/14 (Wijeratne papers); Ceylon Daily News 24.09.34 (Meeting of the Kelani Valley Planter’s Association)

[88]  CEYLON Hansard 1938 p.1686 (Kannangara] Ceylon Government Gazette, 24.09.37 p.984 (a case of Fiscal sale); SV Kalutara p.33

[89] SV Galle p.20 sq; AR Tea Controller 1938 appendix A; contra: CBC II p.472 ; SV Kalutara p.4 sq.

[90] AR Central Province 1934 p.B5-6, AR Tea Controller 1935 p,S4, AR Rubber Controller 1935 p.T8, AR Matale 1936 p. B21; AR Southern Province 1936 p.C5, AR Matara 1936 p. C21, AR Sabaragamuwa 1936 p.I6, 1937 p.I8

[91] CEYLON Hansard 1933 p. 727, p.873 (G.K. W. Perera), Ceylon Daily News 16.02.35 (S.A. Wickramasinghe) , CEYLON Hansard 1936 p. 26 and 407 (N.M. Perera)

[92] CEYLON Hansard 1938, p. 26-27 and 407-408; cf Sessional Paper VI of 1938 p.85

[93] AR RCS 1933 p.E6, SV Kurunägala p. 9-10, DAOR (central) 1929-p.4, AR Director of Agriculture 1931 p.06, AR North Western Province 1933 p.F4, 1936 p.F7, SP VII of 1937 p.12

[94] CBC II p,488, SP VII of 1947, p.7

[95] AR RCS 1931 p.E5

[96] Diaries ASO Jones Bateman 4-10.03.1933, and ASO Abeyakoon 25-28.04.33; AR Southern Province 1930 p.C3, Diary Ratnapura 26-27.09.34, AR Sabaragamuwa 1933 p. I4

[97] AR Kalutara 1932. p.A19, AR Southern Province 1932 p.C7, AR North Western Province 1932 p. F7, AR Sabaragamuwa 1932 p.I11, 1933 p.I12, AR Matale 1936 p.B26

[98] SV Kurunägala p. 30-31, SV Rayigam korale p. 10, SV Kalutara p. 18 ; CBC II p. 505

[99] AR 1935 p.F9

[100] Diary ASO Rasaretnam Feb. 1934, SV Kurunägala p. 13; AR Matale 1930 p.B17 & 1932 p. B21, AR Central Province 1932 p.B3, AR North Western Province 1932 p. F3-4. See also COREA (G.) op. cit. 1975 p.97

[101] Diary ASO Rasaretnam, February 1934

[102] AR Kalutara 1930 p.A14, 1932 p.A17. AR Southern Province 1930 p.C3, 1933 p.C4, AR Director of Agriculture 1931 p. D71.

[103] CBC II p.385 (Director of the irrigation department)

[104] AR Central Province 1932 p.B4

[105] AR Director of Agriculture 1931 p.D8

[106] AR Director of Agriculture 1936 p.D12

[107] AR Director of Agriculture 1930 p. D23, 1931 p. D40

[108] AGA Ke 18.01.31, 15.03.32, AR Ke 1938 p.I18. AR NWP 1932 p.F3-4 

[109] AR Director of Agriculture 1931 p. D71 (Kalutara), AR Sabaragamuwa 1931 p. I4, AR Kägalla 1931 p.I18-19, 1930 p.I16. AR Southern Province 1931 p.C4. AR Matara 1931p.C14. AR North Western Province 1931 p.F3-4. SLNA 26/1408 22.10.32 (Matara) AR Nuwara Eliya 1932 p.B27.

[110] AGA Kägalla 1-2.11.38 AR Nuwara Eliya 1936 p.B35

[111] DE SILVA (K.M.) ed., History of Ceylon vol III, Peradeniya 1973, p. 303-316

[112] AR NWP 1928 p.F4, 1934 P.F4, CBC II p.517. AR CP 1938 p.B5 ; AR Sabaragamuwa 1933 p. I4, AR Director of Agriculture 1936 P.012, AR CofL 1932 p.034; Diary AGA Kägalla 21.03.1933

[113] See Eric Meyer, “Towards a new land policy in the Kandyan regions: from the Ceylon Land Commission of 1927-1928 to the Kandyan Peasantry Commission of 1949-1950” https://slkdiaspo.hypotheses.org/6972

[114] Diary ASO Sandys, October 1929

[115] Diary ASO Rasaretnam 6-7.12.1932

[116] Diaries ASO Northoroft Augist 1932 (Lassekanda), ASO Light March 1933 (Eratme], ASO Cocks September 1934 (Alutgama, Wanduragala, Hitgoda Walpola) cf. AR Matale 1931 p.B23

[117] Diaries ASO Fernando 4 & 23,07.30, ASO Christoffelz 1930 & 23 .04.1931

[118] Diary ASO Abeyakoon, july 1932

[119] Diary ASO Jones Bateman 5.07.32, 4 et 10.03.33 cf Diary ASO Ingledow 22 10.30

[120] Diary AGA Kägalla 8.12.1927, 11.01.1931, 5,09.31 to 12.12.31, 12.09.32

[121] Diary AGA Kägalla 27,06.32, 22.11.33,11.01,34

[122] Diary AGA Kägalla 18.01.31, 15.03.32 et 18.03.32

[123] Diary AGA Kägalla 5.02.32, 17.04, 11.06, 11.07.1934; 27.11.1937, 10-12.10.1938; AR Kägalla 1938 p.I8.

[124] SV Galle p.5

[125] Diary AGA Kägalla 18.10.1932 & 21.01.1933

[126] Diary ASO Sandys, 20.05.1930 (Doratiyagedara)

[127] AR Land Commissioner 1932, p. B5

[128] AR Land Commissioner 1933 p.P6, AR Western Province 1932 p.A4

[129] CEYLON Hansard 1931 (2) p.231 (H. Freeman)

[130] SV Kurunägala p.3 , SV Matale p.2; AR Land Commissioner 1933 p.P6; Diary B. Aluvihare

12 et 19.03.39

[131] SV Kalutara p.2

[132] AR CofL 1932 p.O37

[133] ROGERS (J.), Crime, Justice and Society in Colonial Sri Lanka. London, 1987

[134] AR Inspector General of Police (hereafter IGP) 1933 p.A16; AR Western Province 1925 p.A4, SLNA 25/14: LCPA Annual General meeting 1924 and minutes 28.03.1924

[135] AR IGP 1933 p. A13

[136] AR Sabaragamuwa 1933 p. I10, AR Western Province 1932 p.A6, AR IGP 1933 p.A17 and 1934 p.A11

[137] AR IGP 1931 p.A11 & 15, 1933 p.A19, 1934 p.A16

[138] AR North Western Province 1935 p.F10 & F15, Diary AGA Kägalla 19.06.35

[139] AR IGP 1930, AR RCS 1936 p. E5-6, AR Central Province 1936 p.B5, AR Southern Province 1931 p.C5

[140] AR NWP 1936 p.F12; SO 7.11.1930

[141] SV Kalutara p.33 (Iddagoda)

[142] AR IGP 1933 p.A17, 1934 p.A13-15, AR North Western Province 1935 p. F9, Diary Kurunägala 2.02.1935.

[143] Diaries Ratnapura 2106.1935, AGA Puttalam 21.01.1935

 

.

Four years of the Batticaloa Justice Walk

Photos by Mia Abeyawardene

Every morning for the past four years, come rain or shine, a group of dedicated activists and relatives of the forcibly disappeared have been making the long walk in Batticaloa town from St Sebastian Church to Gandhi Park, a route that has become a daily form of resistance. In a world of fleeting digital trends and mass mobilisations, the Justice Walk offers a different way of thinking about change: one that is slow, mindful and ingrained in the unwavering commitment of everyday practice.

The roots of this movement trace back to Sri Lanka’s emergency periods. When gathering in groups was prohibited and protests required elusive state permissions, a unique form of dissent emerged: the single file march. By walking alone but together – separated by just enough distance to avoid the legal definition of an unlawful assembly – activists found a way to say what needed to be said without uttering a word.

This history of foot pilgrimages evolved in the early 2000s, often led by the mothers of the disappeared. These women would walk from temple to temple or church to church, turning their personal grief into a public call for accountability. The current iteration of the Justice Walk found its immediate spark during the aragalaya in 2022.

When the central protest sites in Colombo were dismantled and curfews were imposed on May 12 four years ago, a small group met in a private home. They were nervous but they decided to reclaim the public space. They began with a plan for five days, which then extended to 10. “It kind of just happened that we wanted to continue,” walker Amara says. From its initial conception, the Justice Walk has spanned nearly 1,500 days of continuous presence.

At the heart of Gandhi Park stands a tree that the walkers have named the Justice Tree. In the absence of a permanent physical office, at different points in time this tree has been their meeting place, their archive and their mailing address. They have even used Justice Tree, Gandhi Park as a formal address to send recommendations to the president regarding new terror laws.

Today the tree remains adorned with artwork, poetry and placards; it functions as a living library of history. Every month the banners change to reflect the names of those who disappeared in that specific month in Batticaloa’s history. One of the walkers, Sharadha Devi, describes the tree as a silent witness: “This tree does not know how to talk. If it could, it would tell many stories… it is the one that bears our pain and suffering.” For the participants of the Justice Walk, system change is not merely about replacing a political leader or a specific government. In the East, where Tamil communities have long faced unique struggles regarding land, disappearances and wartime violence, the call for justice is much older than the recent economic crisis.

While the fuel and food shortages of 2022 initially brought thousands into the streets, the walkers realised that true transformation required something deeper than mass mobilisation; it required an internal transformation. “Change has to come from us,” Sarala Emmanuel explains. “We need to talk about history. We need to question things in our everyday practice, whether it’s about the environment, the economy or what we see as entitlements.”

This philosophy explains why they continue to walk long after the height of the aragalaya. When passersby ask, “Why are you still walking? Didn’t you get what you wanted?” the walkers respond with their own questions: “Can you afford food? Have things changed in our neighborhoods?” The walk is a space kept open specifically to ask these questions when the rest of the world has moved on.

The Justice Walk is a space to remember all victims of violence, refusing to take sides in a way that prioritises one grief over another. It commemorates massacres where the military was responsible but it also honours Buddhist monks and the hundreds of police officers killed in 1990. The walkers’ solidarity extends beyond the borders of Sri Lanka. On the seventh of every month, they walk for Palestine and the victims of conflicts in Sudan and other global crises. On the 25th, they carry placards for women living with disabilities who may not be physically able to participate in the walk themselves. In doing so, they connect the local soil of Batticaloa to a global history of resistance, drawing inspiration from the mothers of the Plaza de Mayo in Argentina, who have walked for the disappeared for over three decades.

The Justice Walk encourages a focus on mindfulness. It is not a performance for an audience; it is a discipline. The walkers describe the difficulties of being present – fighting the distractions of the mind and the urge to worry about the next task. Their pace is different now than it was four years ago; it is slower, more deliberate.

As they enter their fifth year, the group admits it does not have a grand plan. “How long are we going to do this? We don’t know,” says one. “But we will walk. That is the only thing we know.”

The Justice Walk reminds us that history is something that we can reflect on every day to have a greater understanding of the present. By walking this route day after day, the walkers ensure that the names of the disappeared are not forgotten, that the struggles of municipal workers are heard and that the future is filled with a persistent, quiet demand for a more just world.

To find out more about the Justice Walk in Batticaloa you can visit its Facebook Page.

 

 

Narrative Reading List on Women and the City (Colombo)

Developed by Iromi Perera, Meghal Perera and Piyumi Wattuhewa from Colombo Urban Lab for Everystory

https://www.everystorysl.org/yfn/women-and-the-city

Everystory Sri Lanka published the narrative reading list on Women and the City, discussing how the city of Colombo, is seen, experienced, lived in and navigated by women. 

 

Introduction

“Any settlement is an inscription in space of the social relations in the society that built it…. Our cities are patriarchy written in stone, brick, glass and concrete.” Jane Darke, Geographer

Cities have historically been planned for and by men. From the 1970s, architects, geographers and feminists have questioned the impact of such a built environment on women, exploring what it means to be a woman in anurban space and what struggles and opportunities women encounter in these environments. As urbanisation increased in the 19th century, so did concerns about women’s place in these unfamiliar crowded environments, as cities offered a degree of freedom and agency to women, from economic opportunities to romantic encounters.

Colonial cities were often missing women and Colombo was no different, as early migrants were often single men migrating to the city in search of fortune. In fact it was only in the 1960s, centuries after its founding, that Colombo’s gender ratio caught up with the rest of the country. Nihal Perera charts the transformation of colonial Colombo from a white male city to one with both European and indigenous Lankan women through processes of interracial marriage and missionary schools. In Sri Lanka, the city has been seen as a Westernised and modern space contrasted with the village as a site of national authenticity. Cultural narratives have often positioned women in Colombo as corrupted and Westernised: Harshana Rambukwella discusses  common trope of a young man from a village losing himself through contact with the city and the sexually promiscuous (often Eurasian) women who inhabit it.

Colombo in the 1970s

Home Work?

Architect Dolores Hayden observed that a century of urban planning was informed by the principle that ‘a woman’s place is in the home,’ noting that these “dwellings, neighbourhoods and cities designed for homebound women constrain women physically, socially, and economically.” These cities were designed for the model of a male breadwinner commuting from the suburbs to an office in the city, returning to an oasis of domestic bliss governed by his wife. The city was a masculine space of economic activity, work and production, while the home was the worker’s refuge. Home is a site of shelter and nurture, the site of essential domestic labour that enables life and work to continue. Whether referred to as social reproduction or care work, the mundane tasks of cooking, cleaning, laundry, taking care of children and elderly are performed mostly by women at home.

1950s advertisements promoted and reflected the gendered divide of space and roles.

Making and running a home is no easy task, especially in the cities of the global South where infrastructure and service delivery may be insufficient, fragmented or non-existent. Where the grid is overburdened or absent, women often do the work of making sure their households have access to water, electricity and sanitation. This was particularly so during COVID-19 and Sri Lanka’s economic crisis. Washing clothes by hand, foregoing nutritious food, cooking on hazardous wood-stoves to save gas, were all strategies that women adopted to navigate the crisis which had a disproportionate impact on low-income urban households who relied on daily wages and often had higher costs of living than their rural counterparts. Meghal Perera reflects on the electricity consumption of the working class poor in Colombo, examining the impact of tariff increases in 2022 – 2023 and its impact on women and their time poverty.

Writing about how care is intrinsically linked to housing, David Madden notes that “every time a public housing development is demolished or a household is evicted, some piece of care infrastructure is shattered and needs to be rebuilt at cost. The contemporary city is battered by a relentless churn, which forces households to repeatedly build and rebuild structures and networks of social support.” In Sri Lanka, displacement has had a disproportionate impact on women in urban settlements. Even the possibility of eviction can send ripples through communities, with women again bearing the brunt. Asha Abeysekera describes how women in a low-income settlement in Slave Island face hostility and violence from their brothers, husbands and in-laws as inheritance disputes come to a head due to looming evictions and anticipated compensation. Relocation itself is a jolting experience; networks of communal care and surveillance that made it safe for children to play outside no longer exist, narrow corridors and unlit stairs limit the mobility of teenage girls. Iromi Perera writes about how even simple tasks like laundry become fraught and contested in high-rise tower blocks in Colombo that communities are relocated to in the name of development.

Iromi Perera looks at how relocation to a high-rise building makes the gendered work of laundry more complicated and time-consuming for women. 

One approach is to think of urban infrastructures of care, which are aspects of the built environment that impede or support caregiving labour. Hayden warns us that the solutions to “overcome an environment without child care, public transportation, or food service have been “private,” commercially profitable solutions: maids and baby-sitters by the hour; franchise day care or extended television viewing; fast food service; easier credit for purchasing an automobile, a washer, or a microwave oven.” The cost of these private fixes is often borne by poorer women who take on the poorly paid jobs generated by these conditions. Yet care infrastructures can be thought of in more transformative ways. For instance, the first female Mayor of Bogota, Colombia established ‘Care Blocks’ which provided integrated public services around the needs of caregivers and their dependents. Located within a 15-20 minute walk, they offer not only childcare, eldercare and job training, but legal assistance, adult education, recreation and leisure facilities. In Colombo, care remains very much within the mother’s domain, and impedes working class women from taking on full time work or formal work and their income generation activities are very much still determined by the timings and availability of day cares or school timings.

Women traditional flowing dresses for their performance at a “care block” center in Bogotá, Colombia. The class is one of the free services offered to anyone in the neighborhood who is an unpaid caregiver for their family.

While urban planners may not count on women working, the reality is very different. In the cities of the global South, a majority of women work in the informal sector, in jobs that are poorly paid and precarious. Women constitute a majority of market vendors worldwide, and often suffer as a result of spaces that have not been designed with them in mind. Female vendors often do not have access to toilets and sanitation facilities, and even when they do these are often not gender-separated which poses safety issues. The precarity of informal vending also exacerbates working conditions with women vendors facing violence and harassment from the police, male vendors and even customers, alongside the constant threat of eviction. Female-gig workers don’t have it any better, experiencing sexual violence, pollution and a lack of labour protections.

Such work is also complicated in the context of climate change and the increasing intensity and frequency of extreme heat. In Colombo, outdoor female workers are affected by heat stress in different ways: goods spoiling in the heat causes income loss, reduced water intake when they don’t have access to a bathroom and may cause infections and other health impacts. The absence of public infrastructure such as public bathrooms only exacerbates these vulnerabilities. Even in their own communities,  women in low-income settlements across South Asia lack access to bathrooms which puts their health and safety at risk. Bathrooms can also be another flashpoint of sexism that is designed into the city: open-air urinals installed in Paris in 2018 were widely condemned for reinforcing the idea that only men exist in public spaces.

Mobility, Security and Reclaiming the City

Women’s mobility in the city is influenced by a variety of factors. Women have different transport patterns from men, often taking additional trips to take care of domestic responsibilities and caregiving, rather than a straightforward commute to office. They are also more likely to take more walking trips than their male counterparts. Given that women are often confined to the domestic sphere in places where gender roles are rigid, efficient and affordable public transport can have a huge impact in increasing women’s mobility. Karnataka’s Shakthi Scheme, which provides free rides to all women and trans people on state buses, resulted in women having more financial independence, joining the workplace and taking trips for leisure for the first time.

The threat of gender based violence also looms over women’s transport choices. A UNFPA study found that 90% of Sri Lankan women had experienced some form of sexual harassment on public transport. Such experiences can have ripple effects into all aspects of women’s life. Long commutes may dissuade women from joining the labour force, while time-poverty of caregivers may increase as they have to accompany female children to places on public transport. Ride hailing apps may facilitate women’s mobility, particularly at night, but also come with their own risks.

In light of the threat of gender based violence on public transport, many cities have adopted female-only carriages and buses as a means of ensuring women a safe journey, including those in India, Japan and Iran. While such measures may ease anxieties around public transport, critics note that sex-segregated transport does not address behavioural change and reinforces the idea that men and women cannot exist in the same space without gender based violence.

Many scholars have argued for a new approach to how we think about women’s safety in public places. They note that safety for women is a goal that can be co-opted by patriarchal forces to reinforce gender stereotypes and limit freedoms of women. What would happen if we abandoned viewing women and the city solely through the lens of potential violence? Shilpa Phadke and Sameera Khan argue that a right to risk is a more liberatory goal which grants women unconditional access to public space. Under this logic, women, like men, can access the city even at night, because they have the right to public space and its pleasures. Reorienting the city as a place of pleasure, joy and fun can be a means of attacking the original logic that would see women’s place in the kitchen. In their seminal work, Why Loiter? Sameera Khan, Shilpa Phadke and Shilpa Ranade make the case for women’s right to loiter in the city, as men do all the time. Only through loitering, or existing in space without a legitimate or respectable reason, can women reclaim urban space and the full citizenship that comes with it.

Why Loiter has inspired initiatives like #GirlsatDhabas and #GirlsPlayingStreetCricket through which women and girls across South Asia reclaim urban spaces.

Resources

Books

Feminist City: A Field Guide by Leslie Kern

Cities, Slums and Gender in the Global South – Sylvia Chant, Cathy McIlwaine

The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs

Why Loiter?: Women and Risk on Mumbai Streets by Shilpa Phadke, Sameera Khan, and Shilpa Ranade

Urban Undesirables: City Transition and Street-Based Sex Work in Bangalore by Neethi P. and Anant Kamath

Articles

Feminism and the Politics of the Commons – Silvia Federici ‍

Dangerous Liaisons – Shilpa Phadke

Women’s search for public space and leisure in Agra: cots, courtyards, and riverbank – Mahima Taneja

Gender, public space and social segregation in Cairo: of taxi drivers, prostitutes and professional women– Anouk De Koning

Gender, space, and resistance: street vendors of Dhaka city – Meheri Tamanna, Kyoko Kusakabe, Joyee Shairee Chatterjee & Vilas Nitivattananon

Making Colombo Intimate – Mihirini Sirisena

What it’s like being a female tuk-tuk driver in Sri Lanka – Zinara Rathnayake

Can Fun Be Feminist? Gender, Space and Mobility in Lyari, Karachi – Nida Kirmani

On Building Cities for Women and the Early Days of Feminist Architecture

Flâneuse: Women Walk the City in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice, and London – Lauren Elkin

‍ ‍

Watch

Work at Your Own Risk

What Would a Feminist City Look Like?

Listen

She Builds: Episode on Minette De Silva https://www.shebuildspodcast.com/episodes/minnettedesilva?rq=minette

The Feminist City https://vidhilegalpolicy.in/podcasts/the-feminist-city-trailer/women-in-the-platform-economy-with-dr-sarayu-natarajan-part-2/

‍ ‍

𝐊𝐮𝐦𝐚𝐫𝐢 𝐉𝐚𝐲𝐚𝐰𝐚𝐫𝐝𝐞𝐧𝐚 𝐅𝐞𝐦𝐢𝐧𝐢𝐬𝐭 𝐀𝐫𝐜𝐡𝐢𝐯𝐞: 𝐂𝐚𝐥𝐥 𝐅𝐨𝐫 𝐄𝐧𝐠𝐚𝐠𝐞𝐦𝐞𝐧𝐭

In celebration of the life, alignments, and commitments, of the political scientist and historian Kumari Jayawardena, the Social Scientists’ Association of Sri Lanka (SSA) of which she is a founder member and former Secretary, is creating a digital archive of her scholarship.

To publicise the Archive and promote engagement with the Kumari Jayawardena collectionthe SSA will host an all-day workshop in Colombo in late September 2026, supported by the Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung (RLS) South Asia office. 

Short papers of under 4000 words in an accessible style and for a non-academic audience are anticipated, engaging with the continuing relevance of her multi-disciplinary scholarship; and generating fresh perspectives and insights to enrich socialist feminist organising and thought today, with a view to their online (www.polity.lk) and print publication (Polity Vol. 14, No. 2, July-December 2026).

Expressions of Interest are invited from activists, artists, and scholars, based in Sri Lanka. Send your pitch (under 300 words) to <ssa.femarchive@gmail.com> before 22 May 2026.

 

 

“THE IMPACT OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION ON THE RURAL ECONOMY AND SOCIETY OF COLONIAL CEYLON (1925-1939)” by Eric Paul MEYER

The following text is the revised English version of my doctoral dissertation defended in French in 1980 at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris, before a jury composed of Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Jean Bouvier and Charles Malamoud. My intention is to give the English-speaking public access to a historical analysis that, although written 45 years ago, remains relevant in some respects, if only by the documents it has gathered. The part of this essay devoted to the 1934-1935 malaria epidemic has already been the subject of an English version available on the Sri Lanka & diasporas website[1] and will not be repeated here, but must be integrated into this text, which is published here in three separate parts.

The first part is devoted to the genesis and channels of diffusion of the crisis

The second to its impact on the economy and population of the plantations and on the economy and society of the Sinhalese villages

The third to Ceylonese landowners facing the crisis

 

It seemed appropriate, in those years of crisis where the precedent of the 1930s was often mentioned, to offer a precise picture of the impact of the Great Depression on a particularly dependent society. Ceylon (we will use here the name of Sri Lanka during the colonial period) provides a characteristic example of a country deeply penetrated by the plantation economy. The crisis of the 1930s offered an opportunity to examine how economic movements affected the fate of a peripheral economy and a dependent society, and revealed its structures.

It was indeed the depression and its after effects, including the malaria epidemic of 1934-1935, that determined a ‘discovery’ of the condition of peasantry among contemporaries and gave rise to the first in-depth investigations. “Just as the progress of a disease shows a doctor the secret life of a body, so does the progress of a great calamity provides the historian with valuable information about the nature of the society it affects” wrote the historian Marc Bloch. The crisis is therefore revealing of the structures, both for contemporaries and for the historian; and in the case that concerns us, the malaria epidemic following the economic depression, is particularly revealing. A problem of method has arisen that I do not think I have fully resolved: in the given image of rural society at the time of depression, the features that result from the economic crisis are difficult to distinguish from those that belong to a previous evolution, in the absence of information compatible for the period of the pre-crisis. In addition, quantitative data are not sufficiently continuous or reliable enough to allow a statistical analysis of social facts. There are, in fact, reliable figures on the evolution of quantities and prices of export products, which will be used to follow the steps and assess the extent of the crisis; ten-year population censuses also provide reliable information, but whose interpretation is often difficult. Finally, data on the movement of land ownership have been laboriously collected, and will be the subject of a tentative statistical development. However, these series do not provide decisive information on social facts in their links with economic movements, on the impact phenomena that we have chosen to study. In this research, the mechanisms will therefore appear more clearly than the fluxes; the statistical apparatus will not constitute its framework but will simply support a number of developments.

The constraints imposed by the state of the sources are one thing. The choices resulting from the framing of the subject are another. It was resolved to limit to a minimum the developments devoted to purely financial mechanisms, which had already been the subject of research, and to draw attention to the social impact of the Great Depression. At this very level, it appeared necessary to operate a second limitation: although urban society, i.e. essentially that of the capital, had been seriously affected by the crisis, we have excluded it from the present study, limited to the impact of depression in the rural world, including plantations, without however discarding its effects on the land ownership of city dwellers, to the extent that it influences the fate of rural society. On the other hand, it appeared necessary to gather and exploit as much grass root level information as possible, which could to some extent make up for the shortcomings of quantitative information. Only a quasi-monographic study could reveal the real impact of the crisis: the analysis of the spread of depression by very tenuous channels questioned the dualistic image given by observers at the macro-economic level; the relatively long latency time separating the triggering of depression from its impact on rural masses could only be explained by the game of phenomena falling within economic anthropology, based on the field investigation, including oral testimonies.

The most useful documents were the printed annual reports (Administration Reports) and the journals (Diaries) of the officials in charge of the provincial administration (Government Agents and Assistant Government Agents) and of the operations determining the respective land rights of the State and the private owners (Settlement Officers and Assistant Settlement Officers). Unpublished documents offered the advantage of controlling and correcting the omissions or complacency of reports intended for publication. The productions of administrators who live at the age of the car, telephone and paperwork do not have the authenticity or precision of those of their predecessors who made their tours on horseback or on foot and who were spared the constraint of routine reports. But their existence is already quite exceptional and does not seem to have many equivalents in the colonial world of the time. The reports of the parliamentary committees of inquiry are a second type of source widely used. With the establishment from 1931 of a representative regime, they multiplied and developed. However, these Sessional Papers are of unequal value and interest, depending on the care given to the investigation, and their main flaw is often to collect more opinions than facts. The most useful are those related to the epidemic and the huge publication of the Ceylon Banking Commission, which offers the advantage of including almost all of the memos received by the commission and the minutes of all its public sessions. Socio-economic surveys conducted in some villages from 1936 onwards are particularly valuable, although they have methodological flaws, and they have no equivalent for the period before the Depression to make it possible to notice an evolution. The central archives of the colonial administration offer much less interest: it appears that London was relatively poorly informed about what was really happening in its ‘model colony’, and in any case the information is at the level of the great political strategy and not of social facts. The press is also quite disappointing, with the exception of the reports of parliamentary sessions (which are also found in the semi-official publication called the Hansard) and some letters from readers. Among the other documents used: the censuses (but the one of 1931 saw its publication seriously amputated because of the crisis, and the next one was only carried out in 1946 because of the war); the Ferguson directories, which include lists of plantations; the Blue Books, collections of statistics of very unequal value; and the official journal of the colony (Ceylon Government Gazette) which served as the raw material for a study of the sale of properties by the judicial authority. I also drew a number of information from informal contacts between 1975 and 1979 with elders, contemporaries of the event, which in some cases took the form of more structured interviews: among these testimonies, those of a former Marxist minister elected deputy of the south of the district of Kägalla in 1936, N.M. Perera (interview conducted a few months before his death); of a former leader of the depressed Kandyan castes, N.H. Keerthiratne; of the son of the former deputy of Kägalla, Tissa Wijeyaratne, former ambassador to Paris (I was allowed to use his father’s personal papers, now deposited in the National Archives of Sri Lanka); of former Kandyan headmen of all ranks (E. Delwala, A. Bandara); of a provincial lawyer (A.B.C. de Soysa); finally, of groups of villagers from the district of Kägalla.

The historiography of Ceylon is abundant and of good quality. Between 1955 and 1970, a number of young Ceylonese scholars came to Great Britain to carry out research in colonial archives, and the collective volume of Ceylon’s university history devoted to the contemporary period highlights the quality of their work[2]. But, made in the colonial metropolis, they have the paradoxical defect of not using local sources, with a few exceptions; on the contrary, it is these sources that I have perused the most. Several theses have been devoted by economists to the period of the Great Depression; but all are at the macroeconomic level and only consider in passing the mechanisms of the social impact of the phenomenon[3]. On the other hand, the analysis of the impact of the depression in other colonized countries has made considerable progress in recent years. Michael Adas’ pioneering book on the rise and crisis of Burmese commercial rice cultivation has paved the way, more recently taken up by Ian Brown’s study[4]. It is about a country that offers many common features with Ceylon by its Buddhist religion, and by the role played by the Nattukottai Chettiar Indian bankers. The evolution that Michael Adas describes is exactly parallel to that of Ceylon: it is the story of a growth in indigenous commercial production, thanks to a market created by the British imperial system of task sharing on a global scale; and of the cessation of this growth resulting from the closure of the pioneering ‘frontier’ even before the Great Depression: an endogenous crisis that the global crisis, which translates here into a collapse in the price of rice, makes irresistible; while the presence of a large community of Indian origin provokes xenophobic reactions and interethnic violence that accompany the birth of the national movement.

In the Indian domain, the general synthesis of D. Rothermund, a work devoted to rural South India by C. Baker, and a detailed study of the Depression in Madras by K.A. Manikumar[5], also suggest the existence of a growth, but much slower, over the twenty years preceding the crisis; they show the effects on the standard of living of the peasantry of the fall in the prices of export agricultural products (especially cotton and peanuts), and pose as I will do the problem of rural debt and the processes of land alienation that it may have led to. The Chettiar are also present there – in their homeland-, but the specificity of the Indian evolution during the depression is due to the fact that indigenous capital fleeing export agriculture that has ceased to be profitable is massively invested in a nascent national industry, so that India is one of the few countries whose industrial production indices does not decline during the depression. Manikumar recognizes that “the change from cultivation for home consumption to cultivation for the market had integrated the Madras economy into the world economy”, and he considers that the crisis began in 1929 and not before, and that it turned into a depression due to the lasting collapse of the prices of agricultural export products in 1931.

The multiplication of studies on Africa led to the organization in 1976 of a symposium on the theme of ‘Africa and the Crisis’. The context is very different from that of the British colonies in Asia: a more recent domination, fewer indigenous plantations which, on the contrary, tend to develop during the depression; but a series of convergences also appear: existence of a colonial crisis prior to the depression that accentuates it, degradation of the standard of living of peasant populations[6].

The general studies on the Great Depression do not bring anything specific to our purpose. The proceedings of a symposium held in Lisbon in 1933 on the crisis and the colonies reflect the concerns of the administration and of colonial interests. The idea that emerges is the need to encourage the maintenance of a dualism separating the ‘indigenous sector’ and the ‘colonial sector’ in order to ‘protect the indigenous’ in the event of an exogenous crisis: one of the speakers is the Dutchman J.H. Boeke who systematized his dualist theses shortly afterwards[7]. Among more recent studies, in addition to the detailed article by C.H. Lee who presents a review of the effects of depression on raw material producing countries, the most complete synthesis is that of Dietmar Rothermund devoted to the global impact of the great depression. But at this level of generality, reflections on the notion and the interpretations of the crisis are more inspiring than summary inventories[8].

 

Most of the problems of interpretation raised by the study of the crisis in dependent economies were posed in the introduction (J. Bouvier) and the conclusion (R. Gallissot) of the symposium on Africa and the crisis.  The anteriority to the crash of October 1929 of the depression of the prices of raw materials (especially rubber and copra for Ceylon) raises the problem of the origins of the crisis. It strongly suggests that the explanation by overproduction remains largely valid, and that in the genesis of this phenomenon dependent economies played a decisive role; this question is linked to that of the respective play of endogenous factors and exogenous factors in the outbreak of the crisis in a given country or economic area: the case of Ceylon clearly poses the problem of the articulation or superposition of a long-term crisis and cyclical factors. A second set of questions is posed by the sectoral extent of depression. If, as most studies suggest, the entire economy of the colonized countries was struck by its direct or indirect impact, the dualist theory dear to the colonial circles of the time, according to which the indigenous sector and the capitalist sector would be separated by a watertight partition, a cordon sanitaire that would protect the peasant from the effects of global fluctuations, is ruined. Dualism can therefore be interpreted as a political myth, itself a sign of a crisis in the colonial system. I met this theme constantly during this study, and proposes to return in more detail to its meaning in conclusion. I am convinced that words such as that of the French rapporteur at the Lisbon conference[9] should not be attributed to simple blindness: “From the indigenous point of view, you will recognize with me, with a certain satisfaction, that the populations have not suffered too much from the current crisis (…) Nothing comparable to what happened in civilized countries (sic) happened for them, neither as unemployment nor as misery. Why? Because, all the same, next to the new economy remained the indigenous economy.” These considerations naturally lead to the question of the policies followed by colonial governments confronted with the Depression, the awareness of “underdevelopment”, and the role of the Depression in the genesis of the colonial crisis. In this regard, the example studied here is specific, due to the attribution to Ceylon of a representative regime which corresponds exactly to the years of depression: a coincidence that may not be fortuitous.

 

 

PART 1

 EXOGENOUS CRISIS, ENDOGENOUS CRISIS

THE GENESIS AND DIFFUSION

OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION

 

 

“The Depression occurred at the precise moment when the long-term economic expansion in the country was naturally coming to an end.” Gamani Corea[10]

 

When I started this research, I had formulated the hypothesis that, in a colonized country as dependent as Ceylon, the crisis of the 1930s would be a pure import product. A better knowledge of the country and the period revealed that the impact of the exogenous crisis coincided with the results of internal mutations; economic depression appeared to me as the effect of a superposition. Superposition, or interaction? The question is important: I do not intend to decide it in the context of a work more focused on the effects than on the causes of depression. I will nevertheless try to assess to what extent the endogenous – actually indigenous crisis, could have determined or been determined by the exogenous crisis.  What are the components of this internal crisis? First, a demographic increase, relatively early in the plantation areas of the island in comparison with the situation prevailing in the Indian subcontinent; its origin is linked to the economic boom of the previous two or three decades; its effects are critical only to the extent that they coincide with the end of the spatial expansion of permanent crops in the wet zone. Second, the spectacular development of small indigenous plantations that introduces disturbances in the game of the planting economy established by the colonizers and to their benefit; to the extent that similar phenomena have occurred in other producing countries (including Malaysia and the Dutch Indies, the world’s largest rubber producers), the sudden swelling of production capacity, a factor of long-term overproduction, seems to me to be analyzed according to the internal conditions specific to the producing countries. Finally, the ecological and economic upheaval determined by the intrusion of plantations into peasant terroirs has given way to a fragile balance, where the peasant ceasing to be a full-time farmer depends more and more on the resources induced by the presence of plantations.

 

 

THE LIMITS OF GROWTH.

 

All the analyses of the Ceylon economy give the first place to the capitalist sector of European plantations, then to the traditional food sector, the sector of small indigenous plantations occupying a very small place[11]. We deliberately choose to reverse, if not the whole perspective, at least the order of presentation. Let us not be mistaken: it is not a question of denying that the impulse of growth was of external origin; what this approach suggests is that this movement has become ‘indigenized’, and that it has given rise to contradictions that have compromised its pursuit. Measuring this growth is particularly difficult. Although presented as a ‘model colony’, the island had no institution responsible for collecting statistics; the only reliable data are the ten-year demographic censuses (since 1871, with a marked improvement in the methods used from 1911), and the figure of imports and exports. For the rest, and especially in terms of areas and agricultural production, and living standards, the government was content to publish each year in a collection called the Blue Book figures compiled from routine surveys of village or district headmen, of an imperfect or even fanciful character. The abolition of the grain tax in 1892 had relieved the peasantry of a weight perhaps less heavy than its opponents claimed, and at the same time deprived the historian of a source of valuable information. This abolition of any State levy on the food sector, creating a situation almost without example in the world, proves better than any other indication to what extent the plantation economy and the monetization that accompanied it had already penetrated the economic organism: the product of import taxes on foodstuffs (mainly rice) and export taxes on plantation products, and indirect duties on alcohol and the monopoly of salt, were sufficient until the end of the 1920s to feed the coffers of the colony. The first systematic attempts to count areas and production are contemporary with the slowing down of growth, the first surveys on the standard of living are posterior to the crisis. The coincidence is not accidental, but it frustrates the point-of-comparison seeker. To assess the progress of agricultural production or the variations in the standard of living, one is compelled to use qualitative testimonies, or indirect indices, so that the mechanisms appear more clearly than the flows. However, there is no doubt that growth has occurred since the beginning of the century, bringing the entire rural population of plantation areas into a trade economy. Two sure clues to this change are the growth in rice imports per capita, and the reduction in infant mortality rates. Rice imports, originally intended for plantation workers and urban populations, were growing faster than the plantation population and the total population; the increase per capita (about 30% from 1900 to 1917), was abruptly interrupted by a supply crisis and then returnd to its previous level during the 1920s. This is explained by the progress of the village consumption of imported rice, the implications of which will be analyzed in more detail. Reported infant mortality rates increased until 1911, due to the improvement in registration methods and perhaps the poor health conditions of the growing estate population; then they declined regularly (with, however, two peaks corresponding to the 1919 flu epidemic and 1934-1935 malaria epidemic). Most contemporaries insisted on this upward trend such as the Government Agent of Ratnapura, in charge of one of the rubber-producing districts, who however considered that progress to be sustainable required a judicious adjustment in the repartition of land between outside investors and villagers[12].

 

The hypothesis of a deterioration in the peasant condition under the impact of the plantation economy, commonly accepted by nationalist circles from the 1930s, fits badly with these testimonies that signal a long-term improvement in living conditions. But growth was fragile, its spatial and social distribution was uneven. The new balance that was being established connected a large part of the rural population with the world circuits in such a way that it benefitted from the fallout of prosperity; but it had no control over these circuits and took the habit of dependence. This new situation resulted in population growth and the scarcity of the land available for further expansion.

 

 

From the old ecological regime to the new economic system

 

Clifford Geertz’s studies on Indonesia paved the way for an ecological analysis of the impact of the plantation economy on village structures. Whatever the theoretical criticisms that such an approach may raise, it provides a useful tool for analysis. The relationship between the village sector and the plantation sector in Ceylon offers a significantly different example of intrusion of a foreign economic body into a traditional structure[13]. In Indonesia, according to Geertz, two distinct systems coexisted and mixed together: in Java a rice ecosystem predominated: the planting economy was forcibly inserted in the paddy cycles by virtue of the ‘culture system’, which forced farmers to devote part of their terroir, by rotation, to a speculative crop, usually sugar. In the Outer Islands, agriculture was based on periodic clearing of temporary fields abandoned after a few years as soon as the fertility of the soil was exhausted: the plantation economy was inserted in the interstitial spaces without generally integrating into the rhythms of peasant cultivation. According to Geertz, while the sugar economy engaged the rice sector in a process of intensification without modernization (which he called ‘involution’), the planting economy of the Outer Islands determined a development that, by virtue of a demonstration effect, was to promote the rise of market-oriented small producers. In the Kandyan regions of Ceylon, before the intrusion of the plantations, there was only one ecosystem combining the two types studied by Geertz: each village represented a miniature Indonesia, composed of a rice center and a periphery of temporary fields (called chenas), the contact area being occupied by houses surrounded by fruit gardens[14]. The typical village landscape of the wet zone was therefore tripartite. In the least populated areas, the spaces furthest from the paddy fields preserved their primitive vegetation and served as hunting grounds, for fruit collection or tapping the sap of certain trees (such as the sugar palm); the villagers supplied themselves with timber or heating wood, and let their cattle graze. On the chenas two distinct types of cultivation were practiced: that of millets (amu and kurakkan) which could grow on all kinds of land but provided poor quality food; and that of ‘mountain rice’ (älwi) which required a rich soil and sufficient natural humidity. Finally, in contact with the two zones, a belt of fruit gardens (watte) surrounding the village houses; the gardens came up against the chenas area and in the event of population growth, could extend at its expense. The spatial dosage of these different zones varied from one locality to another. The colonial administration recognized as normal an area ratio of 3 (chenas) to 1 (paddy fields). But ratios of 10 for 1 were frequent in villages where paddy terroirs were particularly exiguous and where some social groups systematically exploited highland resources.

 

This geographical structure was perceived very intensely, it shaped the village mentality. The paddy field was the place of stability, security, legality. Everyone knew perfectly the characteristics and limits of the paddy lands. In contrast, the highlands represented the place of mobility, occasional work, imprecision, even illegality: this is where the arbitrariness of traditional chiefdom was best exercised, sheltered from the interference of colonial authorities: this class derived its wealth from its paddy fields, but its power from its control of marginal spaces. The cultivation of chenas was not a secondary element in the village economy. It represented an essential factor in a given ecological balance. Just as, in the Sinhalese diet, there is no rice without curry, so there were no rice fields without highlands. Chena offered a flexibility essential to the survival of the ecosystem: it made it possible to compensate for a bad harvest with an improvised cultivation, or to amass a modest surplus in anticipation of family events that generate expenses such as weddings or village festivals. Socially, the cultivation of the chena played the role of a safety valve; it provided certain individuals in rupture (couples not socially recognized for example) or certain social groups (castes of hunters or palm sugar extractors for example) with a means of survival. It represented the place of marginality par excellence.

 

The legal status of villages dated back to the monarchical era, but British legislation introduced new rules from the 1830s. In the past there were four types of villages. The most numerous which were also the smallest, the koralegam, were bound to a simple tax on grain production (irrigated paddy and älwi only), to which the British added a corvée on the roads convertible into head tax in money; most of the koralegam were populated by peasants belonging to the Goyigama caste located at the top of the social hierarchy and from which all the traditional headmen had come; the full ownership of paddy fields and gardens was recognized to the villagers, but the status of the highlands remained uncertain. Under an ordinance enacted in 1840, the British government appropriated all the land whose occupants could not prove that they paid the paddy tax, which automatically excluded millet-cultivated areas. The gabadagam , the vast villages of the king’s private estates, were exploited under a system comparable to that of the reserve and the tenures of the large domains in the medieval Europe. The tenants, usually of the Batgama caste, had only limited rights on the land. The colonial government abolished this regime during the 1830s, selling the reserve and recognizing the tenants’ full ownership of their paddy lands, but it retained its exclusive rights over the highlands. The temple villages (devalegam and viharegam) and the seigneurial villages (nindagam) operated according to a system comparable to that of the gabadagam, which the English let exist when their owners were able to provide proof that they resulted from a royal gift: in this case the highlands were recognized as private. Finally inside each village of some importance, the terroir was organized into pangu, operating units each corresponding to a lineage: each panguwa had its rice fields, often its hamlet and gardens, and, what escaped most of the colonial administrators, its chena area.

 

During the first phase of the intrusion of the plantations (1840-1855 approximately), the alienation of the land took place according to a process from which the Sinhalese were almost entirely excluded. The planters selected a land suitable for them, usually a forest, settled there, and legalized their occupation by buying the soil from the Crown for a symbolic sum. The villagers, whose spaces constituted hunting and gathering grounds, sometimes reacted by opposing surveying operations. During the peasant rebellion that occurred in 1848, whose origin was fiscal and the ideology millenarist, several plantations were attacked and burned by the villagers. But no large-scale movement occurred, for lack of the support of the traditional headmen, who were beginning to take advantage of their position as intermediaries between villagers and planters, and to discover the resources that the sale or rental to the planters of the land they controlled could provide. Soon, a fraction of the peasantry, at the instigation of small merchants from the coastal regions, entered the monetary economy by planting coffee trees in the gardens or on a portion of the chenas. The emergence of a market first virtual, then effective of the highlands played a decisive role at the origins of the second phase of plantation intrusion. In the interior of the country, the paddy tax was generally evaluated and received by the headmen. When the peasants were unable to pay they mortgaged their land. If the operation resulted in a judicial sale, the villagers who sought at all costs to keep their rice fields more willingly alienated highlands with indefinite limits. The transfer remained fictitious as long as it was not relayed by any external request of any magnitude but the buyers, traditional headmen or merchants, constituted a sort of capital of securities. During the years 1865-1870, the colonial authorities noticed that in the provinces not yet open to the plantation economy, the highlands were out of their control. Their first reaction was to repress the cultivation of chenas, which immediately led to serious food shortage in the regions concerned. Then the government resolved to adopt a more conciliatory position in a test district, that of Kägalla, where the demand for land for plantations was already significant. Carried out during the 1880s, the settlement of the chenas resulted in an ‘amicable’ division of the terroirs, the State renouncing any claim on a fraction of the highlands but asserting ownership of the rest. The operation allowed the State to build up vast one-piece domains regrouping the ‘confiscated’ chenas of several villages, which it was quick to resell to the planters. At the same time, the dramatic collapse of the coffee economy, combined with the forced conversion into money of the paddy tax, ruined many peasants. Instead of keeping the land that had been granted to them, many decided or were forced to sell it to planters already established nearby. Speculators rushed to the district. The planters employed the services of ‘land hunters’ – merchants or tavern keepers who pushed the villagers to go into debt, artisans working on the plantations, village headmen baited by the promise of bribes, dishonest lawyers who offered the peasants their services, exploiting the agrarian quarrels multiplied by the rise of the land market and by the defects of the ‘settlement’. Some families who had been deprived of the areas where they used to cultivate had not obtained compensation in the block assigned to the villagers, the planned redistribution having only benefited the clientele of traditional headmen. A new settlement was undertaken during the 1890s to remedy these defects and curb the massive movement of alienation of private lands. But it was too late to stop a mechanism that government policy had largely helped to trigger.

 

In the strategy of land speculation, the struggle for the appropriation of the added value created by the irruption of plantations took a sharp turn when the rubber boom relayed that of tea. The planters, who became the agents of large companies, sought to buy the land at low prices on behalf of their principals; the economic constitution of a huge land capital was, with the exploitation of a workforce of Indian origin, one of the ingredients of the maximization of profit rates. The colonial government, for its part, began after years of laissez-faire to worry about its land capital, and sought to assert its rights against both planters and villagers. The intermediaries were in the process of raising enough capital to allow them to behave autonomously and aspire to bourgeois respectability. And some villagers were beginning to become aware of the value of their land and the resources they could derive from it by constituting their own plantations. From 1897, a large-scale settlement policy was initiated, this time successfully. A body of specialized investigators concentrated its activities on the areas of the low country where coconut plantations were developing, and later on some areas of rubber cultivation. By that date and in these areas, large-scale land speculation was practiced by a nascent national bourgeoisie eager to invest in a booming sector the profits derived from market activities or liberal professions. It was obviously easier for the colonial government to defend the peasantry against Ceylonese investors than against the British planters… But this policy became the target of increasingly precise attacks by those who considered themselves victims: the attribution of internal autonomy to the country resulted in a slowdown in settlement activities. It is true that by that time, the extension of the plantations had reached its maximum; the depression would soon calm the speculative fever.

 

In all the areas where the villages were surrounded by plantations, a decisive break in the old agrarian regime occurred. The least populated forest districts were the first and most severely affected. Small villages were reduced to their small paddy fields and garden belts: their population growth was stopped. The large rice villages of the most densely populated areas were not affected in their demographic dynamism, but the problems of overcrowding and underemployment took a sharp turn within a generation. The only localities that experienced a smooth transition from one regime to another were those where the absence of large plantations had allowed the transformation of the chenas into cash crops by the villagers themselves, and to a much lesser extent those where the employment caused by the rise of plantations had immediately taken the place of work on the chenas.

 

The impact of the intrusion of plantations on the village ecosystems took many forms. The paddy fields located below the tea and rubber plantations were momentarily or sometimes even permanently silted, the practice of clean weeding aggravating the erosion of the hills; the only benefit that the farmers derived from it was to receive chemical fertilizers at the same time. Deforestation affected the regularity of the springs feeding the gardens and rice fields, and the planters sometimes diverted water from streams to operate their factories. The defense of the planters, when they were accused of these attacks on paddy cultivation, was to claim that the cultivation of chenas was also destructive of the natural environment. This classic colonial argument does not correspond to reality: the very principle of temporary cultivation allowed the regrowth of a secondary forest, and as long as the terroir was large enough, the villagers arranged their chenas in such a way that the hills were never bared by whole sections. The villagers used to put their paddy fields in defense with the help of palisades, and to let their cattle graze freely on all the rest of the terroir. When forests and chenas were converted into plantations, the animals continued to wander on their usual grazing grounds, finding young tea shoots to their liking. The favorite sport of plantation workers quickly became the hunting of village cattle that they would sometimes seize in the village itself (a large proportion of plantation workers belonged to untouchable non-vegetarian castes). These border incidents became a constant source of tension between the villages and the plantations. The peasants accused the planters of not enclosing their estates, as they themselves put their fields in defense. The planters, imbued with their Western conception of abstract boundary of property, and, for some of them, obsessed with a complex of racist agoraphobia aggravated by their way of life, felt as an intolerable attack any presence of “native elements in British territory” according to the ironic expression of a contemporary. Most did not know the Sinhalese language, many considered the village as an unknown territory, a source of crime, from where stealing expeditions originated and where ‘their’ coolies were perverted by traffickers with criminal designs; some imagined that the extension of the small village plantations, which worried them, was done with the help of plants stolen from their nurseries, and they obtained permission from the colonial authorities to use corporal punishment in case of flagrante delicto. In addition, many plantation owners refused to let the villagers use through their estates the old paths that connected the villages to each other: they did not hesitate, on the other hand, to widen the paths through gardens and paddy fields, which the villagers sometimes obstructed in retaliation. It is not proven that at the level of the entire country each of these disturbances – silting of fields, drying of springs, slaughtering of livestock, refusal of the right of way, was sufficient to determine a regression of agricultural techniques and yields. But it is difficult to escape the conclusion that their accumulation had the effect of discouraging a process of Javanese intensification that could have been caused by the contraction of the terroir in a context of strong population growth.

 

Nevertheless, the decisive phenomenon in the break in the old equilibrium remains the complete disappearance of chenas in plantation areas between 1890 and 1930, just when population growth accelerated. Thus the ecosystem lost its flexibility at the very moment when it became the most necessary. But this contraction of the terroir was not reflected in a total proletarianization of the peasantry, nor in a generalization of peasant commercial agriculture, nor in an intensification of paddy cultivation, but in the search for a type of resources offering a comparable flexibility. The reaction of the villagers to this ecological revolution, and more generally to the growth of a monetary economy, was a function of local conditions. In the coconut areas established at the expense of irregularly cultivated rice fields, a few villages were affected by the rural exodus. Some were absorbed in the structure of the plantations, and their inhabitants became ‘coolies’ on the large estates. On the other hand, in the regions where the government had refrained from selling land to planters, and where land speculation had not been unleashed, the most enterprising villagers converted to plantation agriculture; the settlement operations of the early 20th century favored this evolution. The magnitude of the peasant response to market demands, when conditions were favorable, was a challenge to dualistic theses dear to colonial business circles anxious to maintain full control of the plantation sector. But the small holdings proved to be very vulnerable to crises. Kinigoda, in the district of Kägalla, offers a typical example of this kind of evolution: one of the most backward and most malarial areas in the country, inhabited by so-called backward castes, but protected from the extension of plantations as fuel reserve for the railways, it was transformed in the space of a decade, thanks to the proximity of a railway station (Rambukkana) and the establishment of a purely indigenous marketing network. The chenas were converted into banana, then coconut plantations, by the villagers themselves. In other regions, small rubber plantations multiplied (latex manufacturing operations do not require expensive tools) and even tea: during the 1920s, some tea factories began to operate exclusively with leaves purchased from small producers. But often, the loss of chenas was not compensated by a sufficient extension of the village plantations for lack of available space.

 

A complex economic system took the place of the old ecosystem. In a context of land hunger and demographic explosion, the element of flexibility was provided by the diversification of resources made possible by the proximity of plantations. The village economy did not fully integrate into the plantation economy, but it borrowed from it the elements necessary for its survival, and this reluctant symbiosis became as necessary for the balance of the village as was once the cultivation of the chenas. This new mixed economy was based on three sources of income: the product of paddy fields, often cultivated under the tattumaru system (rotation of a plot between members of the same family group, each cultivating a season in turn); the products of the fruit garden surrounding each house, a fraction of which was sold on the market created by the population of immigrant workers of the plantations; finally, occasional or relatively regular salaried jobs made necessary by the irregularity of the resources from the paddy fields in tattumaru. These jobs depended directly or not on the plantations: many planters discovered that it was profitable to entrust villagers with the operations of incision of the rubber trees and the collection of latex, paying them for the task; others found work such as woodcutters, masons, etc.

 

Internal social changes resulting from the rise of plantations are difficult to assess. Here are some hypotheses. The structure of power at the regional level was not radically changed: some families of superior headmen who bargained for their collaboration with the planters derived considerable profits and increased influence. On the other hand, at the local level, simple village headmen often saw their prerogatives reduced to little by the establishment of the planters’ law on the spaces they once controlled, and by the influx of traders and workers from coastal regions. The irremediable decline of the village aristocracy is at partly attributable to this cause. During the last hundred years, some lineages vegetated or even disappeared, while others grew and multiplied. The ‘low caste’ villagers had often sold their land first: they were more vulnerable to the pressures of the Goyigama headmen. The Batgama of the old royal villages, who had been denied ownership of their chenas during the settlements, often sold them for ridiculous sums, but some successfully launched into plantation enterprises. The inhabitants of the seigneurial and temple villages were sheltered from state interference in the cultivation of chenas but they did not enjoy any property rights in the highlands and when their lords became aware of the profits they could draw from the rental or sale of their estates, these tenants were deprived of their chenas without the slightest compensation. Finally, the Vahumpura caste, whose traditional resource consisted of exploiting the sugar palms of the forests, found itself in some areas deprived of this means of subsistence, and forced to look for employment on the plantations. Nevertheless, we must beware of all schematism: some non-Goyigama communities offered remarkable resistance to land speculation, and their entrepreneurial spirit led them to develop small plantations, while many Goyigama populated villages sank into immobilism.

 

The main beneficiaries of this revolution were not the villagers, but the intermediaries and investors. One of the major sources of the fortune of the Ceylon bourgeoisie is derived from these speculative activities. Muslim merchants, Sinhalese traders from coastal regions, surveyors, notaries, Sinhalese lawyers or Burghers (descendants of Dutch settlers) amassed capital that allowed them to buy land and open plantations, and to settle in Colombo. At the next generation, this class formed the framework of the political elite that was to get into power at independence. 

 

 

The rise of small producers.

 

Under the influence of the plantation economy, a growing fraction of the rural population found itself integrated, whether they liked it or not, into the circuits of the world economy. Until the Great Depression, this integration was constantly underestimated by observers foreign to the villages. The testimony of an administrator responsible for cooperative societies, close by his function to rural realities, who discovered in 1933 the effects of the increase in tea prices, appears typical in this regard: “This is a factor that has infinitely more influence on the prosperity of the Sinhalese villager than I had ever imagined before the difficult years that tea cultivation has gone through. Not only do a huge number of villagers have their own small tea plots, but they depend to a very large extent on their work on the plantations, while the market for their vegetable production in particular is very largely conditioned by the presence of the immigrant worker from the plantations”[15]. The crisis here played the role of a revealer, and we could not better express the phenomena that are at the core of this research. The integration was certainly not done all at once, nor in the same way. From the 19th century, the Kandyan peasants, at the instigation of the merchants of the low country and at the imitation of the first British planters, devoted a growing portion of their gardens to the cultivation of coffee, which had been acclimatized in Ceylon since the arrival of the Arabs (15th century). These small prosperous gardens had led to an early monetization, which the government had taken advantage of to proceed with the forced conversion of the grain tithe into a tax in cash. The coffee crisis (1880 to 1890) was to put an end to this boom and plunge the most prosperous villages into misery. The recovery was made by the conversion of coffee to tea, undertaken first by the large planters, followed after a few years by a few small Ceylonese producers: but the complexity of the processing operations of tea leaves made such a conversion difficult for them, unless they could sell them to factories.

 

In the low country, integration was more spontaneous. The cultivation of the coconut tree has been indigenous in Ceylon for at least a millennium. It had long remained limited to peasant gardens and reserved for family consumption. But as early as the 18th century the production of coconut alcohol (arrack), intended for the Indian market, and during the next century the European demand for oilseeds, led the largest Ceylon owners to plant vast expanses and small farmers to market a growing share of their production. The district of Kurunägala thus experienced a spectacular boom at the beginning of the 20th century; the chenas and the forests were converted in a few years into plantations. In this process, the loans granted by the Indian bankers Chettiar played a decisive role. Other indigenous productions of minor importance were similarly stimulated by external demand: the arecanut, a specialty of the district of Kägalla, exported to India; cinnamon bought by the Portuguese as early as the 16th century, which was to be affected around 1830 by the competition of the Dutch Indies; citronella, growing wild in the south of the island, which began to be exported at the beginning of the 20th century. In a third step, it was again the Europeans who gave the example of the development of a new product, rubber. The large plantations, established between 1895 and 1910 for the most part, were imitated by the peasants of the mid-country, who from 1910 devoted ever-increasing spaces to rubber: the transformation of latex is within everyone’s reach and requires little equipment. The small cyclical crisis that occurred in 1919-1920 was not to interrupt this boom, which reached its peak between 1925 and 1927.

 

The link between the development of the plantation economy and prosperity is undeniable. The optimistic impression that emerges from the 500-page official report on the results of the 1911 census is not so much the effect of the complacency of the colonial administration as of this phenomenon of growth that was in full swing on this date[16]: “The coconut boom has been followed by a wave of material prosperity which has enriched all owners of land and brought employment to all classes of artisans. The extension of large estates is gradually squeezing some of the villagers out of their holdings, and they are being reduced to the position of vagrant labourers without any settled homes; but on the whole the increase in wealth has been fairly and generally divided”. Never was this prosperity more evident than in 1925, the year of the second rubber boom. All plantation districts without exception saw the standard of living of their population increase. The number of smallholders was indeed much more considerable in 1925 than it was during the first boom of 1905-1910. The demand for land was intense, speculators patrolled the districts in search of vacant land, and those of the villagers who did not have land found without difficulty to work on large estates.

 

Not all regions of the island were suitable for the establishment of plantations. The dry area in the north-central (Rajarata) and southeast (Ruhuna), depopulated since the 13th century, still housed at the beginning of the 20th century miserable villages at the foot of their too often empty reservoirs, compelled to cultivate chenas often several seasons in a row, undermined by malaria, subject to the good pleasure of a repressive or lax but always unpredictable administration. Described in two different registers by the writer Leonard Wolf (Virgina’s husband) in an admirable novel (The Village in the Jungle) and by a series of ethnologists, the most remarkable of whom was Edmund Leach (Pul Eliya), these villages have attracted the attention of tradition-loving observers; but they are in no way representative of Ceylon in the 20th century[17]. It would also be wrong to present them as a relic of the past: as far away as they were from plantations, those which were near the roads leading from ports facing India to the upper Kandyan country were affected by the passage of migrants as long as their journey was made by this route, and the others suffered or benefited from the attentions of an administration torn between its community of interests with the planters and its desire to help abandoned populations. It could have been expected that the population of these villages would be attracted by the prosperity of the plantation sector and migrate. However, this was not the case, with a few exceptions such as that of peasants of Kolonna korale hiring themselves on the large estates up-country in the dead season. This stability can be attributed either to the difficulty of communication and the lack of information, or to cultural features[18].     

 

We will now limit this analysis to the villages marked by the rise of plantations, which were home to the majority of the population even if they occupied only a minority of the island area. A profound change occurred there, marked by the growth of small peasant plantations and the employment of villagers on nearby large estates; these two elements are also linked because many micro-owners accumulated a small starting capital and assimilated new cultivation techniques by working part-time on the estates.

 

The number of small village plantations is only known precisely in the case of tea and rubber, thanks to the surveys made necessary by the establishment in 1933 and 1934 of restriction plans in the context of the Depression. During the 1920s, a first count (in the context of the ‘Stevenson Plan’) had remained imperfect, many owners seeing it as a prelude to taxation; on the contrary, in 1934 there was a tendency to over-registration, the plan resulting in the issuance of negotiable coupons in the limits of quotas defined according to the planted areas; but these declarations were verified on the ground, and the published results are trustworthy. In the case of rubber, the statistics establish the date on which the areas were planted: the analysis is very revealing in this regard. Between 1922 and 1934, micro-estates of less than 10 acres increased by 104% and occupied in 1934 21.6% of the planted area, compared to 13.8% in 1922. At the same time, medium size plantations increased by 44.7%, while the growth of large estates was limited to 12%, their share of the total area decreasing from 67% to 57%. The boom of small peasant production was particularly marked in the districts of Galle, Matara, Ratnapura and Kägalla, which made them vulnerable to price fluctuations: “As early as 1920 peasants had begun planting rubber in small holdings. Rubber being the type of permanent crop as it is, the result was an increase in the extent of land which the individual could look after. And when there was a squeeze on the land, it was vegetable cultivation that was edged out. This worked well enough for a time (…) However when depression came the peasant found himself without either rubber or free land to try whatever else might have been profitable. Added to this was the difficulty that work on the plantations came to a virtual halt”[19]. In 1938, Ceylon had 97,997 rubber estates of less than 10 acres, covering 130,487 acres, or 1.33 acres each on average; they represented 94.3% of the total number of rubber properties, and 21.5% of their area. A summary calculation based on the 1931 census gives about 180,000 rural families for the rubber growing districts; one in two families would therefore theoretically be in possession of a small property; it is obviously necessary to reduce the estimate to take into account families with several or larger properties; but in any case, the level reached was very considerable[20].  

 

In the case of tea, statistics give 76,149 properties of less than 10 acres in 1938 (97% of the number) covering 61,292 acres (11% of the area); each had on average only 0.8 acres. If we only take into account the village population (1931), which amounted to about 130,000 families, there would in principle be a little more than one property for two families. But a number of these small tea plots were worked part time by plantation workers of Indian origin who were not registered as villagers, which makes it difficult to have a global view; it is not possible to date this development statistically, but all the qualitative indications affirm that it increased during the years 1910-1920[21]. There are no reliable data on small coconut plantations for this period, and even today estimates differ depending on whether or not peasant gardens are included. A survey published in 1953 concluded that there were 115,000 small coconut estates with an average of 5 acres; but the gardens should be added; the number of families in the coconut plantations districts amounting to nearly 300,000, about one in three households would have been in possession of a small coconut property, the other two also having coconut trees in their gardens.[22] The economist Lal Jayawardena estimates that in 1930, there were, all products combined, some 270,000 small plantations, and concludes that each peasant family owned one of them; I would rather say each lineage; but I do not subscribe in any way to the conclusion drawn by the author, according to whom the villagers would have no need to look for work on the plantations[23].

 

It is difficult to estimate the revenues from this small production before the crisis. What we know from the years 1936-38 suggests that tea or rubber small holders who at that date derived from it at most a third of his livelihood, could live on it in a period of high prices around 1925. Village producers treated their latex themselves: coagulation operations require only acid and tanks, and the following operations a hand press and a smokery; in the opinion of the agronomic services, some small producers put on the market in 1927 a rubber “of a quality equal to or higher than the best rubber from large plantations”[24]. This represented a serious competition in the long run for large planters, whose attitude towards the villagers was full of ambiguities. Some remained suspicious of thefts and noticed that in the contact areas between large estates and village, the plants had a one-way migratory propensity, and a certain leakage also affected the work tools[25]. But this involuntary aid to village development was not denounced by all planters: many factories had unused production capacity and the purchase at low prices of fresh tea leaves, liquid or coagulated latex, had become a source of profits. Some entrepreneurs, mostly Ceylonese, had built during the 1920s tea or rubber factories that operated exclusively with the help of the production of small indigenous planters: these were particularly numerous in the district of Kandy and around the small town of Balangoda and in these areas peasant prosperity was evident[26]. Nevertheless, this development of small plantations remained fragile, due to its marginality compared to the economic system as a whole. They only found their place in a context of rapid growth. But if they were economically marginal, they were not socially so; they were less and less an additional resource, and increasingly the main source of income for a growing number of villagers. The general decline in food production provides proof of this. The conviction prevailed during the 1920s that paddy cultivation was an unprofitable activity in Ceylon: the best thing to do, according to an administrator, was to “leave rice cultivation for the more profitable cultivation of tea, rubber and coconut tree”. This was still the feeling of some Europeans ten years later, as evidenced by this typically colonialist withering remark by J.D. Aitken, a representative of Colombo’s business circles, in 1934: “To make Ceylon self-sufficient in rice is as foolish as making the Orkney islands self-sufficient in grapes”[27]. Despite supply disruptions as in 1919-1920, rice, imported mainly from Burma, was so cheap that after completely eliminating the locally produced paddy from plantation shops, it had conquered the largest share of the village market. There are no statistics prior to 1936 on the degree of dependence on rice imports for each region of the island and we must, once again, be content with testimonies that report a decline in paddy cultivation. Some owners drained the valley bottoms or emptied the village tanks to plant them with rubber or coconut trees. The phenomenon was common in the east of the district of Kalutara, in the north of that of Galle[28], and on the margins of the district of Kurunägala, where paddy fields, inadequately irrigated due to poor maintenance of hydraulic works, had been absorbed into expanding coconut estates[29]. A commission of inquiry on soil erosion did not hesitate to affirm with some exaggeration that the extension of small plantations was done “particularly by the conversion of rice fields” and mentioned the case of old terraced paddy fields devoted to the cultivation of tea[30]. A cumulative process may have occurred: following the installation of plantations on the highest lands, the paddy fields located below were silted with the mud of the carefully weeded tea fields. Other contributing factors were the drying up of springs following the felling of forests, the reduction of the usual grazing grounds of buffaloes, the difficulty of obtaining sticks to fence paddy fields. Finally, the workforce normally employed in paddy cultivation was diverted by the attraction exerted by salaried employment on plantations. This phenomenon was not new: as early as the 1900s, planters were trying to recruit employees even during the paddy season. But it assumed in the 1920s proportions sufficient to worry the indigenous headmen, themselves owners of rice fields. In the south, the link between paddy stagnation and employment on plantations was explicit: “the transplanting of rice is generally only practiced by headmen (…) The main difficulty seems to be the lack of labour, women and children prefer to work on plantations. Another reason is that even when there are job seekers, they demand to be paid in cash, which is not always easy for rice farmers”[31].  A former administrator interviewed during the 1960s considered that “the villagers had ceased to be farmers, except for their small garden”. Excessive affirmation: as unprofitable as it was, rice cultivation had not disappeared, and it often took little to revive it[32].

 

 

Sinhalese day labourers on the plantations

 

The role played by the employment of Sinhalese in plantations has always been underestimated by economists and historians imbued with dualist theses, obsessed with the central place held by workers of Indian origin in the operation of large estates established in high-altitude regions where the village population was absent. For example the economist Snodgrass claimed that the employment of the villagers on the plantations has remained negligible. Lal Jayawardena said that the peasantry was satisfied with its land and was therefore in no way forced to seek resources outside[33]. Contrary to these authors, I maintain that this type of resource has played a decisive role in the balance of a large number of villages and plantations, at least since the beginning of the 20th century. It is true that this workforce has never turned into a stable proletariat, unlike the Tamils of Indian origin residing in large domains; but it is their very flexibility and mobility that have made these workers indispensable. The major difficulty for the study of the phenomenon is the absence of overall statistics. The planters took into account the population residing on their estates, but not the teams of more or less occasional workers who returned to their villages every evening. The censuses counted the Sinhalese population residing on the estates, which in 1901 stood at 5.56% of the total number of resident workers, in 1911 at 7.66%, in 1921 at 9.85%, in 1931 at 9.89% and in 1946 at 15.6%. As for the statistics of labour services, they did not list the Sinhalese employed on small plantations not employing workers of Indian origin, which were by definition those where the Sinhalese were the most numerous; in large plantations, their percentage compared to the total workforce would be 9.2% in 1929, 10.9% in 1934 and 14.8% in 1939; but these figures do not take into account occasional workers, and the first serious survey on this subject is not prior to 1937-1939. At that time, on the large plantations, there were 97,391 Sinhalese workers, including 31.7% residents, 46.4% regular non-residents and 21.9% more or less occasional non-residents paid by the task[34]. The employment of the Sinhalese is as old as the plantations themselves, which they often opened as wood cutters. It became more frequent at the turn of the century, with the rise of coconut and rubber plantations and the contraction of the spaces available for the cultivation of chenas. The testimonies collected in a 1908 survey leave no doubt on this subject; the geography of the employment of the Sinhalese is in accordance with that which emerges from the statistics of the Labour Controller in 1948[35].

 

The Southern province, especially the district of Matara, regularly provided a large share of the resident workers, as the plantations located in this region rarely called on Indian Tamils; in the west of the country, the districts of Kalutara and Kägalla were also very marked by this phenomenon but the Indian Tamils also came there in large numbers. All the coconut estates of the North-western province had from the beginning employed exclusively Sinhalese workers. In the upper country, on the tea plantations, the employment of villagers had developed in the Mahaveli Ganga valley between Gampola and Nawalapitiya, the Kotmale valley, the surroundings of Matale, and the confines of the districts of Badulla and Nuwara Eliya. The results of the 1948 survey indicate that coconut land areas employed more than 75% of villagers, rubber districts between 30 and 50%, intermediate areas between tea and rubber about 25%, and tea districts in the upper country less than 20%. It is obviously difficult to rely on statistics from 1948 to affirm that this type of employment represented for planters more than a backup force during the 1920s. On the other hand, it was possibly essential for the villagers themselves.

 

Who were these workers? To answer this question, it is necessary to take into account the characteristics of the village society, which was far from being egalitarian[36].  Several lines of cleavage ran through it, separating within the same family the generations, within the same lineage different branches, inside the same village different lineages and different castes, and finally distinguishing the native villagers from the outsiders, merchants, squatters and others. The conjugal family was already the basic unit of Sinhalese society. It was rare for married children to live under their father’s roof. But the parents owned the land, and usually cultivated it with the help of the youngest who, in the Kandy regions, inherited the house and property if he was able to compensate his elders. The latter, during the lifetime of their parents and even after the inheritance division, had therefore to provide for their own family by seeking external resources, especially in times of population growth. It is significant that the itinerant cultivation of chenas had always been the work of young households, and that salaried employment on plantations, which replaced it, was frequently restricted to this category; this trait helps to explain the instability of these workers who were employed while waiting for an inheritance. This problem of young people previously found a solution in the current practice of fraternal polyandry: elders and cadets lived in the same home, avoiding any inheritance division, and at the same time limiting the number of their own heirs; fraternal polyandry had certainly been encouraged in monarchical times because it allowed each family to ensure the service of the king while continuing to cultivate its land. During of the 20th century, the practice had not entirely disappeared, as evidenced by the genealogies collected in Kandyan villages. But the multiplication of external jobs must have led to its decline. Another way to avoid inheritance divisions was to preserve the heritage undivided by organizing a rotation of land; this system, generally known as tattumaru, gave rise to an abundant literature that sometimes tended to obscure the question. The principle is as follows: each household of the lineage has the right to cultivate all or part of the paddy land of the lineage at an interval determined by its place in the real or supposed family tree of the lineage (hence countless disputes relating to the exact status of each). Thus, in the simple hypothesis of two brothers heirs of the founder of the lineage, one without offspring and the other having three children, the uncle without children will cultivate the paddy fields every other year while his three nephews will have access to the land only one year out of six. After several generations, the system becomes extraordinarily complex and it is not uncommon to encounter ten-year or more rotations: the tattumaru then becomes purely symbolic, and the usufructuaries cede their rights to one of them for some reciprocal advantage. The system has nothing egalitarian in its principle. But even when access to the means of production is reduced to a fiction, the absence of full ownership binds the main usufructuary to duties of solidarity from which he cannot escape, at the risk of being taxed of stingyness, a capital sin in the Sinhalese value system. It is clear that the tattumaru system can only subsist if other resources are available to those concerned. This aspect of things is curiously ignored by most studies; it can explain the spatial location of the phenomenon that has often intrigued observers: tattumaru is especially widespread in areas where the cultivation of chenas with unirrigated rice (älwi) predominated, and where its disappearance had given way to employment on rubber plantations.

 

Another line of cleavage separated, in the same village, different lineages and often different castes. Some considered themselves the founders of the village, others had settled later, attracted or tolerated by the former. In the context of the old seigneurial villages, there were lineages of dependent servants or artisans, belonging to lower castes in the hierarchy who received a fraction of the terroir in exchange for their services. With the slow but almost general weakening of the authority of the dominants resulting from their loss of control over the highlands and their tutelage under the colonial power, these dependent groups found themselves deprived of their protectors and exploiters, and exposed to the activities of land traffickers; it therefore seems that they had become, proportionally more than others, landless peasants and that they were particularly numerous in the category of occasional workers. The development of the plantations therefore represented an opportunity for them to improve their condition, after having often been at the origin of their uprooting[37]. It is difficult to know the caste membership of plantation employees, the planters themselves being perfectly ignorant in this matter. The villagers belonging to hierarchically inferior castes had probably more frequently than their Goyigama neighbours sought salaried jobs, either because they had lost their highlands (case of the Batgama villagers living in the former royal villages, or the numerous Berava in the temple villages) or because their habitat was located in the highlands where plantations were established (case of the Vahumpura villagers, settled in the hills where they once lived from the extraction of palm sugar and the cultivation other fruit trees)[38].  It is often said that these groups, used to working for others, more easily accepted the discipline imposed by the planters, and did not fear contact with resident workers of Indian origin often themselves belonging to ‘low’ Tamil castes. This reasoning, quite common when the issue is raised with Goyigama people, seems to me questionable. The cases of Goyigama peasants occupying salaried jobs were not rare. Among the newcomers in the villages, there were a number of squatters, attracted by the jobs offered in nearby plantations. They quickly melted into the village fabric by getting married on the spot. But entire families had also moved, particularly in the district of Kurunägala where migrants from coastal areas had largely participated in the development of coconut cultivation. Devoid of rights on the ground, tolerated more than welcomed, they found themselves confined to these jobs that had attracted them[39].

 

For impoverished peasants, the choice was clear: “the farmer who used to receive small advances during the growing season and to receive very little of his share at harvest is no longer satisfied with this system and prefers to work on large estates, where he receives a good salary paid regularly”[40]. Other significant features of the recruitment of occasional workers deserve to be noted. The high proportion of women and young people among them is noticed by many observers and tends to confirm them in their idea that this is a marginal phenomenon that only provides households with complementary resources. The presence of young people or even children is explained by what has been said above about the family, that of women is not surprising in the Sinhalese social context where women are much freer than among Tamils, for example; that said, it is difficult to assess the real degree of autonomy of these women vis-à-vis their husbands remaining in the village to cultivate their gardens or to stay idle[41]. Recruitment methods varied from one plantation to another: the large plantations employed the services of the village headmen or Sinhalese kangani, and they were always ready, during the rush periods, to hire the villagers who came to the plantation after the call of regular workers. The type of work carried out by the Sinhalese varied from one domain to another but, contrary to popular belief, no task was repulsive to them: men were very frequently woodcutters and tappers of rubber trees, children and young people engaged in weeding teams working on the task, women picked tea like Tamils.

 

In addition to occasional or regular employment, villagers in plantation regions used to sell vegetables and fresh fruit to Tamil workers residing on estates, who for the most part did not have the use of gardens; or they exchanged them for rice. Toddy (fermented juice of palm trees) and arrack (distilled toddy), widely consumed by ‘low-caste’ Tamils, represented a tolerated source of income, in the first case, and illicit, for the second. Although this is often overlooked, a series of clues suggest that, for a very long time, the clandestine sale of alcohol was the main source of income for many villages located at the foot of the plantations. The institution of a partial prohibition, under the pressure of the puritan Buddhist circles, did not stop the practice. Thus, in a remote canton of the district of Kägalla, called by its inhabitants the Kälerata (Forest country), Vahumpura and Goyigama peasants, traditionally producers of jaggery (palm sugar), turned to the manufacture of fermented toddy, which they exchanged for rice with the Tamils of the Kelani valley estates and the merchants of the bazaars of Deraniyagala and Dehiowita. The profits were apparently sufficient to ensure the subsistence of this peasantry almost completely devoid of rice fields and having had to gradually abandon the cultivation of its chenas due to the extension of the plantations[42].

 

The Sinhalese, both small planters and employees of the domains, had shown a capacity to respond to market incentives, like the Burmese peasants studied by Michael Adas, who were able to take advantage of the opportunities offered to develop large-scale paddy cultivation in the Irrawadi Delta[43].The difference lies in that by virtue of the system of task sharing imposed by the colonial power, the Sinhalese had to grow products foreign to peasant traditions, with the exception of coconut.

Who were ultimately the main beneficiaries of the expansion? And who were the ones who depended on it the most for their survival? Small landowners capable of converting their highlands into plantations had become able to live on their rents in times of high price especially in the 1920s, something that would have been unthinkable a few decades earlier. Proportionally, it is the most humble or marginal categories of the population that had taken advantage of the situation. Families belonging to humiliated castes had found a means of subsistence independent of their former masters in salaried employment on large plantations. Those who were able to preserve their lands had often shown a greater entrepreneurial spirit than their Goyigama neighbours, judging by the extension of small plantations around Kadugannawa, Gampola, Rambukkana and Narammala, belonging to Duraya peasants (this honorary name includes several castes including the Batgama and Panna)[44]. More generally, all those whose economic position was precarious, sharecroppers, women, young men, enjoyed greater autonomy: once dependent on their masters, their husbands or their parents, they were now dependent on the prosperity of tea, rubber or coconut.

 

 

The elements of an endogenous crisis: population growth and land hunger

 

There were shadows in the picture of the prosperity of the 1920s. In the specific case of Ceylon, contemporaries became aware of this as early as 1927, when the agrarian issue was raised for the first time. The elements of an emerging endogenous crisis were the combination of faster population growth and exhaustion of the amount of land available for village expansion in the country’s wet zone. According to the calculations made by Snodgrass, the pressure index of the rural population on the land left at the disposal of the peasantry would have remained substantially constant until 1921, and would have deteriorated abruptly from that date. Whatever the merits and weaknesses of the calculations of Snodgrass, these conclusions fit perfectly with the ‘literary’ data available, whether the reports of the colonial administrators or the testimonies collected by the Land Commission between 1927 and 1929. All evoke the worsening of the agrarian problem in terms of available space, many affirm the swelling of a category of landless peasants. However, such an increase in the agricultural pressure index is in no way sufficient to prove that there was a worsening of economic conditions: productivity would have to stagnate, and no new source of income would have been added. We know that, on the contrary, peasant resources had diversified. Moreover, it is possible to argue that the acceleration of population growth, an essential component of this increased pressure, resulted from an economic improvement, leading to a decrease in infant mortality. Finally, such a general figure does not take into account regional disparities, nor, above all, social inequalities. Only an increase in the percentage of landless peasant families would be relevant; but the first data are not prior to 1936, and their accuracy is questionable. According to village socio-economic surveys, the number of households without land would have represented at that time 44% of the total, but a careful analysis of the survey methods led Lal Jayawardena to doubt this figure, young households not yet having access to property being classified in this category[45]. Should we give up evaluating this land hunger, or even relegate it to the store of political artifices, as Jayawardena tends to do? I don’t think so: there is too much evidence to the contrary, that lead to consider the phenomenon in two forms, absolute and relative: in limited areas, the amount of land was materially insufficient to allow the continuation of village expansion; but in most localities, it was the inequality in the distribution of land that was responsible for such a situation: the appetite for land of the outsiders was at the origin of the hunger for land of the villagers. And while at the beginning of the century the villagers sold their rights to the highlands to planters for a dish of rice, the 1920s were marked by a rivalry between speculators and peasants for the control of a space that was shrinking. Land hunger is not a myth. The peasants were very aware of the situation, as evidenced by this statement reported as typical by a Settlement Officer[46] : “A man told me: I thought I would just have sufficient land for two children at the same time; now I have seven and my land is no longer enough”. The most accurate information on the issue can be found in the unpublished diaries of the Settlement Officers and in the published or unpublished reports that were used for the work of the Land Commission. Land hunger was evident in specific regions. First, two cantons up-country, Kotmale and Udukinda[47]. In Kotmale, villagers demanded land to build their houses, grow products to sell to the population of the plantations adjacent to their gardens. The district administrator would prefer to see them work themselves on the plantations or to cultivate their paddy fields more intensively. The most demanding were the young, and those of their elders who had “by their folly or bad luck alienated their ancestral properties”. They asked for the allotment of the few remaining communal pastures (most of it has been sold to the planters) and they opposed the owners of paddy fields who needed them for their buffaloes. The same administrator was aware in 1926 of the fragility of the small plantations that had multiplied on the outskirts of the villages: “in the event of a significant drop in tea price, large plantations and factories will stop buying their leaves from them, and farmers will be forced to sell their plots at very cheap prices to some capitalists”.  In Udukinda, the issue was aggravated by the activities of the kangani, who more than unenterprising villagers, launched small plantations. A conflict for the land appeared between Sinhalese and Tamils, the latter having installed gardens or small plantations even in places where the regulations against erosion prohibited it. It was the villagers themselves who at first sold them land; but they repented, and the peasants’ opposition to any alienation often became systematic “Many lands were sold that should not have been sold,” commented the administrator. Not far from there, gardens were alienated at the initiative of a large local family, heavily indebted, and the village was practically abandoned[48].

 

In the south of the island, the district of Matara presented a different case of agrarian congestion. It resulted from the concentration of land in the hands of a minority of large landowners, which led to the formation of a landless proletariat. As early as 1901, an insightful administrator, W.E. Davidson, became aware of this; one of his successors, A.N. Strong, launched in 1925 a policy of agrarian reform that was to inspire the projects of the Land Commission: its basis was the subdivision of land still available in inalienable plots, and the planning of rural space at the village level (‘mapping out’). In the event of extreme overcrowding, Strong went so far as to consider the expropriation of the plantations and their redistribution: a project revolutionary in 1925, which was to find a beginning of execution after 1940, culminating with the nationalizations of 1972 and 1975. The beneficiaries were to be in the order of priority the peasants without land, who would establish their houses and gardens on these plots, then the ‘small capitalists’, in other words the promoters of small plantations[49]. A change of administrator in 1929 was to break this attempt.

 

The example of the confines of the districts of Kalutara and Ratnapura (cantons of East Pasdun and Kukul) is that of the sudden transition from abundance to an apparent shortage of land. There was a burst of unbridled speculation during the last surge in rubber prices in 1925, when the cost of production of a pound of rubber was one seventh of its selling price. Investors who rushed, almost all Sinhalese from the Low country, bought indiscriminately land that the smartest peasants resold two or three times to different buyers. In this specific case, population growth had no share of responsibility in the process, and the hunger for land was purely speculative in nature: “Folly in sale, folly in purchase, a tragic harlequinade has been played in this Kukul korale. The transactions might almost be said to be twice cursed: they cursed him that gave and him that took.”, wrote Stace, the Settlement Officer[50]. Twenty to thirty years earlier, the entire district of Kägalla was experiencing a similar evolution. There is no district where the effects of population growth resulting partially from the presence of plantations, and the contraction of village land having the same origin have been combined to such a degree. For a long time, the latent crisis was postponed by the profits from the peasant plantations of banana, coconut or rubber trees, the sale of arecanuts and toddy, and by the resources provided by salaried employment. There were, it is true, very few zones absolutely without land; but, according to the estimate of a local headman himself involved in land operations, three quarters of the land belonged in 1925 to one twentieth of the population. From 1930 there was practically no land left for the extension of the villages, to the point that the Settlement Department had almost given up on carrying out its activities there, all the lands having become private property. And it was there that the first plantations were expropriated.[51]

 

Finally, the North-western province, which roughly corresponds to the area of extensive coconut cultivation, experienced years of plantation growth that began around 1890. The cultivation of the coconut tree is greedy for space, but stingy for jobs (1 worker per about 4 hectares, ten times less than tea): the threshold of relative overcrowding is therefore quickly reached where it is a monoculture. In the struggle for land, the fight was excessively unequal between the great owners of Colombo and often miserable peasants, having long lived in the isolation of their villages surrounded by chenas. A Settlement Officer reported the words of an old peasant forced to leave his village, which was deserted: “Ihala and Pahaladilla are practically devoid of inhabitants, who have all been driven out by a certain rich landowner. We asked a very old man what had happened to him and he said: Loka [literally the Big man] wanted me to go, so I went. – Did he pay you anything for the land? – No”[52]. Some villages resisted better, especially those that had been the subject of settlement and where peasants knew their rights. But most of the villagers found themselves in a Latin American-type situation of microfundiaries in the face of absentee latifundiaries, and even if in absolute number the region was not overcrowded, land grabbing by a minority created a situation of relative land hunger: “I receive many requests every day from landless and half-hungry villagers; one of them tells me that he makes his wife and three children live in a clay hut, on a soil that does not belong to him, with less than half a rupee per day”. As the cultivation of the coconut tree was an activity within everyone’s reach, the demand for land was almost general. Apparently, this demand was a sign of continued expansion, it was stimulated by the steady growth of the purchasing power of the wealthy fringe of the peasantry. But behind the villager demanding land often loomed the speculator, and the Settlement Officers encountered many cases where the land they allocated against payment to the peasants was immediately resold to outsiders[53]. Nowhere can we better perceive how expansion comes up against natural limits and obstacles to the distribution of property. The growth of coconut plantations exceeded their natural ecological setting, extending over arid areas previously considered unsuited for cultivation, on the northern fringe of the province. The expansionist aims of the already established planters went against the interests of the village; among many examples, that of those owners whose domain encircled village reservoirs, which they wanted to appropriate, or who attempted to grab the slightest little land by all means[54].

 

Finally, debt was taking on such proportions that instead of helping to develop, it blocked the villager’s horizon. A settlement officer gave his version of the phenomenon: “Galakumbura: this is a village where the inhabitants have been almost entirely bought out by capitalists, the number of families being reduced to eight. I asked one man what was the cause of this orgy of selling and he put it down to what R.L. Stevenson would describe as ‘drink and the devil’; he said: ‘People drink arrack and toddy at Kuliyapitiya [the local bazaar], then brawls ensue and they become involved in criminal cases’. Then they fell into debts and are forced to sell to pay off the loans”[55].

 

 

The agrarian question

 

The new agrarian policy suggested by the Land Commission in 1927-1928, when the crisis had not yet broken out, was a reflection of the concerns of the ruling circles, both British and Ceylonese, in the face of worrying signs of an endogenous crisis. To understand the motivations, it is necessary to recall the main features of political evolution during the 1920s. At that time, a moderate nationalist movement emerged. The National Congress of Ceylon, a pale replica of its Indian counterpart, claimed the participation of the Ceylonese in the affairs, which the colonial authorities would grant in stages, first in 1924, on the basis of limited suffrage and according to a system of separate colleges. In a second stage, following the radical conclusions of a royal commission of inquiry (Donoughmore Commission, which sat by the same time as the Land Commission), universal suffrage and parliamentary responsibility were granted in 1931, during the Depression. In between, the agrarian question began to agitate opinion, and politicians could no longer afford to ignore it, in view of the extension of the electorate. The nationalist politicians of the 1920s accused the colonial authorities of having alienated indiscriminately for a century, to the benefit of British planters, land over which the villagers had rights, and which even if they were not used intensively at the time of their alienation, would later prove essential to the village balance. This thesis of expropriation acquired an increased audience and was taken up by the Sinhala language press and discussed in Maha Jana Sabhas, provincial political circles that multiplied at the time. Two Sabhas, those of Kägalla and Kalutara (two areas particularly affected by land speculation) published pamphlets vigorously attacking colonial policy. But one cannot fail to be struck by the fact that in the first case at least, the author of the attacks was himself a confirmed speculator, which allows us to doubt the intentions of a number of so-called defenders of the peasantry. The real target of the attacks was in fact the Settlement Department, accused of making peasants pay Government for land that they believed belonged to them, and above all of making the owners of plantations established in dubious conditions pay still higher prices[56]. The Ceylon political leaders were generally large plantation owners. Many of them had constituted their estates at the expense of the villagers, especially in the Kurunägala district, where every bourgeois family in Colombo owned or sought to acquire a coconut estate considered a secure placement. During the period of prosperity, despite their verbal attacks against the ‘British plantocracy’, politicians remained mainly concerned with their interests. The position of the young D.S. Senanayake in 1925, whose family owned extensive plantations, is not lacking in interest: testifying before the Commission which was enquiring about the effects of the Stevenson plan to control rubber production, Senanayake opposed any restriction to land alienation: “I must say that in Ceylon there is no land at present suitable for the further cultivation of rubber, as the government is adopting the dog-in-the-manger policy. Ceylon would be far more prosperous if the government opens its eyes to the fact and releases land as much as possible. Ceylon can always compete with the rest of the world. In Ceylon labour is cheap, conditions are better, and I should say the yield is better”[57]. The main association of Ceylonese planters (the Low Country Products Association) put forward a comparable argument in 1928 against the proposals of the Land Commission; it would be necessary that peasants and capitalists obtain the same facilities for the development of the land; because the large landowners would stimulate the small peasants, playing the role of pioneers, their elimination would present serious dangers[58].

 

The administration’s position on the agrarian issue was ambiguous, and the analysis made by the governor of the time, Sir Hugh Clifford, was not necessarily that of the colonial administration as a whole. His ideal was that of dualism, although the reality he had before his eyes was that of integration. The reasoning he held was as follows: against the supporters of an economic nationalism, he argued that the rise of the plantation economy had been beneficial as a whole to the Sinhalese peasantry, as attested by the population growth in the areas it affected. But this boom had reached the point where it risked calling into question its own successes: the shortage of land blocked the development of a proprietary peasantry and favoured that of a landless proletariat : “For the first time since the agricultural development of Ceylon had been undertaken by Europeans, lands which could be put to profitable use by the indigenous peasantry of the country came into demand for conversion into properly organized and managed estates (…) It is clear that the further indefinite growth of large tea, rubber and coconut estates cannot continue to be promoted and encouraged unless the Government of Ceylon is prepared to face the prospect, long ere another seventy years have come and gone, of a congested population in a tropical agricultural country, with no suitable land available for its use. Were such a state of things to come about, the vast number of Sinhalese peasants, who would thus be rendered landless in their own native country – while huge areas were owned and cultivated by landowners the bulk of whom are of alien origin – would have against the colonial government (which had taken no measures to guard against this contingency) a legitimate grievance of the first magnitude”[59]. Was this a self-criticism of British agrarian policy? Not at all. According to the governor, this dangerous evolution resulted from a fever of land speculation for which the Ceylonese themselves and not the British were responsible. The solution was for Clifford to restore dualism and at the same time stop the extension of the large estates: “the plan I put forward should have the effect of gradually draining out of the plantations of the island all the Sinhalese who are not employed there to specialized tasks, to transform them into owner peasants”. This point of view was not shared by the entire administration[60]. Some Government Agents believed that the point of saturation was far from being reached (Thaine, Western Province), others on the contrary that there was no land available for such a project (Schrader, Southern Province). Some pointed out the dangers of a multiplication of small plantation owners, who would be vulnerable to the first crisis (Harrisson Jones, North Western Province). Others doubted the reality of land hunger and made the peasants themselves responsible for the alienation of their lands (Wedderburn, North Central Province). The Assistant Government Agent of Kägalla Hobday expressed a radical colonialist opinion: “It would in my opinion be improvident and arbitrary to prohibit completely the sale of any more Crown lands to capitalists. After all it is the capitalist who makes good use of the land and the peasant who spoils it. The Ceylon villager or at any rate the Kandyan villager will never exert himself to make a prosperous ‘small holding’ out of a chena allotment. He will grow enough to keep himself alive and that is all. It is often the case in this district that the more land a villager has, the more primitive and miserable is his existence. The best off is the man who supplements the small return of his paddy land and chena with good pay from a neighboring estate”. The majority of the administration recognized the existence of a problem, but diverged on the solutions, some trusting in the ability of the plantations to ensure the continuous development of the whole country and the creation of jobs sufficient to compensate for the effects of population growth, others wanting to block its development in favour of the development of a small owner peasantry.

 

The Land Commission opted for the second position[61]. Meeting in June 1927 and sitting for two years, it produced ten reports (only the third and the last have some consistency). The commission questioned hundreds of witnesses but did not have any statistical study of the agrarian crisis carried out. Its conclusions were therefore more a summary of opinions than a rigorous analysis of the issue. It recognized the existence of an agrarian problem; it did not clearly comment on its origins, but suggested a series of emergency remedies. First, the government should stop all existing land alienation practices, and somehow freeze the land market; in particular, stop alienating large blocks to planters, and stop auctioning small plots to villagers; peasants should be forbidden to alienate land that had not yet been the subject of settlement. The work of the Settlement Department should be made more expeditious and supplemented with a kind of rural planning (mapping out) so that the expansion of each village, when possible, was arranged in a rational way. The alienation of the land should be done as a priority for the benefit of poor peasants; but when they did not have the means to buy them, it was envisaged giving them free as a perpetual usufruct with a ban on alienation, or in full ownership if they were ‘paraveni [ancestral] chenas’. In the event of a village territory fully occupied, expropriation was not envisaged, but the establishment of settlements on available spaces nearby, or distant colonies in the vast expanses of the Rajarata. The petty bourgeoisie was not forgotten: it was planned for its benefit, in areas sufficiently provided with land, the alienation of blocks large enough to establish small plantations. As for large planters, they had nothing to fear, their only hindrance now being a greater difficulty in acquiring land. The government hastened to follow up on the most acceptable proposals from its point of view, so as to avoid having to give in on the essentials – namely the control allowed by the presumption of belonging to the Crown of the uncultivated lands, established by the Ordinance 12 of 1840: “there is no guarantee that the new State Council with perhaps a considerably changed personnel will understand these complicated measures or appreciate the labour and patience on both sides which has resulted in the present compromise. Should the controversy be opened on the old lines and an attack pressed against the existing law in the new council, the result may well have disastrous effects”[62]. We will not go into the details of the measures adopted, simply indicating the trend and assessing their scope. The State retained the theoretical ownership of the highlands and the machinery to ensure control remained in place, but the Settlement Officers were instructed to be more generous. On the other hand, the auctioning of land in large blocks intended for large planters was abandoned; all available land was reserved for the peasant population as a priority, and for the Ceylon bourgeoisie in second. There is a measure taken as early as 1927 that was to lead to unexpected consequences: it is the prohibition made to the beneficiaries of settlements to sell the land thus obtained to foreign speculators. The poorest villagers, unable to sell part of these highlands to pay the price demanded by the government for settlement, were led to sell their ancestral gardens, or even their rice fields: “If a very poor villager obtains 3/4 acres, even at 10 rupees the acre only, he will not be able to pay; if he sells an acre, he will be able to. The remedy would be to give up to five acres for free. There is now a marked increase in the sale by the villagers of fields and gardens, partly to overcome this difficulty, but to a large extent because of the need for cash that the villagers once procured by the resale of chenas with questionable titles”[63]. Such a trend says a lot about the inelasticity of peasant resources, about the reasons that pushed the villagers to accept settlements so willingly, in short, about the limits of the prosperity of the years 1920.

 

The Great Depression put an end to speculation and made it easier for authorities to intervene in the agrarian field, but it was too late to reverse the process of concentration of land ownership in the hands of a small number[64]. The Land Commission had recognized the inevitable halt to the territorial expansion of the plantation economy. The fact that it tabled its conclusions the same year in which the global crisis broke out is not entirely coincidence. The indigenous crisis of which it was the fruit had slowly matured during the 1920s under the pressure of external forces. The bouts of speculation related to the chaotic state of the rubber market before 1929 had contributed to revealing the limits of expansion, while the men on the ground saw every day the combined effects of population growth and land speculation. Expansion, according to the expression of Gamani Corea, was reaching its own end. The collapse of external markets, significant before 1929, in which overproduction linked to the rise of small plantations had its share of responsibility, therefore did not break a steady momentum; it rushed a latent crisis. This conclusion is exactly in line with that of Michael Adas: “Government officials and Burmese nationalists alike failed to recognize or actually to prevent the gradual deterioration of the condition of the agrarian classes in the Delta until the very last years of the decades. Their failure has been reflected in the works of many historians of modern Burma who have emphasized the impact of the Great Depression on the economy and society of Burma and neglected the changes in the early 1900s which made the crisis of the 1930s inevitable. This emphasis has obscured the root causes of that crisis, which lay in the very nature of the economic system which evolved in the Delta. Although they became more intense in the late 1920s and the 1930s, there were serious agrarian problems long before the Great Depression”[65]. In Ceylon as in Burma, an indigenous pioneering frontier was closing for the same reasons: lack of land, population growth, restriction of credit.

 

To conclude this analysis of the endogenous crisis, which was an ‘indigenous’ crisis, the following scheme seems to best account for the facts:

 

– The development of the plantation economy in the island’s wet zone caused, particularly after 1890, irreversible ecological and economic changes; but this evolution can in no way be interpreted as a long-term crisis. A new balance was established, in which the losses from the subversion of the old ecosystem were compensated and, in terms of standard of living, probably overcompensated by the gains from the fallout of the plantation economy, no watertight partition separating, contrary to the dualist scheme, the village sector from the plantation sector.

 

– In the old ecological regime, a macabre regulation mechanism functioned, by virtue of which the production of human beings and that of means of subsistence varied almost hand in hand: the demographic waves resulting from the growth phases of production were quickly clipped by climate fluctuations and their malarial sequelae. In the new regime, the market-induced fluctuations in production did not have such immediate demographic effects: a phase of expansion determined a demographic wave, under the conditions of a rural society where little or no birth control was exercised, but the resulting pressure on the land could increase without causing immediate imbalance for some time, as the economic cycles were generally longer than the climatic cycles.

 

– One can argue that an endogenous crisis was triggered before the exogenous crisis. The acute hunger for land, which was in itself the effect of the old expansion of large plantations and recent micro-holdings, was a sign that the continuation of development was compromised in the short term due to a lack of available space. But the growth of small indigenous production was just as threatened by the contradiction, which had been emerging since the mid-1920s, between the interests of small farmers and those of large planters. The appearance of an overcapacity in production during the 1920s was due to indigenous growth; this inchoative and marginal development (from an economic but not social point of view) was at the mercy of an economic turnaround; to the extent that it was not limited to the Ceylon case, but was found in Malaysia and the Dutch Indies in the case of rubber, it was a determining element in the appearance of the exogenous crisis. In other words, everything leads to strongly reaffirming the thesis of overproduction (and not underconsumption) with this essential precision: the appearance of overcapacity was the work of small indigenous producers. The Burmese case studied by Adas shows that identical mechanisms were at work with regard to rice production. 

 

 

 

 

THE DEPRESSION’S PROGRESS

 

Most contemporaries tended to consider the crisis as a phenomenon spreading from industrialized metropolitan centers to agricultural peripheries, colonized or not. In this perspective, which could be described as imperialist, the New York stock market crash represented the visible, spectacular source of the crisis, and everything that was prior to the event was relegated to the category of prodromes. This approach remains that of many economists obsessed with the American case. But a more sustained interest in the movement of commodity prices in the dissemination process has led to highlighting the anteriority of the depression compared to the stock market crash. Inverting the perspectives, depression therefore appears as a phenomenon coming from the peripheries and heading towards the center. The stock market crash, by a boomerang effect, sent the depression back to its starting point. The crisis did not spread one-way[66]. The purpose of this research being to analyze the social impact of depression and not to describe its general mechanisms, we will be attentive to the tenuous propagation channels of the phenomenon at the ground level where they reach the population, keeping in mind that where we see an external influence exerted, a movement in the opposite direction may well have also occurred. The Great Depression has spread through three channels communicating with each other: the collapse of the prices of the main agricultural export products, is a known phenomenon whose familiar features will simply be recalled; the crisis of the local credit system, controlled by Nattukottai Chettiar, financiers of South Indian origin, and the crisis of the colony’s finances, will attract our attention as they involve more specific mechanisms.

 

 

Dependence on exports

 

By its dependence on three products, tea, rubber and coconut products (copra, oil, desiccated nut), and by its negligible trading capabilities on the world market (the island being a colony, and its share of production being decisive only for tea), Ceylon was particularly vulnerable to price fluctuations. The depression of the 1930s had precedents in this regard: with the rise of plantations, the phases of the world economy punctuated the fate if not of the island, at least of the driving sector of its economy. From 1846-48, the European crisis combined with the effects of risky speculations momentarily ruined coffee production. Between 1878 and 1890, the European depression combined its effects with those of Brazilian competition and the ravages of a fungus attacking coffee plants, the hemileia vastatrix, to annihilate plantations, and only the timely conversion to tea saved the plantation economy. A phenomenon of external origin, in both cases, was combined with the elements of an internal crisis; let us add that in 1878-90, the small indigenous coffee producers, already numerous, were the first victims of the crisis, and that among the causes of the multiplication of hemileia, the cultivation of spaces unsuitable for the coffee bush was not negligible. These traits foreshadow those of the Great Depression. The last of these events was in 1919-1920, when the post-war crisis caused the prices of most export products to fall; aggravating circumstance, rice prices soared due to shortage, while the effects of the global flu epidemic disorganized production and led to considerable mortality. Its social effects prefigure those of the Depression: unemployment of Sinhalese workers, rise in rural crime, misery in the most dependent districts. But the lively recovery of rubber prices quickly erased the traces[67].

 

The singularity of the Great Depression in Ceylon is first of all due to its duration: it began between 1926 and 1929 and ended hardly before 1940; then, to the fact that it marked the end of a long-term trend of expansion that began around 1890; finally, to the considerable depth and extension of its impact, since the country’s economy had become increasingly permeable to influences emanating from the plantation sector since the beginning of the century. The decline in prices was uneven depending on the products. Rubber, after a brief lull in 1928-29, reached the lowest prices of its turbulent history between 1931 and 1933. The decline of copra began in 1929; it was stopped in 1932 under the effect of a recovery in Indian demand, and reached its lowest level in 1934. Tea resisted well until 1930, then plunged, but in smaller proportions than rubber; it regained a remunerative level after 1934. The recovery was general between 1935 and 1937, but it was followed by a relapse in 1937-38, which the war boom would end after 1940. The value of exports, given the quantities exported, varied slightly differently because prices varied more than production. For rubber, there was a tendency to compensate for the losses due to the fall in prices by an increase in exported quantities. In the same way, price variations were slightly mitigated in the case of tea, and much more significantly in that of copra.

 

Of all the raw materials, rubber is the one whose prices have proven to be the most unstable: “We are not dealing with a commodity like any other: it is dynamite” declared Colonel Colt, President of the U.S. Rubber Company[68]. The economist P.T. Bauer gave as early as 1948 a masterful study of the history of rubber: his greater familiarity with Malaysia and the Dutch Indies led him to some inaccuracies about Ceylon, which Gerald Peiris usefully corrected. This work will allow us to be brief[69]. Among the major facts to remember: rubber became during the 1920s the first export product of the British Empire and took a place in world trade equivalent to coal. Great Britain used it to balance its trade with the United States, which was by far the largest importer. Tropical Asia provided almost all of the production. Small producers represented 40.5% of production in 1929, Euro-American companies controlling only 49% of production. These companies were themselves little concentrated: the 600 larger controlled 32% of production, and the largest only 0.75%; but the management of operations was in the hands of a limited number of agencies. Ceylon provided only 7% of world production at the end of 1929, Malaysia 38% and the Dutch Indies 41%. The British tried to set up a production restriction plan between 1923 and 1928 (Stevenson Plan, due in fact to the initiative of Winston Churchill) that contributed to the boom of 1924-25, but at the same time pushed the Dutch Indies and French Indochina that were not concerned to multiply their plantations. The implementation of this plan revealed a desire on the part of large planters, who were responsible for assessing the production capacity of each unit, to systematically reduce the share of micro-units[70]. The Stevenson Plan did not prevent the fall in prices in 1926 after the peaks reached in 1924-25, due to the arrival on the market of the production of the Dutch Indies and more generally of Asian micro-fundiaries. This fall was initially considered a normal phenomenon given the usual instability of prices, and it is only when it was aggravated by the effects of the American crisis that it was perceived as an unusual catastrophe. But its precocity led to the cessation of production of a certain number of small units and the abandonment of plantations as soon as they opened. A new restriction plan including this time the Dutch colonies was set up in 1934, which will be examined later.

 

The history of tea has not been the subject of research of the same quality. At our level, Wickizer’s study is enough[71]. Tea was the only export product in which Ceylon held a decisive share of the market (24 to 26% depending on the year) but the prices were established in London (Mincing Lane) by traders who bought the production of the different countries. Production was much more concentrated than that of rubber, due to the high cost of the initial investment (especially the machinery of the factories): 120 to 200 pounds sterling per acre. This situation facilitated the agreements of producers: thus, the 1933 agreement had the support of 90% of them. Small producers remained marginal; they were subject to the control of large planters or factories that collected their leaves to treat them, an operation beyond the reach of the small planter. Tea prices generally fluctuated less than those of other products. It is generally accepted that tea, a cheap drink, is little affected by a decrease in the standard of living in buying countries, once consumption habits are taken. However, in Ceylon, where there were different qualities of tea, the most expensive teas had best maintained their prices, and the mediocre qualities had been more affected. The grands crus were produced at the highest altitudes, where there were no Sinhalese villages, and most of their production was in the hands of the great British companies. Ordinary teas were sold in the Middle East market, and the share of small village farmers in production was significant. Thus, as in the case of rubber, but according to different processes, it is clear that small producers were more at the mercy of a crisis than large planters.

 

The depression of coconut products has not been documented: the statistics are very deficient, and the product did not have the same importance as rubber and tea from the point of view of world trade[72]. Unlike tea, the nut is a standard product but the multiplicity of its uses, depending on the type of processing it undergoes, theoretically makes substitutions from one sub-product to another possible if the fall in prices is not general. Copra, and coconut oil were dragged into the global depression of the oilseed markets (they were bought by the food and soap industries). On the other hand, the dried coconut, used in pastry, resisted better, as did toddy and arrack. The coconut was an almost exclusively indigenous production, European investments were low; nevertheless there was a high concentration of commercial production in the hands of a limited number of very large Ceylonese owners, most of whom lived in Colombo, while small landowners depended on traders, oil mill entrepreneurs and arrack distilleries who took most of the profits. Finally, a large fraction of the production (maybe 50%) was not destined for export, but for the domestic market in the form of fresh nuts, toddy and arrack, intended for cities and areas where the coconut tree does not come well. The depression affecting the standard of living of urban classes and reducing the number of plantation workers led to the collapse of producer prices in this sector. The planter was therefore doubly affected by the crisis, no substitution being feasible; the momentary recovery of prices in 1932 is explained by a poor harvest in South India which had to import increased quantities. But the nature of production and market structures excluded the formation of international agreements for price support and the elimination of small producers.

 

The analysis of the oscillations of the colony’s balance of payments does not provide directly usable indications for the knowledge of the social impact of the depression. However, it provides general indications that should not be neglected given the statistical deficiencies in other areas[73]. It could be expected that the trade balance would be very seriously affected by the fall in the prices of the three main export products, tea, rubber and copra, but the particular structure of imports did mitigate this imbalance: food and textile products, which regularly represented more than 50% of them (52.75% in 1928, 57% in 1933) tended to fluctuate hand in hand with export products. The belonging of Ceylon to the sterling zone makes it difficult to assess monetary transfers between the metropolis and the colony. In a period of expansion, entries prevailed over exits as long as the constitution of land capital and equipment in machinery required metropolitan investments; but at least since the 1920s, exits prevailed, in the form of often spectacular dividends distributed to shareholders of plantation companies. Depression led to a collapse in profits and the majority of companies stopped distributing dividends. From the point of view of the balance of payments, the result was therefore favourable: exits were stopped, which would not have been the case if the country’s debt had consisted of government loans. The crisis therefore had no catastrophic effects on the national economy considered as a whole. The imbalances it caused stemmed mainly from the disorganization of credit systems and changes in the distribution of public spending and national income.

 

 

The public finance crisis

 

Depression also spread to the entire economic organization through the restriction of public spending. At first glance, however, the State’s resources do not seem to have been very seriously affected by the economic situation, but in practice, the budget choices made resulted in reducing spending in the areas that were precisely the most job-generating. To grasp the precise play of these mechanisms and the reasons that dictated these choices, it is necessary to take into account the political context and colonial budgetary practices. The advent of depression was contemporary with a representative regime advocated by the commission of inquiry led by Lord Donoughmore (1928). This commission, in which the Labour representative Drummond Shiels played an influential role, was surprised by the lack of attention paid to the well-being of the mass of the population, and it concluded that the adoption of universal suffrage would exert pressure likely to remedy this gap. The regime put in place in 1931 granted extensive powers in budgetary matters to ministers appointed by the specialized committees of an assembly, the State Council, elected by universal suffrage of both sexes. Strong pressure could have been expected in favour of an extension of the State’s social security contributions. But this was not the case; the first legislature (1931-36) was marked by its great budgetary timidity, its attachment to the strictest financial orthodoxy as it had been established by a century-old colonial practice.  The members of the State Council were more concerned to lighten the tax burdens on their properties and to maintain their constituency through a well-ordered charity than to embark on the path of a State social policy, and the colonial administration kept a decisive influence in financial and monetary matters. The particular system governing monetary emissions in the British Asian colonies made impossible any financing by inflation of a social policy: the Ceylon rupee was convertible into sterling (or Indian rupees themselves convertible into sterling), so that the money supply depended on the amount of sterling in reserve and the gains or losses that could result from the balance of payments. British commercial banks, for their part, maintained a high coverage rate and systematically placed their availability on the London short-term market, which made it impossible for the government to call on them to take out Ceylon loans. Since the beginning, colonial budgetary practice consisted of adjusting spending to expected resources; but import and export taxes, and alcohol duties, ensured most of the tax revenues: in times of depression, such a structure led to a severe fiscal contraction. As early as 1928, aware of the risk of a decrease in resources, the administration envisaged a restriction on spending, or failing that, an increase in import duties, and eventually the establishment of income tax.

 

The stages of the adoption of income tax deserve to be described in detail here because they shed light on the position of the interests at stake. The following information is extracted from three hitherto unpublished files kept in Colombo, where senior officials of the colony, the governor in the lead, and the various lobbies of the island, expressed themselves with an unusual frankness[74]. At the origin of the case, a report from the treasurer of the colony of February 1929, in which he pointed the growth of expenses faster than that of revenues. Existing taxation, he wrote, “is nearer to the limits to which it can be carried without causing hardship to the poor or checking the colony’s major industries than it is generally supposed to be”.  Most of the island’s wealth, he added, is appropriated by people who spend or reinvest it outside the island (i.e. the British shareholders of the Plantation Companies); inheritance rights and taxes on stock exchange transactions hardly benefit Ceylon but the country where these companies and individuals have taken up residence (i.e. Great Britain). The treasurer therefore suggested in the medium term the establishment of an income tax, and immediately, in the absence of a reduction in expenses, the launch of a loan and an increase in import taxes; the reduction in resources seemed irremediable, because it was linked to the already significant fall in export rubber prices, and to the reduction in legal alcohol consumption following closures of arrack taverns obtained by the propaganda of prohibitionists, whose action was related to the Buddhist national renaissance of the beginning of the 20th century. On March 16, 1929, the governor brought together the heads of departments to try to impose savings: in three years, health investment spending had increased by 32%, education by 50%, public works by 17%; the agriculture budget by 57%, that of justice by 30%, that of the police by 11% and 140% (two different budgets) and that of the provincial administration by 130%. Failing to sufficiently reduce these expenses, which, given the changes in mentalities and social changes, seemed difficult to compress, the government resolved to increase import duties by 5%: this decision led to an outcry from some of the elected members of the Legislative Council who denounced the risk of an increase in the cost of living, because food, rice, sugar, condiments, dried fish, constituted the largest share of imports. They thereby defended the interests of the indigenous bourgeoisie that owned the large plantations – the ‘brown plantocracy’, as their opponents said pleasantly, whose interests did not differ fundamentally from those of the ‘white plantocracy’. However, a fraction of this same class, made up of close collaborators of the colonial powers and hostile to any prospect of political autonomy, supported the government’s position. A deputation of this Unionist Association of Ceylon visited the governor on 23.09.1929 and pleaded for a policy of major works financed by borrowing, to ward off the risk of unemployment. One of the members of this delegation, the Reverend Ekanayake, insisted that there should be no reduction in health expenses: he pointed out that the number of admissions to hospitals tended to increase, and that malnutrition was at the root of morbidity; he also pointed out that, contrary to the arguments of supporters of reductions in public works expenses, it was not the Tamil workers of the plantations, but the Sinhalese villagers who risked being the victims of the austerity policy. The governor answered that there was indeed great rural poverty in the country, and explained this, among other things, by the fact that the administration had frozen the Crown lands for too long and proceeded too slowly with settlement operations. In the future, he added, it is the income tax that would ensure the financing of social spending; in the meantime, the taxation of imported food was essential. Health spending should be maintained, but it would be necessary to slow down construction operations and also unfortunately, the fight against malaria, “which we would like to be able to conduct more effectively than has been done in the past”. In the early 1930s the lobbies of the plantocracy (the Ceylon Chamber of Commerce, the Planters Association, the Ceylon Estate Proprietors Association and the Low Country Products Association) were again calling for a stricter economy and without rejecting the principle of income tax, demanded that plantations not be double taxed (by export duties and income tax). The governor replied that he was ready to reduce public service salaries, but that there was no question of cutting more on essential investments. On June 21, 1930, a letter from the same associations used the same arguments, going so far as to ask for savings on public works in progress. The central administration, despite the pressure exerted in London by the Ceylon lobby, joined the idea of an income tax and dispatched a financial expert to study its merits and modalities. Immediately the wealthy owners revolted and multiplied public meetings in Colombo. Their pamphlets printed on luxurious paper were titled: “Our slogan: retrenchment; our symbol: the axe”. More discreetly, the Nattukottai Chettiar Association, which feared double taxation, in Ceylon and India, sent a delegation to the governor. The Chamber of Commerce demanded that if the income tax was finally adopted, export taxes be lifted; it said that the crisis was the most serious that the country had experienced since the collapse of the coffee economy: “Companies that paid dividends of 40% (sic) have paid nothing to their shareholders this year”. As for the Low Country Products Association (LCPA), in defense of the Ceylon owners of coconut estates, it asked that they be exempted and that companies domiciled in Great Britain be surcharged, with the argument that these coconut lands were “more in the nature of an insurance for their children rather than an investment for earning dividends within a short period of years”. Finally, the nationalist politicians of the Ceylon National Congress accepted the principle of taxation but joined forces with the LCPA to demand the exemption of small coconut planters. The government remained inflexible and the tax was instituted in 1932; but the tax threshold was high until 1935, so the ratio remained low.

 

The actual budgetary practice from 1930 to 1938 shows that the problem was solved by a series of other expedients. A succession of fortuitous circumstances made it possible to maintain the level of resources with the exception of the fiscal year 1931-1932[75]. Among these favorable circumstances, the late provision of loans contracted for infrastructure work already carried out and charged to the budget surpluses of previous years; the huge amount of inheritance tax paid in 1932-33 by the heirs of one of the largest British owners on the island, Lord Inchcape (8 million rupees), a little more than the total amounts that would be devoted later to relief during the malaria epidemic: this underlines the disproportion between the financial dimensions of British capital and that of the island administration. Nevertheless, a moderate cut (2.5% to 10%) on the salaries of the public service had to be carried out in 1932-1934, and in April 1932, the income tax was finally established, these measures compensating for the reduction or total abolition of export duties on rubber, copra, then tea and cocoa that filled the expectations of the planters. Finally, the overall mass of State resources was not seriously reduced due to the depression. Should we conclude that the impact of depression was zero in this area? Despite the temporary cut on public service salaries, it was the spending sector that best resisted in absolute numbers, with that of social services, which increased sharply at the end of the malaria epidemic. On the other hand, investment spending literally collapsed, especially in the public works sector. For political and practical reasons, public order, social services, and the salaries of civil servants in place were difficult to compress; on the other hand, projected investments could be postponed until better days. In doing so, those responsible were sacrificing one of the major sources of urban and rural employment and in particular occasional employment, the essential nature of which we stressed in the socio-economic balance of the villages. On a small scale, it was an ‘anti-New Deal’ that Ceylon experienced. And socially, the effect of this choice was to aggravate the gap between the wealthy and the others, reduced to living on ties that they could have forged with the powerful. In the burgeoning ‘welfare State’, clientelism already had a place of choice.

 

 

The Chettiar, financing of expansion and integration of credit circuits.

 

The personal resources of members of the middle classes and wealthy peasantry were not sufficient for the initial financing of small plantations, in particular for the purchase of land from the State or villagers. However, the rudimentary rural credit system was not adapted to the requirements of a long-term investment, but only to the needs of a growing season, while at the other extreme, access to British commercial banks was closed to the vast majority of the Ceylonese. There was therefore a place to take, which South Indian bankers already established in Ceylon, the Nattukottai Chettiar, were able to occupy. Traditional forms of credit, as they already existed during the 18th century in the kingdom of Kandy, essentially met the needs between two harvests of rice or millet, and the imperatives of ceremonial expenditure and dowries; loans of this type were generally internal to the village society; they theoretically bore high interest, but in practice, the rates actually received were adapted to the nature of relations between creditors and debtors, profit being valued more in terms of prestige and authority than in terms of enrichment. On the other hand, the rare loans of money were granted by foreigners, especially Tamils traders who themselves obtained advances from the Royal Treasury at 20% that they made grow at 50% or 100%. The stranger to local society, in Ceylon as in pre-capitalist Europe, had a formidable asset: he was free from any personal attachment to his debtor. In the name of an already capitalist calculation, he could resist social pressures[76]. In the colonial period, peasant credit, internal to the social group, continued to operate, but fell under the dependence of market credit. The British facilitated the advent of the latter, by developing transport, by exacting grain taxes in cash, by multiplying the Courts through which lenders could claim repayment of their debts. Colonization then created an external purpose to the extension of peasant debt, by provoking intense land speculation during the development of large plantations: the preferred process of speculators was to push the villagers to go into debt by granting them facilities much higher than their repayment capacity, and to seize their land. But the great development of external credit dates back to the moment when it began to fulfill a positive function by helping to finance indigenous plantations. This period coincides with that in which the Nattukottai Chettiar, traders and exchangers established in Ceylon since the 18th century, were looking for new uses for the capital they had raised in the import of textiles and rice from South India, in the exchange operations between the places of Madras and Colombo (made necessary by the deficit of the balance of payments in Ceylon’s rupees vis-à-vis India and settled by the profits in sterling derived from coffee exports), and finally in the transport of cash necessary for planters to pay their labour force. The establishment in Colombo of the subsidiaries of the major Anglo-Indian commercial banks in the 1860s, easier transport in the plantation areas and the creation of bank branches up-country, pushed the Nattukottai Chettiar to diversify their activities towards the Low country, where the demand for copra began to stimulate coconut plantations.

 

Who were these Nattukottai Chettiar? Their past, their customs, their commercial methods have been the subject of many descriptions and many controversies, of which we will select here only the elements to explain their action and success in Ceylon[77]. They formed the highest sub-caste of a group of castes whose presence is attested by the oldest Tamil texts; the name (Chettiar) is derived from a Sanskrit term designating the head of a merchant guild (shreshti) and it is used in the broad sense to designate any Tamil merchant. The Nattukottai Chettiar, who controlled the salt trade, practiced the profession of moneylenders at least since the 8th century A.D. The region where they came from, Chettinad, was the most arid and desolate of all of South India, which may explain why the Chettiar soon sought fortune outside their country. Being located in the part of the peninsula that faces north of Ceylon, it was therefore natural that they extended the field of their activity to the island; their presence is attested in Dutch times, but is probably much earlier.

 

By the type of education they gave to their children, by the rigidity of their principles and by the strength of their caste organization, the families of Nattukottai Chettiar had assets that allowed them to behave as a strongly knit financial group entirely devoted to trading and lending money. They represent a remarkable example of the use of traditional social solidarity for mercantile purposes, which may be compared to the beginnings of the Israelite and Protestant banking in Europe; but the society in which they carried out their activities, especially in the colonial economic context, was very different. Lender firms were family businesses cemented by cross-alliances (the sub-caste was divided into nine exogamous clans); each of them was designated by a firm name that served as a company name, the vilasam, which was formed by the initials of the name of each of the company’s partners: the vilasam could change over the years[78]. The parent company of each firm remained established in India, usually in Chettinad, sometimes in Madras for the most powerful of them. It set up subsidiaries abroad; each firm had at least one in Burma, where the Nattukottai Chettiar financed a large part of the rice production for export, and quite often one in Ceylon; and more rarely one in Malaysia, Vietnam and Mauritius. The sons of the family received an education that instilled in them very young the sense of money: they were forced from the age of ten to manage their budget, which they reported to the head of the family; they were accustomed to an austere lifestyle in the context of the large family house where they continued to live after their marriage, contracted young according to Indian custom; prodigality was excluded, and when a visitor was invited, it was customary that only the first meal was served free of charge; if his stay was prolonged, the invoice was presented to him as a rule. Shortly after their marriage, the young men, separated from their wives, were sent to foreign agencies for a period of three years; upon their return, if they had proven to be able to raise sufficient capital, they were admitted as shareholders of the firm and were shortly after sent as head of an agency for an identical period; fully responsible for the sums made available to them, they had to report every three years to the family council which served as the board of directors of the firm. The accounting practices of the Nattukottai Chettiar were very advanced, with features such as the use of secret codes. The multiplicity of their account books made them suspicious in the eyes of some clients who did not understand their usefulness and saw it as an instrument of fraud: they had no less than eleven (entry and exit book, daily and monthly balance sheets, balance books with each client, account book with creditor banks, book of loans between Chettiar firms, statement of income from the properties, statement of the agency’s accounts with the parent company, books of personal expenses and donations to temples). Relations between firms were governed by precise rules, which the caste council established in each important financial center (Madras, Rangoon, Colombo etc…) was responsible for defining and enforcing. This council sat in the generally imposing Shaivite temple that each local community built with the help of considerable levies on the profits of the firms. The authority of the council was of a socio-religious nature; a member convicted of indelicateness, or bankrupt, was ostracized from his caste and consequently excluded from his profession; but bankruptcies were rare, because other firms normally came to the rescue of a member in difficulty. The caste council also devoted its activities to setting the rates of loans granted between Nattukottai Chettiar (madappu vattai), and to defending the interests of the community. The Nattukottai Chettiar Association created in Ceylon during the 1920s was its secularized emanation.

 

The majority of firms were businesses of apparently modest size, which in reality handled considerable sums. Each branch looked like a bank in the original sense of the term: a counter, a chair, a safe, a sleeping mat. These agencies were grouped in specialized streets (Sea Street, in Colombo) as was the rule in India or medieval Europe[79]. Most of the agencies of Colombo and Kandy themselves had sub-branches in the merchant bazaars established in the plantation areas, where independent firms were also encountered. They were concentrated in two areas: the tea-producing region located south of Kandy, where most of the firms had been established since the time when they imported rice and handled the transfer of funds for the payment of Tamil workers: these firms converted to loaning to the kangani and the Sinhalese wishing to create small tea plantations, and continued to discount the bills of the merchants of the region, especially the Muslims. The other area of intense activity of the Nattukottai Chettiar was the Colombo – Kurunägala – Puttalam triangle: firms based in Colombo lent to large Ceylon and Indian traders and to owners of large coconut plantations, while subsidiaries established more recently in the villages of the coconut producing zone financed the activities of small and medium-sized Ceylon planters and bazaar merchants. The volume of business of these provincial agencies was not negligible, but difficult to assess. The only testimony published to our knowledge, of which we have no reason to suspect the accuracy, concerns a medium-sized Puttalam firm, in the coconut producing area[80]: S.M.S.P. Muttiah Chettiar estimated the value of his business, short-term loans and sums immobilized in mortgages, to some 300,000 rupees in 1934; his father had settled on the island in 1885 with a starting capital of about 40,000 rupees.

 

The principle on which the lending operations of the Nattukottai Chettiar were based was as follows: they granted their client, with a very high degree of liberality and without worrying about the property titles, a starting loan, which allowed the speculator to buy land or the owner to plant coconut trees or tea[81]. Then they took the highest possible interest (13% was a minimum) according to the possibilities of the debtor, without looking for the repayment of the principal. After a few years, especially if the debtor showed bad will, they took a mortgage on the land that was beginning to be productive, threatening to claim repayment of the capital in case of refusal. The Nattukottai Chettiar actually behaved like shareholders receiving dividends varying according to the situation. But the threat they could pose to the operation was not a sale on the stock exchange or an unfavorable vote of a Board of Directors: it was blackmail into judicial recovery. Thus, the problem of medium- or long-term financing of coconut enterprise, which requires about ten years before becoming productive, was resolved in a fragile but satisfactory way for the parties in times of prosperity. It has been said and repeated that the rates charged by the Nattukottai Chettiar were unbearable for agricultural companies. The examination of the dividends paid to their shareholders by a representative sample of European plantation companies suggests that in times of prosperity, for a plantation in full production, the rates claimed were perfectly realistic. The system would not have been unhealthy if the Nattukottai Chettiar could have benefitted from long-term deposits. But they were reduced to their own capital, to demand deposits from a few Ceylonese (this point is controversial) and above all to short-term loans granted by British commercial banks. The latter refused to directly finance most of the indigenous entrepreneurs, considering the investment unsafe due to their lack of familiarity with this potential clientele and the insecurity of the property titles. This refusal was interpreted by the Ceylonese as a form of economic racism. On the other hand, the solidity of the Nattukottai Chettiar organization, the fact that they were known to the planters to whom they had served as bankers before the advent of commercial banks, and the location in Madras, headquarters of the European banks, of the most influential Chettiar parent companies, would make the latter privileged partners, exclusive intermediaries between British capital and indigenous capital. But the British bankers remained cautious: unable to demand guarantees from financiers whose real estate fortune was non-existent, they used as intermediary their ‘native’ cashier, the shroff (saraf in India), responsible on his personal fortune for transactions with non-Europeans, and taking his percentage, of the order of 2%. In addition, they restricted their operations to short-term loans of about three months[82]. What was the amount of these loans? According to the Banking Commission’s estimates, on average 25 million rupees (but a European banker interviewed by the same commission estimated them at only 10 million rupees)[83]. The capital of the firms, including deposits made in India, represented some 125 million rupees. The Nattukottai Chettiar should have used bank loans solely to finance their short-term operations, reserving their capital for mortgage investments involving sustainable fixed assets. The data provided by their association in 1934 suggests that such a policy was feasible and should be generally followed. But it seems that a number of firms among the largest were led to take advantage of the fact that banks regularly renewed their loans and that it was possible to borrow from one to repay the other, to engage in these risky operations that are the temptation of any banker. The thing was all the more attractive as the interest rates charged by the shroffs of large banks were of the order of 8% (bank rates were themselves around 6%) and that the Chettiar did not lend at less than 13%, and most often, by their admission, at rates of 15 to 25%. The activity of the Nattukottai Chettiar in Ceylon led them to play a crucial role in the economic integration of the British colonies in Asia. Placed at the hinge between the British banking system and the indigenous economy, they participated in the complementary development of the Burmese rice economy and the Ceylon and Malay plantation economy. And within each country, they put in communication the different economic circuits by partially ensuring with the help of British capital the development of indigenous plantations, the financing of food and textile trade. They thereby made the whole of society vulnerable to fluctuations in their own activity.

 

The ‘Chetty crisis’ of 1925 was to highlight these weaknesses. In the absence of access to the archives of the firms, it is not yet possible to write the documented history of the disengagement of the Nattukottai Chettiar from the plantation economy and the imperial system. With regard to Ceylon, the only usable testimonies are those of former shroffs interviewed by the Banking Commission, and the announcements of the Ceylon Government Gazette[84]. The banking crisis began with the bankruptcy filing in June 1925 of a large firm reputed to be serious, A.R.A.R.S.M. Its liabilities amounted to 3,700,000 rupees in India and 1,700,000 rupees in Ceylon, against a total asset of the order of 950,000 rupees. It seems that A.R.A.R.S.M had speculated during the rubber boom, which is suggested by the list of its properties put up for judicial sale (plantations in the south of the island) and its association with the British house James Finlay, creditor for 196,332 rupees, itself involved in land speculation operations. By virtue of the internal solidarity of the community, A.R.A.R.S.M. should have been saved but it seems that such loans, actually granted (A.M.N. was a creditor for 75,766 rupees) were not enough. Is it this failure that led the British banks to closely examine the financial situation of their Chettiar partners and to stop their credits, noting with concern that “they found to their dismay that many of the securities offered to them by the Chettiar were not safe and others were neither sufficient nor adequate”.  This is the interpretation given by a former shroff. But it is strange that the bankers and their shroffs did not know earlier about these practices, all the more so since the main creditor bank, the Imperial Bank of India, founded in 1921 by incorporating the Banks of Madras, Calcutta and Bombay, had among its directors the most powerful Chettiar banker of Madras, Sir Annamalai Chettiar. It seems more likely that these financiers, anticipating the depreciation of mortgaged land, took the opportunity to put an end to a practice that was safe only in a period of expansion. In 1925, at the height of the rubber boom, they realized that this expansion was not going to last. Perhaps they even sought to limit the expansion of small indigenous plantations whose competition worried the large firms, and to promote concentration in this sector? Pure hypothesis, which only the consultation of the bank archives would make it possible to elucidate. However, the bankruptcy of A.R.A.R.S.M. led the banks first to set up an agreement to prevent multiple loan operations, the Imperial Bank being responsible for keeping up to date a list of firms indicating the ceiling of the credits to which each could claim. Then over the years the volume of loans granted was reduced to the point of becoming almost zero in 1931 (500,000 rupees); the Nattukottai Chettiar accused the banks of having weaned them of loans; the bankers claimed that the Chettiar themselves had stopped asking for loans. Whatever the truth on this point, a system was broken, and the economic decline began. The Chettiar would soon pass on their difficulties to their customers, stopping any new investment, and raising the cost of their commercial credits.  Foreshadowing the Great Depression, the ‘Chetty crisis’ would spread to the entire economic organization. The weaknesses that were to lead to the paralysis of the activities of the Chettiar were none other than those of the economic system itself. The ‘Chetty crisis’ was the early sign of a malaise that would paralyze the entire system. The bank’s sensitivity to any announcement of a cyclical reversal, making this reversal decisive, found a new illustration here. That is why it seems justified to date back to 1925 the prodrome of the Great Depression in Ceylon.

 

 

The two sides of the same crisis.

 

Endogenous crisis and exogenous crisis interpenetrated each other in an inseparable way. They represented the two sides of the same phenomenon. What was at issue was the continued expansion of a small autonomous indigenous production, tolerated or even encouraged from outside in times of prosperity, but which had become undesirable as soon as the economic trend reversed. Marginal because it came late (as well as the employment of local workers in large plantations which was socially equivalent to it), this small production almost simultaneously met its limits in three areas. Physical limits: the space available for the extension of plantations was becoming more and more restricted – internal crisis. Financial limits: the indigenous credit system was disorganized by the restrictive policy of British banks – external crisis, but also by the increase in the price of land resulting from its scarcity – internal crisis. Trade limits: the simultaneous arrival on the market of all small producers, especially in the case of rubber, created an overproduction to which no swelling of demand corresponded.

 

This was the pattern of the situation in Ceylon. Michael Adas’ study shows that the mechanisms of the Burmese crisis were similar. The data available on Malaysia and the Dutch Indies suggest the existence of phenomena of the same nature. Did they extend to all economically dependent countries, or only to ‘developing countries’, in the authentic sense of the term, those where an enterprising peasantry and a bourgeois class had taken advantage of the opportunities offered by colonial capitalism? Should the reasoning be extended to all agricultural producers, including small farmers in industrial countries? Were the sources of the Great Depression at the periphery of the system and not in its center?

 

[1] “The 1934-1935 Malaria Epidemic in Sri Lanka” [http://slkdiaspo.hypotheses.org/1251]

 

[2] DE SILVA (K.M.) ed. History of Ceylon vol III, Peradeniya, 1973

[3] JAYAWARDENA (V.K.), The Rise of the Labor Movement in Sri Lanka, Durham, 1972; COREA (G.), The Instability of an Export Economy, Colombo,1975; GUNASEKARA (H.A.de S.), From Dependent Currency to Central Banking in Ceylon. London, 1962; INDRARATNA (A.D.V. de S.), The Ceylon Economy from the Great Depression to the Great Boom. An analysis of Cyclical Fluctuations and their Impact, Colombo 1966.

[4] ADAS (M.) The Burma Delta. Economic Development and Social Change on an Asian Rice Frontier, Madison, 1974; BROWN (I.) A Colonial Economy in Crisis: Burma’s Rice Cultivators and the World Depression of the 1930s. London, 2005. Ian Brown calls into question Michael Adas’ analysis asserting the anteriority of the agrarian crisis; he insists on the differential nature of the impact according to the categories of the peasant population and on the political consequences of the appropriation of land by Chettiar creditors.

[5] BAKER (C.)  An Indian Rural Economy 1880-1955: the Tamil Countryside. Oxford 1984; MANIKUMAR (K.A.) A Colonial Economy in the Great Depression: Madras 1929-1937. Chennai, 2003; ROTHERMUND (D.) India in the Great Depression, 1929-1939, Delhi,1992 and The Global Impact of the Great Depression, 1929-1939, London 1996.

[6] L’Afrique et la crise de 1930, Revue française d’histoire d’outre-mer LXIII, 232-233, 1976

[7] BOEKE (J.H.), Dualistische economie, Leiden, 1930 ; Economics and economic policy of dual societies, as exemplified by Indonesia, Haarlem 1953.

[8] LEE (C.H.), “The Effects of the Depression on Primary Producing Countries” Journal of Contemporary History  4 (4), 1969, ROTHERMUND (D.) op. cit. 1996.

[9] La crise et les colonies, Bibliothèque coloniale internationale XXIIe session de l’Institut colonial international, Bruxelles, 1933, 2 vols.; speeches by DU VIVIER DE STREEL, p. 169-170 (vol 1) ; and BOEKE p. 69 (vol 2)

[10] COREA (G.) op. cit. 1975, p. 86

[11] For example SNODGRASS (D.R. ) , Ceylon, an Export Economy in Transition, Homewood, 1966; GUNASEKARA (H.A. de S.) op. cit. 1962;  PEEBLES (P.),  Sri Lanka, a Handbook of Historical Statistics, Boston, 1982 and COREA (G.) op. cit. 1976, have a more balanced approach.

[12] Administration Report (AR) Sabaragamuwa 1927 p. I4

[13] GEERTZ (C.) op.cit. 1956

[14] PIERIS (R.) Sinhalese Social Organization, the Kandyan Period. Colombo,1956

[15] AR Registrar of Cooperative Societies 1933

[16] DENHAM (E.B.), Ceylon at the Census of 1911, Colombo 1912, p. 93-98, AR Kägalla 1912-13, AR Sabaragamuwa 1907 p. I2

[17] WOOLF (Leonard), The Village in the Jungle, London, 1913, LEACH (E.R.), Pul Eliya, a Village in Ceylon, Cambridge, 1961.

[18] CEYLON, Census of Ceylon, village statistics, 1871 to 1931.

[19] SENARATNE (S.P.F.), Status, Power and Resources. The Study of a Sinhalese village. London, SOAS Ph. D. thesis, 1971, p. 22-23

[20] AR Rubber Controller 1938 annex A; CEYLON, Census of Ceylon, 1931

[21] AR Tea Controller 1938 annex A. 

[22] International Bank for Reconstruction and Development, The economic development of Ceylon, New York 1953, p. 247 ; see also FARMER  (B.H.) op. cit. 1957 p.87 and CEYLON, Census of Ceylon 1931.

[23] JAYAWARDENA (L.R.U.) The Supply of Sinhalese Labour to Ceylon Plantations, 1830-1930: a Study of Imperial Policy in a Peasant Society. Cambridge, Ph. D. thesis, 1963, Appendix

[24] CEYLON, Report of the Divisional Agricultural Officer (Central), 1927 p.3

[25] AR Nuwara Eliya (hereafter NE) 1925 p.B29, AR Inspector General of Police (hereafter IGP) 1925 p.B18

[26] AR NE 1925 p.B28; Diary Assistant Settlement Officer (hereafter ASO) Aluvihare, 21.02 & 4.03.1930; these diaries are kept in the Land Settlement Department records in Colombo.

[27] Sri Lanka National Archives (hereafter SLNA) Colonial Secretary Records, L/296/1927: report by the Assistant Government Agent (hereafter AGA) Puttalam on the 3rd interim report of the Land Commission; villages (hereafter CBC II) p.6

[28] AR Southern Province 1925 p.C2, AR Matara 1926 p.C17 ; Diary Settlement Officer October 1933 (Omatta); Diaries ASO Hunter, March 1928 (Badureliya), ASO Rajasingham October 1933 (Latpandura), ASO Egan 11.04.1927 (Bambarawana)

[29] Diary ASO Luddington 9, 19 & 26.02.1927 (Dodampewela, Wirambuwa, Madakumburumulla); and ASO Davies 17.03.1933 (Ihala Malagane)

[30] CEYLON Sessional Paper 3 of 1931

[31] AR Central Province 1926 p.B3, AR NE 1926 p.B35, DAOR (Central) 1928 p. 2; quotation from AR Ma 1928 p. C18

[32] Michael Roberts Oral History Project, interview of Frederick Leach; CEYLON, Report of the Divisional Agricultural Officer (Central), 1928 p.2

[33] SNODGRASS (D.R.) op. cit. 1965; JAYAWARDENA (L.R.U.) op. cit. 1963

[34] CEYLON, Census of Ceylon, 1921, 1931, 1946. AR Controller of Labour (hereafter CofL) 1938 et 1939, passim.

[35] CEYLON, Report and Proceedings of the Labour Commission, Colombo, 1908. AR CofL 1948 p.C7.

[36] OBEYESEKERE (G.), Land Tenure in Village Ceylon, Cambridge 1967, YALMAN (N.) Under the Bo-Tree, Berkeley, 1967, TAMBIAH (S.J.) “Ceylon” in LAMBERT & HOSELITZ, The Role of Savings and Wealth in southern Asia and the West. Paris, UNESCO, 1963, ROBINSON(M.)Political Structure in a Changing Sinhalese Village, Cambridge, 1975, SARKAR & TAMBIAH, The Disintegrating Village, Peradeniya, 1957, LEACH (E.R.) op. cit. 1961, MOORE (M.P.) & WICKREMASINGHE (G.), Thattumaru, Kattimaru, Systems of Land Tenure. Colombo, 1978.

[37] AR Sabaragamuwa 1907 p. I2

[38] SENARATNE (S.P.F.), op. cit. 1971 p. 37 sq. : in Remuna, a bi-caste village, the Vahumpura lost their lands and looked more for outside employment than the Goyigama.

[39] SV Kurunägala p. 2 sq.

[40] AR Sabaragamuwa 1916

[41] AR Central Province 1925 p.B2 [children avoid school to work on plantations]; JAYAWARDENA L.R.U.) 1963, op. cit. p. 279, quoted a planter who maintained that 90% of the Sinhalese workers were young people without family responsibilities

[42] AR Controller of Excise, 1925 and following years

[43] ADAS (M.), op. cit., 1974

[44] Interview of N.H. Keerthiratne, by Eric Meyer, 20.03.1978; MEYER (E.) “Historical Aspects of Caste in the Kandyan Regions, with particular reference to the non-Goyigama castes of the Kägalla District” Sri Lanka Journal of the Humanities and Social Sciences, 40 (2015), pp. 21-54

 

[45] SNODGRASS (D.R.) op. cit 1966, JAYAWARDENA (L.R.U.) op. cit. 1963, appendix: the statistics of landlessness and chapter V.

[46] Diary ASO Sandys, 20.05.1930

[47] SLNA L/296/1927: Report by the AGA Nuwara Eliya on the third interim report of the Land Commission; AR Nuwara Eliya 1926 p.B35.

[48] AR Uva 1928 p.H8, Diary ASO Abeyakoon 25.04.34 (Diyabokadare), Diary ASO Seneviratne, August 1931 (Tuppitiya, Ellegama, Idanegama,J

[49] AR Matara 1925 p.C22, 1926 p.C27, 1920 p. C33, 1929 p.C25. cf. ROHP, interview d’A.N. Strong.

[50] Diary SO Stace, 23.01.1929; diary ASO Christoffelz, July 1928, AR Kalutara 1925 p.A19 and 1928 p.A28.

[51] See Eric Meyer, “Highland Appropriation by the Plantation Sector in the Kägalla District (1870-1930)”

https://slkdiaspo.hypotheses.org /6732 (2025)

[52] Diary ASO Sandys, 12.06.1929 and 2.02.1929; also Diaries ASO Bassett June 1929 and Seneviratne January 1933

[53] AR NWP 1927 p.F10; Evidence of the Committee on Landless Villagers, evidence of L. Nugawela; diaries of ASO Aluwihare 1.08.30, and ASO Sandys, July 1930.

[54] Diaries ASO Fernando, 23.09.30 (Madakumburemulla), and ASO Seneviratne 3.08.32 (Bowetta)

[55] Diary ASO Sandys, 29.07.1930

[56] WICKREMESINGHE (A.A.), Land Tenure in the Kandyan Provinces, Colombo, 1924, WIJEMANNE (S.R.), The Land Policy of the Government of Ceylon Critically Examined, Colombo, 1926, JAYAWARDENA (L.R.U.) op. cit. 1963. cf. HANSARD 1927 p.139.

[57] CO54/874 Evidence of the Select Committee of the Legislative Council on Rubber Restriction, 1925, p. 10

[58] SLNA 24/14 Minutes of the L.C.P.A. meetings, 3.07.1928

[59]  CO54/886 including: Confidential print n° 386, memorandum by Sir H. Clifford on Land Policy, 21.03.27; Message of

the Governor to the Hon. members of the Finance committee 1927; CLIFFORD (C.), Some Reflections on the Ceylon Land Question, Colombo, 1927.

[60] SLNA L62/1928 Reports of the Revenue and Settlement Officers containing their comments on the third interim report of the Land Commission.

[61] CO54/903/3 dispatch n° 571, 16.7.1930. cf. CEYLON Sessional Paper 2 of 1928.

[62] CO54/903/3 dispatch n° 571

[63] ASO Bassett, in SLNA L62/1928; diaries ASO Bassett, 24.11.1927 and ASO Christoffelz, 27-28.08.1928.

[64] CO54/926 Governor to Secretary of State 950, 31.01.1935.

[65] ADAS (M.) op. cit., 1974 p. 127-128.

[66] BOUVIER (J.) in L’Afrique et la crise de 1930, Revue française d’histoire d’outre-mer LXIII, 232-233, 1976 ; see also LEE (C.H.) op.cit. 1969.

[67] AR Kägalla 1919

[68] LAWRENCE (J.C.), The World’s Struggle with Rubbr, New York, 1931 p.2

[69] BAUER (P.T.), The Rubber Monopoly, a Study in Competition and Monopoly, London, 1948; PEIRIS (G.) “The effects of the price fluctuations on Rubber Production in Ceylon, a study of the depression and the Korean war boom”, Ceylon Journal of Historical and Social Studies, n.s. 2(1), 1972

[70] CEYLON Sessional Paper 14 of 1925, evidence of C.E.A. Dias p. 12

[71] WICKIZER (V.D.) Tea under International Regulation, Stanford, 1944, especially pp. 5,66,72,125,181.

[72] CEYLON Sessional Paper 25 of 1933 (Coconut commission)

[73] COREA (G.) op. cit. 1975 chapter. III

[74] SLNA, Colonial Secretary records F/219/1929 (note on the financial position of the colony and action thereon); F/94/1930 (Report of the income tax adviser), F/225/1930 (Protests against the proposed income tax), F/1407/1930.

[75] COREA 1975 chapter IV

 

[76] MEYER (E.) : “From Internal to External Debt. Observations on Changes in Credit Practices in Sri Lanka in Colonial Times” in MALAMOUD (Ch.) ed., Debts and Debtors. New Delhi, Vikas, 1983, pp. 161-177.

[77] GUNASEKERA (H.A. de S.) op. cit. 1962, p. 195-205; WEERASOORIA (W.S.), The Nattukottai Chettiar Merchant Bankers in Ceylon, Dehiwala, 1973; RUDNER (D.W.), Caste and Capitalism in Colonial India: the Nattukottai Chettiar. Berkeley, 1994; MAHADEVAN (R.), Fortune Seekers, a Business History of the Nattukottai Chettiars, New Delhi, 2025.

[78] We shall publish in annex a full list of the 620 vilasam encountered during this research.

[79] Their geographical location at the island level can be seen from the map we have drawn up from the indications provided to the Banking Commission, in appendix.

[80] CBC II p.459.

[81] CBC II p. 375, 409, 456, 458

[82] WEERASOORIA (W.S.) op. cit. 1973 p.XXV, contra: CBC II p.187-189.

[83] CBC I p.42, CBC II p.483 (I. Stewart), CBC II p.354 (Tyagarajah)

[84] RUDNER (D.W.), op. cit. 1994 p. 78-79, CBC II p. 253, 316, 354-55, 483. WEERASOORIA (W.S.) op. cit. 1973, p.38-41. Ceylon Government Gazette 1925 p.645 sq